Something about the two on a head on collision, domestic spaces of unconventional provenance fulfilling what they were designed to but could not.
In any case, this WMD was meant to address a range of issues “from Homecoming to Homeland Security, from nomadic, American lifestyle to space travel, from military defense budgets to rural poverty. It combines the concerns of the most serious threat to national security and celebrates the distinct and original nature of American humor and invention.”
We rather liked collecting our posts on agricultural landscapes into one, so we'd like to do the same with our posts on fountains, in reverse chronological order.
On Michael Cross' Bridge, a sort of interactive reflecting pool from which an outbreak of messianic prophecies, marian visions and apocalyptic auguries will precipitate.
On some selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Because is not the heavily controlled Mississippi River really just a fountain writ-large?
Some civil engineers from Purdue University apparently believe that the best way for Istanbul to lessen the humanitarian crisis and economic impact of a catastrophic earthquake striking the ancient city is to build a second Istanbul.
Istanbul v1.0, these engineers point out, won't be able to withstand a major seismic event as “many of the city's buildings were constructed with little regard for modern building standards.”
The city itself is not well designed for earthquakes. Many streets are narrow and winding and would quickly fill with debris after an earthquake, preventing aid from reaching those who are trapped or injured.
And if Istanbul goes, so goes the nation.
Istanbul v2.0, on the other hand, will be “earthquake resistant, with strong buildings and wide streets. The city would be designed to take advantage of building techniques used to minimize earthquake damage and incorporate modern technologies such as electronic locks and security, video communication and environmentally friendly technologies.”
More importantly, this “satellite city” would serve as a refugee camp and guarantee continuity of the nation's economic activity, 80 percent of which occurs in Istanbul.
Of course, the new city will not lay empty, gathering dust and weeds as it waits for the first influx of seismic refugees to arrive. It is “designed to be an economic hub,” with a business, residential and entertainment districts ready to be utilized in the meantime.
Oddly enough, we are reminded of the Japanese tradition of building exact copies of Shinto's holiest shrines at Ise every 20 years and then completely dismantling the current temples save for a central wooden pole. In another 20 years, a new set of replicas will be erected around this pole, thus completing and restarting the cycle over again.
Consequently, we are left to wonder what if a similar phenomenon were to happen to cities?
Let's say a new city is built, a fully functioning metropolis complete with homes, businesses, museums and infrastructure. For twenty years, people would live there, going about their lives, going to work, raising their children, tending to their gardens. Everyday they would hear news of another city under construction at an adjacent site. In fact, they will be reminded of this at every hour of the day, if not from the news, then from the distant but incessant machine noise and dust plumes emanating from the horizon. It becomes a major aspect of daily life, settling in nicely or not so nicely into the background, like radiation or an impending major earthquake or a Hurricane Katrina, oscillating between states of ambience and immediate critical concern.
When the new city is finished, everyone will have to migrate there, as the now older city will torn down, the sewers excavated and upturned. Everything else will be burnt to the ground. But in another 20 years, they will again be exiled, forced to a newer city constructed on the very same site from where they had fled from decades ago.
And so on and so on.
At each new city, then, will people replicate an exact copy of the old? Will their gardens, high rises and even the paintings in the museums be perfect reproductions of the originals, which are themselves copies of reproductions? Will the layout of the streets be an exact mirror image of the one they had walked on and driven through not too long ago?
Or will they gradually come to develop new cultural traditions favoring the values of impermanence, of continual change? Will their society be based on a culture of experimentation and radical innovation? In other words, will they stop designing buildings and landscapes exactly the same way as before, even if it's been proven to work time and time again, when failure can and will be erased in no more than 20 years' time?
For that matter, will there be such a thing as historic preservation when everything is understood to be temporary and concepts such as icons and authenticity are illusory?
What will the built environment look like when everything is conceived as planned waste?
How will you live your life in tenuous circumstances?
In any case, there is a 3D animation of Istanbul v2.0 for you to look at. You'll see, among other things, a cluster of earthquake-resistant buildings arranged in the shape of a star. This shape, we are told, is that of a Selcuk star, a classical Turkish symbol.
More importantly, you will see its overly segregated design and the absence of what some may describe as “charm,” that urban quality accumulated through centuries of successively being a Greek polis, a Roman outpost, the imperial seat of Byzantine emperors and Ottoman sultans, and the uncontested premier city of the modern Turkish state. Some urban planners and romantics will no doubt lambast it.
With our recent series of agriculturally-themed post at an end, and with original blogger Jorn Barger's sage advice for other bloggers to “re-post [their] favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time” still very much worth taking, here then are some of our past dealings with agricultural landscapes, in chronological order.
