With the all too brief mention earlier of OTEC comes this image of a concept OTEC power plant.
It looks more sleek and futuristic (or retro-futuristic, if you're much versed in vintage SF) than other prototypes, a creature more adapted to fictional outer space than to the oceans.
But something about its bulbous main compartment led us to wonder if there is enough room inside for seasteaders to muck about with nation-building. Amidst all those noisy condensers and turbine generators and navigational gears, perhaps even inspired by them, they try to formulate the mechanics of a new micro-civilization, new identities and new cultural traditions.
If not, how about a second, similarly bulbous habitat module perched on top, above the water line? Or a polyhedral honeycomb of spherical units for, you guessed it, climate change refugees to call home? It would be a kind of artificialenergyisland but sovereign.
With an overabundance of low-cost, carbon-neutral energy, this New Tuvulu could desalinate fresh water for its citizens and a mini-aquaponics industry. Power enough open-ocean aquaculture cages, and all will be well fed. Any surplus electricity, fish and fresh water would then be traded to neighboring countries. Consequently, their GDP skyrockets.
Like the Aquapod®, the Oceansphere™ will be untethered to the sea floor and is being marketed as a solution to the continuing rapid decline of wild fish population.
One noteworthy difference is its proposed energy source: the ocean itself. Specifically, the Oceansphere™ will exploit the temperature difference between shallow and deep water through a method called ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC). The “exclusive patent pending hybrid OTEC power plant,” we are told, will provide “100% of the electricity necessary to geostatically position the 82,500 cubic-meter Oceansphere™.”
The 2008 ASLA Student Awards were announced last month. As usual, to figure out which project to post, we filtered the winners through our blog's ratty crochet of thematic threads: but all remained. They're all interesting, intelligently described and evocatively illustrated. Unfortunately, we haven't the time to make individual entries for each one. We're still going to single out one, however, and maybe a second one later, for no other reason than it is by a student at a non-North American university.
That student is Marti Mas Riera, of Universitat Politecnica De Catalunya, Barcelona, and his project is a rainwater harvesting scheme for the Arabic Fortress Hill of Baza in Andalucia.
To understand the scheme, it's best to trace an imaginary journey a single drop of rainwater would undertake in Riera's recontoured hill.
So let's say it falls into one of the new gardens on the summit.
There, it somehow doesn't get absorb by the aromatic plants or seep through the vegetated spaces between the pavers. Instead, propelled by gravity, it rolls down into one of the “geometric fissures.” Once in these trenches, it is then channeled down to one of the 4 new plazas at the bottom of the hill via a narrow access path, on the middle of which is another collection canal.
This canal is connected to an overhang of unspecified stone material, through which our intrepid little drop enters the plaza in a temporary waterfall before it gets swallowed by little holes drilled into the basalt pavers. Under these pavers, below the plaza proper, is a water storage tank.
There, it waits until something needs watering.
Riera, then, has essentially re-landscaped the hill into a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, its complexly interconnected parts paved into the built environment as sculptural installations or infrastructural decorations. Rainfall, an obvious rarity in southern Spain and an event in itself, is further turned into a choreographed spectacle.
One can certainly imagine little kids making toy paper boats (or landscape architecture students on assignments and even us trying to recapture the halcyon days of our distant youths) and then letting them set sail from one of the canals atop the hill. Clothes soaking wet but bounding with joy, they will try to follow it on its journey, walking, running, strolling, stopping when it gets stuck to nudge it along, hurrying and slowing in syncopated rhythms, in fits of giggles and screams of delight.
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.
