During a seemingly endless nighttime hypertextual journey through Wikipedia — one that took us from Tempelhof to a crash course on Nazi architecture and inevitably on to Hitler's imagined future capital, Welthauptstadt Germania, a city that became a ruin without first having existed, and to Albert Speer, whose post-war gardening activities are worth detailing, which we will in a future post, i.e., if we still have the stamina to trudge through his excruciatingly long diary for the few relevant entries, before looping back to the start to then read about the Berlin Airlift, whose infrastructural and spatial organization, including the three air corridors above the blockaded Soviet Occupied Zone, we find so utterly interesting — we discovered the Schwerbelastungskörper.
It's a massive cylindrical block of concrete, standing 18 meters high and weighing in at 12,560 metric tons. It is located in the Berlin neighborhood of Tempelhof, where the eponymous airport is found. Under all that tonnage is a slimmer cylinder with a lower and an upper chamber, both of which were outfitted with measuring instruments. In profile, the whole structure would look like a mushroom.
But what exactly is it? And what are those instruments measuring?
The name is translated as “heavy load-bearing body,” although someone in the discussion page of the wiki article has suggested that “heavy load-exerting body” might be more accurate. It was constructed in 1941 to test how well the marshy ground upon which Berlin sits could handle the massive projects planned for Germania. More specifically, it was built to see how the landscape would react to Hitler's gigantic Triumphal Arch, whose opening would have accommodated the triumph in Paris.
The results were not encouraging:
The Schwerbelastungskörper sank 7 inches in the three years it was to be used for testing, a maximum depth of 2.5 inches was allowed. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it is unlikely the soil could have supported such structures without further preparation.
Hitler dismissed these findings, perhaps confident that the landscape can be subjugated with fine Teutonic engineering. But his Third Rome had to wait; there was a war to be waged.
Of course, history then happened, and the Schwerbelastungskörper remained where it stood, waiting for a city that will never come, sinking, still taking measures of the landscape, accumulating trash and graffiti, outliving its original function and its planned 20 weeks' worth of existence.
In 1995, it gained historic status and thereafter given some preservation work that continues today. And if we deciphered the BabelFish translation of this webpage correctly, the structure is to be turned into a history museum, a major component of a redevelopment plan to revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, we are reminded of an article published in The New York Times earlier this month about two full-size mock-ups of the future Freedom Tower, one built in California and another in central New Mexico, which “can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.” In order to see how well the facade and the structure perform under extreme conditions, they were subjected to simulated hurricanes and earthquakes, among other things.
Water jets simulating winds of 74 miles per hour were sprayed at the facade. During the 15-minute test cycle, each square foot of glass was hit with more than a gallon of water.
In another test, a dismounted airplane propeller was switched on to simulate even-stronger and more-scattered winds.
[...]
Hydraulic jacks were used to simulate the different horizontal sway of various floors, both fully occupied and empty. The surface was also chilled to 10 degrees (refrigerated piping was applied to the glass) and baked at 100 degrees (by heat lamps).
Gusts up to 167 m.p.h. were simulated by using pumps to pull air out of the chamber, creating a condition in which the external air pressure was far greater than the internal pressure. The process was reversed, too, by pumping air into the chamber, simulating conditions on the side of the tower away from the wind.
An earthquake was simulated by jacks pulling the mock-up in different directions.
And since everyone believes that the tower will be a prime target of terrorist attacks, the mock-up in New Mexico was blasted with an “explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.”
These near-analogues are actually not the only ones. Three years ago a mock-up of the WTC memorial fountain was also built, installed somewhat incongruously above ground in a suburban backyard in Canada. Of all places!
Unlike the simulated Freedom Towers, however, this lobotomized fountain wasn't placed under structural duress. Instead, it was used primarily to help determine the ideal hydrological conditions in which the “billowing silvery curtains of falling water” do “not splash visitors or disintegrate in the wind or roar deafeningly or freeze in winter or clog up in autumn when the oak leaves begin falling in the surrounding plaza.”
One wonders what actually happens to these structures and others like them after all the tests have been carried out?
One of the Freedom Tower replicas was built for $537,000. It would sound rather wasteful to have it scrapped and dumped in oversaturated landfills instead of being repurposed.
Give it to us, in other words, and we'll convert this representational “corner of three typical tower floors” into our new HQ, its “enclosed steel chamber” chicly decorated. When things are slow or when we need a little breather from mining the interweb, we will simply gaze through the laminated glass panes out to the waters of our ¼ fountain cascading down into a truncated void.
Architect and Landscape Architecture Magazine will come knocking on our armageddon-proof aluminum doors to do a feature. The article will come with hyper-glossy photos of us on another clicker-happy run through Wikipedia. And we will be quoted pretentiously proclaiming that “Near-Analogues are the new prefabs.”
