When radio and TV talkers speculated about a possible popularity bounce for the NHL in the wake of a strong Olympic tournament -- notably the two Canada-United States machups -- they proffered numerous possibilities for the sport to build off that apparent success.
Whether TV ratings for a once-every-four-year event really mean anything for the least popular pro sports league in the United States might take a long time to determine.
Still, the NHL showed subtlety was not part of its post-Olympics plan Tuesday night.
On the FSN broadcast of the Buffalo Sabres game against the Pittsburgh Penguins, a matchup that included the Olympic tournament MVP (U.S. goalie Ryan Miller who plays for Buffalo) and the player who scored the decisive goal in the gold medal game (Canadian forward Sidney Crosby who plays for Pittsburgh), pre-game introductions included individual recognition of all Olympic hockey players participating in the game.
With the Olympic theme music in the background at the Mellon Arena, the public address announcer announced every player from each international team and the arnea spotlight then focused on each of the players, culminating with Crosby. While the approach produced some interested results, among them a big ovation for Miller in a rival arena, it also showed that the NHL does not believe its product can stand on its own.
As much as pro hockey could use a boost, it has to craft success on more than just the Olympic hype.
No medals were awarded Sunday, but a somewhat suprising U.S. victory against Canada finally got Olympic men's hockey on NBC.
As the game concluded on MSNBC -- with play-by-play man Mike Emrick again showing why he's one of the best hockey broadcasters in the business -- NBC finally showed the action from what was an action-packed game.
Because it was not skating or sking, because it was only a preliminary round game, NBC had pushed the star-studded hockey matchup to MSNBC, where it aired commercial-free, live and in its entirety.
Only with the U.S. victory ensured did NBC mention the game. That came just after 10 p.m., with Bob Costas noting the victory and then, after a break, the network provided a live look-in at the empty arena with Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth recounting the emotion and energy of the game with a few highlights. They were clearly impressed with the game they had witnessed.
Unfortunately, many other sports fans were denied that opportunity. Sure, die-hards with the right cable package or satellite service certainly found the game on MSNBC, but many others missed a chance to watch one of the Games' best moments so far live.
And NBC's crew, led by Emrick and analyst Ed Olczyk, were solid throughout. Olczyk, the former Pittsburgh Penguins coach, was the only person at a news conference before the start of the Games who said he expected the U.S. to emerge with the gold medal from the hockey tournament. Along with their on-air skills, the broadcast's production (camera angles, replays and more) were perfect.
Conversely, the hurried mention of the game on NBC was clearly live TV, because Michaels was audibly talking to his producer at the same time Costas was talking to the nation and trying to introduce him and Collinsworth.
As NBC's Olympic coverage dominates nightly ratings, often overlooked curling -- shown almost exclusively on cable partner MSNBC and usually treated as either a curiosity or joke by U.S. sports fans and viewers -- provides many of the elements those same fans find important in their mainstream sports.
Specifically, it's an easy sport to follow on TV, contests get completed in a compartively quick timeframe and the nature of the sport allows ample room for analysts to provide commentary and criticism.
A Sunday matchup between women's teams from the United States and Canada provided a solid example.
While Canada dominated the match, members of NBC's broadcast crew did just what a group broadcasting an NFL game would during a blowout -- they tapped into technology and repeatedly pointed out mistakes.
First, they capably used a telestrator to analyze and outline strategy. Early in the match, with Canada needing a superb shot to start a chain-reaction among the 42-pound rocks, NBC's Colleen Jones adeptly used the on-screen technlogy to show just where the shot needed to go to work. Not surprisingly, the accurate Canadians made the play work exactly that way.
Several days ago, during their first few curling broadcasts of the Games, they were not nearly as adept with the technology. That they have improved provides a nice benefit for viewers frustrated by the fact that the TV types were stumbling with the technology in the first place.
Second, the NBC team has done something that chafes some curling purists -- it has criticized the execution and strategy of the curlers themselves. They have noted flawed strategy or missed shots, and on Sunday they continually pointed to obviously missed throws by U.S. team member Debbie McCormick. To those purists criticism probably sounds out of place. To casual curling observers and U.S. sports fans just giving the sport a chance, though, it looks and sounds like any other sport they see on TV. And that, even with an unusual sport, makes things seem familiar and worth watching.
