Instant Wi-Fi Cloud of Cyborg Fauna

(Original photo by Bjarne Winkler. Source.)

According to SciDev.Net, “swarming micro air vehicles” might soon be deployed over disaster areas to set up emergency wireless networks. Developed by scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, these flying robots will be “emitting a wireless signal” to establish “temporary radio or mobile communication networks to coordinate the search for survivors.”

“To distribute the vehicles effectively above a designated zone,” the article goes on, the research team “took inspiration from the way ants leave chemical trails to guide colonies to sources of food. Some of the vehicles hover in small circles linked to the location of rescuers and the other vehicles navigate around these markers.”

Elsewhere and earlier, we learned from Wired that, should dictators cut off their country from the internet, there are ways to restore connectivity to the populace. The U.S. military, for instance, has converted a cargo plane into an “airborne broadcasting center,” which “hypothetically” can boost Wi-Fi bars in bandwidth-denied areas to full strength. Any of the military's aircrafts can be converted into “cell towers in the sky” by attaching cellular pods to their wings or bellies.

To this arsenal, one can supposedly add the above flying robots. When the switch is turned off, they'll be released from their roost to swarm over revolutionary spaces to churn up an electromagnetic storm of Facebook schedules, retweets and Anderson Cooper's adoring visage.


(Original photo by Bjarne Winkler. Source.)

But instead of hovering over disaster and conflict areas, how about urban and rural dead zones or in even more remote locales? And instead of drones and toy airplanes, you conscript pigeons, starlings and other flying weeds into a wi-fi network of cyborg fauna?

This network needn't be online all the time. The birds, after all, need some rest. So you simply let them loose, say, during rush hour to temporarily augment the network.

One imagines urban homesteaders converting a water tank into an aviary for their robo-starlings, next to their urban apiaries, urban chicken coops and urban farming tool shed. When they need to communicate with other urban homesteaders, either nearby or in another Detroit-like ruin pornscape, they only need to open the hatch. It's an artisanal wi-fi for networked off-grid living.

In order to lessen e-waste, each starling is equipped with a homing beacon, which will signal home should the animal die in flight. The homesteader simply has to trace the electronic beeps to collect the carcass and its outfittings. In the meantime, the beacon will be powered by the decaying organic matter.

(Also in the archives: Augmented Ethology and the Extreme Green Guerillas' Animal Messaging Service.)

Soft Brackets

In case you need reminding, you now only have exactly one month to submit to Bracket 2.

Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.

...

Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.

And in case you've yet to begin work on your submission and need a starting point, check out these videos of landslides and the infrastructural counter-measures to mitigate and manage an ever shifting landscape.















(Also browse #avalanche.)

Landslide Taxonomy

(Image courtesy of the British Geological Survey.)

On the landslide taxonomy above, the British Geological Survey writes:

The main classification criteria are: type of movement (falls, topples, slides spreads, flows), and type of material involved in the movement (rock, debris, earth). Combining movement and material type terms enables an appropriately descriptive landslide name to be formulated. Naming can become more detailed with the addition of other descriptive details related to activity state, water content , rate of movement, etc., if known (e.g. active, complex, extremely rapid, dry rock fall-debris flow).

Only a small selection of the wide spectrum of landslide types that may develop in nature are shown here.

Surely the image needs to be accompanied by an illustrative taxonomy of mitigative measures against landslides showing a wide spectrum of programs and strategies for inhabiting the geological wilderness.

USGS 07359610

(A node in the transcontinental hydro-veillance mesh network coldly records in real-time a harrowing human tragedy on the ground. Source: USGS.)

Disaster Tumuli

(Avalanche defense structures in Siglufjörður, Iceland. Photo courtesy of Landslag.)

Inscribed on that liminal space where civilization messily interfaces with the wilderness is a series of monumental earthworks protecting the Icelandic town of Siglufjörður from snow avalanches and landslides.

While the planning and construction of these defense structures were the work of a multi-disciplanary team, for our own purposes, we'll concentrate on the contributions of the landscape architects involved in the project, specifically the Reykjavík-based firm of Landslag.


(Located just a few kilometers south of the Arctic Circle on the shores of a narrow fjord backed by mountains up to 1000m high, Siglufjörður, like so many other Icelandic towns and villages, is highly vulnerable to snow avalanches. Photo courtesy of Landslag.)


(Phase I and II. Image courtesy of Landslag.)

