Chicago 2018, or: A Proposal for the First Wholly Urban Winter Olympics

(Reconfiguring a mountain in Trysil, Norway, by Ecosign. Via InfraNet Lab.)

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.


(Summer ski jumping exhibition at Soldier Field in 1954. Note the tiny, solitary jumper in mid-flight. Also note the capacity crowd. Might Chicago 2018 set attendance record?)

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.


(Vicente Guallart can show you how to make a mountain.)

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.


(Snow Mountain by S333 is “the first indoor ski complex to be built in the US and uniquely combines an all year multi-functional skiing centre with hotels, time-share apartments, indoor water parks and extensive recreational areas.”)

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.


(Urban Ski Mountain by Natalie Ghatan is “a high-rise geometry that can simultaneously accommodate a vertically-arrayed subsidiary ski community program, along with indoor outdoor skiing amenities.”)

But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.


(A proposal by Liam Young, of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, with Andrew d’Occhio and James Pierre DuPlessis, for Bathouse, Visitor Centre and Research Station for a London Wetlands site.)


(Quoting Liam Young: “Made from a growing medium of peat moss and spray concrete the material that forms the bulk of the Bathouse is sprayed over these volumes of public occupation and steel reinforcement. The material, a variation on the ‘Hypertufa’ commonly used by home gardeners, is lightweight and highly porous. It binds the other elements together, the whole structure performing with the same properties as reinforced concrete.”)


(Again quoting Liam Young: “This is a dark, discovered, augmented wilderness embedded with technology for remote virtual bat viewing and arranged for intimate but unobtrusive onsite observation.”)

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?


(After the airport, comes The Berg.)

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.


(Guallart Architects' proposal for Denia Cultural Park, Spain.)

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.

As for the cost, we'll get back to you.

First Draft:
Ski Delft

Ice Climbing in the Abandoned Malls of Foreclosure America

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:


(Jules Spinatsch, Scene SF4, 2006.)

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?


(Jules Spinatsch, Scene SF1, 2007.)

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 Times article. “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 the Archives:
The Ice Show

(With thanks to Geoff for earlier pointing us to Jules Spinatsch's series.)

Glacier-Sailing with the Katabatic Winds

(Geographer Hans-Joachim Fuchs and his students in the Swiss Alps. Photo by Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters. Source.)

Last month, we read on Der Spiegel about a German researcher who was conducting an experiment into slowing or stopping altogether the melting of Alpine glaciers.

Geographer Hans-Joachim Fuchs in the western German city Mainz has another idea. He wants to harness the power of cold mountain winds — so-called kabatic [sic] winds, or streams of cold, dense air that flow downhill — with windscreens. The screens would keep the cool air on top of the glaciers, perhaps preserving them for a little while longer.

For some reasons — maybe because our attention was somewhere else, i.e., too many RSS feeds, too little brain cells — we thought Fuchs was using the windscreens as though they were sails, to catch the winds to thrust the glaciers away from the higher temperatures of lower elevations. Curioser, we began wondering if they could also work on the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, where they will slow their march towards the sea. Or vice versa, if you want your glaciers to melt faster so you can increase your habitable territory, make oil exploration easier, and want to sell freshwater at exorbitant prices to water-parched countries.

Our full cognitive abilities did eventually return, but frankly, we should have just continued on misreading the article, because the real experiment is as absurd and farfetched as our own speculations.

“Something like that would certainly not be very effective,” says one glaciologist about Fuchs' idea.

“Even if you built a wind screen big enough, it's doubtful whether you could meaningfully alter the wind patterns,” says another glaciologist.

Fuchs is not a glaciologist.


(A student checks an instrument. Photo by Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters. Source.)


(Another student checks an instrument. Photo by Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters. Source.)

Perhaps Fuchs and all the others should just forget about solving the local effects of climate change and directly combat global warming head on. Attack the virus, not the symptoms.

So for instance, Fuchs can re-conceptualize his windscreens as a source of sustainable energy. To do this, he may want to collaborate with Sheila Kennedy and his durable plastic curtains gets replaced with her photovoltaic curtains.


(Sheila Kennedy's Soft House. Source.)

There isn't enough sun in the Alps, you say, not to mention Kennedy's electrified fabric probably isn't scalable from domestic use to industrial use?

