Bidding for this oil drilling station augmented with a lighthouse will start this spring. One wonders what potential buyers would want to use it for. Might they convert it into an oceanic summer McMansion with an amazing 360º ocean view (that is, if they're lucky enough to get financing), the vanguard of an incoming sea-level-rise real estate speculative bubble?
We actually don't mind this sort of irrational housing fad, if it means seeing beachfront McMansions get razed to the ground and rebuilt offshore as part of a managed retreat program while at the same time curtailing further coastal development. If it means halting the billions of tax revenues annually earmarked to protect these properties of the very few, money which can be used in ways that can benefit the very many, then by all means speculate away.
One item that we ended up not including in our survey of reclaimedunderspaces is a proposal by West 8 “for transforming the 10.8 km disused railway line surrounding the city-heart of Gwangju [South Korea] into a usable green corridor.” One element in their proposal is a botanic bridge containing massive concrete tree-pots planted with representative samplings of indigenous Korean flora.
Which would creep along the entire length of the redesigned railway line in staggered but graceful steps. A forest on move and on the prowl for new vistas, rustling their branches and leaves melodically with their own velocity.
Or not.
On rooftops across the city and with binoculars on hand, people will wait for these walking shrubs to pass by and try to identify one or all of the specimens, which would be changed periodically. Treewatching. It's the new urban hobby.
While desperately trying to organize our archives, we discovered an entry to an old ideas competition (whose website has since dissipated into the digital ether) for the transformation of Quito's international airport after its planned closing. It was designed by a trans-university team of professors and students from Arizona State University, the University of Illinois and Cal Poly. In the interest of disseminating ideas, especially good ones, we're reproducing their images below.
They're quite gorgeous, luscious even. A closer look reveals that some of the scale figures look as though they've been drawn by a deviant medieval monk dreamt up by Umberto Eco. There are fishermen with haloed cat heads, sheep-headed urban farmers also with halos, a goat-headed flâneur with a parasol; it's a menagerie of cryptids catalogued by Charles Avery during an altermodern journey to a magical realist landscape.
The designers weren't being silly, of course, because this graphic style was meant to convey a central concept. Ken McCown, one of the team members wrote, “We saw Ecuador as this country the UN recognizes with Megadiversity. With this megadiversity concept, we wanted to show that the people were intertwined with the landscape systems, and we linked this into the Catholic narrative of the saints into the pictures. So you have people that are part-human, part-animal performing the narratives of the saints while interacting with landscape processes. Religion/Humanities and Science together?”
Quoting the project statement:
This design for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador celebrates the rebirth of Latin American culture as the last vestiges of colonialism wane in the early 21st century. It capitalizes on local conditions to grow a design suited to the needs of the city while celebrating Ecuador's status as a country of megadiversity. The Ecuadorian flag is the inspiration that organizes the design and provides a symbol for the capitol city. Three bands compose the reuse of the airport lands for a new urban park: agriculture, water, and market. These bands correspond to the colors of the flag, the yellow zone is agriculture and park use, the blue is water and the market area is the red zone.
We won't try to summarize the rest of it and instead will copy-paste it in full in the comments. For those that revel in project statements, it's a good read, recommended to our student readers. The entire proposal is quite pragmatic, not overly stylized or indulgently complicated. Their considered approach to restitch Quito's urban fabric is convincing. If the competition wasn't merely an ideas competition but actually was looking for something to build, it might have had a good chance at garnering the top prize and a commission.
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.
Pedreres de s'Hostal is a disused stone quarry on the island of Minorca, Spain. In 1994, the quarry saw its last stonecutters, and since then, the non-profit organization Líthica has been hard at work transforming this industrial landscape into a post-industrial heritage park.
While not yet complete, the quarry must already be quite something to experience. To enter, one has to take a deep plunge into an abyss, a descent that may or may not be reminiscent of ancient myths. Persephone's abduction? Dante's guided tour of Tartarus?
Upon reaching the bottom of the central void room, you are compressed into an insignificant atom by monolithic walls, whose patterned textures of machine incisions and impossible staircases add to a hallucinatory effect. The scale is repressive, destabilizing.
Should you regain back your bearing, there is a labyrinth of geometrically cut canyons to explore. You look up, and the eternally blue sky of the Mediterranean is framed by unnaturally straight edges, like a James Turrell skyscape, disorienting.
This is where you get lost, where even time gets sucked into dark crevices.
Or would it be more accurate to say that time is preserved here? Centuries of chiseling and sawing, the gradual subduction of the earth, slabs of bedrock carted away by generations of Minorcans: all are recorded on the rockface. Even the tools of the trade have been left to rust and decay out in the open, for instance, a sawing machine. There is even a short segment of a rail line.
To add to your disorientation, there is a reconstruction of an enclosed Medieval garden, one cloistered by vertiginous cliffs.
What on earth is a Medieval garden doing here?
Are you actually walking through the excavated remains of a Medieval city, buried long ago under volcanic ash like Pompeii, then mineralized and now in the process of extraction after its recent discovery?
