Defiant gardens are gardens created during times of extreme crisis, built behind the trenches of World War I, on both sides of the Western Front; in Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps during World War II; in POW and civilian internment camps, tended to by prisoners and their captors alike; in internment camps for Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II; in garrisons, depots and battalion headquarters; in refugee camps; even on the hollowed out concavities left behind by the Blitz. They are “short-lived, their marks on the land quickly obliterated.”
“Capability Brown” has been one our most prolific tipsters. Always answering our open call for anything remotely related to landscape architecture, he recently directed us to the Wired blog Gadget Lab, specifically to this entry about a DIY “device that will charge your USB-capable devices while you do what you do best. Breathe. Using some parts scavenged from an old CD-ROM drive, a simple electronic circuit, and a few rubber bands you will soon be huffing and puffing your way to fully-charged pseudo-useful electronic gadget nirvana.”
Reviewing the links he's sent us over the past year, we've noticed, to our astonishment, that however unrelated they seem to be, they blend together into a very intriguing landscape idea.
To illustrate, we'll begin by saying that “Capability Brown” likes to send us information on piezoelectricity after seeing how interested we are in the material as an alternative, human-generated energy source. We're slowly investigating the websites on his list.
Possibly anticipating us dreaming about a wearable power charger tailored from flexible piezoelectric membrane, “Capability Brown” alerted us a few of months ago to the launch of H-Bomb, purportedly the world's first power heated wetsuit from Rip Curl. The heat, which you can crank up to 65°C (150°F), is generated by two Polymer Lithium Ion batteries.
“These are the same batteries found in your mobile phone, ipod and laptop computer,” we learn. “There is no danger of exposure to these batteries by radiation, electric shock or explosion – even if it is called the Bomb! The batteries weigh 0.12kg each and are positioned on your lower back where they are cushioned against your body by a layer of neoprene sponge so you can't feel them.”
You will be able to recharge the batteries in the The H-Bomb2.
While the thought of surfing somewhere in the Arctic Circle sounds incredibly adventuresome, we prefer deep-sea diving to splashing about on the beach, and trying out our piezo-wetsuits somewhere with a better selection of flora and fauna. Correctly guessing our wish, “Capability Brown” e-mailed us this BBC Newsarticle on the discovery of nearly 700 hundred new marine species in the vast, dark deep-sea around Antarctica.
As part of the ANDEEP (Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity) Project, scientists “spotted 674 species of isopod (a diverse order of crustaceans), most of which had never previously been described; more than 200 polychaete species (marine worms), 81 of which were found to be new species; and 76 sponges, 17 of which had previously been unknown.”
Fantasizing a bit further, wouldn't it be better to bring the Southern Ocean closer to us? “Capability Brown” obviously divined our dreams over a year ago when he directed us to velo-city after reading about it on Archinect.
Proposed by architect Chris Hardwicke, “velo-city is a high-speed, all-season, pollution-free, ultra-quiet transit system that makes people healthier. Using an infrastructure of elevated cycle tracks velo-city creates a network across the city. The elevated bikeways are enclosed in tubes to provide protection for all season cycling. The bikeway tubes are separated by direction of travel to create a dynamic air circulation loop that creates a natural tail-wind for cyclists. The reduction of air resistance increases the efficiency of cycling by about 90% allowing for speeds of up to 40 km/hr.”
Why not fill it with water? An aquarium in the sky. A deep oceanic riverine current but on stilts and theters. Watch eels slithering their way through the interlocking tubular loop-de-loop-de-whoop. Or a pack of migrating humpback whales -- the latest leg on their Darwinian odyssey...from sea to land then back to sea again, and finally, to the skies. And if the entire structure collapses, well...back to land again in a sort of Douglas Adams dysfantasia. And why not some bioluminescent hatchetfishes, twinkling in the night sky where stars have long been blotted out by urban light pollution. Surely a very romantic evening can be had under the shimmering Aquarium in the Sky. Until...of course...a 40-ton humpback whale comes plunging down.
