faslanyc

Landscapes and Instruments

2012-02-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

[the powerful, graceful movements of the triple articulated arm of the backhoe works steadily to excavate the earth it sits on; the views it frames, the radii it creates, and the interaction moments with people, machines, and material work to make landscape as it excavates for building footers and utility pipes]

Wewanted to take a moment to announce a new effort we’ve got going on called“Landscapes and Instruments”. It is aproject interested in- wait for it- the way instruments make landscapes. It is as simple as it sounds. The one key thing to be clear about is thatinstruments are not at all limited to machines or tools. Rather, following Dewey’s instrumental theoryof knowledge, the suite of instruments is expanded to include the full range oftools, techniques, ideas, concepts and even the movements of the body that aredeveloped by organisms as a method for reorganizingtheir environment when experiencing conflict in a specific situation.

Rightnow the effort is organized according to the following: 1) a project (landscapes and instruments), 2) a theory(landscape instrumentalism), and 3) a firstspeculative proposal (Tierra Plastica). The hope is to continue developing andimplementing proposals over time to test the methodology and theory. You can check out the thesis statement,bibliography, definition of landscape approach, theoretical underpinnings, and urban context as well as follow the blog for research on the political-economicsituation, the areas of focus, the importance of dredging and other themes. A tumblr has been set up to share the imagesthat are now being produced fairly regularly.

We’dlove to invite anyone interested to check out the project and follow theprogress on both the blog and tumblr. Suggestions, criticisms, links, and feedback are not only welcome butdemanded, you rat bastard sons of bitches! Or whatever. But our hope is tocreate a platform to pursue the work within a constellation of interested andchallenging ideas. It is very much anopen-ended pursuit, a pirate ship scouring for booty, and will almost certainlyend in defeat in the gallows at the hands of her highness’ royal navy. Nonetheless, we invite you along.

Cathedral or Bazaar?

2012-01-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

[a bazaar in Baghdad; image from flickr user micmol]

The otherday we were spending a little time with Eric Raymond’s seminal essay “The Cathedraland the Bazaar”. We do it periodicallyas a way of self-medicating against the annoying notion of emergent urbanisticideologies bandied about in the halls of higher learning, and as a realitycheck for our own childish notions. The1997 essay about the design lessons learned from the Linux system is full ofinsightful, potent jewels that might inform new models of landscapepractice. More important, simply readingthis nerdy computer man’s essay is an aesthetic experience:

Linux overturned much of what I thought Iknew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototypingand evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certaincritical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach wasrequired. I believed that the most important needed to be built likecathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of magesworking in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds's style of development—releaseearly and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point ofpromiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-buildinghere—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar ofdiffering agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites,who'd take submissions from anyone)out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by asuccession of miracles.

Throughoutthe essay Raymond pays extra attention to the mechanics of the Linux system andhis materialist analysis leads to surprising conclusions which are cleverlytitled with captions such as “Release early, release often” and “On Managementand the Maginot Line”. When diving in todetails such as Linux kernel release mechanisms he bores down in on them,nerdily fumbling them around in his hands, poking it with sticks, and examiningthem under looking glasses.

My original formulation was that every problem ``willbe transparent to somebody''. [Linuxcreater] Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problemis not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it.``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understandsit. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.''

In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs anddevelopment problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena… In the bazaar view, on the other hand, youassume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena—or, at least, that they turnshallow pretty quickly when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers poundingon every single new release. Accordingly you release often inorder to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less tolose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

But the problem with being clever and original insoftware design is that it gets to be a habit—you start reflexively making things cute and complicated when youshould be keeping them robust and simple.

What strikes us isthe emphasis on experimentation and execution. Conceptualization is rightfully relegated to being the third wheel. Within the field of landscape practice wewould do well to take a page from this book and focus more on experimentationand execution and a little less on conceptualization. Engagement with the medium itself has longbeen a fundamental aspect of landscape practice. Some will object that thereare very real barriers to entry with something like operating a backhoe orgrowing a forest, but the focus on conceptualization is most severe andstriking within the academy, the very institutions that might marshal theresources needed to create opportunities to overcome these barriers. And this is due to an almost singular focuson conceptualization (and representation).

Extending Raymond’sanalysis, one could imagine a future where landscape education doesn’t occursolely in a building with a mac, a table saw, and an onsrud router as the onlyinstruments with the surrounding landscape purely ornamental and maintain bycrews. Rather, a significant part oflandscape education might allow for coir log installations, driving scalemockup sheet piling, propagating live stakes, and getting a heavy equipmentoperator’s license. This leap wouldrequire us to wriggle free from the Eurocentric art-historical death grip, butit promises the chance to create more bizarre landscapes.

[there may always be a need for the cathedral, but that doesn't mean that we need to construct the whole academy around them]

Bolivia Mar

2012-01-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

[Los Caracoles highway which climbs the Andes from Argentina to Peru; Los Caracoles were part of the Dakar 2010 rally landscape]

Lastweekend saw the close of the annual Dakar rally raid. We are particular fond of the race becausethe vehicles used are so extreme that they bring in to relief the direct waythat instruments make landscapes: theDakar rally landscape is a sprawling line of mountains and cities and desertsand rivers covering the southern half of South America. Without the specialized equipments of theDakar rally these zones are spectacular sand dunes, trees, rivers, and ocean,but they are not the rally landscape until a class-T1 car goes crashing throughthe riparian undergrowth along the Rio Pisco ahead of a pack of 500 cc quadbikes. Thisyear’s race began on the Atlantic coast in the Argentine city of Mar de Plata,shot across the pampas, past the ruins of Epecuen, over the Andes Mountains inChile, and through the Atacama Desert before finishing in Lima, Peru. One place it didn’t go through was theBolivian Litoral- the landlocked nation’s historical ocean accesscorridor. Maps that predate 1883 reveal thenation was not always landlocked. Infact, the Andean country enjoyed ownership of a wide swath of ocean accessthrough the Atacama Desert. While theexact borders and jurisdictions were ambiguous and contested since at leastindependence from Spain in 1826, no one seemed to much care until the discoveryof massive amounts of saltpeter in the 1870’s.

[a map of the campaigns for independence in 1826 shows Bolivia with access to the Pacific through the Atacama Desert]

[the monument to the sea at Bolivia Mar. This is located at the end of the Interoceanic Highway; note the extremely strange spiral stair that terminates in the wire mouth of the female face at the top of the space frame; this monument is the center of the recreational area]

In the 19th century saltpeter was a main component of agriculturalfertilizer and food preservatives. Itwas also a major ingredient in explosives and rocket propellants. Saltpeter was food and bombs. And the largestsaltpeter resources in the world were in the Atacama. The War of the Pacific between Chile (backedby British capital) and the Peru-Bolivia Alliance left Chile in control of theAtacama and Bolivia without access to the Pacific. Today the area is still contested andlittered with national parks. Thesaltpeter mines became obsolete with the discovery of the Haber process forsynthesizing nitrates, and the mining towns are gone but Chile enjoys thewealth generated by the massive copper mines in the territory. Bolivia enjoys Bolivia Mar.

BoliviaMar is a 3 mile slice of dusty shoreline on the Peruvian coast just south ofthe tiny town of Ilo. The result of a1992 agreement between the two nation, Bolivia Mar is technically a piece ofBolivia, a gesture of goodwill from their Andean neighbor and consolation forthe loss of their coast. When the agreementwas first reached it seems most hopes were pinned on vague notions about thepower of private capital to develop random slices of terrain-cum-property. The results have been bizarre, and while wekind of like things as they are- a strange combination of impotent nationalambitions and industrial exploitation- it is clear that the intended resultshave not been achieved. The recent pactratified in 2010 is a bit more ambitious and specific. Thenew plans for Bolivia Mar call for expansion of the existing port facilities atthe nearby town of Ilo to operate as a binational port serving Bolivianindustrial interests. In additionindustrial installation for the refinement of natural gas and iron mined in theBolivian highlands are to be constructed and administered by Bolivia. To the south a recreational zone is to becreated at Bolivia Mar with fishing piers, hotels, and a promenade.

[the Enersur dock just south of Bolivia Mar is one of the longest in the world; the complex is a thermoelectric plant using coal brought by boat and seawater to create electricity for industrial and domestic use in Ilo; the Suez Energy International company which owns Enersur, is exploring the possibility of exporting copper here from its Quellaveco Atacama location, scheduled to begin production in 2014]

Whatis one to make of this monstrous concoction of industrial-port-recreationalfacilities, all established in a historically contested territory filled witheconomic promise and political landmines? This strange situation makes us ask wonder can a landscape approachgenerate beneficial relations, and point the way towards a re-knitting of thisfrontier landscape? Bolivia Mar may belittle more than a symbolic historical curiosity. Or it may offer a chance to develop a newmodel for making the territory in a situation where resources are scarce,history is heavy, jurisdictions are contested, and the need for a solution isimperative. Wehave no idea. We are fascinated by thisBolivia-by-the-Sea, however. Along thePeruvian coast west of the Lake Titicaca, and south of Lima a small slice ofsand dune has been carved out for the industrial-recreational desires of thenation of Bolivia. Might the port of Ilobe able to leverage this new bi-national status, the wealth of the Bolivianhighlands and the opening of the Interoceanic Highway connecting Brazil andPeru to build itself as one of the great Pacific ports, offering an alternativeto Valparaiso, Callao, and Los Angeles? Weimagine that new techniques of territorialization might be developed anddeployed, resulting in strange synthetic landscapes.

[is Bolivia Mar what Tyson was referring to when he said "I might just fade into Bolivian..."?? If so, it only further confirms our hypothesis that Mike Tyson is the greatest landscape architect ever]

Gateway: National Parks and the Making of the Territory

2012-01-13T11:55:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of 2011 the good folks over at PAP released a bookabout New York City’s best big park- Gateway National Park! Gateway is seemingly unique among nationalparks; rather than an image of pristine wilderness offered up for theconsumption of national tourists, it is marked by the ruins and wastedinfrastructures of the old airfield and chimera-ecologies materializing in theleftover places around the edges of Jamaica Bay, Staten Island, and Sandy Hook. Here the primary patrons are not busloads oftourists from afar, but locals living on the outer rim of New York City. Outfall sewers and obsolete cold war defensesare as important as rock outcroppings and maritime forests.

[A few years ago we made our affections for the slice of Gatewayknown as Floyd Bennett Field known by penning a few rough verses on the future of recreation for the Urban Omnibus. Popular contemporary conceptions of the American landscape might be characterized as “Europe on steroids”. We think this doesn’t go far enough into the heavy and psychoactive drugs. It is better characterized variously as “Europe on steroids, cocaine, peyote, and meth-amphetamine”.]]

The book features some solid essays by FASLANYC-favorites Ethan Carr and Kate Orff and publishes theresults of the 2007 ideas competition held by the Van Alen Institute. The format and price approach thescary-in-more-ways-than-one realm of coffee table tome and begs the question:wouldn't the objectives of this project be better served through an internetplatform? Nonetheless, the essays arecomprehensive and daring, and while the competition entries already seem dated-featuring all the stuff that all the competitions in 2007 featured- togetherthey serve as a powerful ode to the potentiality of the place. Part activist propaganda, part speculativeexercise, with just a dash of serious scholarship, the book is a good bookend tothe first phase of Gateway’s rebirth.

The Gateway book adds to the frothy ferment surroundingNational Parks in recent years. Since2007 there have been two competitions by the Van Alen Institute, the St. LouisArch grounds project, and the hallmark that any historical fact needs to beconsidered significant- a Ken Burns documentary. These are all part of a larger environmentaland economic conversation, thrown in to relief by the Great Recession andslashing of government budgets, about the future of our federal lands. The dialogue surrounding these huge swaths ofour patrimony is typically focused on wilderness conservation and the public good of recreation and tourism as an antidote to the ills of 19th century urbanism. No doubt there is muchtruth to this, and many folks smarter than ourselves have spent theirconsiderable careers crafting the narrative. But that is not what interests us today.

[We can say from experience that what Floyd Bennett Field needs is not further study, but some people out there flying more model planes, playing soccer, growing and building habitat, and racing bicycles. Here’s to the hope that future academic articles on the Gateway National Park don’t end with the familiar “needs more study”, but rather “do some shit.”]

Focusing on national parks, a quick survey of the history of the widerAmerican landscape brings an alarming historical trend to the surface. The idea for national parks originated in theUnited States as the country was quickly expanding west, seizing lands fromMexico and staking claims in California to ward off British Imperial designs(at that time Canada was still British). The official history states that they were an outgrowth of a philosophyarticulated by Olmsted in his 1865 report on Yosemite. According to National Park Service HistorianDwight T. Pitcaithly the idea was one of:

leisurebased on nature's regenerative powers for an urbanizing society. [Olmsted]believed… that the essence of park land should be in establishing a contrast tothe pace of the modern world… Olmstedenvisioned a need for ordinary citizens to maintain perspective in their dailylives by being exposed to, and encouraged to contemplate, the natural [sic]rhythms of the natural world.

