A recent competition asked participants to develop a master plan for Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, Tennessee. The organizers had quite lofty goals. In no uncertain terms, they wanted the newly transformed park be the Central Park of the 21st century. It has to be everything: “a new regional center for growth, a new destination for residents, a jewel of civic pride, and an attraction to people from around the world.” One shouldn't be surprised if at the last minute they decided not to require that it must bring about world peace and end global warming, because why can't we ask of our parks, especially the future great ones, to induce social equality and be like an ecological beast-machine gobbling up all the CO2 produced by the South.
In any case, how does one design a great park? It's a rather dauntingly complex problem, which, as one might suspect, the three chosen finalists peripherally addressed by focusing on another.
How can the agricultural past inform the design of an urban park?
The answers, as provided by Field Operations, Hargreaves Associates and Tom Leader Studio, are very interesting, if not reminiscent.
For Field Operations, agriculture seems to mean hyper-productivity, virility, each day a rigidly structured set of activities. Thus, a hyper-park.
Shelby Farms Park is already today an amazing reserve of public parkland and amenity. It’s huge scale offers an extraordinary resource for people who are interested in large-scale recreation activities – strolling, jogging, cycling, roller-blading, picnicking, dog walking, swimming, camping, horse-back riding, dog training, fishing, shooting, gardening and the like. It’s agricultural heritage is also a great resource for land husbandry practices, including farming, research, energy, education and markets.
Our design vision amplifies these trends toward higher intensity and variety of uses. [...] Twelve distinctive landscapes will each support certain uses and activities, allowing a coherent “place” structure for the many varied user groups set within a larger Park setting.
At 4500 acres, definitely a bigger acreage than Central Park and nearly four times the size of the future Orange County Great Park, there certainly will be enough space to incorporate all of these planned uses.
For Hargreaves Associates, the sweeping monumentality of agricultural landscapes finds expression through their signature style — the braided topography — by which all activities and spaces are organized.
From their project statement:
We have approached the site by examining the site-specific qualities that make it a beloved destination today: expansive fields, sweeping views, spectacular sunsets, rolling hills, nestled lakes, extensive walking trails, equestrian trails and events, farm lands, hands-on learning about agriculture and nature, a country drive, and bottomland forests. There is much at Shelby Farms Park to be discovered.
We have integrated those elements by creating a multi-layered design that intertwines the various existing areas of the park. A network of landscape and movement systems provides for recreation and access by foot, by bike, by horse, by shuttle...and by boat. A system of beautiful lakes that reflect the memorable Memphis sky allows a connection to the river - both real and metaphorical as well as a whole new movement system on the site.
Whereas Field Operations makes use of the grid and compartmentalization, Hargreaves Associates prefers terraforming.
And then there's the master plan by Tom Leader Studio.
Quoting in full:
All you have to do is read the name. The history of farming is the most useful way of thinking when looking toward the future of Shelby Farms Park. This is a huge piece of land that has been in the process of breaking down into 3 or 4 separate domains. Due to the size and available resources, the only viable strategy for creating a singular park is to work closely and dramatically in partnership with nature. That’s what farmers do – they closely study the soil, climate, hydrology, transport, market, and come up with a plan for cultivation that builds on the best aspects of their land. This is a plan for cultivating a very big park. This is how you grow Memphis.
What does that mean? It means we have introduced a whole series of crops that are not literally corn or soybeans but things that address some current issues in the city. For example, health and fitness - how to reverse the trend toward obesity and type 2 diabetes? By developing a substantial local organic farm, restaurant, and sustainable food scene where little currently exists - spawning a whole new green industry. By greatly expanding enjoyable ways to get exercise – swimming, canoeing, trail running, hiking over a vast network. By harvesting enough solar energy to take the park off the grid. By creating a home for the native Memphis music scene – a place where local bands and musicians can gather, find studio space, find a ready-made audience on a big lake with a beach, a place for performance at all scales. These and several other important “crops” for Memphis are what we want to grow here at Shelby Farms Park.
Conceptually, it isn't at all that different from the other two. Minimalism to all three is a non-starter; horror vacui pervades throughout — although, now that we think about it, this is probably a condition of the competition itself, from the organizers being fearful of a perception that public money may seem to have been wasted if there's only nature there and if soccer moms can't occupy their hyperactive broods with things to do at the new park.
