Pruned

Prunings XLVI

2008-07-19T16:40:00.005-05:00

(A gardener clipping hedges at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, England. Photo by Anne Nellis. Source.)

BusinessWeek on T. Boone Pickens, the “modern-day John D. Rockefeller” who “owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.”

The LA Times on farming with the sea. (Via del.icio.us/reinito, del.icio.us/bfunk and del.icio.us/bldgblog.)

The New Yorker on the American lawn. “What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them.” (See also the book, The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot.)

GOOD Magazine on pollution tourism. (Via Temporary Travel Office.)

Pink Tentacle on some floodgates.

Off-Grid on soil power. “Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that make use of the energy given off by soil microbes are amongst the technologies that hold promise for bringing power to developing states.” (See also the Soil Lamp.)

(More on del.icio.us/pruned.)

2008-07-18T14:46:00.001-05:00

We ♥ P-REX.

Microcoasts

2008-07-17T21:52:00.005-05:00

(A wooden artificial island on the coast of Spain. Photo courtesy of Vicente Guallart.)

While we are still on the subject of coastal interventions, let us finally enter into the archives Vicente Guallart's wonderful microcoasts.

Installed on a rough stretch of the Spanish coast in a state of “permanent revision,” to use the architect's translated words, these terrestrial islands enable comfortable colonization where solid ground gives way to more ambiguous landforms.

(Some patterned contours, some peaks, and some of the indigenous population. Photo courtesy of Vicente Guallart.)

If we can be permitted to continue our self-indulgent streak, we would like to imagine these microcoasts having been fitted with an internal fantamagical machinery that allows them to expand and contract, either following some sort of obscure, unknowable tectonic logic or in direct response to external stimuli, for instance, beach erosion and the fluctuating numbers of English pensioners.

Each one is like an orthogonal paramecium genetically modified with an Autobot's DNA, unfurling its geometry laterally or outwards into the sea, perhaps joining others of its own species to form a superorganism and in the process Spain gains a small province, before mitotically subdividing into beach furniture. For power, they graze on a diet of sun, wind and waves.

When there is no more edge, when the sea finally abuts the city, they will just migrate to new ecotonal pastures.

(More islands. Photo courtesy of Vicente Guallart.)

And while all of this is happening, you can picnic or sunbathe or set up permanent camp.

(And more islands. Photo courtesy of Vicente Guallart.)

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

The Great Climate Change Park

2008-07-16T18:09:00.006-05:00

(A perspective view of a proposed Floyd Bennet Field park in Jamaica Bay, New York. Image by Ashley Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi.)

Mapping the Ecotone, Ashley Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi's winning entry in the design competition Envisioning Gateway, is one of those things that we have been meaning to post for months.

Having earlier attempted to communicate our fascination with coastal interventions and our belief that by merely being sited on such tenuous terrain, they are by default the most interesting type of project there is, we think that the duo's project will be a good postcript to our previous post.

Their proposal is certainly among the best that we have encountered last year, and it definitely deserved its First Prize.

(A plan view of the park. Image by Kelly and Wakabayashi.)

Kelly and Wakabayashi had a two-fold task. First, they had to develop a master plan that unifies the separate units of the Gateway National Recreation Area that are scattered throughout the New York-New Jersey harbor and coast. Second, within this larger scale, they had to design a new park at Floyd Bennet Field in Jamaica Bay, the result of which are seen in the images accompanying this post.

A major element of their proposal is a series of jetties and piers, rigid infrastructure in an otherwise shifting landscape. Its the urban edge intersecting with the natural landscape. From above, they look like the disused runways of the old airport, here realigned not to direct people off to distant locales but to the site itself.

(The proposed ecotonal infrastructure in various stages of inundation. What marvelous narrative! Image by Kelly and Wakabayashi.)

