mammoth // building nothing out of something
July 31, 2009 – 12:27 pm

cloud skippers

Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”:

Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the clouds in machine-like dwellings, self-sufficient and free from trappings of everyday life as we know it…

Staying afloat requires work. A delicate equilibrium must be maintained to remain anchored in the air. Abrupt shifts in weight can dislodge a Cloud Skipper from the jet stream – low levels of rainwater storage or sloppy waste management, excessive hoarding or rapid shifts in population – any dramatic change may result in a loss of altitude, or worse, a precipitous fall to Earth. The unique emphasis on weight shapes a new economy with its own values and currency. Gravity banks deal in kilos of crops, or gallons of water, in lieu of more traditional monetary loans. As material over-consumption may have catastrophic consequences, money as we know it is redefined.

Cloud Skippers must also take into account the constant shifting of the jet stream’s course. With no solid connection to the ground below, the idea of community is re-imagined. Assuming a nomadic nature, Cloud Skippers fly whichever way the winds take them. Through such trials and demands, a strong, fluid bond develops among Skippers in their efforts to survive in such a precarious environment. Balance is emphasized, manifested in a collective responsibility of the entire community and reinforced by personal discipline as well as respect for the limits of one’s environment and the needs of one’s neighbors.

That, of course, is the utopian version.  There are other possibilities, perhaps no less fascinating, but certainly not as pleasantly communal, as might be suggested by the history of earth-bound nomadic peoples (the near-constant struggle between the Tuareg and whatever governments claim their portions of the Sahara at any given time, for instance).  Terrestial governments might not be so willing to cede their airspace or rain to the Cloud Skippers, while the tight communal discipline required to eek out existence in the harsh environment of the jet stream could as easily lead to clannish fragmentation as to a heightened sense of responsibility towards neighbors.

[see also mammoth’s own sloppily documented entry to [bracket], which suggests harnessing the wind in a completely different fashion]

By rholmes | Posted in speculative-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
July 28, 2009 – 1:05 pm

high line, briefly

The High Line receives a glowing review from the New York Review of Books (which, due their odd desire to maintain the pretense that they publish book reviews and not journalism, pretends that the article is a review of the pamphlet-sized Designing the High Line, though it merits only a single paragraph in the article).

From the TerraGRAM proposal for the High Line; note the rolling staircase (like those used at airports).

I’ve always thought it unfortunate that the TerraGRAM team didn’t have the chance to realize their vision, which, as an article in Metropolis pointed out several years ago, was the one entry to the original competition that “had the confidence and the humility to let the High Line be the High Line”.  Its hard not to feel that the eventual approach adopted by Field Operations and DSR — disassembling the structure and then reassembling it as a simulacrum of its prior self, a planting plan that mimics the appearance but not the process of the wilderness it replaces — is somewhat disingenious and disappointingly second-best (even if their hand was forced in that direction), particularly in comparison to the TerraGRAM approach, which was so focused on enabling processes and communities of curation (though, obviously, not everyone agrees, and perhaps I’ll have a different opinion once I’m able to visit).

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July 24, 2009 – 12:44 pm

there is no such thing as photographic truth

Critical Terrain asked photographers Alex Fradkin, Tim Griffith, Mark Luthringer, and David Maisel to contribute their thoughts on the Edgar Martins digital fabrication episode, which I accidentally stumbled into earlier this month.

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July 22, 2009 – 12:06 pm

readings: on water

1. Good Magazine’s Water Issue discusses clean water technologies for the developing world, the current and historical contamination of American tap water, fully recycled tap water, how the control of water is becoming central to the conflict between India and Pakistan and interviews Robert Glennon, author of the new book Unquenchable, which explores America’s water crisis:

“We are spoiled. The water managers have done too good a job. We wake up in the morning, turn on our taps, and out comes a plentiful supply of clean water for less money than we pay for cable television. But in some sections of the country, people are noticing. Last year, Atlanta’s principal water supplier, Lake Lanier, came within 90 days of drying up. That was a real wake-up call [but] Atlanta failed miserably. They took very modest steps that did not include banning new ground­‑water wells. People were free to drill wells and didn’t even need approval of the state unless they were pumping over 100,000 gallons per day. It was open season on the groundwater supply.”