In any case, though somewhat more clearly vocalized by Tom Leader Studio, all three finalists have turned the park into a kind of social engineering, a tool with which sedentary, fat, uncultured, carbon-producing Southerners are cultivated into fit environmentalists who may or may not be avid supporters of the local music scene but are otherwise aesthetes.
Be sure to check out more images of the master plans by all three teams at the Shelby Farms Park website. Also, the organizers have set up a YouTube account where you can watch videos about the park itself, the competition and interviews with the principal designers.
The winning design will be announced on April 9, 2008.
In the midst of wars, there are gardens. Here are photographs of three and their gardeners; all were downloaded from Defiant Gardens (the website).
Above is a photo Bill Beardall during his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970. In a letter to Kenneth Helphand, author of Defiant Gardens (the book), Beardall wrote about his “oasis”:
It had a calming affect on me to come back to my ‘hootch’ where, as a Marine Helicopter Pilot, after a long day of flying missions in the I Corps area to see a little bit of green growing by my doorway. What you see in the first attachment is early in my garden’s life. The bananas grew much taller, the periwinkles as well. The watermelon actually produced fruit, although by the time they were beginning to show any size, the Marines pulled out of Vietnam.
And:
Persistent watering kept [the bananas] flourishing, much to the amusement of my squadron mates and the Vietnamese workers in our area. The Portulaca [and] periwinkle [...] were for color, easy to grow, and satisfied my artistic need for a change from the olive drab of our flight suits and aircraft. The watermelon was simply a challenge and a wish for the wet lushness of the fruit. As small as it was, it was my oasis. Many a day or late evening I would sit on my ‘patio’ drink a ‘cocktail’ and enjoy the setting of the sun in the West. I could almost block out the medevac choppers going out and the sound of the artillery in the distance. I have never forgotten much from that war and never my oasis.
Several decades later, in another conflict region, one still finds evidence of this primordial desire to cultivate.
From Kabul, Lt. Janette Arencibia wrote to Helphand:
I have been here for three weeks and have a year to go. Other soldiers (including coalition forces) have been establishing gardens in this country for the last several years.
My job as a gardener is to share my passion with the other wonderful individuals who have already made Afghanistan more beautiful.
I am attaching a few pictures from a small garden in Kabul, specifically at Camp Cobra, an Afghan National Army base. This garden was created by an officer in the Afghan National Army with a passion for flowers. I listened to him passionately tell the story of the origin of the seeds.
One country over towards the east, another garden is passionately tended to.
From Sgt. Carl J Quam, Jr.:
I came up with the idea, along with Sgt Wanzek, because we were missing home, farming, and the joy of growing something. We had a spell when supply lines were all but cut by the insurgents, and I said we might be able to grow our own vegetables, since the MREs dont have them and the supply trucks werent making it to our FOB. Friends of myself and SGT Wanzek, named Nathan and Stacy Hoehn in Valley City, ND, had the seeds donated by the Valley City Nursery. The Hoehns also sent over some garden hose and a sprinkler, the sprinker we didn’t use. We learned from the locals to irrigate with deep trenches and let the water soak into the dirt in between. [...] At the time of garden prep, planting, weeding and watering, Sgt Wanzek and myself, along with the rest of our crew, were running 4-6 combat patrols a week, in 100-140 degree weather. When we came back to our area, we had a hard time getting motivated to work and weed, but we did. Like I said, it was good therapy to relax after a day of dodging roadside bombs, RPGs and escorting semi trucks full of unexploded ordinance over the worst stretch of road in northern Iraq.
We wanted to include the gardens tended to by detainees at Camp Iguana in Guantanamo Bay — yes, even those in limbo have gardens; with seeds saved from their meals, they were able to grow small plants like watermelon, peppers, garlic, cantaloupe and even a lemon tree about two inches tall — but unfortunately, there are no photos to be found. Perhaps you have some and are willing to share?
Let's start with io9 on “show caves,” the garden grottoes of the 21st century.
