Many things tend to remind us of many other things. For instance, the image of King Alfonso XVII's architecturally riotous bathing machine moving back and forth, in imitation of the often hypnotic ebb and flow of the tides, slowly, languorously as one would expect to be when holidaying at the beach, instantly called to mind two projects by the Dutch artist-architect John Körmeling.
The full scale, freestanding structure rotates on rails embedded on a grassy roundabout in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Powered by solar panels, it completes one revolution every 20 hours, its constantly shifting position supposed to evoke a “feeling of alienation from reality.” Front and back gardens were proposed for this permanent art installation but are not yet evident in photographs.
As a public sculpture, the house isn't meant to be inhabited, which begs the obvious question: why not? Perhaps if we wait long enough for the global economic crisis to make vagabond of so many there, we will see it unintentionally colonized.
Moving on to the second: Happy Street.
At first it looks like a proposal for a dense housing project on stilts, wherein residential units flank a roadway curlicued like a roller coaster. Indeed, a photo of a scale model early in its construction (or is it a finished maquette?) shows the street looking like the specialized railway tracks of amusement rides.
We like to think that Körmeling wants to embed a set of rails into the asphalt to facilitate conveyance, because he envisions the units being repositioned, like a certain bathing machine, into a different arrangement every 20 hours. And if his plans become a logistical nightmare, they will remain as infrastructural decoration like half-buried, half-remembered trolley tracks of yesteryear, experienced bumpily by commuters daily.
But perhaps one could more accurately describe Easy Street as a modular city neighborhood of more heterogeneous land uses — sleek condominiums, traditional canal houses, supermarkets, dry cleaners and cultural amenities: a re-interpretation of the cul-de-sac. Dendritic urban planning replaced with multi-dimensional knot topology.
In either case, it's an expected though reasonable urban strategy for a flood prone country with limited space to grow.
Further research online, however, tells us that neither is the case. It is actually the winning concept for the Pavilion of the Netherlands at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
Bas Haring explains the concept thus:
As the world becomes ever more efficient, it demands more straight streets and rectangular buildings. The fact that the world is becoming more efficient is also eminently logical; efficiency trumps inefficiency. Inefficiency disappears and efficiency endures, and the yet more efficient will in turn also remain. Logical. But is it pleasing? Who is made happy by the efficient, the linear, the rectangular? That is the question Happy Street seems to be posing.
In truth, the linear is somewhat dull. Every straight line looks like every other. Draw a line from one corner of the paper to the other and it is exactly as straight as every other straight line. All things considered there is only one kind of straight line and that is a straight one. Unlike crooked lines. There are millions of kinds of those. Draw a crooked line on the paper, from one corner to the other, or any which way. Odds are that exactly the same crooked line has never been drawn before.
We are like the crooked line: whimsical and unique. Happy Street stands up for the human aspect. For the less efficient. For us.
This is typically Dutch.
So is this, then, a distillation of Dutch landscape and architecture design? “Organized, calculated, efficient, but with room for individuality and whimsicality”?
After working so hard expressing an entire nation's vision of itself, one hopes that the whole structure could be carted away and reused elsewhere instead of rotting on the expo grounds like one of its predecessors. And since we do have a fair amount of interest on coastal development, we propose that it be reassembled on a barrier islands on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and that all units are detached and fastened with wheels.
Better yet, manufacture hundreds of these steel and concrete superstructures and then scatter them along the Atlantic coast from Maine all the way down to the Florida Keys. Instant City.
McDubai®.
And each one would support a community of permanent residents or a nomadic population of weekenders, tourists, summer residents, retirees, and seasonal workers who all come, leave and return again. One could take on the character of a quaint hamlet by the sea or SoHo or an ultra-exclusive seaside resort.
Should you bore of Cape Cod, simply sell your lot space and drive your Dutch-designed cottage or shipping-container-turned-winnebagos or a King Alfonso XIII® off to the Carolinas.
Should your sushi restaurant outlive its novelty among the populace or should there no longer be a great demand for avante-garde films at your cinémathèque, again, just relocate your entire unit to a new settlement.
It's trailer park meets Smout Allen in an interspecies tryst between the vernacular and architecture school academe. In the salty, frothy, heaving surf, genetic materials are exchanged to concoct a deformed Archigram city.