Finally, curling broadcasts during the Games have included another technique familiar to viewers of the NFL and other major U.S. sports -- visits to the booth by celebrities and other sports starts. With curling, those visitors have included Vernon Davis, the San Franciso 49ers tight end who was selected as honorary captain for the U.S. curling team, and Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who probably has a pass and an open invitation to visit any venue in Vancouver any time he wants.
Also, the analysts' criticism eventually proved correct -- or at least actionable. When the U.S. team played to its next game, against Sweeden later Sunday, McCormick, the team captain, had replaced herself as the team's final thrower.
During Wednesday's gold rush with some star-studded storylines from the Winter Olympics, NBC's primetime coverage again showed that the Games are not sports on TV.
They're not a vehicle for complete coverage and timely results, either.
They're just a TV program with a sports theme ... and that's really OK.
People who cared, and even those with no interest at all, knew hours before it happened that Lindsey Vonn had won gold in the women's downhill. Her story of talent and overcoming injury has been one of the most omnipresent themes of the Games. Many viewers probably planned to watch at night and see the gold-medal run for themselves because that was the only way they could see it.
As part of its storytelling approach, NBC began its Wednesday night broadcast by focusing on a Fantastic Four, of sorts, some the most marketable U.S. team members -- Vonn, Shani Davis, Apolo Ohno and Shaun White -- who would be the focus of the evening's coverage. They would be the stars of the show, a show set to last for several more hours and designed to drive ratings and maintain viewership -- the same goals of any other TV show.
That approach makes sense on many levels for NBC. Because the Olympics only happen once every four years, viewers might be willing to exercise a bit more patience for results and stories. Additionally, while critics and media members regularly gripe about the lack of live events shown by the network, those people probably represent a minority among sports fans.
Could NBC have shown Vonn's run live Wednesday afternoon on one of its sister channels? Probably. Would it have made sense to do that, when fewer people would've seen it and then show it again at night? Probably not. (Another factor that plays into such decisions are the highlights of the events. Once something airs, it is not available for other networks to air the highlights for a specified period. If NBC would've gone live with it in the afternoon, that would've changed when footage would be available for replay by its rivals. That's why ESPN's morning shows had only still images of Vonn.)
While NBC's approach makes sense on many levels, some confusing warts remain. Most notably, they come in terms of access and timing.
Examples from Wednesday night's coverage include: -- A nearly two-hour gap between when Davis won his gold medal in the 1,000-meter speed skating event until the time an interview with him was shown on TV. He crossed the finished line at 8:43 p.m. He was finally interviewed -- after several "coming up soon" teases -- at 10:40 p.m. That's silly and unacceptable. Especially because all of what happened in the interim was hardly meaningful. -- A lack of follow up on the Vonn story. OK, her run was shown in the Davis interim, airing at 9:36 p.m., but appropriate context and reaction was missing. With Vonn's gold-medal run actually completed hours before, NBC should've had a longer interview or something new from her. Yes, the network designates what it's showing "live" and what it's not with an on-screen graphic but that's a subtlety missed by some and not always consistently practiced. Instead of showing the run and adding context, though, viewers got the run only -- and the impression that it had just happened. Or had happened more recently than it did. -- A wonderful shot of snowboarder Louie Vito programming his iPod before a run with no follow up about what he listens to while competing. Or whether he's alone in using music during the run, or if it's something all snowboarders do. Something like that would've helped make the competitors more personal. Then again, it was Vito, not White -- and he was the predetermined focus.
More nitpicking ... -- During White's preliminary run, which earned a huge score of 45.8 (out of 50), commentators said the run was spectacular and would easily earn him a spot in the halfpipe final. Then, when the score was announced, they said he has a "sigh of relief." Why? If he was clearly the best and put down a good run, why would he be relieved? -- While the speed skating venue had problems with its ice again Wednesday, something NBC mentioned within the first five minutes of its broadcast, no reports ever followed about the situation. After the logistical problems the Games have endured at that venue and others, you start to wonder if NBC has decided not to pile on the Vancouver folks in that regard. -- With several mentions about the "breakout" and surprising performances by Korean speed skaters, there was not attempt to explain why. When unexpected results surface at the Games, cynical and even long-time viewers inevitably wonder why -- because the Olympics have a long history of performance-enhancing efforts eventually being revealed. And the way it was covered, or not covered, just allows more speculation. -- After White's first run in the finals, with the highest score of the night, how could a camera other than NBC's be the one that was in the foreground for a shot. So, NBC viewers saw White, and also the back of the head and back of the camera from another country's feed. It was just surprising they did not have another options. That at least happened live, though.