While we're on the subject of things agricultural and of things covered by just about everyone long before today, there is Pasona O2, a subterranean farm cultivated inside a former bank vault beneath a high rise building in one of Tokyo's business districts.
Though walled in from sunlight, weather and geology, it's unbelievably verdant. Tomatoes, lettuces, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs, are grown in an area about 1,000 square meters. There is even a terraced rice paddy.
This is all done, by the way, in a very hi-tech fashion. Computers control the temperature and light, which in this case is artificially generated by LEDs, halide lamps and sodium vapor lamps.
Carbon dioxide, we read, is delivered by spraying.
Understandably, people have wondered what the energy requirement is for these “plant factories,” worried that a basement greenhouse might be too inefficient for a wider application.
Of course, any highly unsustainable demand for energy can easily be offset by drilling miles deep into Japan's tectonic landscape to generate hydrothermal energy.
But what exactly is the purpose of Pasona O2? Certainly it is not where cutting edge agritechnology and biotechnology research is being done. Nor does it grow its produce to sell on the market. It doesn't even pretend to be a model for future food production in Japan whose farming population continues to dwindle.
In actuality, it was built primarily as a demonstration and training facility for jobless young people who see a career in agriculture as a possibility. Though not really plugged in to the youth culture of Japan, we'll say that the presence of all that hi-tech equipment can do a long way to maintain interest.
In any case, all our sources are from over two and half years ago, and in searching for updates to use here, we didn't come across any that wasn't written in Japanese.
Having been covered apparently by everyone, the details of Robert Fidler's architectural cloak and dagger should by now be very familiar to all. But just in case some of our readers have yet to hear about it, the general narrative is as follows.
Six years ago, reports the Daily Mail, after failed attempts at getting a planning permission to build his dream house, Fidler erected a “40ft stack of hay bales covered by huge tarpaulins” so that he could secretly put it up — a mock-Tudor castle complete with ramparts, turrets and cannons. When it was finished two years later, the family moved in.
Their homestead still being very much illegal, the Fidlers kept their wall of hay standing, thinking that if they can keep their house a secret and no one complains about it to the local council for four years, it would automatically become legal. Unbelievably, it actually managed to hide the bulky structure from everybody. It even became a host to a transient microecosystem of birds, insects and vegetation, all as fugitive as the wall and the house themselves.
The ruse, however, was for naught. When the hay wall was taken down after the four years, officials ordered the Fidlers to destroy their castle after people discovered and expectedly complained about it.
While others may deplore the Fidlers for building what could understandably be described as a monstrosity, on the other hand, we take them to task for being unambitious.
We have always considered agricultural landscapes as ideal grounds for new and alternative theories of architecture and landscape architecture, contributing since time immemorial to significant developments in the history of landscape design. But what do we often hear?
We are told, for instance, that they are ideal sites for serial killers to lay undetected, whose barns and silos breed not a predilection for artistic avant-gardism but rather criminally deviant behaviors and the darkest of souls.
That they are not potent territory for testing out new forms of landscape design and are instead the territory of demonic creatures with a penchant for body parts and experimental techniques in body modification.
You will not find François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville pursuing new modes of engagements with rural landscapes, but you will likely encounter innocent looking country bumpkins experimenting with new forms of pseudo-Christian cults, converting cornfields into outdoor temples.
But what about hearing stories of, say, a couple getting stranded somewhere in the sun-drenched expanses of Kansas, and instead of stumbling into a farmer who wants to crucify them, they befriend a farmer who for decades has been tunneling a complex system of underground passages, which until recently have lain unused except for when the local freemasons rent them for their arcane rituals. He is using them now for experimental pharming.
Or it could be that the farmer isn't hiding from federal agents and endangering the world's food supply. Instead, he is formulating new designs and construction techniques for constructed wetlands, which will function as a park, a wildlife buffer zone and most importantly, a treatment plant for agricultural runoffs.
Or discover not mock-Tudor monstrosities but sentienthomesteads, flexing and contorting and scampering about in response to the vagaries of weather, geology and maybe the extreme fluctuations of the price of corn.
Somewhere in the gridded vastness of the American agricultural landscape is a farmer who takes nightly field trips through his cornfields. He goes on these walks not because he's a little bit off kilter after years of living in near total isolation, a prisoner of his own cultivated hortus conclusus, but because it's part of his creative process. You see, he's writing a novel, the new Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for the 21st century, and believes that these agricultural immersions — through hypnotic formalities, altered vistas and tenuous dimensions — induce a Sibylline state of frenzied creativity necessary for tackling such a major literary undertaking.
Could our house plants someday tell us just how much we suck at being a parent?