“A century ago,” we read in Against the Tide by Cornelia Dean, “it was easy to abandon coastal land.” What few buildings constructed by the ocean included movable cabins that could be jacked up, rolled on logs and shipped to the mainland on barges; cheap shelters like shacks for shipwrecked mariners that wouldn't be a devastating loss if destroyed; and “informal oceanfront 'camps'”. And then there's Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, who considered his knapsack as “the only ever-ready wagon of the dunes.” In other words, you could easily retreat to avoid harm's way.
Now, “as coastal land grows in value, beach houses are becoming more and more elaborate. The small dune-sheltered cottage of fifty years ago is a thing of the past. Today new-built houses have four, five, or six bedrooms, each with its own bath, and are equipped with every sort of luxury. Some of these new houses are permanent residences, or second homes. But many are rental properties, which must be lavishly equipped if they are to command the high rents their amortization requires. Vacationers who once came to the beach to enjoy sea breezes now demand air conditioning and cable television.” As Dean eventually summarizes, “rather than retreat from the beach, Americans are digging in,” even after hurricanes after hurricanes have unraveled countless coastal communities into piles of driftwood.
On Happy Street, Florida, meanwhile, everybody can decamp their luxurious, six-bedroom LOT-EK units at a moment's notice and take shelter on Happy Street, South Carolina. Though the landscape will be battered or even dramatically recontoured, you know you will be able to very quickly return your city-on-wheels to your city-on-stilts.
Unlike other open-ocean fish farming cages that are tethered to the sea floor, the Aquapod® is unmoored, able to maneuver and stabilize itself beneath the waves with its own built-in thrusters.
Designed by a team led by Cliff Goudey, the director of the MIT Sea Grant's Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, a prototype was constructed for a technical feasibility test this summer in the waters off of Puerto Rico.
Migratory and geodesic, it perhaps answers the rarely asked question: what would Buckminster Fuller and Archigram have come up with had they taken up underwater agriculture?
The project is funded by NOAA’s Marine Aquaculture Program, aimed at demonstrating the technology needed to raise fish in the vast portions of the U.S. [Exclusive Economic Zone] that are too deep for conventional anchored fish cages. By operating while submerged and in predictable ocean currents, mobile fish farms need only a modest means of positioning to stay within planned trajectories. There are many locations both in U.S. waters and around the world where oceanic currents and gyres offer useful frameworks for such mobile operations. Though futuristic compared to today’s near-shore fish farming practices, the concept avoids the user conflicts and compromised water quality of coastal waters.
Indeed, near-shore aquaculture is much criticized for polluting coastal waters, despite the fact that it minimally exploits severely depleted wild fish stocks. Quoting Wikipedia:
The concentrated nature of aquaculture often leads to higher than normal levels of fish waste in the water. Fish waste is organic and composed of nutrients necessary in all components of aquatic food webs. In some instances such as nearshore, high-intensity operations, increased waste can adversely affect the environment by decreasing dissolved oxygen levels in the water column.
Not only is the quality of the water affected but that of the food as well. Many hatcheries can be found near urban areas and sometimes get exposed to stormwater and industrial runoffs. The risk of contamination is further magnified when cages are tightly concentrated together. This disrupts the natural water circulation that otherwise would take waste out of and bring fresh water into the system. Bred in such close quarters, the fish stocks become even more vulnerable to disease outbreaks and parasite infestation.
Off-shore aquaculture, as envisioned by Goudey and others, would resolve these problems, as this approach would 1) take the operation away from the foul waters of the coasts and 2) utilize strong ocean currents to flush away fish wastes. Should the cages enter a less than pristine area, it would simply move again. And if the currents aren't moving fast enough, the propellers would create the necessary turbulence.
In any case, as environmentally considerate as the Aquapod® is, that it can propel itself is the one detail that really interest us to no end.
Firstly, imagine a swarm of geodesic farms bobbing about in the deep, and inside each one is an entirely different swarm self-organizing in myriad emergent blobs.
Secondly, imagine them not simply floating semi-idly but rather orbiting an apparent barycenter, like an underwater solar system of satellite hatcheries revolving around a feeder sphere from which nutrients ooze out and are fling outwards towards awaiting hungry fishes.
