Originally, we thought what great news this must be to mothers (and fathers), to the aged and to the simply incontinent, because this new material is classed in the same group of super absorbent polymers that also includes gels found in diapers. It turns out, however, that the substance was designed not for consumers but rather primarily for industrial applications, for instance, to suck up leftover waste chemicals in brownfields and absorb oil spills about to wipe out an entire ecosystem.
Having now brought up the subject of super absorbent polymers (SAP), we would now like to quote a rather generous portion of Deena DeNaro's report for Core77 on the 2nd Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale, curated by Adriaan Geuze of West 8.
It concerns a radical reconsideration of SAPs as a landscape application. Presently, they are used mostly to increase the water reserve of soils and to mitigate erosion.
In SPONGEcity, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Transportation, Public Works and Water Management, and designed by Niall Kirkwood [and 15 landscape architecture graduate students from] the Harvard Graduate School of Design, floodwaters are captured by a dual sponge system both soft and structural. Elbows, or man-made oxbows, are built along the river Waal expanding the floodplain. Within each floodplain, canals are dug out to hold some of the floodwater. Cellular networks of Super Absorbent Polymers (SAP's) are placed in these elbows and when the dikes close to the river are breached a new absorbent sponge landscape is created along the entire river. The sponges create a dramatic new terrain as they swell to a height of up to 20 meters. This sponge matrix radically re-imagines the traditional Dutch city by proposing a hybrid structure that contains water and constructs space for urbanization. Capable of holding 100 times its own weight in water, the structural sponge is realized by adding a hardening agent to the SAP, which creates a shell on the surface for development. The soft sponge is a fluctuating system of undulating hills that rise and fall according to seasonal floods. As mean water levels rise, soft sponge is converted to structural sponge and a new band of soft sponge is established on the periphery. The overall sponge matrix allows development to exist within a floodplain. The urban conditions benefit from the framework of sponge elbows by structuring newfound ground within the floodplain.
This one paragraph seems to be the most extensive description of the project found online, with the possible exception of this terragram. In that Niall Kirkwood interview, we hear more about the project and learn that he was tasked to challenge the mentality of defense — of instinctively spending billions and billions of euros to build sea walls and dykes, to raise an entire country, and then subjecting the population to equally costly mass migration when the concrete crumbles — by speculating on ways to open up the landscape to disaster but not to catastrophe.
Did New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers receive this terragram? The relevant part starts at 46:12 and ends roughly around 54:30.
Meanwhile, we cannot help but wonder why the Netherlandses and the New Orleanses of the world should have all the speculative fun with super absorbent polymers.
Give us tons of the stuff and Pruned will drive out to the glacier-flattened terrain of the Illinois prairie. And using vertical drain installation rigs, we'll inject (infect?) a whole township with the gel so that when the rain comes, the landscape balloons with Himalayan peaks and Alpine valleys, an entire state county positively giddy with heretofore unknown contour lines. Instant topography.
Engineers at Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability in Darmstadt, Germany apparently have found a way to cancel out environmental noise using the very windows that normally amplify it.
According to Discovery Channel, “postage stamp-sized patches made of a ceramic called piezoelectric material, which behaves both like a sensor and vibration generator when shot with an electric charge” were embedded into test windows.
More from the article:
Wires running through the window link the stamp-sized patches to a computer controller and an amplifier. When a sound-generated vibration rattles the window, the piezoelectric patch senses it.
That data goes to the controller, which in turn delivers a specific electric charge back up to the patch, causing it to vibrate at a phase that ideally cancels out the sound vibrations.
In laboratory experiments, they were able to reduce noise of 90-100 decibels (the sound of a subway or power mower) by 50 percent.
Other technical and cost issues aside, we wonder if you could doubly reverse this. What would happen, for instance, if one were to embed these stamp-sized piezoelectric patches into Notre-Dame's new stained glass windows, and rather than canceling out incoming noises from outside, outbound noises from the altar and nave get amplified? Paris will burn, perhaps. Nevertheless, we do like the idea of cathedrals humming to the surrounding landscape with a Requiem mass or Haydn's Creation. We've always imagined how incredibly cool it would be to hear Pärt's Sarah was Ninety Years Old inside the cavern's of Hagia Sofia, and now wonder how it would be like for to hear its hypnotic drum beats echoing, like a muezzin's call to prayer, through the streets of Istanbul.
Of course, future applications will more likely involve rewiring your windows so that they can alert you of incoming X-ray hurricanes and to wage suburban audio warfares?
In the U.S., there are roads that go on straight for miles and miles on end, and then suddenly they splinter, as if sheared by an ancient earthquake. These sites of displacements are merely where the greatest manufactured landscape in the history of the world — Jefferson's continental quilt — self-corrects against the curvature of the earth from deforming its neat rectangular townships and sections into unequal trapezoids.
Planting a tree? Installing a fence? Retrofitting your sewer line? Planning a multi-level ICBM-proof subterranean addition to your house?