1) The Guardian on the “Eight Blunder” of the World. Is the Palm Jumeirah merely experiencing some growing pains or will it be a gangrenous toe that will infect the rest of Dubai, its future amputated?
2) Next American City on disaster urbanism in the wildfire country of Southern California and in the flood valleys of the Mississippi River.
3) The New York Times on cleaning the toxic landscapes of Fort Bragg, California with bioremediating mushrooms.
4) The Guardian on climate change, wasted money in the billions, doomed flood defences and abandoned villages on Britain's changing coastline.
5) Der Spiegel on Berlin's Tempelhof a.k.a. the Mother of all Airports. Meant to be one of the centerpieces of Germania, Hitler's future capital, but actually completed by the Americans who used it as an army base, the site of the Berlin Airlift and photo-ops of arriving Hollywood stars, this mythic “inland sea with the yearning for faraway places” is now on the hands of voters who will decide today whether to keep it open or close it.
Armed with grant money, hammers and some technical help, residents around the city have gone about spiffing up bus stops, among a number of other outdoor spaces, into something known as community living rooms.
The idea began several years ago in Oakland, where community organizers and residents got together to improve places where neighbors tended to congregate — the corner store, outside the barbershop — amid a decidedly downtrodden environment.
“The idea was to enable low-income communities to create their own social spaces and improve their neighborhoods without bringing on gentrification,” said Steve Rasmussen Cancian, the landscape architect who helped introduce the living rooms.
Beginning in 1978, when a spherical chunk of oak got lodged in a stream as he was moving it to his studio, the sculptor David Nash has documented its long riverine journey.
“For 25 years,” Nash writes, “I have followed its engagement with the weather, gravity and the seasons. It became a stepping-stone into the drama of physical geography. Spheres imply movement and initially I helped it to move, but after a few years I observed it only intervening when absolutely necessary - when it became wedged under a bridge.”
The journey is so extraordinary — made more so perhaps by the fact that it's so well-documented — that we can't help but quote the rest of Nash's accounts:
During the first 24 years it moved down stream nine times remaining static for months and years. Sedentary and heavy it would sit bedded in stones animated by the varying water levels and the seasons. Beyond the bridge its position survived many storms, the force of the water spread over the shallow banks did not have the power to shift it. I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime.
Then in November 2002 it was gone. The 'goneness' was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile. The high tides around full moon and the new moon moved it every 12 hours to a new place, each placement unique to the consequence of the tide, wind, rain and depth of water.
In January 2003 it disappeared from the estuary but was found again in a marsh. An incoming tide had taken it up a creek, where it stayed for five weeks. The equinox tide of March 19 2003 was high enough to float it back to the estuary where it continued its movement back and forth 3 or 4 kilometres each move.
The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can, only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.
Obviously we know what has happened to it — it's been scooped up by a reclusive oil tycoon to adorn his secret garden like a pilfered Grecian kore. Resting on a pedestal, accumulating monetary value, periodically acting the part of a showpiece to entertain guests.
It would be unsurprising to hear someone remark that the boulder is at the mercy of the elements, although we're more apt to say that it is the river that is at the mercy of this artifact, under the weight of human agency, and of Nash's relentless gaze and choreographic machinations.
The river turned into a Picturesque folly; the passing of time, the same physical forces that smooth out rocks and bend rivers turned into a constructed view.
A motorist in Al Ahsaa City, Saudi Arabia captured these few minutes of the earth exhaling. It's lo-res, cinematically shaky but still a sight to behold, wondrous and sublime. As it must be commented on — for it's hardly unnoticeably — we are told that the soundtrack is an exaltation of one or several of the divine's multitudinous attributes but we are sure it's a paean to the hidden but knowable geological forces at work eternally shaping the landscape. And just slightly off camera are a flock of demoiselles about to re-enact Busby Berkeley's famous pyramid fountain of lascivious ladyflesh. Of course.
This is the Soil Lamp, designed by Design Academy Eindhoven student Marieke Staps and recently exhibited during Milan Design Week 2008.
Quoting the project brief, in Dutch:
Gratis en milieuvriendelijke energie voor eeuwig. De lamp werkt op modder. De stofwisseling van het biologische leven produceert genoeg elektriciteit om er een led op te laten branden. De modder zit in verschillende cellen. In deze cellen zitten koper en zink om de stroom te geleiden. Hoe meer cellen hoe meer stroom er geproduceerd wordt. Je hebt enorm veel mogelijkheden binnen deze techniek. Het enige wat de lamp nodig heeft is zo nu en dan een scheutje water. Ik heb voor het materiaal glas gekozen omdat ik de techniek zichtbaar wil maken. Door de mooie simpele vormgeving kun je de lamp in elk interieur en elke tuin plaatsen. De vormgeving is een direct gevolg van de techniek.
