The latest in a series of competitions sponsored by Urban Revision has begun. Previously, each competition had focused on an aspect of the urban block: energy in Re:Volt; transportation in Re:Route; and commerce in Re:Store.
In Re:Connect, participants are asked to focus on community.
More details:
The character of a neighborhood is a reflection of the people who live there. When people feel connected to a place, they feel more connected to one another. The community becomes an extended family and life more meaningful. Thus, we're looking for urban planning approaches where revamped environments bring current residents together, particularly families. This is a chance to repair the essential relationships between social work, nature and urban infill with ideas that value humanistic thinking and imagination over bulldozers. Ponder the kinds of structures and landscapes that typically exist in run-down areas and transform them into eco-wise spaces that make life better. How might you overcome the inevitable resistance to change, and harness the community's human resources? Introducing eldercare and childcare programs or sustainable landscaping with useable harvests might be just what's needed. The best plans, no matter their originality or scale, will aim to positively affect neighboring blocks as well.
And since the last line in the competition brief quoted above did say that entries needn't be completely original, perhaps you can reinterpret Edible Estates or spatialize these John Pfahl photographs.
Would forming a militia of mechanizedguerillagardeners and then carrying out scouting patrols for and nighttime sabotage missions against barren patches of landscape around your city block make “people feel connected to a place?”
In any case, the registration deadline is June 1, and the submission deadline is June 15. However, these dates may change.
Last year, Kevin Robert Perry won an ASLA Professional Award for a truly innovative stormwater management system he designed for the city of Portland, Oregon. Referred to as the “first of its kind anywhere,” Perry's project replaced the city's combined storm/sewer pipe system with a landscaped curb extension carved out of a portion of the street's parking zone.
In other words, instead of using expensive and high maintenance system to funnel urban runoffs to distant, equally expensive and high maintenance treatment facilities and discharge points, they are instead managed on-site with simple, cost-effective, attractive and environmentally sustainable infrastructure.
And here's how it works:
Stormwater runoff from 10,000 square feet of NE Siskiyou Street and neighboring driveways flows downhill along the existing curb until it reaches the 7-foot wide, 50-foot long curb extensions. An 18-inch wide curb cut allows this water to enter each curb extension. Once water is within the landscape area, the water is retained to a depth of 7 inches by a series of checkdams. Depending on the intensity of a rain event, water will cascade from one "cell" to another until plants and soil absorb the runoff or until the curb extensions reach their storage capacity. The landscape system in place infiltrates water at a rate of 3 inches per hour. If a storm is intense enough, water will exit the landscape area through another curb cut at the end of each curb extension and will flow into the existing street inlets. With the new stormwater curb extensions now in place, nearly all of NE Siskiyou’s annual street runoff, estimated at 225,000 gallons, is managed by its landscape system.
And here's the plant list, which unfortunately makes no mention of genetically modified super-phytoremediating neo-plants:
The plants selected for the NE Siskiyou Green Street are primarily Pacific Northwest natives, such as Oregon grape, sword fern, and grooved rush. Adaptable ornamental species such as blue oat grass, boxleaf euonymus, and New Zealand sedge, were also planted because these species are low-maintenance and fit very well in the neighborhood context. All of the selected plant species are low-growing evergreen varieties with varying colors and textures which always provide year-round interest.
This program, of course, required the participation of the local residents to help realize and, once built, maintain it. As it says in the project statement, “the aesthetic appeal and intrigue of the new stormwater facilities creates a community asset that promotes both environmental stewardship and education at the neighborhood level.”
In looking at the pictures and getting glimpses of context, one could mistake that this sort of project can only be successfully implemented in neighborhoods such as NE Siskkiyou Green Street — fairly well-off parts where residents can exert political influence on street renovations or on anything that can affect property values.
But what we find absolutely wonderful about Perry's designs is that they can be applied to economically depressed areas, in inner cities or blighted post-industrial towns, whose local governments find themselves unable to maintain basic infrastructural services.
Either due to a federal administration siphoning away public works money into boyish adventures; an erosion of its tax base as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis; industries closing or moving as demanded by globalization; or even post-oil and post-water realities making current stormwater management practices unsustainable — these same local governments see their public works budget depleted and running in the red, resulting in their neighborhoods taken off the grid.
The expected response of residents would be to move. Some do just that but it's often the case that many would be financially unable and so must then contend with a pestilential landscape of failed sewers, stagnant pools and unappealing vegetation.
It is in this context, we believe, that Perry's designs seem most suited for and are critically needed.
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.