This official history is generally accepted, despite the extremely suspect reading of Olmsted (did he really think that parks were anti-modern,providing only contrast to everything that was contemporary? Did he really think that ordinary citizens intheir daily lives were just going to hop on horseback at the end of a tough dayat the mill and head down for a breath of fresh air at Yosemite? Methinks not.)

Well, this is all well and good. Never mind that these national parks were located several days travelfrom any nearby populations, much less those of a verifiable city- at that timeSan Francisco was the only population center in the top 100 in the West, andthat thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849. Whatis more, getting to these places was exceedingly difficult, as the Golden Spikewouldn’t be driven for four more years, and the car was not yet a twinkle in eyeof a prepubescent Henry Ford. It wouldbe decades before National Parks were created within a day or two of the urbanpopulations- all of the pre-depression parks were west of the continental divide, save one or two exceptions. Theargument has been made that this was a far-sighted move, one in which Olmstedand others anticipated a future in which these areas would be near urbanpopulations. What is more, they foresawthat these places would be under threat from those urban populations they weremeant to serve if not protected. Andthat is true. So we made some nationalparks. Took city parks, scaled them up,and put them under the jurisdiction of the federal government.

[a 1956 NPS map showing the nation's national parks and monuments. By far the majority of the parks were in the West, though this has changed a bit post WWII]

This was America’s best idea! Ourgreatest invention! Our mountains andforest and rivers were bigger, more drastic, more majestic! An entire art-historical theory- the sublime-found its footing and took off on the strength of these natural objects. This was the raw material of our futuresociety which we could put up against the great cultural monuments of Europeand the Far East! Unfortunately it doesnot explain why no national parks were created east of the Mississippi untilhalf a century later and why many of them were located at the edges ofcontested terrains which had been taken from Mexico or were loosely controlledterritories with no state governments and sparse national populations.

A similar trend can be observed throughout the Americas. Huge swaths of Hawaii were made nationalparks before it was ever a state. The majorityof the lands of the Darien Gap on the border between Panama and Colombia areadministered as a national park, a phenomenon that holds true for most modern CentralAmerican borders. The massiveVenezuela-Brazil border is almost entirely national park, as is much of theborder between Peru and Bolivia.

Our thesis here today is that national parks in the American landscapeare more than conservation-recreation machines; their primary purpose is geo-political. Creating national parks was first andforemost a historical act of territorialization of the American landscape. Recreation for future populations and theconservation of natural objects and ecosystems was a major factor, but this wasof secondary importance to the acts of territorialization needed to construct anational landscape in the expanses of the Americas where populations were thinand heterogeneous, capital was concentrated in a few hands, and borders werecontested. Take the case of ParqueNacional Iguazu in the Argentine portion of the Triple Frontera zone of SouthAmerica.

The falls of Iguazu had been known to Europeans at least since theirdiscovery by Spanish explorer de Vaca in 1541. A Jesuit mission was established ten years later, but the populationremained entirely indigenous until 1881. The territory was under Paraguayan jurisdiction until it was ceded to Argentina as an outcome of the War of the Triple Alliance in 1864. The area remained a contested zone and largely unsettled by Argentines until 1902 excursions into the area, much like those undertaken in Yosemite30 years prior, convinced authorities in Buenos Aires of its importance. Despite an almost non-existentnational population, its strategic location at the border with Paraguay and Brazil as wellas the recreational possibilities the area might one day offer to tourists was enough to convince the government to buy the land and build a tourist town and military port.

In subsequent decades landscape designers Carlos Thays and BenitoCarrasco authored reports on the potential of the place and editorialized inthe national newspapers about the importance of conserving the falls and the surrounding jungle. Eventually the land was purchased anddesignated a future national park and zonamilitar (military base), a vision which came to fruition in 1928 asArgentina’s first national park. Thayswas chosen to provide the urban plan for the city located in the new nationalterritory with the objectives of supporting the touristic-military objectivesin the national interest.

[the contested zones of the land-locked nation of Paraguay- Puerto Iguazu is in the little elbow where the pink and orange meet to the far right; the orange zone is now part of Argentina, the various other orange areas were also once claimed by Paraguay but have been ceded to or taken by other South American countries since 1811]

This particular case makes even more clear the geo-political role ofnational parks in the American landscape and suggests that parks are not onlylandscapes themselves, but are also mechanisms for the construction of largerlandscapes- national territories. In theAmericas they not only accommodate tourists and conserve natural objects andecosystems, they also offer a way for the national government to establish acontrol regime in a contested zone which creates new and differentopportunities for populations, economies, and ecologies to develop.

Of course, that could all be crap, so much horseshit on the side of thetrail to Old Faithful. But we think thatthis reading of national parks in the American landscape might offer a potentlens to view the urban national parks that have been getting so much attentionin recent years, be they the DC forts, Gateway National Recreation Area, or theSt. Louis Arch Grounds.

We have suggested before that the frontier is now in our cities. This relation seems even more tightly coupledin places like Gateway and the DC forts, where military installations precededthe creation of a park. If nationalparks are a uniquely pan-American instrument for dealing with the Americanfrontier, and the frontier is an urban fact in our post-industrial cities, thenwhat are the means by which an urban park constructs the national territory?

[given the contested history of the Falkland Island/Islas Malvinas and their potential to one day serve as a stopover on South Seas trading routes and a point of departure to the warming Antarctic Peninsula, we are guessing there is a decent chance that one day huge chunks of them will be designated as a national park]

Landscapes of Radio Silence

2011-12-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

[The National Radio Quiet Zone is a 13,000 square mile rectanglestraddling the Virginia-West Virginia border; if you’ve ever driven throughthis area and tried to make a phone call you noticed that it becomesincreasingly impossible towards the center; this is not only because you are in“the sticks/styx”, though you are, it is also because you are in the center ofthe federally controlled National Radio Quiet Zone]

The National Radio Quiet Zone was created in 1958 by the United States FederalCommunications Commission to shelter the National Radio Astronomy Observatoryin Green Bank, WV and the radio receiving facilities for the United States Navyin nearby Sugar Grove, WV. The locationof the zone was chosen because the rugged Alleghany Mountains offer terrainshielding that blocks the electromagnetic hum encircling most of the globe thanksto the proliferation of electronic gizmo landscapes in the last century.

The zone is an historical anomaly, enabled by a preponderance ofcontiguous federal land, the geology of the Alleghany Mountains, and aparticular moment in the political economy of West Virginia. (Other NRAO stations in Socorro, New Mexico andthe Atacama Desert in Chile have their own advantages, but neither is a NRQZ.) It is tempting to claim that the Zone cameabout because of these preconditions, that it was somehow a material manifestationof these inherent qualities. But thisdenies the agency of the telescope technology which brought together suchdisparate artifacts as Alleghany topography, the George Washington NationalForest tract, and the political maneuvering of former West Virginia SenatorRobert C. Byrd. More important, itassumes that since those preconditions manifested this material condition- thelandscape of silence with its telescopes- then they will continue in perpetuityas long as the preconditions remain. This is, of course, not true. TheNRQZ as a zone free of electromagnetic interference is constantly being torn apart and reconstructed- electro gadgets arehunted down and eliminated, permits for cell phone towers are denied, a touristwith an unusually strong ham radio leaves Snowshoe Ski Resort.

[An AT&T tropospheric scatter relay station situated on top of a mountain in Buckingham, VA near the NRQZ; this obsolete piece of Cold War infrastructure is one of the progenitors of the myriad devices that consistently work to tear apart the radio silence of the NRQZ; image source]

The integrity of the zone is maintained not only by the terrain shieldof the mountains, but also by the actions of different workers and the specificinstruments used- at the NRAO scientists drive a fleet of diesel ’69 CheckerCabs and ‘70s Dodge trucks. The on-sitelabs are designed to ensure that no radiation generated in the architectureescapes the building envelope. Most famously,they employ a grizzled ex-midshipman/electro-junky/hillbilly genius to rove the QuietZone extinguishing offending electronic heating pads or broadcastingtowers.

This vast tract is an example of that particularly interestinglandscape typology where absence ofsomething is the defining characteristic. All of the different parts- the Alleghany Mountains, visitors to SnowshoeSki Resort, the Cass Railroad, the Green Bank Telescope, soy beans growing inthe Shenandoah Valley- come into and extend beyond the limits of the NRQZ. Yet inside the Quiet Zone they are but parts-objects relating to each other within a landscape of radio silence. Following Michel Serres, Kazys Varnelis andBruno Latour, an actor-network reading of the Quiet Zone shows this landscape tobe a network of specific geologies, political actions, technological operations,and behaviors of locals and tourists, all held together and determined by the desiresof a telescope! In his essay “BrunoLatour, King of Networks” Graham Harman notes:

What wefind always and everywhere are simply networks of actors. The actor is not quite an object and notquite a subject; or rather, it can behave like both of these, depending on howview it. Following Serres, Latour makes use of the term “quasi-object” to referto the precarious status of entities. Onthe one hand they are contextualized by the objects with which they are fused;on the other, they have retreated into their own dark inner natures and arenever fully measured by the networks in which they are involved at any givenmoment.

[CentralPark in 1860, while under construction the landscape was already what we knowas Central Park; though its shape and form differed radically, the boundariesand uses offered by the park were already in place]

[paintingby Maurice Pendergast at the turn of the 20^th century; the form hadchanged but many of the uses were similar and Central Park was still CentralPark]

And so we might imagine that the telescope is one of thesequasi-objects, a precarious entity contextualized by the surrounding mountains,hillbilly enclaves, and scientific projects while also inflecting their shapeand formal materialization. Given theprecarious and contingent nature of this quasi-object and its prominence indetermining the landscape of radio silence, the concept of fixity is particularly beguiling. In a landscape there is always some notion of fixity engaged in anintense tango with the precariousness of quasi-objects. The NRQZ and the 1988 collapse of the GreenBank Telescope provide an ideal case-study.

In 1988 the Green Bank Telescope collapsed due to the failure of agusset plate in the box girder assembly that formed the main antenna support. Suddenly the reason for maintaining the QuietZone was gone. What followed seemsfairly logical, but provides some interesting insight into the question offixity and contingency in landscapes. Instead of dissolution of the Quiet Zone landscape, a new telescope was built-the integrity of the landscape was maintained despite the destruction of one ofthe primary parts. If we can imaginethis particular landscape as a network in a given terrain defined byquasi-objects and their relations that is continually constructed by all sortsof actors, then the question of fixity is really a topological one (as opposed to a hermeneutical one). In the future, given the rise of computationand the relevance of Latour’s ideas, we imagine that landscape architects might take more cuesfrom the mathematician in Moebius.

[Photo of the original 300 foot Green Bank Telescope on November 15, 1988 before its collapse; image source]

[the original telescope on November 16, 1988]

A Field Guide to Occupation

2011-11-20T11:32:00.001-08:00

The Occupy movement has heated up precipitously since we last postedhere. Last weekend saw a coordinatedauthoritarian crackdown on the occupation with fallout and confrontation continuing throughoutthe week. That this coordinated effort occurredis not a surprise. The writings ofhistorians such as Fernand Braudel or JC VanLeur demonstrate how closelyknit and mutually reinforcing the institutions of the market and statemilitancy tend to be in modern political economy, where any perceived threat tothe market is usually confronted by the power of the state (see the Opium Wars).

[the Opium Wars in China were an instance of direct state-authored military intervention in the interests of the national market institution]

The root of confrontation might be seen in the peaceful but assertiveact of occupation, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the act of taking or maintaining possession of a country, building, land, etc especially by force. The fact that protesters arechoosing to claim a public space and make their argument through an assertion of physicalpresence should not be watered down. The stateand the market both offer institutionalized and accepted modes of protest,including permitted gatherings, legal challenge, and ostensibly the choice toshop or work elsewhere. Of course, theirmechanisms for sublimating the authentic grievances voiced through thesechannels are so sophisticated as to render impotent accepted forms of protest. The genius of the Occupy movement its ability to set new terms of engagement including the occupation of symbolicallyimportant public spaces- Wall Street, City Hall, campus quads, public parks,and the like- and the tactics employed to carry out those strategies- tentcities, kitchens, day marches, drumming, blogging, and internet broadcasting.

Confronted with these new terms, the state has deployed a raft oftactics and strategies that look eerily similar to crowd control strategies fora heated soccer match between hated South American rivals. These include border fencing, chemical andelectrical weapons, mass arrests, and massed units of armed foot patrolsdressed like storm trooper automotons. While the Occupiers are interested in assertively stoking a conversationand forcing those they vilify to confront the fact that life is , in fact,nasty, brutish, and short, the state decides that this must not be. And so they escalate the tensions in theinterest of protecting the targets of the Occupy protests, deciding that ifsome heads are going to be cracked, or if some people are just going to beinconvenienced, better it be a host of protesters than those that keep quietand go to work.

