Elastic Pruned, Part I

Last month MoMA opened its new exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, to enthusiastic reviews, with Nicolai Ouroussoff even calling it “the most uplifting show MoMA’s architecture and design department has presented since the museum reopened in 2004” before finally declaring — and perhaps while also trying to elicit a bit of pity for those unable to see the exhibited works in person — that “thanks to its imaginative breadth, we can begin to dream again.”

Thankfully, we the geographically displaced are able to get a sense of this “imaginative breadth” and partake in the shows unbridled optimism through the exhibition's website, which is refreshingly easy to use. Militant anti-flash website that we are, we were nevertheless disarmed by its multi-navigational interface. For over a week now, we've been madly clicking away like trigger-happy Blackwater soldiers. And we don't see ourselves stopping anytime soon, as there is this link archive provided by MoMA.

In any case, while combing through the website, we were happily reacquainted with some of the projects we have covered before and some that are conceptually similar to ones we have written about in the past. There are about a dozen of them.

We are going to archive them in two separate posts.


(Elastic Pruned. Admission price: $0.)

One of the unexpected outcomes from our recent self-linking bacchanalias is that they highlight one of this blog's overriding themes — how natural processes, like hydrology, growth and decay, become entangled with human culture.

Corollary to that is the role technology — old, new, and imagined future ones — plays in this entanglement, a role which can often lead to and indeed does result in dramatic landscape changes. This is another theme that appears again and again on Pruned. And it also underpins all the disparate choices for this MoMA exhibition, which, as the online catalogue explains, “explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.” With these upcoming self-linking bacchanalias, then, we should have another chance to at least vocalize another longstanding interest.

Here is Part I.

We'll be your docent, absolutely free of charge.


(The AMOEBA. Photo by Mitsui Zosen/Akishima Laboratories, Inc. Source.)

First on the list is the AMOEBA, or the Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin, “a circular basin about the size of an inflatable children's pool” that is used “to evaluate the effects of waves on ship designs.”

Using the fifty plungerlike mechanical units installed along its rim, AMOEBA can produce a variety of wave conditions and then calm the water's surface on command. One of [Shigeru Naito]'s students found another use for this equipment: creating the alphabet on the water's surface. When waves in various frequencies converge, the water's surface rises at specific points; by connecting these points, lines and shapes can be drawn.

Of course, we also found another use for it, specifically to inscribe the Gardens of Versailles in their entirety and in full scale somewhere in the South Pacific.

Hydrology coalescing into elaborate parterres, Baroque statues, and architectonic hedges and borders — all of which doubling as aquariums. A pack of humpback whales, for instance, will be gliding gently alongside as you sail down the main axis, their timeless chanting filling the breezy tropical air. Enter any one of the many bosquets dotting the landscape and you're soon surrounded by a swarm of fish. Enter another one and you're soon privy to the mating rituals of giant jellyfishes, seemingly weightless. Ethereal. Watch out for the one with the great white sharks though.

Then at night, you set anchor in the middle of a tapis vert, a simple grass lawn on land perhaps but out in the Pacific, it's a vast cultivated field of bioluminescent dinoflagelletes.

We also found how this Baroque fountain can play a role in maritime warfare.


(Automated Construction. Photo by Behrokh Khoshnevis. Source)

Next is Contour Crafting, invented by Behrokh Khosnevis. This project is listed under the thematic group Thought to Action with other “new methods of manufacture and behavioral rules that establish the future of design forms and capabilities.”

A single house or a colony of houses may be constructed automatically by the process in a single run, with all plumbing and electrical utilities imbedded in each house; yet each building could have a different architectural design. An average size custom-designed house may be built by Contour Crafting within a day.

This simplified manufacturing process thus has the potential to save energy and reduce waste. Furthermore:

The implication is especially profound for emergency-shelter construction and low-income housing. This new mode of construction will be one of the very feasible approaches for building on the moon or Mars, both of which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the century.

We, on the other hand, thought that it could also be turned into a cenotaph mega-machine, capable of printing thousands of Pharaonic mausoleums based on designs by Boullée, resulting in entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting thousands of encapsulated monumental voids.


