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Solid Ground
 Armatures for a fluid landscape, as photographed by Toshio Shibata.       Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg Harbor Project
Gazex®
 Several memes running through this blog come wonderfully together in Gazex®, an anti-avalanche system manufactured by Technologie Alpine de Sécurité (TAS): terrestrial augments, wilderness access, urban/wild interface, disaster urbanism, climate change and (admittedly a stretch) fountains.  From a distance, they look like disembodied talons jutting out from the rockface, ready to prick at imminent disasters. With their array of remote sensors, they are constantly reading the landscape; the mountains are kept under constant surveillance, lest they want to endanger quaint Alpine hamlets and new luxury ski resort developments above Denver or lose skiers to the wintry wilds. When an avalanche is deemed likely, it detonates a mixture of oxygen and propane gas in its explosion chamber. The resulting hot gas is then directed downwards to the zone at risk.  TAS describes their product as the best avalanche prevention mechanism, as there are “no explosives to handle and no personnel interventions in or near danger zones.” But will there be any market for it in the near future? At least in the Alps, demand may soon vanish due to “a change in the large-scale weather pattern.” From New Scientist: In the late 1980s, there was a dramatic step-like drop in the amount of snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Since then, snowfall has never recovered. In some years, the amount that fell on the plateau between Zurich, Bern and Basel was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, says Christoph Marty at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos. He has analysed snowfall trends spanning 60 years and adds that the average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago. Maybe TAS should start manufacturing artificial snow machines? Preferably not.  Should you want to see it in action, you can download this video. There is another, but that file may be corrupt, as it won't unzip for us.  It's the new version of Geoff's Earth-Fountain©, the present memorial to a vanishing landscape and the future memorial to an extinct one. Depending on who you ask, that bang echoing through the valley will be regarded as a mournful wail or a joyful bellow heralding the arrival of something new. Drangagil Neskaupstaður Sites of Managed Anxiety Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes
Fish Works
 On view till 27 September 2008 at the Center for Architecture in New York are select entries from the South Street Seaport - Re-envisioning the Urban Edge competition. Unfortunately, no images are provided. 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.   Of course, you could also implement these designs to waterfronts elsewhere. On agro
Lou Gehrig's Plaza
 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. 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. It's landscape as a diagnostic tool.  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? The Alzheimer House My Garden Is Telling Me That I'm Abusing My Kids
NAFTA Superhighway
 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.
A Radioactive River Runs Through It
 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. Programming (In)Security Yongbyon Happy Family People Complex
Prunings XLVIII
 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.” BBC News on the first truly global map of the world's rocks. 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. Cabinet Magazine and Rosalind Williams on subterranean spaces. Bustler on the CityRacks competition to find new solutions for NYC’s bike locking/parking fixtures. The finalists are announced. |
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