Unless you have a curious disregard for your safety, lack any sense of civic responsibility, and have a grotesque surplus of money to throw away in fines and court costs, then it's best that you call 811.
Soon after you relay the relevant information, such as where you live and where exactly you want to dig, a veritable infrastructural army starts to descend upon your homestead. First comes a cadre from the electric company followed by another from the gas company. Next comes the phone company and the water company. Perhaps the first wave shall come from the cable company who are then followed by locators from the sewer department and various other public works agencies, all of whom are ridiculously fitted with high-tech GPS gadgets and the entire GIS database of the urban service grid.
Whatever the order it may be, they will all leave behind their own markings, as prescribed by the nearest orbiting satellite, punctuated by semi-cryptographic signs, numbers and colored flags. An invisible landscape, unknowable to most of us in any other circumstances, enigmatically makes its presence.
The concept of a central organizing body from which you can actually find out what might be hidden under your property alone makes our minds reel with possibilities.
For instance, we can't help but imagine places where there is a particularly dense built-up of natural and cultural layers, and calling 811 would thus bring in scientists and local historians. You ring, and archaeologists come to mark the boundaries of unexcavated Native American burial mounds. Strange globular shapes right next to even stranger figurative etchings left by a paleontologist above an ancient fossil bed. Strings of numbers specifying the depth of an ancient landfill or the charred remains of a city, but which seems only augurs can discern.
Then again individual homeowners probably would never dig deep enough to disturb fossils and burial mounds. But that you could actually find out (in our fantasies), and so easily at that (again, in our imaginations), whether or not they do lie underneath, simply excites us.
Taking this reverie to its next logical phase, representatives from the Vatican come to visit in the middle of the night, while you're sleeping. In the morning, you find weird, esoteric inscriptions spray painted on your lawn. After consulting a leather bound manuscript handed down through generations of Freemasons, you learn that these inscriptions mark the border and dimensions of an anti axis mundi. It would thus be inauspicious to dig right there, because directly below — way, way down there — lies the gate to Tartarus.
Speaking of digging, especially through historically rich urban underlayers, there are two projects worth mentioning.
First is Turkey's Marmaray Project for a new subway line, parts of which will be submerged under the Bosphorus. The entire project was expected to be completed by 2009, but that may be revised due to the discovery of a Byzantine port where a tunnel terminal is proposed.
According to BBC News, “Yenikapi on the European side of the city was selected to house a state-of-the-art train station. But when shanty homes were cleared from the site, archaeologists uncovered treasures beneath of a kind never before discovered here.”
“Just a few metres below ground,” so the article goes, “they found an ancient port of Constantinople - named in historical records as the Eleutherios harbour, one of the busiest of Byzantium.”
So far the archaeologists have uncovered eight wooden boats that are at least a thousand years old, parts of the ancient city wall, and various clues to what it was like to live in the city in the 4th Century.
Second is Rome's plan for a third subway line that will go right through the historic center of the city.
The perennial tug-of-war between preserving ancient treasures and developing much-needed infrastructure is moving underground, as the city mobilizes archaeologists to probe the bowels of the Eternal City in preparation for a new, 25-kilometer (15-mile) subway line.
Eyesore yellow panels have sprung up over the past months to cordon off 38 archaeological digs, often set up near famous monuments or on key thoroughfares of the already chronically gridlocked historical center.
Already these digs have unearthed an Augustan era public building, taverns, parts of 16th-century palaces, and Roman tombs, though presumably the primary objective of these archaeological probes is not discovery but to minimize delays and to avoid the cancellation of the whole project should there be any significant find.
Of course, the whole planning would go a lot simpler if the metropolitan engineers only had to call a three-digit phone number, and within a day or two, thousands of years of history are marked for them on the ground. Where it looks the least cluttered cartographically, the subway goes.
While we are still on the subject of urban underlayers, permit us to include this National Geographic illustration of New York's subterranean landscape.
From the website:
Digging anything in New York requires careful examination of mechanical drawings that take into account items over 100 years old. Careless digging could knock out blocks of utilities and cost millions of dollars to repair. Engineers today must rely on long-dead predecessors for accurate records of past work. These maps, new and old, are closely guarded; in the wrong hands, they could bring all of New York to its knees.
For the scale version of the illustration above, go here. And for a completely different underground tour, see our post on Negative Manhattan.
Finally, to return back to the surface, we can't help wondering whether you actually need to dig in order to make the call? What if we merely want to summon the locators just to see what's under there? Is simple curiosity enough?
What if we just want them to spray paint the ground around the house so that we could have a sort public art installation, an homage to Richard Long, for our next garden party?
Perhaps the duo are presently occupied with Over the River?
Meanwhile, wouldn't it be deliciously intriguing to hear that Dubai is scheming to snatch the project away from its rival and that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are receptive to a change of venue?
National Geographic Newsreported earlier this year that “isolated tribes in the Amazon are now using satellites, computers, and even Google Earth to guard against threats from logging, agriculture, drug wars, and oil operations.”
In another National Geographic Newsarticle, we also read that activist groups in Southeast Asia have been helping indigenous communities “mix computers and handheld navigation devices with paints, yarn, and cardboard to make simple but accurate three-dimensional terrain models.” These models were then used in the courts to fight developers and in gaining political support. Already the Higaunon people in the Philippines have won an ancestral land title, and the Rumah Nor in Malaysia have stopped a major paper company from encroaching on its territory.
With Google spotlighting the continuing genocide in the Sudan on Google Earth, there is much to be enthusiastic about this synergy between high-tech geospatial technologies and human rights activism.
Unfortunately, as with any quasi-democratic government easily prone to corruption and bribery, lawmakers in the Philippines and Malaysia have re-written existing laws to require the use of GIS technologies and “anything related to measuring space” to officially recognized professionals.
While these legislative revisions do not outright forbid indigenous groups from making maps and terrain models, they effectively bar indigenous communities from making high-tech maps. As Mark Bujang, of the Iban people from Malaysia's Sarawak state on the island of Borneo, explains: “Imagine that indigenous communities who are trying to show the location and size of their native customary land in court are not able to do so unless they get someone who is licensed and registered. This is not possible, because most of the licensed and registered surveyors are working with the government or private consultant firms, [and] the latter costs too much for the communities.”
Longitudinal Slum, according to J.B. Jackson, is “an intermittent eyesore of drive-ins, diners, souvenir stands, purulent amusement parks, cheap-jack restaurants, and the kind of cabins my companion describes as mailboxes.” Geoff DeOld and Emily Andersen, 2/3 of the much missed blog theboxtank, are our guides.
The winner and runners-up of Metropolis Magazine's 2007 Next Generation Design Competition have been announced, and two projects especially intrigued us.
One is Alberto Villarreal's BrightWalk, described as a “shoe that incorporates piezo-electric transducers and electroluminescent polymers to generate light while the user is walking or running.” Sounding less like something you would wave around at a rave ten years ago but nevertheless conceptually similar is Elizabeth Redmond's PowerLeap, which according to ArchNewsNow is a “piezoelectric urban flooring system that saves the energy used as people walk across it, and lights up the nighttime sidewalk.”
Firstly, apart from Villarreal's website, the press release from Metropolis Magazine, and the ArchNewsNow article, are we to understand that no other online sources describing these projects exist? Should we have attended the announcement event last week; buy the May issue (are all the runners-up given adequate description?); travel to the ICFF in New York; or wait months for the projects to make their way to Chicago for more than the seemingly cursory descriptions we've been able to collect?
Secondly, we were reminded of three things:
1) Here at Pruned, whenever one speaks of piezoelectricity, we will always be reminded first of Yusuke Obuchi's phenomenal Wave Garden.
The following is what we wrote last time:
Floating off the California coastline, the Wave Garden is a prototype for a dual-function power plant and public park, oscillating with the ocean waves and cycles of energy demand. It is designed to succeed the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant after its 40-year license expires in the year 2026.
As an alternative to nuclear and other conventional energy sources, the Wave Garden is an electric power plant that derives energy from the movement of ocean waves. Its piezo-electro membrane is a flexible electric generator, where bending the material or applying stress creates an electric charge. Conversely, applying electric current to the membranes causes it to deform.
Monday through Friday, it generates energy, but at the weekends, the Wave Garden changes into a public garden - thus changing from a space of production to one of recreation and consumption. At the weekends, selected areas lift above the surface of the ocean, acting as a ceiling under which boats approach the entrances.
2) Next was this Wiredarticle, published last year in August, wherein we read that one of the regional subdivisions of the national Japanese railway network, with the help of researchers from Keio University, “plans to embed piezo pads in the floor under the ticket gates. As people pass through, vibration and pressure on the pads is converted by piezo crystals into an electrical charge which can then be channeled to highly efficient power storage systems and provide clean, ecologically friendly power to parts of the station. Although the piezo current is apparently a small one, if enough passengers pass through (and bounce a bit as they do), quite respectable amounts of electricity can be accumulated.”
3) Lastly, the Sustainable Dance Club, whose dance floor will convert the kinetic energy of clubbers to power lights, acoustics, toilets, etc. A video by National Geographic and BBC World on the SDC is available on YouTube.
To extend all these ideas further — or rather to return back to Redmond's proposal — one could imagine an extensive array of piezoelectric pedestrian pathways coursing through the urban landscape. Every sidewalk, subway tunnels, promenades, entryways and throughways siphoning power from the crowd.
And if one wants to be more strategic and thus more efficient, simply document via time-lapse photography how people move, say, through the Zócalo in Mexico City, and then install the flexible piezo-electro pavers onto where pedestrians self-organize, resulting perhaps in a strikingly beautiful paving pattern.
