Remember in our post last month about the Tarim Desert Highway when we said it would be worthwhile to track down some of the research that went into protecting the highway from the creeping sand dunes? We've been doing just that since then, though, scientific journals being what they are, we kept stumbling into firewalls after firewalls. In other words, all that we have gathered so far are abstracts, which are perhaps fine for now. They're enough of a fodder for unhinged minds.
One abstract in particular describes an experiment using different kinds of “liquid polymers” to stabilize sand. These were sprayed onto test sandbeds in a wind tunnel and also on a patch of the Taklimakan Desert, where they “produced a strong crust 0.2-0.5 cm thick.” The last sentence reads:
Our results suggest that all the stabilizers exhibited good infiltration, crushing strength, and elasticity, and that they could thus be used to control damage to highways caused by blown sand in the Taklimakan Desert.
Obviously, the most logical next step here is not to do more studies but to give us an oil tankerful of this earth glue. With it, we'll paint the entire desert, thus freezing the landscape in time and space.
Better yet, how about re-sculpting the Taklimakan to mimic the landforms of, say, the Painted Desert of Arizona. The dramatic, stratified coloring won't be copied, but all its contour lines would be replicated exactly. Of course, in China, simulating exotic terrains isn't new. Remember Huangyangtan?
How about gouging deep canyons, which are graded, arranged, oriented, networked and coated with the binding agent in such a way as to enable strong, steady wind currents flowing through this bifurcated aeolian-shed? These air channels would then be planted with a forest of wind turbines. Or wind-dammed.
How about taking the sand glue to Inner Mongolia? Its desert dunes feed the powerful sandstorms that regularly blanket northern China and choke Beijing in a thick, suffocating fog of pulverized earth. These granular blitzkriegs then cross over high seas to bombard cities in the Koreas and Japan, causing respiratory and eye diseases. With the desertification of the region continuing apace and water resource too scarce to support afforestation, maybe these chemical encrustation will be increasingly considered as a viable solution to a whole list of environmental problems.
And again, instead of spraying it around willy-nilly, how about “stabilizing” a city: a false ruin seemingly long buried in the sand but only just recently revealed by the wind. Hundreds of such cities forming a new Great Wall of China protecting real cities against advancing deserts.
One could even suround Ordos, wherein the lucky owners of one of the 100 boutique cabins can undertake an Antonionian adventure. Their carefully planned disappearance will surely be the talk of the whole village. And everyone will be grateful to you, because what else could be interesting to talk about? For many, “trying” to find you would be good sporting fun in the middle of nowhere. “So Monica Vitti,” one habitué of The Moment Blog will remark.
Behold! The world's largest vacuum chamber constructed for vehicle testing of the new Orion spacecraft.
Thermal vacuum testing and electromagnetic interference testing will take place in the vacuum chamber. Thermal vacuum testing will confirm that the spacecraft can withstand the extreme hot and cold temperatures present in space, and electromagnetic interference testing will verify the reliability of Orion's communication and electronic systems.
Adjacent to this chamber is an earthquake simulator that will also subject the ship to the violent conditions of liftoff.
The 75,000-pound craft will sit on a huge vibration table; comprising a 125,000-pound mass that must be shaken with an intensity equal to that of a launch.
And:
Twenty-four horns will blow high-pressured nitrogen gas to match the intensity level of the sounds produced during the launch. Most acoustic facilities have around two or three horns. But for this facility, everything is being built bigger in scale to more accurately assess the spacecraft.
In other words, when fully operational, or even when not, these will be two of the most interesting spaces in the world.
If ever Sandusky, Ohio becomes the unlikeliest host to an edition of Postpolis!, this certainly would be the perfect venue. Cut off from normal air, curators, speakers and audience will don pressurized spacesuits, communicate via crackling shortwave radio, move about and sit through sonic stillness. Can a lively, at times riotously boisterous, conversations be had under threat of suffocation? About such things as the testing grounds for space exploration and the messy historiography of their microearth capsules?
Berlin yet again; Chicago yet again. Earlier, we made a passing comparison between NURBN's Tempelhof See with The Hole. Now, to bring balance to the universe, we're twinning together Jakob Tigges' Tempelhof Mountain and a ski jumping ramp temporarily inserted into Chicago's Soldier Field in 1954 — after all, is the ramp not an intimation of a mountain in the way that Tigges' is a facsimile of a real one?
The latter is a mathematically perfect combination of topographical conditions. Contour lines, slopes and snow type, and maybe even favorable sun angles and prevailing wind direction for the athletes (and optimal viewing perspective for the better enjoyment of the spectators): all have been co-opted to actualize a very specific event space.
The former is similarly a complicated exercise in mountain design. Tapping into a pathological desire for unspoiled Nature, a patch of Alpine wilderness is recreated hundreds of miles away in the center of Berlin. If actually built, it would mostly likely be ridiculously programmed in the same way so many parts of the Alps have been absurdly landscaped for winter enthusiasts.
Before its renovation in 2003, the result of which garnered a rave review from The New York Times, even placed fourth in their list of the year's best new buildings, but got pummeled by local culture observers, Soldier Field was already being augmented, spectacularly at that if we are being honest.
Perhaps Zaha Hadid could be persuaded to design another ski jumping ramp, though this prosthesis would be hinged and can be flipped up whenever there's a Bears game. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower. It's the technolicious abstraction of geology.
In any case, this sort of thing isn't as rare as we first thought. This ramp was erected in Empire Stadium, Vancouver, in 1958.
Even the stadiums of winterless Los Angeles were similarly augmented.
If you can't go to the mountains, bring the mountains to you.
POSTSCRIPT #1: A 1937 home movie captures "a winter sport & theatrics event at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Includes scenes of automobile theatrics, people skiing down a constructed ramp and ice skaters skating on an ice rink."
Pedreres de s'Hostal is a disused stone quarry on the island of Minorca, Spain. In 1994, the quarry saw its last stonecutters, and since then, the non-profit organization Líthica has been hard at work transforming this industrial landscape into a post-industrial heritage park.
While not yet complete, the quarry must already be quite something to experience. To enter, one has to take a deep plunge into an abyss, a descent that may or may not be reminiscent of ancient myths. Persephone's abduction? Dante's guided tour of Tartarus?
Upon reaching the bottom of the central void room, you are compressed into an insignificant atom by monolithic walls, whose patterned textures of machine incisions and impossible staircases add to a hallucinatory effect. The scale is repressive, destabilizing.
Should you regain back your bearing, there is a labyrinth of geometrically cut canyons to explore. You look up, and the eternally blue sky of the Mediterranean is framed by unnaturally straight edges, like a James Turrell skyscape, disorienting.
This is where you get lost, where even time gets sucked into dark crevices.
Or would it be more accurate to say that time is preserved here? Centuries of chiseling and sawing, the gradual subduction of the earth, slabs of bedrock carted away by generations of Minorcans: all are recorded on the rockface. Even the tools of the trade have been left to rust and decay out in the open, for instance, a sawing machine. There is even a short segment of a rail line.
To add to your disorientation, there is a reconstruction of an enclosed Medieval garden, one cloistered by vertiginous cliffs.
What on earth is a Medieval garden doing here?
Are you actually walking through the excavated remains of a Medieval city, buried long ago under volcanic ash like Pompeii, then mineralized and now in the process of extraction after its recent discovery?
Or was this whole landscape the aborted attempt at imitating the underground cities of Cappadocia or the sculpted ruins of Petra, the reason for its termination long forgotten? Now Nature is busy everywhere reclaiming its momentary lost territory. Stay here long enough and you yourself might similarly be absorbed, turned feral.
In actuality, not only has the quarry been turned into an outdoor history museum decorated with artifacts, it's been landscaped as an arboretum showcasing native Minorcan flora. In keeping with the stonecutters' tradition of cultivating orchards and vegetable gardens in disused parts of the quarry, each excavated spaces plays host to a different plant community. One quarry room, for instance, has been set aside for fruit trees. Another one contains bushes and shrubs, and in another, cultivated olive trees and aromatic plants. In one quarry, there are ponds of freshwater Minorcan plants.
Once a landfill and fated to the amnesiac wilderness, divorced from collective memory, Pedreres de s'Hostal is clearly now a hotspot of activity.
And a model for the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes everywhere.
We return back to Berlin, this time to point our readers to Noah Beil's photographic series, Mountain As Monument.
Quoting his project statement:
The intense bombing of World War II left the streets of many European cities clogged with the remains of demolished masonry buildings. In Berlin alone, over 45 million cubic meters of debris had to be cleared as a part of post-war rebuilding efforts. After intact bricks were recovered for reuse, with much of the manual labor performed by women, waste materials were transported to distributed collection locations and piled into hills known in German as Schuttberg or Trümmerberg. Today, these debris hills are difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring features as they have been landscaped into parks with manicured grass and densely vegetated sections.
When Beil e-mailed us about his project, the image of a half-built skyscraper burning in Guangdong, China's manufacturing powerhouse province, was still fresh in our minds. The building looks to be unsalvageable and so likely to be torn down, a plausibly enough infill material to make an artificial hill. If it's not, one only needs to wait.
Wait for the country's economic woes to sink deeper and deeper, even with all those stimulus packages, and soon there will be a huge population of disgruntled, unemployed workers. They can't all go back home to their farming villages, because only drought awaits them there. They will stay put, ever growing restless, seething in anger, each one a potential arsonist of half-built skyscrapers. Almost anything could turn them into a riotous mob. Maybe blocking one too many of their favorite YouTube videos is enough to trigger a transformation. When the tipping point is reached, though, Guangdong will be pockmarked with a constellation of infernal cities. The cities of Koolhaas' Pearl River Delta will burn like Dresden and Berlin of 1945.