Brett Milligan at FreeAssociation Design documented the material and spatial qualities of OccupyPortland before it was removed from Lawnsdale and Chapman Square in Portland. TheAtlantic has provided incredible coverage, including Alexis Madrigal’stypically insightful piece analyzing the roots of this systematic stateviolence against citizens.

[referees are escorted from the stadium during the 1964 soccer riots in Lima, Peru; In a game between Peru and Argentina a critical goal was disallowed; spectators rushed the field in protest and were subsequently gassed by the police, as they tried to escape they found the exits to the stadium were locked; hundreds died, crushed or asphyxiated]

We were compelled to offer a quick analysis of some of the equipmentsand tactics in use in the hopes of enabling an understanding of theselandscapes of occupation. The analysisis broken down in to three sections that aim to capture a variety ofinstruments in operations. The hope isthat while the analysis is far from exhaustive, it might offer a frameworkunderstanding the instrumental aspects of these tactics and equipments, andallow for a mapping of how to negotiate these contested landscapes.

Borders

Borders are a fundamental element of any landscape. They not only establish the shape and size ofa place, they also mediate the exchange between adjacent entities andspaces. Borders in the Occupy movementare typically the pre-existing curbs of roads, the steps and exterior walls of adjacentbuildings, or densely planted areas. Theseintensify and mediate activity, becoming places of certain types ofconversation: proselytizing ofpassersby, or confrontation with bankers or politicians going to work. The benign and commonplace characteristic ofthese borders tends to inflect these relations, limiting them to passive andverbal exchanges.

["Police fences reproducing" by AppellateSquawk; these are used to enlarge a perimeter of state control in public space]

[the importance of enlarging and transgressing an aggressively established border become paramount for the most aggressive people on either side of the demonstration in Times Square, New York City; image courtesy of the National Journal]

The introduction by police of modular steel barrier fencing and theirreinforcement by armed patrol units greatly amplifies the nature of theseexchanges. They become zones of heatedconfrontation and violence, drawing to it the most active members of both sidesand provoking them. Each side sees theborder as an affront- for the protesters its mere presence is unfair, for thepolice the fact that they don’t get to put it where they decide it should go isan attack. The use of human bodies as aborder similarly works to escalate actions, creating terms that establish andsense of immediacy and demand there must be a victor and the vanquished in that moment. The cops that are in contact withpoliticians, media, each other, and are able to make strategic decisions areclustered back from the border whereas the foot soldier reduced to helmetedactants reacting to their immediate surroundings are clustered along thelines. Much the same occurs with theprotesters, with those interested to turn their anger towards a faceless symbolthrough shouting or incessantly snapping photos or taking video move toward theline. The border thus serves toreorganize a relatively flat and homogeneous field of actors along lines thatradiate back from the borders in a gradient.

Tents

The widespread use and destruction of tents has been the iconicstrategy employed by protesters and police. By employing camping equipment- sleeping bags, tents, tarps, stoves- whichis procured from nearby, dispersed locations (homes and stores) the protestersare able to greatly extend the ability of their bodies to occupy an outdoorpublic space while still conveying the image of a tenuous and negotiatedexistence in that place. A large scalebourgeoisie yacht-occupation of the marinas along Manhattan’s Hudson River sidewould hardly have the same effect. These dwellings require inputs of food,replacement materials, and waste disposal that extend the network out to localhouses and business that have the needed supplies. The landscape that is created- including thehomes and stores supplying the equipment a

[the array of domestic equipments in Occupy Portland as documented by Brett Milligan before its destruction November 12th]

[a landscape where resistance goes to become anonymous; the landfill in Kearny, NJ may be a final resting home for many of the tents, bags, pans, and tarps that sustained Occupy Wall Street through the fall]

By confiscating and destroying this equipment and enforcing rules initiallyintended to criminalize the homeless and youth (no sleeping on park benches, nobiking, drumming, or cooking) the state is able to dismantle the landscape anddissolve the immediate capacity of those people to continue occupation. In this operation (after the people aredispersed) trucks are brought in from municipal yards capable of haulingeverything away at once, and in a disorderly fashion. The final resting places are other municipalyards- landfills- designated for the disposal of society’s undesirable materialwastes. This equipment is of coursedesigned to be disassembled, stored, and reused. The fact that the police employ large-scaleand violent methods of disassembly and disposal is a symbolic act. The landscape that is generated is one of largecentralized municipal yards and dispersed local homes and businesses. Materials flow from the homes and businessesand coagulate for a time in strategic sites, forming a sort of heterogeneousand horizontal settlement- a larger entity. This entity is then deconstructedwholesale and disposed of alongside restaurant waste and construction anddemolition debris in a city landfill, where it will be mixed, covered over, andsymbolically forgotten in the future.

Media

The instruments of media create an extensive landscape in the Occupymovement. The images and audio theyrecord engage a huge slice of the population. The field devices including police intercoms, bullhorns, ipads, cameras,and video recorders can immediately distill the effects and extend the reach ofthe actions of each person nearby. Theseinstruments access a regional network of server centers which then offer thecontent to every person who access the internet. That the Occupy organizers use these samenetworks to coordinate marches, disseminate tools and information, andestablish principles is not surprise (and is detailed here by Alexis onceagain). However, these instruments are most powerful because of the potentiality they embody. Because they are media devices they are bothobjects in their own right and can affect other objects. They can be used antagonistically(coordinating police crackdowns, photographing officers incessantly) ordefensively (the possibility of being caught can limit the irrational anger ofauthorities and protesters).

[Image from a video tour Google put together of its server containers, screen capture by Stephen Shankland/CNET, image via Mammoth's "Preliminary Atlas of the Gizmo Landscape"]

[both bystanders and police use media recording devices as some occupy San Diego protesters are removed from Civic Center Plaza on Oct 14th; image courtesy of the National Journal]

In their immediate vicinity (whether on the ground or through digitalspace) these instruments produce desireeffects, urging police patrols into action, enabling satellite occupations,or emboldening protesters to confront authorities or each other. The effects can destabilize to chains ofcommand as well as coordinate novel or reinforcing ground actions. Insidiously, they also offer a level of removalfrom embodied events; police officers get an order from their telephones andexecute it through the chain of command, protesters turn in to bystanders aspeople are brutalized with batons or doused with poison chemicals.

[The analysis is rather hastily assembled and we would love anyadditional information, insight, or correction to what we offer here.]

On Landscape Ontology: An Interview with Levi Bryant

2011-11-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

These days the term "landscape" is included frequently as part of several growing and exciting fields of inquiry interested in human settlement and occupation- landscape urbanism, landscape ecology, landscape archeology, and landscape architecture, among others. Despite this, an ontological definition of exactly what a landscape is or might be remains problematic and ambiguous.

Levi Bryant is a professor of philosophy and the author of the recently released Democracy of Objects, as well as co-editor of O-Zone, a new journal of object-oriented studies. As an object-oriented philosopher Dr. Bryant works to develop a philosophy that pushes beyond the boundaries of human subjectivity to grapple with reality in all of its nasty splendor. In recent years the work of Dr. Bryant and others such as Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, and Ian Bogost is opening up new, actionable ways of thinking and working in the world.

Recently we had the chance to discuss intersections between his work and ideas of wilderness, landscape, control mechanisms and the ambivalence of utopian fictions in affecting public space.

[ectomycorrhizae are fungi that form symbiotic associations with plant roots, taking in the carbon provided by the photosynthetic capabilities of the plant; this symbiotic relation allows plants to access minerals and water in the soil that would otherwise be inaccessible to their larger cell structures]

Dr. Bryant, you've mentioned before many of the thinkers you are indebted to. I'm interested if there were specific experiences or places which alsopushed you to make the connections that you are developing in your form ofobject oriented ontology?

Brian, thanks for taking the time totalk with me today. It’s alwaysdifficult to determine what experiences might have made you fascinated with thethings that fascinate you, and this above all because experience, as theanalytic philosophers like to say, is so theory laden. At the heart of all experience is somethingof a self-reflexive paradox. Does somethingfascinate you because of experiences you have had? Or do you have the experiences you’ve hadbecause something fascinates you? There’s an undecidability here.

Nonetheless, two experiences come tomind. As a child I loved buildingthings. We would scavenge the localbuilding sites to gather scrap wood and nails and build forts, tree houses, anda friend and I even built a beautiful bridge across the creek in the park. We drove pilings deep into the creek bottomand constructed the bridge out of artfully arranged 2x4s. It had a feel akin to a Japanese woodenwalking path, which probably wasn’t much of a surprise as the interior designof the houses I grew up in had so many Asian influences. In working with wood and landscapes in theway we did—especially with irregularly shaped bits of scrap wood –you reallydiscover the agency of matter. On theone hand, you can’t make materials do whatever you want them to do. There’s a very real sense in which you haveto submit to the exigencies, the singularities, the idiosyncrasies of yourmedium to do anything with that medium. This was above all the case with scrap wood which, due to its varioussizes and how it had been cut functioned in a way not unlike the manner inwhich the constraints on writing a haiku or in iambic pentameter lead tosurprising inventions of language. Inshort, there’s a poetry of matter, or perhaps a poetry of working with matter, thatentails that any fabrication or construction is always a mutual result of thecraftsperson, the artisan, and the material. These are things that every artist, engineer, artisan, and cook, Ibelieve, knows; though philosophers, in their commerce with ideas and textsoften seem to miss this dimension of the world. I think that these early experiences working with physical and naturalobjects gave me a healthy respect for the autonomy and agency of entities thatwould later render me receptive and sympathetic to object-oriented thought.

The other experience that comes tomind is a bit darker and less idyllic. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I went through a difficult time in highschool and my family kicked me out of the home for a while. Insofar as I worked at a restaurant that paidvery little, I was directly thrown into poverty and was naked and vulnerablebefore the world. Paraphrasing Heideggerwith a Marxist twist, when you live in poverty everything is a brokenhammer. Here it will be recalled thatHeidegger argued that in the midst of use tools are rendered invisible becausethey become, as it were, immediate extensions of our body and projects. In working with a tool we are directed at theproject, the goal in which we’re engaged, not the tool that we’re using. However, when our tool breaks, we suddenlybecome aware of both the tool itself and the set of relations between toolsthat this particular tool belonged to. The tool and the network become present to us where before they wereunconscious and invisible (and here I won’t say “withdrawn”, but theinvisibility I’m talking about here is different than the withdrawal Harman isgetting at, I think).

Well this is how it is with povertyand homelessness. Everything becomes abroken hammer and the objects of the world and the networks to which theybelong become visible everywhere. Theybecome visible precisely because they are no longer operative in the world ofthe impoverished person. This is alsohow it is for excluded groups. Suddenlythe world becomes a menacing problematic place. To eat and to live you must go to your job. To go to your job your uniform needs to beclean. For your uniform to be clean youmust go to the laundry mat. To go to thelaundry mat you need transportation and money to buy soap and pay for thewashers and dryers. But to have moneyyou have to go to a job. Where, inordinary day-to-day life, the objects that sustain our social relations andways of living become all but invisible because they are functioning in the waythey’re supposed to function, in a state like poverty and homelessness all ofthose objects become obtrusive and present precisely because they are absent.

This experience, I believe,cultivated in me a strong sensitivity to the nonhuman objects that sustain ourexistence and social relations. In myview, a good deal of philosophy and cultural theory is blind to this dimensionof existence for the very reason that the material infrastructure—to useShannon Mattern’s term –upon which our existence is sustained is invisible byvirtue of functioning properly. Thisleads to a systematic distortion of philosophical problems insofar asrepresentation, signs, language, thought, ideas, and text come to beprivileged. What we miss is that not allproblems are necessarily a matter of, for lack of a better word, the ideationalor beliefs, but that the networks of objects that sustain us might very wellaccount for much of the reason patterns of living continue in the way theydo. In this respect, design, at thematerial level, can be revolutionary even where it doesn’t involve any changein beliefs.

[a painting in the limestone caves under southern Paris; note the prehistoric dinosaur bird, the canoe, the mycorrhizae-like wave crests, as well as the soda bottles and tea lights in the foreground]

The cover of Democracyof Objects features a series offantistical objects of similar scale and spacing strung on a piece of somethinglike barbed wire. The book The Speculative Turn thatyou edited with Graham Harman and Nick Srnicek features a pair of pruningshears. Barbed wire was a revolutionary technology that fundamentallyshifted settlement patterns across the North American midwest; pruners are theideal general purpose tool for maintenance and propagation of vegetation. Can you talk a little bit about the choice of those images?

To be quite honest I had no role inchoosing the images for either of my books, though I couldn’t be more pleasedwith the choices of the editors. I’mparticularly fond of Tammy Lu’s cover for TheDemocracy of Objects as I believe it very much captures the spirit of mythought. Seen from afar it looks likeflowers intertwined along threads of ivy. This very much captures my conception of objects as something that“bloom” or unfold, just as the Greeks conceived phusis as a blooming or unfolding. However, as you look more closely you suddenly see a hint of menace (thebarb wire and fishing tackle), as well as a universe that somehow manages tobeautifully interweave natural entities, computer memory storage devices, barbwire, fishing tackle and so on. TammyLu’s work captures the sense of a flat ontology where nature, culture, andtechnology are not distinct ontological realms but rather where all entitiesare intermingled on a single flat plain of immanence and where there is nosupplementary space that contains them but only the relations they forge withone another generating a network space. It is a world of great beauty as well as lurking menace.

The cover of The Speculative Turn is a bit more masculine and difficult for meto decipher. No doubt pruning sheerswere dimly chosen to convey the sense of something of the tradition—the Kantiancorrelationist legacy –being pruned away. This would be the aggressive, warlike dimension that seems especiallypopular among those speculative realists that fall in the nihilisticeliminativist camp and that seem to revel in death and destruction. Indeed, perhaps a major fault-line inspeculative realism is between that camp that emphasizes construction andbuilding (though without a anthropocentric reference for these terms) foundamong the object-oriented ontologists and the process-relationists, and thatside that seems delighted by tearing down, destroying, and death found amongthe nihilistic eliminativists. A moregenerous reading of the pruning sheers, however, would be to comprehend themalong the lines of the bonsai tree, as the collaborative process that takesplace between humans and nonhumans in the cultivation of collectives.

You refer to yourparticular object-oriented ontology as onticology, which rests on the eponymous ontic principle meaning that beings or entities consist in producingdifference. Two concepts of onticology which you have established asimportant are wilderness and potentiality. Infields concerned with an idea of landscape- geography, ecology, archeology,landscape architecture, art history, forestry, etc.- variants of these conceptsof figure prominently. Does onticology offer a definition for landscape?

I am suspicious of concepts likelandscape and environment because, in the popular imagination, they seem toimply fixed containers that are already there and that entities must adaptto. These concepts, I believe, point inthe right direction, but don’t quite go far enough. For this reason, I have tried to replace theconcepts of landscape and environment with the concept of “regimes ofattraction”. In my view, landscapes andenvironments are not something other than objects, but are rather networks orassemblages of objects. In other words,within the framework of onticology there is nothing but objects and relationsbetween objects; though I insist that objects can be severed from their relationsand that not every object is related to every other object. A regime of attraction is a set of relationsamong objects. I refer to theserelations as “regimes of attraction” because these relations evoke or activatepotentials within the objects related, leading them to actualize themselves inparticular ways. For example, right nowit’s very cold in my house because the temperature has dropped and my heatisn’t currently working. This is aregime of attraction involving my home, the position of the planet, weatherpatterns, my body, etc. This regime ofattraction leads my body to actualize itself in various ways. For example, the skin about my fingers istight and it is now hard to type as I write this. These relations between entities generate aparticular actuality or local manifestation in my body. A key point here is that landscapes are notfixed and static, but, because the objects involved in the regime of attractionare acting and reacting to one another, are perpetually unfolding andchanging. They can’t be pinned down onceand for all. For example, my bodynonetheless emits heat, vying with the coolness of the room.

I would thus refer to a landscape asa regime of attraction defined by a field of relations among a variety ofdifferent objects that presides over the local manifestations of the objectswithin this regime of attraction. Inshort, landscapes are networks or assemblages. They investigate what I call “cartographies” of entities and theirrelations in network time-space. I donot wish to step on the toes of landscape theorists as I have more to learnfrom them than they have to learn from me, but I’m inclined to suggest thatlandscape thought can be divided into two domains: landscape analytics and landscape activism. Landscape analytics might be thought as thecartography of the space-time of these relations between entities or objects,investigating both how they interact to produce various local manifestations,but also to compose a “virtual map” of the potentialities or tendencies thatreside within these regimes of attraction; the paths along which change inthese landscapes is unfolding and possible.

Landscape activism, by contrast, isnot merely a cartography of space-time assemblages of objects, but rather isthe attempt to intervene in landscapes or regimes of attraction so as to formthem in ways to produce particular desired local manifestations. This work of design can range from thetrivial to the profound. It might consistof something as simple as interior design that strives to produce particulartypes of affects in people that occupy a room, to revolutionary transformationsof social relations that through the artful arrangement of objects open vectorswhere humans and nonhumans become able to relate in entirely new ways, escapingclaustrophobic and oppressive regimes of attraction that both quelled thepossibility of these relations and generated misery for those occupying theseregimes of attraction.

[a 47.3 foot diameter tunnel boring machine emerges near Niagara falls after tunneling 6.3 miles at depths of 500 feet under the Niagara escarpment as part of the Ontario Power Generation project]

Onticology seeks toreconcile the critical, discursive aspects of Kantian critique with aninsistence that objects of the world have their own irreducible alterity byproviding an affirmative definition of difference. You've characterizedthis as a refusal to reduce objects to their cultural representations withoutremainder. What do mechanisms of control- wire fences, cell membranes,code language- play in this process of differencing?

It seems to me that there is only ametaphorical relations between cell membranes and entities like control-wirefences and code languages, though I’ll have to think about this some more. Every object necessarily has a membrane ofsome sort or another that regulates its relationship to other entities in theworld. This is part of what it means tosay—in the framework of onticology –that objects are withdrawn from oneanother. Objects never directlyencounter one another, but rather encounter other through the distorting lensesof their membranes. Put differently,every object metabolizes the other entities of the world through itsmembrane. Membranes, of course, need notbe films like a skin, but can just as easily be the structure of the object orlinguistic and conceptual codes.

By contrast, when we talk aboutsomething like a control-wire fence it seems that we’re talking about somethinga bit more complex than a membrane. Entities like control-wire fences are not membranes, so much as objectsthat function as intermediaries between one or more object and one or moreother objects. In the case of acontrol-wire fence you have an entity bound by one membrane (the entities onone side of the fence) related to an entity bounded by another membrane (thecontrol-wire fence) relating to entities with yet another membrane (theentities on the other side of the fence). There is thus a transmission of affect that is translated from oneentity to another with the fence serving as an intermediary such that theaffect can be transformed and modified quite a bit as we all experience whendealing with “red tape” and bureaucracies. In this regard, the control-wire fence is what Marshall McLuhan refersto as a “medium”. It is both an objectin its own right and an object that transports and transforms the other objectsfor which it serves as an intermediary. There are all sorts of significant implications that follow fromentities that function in this way, some positive, others horrific.

Your philosophyemphatically deals with reality, not just our access to it; in this way itseems related to John Dewey's instrumental theory of knowledge,especially with the notion that theactivities of thinking and knowing occur when an "organism experiences conflict within a specific situation". In his philosophy, metaphysics is concerned with ideas that openup new lines of action within a contingent and material reality. As aresult, the object of knowledge is the future, not a rationalization of thepast. Is it fair to suggest there are similarities here with yourapproach?

Dewey is a figure that I seldommention, but is nonetheless someone who is everywhere present in mythought. I first discovered Deweythrough Experience and Nature in highschool, where he articulated precisely the sort of relation between thought andbeing that I believed I was striving after. Later, through an encounter with the sadly departed Hans Seigfried, Idiscovered Dewey again through Logic: A Theory of Inquiry. During that time I devoured Dewey’s writingson learning, inquiry, education, and aesthetics. In my view, Dewey’s instrumentalistconception of knowledge and inquiry is the only theory of knowledge consistentwith onticology. Hints of this can befound all over the place in my treatment of Bhaskar’s philosophy of science inthe first chapter of The Democracy ofObjects. I think Dewey’sinstrumentalist theory of knowledge has the added virtue of being the only truetheory of knowledge. Dewey refused theidealist trend in philosophy inaugurated in Socrates’s disdainful treatment ofthe servant boy in Meno.

[Utopian Cartographies- Ortelius' 1595 representation of Thomas More's Utopia]

There seems to be a lotsimilarity in your philosophy, and speculative realism more broadly, and thetradition of the utopian project within design practice. In design practice these aretypically fictions where the objective is to suggest new relations and possiblefutures, a practice that stretches back to the Utopian works of Plato. Inthis design practice representation is always at issue. How isrepresentation considered in object-oriented ontology, and how is it related tothe agency of the medium of representation?

Within the framework of onticologyfictions are themselves real entities. In my own work I am always trying to emphasize the materiality of textsand identities, the fact that they are entities in their own right thatcirculate throughout the world and that affect other entities and objects. Now clearly Josoph K. in Kafka’s work is nota real person that breaths, eats, is murdered, and so on, but nonetheless The Trial and The Castle are real entities that circulate throughout the worldand that affect people in a variety of ways. We can elect to live as Joseph K, seeing our place of employment or ourcountry or our circumstances as the Castle or the Court; and in this way we canbe led to interact with the world about us in ways that we otherwise might notdo. Two lovers can read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or watch The Secretary or Punch Drunk Love and discovering new ways of loving, living theirlove, and feeling. Did these affects already exist in them, or did the workcultivate these affects? I lean in thedirection that fabricators of fictions inventaffects rather than finding them ready made, and that in doing so they inventthe possibility of new collectives and forms of living and feeling. This is why the domain of fiction is a siteof both micro- and macro-politics, for it is both a site where both theimagining of alternative forms of collectivity are rendered available and thesite where oppressive collectivities are maintained through the construction ofdark affects. This, I believe, is muchof what John Protevi is getting at in his work Political Affect.

Popular conceptions ofpublic space often reference a mythologized past of luscious recreation parksof the 19th century, Italian Renaissance piazzas, and ancient Greek agoras. Most of the time these have nothing to do with actual public spacestoday- contested zones of exclusion, power, spectacle, and insipid banality. What are the implications for an object-oriented ontology approach in thepractice of construing and constructing public space?

It’sdifficult to respond in a single way to this question. First, one of the ways in which we constructour present is through fictionalized conceptions of the past. Yet these conceptions of the past cancertainly be a double edged sword. Takethe examples of how conservatives often talk about the 1950s. They talk about the 50s as a time that wasidyllic, where children were innocent and polite, where there was civilityeverywhere, and where there was generalized prosperity. This myth of the 50s takes on a teleologicalfunction in the present, both suggesting that contemporary society has fallen,and that we must return to this lost form of life. Yet the reality of the 50s was quitedifferent. Domestic abuse and childabuse, no doubt exacerbated by war trauma from both World War II and the KoreanWar, was rampant, substance abuse was at all time highs among the white middleclass, women lived under oppressive conditions lacking in freedom and autonomy,there was profound racial division, and so on. The fiction of the 50s functions to mask and repress the very realsocial conditions that necessitated the cultural revolutions of the 60s.

On theother hand, utopian fictions have often served as a vital component ofrevolutionary change. Here we mightrecall the role that Greco-Roman thought played in the Enlightenment. There was an idealized conception of Greekand early Roman cultural, political, and speculative life that was integral tothe invention of new forms of life, knowledge, and collectivity during theEnlightenment period. The Enlightenmentthinkers needed to, as it were, leap over Christianity and the Middle Ages toenvision the possibility of a new life and a world. It matters little whether Greece and Romewere actually like this. Theyweren’t. The simulacrum of Greece andRome rendered an alternative world available for collective action. This is the value of the reality of ficitons.

***

Readers interested in a further introduction to Levi Bryant's work can check out his excellent blog Larval Subjects, which has made several appearances here at FASLANYC.

He is also the author of several books including Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence.

Lastly, interested readers might consider submitting material this coming spring for the first edition of O-Zone, which has put together an excellent cast of editors and an exciting statement-of-intent which can be seen here.

Landscape Delicatessen

2011-10-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Our southern correspondent H Willis Montcrief reports on a fascinatingproject that has popped up in Central Virginia. Known as the Foam Dome Home, the project is an experiment in living- partHeideggerian hut, part space ship, part modernist utopia. It’s like the first house, but from thefuture.

[Heidegger's Hut in 2001]

[the foam dome home faces Hurricane Irene while the Blue Ridge Mountains look on from the West]

The project is the home of University of Virginia landscapearchitecture graduate student Seth Denizen and is wonderfully documentedhere. It is a technical andad-hoc amalgamation of expanded polystyrene, bamboo skewers, salvaged palletracks, an old wood stove, heat-formed plexiglass, and a “fabric reinforcedelastomeric system used to recover aged and deteriorated metal roofs.” On the blog you can follow the projectthrough the materials collection process, fabrication, construction, and the recentconfrontations with hurricanes and earthquakes, all rendered with lots ofdetail in a delightfully acerbic tone.

Now, dome homes made of foam are not a particularly novel idea, havingbeen around at least since the 60’s when hippyism and the Space Race combinedto create an unparalleled utopian stew. Their applications range from hippie enclaves to mass produced hobbit homes spread across the Japanese landscape like ticky-tack mushrooms. But there is much to like about this particular foam domehome- the beauty, the resourcefulness, the conceptual rigor and sophistication,the lack thereof regarding architectural detailing, and the willingness to livein one’s own experiment. The applied technologies run the gamut from cow fencing found in central Virginia appliedas transverse bracing to a three axis Onsrud router with a “50 square footmilling bed divided into two independently controlled vacuum tables.” The foundation for the dome is a platform made of pallet racks and reminiscentof the modernist pilotis ideal butspringing from a pragmatic concern- making a side entrance into a dome is hard,but entering from the bottom is easy.