Adrià Bassaganyes and Ben Salem, of Eindhoven University of Technology, in co-operation with Singapore National University’s Mixed Reality Lab, are exploring that possibility — and more — with their investigative project called Ambient Biomedia.
Quoting a quote published in a recent post in Next Nature:
Ambient Biomedia is an investigative project about using living beings, in particular plants, to display human lifestyle problems information. The working principle of our systems is taking data about the lifestyle aspect that the user wants to monitor, such as time spent with somebody, health aspects or bad habits, and semantically couple it into an aspect of a living being. The user would merge the plant with his daily environment, following the evolution of his problem’s state in a non intrusive way. Thanks to the empathical link existing between human and other living beings, the user would see himself reflected on the plant, feeling sorry for herself, meditating about his problem and hopefully, taking measures to solve it.
In other words, cropping up soon all over the place will be gardens that can diagnose a whole range of existing medical and psychosocial problems and which actually then become part of a prescribed therapeutic regimen.
Indeed, the data-gathering component of this ambient system is quite feasible in light of the following two research projects.
1) The first project was the subject of a post we wrote last summer and involves the development of an early detection system for Alzheimer's disease. In that project, a house was rigged with motion detectors to monitor changes, however imperceptibly small and wildly erratic, in the day-to-day activity of its elderly volunteer.
The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.
Spot the tiny wobbles and wiggles and you can spot the disease early.
2) The second one we read about in an article published last year in The Economist. There, we learned that Yoshiharu Yamamoto, of the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have discovered that “depressed people move in a mathematically different way from other people.”
In their experiment, the researchers monitored changes in the daily movement of those that were diagnosed with clinical depression and those that were healthy. To no one's surprise, they observed a difference in activity between the two experimental groups. When they plotted their data out on graphs, however, they were surprised to see the results feature the characteristic curve of a power law distribution.
The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.
Spot the tell-tale curvature and you can spot the disease, the research suggests.
Gathering actuatable data of any aspects of lifestyle, then, seems to be just a matter of building an in-house or external surveillance system using GIS, CCTV, remote sensing, complex algorithms, motion-activated laser beams and other cool toys mostly geared for the security industry.
So the next question is: how will all those data get manifested in plants? This, too, has been explored before, for instance, in an art installation called Spore 1.1.
But despite all these real-world examples suggesting plausibility, a working ambient system might not ever be successfully produced. But no matter, we still want to know what landscape architects will do with it.
Will landscape architects, for instance, march up to the Department of Children and Family Services with the designs for a garden that can actuate the abusive behavior of foster parents towards kids placed under their ward so that underpaid, overworked and overstretched case workers need only to drive by their houses for an evaluation? If the lawn is green or the rose bushes are lusciously flowering, then all is well inside, physically and psychologically. But if the verdancy of the hedges doesn't quite meet visual standards, then a home inspection is warranted? The suburban landscape vernacular as a measuring stick of domestic and social harmony — which, of course, isn't unheard of.
Will they instead design neighborhood parks finely attuned to the pederastic behaviors of unregistered sex offenders in the area, orchestrating a genetically-encoded series of seismonastic movements when one is detected?
Will they file patents on a rose hybrid that can actuate how much sex you're getting? If it desiccates when you're not having any, what will you do about it?
Finding that the “empathical link existing between human and other living beings” cannot be reliably counted on to spur people to take corrective measures, will they then commission the services of genetic engineers to enable the plants to produce an antidote in pollen form and to release it when needed whether one wants to be cured or not?
While again fruitlessly trying to clear our archives of accumulated links, we were happily reacquainted with Richard Box's installation called Field.
Realized in February 2004 while he was Artist-in-Residence of the Physics Department at Bristol University, the project involved over a thousand fluorescent bulbs “planted” underneath high voltage AC transmission lines. Unwired, the bulbs drew energy from the surrounding electromagnetic radiation and lit up, making for what must have been a marvelous sight.
The FIELD of tubes will flicker in to life across the hillside as the early evening light fades. The performance each evening is hard to anticipate as the daily operation of the electricity supply will differ and is always dependent on the weather. In all the best traditions of land art it is conditional on the variations of the great outdoors, and requires its audience to be patient. Here a parallel can be struck between FIELD and Walter DeMaria's Lightning Field sited in the Nevada Desert [N.B. it's actually located in New Mexico] - many visitors travel for days to see [it], camp beside it and are lucky if they experience the sort of storm that will make the lightning dance across the 'field' of conductors.
It has been remarked that Richard Box was trying to draw attention to the dangers of overhead power lines but the artist maintains that he was simply making visible what is otherwise invisible.