In an earlier age, these simulated abysses were the playgrounds of kings and their terminally bored queen consorts; popes and their cardinals, who may or may not have been their illegitimate sons; and the titled nobility and the desperate lesser aristocrats. Now, as suggested by Geoff Manaugh, these Hadeses in miniature should be taken up by “investor class Brits, hip-hop moguls, and easy-money Hollywood types.” Instead of getting drunk every night or coming up with another act to fool doctors into prescribing them drugs, they funnel their money and creative energies into “vast, echoless complex[es]” whose “stalactites have been precision-cut by CNC-milling machines, the walls shaped by computer-programmable routers.”
Especially for those whose summer blockbusters hits have never really given them much satisfaction, they might find the artistic fulfillment they have long sought in these void canvases.
But as an aside, it is said that Marie Antoinette tried to escape from the mob that had come to take her to Paris, and eventually to prison, in the grotto of the Petit Trianon. Intended as a site for diversions, a refuge from the rigid protocols of the royal court, the grotto was also one of the stops on her way to the guillotine.
A contemporary re-imagining of this anecdote might involve a young, successful independent film actor; an addiction to show caves that spirals out of control, causing him to loose his grip on reality; a mob of TMZ paparazzi; and some prescription drugs. Jules Verne: A True Hollywood Story.
Next we have Wikipedia on KBR, Inc., the engineering and construction company, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton. Some of the company's projects undertaken for the U.S. government include Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. “The camp,” we read, “is built mainly of wooden, semi permanent SEA (South East Asia) huts and is surrounded by a 2.5 meter high earthen wall. To construct the base two hills were lopped off and the valley between them was filled with the resulting material.”
In Afghanistan, “KBR was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul.” The company also receive $216 million “for work under Operation Enduring Freedom” which involved “establishing base camps at Kandahar and Bagram Air Base and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia.”
KBR's activities in Iraq are no less extensive. “The United States Army hired KBR to provide housing for approximately 100,000 soldiers in Iraq in a contract worth $200 million, based on a long-term contract signed in December 2001 under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). Other LOGCAP orders have included a pre-invasion order to repair oil facilities in Iraq” and “$28.2 million to build POW camps.”
We now wait for the Princeton Architectural Press or Actar or, dare we dream, Spacemaker Press to publish a much needed critical appraisal of KBR, Inc. and its adventures in military urbanism.
Now on to Vapor, a new exhibition at the Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco in which Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos and Preemptive Media takes on “our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work.”
Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies – sensors, databases, and communications equipment – that are only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also refers to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art’s medium. Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.
One wonders what Correggio might have created with air quality as his subject matter and medium. Perhaps a new version of his Jupiter and Io inspired by the recent reports of dust storms blowing from the Gobi Desert and across over the Yellow Sea. Jupiter rendered as vaporized earth, dyed with the toxins of an industrialized China, on its way to its yearly tryst with Io, i.e., a timid Korea and an emasculated Japan. Erotic rapture turns into bloodied respiratory convulsions.
Or what about John Constable and J.W. Turner? How would those cloud-obsessed painters have approached smog?
Reporting on a research led by Benjamin Chao of the National Central University in Taiwan, National Geographic News tells us that “dams and reservoirs have stored so much water over the past several decades that they have masked surging sea levels.” In fact, “without dams, sea levels would have risen 30 percent more than they already have.”
So while the world waits for green technologies and sustainability practices to deliver on their promises and for China and India to adopt them, and then afterwards wait yet again for the expected results to show up, we should have the Israelis to put up barrier walls around Antarctica and Greenland to contain all their fresh water so that Bangladesh don't have to suffer climatic genocide.
Onwards to slum tourism, or “poorism.” From The New York Times:
From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums.
Is this voyeurism? Is it exploitation? Does it “change the reputation of the slums one tourist at a time?” Sponsor our trip, and we'll report back to you.
Meanwhile, one tourist was quoted in the article as saying something extraordinarily interesting. Speaking of an incident during her tour to one of Rio de Janeiro's favelas, specifically when “a young man approached the group, smiling and holding a cocked gun,” Rajika Bhasin said she became “just very aware of [her] surroundings, and aware of the fact that [she] was on this guy’s turf.”
Can one, then, become better attuned to the intricacies of the built environment when placed under threat of bodily harm? Can landscape architecture students acquire a more robust set of landscape reading skills if they are dropped down every academic year in the middle of Rocinha or Soweto and left there to fend for themselves for a week?
