Thankfully, N.E.E.D., whose entry was awarded First Place, provided us with images of their winning proposal: “an aquaculture-driven floating park, inlaid with combinational modules of public indoor programs.”
“South Street Seaport,” writes N.E.E.D., “has always been closely connected with infrastructural industry of the city. Being a port and a market for fish, it actively switched its urban structure according to development of transportation modes and storing methods of goods. To continue this historical trajectory of being a highly responsive urban district, the project proposes a fish farm(works), where the future of aquaculture actuates the next transformation phase of the area.”
But fish grown in the waters of New York City? Somehow locavores might still prefer frozen fish trucked in from afar over fresh ones from the East River. There is a “sustainable water purification system,” though the way the project statement reads, one is made to think that this is for cleaning water that has been contaminated by this near-shore aquaculture and not to sanitize river water for use in the farm.
Nevertheless, as with any ideas, this shortcoming can easily be resolved with further development.
One wishes here, though, that the spongy, osseous kelp forest underneath was extended above the water line: a spongy, osseous rain forest within which fishes swarm. New York's new skyscraper-aquariums.
Still, we do like the idea of extending the territory of Manhattan, a phenomenon not without historical precedence. You could even push the entire edge all the way out with these “half-submered pontoons,” thus stitching the island and the other boroughs together.
While everyone above enjoys the floating park and its many programmed cabinets de verdure, and amidst hilarious territorial disputes over, say, where Manhattan begins and Brooklyn begins (or vice versa), an aquatic eco-machine purifies the water below to a level that 1) eating its locally grown fish will not physically and psychologically repulse people; 2) urban agriculture moves away from the grotesquely expensive real estate of Manhattan into the less(?) expensive real estate of the tidal estuary; and 3) when there's an architecture biennale/festival in the city, someone will stage The Continuous (Sushi) Picnic.
Research into Lou Gehrig's disease has demonstrated that, at least in mice carrying the associated genetic mutation, this neurodegenerative disorder can spatially manifest itself as “very subtle” but detectable behavioral patterns before the onset of symptoms.
Quoting at length a press release from the American Psychological Association:
Researchers led by Neri Kafkafi, PhD, of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, part of the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, mathematically analyzed about 50,000 predetermined movement patterns that resulted when rats roamed freely, one by one, in a small arena. The software created an abstract space defined by combinations of behavior such as speed, acceleration and direction of movement. Mining the resulting behavioral data enabled researchers to test many more facets of behavior than they could analyze manually.
After videotaping the movement of two groups of rats – one type with the mutation that results in an ALS-type syndrome, the other type normal controls — the scientists used the computer to "pan" for differences between groups and identified a unique motor pattern in mutant rats two months before disease onset (which would equate to roughly five to 10 years in humans).
Of the multitude of behavior patterns analyzed, the predefined "heavily braking while slightly turning away from the wall" showed a group difference. In two independent data sets, rats with the ALS-type mutation were significantly less likely than controls to brake and turn from the arena wall as they approached.
The benefit of this study is that “by being able to predict more accurately which carriers may express the disease before they experience symptoms (the 'premorbid' state), researchers could test medicines that might prevent symptoms from emerging.”
One wonders whether this sort of research, somewhere down the line, will result in public places getting littered with CCTV cameras data mining for the tell-tale signs of genetic diseases affecting motor functions. Similarly when traffic cameras take a photo of your license plate when you go over the speed limit and then get your ticket in the mail a couple of days later, these outdoor medical scanners take a photo of your face, match it up to a database at the CDC and a couple of days later, you get a diagnosis in the mail.
There will be a specially outfitted plaza where those without health insurance can get their free check-ups. Those with no more sick days can simply walk pass through on their way to work or linger about during their lunch breaks. Hypochondriacs will come in droves and stay there, like skateboarders to a Brutalist plaza.
If there is a predictive behavioral pattern to a pedophile's movements within the spatial confines of playgrounds and parks (that is, if children still go outdoors anymore) as well as the streets bordering schools, you get a court order to receive some psychiatric counseling.
Do terrorists have a genetic mutation that not only affect their cognitive reasoning but also their motor functions, the pattern array of which is so perceptibly different with that of non-terrorists that you can “spot” them?
We're always suckers for interesting lines drawn on a map, so we cannot help but complement our earlier post on the radioactive waste transport routes to Yucca Mountain with this map of the “NASCO Corridor focus area.” It primarily shows existing transportation infrastructures linking the three NAFTA trade bloc countries. Collectively, they are sometimes nicknamed as the NAFTA Superhighway.
The term may also refer to a mythological highway that, according to The Nation, is imagined to “be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else.” Gap jeans stitched together by little Indian kids? Nonunionized illegal immigrants? Lead-painted toys from China? Cocaine? CLUI tourists?
In any case, this other NAFTA Superhighway, as a matter of cultural geography, sounds incredibly interesting.
Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.
In reading BLDGBLOG's post on urban infrastructure as a source of nightmares, one wonders if this is an actual nightmare, a real one collectively dreamt up by the Midwest. Each night, up and down I-35, people violently wake up from the same dream: a road “slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat.” They all wish they were dreaming about Freddy Krueger instead of a pack of migrant labors moving in the cover of darkness en route to harvest fields in Iowa.
Or more interestingly, it's the projection of East Coast progressives; it's what they think these people are having or should be having nightmares about.
Better yet, it's the wet dreams of NASCO, Wal-Mart and other multi-national business coalitions.
This image comes from the official website of U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV). It shows the proposed rail route radioactive waste will take if and when the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository becomes operational.
As graphically depicted, it begs easy comparison to the Mississippi-Missouri river system. Rivulets and tributaries and one big fat branch sweeping across the landscape, meandering as they transport their cargo inexorably to their destination, dutifully following the laws of gravity but a lot of the times not, and with and against the will of the people.
Both are considered very important to national security and therefore must be controlled. The river, of course, has its dams and levees and navigational locks, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, but it also has a proto-nervous and proto-immune systems constantly monitoring any abnormal levels of natural activities, which, if detected, will be taken care of by a cadre of engineers. The rails will no doubt have its own security barriers, a surveillance system and a disaster management protocol.
And therein lies our main reason for posting the map: we want to propose a landscape architecture studio in which students are tasked to design the landscape of this radioactive corridor, which must be occupiable public open space, and thus will have to balance (or not) the demands of security and access.
Will they be inspired by Israel's West Bank barrier or North Korea's DMZ or both?
Will they create the country's longest and thinnest national park with an outer layer of well-infrastructured recreational area and an inner layer of restricted wilderness? Or will the whole thing be just a constructed wetland filled with Bird flu-West Nile hybrid superviruses that even terrorists are scared of?
Perhaps in imitation of Gertrude Jekyll, one designs a thick, fury border of native vegetation transcoded with phytoremediating genes. And interspersed along these rows of explosive biodiversity, in equal distance from each others like grain elevators, are sentinel towers housing landscape architects charged with maintaining the greenbelt.
In any case, if and when shipment begins, it would be interesting to travel to all those farming towns and those vast, horizon-filled counties lining the rails just to ask what the people now think of those very evocative sounds of bullhorns rolling across the landscape. Will they still be rendered nostalgic for the heroic past, half-remembering childhood stories of their great-grandmothers tending to their prairie homesteads, marking the passing of the day and the seasons by the passing of trains, sometimes waiting the delivery of their daughters' new Sunday best clothes ordered from Sears Catalog, always lulled to sleep by the distant sounds of metal wheels on metal tracks?
Will the sound still call to mind the glamorous era of American intercontinental railway journey when the dashing Cary Grant and the lovely Eva Marie Saint drank champagne in plush, oak-paneled boxcars while evading cops, spies and double agents against the backdrop of the national landscape?
Or do they now evoke nuclear holocausts, a country heading towards a post-oil crisis and Rob Lowe?
The Romantic and the Pastoral landscape replaced by an anxious terrain in constant threat of a sonic blast.
The New Republic on the demographic inversion of the American city. For example, “Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city—Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center—some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white—are those who can afford to do so.”
New Statesman on the secret history of Vienna's Nazi flak towers. “These reinforced concrete colossi...still dominate their surroundings without a hint of remorse” but they “do not exist as part of 'official' Vienna, the tourist temple to Mozart, Strauss and chocolate cake. Other than a brief mention in guidebooks and the occasional academic study, they are invisible. Yet Vienna is, of course, also the city of Sigmund Freud, and these relics of a dark past are poised to burst out of the city's subconscious.”
BBC News on Bangladesh's growing landmass: “1,000 square kilometres” over the “next 50 years,” according to Maminul Haque Sarker of the Dhaka-based Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services. But Dr. Atiq Rahman, a lead author of a UN report on climate change, says this may not make the country any less vulnerable: “The rate at which sediment is deposited and new land is created is much slower than the rate at which climate change and sea level rises are taking place.” In other words, The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game is still on.
Meet the 12-TET Rover. What The New York Timesonce described as a “shape-changing jungle gym” is, in fact, one of NASA's future extraterrestrial explorers, designed to carry out its mission without much guidance from earth-bound ground controllers.
This autonomy is enabled, in part, by its skeletal frame — 26 extendable metal rods forming 12 tetrahedrons, hence the name — which allows the rover to “reconfigure itself into almost any shape” and adapt to terrains and situations that scientists have not foreseen. So “across flat terrain, it would roll like tumbleweed. It could pull itself, almost catlike, onto rocks or flatten itself and slither through holes.”
