OPPTA, the “observatorio panamericano”, is holding an international ideas competition under the theme of “emergency interventions”, looking for “technical, territorial, architectural, or infrastructural” responses to both “natural and anthropic” disasters on the American continents.  Five sites have been identified:

Petropolis. State of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil.
How to repopulate and reforest, respectively, an informal urban grid and an environmentally protected area, both under threat.

Puerto Saavedra. Región Araucanía. Chile.
How to recycle an urban grid which is under threat of natural disasters.

San Cristobel. Bolivar Department. Colombia.
How to manage the integral development of habitability in a territory affected by floods linked to climate change.

Chimalhuacán. State of Mexico. Mexico.
How to regenerate an urban grid resulting from accelerated processes of irregular settlement.

Cercado de Lima. Lima. Peru.
How to regenerate a non-planned settlement threatened by anthropic risks.

Registration for the competition is open now, and proposals are due April 16th; more information, including details on each of the sites, is available at the OPPTA website.

Bracket has issued a call for submissions for their third issue, [at extremes]:

Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?

Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention?  What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?

Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?

The submission deadline is February 20, 2012; more details, including a typically stellar jury, available at the Bracket site.

[Image by Charles Negre, via but does it float.]

["Signs for Naturalized Areas", from Windsor, Ontario's Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers' strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers' strike; the project aimed to invert that understanding, and suggest that citizens might instead view them as "wonderful additions to [the] urban landscape”.]

“Signs for Naturalized Areas” strike me as particularly interesting in light of my post from last week on “hypothetical signs”, as, like both the Hypothetical Development Organization and Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign, these are also an example of signs-as-(landscape)-architecture.  The difference here, though, is that while both the HDO and Gökçeoğlu’s photoshops used signs as a means for publishing an architectural proposal — a story about how a place might be constructed differently — Broken City Lab used signs to advertise an extant but hitherto invisible quality of the landscape. These signs reveal, rather than inventing. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that the artists working in landscape utilize this mode of operation, while the HDO and Gökçeoğlu, working with buildings, operate in the other.)

["Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors", a documentary short by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, looks at one of our favorite things -- the physical infrastructure of the internet -- and, in particular, the telco hotel at 60 Hudson Street. It's particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the "tendency of communications infrastructure to retrofit pre-existing networks to suit the needs of new technologies": the building became a modern internet hub primarily because it was already a hub in earlier communications networks, permeated by pneumatic tubes, telegraph cables, and telephone lines, and thus easily suited to the running of fiber-optic cables. (This is important because it demonstrates the relative fixity of infrastructural geographies -- like the pattern of the cities they are embedded in, the positions of infrastructures tend to endure even as the infrastructures themselves decay and are replaced.)]

Read more about Everything Sings and view a gallery of Wood's images at Places.]

A nice slideshow by Laura Tepper on Places looks at the intersection of “wildlife habitat and highway design”, from “the six massive wildlife overpasses lining the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park” to HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s winning entry to the recent ARC competition for Vail Pass, “Hypar-nature” (pictured above) and across the Atlantic to the long history of animal road crossings in France and comprehensive national highway landscape plans in the Netherlands.

“Within this expanded context, landscape architects are emerging as cultural leaders; in part this is because our field already deals with complexity at very large scales, with details at very small scales, and with time and change in both the short and long run. We also accept uncertainty as part of the life of a project — landscapes are beyond our full control. Cities and metropolitan regions — among the most complex of human inventions — require this mix of big, strategic thinking and tactical, on-the-ground agility. And they demand a comfort level in dealing with change, especially unanticipated change. Projects for large areas of existing cities — like the redevelopment of 300 acres of contaminated former portlands in Toronto, or of 5.5 miles of largely industrial riverfront in Minneapolis — will take decades to be realized, through a succession of economic highs and lows, political administrations, demographic shifts, environmental challenges (like major storms), and so on.

The strategies that landscape architects develop for such places should set out strong frameworks to initiate transformation, but also be able to absorb the kind of external changes I just described. So, rather than defining strict master plans for the Toronto and Minneapolis territories — master plans which try to limit change and prescribe physical or programmatic relationships — we chose to develop strong framework plans whose contents could shift or adjust to outside influences or even internal rules, but whose final results would only come through time. This is a very different way of thinking for designers and planners — but it is, in fact, the way landscapes and cities work anyway.”

Read the full interview at Places.