It's a simple design but a fantastically genius one. It allows park visitors to come “into direct contact with marshlands, tides and fluctuating sea levels” but — in keeping with the natural condition of the park, a place in “necessary flux” — this infrastructure vacillates between accessibility and inaccessibility.

In other words, during low water levels, you can throw around a frisbee or have a picnic or take a hike on dry ground; you can do most anything what you can at a national park or an urban park. But when the waters come and inundate the site, there will just be some things that you cannot do, though there will also be more opportunities for fishing, kayaking and the likes.

The great deluge may have come but there's no reason to panic. The design being as resilient as it is, the infrastructure hasn't collapsed. The symbiotic relation between the varying ecological and cultural systems hasn't deteriorated.

This is disaster designed.

(Another perspective view of the proposed Floyd Bennet Field park. Image by Kelly and Wakabayashi.)

There is an important lesson here for coastal cities threatened by sea level rise and even cities such as New Orleans. The prevailing paradigm is to separate urban settlements from the waters, to fortify against attacks from the elements. But it's a catastrophic mistake to think that one can contain something as eternally mutable as the landscape. You cannot freeze the outline of the shores or the riverbanks forever in time and place.

What Kelly and Wakabayashi are saying, then, is open up the city to the waters. Give it a zone of transition — an ecotone — where both land and water can be occupied simultaneously.

In the abstract, replace rigid ideals of form and structure, classical notions of stability and clarity, and the modernist fetish for monumentality with an orthodoxy of responsiveness, flexibility and adaptibility.

(Tidal shifts at Floyd Bennet Field. When all the land is flooded, the piers and jetties must be something to behold. Like submerged monoliths. Or the false ruins of a flooded city jutting out from the depths. Image by Kelly and Wakabayashi.)

Meanwhile, it must be mentioned that in addition to being points of access, the jetties and piers are pedagogical tools as well. As the landscape changes around them, they provide a backdrop with which one may be able to discern the various habitats, the disappearance and reemergence of landforms, and fluctuating sea levels.

One may even possibly detect the creeping effects of global warming.

(Where the wetlands will be in 2010, in 2040 and in 2080. Image by Kelly and Wakabayashi.)

(Thanks to Ashley Kelly for providing a digital copy of their original entry boards.)

Mineral Manhattan

2008-07-15T22:18:00.001-05:00

(The fossilized remains of the Statue of Liberty and WTC towers. And some residual landscape and primordial clouds. From an unknown issue of The New York Times Magazine. Slightly larger version. See also, yet again: Pictorial Stones.)

Sand Wars

2008-07-15T18:04:00.005-05:00

(Houses on stilts on Nags Head, North Carolina. Photo by Stephan Delfour-Given/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of “industrial Brindisi” and “elegant, baroque Lecce” are battling each other over sand.

Quoting The Guardian:

Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: “Don't touch the sand.”

As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.

Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.

Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.

And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.

In any case, to return back to Italy, the deputy mayor of Lecce was asked from where the city will now get their sand after the courts had ordered them to stop digging in front of Brindisi. She replied that they will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.

In the Archives:
Climate Ghettos

Related:
The Retreating Village

New Nauru

2008-07-14T18:15:00.009-05:00

(Nauru's investments in Hawaiian hi-rise luxury condos. From left to right, with the yellow border: 133 Waimanu, Nauru Tower and Hawaiki Tower. Photo by Stone 55. Source.)

In one of our more recent climate change fantasies, we proposed that the richest and most intensive carbon producing countries should set aside “reservations” in their own territories — and not just in some arid, treeless corner of New Mexico, for instance, but in prime real estate — for refugees whose Pacific island nations have been swept under the ocean by sea level rise.

Now someone has pointed us to a Wikipedia article on the Nauru Phosphate Corporation, the government entity in charge of phosphate mining in Nauru. Specifically, we were directed to the unfortunately small section on its long-term investments intended to support the citizens once the phosphate reserves have been exhausted.