(Twirling about in the hydrological playground, 1994-ongoing. Photo by Frimmel Smith. Source.)

And then there is the PlayPump, a project by PlayPumps International. MoMA describes it thus:

The PlayPump water system is a merry-go-round that uses kid power to pump water. As they play, children spin the PlayPump, powering it to the pump underground water into an aboveground tank. This 660-gallon storage tank provides easy access to water with the simple turn of a tap. The storage tank also serves as a billboard, which can be used to promote messages about social issues relevant to a particular community.

By some accounts, these hydrological playgrounds are quite successful in augmenting infrastructural deficiencies in several African countries, but we did wonder last year if there was a better strategy in giving African children better access to fresh water while also greatly benefiting American kids.

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 give this piece 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 and playgrounds, wherein 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® and simultaneously teaching them about the incredibly, wonderfully awesome subject of hydrology and imparting a life long commitment to water conservation?

We apparently forgot to breath, but in any case, our answer then and now is a resounding “Yes!”


(A model of the Non-Stop Shoes, 1999. Photo by Xavier Padrós. Source.)

Grouped with the PlayPump and other methods of “local energy harvesting” are the Non-Stop Shoes by Emili Padrós, of emiliana design studio.

With Non-Stop shoes, Padrós looks at the energy potential of everyday routines such as walking, climbing, stairs, and opening doors. Energy generated during the day by these activities is stored in the shoes and may be used later to power devices such as a lamp, a radio, or a fan. Containers could be used to collect energy from the shoes of a whole family to feed more power domestic appliances.

This is one of the projects that we did not cover before, but it is astonishingly similar in concept to Alberto Villarreal's BrightWalk, the winner in last year's Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design Competition.

Villarreal's shoes were mentioned in a post with other projects experimenting with piezoelectric membranes as an infrastructural with which renewable energy can be harnessed. These other projects include a Japanese train station whose ticketing gates are embedded with piezo pads and Elizabeth Redmond's PowerLeap, both of which also investigate the potential of piezoelectricity and, in the case of these two, how can be spatialized on an urban scale.

Also worth mentioning here is Crowd Farm, a proposal by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk to — you guessed it — “harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings.”

Weaving through the urban landscape along with our already dense infrastructure of consumption will be an equally dense filigree of an infrastructure of production.


(Ellen Ripley hydraulic ready-to-wear for guerrilla gardeners. Photo by Dr. Keijirou Yamamoto. Source.)

Speaking of human kinetics, there is the Power Assist Suit, “a battery-powered exoskeleton” built by Dr. Keijirou Yamamoto of Kanagawa Institute of Technology as “a response to the fact that Japan does not have adequate number of healthy young people to take care of its rapidly aging population. The suit is designed to help a caregiver carry a bedridden patient.”

Again, we never wrote about this, but there was one similar project that we did. It's called the Bleex, or Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, and this DARPA-funded exoskeleton allows the wearer to carry hundreds of pounds (potentially more) with little physical effort. In other words, using the Bleex, you can carry as many as a dozen bedridden patients, if you wanted to.

Or:

It's the future of guerrilla gardening. You get suited up with the Bleex, and with your night vision goggles, satellite navigation systems and weaponized hoe, you set about re-wilding urban concrete wastelands. Under the cover of darkness, a squadron of Bleex Soldier-Gardeners carries out sabotage on Wal-Mart parking lots. With prairie grasses and wildflowers.

The Bleex, unfortunately, may be too expensive for the local garden enthusiast, in which case there is the Muscle Suit.


(A classic landscape scene inside our cells. Image by XVIVO. Source.)

And finally for today is the image above from one of The Inner Life of the Cell animations, conceived by professors at Harvard University and animated by XVIVO. This animation and others in the series are used as a teaching tool for undergraduate students.

It was quite extraordinary seeing it then, and it still is. The video used by MoMA for its website is a bit tiny, but a larger version — with a soundtrack — can be viewed here.

