mammoth // building nothing out of something
May 24, 2011 – 6:00 am

floods

The next week or two will be dedicated to floods.

This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun.  We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding.  Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the current Mississippi floods, which will be remembered by history along with the floods of 1927, 1983, and 1993 as one of the Great Mississippi Floods.  Despite their constancy, floods are often (like the infrastructures we build to control them) out of sight and out of mind.  The aim of our posting over the next week or two, in so far as it has a single aim, will be simply to remember, to see, to be aware of floods.

That said, there are a couple of themes I expect to return to.  (The posts in this series are, for the most part, as yet unwritten, so I also expect to find some unexpected themes.)  Both of these, conveniently, can be found in nascent form in Alexis Madrigal’s recent and excellent “explainer” on the current Mississippi floods at the Atlantic Online.

First, unlike (for instance) the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which preceded (and instigated) the Flood Control Act of 1928 and the subsequent fortification of the Mississippi, both the current Mississippi floods and most contemporary floods elsewhere are not natural disasters, but infra-natural disasters.  That is, the natural systems which produce floods are now so thoroughly intertwined with infrastructural systems that it is inappropriate to speak of them separately, or at least to speak of them without acknowledging the role of infrastructures in directing, mitigating, exaggerating, and otherwise affecting the paths of floodwaters.  (This is particularly true now that the issue of flooding is so tied to the issue of climate change, the most geographically comprehensive way that humans have altered and are altering our environment.  Flood protection infrastructures can also be said to be climate defense systems.)

Madrigal drives home this point in the introduction to his piece:

“What is the Mississippi River? It’s not actually a silly question. The Mississippi no longer fits the definition a river as “a natural watercourse flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river.” Rather, the waterway has been shaped in many ways, big and small, to suit human needs. While it maybe not be tamed, it’s far from wild — and understanding the floods that are expected to crest in Louisiana soon means understanding dams, levees, and control structures as much as rain, climate, and geography. From almost the moment in the early 18th century when the French started to build New Orleans, settlers built levees, and in so doing, entered into a complex geoclimactic relationship with about 41 percent of the United States.”

Second, as this is a blog about spatial design, we are particularly interested in how designers react to flood conditions.  Whether at an urban, regional, or site scale, there is one particular principle that is key to design for floods, which, again, Madrigal touches on:

“Under flood conditions, the best way to take pressure off a place downstream is to let water flow upstream.”

Though a simple statement — and one that flood engineers have always been aware of the import of, as flood control plans have always involved making choices about where to let rivers overflow their banks and where to maintain barriers — there has been an important shift in the way that this statement guides design for floods, as the orthodoxy of storm-water management is gradually moving away from striving to move water quickly and towards slowing the movement of water as much as possible.

As author Scott Huler notes in his tour of typical American infrastructures, On the Grid, this shift “involves making a complete about-face from traditional practices.  Instead of getting water to go somewhere else, engineers now do everything they can to keep the water where it is”. In place of a “simple mechanical process of nuisance removal”, he says, “stormwater infrastructure has become a biological process of resource management”.  Under flood conditions, of course, the primary locus of concern shifts from management stormwater as a resource to mitigating the damage caused by extreme excesses of water — but the transition that Huler identifies from hard, fast, mechanical infrastructures towards soft, slow, biological infrastructures is indeed underway, to at least some degree, for both general stormwater and flood infrastructures, and will be a repeated theme of some of the design proposals we hope to look at.

[Thanks to Tim Maly for the link to Alexis Madrigal’s post.  The image at the top of the post is a false-color satellite photograph, taken on 11 May, of the Morganza Spillway, which lies between the Mississippi (curving to the east on the right side of the image) and the Atchafalaya (on the western side).  “The floodway, designed to reduce water levels in the Mississippi during emergencies, was last open from April 19 to June 13, 1973, the only time it has ever been opened.”  I expect to discuss the Morganza further.]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
May 22, 2011 – 6:00 pm

urban field manuals


[Photographs from Christoph Engel’s series “Exterieur”, which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.]

Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the humble maintenance manual — a document which is, in an architectural context, typically slapped together at the end of a project in an inevitably futile attempt to arrest the effects of material degradation on the completed architectural object as long as possible — might be hybridized with the similarly prosaic field guide to produce a new kind of architectural document (the field manual), describing procedures and possibilities rather than prescribing forms:

In considering novel urbanisms, it is important not only to investigate new urban processes and kinds of organization, but also to re-evaluate the methodologies by which we intervene in urban systems and spaces.  The traditional tools of the urbanist are the capital project and the contract document; the capital project originates with a major initial capital investment by a party other than the designer (usually either a public agency or a private investor), while contract documents are used to define the terms of production and maintenance of a capital project. Neither of these tools are obsolete in a condition of “editing urbanism”. However, we propose that another, often-ignored tool may be of greater use: the maintenance manual.

Today’s urban maintenance manual is typically a dull and even banal document; whether it is produced by an architectural team for a built project or a planning department for a zoning code, it is typically explicitly aimed at preserving the status quo within the urban environment.