But the aspect we love best about the project is the way it creates a sort of landscape delicatessen- the bringing together of all sorts idiosyncratic characters (the Onsrud router, cow fencing, a central Virginia hill, refuse foam from a Worcester construction project) and setting them into new and surprising relations to one another, all within a specific place. This suggests a materialist definition for landscape that gets beyond picturesque scenery, green infrastructures, snazzy noun urbanisms, or dynamic flows (all of which we tend to rely on). This project suggests that the concept of landscape might be understood as a set of objects and their relations set within a bounded, larger context.

[foam dome homes in Japan]

[foam dome home is like the Douglas House by Richard Meier, except the total opposite; image from Dwell]

[a foam dome-type landscape, from the movie Delicatessen]

Frontier Mappings

2011-10-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

Frederick Jackson Turner’s characterization of the frontier was fundamental to understanding its importance in shaping American societies. His frontier thesis stated that the continual presence and progression of the frontier westward across the continent was critical to shaping the American people and institutions, and that its disappearance in the late 19th century signaled a cultural crisis for the United States of America.

[an approximation of the American frontier in 1775 as characterized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner; this schematic has fundamentally shaped the popular mythology of the United States- from creeds and federal policy (westward expansion and manifest destiny) to popular culture and landscape design (Toby Keith anthems and Olmsted's design for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair). And rightfully so]

The thesis was brilliant- for the first time someone recognized that the rules of the European frontier did not apply here in the Americas. Of course, being the one to take the first major pass, there were some areas that needed more work. Historian Walter Prescott Webb more precisely described the frontier, noting that in the Americas a frontier was “not a line to stop at, but an area inviting entrance. Instead of having one dimension, length, as in Europe, the American frontier has two dimensions, length and breadth.” Another historian of the American West, Herbert Eugene Bolton, argued that the American frontier can't be understood in terms of an inexorable, Anglo-centric march west. For Bolton, the American frontier was a hemispheric condition of contested terrains; while the Anglo-Americans marched west, the French moved south, the Spanish moved north, the Russians moved east, the British controlled Canada, and the Portuguese expanded in all directions. Purging Turner's Anglophilia from the Frontier Thesis (it was a common affliction at that time) and combining Webb's representation of the frontier concept with Bolton's, we start to render a more interesting and appropriate approximation of the American frontier.

Wider Horizons of the American Landscape

[an approximation of the actual American frontier in 1775; French territory is green, Spanish is dark blue, Portugese is yellow, Dutch is orange, British is red, Russian is pink, areas contested between the British and French are light blue, indigenous nations are mapped with white labels; borders are fuzzy and territories are not homogeneous blocks, but rather heterogeneous zones of conflict and potential]

“A certain philosopher asserts that a space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins its presencing.” [paraphrased]

- William T. Vollman, Imperial

Combining the work of these frontier historians with that of geographers and landscape architects such as Richard Campanella, Elizabeth Meyer, and Peter Jacobson, it is possible to understand the American frontier as a landscape condition: a constructed environment consisting of autonomous objects in relation to one another within a larger context. The American landscape is a hemispheric condition with overlapping and contingent jurisdictions over expansive territories characterized by bigness and smashing. The rivers are bigger, the mountains are higher, the deserts drier, the forests taller, and the horizons wider.

The frontier is non-directional. It is not a thick band of open, receding land at the edge of society but rather a heterogeneous and uneven agglomeration of difficult and contested territories where myriad indigenous and colonizing interests are smashing into one another over and over. The frontier in the American landscape is not Turner’s blank space or Webb’s thick zone at the settled edge. It is defined by overlapping and ambiguous administrative jurisdictions at different scales. It is not always clear who is in charge, and that creates a unique set of problems and possibilities- control is ambiguous, there are real and perceived dangers, and there is latent potential. This contingency and potentiality generates the frontier conditions which the Scottish recognized in the Darien Gap, the United States recognized in the Southwest, and the French saw in the Mississippi Valley. As a landscape condition, the frontier is endemic to the American landscape; marked by difficult terrain, massive government investments, a tantalizing mix of potential commercial success and imminent disaster.

Materialism, Realism, Hadidism

2011-10-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

["Completed for the northern terminal of the city’s B tramline, our concept utilizes overlapping fields: echoing the energetic movement of cars, trams, bicycles and pedestrians; fusing together to form a constantly shifting but clearly delineated whole. In the car park, floor marks and light delineate a ‘magnetic field’.” – text from ZHA website]

[“Completed for the big box shed of Charlottesville, Virginia's Pantops Shopping center, our concept utilizes comingling fields echoing the confluence of hydrological systems of the Appalachian foothills comingling with the Rivanna River as well as the markings of cows that dot the hillsides, stupidly chewing on fescue to form an amorphous yet specific region clearly legible from outer space. The result is the creation of a ‘magnetic field’ at least as attractive as the Starbucks anchoring the eastern end of the shopping shed.” – text made up on the spot after two sazeracs.]

Panning around on Google Earth one is likely to discover novel perspectives on infrastructural networks and massive environmental construction projects. There are also bizarre delights like the one above which is all the more striking for its aerial resemblance to the early and much-published Hoenheim-Nord project by Zaha Hadid Architects. These are the types of projects which begs the response:

If that is the answer, what the hell was the question?

In the case of the ZHA project the question is almost certainly "How can we make every building project look like one of Zaha's paintings from the 70's?" While not without merit (that's right, it must be softened with a double negative- it's that lame), this idealist approach produces results which elicit the following response, "No, no, I get it... (head shaking) That's some stupid shit." In the case of Hoenheim, it looks cool and cheeky and you can take a rad aerial photo of it, but then all of those criteria are easily satisfied by the roof on the Pantops shopping center.

A general characteristic of landscape/architectural practice is the receiving of problems-as-stated, which are then critiqued and solved according to very sophisticated formal, technological, and sociological methods. Unfortunately, we deploy those methods to investigate the wrong problem and end up with situations that are wildly inappropriate, or "stupid shit". Gilles Deleuze offers some insight into this tendency and the nature of problems:

We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution. Already, under this double aspect, they can be no more than phantoms. We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions, that both of these concern only solutions... A solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a response, and the problem always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or falsity - in other words, in proportion to its sense... 'solvability' must depend upon an internal characteristic: it must be determined by the conditions of the problem, engendered in and by the problem along with the real solutions. (Difference and Repetition, p 158)

By moving away from idealist methodologies and the over-reliance on abstraction and critique just a bit, and toward materialist and realist methods, the practice of landscape might recover and reclaim surprising directions and insights through cross pollination and experimentation.

Triple Frontier

2011-10-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

The town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia sits at the confluence of theShenandoah and Potomac Rivers where they slip out of the Shenandoah Valley andhead toward the Chesapeake Bay. Here thestates of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia come together. The place was identified by George Washingtonin 1785 as the ideal location for a national armory despite all evidence to thecontrary- lumber and hydro power were abundant but metal and skilled mechanicallabor was extremely scarce and had to be shipped in. Of course, as the President of the Potowmack Company, which was concerned with the improvement of the Potomac River forshipping (a topic we’ll return to later) and a landowner along the lowerPotomac River, Washington was particularly interested in the establishment ofan industrial center in this region and if he needed to use the leverage of thefederal government to do it, so be it. Inthe 1820’s it was the place where John C. Hall worked out the fabrication ofmetal weaponry using interchangeable parts, a production innovation which revolutionized the production of everything from M1819 breech loading rifles used in theSeminole Wars to iPads.

[the rugged topography surrounding Harpers Ferry was extensively surveyed during the Civil War; this map, made in 1863, clearly shows the Potomac and Shenandoah passing through the Blue Ridge Mountains, with the low point at the confluence occupied by the Harpers Ferry Arsenal and Armory, and the small incorporated town of Bolivar (named for the Liberator himself) located uphill on the way out of town to the west]

[The towns of Harpers Ferry and Bolivar today, surrounded by National historical parkland; the Amtrak railroad still stops in Harpers Ferry, though the highway passes the towns on the southern Virginia edge of the pass before switching over to the Maryland side just downstream]

Nowadays, the picturesque twin towns of Harpers Ferry and Bolivar, WestVirginia are little more than depressed, tourist destinations held up byfederal money as a center of the National Parks Service and holding a line onthe National Register of Historic Places. The mountainous terrain, Amtrak train, and ruined canals create apicturesque landscape where the town sits looking through the mountain pass. But just one hundred and fifty years ago, thetown was North America’s own Triple Frontier, the place where North, South, andWest came violently together, catalyzed by federal infrastructure, smashedtogether with local people and mixed together with a steady stream of driftersand explorers. The outcome wasdastardly.

[the booming site of Harpers Ferry at the start of the Civil War; the railroad and power canals are built, along with large industrial factories including flour and saw mills, in addition to the Arsenal and Armory; worker's housing lines the roads out of town, which is surrounded by a wooden stockade; to the right up on the hill is the local church]

[Harpers Ferry in 1861 during the Civil War, looking east from a hill near Bolivar; the church can be seen downhill in the center; soldiers and cannon occupy the foreground; like many border states West Virginia was a conflicted battleground, raising regiments for both the Union and Confederate Armies; Harpers Ferry changed hands several times though West Virginia would ultimately settle as a Union state]

In 1796 the federal government purchased land at Harpers Ferry andconstruction began on the United States Armory and Arsenal. The stated intention was to provide thenation with redundancy in arms manufacturing along with the sister armory inSpringfield, Mass (which enjoyed better access to important things like metaland workers) and was closer to the nation’s new capital at the mouth of thePotomac. The undertaking was fraughtfrom the beginning, with federal control and influence in manufacturingprocesses being constantly resisted by the local population and difficultyfinding competent foremen, skilled craftsmen, day laborers, and people willingto implement industrial manufacturing processes that emphasized repetition andreplicability, but with townsfolk more than happy to angle for the contractsand jobs that the new federal government was eagerly supporting in hopes ofdiminishing our independence on European firearms.

The result was something of a wild west boomtown. Not only was John Hall off in a factoryperfecting the machine process of interchangeable parts that wouldrevolutionize manufacturing, but southern gunsmiths were cranking out firearmsto meet federal quotas, bristling at Yankee foremen, and drinking and huntingwhen their counterparts up in Springfield were hammering away. The construction and operation of the Armorywas badly mismanaged by local landed gentry who’d received federal poststhrough good connections. All while aconstant stream of homesteaders made their way through the town, working for aseason or a fortnight until they had enough money to keep heading west, lookingto take advantage of westward expansion and the soon-to-be-signed HomesteadAct. There were also tons of guns justlying around the town.

[Harpers Ferry looking west across the Potomac from Maryland]

[Harpers Ferry in 1862, the B & O Railroad Bridge was destroyed after the Antietam Campaign in Maryland]

[a map showing the Union and Confederate states as well as the western territories beyond the Mississippi; Harpers Ferry was not only tossed back and forth between North and South and at the very center of the jurisdictional ripping-in-two of the state of Virginia; the third state, Maryland had its own major conflicts, being a slave-owning Union state; Harpers Ferry was also a gateway across the Appalachians and into the Ohio River Valley for the multitudes that were thronging west along with the railroads]

A flashpoint occurred just before the civil war, when abolitionist JohnBrown set up shop and hatched a plan to take over the US Federal Armory withtwenty-two trained men, capture and distribute the weapons stored there andincite a slave rebellion throughout the Southern States. The raid on the armory was successful but therebellion decidedly less so. He and hisremaining men were captured by federal forces two days later. Civil war wasn’t far.

But rather than a nuanced and/or redneck rehashing of Civil War themesand stories, what we are most interested here today is the landscape condition of Harpers Ferry at that historical moment. In 1862, when the Homestead Act was signed,this landscape was the locus of a violent collision between North, South, andWest, each with their own ideas, mythologies, and regimes of control. Like the Triple Frontera in South America or the Darien Gap in Central America,this landscape has something to teach us about the American frontier landscape-patterns emerge. A large federalinfrastructure (the canals, Armory, and railroad), oppositions within localpolitics, a difficult terrain, cultural violence and collision, overlapping andambiguous jurisdictions heavywith potentiality created the conditions for an American frontier landscape.

Today's Newsdesk

2011-10-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

[definitely a monster/fossil; the unrealized monument to Christopher Columbus for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair was intended to "convey visitors by lift to the Equator, and thence by spiral railway to the North Pole"; sounds like modernity..]