A tw0-hour delay for a pothole interrupted the Daytona 500 on Sunday but Fox Sports did about the best it could -- from start-of-the-season talk to an interview with NASCAR chairman Brian France -- as a way to fill time.
What was most lacking during coverage of the delay was a closer camera angle of what was happening at the fix spot or even more specific information about the attempt to fix the situation. Still, racing fans are a loyal bunch, so many probably stayed with the coverage -- and those who did not could flip to NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics.
During the race delay, NBC had live coverage of the nordic combined as Johnny Spillane of the United States earned the silver medal (the first for a U.S. competitor in the event) while three U.S. competitors finished among the top six in the event. On TV it was simply cross country skiing, the second half of two events in the nordic combined. That might not serve as appointment viewing for some sports fans, but the event finished in just over 25 minutes and it was contested in four laps. Again, that's something casual viewers could grasp, and certainly any who had switched over from NASCAR.
In addition to that event Sunday, NBC had Apolo Ohno finishing second in the 1,500-meter short track speedskating event Saturday night -- another easy-to-understand event that can engage viewers because of its physicality and speed. So far, it seems like a good start in terms of coverage and storylines for the Olympic network.
For NASCAR, the weekend also included Saturday's Nationwide Series race, which included the debut of Danica Patrick in the series. Some certainly think she got too much attention leading up to and during the race, but she was clearly the storyline. And, after some early race struggles, she seemed to be getting more comfortable in the car. Nobody realistically expected a top-10 or even top-20 finish in her debut, and her eventual 35th-place result was the result of getting caught in an accident she could not avoid and that was not her fault.
She'll be back, with the accompanying attention, this weekend when the series visits California.
One thing ESPN avoided or missed with coverage of the race, though, was Tony Stewart's patient pass of Patrick. He started deep in the field, came up on Patrick fairly early and kept his distance -- clearly wary of any rookie driver -- before eventually getting around her. While the broadcast crew talked about him moving through the field, it seemed like they missed Stewart's obvious attempt to give Patrick as much room as possible. From his perspective, had he pushed hard and gotten her loose, he would've been the bad guy. At the same time, if he'd have gotten to close and she would've wobbled it could've hurt his chances -- and he eventually won the race.
His pass was not a big moment in the race, but it was a subtle thing that could've been addressed for viewers.
On Sunday, Fox Sports missed another obvious-on-TV moment. They talked about legendary Richard Petty driving the pace car for the Daytona 500, but a view of the car on the track clearly showed the 82-year-old "king" of stock-car racing in the passenger seat. Not that it matters, because nobody really expects Petty to drive the car, but it was just an example of missing the obvious.
This Olympic Stadium is inspired by the historical transformation of the Stadium of Domitian into Piazza Navona in Rome and also to some extent the post-games strategies of Atlanta's Olympic Stadium, which was reconfigured into Turner Field; Albertville's circus-like Théâtre des Cérémonies, which like a circus big top was wholly dismantled and recycled; and the future London stadium, whose seating capacity will be downgraded, the same legacy plan for Chicago's holdover stadium for its failed bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Rather than remaining a stadium in a city already saturated with athletic and outdoor cultural venues, this proposed stadium will be adaptively reused post-games into low-rise affordable/low income housing or for mixed uses. It'll be truncated down, and the excised modular units will be clustered around the stadium proper. This newly formed neighborhood will then be infilled with further development to reach a certain density. Additionally, the stadium proper itself will be carved out into segments (not too many, perhaps just two or three openings) in order to open up the interior to the urban grid and link it to the city's Olmsted-designed Emerald necklace of large parks and green boulevards. This open space may be a park, a plaza or whatever the winning proposal will be in an official design competition to repurpose the grassy turf.
The stadium exterior may have the ebullience of FAT, the lushness of a vertical garden or the networked interactivity of a vast multimedia screen of pure data. But the design will have to bear in mind its edited future and that the interior, too, will be a facade facing a park/plaza/whatever.
This stadium or the Olympics needn't be in Chicago.
News arose before the Olympic Games really began, and NBC responded perfectly.
As the network's coverage of the Winter Games from Vancouver began Friday night, at a time when officials hoped to hype Canada's relationship with the United States and provide those travelogue features about the host Olympic country, death interrupted.
Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21, a men's luge competitor from the republic of Georgia, was killed during a training run Friday when he lost control on the last turn and was tossed outside the icy track. His body ragdolled against a steel support beam and, at nearly 90 mph, the accident was deadly.
With hours to prepare before its network coverage began, NBC covered and reported the story well. There was no way they could avoid the story and did not -- talking to Olympic officials, U.S. luge competitors and many others.
Perhaps most surprising in the nearly 5-minute segment was video of the crash itself. With the network taping everything that happens at the Games, to prepare for when coverage actually begins and to have as sample footage of competitors, NBC had video of the crash and they showed it -- twice, in slow motion.
Some might think that was too much, but in our video-crazed society it was probably expected. Without the footage, it would be difficult to visualize what had happened.
Most striking, and probably unnecessary, though, was a still image of first responders trying to revive Kumaritashvili. The image was not gruesome, but the video was more than enough for the story -- if only because it was not as personal as the photo.
Again, with a U.S. network's broadcast there's little danger of any images catching family and friends by surprise, but NBC certainly tiptoed toward the line of good taste with the still image. That's nitpicking, though, because NBC opened the games at its best covering a difficult and unexpected story.
Really, the weakest part of NBC's first 15 minute on air was Tom Brokaw. The anchor's comments bookended the expected U.S.-Canada relationship story and while the piece provided good perspective Brokaw seemed out of place and unnecessarily trite as the piece ended. Surely, the thin-skinned among jingoistic U.S. fans will take note of Brokaw's closing comments about the strength of Canada's economy.
After months of network hype, which hit a fever pitch in the past week during prime-time programming, NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics begins Friday night with the Opening Ceremony.
During the 17 days of competition in Canada, NBC and its numerous outlets -- USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal HD and Universal Sports -- will produce 835 hours or programming.
On its main network coverage, NBC Sports will feature Bob Costas as the lead host during prime-time hours while Al Michaels serves as daytime host. For Michaels, it's the first time he's worked an Olympics since 1988.
For its late-night coverage, NBC Sports again turns to steady Mary Carillo. Overall, NBC has 53 announcers for the Games, seven of whom are native Canadians.
On Saturday, competition begins in eight sports, with six medal events. The two sports that begin that day and do not award medals are luge and hockey -- which gets its regular Olympic hype and love from many commentators and sports-talk types during the Games.
Those folks might not normally watch hockey, but they'll pledge their willingness to do so during the Games because of the "wide-open style of play" possible on the "bigger sheet of ice."
To cover hockey, and continue the hype, the NBC Sports team includes some of the same experts it utilizes on its NHL coverage -- Mike Milbury and Ed Olczyk.
For the month of February, including the two weeks when the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be staged, you can participate in the fifth and latest installation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Vectorial Elevation in Vancouver.
Twenty robotic searchlights have been spread out along the English Bay, and via a three-dimensional interface on the installation's website, their positions can be reconfigured by anyone. From anywhere in the world, you can redesign the skyline of Vancouver.
You can render the intricate vaulting system of a Gothic cathedral or the geometric tessellation of a Persian mosque; inscribe cryptic constellations onto passing clouds; or cultivate a photonic bouquet for Valentine's Day.
Perhaps someone might want to recreate a childhood memory of searchlights that once beckoned them to a glamorous Hollywood movie premier while another might one to evoke the torched nighttime skies of London during the Blitz. Indeed, searchlights add spectacle and a sense of excitement to any event, thus making them perfect additions to the festive environment of the Olympics. But they are also harbingers of violence and destruction, and of course, the Olympics have a long urbicidal track record.
In any case, all designs will be placed on queue, then projected for everyone to see on site or on webcams, and finally given their own webpage with photographs as documentation of your participation.
So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we'll help them out.
Almost everything is going for Chicago. Its infrastructure is less than perfect for the huge Summer Olympics crowds, but would be more than able to handle the modest attendance at a Winter Olympics and would definitely be unmatched by the usual winter bid cities and their smaller scale public transportation systems. Its gargantuan hotel industry would easily surpass capacity requirements.
There will also be no need to build a hulking, temporary 80,000-seat stadium, as Soldier Field will be more than able to seat the smaller crowd at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. And perhaps it can even host another event. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the venue for the ceremonies was also the same arena for ski jumping events. As the following photograph shows, this combination is possible at Soldier Field.