Its form, however, offers the opportunity for new kinds of urban engagement. Rather than prescribing set geometries for an urban territory or drawing up master plans for the delineation of new neighborhoods — as is done in traditional urban practice — the maintenance manual can be used to describe procedures and reactions to be performed in response to shifting urban conditions. In this sense, the maintenance manual offers urban editors a dual opportunity to increase focus on adaptable, opportunistic strategies, and to expand agency in shaping the city from the typically limited set of actors (such as professional designers, developers, and local politicians) to anyone who can read, interpret, and apply the instructions found within a manual.  It provides a format for instructions to edit the city, block-by-block, landscape-by-landscape.

The full piece — which illustrates the potential of this approach by developing the outline of such a kind of document through cataloging a succession of contemporary urban projects, ranging from Santiago Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas to the work of Grassroots Mapping to the recent output of the New York City government, aligning them with a series of working modes we call “the bureaucratic retrofit”, “the subversive”, “the diagnostic”, “the jerry-rig”, “the readymade”, and “the mycorrhizal”  — can be found in MONU 14, which is available here.

[Brett has a post up at Free Association Design which, among other things, goes into further detail on those working modes.]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscape-architecture, publications, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 11, 2011 – 8:26 am

matter battle sublime


[Gravity Probe B, the most perfect sphere humans have created, comes within 40 atomic layers of matching its Platonic Form. The litany of innovations it took to conduct a theoretically simple experiment – one which needed precise execution – is a testament to the wondrous complexity of meatspace.]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, engineering, technology | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on matter battle sublime | Permalink
May 11, 2011 – 6:00 am

the maracanã as public space

Nate Berg has a nice article in the New York Times on how Brazil’s Maracanã — the massive stadium built for the 1950 World Cup, where some two hundred thousand spectators watched the final between Brazil and Uruguay — has traditionally served as an important public space (“a rare type of space in Rio where you can actually get together people of different social classes”), a function which is now threatened by renovations for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, as the modernization of stadium facilities promises to finish pricing out Rio’s masses.

Berg’s article reminds me that I’d love to see a study of how stadia function (historically, presently) as public spaces.  We’ve never attempted anything so rigorous here, but we have produced a few brief scattered thoughts on stadia, from Allianz Arena as a test case for networked urbanism to touring Soccer City Stadium from above and within to reading Dan Hill on the design of “The Cloud” for London’s Olympics.

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May 9, 2011 – 7:00 pm

the economist on american infrastructure


[“Enroute high” aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com.  American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose “imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space” and which “forces planes to use inefficient routes in order to stay in contact with controllers”.]

The Economist reports on the sorry state of American transportation infrastructure:

“America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart. American cities have suffered a rash of recent infrastructure calamities, from the failure of the New Orleans levees to the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis, to a fatal crash on Washington, DC’s (generally impressive) metro system. But just as striking are the common shortcomings. America’s civil engineers routinely give its transport structures poor marks, rating roads, rails and bridges as deficient or functionally obsolete. And according to a World Economic Forum study America’s infrastructure has got worse, by comparison with other countries, over the past decade. In the WEF 2010 league table America now ranks 23rd for overall infrastructure quality, between Spain and Chile. Its roads, railways, ports and air-transport infrastructure are all judged mediocre against networks in northern Europe.”

Of course, there is nothing new about this issue (which we’ve called the infrastructural public policy problem), but it is worth reiterating, given the ease with which such reports pass before our eyes and fade from memory.  It’s quite unfortunate that, if one were to answer descriptively (and in specific reference to the United States) FASLANYC‘s call for an authentically American infrastructural urbanism, the primary distinguishing characteristics you would begin with would be descriptors like “underfunded”, “crumbling”, “antiquated”, and “poorly planned”.

The Economist‘s article does go beyond the simple description of the problem, to sketch some of the roots of the problem and describe some policies which might ameliorate the problem:

“If Washington is spending less than it should, falling tax revenues are partly to blame. Revenue from taxes on petrol and diesel flow into trust funds that are the primary source of federal money for roads and mass transit. That flow has diminished to a drip. America’s petrol tax is low by international standards, and has not gone up since 1993. While the real value of the tax has eroded, the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure has gone up. As a result, the highway trust fund no longer supports even current spending. Congress has repeatedly been forced to top up the trust fund, with $30 billion since 2008.

Other rich nations avoid these problems. The cost of car ownership in Germany is 50% higher than it is in America, thanks to higher taxes on cars and petrol and higher fees on drivers’ licences. The result is a more sustainably funded transport system. In 2006 German road fees brought in 2.6 times the money spent building and maintaining roads. American road taxes collected at the federal, state and local level covered just 72% of the money spent on highways that year, according to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank.

The federal government is responsible for only a quarter of total transport spending, but the way it allocates funding shapes the way things are done at the state and local levels. Unfortunately, it tends not to reward the prudent, thanks to formulas that govern over 70% of federal investment. Petrol-tax revenues, for instance, are returned to the states according to the miles of highway they contain, the distances their residents drive, and the fuel they burn. The system is awash with perverse incentives. A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.”

Read the full article at the Economist.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 9, 2011 – 6:00 am

island infrastructures, border towns, and unknown fields

There are a lot of things you could do this summer.

