Last week The New York Times published the latest installment in its ongoing series exploring the environmental and human impact of China's epic economic growth, and from it we learn, among other things, that the country is continuing apace with the construction of “the biggest water project in the history of the world.”
Called the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, it will essential graft into the country's present hydrology three new major rivers — concretized, subterranean, gravity defying — which together will “funnel more than 12 trillion gallons northward every year along three routes from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050. The eastern and central lines are already under construction; the western line, the most disputed because of environmental concerns, remains in the planning stages.”
Dwarfing the more famous Three Gorges Dams in cost and scale, this hydroengineering colossal is China's solution to a predicted water-parched future, one that surely would derail the most dynamic economy in the world if it came to pass.
The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million people, it has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its supply. Other countries, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States, have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels. But scientists say those below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years.
It's a hydrological version of the Great Wall, an olympian infrastructural defensive against an impending civilization-ending crisis.
But will it work? You'll have to read the article for a complete assessment.
The call for entries for the next Next Generation design competition is out, and this time the theme is on something very dear to Pruned's heart: WATER!
Water is everywhere—in nature, industry, home, our bodies, products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, systems (just to name a few).
With up to one third of the global population living without reliable access to clean water, we need better design solutions that account for potable water, gray water, black water—its uses, re-uses, controls, management, efficiency, and conservation.
We call on your innovative design solutions at all scales and sizes—products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, communication systems, or anything else you’ve dreamed up—for handling this most precious and most threatened natural resource. The time for new thinking on water is now.
Could it be that you want to design an awesome set of cocktail glasses? And that in your poetically beautiful project statement, you will mention how water has always been considered the epitome of purity, a fundamental attribute of Paradise, and used to cleanse the soul of its sins, but it, too, can flood entire villages, terrify us with its abyss, and turn children cancerous with its impurities? You'll even say how very Treehuggable it is, because recycled hypodermic needles are used. No more shall they litter our beaches.
Do you have an exceptional talent for programing and so will create a computer game to rival SimCity?
I can already tell that all the winners and runners-up will be phenomenally great. But in case yours isn't one of the projects chosen, send it to me and I'll post it here on Pruned. Sometimes the best aren't chosen.
One last scanned image from Diana Ketcham's Le Désert de Retz to post here, if for no other reason than it's simply a terrific photo.
It's of André Breton and his Surrealist group, posing for photograph after “[breaking] in through the crumbling wall,” as proto-(sub)urban adventurers “enchanted by the Désert as a symbol of the death of man's intelligence by forces that are primitive, elemental, and irrational.” It would be interesting to hear what they did inside: did they enact a Surrealist play; read poetry to each other; have a picnic in honor of Manet and Seurat; play hide and seek; have sex; reenact Marie Antoinette reenacting a day in the life of a shepherdess; posed for more photos, smiling or making faces behind their death masks? Unfortunately, Ketcham doesn't give a single anecdote.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to speculate what new meanings people today in the twenty-first century will exert into the garden.
Will people again see it as “a triumph of artifice” and an “ingenious integration of the civilizing arts, as works that incorporated the techniques of painting, sculpture, architecture, horticulture, and engineering with the content of literature” in much the same way as M. de Monville's contemporaries had seen it? Will today's installation and performance artists seek new forms of expressions having realized that their methods have not only been done before but also been done magnificently?
Or will it be taken up again as a symbol of gross opulence and immorality, the same way M. de Monville's prosecutors regarded it as during the Reign of Terror? Or would people find it rather poignant and precious that it had survived largely intact, against incredible odds?
And what would M. de Monville actually think of the fact that a third of his property is now part of a golf course, which is conceptually not too dissimilar from his pastoral garden?
And what about those who had found it “a frightening place, where one ventured seeking the thrills of terror” among “its monstrous trees, its shadows, its air of isolation” — how might they now think of the politics surrounding its “rediscovery” in the 60s, the calls for its renovation, and the lawsuits that have delayed its restoration? Where before one had hoped to be enveloped entirely by the wilderness in the hopes of gaining some metaphysical insight, one now detects the mundane machinations of a bureaucracy.
When Thomas Jefferson visited the Désert de Retz, Diana Ketcham imagined him having “tea in the ChineseHouse, served from [M. de Monville's] collection of antique porcelain. If the day was hot, a servant may have rushed over from the Pyramid bearing ice for their drinks.”
In what could only have been done by a grand master of wit, this classic form, usually associated with hot and arid landscapes, was turned into a working icehouse, “packed every winter with ice carried down from the Alps by wagon.” Eminently decorative and functional, it was an Egyptian fantasy for serving glaciers.
The Broken Column House is so named because it takes the form of a ruined classical column: truncated, jagged and riven with fissures. It was built by the aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville who used it as his main residence during the years immediately before the French Revolution. Nestled within the confines of Monville's private pleasure garden, called the Désertde Retz, it “stands like a solitary beacon, signaling the visitor to prepare for an encounter with the bizarre.”
And what bizarre encounters!
Visitors to the Désert would have encountered not just the Broken Column but also the ChineseHouse and the Tartar tent, which was made not out of fabric but tin metal, “gay with painted stripes” and erected on an artificial island in an artificial lake. Like many large gardens, it had a grotto, through which one would have entered the property (in other words, before Paradise, one must first journey down to the Abyss). There was also a peasant-chic thatched-roof cottage and the false ruins of a Gothic church. You could say, then, that the Désert was an outdoor museum of crypto-architectural history. Indeed, Diana Ketcham, in her slim but copiously illustrated book, describes it as “one of the glories of the architecture of fantasy.”