And as we re-imagined it a few months ago for a new century, this new prosthetic mountain analogue would be hinged, meaning it can be flipped up and down. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower.
It's the technolicious descendant of the first Ferris wheel, built in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
It's easy to re-render venues in the failed summer bid into venues for a winter bid. For instance, next door to Soldier Field is the cluster of convention halls where various sports such as gymnastics would have been held; its sprawling spaces would be converted to house figure skating, speed skating and curling competitions. The United Center — formerly proposed for basketball — would host ice hockey competitions; it already serves as the home of the city's professional hockey and basketball teams anyway.
Some of the large urban parks in the old bid will again be drafted into the new bid. At Millennium Park, medal ceremonies will take place against the backdrop of the greatest skyline in the world. One or two will be re-landscaped for freestyle skiing, snowboarding and sliding competitions. As for the serpentine race track used in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, one is tempted to hire Frank Gehry to replicate his BP Pedestrian Bridge.
Since all the venues will be wholly situated inside a major global metropolis and not in some sequestered, exclusive mountain spa resorts hundreds of gas-guzzling miles away from the supposed host city, chances are that they will be heavily used after the games; maybe a subculture of urban snowboarders will clique together. Perhaps one of the better legacies of the games would be the popular adaptation of winter sports (some or all of which are seen as the domain of the privileged) by new socioeconomic and racial classes.
In any case, during the summer, these same installations will add interesting landforms to the parks. The slopping concave hollow of the half-pipe could be re-landscaped as the seating lawn for an outdoor theater. The sliding track, meanwhile, becomes a monumental piece of public sculpture-cum-skating park.
Of course, there is one major thing that's going against Chicago. It's not the availability of snow, since this is also a concern in many alpine areas. Climate change is evaporating glaciers everywhere, and natural snow cover grows increasingly tenuous.
Chicago's gritty landscape shouldn't be much of a handicap as well. It may seem that way at first, as it definitely doesn't embody a certain sort of nature — rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc. — which is presumably a prerequisite for certain venues. But have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?
The one glaring negative is the city's glacial-flattened topography. Where does one hold the alpine events?
They'll be held in an artificial mountain. Obviously.
But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.
And its scale will need to be exponentially inflated. This is the Make No Little Plans for the 21st century.
If one is worried that no future host city will ever be able to architecturally outdo the Beijing Olympics (as if organizing and building the games once again in a free and democratic country with no ethnic cleansing being carried out along its periphery isn't enough to surpass it?), this Everest of the Prairie will surely top a fantasy list of the greatest Olympic venues.
How can the IOC mafia refuse this big, bold vision?
It's an Olmstedian park writ large, and it's going be sited in the heavy industrial Lake Calumet sector of the South Side. Unless the Lakefront is larger, this will be Chicago's largest public open space, something which this part of the city sorely needs. Moreover, it will provide the opportunity to finally clean up this Superfund site.
Embedded within this double twin of the Loop Skyline and Millennium Park are spaces for use by athletes, officials and spectators. One could also hallow out spaces for the media center and even a satellite Olympic Village. After the games, they'll be converted into community centers, offices and residences, even theaters and indoor rock climbing caverns, all sheathed by the largest green roof in the world. And the views will undoubtedly be spectacular. On the outside surface, meanwhile, parts of the mountain will be turned into a refuge for imported wildlife.
The shipping industry is in a crisis, reportsDer Spiegel. The brutal downturn in global trade has left many container ships idling in ports around the world and will soon be accompanied by newer ships placed on order during an economic boom that seemed unending. With this much glut in the market, no doubt rental rates are dropping precipitously. When some of the shipping companies go bankrupt, perhaps anyone would then be able to afford to buy (not just rent one) a Panamax or post-Panamax vessels at bargain basement prices.
But then what will you do with it? You'd offer it, of course, to the Chicago Olympic Organizing Committee (that is, if Il Duce gets his wish) for conversion into their Aquatics Complex. Park it right in the middle of Lake Michigan; cleanse it of its toxic fuel, lead pipes and other hazardous materials; gut it; and then install all the necessary accoutrements of an Olympic natatorium.
Not enough space? Simply purchase a second vessel and a third one for good measure; they'll be similarly dirt cheap, we're sure of it. And then solder one to the port side of your first purchase and the other to the starboard side: two aisles and a central nave.
