A Portable Observatory for Observing Desert Lines, Geoglyphs and Stellar Observatories

(Maria Reiche atop one of the ladders she used to study and map the Nazca lines in Peru. Photo by Bruce Chatwin. Source.)

Gym Class Heroes Cupids Chokehold Breakfast in America

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A Genuine, Brave American Hero [Update]

Regular readers here may have noticed the increased hits here at Talk Wisdom over the past several weeks. One of the most frequent searches that lead people here is the phrase, "the meaning of Christmas."

*Sigh....*

How sad is it to realize that people have to search for the answer to such an obvious question these days? I could understand people needed to learn about it in a Muslim country, but here in America?

When I was growing up, EVERYONE knew the true meaning of Christmas - even if they weren't necessarily believers.

The second most frequent search that leads new visitors here is the phrase (or something similar), "LTC Terry Lakin."

I have just read THE best article on this brave man's challenge - LTC Terrence Lakin - for proof of Obama's eligibility to be POTUS and Lakin's subsequent court martial hearing for disobeying orders over at American Thinker: Crucible of a Hero.

This has to be one of those rare times that I have seriously considered printing out and framing a blog post!

Excerpt:

When Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, M.D. walks out of the chamber where he has faced a court-martial this week, he will emerge -- regardless of the verdict -- a towering American hero.


Nothing like the stupendous display which he has mounted -- of principled, sustained self-sacrifice and fearless defiance -- has been seen in decades on the American political stage. Together with the peril of actual battlefield engagement, it ranks alongside the greatest courageous stances even of the American Revolution itself. Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale -- those kinds of stances.


This case is of shatteringly great significance, and if you don't know about it, well, you can thank the cowards, commies, and crooks at your favorite mainstream media Bureau of Disinformation, National Desk. Lt. Col. Lakin has been abandoned by the establishment press, dastards and lackeys almost to a one. In a just post-Obama world, there is hope that one day, there will come the destruction of a thousand shameful careers in what was once journalism -- via abdication by the press of its vital role as Fourth Estate; desertion of its watch as the protector of American liberty; and its own unforced, alacritous auto-castration.

For historical background and the underpinnings, foundations, and history of this case, see Lt. Col. Lakin himself and Thomas Lifson, both in April 2010; see also www.safeguardourconstitution.com.

I am so tempted to copy and paste the entire essay here! But before I provide the link to the rest of the story, I must share this paragraph:

In fact, there is more than a certified, long-form birth certificate -- a lot more -- about Barack "Barry Soetoro" Hussein Obama that no one outside the hermetic world of sworn-to-silence hospital personnel, state vital records workers, and college bursar-level functionaries has ever seen. A partial list would include, in addition, Neolani kindergarten records, the Obama-Dunham marriage license, the Obama-Dunham divorce records, the Soetoro-Dunham marriage license, Soetoro adoption records, the Punahou School application and records, Noelami Elementary School records, the Soetoro-Dunham divorce records, consistent selective service registration info, SAT scores, LSAT scores, Occidental College records, financial aid records, passports, Columbia University records, putative Columbia thesis on "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament," Harvard University records, Harvard Law Review records, any writings as president of the Harvard Law Review beyond one tough anti-fetus fragment, Illinois bar records, certificates of baptism or adoption, medical records, Illinois State Senate records from 1997-2004, Illinois State Senate schedule, law practice client list while at Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard, University of Chicago scholarly articles, and more. Oh, but we do have a document from the Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, a Catholic institution, which shows him enrolled as Barry Soetoro -- as a Muslim and an Indonesian.

What a great summary of all that Soetoro-Obama is hiding! What's more, that last sentence in the above paragraph is quite the kicker!

Oh wait. I can't resist ending with this quip:

This is the kind of courage -- after the crawling, burrowing, light-averse invertebrates of the political landscape have long since slithered away and vanished -- that gets statues of a man built in public squares.

Read it all HERE

Hat tip:

American Thinker

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Update:

While reading the article links in Mr. Richard Kantro's essay, the link to SafeguardOur Constitution was blocked! Live link:

Safeguard Our Constitution.com

More stories about Lakin:

drkatesview
Standing with Lt. Col. Terry Lakin - ©2010 drkate Ironic, isn’t it, when we as Americans have standing to be punished, but not enough standing to ask about our own National Security and its je...



The Post & Email
Is the U.S. now ruled by Military Dictatorship? - WHAT AUTHORITY DO THE ARMY COMMANDERS TRULY HAVE OVER TERRY LAKIN? by Sharon Rondeau (Dec. 15, 2010) — In a move reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, Lt. C...

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Update 12/16/10

I find it interesting that Fox News.com is reporting on this story today. Could it be for the reason that LTC Lakin has pleaded guilty to one of the charges against him and now admits that he used the wrong venue to bring forward the question of Obama's eligibility and unreleased documents that would have proved to all of America whether or not Obama is a natural born citizen?

The article is quite fair in that it DOES mention the fact that natural born citizenship is necessary for an American citizen to hold the office of POTUS. However, it would have been a stronger argument if it had mentioned that Obama's (supposed) biological father was Kenyan and NEVER became a U.S. citizen. That is the entire crux of the matter. As I have posted on my sidebar:

THE RELEVANT OBAMA ADMISSION
At Barack Obama’s web site, the following admission:

“FactCheck.org Clarifies Barack’s Citizenship

‘When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children…’ “

Read that last line again.

“That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children…”

That’s an admission that Great Britain “governed the status” of Barack Obama, Jr. He has chosen to highlight this on his own volition.

And this leads to the relevant question:

HOW CAN A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN’S STATUS BE “GOVERNED” BY GREAT BRITAIN?

A natural born citizen’s status should only be governed by the United States.

Hat Tip: Natural Born Citizen blog

All that we know (via several judges statements) is that if Obama's records were released, it would have been "an embarrassment" for him. Embarrassed about what? Could you imagine if George W. Bush hid his bona fides and a court judge declared that releasing them would cause embarrassment to him how the libtards and the media of mass deception would have reacted? Keith Olberdummy's head would have exploded!

Unfortunately the "birther" issue and the focus on the hidden vault-length COLB can (and has been) used as a distraction against the REAL issue. No matter what Obama's B.C. says or where he was, in fact, born; if Obama Sr. is Barack's biological dad, there is NO WAY that Obama Jr. could possibly be a natural born citizen of the United States of America. At best, he is a naturalized citizen. At worse, (in the case of him never being naturalized) he is an illegal alien. The only other possible explanations (in my mind) are that Obama's biological father was not Obama Sr., or, the box on the original vault-length COLB was left blank. Does anyone have any other possible explanations for hiding his records?

All of the court cases that have been dismissed with the lawyerese excuse of "not having standing" is a travesty of justice, IMHO. It may have been legal to do so, but obviously not an ethical move. Big surprise...huh? America is filled with unethical judges, lawyers and law clerks.

The cover-up of Obama's bona fides is being tracked by the Library of Congress via The Obama File. If you will notice, the site was selected (way back in 2008) by the Library of Congress for inclusion in their historic collection on the Obama years:

The United States Library of Congress has selected TheObamaFile.com
for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials.

Question: Why would this site be selected if it was not considered a "legitimate collection of Internet materials" about Obama?

Answer: Because the Library of Congress must KNOW that something is suspicious about the hidden records of Obama's past.

One day, all (or most) will be revealed about Obama and I'm sure that if America survives the Obama years, WE THE PEOPLE will have witnessed the closest attempt to take over and overthrow our Constitutional Republic and make our nation into a terrible progressive, Neo-Marxist utopia doomed for the same failure as every other nation that embraced national socialism (a.k.a. Nazism), Marxism, and/or communism.

God help us until this corrupto-crat is removed or voted out of office!

The comments over at Fox News.com are quite interesting. A lot of libtards have invaded and are busy spewing their hate-filled rhetoric against LTC Lakin. One day, when Obama bona fides are revealed, Dr. LTC Lakin will be recognized as a hero for what he did to expose the truth about Obama. It may take a long time, but he will be exonerated - no matter what the Army chooses to do regarding this court-martial.

Here are some of the good (and some funny!) comments over at Fox News.com:


Wadepainter:
Well all I can say is the taxpayers will save alot of money with this president when his library is built, it will be about the size of an outhouse and the only thing in it will be a worn out teleprompter and a blackberry with all the information of course erased.

23 people liked this.

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theengineer 3 hours ago

"Why?" it is the real question.
Why is Obama hiding his birth certificate?
Why is Obama hiding his school records?
Why is Obama hiding his college records?
Why is Obama hiding his bar records?
What is he hiding?
What happened to his promised 'transparency'?
Now an honorable man takes a hit to try to do what Congress and/or the Supreme Court has refused to do. What a shame.

28 people liked this.

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theengineer:
What a surprise!
Lakin was not allowed to defend himself. He (wrongly) thought his court martial would not be a kangaroo court.

Of course, if his judge Col. Denise Lind had allowed Lakin to defend himself, that would have ended her political career. I am sure it was an easy decision for her: Lakin or her. She had to make sure it was a kangaroo court.

What a travesty!

What is the Manchurian President hiding?
17 people liked this

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john_henry_at_yahoo 2 hours ago

What's the difference between Maobama and his dog? His dog has papers.
9 people liked this. Like [Ha ha ha haaaa!]

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godshedhisgrace:

So despite the fact that Obama has spent millions hiding his personal documents, you are willing to take him and the officials in Hawaii at their word - all of this in light of several secrets that have been exposed by WikiLeaks, which at the very least, indicate that government officials are not "transparent".....this makes you look naive and ignorant.

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The website is running VERY SLOW. More later...

His Country's Man

I found John McCain's speech very patriotic, genuine, and filled with America's greatness. This is quite a contrast from the constant negativity being spewed during the DNC convention last week. Obama's speech "among the Greek pillars" was a show - not very genuine IMO.

McCain shared many great points. I think that the best statement was when he stated that after his captivity for five years in a cell in Vietnam, he was no longer "his own man - he was his country's man."

What a contrast between Cindy McCain's life and love of country vs. Michele Obama's statements in the past like when she said, "for the first time in my adult life - I am proud of my country."

Michele must have been coached to change her image at the DNC convention. She certainly wasn't "herself" there. She tried to re-make herself and hide her previously nasty tones. The coaches helped her to put on a new wardrobe and a new hairdo - all with the goal of putting forth a kinder, gentler image. For me? It didn't work. I already knew the real Michele Obama - all too well.

While watching the video of Cindy McCain and all that she has done to help others, I couldn't help but think about one of Michele Obama's most disturbing lines during the campaign. It was when she was "encouraging" a crowd of supporters to get out and work. She also told them, 'Barack will NEVER let you go back to the way you used to live' - or something like that. How arrogant a statement is that?? Does she think that she and her husband will get into office and create some kind of Marxist-type utopia complete with their minions of "worker bees" at their beck and call?

What a HUGE contrast there is between the two would-be First Ladies.

Back to McCain's speech.

Our choice couldn't be more stark, or more clear. Either the country will elect an inexperienced candidate - who is known for his corrupt associates and was was "selected" by the DNC, the MSM, the Soros millionaire types, the Hollywood crowd, and the Obamabot followers - or, they will be wise enough to see through that charade and elect a true patriot, America lover and defender who will work for YOU, protect and defend our nation, and put country first - rather than get into office for the purpose of his own glory.

I continue to pray for the election of John McCain.

More tomorrow. Goodnight!

Transcript link: 'I'm running for president to keep the country I love safe'

Excerpt:

I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me. I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners. Our Code said we could only go home in the order of our capture, and there were men who had been shot down before me. I thought about it, though. I wasn't in great shape, and I missed everything about America. But I turned it down.

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I'd been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I'd been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me. Through taps on a wall he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for our country and for the men I had the honor to serve with. Because every day they fought for me.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's.

I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

HT: Politico

We ♥ Wetland Machines

(Latina's future eco-machine. Image by Alan Berger, Case Brown and P-REX.)

Of course, we have to return for a third time back to P-REX, this time to single out one of their projects, the Pontine Systemic Design.

The result of Alan Berger's year as the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize recipient in Landscape Architecture, at the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with Case Brown, this project proposes to “re-introduce a gigantic new wetland machine” to cleanse and adaptively reuse one of the highly polluted zones of Italy's Lazio region, the drained Pontine Marshes. It is both a productive filtration system and a regional recreation area.

Quoting the project summary at length:

Choosing a gigantic, consolidated wetland site will likely be more viable in the complex patchwork of land ownership. Given Latina’s situation distributed treatment areas would be both enormously complex to purchase and ineffective to manage. The Wetland Machine’s dimensions are directly related to the amount of wetland area needed to treat the amount of water in the Canale Aque Alte—the major collector for this highly polluted zone. At 220 l/s, with a load around 50+ mg/l of N, at least 2 square kilometers of treatment wetland will be required. The design retro-fits and widens existing canals to serve as flow distributors. Furthermore, soil cut/fill operations are used for terraforming shallow ridges and valleys to hold/treat water and make raised areas for new public space and program. At 2.3 sq. km., the new wetland machine will drastically improve the regional water supply and provide needed open space for recreation. At only 6 km from Latina, the site could house programs and environments almost completely lacking in the region—large open landscapes with diverse vegetation. Extensive edge habitat diversity or programs—shallow shoals for juvenile fish and swimming, starker edges for fishing and water storage.

Early this summer, the President of Latina Province launched a feasibility study to evaluate the potential of this wetland machine.








(Components of the wetland machine. Images by Alan Berger, Case Brown and P-REX.)


(The wetland machine embedded in the former Pontine Marshes. Image by Alan Berger, Case Brown and P-REX.)

There are more fascinating projects at P-REX. If you are at all interested in how to adapt entropic landscapes — such as abandoned mine pits mountains of slag and pools of cyanice, vacant urban lands, landfills and former military installations — in a holistic, multi-layered strategy for future productive use and more sustainable outcomes, let Alan Berger and his colleagues show you how.


POSTSCRIPT #1: The New York Times on Alan Berger and the Pontine project. ““The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape,” says Berger. (22 September 2008)

POSTSCRIPT #2: Much earlier, The New York Times tagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado. (22 September 2008)


(With huge thanks to Alan Berger for providing us with hi-res versions of the images.)

Landscape Hints

Discovered recently are these digitized before-and-after landscape illustrations of Humphry Repton, the prolific and influential English landscape designer of the 18th and 19th centuries, taken from what must be the only complete online facsimile of his important texts.

That book, with the wonderfully wordy title of Sketches and hints on landscape gardening : collected from designs and observations now in the possession of the different noblemen and gentlemen, for whose use they were originally made : the whole tending to establish fixed principles in the art of laying out ground, published in 1794, can be found at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.




Flip over a flap and a new landscape paradigm just might appear.

Writes gardenhistorygirl — who first alerted us to their online presence:

Long before cable TV popularized instant makeovers of houses, gardens, wardrobes, bodies and souls, Humphrey Repton knew the power of the 'before' and 'after'. His famous Red Books were presentation sketches for his potential clients; lovingly detailed watercolors with flaps that lifted or swept to the side to show in turn the existing landscape and how he proposed to improve it. They are still treasured in museums, national and municipal properties, and private homes across England.

More before-and-after landscapes follow.




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A quick word about these two images, for they are hilarious. The landscape alteration here does not seem to involve any physical changes but rather just the addition of livestock — farm animals as decorative elements, living sculptures even, transforming the English countryside into a mythical Romantic idyll.

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Or you add some sheep.

One wonders if the direct descendant of this pastoral tradition is the current vogue of visualizing landscapes adaptively reused for the coming climate-changed, post-oil, post-water world. And here we're thinking of Farmadelphia, Chicken Wing, Animal Messaging Service, etc. — landscapes which are populated by a new breed of Henry David Thoreaus.

Flip over the digital flap and you find Romantic hero-ecologists practicing an imagined earlier sustainable way of life adopted for an aestheticized vision of the future.

(Spotted by gardenhistorygirl.)

Artfully Planned Decay

(Photo by Herman Wouters for The New York Times.)

There's a fine article today by the New York Times on Piet Oudolf, the Dutch avant-gardener and rarely mentioned co-conspirator of the future elevated park of New York's High Line. Go read and find out why “the real test of a well-composed garden is not how nicely it blooms but how beautifully it decomposes” and also why Oudolf got tired of “the soft pornography of the flower.”

In the Archives:
The Very Rich Hour of a Compost Pile

The Broken Column House

(The Broken Column House at Désert de Retz, 1988. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

The Broken Column House is so named because it takes the form of a ruined classical column: truncated, jagged and riven with fissures. It was built by the aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville who used it as his main residence during the years immediately before the French Revolution. Nestled within the confines of Monville's private pleasure garden, called the Désert de Retz, it “stands like a solitary beacon, signaling the visitor to prepare for an encounter with the bizarre.”

And what bizarre encounters!


(The Broken Column House at Désert de Retz, 1993. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

Visitors to the Désert would have encountered not just the Broken Column but also the Chinese House and the Tartar tent, which was made not out of fabric but tin metal, “gay with painted stripes” and erected on an artificial island in an artificial lake. Like many large gardens, it had a grotto, through which one would have entered the property (in other words, before Paradise, one must first journey down to the Abyss). There was also a peasant-chic thatched-roof cottage and the false ruins of a Gothic church. You could say, then, that the Désert was an outdoor museum of crypto-architectural history. Indeed, Diana Ketcham, in her slim but copiously illustrated book, describes it as “one of the glories of the architecture of fantasy.”

The garden itself was rather eccentric. Set within a natural-looking park were a model farm, a working dairy and an orangerie. Since Monville had no need to earn income from agriculture, these were more for leisure than production. Indeed, one shouldn't be surprised if one learns that some of Monville's guests, many of whom were members of the aristocracy, may have role-played as farmers or milkmaids for an afternoon.

Perhaps stranger things may have happened inside the walls of a garden presided over by a monied gentleman, an inveterate socialite who was said to have been “built like a model,” had “superb legs,” and bedded a different woman every night, either in the house or in any one of his fantastical follies.

One might think that Monville was psychologically unstable, the Ludwig of the Ancien Régime, and that his gardens were but the whims of one with too much money on his hands. But the Désert was a robust testing grounds for new forms and theories of landscape and architecture. Perhaps not unlike the Nevada Test Site and other military training facilities, it was an experimental terrain within which alternative systems to, say, Le Nôtre and Vitruvius, were dreamt up, cultivated and then promoted.


(The Broken Column House viewed through a 450-year-old linden at Désert de Retz, 1993. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

To a more modern visitor, meanwhile, fed with a steady diet of science fiction movies and literature, the Broken Column may evoke a distant Age of Titans, when giants roamed the land and built massive temples and homes, and the epic conflagration that ushered in the era's end, and then in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Lilliputian survivors made shelters out of the ruins and waited for Nature to return and erase the evidence of the disaster.

As absurd as that may sound, it is the sort of reaction Monville and other contemporary designers and patrons of irregular gardens in the English style intended to elicit. With their carefully composed views, such gardens were meant as the “stage sets for the enactment of fantasies of a pastoral or mythic character” — or “the stage for terror.”

Ketcham elaborates: “The sight of the [column] fragment generates a [...] superhuman dimension in the mind of the viewer. A corollary response is the realization that giants are at hand. Coming upon the Column, a human visitor feels the fear of the fairy tale hero stumbling up against the giant's boot.”

For the viewer who identifies with the giants, on the other hand, or with the old Testament God who struck down the Tower of Babel, the conceit of the colosal temple is exhilarating. In our unbelieving age, it is easier to respond to the purely spatial implications of the imaginary real. According to the Doric formula, height equals eight times the diameter, the full-scale column would stand at 384 feet. The architectural footprint of such a temple would extend beyond the borders of the garden.

Scale, then, becomes a technique with which Monville could create “a mood of altered reality.”

Ketcham again: “In the conventional picturesque garden, the presence of follies enhances the viewers' sense of physical and intellectual power, placing them in a controlling relation to the architecture of all times and all places, which has been scaled down to the comfortable proportions of the rural everyday landscape.” But here at the Désert, “it is the viewer who is reduced, rendered small and bewildered before the mysterious bulk of the Broken Column.”


(A cross section of the Broken Column House as recorded in Jardins anglo-chinois by George Le Rouge, 1785.)

Comparable contemporary architecture — the ones that you might expect to see in Las Vegas and RoadsideAmerica.com — may be ridden with gaudily clad tourists unknowingly suffering from post-modernist angst or architecture students, with copies of Baudrillard stuffed in their backpacks and gallons of ennui, seeking self-consciously ironic experiences.

The Désert, on the other hand, welcomed guests of a different sort. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, while serving as a minister to France, paid a visit to the Désert and “used elements of the floor plan of the the Broken Column in his design for the University of Virginia rotunda. Other illustrious persons who made it a favored retreat included Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV; the Duc d'Orléans; and Queen Marie Antoinette, who found inspiration there for her English gardens at Versailles.


(Members of the Frédéderic Passy family, who owned the Désert from 1856 to 1936 and lived in the Broken column, showing their addition of fourth-story windows and flattened roof, c. 1910.)

There are so many interesting things to be said about the Broken Column House and the Désert de Retz, but we'll limit them to two here.

Firstly, the Désert is the only folly garden of France's eighteenth century that still exists close to its original state. Some of the grandest were leveled after the Revolution while others now exist heavily renovated or in fragments, leaving little sense of the original schemes.

But “decades of neglect saved the Désert de Retz from this common fate. Forgotten or ignored by a series of absentee owners, the park and its architectural contents were permitted to decay undisturbed and were taken up only in the 1980s as the object of restoration.”

The result is that what the eighteenth century devised as an artificial ruin became in the twentieth century a literal one, an irony whose poignancy has moved all of those who have pushed through the underbrush to enter into this forgotten place.

(The completely restored Column exterior, with the cracks and jagged roofline back in place.)

Secondly, as mentioned above, a program of restoration was carried out in the 1980s and one that still continues today. And therein lies some very interesting questions.

How does one return an artificial ruin, which became a true ruin, back to its original artificiality, a condition which aspired to be what it had become?

How does one restore decay from a state of real decay?

Here one imagines the restorers waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched with sweat, unwilling to return to sleep for fear of dreaming recursively the horrors of authenticity. “Is this a fake crack? A real crack? Fake? Real? Fake? Real?"

Such is the terror of the Picturesque garden.

Books:
By Diana Ketcham, 1997.
By Michael Kenna, 1990.

Links:
The Broken Column on Google Maps
Flickr: Le Désert de Retz

Future Tense:
A Pyramid For Serving Glaciers
At the Gates of the Desert

The Retreating Village

(The village of Happisburgh, Norfolk, England, falling into the sea. Photo by Andrew Stacey. Tons more of his photos starting here. And even more photos here.)

Is your seaside town in danger of succumbing to the waves, soon to be underwater in the next decade, if not next year?

Is your quaint vacation beach cottage getting swept away by migrating sand dunes?

Has the government finally realized that funneling billions of dollars to build sea defenses are truly a waste and that the good money of good tax payers everywhere can be better spent somewhere else?

Are you going to become a climate change refugee?

If so, and yet you still want to preserve both your house and town, Mark Smout and Laura Allen, or Smout Allen bibliographically, have the solution. Specifically, there is their proposal for a retreating village, as described in their utterly marvelous contribution to the Pamphlet Architecture series, titled Augmented Landscape.


(Houses on the move. Illustration by Smout Allen.)

“The coastal village of Happisburgh in North Norfolk is falling into the sea,” we read in their pamphlet. It's a victim of rising sea levels, climate change and government inaction.

While other villages would simply pack everything up and leave, never to return, the duo imagines a condition between flight and colonization, between temporary settlement and permanent retreat, all the while inhabiting a perpetually shifting edge.

“Our proposal for a retreating village of small houses and streets is deployed in the disintegrating territory between the sea and the land. The village reacts to predicted rates of retreat, as much as five meters per year, by sliding and shifting to safer land. To achieve this the scheme employs a mechanical landscape of winches, pulleys, rails, and counterweights, mimicking techniques for hauling boats from the waves. It also adopts [from a millennia's worth of garden and landscape design?] an architectural language of impermanence, of permeable screens, loose-fit structures, and cheap materials that complement and contribute to the nature of the restless landscape.”


(A 1:200 model showing two houses set atop a strip of cliff, arcs, beams, rope gardens and the paraphernalia of haulage. Photo by Smout Allen.)


(A 1:500 model of the village showing its trajectory and the tracings of its former settlements. Photo by Smout Allen.)

In this migrant village, houses are “mounted on steel and concrete skits that allow each house to be dragged” using “pulleys that are anchored in the landscape and attached to the frame.”

Additionally, each one will be accompanied in their slow, nomadic journey with “three-dimensionally woven geotextile bags” that not only reinforce the surrounding soil but will also be used as “allotments for prize-winning vegetables” or “a personal space for sunbathing.”


(Illustration by Smout Allen.)


(Illustration by Smout Allen.)

Immediately one wonders what it would be like to live in a village with a “twitchy attitude,” one that's constantly repositioning and reconfiguring, literally exposed to topography, geography and climate without the stability traditionally afforded by the home.

No solid ground but the unceasing performance of slow disaster. Though you'll still have your house and the sublime view of the sea.

In the Archives:
Galveston on Stilts
The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game
Climate Ghettos

“Of Gardens”

“When Ages grow to Civility and Elegancie, Men come to Build Stately, sooner than to Garden Finely: As if Gardening were the Greater Perfection.” — Francis Bacon, 1625

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925-2006

(Annotated photograph by Richard Demarco. Source.)

Ian Hamilton Finlay — artist, poet, moralist, and “avant gardener” of Little Sparta — has died aged 80.

Obituary:
The Guardian

The Enigmatic Jean-Jacques Lequeu

Why no cinematic biography of Jean-Jacques Lequeu has been produced yet is a mystery to me. All the elements of an Oscar-winning drama are there. You have a genius protagonist, a visionary, who toils not in the hallowed halls of the Academy but in decrepit offices, out there in the margins of the art world. By day, he is surround by bureaucrats and the machinations of the state, but by day's end, he walks home to a brothel.

In post-Revolution and Napoleon France, Lequeu produced some of the most imaginative landscape and architectural designs, some a masterful combination of the Gothic, the Egyptian, the Greek, the Chinese, and a smattering of hallucinations. However, except for two folies in Rouen, none were ever constructed. He was somewhat of a pornographer as well and at least in his self-portraits, a cross-dresser. As there are too few sources to go by, the screenwriter can easily color his life some more. After all, he did create portraits of nuns bearing their breasts.



For some tension, a rivalry between Lequeu and another architect with similar visionary yet unbuilt works, Étienne-Louis Boullée, can be dramatized. By Lequeu (supposedly):

You Artists who demand Justice, Awake! A clique has been formed in the Jury of the Arts set up by the National Convention […] A kind of architectural lunatic, the seventy-year-old Boullée is at the centre of it and has arranged everything to his advantage […] and keep an eye on that humbug Ledoux and the smug charlatan Le Roy.

So in a sort of pseudo-sequel to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, Lequeu becomes Salieri, seething with envy and animosity at the more celebrated Mozart, i.e., Boullée. But inversely, the bureaucratic draughtsman is truly the more sublime artist, the one favored by God with the gift to fill Man's soul with Divine Grace, though unfortunately, he still dies penniless and in obscurity. As a parallel to the burial scene at a potter's field in Milos Forman's cinematic version of Shaffer's play, an epilogue will show a family member or maybe a co-worker braving the rain and the thrash-strewn streets towards the Bibliothèque nationale de France to which Lequeu's entire oeuvre will be anonymous donated. Or perhaps it will be one of Lequeu's favorite nudist nuns to ensure that posterity will be able to rediscover his genius? As always, it's the profane that sustains the sacred.



I was first introduced to Lequeu when a professor recommended Phillippe Duboy's manuscript on the artist, subtitled An Architectural Enigma for a studio project on boundaries. I was then investigating ritualistic boundaries and the forms and processes in which a unified space becomes delineated in varying levels of sacrality. Seeing Lequeu's sections of interior spaces, I knew it was smooth sailing from then on. But of course, there followed images and images of protruding penises, cavernous vaginas, hairy legs and chests, and more penises and vaginas. What little image I had of landscape architecture as a gentlemanly, quiet profession was erased for good, and it didn't matter whether Lequeu was considered a landscape or a garden designer or not. The deed was done. No holes barred from then on.



I relate this anecdote for two things: 1) In my imaginary movie, this would serve as a prologue: the scene opens on the wind-swept prairie of the Midwest, an all-too eager student... fade to black, then a shot of Lequeu in a brothel... perhaps the student is the Bastian to Lequeu's Atreyu... perhaps not; and 2) Lequeu's designs seem to have been influenced by the ancient practice of augury - ritualistic, mystical, and highly differentiated. So in the novelization phase of my imaginary movie, Dan Brown will concoct a historical fantamagical story of a super secret religious society guarding a terrifying truth at all cost. The Lequeu Code. Spielberg-Merchant-Ivory will produce the schmaltziest movie ever as only they could. Oscars for Art Direction and Costumes are a lock, and Lequeu's name will forever be ingrained in popular culture.





Anyway, one can peruse the entire collection online at the BNF's Gallica website, which originally was the whole point of this entry.

And for another figure who deserves a cinematic treatment, go here.

Link:
Jean-Jacques Lequeu @ Gallica

Axel Erlandson and the Tree Circus

Every element to this fascinating story seems ripe for a feature documentary. There are the trees, seemingly extraterrestrial but undoubtedly man-made. There is Axel Erlandson, an arboreal alchemist with grand visions of commercial success but whose endless hours spent on his menagerie point to a devotion verging on the spiritual. There are the variable horticultural triumphs hinting at the fame he longed for but found difficult to cultivate. And then the neglect, constant confusion over ownership, and the epic transfer to a theme park. An aberrant Wagnerian Philip Glass passage would be blaring in the soundtrack at this time. A wife, an architect (not a landscape architect), and a nurseryman complete the cast.

Someone contact Errol Morris!









It is a variation on a classic garden narrative — an eccentric, garden aesthete, the favorite of aristocrats or even an aristocrat himself, experimenting with forms at a grand country estate, which becomes the stage setting for social fraternizing. Amidst the part-Japanese, part-Egyptian, part-Classical regular-irregular topiary jungle, social conventions are strictly enforced. One faux pas and you suffer the same fate as Glen Close in the finale of Dangerous Liaison. Except when it's a deliciously illicit tryst, which everyone else would be having. And then circumstances of history lead to the garden's ruin, to the designer obscurity, only to be rediscovered and transformed into a theme park in contemporary times.

Tourists now flock en mass. And well-funded grad students come for an hour and then proceed to spend their remaining grant money drinking and partying.





Links:
Circus Trees @ Bonfante Gardens
Axel Erlandson @ Designboom
Contemporary photos @ Phancy
Arborculture

Future Tense:
Wind Tunnel QTVR