Over on Dirt a friend of ours, Dasha Lebedeva, has posted a write up on a recent lecture by FASLANYC favorite Camilo Restrepo. He recently visited the University of Virginia School of Architecture and gave a public lecture titled "Monsters and Fossils: Ideas Towards a Mongrel Architecture." We fucking love the Foucaultian characterization of architecture as either a monster [unknown and threatening] or a fossil [historical, mysterious], and the mongrel metaphor for architecture in an age of unparalleled information and material exchange is ultimately optimistic. He speaks of architecture and landscape in terms of something that "creates difference through the design of relations in space." Check out the write up over on DIRT if you are interested.

Also worth noting, Places recently ran an interview with landscape architect Chris Reed, as part of an ongoing series (see Matt Urbanski of MVVA, Dilip DaCunha and Anu Marthur, and Adrian Geuze of West 8). Stoss' 2006 "Safe Zone" entry in to the Metis Reford Garden Design Festival is still one of our all time favorites [see the 2012 Call for Entries to the Festival here]. We've had a chance to hear the fellow speak a few times over the past year and simply put, the dude (and his Stoss cohort) is articulate, smart, and damn good.

["Minsur" from the photo series "country infrastructures" by Camilo Restrepo]

Triple Frontera

2011-10-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Just downstream from the world's largest hydroelectric facility, at the confluence of theIguazu and Parana Rivers, is a zone known as the Triple Frontera. Located on the mighty Parana and IguazuRivers, the area is one of the fastest growing, most important, and mostdangerous areas in the Southern Cone of South America. Located where the territories of Argentina,Brazil and Paraguay meet, the Triple Frontera is made up of the cities ofCiudad del Este (Paraguay), Foz de Iguazu (Brazil), and Puerto Iguazu(Argentina). Since negotiation andconstruction for the bi-national Itaipu Dam began with the Iguazu Act in 1966,the population of the Triple Frontera has grown from 60,000 to over 750,000. The zone is centered over top of one ofthe largest freshwater reserves in the world- the Guarani Aquifer.

Because of differences in border controls and patent laws in the threecountries, the Triple Frontera is a center for the manufacture and popular saleof manufactured goods and contraband. Stolenautos from nearby city centers such as Buenos Aires are processed here andresold in secondary markets. The contrabandand narcotics trade is supposedly run by bands of organized criminals ofvarious degrees of sophistication. Thereis evidence that the FARC runs significant narco-traffic through here, usingthe area as the southern hub for the cocaine trade, supplying the capitalcities of the Rio de la Plata region (Asuncion, Montevideo, Buenos Aires,Brasilia, as well as Rio and Sao Paulo are all in the watershed). International terrorist groups such asHezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Queda maintain cells and logistics assistancewithin the Triple Frontera and terrorist attacks that occurred in Buenos Aires in1992 and 1994 may have been perpetrated by terrorist cells based in the TripleFrontera zone.

The area is considered the most destabilized and dangerous in all ofSouth America outside of the FARC-controlled regions of Colombia (including theDarien Gap). The terrorist attacks inBuenos Aires prompted the formation of the “Comando Tripartito de la TripleFrontera”, a loose organization consisting primarily of Argentina borderpatrol, and Brazilian Air Force and intended to coordinate methods ofterritorial control and contain organized crime and terrorist activity in theregion, especially the small narcotics planes coming from Bolivia and Colombia. The Argentine border, considered easier to controlbecause of the much smaller population in Puerto Iguazu, is seen as a key inthe policing efforts. Post-September 11^thhas seen an intensification of the efforts with theadvent of the “3+1” effort (including the United States).

[just downstream from the Itaipu Dam, the Puente de la Amistad (Friendship Bridge) inextricably links Paraguay and Brazil; completed in 1965, the year before the Itaipu Dam negotiations began, most of Paraguay's imports and exports pass over the bridge; it is the main artery for smugglers in the area and a gorgeous piece of Brazilian modernism]

[the Itaipu Dam on the Rio Parana, inextricably links Paraguay and Brazil; beginning in 1966, the dam is a result of 30 years of negotiation and construction by the two nations; in 2000 the dam generated over 93,000 gigawatt hours of electricity, supplying Brazil with 20% of its needs and Paraguay with 94% of its electric power]

[the Triple Frontera zone; Paraguay is the left 1/3 of the image, Argentina is to the south and Brazil is to the north; huge swaths of the rain forest in Brazil and Paraguay have been put into agricultural production, much of the Argentine side is protected as a national forest (modeled on the North American system); the Itaipu Dam is just north of the image]

[agricultural production dominates the shores of Lake Itaipu in Brazil and Paraguay, just north of the Itaipu Dam]

All of this geopolitical intrigue is fascinating and horrifying (and treating it is beyond the scope of a FASLANYC post). The combination of the hydro-geological and technological sublime with the Falls of Iguazu and the Itaipu dam just a few kilometers from one another is absolutely unmatched. On top of that add an exploding population, large-scale resource exploitation, violence and ambiguity in jurisdictional authority and a large percentage of the world’s freshwater and you quickly realize that we are dealing with a massive and severe situation, one brimming with potentiality and generative capacity. Leaving aside judgements regarding the legality and justice of certain actions, it is the fact that here they find space to operate and to generate new forms that is so intriguing. Were the area under the control of a single national regime, or the geography not as varied, this would not be the case, for better or worse.

This situation can be best understood and studied as a frontier landscape, a condition fundamental to and common throughout the Americas. We would suggest that an ontological understanding of borders and frontiers, and the differences between them, are key to developing a uniquely American landscape praxis. In the case of the Triple Frontera, the ambiguity and opportunity afforded to alternative activities is created by a large heterogeneous population divided by different regimes of control , all settled in a vicious and potent geography that is difficult to police. At the Triple Frontera, the frontier is in the city.

[inside the Itaipu Dam- a gratuitous nab from wikipedia]

Frontier Technologies: Barbed Wire

2011-09-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

[smashing barbed wire between trenches with mortar shells; Europe during the Great War]

From the very beginning the concept of fencing was inverted in theAmerican colonies. In England the lawrequired that domesticated animals be fenced in and managed on a piece ofproperty- it was a strategy of retention. In the Americas however, a tradition ofcommon lands and open grazing quickly developed. Livestock were left to roam free and roundedup at the end of the season for slaughter or overwintering in barns, whilefarmers were responsible for fencing in their fields or subsistencegardens. And so they did, developingfence types as a defensive strategy ofdetention, meant to keep hogs, deer, goats and other livestock or wildanimals at bay. Though the spatialpatterns and urbanization regimes varied wildly throughout the Americas, thefencing strategy of enclosed, agricultural production surrounded by expansiveopen lands for grazing was normalized from the commons of New England to the haciendas of California and Mexico, the estancias of Chile and Argentina, and thefazendas of Brazil.

The materials at hand influenced the fence types developed. The Virginia worm fence was especiallypopular in the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. Despite using massive quantities of wood itneeded no metal, leather, mortar, or other valuable materials and could becannibalized during the winter for firewood when there were no crops toprotect. This policy quickly brought thecolonists in the east into conflict with the indigenous people who consideredthe lands to be their hunting grounds and the roaming pigs to be freegame. Despite the politicaldifficulties, the material demands of this fencing strategy were well suited tothe eastern seaboard and the technology began to spread west during the 19^thcentury.

[the Virginia worm fence at Gettysburg, PA]

While the Louisiana Purchase in 1804 opened up the possibility of USexpansion westward, it was not until nearly 60 years later with the signing ofthe Homestead Act by Abraham Lincoln that population pressure began toincrease. With the ending of the civilwar, the maturation of canal technologies and rise of steam locomotive engines,Americans began pushing to expand out of the woodland areas of Appalachia andinto the plains. In the Midwest therewere few trees, and there certainly weren’t enough to build a house andconstruct a ridiculous worm-fence around one’s property to protect the farmfrom the cattle and bison roaming free.

Barbed wire made homestead settlement there possible. By offering a fence technology that used verylittle wood and was relatively easy to construct, barbed wire fencing made itpossible to farm in the Midwest. Salesof barbed wire boomed. The Texas Genealogy and History site notes that in 1875 the Washburn and Moen Wire Company sold 10,000pounds of barbed wire. Five years laterit sold nearly 51,000,000 pounds in Texas alone. Railroad right-of-ways were required to belined with the wire, which proved a useful source to farmers who foundthemselves in a pinch or without the ability to get to market.

National armies quickly realized that this wire not only hinderedlivestock but also humans and anything else made of flesh, and it was quicklydeployed to demarcate defensive positions. Coils of the stuff were rolled out between trenches to create thickdefensive membranes that offered little resistance to mortars and bullets but wereimpenetrable to grounded fleshy combatants. Within a century this temporary strategy had crystallized alongcontested borders such as the Korean DMZ or parts of the US-Mexico border. A frontier technology was adapted for the borderlandscape.

[American GI's put down barbed wire coils on the Korean border; 1962]

[the Korean Demilitarized Zone, between North and South Korea; barbed wire is used in conjunction with lighting and a patrol regime to ensure the border is not transgressed]

Deploying barbed wire is a land-assault strategy: it is a measure of control for creating aterritory, and it is geographical (just putting a chunk down that one can easilygo around does nothing). And it is perceivedas a particularly nasty one, offending our delicate sensibilities because itconfronts a most basic weakness- fleshness. But this was not always the case- there was a time when barbed wirefencing was perceived as a miracle of the American frontier can-do spirit, andas such there are still historical societies and old-timers that travel aroundcollecting special pieces of the stuff.

Levi Bryant’s ontic principlesuggest to us that a whole new range of fence types might be developed anddeployed, and that especially in frontier landscapes- those defined by ambiguousand overlapping jurisdictions, perceived dangers, and latent potentiality-fencing might be particularly apt as a strategy for respecting difference. Everyone has seen if not noticed the weeds and trees that spring upalong guardrails and fence lines that can’t be easily mowed. Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms”showed that fences can create difference without limiting human movement, and Brett Milligan’s “Goats on Belmont” project isan example of a fence generating the conditions for a recreational landscape[granted, it’s a stupid chain link fence and it’s the project that is smart. nonetheless the project couldn’t happen without the fence].

[Robert Irwin's "Two Running Violet V Forms" weaves chain link fence fabric between Eucalyptus trees]

[combinations of banal materials and forms like jersey barriers and chain link fencing might be used to separate in unexpected ways and generate new possibilities for use and experience]

[construction fencing, here used to simply demarcate a swath of trees to be cleared, also serves to register topographic change and plays against the tree trunks and vegetation; this might be used not only to showcase formal variation but also to create the conditions for new plant ecologies, goat parks, or play areas]

We’d like to see more ASLA awards go to landscape projects laced withflesh-tearing wire, keeping out voracious yuppy whiners like ourselves andsharing its secrets only with the lunatics, chimney swifts, and mycorrhizaethat respect the de/militarized landscape. That may be a bridge to far for now, but by considering seeminglymundane, offensive, or inappropriate technologies in the context of thefrontier landscape that is endemic to the Americas, we might develop some newpossibilities for program, form and construction of a real public space.

The Lunatic Landscape

2011-09-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

["Knives, Daggers, and Forks Made by Lunatics", a piece in the "Madmen's Museum", described in fascinating detail in Cassell's Magazine in 1903; image source]

Brooklyn Bridge Park is lit by metal halide lamps strapped to telephonepoles*, creating what you mightcall a “parking lot aesthetic”. It’strue that the wood pole-with-cobra-head-lamp is a ubiquitous object along mostcity streets, often coupled with telephone cables and electric powerlines. And it’s also true that mostpeople consider a good park light to be the pedestrian-scale glowing objectdescended from the old gas lamps lining the promenades of Europeancapitals. But this misses an important precedent: the old moon light towers of the 19th century.

Between 10 and 20 stories high, these towers were meant to light greatswaths of the city and seem to have been particularly useful in sprawlingindustrial towns with big working and recreational spaces that would have beentoo costly to light with pedestrian lamps. The moonlight towers, an arc light on top of atruss tower, were an American adaptation of a trend begun in Paris where efficientarc lamps began to be used at the top of buildings in place of oil and gas lamps. Though extremely efficient andrelatively easy to operate, arc lights burgn bright and extremely hot and sowere not suitable for indoor use. However, when placed on top of a giant tower they had the ability to light entire city blocks using far less labor and energy than gas lamps.

[lighting in Brooklyn Bridge park; as the trees grow over time the differences in light and shadow will become more pronounced]

In 1885, this New York Times report of the Convention of the National Electric Light Association reported that Detroit was using 90 of these towers in a triangulated pattern to light an area 10 1/2 square miles at a price that was slightly cheaper than naphta or gas lights. The result was such that "the entire city was lighted as if by an artificial moon and the rear yards and alleys were made as light as the street." Judging by the trusses and cables in the below picture the effect was likely that of an elegant scaffold erected over the city.