In the past couple of months, the IOC mafia has been inspecting the four cities vying for the rights to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Naturally, our curiosity in Chicago's candidacy heightened a bit; we even felt compelled to look through the city's updated bid book, heading straight first for what people really care about: the pretty pictures of proposed venues.
Amidst the technicolor gumbo of humdrums, the aquatics complex is a noticeable thick glop. Remember when you're watching a major stadium sporting event and the camera pans for a few seconds outside, catching sights of adjacent buildings — those temporary structures wrapped in white tarpaulin, topped with awnings, used as crafts service stations and staging area? Placed as it is next to the proposed Olympic Stadium, Chicago's aquatics complex is sort of like a collection of those outhouses.
Of course, this is not to say that the venue isn't going to redeem itself in other key areas. Aesthetically unimpressive it may be, it could leave a truly lasting legacy, filled in the many years to come with raucous kids and their families from the surrounding neighborhoods instead of staying empty until the rare national or international competition comes along, accumulating large maintenance bills with only the Flickr hordes frotteurising its skillfully designed skin to keep it company. Bucking the trend of the past two Olympics, it might not also morph into some ethically obscene monster, disenfranchising people left and right, funneling funds from social services and ruining the city's cultural heritage. It might even attain a LEED Quadruple Gold-Diamond Crown rating. And during the two weeks of competition, everyone's spirits are elevated higher than ever before, their soul stirred into rapture.
All we're saying is that the physical elements of the proposal could be more interesting.
As a counter venue, then, we propose a concept aquatics complex in the middle of Lake Michigan.
The superstructure, constructed on land and towed into place, will be wholly submerged, tethered to the lakebed with anchors or resting on pylons. Underwater may be an entire oil rig or Tatlin's decoiled tower, but only jutting out will be the viewing stands, the diving platforms and a few other decorative verticals. A circulation network of gangplanks, metallic or of fine timber, will just break the surface.
While the main competition pools are closed containers, the practice lanes may just simply be on open water. The actual spaces of these ancillary pools are delineated by border frames. These Euclidian hydro-geometries, in turn, will be arranged so that from Google Maps, they will look like they belong in a Piet Mondrian grid painting or a Suprematist collage.
Last week, Phronesisaical reminded us again of Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension, a piece of performance art, which they describe as “a brilliant commentary on war and the complicity of those for whom distance creates a sense of false reality and moral neutrality.”
For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space [at Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery], while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.
While it won't be as powerful or even catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, how about installing webcams to watch over landscapes as their mineral wealth gets extracted? Next to it would be a garden hose, with which you could target passing miners. Dirt clinging onto them will be washed away; they may even be refreshed by its cool waters. And you, the direct beneficiaries of their labor, will also be cleansed of your consumerist sins. Tele-absolution.
This performance art will be titled It's the least that I could do.
Also last week (and on the same day), Design Under Sky pointed us to TRASH: anycoloryoulike, a public art installation in which “standard piles of trash are replaced with artist-created bags” to decorate the streets of New York. The project simultaneously “beautifies the city and calls attention to waste consumption.”
Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.”
Continuing on with this last week meme, here are two items posted the day before Phronesisaical and Design Under Sky published theirs.
Firstly, BLDGBLOG covered a “bouncy chapel” for the penitent on vacation on the beaches of Sardinia. It “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
It also reminded us of another inflatable church installed this May on a parking lot in Troy, New York. Though not built for traditional worship, it was a 1:1 scale reproduction of the church — “a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery” — that once stood on the same site.
Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.
Seen through the diaphanous walls of this ghost church, visitors themselves appear ghost-like, ectoplasmic, haunting the same space as the past.
Secondly, Dezeen showed some photos of a stair-like viewing platform, which the Office for Subversive Architecture attached to the 17-kilometer-long, blue fence surrounding London's future Olympic Park. Climb up, and for a moment you can infiltrate “the secrecy surrounding preparations for the 2012 Olympics.”
It recalls to mind Heavy Trash's viewing platforms for gated communities in Los Angeles. Some photos here.
To borrow language from Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, they are framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience and to suit a sociopolitical agenda.
Many have posted Michel de Broin's Superficielle before, and it was Vvork's turn last week. It's a lovely sculpture that renders the landscape into a Cubist puzzle.
Quoting de Broin:
Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror. The large stone, tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings. In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects one cannot be mislead by its presence, yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.
A horrible, horrible last sentence, but a marvelous, marvelous installation nonetheless.