These anti-disaster tumuli were built in two phases. Completed in 1999, Phase I involved the construction of two deflecting dams on the south end of town. These direct avalanches from the most hazardous locations away from the populated area. The smaller of these dams, at 200m long and 15-16m high, is not as visible as the larger dam, which measures 700m long and 18m high and runs prominently up along the mountainside to an elevation of 180m.

Completed in 2008, Phase II involved the construction of 6 walls and dikes running along the entire mountainward side of Siglufjörður. Unlike the two deflecting dams built in Phase 1, these are intended to stop the flow of an avalanche rather than change its course.


(Geoprosthetics. Photo courtesy of Landslag.)

During the early planning stages of the project, there were concerns about the negative social and even psychological impact of these massive landscape alterations on the town's residents, who, despite acknowledging their vital role in preventing fatalities and property damage, might nevertheless show strong resistance to such large-scale structures. This is where Landslag came in.

Working closely with the engineers, geophysicists and meteorologists, Landslag focused on minimizing the visual impact of the project. Their solution was to approach the structures not only as fortifications against nature but also as an opportunity to create recreational spaces out of the defensive infrastructure. They were turned into an architectural statement, a positive cultural asset rather than an invasive structure. Since these gigantic structures could never be hidden, nor could they be camouflaged from view with tall-growing trees, turning them into landmarks was very logical.


(The larger of the two deflecting dam, at the end of which is a viewing platform. Photo courtesy of Landslag.)

The avalanche defense structure, in fact, doubles as an outdoor recreational facility. Paths weave around the structures and run on top along their ridge lines, directing hikers up the mountain. Already these trails are heavily used. At the end of the larger deflecting dam is a sloping bastion used as a public viewing platform. It's a hazard zone, but they're also occupiable.


(A sketch for a disaster park. Image courtesy of Landslag.)


(Picturesque anxiety. Image courtesy of Landslag.)

In order to avoid the deflecting walls from looking too dominating, they were designed to mimic the natural features of the surrounding landscapes. With the additional use of natural materials, their organic, undulating forms help to blend them into the landscape. To even further soften their substantial profiles, a process has been started which in decades to come will see the natural vegetation of the area reclaim and inhabit it once again.


(With and against contour lines. Photo courtesy of Landslag.)

It is worth contrasting these with the avalanche protection structures at Drangagil Neskaupstaður and Flateyri, which look like they belong more to a Medieval walled city.

Other avalanche protection strategies:
Gazex®
Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes
Sites of Managed Anxiety

Flood Hunting

(A rare flood in the Negev Desert, January 2010. Photo courtesy of Haaretz.)

A newly stumbled term, which we quite like, is flood hunting, or the act of traveling to sites of inundation. What compel flood hunters are probably the same as what compel other disaster tourists: curiosity, adventure, the thrill of the sublime, Nielsen ratings points. But we like to think that they partake in such a dangerous pastime for their own edification as well, i.e., to witness hydrological and geological processes previously only experienced second-hand and to gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure. So besides the rare desert floods and the Mississippi spilling over its banks, one could add to the agenda Los Angeles' concretized river filling up, acqua alta, the formation of quake lakes and the creeping high waters behind the Three Gorges Dams.

We also like to think that flood hunting could be a subgenre of tactical tourism, a critical activity that looks at spatio-cultural conditions largely invisible or ignored during dry periods but pronounced during flood events, e.g., New Orleans' socioeconomic inequity spatially demarcated by Hurricane Katrina and levee failures.

However, if flood hunting is too much of a cardiovascular thrill, a more relaxing option might be the gutter dérive, or the act of tracing urban stormwater runoff on the surface, the positive of sewer spelunking. It may sound like a boring way to spend a rainy day when you could be dry indoors tweeting or updating your Facebook profile, but if your city is topographically blessed or if it's Portland with its green streets or if it's a city in which Marti Mas Riera has been let loose or if it's a city of experimental gutter-scapes, oh, the fun you will have!

How about bulwarking, the act of rambling through monumental flood protection infrastructure? Should be popular recreation in our future climate changed coastlines.

In the Archives:
The Great Climate Change Park

(Via Terrain Vague.)

Disaster City

(Photo by Brent Humphreys.)

Popular Science paid a visit to Disaster City in College Station, Texas. It isn't a city, of course, but “a vast disaster-simulation center designed to look and feel as close to catastrophe as you ever want to be. Each hairline crack, each mangled car, all the mountains of rubble are modeled on wreckage from real disasters, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 72 people and injured nearly 12,000. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired the collapsed parking garage, with cars dangling off the sides like spiders from a ceiling, while the 12-foot-deep rubble catacombs resemble those from Ground Zero.”

This “Jerry Bruckheimer set” is where search-and-rescue teams go to train.

Michelangelo rolling over on top of Bernini

(Michelangelo vs. Bernini.)

More screen captures, this time from a trailer of Roland Emmerich's film 2012, which looks as if it's aspiring to be classified in the bukakke subgenre of disaster porn. Retinal outbursts of apocalyptic carnage will be numerous and their delivery relentless and furious, nonstop until of course the FX shops have exhausted themselves and not because of some narrative obligations.

It would great if some of the shots in the trailer each provided the basis for a landscape/architecture studio, an ideas competition or the instigation for a series of micro blog posts. For instance, Michelangelo's dome rolling over on top of Bernini's piazza could be the starting point for a studio in which students are tasked to formulate a master plan for a post-apocalypse Rome. They will be following in the footsteps of some of the greatest (or at least most interesting) builders and urban planners in history: the emperors, the popes and the fascists.

With such illustrious precedents, the pressure on students to outdo them will cause sleepless, sweaty and scream-filled nights. However, one will be soundly dreaming about Michelangelo's still decapitated dome, lying on its sides, fully restored and repurposed as public housing, then elevated on a rainforest of recycled columns above Bernini.


(Kennedy vs. Obama.)

Another maybe could explore what urban lessons can gleaned from the floating, nuclear city of USS John F. Kennedy and speculate on their applicability to landborne cities.

If you can incorporate the aircraft carrier omelette-flipping onto the White House into your proposal without getting pelted by assorted vegetables and laughed out of your final critique, you will win a very plump traveling fellowship.


(Geoff's Earth-Fountain.)

And lastly, how about landscape architecture via tectonic attenuation?

Earthquake Van

One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.

In the Archives:
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Poseidon vs. Aeolus

(Spotted on Dvice.)

Killer View

(At 9:00 a.m. PST on Oct. 22, 2007.)

In a very recent post, I started talking about a Swiss company's snow avalanche life-jacket and then somehow ended up writing a drive-by-proposal for a migratory spa town, which the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan would set up during a wildfire event in southern California in the hopes of attaining — in the middle of a coronal maelstrom — psychic rejuvenation within its protective walls, because rehab centers, county jail cells, Starbucks and other celebrity landscape du jour have earlier failed to give them what it is that they seem to always be photographed seeking.

I then stated briefly that through their insulated windows they would be privy to “a cinematic struggle better than what is shown at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard.” Or an analogue surface of the sun.

A few days hence, I discovered some photographs from the United States Geological Survey that might as well have been taken from these imagined mobile therapeutic chambers.


(At 3:26 a.m. PST on Oct. 3, 2007.)


(At 09:45 a.m. PST on Oct. 21, 2007.)


(At 4:50 a.m. PST on Oct. 22, 2007.)


(At 09:01 a.m. PST on Oct. 22, 2007.)


(At 09:10 a.m. PST on Oct. 22, 2007.)


(At 11:12 p.m. PST on Oct. 23, 2007.)

To be more accurate, these sublime scenes of wildlife escaping the fires and then returning to a devastated landscape were captured “using a 'camera trap,' a camera wired with motion sensors to automatically take photos when the sensors detect movement in the camera’s field of view.”

Quoting further:

This camera trap is on the former El Toro Marine Base, an area that burned last week in the Orange County Santiago Fire. This particular area was the southernmost extension of the fire, where it crossed over a toll road into this small peninsula of habitat surrounded on the other three sides by urban development, small agricultural fields and the main part of the former Marine Base.

It's yet another extensive surveillance system, one that monitors, in this case, “elusive, often-nocturnal animals” as they inhabit a “complex landscape of open spaces, roads and urban areas.” In other words, it isn't too dissimilar from the one stalking the streets of Los Angeles.

(All photos courtesy of USGS.)

Other Disaster Labs

Two more disaster machines, which were also featured in this New Scientist pay-per-view article along with the shake table and the portable hurricane.


(Photo courtesy of the ATF Fire Research Laboratory.)

First, from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives comes the Fire Research Laboratory, the “first facility dedicated to aiding criminal fire investigations.”

The lab is so huge, New Scientist tells us, that it can fit “a three-room apartment or even a two storey office building, all beneath the world's largest stainless calorimetry hood for measuring the heat output of fires.” There, “engineers study ignition methods, the causes of electrical fires, the speed at which items burn and the way flammable liquids affect a fire's spread.”