2. Pruned looks at the Artifical Desert Lake of Turkmenistan (intimately linked to the drying of the Aral Sea) and additional projects from the exhibition Out of Water (previously covered by Infranetlab as Strategies against Desertification).

The Toktogul Reservoir in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia’s largest reservoir [image source]

3. Infranetlab on the stepwells of India, ancient infrastructural monuments dug deep into the earth for moisture, and on a student project that reconfigures part of the Rivière-des-prairies hydro-electric dam.

4. Previous discussion of water on mammoth: tracing the ambiguity of seamelt and landrise, on Alberto Kalach and the vanished lakes of Mexico City, wondering whether the Netherlands provides an example of the coexistence of rigid and flexible strategies for flood management, and on bayous, floods, and indeterminacy in Texas.

5. Project M‘s Buy a Meter allows you to donate to help purchase water meters for families in Hale County, Alabama, who will otherwise lack access to clean water. Water for one home is $425.

6. From the Guardian article from 2006 on the daylighted river and park that replaced the Cheonggycheon Highway in Seoul (mentioned and linked to by Stephen below):

“Work started in July 2003. It had taken 20 years to build the roads and to obliterate the river, but it took contractors just two years to pull them down and restore it. It cost $380m (£201m) and required 620,000 tonnes of concrete and asphalt to be removed and recycled. Twenty-two new bridges were built, and the water in the river was restored, albeit mainly from groundwater. There was fierce opposition and protests to begin with from nearby traders, who feared that cars would no longer be able to get there, and thousands of hawkers and other people who used the space below the motorway were forced to leave. They were eventually relocated…

The city had beefed up its bus service and given people options to avoid the motorway, and the effect on the environment was remarkable. Hwang says: “We found that surface temperatures in summer along the restored river were an average 3.6 degrees Centigrade lower than places 400 metres away. The river is now a natural air conditioner, cooling the capital during its long hot summers. Average wind speeds in June this year were 50% higher than the same period last year. It was extraordinary. Also, many birds came back, plus fish, insects and plants. The variety of wildlife has vastly increased since we tore up the road.”

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July 21, 2009 – 9:19 pm

miscellany

Somewhere, Louis Kahn is blushing.

HOW DARE THEY.

Is this Landscape Urbanism?

Or is this?

More on Seoul here.

And here.

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July 21, 2009 – 2:52 pm

american turbine

Adam Goodheart mulls over the place of the wind turbine in the American landscape:

Just a century ago, however, windmills by the hundreds of thousands dotted many of the same landscapes where their present-day descendants now loom. Nearly every farmyard had its own spindly device atop a steel tower, pumping water and powering lamps. Those windmills, in their time, stood for the settlers’ proud dominion over nature, for their self-sufficiency and for the Yankee ingenuity that produced something from nothing, literally from thin air. Dozens of manufacturers competed for customers, hawking machines whose brand names formed a kind of American poetry: Buckeye, Climax, Daisy, Dandy, OK, Tip Top, Whizz.

… I wonder whether the turbines of our own century may come to stand for newer forms of self-sufficiency, less individual than national. Rising from the land in shapes as gracile as Brancusi sculptures, they seem to inhabit a middle ground between technology and nature — perfect emblems, perhaps, of a conflicted culture that cherishes its iPhones and organic gardens in equal measure. Maybe, too, they will still stand for the old American dream of snatching something from thin air: a future without sacrifice, and liberty as boundless as the sky.

Goodheart’s piece is accompanied by a few photographs from Mitch Epstein’s forthcoming American Power, which “examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape.”