What would it mean to the Netherlands if we were to organize the Olympic Games in 2028? How do you ensure that the stadiums used for the Games can still have a proper function afterwards? How do you organize the infrastructure and mobility for the Games? Do you combine all the functions in a single building, or do you spread the Games throughout the country?
MVRDV (in collaboration with the Academy of Architecture Rotterdam and the Berlage Institute) investigated the feasibility and the spatial chances of the 2028 Olympic Games in the Netherlands. Themes such as climate change, water management and energy production were connected in various ways with solutions for stadiums, infrastructure and accommodation for athletes.
If you don't find yourself nowhere near the Netherlands before the exhibition ends in September 21, you can purchase the book.
Pruned turned 3 yesterday. To mark the start of Year 4, we return briefly to our first post, specifically to the referenced book edited by Joy Kenseth, The Age of the Marvelous, because, should it need to be disclosed, the Marvelous has been the overall theme of this blog from its inception and Kenseth's volume our editorial guide. We dredge, in other words, the interweb ether for “anything that lay outside the ordinary” and has “the capacity to excite the particular emotional responses of wonder, surprise, astonishment, or admiration.”
In the chapter written by Mark S. Weil, then, we see the above etching of a naumachia, or mock sea battle, in the flooded courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti. Staged as part of the festivities of 1589 celebrating a Medici marriage, it was “intended to amaze invited guests with their visual effects and to impress them with the wealth and power of the court.”
As illustrated by Orazio Scarabelli, eighteen Christian and Turkish ships do their stylized dance in front of a miniature fortress. Oars and sail masts interlock like the limbs of Busby Berkeley showgirls. Voluptuous hulls ram into each other in diagonal confusion. The once solid ground is now a vacillating carpet of faceless actors performing on cramped, presumably cacophonous pageant floats. Man, which had just been fleshed out and deified by the likes of Michelangelo, reverts back into the murky crowd. It's Mannerist mayhem in the bowels of Renaissance clarity.
And could you believe that that wasn't even the showstopper? Weil quotes Alois Nagler describing the program before this naumachia:
The greatest excitement was caused by a garden which, propelled by invisible forces, moved into the courtyard and unfolded on all sides to the tittering of birds. In the garden were imitations of towers, fortresses, pyramids, ships, horsemen, and animals all made out of greenery. A cloud of birds swarmed up before the Grand Duchess and one of the animals landed in the bride's lap, a good omen.
Weil, unfortunately, doesn't provide an image, if there is one.
In any case, the staging of a naumachia has not gone entirely out of fashion. If we don't count military exercises in such anxious terrains as the Taiwan Strait, the Sea of Japan and the Persian Gulf, the most recent one, of similar monumental scale, was carried out for the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992.
We see the Mediterranean Sea rendered as a pointillist foam of humanity, each singular speck wearing a costume that seems to have been repurposed from loose tiles at Gaudí's Park Güell into gigantic Pringles. However individualized each one may appear up close, seen from the bleachers they coagulate into a kind of anti-humanist whole, flowing and ebbing in tandem, self-organizing, as if unconsciously following the physics of hydrology. They inundate. They make waves. They shudder as though whelmed by rough weather.
Navigating this simulated froth are the two belligerent sides of the fake naval war. On one side are the monstrous inhabitants of the deep, such as the Hydra with its inflatable tentacles vigorously flagellating in the currents. Other beasts reside here, too. There is plague and hunger and maybe even boredom, but which of the three is — or whether all of them are — theatrically evoked by The Giant Virus-like Spiky Ball and The Teeming Shoal-Army of Knives is difficult to pinpoint.
On the other side are the heirs of Hercules, adventurers exploring the undiscovered contours of this temporary landscape. They wear dominatrix costumes and act in very broad strokes, but again, whether these details are intended to scale their performance for the jumbo television screen and the exaggerated dimensions of the stadium is hard to know. Nevertheless, these heros win the battle, or at least survive the attacks. To commemorate their victory over Evil, they found a city that would later grow into Barcelona.
Their ship, meanwhile, is constructed out of Cor-ten steel; that is, we think it's Richard Serra's favorite medium. Otherwise, it's something metallic, an expression of Catalonia's industrial virility. This is the Olympics, after all, and everything about this twentieth-century naumachia is practically drowning in symbolism.
