Dredging the bottom of our archives brought up an interesting project by Edinburgh-based landscape architects Gross. Max. to counter the effect of global warming.
Submitted as part of the 6000 Miles exibition organized by Glasgow's The Lighthouse in early 2005, they proposed to use the Torness Nuclear Power Station to create a nuclear-powered iceberg and park it nearby on some stretch of Scotland's 6,000-mile coast.
This is called “local freezing.”
Of course, our immediately response is — why only one iceberg?
If we are to believe Gross. Max. that “the only way to reduce the levels of CO2 emissions is to rely on nuclear power,” then the next logical iteration of their proposal is to build dozens more — a radioactive necklace of giant refrigerators — and then turn all those firths and lochs into glacier fields, maintaining Scotland's national climate as it awaits atmospheric conditions to return to pre-modern levels.
Historic preservation for the climate-changed future.
But whether or not you believe that nuclear power stations should have a role in combatting climate change or even whether or not this concept would alleviate the local effects of ungeographically high temperatures, this will surely be a popular destination.
In Berlin a tropical indoor beach has just been opened while even in Scotland we now see the first indoor ski slopes with real snow. As a matter of fact people can't resist climate change; they actually hold a deep desire for it. Change of climate is the most important factor in selecting holiday destinations!
And in case you get tired of all that ice, “the actual heat generated to cool the iceberg is utilised to create hot water lagoons in the nearby cement works quarry. The limestone of the actual rock formation will generate amazing dazzling blue lagoons.”
For UK residents at least, it'll be a cheap alternative to Iceland.
Behold some 400 “lakes and seas” on Saturn's moon, Titan, as captured by the spacecraft Cassini. Rendered with the auric exuberance of Klimt and the bold angularity of Schiele, through complicated parabolas and hyperbolas, one wonders if NASA astronomers and computer scientists aren't attempting to formulate an official visual style. Instead of sci-fi realism, extraterrestrial landscapes and future colonized worlds will be illustrated in a sort of hyperdecorative post-art nouveau style. Or not.
In any case, as the above resized image does no justice to the original, you should download the full satellite composite image, either the 10MB jpeg version or the 186MB tiff version.
The two share quite a few in common. For instance, both employ constructed wetlands to detoxify contaminated landscapes. In the case of Silver Lake, it is the Los Angeles River's heady stew of 14 EPA-listed chemical pollutants; AMD&ART, for its part, has targeted acid mine drainage (AMD), hence the name. Additionally, both were conceived as pedagogical landscapes, teaching visitors their respective historical context and technologies. As such, they are occupiable open spaces.
There is one major difference though: AMD&ART Park is actually built and has been in operation for almost 15 years.
Beginning in 1994, a multi-disciplinary team — which consisted of T. Allan Comp, a historian and director of the non-profit AMD&ART; Robert Deason, a hydrogeologist; Stacy Levy, a sculptor; AmeriCorps interns; and landscape architect Julie Bargmann, of D.I.R.T. Studio — were tasked to create “a large-scale, artful public space that directly addresses the problems of AMD and much more.”
AMD in the entire Appalachian Region, we read, is “the most widespread water quality problem, as well as a significant economic and social constraint.” Indeed, the EPA has designated it as the biggest environmental problem in the eastern mountains.
Seeping or surging from abandoned coal mines, AMD is the metals-laden water, often acidic, that coats stream beds with orange sediment, killing the bottom of the food chain. Often desolating entire watersheds, these rust colored streams are the consequence of a proud past filled with hard work and dedication in an era that paid little attention to environmental consequences. Today, AMD is a painful reminder of the poverty and economic abandonment that still exists in coal country, the emblematic orange silent signature of dying communities.
The result of the collaboration is, if not innovative, gloriously inspiring.
Several discrete elements make up the park. Located in the eastern part is a passive water treatment system and the so-called Litmus Garden. On the other side is a wetland habitat zone and in between is a recreational area. Interspersed throughout are several art installations, hence the second part of the name, though one could call the whole site an art installation itself.
The treatment zone is easily distinguished by a series of 7 keystone-shaped treatment ponds. No cutting edge nanotechnology or the latest transgenic organism or even heavy machinery is used. Turning the highly toxic water into one that you can swim in is done with elementary physics, chemistry and biology. Regular limestone, for instance, is applied instead to lower the water's acidity. Plants simply dying off and decaying in the winter and then returning in the spring also helps to change its pH level. Even gravity is utilized to help suspended metals settle out of the ADM.
Meanwhile, the function of each ponds are best explained by the following signs, themselves an important component of the park.
Running along these ponds is the Litmus Garden. It plays no role in the water treatment, but it does act as a “visual representation of [the] changing health of the river.”
Small groves or bands of thirteen native tree species were chosen for their autumn foliage colors. In the fall, the Litmus Garden trees will turn deep red around Pond 1 and grade through orange and yellow to blue-green at the end of the treatment system in Pond 6, creating a visual reflection of enhanced water quality — and a great reason for a Vintondale community fall celebration.