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July 21, 2009 – 8:58 am

strange buildings

Via things, a list of 50 “strange buildings” which mashes icons of modern architecture (Nagakin Capsule Tower, Habitat 67, Lloyd’s) with ducks and idiosyncratic vernacular structures.  As things notes, the interesting thing here is not the list, but the (inclusive) attitude towards architecture revealed by the list.

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July 20, 2009 – 8:56 pm

its prettiness and romance will then be gone

As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and forward-thinking project from a city not known for its innovative ecological design (though they have built a rather seductive tangle of on and off ramps), but also manages to mash three of my favorite things — urban parks, flood control and freeway interchanges — into the same space:

Water on Buffalo Bayou can rise rapidly from sea level to 35 feet (11 m) deep, often within several hours. SWA met that challenge by designing all landscape plantings, trail markers, signage, benches, lights to withstand periodic submersion by muddy, debris filled flood waters. In the event of high water, small hydrants, spaced conveniently, wash off any deposited silt, returning it to the bayou before it dries.

The Promenade, embedded into the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, in the shadows of Houston’s skyscrapers and lying beneath I-45.


Read More »

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
July 18, 2009 – 2:18 pm

sergey prokudin-gorsky

“Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer… Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915.”

[via opus // more about the digital reclamation of Gorsky’s photos at wikipedia]

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July 17, 2009 – 1:38 pm

smart tagging garbage

New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.

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July 15, 2009 – 2:47 pm

death of the aral sea

The European Space Agency documents the decline of the Aral Sea, via Wired, whose 2002 article on the management of the Amu Darya explains in great detail the reasons for that decline.

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July 14, 2009 – 3:04 pm

songdo’s tendril

You find this mass anchored in the Yellow Sea (google map) off the Korean coast, attached by a thin line of gravel and asphalt (drawn in the straight line which is the international tell of the engineer) to New Songdo City, the massive planned addition to the port of Incheon.  A perfect rectangle in a bay of irregular mud flats shaped by the eroding tides, dotted with giant holding tanks and extending to the south a pair of long tendrils of pipe and steel.  A fascinating piece of infrastructural detritus.  Your first (and incorrect) assumption is that it is related to the process of land construction for Songdo; perhaps it holds dredge on the left, and treats water in the middle?  But zooming in you see stranger, unexpected artifacts: a golf course, roads planned for pedestrians, an 88-meter tall spire that looms over the tanks, a series of formal gardens.

Though it is unlabeled on the map, a bit of work (your first clues: read the labels of the storage tanks, and cross-reference that with the address you get by querying the location of the tanks in google maps) uncovers that the rectangle is the Incheon LNG Terminal, one of the world’s largest liquid natural gas terminals.

This, it turns out, is one of the most fascinating studio projects never assigned:

1. Select a bay off the coast of a major port city.

2. Choose a regular geometric form; this will be the piece of land you will raise, like some prosaic Atlantis, from that bay.  You may set the scale of the form at your discretion.

3. Select a major form of contemporary urban infrastructure, such as oil terminal, nuclear power plant, or wastewater treatment plant.  This will be the primary program for your island.

4. The island will also house workers for that infrastructure.  They will need roads, stores, restaurants, and places to entertain themselves in between trips across the long road back to the mainland.  A golf course is suggested.

5. Build a museum on that island, to explain the history, necessity, and importance of your island’s chosen infrastructure.  Give the museum a whimsical entry court, filled with some sort of set of memorials to the un-famous personages who invented the various components and processes integral to your island’s chosen infrastructure.  Finally, construct an observation tower from which the visitors to your island can observe, through telescope, the details of your island’s chosen infrastructure.

6. Frost your island with gardens, preferably referencing the traditions of other cultures: for instance, if your island is off the coast of Korea you might choose to plant hedges reminiscent of French royal gardens.

7. Do not forget that this island — even the museum and gardens — already exists.

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 14, 2009 – 8:41 am

transmilenio and bus rapid transit

Article at the New York Times on the value of bus rapid transit systems, particularly Bogota’s Transmilenio.