[Throughout the last part of the 19^th century Detroit maintained an extensive network of moonlight towers that set the standard in municipal lighting until buildings grew taller in the 1890's. The scale of the towers create big open space, ground planes not articulated by paths of light posts]

[Austin, Texas still has approximately 17 moonlight towers operating in the town; they have been preserved throughout the 20th century despite the shift away from tower lights in municipal systems]

Of course, that report, being from the Electric lighting commission, was biased. It did light up streets and alleys and yards, but only those blocked by buildings and trees. Despite the tower’s ability to light up entire city blocks with thepower of a moon, they fell out of favor because they created large shadows. The ever higher buildings of the 19^thand early 20^th century often resulted in one half of the streetbeing well-lit while the other half was in total darkness. The large territories of shadow-and-lightcreated zones beyond the control of the city manager; creeping grins leered atthe upstanding citizens on evening strolls from across the road, and hideous creolecackles rang through the darkened half-streets of industrial towns up and down theMississippi Valley.

The lights were phased out and the streets more evenly lit bypedestrian poles topped with new electrical incandescent lamps. Nonetheless, it is encouraging that theseeffects are being brought back into public spaces. Not every place needs to be domesticated by apedestrian scale lamp, bathed in light and scaled to the human body. While landscape architects have traditionally been consumed with the creation of the perception of safety and control, we liketo think there is room for the lunatics who roam the shadows, ebbing and flowingwith the light of the moon [1, 2]. Becauselandscape practice not only establishes a territory and formalizes methods ofcontrol, it also generates the conditions for deterritorialization, speculating on ways that those boundaries might be transgressed and how one might embrace thebigness and wildness of it all.

[New Orleans used a moonlight tower in the 1880s and 90s along the levee at Canal Street. The all night light and shadow enabled industry, commerce, and recreation to continue throughout the night in the French Quarter.

* it appears that they are metal halide from a brief on the ground inspection; in fact they may be another type of lamp for all we know

1- the term "lunatic" can be traced back to the latin "luna" for moon, from the belief that periods of insanity were related to the cycles of the moon.

2- we don't mean to imply too strongly that MVVA is very concerned with the lunatics and operations of deterritorialization. In fact, they are one of the best at gentrifying derelict urban zones through landscape design, working almost exclusively for the bourgeioise. But they also do some interesting work that transgresses their own control mechanisms, and the lighting in Brooklyn Bridge Park may prove to be an example of this. Regardless, it is far superior and more apt to use tall lights at the waters edge in NYC than it is to put those ridiculous pedestrian poles that line the riverfront promenades on the west side.

The Darien Gap

2011-09-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

The American frontier is sharply distinguishedfrom the European frontier- a fortified boundary line running through densepopulations. The most significant thingabout the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.
- Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of theFrontier in American History.” 1893.

[the Pan American Highway running through the Peruvian desert]

The Pan American Highway is a sprawling infrastructural remnant of the independence revolutions, American hegemonic sentiment, and World War defense logistics. It is a continuous road connecting thesouthern tip of Patagonia to the far northern reaches of Alaska save oneexception- the Darién Gap.

The Pan-American Highway began in earnest in 1923, spurred on by theconstruction of the Panama Canal in 1914. The segment of the highway connecting the Canal to North America was adefensive strategy to protect North American commercial interests from GermanU-boats. It aimed to connect the commercialshipping centers in the US with Mexico City, capital cities in Central Americaand the Panama Canal. To the south, theDarién Gap stayed on the periphery and the Pan-American Highway remainedincomplete. Since that time significantefforts have been made to complete the road in support of commercial interestsand increased the mobility of regional populations.

[the Inter American Highway connecting the Panama Canal, the capital cities of Central America, and Interstate 35 in Laredo, Texas]

[the construction of the locks of the Panama Canal; image source]

The Darién Gap exists between the Panamanian settlement of Aviza andthe Colombian town of Cúcuta. It is 87kilometers of jungle highlands and swampy delta along the border of Panama andColombia and is purportedly a haven to the biodiversity of the isthmus, the indigenousKuna people, and FARC operatives. Despiteits strategic location at the crossroads of North and South America and theAtlantic and Pacific Oceans, the geography of the Gap has defied attempts at Europeansettlement owing to the difficulty of the terrain.

In recent years environmental interest groups have joined forces withindigenous peoples and the powerful Panamanian beef lobby to argue against thecompletion of the road. Panamanianranchers maintain that the Gap provides a biological buffer preventing thespread of hoof-and-mouth disease from Colombia in to Central and NorthAmerica. This confluence of immensepotentiality, bigness of the terrain, contested commercial interests, and difficultyin establishing new settlements is a historical fact dating back at least tothe beginning of European colonization.

[the Isthmus of Panama, the Darien Gap is at the very southern edge of Panama]

[an admittedly ambiguous close up of the Darien Gap; the Atrato River creates a massive swampy delta in the Darien lowlands before pouring in to the Caledonia Bay to the North; the swampy conditions made North European agricultural practices impossible and bred sickness that undid the Caledonia Colony]

In the late 17^th century the major European powers hadestablished important colonies, trade routes and treaties throughout theAmericas. During the frothy expansion ofEuropean colonialism Scotland was inspired by entrepreneur William Patterson totry and establish a commercial colony on the Isthmus of Panama from where theycould control trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The area was a de facto Spanish domain but uncontestedas its difficult geography, low indigenous populations, and lack of mineralwealth left it outside of the imperial regime, a situation the Scots hoped totake advantage of.

In 1698 they marshaled most of the capital in the country throughpublic stock offerings and the Darién Company launched a settlement expedition withthe intent to establish the Colony of Caledonia. It was known that the region of Caledoniaoffered a natural harbor with the promise of shelter and a chance atsuccess. Their demise was immediate, atone point dying at a rate of 10 per day due to sickness and the unsuitabilityof the land to Northern European agricultural practices. By 1700 the colony was done and the survivorswere ushered out by a cluster of armed Spanish ships. The loss of most of the Scotland’s capitalwas an important factor in Scotland’s union with England in 1707. As part of the union England agreed to repayScotland’s wealthy citizens the money they had lost on the venture plus 5%interest. It proved enough to buy themoff. The modern day Darién Gap is stillinhabited by the Kuna people, explored by intrepid adventurers and tourists, explorationexpeditions are occasionally mounted, and the FARC slides in and out remainingout of reach of Colombian authorities.

[the Darian Gap on the Panama Isthmus connecting North and South America, the object of Scotland's colonial desires]

Frederick Jackson Turner’s characterization of the frontier wasimportant in recognizing its importance in shaping Americansocieties. We would extend this to all ofthe Americas, arguing that the frontier condition existed throughout thecontinent. The frontier was alsonon-directional. It was a heterogeneousand uneven agglomeration of difficult and contested territories where myriad indigenousand divergent colonial interests- Scotch, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese-were smashing into one another over and over. That is, the land wasn’t totally open as Turner suggested, but rather the jurisdictionaladministration was ambiguous, andthis generated the potentiality which the Scottish recognized in the DarienGap, the United States recognized in the Southwest, and the French saw in theMississippi Valley. The frontier wasendemic to the American landscape, marked by difficult terrain, a tantalizingmix of potential commercial success and imminent disaster, and overlapping andambiguous jurisdictions. The Darién Gap, in short.

[the 1960 Trans Darien Expedition: 134 days to cross, 500 kms of trails, 180 river crossings, 125 log bridges built, 3 automobile rollovers, malaria, 544 kilos in cargo, 1 capstain winch per vehicle, 52 HP engine, 104 liters of gas; image source]

Housekeeping on the Frontier

2011-09-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

After taking a month break we are back here at FASLANYC headquarters and it’s only fair to take care of somehousekeeping first. Of note in the lastmonth, Places has been running a series on fiction, and Mammoth iswrapping up one of the longest blog series of all time on floods and the Mississippi River. We’ve forgotten why itstarted, but it is definitely worth perusing, especially now as it wraps up. Brett Milligan of F.A.D. has been documenting the second edition of the “Goats on Belmont” project in Portland, Oregan.

In NYC related news, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley are moving to town to runStudio-X and will presumably be crossing swords with the Friends of the Pleistocene, who just released their “Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York.” JulieBargmann is moving D.I.R.T. Studio to Brooklyn and that only seems fair. D.I.R.T. in Charlottesville always felt like a polar bear in a municipalzoo in Mobile, Alabama- it sounds like a cool idea and it can live, but it is justsad, covered in mud, and not even the visitors are happy that it is there. She’ll be part of the “Second Wave of Modernism” conference at the MoMA in November with a lineup that is what youmight call heavy. Also coming to NYC are our favoritephilosophers Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, as well as the prolific Timothy Mortonfor the Object Oriented Ontology symposium. Read these guys, and if you are in the city drop by on Wednesday,September 14^th.

[D.I.R.T. Studio's webpage announcement; it is unclear whether Bargmann is Kong or the damsel, but it's awesome]

Lastly, we managed to slip an essay into Kerb 19- Paradigms of Nature: Post Natural Futures alongside some impressive contributors including PaisajesEmergentes, Scape Studio, Liam Young, David Gissen, and several others. Our piece is about mushrooms. We’re also excited that another of ourfavorites, Camilo Restrepo of Medellin, Colombia will be landing in Virginia ina couple of weeks to discuss recent work. If you're in Charlottesville drop by, and if you want to get a drink, send an email.

Let the games begin.

******

One of our interests here at FASLANYCis to develop a theory and practice of the American Landscape. It’s a topic we’ve discussed before and willbe exploring more in the coming months. The idea springs from the belief that the Americas are horrible and awesome andshould be understood as an exceptional landscape condition. Our main approach for a while will be througha study of frontiers and borders. Whereas in Europe the words "frontier" and "border" are synonymous, they hold vastly different meanings in the Americas.

[the San Gabriel Jesuit mission in Los Angeles County, 1818; the missions in california and throughout the borderlands of the Spanish colonial empire are testament to the fact that the creation of the American landscape was not an east-to-west phenomenon, but occurred from multiple directions at different times and under the influence of various imperial and indigenous regimes]

[the ruins of the San Juan Capistrano mission in California; image source]

Historian Walter Prescott Webb noted in the 1940's that in theAmericas a frontier was “not a line to stop at, but an area inviting entrance.Instead of having one dimension, length, as in Europe, the American frontierhas two dimensions, length and breadth.” It gets particularly interesting when you combine this concept with therealization of another historian of the American West- Herbert Eugene Bolton. He argued that the story of the Americas can’tbe understood simply as an inexorable, anglo-centric march west, as famously characterizedby Frederick Jackson Turner and Webb. Bolton’scontribution was to simply and emphatically point out that the United Statesmay have largely expanded west but the story of the American landscape itselfwas not one of westward expansion.

The American West was not an undifferentiated, untamed wildernesswaiting to be harnessed by the new American nation. It wasa land already claimed and inhabited by the Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans,English, French, minor European nations, and the hundreds of indigenous tribesand nations that in no way considered themselves a homogeneous block. Each of these societies relied on differentregimes and created unique forms and patterns of settlement, trade, and defenseenmeshed in overlapping and contested claims of authority. It was a landscape of violence, smashing, andbigness with its own emphases and necessities, and this landscape condition wasendemic throughout all the Americas.

The frontier in the American landscape is not just Webb’s thickzone at the settled edge having both depth and length, but it is also definedby overlapping and ambiguous administrative jurisdictions- it is not alwaysclear who is in charge, and that creates a unique set of problems andpossibilities. By understanding this wemight be able to recover and further develop an American landscapeapproach. We would argue this approachhas been largely lost since the European Turn, when the design academy in the UnitedStates decided that we needed to align ourselves closely with Western Europe(not a bad idea) to the exclusion of continueddialogue throughout the Americas (a very limiting idea). We argue that we should be studying theAmericas as a hemisphere: apost-colonial, modern landscape defined by overlapping and ambiguousjurisdictions.

[a ladder leading to a border tunnel access along the US-Mexico border; the tactics and strategies used to destabilize authoritarian power in these zones constructs a kind of contemporary American frontier; image from the New York Times]

To that end, we’ll be zooming around the Americas, looking at frontier and border landscapes, historical and contemporary, and offering some thoughtson them. We’ll likely be changing ourthinking about some of the concepts as they develop, and invite you to offerany thoughts that might push that process along. We’ll continue posting on other topics occasionally,and of course we should just admit that this effort is also a chance to mixstories of cowboys and South America. And so we shall.

Waits Awards 2011

2011-07-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Like a rutting goat, or a pig rooting through the detritus on the forest floor of landscape architecture, our correspondents work- tirelessly at times, at other times very much at their leisure- to bring you the strange and forgotten nuggets from the world of landscape. After another year of “roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it”, it is time to present the second annual Waits Awards [last year’s projects can be seen here].

[the FASLANYC team hard at work on the Waits Awards]

The Waits Awards are named in honor of scoundrel/conjurer Tom Waits. We here at FASLANYC share his fascination with mythical characters as well as the belief that "all hardware items must be admired for their sonic properties." A Waits signifies that a project relishes the particular and the bizarre, it values aesthetics without privileging beauty, it is simultaneously primitive and clinical. These projects are usually highly tactical and lo-fi, simple and sophisticated, ultimately working to demystify the act of intervening in the landscape.