(To be continued in Part II.)

Mars in Terabytes

(But it does move! An image of Martian geologic activity, by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Source.)

A couple of days ago, the HiRISE Team, which oversees the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, released 9.9 terabytes worth of image data. Probably the most reported images are the four avalanches “caught in action,” one of which is captured in the photo above.

Cameras orbiting Mars have taken thousands of images that have enabled scientists to put together pieces of Mars’ geologic history. However, most of them reveal landscapes that haven’t changed much in millions of years. Some images taken at different times of year do show seasonal changes from one image to the next; however, it is extremely rare to catch such a dramatic event in action.

For more spectacular photos, you can browse through this database in retinal ecstasy.

In the Archives:
Tornado Alleys of Mars
Candor & Meridiani
Mars Exposed

Earthquake Van

One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.

In the Archives:
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Poseidon vs. Aeolus

(Spotted on Dvice.)

New Chernobyl

(The Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.)

A couple of weeks ago and again last week, Wired featured a nanocrystal that can absorb carbon dioxide. Discovered by scientists at UCLA:

The sponge-like material, called ZIF-69, promises to hold 60 times its volume in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas scientists say is primarily responsible for climate change.

And:

ZIF-69 is like a carbon dioxide trap, allowing only CO2 in, while screening out molecules with different shapes. Under pressure, the compound allows the carbon dioxide in, but not back out. Then, when scientists decompress the material, the gas is released, allowing scientists to dump the captured CO2 into a storage system.

But what is this storage system? Wired, again: “Right now, engineers are planning to inject the CO2 into the ground in a process known as geological sequestration.”

Of course, there are critics to this approach of combatting climate change — “a pie-in-the-sky idea that entrenched fossil fuel companies promote to stave off the implementation of truly renewable technologies like solar and wind power.” It's greenwashing, in other words.


(Some ZIF crystals. Photo by Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA. Source.)

Meanwhile, with this ZIF-69 greenwashing now commingling in our minds with Gross. Max.'s proposal to use nuclear power to help reduce CO2 emissions, we were reminded of a waste treatment reactor built by the Israeli firm Environmental Energy Resources (EER) that can turn “radioactive, hazardous and municipal waste into inert byproducts such as glass and clean energy.”


(A detail of EER's reactor. Photo courtesy of EER. Source.)

This technology will not make nuclear power plants any safer; it can only make their waste and collateral damages that much easier to eradicate — i.e., not carted away into distant storage sites where they remain dangerous; they are actually decontaminated — and in a manner that, we are told, “does not harm the environment and leaves no surface water, groundwater, or soil pollution in its wake.”

But the process does leave something in its wake:

The EER reactor combines three processes into one solution: it takes plasma torches to break down the waste; carbon leftovers are gasified and inorganic components are converted to solid waste. The remaining vitrified material is inert and can be cast into molds to produce tiles, blocks or plates for the construction industry.

In other words, you can use these carbon leftovers to build an entire city.


(Some of the green-tinted vitrified byproduct of radioactive waste eradication. Photo courtesy of EER. Source.)

The morning after Russia's presidential election and the vodka-soaked celebration parties at the ruling oligarchy's palatial ballrooms, one of Putin's henchmen and now president-elect Medvedev's vassals — a Russian nouveau riche who made his multi-billion ruble fortune from oil and gas — inexplicably becomes afflicted with the Rockefeller syndrome. After nearly a decade of being a party to the environmental degradation and human rights abuses of post-Yeltsin Russia, he now wishes to make amends. He wants redemption.

He looks into donating a substantial amount of money to charitable organizations and philanthropic works. He meets with museum curators and trustees to see if they want him to buy for them that new expensive Old Master painting that's just entered the market or fund that new gallery wing for which they have been fruitlessly whoring themselves around. He even explores the possibility of creating a world class university from scratch. These may or may not undo his sins, but at least he will look his best in the amnesiac eyes of the future.

But then he reads something about EER's reactor. He immediately realizes that it could provide a way to clean up Chernobyl, where he was born, where he had spent the halcyon days of childhood and from where he was exiled by the 1986 meltdown of its nuclear power plant. He realizes that salvation awaits him there.