By mid-century, more than half of the U.S. population will live within a day’s drive of a coast or lakeshore. Once the realm of small villages and ocean-based economies, these areas are now heavily developed and populated with tourists and secondary homes. Many inhabitants appreciate the scenery, but assume shorelines never change.
That's because they're idiots!
Billions of years of geologic history have shown that coastal areas are the least constant features on the planet’s surface. Tropical storms (hurricanes) and extratropical storms (Pacific storms, nor’easters) devastate shorelines. In addition, the post-glacial rise in sea level enables storm surges to destroy coastal areas at higher and higher elevations each century. Fixed structures built on coasts with rising sea levels may be doomed.
“For reasons not fully understood by scientists,” NASA tells us, “the weeks around the vernal equinox are prone to Northern Lights.”
This is a bit of a puzzle. Auroras are caused by solar activity, but the sun doesn’t know what season it is on Earth. So how could one season yield more auroras than another?
To better understand auroras, NASA sent five satellites, collectively called THEMIS, or Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. During the mission's first year of operations, the satellites have “observed one geomagnetic storm with a total energy of five hundred thousand billion (5 x 10^14) Joules,” which is “approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.” And then there are those so-called magnetic ropes, which are magnetic fields that are “organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner’s rope connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun. Solar wind particles flow along the ropes in whirligig trajectories leading from the sun to Earth.”
To repeat: Solar wind particles flow along the ropes in whirligig trajectories leading from the sun to Earth.
Having recently been alerted by BLDGBLOG to these proposals for the George W. Bush Presidential Library — speculative architecture via air mail; manifestos for $0.41 — we can't help but wonder:
Can you build a library out of auroras?
Can these shimmering ribbons of earthly solarity be turned into a repository of knowledge?
Using a translation matrix yet to be programmed and actuators yet to be invented, you could digitize, say, the entire content of BLDGBLOG into charged electrons and protons, which you would thereafter eject from a fleet of satellites orbiting between the earth and the sun. These particles would then hitch a ride on solar winds, eventually colliding with artificially produced charged particles floating in a finely reconfigured magnetosphere. Writing in the sky with remnants of stars.
Or you could use the satellites to weave and unravel those “magnetic ropes” to manipulate the flow of solar wind particles, as one would strum the strings of a cello to create certain photonic vibrations.
Alternatively, instead of satellites, you could have a gigantic circular struts floating above the poles. Through millions of spray nozzles, charged particles will be exhaled, the amount and timing and direction being determined by a complex algorithm yet to be conceived.
When all things are working (or not working), the polar regions will be alight with the transliterated works of Mr. Manaugh. The whole landscapes singing Homeric tales of undiscovered subterranean rooms, lunar urbanism, buttressed buttresses and magmatic Baroque churches. The still waters of the Icelandic fjords and the hushed glacial fields of Alaska filled with the geomagnetic crackling of encoded artificial islands and algal farms.
However, in order to listen to them — i.e., to read them — patrons would need to use sensors yet to be developed located in spaces yet to be spatialized.
A couple of things:
1) Going back to the original question, should that now ask: can you make auroras out of libraries?
2) Not in a million years did we think that we would ever reference Babylon 5 and Diller+Scofidio in a single sentence in this landscape architecture blog, but our description above reminded us of the Shadow Planet Killer and the Blur Building.
“But shouldn't libraries be universally accessible?” you might object. “Not everyone can afford the trip. A few can't even stand the cold.”
Very well then. Forget BLDGBLOG — sorry, G! — this will be the new wing of the Vatican Secret Archives, open only to scholars with academic credentials and well-funded fellowships. In fact, forget our north pole, let's make them even more inaccessible and file them on other planets.
We are forced to face the reality on a daily basis that environmental damage is more advanced than experts predicted. As global warming becomes the top of almost every government’s agenda, recent trends have put pressure on world leaders to act immediately: for instance, forced recycling, carbon offsetting and a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable.
Nitta then asks:
Are these efforts really improving the environment? Are these activities saving the Earth?
Considering that her “project takes current green trends to the extreme,” Nitta's answer seems to be that our current efforts are not making a dent, hence the Animal Messaging Service.