[Psyttaleia Island, Alcatraz of wastewater treatment plants. Via the awesomely-named tumblr The Value of Garbage. Aerial photos from this slideshow of Psyttaleia construction images. For more, see this description of the island (in Greek).]

[Residue Treatment Center (or CTRV) in Vacarisses, designed by Batlle i Roig. While the CTRV is a municipal solid waste treatment facility, not a wastewater treatment facility (where flushed feces usually go), the two kinds of facilities are commonly linked by the need to dispose of solid materials separated out of water at wastewater treatment facilities.

Photographs by Francisco Urrutia via Quaderns #262 "Parainfrastructures", where you can read more about the project.]

[More egg digesters, this time at New York's Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. A New York City press release describes the eggs:

"The digesters will process up to 1.5 million gallons of sludge everyday. Each egg, clad with low reflectivity stainless steel, is 145 feet high and 80 feet in diameter. The eight eggs were welded on site from pieces that were brought from Texas and fabricated by Chicago Bridge and Iron. It took three months to assemble each one. Although the weight for each egg is around 2 million pounds when empty; it is calculated that they may weigh up to 32 million pounds when processing sludge...

Digesters play a critical role in the wastewater treatment process. During the wastewater treatment process, organic material called sludge is removed from sewage. Sludge is "digested" and processed for beneficial use. Inside of digesters, bacteria break down this sludge into more stable materials. Heat, lack of oxygen, and time are all needed for this to happen. Much of the sludge is converted into water, carbon dioxide and methane gas. The remaining is called digested sludge. Digested sludge is then dewatered to form a cake, which, after additional processing, can be beneficially used as a fertilizer. The eggs are state of the art in digester design as the shape assists in concentrating grit at the bottom of the tank, mixing for improved digestion and the concentration of gas at the top of the tank. Each egg holds 3 million gallons of sludge."

Image via Flickr user roboppy (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).]

While there is a lot that has gone unfortunately unposted this summer (our drafts queue is more than a little bit out of control) — at least in part due to Rob’s failure to contain the floods series (which is finished, by the way, with yesterday’s final post on de-damming the Dutch delta) to anything like a reasonable length — there are a number of exciting things going on at mammoth behind the scenes.

Some of them will hopefully make appearances here in the coming months; some of them may also manifest, but in other ways; and some of them are likely to take quite a while to mature to the point that they have a public manifestation, but those might be the ones we’re most excited about.  (Very vague, we know.)

Two particular academic matters seem worth noting at the moment.  First, Stephen is in the midst of evaluating real estate development graduate programs, and is consequently anticipating a possible return to school in the near-or-mid future.  Second, Rob is teaching studio for the first time this fall in Virginia Tech’s MLA program, at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.

It’s unclear what this will mean for the blogging in the fall; perhaps these things will leave us energized and imaginations fertilized; perhaps they will drain us, and blogging will be light.  That will be what it is, either way.  There is a medium-sized backlog of things we wrote over the summer (while the blog was occupied with the flood series), and we expect to publish those over the coming month.  This should include text from our talk at Infranetlab’s Pamphlet Architecture launch at Storefront, a long update to the Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes that Rob presented at MediaLab Prado, another student project or two, some excellent guest posts, and, apropos of that last item, a week about shit. Literally.

Finally, some of our good friends have been working on Border Town, “an independent design studio about divided cities”. They are in the midst of an exhibit we are sorry to be missing in Detroit, but we’ll have a contribution up shortly to the online discussion they’ve been fostering.

[Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army Corps; construction began before design was complete, as a result of the pressing need to complete the barrier by the target date of 1 June 2011. According to Dredging Today, the Barrier is "more than two miles long, 25 feet high and contains enough steel to build eight Eiffel Towers":

"During Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, a “funnel” created by the levees along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the levees along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet allowed the surge that came across Lake Borgne to push into the heart of the city, and contributed to the failure of the section of the Industrial Canal that connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.

By moving the surge barrier — the primary protection against flood surge — eight miles east of the city, the hope is the structure will stop much of any storm surge that could funnel into the city, Sinkler said. Sealing off this area should take pressure off those internal floodwalls, which have also been strengthened since Katrina..."]

[The Surge Barrier at the end of May, just before the completion of construction. All photos (except for the screenshot from our partial atlas of Mississippi Floods) are from Team New Orleans' flickr set; if you can't get enough of the Surge Barrier, this panorama doesn't fit well on mammoth, but is definitely worth a look..]