Or was this whole landscape the aborted attempt at imitating the underground cities of Cappadocia or the sculpted ruins of Petra, the reason for its termination long forgotten? Now Nature is busy everywhere reclaiming its momentary lost territory. Stay here long enough and you yourself might similarly be absorbed, turned feral.
In actuality, not only has the quarry been turned into an outdoor history museum decorated with artifacts, it's been landscaped as an arboretum showcasing native Minorcan flora. In keeping with the stonecutters' tradition of cultivating orchards and vegetable gardens in disused parts of the quarry, each excavated spaces plays host to a different plant community. One quarry room, for instance, has been set aside for fruit trees. Another one contains bushes and shrubs, and in another, cultivated olive trees and aromatic plants. In one quarry, there are ponds of freshwater Minorcan plants.
Once a landfill and fated to the amnesiac wilderness, divorced from collective memory, Pedreres de s'Hostal is clearly now a hotspot of activity.
And a model for the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes everywhere.
In August this year, a design competition was launched to generate ideas to repurpose Quito's Mariscal Sucre International Airport after its planned closing in a couple of years.
According to the organizers, “the coming availability of 126 hectares of space with a flat topography, located in the midst of a consolidated area, which thanks to the decision of the Quito Metropolitan Council, will be transformed into a park, constitutes an exceptional event and a unique opportunity. This leads us to rethink the city and to take advantage of the opportunity to set forth solutions to multiple issues linked to: changes in the use and building capacity of land; improvement in mobility and transversal connectivity; expansion of infrastructure; provision of green areas and public spaces; improvement in environmental conditions, recovery of urban landscapes and environment; improvement of the quality of life of present and future inhabitants of the city.”
We only learned of this competition, because two teams that had submitted entries uploaded their images onto their Flickr accounts after the results were announced late last month. Both projects are quite spectacular, visually gorgeous and brimming with ideas. We'll post them separately, and should we find more entries and like what we see, we'll publish them here as well.
The first team, then, is Paisajes Emergentes, a studio collective based in Medellin and Bogota, Colombia. Its members include Luis Callejas, Edgar Mazo and Sebastian Mejia.
This is their Second Prize-winning entry, in all its linear awesomeness.
Per the competition brief, water has to be central element in the design. After all, the organizers refer to the future park as Parque del Lago.
In response, Paisajes Emergentes flooded the 3-kilometer runway to create an “active hydrologic park,” which they then partitioned into 6 programmatically discrete areas.
1. At the north end of the park are wetlands. These bioremediate water redirected from the other end of the park after having run its course through this outrageously elongated pool.
2. Relatively clean water from the wetlands is then used to fill an open air aquarium. The tanks here contain fluvial species from tropical ecosystems.
3. An aquatic botanical garden comes next in this hydrological assembly line. Whereas the faunal variety is showcased in the aquarium, tropical plants are the main attractions here, though both are equally essential to maintain any kind of a robust ecosystem.
4. From there, water moves into circular water tanks, where it is mechanically oxygenated and filtrated. Pedestrian walkways involve people with an infrastructure and a process that are usually hidden from them. Meanwhile, one has to question the placement of these tanks. Shouldn't it be at the head of the line to take care of the heavy duty stuff? Given the park's closed system and the proven ability of constructed wetlands to improve water quality biologically, is a “conventional” treatment plant, of that scale, even necessary?
5. In any case, the water must meet legal standards of quality if they are to fill the public pools and thermal baths. A combination of wind and solar energy is used to heat this aquatic complex.
6. Finally, we come to a recreational lake, where the water is collected in subterranean tanks to satisfy the need of irrigation systems and general maintenance of the park before.
Additional activities are also programmed adjacent to this central pool. For instance, the old terminal building is turned into a convention center. Soft materials and walls are removed, and the remaining forest of columns confine 3 theaters inside hanging gardens.
There is also an open air aviation museum, where a fleet of planes are allowed to rot in their obsolescence. A wetland fed by waters from the botanical garden is allowed colonize this area. In time, the planes become a sort of Picturesque ruins of the industrial age, sinking into deep mire, crumbling in the wilds.
Meanwhile, it would have been nice to see how the park relates to its context, apart from suggesting amenities the local community may (or may not) need. Graphically, the site looks divorced from the urban grid. All paths radiate out of the terminal building and one parking lot on the other half, then terminate just before they reach the edge of the park. Opportunities for more meaningful connectivity between the surrounding neighborhoods and between the north and south parts of the city seem to have been missed.
Perhaps because it's getting colder by the day here in the North, but Jules Spinatsch's photographic series Snow Management came to our minds today, specifically, this photo of an icy stalagmite that at first seems to have formed after a water main had burst:
But then details begin to come into focus, such as what appears to be advertising banners by The North Face and what could likely be two timekeeping clocks. Since the series as a whole documents the artificial landscape of Alpine sports and leisure, one can reasonably conclude that this is a venue for interior ice-climbing races. Spiraling around this atrium would be viewing balconies.
