This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. This is the first part.
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Built in what used to be blighted industrial landscape severed from the urban fabric by rail lines and an elevated highway, Hargreaves Associates' WaterfrontPark in Louisville, Kentucky is now a premier public open space. Once inaccessible, an absence and an abscess in the civic life of the city, the area now teems with activity. The centerpiece of the whole park, the 12-acre Great Lawn, runs under an 8-lane segment of Interstate 64 and then slopes gently down towards the river, providing that once missing link between the downtown area and the Ohio River. The Great Lawn also provides expansive views of the waters and the city, and unsurprisingly, it gets completely overtaken by crowds during major events. More tranquil areas can be found in the rest of the park, all of which are intimately tucked within meandering landforms that either mimic the flow of the adjacent river or the flow of traffic hovering above or both. Another major piece of the park will be an abandoned railroad bridge adapted to provide a bicycle and pedestrian crossing to the other side of the river. Rather than tearing it down, this infrastructural remnant will be treated as a sort of monumental public sculpture, a reminder of the city's industrial past.
Developed in part through an open and interactive public design process overseen by NL Architects, A8ernA “provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”
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Designed by the SWA Group, the Buffalo Bayou Promenade “connected Houston's downtown core to the river park to the west under and through a neglected and near impossible mess of freeways and bridges, adding 23 acres of parkland to Houston's inner city. The landscape architect's early visioning and then implementation converted a trash-soaked eyesore — intimidating to pedestrians and detrimental to flood control efforts — into 3,000 linear feet of urban park that provides a prominent gateway to downtown Houston.”
Spatial detritus, infrastructure, urban parks, theatrical lighting, floods and flood control, hydrologically responsive public open spaces — combine all of them together and you've got awesome.
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The McCormick Tribune Student Center on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, is Rem Koolhaas's contrapuntal infill in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's “immaculately modern desert.” The one-story building holds aloft an oval tube which encircles an elevated tracks. Not only does it muffle the noise from passing trains, it absorbs a disturbance, one which has for decades split campus life, separating student residences on one side from classrooms on the other side.
Continuing an occasional series on our formative design influences, this is Elevated Wetlands, a public art project in Toronto, Canada, by landLAB's principal landscape architect Neil Hadley and artist Noel Harding. Long time readers no doubt have noticed our obsession with constructed wetlands. This is the root cause, the epidemiological vector.
Installed more than a decade ago, the project consists of six large polystyrene containers that are filled with recycled plastics acting as large hydroponics planters for native plantings from the Don River Valley. Water from the polluted Don River is pumped via solar photovoltaic pumps into the sculpture, and is filtered through the planted containers, and then cascades into large ground level wetlands, returning to the river cleansed.
While the water that re-enters the river is significantly purified, the impact of these elevated wetlands in improving environmental quality is negligible at best. The water they process is too small. However, as a teaching tool on ecological and design issues, their impact may be far greater. In our case, it was profound.
Elevated Wetlands taught us the remediating properties of wetlands and that these natural processes can be artificially recreated. Wetlands are the kidneys of the environment, we learned with further investigation, and like in some eco-utopian fantasia, these organs can be cloned without bodies — a modular cyborg landscape.
Prominently sited as they are next to a major traffic artery into downtown Toronto, it was one of our very first lessons in context, something drilled into us during the heady days of Year One and forever after. And it was also an early introduction to the concepts of “revelatory landscapes” (i.e., making the invisible visible) and “working landscapes” (as opposed to landscapes of leisure and meditation).
And this project even taught us that there needn't be a conflict between ecology and aesthetics, that in trying to reclaim degraded landscapes, the science and the technology that do all the heavy lifting can be incorporated into a work of art that isn't superficial but one that can actually be provocative.
Now, a decade later, or post-High Line, how about finding disused elevated train tracks and converting them into linear wetland to treat urban stormwater and wastewater?
A ribbony infrastructure coiling and recoiling around the city, spiraling around tower blocks and zigzagging down skyscrapers; an eco-progeny of Brutalist skyways, skybridges and skywalks.
While desperately trying to organize our archives, we discovered an entry to an old ideas competition (whose website has since dissipated into the digital ether) for the transformation of Quito's international airport after its planned closing. It was designed by a trans-university team of professors and students from Arizona State University, the University of Illinois and Cal Poly. In the interest of disseminating ideas, especially good ones, we're reproducing their images below.
