From a vineyard above London to a fish farm in Central London.
Without drive-by commentary, here is Benedetta Gargiulo's project statement in its entirety:
Aquaculture is an urban landscape that playfully explores and re-imagines industrial food production, inviting visitors to examine the complex interrelationships between the private consumption and mass production of fresh fish.
Formed as a sinuous pedestrian network extending along the sides of Regent's Canal, its central structural element is water. Aquaculture is characterized by continuous waterfalls and levelled terraces, which co-exist with the topography of Central London. It is a fish-farm that doubles as an innovative architectural body, providing a network of bridges, multi-level pathways and accessible connections across the riverbanks, while contemporaneously purifying and treating the canal's water. The cultivated fishes are treated, filleted, and packaged on-site for instant consumption or for take away.
The visitors participate in the entire industrial process whilst experiencing an ‘Aqua Bridge’ or entering the ‘Aqua Tunnel’ by glancing at the mackerel and cod production lines from the sushi bar or simply by crossing and walking along the canal.
But we do want to say that we wanted to post this project because of that beautiful ribbed structure, a possible nod to the nave of St. Paul's, the iron truss roof of Saint Pancras or the de-fleshed carcass of aquacultured mackerels. Of course, the referent could be something else or altogether nonexistent. Perhaps it's a single computational iteration chosen with quasi-randomness amongst many. Or not.
In any case, this well-defined shell provides a nice counterpoint to the jumble of bridges, access ramps, tunnels and conveyor belts — all recoiling within and without, jutting in and out, directing fishes, fishmongers, diners and pedestrians here to there and vice versa.
In the labels for all the images in this series of posts, please note the links to their original and much larger versions, which have been uploaded to our Flickr account.
Off and on for the last year, we have been following the progress of a studio at the Architectural Association tasked with this central question: Can extremes of programmatic effectiveness blend with the fragility of human habitat?
Most of the students approached the problem via industrial food production, which when blended into the city can create urban Edens in one extreme or situations reminiscent of the stockyards in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in another. Intrigued by their investigations, we asked the tutors, Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos, the duo behind the spectacular Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad and the newest pamphlet, Untold Stories, for images and any explanatory text. We like four projects in particular, so much so that we've decided to post them individually.
The first of these is a proposal for an airborne vineyard by Soonil Kim.
Writes Kim:
Inspired by the urban grains especially the railway network from both St. Pancras and King’s Cross Station around the site, the design is a formal continuation of the topography while reinforcing the colonisation of air space by winery branches. The audacious structure, the winery and the vineyard for red wine grapes are connected by a suspended transport network enabling the use of ground space for a public park. With a capacity to produce 10,000 bottles of red wine annually the project re-articulates private and public space blending productive infrastructure with quality areas to Londoners and tourists.
One can certainly imagine such a network built to grow others things, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, cash crops, commercial flowers and plants, with the winery turned into a farmer's market.
Need more space to grow? Simply extend it. Cities may have a lot of rooftop space for farming, but the negative space above people's heads is exponentially greater.
A tentacled superorganism creeping out rhizomatically to the suburbs and towards sunlight.
We promise these to be last passages we ever quote from Cornelia Dean's Against the Tides.
In April 1888 [...] Brighton Beach Hotel on Coney Island, a multistory frame structure with scores of rooms, was moved 450 feet inland when it was threatened by erosion. Its owner, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad, jacked the thing up and hauled it inland in one piece, using six locomotives, 112 flatcars, and twenty-four specially laid tracks. The structure moved “at a fast walk,” Scientific American reported in its issue of April 14, 1888, adding: “No difficulty of any kind was encountered.”
Images from that issue of Scientific American, including one from the Library of Congress, are replicated below:
A century and a decade later, another substantial structure on the Atlantic coast was moved wholly intact: the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
When it was built in 1870, the lighthouse was located 1600 feet inland. Sited on one of the most unstable landscapes, where you can witness geological changes occurring in real time, it saw the shoreline getting closer and closer over the years. People feared that without protection the waves would eat away at its foundation, toppling it over. And protect it they tried.
First, the U.S. Navy “installed three groins to trap sand in front of it. Erosion worsened downdrift at the lighthouse. The downdrift groin was strengthened, which helped somewhat, but waves soon began cutting around its southern flank, threatening the lighthouse again.”
Then a businessman helped with the purchase of “the latest thing in shoreline protection technology: artificial seaweed.” After it was installed, “the project quickly failed. Fronds broke loose and caught in the propellers of passing boats. Others ended up in tangles on the beach. It was a mess.”
Asked by officials from the National Park Services, the Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans for a seawall to surround the Cape Hatteras beacon. Everything outside this defensive wall would be allowed to erode away, essentially turning the lighthouse area into a fortified island. As the coastline moves further inland, this new artificial island would migrate out to sea. Should the coastline itself retreat and march out back to sea, perhaps in the next Ice Age, both lighthouse and island would rejoin the mainland: an image we certainly like imagining. Problem was the seawall would block much of the lighthouse, especially its photogenic base. Moreover, the structure rests on a foundation of yellow pine logs. Their “strength is legendary” but could only be maintained if submerged in fresh water. If the lighthouse goes out to sea, salt water will flush it out, and if the fresh water goes, so goes the foundation and the lighthouse.
Since no one wanted to just let nature take its course on the coast and let the lighthouse collapse into a Picturesque ruin for Neo-Romantic tourists, the only other “sensible approach to accelerating erosion,” as the enfant terrible of coastal geopolitics, Orrin H. Pilkey, and others advocate, is: managed retreat.
In July, 1999, “the lighthouse, traveling on steel plate resting on iron rails, arrived at its new site, 1,600 feet inland from the sea.”
Architecture here has been yanked from its isolation and thrown into the wilds of ambiguous conditions, to dynamic forces and flows. If only for a short time, it was opened to the landscape.
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.