And thirdly, imagine that this entire farm is swirling about in oceanic currents — or as described by Forbes, how Goudey imagines it actually working:
Put hatchlings in cages into a Caribbean gyre near Barbados. The cages would be tracked by GPS, kept on course with Goudey's propeller system, and visited by feeding boats. The fish, drifting in the gyre, would grow as the current took them west toward the Yucatan, then north into the Gulf of Mexico and finally into the Gulf Stream where the fish could pass near Miami just as they are good-eatin' size. Cages could be timed to arrive monthly or even weekly.
In our very nascent days, we reported about these community gardens. This is what we wrote:
For over a decade, a group of mostly immigrant families have been tilling a colorful patchwork of thriving farms in one of the most industrialized landscape of Los Angeles. Out of concrete and asphalt, a community of urban farmers have cultivated a whole variety of fruiting trees, cash crops and vegetables. Growing in the shadow of power lines and skyscrapers are avocado, guavas, bananas and peach trees, as are sugarcane, corn, cactus, lettuce, winter squash, broccoli and lettuce. The list surely contains a lot more, but all are harvested not just for food but also for medicine and to supplement low incomes by selling them.
It is by no surprise that we found ourselves imagining what would have been if some pieces of this mosaic of Edens had survived and then wholly transplanted to another place, kept nurtured there and its fruits continued to be harvested until this summer, when it would have been wholly transplanted again all the way to Venice for this year's Architecture Biennale. Rather than a garden installation by Kathryn Gustafson (x2), visitors find a replicant urban farm with migrant workers tilling its soil. Instead of an allegory of earthly dilemmas, one is immediately confronted with the real world of real issues: environmental and social justice, globalization, the geopolitics of displacement, gentrification, etc. And instead of achieving enlightenment through heavyhanded formalism, overly programmed narrative and yesteryear's signification, you enter into a real dialogue with the gardeners and are truly made aware.
In any case, screenings of the movie are very sporadic at the moment and probably will remain so, unless it finds a distributor. We hope a DVD will be released soon.
Perhaps because it's getting colder by the day here in the North, but Jules Spinatsch's photographic series Snow Management came to our minds today, specifically, this photo of an icy stalagmite that at first seems to have formed after a water main had burst:
But then details begin to come into focus, such as what appears to be advertising banners by The North Face and what could likely be two timekeeping clocks. Since the series as a whole documents the artificial landscape of Alpine sports and leisure, it's safe to assume that this is a venue for indoor ice-climbing races. Spiraling around this atrium, then, would be viewing balconies.
What else could it be?
Spinatsch doesn't offer much information. We know the building is in Austria, France, Italy or Switzerland, but exactly where is a mystery. The building itself is difficult to ascertain. What kind is it?
Is it a freestanding concrete silo constructed solely for this single outdoor-indoor sport?
Is it a multi-story parking garage with a secondary function?
Is it a defunct mall, an early victim of the credit crunch, now repurposed?
Of these possibilities, it is the last that we find the most compelling. Imagine that the collapse of the global financial sector and the resulting dramatic fall in consumer spending have caused scores of retail chain stores to declare bankruptcy. Malls everywhere are shuttered.
Imagine further that, as but one adaptive re-use, these abandoned cathedrals of capitalism are turned into ice-climbing clubhouses. Where people had once gorged thousands of calories in one serving, now people are burning those same calories belaying an icefall in the Food Court. Where once the multi-carded and the debt-ridden had found comfort in materialism, they now come to experience a similar adrenalin rush from the prospect of multiple compound fracture, if not death. Where once they had hopped from store to store in a zombie-like delirium, there, in a kind of Waldian introspection midway up a simulated glacier (Thoreau's frozen New England pond reconfigured vertically, if you will), now they are considering a fundamental alteration to their lifestyles, a change for the better.
“You can’t bring your old habits here,” Lebbeus Woods was quoted as saying in a recent New York Timesarticle. “If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent yourself.”
Of course, he was talking about his own architectural spaces, but maybe it could be similarly prescribed to these repurposed architectures of our own economic demise. And for anything newly built.
Last month we alerted readers that kerb was looking for article submissions for their 17th issue: Death of Landscape. The deadline has past, but there is still a way for you to contribute. The editorial team wants some images.