Exploring the deep in the skies above Chicago, loop-de-loop-de-whooping in loop-de-loop-de-whoops, knotted to the exact hydrodynamic flow patterns of the Southern Ocean. Or they could even be patterned after the violent hydrothermal whirlpools in the mid-ocean ridges: over Rome are the rivers coursing through the Marianas Trench, and over Cairo the convections of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Watch Japanese “researchers” hunt whales for “science” or schools of tuna rhyming with flocks of starlings. Near where a loop dips to within a few feet off the ground, children play next to Charybdis, the Kraken and the Leviathan.
Features a landscape architecture practice for the first time in Pamphlet history. London's Smout Allen presents five projects that respond to the way in which man has enlarged the landscape through architecture and infrastructure, manipulating and blurring perceptions of what is natural and what is artificial.
Contemporary cities are characterized by fluidity. They grow beyond their borders and converge along different lines. Some cities are erased by natural occurrences, while other disappear due to the construction of dams and are rebuilt at other locations. Transient Sedimentation explores the effect of movement and relocation on cities and landscapes and includes experimental architecture in Manhattan, Vienna, and other locations.
A site study of the aftermath of a deadly debris that occurred in 2005 in the town of La Conchita, California, north of Los Angeles. La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in immediate, raw terms. Global warming appears to be accelerating the danger. Without resources for healing or leaving, La Conchita lives on in abandonment. McPhee's images reach through obsessive layers of visual data towards an integration beyond the material facts of the site. The large-scale images that result from this process are topologies of absence and recovery.
The obelisk was carved during the reign of Nebkaure Amenemhet II (1992-1985 BCE), and originally stood in the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis. The Roman emperor Caligula brought it to Rome in 37 AD as one of many tokens of the Roman conquest of Egypt, and erected the spoil on the spine of his eponymous circus, later renamed for Nero.
A millenium and a half later, in 1585, Pope Sixtus asked Domenico Fontana to move the 330-ton Aswan granite the quarter mile or so to St. Peter's Square. The operation was carried out using hemp ropes and iron bars weighing 40,000 pounds, plus 900 men and 72 horses, and took about 5 months to complete. It was no easy move. Nevertheless, the entire event proved to be a spectacle, captivating the city's populace.
We would be remiss if we didn't briefly mention that the relocation of the obelisk capped the tail end of the slow but inexorable epic reconstruction of the city of Rome by the papacy after the Western Schism.
When the popes returned from their Avignon sojourn, they found the city nearly deserted, a hulking heap of trash, the center having the look of a backwoods country. It looked beggarly; or as Petrarch described the one-time center of the world, “a matron with the dignity of age but her grey locks disheveled, her garments, and her face overspread with the pallor of misery.”
Starting with Nicholas V in the mid-15th century, the popes as master urban planners set about returning the city back to economic prosperity and to pastoral preeminence in Christendom. Old roads were opened up, and new ones built. So were new palaces, churches, and piazzas. Entire neighborhoods were razed down, others cleaned for re-habitation. Monumental schemes were planed, re-planned, and then finally executed. Broad, straight roads swept through the landscape, irrespective of the hilly terrain and existing grid, connecting all the mother churches with each other, to other holy sites and to the city gates.
Pilgrims soon circulated about the urbis as though it were a theater; and for all intents and purposes it was indeed one huge stage, wherein souls were saved or condemned while the church cashed in, watching their coffers bloat from selling indulgences. From one basilica to another basilica, from one severed finger to a decapitated martyr's head to yet another saintly relic, pilgrims traversed the reconfigured urban landscape, praying, chanting, giving offerings, receiving absolution and using the vast store of saintly sculptures and monuments as props.
It was as carefully choreographed as moving the Vatican obelisk.
We would be remiss as well if we didn't briefly note that most art historians seem to like to comment that not only did the obelisk provide the ideal visual anchor and spatial coherence to a large, open public space but, with the mounting of a cross on the summit, this once trophy of Roman imperialism became a trophy of the Catholic church. The triumph of Christianity over paganism, as it were.
Of course, one can only wonder who will make this trophy of a trophy into their own trophy one thousand or so years from now.
Or in a bit of performance art inspired by Busby Berkeley, will Maurizio Cattelan steer through the Baroque avenues of Rome four parade balloons in the exact shape and dimensions as the minarets of Hagia Sophia? With a cast of thousands and the entire zoological content of Bioparco di Roma? It'll be a new Roman triumph, passing through the Arch of Constantinople. The minarets will get stuck and so must be deflated. Cities in Western Europe and Muslim countries will riot.