What else could it be?
Spinatsch doesn't offer much information. We know the building is in Austria, France, Italy or Switzerland, but exactly where is a mystery. The building itself is difficult to ascertain. What kind is it?
Is it a freestanding concrete silo constructed solely for this single outdoor-indoor sport?
Is it a multi-story parking garage with a secondary function?
Is it a defunct mall, an early victim of the credit crunch, now repurposed?
Of these possibilities, it is the last that we find the most compelling. Imagine that the collapse of the global financial sector and the resulting dramatic fall in consumer spending have caused scores of retail chain stores to declare bankruptcy. Malls everywhere are shuttered.
Imagine further that, as but one adaptive re-use, these abandoned cathedrals of capitalism are turned into ice-climbing clubhouses. Where people had once gorged thousands of calories in one serving, now people are burning those same calories belaying an icefall in the Food Court. Where once the multi-carded and the debt-ridden had found comfort in materialism, they now come to experience a similar adrenalin rush from the prospect of multiple compound fracture, if not death. Where once they had hopped from store to store in a zombie-like delirium, there, in a kind of Waldian introspection midway up a simulated glacier (Thoreau's frozen New England pond reconfigured vertically, if you will), now they are considering a fundamental alteration to their lifestyles, a change for the better.
“You can’t bring your old habits here,” Lebbeus Woods was quoted as saying in a recent New York Timesarticle. “If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent yourself.”
Of course, he was talking about his own architectural spaces, but maybe it could be similarly prescribed to these repurposed architectures of our own economic demise. And for anything newly built.
In an undated BBC Newsphoto essay, Katrina Manson writes:
During Sierra Leone's brutal 1991 - 2002 civil war, dozens of people were executed on the Aberdeen Road bridge in the seaside capital, Freetown.
Their bodies were thrown into the fishing waters below.
While most of those who could afford to get out of the country did, others hid anywhere they could manage.
And one of the places where people took refuge away from the violence happened to be the bridge itself. Over a hundred people, we read, sought shelter there as executions took place above.
Today, the bridge is home to a family of six.
For such a nontraditional house, dwelling and domesticity still take on some characteristics that are all too conventional.
The entrance, for instance, is “via a rickety wooden ladder and small rectangular hole in the concrete base.” It's a porous boundary, in other words, clearly demarcated. A spatialized event.
There is a cooking area, which is presumably separate from where the family sleeps. Concerns for ornaments and a sense of ownership are evident in the wall mural containing “images of helicopters, drums, animals and black people and white people living in harmony.”
The wife cooks.
Perhaps in another nontraditional house in a more politically and economically stable location, one hopes to hear of their inhabitants and their mode of living changed fundamentally.
Because surely it would be interesting to find out, among other things, that after living in a private space station orbiting the moon and the earth in a figure-8 trajectory, a young married couple have decided to forgo messy genetic exchanges altogether and instead rear clones of themselves exclusively. There's something in the habitation modules vibrating in concert with the solar flares that cancels out prejudices and moral inhibitions.
And that a suburban family transplanted into cave no longer waste their time worrying about jobs or the children's education or where they sleep. Their deep, dewy and spatially indeterminate abode has inspired them to follow a metaphysical lifestyle unknown to everyone in the history of monasticism. They don't eat breakfast. They can now move as if gravity is optional.
You used to vote Democratic, but after squatting in a mall undetected for years, you now vote Republican.
Living in a dam would be ridiculously fun. But to hear that the only things that have changed are your mailing address and monthly mortgage payments, and that you've made yourself a generic kitchen, bedroom and salon fitted with ornaments ordered from William & Sonoma, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Ikea, respectively, could get disgustingly boring fast.
The view may be spectacular but what if the view can cause the emergence of photogenic extrahuman abilities?
When Jardinators have lived out their usefulness, they apparently go to pasture in Ferropolis.
Located right in the middle of a former open-pit mine near the city of Dessau, in Bauhaus country, it is part open air museum and part multimedia venue inhabited by monolithic machines, perhaps belonging to the same species that had turned the surrounding landscape into a post-industrial desert.
Meant to be “an ominous monument and symbol of the extensive exploitation of the countryside and the ecological consequences of doing so,” this City of Iron “also represents a new start in dealing with nature and the countryside. It is an attempt, at the end of an epoch, to create new perspectives for a landscape depleted by industrial exploitation. It is also an attempt to find answers to what are currently two of the most frequently asked questions: where is structural change in the region leading, and what will a post-industrial cultural landscape look like?”
And of course, there's Niall Kirkwood's Manufactured Sites. It's no coffee table book, and maybe a little bit technical for the lay person, but it's an incredibly important book.
Meanwhile, we read that there are only five mechano-titans. Surely that isn't enough. There should be at least 1,000, either arranged like the formal aeronautical gardens at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or irregularly, an inorganic forest waiting for Bangladeshi migrant loggers and for descendants of the Brothers Grimm to pen new fairy tales.
