From the HABS/HAER collections in the Library of Congress comes these gorgeous photographs of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota.
Several such sites were planned as part of the Safeguard Program, but only this was ever completed. And after being in operations for just 4 months, it was deactivated.
In the years since, countless drunken youths and their spray paints have made pilgrimages to these Pharaonic ruins of the U.S. Army. No doubt one of them must have wondered whether if it was simply a matter of coincidence that this pyramid, whose walls he was pissing on, resembles the unfinished pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States, its once radar equipment being the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye.
Or if the military counts among its ranks a cabal of Freemasons constantly and surreptitiously finding ways to channel their aesthetic inclinations, in the face of institutionalized prohibition against self-expression and individuality. Sculpted berms here, geometrically-patterned rows of exhaust stacks there, mastaba-shaped radar facility right over there, chalked footpaths everywhere.
The U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a subset of Land Art.
One of his companions, a blogger of the built environment, will later report these inebriated musings, speculating further that those anonymous soldier-bureaucrat-architects must have been great admirers of the unbuilt works of Étienne-Louis Boullée. As an homage, they designed the radar building in the form of the master's pyramidal cenotaphs.
Even their monument-complex are pierced with holes, this blogger will blog, although they are not cosmically aligned. You will not see stars; they do not form constellations. Rather, they are aligned to millions of city dwellers halfway around the world, under surveillance, targeted for total erasure.
However, there are some alternatives, for instance, this flippin'ship.
Known formally as the R/P FLIP, it's a mobile research station used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography principally to “study how sound waves behave under water,” but during its 40 years of operation it has also collected data on the “way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals.”
You can see it position itself vertically, as well as the crew, refrigerators, stoves and coffee pots adjusting to the changing spatial configuration, in this short video.
The ship is the only one of its kind, but surely hundreds should be built, each one interning the pulverized remains of the dead. Or housing a single occupant. One could be the family mausoleum of a Greek shipping magnate. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
A not-so-little forest of columbaria bobbing about in the future ice-free waters of an auroral Arctic.
Should their ballast decay and the whole vessel sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it will simply be a return to standard practices.
It's about that time of year again, a few weeks before the anniversary of this blog when we go searching for something special to treat ourselves with. For the first anniversary, we ordered a few of these architectural notecards by Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Adams. Last year we looked into getting a weather modification machine, specifically this portable hurricane, before deciding to buy a couple more notecards.
This year, we'll probably just order yet more notecards, although what we really want is this lighthouse, pictured above, which is being auctioned off by the fantastically named U.S. Office of Property Disposals. It's located in Chesapeake Bay about 5 nautical miles from the nearest shore. It has “elements of the Second Empire architectural style,” we read.
When the auction ends, perhaps we'll learn that Zega & Adams gave the winning bid. They plan to remodel it into a chinoiserie pavilion, so that they can reenact some of the wildest garden debaucheries of Marie Antoinette.
Or preferably, we find out that a fan of Arnold Böcklin is the new owner. He wants to convert the building into a columbarium.
In still weather or rougher seas, the dead will metaphorically cross the Styx to their final resting place, which in its former life illuminated and guided the lost but, like them, is now extinguished.
2) The Stranger on the topography of terror, or: How Seattle's famed Freeway Park became “a garden of earthly delights—for the city's crazed murderers and inhuman rapists.”
[S]oil eating is poverty and hunger's most extreme outpost. It is an activity that is charged with a strangely archaic quality where a lack is miraculously turned into a surplus. In his febrile state of hunger, the soil eater transforms the clay of the bed river into filling food. He is set within a hallucinogenic landscape where the very ground he walks on is transformed into nourishment.
5) AlterNet on the National Mall redesign. “Critics of the redesign [...] are complaining that the National Park Service's proposed redesign, still in its formative phase, is a subtle attempt to restrict [the] time-honored ability to congregate and complain.” NPS disagrees.
‘Made in Transit’ is a supply chain concept in which the food grows on board a vehicle on the way to the supermarket, shifting the paradigm of packaging from preserving freshness to enabling growth, and shifting ‘best before’ to ‘ready by.’
8) Edouard François, who designed this marvelous aviary, takes on garage doors. See it?
When we were fantasizing about Venice as a reconfigurable jigsaw puzzle, we had in mind, among other things, PARA's submission for an ideas competition to “rejuvenate” the “ruins” of New York City's Roosevelt Island.
Called Mobile Art Park, it's a cultural and sports complex conceived as a “network of floating barges.”
The barges form a migrating network that extends throughout the regional waters of New York’s five boroughs and beyond. Linking together in multiple combinations, the barges accommodate different events at the scale of the entire Southpoint site. Dispersed throughout the city, the barges bridge culturally disparate enclaves with the vibrant communities of artists already thriving in the city.