To save Chernobyl and his soul, then, he will raze everything down — offices, Soviet apartment blocks, hospitals, roads, pavements, gardens, playgrounds, schools, trees, forests, everything within tens of kilometers around the reactor — and scoop up everything else — soil, roots, bedrock, sewers, etc. An entire landscape surgically excised, as one would a tumor, and then incinerated.

And then using the harvested chunks of “lava-like rocks,” a new Chernobyl will spring forth from the detritus of interrupted lives — radiation free and inhabitable once again.

Twenty years from now, when this new city has been repopulated with former nuclear exiles and new gardens and verdant parks have sprouted — on a morning just like any other when the sun has just appeared in the horizon — the whole city will glow in bright emerald iridescence.

Image of the (Leap Year) Day

(From the website of the International Symposium on Mitigative Measures against Snow Avalanches. Photo by Tómas Jóhannesson.)

The anxious terrain of Drangagil Neskaupstaður in the east fjords of Iceland — where catching dams, braking mounds, deflection earthen walls, diversionary canals and other tectonic reconfigurations of the earth's surface lay waiting in the summer for winter's snow.

They're avalanche protection structures, but they may as well be MOUT facilities where landscape architects are trained to deal with future disasters that may or may not come; a new subgenre of public art; or the shooting location for Guy Maddin's sequel to Careful.

In the Archives:
Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes
Sites of Managed Anxiety

“It silted up”

(Hydrotectonics splitting the towns of Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico. Photo by Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times.)

We've been blogging for nearly 3 years now, and this is the first we've ever been tagged. The culprit is Jacky Bowring, of Passages, whose Park of the Lost Object was featured here last year.

We're only too glad to keep this going. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

From the Penguin Books 1993 revised and updated edition of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner:

Another bypass was cut; it too silted up. Finally, after much negotiation, the developers persuaded the Mexican government to let them cut still another channel below the border. Because it was meant as a temporary expedient while the original channel was cleaned out in advance of the spring floods, the Mexican channel had the flimsiest of control gates. As luck would have it, the spring floods arrived two months early. In February, a great surge of snowmelt and warm rain spilled out of the Gila River, just above the Mexican channel, and made off with the control gate.

We fiddled with the rules a bit. We're not supposed to include the fifth (complete) sentence; we did. And we're only supposed to post the three after it; we included the fourth, because it sounds as though it's the perfect punch line to a hilarious joke about hydroengineering. So there's a total of five...or six if you count this post's title, which is actually the fourth (complete) sentence on the page.

And Cadillac Desert wasn't even the nearest book. Reisner's volume was underneath that book, which was the 2000 paperback edition of Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. However, on p. 123, this is what we found:


(A map of major lithospheric plates and some minor ones.)

Because we're having fun, the third book in that pile is In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, edited by Jeffrey Miller. On page 123, the 3 sentences after the fifth are as follows:

How far is it from there? Or to somewhere nearer than that. But do be specific as to time, day period, week.

Taken out of context, this could be an instruction for a well-designed landscape architecture project.

But onward it goes. We're tagging Archidose, BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, Super Colossal and Where.


POSTSCRIPT #1: Where's page 123. (28 Feb 2008)

POSTSCRIPT #2: Archidose's page 123. (28 Feb 2008)

POSTSCRIPT #3: Subtopia's page 123. (29 Feb 2008)

POSTSCRIPT #4: Super Colossal's page 123. (17 Mar 2008)

Nuclear-Powered Glaciers

(Scotland's iceberg. Image by Gross. Max.)

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.”


(Torness Nuclear Power Station. Photo by Neal. Source.)


(Scotland's iceberg and blue lagoons. Image by The Lighthouse.)

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.


(Torness Nuclear Power Station. Photo by Charlie and Shelli. Source.)


(Scotland's iceberg. Image by Gross. Max.)

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.

Titanic Lakes

(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/USGS.)

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.

In the Archives:
Sugimoto in Titan