With 3675 Americans killed in 2005, “more than all natural disasters combined,” everyone strives for precision and accuracy. “When recreating a fire, the engineers and craftsman are faithful to the original right down to the furnishings. The total amount of combustible material is crucial. If a room had bundles of laundry tossed on the floor, it is carefully replicated.”


(Photo courtesy of the O. H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.)

Next is the Tsunami Wave Basin, housed in a “hangar-size building” at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

It is “seriously big: 49 metres long by 26.5 wide by 2.1 deep. It is the largest and most sophisticated wave tank in the world, and the first dedicated to tsunamis.”

A major question is exactly what impact tsunamis can have on coastal structures and sediment. So in July, researchers built miniature model of a coastal town along a sloping “beach” at the edge of the basin. They are now setting up experiments to measure the resulting forces as the water hits the shore, and to test whether buildings of certain shapes, such as cylinders, might be better than others for withstanding a tsunami.

One wonders if Architecture for Humanity has signed up for some wave time to better improve their anti-tsunami projects.

Meanwhile, since we obviously can't help ourselves, we'd like to see these disaster machines strapped onto The Jardinator©.


(Photographer unknown. Source.)

You then let it loose. And fortunately for all Japanese cities, it will not topple down skyscrapers and stomp on Hello Kitty; this monstrous stillborn love child of Godzilla and ThyssenKrup will actually help your home and cities avert major disasters. It will improve the quality of your life.

If you see it surfacing offshore and rumbling onto the beach, soon aftewards you will fear no more hurricanes and tsunamis. Children will come running down the streets to greet it as if it were the ice cream truck, because they know that they will no longer be in danger of getting burnt alive in the middle of the night. Everyone will deem it of monumental importance that virgins will be sacrificed along its path.

But then it becomes self-aware. Uh oh.

In the Archives:
The 17th St Canal Physical Model

Disaster Lab

Though this New Scientist article on “the biggest and baddest platforms for faking quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and fire” is unfortunately behind a subscriber-only firewall, there is this short video on one of the featured “disaster machines” uploaded to YouTube. It's the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table, the largest of its kind, topped with a 7-seven story building weathering a seismic storm.

Personally, we'd like to subject the Farnsworth House to a few tests just to see if it can survive a major New Madrid event. We'll seat on plush, midcentury Eames chairs, eat popcorn, and wait for the moment of disintegration. Or maybe Mies will completely surprise us, and we witness his house escape a tectonic hurricane unscathed. That too much context, apparently, isn't a problem at all.

In the Archives:
Portable Hurricane

Galveston on Stilts

In her amazing book Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, Cornelia Dean recounts all too briefly what Galvestonians did to their city after the hurricane of 1900, a devastating storm that killed nearly 6,000 people and leveled what was then considered “the center of commerce for the entire Southwest” into a mountain of driftwood.

Rather than retreating from the shifting sands to points higher elsewhere, we read that the city instead decided to build a seawall, fencing itself off from future disasters. It then raised everything behind this wall — houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens — by as much as 17 feet, and flooded the revealed negative stratum with silt.

It was a “plan that even in an era of engineering daring stood out for its size, cost, and audacity.”


(Before the project started, engineers went around town marking telephone poles to show how high the owners should raise their buildings. In both photographs the man points to the same white line.)

Quoting pages 6 and 8:

The lifting operation was one of sheer brawn. Laborers ran beams under the buildings and mounted them on screwjacks that burly men turned by hand. In this way, 2,156 buildings were laboriously hoisted, a quarter of an inch at a turn, until they reached the requisite height and new foundations could be built beneath them. Meanwhile, children climbed rickety catwalks to reach their schools; housewives hung their laundry from lines strung fifteen feet above the ground.

Even substantial structures took to the air. At St. Patrick's Church, a three-hundred ton brick structure, services continued as it rose to the grunts of laborers manning two hundred screwjacks beneath it.

To repeat: At St. Patrick's Church, a three-hundred ton brick structure, services continued as it rose to the grunts of laborers manning two hundred screwjacks beneath it!


(St. Patrick's Church on stilts.)

Once airborne, a proto-Archigram city in quasi-flight, fill was delivered from a canal engineers had dug down the middle of the island.

Day and night, dredges moved back and forth between Galveston Harbor and this canal, dredging up fill from the harbor bottom and spewing it out on either side of the canal in a slurry of water and sand.

There were some residents who did not want to jack up their properties; these same people then witnessed their houses getting “drowned in the slurry of sand.”