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July 13, 2009 – 12:18 pm

carlo ratti interview @ city of sound

Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect:

This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft infrastructure, overlaid onto the hard infrastructure of the city, is a theme common to this work. One thing that I consistently get asked by clients when I talk them through these kinds of changes is, “Yeah, but how will it change the physical form of cities? How will the cities look different?” I sometimes respond by referencing those other bike-sharing schemes in Barcelona, Paris, Lyon et al and illustrating how these are really informational services; soft infrastructure coordinated by informatics, and laid over the existing fabric of the city. Aside from hubs for the bikes, there are very few physical changes to the cities. Yet these systems have radically changed the sense of mobility in their cities, utterly changing the way the city feels.

Ratti agrees, seeing that digital activity is a layer in interface with the city. It’s not a separate virtual space, as some seem to think, but it’s augmenting our physical space. As he points out, we’re hardly going to change or destroy all these existing buildings and spaces anytime soon – urban form just doesn’t change that quickly, but the profound changes in the way cities feel and function may be in this internet-enabled informational layer.

Read the rest of the interview.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, technology | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 10, 2009 – 8:49 am

dirt

My father was trained as an agronomist, so I endured a fair number of lectures as a child about the importance of distinguishing between soil and dirt.  Nonetheless, I recently added David Montgomery’s Dirt (which is about soil) to my reading list, and Jim Rossignol’s review of another book entitled Dirt (this one — also about soil — being by William Bryant Logan, which is, as Rossignol notes, a name that belongs on the cover of books) has convinced me to add that one as well.

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July 8, 2009 – 1:59 pm

congestion pricing manhattan

A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff.  The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens.  Congestion pricing is an excellent example of tactically hacking a vast and complex existing system; while it requires a lot of hard and rigorous work to do correctly, it is exactly the sort of strategy that can be used to transform conditions in a megacity with a great deal of infrastructural inertia.

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July 8, 2009 – 10:47 am

the people’s public works

Here’s one such strategy for applying architectural tactics to a much broader set of situations and materials, Stephen, from Rebar (who are perhaps the best current example of a group doing such things, at least that I’m aware of):

The project, entitled “The People’s Public Works”, “[lures] the public into a carnival midway with infrastructure as the theme” and is sited in the excavated bowels of a block awaiting the arrival of a new skyscraper, perhaps delayed or halted by lack of financing. “The pit would offer an array of ad hoc nooks where people could explore the nuts and bolts of city building. Explorers might encounter a workshop on pothole repairs, celebrations of public servants, participant games and artists-in-residence – all amid surplus piles of such urban arcana as backhoes and orange cones.” If and when construction resumes, the People’s Public Works — being as much social organization as physical installation — uproots itself and is reinstalled in another excavation, revealing another set of infrastructural conditions to the public eye.

[link via Landscape+Urbanism]

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July 7, 2009 – 1:45 pm

grande cretto

Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto is a waist-high concrete casting of the old town of Gibellina, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 (image via flickr user claude05).

The town of Nuova Gibellina, which was built to house Gibellina’s displaced residents, is now fantastically eerie, as it was imagined as a triumphant convergence of modern art and architecture, but has since been abandoned.

Imagine, for a moment, that the residents of Nuova Gibellina have decamped not for the cities and jobs of Palermo or Catania, but have returned to Burri’s shell, making the now-inverted casts of the familiar streets of their childhoods into new homes, hanging struts to support fabric roofs and strands of lights from concrete shelves. Or piling soil onto the outlines of old city blocks, watering and watching as grass takes root, and grazing sheep or organizing games of calcio on graves of their grandfathers’ houses.  Re-inhabited land art.