The garden itself was rather eccentric. Set within a natural-looking park were a model farm, a working dairy and an orangerie. Since Monville had no need to earn income from agriculture, these were more for leisure than production. Indeed, one shouldn't be surprised if one learns that some of Monville's guests, many of whom were members of the aristocracy, may have role-played as farmers or milkmaids for an afternoon.
Perhaps stranger things may have happened inside the walls of a garden presided over by a monied gentleman, an inveterate socialite who was said to have been “built like a model,” had “superb legs,” and bedded a different woman every night, either in the house or in any one of his fantastical follies.
One might think that Monville was psychologically unstable, the Ludwig of the Ancien Régime, and that his gardens were but the whims of one with too much money on his hands. But the Désert was a robust testing grounds for new forms and theories of landscape and architecture. Perhaps not unlike the Nevada Test Site and other military training facilities, it was an experimental terrain within which alternative systems to, say, Le Nôtre and Vitruvius, were dreamt up, cultivated and then promoted.
To a more modern visitor, meanwhile, fed with a steady diet of science fiction movies and literature, the Broken Column may evoke a distant Age of Titans, when giants roamed the land and built massive temples and homes, and the epic conflagration that ushered in the era's end, and then in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Lilliputian survivors made shelters out of the ruins and waited for Nature to return and erase the evidence of the disaster.
As absurd as that may sound, it is the sort of reaction Monville and other contemporary designers and patrons of irregular gardens in the English style intended to elicit. With their carefully composed views, such gardens were meant as the “stage sets for the enactment of fantasies of a pastoral or mythic character” — or “the stage for terror.”
Ketcham elaborates: “The sight of the [column] fragment generates a [...] superhuman dimension in the mind of the viewer. A corollary response is the realization that giants are at hand. Coming upon the Column, a human visitor feels the fear of the fairy tale hero stumbling up against the giant's boot.”
For the viewer who identifies with the giants, on the other hand, or with the old Testament God who struck down the Tower of Babel, the conceit of the colosal temple is exhilarating. In our unbelieving age, it is easier to respond to the purely spatial implications of the imaginary real. According to the Doric formula, height equals eight times the diameter, the full-scale column would stand at 384 feet. The architectural footprint of such a temple would extend beyond the borders of the garden.
Scale, then, becomes a technique with which Monville could create “a mood of altered reality.”
Ketcham again: “In the conventional picturesque garden, the presence of follies enhances the viewers' sense of physical and intellectual power, placing them in a controlling relation to the architecture of all times and all places, which has been scaled down to the comfortable proportions of the rural everyday landscape.” But here at the Désert, “it is the viewer who is reduced, rendered small and bewildered before the mysterious bulk of the Broken Column.”
Comparable contemporary architecture — the ones that you might expect to see in Las Vegas and RoadsideAmerica.com — may be ridden with gaudily clad tourists unknowingly suffering from post-modernist angst or architecture students, with copies of Baudrillard stuffed in their backpacks and gallons of ennui, seeking self-consciously ironic experiences.
The Désert, on the other hand, welcomed guests of a different sort. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, while serving as a minister to France, paid a visit to the Désert and “used elements of the floor plan of the the Broken Column in his design for the University of Virginia rotunda. Other illustrious persons who made it a favored retreat included Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV; the Duc d'Orléans; and Queen Marie Antoinette, who found inspiration there for her English gardens at Versailles.
There are so many interesting things to be said about the Broken Column House and the Désert de Retz, but we'll limit them to two here.
Firstly, the Désert is the only folly garden of France's eighteenth century that still exists close to its original state. Some of the grandest were leveled after the Revolution while others now exist heavily renovated or in fragments, leaving little sense of the original schemes.
But “decades of neglect saved the Désert de Retz from this common fate. Forgotten or ignored by a series of absentee owners, the park and its architectural contents were permitted to decay undisturbed and were taken up only in the 1980s as the object of restoration.”
The result is that what the eighteenth century devised as an artificial ruin became in the twentieth century a literal one, an irony whose poignancy has moved all of those who have pushed through the underbrush to enter into this forgotten place.
Secondly, as mentioned above, a program of restoration was carried out in the 1980s and one that still continues today. And therein lies some very interesting questions.
How does one return an artificial ruin, which became a true ruin, back to its original artificiality, a condition which aspired to be what it had become?
How does one restore decay from a state of real decay?
Here one imagines the restorers waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched with sweat, unwilling to return to sleep for fear of dreaming recursively the horrors of authenticity. “Is this a fake crack? A real crack? Fake? Real? Fake? Real?"
On the unrealized project, Raimist writes: “Noguchi designed this playground for a portion of the United Nations complex on the East River in New York. The project was to be privately funded and located on property given a special international diplomatic designation. Nevertheless, Robert Moses (the authoritarian director of public works for the City of New York) was able to get the project canceled. Moses was Noguchi's arch-nemisis in NYC having ridiculed his design for Play Mountain back in 1933. He continued to thwart any public park of Noguchi's design from ever being constructed in New York. I believe Moses criticized this design as 'dangerous' and little more than a 'rabbit warren'.”
A UN playground is anything but for children and innocent play, it would seem.
And Raimist has also uploaded a photo showing models of Giacomettian playground equipments, again designed by Noguchi. Devoid of any humans, it looks like a surrealist tableau, as desolate and unnerving as a de Chirico landscape.
One wonders, then, if Noguchi intended his playgrounds to be the perfect environment to rear sophisticated aesthetes and connoisseurs of world culture.
Or did he secretly scheme to turn the children of UN diplomats into psychopaths? Is the UN playground a “rabbit warren” for budding dictators? “Post-war Modernist landscapes turned me into a despot,” they would say during trials at the International Criminal Court.
Meanwhile, there are also images of another unbuilt project, the Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima, which Raimist discusses in threeexcellentposts. Go see.