The owners of several elegant Victorian mansions declined to subject them to the rigors of the screwjack. Instead they let the pumped sand fill their first reception rooms or turned them into basements. The lawn of one graceful brick house, once surrounded by a ten-foot wrought-iron fence, is now edged by ornamental ironwork about a foot high—the top of the fence is peeking up through the surface of the fill that now surrounds it.

So who wants to take a bet on when Galveston will get jacked up again?

Or for that matter, when will it be done to New Orleans, Dakha, Venice, New York, and every other major cities in the world threatened by sea-level rise?


(Before and after the fill.)






(The ”Leviathan”, flooding the earth with silt.)



(All photos courtesy of the Galveston and Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library.)

In the Archives:
The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game

Portable Hurricane

(Photo by Kristen Bartlett Grace/University of Florida.)

Our second anniversary is fast approaching, so we've been looking for something to treat ourselves with, the same way we treated ourselves to some passkeys to Kubrickian and Schnitzlerian sex orgies. A very promising candidate comes from the University of Florida: the world's largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator.

According to the article linked above, the simulator has eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans that can whip up winds up to 130 mph (Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale). Researchers at the university will use it to blast vacant homes not only with hurricane winds but also with high-pressure jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.

“The goal: to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage.”

Obviously, we'll have better use for it:

1) Take it to New York during Postopolis! and blast the Storefront to see how well Vito Acconci and Steven Holl can structurally withstand a Category 3, if its configurable façade is supple enough, malleable enough to respond to weather (architecture vs. landscape; objectified forms vs. enigmatic forces; formalism vs. uncertainty; fixed dynamism vs. ambiguous processes; starchitects and MoMA'd provacateurs vs. landscape architecture bloggers). That or to demonstrate the effects of climate change on the city with exceedingly more immediacy and greater visceral effects than some Google Earth overlay showing the city inundated by sea-level rise. In any case, we'll call it an art installation.

2) Take it to Montana where we'll seek out a Hollywood mogul with millions of dollars to spare, and because he is bored out of his wits, he's more than willing to fund our proposal for a landscape intervention: a hurricane-scoured Floridian landscape simulated on the badlands - terrifying, sublime, beautiful.

And 3) take it to our nearest constructed grove and then let loose our inner Axel Erlandson.

Giant Guatemalan Sinkhole

Via the awesome gravestmor, who earlier alerted us to the movie trailer of the Mexican documentary feature, En El Hoyo, we learn that on February 23, “after rumbling for weeks, part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth.”


(Photograph from Reuters/STR New, illustration by Paul Hannan/National Geographic Digital Media.)

According to National Geographic News, “the reportedly 330-foot-deep (100-meter-deep) sinkhole swallowed about a dozen homes and is so far blamed in the deaths of three people—two teenagers, found floating in torrent of sewage, and their father, who was pulled from the chasm.”

While everyone knows who the real culprit of this terrestrial villainy is, Guatemalan officials nevertheless blame rainstorms and a ruptured sewer main for the sinkhole. “After the collapse, the seemingly bottomless depths gave off tremors, sounds of flowing water, and the scent of sewage,” we also learn.

It's at times like this when we wish there was a secret cabal of landscape architects, all possessing extraordinary design abilities and astounding planning skills: The League of Super Amazing Landscape Architect Friends.

Holed up in their subterranean lair designed, of course, by Barco, they wait, surveilling seismic monitors, Google Earth imagery, RSS news feeds, global hydrographs and ambient air sensors, until a new geological wound on the surface of the earth calls out for them.

When another giant sinkhole suddenly appears in another major city, a red light flashes immediately on one of their giant screens, sirens blaring. Within minutes, they are parachuting down towards the disaster zone. And mere seconds after they've landed, they already have sketched out the schematics for a fantastic vertical park, sure to draw thousands of tourists, mountain climbers and well-funded graduate students of garden history, who will come for exactly one hour to analyse the site and then spend the rest of their fellowship money whoring and boozing it up. The park won't erase the tragedy, obviously, but it might serve as a fitting memorial. Plus much tourist revenue will be generated.

Or when a mayor too powerful for everyone's good decides to build a multi-billion dollar stormwater deep tunnel, representatives from the league will rappel down City Hall, to the dumbstruck faces of aldermen, to offer inexpensive municipal stormwater management alternatives. Tax payers across the city will rejoice.

Is there an open-pit mine polluting your watershed? Have no fear, Julie Bargmann's protégé will come to the rescue.