It's a horticultural and hydrological rhyming scheme, in other words.
Once cleaned or “legal”, the water is then diverted to a seven-acre wetland built on what was “once the busy industrial heart of Vintondale.”
Once an industrial wasteland, our History Wetlands now serve as home to a growing number of plants and animals. Over 10,000 native wetlands plants have been planted, providing a habitat for many insect and bird species including wood ducks, geese, and killdeer. Beaver, fox, deer, and other animals have also been spotted in the wetlands. Ten bat boxes complement the landscape of our wetlands in anticipation of attracting native bats to the area.
From wasteland back into Eden, albeit with the marks of its exile. And this isn't so much a restoration or a reclamation as it is redemption.
But in any case, knowing what wetlands can do, the water can only get cleaner than when it had left the treatment ponds.
Once the treatment and wetland sections were completed, attention was then turned to developing a multi-purpose, four-acre recreation area that now hosts soccer, baseball, football, and many other outdoor games. “Closely reflecting the aspirations of the very first design meetings with the community, the park is rapidly becoming the new social center of Vintondale, bringing new pride and new activity to the community,” we read.
Parks nowadays seem to be programmed to the hilt and then some. Tomorrow, they'll be asked to save the world.
Meanwhile, Eric Reece, author of Lost Mountain, wrote an article about the park for Orion Magazine. There, he speculates that “one of the most important elements of Vintondale may not be its water-treatment system or its sculptural installations, but rather its function as a potential model for many other such projects across the country.” He quotes T. Allen Comp, the park's project director:
AMD&ART is now both the name of a park in Vintondale and the name of an idea, a commitment to interdisciplinary work in the service of community aspirations to fix the environment.
Indeed, as Reece adds, “since the completion of the park, Comp has established the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team, a group of fifty-five OSM and VISTA volunteers who are working with the AMD&ART model to engage coal field communities in projects that will remediate damaged waterways and rekindle the power of place.”
An Associated Pressarticle published by The New York Times a couple of months ago told us that the Elysian and Silver Lake—the “two reservoirs that supply drinking water” to sections of Los Angeles—were found to contain “high levels of the carcinogen bromate.” When alerted, the city's Department of Water and Power took them both out of service and announced that beginning early this year, they would drain, clean and refill the reservoirs, a process that could last until the summer.
Alternatively, they could consider implementing in parts or in whole a design proposal from out of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the California Polytechnic State University in Pomona.
In this proposal — the product of a collaboration in 2005 between Ken McCown, Andy Wilcox and Kevin Hinders, with research and production assistance from their students — the fenced-off Silver Lake is turned into a public open space hosting one giant bioremediating ecological machine, one that could theoretically render inert the cancer-causing bromate and other pollutants.
The key elements are thus:
1) Presently, the Colorado River and the California Aqueduct supply water to the reservoir, though in the past, the Los Angeles River was the feeder channel. The proposal restores this historical link.
2) A terraced ring canal follows the contour of the reservoir. Installed on the terraces are modular biopods used to bioremediate the 43 pollutants listed by the EPA as present in the Los Angeles River. The cleaned water is then gathered and stored in an underground tank beneath the reservoir before it is put out for use in the city.
It's landscape turned into a therapeutic and preventative medicine, applying natural processes into an artificial apparatus.
Continuing on:
3) The inner wall of that canal forms an internal dam that elevates the water level for the purposes of aesthetics.
4) The whole site is turned into a park, the third largest in a city that “suffers from a paucity of recreation and occupiable public space in comparison to other world cities of similar prominence by almost every means you can measure for this!” Instead of jogging along a fenced periphery, people can do so inside, on top of the canal or on designated paths.
5) The park has an unabashedly pedagogical program. There is a water center, water laboratories, a community center, a library, a pythoremediation garden, and a demonstration and research wetland.
In other words, it's like a Museum of Science and Industry. One wonders if every elementary school kids in the Greater Los Angeles area will be forced to go on field trips there, creating indelible childhood memories that will either be positive or negative ones.
One kid in particular will accidentally get pricked by an irradiated transgenic post-plant. The following morning, he tells his perplexed aunt and uncle that he wants to become a landscape architect when he grows up. That or he mysteriously mutates overnight into a Phytoremediating Superhero. Exactly who or what he will be fighting for and fighting against will be the so-called hero's dilemma. Our awesome screenplay for his story will be turned into a blockbuster movie. The Superfund Trilogy.
In any case, we're anticipating that questions will be asked about the viability of the proposal to detoxify the water and about what actual plants and organisms will the biopods have.
We have this suggestion: to brush up on the scientific literature and perhaps create a plant list of your own in process, browse through this website by John W. Cross (last update: September 27, 2007) on all things phytoremediation. Primarily bibliographical, it only lists books, journals, peer reviewed articles and links to other sites on the topic, but what a list! And though its listings may not be exhaustive, compared to this site and this EPA site, the quantity shouldn't be very intimidating to non-scientists.
Larger versions of the images can be viewed in Ken McCown's Flickr photoset, which also contains other images of the proposal.
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.”