Each barge, then, could hold a tennis court, a skatepark, a farm and a farmer's market, a forest or a combination thereof. There are wind turbines as well.
Having been reminded recently of MVRDV's Dutch Pavilion languishing in the now shuttered grounds of Expo 2000 in Hannover and also the ruins of Expo1992 in Sevilla, we propose that in a future universal exposition, all buildings should rest atop floating platforms. Or are actually the floating platforms themselves. Each one would be built by the participating nations in their own ports, anchored there until the start of the expo nears and the armada needs to be assembled.
In this world's fair, the overall theme could be future coastlines, perhaps established by Adriaan Geuze of West 8. He is hired as creative director, because he once curated The Flood.
In his program brief, he will call attention to the fact that “around the world cities are situated on low-lying coastal zones and in delta regions where rivers enter the sea. These are amongst the most fertile areas and are well linked by sea and land to the world. But these are also cities with populations in the millions that are now highly vulnerable because of the threat of flooding.”
Of course, Adriaan Geuze will have plenty of solutions to combat this threat to showcase at the host city, New Orleans.
Or it could be the first ever major international event to be held on international waters, just offshore from Burma's Irrawaddy Delta with a satellite venue a few miles from Bangladesh's Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta.
As its national pavilion, the U.S. will send the supercarrier USS Nimitz, which accidentally rams into Zaha Hadid's pavilion. Tant pis.
When the expo ends, each pavilion will return to their home port, becoming art centers or public open spaces or artificial reefs.
Speaking of Venice, there were some reports a couple months ago telling us that officials are “pursuing [a] proposal with great interest” that could save the city from sea level rise.
According to Agence France-Presse, “Local officials and engineers are planning to lift buildings under operation 'Rialto' by up to one metre (3.3 feet) using piston-supported-poles to be placed at the bottom of each structure. This will take around a month per building if each structure is raised by eight centimetres (3.14 inches) a day.”
There is another project, one that is actually being realized, to save Venice. Called the MOSE Project, it involves constructing adjustable barriers at the three entrances to the Venetian Lagoon. While these barriers may protect the city from future floods, buildings whose lower levels are already submerged will remain inundated, continuing to rot at their foundations. In other words, there is really no change in the status quo.
Project Rialto, on the other hand, will restore access and functionality to once flooded floors. There is also the possibility of lifting the building still higher if needed, for instance, if sea level rise exceeds the design parameters of the barriers and overtops them. Meanwhile, the city and its neighborhoods may begin to resemble what they were like before things started sinking.
Of course, we have to wonder why would you want to revive an image of its past? It won't reverse the exodus of its citizens or prevent it from becoming an open air museum.
Why not use this opportunity to play around with the built environment? You could, for instance, jack up this palazzo up higher than 3.3 feet. Or that palazzo by a towering 50 feet.
Sculpting negative spaces, reconfiguring campi, creating a second piazza.
Better yet, you slip in a barge under them. Venice as a tectonic jigsaw puzzle, its mini-island pieces floating but firmly tethered for most of the time until the curator of a future edition of the Architecture Biennale wants to rearrange things.
Or until the Art Institute of Chicago decides to organize a blockbuster exhibition on Venetian palazzos or Tate Britain on Turner's Venice. When their entreaties for loans are answered, chunks of the city will unmoor themselves from the lagoon. Once equipped to ward off Somalian pirates, they will simply sail away, leaving behind some scaffolding wrapped with full-scale photographic replicas of the borrowed architecture to let disappointed tourists know what they are sorely missing.
Of course, when London gets flooded for real by the middle of this century, the city will not look quite as charming. No Lonely Planet devotee would want to go there during his gap year. Instead, it would most certainly become a pestilential swamp, ridden with malaria and mutagenic superviruses, a methanous bog slowly digesting St. Paul's.
And behind every crumbling facade, a coven of sub-humans patiently waits for the night when they can continue their hunt for Will Smith.
Spotted yesterday on Der Spiegel is the above photograph of tulip farms in the northern Netherlands. No doubt artificially induced to coincide with Mother's Day in the U.S. and in many other countries this month, we see the fields explode in Suprematist technicolor.
It's Nature turned into a machine, detached from the natural cycles of time and geography — in other words, detached from itself — re-landscaped here to service a $40 billion global flower industry.
Once harvested the flowers will embark on a whirlwind journey. They will pass through greenhouses, cutting rooms, auction houses and conveyor belts — in fact, through a massive industrial complex not unlike the gargantuan automobile assembly plants of the Big Three — before then being loaded on to trucks and cargo planes, enlarging their carbon footprint en route to points elsewhere, where they may be placed in quarantine spaces by customs officials with other flowers similarly displaced from other growing regions till they are finally allowed to continue on to neighborhood flower shops and awaiting mothers.
Unnaturally but beautifully assembled bouquets as mobile landscapes.