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?
Show them its rotting corpse in the overgrown lawns of Foreclosure, Florida or its perfumed diseased body getting further irradiated by a Middle Eastern sun. Perhaps you have evidence that it's actually flourishing in the toxic landscape of the Pontine Marshes and in the PleistocenePark?
Whatever you've got, keep in mind that the due date is 17 October 2008.
As reported today in New Scientist and elsewhere, the same basic principles used in recent experiments to render objects invisible at least in some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have been employed to develop a dike system that can shield objects they surround from water waves.
This system is composed of “concentric rings of rigid pillars.” Waves passing through its “labyrinth of radial and concentric corridors” are not cancelled out but rather are reconfigured (re-sculpted?) in such a way that they pass through the object inside with little or no effect.
If this scheme can work in scaled-up versions, it may well protect vulnerable coastlines, entire islands and offshore oil platforms from destructive tsunamis.
While acknowledging the skepticism of so many directed at this tsunami cloaking device, we have to confess to being quite mesmerized, to the detriment of our rational faculties, by the incredibly poetic image of these barriers submerged in the gloomy depths: a flooded forest of concrete colossi diffracting sunlight into its own prismatic corridors.
Perhaps they've been turned into artificial coral reefs to generate some ecotourism income to diversify the local economy and offset construction costs. Or maybe they've been topped off with wind turbines. Or both: The Anti-Tsunami Wind Farm and Barrier Reef Wildlife Park. Surely an ideas competition must be held so as to generate other possible programmes.
In any case, it's probably something Peter Eisenman would design if hired by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Thousands of years from now, when the glaciers come to reclaim back territories they had once surrendered and sea levels retreat in response, they will begin to emerge out of the waters: false skyscrapers barnacled with the ossified remains of countless generations of organisms but still retaining their minimalist geometry; a labyrinth of monoliths taking measurements of a landscape in flux but whose true functions have long been forgotten.
“They are memorials to ancient mariners lost at sea,” one of our many-times-great-grandsons will speculate.
“They're astronomical observatories,” another will suggest.
“You're both wrong,” a future crypto-geographer will shout. “It's a contemplative space designed by a 21st century landscape architect, though rather than being used as a place of serene meditation, it became the well-concealed playground of horny teens, drug dealers and rapists, as well as the pissoir of inebriated sports fans.”
Soon afterwards they will shriek in frustration like Kubrickian apes.
Via del.icio.us/bldgblog, we discovered the above photo from the National Maritime Museum. In the foreground, you see a group of bathing machines en route to the waters off Scarborough in Yorkshire, England.
A common sight in beach resorts in the 19th century, bathing machines allowed women to change their clothes in private, reach the waters without parading through open stretches of beach in their bathing suits, and then frolic about in relative privacy and without violating contemporary notions of modesty. Queen Victoria certainly had one, and like it, these caravans of propriety, of social mores too foreign for our own eyes, were simple wooden structures. Lest they invite voyeurs, they were built without windows, otherwise there were little ones inaccessible to prying eyes. Some were made of canvas and still others were very luxurious affairs, but all of them were on wheels, pulled in and out of the surf by horses or brute human power.
Perhaps there's something to be learned from this outmoded sea-side etiquette. Instead of building a palatial beach house with five bathrooms that will only be used as a summer retreat, you build something more modest, say, a tiny house — on wheels.
When the next Category 5 hurricane eyes your neck of the woods, it, of course, retreats to safer harbors. You don't even have to ask tax payers to bail you out after damaging winds and storm surges have deconstructed your Martha Stewart Living centerfold into driftwood and then ask/beg/litigate again to pay the federal flood insurance of your replacement colossus designed by Toll Brothers. Considering the current economic climate, there probably wouldn't be enough federal money left that can be earmarked for beach fortification that only benefits you, who, in turn, probably couldn't afford a rarely inhabited second (or third or fourth) home.
From a vernacular architecture of Victorian social conventions to a zeitgeist architecture of fiscal sobriety.
In any case, part of the label of the photo reads: “Scarborough made the headlines in 1993 after a landslide caused the Holbeck Hall hotel to fall into the sea.” Holbeck Hall should have been on wheels, too.