There, we read that “the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Development group has constructed two of five hi-rise luxury condos in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The five towers (two completed as of 10/05) are located on prime Honolulu real estate with ocean views, and represent a benchmark in Honolulu luxury high-rises. Other investments included Nauru House [divested in 2004 to pay off debts] in Melbourne and Hawaiki Tower in Honolulu.”

Should Nauru's co-investors might feel charitable and transfer their shares of these luxury condos to the struggling island, we can imagine these towers, then, being granted extraterritorial status. In spacious floorplans and lushly decorated rooms, Nauru's citizens can ride out the flood in foreign land while still preserving their sovereignty, if not their island culture.

Put in some wind turbines on top, drill a few geothermal pipes into the molten underbelly of Oahu, harness the power of the waves and maybe New Nauru can become a sustainable settlement, something which its most recent incarnation was definitely not. Of course, they may have to battle their neighbors who must protect the market value of their multi-million dollar condos.

Alternatively, they could be employed as migrant service workers by the tennant associations, their wages being sent back home to shore up their country's GDP as remittances.

(Thanks, Andy K!)

Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea

2008-07-14T02:13:00.007-05:00

First there was Barcelona, and now Cyprus is also importing water.

Like Spain, Cyprus is suffering from a severe drought that has left its reservoirs at 7.5% full. In fact, according to Reuters, the first shipment of 40,000 cubic meters of drinking water from Greece is “more than double the quantity in all of the Mediterranean island's 17 main reservoirs.”

In this project, described as “unprecedented in its scale,” there will be a total of 5 tankers delivering water over the next 6 months, though we can't help imagine a continuous line of smaller ships of the line plying through the waves of this ancient sea for many years to come, until global warming is reversed or the Cypriots decide to leave en masse, a river encased in metal, with tributaries from other hydrologically well-endowed regions, and meandering just like any other by means of propellers.

One wonders what the geopolitical implications of this new international trade could be? Will these maritime sea lanes be considered as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, in which any disruption always poses a threat to national security and are thus constantly patrolled by naval forces and monitored from above by a constellation of spy satellites? Will calls for UN trade embargo be sought against countries threatening these vital routes?

You can live without oil. You can live without high-priced rice while the current food crisis rages on. But you can't live without water.

In any case, we wonder as well what the contours of the geopolitical landscape would be like if Israel were to import water not just from the European side of the Mediterranean but, out of the gravest of gravest necessity, from its Arab neighbors also, for instance, tapping the Tigris or the already overtapped Nile? As inconceivable as this scenario may be, the reality of it is that climate change will reconfigure new artificial river valleys in the most unlikely combination of countries.

Meanwhile, instead of tankers, how about dirigibles retrofitted with solar panels? During the rainy season, they graze along the canopies of the Amazon, soaking up fresh tropical water. Enterprising landscape architects on an eco-tour of the rainforest will record their mesmerizing whirs of rotating blades — the eco-soundtrack of New Nature — and then sell the DVDs on eBay or at a farmer's market.

Come the dry season, they migrate to Cyprus and Barcelona.

In the Archives:
A New River in the Mediterranean Sea

Lithic Landscape

2008-07-13T18:41:00.003-05:00

(This image depicting Abraham sacrificing Isaac is but one of the finer examples of pietre dure accompanying a recent New York Times article on a new exhibition on this hyper-form of mosaic at the Met. In a marvelous synergy between material and subject, the pieces of stones — baked deep in the grinding innards of the earth — give this overwrought scene of infanticide its explosive energy. See also: Pictorial Stones.)

2008-06-23T17:09:00.001-05:00

New York's Central Park has turned into a battleground, New York Magazine tells us — joggers vs. bikers vs. dog walkers vs. drivers. “It’s about the politics of public space. Who gets that space? And how is it apportioned?”

New Kiribati

2008-06-16T18:06:00.017-05:00

Earlier this month, the president of Kiribati warned the nations of the world that his country will be gone by century's end. Submerged under rising sea level, a casualty of climate change.