And this is how BabelFish translates it:
Free and environment-friendly energy for eternal. The lamp works on mud. The stofwisseling of biological living produces enough electricity to launch LED there to burn. Mud is present in several warrants. In these warrants are present purchaser and zinc conduct the flow. How more warrants how more flow is produced. You have enormously many possibilities this technique. Some what has the lamp necessary is this way now and then scheutje water. I have chosen glass for the material because I technique makes visible will. By the beautiful simple design you can place the lamp in each interieur and each garden. The design is an direct consequence of technique.
So essentially, then, the metallic strips of zinc and the cornucopia of minerals and organisms in the damp soil chemically react with one another to initiate a constant electrical current that lights up an LED.
A few questions:
1) Is it an actual working model or just another concept model, a Gravia Lamp v2.0?
2) If it's a working model, how does it work actually? We'd be interested in seeing some flow diagrams and numbers. And what kind of soil mixture?
3) And if it does work, can you take the metallic body and LED out of its lower 3/4 glass enclosure, remove the test tubes and the soil contained therein, and then impale it into the ground — will the LED still glow? Can a generous benefactor of the arts (perhaps Dia) manufacture for us several thousands so that we can run amok with these geological illuminations in Canada's trillion-barrel tar pits or Russia's still untapped gas fields, away from amateur astronomers and other light-sensitive nighttime fauna, making new earthly constellations of future negative contour lines and rhizomatous pipelines? Because why should this alternative energy light fixture be installed only in parks, gardens, driveways, streets and indoor rooms everywhere?
Over a year since their last newsletter, the CLUI has now put up the latest edition. Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”
Vast asphalt geometries and bounded trajectories tattooed on the surface of the earth, they are described as the “nurseries” for our vehicular companions, reared in “a microcosm of the country, built for subjecting vehicles to all the types of terrain - from interstates, to suburban stop and go; from dirt roads to black ice” — where America is geographically, meteorologically and infrastructurally condensed.
The automotive test tracks of America are mostly in the West and Midwest. Around Detroit, each of the “big three” operates at least one major complex. Test tracks are located around Phoenix, Arizona, to test in conditions of extreme heat, on top of everything else. On the fringes of this city's sprawl are tracks for companies whose home terrain has no desert to work in, such as Volvo, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Nissan. Honda and Hyundai's tracks are in the desert north of Los Angeles. And, in Illinois, Caterpillar, the global earth mover, tests its machines in a giant hilltop sandbox.
You can tour these places, at least via photographs, in Autotechnogeoglyphics: Vehicular Test Tracks in America, CLUI's contribution to the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans, and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional Vietnamese way. The proposed market on the site will provide a location for the individual farmers to supplement their income as well as serve as a central meeting space for the larger Vietnamese community along the Gulf Coast. Based on the history of the markets in the area before Katrina, as many as 3,000 people are expected to come to the site for a Saturday market, perhaps more on traditional festival days. Specialty vegetables and foods used in Vietnamese cuisine will be sold at the market. Local Vietnamese restaurants will have a space to sell prepared food during market days as well.
Another goal of the project is to bring together the different generations with the local community through the shared endeavor of the farm and that the traditional skills and practices of the culture brought from Vietnam to America are passed down by the generation of elders. Thus it is also important that the farm also acts as a community center and areas for sports and playgrounds are proposed for the site. The community sees this project as the centerpiece for the rebuilding efforts in the New Orleans East.
If you're at all interested in urban agriculture, this is a good case study to review.
Four architects were asked by New York magazine to submit ideas for a vacant lot in lower Manhattan. It's merely a design exercise, as none of the proposals will actually be built. Or maybe one or all will be used to fill other urban voids. Equally plausible, it's all been done in the past.
Undoubtedly of greatest interest to us is Work AC's sequel to its upcoming installation at P.S. 1. This iteration of the same idea takes the form of a multi-tiered apartment building with agro-roofs, propped up towards the sun by Brancusi sculptures and above what looks like a farmers' market. Or perhaps a flea market, where the detritus of a capitalist culture gets recycled in survivalist fantasia below a mythological rural idyll.
In any case, the whole structure reminds one of bleachers found in sports fields everywhere, leading us to wonder whether the second sequel in an urban agriculture trilogy by Work AC is an adaptive reuse of Shea Stadium, the soon-to-be former ballpark of the New York Mets, into a locavore utopia.
Build a duplicate stadium — why not 1,000 — and you could have the beginning of a Queens rice terrace to rival those found at Banaue in the Philippines.
Part Grand Canyon, part Norwegian fjords, lining the edges of the five boroughs, built high up, protecting the megalopolis from sea level rise, bad diets and the coming globalfoodcrisis.