Unknown Fields

[Baikonur Cosmodrome, via Unknown Fields Division]

Liam Young and Kate Davies lead the 2011 edition of this “annual nomadic studio” on an expedition through “landscapes of obsolete futures” in the former USSR:

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, we will pack our Geiger counters and spacesuits as we chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Beginning in the shadows of nuclear disaster we will survey the irradiated wilderness and bear witness to a sobering apocalyptic vision. We will skirt the retreating tide of the Aral Sea and mine the ‘black gold’ in the Caspian oilfields and caviar factories. We will wander through the cotton fields of Kazakhstan and tread the ancient silk road before reaching the shores of the cosmic ocean bathed in the white light of satellites blasting into tomorrow’s sky. In these shifting fields of nature and artifice we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and document a cross-section through a haunting landscape of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete.

The Unknown Fields Division departs from London and runs from July 11-22; applications are due by May 20. Follow @unknownfields for updates.

Border Town

[The border between Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau, via flickr user aloxe.]

Emily Horne and Tim Maly are running an independent design studio on the fertile topic of border towns:

We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity.

Border Town is a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that will investigate the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it.

Border Town runs from June 16 through August 18 in Toronto; submit your applications here by June 2.  Follow @dividedcities for further updates, I assume.

Island in the Infrastream

[West Hayden Island, via The Oregonian]

Brett Milligan is co-teaching a design studio in Portland:

Hayden Island occupies a key location at Portland’s northern edge.  Situated in the Columbia River near the confluence with the Willamette, the island is a strategic and sought-after hub for multiple landscape systems.  Its largely undeveloped western-half provides key habitats for wildlife, while also serving as an active dredge depot for material pulled from nearby shipping channels. The city is currently exploring requests for additional infrastructure on the island, including public recreational facilities and industrial shipping terminals; seeking to temper both of these desires with environmental concerns for the island’s existing ecologies that have largely developed through lack of deliberate management.

The ecology of the western half of the island (800+ acres) has its unique qualities that fall far from the conceptual realm of the pristine or untouched.  The island has been receiving dredge material for nearly a century.  The Columbia River Basin in which it sits is the most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world – an infrastructure that induces systemic shifts in flooding regimes and sediment flows, which in turn generates altered migrations in land form, vegetation and habitats on the island.  Yet the island thrives as a critical migration hub for both the Pacific Flyway and endangered aquatic species.

We will investigate design scenarios for the future of West Hayden Island through a critical understanding of the diverse and migrant infrastructures converging upon it.  Through field work and design speculation, students will explore how these competing systems might best be sited and conjoined.  In particular, we will be particularly interested in exploring the thresholds where these processes and active materials intersect, testing the limits and design possibilities for their cohabitation.

The studio runs June 20 through August 5 and is through the University of Oregon; further details and information on applications, which I imagine are due soon, can be found here.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on island infrastructures, border towns, and unknown fields | Permalink
May 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

i-beams and networked screens


[A pair of projects by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living); top, Amphibious Architecture; above, Living Light.]

The thirtieth anniversary issue of Metropolis has a number of great articles in it (and I hope to write at length shortly about one of those, Andres Duany’s apology for the New Urbanism), so I’d recommend picking up the entire issue, but, if you’re not inclined to do so, you ought to at least read Andrew Blum’s short piece on architecture, social media, and physical space:

“Our experience of the world around us has changed to a degree not seen since the arrival of trains and cars. The presence of “the Net”—by which I loosely mean all two-way, personal media—has become as much a factor in our experience of space as the play of light and shadow on a wall, or the cultural accretions that dignify local architectural styles…

…what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?”

Read the full article at Metropolis.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on i-beams and networked screens | Permalink
May 3, 2011 – 1:10 pm

a pre-modern critique of the new urbanism

A minor point, but this is kind of fascinating — a critique of New Urbanism which, rather than going the common route of charging New Urbanism with nostalgic pre-modernism, argues that New Urbanism is insufficiently pre-modern — in this specific case, arguing that New Urbanists have praised a certain kind of narrow traditional street but produced a zoning code which doesn’t permit the construction of that kind of street.  (It’s a bit like a right-wing critique of Wall Street — there’s certainly room to make it, but you don’t hear it often.)  These guys should be introduced to Rudofsky and Alexander, who (for what it’s worth) were arguing for a return to pre-modern urban patterns years before the New Urbanists showed up.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
May 3, 2011 – 9:08 am

splash house

A group of graduate architecture students from Parsons’ Design Workshop is attempting to (partially) fund an unsolicited project called Splash House using Kickstarter:

The Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center is an invaluable place for kids to play and learn. Yet for several months every summer the Washington Heights community is denied this critical resource when the facility is converted into locker rooms for the Highbridge Park Swimming Pool.

We’ve designed Splash House, a new pool-deck pavilion for the Highbridge Park Pool in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. It is a space where swimmers can change and safely store belongings, and we’re ready to construct it ourselves this summer.

We need your help!  All donations will go towards procuring building materials for Splash House; everything from screws to steel beams.

Although it’s probably not the first such attempt, it’s the first one I’m aware of.