(Also read about Ramses II's 10-hour journey through the streets of Cairo in this BBC News article. Apparently tens of thousands of people lined the streets to witness the spectacle.)
In a fun little adaptive reuse project, landscape architect Tom Leader and his colleagues Roman Chiu and Sara Peschel want to add chicken coops on wheels to one of the great icons of Modernism, the Farnsworth House, in order to prepare it for the “coming survivalist era of radical sustainability.”
The project takes inspiration from past retrofits:
The current tendency to embalm our historical monuments, trying to maintain them precisely as they were in their functional lives, is a relatively new practice. Most of the great monuments of ancient Rome were adapted in the middle Ages for re-use in some "parasitical" way related to their basic form and system. The Coliseum became a large scale apartment block as well as a stone quarry. Domitian's Arena was converted to the hippodrome-shaped Piazza Navona with stores resting their foundations and partitions on the surrounding groins and vaults.
Similarly, so that it can stave off future threats of demolition and floods, the new extension is meant to provide income for its own maintenance. One wonders though how much the eggs will have to cost to pay for heating and to replace broken windows.
Meanwhile, someone should propose retrofitting Philip Johnson's houses in New Canaan, Connecticut into a boutique abattoir. Organic spring lambs reared in an Arcadian setting, then slaughtered with modernist efficiency. Johnson's Loins® for $500/lb.
Or genetically modified pigs nurtured in Johnson's “perfected” landscape, then ensanguinated in hermetically sealed glass hamlets, their butchers soothed from the horrors of blood and squealing with an enveloping view of Nature.
In any case, head over to Google Maps to explore, according to Earth Observatory, “one of Africa's major producers of soda ash (sodium carbonate) and salt.” It is also “an easily recognizable visual feature for astronauts aboard the ISS.”
Also check out other salt ponds in the Dead Sea and San Francisco Bay. Better yet, stimulate your visual cortex into catatonic ecstasy with David Maisel's photographic series Terminal Mirage.
While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.
A simple tap (5) makes it easy for women and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).
The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities. All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance.
Not surprisingly, trying to assess the design and application of the PlayPump system took us on an emotional roller coaster ride. One minute we were giddy with enthusiasm (“Fucking brilliant!”), but the next minute, completely raving with skepticism (how long do the children have to twirl and twirl around to fill the tank; and is the water any safer?), only to return back to unbridled enthusiasm (well, it's not as if the goal is to provide communities with daily showers, car washes, and indoor toilet flushes; and surely groundwater is reliably safer than the surface water sources to which the PlayPump offers an alternative).
Back and forth.
Convinced how cool the whole thing is, we soon found yet more reasons to doubt the viability of this earnest endeavor: aren't there better options, such as these? Well, of course. The PlayPump isn't meant to be the singular solution for every possible situation. Aggregation is a good strategy.
Counterproductive as we sometimes are with our privileged ironic asides, we asked ourselves: don't you find the ads a bit troubling, even comical? (Advertising in economically depressed areas? Is this like Colors by Benetton or something?) To which we replied: Yes, we are indeed privileged.
Back and so forth.
But before we reverted back to our usual default position of enthusiastic interest, we asked one last question: wouldn't it be better to just slice off a sizable chunk of what we in the United States spend on public water services — for instance, to recreate some sort of Edenic fantasies in the desert Southwest with water diverted from severely depleted sources — and allocate that portion to sub-Saharan African nations where the money will be used to improve their hydrological infrastructure, and we are the ones who get to install the PlayPumps in our school grounds, parks and backyards, where a growing population of obese, diabetic, allergic children — the ones inured to the hardship of suburban domesticity — are forced to trim a little bit of the fat, reduce their susceptibility to diabetes and prevent future addictions to Allegra® and Claritin® while simultaneously teaching them about the incredibly, wonderfully awesome subject of hydrology and imparting a life long commitment to water conservation?
Yes.
POSTSCRIPT #1: PBS Frontline has a follow up on the PlayPumps, and most of it isn't good news.