[Synchornicity link via Endlessfield]

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July 7, 2009 – 1:20 am

my dreams, squashed

If you folks haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend this article on Will Allen, founder of Growing Power and a ‘street farmer’ in Milwaukee, highly enough.  I’m not even going to pull a quote from it – just go read the whole thing.  Given a choice between having the career of Rem Koolhaas, or the career of Will Allen, I’m not sure which I’d pick – though I would argue that Allen’s work has a far bigger impact socially, and potentially ecologically and economically, in a given locale than Koolhaas’s (obviously this ignores the ability of Koolhaas and similarly distinguished members of the academy to shape theoretical discourse on urbanism – but now that the era of iconic city images is drawing to a close, or at least shifting priorities, how much does this academic influence matter?  This is something I need to think on more).  

Maybe the bigger issue here is that such a choice isn’t ever presented to young designers of buildings and cities.  Reading this reminded me of an experience I had when I was about halfway through architecture school.  As I was walking toward Thom Mayne’s new (at the time) Federal Building, I passed a percussionist absolutely shredding on a set of upturned buckets.  The street, for blocks in either direction, was alive with his soundtrack – it enveloped that corner of the city.  Coincident with this experience, I could see the top of Mayne’s building towering above the rest the city as I drew nearer.  The disparity in affect between the vibrant immediacy of the drumming and the iconic, static Federal Building was almost comical.  This guy with twenty bucks worth of buckets and old pans was adding more to the social milieu than a few hundred million dollars worth of contemporary architecture.  Contra Ouroussoff, I wasn’t even allowed into the lobby, nor were any government workers “mingling with the masses” in the plaza.

There are a ton of counters to an argument which contends bucket percussionists are a more valuable addition to a city than contemporary architecture; by no means is this an argument I’m trying to make.  (An obvious one: when done tactically, with a sensitivity to the surrounding urban condition and a sound financial foundation, this sort of development can act as precisely the sort of anchor which attracts new shops and residences, and thus pedestrians, and thus drummers.)  I think where I was heading, before getting wildly off-course, was that I get incredibly excited by things like urban farming, which have all the excitement and accessibility of street performances; combined with the social, ecological, and economic transformative potential of the very best traditional architectural and urban projects (‘traditional’ is meant here to signify projects which revolve around the creation of form and space, not an aesthetic style).  I wish that strategies like these were awarded more credit in the upper echelons of architectural and urbanist discourse.

By Stephen | Posted in urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
July 6, 2009 – 11:44 am

the coming infrastructure bubble?


[Interior of an abandoned and incomplete home in a subdivision outside Phoenix, from an excellent slideshow of photographs taken by Edgar Martins, commissioned by the New York Times to document the real estate bust.]

I’d highly recommend reading or re-reading Eric Janszen’s “The Next Bubble”, which was published in Harper’s almost a year and a half ago.  Given the buzz surrounding the role of infrastructure and energy projects in the Obama administration’s recovery plan and the high percentage of the spending so far which is slated to be sunk into networks of connector highways being built primarily for the sake of spending money, its hard not find Janszen’s article eerily prescient:

There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom—under the rubric “Web 2.0”—is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.

There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water…

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure—transportation and communications systems, water, and power…

Its important to note that Janszen doesn’t exactly mean that this bubble can or should be prevented, even if his prediction is correct (“the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence”).  In fact, he notes that he prefers the term ‘asset hyperinflation’ to ‘bubble’, as bubble carries conotations which may or may not apply to a given asset hyperinflation.  But it does seem like a healthy cautionary note that architects and landscape architects ought to listen to, lest we pin our hopes for the future of our professions on an industry as capable of flaming out as the real estate industry.

More:
– I was reminded of Janszen’s article by Varnelis, who should be your primary source for pessimism about the relationship between architecture and infrastructure, which I think is a necessary thing.
– a recent story about Janszen and his bubble prediction from NPR.
– a February 2008 interview at Grist with Janszen about his article.
– You can follow Janszen’s prognostications at iTulip.com.  Which I’ve never visited.

By rholmes | Posted in energy, finance, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink