This post simply reproduces a passage from Against the Tide, a nice introductory survey of the American coastal built environment, by New York Times science editor Cornelia Dean. The littoral landscape is a continuing fascination here, and this post is but another iteration of this meme. There will be others, with those that had come before, including this one, acting collectively as a prologue.
So, quoting at length:
Almost half of all construction in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s took place in coastal areas, and demographers estimate that by the year 2000, 80 percent of Americans will live within an hour's drive off the coast. By 2010, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration says, population density along ocean coasts will be almost four hundred people per square mile, as against less than one hundred per square mile for the rest of the nation.
But the coast is not a stable landscape. Inlets open, heal, and reform. Seaside cliffs erode and slump. Sand shifts. Though we think of the land as terra firma, when we go the beach on a stormy day we can watch geological change occur before our eyes.
Much of this development began before science was able to say precisely what was happening in the geology of the coast. Even today much remains unknown about what happens in the mysterious region where air, water, and land meet. For one thing, research can be difficult to conduct; studying the surfzone is notoriously labor-intensive, unpleasant, and dangerous. Even worse, the nation's increasing commitment to living on the beach has created a powerful force against the application of knowledge already in hand. There is a kind of constituency of ignorance, people who have so much invested in coastal real estate that they do not want to hear how vulnerable it is.
The biggest burst of development on the coast has occurred since about 1970, during a period in which there have been unusually few coastal storms, particularly hurricanes. If weather patterns were now to return to those earlier years in the twentieth century, the property damage and loss of life could be devastating. On top of that, sea level is rising; if the earth is warming, and mainstream climatologists believe it is, the situation will only get worse. Geologists say 70 percent of the saltwater coastline of the lower forty-eight states is eroding, and some put the figure at closer to 90 percent. The Galveston solution—armoring—can hold off the sea, but only for a while. The best shore protection is a wide, healthy beach. No amount of rock or concrete can make a beach wider. And Nature always bats last at the coast.
Stonehenge is a monument to contemporary doubt, to fallibility, competing theories and conflicting mythologies. And perhaps these confusions explain the curse of the Stonehenge Visitors centre. Because, though seemingly benign, visitors centres are highly strung cultural artefacts.
The role of a visitors centre is more than corralling cars and dispensing cappuccinos. The real substance of a Visitors Centre is to articulate our relationship to history, nature or whatever it is we happen to be visiting. The current visitors centre typology employs a kind of eco-high tech that steers a path between various controversies. It's a building type that attempts to feel authentic, natural and generically vernacular but contains enough contemporary tropes of transparency and engineering to differentiate it from commercialised 'themed' heritage. If you only visited Visitors Centres, leaving before you saw the significant site, you'd develop a nuanced understanding of the ways contemporary culture relates to nature and history.
It just seems so strange to us that the country of garden follies (culturally mediated engagement with nature and history), the grided architecture of metes and bounds, and the literary invented landscapes of the Lakes District could still be having problems negotiating between the manmade and the natural and between authentic experience and drive-by tourism. Haven't these issues been resolved already over there?
2)Bustler on the winners of the Brooklyn Grand Army Plaza competition.
4)SUBSURFACE Magazine on Issuu.com. A student publication from the Department of Landscape Architecture, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
[W]ith the growing interest in sustainable gardening and the widespread dissatisfaction with the time, expense and chemical fertilizers required for traditional lawn care, meadows are becoming increasingly popular. A perennial meadow in bloom, its colors constantly changing with the play of light and shadow, may be nature at its most alluring. Yet, as random and natural as a meadow looks, there is nothing haphazard about creating one. Planting a meadow, it turns out, is as rule-bound and time-consuming as planting any perennial border.
6)Defense Tech on liquid-cooled underwear, BBC News on robo-skeleton for the paralyzed, and Wired Gadgets on d03: ready-to-wear for extreme landscapes. (As a possible ground cover, d03's “intelligent shock absorbers” calls to mind Stoss' Safe Zone, a temporary garden installation for the International Garden Festival, Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens.)
While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?
In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.
And self-powered lighting fixtures; some artificial turf and mildly meditative Zen boulders; a few dozen rabbits, cute or otherwise; anti-gravity hydrology; and of course, the all-important signage: “Warning: If Not Rapture, May Cause Death.”
And after you push a few buttons, flick one or two switches and drain Europe of all of its electricity, your floating garden then goes on an endless subterranean ringed journey.
It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.
In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.
We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.
In other words:
Where the Big Bang might have been simulated endlessly, extra dimensions observed for the first time, and the fundamental construct of Nature elucidated, it might soon be filled with the buying patterns of ex-urbanites at Wal-Mart, hilariously awful credit ratings of college graduates, and our entire archive of bukkake porn.
You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.
Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London's Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it's the “Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.” The Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, and because of the close pairing, we naturally thought that its subterranean equivalent, the Rhizotron, was just as spectacular in terms of design and engineering.
Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, before when we couldn't help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind museum glass windows), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (“The soil has architecture?!?!” the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)
This was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — until somehow you emerge out into the open at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.
Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.
Consider, then, “the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.” The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.
What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.
Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park. Open it to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.
There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the “giants of coal age forests,” the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.
The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It's a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of “ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.”
As splendid as Lascaux's prehistoric cave paintings. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (though this might have a truer version of the Creation story).
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1:Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
Editors at kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal compiled by undergraduates at the Landscape Architecture program @ RMIT, are calling for submissions for their 17th edition. They want to know:
Is Landscape Architecture dead?
Does Landscape Architecture have the capacity to deal with the potentials of the future?
What is the future of Landscape Architecture?
How can landscape be shaped by concepts/models/ideas/theories that are not normally considered relevant to Landscape?
The due date for abstracts is only a few days away — 5 September 2008 — but we are told that they will be happy to accept abstracts and full submissions up until 26 September 2008.
And by abstracts, they mean a 100-250 word outline of the proposed submission - be it written, multimedia, photoessay, model images, etc. The format is open; anything submitted will just need to be accompanied by text.
