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Descansos
 Very briefly, as a postscript to an old post, the New York Times invited several people to comment on roadside memorials, no doubt inspired by the recent public exhalations of supposedly private grief over Michael Jackson's death. The editors asked: “Why do people feel a need to build them? Are they a distraction or a warning? Should restrictions be placed on them?” As expected, the responses (and the many fascinating comments from readers) are incredibly diverse.
Land Art Generator Initiative
 At the moment, there are no project sites, no deadlines, no jury and no sponsors to announce, let alone what coming in first place will mean, either receiving a cash prize or a commission or both. But if and when the logistics are properly set up, Land Art Generator Initiative could be a fascinating competition to follow. From the project statement, emphasis theirs: The goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations in the United Arab Emirates that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to up to 50,000 homes in the UAE. How about a frozen desert artificially gouged with wind-damned canyons? There is a blog, bLAGI, in which you can check for any updates.
This Land Is Really Your Land
 Next month, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will again be leading safaris to the beaches of Malibu. The safaris are free and scheduled as follows: SUN Aug 2, 11:00am-2:30pm Spaces are limited, so e-mail info@laurbanrangers.org with your name, the number of people and preferred date as soon as possible. The beaches you'll be touring are all public. In fact, all that stretch of wet Malibu sand are yours, mine, ours. All that awesome views of the Pacific, blocked from the road by developments that line the beaches, are your right. But there seems to be a concerted effort by private property owners to obfuscate the lines of ownership, making the public feel like criminal trespassers in some exclusive enclave of millionaires and celebutants. If you aren't met by security guards at the very few public access entrances, this after navigating through barriers just to get to public parking lots, there are signs warning you that you are passing through “private property” and entering a “private beach.” Thankfully, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will show you how to hunt for these hidden entrances, spot the illegal signs, and map out the public-private beach boundary. There will even be a public easement potluck, one of the many activities you can do (legally) in your beach. POSTSCRIPT #1: By demand, the rangers have added a fourth (sunset) beach safari: SUN Aug 23, 4:00pm-7:30pm. POSTSCRIPT #2: A homeowner is seen and heard in this YouTube video calling participants in a Malibu Beach safari “a bunch of scumbags” and the ranger leading the tour “an ugly old lady.” The same guy later shouts at the group: “Go back to the valley!”
On Agro Redux
 Last year, we collected all our agriculturally themed posts in a single link-tastic post. We thought we might do the same with all the agriculturally themed posts published since then. But first we'd like to alert our readers to two marvelous events. One is London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground, a seminar moderated by David Barrie which focused “on what has, is and will be done to increase the integration of food production into the city.” It was held in late May, and lucky for everyone who didn't make it, Nicola Twilley posted a wonderful summary of the talks for BLDGBLOG. The other is Foodprint: Exhibition currently on view at Stroom Den Haag. Artists and designers in the show include Agnes Denes, Fritz Haeg and Atelier van Lieshout. The exhibition will end in August 23, 2009, but it's actually part of a 2-year-long series of programs exploring “the influence food can have on the culture, shape and functioning of the city, using The Hague as a case study.” For instance, there is Foodprint: Art projects for the city, which will involve new commissioned works. In one of these, Atelier Van Lieshout will make “a machine that turns human meat into food for pigs.” Huh? If you're intrigued (and can read Dutch), you can probably find out more about this machine at the Foodprint: Weblog. Now on to the link-o-rama. 1) Agro Park: on the competition to design a new hyper-park for Memphis, Tennessee. 2) Locavore Utopia: Work Architecture Company's prequel to their P.S. 1 installation, Public Farm 1. 3) After the Deluge, The Farm: urban farming in post-Katrina New Orleans. 4) The Machinic Landscape of Tulips. 5) Fish Works: N.E.E.D.'s aquafarm proposal for South Street Seaport, New York. 6) Small Food Nation: tiny cows for tiny houses for tiny footprint living. 7) It Still Turns and Returns: the gyroscopic whirligigs of gravity defying cows, sort of. 8) Michael Jackson as Landscape Architecture. 9) Agro-veillance: will our horizons soon darken with a data aviary of pilotless surveillance drones kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm? 10) South Central Farms: The Documentary. 11) Aquapod®: what would Buckminster Fuller and Archigram have come up with had they taken up underwater agriculture? 12) Oceansphere™: Cf. Aquapod®. 13) AAgrotecture 1: King's Vineyard London. 14) AAgrotecture 2: Aquaculture. 15) AAgrotecture 3: Farmacy. 16) [farming]: announcing [bracket], a new annual publication from InfraNet Lab in collaboration with Archinect. 17) Baby Farmer: a hazmat suit for USDA certified organic supplier of replicant Jude Laws. 19) AAgrotecture 4: Gastronomic Garden. 20) Ensuring the Future of Food in Japan: Good Japanese eat Japanese food. 21) Arbor tremuloides: a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. 22) A Toxic Tour Through Maryland's Industrial Poultry Landscape. 23) Tactical Horticulture: nursery for anti-terrorist shrubs.
A few bloggers, nude, each with a headless young child's large-finger-armed body attached by the neck to their chests, standing on a landscape
 This month's wunderkammer of marvelous blogging: 1) Critical Terrain, by Alan Rapp, editor of The BLDGBLOG Book, etc. For more, check out our public list of
Sewer Zeppelins for the Era of Infrastructural Anarchy & Other Roman Tales
 Last month, a cadre of guerilla architecture critics (or just plain vandals) splashed the white walls of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum with green and red paint, thus rendering the Italian tricolor in an unintentional homage to America's greatest living painter, though permanent Roman habitué, Cy Twombly. It was presumably the first outwardly visceral manifestation of popular distaste for the building.  Many others no doubt would like nothing more than to deface the museum. The mayor, for instance, has been very vocal about wanting to remove it (minus the altar, of course) and then reconstruct it fuori le Mura. Whether this would mean that the original will be recycled for the new building or entirely torn down into unsalvageable detritus, these urbicidal fantasies of demolition, alteration and displacement are pretty much on par with the spatial history of the piazza. The new building, for instance, replaced a pavilion partly designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo under Benito Mussolini to house the Ara Pacis, which was discovered somewhere offsite and relocated to its present location. This earlier building was dismantled, because it was deemed incapable of protecting the ancient monument from Rome's damaging pollution and summer weather. However, a stone wall containing inscriptions of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti was saved from total annihilation and incorporated into Meier's building design. A new temple built on top of the foundations of an old temple. Meanwhile, the demolished pavilion itself was part of a Fascist program of erasure. Mussolini wanted to create a new piazza, the center piece of which would be the Mausoleum of Augustus. At the time, parts of the tomb laid buried beneath several layers of urban fill and topped with a concert hall, the latest in a long line of adaptive reuse programs. The tomb was further “hidden” by narrow streets and dense urban growth. To “liberate” it, Mussolini simply obliterated the surrounding neighborhood. Left untouched were a couple of churches, one of which, San Rocco, is a fascinating impasto of Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical and Palladian styles. These survivors — together with Morpurgo's pavilion and a complex of new modern buildings for use by Fascist Party functionaries — were calibrated to frame the bounded space of the new Piazza Augusto Imperatore. It's interesting to note here that embedded on the facades of the new buildings are friezes, mosaics and inscriptions, a decorative program no doubt intended to create a link with the sculptural reliefs on the Ara Pacis on the other side of the piazza. One of those inscriptions, apart from mythologizing Mussolini and Fascism, actually commemorates the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus and by extension celebrates the urban pogrom that had to be metted out in order to “liberate” the tomb from its shadowy grave. So perhaps if the mayor were to carry out his own pogrom, then he, too, may commemorate it with yet another set of friezes on the front of his new museum. And obviously these new friezes will also memorialize our liberation from starchitectural stupor. In any case, to add to these violent, cross-spatiotemporal architectural critiques, Meier stated after the demolition of Morpurgo's pavilion but before the start of construction of his new museum that he wanted (and may yet still want) to tear down the other Fascist-era additions to the piazza. These buildings may have perfectly acted out Mussolini's urban scenography of Fascist ideologies but the resulting piazza is an incredibly failed urban space. It's inhospitable to everyday use and pedestrians avoid it. Meier presumably knows better. And if he gets his way, then there would be another occasion for textual frotteurism and iconographical link-orgy: a sculptural band of friezes in which we see the wannabe urban planner in the guise of the Angel of Modernism — Meier Dux, the liberator of the Eternal City from its own ancientness. But we're obviously digressing.  When reading about the incident, what grabbed our complete attention wasn't the paint job. What actually spurred us into confecting this post was the porcelain toilet and the two packs of toilet paper left at the scene. Because these scatological implements aren't the most imaginative form of “activism” (or for no other reason than just because), we set about concocting less facile, though dubiously practical, strategies of protest. We used the following as points of departure. 1) As far as we know, no one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism. The presence of Graziano Cecchini in the crowd of onlookers at the scene, however, elicited some very faint accusatory speculations. Cecchini, you might remember, was the artist and member of the neo-Futurist group, ATM Azionefuturista 2007, who dyed the Trevi Fountain red nearly two years ago, an incident which we covered here then. If you can also recall, he turned the fountain's crystal clear waters into a vermillion Nile as a way to protest the obscenely high cost of organizing that year's International Film Festival of Rome — like a self-righteous Moses preaching to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses. 2) Earlier that summer, another incident occurred at the Trevi Fountain and at other Roman fountains. You can say that it was similarly faintly Biblical: the waters parted — or rather dried up — which is probably the same thing. The culprits that time weren't hydro-anarchists venting out grievances with the hegemonic elite. Vandal-artists weren't enacting one of their staged happenings using the built environment as their canvas and minor urban disasters as their paint. As we reported at the end of last year, the water supply to the fountains was cut short when construction workers across town damaged an ancient pipe while building a private underground car park. The blockage was discovered when a waterborne camera was slithered through the city's rhyzomatic ecosystem of voids to pinpoint its location. While the tired, sweaty tourists around the city didn't erupt into a riotous mob, this incident left us wondering whether they could be agitated into a pillaging horde, ransacking archaeological sites and museums, by strategically pinching the right combination of ganglial pathways of the city's infrastructural network. 3) Staying in Rome but venturing more than a century back in time: in the 1870s, we read in The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, archaeologists dug up the floor of the Colosseum and exposed its basement corridors. This apparently upset so many people, including the Pope, because it meant removing the arena's religious paraphernalia, such as the Stations of the Cross, a huge crucifix in the center and a hermitage and its hermit. The recently unified Italian state, in other words, was seen to be trampling over sacred ground, and the birthplace of so many martyrs and saints, was to be converted into a secular artifact, an archaeologist's play pen. But of greater interest for us here is the fact that during the excavation, drainage was such a problem that the sewers and underground corridors had filled with water. Harkening back to when it used to host mock naval battles, the Colosseum remained an artificial lake for many years until a new sewer was built to channel the water away. 4) Returning to the present but now venturing out of the city: decorating this post are CC-licensed photos of Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, one of several installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora at this year's Venice Art Biennale. 5) Further afield: in an article published by The New York Times in 2003, we learned that public works officials in New York sent a self-propelled, submersible Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) down into in the 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct that supplies New York City with half of its drinking water. Millions of gallons have been leaking, and they wanted to know where and how it was seeping out. Leakage of up to 36 million gallons a day was detected starting in 1991. The leaking stretch lies somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskills and the West Branch Reservoir, a way station for city-bound water here in Putnam County. The city's engineers have been periodically sending, as recently as last month, torpedo-shaped, deep-sea robots to monitor the cracks. There are important lessons about crumbling infrastructure and the importance of surveillance and maintenance in an age of peak water and climate change that no doubt could be extracted from here, but we have to move on.  So. Instead of leaving cute trinkets next to one's object of disgust, you go for the jugular. First assemble together a fleet of self-propelled, subterranean dirigibles. Be sure that they can navigate through both water-filled tunnels and more airier ones. To be able to track their location and velocity, implant each one with an iPhone or any cheap, GPS-enabled mobile device. With maps of the negative labyrinth on hand, you let them loose. At designated strategic nodes, you phone them. They pause in mid-flight. Seconds later, they inflate and wedge themselves very tightly in the tunnel. If the tunnel is too big, then several of your dirigibles will clump together to ensure total blockage. And then finally, using the sewers' miasmic vapour as a reagent, their nylon skins fantamagically fuse with the tunnel walls and turn metallic, nearly diamond-hard. An hour or two later, manholes and storm drains begin venting your furious critique. A further hour or two, an artificial lake lays stagnant next to (or better yet, surrounds) the target building. Of course, the target needn't be a building. It could be a new plaza as anti-pedestrian as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Or an obscenely overbudget hyper-park. Or a grotesquely earnest memorial. Or a similarly ghastly public art installation whose aesthetics suggest it has time-travelled from the 80s. Whatever it is, you consider it a pestilential addition to the built environment in the same way your artificial lake is a deadly public health hazard. Not surprisingly, others with their own beef and their own agenda will copy your tactics. Sewers all over the world will be swarming with dirigibles, buzzing with the amplified hum of their tiny propellers. Artificial lakes will bubble up and vanish, rising and falling in accordance to the perennially shifting climate of architectural taste. Not surprisingly as well, officials will try to stop these acts of sabotage. They will take sewer maps out of the public domain. They will even request the federal government to classify them as state secrets. Consequently, all public works employees will have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Urban adventurers will be charged with espionage if found hiking through the tunnels. Or simply shot on site as they claw their out of the sewers like Harry Lime in The Third Man. If the public before were oblivious to the vast underground landscape that makes their life possible, only getting a hint of what lies beneath when an underpass is flooded or when a boy mysteriously goes missing while out exploring an abandoned section, then they will now be utterly, completely, permanently ignorant. When a boy does indeed go missing, there will be no search and rescue and thus no wall-to-wall television coverage of melodrama. There will be no prolonged national hysteria over the fate of the child, and there definitely will be no photogenic heros confected out of the whims of the masses. The missing kid will simply be censored from the day's news, and the parents will be told they never had that child. The kid, like the sewer maps, will be redacted. In response, sewer anarchists will outfit their dirigibles with DIY sonars or laser scanners. They will make their own maps. As a counter-countermeasure, combat engineers will reconfigure the network into an even more bewildering jumble of tunnels. They will dug fake tunnels, tunnel that leads to dead ends, tunnels that impossibly knot into themselves, tunnels with sonar-cancelling pings, tunnels that lead to police headquarters, tunnels that effloresce into a thicket of infinitely bifurcating tunnels, and tunnels that lead to other dimensions. Alternatively, they will de-tangle the network. Obsolete tunnels will be filled in, others consolidated. Certain segments will be expanded into rationally planned, naturally lighted, cathedral-like vaults. These tunnels will actually be more than what the city needs to funnel its wastewater and stormwater, but at least they will be hard to be barricaded. It's the Haussmannisation of the sewers. The other side, of course, will simply hack their dirigibles into more sophisticated mapping tools and employ advanced computer modeling techniques to simulate alternative infiltration strategies. It's one side always trying to outwit the other side. Because whoever rules the sewers rules the city.
Poule mouillée!
 And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury. “This garden,” they write, “takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.” Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss. This installation is called Poule mouillée!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! The Hydrological Playground |
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