And even if, by some ridiculously well-timed miracle, everyone reduces their carbon footprint to near zero, the 92,000 island inhabitants “may be at the point of no return” where reversing the effects of the emissions already in the atmosphere will not come before their atolls get flooded. The president thus asked for help in resettling his people.

While very impolitic, he should demand from the worst polluting nations that as an act of “redemption” they should set aside “reservations” in prime real estate, for instance, some of the Hawaiian islands, where the entire population can collectively forge a new set of geographic identitites instead of being dispersed in diasporic communities around the world.

Maybe China is open to the idea of deleting a part of the Tibetan plateau and exporting the pulverized geology to the Pacific. They will, of course, argue that this a form of carbon emission trading.

Or the European Union could give the president an order or two of Vicent Callebaut's Lilypad.

Quoting Archinect, where we first saw this featured.

LILYPAD is a true amphibian - half aquatic and half terrestrial city - able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters. This artificial lagoon is entirely immersed, ballasting the city. It enables inhabitants to live in the heart of the sub aquatic depths. The multi functional program is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated to work, shopping and entertainment. The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline. The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature, exploring new modes of cross-cultural aquatic living.

Kiribati would probably need a less pimped out version, unless, of course, they realign their economy away from fish and phosphate towards eco-tourism — which leads us to wonder: will future climate change refugees become a new caste of service sector workers inhabiting a sort of Floating Hotel & Duty Free Mall, the port of call that comes to you, wherein the fine art of the greeting and linen folding is treated as a Masonic secret passed down from one generation to the next?

In any case, some more unabashedly digital images.

Meanwhile, this is MER, by PLOT, now BIG and JDS.

(Except for the last, which is by BIG, all images are by Vicent Callebaut and Pixelab.)

In the Archives:
The Vortex of 80,000 Nikes

2008-06-15T18:47:00.001-05:00

Polar Inertia visits some abandoned swimming pools.

NL 2028

2008-06-12T17:37:00.004-05:00

(The Olympic Hyper-Dome. Image by Lukas Narutis.)

This sounds like a very interesting exhibition:

What would it mean to the Netherlands if we were to organize the Olympic Games in 2028? How do you ensure that the stadiums used for the Games can still have a proper function afterwards? How do you organize the infrastructure and mobility for the Games? Do you combine all the functions in a single building, or do you spread the Games throughout the country?

MVRDV (in collaboration with the Academy of Architecture Rotterdam and the Berlage Institute) investigated the feasibility and the spatial chances of the 2028 Olympic Games in the Netherlands. Themes such as climate change, water management and energy production were connected in various ways with solutions for stadiums, infrastructure and accommodation for athletes.

If you don't find yourself nowhere near the Netherlands before the exhibition ends in September 21, you can purchase the book.

We also have a proposal.

(Via Super Colossal.)

2008-06-11T16:54:00.001-05:00

A 26-ton miniature earth core filled with boiling metal will spin at about 90 miles per hour in a laboratory to generate “the world's first artificial, spherical and self-sustaining magnetic field.” It will help scientists better understand our planet's magnetic climate, which “acts like a protective shield, blocking harmful particles from the sun, which fry the electronics on board orbiting satellites and mess with the electrical grids powering homes and offices.” It will also birth a new industry in magnetic weather modification.

2008-06-11T00:26:00.005-05:00

Charles Holland, of Fantastic Journal, writes:

In his book Looking at the Overlooked Norman Bryson describes the strange impossibility of the scenes depicted in Dutch still life painting. Vases teeming with exotic flowers would be painted in lavish detail despite the fact that the flowers themselves could never have existed together in that state. Coming from different continents and time zones they would flower at different times of the year and their representation together in full bloom is a perverse distortion of nature. The flowers represent both a temporal and spatial collapsing of distinctions and difference. The pictures instead celebrate a new found knowledge and power within the world, they are the product of empire.