Have you spotted another coastal development? Send an anonymous tip to the league and a Super Amazing Landscape Architect Friend or two will pay the developers a visit to point out the idiocy of their whole plan with powerpoint presentations.

In the Archives:
Tunnel-Digging as a Hobby

Cemeteries as Major Disaster Response Protocol

(Photo source: AFP/Getty Images.)

Apparently, some of the people displaced by the devastating floods in Jakarta have found shelter in a cemetery located in the center of the city.

“For several hundred evacuees,” reports The New York Times, “the cemetery offered a refuge, with public toilets and working water pumps for washing. An informal community has emerged there, with women cooking donated food at a communal fire under a big blue tarpaulin.”

Says one evacuee, “We are afraid to sleep in the cemetery. But we have no other place to go. We are sleeping among the dead.”

But “during the day, the cemetery is now a lively place, as displaced people from surrounding neighborhoods come to wash at its pumps and use its outdoor toilets.”

Cemeteries, planned on high ground, sacred spaces normally detached from the rest of the city, becoming critical centers in post-disaster relief and humanitarian aid.



Which reminds us of a Cairene cemetery, pictured above. Known to Westerners as the City of the Dead, it is home to thousands of refugees from Cairo's housing shortage, a “necropolis turned metropolis”, where tombs and mausoleums have been converted to house families, schools, and small business. There is even the occasional wedding parties.







The last four photos are by Ed Kashi, whose amazing though unfortunately downsized photos of the City of the Dead first appeared in the Winter '96 issue of Atlas Magazine, with a brief essay by Julie Winokur.

Reinterred City

Simultaneously indulging the fantasies of Dr. Strangelove and the Soprintendenza, Andrew Evans wants to deploy a robot to cities devastated by an earthquake, whereupon this “burrowing robot negotiates through the unstable rubble and solid earth, creating an interred, inhabitable structure from recycled debris. The raw system left behind by the robot provides a basic framework for shelter, infrastructure, and structural stability in an upheaved landscape. The resultant system is a landscape of interconnected spaces ready for human colonization.”

But what of the ruined city above? Well, it becomes an archaeological site, finely reconfigured so as to generate billions in tourism revenues, rivaling the economic power of Pompeii and Luxor, while the Reinterred City below, presumably one of a few, itself will attract hordes of visitors.







In the Archives:
Tunnel-Digging as a Hobby

(Thanks, Andrew!)

Siting the Disaster

Two years ago, a piece of a mountain in Japan self-mutilated. Luckily for us, it was captured on video, which can be downloaded from YouTube.



Hope no one is repulsed if I simply link to this classic BLDGBLOG post, wherein Geoff Manaugh via John McPhee describes “how architecture can survive in the fallout paths of rock slides, debris slugs, and other flows of geologic mass wasting.” And also to this post here on Pruned, in which the formative potential of a different kind of disaster, i.e., the super-crowd, in landscape design is covered.

(Video spotted on kottke.org.)

“A wound in the geological bowels of the earth”

Living in Indonesia must be very trying these days: “First came the 2004 tsunami. Then Indonesia was afflicted by the Merapi volcano and a major earthquake in Yogyakarta. Now, a heavily populated region of East Java has been consumed by an unstoppable 'mud volcano' that may have been caused by a gas- and oil-drilling project.”


(Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.)

“The geyser,” we are told (in fantastically descriptive prose, by the way), “bubbles, gurgles and occasionally emits loud bursts, constantly spurting steaming, inky dark mud from the bowels of the earth. The putrid stench is sometimes interspersed with the odor of petroleum. The plume occasionally contains larger amounts of hydrogen sulfide, producing sulfur's telltale odor of rotten eggs.”

But no one knows for certain what's causing the eruption; how long it will continue; who's to blame, i.e., how much is the drilling company to blame; and how to stop it. If anything, it may take “[m]ore than 100 magicians, shamans, and witches,” the “Queen of Bali,” and “hordes of engineers and scientists” to plug the hole.

In a totally unrelated but nevertheless visually related event, here finally is the answer to a long-standing question here on Pruned: what if Busby Berkeley had a handful of depth charges?



And still yet another completely different but visually related phenomenon, “geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the 'air' have been discovered on Mars.”



All they need now are some “environmentally sound” boardwalk, one or two interplanetary park rangers, and vacationing Martian terraformers.

And finally, since we obviously cannot help ourselves, the unmistakably man-made gushing wound in the geological bowels of a comet:



In the Archives:
Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers
Geoff's Earth-Fountain©