You can see it in action in an animation that's available for download at NASA's Autnonomous NanoTechnology Swarm website. The movie file, by the way, is 633.7 MB. Consider yourself warned.
Apparently, there's a prototype roaming a hallway somewhere. You can see it in action here [17.8 MB] and here [5.1 MB].
When not tumbling through the digitized surface of other worlds, these rovers have been drafted by the military for urban reconnaissance or hunting down certain cave dwellers.
Meet the TET Warfighter and its camouflaged pneumatic body.
The thesis is a critical response to Bruce Peninsula National Park's plan to build a new visitor center on a very tame site far from the wild shores of Georgian Bay. The images and text that follow portray an architectural fantasy that proposes, instead, to inhabit the interior landscape of the Bruce Peninsula.
So rather than experiencing the landscape from afar, you are inserted into the interior wilderness of carved bedrock, ancient limestone towers, dark fissures and underground rivers. Instead of outhouses, you will be inhabiting a labyrinth of abysses.
In the proposed scheme, an access and guidance system enables people to climb down into fissures and caverns, mimicking cedar tree roots on the site. Flrexible stainless steel attachments and fittings are inserted into fissures in the rock and hold a network of cedar roots imported to the site from harvested forests. The stainless steel structure mimics fossils, or coral bones, and the roots age and become part of the landscape.
And:
In contrast to the park's philosophy of interpreting the wilderness through a building set apart from the wild, the schematic and imagined access proposal of the thesis do not control or tame the wilderness. The wild space of the interior of the rock of the Bruce Peninsula crosses the boundary of personal safety and loss of identity, and revels in the unconscious. It is through our own inner wild that we respond to the natural and relate to the remaining wilderness.
Here are some images:
In a Metropolismicro-interview of Martha Schwartz, we learn that her dream job is to design “a national park in eastern Nevada, where we join together abandoned gold mines—that have just been left there to rot—and redesign them.”
How marvelous would it be, as part of the master plan to link them all together, to deploy NASA's TET rovers into these mines. In addition to using these skeletal tetrahedral frames as geological armatures, to hold back the earth and facilitate access, they will also bore through the bedrock, drilling new passages and eroding caverns to dwarf the nave of St. Peter's, wherein they will lock into place as columns, arches and internal buttresses.
A few centuries from now, landscape architects will go spelunking through this subterranean park. They are actually postulants to a secret society of Freemasons that had splintered off from the American Society of Landscape Architecture. As part of their Masonic initiation rites, these future stewards of the earth must first immerse themselves in the abyss; it's baptism by artificial voids. To become better caretakers of the environment, they must encounter the fullness, the exquisite grandeur, the terrifying unconscious indifference of the landscape.
Of course, we have to return for a third time back to P-REX [Updated URL: P-REX Lab], this time to single out one of their projects, the Pontine Systemic Design.
The result of Alan Berger's year as the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize recipient in Landscape Architecture, at the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with Case Brown, this project proposes to “re-introduce a gigantic new wetland machine” to cleanse and adaptively reuse one of the highly polluted zones of Italy's Lazio region, the drained Pontine Marshes. It is both a productive filtration system and a regional recreation area.
Quoting the project summary at length:
Choosing a gigantic, consolidated wetland site will likely be more viable in the complex patchwork of land ownership. Given Latina’s situation distributed treatment areas would be both enormously complex to purchase and ineffective to manage. The Wetland Machine’s dimensions are directly related to the amount of wetland area needed to treat the amount of water in the Canale Aque Alte—the major collector for this highly polluted zone. At 220 l/s, with a load around 50+ mg/l of N, at least 2 square kilometers of treatment wetland will be required. The design retro-fits and widens existing canals to serve as flow distributors. Furthermore, soil cut/fill operations are used for terraforming shallow ridges and valleys to hold/treat water and make raised areas for new public space and program. At 2.3 sq. km., the new wetland machine will drastically improve the regional water supply and provide needed open space for recreation. At only 6 km from Latina, the site could house programs and environments almost completely lacking in the region—large open landscapes with diverse vegetation. Extensive edge habitat diversity or programs—shallow shoals for juvenile fish and swimming, starker edges for fishing and water storage.
Early this summer, the President of Latina Province launched a feasibility study to evaluate the potential of this wetland machine.
There are more fascinating projects at P-REX. If you are at all interested in how to adapt entropic landscapes — such as abandoned mine pits mountains of slag and pools of cyanice, vacant urban lands, landfills and former military installations — in a holistic, multi-layered strategy for future productive use and more sustainable outcomes, let Alan Berger and his colleagues show you how.
POSTSCRIPT #1:The New York Times on Alan Berger and the Pontine project. “The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape,” says Berger.
POSTSCRIPT #2: Much earlier, The New York Timestagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado.