In our post-humanist era, the direct descendants of Dutch still life painting — and also this sort of Northern Renaissance genre painting — must be our cloned sheep and GM rice fields and auricular mice and Martian designer plants and transgenic zoos when visually composed for mass consumption via CNN, press releases and blogs.

Naumachia in the Courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti held on 11 May 1589 and Other Adventures in Froth

2008-06-10T11:38:00.018-05:00

(Mannerist mayhem in the bowels of Renaissance clarity. Image by Orazio Scarabelli.)

Pruned turned 3 yesterday. To mark the start of Year 4, we return briefly to our first post, specifically to the referenced book edited by Joy Kenseth, The Age of the Marvelous, because, should it need to be disclosed, the Marvelous has been the overall theme of this blog from its inception and Kenseth's volume our editorial guide. We dredge, in other words, the interweb ether for “anything that lay outside the ordinary” and has “the capacity to excite the particular emotional responses of wonder, surprise, astonishment, or admiration.”

In the chapter written by Mark S. Weil, then, we see the above etching of a naumachia, or mock sea battle, in the flooded courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti. Staged as part of the festivities of 1589 celebrating a Medici marriage, it was “intended to amaze invited guests with their visual effects and to impress them with the wealth and power of the court.”

As illustrated by Orazio Scarabelli, eighteen Christian and Turkish ships do their stylized dance in front of a miniature fortress. Oars and sail masts interlock like the limbs of Busby Berkeley showgirls. Voluptuous hulls ram into each other in diagonal confusion. What solid ground there was has been covered with a vacillating carpet of faceless actors performing on cramped, presumably cacophonous pageant floats. Man, which had just been fleshed out and deified by the likes of Michelangelo, reverts back into the murky crowd. It's Mannerist mayhem in the bowels of Renaissance clarity.

And could you believe that that wasn't even the showstopper? Weil quotes Alois Nagler describing the program before this naumachia:

The greatest excitement was caused by a garden which, propelled by invisible forces, moved into the courtyard and unfolded on all sides to the tittering of birds. In the garden were imitations of towers, fortresses, pyramids, ships, horsemen, and animals all made out of greenery. A cloud of birds swarmed up before the Grand Duchess and one of the animals landed in the bride's lap, a good omen.

Weil, unfortunately, doesn't provide an image, if there is one.

In any case, the staging of a naumachia has not gone entirely out of fashion. If we don't count military exercises in such anxious terrains as the Taiwan Strait, the Sea of Japan and the Persian Gulf, the most recent one, of similar monumental scale, was carried out for the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992.

(Some time ago there was a YouTube video of this; it's now nowhere to be found. There is, however, about 10 seconds of footage in this clip starting at 0:58. Photo by Bernard Asset—Vandystadt/Allsport.)

We see the Mediterranean Sea rendered as a pointillist foam of humanity, each singular speck wearing a costume that seems to have been repurposed from loose tiles at Gaudí's Park Güell into gigantic Pringles. However individualized each one may appear up close, seen from the bleachers they coagulate into a kind of anti-humanist whole, flowing and ebbing in tandem, self-organizing, as if unconsciously following the physics of hydrology. They inundate. They make waves. They shudder as though whelmed by rough weather.

Navigating this simulated froth are the two belligerent sides of the fake naval war. On one side are the monstrous inhabitants of the deep, such as the Hydra with its inflatable tentacles vigorously flagellating in the currents. Other beasts reside here, too. There is plague and hunger and maybe even boredom, but which of the three is — or whether all of them are — theatrically evoked by The Giant Virus-like Spiky Ball and The Teeming Shoal-Army of Knives is difficult to pinpoint.