If one were to pursue an extended political reading of this elaborately staged spectacle, one can make a case that it's a subversive call for an independent Catalonia. Barcelona, the choreographers argue, has its own creation story, its own mythology and even its own national epic akin to the American Civil War and the French Revolution. Before Franco, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moors and even the Romans, the city already had a history. Moreover, you will not find here bullfighters or flamenco dancers wearing their peinetas and maniacally clucking their castanets — which at the turn of the 19th century were arbitrarily co-opted and standardized as the national identity; in Catalonia, that blood sport and those quaint customs might as well be of English origins. And you will not see here evidence of Andalucia, which apparently is the hegemonic national landscape. Instead, in this corner of the Iberian peninsula, you'll encounter a foreign landscape, a sea-drenched terrain (until recently, that is) populated by the worldly love-hybrids of Picasso and Jean-Paul Gaultier.
Since we are talking about the Olympics, all of these lead us to wonder: will there be a naumachia during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games?
After Barcelona, the next three Olympics had their own watery musical. Atlanta evoked the swamps of the South; Old Man River made an appearance. Sidney told the creation story of Australia, who, like Aphrodite, emerged from the sea. And in Athens, the Mediterranean Sea was rendered again, that time with real water. If Beijing were to follow precedence, spectators would be privy to a hydro-extravangaza. After all, China is building the biggest water project in the history of the world; staging a naumachia would be a walk in the park.
Returning to the mock sea battle at the Palazzo Pitti, Weil remarked that the production “served to reinforce political dogma, such as the superiority of Christian forces over those of the Turk.” So will the Beijing festivities also “reinforce political dogma?” The answer, of course, is that they will. You can be sure that naumachia or no naumachia there will be propaganda to be broadcast from Herzog & de Meuron's stadium to an audience in the billions.
Or next door inside the frothy facade of the aquatics center.
Lined around the flooded courtyard, the Chinese will see their divers and swimmers herald their official re-entry into the world stage as a muscular nation. The rest of us will simply be impressed by the show of wealth and power.
Last week, occasional tipster Chris D. sent us an email that instantly put us into an uncontrollable state of giddiness. He writes:
I live in Holland which is very flat, so there's nowhere for the kids to go sledding when it snows. However, the Technical University of Delft has a library that's a sort of modern architecture grass-roofed four-story gently-sloping hill. When it snowed a week ago I took a few pictures showing the kids going crazy sledding down the library.
Also in the email were some links, including the architect's website, where we read that “the vast lawn is lifted on one edge like a sheet of paper and shapes the roof of the new library. A roof that can be walked upon. The grass roof of the library is freely accessible for walking and lounging, creating a new amenity for the whole campus.”
So perhaps not only can this building open up new multi-use strategies for urban open spaces but also, one hopes, inspire Alps-less and Rockies-less cities to create viable bids to host the Winter Olympic Games. Mt. Fuji or the Arctic Circle need not have to be nearby. A bit of artificial snow and some dramatic re-contouring of terrain, and cities unblemished by tectonic uplifts can compete with the likes of Salzburg, Sochi and Jaca.
Chicago, for instance. Here at Pruned HQ, a new Delftian library could serve as the venue for aerial and moguls freestyle skiing. Or the halfpipe.
Instead of taking a ride on ski lifts, alpine skiers will instead ride on elevators in the city's newest skyscraper up to their starting gates before slamming down on the building's sloping façades.
And rather than through a forest of Christmas trees populated by reindeers and other cute woodland creatures, cross country skiers will navigate their way through restored prairie flora and reanimated Pleistocene megafauna at Millennium Park v2.0, a new sprawling green roof covering subterranean parking garages, railyards and even the West Loop segments of the Dan Ryan, Kennedy and Eisenhower Expressways.
No doubt Chicago's Pritzker family will ask their lackey Frank Gehry to design the luge, skeleton and bobsled tracks to be sited at this new park.
And why not a hockey stadium arena atop the figure ice skating venue atop the speed skating tracks atop the Medal Ceremony Plaza right on Block 37, further densifying downtown. The Über-Loop.
In other words, the first truly urban winter olympics, one that will also please the legacy-minded IOC when it comes to post-games use.
One also hopes that the monopolistic hold on Olympic master planning by the big landscape architecture firms (Sydney/Hargreaves Associates; Beijing/Sasaki; London/EDAW) can be broken finally, allowing for mid-size and emerging studios to be hired.