In that case, forget the solar textiles; use piezoelectric curtains to harvest wind energy. Array them on the the sides of mountains and along the valleys to create katabatic tunnels and magnify the force and duration of the winds.

Meanwhile, with the snows gone and vegetation not yet well-established, rockslides will be more frequent. Solution: collaborate with Cemagref, the world leading institution in avalanche science. Ask them to engineer your mega-clothesline to act like a deflection or catchment dam when disasters strike. You will definitely need some anti-landslide protection, because developers would be lulled into a false sense of security and build where they shouldn't.

And if these anti-avalance protections aren't enough, you could always apply certain types of bacterium known to hold post-glacial soil together like cement.


(Anti-avalanche fences in Switzerland. Photo courtesy of swissworld.org. Source.)

You still say they won't generate enough electricity to make a difference, even if all of Europe's soon-to-be iceless mountains are curtained? Very well. Forget Europe.

Let's head to Nepal, Tibet, Peru, Bolivia, Eritrea and elsewhere cut off from the grid, where a now less extensive installation may not be enough to power the microwave and the washing machine and the space heater and the television and all the lightbulbs in the house at once but they will provide enough electricity to power the public water pump, the medical instruments in the clinic, the low-kilowatt fixtures in the school, and home radios.

Collaborate with FogQuest, and they could be turned into fog water collectors as well.


(Fog water collectors in Nepal and elsewhere. Photos courtesy of FogQuest. Various sources.)

But to return to Europe and to Fuchs, his curtains may yet still have a meaningful effect if they were again re-conceptualized as an art installation, one that hopefully can bring even more attention to the local effects of global warming and forces people to question their lifestyles.

His ideas may be “crazy,” the butt of jokes among true glaciologists and climatologists, but at least with his frequent appearances in the mass media, more are now keenly aware that their precious glaciers are disappearing.

In an homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, he will title it: Running Fence v2.0.


(Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Running Fence.)

Spiraling corkscrew-like from the zenith of the Matterhorn down to its base, they'll billow in the katabatic winds like Tibetan prayer rags, awaiting the passing of one landscape and the coming of another.

Gazex®

(A mountain implant. Photo courtesy of TAS.)

Several memes running through this blog come wonderfully together in Gazex®, an anti-avalanche system manufactured by Technologie Alpine de Sécurité (TAS): terrestrial augments, wilderness access, urban/wild interface, disaster urbanism, climate change and (admittedly a stretch) fountains.


(Two Gazex® pipes in the Val Thorens, France. Photo by Flickr user “123_456”. Source.)

From a distance, they look like disembodied talons jutting out from the rockface, ready to prick at imminent disasters. With their array of remote sensors, they are constantly reading the landscape; the mountains are kept under constant surveillance, lest they want to endanger quaint Alpine hamlets and new luxury ski resort developments above Denver or lose skiers to the wintry wilds.

When an avalanche is deemed likely, it detonates a mixture of oxygen and propane gas in its explosion chamber. The resulting hot gas is then directed downwards to the zone at risk.


(Photo courtesy of Cemagref. Source.)

TAS describes their product as the best avalanche prevention mechanism, as there are “no explosives to handle and no personnel interventions in or near danger zones.” But will there be any market for it in the near future? At least in the Alps, demand may soon vanish due to “a change in the large-scale weather pattern.”

From New Scientist:

In the late 1980s, there was a dramatic step-like drop in the amount of snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Since then, snowfall has never recovered. In some years, the amount that fell on the plateau between Zurich, Bern and Basel was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, says Christoph Marty at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos. He has analysed snowfall trends spanning 60 years and adds that the average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.

The future of winter tourism in the region is looking grim.

Maybe TAS should start manufacturing artificial snow machines? Preferably not.


(Workers doing summer maintenance work or mountain climbers in a future snow-less Alps? Photo courtesy of TAS.)

Should you want to see it in action, you can download this video. There is another, but that file may be corrupt, as it won't unzip for us.



It's the new version of Geoff's Earth-Fountain©, the present memorial to a vanishing landscape and the future memorial to an extinct one. Depending on who you ask, that bang echoing through the valley will be regarded as a mournful wail or a joyful bellow heralding the arrival of something new.

In the Archives:
Drangagil Neskaupstaður
Sites of Managed Anxiety
Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes

Nuclear-Powered Glaciers

(Scotland's iceberg. Image by Gross. Max.)

Dredging the bottom of our archives brought up an interesting project by Edinburgh-based landscape architects Gross. Max. to counter the effect of global warming.

Submitted as part of the 6000 Miles exibition organized by Glasgow's The Lighthouse in early 2005, they proposed to use the Torness Nuclear Power Station to create a nuclear-powered iceberg and park it nearby on some stretch of Scotland's 6,000-mile coast.

This is called “local freezing.”


(Torness Nuclear Power Station. Photo by Neal. Source.)


(Scotland's iceberg and blue lagoons. Image by The Lighthouse.)

Of course, our immediately response is — why only one iceberg?

If we are to believe Gross. Max. that “the only way to reduce the levels of CO₂ emissions is to rely on nuclear power,” then the next logical iteration of their proposal is to build dozens more — a radioactive necklace of giant refrigerators — and then turn all those firths and lochs into glacier fields, maintaining Scotland's national climate as it awaits atmospheric conditions to return to pre-modern levels.

Historic preservation for the climate-changed future.


(Torness Nuclear Power Station. Photo by Charlie and Shelli. Source.)


(Scotland's iceberg. Image by Gross. Max.)

But whether or not you believe that nuclear power stations should have a role in combatting climate change or even whether or not this concept would alleviate the local effects of ungeographically high temperatures, this will surely be a popular destination.

In Berlin a tropical indoor beach has just been opened while even in Scotland we now see the first indoor ski slopes with real snow. As a matter of fact people can't resist climate change; they actually hold a deep desire for it. Change of climate is the most important factor in selecting holiday destinations!

And in case you get tired of all that ice, “the actual heat generated to cool the iceberg is utilised to create hot water lagoons in the nearby cement works quarry. The limestone of the actual rock formation will generate amazing dazzling blue lagoons.”

For UK residents at least, it'll be a cheap alternative to Iceland.

Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes

(Images courtesy of Snowpulse.)

Speaking of avant-garde wear, the Swiss company, Snowpulse, is selling an avalanche protection gear that can protect skiers and general hikers if they happen to get attacked by a mountain.

Following are some of their selling points:

Similarly to a life-jacket used in the sea, the Life Bag keeps you on your back and your head out of the snow. It’s the best solution to avoid being asphyxiated.

Snowpulse airbags offer a high added value option: the automatic deflation of your airbag. The airbag deflation creates a cavity around the victim. This cavity is a real help to extract the victim and also provides 150 Liters of air to breath if you are buried. Survival time is therefore drastically increased.

Up to 20% of avalanche deaths are due to traumas. Snowpulse airbags are the only one designed to protect your head and thorax against shocks.

What the company should manufacture next is a model that can increase survivability if you happen to be buried in a hundred feet of snow and perhaps at a deeper stratum.

Let's say you and your adventure buddies are traversing a little explored valley in the Rockies. The snow is freshly fallen, the smell of pine perfumes the air, the sun gently pricking your frozen cheeks. And then you hear a low rumbling sound, and it's getting louder and louder. But even before you notice that an avalanche is racing towards you, the motion detectors built into your Life Bags Xtreme® automatically trigger rapid inflation so that in nanoseconds you are enveloped in a protective bubble stocked with supplies to last weeks. Your companions, too, are safely domiciled inside their own caverns, to which your wearable anti-avalanche home plugs in instinctively with filamental tunnels. Under all that snow, a quaint mountain hamlet forms.

And perhaps this has been planned all along. You're a new breed of extreme property developers intent on developing a new ex-urb of Denver located deep in the wilderness. Avalanche urbanism.

Or: you're hiking through parched landscapes on the periphery of Los Angeles. And as predicted by FEMA, a perfect firestorm appears from behind a ridge, soon to engulf you and your companions. Of course, no one panics, because everyone's wearable anti-wildfire homes swell to form a protective bubble filled with supercooled air. And since there's a minibar, everyone waits out the fires.

Through insulated windows, you see a cinematic struggle better than what is shown at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Disaster tourism.

One even swears that he's on the surface of the sun.

Others think that they're experiencing some sort of therapeutic cleansing. It's the new California spa town: mobile, ridiculously trendy and a passing fad.

In the Archives:
Sites of Managed Anxiety
Wearable Homes

(Spotted at Medgadget.)

A Pyramid For Serving Glaciers

(Photo by Michael Kenna.)

When Thomas Jefferson visited the Désert de Retz, Diana Ketcham imagined him having “tea in the Chinese House, served from [M. de Monville's] collection of antique porcelain. If the day was hot, a servant may have rushed over from the Pyramid bearing ice for their drinks.”

In what could only have been done by a grand master of wit, this classic form, usually associated with hot and arid landscapes, was turned into a working icehouse, “packed every winter with ice carried down from the Alps by wagon.” Eminently decorative and functional, it was an Egyptian fantasy for serving glaciers.

Link:
Flickr: Le Désert de Retz

Unraveling the cosmos in the depths of Antarctica

(Image courtesy of the National Science Foundation and IceCube, University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

A team of astrophysicists and engineers are busily boring through the ice caps of Antarctica. More than 70 holes will be drilled, spread out over an area approximately 1.5 square miles. Each one will be 1.5 miles deep, or at least 4 times the height of Sears Tower, and wide enough to fit one person snugly. A string with about 60 optical sensors will be lowered into each hole, after which water is pumped in and allowed to freeze, thereby locking the sensors in place.

So what is it?


(Image courtesy of the National Science Foundation and IceCube, University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

It's a telescope, of course.

Called the IceCube, it's a chunk of the polar ice caps turned into a gigantic scientific instrument, which astronomers hope will capture a few wayward neutrinos, those extremely elusive subatomic particles that travel for millions of light years through space, passing right through galaxies, planets and extraterrestrial civilizations but rarely colliding with even a single atom. In fact, trillions of them are passing through your body while you're reading this post. Right now. Every second. Undetectable.

These ghost particles — as they are understandably sometimes referred to as — come from exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes and neutron stars. So when completed, this cubic kilometer telescope will enable scientists to gaze into some of the most distant bodies in the cosmos and witness its most violent events. And if those aren't enough, it may even help to unravel some of the mysteries behind dark matter.


(Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation and IceCube, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Source.)


(Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation and IceCube, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Source.)

Trying to observe neutrinos — and other cosmological phenomena — always seem to make for fascinating landscape and architecture.

For instance, there is the Super-Kamiokande, that water-filled “giant crystal cathedral” somewhere deep underground in Japan. It once suffered a catastrophic accident six years ago but was recently restored to its former beatific grandeur, as the photo below can attest.


(The repaired neutrino observatory Super-Kamiokande. Photo courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, the University of Tokyo.)

And then there's CERN's Large Hadron Collider, featured twice before on Pruned here and here, which when it comes into service later this year or the next, will help scientists detect subatomic particles far more elusive than neutrinos.


(Photo by Maximilien Brice, CERN Geneva.)

The Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico is a favorite landmark on Google Maps.

Lastly, we've always been fascinated by this unfortunately resized photo, downloaded via this BBC News article, of UK professor Jim Hough. At his feet is “a shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig through until you realize it stretches for hundreds of metres.”



“The sheeting hides a trench,” the article goes on to explain, and protected within is “the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves.” Angled perpendicularly to another tube, both of which have been plopped down on the countryside, both running next to some country road (which must surely offer travelers picturesque views of quaint English cottages and pastoral landscapes), besides hedges, through farms and pastures, surriptitious and rather banal looking — it's a new kind of telescope for a new kind of astronomy.

Which leads us to wonder what other astronomical infrastructure lies half-hidden somewhere in the landscapes, masked as public works in the streets of, say, Chicago or as ornamental decorations on the sides of gentrified high rise condos and intentionally innocuous office towers or as patches of urban forests whose trees spend all their time detecting and capturing intergalactic radio waves instead of sunlight for photosynthesis — all of which have been aggregated and networked into a kind of telescope the size of North America.

The vernacular built environment as a subfield of astronomy. Or vice versa.

Landscape architects and neighborhood gardeners would be recruited. You sign up on some website, and before the week is over you receive a small package containing seeds in the mail. But they are not just any seeds. These ordinary-looking seeds have actually been genetically modified to detect X-ray bursts from the sun or from some extragalactic sources located halfway across the Universe and emitted billions of years ago. Come winter, you send in dead flowers, leaves and whatever seeds that have been produced to a central processing lab where they are grounded, bombarded with lasers, and analyzed. Gardening as collaborative distributive astronomy.

Or instead of plant material, you get some weirdly futuristic devices and contraptions that look like — and do indeed function as — lawn edgers or cupolas for your gazebo, but obviously you know full well that they attuned to the songs of black holes.

Large professional firms, meanwhile, will get something a bit larger — a freight shipment of what must seem like a full-scale version of Frank Gehry's stainless steel acoustical tresllis, which must be installed in their next Super Park project. There, above the heads of picnickers enjoying the night's program of light classical music, it will scan the heavens for remnants of the Big Bang.

The whole earth upturned so that we might get a glimpse of Creation.

“What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?”

Another pragmatic utopia, this one envisioned by Bruce Mau, in which Greenland harvests its melting iceberg water and market it to places with severely limited access to clean water, e.g. Africa.

According to the catalogue, which you can download from the website of the exhibition Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks, “Greenland's Home Rule government issued the first license to collect and export its melt water to Aquapolaris, a private company. In Beverly Hills, bottles of iceberg water sell for $10 U.S. each. And in Newfoundland, icebergs are replacing fish as the basis of new business opportunities. Every spring, icebergs from Greenland parade south, past the coast of Newfoundland. The same people who used to fish now harvest icebergs from a floating barge, using a grapple crane to break off chunks of ice. The ice is crushed, melted and stored in tanks. The water is used for free by the Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation to produce Iceberg Vodka.”



So instead of letting others profit from their own natural resource, instead of drowning Manhattan and Bangladesh, before all those tons of fresh water catastrophically disrupts ocean circulation and with it world climate, Greenland can bottle up the billions of liters of water flowing into the sea, and acquire a portion of the lucrative bottled water market. And it needn't be a big portion. As Bruce Mau calculates, for Greenland's 57,000 citizens, “controlling just one percent...produces an additional capital income of 62,000 euros.” With that much wealth, a country could create national infrastructure, improve educational services, and achieve economic, social and ecological sustainability.

Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, Bruce Mau writes that “[u]sing the ocean to transport bulk water is an industry in its infancy, but evidence of experiments and new technologies abound.”

For instance, the Medusa Bag, “a giant bag designed in 1988 by James Cran of Calgary, Alberta to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It can carry 1000,000 m³ of bulk water. The Norwegian Shipping Company used a similar bag to transport water in Scandinavia.”



Link:
Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks

In the Archives:
Pharmland™

The Ice Show

To postscript an earlier wintry post, here are some awesome icy stalagmites sculpted by members of the Alaskan Alpine Club, where one can learn, among other things, all the “non-standard stuff about mountain climbing.”



Admittedly, my interest in mountain climbing goes only so far as highly recommending the documentary Touching the Void and the neglected bergfilme of Leni Riefenstahl. I simply want to learn how to construct these monoliths.



And fortunately, the instructions seem pretty straightforward: first you attach your choice of nozzle head at the end of a garden hose and then “mix random parts of water and freezing air.” Sub-zero landscape architecture in no time.

Or if you adopt their uncompromising individualist philosophy and contempt of authority: arctic guerrilla gardening.



And then there's the upcoming 2018 Chicago Winter Olympics. Expect several of these colossal frozen spires standing side by side with the city's historic skyscrapers — one of which will be the venue for an as yet nonexistent winter sport. A skyline second to none. And for the sideshow, how about a WTC-esque twin installation at the mouth of the Chicago River? The site should still be empty.

Or farther afield, ridiculously vast fields of ice towers standing as a memorial to past and future glacial ages, where you can either do some climbing or ponder the question, what is the sound of an ice tower falling in the middle of a forest of ice towers?



It's amazing that no one has yet appropriated this freezing process to create X-treme Winter Vacation Hotspots. Better but still no less safer than K2. In Antarctica or Siberia or back in Alaska.

(All photos courtesy of the Alaskan Alpine Club.)