[Splash House rendering by the students of the Design Workshop.]

Endeavors like this are exciting to see, and have a clear relationship to the current discourse in architecture concerning business models and future practices. I can’t get too carried away with the prospect of Kickstarter as single-source capital for a built project, because I’m yet to be convinced of its ability to fund projects beyond a couple tens of thousands of dollars (if that).  (And the fact that the Design Workshop students aren’t using it as single-source capital only reinforces this point.) Kickstarter wants to be a force multiplier for architectural projects, not a stand-in for a traditional (monied) client. When used in a way which recalls the literal significance of its name, I think tremendous possibilities for architecture and urbanism are present. A couple off-the-cuff examples of what I’m thinking:

– Propose an architectural product instead of an architectural object. This could be a study to create field manuals, or project like New York City’s recent effort to create a simplified version of their zoning code in a book designed with non-technical folks in mind. Efforts that aim for larger effects throughout a region by leveraging civic engagement which might otherwise be left latent, efforts which utilize a small amount of startup financial capital in order to mobilize a much larger amount of human capital.

1 Boyer asks: “What would the Kickstarter of real estate look like and how might a similar demand-aggregator offer a productive counterpart to the dreaded “not in my back yard” syndrome? Is there a “please in my backyard” platform that could act as a spatial happiness engine, better empowering individuals to inflect their own corner of the city to meet their personal desires?”

– In a similar fashion to what Bryan Boyer proposes here [1], it’s not hard to see a situation in which a prospective builder or local entrepreneur could utilize the Kickstarter infrastructure and some grassroots community marketing to aggregate committed interest from future clients. This financial demonstration of interest could be used as a down payment on a construction loan, or as a proof-of-concept minimum viable product in tandem with a business plan to acquire a business loan.

This is certainly no knock on the Parsons Design Workshop team (who I am sure would welcome your support, and have a nice history of design-build projects in the public realm) — but I’m looking forward to a future where designers ask “if no client, then how?” instead of “if no client, then who?”

[Link via Federico Negro of CASE Inc.]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, finance | Tagged , | Comments Off on splash house | Permalink
May 2, 2011 – 9:32 pm

predictive gis and geospatial intelligence

A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software system for his previous employers that does “geographic crime analysis, early warning and risk forecasting”.

Having (I think, I’m not bothering to track down the location at the moment) before posited that landscape architecture, like architecture, possesses some strong disciplinary aptitude for something(s) like “spatial intelligence” (we landscape architects might call our version “geospatial intelligence”) which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of techniques, and also believing that the capacity to interpret and represent spatial patterns within landscape is a particularly important manifestation of spatial intelligence within the discipline, I find examples like this extremely encouraging, because they indicate that there is some validity to that argument.

[Link via Damian Holmes (@landreader).]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on predictive gis and geospatial intelligence | Permalink
April 29, 2011 – 4:02 pm

west kowloon reclamation


[Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.]


[“Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size.  Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent of total land area.” (Mark Huppert and Mark Weigum, “From Reclamation to Renewal”)]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
April 22, 2011 – 4:05 pm

aerotropolis, continued

In advance of another event related to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda’s recently-published Aerotropolis, Andrew Blum asked twitter for questions for Lindsay.  I responded with the central point from my previous post on Aerotropolis:

  1. Andrew Blum
    ajblum Good chatter about tonight’s Aerotropolis event so I’ll put it out there: Any questions from the cloud*? (*Not actually a cloud.) 20 Apr 2011 from Twitter for iPhone
  2. Rob Holmes
    eatingbark @ajblum Yes. Lindsay says: “The notion of the aerotropolis is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form”. 20 Apr 2011 from web
  3. Rob Holmes
    eatingbark @ajblum Seems to me that the “aerotropolis” is more a symbol of globalization than it is globalization crystallized. That would be ports. 20 Apr 2011 from web
  4. Rob Holmes
    eatingbark @ajblum Much longer version here: http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2011/03/aerotropolis/. 20 Apr 2011 from web
  5. this quote was generated by twtQuote

Since Lindsay was good enough to reply several times, I’ve archived that conversation here (after the jump) for anyone interested in reading Lindsay’s response.

Read More »

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April 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm

colonnade park


[Colonnade Park, photographed by Brett Milligan.]

Free Association Design reports from Seattle’s Colonnade Park, an “urban mountain bike skills park” constructed by volunteers from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance:

It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is made of was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. And typical off-the-shelf items, like permeable waffle pavers (above), have been retooled as robust and removable cellular confinement systems…

One comes away with the impression that the park will keep remaking itself incrementally, over and over again. Pieces and segments will be modified as they wear out, with new experiments being plugged in as desired. It seems that the builders and volunteers that have constructed it might actually be a little forlorn if the park were ever fully finished.

There’s a really instructive contrast to be drawn between this and, say, the High Line (though I could use other examples). Both enter a messy, dis-used slice of urban space which draws its appeal specifically from that mess and dis-use, but where the High Line parodies and imitates that appeal, the incremental additions Milligan describes amplify its appeal. The angled planes of waffle pavers, crudely assembled wooden ramps, and bermed piles of earth are, in their raw instrumentality, at ease between the orderly forest of concrete columns in a way that ‘sophisticated’ details likely could never be, and so Colonnade Park seems an exceptionally comfortable appropriation of an infrastructural left-over as a public space. These are the details of an infrastructural vernacular.