They're quite gorgeous, luscious even. A closer look reveals that some of the scale figures look as though they've been drawn by a deviant medieval monk dreamt up by Umberto Eco. There are fishermen with haloed cat heads, sheep-headed urban farmers also with halos, a goat-headed flâneur with a parasol; it's a menagerie of cryptids catalogued by Charles Avery during an altermodern journey to a magical realist landscape.
The designers weren't being silly, of course, because this graphic style was meant to convey a central concept. Ken McCown, one of the team members wrote, “We saw Ecuador as this country the UN recognizes with Megadiversity. With this megadiversity concept, we wanted to show that the people were intertwined with the landscape systems, and we linked this into the Catholic narrative of the saints into the pictures. So you have people that are part-human, part-animal performing the narratives of the saints while interacting with landscape processes. Religion/Humanities and Science together?”
Quoting the project statement:
This design for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador celebrates the rebirth of Latin American culture as the last vestiges of colonialism wane in the early 21st century. It capitalizes on local conditions to grow a design suited to the needs of the city while celebrating Ecuador's status as a country of megadiversity. The Ecuadorian flag is the inspiration that organizes the design and provides a symbol for the capitol city. Three bands compose the reuse of the airport lands for a new urban park: agriculture, water, and market. These bands correspond to the colors of the flag, the yellow zone is agriculture and park use, the blue is water and the market area is the red zone.
We won't try to summarize the rest of it and instead will copy-paste it in full in the comments. For those that revel in project statements, it's a good read, recommended to our student readers. The entire proposal is quite pragmatic, not overly stylized or indulgently complicated. Their considered approach to restitch Quito's urban fabric is convincing. If the competition wasn't merely an ideas competition but actually was looking for something to build, it might have had a good chance at garnering the top prize and a commission.
We have covered the works of Colombia-based Paisajes Emergentes before here, here and here. Yet another one is their Second Prize-winning submission, co-developed with Giancarlo Mazzanti Arquitectos, to an international competition which sought to reactivate the historic center of Barranquilla, Colombia.
Specifically, the competition called for the design of four plazas and a long pedestrian walkway. Two of the plazas had to be grafted onto empty spaces. The other two plazas and the walkway had to be built over existing built zones, though these are planned to be demolished.
In programming these spaces, Paisajes Emergentes took two different approaches. The team filled the voids with dense but porous vegetation. For the plantings at San Nicolás Square, they were inspired by the coconut groves growing along the coast and here, their soaring canopy and rhythmic trunks no doubt complement the cavernous spaces and lithic forest inside the church. A huge section of the plaza is left empty, this to preserve the grand approach to the cathedral and, one assumes, to provide a space for major events. At the San Jose Square Complex, meanwhile, the trees are more squat in keeping with its more intimate scale.
For the built up areas, the team proposed reusing the demolished buildings to create outdoor-indoor rooms. One building on Las Palmas Drive, for instance, is gutted to make an open air event space. For the two plazas, severed facades are reconstituted to create outdoor-indoor rooms, or gardens semi-enclosed by quasi-ruins. In a city dotted with abandoned colonial buildings (or so we are told), like Havana (or so we imagined thus), this ruin aesthetic makes sense.
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The First Prize of the competition went to the Oficina de Proyectos Urbanos. Their website uses flash, so unfortunately we can't directly link to their project.
Yesterday's photo of a roundabout cage wasn't exactly an Abbasidian aviary. It wasn't, as we fantasized, a leftover space re-landscaped into an urban ecological hotspot. As pointed out by a reader, it's the Quatre Pavés Water Tower (1971) by Pritzker Laureate Christian de Portzamparc.
In any case, it reminded us of an entry to the 2005 Chicago Prize competition, which sought fresh ideas on how to repurpose Chicago's ubiquitous water tanks.