On the other side are the heirs of Hercules, adventurers exploring the undiscovered contours of this temporary landscape. They wear dominatrix costumes and act in very broad strokes, but again, whether these details are intended to scale their performance for the jumbo television screen and the exaggerated dimensions of the stadium is hard to know. Nevertheless, these heros win the battle, or at least survive the attacks. To commemorate their victory over Evil, they found a city that would later grow into Barcelona.

Their ship, meanwhile, is constructed out of Cor-ten steel; that is, we think it's Richard Serra's favorite medium. Otherwise, it's something metallic, an expression of Catalonia's industrial virility. This is the Olympics, after all, and everything about this twentieth-century naumachia is practically drowning in symbolism.

If one were to pursue an extended political reading of this elaborately staged spectacle, one can make a case that it's a subversive call for an independent Catalonia. Barcelona, the choreographers argue, has its own creation story, its own mythology and even its own national epic akin to the American Civil War and the French Revolution. Before Franco, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moors and even the Romans, the city already had a history. Moreover, you will not find here bullfighters or flamenco dancers wearing their peinetas and maniacally clucking their castanets — which at the turn of the 19th century were arbitrarily co-opted and standardized as the national identity; in Catalonia, that blood sport and those quaint customs might as well be of English origins. And you will not see here evidence of Andalucia, which apparently is the hegemonic national landscape. Instead, in this corner of the Iberian peninsula, you'll encounter a foreign landscape, a sea-drenched terrain (until recently, that is) populated by the worldly love-hybrids of Picasso and Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Since we are talking about the Olympics, all of these lead us to wonder: will there be a naumachia during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games?

(The Beijing National Stadium reflected in one of the artificial lakes of the Olympic Park, making it seem to be floating in an otherwise parched city.)

After Barcelona, the next three Olympics had their own watery musical. Atlanta evoked the swamps of the South; Old Man River made an appearance. Sidney told the creation story of Australia, who, like Aphrodite, emerged from the sea. And in Athens, the Mediterranean Sea was rendered again, that time with real water. If Beijing were to follow precedence, spectators would be privy to a hydro-extravangaza. After all, China is building the biggest water project in the history of the world; staging a naumachia would be a walk in the park.

Returning to the mock sea battle at the Palazzo Pitti, Weil remarked that the production “served to reinforce political dogma, such as the superiority of Christian forces over those of the Turk.” So will the Beijing festivities also “reinforce political dogma?” Of course, though perhaps not necessarily highlight existing ones, but rather create new myths. You can be sure that naumachia or no naumachia there will be propaganda to be broadcast from Herzog & de Meuron's stadium to an audience in the billions.

Or next door inside the frothy facade of the aquatics center.

(The Beijing National Aquatics Center. Image courtesy of PTW Architects.)

Lined around the flooded courtyard, the Chinese will see their divers and swimmers herald their official re-entry into the world stage as a muscular nation. The rest of us will simply be impressed by the show of wealth and power.

In the Archives:
Adventures on the Continental Shelf

2008-06-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

The People's Liberation Army against hydrology — watch it.

2008-06-08T21:04:00.001-05:00

Watch David Barrie explain how to spatialize an edible landscape in Middlesbrough, England — one that can actually have an impact on the physical grid and economic infrastructure of a city. But if you prefer to read text, The Guardian has a report on the project.

2008-06-08T15:56:00.002-05:00

Watch the films of Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille besides their remains at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Necropolises as occupiable urban open spaces.

The Return of the Sewer Divers

2008-06-04T19:22:00.002-05:00

(Taber MacCallum models a prototype hazmat diving system. Based on NASA space suit designs, it's supposed to dramatically decrease the chances of breaches. Photo by John B. Carnett.)

Hazmat diving may be the worst job in science according to MSNBC, but perhaps a form of ultra-niche tourism could be developed out of it.

It will be marketed to extreme adventurers no longer thrilled by skydiving or free solo climbing or locking one's head in the clasp of a crocodile's jaws and, still craving that rush of adrenalin, may be attracted to the possibility of swimming “into clouds of waste, inside nuclear reactors and through toxic spills on America's coasts and inland waterways.” Or how about a lake “full of urine and liquid pig feces” and littered with “needles used to inject the pigs with antibiotics and hormones?” A sublime landscape that must surely terrify your soul, metaphorically and, if your suit gets punctured, literally.

After their adventures, they will be told that an hour or two in these high-risk-environments-turned-diving-parks have given them an understanding of the natural and built environment greater than what they would have gotten from spending a week camping at Yellowstone National Park.

Nodding in agreement, one of them will say, “It felt like Nature was going to digest me alive.”

(Illinois Wetland National Park. Source.)

Speaking of sewers, fantasizing about possible Illinoises was a lot of fun, so we've been imagining quite a few more, including an Illinois in which the Land of Lincoln has been converted into a giant ecological machine treating the nation's entire sewage output.

Gone are the cornfields and the wheatfields and the vegetable fields, and embedded into the Jeffersonian grid in their place are vast constructed wetlands recycling wastewater by natural means.

Moreover, they will double as parklands — the nation's largest national park.

Everyone's shit will be piped in from every state. Even the most toxic effluent from industries will be trucked in, for there are townships specially vegetated with super-bioremediating plants and bacterium to suck up heavy metals and render extremely carcinogenic chemicals inert. Of course, the required infrastructure may be expensive and incredibly carbon intensive, but the financial and environmental costs will be offset multiple folds by this alternative form of waste management.

There will be a lingering smell in the air, but it will never get any worse than a local pig farm during a hot, muggy August day.

In the Archives:
Sewer Divers

2008-06-04T18:36:00.001-05:00

“A new type of 'lunar concrete,' made by mixing moondust and carbon nanotubes, could be used to construct buildings, solar power arrays, and monolithic telescopes on the moon,” National Geographic reports.

2008-06-01T15:11:00.002-05:00

We like storm drain stenciling. They usually read: No Dumping / Drains To River. But how about: Dump Here / Your Kids Get Cancer. Or: You'll Be Drinking That Soon. You can truly educate the public: Drop GPS Here. Go Read Its Tweets. Learn Urban Hydrology.

Prunings XLV

2008-05-31T23:20:00.001-05:00

(Agnus scythicus, or the future agro landscape.)

Now that we'll be posting some of the more interesting links and articles that we find out there as individual entries, our Prunings will be retired soon. But not before we reach L, because this auspicious initial calls for something special. But what? Any ideas?

Meanwhile, here are some blogs, discovered recently or otherwise:

Architectural Scholar

Buildings & Grounds

Check-in Architecture

Fantastic Journal

Metropolis POV

Paisajes Mineros

(As always, you can export our full subscription list as an OPML file via Bloglines.)

2008-05-31T21:37:00.001-05:00

Momus (a.k.a. Nick Currie) is writing a book on Scotland. Not that Scotland, though, but the one thousand possible Scotlands.

Did you hear about the Scotland that spent fifty years at war with Austria, perfecting its weaponry by sending spies to the Tyrolian republic? Or about the Scotland covered in equatorial rainforest and populated by cloned lemurs? Did you hear about the futuristic Shinto Scotland which models itself on the Japan of the Heian period? Or about Nova Caledonia, a lifeship suspended in geostationary orbit exactly 35,786 kilometers above Perth?

Perhaps when we voluntarily exile ourselves from our home state, we'll imagine 1,000 possible Illinoises. Did you hear about the Illinois that became a gigantic reservoir, its melted glacial waters piped in from Greenland through geopolitically sensitive terrain, feeding the parched Southwestern states at $500/barrel, and whose citizens live in cities on stilts enjoying their free healthcare, luxurious pensions and top-notch teachers?

2008-05-31T17:46:00.001-05:00

Geoff Manaugh has a plan. A great plan. So fantastic that we're going to implement it here as well. Similar to this.