1 I’m thinking here of James Corner’s “Representation and landscape: drawing and making in the landscape medium”, which was a sort of ur-text for experimental landscape architecture in the past couple decades. That essay “focuses upon the interface of drawing and landscape, highlighting the paradoxical and enigmatic aspects of drawing, and [also explicates] the mechanisms through which drawing best fulfills its role in the imaginative construing and constructing of built landscapes”. Corner argues that “the primary difficulty in achieving an artful and non-trivial landscape architecture lies within the limits of human imagination and speculative vision — the ability to ‘see’, to see differently, and to see how things might be otherwise”, which he suggests can be done by the kinds of drawings he describes, drawings which “are made neither for construction nor presentation, but rather for the disciplined work of the architect.” These drawings would “act as vehicles for creativity, as intermediary catalysts that are used to generate a landscape architectural project”. Corner’s thoughts are particularly relevant here, of course, not just because of their role in the development of landscape theory, but also because the High Line is a Field Operations project.

It’s probably equally interesting to me that these details — which are beautifully crafted, though in a far different sense than traditional detailing — emerge in the absence of the kinds of drawings that we tend to associate with artful landscape practice [1]. Instead, their sophistication results from the accumulation of hours of volunteer labor — labor which, being the labor of the mountain bikers who use the park, was and is intimately acquainted with mountain biking, and so has been constructing the park with a refined understanding of the spatial practices that will be situated in it.


[For comparison: an undeveloped portion of Colonnade Park; photographed by flickr user mmallory.]

2 It should be noted that another instructive contrast with the High Line appears here, as the High Line (and other, similar post-industrial parks like Duisburg Nord or Gasworks) represents not a break with the Olmstedian tradition of the park as a site of recreation and respite, but merely a post-industrial branch of that tradition. The park with room for leisure-work, on the other hand, is not post-industrial, but post-Olmstedian.

And this suggests a third point of interest: Colonnade Park, as it is both a site for recreation and site which is produced through labor, is an iteration of what FASLANYC has described as “leisure-work” [2].

“…leisure-work we define as a form of recreation — meant to recreate the body and soul — as opposed to production. While leisure-work may have some productive value (just as production-work may have some recreative value) and they may take similar forms, their motivations are ontologically different.”

What fascinates me about this is that where FASLANYC’s prior examples of “leisure-work” — like the Kongjian Yu project at the Architectural University in Shenyang — have tended to be places where a framework is established by a landscape architect and then people come and engage in leisure-work on that site, producing some good (food, for instance) which can be used elsewhere, Colonnade Park itself is the immediate subject of the leisure-work performed. Colonnade Park is not a container for leisure-work, but is the shifting and malleable continuous product of that leisure-work. This in turn suggests a direct applicability to ecological productivity: while the performance metrics which Colonnade Park is shaped towards are the requirements of mountain biking, it is not at all difficult to imagine a parallel Ecological Leisure-Work Park, where recreational work is directed towards the end of ecological productivity, producing (almost as a by-product) an alternative aesthetic formed by the confluence of labor and ecologies, acknowledging and subsuming lo-fi practices, the D.I.Y. aesthetic, wild urban plants, freakologies, cryptoforestry, ecological performance metrics, labor-intensive restoration practices, gardening, guerilla gardening, seed bombing, anthropogenic and post-natural landscapes, resilience science, urbanibalism, and so on.

Click through to F.A.D. for more photographs; I also recommend this older FASLANYC post on “entertainment versus work” and “the changing nature of recreation in New York”.

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on colonnade park | Permalink
April 16, 2011 – 6:00 am

“we’d rather people forgot about us”


[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking “our subterranean infrastructure”; image source.]

Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue:

“Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of Venice Boulevard. With cars racing past on either side, we negotiated our way through scrubby bushes and Styrofoam cups to find the site of one of the most lethal gasoline pipeline explosions in United States history. In June, 1976, a construction crew working on a road-widening project sliced through a Standard Oil petroleum pipeline that was 18 inches nearer the surface than expected. The resulting explosion, Coolidge explains, destroyed the north side of the block and killed nine people. In response to the disaster, California instituted its now-standard DigAlert system, a warning code whose red (electric), green (sewers), orange (communications), and yellow (gas) spray-paint markings are visible (although largely overlooked) on concrete and blacktop across the state, inscribing our subterranean infrastructure on Earth’s surface.

The effect of this information is hard to describe. One minute I’m standing in a nondescript median, surrounded by six lanes of traffic and looking at the skinnier cousin of a fire hydrant; the next, I’m situated at the very center of some sort of infrastructural navel, from which a tangled tracery of colored lines, arrows, and numbers radiates outward across the streets of California.”

Read the full article at Good.  Twilley, with Geoff Manaugh, also contributes to the same issue of Good a brief tour of L.A.’s urban wildlife, from the Exotic Animal Training School as “a controlled ecology of domesticated wilderness fit for popular consumption” to mosquito fish breeding sites.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments Off on “we’d rather people forgot about us” | Permalink
April 15, 2011 – 11:51 am

“like autistic squirrels”

The Guardian interviews Benjamin Bratton:

What can be done to foster and encourage more social entrepreneurs and innovators?

…I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation from so many different places is that it was built on standard platforms and protocols that allowed each point-of-reception to also be a point-of-production. Because of platform neutrality –this is an ideal version, I realise– something that starts in one location can scale to become a global technique with less interference.

What if cities worked the same way? For me good urbanism means a healthy and playful mix of programs, of chance encounters, of interesting relationships with strangers, of cooperative experiences that are not dictated by shopping and entertainment, or worse, by security.

As bits and atoms interweave more closely into digital urbanism, this could produce very dull and lifeless spaces, with everyone locked into a “Groupon phenomenology” of point-chasing and accumulation, like autistic squirrels. Or it could turn the global city –our shared site condition– into a different sort of game, one with much more interesting and generative rules. “Beneath the pavement is a beach.”

Read the full interview at the Guardian.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, technology, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments Off on “like autistic squirrels” | Permalink
March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm

a short aerial tour of the arrival of canadian oil in the united states


[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”]

Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly forgot about the piece, until I was reminded of it by Alexander Trevi.

The piece begins by noting that “today, Canada is the single biggest foreign source of oil for the U.S., and industry analysts project that 20 years from now, it may be supplying one-fourth of all U.S. oil needs”, which puts the importance of those infrastructures into clear perspective.  (That piece, which then describes domestic opposition to expanding both those infrastrucures and our reliance on Canadian oil, is well worth reading, as is yesterday’s sequel, which looks at how infrastructural bottlenecks influence market prices.)  With apologies to Trevi, who triggered the idea for this post by not only sharing the original article, but also hunting down the TransCanada pipeline’s Illinois terminus, I’ve put together a short aerial tour of the infrastructures — the pipeline is essentially invisible, being buried underground, but attendant tank farms, pumping stations, and refineries leave obvious marking patterns on the land — so helpfully mapped by NPR.

This tour is split into two components: first, TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline system (PDF), which runs from Alberta through Manitoba via a fork in Nebraska to endpoints in Illinois and Oklahoma, and second, trucking corridors in Montana and Idaho, used by both Imperial Oil and ConocoPhilips.  (You can see the two maps that this tour is based on in the original article.)

Keystone Pipeline

[The Keystone Pipeline — currently, 2,147 miles of 36-inch diameter underground pipe capable of carrying some 435,000 barrels of oil a day, with another 1,980 miles planned in the Keystone XL expansion — begins here, in Hardisty, Alberta.]


[This, which I believe to be one of the Keystone Pipeline’s 41 pump stations, is, as far as I can tell (the address appears to be the property of TransCanada), the sole above-ground expression of the fork in the Keystone Pipeline in Steele City, Nebraska.]


[Tank farms at the terminus of the Keystone Wood River-Patoka pipeline, near Vernon, Illinois; via @pruned.]


[Refineries and tank farms in Wood River, Illinois, the other primary destination for south-bound oil on the Wood River-Patoka pipeline.]


[Even more tank farms in Cushing, Oklahoma, at the southern end of the Keystone’s other leg.  Cushing is the self-proclaimed “Pipeline Crossroads of the World”.]

Trucking Corridors (Imperial Oil and ConocoPhillips)

[The source: Athabasca Oil Sands, the largest of Canada’s oil sands fields, near Fort McMurray, Alberta]


[The intersection of Mountain Highway 200 — which heads north to Canada — and I-90, near Bonner, Montana.  Oil-related traffic splits here to move either east to Billings or west to Idaho.]


[Coke Drums waiting along the side of the highway in Montana; “the loads are so big — taking up two highway lanes — they have to travel at night”; image via flickr user Nicholas Senn.]


[ConocoPhillips Refinery, Billings, Montana, which “produces a high percentage of transportation fuels, such as gasoline, aviation and diesel fuels, as well as fuel-grade petroleum coke” and whose “finished petroleum products… are delivered via pipeline,  railcar and truck… to markets in Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Washington”; images via bing.]


[Above: the Port of Lewiston, Idaho, on the Clearwater River at its confluence with the Snake River — unsurprisingly, Idaho’s only deepwater port (unless you’re surprised that Idaho has any ports at all); below: Lewiston, via wikipedia.]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
March 30, 2011 – 6:00 am

in and out of the terrain of water


[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.]

This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or can get to those locations this weekend.  Both conferences — “In the Terrain of Water” at Penn, and “Out of Water” at Toronto — are themed around water, with “In the Terrain of Water” beginning with the abundance of water and “Out of Water” starting with its absence, which makes them a nice pair, even if it is physically impossible to be at both conferences.  (I’ll be at neither, unfortunately.)


[Top: a Dixon imprinter; bottom: imprinted land, ready to concentrate rainwater and nurture seedlings; via the Imprinting Foundation.]

Briefly, quoted descriptions of the two conferences, beginning with “In the Terrain of Water”:

Water is everywhere before is somewhere.  It is rain before it is rivers, it soaks before it flows, it spreads before it gathers, it blurs before it clarifies.  Water at these moments in the hydrological cycle is not easy to picture in maps or contain within lines.  It is however to these waters that people are increasingly turning to find innovative solutions to the myriad water-related crises that catalyze politics, dynamics, and fears.  Is it not time to re-invent our relationship with water — see water as not within, adjoining, serving, or threatening settlement, but the ground of settlement?  Could this be the basis of a new vocabulary of place, history, and ecology?  And can the field of design, by virtue of its ability to articulate and re-visualize, lead in the constructing this new vocabulary?

The symposium will be taking place on April 1-2, 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania. There is also an exhibition associated with the symposium, running from March 28- April 4, with a gallery talk taking place on March 31. This will feature drawings by Ian L. McHarg, Louis I. Kahn, Lawrence Halprin, as well as work current Penn faculty, including James Corner, Dilip da Cunha, and Jenny Sabin.

and “Out of Water”:

This conference will offer a forum for water experts in the fields of design, engineering, natural and social sciences to identify not only specific disciplinary methodologies, but also areas of applied and theoretical intersections with respect to water scarcity in arid regions. These investigations will be discussed in context of varying technical and sociopolitical dimensions of water scarcity.

Twenty-two established and emergent designers, scholars and scientists will be brought together to evaluate currently-implemented solution with regard to their efficiency and geographic relevance.

The disciplines represented in this conference include environmental law and water policy, public health, agronomy, hydrology, geography, building science, business strategies, civil engineering, landscape architecture, architecture and urban design.

There are numerous factors that cause water scarcity worldwide, including climatological, environmental and anthropogenic factors such as over-consumption, failing infrastructure, unsustainable agricultural practices and contamination. The challenges posed by water scarcity are currently most acute in arid and underdeveloped regions. Research in these regions should prove to be relevant to those interested in the role that water will come to play in shaping our built environments and our political and economic arenas. In fact, water issues will likely come to play an increasingly important role in instigating academic and professional collaborations and fostering meaningful political dialogues.

Registration (there’s a cost to both conferences) and more details are at the conference websites, linked above.

[Places is running a series of articles timed to coordinate with the conference, such as Kristi Dykema Cheramie’s “The Scale of Nature”, on the Mississippi River Basin Model, and a slideshow of photographs of waterbodies in urbanizing Mexico by Alejandro Cartagena, “Lost Rivers”.]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm

stabilization


[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm

aerotropolis


[FedEx’s “Superhub” at Memphis International Airport; via Bing maps.]

1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis.  (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.)  The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree fully with Lindsay’s comments.  For instance:

“I think the examples of Memphis and Louisville are fascinating, where the sheer economic force of FedEx and UPS basically willed them into being.

Those cities used to be river-trading towns—cotton and tobacco, respectively—before they became basically southern rustbelt towns. But then, in the 1970s and 80s, they were reborn as company towns of FedEx and UPS. In a sense, their economics—for better or for worse, and that’s very much up for debate—are held hostage by our e-commerce habits: every time we press the one-click button on Amazon, it leads to this gigantic logistical mechanism which, in turn, has led to the creation of these vast warehouse districts around the airports of these two cities.

One of the things I tried to touch on in the book is that even actions we think of as primarily virtual lead to the creation of gigantic physical systems and superstructures without us even knowing it.”

It also seems that Lindsay is quite reflective about the topic, as his critical comments on the relationship between aerotropolis and autocracy or his description of the aerotropolis as a weapon in a “war between cities” make clear, and there’s much to commend in the interview (both in the questions, and in the answers).

[1] A previous post on mammoth, “wyoming is in los angeles”, explores the degree to which cities are materially tied to their “hinterlands”.

I should also note here that Manaugh expresses a related sort of skepticism in his question about “the prospect of a failed aerotropolis” — and so it’s worth reading Lindsay’s answer to that question, though it is more about the future of the aerotropolis than a debate about its present status.

2. However, I’m not convinced that the aerotropolis as Lindsay describes it — a city which is “more closely tied to other cities via air than its own hinterlands” — really exists, or is even possible.  Matter matters, and only a little bit of matter and relatively few people (at great energy cost) can realistically be transported frequently by air [1].  Maybe 100 million Chinese tourists really will be flying abroad in 2020 — but even that massive quantity is only one out of every thirteen Chinese (on China’s current population), and those 100 million wouldn’t be people whose lives are characterized by air travel, but people whose lives occasionally — perhaps annually, perhaps bi-annually — feature air travel on special occasions.

3.More interesting than quibbling about the nature of aerotropolis, though, is Lindsay’s assertion that aerotropolis is crystallized globalization:

“The notion of the aerotropolis, then, is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form. It is about flows of people and goods and capital, and it implies that to be connected to a city on the far side of the world matters more than to be connected to your immediate region.”

It seems to me that the “aerotropolis” (particularly on the more restricted Kasarda definition) is more a symbol of globalization than it is the ultimate instantiation of globalization.  Sea shipping is (and was for centuries before the invention of flight) the dominant mode of global transport.  To get an indication of the difference in magnitude between sea and air shipping, just look at Shanghai, the world’s busiest cargo port by tonnage, and Memphis, the world’s busiest airport by tonnage: Memphis sees about three million tons a year; Shanghai sees around five hundred million tons a year.  This is not a statistical aberration.