Chicago is an important stop along the Mississippi Flyway for many bird species during their yearly migrations. This contiguous, low-lying route unbroken by mountain ranges from the Arctic coast of Alaska south to Patagonia has been instrumental in developing migratory paths for various species. Adapting Chicago's water tanks for a new function is a unique opportunity to create a habitat that will enable an endangered bird to safely breed in the city. The Purple Martin, a large songbird who migrates south each year along the flyway has lost its entire natural habitat east of the Mississippi and nearly all of it west of the River. Martins are social birds who readily roost and breed in man-made houses. Given the loss of original habitats, Chicago can use existing infrastructure to connect to the flyway in such a way that birds better inhabit the city - making people aware of its critical relationship to the larger natural environment.
It's somewhat similar in concept to the second prize winner, but this one caught our greater attention because of its renderings of birds shooting out from the tanks, as though uncorked after many restless years in captivity.
For us at least, this image calls to mind any of the staple PBS nature documentaries showing millions of vampire bats whizzing out of their subterranean dwellings soon after the sun has dipped below the horizon. Across a fast darkening sky, darker clouds throb and shudder.
And it also reminds us of Richard Barnes' grotesquely marvelous photographs of European starlings “murmuring” in the skies over Rome.
Surely one must now be wondering whether these self-organizing bio-troposheres could be choreographed in the skies over Chicago.
Orphaned birds have been successfully taught forgotten ancient migration routes, even new ones, so why not imprint other behaviorally malleable birds to cultivate a sort of amorphous topiary sky garden. It would be like landscaping the ethology of an urban ecosystem.
With the ringing of a bell or some other trigger, the birds would surge out in torrents from their rookeries. With another ring (or perhaps guided by one or two oozological agents reared by Natalie Jeremijenko), they will then start to perform their aerial ballet, vacillating between chaotic noise and sensuous shapes, between turbulent instabilities and structured systems.
A living fog sculpting itself with its own meteorology. Reflecting the yellows and the ochres and the oranges at sunrise and sunset, the whole scene will surely look like a Turner painting.
Hack into Jeremijenko's ooz-birds and you can control the flock. Direct an avant-garde staging of The Birds or Mary Poppins if you want. Or do a little bit of guerrilla sky gardening.
With the rising popularity of urban farm animals, perhaps these chickens and honeybees and miniature cows and even the city's existing menagerie of sewer rats and flying rats (and let's not forget the cats and dogs of gentrified inner neighborhoods) can be conscripted and turned into trained acrobats.
Or are they all together already performing one unending gigantic urban show for us humans?
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art is challenging artists to design a universal warning sign that will deter our many-times-great-grandchildren from entering a nuclear waste dump site.
How do you create a warning system to prevent an accidental unearthing of 200 million pounds of radioactive nuclear waste? A simple sign, some chain link and a military post, might work today. But what about 10,000 years from now? In 2002 the U.S. Department of Energy brought together engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists and asked them this question. What type of warning system can be put in place so people, 370 generations from now, won’t open the glowing door?
What they came up with is hardly inspiring: a large earthen mound with a salt core and two identical Dr. Strangelove-esque control rooms with a warning message written in the six official languages of the U.N. and Navajo. Construction of this Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is scheduled to begin in less than three years.
What if an artist designed the system?
Of course, “architects, cartoonists, computer engineers, graphic designers and scientists” can also submit proposals.
There was a similar competition held years ago. The project site was the (now cancelled) nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain. Of the proposals, we wrote that none of them will keep people away.
What should be done in the intervening thousands of year is to develop an anti-radiation pill or the fast-acting anti-tumor pill, so that with these miraculous medical breakthroughs, future travelers will go on so-called radiation tours.
As you walk through the excavated labyrinth of Yucca Mountain, you become listless, nauseous. Going deeper and deeper into the caverns — damp, mildewed surfaces; stale air; pyramids of light falling heavily on your weakening body — you begin to have what will become the worst migraine of your life.
Others in your group had taken a different path and are now suffering from beta burns. Still others, on a different scenic route, are vomiting every few steps, their nose bleeding.
But obviously, all is well; you've taken the pills. Radiation poisoning is as safe as a Disney ride or a stroll through the park.
A quick postscript to our previous post on the Out of Water Project: you can now browse the website that's been set up for the exhibition and its forthcoming book version. Just a few of the projects have been uploaded, though we're assuming more will be online in the coming months.
If you know of a case study or a technology for collection, conversion and distribution of water sources in arid climates — or if you have a project of your own — and want it to be considered for inclusion in the book, send an email to info @ oowproject dot com.