The A.M.S. is an alternative form of communication whereby so-called extreme green guerrillas “send messages internationally by hacking into the animal migration system.” The environmental benefit of this is that it doesn't tie you to big corporations, as one would be if using the Internet and mobile phones, and unlike conventional postal systems, it doesn't leave a huge carbon footprint.
But how does it work?
As but one of Nitta's scenarios, animated here in this flash animation for the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, an EGG member relays his favorite recipe from London to New York by first hacking it into an RFID-tagged whooping swans as they pass through in April during their annual migration. These swans would then fly off, stopping along the way in Iceland. There, unbeknownst to them, the recipe would be hurriedly extracted, either automatically or with further hacking by camouflaged EGG members, who then waits for polar bears to transfer the electronic package into their embedded RFIDs. Amazingly, these bears can swim from ocean-locked Iceland to Greenland, where once again the recipe has to change hands, so to speak. “What is this recipe for?” we have to ask at this point; with this much effort put into getting it from one place to another, it must be for something spectacular. Well, whatever it is for, the last leg of its journey to New York will be undertaken by RFID-tagged salmons. Salmons? Hmm.
In any case, there is also a local version of this service using RFID-tagged pets and visitor animals.
One wonders if instead of hacking into an inorganic apparatus, you actually hack into the animal's biological systems. Instead of uploading the data into an RFID, the sender imprints the message into the animal's behavior, so that rather than downloading electronic bits of information, the receiver decodes the recipe from the subtle wiggling of salmons as they head upstream. To find out how much organic and locally grown basil in the solar roasted Piguail, a very close reading of the landscape is needed. Did that tail fluster or did it flutter? You'll need to brush up on hermeneutics.
You head out to Central Park to read an endearing note from your pen pal across the oceans through the murmurings of millions of starlings. Bird watching will never be the same.
The next day, you take the few flights of stairs to your rooftop garden or your neighbor's to watch honeybees waggle dance the time and place of your best friend's birthday party.
Of course, without RFIDs, one would need to provide a mechanism in which the information can jump between species. This again could be done by hacking each conscripted carrier, either genetically or behaviorally or both, to enable direct interspecies communication. For instance, a love letter translated into a humpback whale's song that starlings can understand and then transliterated into elaborate aerial maneuvers.
There might be a chance that the love letter gets garbled along the way into a message of hate, in which case, that is the price you pay for really saving the planet.
But as always, our overriding interest here would be the effects of an Animal Messaging Service on the built environment.
What if everyone, to the ultimately surprise of Michiko Nitta, fully subscribes to her vision of the extreme green lifestyle and cities everywhere adopt the A.M.S. as the default mode of communication? What then would the physical form of the city be like if its networked infrastructure is based primarily on zoology?
Is this where “vegi.tecture” reaches its true potential?
And how does one site these “natural sanctuaries” as data ports into the spatial grid? Are we going to look back again to Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklaces for our model?
Or could there be a new landscape paradigm, one that is formed and informed by aberrant interspecies interaction; the threat of Avian flu; increasingly depleted natural resources; climate change; and the growing possibility that geoengineering may just be our best chance to counteract global warming?
For answers to those questions, you will most assuredly not find any in this article, but you will read about some interesting facts about a massive government-sponsored faunal surveillance system designed to track the food supply of the U.S. by tagging livestock, poultry and other animals with RFID.
We begin with Michele Gauler's ossuary for the information age, a project which she developed as a student at the Royal College Art in London.
Digital Remains, a beautiful, personalized data-storage artifact equipped with a Bluetooth connection, allows users to log on to the digital remains of a loved one and receive their data on personal digital devices. Search algorithms dig through the data, pulling out relevant personal traces, like a photograph from a holiday spenth together or a favorite piece of music, evoking the presence of the deceased.
This is not in our archives but we have covered similar examples of electronic mourning and remembrance before, for instance, those being experimented with at Forever Fernwood as part of its green burial practices. As their website explains: “Fernwood uses GPS and GIS to collect and manage detailed information about graves on this site. Using this technology allows us to keep accurate records and link to digital LifeStories about people who are buried in natural burial areas while minimizing the impact on the land.”
Indeed, one of the appeals of these digitized rituals is that they are a sustainable alternative to the gas-guzzling, water-guzzling, space-guzzling and money-guzzling Arcadian lawns with which most (American) cemeteries are landscaped.