[Yangshan Deepwater port, off the coast of Shanghai — merely one of Shanghai’s many container-handling facilities; image source.]

If you want to connect to the global economy you build a port.  (Karrie Jacobs: “Even Dubai, which seems to demonstrate how a good airport (and a state-owned airline) can make a city materialize from thin air, initially tested the economic value of a free-trade zone on the Persian Gulf by building a state-of-the-art shipping port.”)  Failing that, you build an inland port, to receive and distribute goods from a sea port.  Yes, if you want to connect to certain specific components of the global economy which require high-value and high-speed material transactions (the small auto-parts industry, for instance), you build an airport, but, just as with the movement of people, that’s a special case, not the baseline.

Even Air Cargo World (which has an obvious interest in air cargo boosterism) admits that sea shipping is hardly the way of the past:

Four years ago this month, Giovanni Bisignani, the director general and CEO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), sounded the alarm to airfreight experts assembled at the IATA World Cargo Symposium in Mexico City.

“Ocean container shipping is becoming more competitive and taking business away,” Bisignani told the audience during his opening address. He then rattled off some startling numbers. Growth in the ocean sector from 2000 to 2005 more than doubled airfreight growth, and from 2006 to 2010, ocean freight was to outpace annual air cargo growth by nearly 2 percent.

“New container ships are faster and cheaper to operate,” he continued. “2006 ocean container freight rates were 20 percent in real terms below 2000 levels. Airfreight rates were only 8 percent lower. … We can expect more intense price competition”

…

Now that a resurgence is taking place in both the ocean and air cargo industries, shippers are starting to plan for the future. It’s been reported that shippers who once operated only in the sky and had  gone to the water are making the shift back to air cargo, but there isn’t enough evidence to suggest a trend is underway. A lot is happening in the shipping industry, and it’s difficult to say how many shippers are returning to the skies, just as it can’t be said that some shippers will remain sea-bound forever. As with most things, the issue isn’t clear cut.

“I have seen some conversion of sea to air, and we certainly saw it for a lot of 2010,” Shah says. “I don’t know if that trend is still continuing. It probably is, but it probably depends and the commodity, and it depends on the industry.”

If you’re looking for a physical instantiation of the ways that contemporary globalization is radically different than 19th-century globalization (and you’re not satisfied with the shipping container, which really is one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century), then I’d suggest that the tubes are a better place to start than the airports.


[Container shipping in the aerotropolis of Dubai — like Shanghai, one of many terminals.]

4. I do wonder if there is an element of unintentional bias operating in the formulation of Lindsay and Karsada’s theses?  If you’re wealthy (or fortunate enough, like I am, to be middle-class in a country where the middle-class is wealthy by global standards), you might connect to the world by flying around it; but if you’re not, you probably connect to the world — experience globalization — through the products you participate in the manufacture, design, storage, marketing, or sales of, the products you purchase, and/or the raw materials that you participate (directly or indirectly) in the extraction of.  If your experience primarily falls into the former category — experiencing the world by traveling it in airplanes — it would be unsurprising if this biased you towards overestimating the significance of airports as drivers of urbanization, and underestimating the impact of the latter items on urbanization.

5. All that said, the existence of the aerotropolis, whatever its fate, future, and ultimate importance is, seems undeniable, and so I’m convinced that this is an important and fascinating phenomenon, well worth studying.

[In return, Greg Lindsay interviews BLDGBLOG.  Lindsay and Manaugh will be continuing these conversations at upcoming live events — click through to BLDGBLOG’s interview for details.  Elsewhere, Kazys Varnelis reacts — with appropriate suspicion about the future prospects for jet-setting global citizens of the aerotropoli — to commentary and chatter surrounding the release of Aerotropolis.]

By rholmes | Posted in economics, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 14, 2011 – 6:21 pm

slugging


[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.]

Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks:

People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers — Oliphant estimates about 10,000 of them every day — are doing the same thing: “slugging.”

Their culture exists almost nowhere else. San Francisco has a similar casual-carpooling system, and there’s a small one in Houston. But that’s it. Even in D.C., slugging exists along only one of the city’s many arteries, I-95 and 395, where the nation’s first HOV lanes were completed in 1975.

Every morning, these commuters meet in park-and-ride lots along the interstate in northern Virginia. They then ride, often in silence, without exchanging so much as first names, obeying rules of etiquette but having no formal organization. No money changes hands, although the motive is hardly altruistic. Each person benefits in pursuit of a selfish goal: For the passenger, it’s a free ride; for the driver, a pass to the HOV lane, and both get a faster trip than they would otherwise. Even society reaps rewards, as thousands of cars come off the highway.

The full article looks at a series of rather interesting issues related to this “self-sustaining casual carpool” — whether the practice could be encouraged by a government which appreciates its benefits, the series of extremely specific conditions which must be met in order for a slugging culture to emerge, the history of that emergence, and so on; read it here.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink