During brief lulls in CNN's wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, we try imagining the complex of rooms from where the Super-Versailles might be monitored and controlled in real-time.
Could they be cavernous, hermetically sealed, climate controlled, an ambience of hard drives whirring and clicking, the smells of days-old coffee and hot rubberized circuitry mixing with endlessly recycled, zealously filtered air, entombed inside a mountain?
Or the opposite of everything imagined above?
Thankfully, the wonderful, if unfortunately non-English, blog Approximation points us to Barco, a Belgian company which specializes in designing and developing solutions for large-screen visualization. A leader in professional markets, so we are told, they have equipped the control rooms of NASA, traffic management centers, national power grids, broadcast studios and military combat rooms. They also outfitted the FIFA World Cup international media center, which served an audience numbering in the billions.
And they even supplied the LED technology for Millennium Park's Crown Fountain.
So from multiple case studies found on their website, it becomes easier to visualize the control room of our very own Super-Versailles. Wall-to-wall cinematics, endless streams of numbers, thousands of hours of hydrological voyeurism saved for the archives or for later viewing and efficiency analysis. Beyond what Warhol ever imagined. In fact, Barco may have one-upped him, John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Alfred Hitchcock.
And among all the trillions of electrified pixels, a lone landscape architect — perhaps he's a descendant of Arnold de Ville or Harold N. Fisk, but definitely has watched Dr. Strangelove and TheMatrixReloaded one too many times — meticulously tracks the migration of a single water molecule: from that first dangling raindrop from a Category 5 hurricane all the way to its first contact with the earth, and then through its frothy journey from rivulets to streams to rivers to cataracts to reservoirs to the fountains of Rome.
Because he has to; the Super-Versailles must follow the script absolutely.
Of course, since he reads too much BLDGBLOG, he'll program scenarios of miniscule critical systems failures. For fun, he'll flood a street or two; drain the Trevi Fountain for a day just to piss off tired, sweaty tourists; and trap honeymooning couples on a Disney cruise ship in the Panama Canal. Mildly inconsequential events of topographical hysterics to pass the hours away.
Going through an archive of half-forgotten bookmarks, we discovered this FORGEMIND.archi.mediaarticle on Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós' Igualada Cemetery located near Barcelona, Spain.
You'll read something about “time architecture” and about life journeys and about space-time-metaphysical continuum and about layering of memories and such. But you'll be forgiven if you skip the whole text and simply peruse the photos, which are many, capture perfectly the essence of the site, and unequivocally support what we've long suspected: that the Igualada Cemetery could be a model for an entirely new flood control system, one that is part levee, part diversionary canal, part city of the dead.
The authors may suspect this as well: “The project is conceived,” they write, “as an earthwork that transforms the surrounding landscape and also as a metaphor for the river of life. A processional route descends from the entrance, where crossed, rusting steel poles which double as gates, proclaim the start of the journey along a winding path where railway sleepers are set into the concrete surface towards the burial area. The route is lined with repeatable concrete loculi forming retaining walls.”
A landscape of concretized rigidity and suppleness, of permanence and impermanence, protecting the living from surging waters, avalanches and supersonic pyroclastic mud flows while welcoming those it could not save.
While preparations for next year's Beijing Summer Olympics may have wrought incredible changes to the physical landscape of the host city, there has also been an effort to end what officials deemed to be anti-social behaviors in public spaces.
For instance, we learn from BBC News that “China has launched a campaign to try to eradicate queue-jumping.” On the 11th day of every month “volunteers wearing red sashes set up stages in squares and on street corners in more than a dozen districts of the city” where they will choreograph a sort of performance art piece of disconnected, institutional linearity slithering across the urban landscape: millions of people standing in the cold, waiting for buses and trains, and all the while supressing any and all urges to jump in line.
And what's a mass campaign to recondition (or westernized?) the public civility of an entire populace without a slogan: “It's civilised to queue, it's glorious to be polite.” Of course, the French may have something to say about that.
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos, both recently tasked to author the next installment of Pamphlet Architecture, once proposed “a gigantic presence of a hanging funeral structure” that will hover above the war torn streets of Baghdad, floating unceasingly “from bright explosive mornings to airless night hours,” and lush with growth from an endless supply of dead Iraqis.
“Day by day, nearly hourly, it updates its assimilating heavy stocks, a statistic of a hundred thousand Iraqi corpses or maybe twenty five thousand.”
Lest someone say that this can never be built, a prototype already exists in the skies above Iraq. To see it, one only needs to track the endless flights of cargo planes delivering dead coalition soldiers back to their home countries. And also the countless parabolic airborne tracings of the injured getting airlifted from battlefields to waiting “cash” units; of celebrities and politicians for Thanksgiving or dubious fact-finding missions; and of celebrity journalists, some of whom will simply add to the spectacle and cause their audience to see the events they cover “as nothing more than a special effect or just another reality TV show” before they get seriously injured and are then swiftly flown away.
More collaborative solutions collected since our last post on übergadgets.
1) SandScape
From MIT Media Lab: “SandScape is a tangible interface for designing and understanding landscapes through a variety of computational simulations using sand. Users view these simulations as they are projected on the surface of a sand model that represents the terrain. The users can choose from a variety of different simulations that highlight either the height, slope, contours, shadows, drainage or aspect of the landscape model.”
2) Jeff Han
Jeff Han's multi-user interactive solution is “an intuitive, 'interface-free,' touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.”
And on FastCompany.com: Adam L. Penenberg, “Can't Touch This” (Feb 2007)
3) Reactable
From the Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona: “The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.”
One of many projects developed at Natural Interaction, Courses is a large space sensing solution wherein multiple visitors are tracked and trigger video events on the floor.
What is it? According to Subtopia, “for some, it is a room-sized genetic structure modeling tool. Others use it to engineer preliminary architectural superstructures suspended in hypothetical space, or simulate incredible emergency landings and training flight paths under fake duress.” And then there are those who want to turn it into a War Room.
In Jacques Leslie's prologue to his book Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, excerpted here at AlterNet, we learn that “between Hoover and the end of the century, more than 45,000 large dams — dams at least five stories tall — were built in 140 countries” and that “the water behind them blots out a terrain bigger than California.” Moreover, Leslie writes that “by now the planet has expended two trillion dollars on dams — the equivalent of the entire 2003 U.S. government budget.”
But here's what could possibly be the most interesting trivia:
The world's dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field.
To repeat: altered the speed of the earth's rotation.
Slightly, that is. But even if the alteration amounts to a mere fraction of a second per day, that dams could shorten or lengthen a year obviously offers a possible solution to a perennial nuisance: earth-bound extinction level asteroids.
In other words, would a hydrological meganetwork of dams hasten the planet's solar orbital journey such that we arrive at the impact point in space and then depart before the asteroid has even arrived?
Trillions of dollars would have to be spent constructing thousands of dams on every river basins in the world, and many trillions more integrating them into urban stormwater management systems; wetland restoration projects; concretized rivers and irrigation channels; fortified lagoons and estuaries; abandoned tunnels; floodcontrolstructures; and every faucets, sprinklers, buckets and rolling 'hippos' throughout the world.
At scheduled times during the year, a transnational governing agency chartered to oversee this Super-Versailles would initiate a carefully programmed sequence of valve openings and closings, of inflows and outflows, of discharge and storage. In soporific trickles and raging Jovian torrents, great volumes of water are shifted across the surface of the earth, against gravity, by sheer human will.
And if the calculations prove correct and the hydrochoreography is followed precisely, the earth would then spin a little faster, and we finish the day and reach year's end early.
Over the course of decades, countless miniscule fractions of seconds are saved, albeit probably amounting to a few seconds. Nevertheless, that just might be enough for us to miss our appointment with the Apocalypse.
In the meantime, before we even know if the whole thing actually works, this apocalypse-averting great flush will be treated as the grand spectacle.
Everywhere fountains will spurt with a little bit more mirth and whimsy. Fireworks will lighten up the night skies over the Three Gorges Dam and Aswan Dam, and barbecue pits will be lit beside a raging Los Angeles River. It'll be the only truly international holiday.
Meanwhile, travelers equipped with the latest edition of The Lonely Planet Guide to Super-Versailles will trek to the Aral Sea, the marshes of southern Iraq, the Everglades or and Owens Lake to witness these ancient landscapes get rehydrated with waters from Greenland's ice caps. To coincide with this event, the local tourist agency will stage a naumachia re-enacting The Deluge.
Those with Fodor's will visit picturesque Venice; those with more adventurous spirit and shun guidebooks at will rappel down behind Niagara Falls.
But most importantly, all the Great Water Wars are averted and resolved.
From NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: “Dunes in Proctor Crater, located in the southern hemisphere of Mars where it was winter at the time this image was taken. Scientists think the bright tones are carbon dioxide or water frost.”
Many more images of Martian aeolian landscapes here.