The following two projects were referenced in a post about a new bioengineering technique in which disembodied meat is grown in laboratories and thereby forgoing rearing livestock on a farm.
A small-scale prototype of a “leather” hacket grown in vitro, Victimless Leather is a living layer supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix shaped like a miniature coat, offering the possibility of wearing leather without directly killing an animal. Catts and Zurr believe that “biotechnological research occurs within a particular social and political system, which will inevitably focus on manipulating nature for profit and economic gain.” They argue that if the things we surround ourselves with every day can be both manufactured and living, growing entities, “we will begin to take a more responsible attitude towards our environment and curb our destructive consumerism.”
In vitro-cultured meat production may have many advatages, but it raises practical questions, as well as some complex philosophical and ethical issues. What should this meat look like? What flavor should it have? How should it be served? King answers the first question: “A mobile magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of livestock. The selected specimen is scanned from head to toe, and accurate cross-section images of its inner organs are generated...to create molds for the in vitro meat. We...might still want to re-create a familiar shape to better remind us where the 'artificial' meat come from.”
Whether grown with features simulating cows or reminiscent of a Thanksgiving turkey from your halcyon childhood or that of your favorite celebrities, say, Michael Jackson, the landscape implication is quite staggering. Imagine growing all our meat in ultra-efficient manufacturing plants that consume dramatically less energy and resources and produce less waste. Also requiring less real estate, imagine then what all those obsolete farms will be transformed into.
Will they be converted to make biofuels exclusively or turned into vast algal ponds to produce hydrogen gas?
Will half of Kansas be covered with solar panels?
Will we have a golden age of national parks?
In any case, let's move down on the list.
Light Wind, a project by Jeroed Verhoeven and Joep Verhoeven, comes with this brief description.
With traditional Dutch windmills in mind, the designers of the studio Demakersvan have created an outdoor lamp that generates its own energy. with every breeze Light Wind stores the energy that it later uses to produce light.
We will be brief as well by simply directing you to these wind turbines embedded with LEDs and also to these Jersey barriers within which are double-stacked Darius turbines.
Moving right along, we find several examples of Google Earth mashups. These mashups, we read, “combine different sources into a single platform, making them one face of collaborative design on the Internet.”
One of the more widely reported mashups is the flood maps from flood.firetree.net that shows coastal areas prone to sea level rise due to global warming. At a setting of +14m sea level rise, you can see entire cities and towns, whole communities and landscapes become inundated in simulated disaster. If not provocative, these maps are at least informative.
More visceral though in terms of driving in the point that your home will be flooded and pulled away into the seas as though by a slow moving but still destructive tsunami is Eve S. Mosher's project that is part public art, part guerrilla theater and part Christoesque interactive installation. From Prunings XXXI:
Artist Eve S. Mosher is leaving behind a trail of blue-tinted chalk as she winds her way through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn. This chalk line, The New York Times reports, “demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.”
Finally, we come to the BEE'S, a project by Susana Soares.
Soares has conceived a series of alternative diagnosis tools that use trained bees to perform health checkups, detect diseases, and monitor fertility cycles. “Bees have a phenomenal odor perception,” explains Soares. “They can be trained to target a specific odor.” The Face Object has two chambers. Bees that detect certain odors in the breath--some of them even connected to forms of cancer--will go into the smaller chamber if they sense them. The Fertility Cycle Object has three chambers: The largest corresponds to the ovulation period, the second to preovulation, and the third to postovulation. The bees will fly into the relevant chamber. The Precise Object has an outer curved tube that prevents bees from flying accidentally into the interior diagnosis chamber, making for a more precise result.
Also training bees as a diagnostic tool is Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University. But instead of using them to detect medical problems, these Croatian bees are being trained to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams. In a post in which we proposed a park for North Korea's DMZ, we quoted a BBC News article as follows:
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
Also mentioned in that post is a genetically-modified weed that can detect the chemical signature of mines and a bunch of fungi that can eat explosives and neutralize radioactive substances. Appropriated as a landscape material, you could have not only a diagnostic tool but a cure to contaminated sites.
Our tour ends here but the exhibition will close May 22, 2008.
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.
One of the unexpected outcomes from our recentself-linkingbacchanalias 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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