When the army has regain control, wait no longer: there should be enough debris for several artificial hills, a mountain range uplifted not with the detritus of war but of a wrecked economy. Part urban regeneration, part city beautification, part state reconstruction of official history, they will then be landscaped as though they have always been there.
Or so we imagined.
Could one also imagine Dubai uplifted with its own artificial hills?
A couple of days hence, NURBN's proposal for an artificial lake — an aqueous inversion of Jakob Tigges' Tempelhof Mountain, really — in Berlin reminded us of one expensive hole on Chicago's lakefront, the one dug for the construction of the Chicago Spire. Because of the economic downturn and the developer's secrecy about a date for the resumption of major work on the building, some have wondered if the hole will remain unfilled, in which case, count another one in a growing list of cancelled prestige projects. No doubt many will see this gaping abyss as a delicious commentary on the excesses of this decade.
But what to do with the hole? Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, has the obvious but probably best idea. Last year, he wrote:
Might the hole, 76 feet deep by 110 feet wide, be filled with water and become the world's deepest swimming pool? Perhaps demonic sports federation directors would threaten to send losers in Olympic swimming races there, forcing them to backstroke in circles for the rest of their lives.
We love reading other people's project proposals: fantastical proposals, provocative proposals, silly proposals, worldchanging proposals, wish-we've-thought-of-it-first proposals. And this, by David Gissen, is a good one: a “fantasy archive for the retrieval of future data related to the indoor atmosphere of cities.”
When I was writing my dissertation, I lamented the fact that we had no archive of indoor air; as we do for all other manner of indoor elements of the built environment—furniture, designed objects, fashion. The specific content of the air of the interiors of the past is lost to us — its bio-physical make-up is gone; we really can’t study it with a full range of analytical methods. But I wondered...what if we archived our current indoor urban atmosphere for the historian of the future? Why would we do this, and how would this be done?
The thought of future urban climatologists in a library of paleo-air, perhaps located on some rocky arctic island, is mindnumbingly interesting.
Imagine cylinders of atmospheres piled high up like drilled ice core samples or perhaps room-sized chambers stacked like shipping containers in vast, darkly lit corridors, all categorized by time, geography and socioeconomic class.
One section contains the indoor chemicals of credit bubble lofts built overnight on gentrified inner city neighborhoods. Another section might be those sampled from rammed earthen homes in Africa, off the grid, with dung-fueled stoves. Or would it be more interesting if they were all jumbled up together? In the morning you're detecting the tell-tale aroma of modern Scandinavian furniture stewing with other chemical exhalations of conspicuous consumption; in the afternoon, something with a bit less artificial provenance.
Out of thin air, a physical space is then reconstructed.
Be sure to check out Gissen's proposal to recreate the “smokey air of Pittsburgh at the early 20th century” above the Pittsburgh of the early 21st century.
1) Wetlands are “the kidneys of the landscape,” able to filter out pollutants from, for instance, agricultural runoffs and urban effluents.
2) Because of their bioremediating properties, wetlands can be a cheap alternative to municipal waste water treatment.
3) During particularly heavy storm events, they act as temporary water storage tanks. They then release the excess water slowly rather than in a deluge, lowering flood heights and minimizing the damage of valuable property downstream.
4) Wetlands also store carbon within their live and preserved (peat) plant biomass instead of releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Therefore, wetlands world-wide help to moderate global climate change.
5) Along the coast, they are good at mitigating the effects of hurricane storm surges, tsunamis, and the less energetic but no less destructive normal ebb and flow of ocean waves.
6) Wetlands help to replenish aquifers that so many people depend on.
7) They are “biological supermarkets,” producing annual commercial harvests of fish and shellfish that sometimes amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, many people rely on wetlands for their livelihood.
8) As eco-attractions, they inject a sizable amount of tourist income to the local economy.
Wetlands, in other words, provide so many beneficial services for people that they are very much deserving of a sacrificial virgin. Or two.
Meanwhile, apart from their more tangible benefits, wetlands have always been a source of intellectual fascination for us. According to Rodney Giblett in his book, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology, only recently have people come to see them as very important features in the landscape. Especially “in the west,” they were long seen as “places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous.”
Dante and Milton demonized them, calling them the embodiment of sin and impurity, the darkest expression of a corrupted inner self. Popular culture in later eras has populated their murky depths with the Swamp Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, murderers and pederasts, satanic occultists and incestuous cousins.
Empires and fledgling nations everywhere simply thought of them as a wasteland, an obstacle towards their Manifest Destiny. So they were drained, cleared of vegetation and filled in. Suffocating them out of their own hydrology was a cause célèbre, indeed considered a heroic act, because to destroy wetlands was to be civilized.
Now with greater scientific understanding of their environmental functions, wetlands are undergoing a sort of cultural reconstruction. In a reversal of fortune that landscape scholars must surely find interesting at the very least, they are metamorphosizing from an anti-Eden into an ecological paradise.