Rather than serving as an accolade for a job well done, the Waits Awards are meant to raise awareness of innovative initiatives and to stimulate dialogue and work. Awards are not necessarily given out to recent projects, but there is an emphasis on timeliness. We hope you will offer up your opinions and insights as well as bring our attention to other projects being undertaken that revel in the nuance and idiosyncrasy of innovative interventions. Without further ado, we present the following projects as recipients of a 2011 Waits Award.

(For the Waits experience, click on the song title before each award before reading the summary and following whichever links catch your fancy).
***

Steel Yard- “Get Behind the Mule”

The Steel Yard in Providence, Rhode Island is an example of landscape architecture enabling the retooling and reindustrialization of an urban work yard. It is an alternative to the default landscape proposition at this scale: to parkify such sites as part of the larger traditional development scheme to maximize immediate profits through commoditization of the landscape. This is accomplished through a shift in scale of operation, repurposing existing constructions including the ground plane, and an emphasis on instrumentality and staging.

[the Steel Yard (in center); here the weedy lawn is the strange brown shape in the center, surrounded by loading yards and staging grounds; the main gantries are to the north]

[something radical happening at night]

[the Steel Yard, with the gantries and the elevated lawn created from refuse corrugated sheet piling on the right]

Of course there is a non-cynical reason for developer profiteering- between the contaminants that must be remediated and the obsolete structures that must be dealt with, brownfields are expensive to reconstruct as usable space. At the Steel Yard the estimated cost for remediation alone was 1.2 million dollars. Using a $600,000 EPA grant and the social capital accrued by offering classes and supporting local artistic and educational projects on the site since 2001, designers Mark Klopfer and Kaki Martin worked with the clients to scavenge reusable refuse and to organize volunteer labor for planting days and small scale construction projects. Old sheet pilings were used to define the ground plane and retain earth, weedy grasses were planted, and the gantries were refurbished. A pervious paving system was installed and rough earthen moats catch any runoff from the contaminated site, a precondition of EPA permitting for the project.

This lo-fi landscape is now a small-scale industrial hub in downtown Providence, serving as an alternative model for redevelopment initiatives in the city. More interestingly, it is not a park that has idolized the ruins of some long-lost industrial past into a photoshopped landscape full of smiling kids flying kites. Here, those same kids can learn to rivet sheet metal while a 1976 Mercedes Unimog drops off a load of reject scaffolding poles and the gantry is used to position a new side panel on a ’68 Airstream.

[the unimog, hauling some steel or something]

Mil Plazas- Talca, Chile- “Ice Cream Man”

Built by architecture students from the University of Talca School of Architecture,Mil Plazas is a series of studies and prototypes culminating in seven plazas located in residual places in the city of Talca, Chile. The paper presented at the 2009 International Congress of Architecture in Quito by the professors reads:

The Mil Plazas studio began as an academic practice that takes place outside of the classroom. The construction of the plazas, their use by the inhabitants, and the resulting social impact has confirms their spatial function and generated new municipal institutions intended to continue the diverse effects begun by these interventions.

With intelligence, enthusiasm, and without money, the students were able to articulate ideas, gain donations, and technical and labor support to construct new plazas in five weeks, plazas that would not exist without their efforts.

The new plazas generated the recuperation and appropriation of new public space by local residents… Equally, the manual labor contributed by local residents catalyzed the creation of new community groups and social circles. The architecture transcended its material reality to achieve a larger social impact. This initiative has been key in convincing local companies to invest money in the construction of new, more permanent plazas in the coming year.

["cubierta de paraguas/covered with umbrellas", one of the installed plazas of Mil Plazas, using cheap red umbrellas, scaffolding towers, nylon rope, and an ingenious tensioning system; seen here in process, held up by the tension system before being pulled tight, or by 100 invisible people; image from la ciudad viva]

["plaza de pallets"; image from supersudaka]

It seems a bit easy to claim that this type of project is only possible with the free labor of students (and we typically would). However, this project could also be seen as a pro-bono effort that reinvigorated specific places within a city and led to new capital projects; projects that are now undergirded with a particular ethic and material aesthetic and supported by a reinforced social infrastructure. It is architecture that transcends its traditional role as the materialization of singularities. And those are precisely the types of projects that can be instigated and executed by innovative collectives of daring individuals.

Obviously an outgrowth of the Arquitectura Directa manifesto by SuperSudaca [one of the instructors is a member], we love this project for the resourcefulness and sophistication exhibited. And based on the title and the emphasis on ephemerality, permutation, and affirmative difference, we like to think that the project offers a sly tip of the cap to Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus.

Oyster Reclamation Research Project- “No One Knows I’m Gone”

The Oyster Restoration Research Project attempts to restore 500 acres of oysters to the New York Harbor by 2015, and 5,000 by 2050, with the aim of using oysters for habitat restoration and water purification in the harbor. In this sense, the oysters are conceived of as a biological agent within the infra-natural system of the New York Harbor. The project organizes actors across scales ranging from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA to local ngo’s and secondary schools in active ways; local universities help develop and test methods for growing oysters, the high school kids at the Harbor School grow the spat, and the USACE works with local ngo’s such as the Bay Ridge Flats Oyster Project to build and monitor the oyster reefs.

The project aims to define policies and implement actions that create oyster reefs on a scale that will positively affect the NY Harbor, all while involving local universities, ngo’s and citizens who want to touch an oyster or wade out into the water. And it is a research project, so monitoring and analysis is fundamental. Construction and management strategies are adaptive and respond to new information. Currently, the focus is on six pilot oyster reefs in different locations. Different reef methods are being tested, and variable environmental conditions [salinity, temperature, pollution] are being monitored. As the reefs expand and new ones are installed the methods will be refined with the hope of optimizing the latent potential of the harbor to regenerate its once-teeming oyster populations.

[the reefs are made from a 6" layer of granite rip rap covered with a layer of clam shells and then a top layer of spat-on-shell oysters grown by secondary school students at the Harbor School; image courtesy of the Urban Omnibus]

[the USACE assists with the large scale installation of the reefs; here clam shells are being dumped over the rip rap base; image courtesy of the Urban Omnibus]

Whether the ambitious goal of 5,000 acres of oyster reef by 2050 can be met is unknown. Any chance of that will rely on the generative capacity of the harbor itself once catalyzed by these operations. Nonetheless, the coordination of activities and expertise across scales, from that of a 3^rd grader in Queens on a summer day, to the NY/NJ Division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, is exciting and worthwhile. It is a model for the type of educational environmental project that humans will be endeavor to undertake with increasing frequency in the future.

The MUMA- “Emotional Weather Report”

[the haunting installation "Silent Evolution" by Jason deCaires Taylor; this quality is created by the ever-changing quality of the light combined with the impossibility of staying still while in the ocean]

The Museum of Underwater Modern Art is located just offshore in Cancun, Mexico. Sure, it’s shameless tourist attraction, as are most museums. But it’s a good one. The familiar forms frozen in familiar positions being slowly colonized by mollusks, covered by sand, and inhabited by crustaceans and fish is enough to horrify a spring break reveler while filling them with wonder. In addition to sculpting the forms, the artist Jason deCaires Taylor formulated the concrete to be textured and pH neutral to promote coral growth. Most exciting, the ocean is both the medium and the context: its organisms and currents effect the sculpture, and this effect grows over time, and people and fish are given a hemispherical perspective in their approach, being able to swim up and around at any angle. The museum is open-ended and ongoing.

[the generative capacity of the ocean is radically transforming the sculpture in loosely anticipated but completely uncontrollable ways]

Ghost Train Park- “We’re All Mad Here”

Ghost Train Park was created by Peruvian art collective Basurama, in Lima, Peru. The design appropriates the structures of a never-finished elevated electric train with other, smaller refuse from the city and turns it into a playground. Begun in the early 80’s, it was to be a monument to neoliberal productivity, orderly progress and convenience. Now it’s a messy and exciting world of trash for kids. But it’s a very specific trash well-treated (tires stripped of their inner walls, columns painted exciting colors) and it’s an exhibition of resourceful assembly. The result are swings and ladders of all shapes and sizes suspended from the shade-providing superstructure of the “ghost train”.

In this case, the designers function almost as the nitrogen-fixing bacteria on the roots of a catalpa tree, helping the social activities latent in the surrounding area put down roots in previously unoccupiable terrain. The delirious use of colors and refuse at an exhilarating scale are exciting, and the swings and ladders are made from tires and cables and ropes that can be easily replaced. Comparing this project to the High Line reveals something almost like a faith in the agency and intelligence of others on the part of the designers.

[trapeze-scale children's swings are suspended from the existing train structure]

[unique structural moments become areas for special ziplines and tire ladders]

Olmsted’s Blank Snow- ”The Briar and the Rose”

Olmsted’s Blank Snow is a project by architects Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro and Nicole Halstead of the University of Buffalo. The project aims to take advantage of the snow that blankets Buffalo each winter, and the plows that are tasked with clearing it, to create an architecture that is “liberated from externally imposed roles, meanings, or functions… enabling all sorts of predicted but also unexpected possibilities.”

[Olmsted's Blank Snow in Buffalo, NY]

[the mounds slowly melting in the springtime]

The site is the terrace of Front Park near the shore of Lake Eerie in Buffalo, New York. Designed by Olmsted and Vaux in 1870 as part of the Buffalo Park System, “The Front” (the original name, before it was parkified) is a 37 acre park located on a bluff overlooking the Niagara River and Lake Eerie towards Canada. It was initially conceived as a public connection to the water and unique setting for recreation and civic display. To this end The Front was integrated into the city’s carriage, bicycle, and pedestrian circulation systems and the large terrace was paved and surrounded by gardens, playing fields, and the Lakeview House. When it opened in 1875 The Front was Buffalo’s most popular public space. That all ended in the 1950’s with the paving over of the Eerie Canal and the expansion of the Peace Bridge crossing into Canada. It is decidedly less interesting now, and is largely forgotten.

Within this context, Olmsted’s Blank Snow seizes on the ephemeral and contingent nature of the winter landscape and proposes to create a series of snow mounds meant to frame views, allow for greater vistas, and encourage appropriation by the few who venture there. This is achieved not with an illustrative plan and capital expenditure, but by simply modifying the specification for how the paved terrace in the park is to be plowed. This project, through engagement with the medium and the instrumentality of things via the operating manual, takes advantage of the abandoned landscape as a place of solitude and potentiality.

[the municipal park and greenway system designed by Olmsted and Vaux; the Front is located on the left midway up, bordering lake Niagara]

[a plowing plan prepared for the snow plow operator]

[multiple plans can be created after each snow fall, owing to the nature of snow; all images from the project website]

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency- “Cemetery Polka”

The DUEA is a project that works to find, collect and combine new practices that are generating in the city of Detroit because of the particular circumstance of city that has an abundance of infrastructure, space, and building material but relatively few functioning social or political institutions or capital for a city of its size. Focusing on efforts that provide an alternative to the conventional cycles of gentrification, the project examines and engages with the many variable forms the act of city-making takes when there is no hegemony.

[a map from the Powerhouse Detroit project, outlining parcels for possible future projects]

In the initial issue of Scapegoat Journal, Andrew Herscher explained the concept behind the project, unreal estate, “as a waste product of capitalism, is by definition an alternative to that structure’s products. As such, the urbanism that unreal estate invites, provokes, sustains or endures diverges not only in its authorship from conventional urbanism, but also in its ideological orientations, culture agencies, and political possibilities. In the same essay, Herscher profiles several “listings” from the “Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit”, which include the Car Wash Café, described as an open-air auto storage facility/party venue/barbeque garden/personal museum.

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency is an attempt to understand, disseminate and strengthen alternative forms of urbanism being generated by the terrain vague real estate situation the city. Through mapping, scavenging for old doors, painting houses slated for demolition garish colors, or creating bizarre entrepreneurial combinations liberated from the profit motive as primary driver, the project is an example of urban practice that registers a departure from conventional urbanism without destroying difference.

An Academy of Dunces

2011-07-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

[don't you dare, you dirty little beast, you rat bastard sonofabitch]

Geoff Dyer had a fantastic piece in the New York Times last week on the tendency of academics to roll up their writing into "a kind of zero-sum perfection" in which "the theatricality of the flamboyant, future-oriented sign-posting is matched by all the retrospection." The piece is hilarious, contains more than a hint of truth, and is a recommended read.

As Ian Bogost noted, the criticism is so damning because the author appropriates the same rhetorical tricks and assumes the same snide tone that he is accusing a particular art historian of (and personally because we are guilty of it). Bogost terms this "academic mumblespeak"; the tendency of academics in the arts and humanities (including designers) to craft phrases like "In this paper I will argue that the thermal gradation relating to lignin-based material products; "lumber", is decidedly less trans-locational than that of ferrous tensile members... (two sentences later)... as I have previously noted (lather, rinse, repeat)." How frequently is the interesting nugget in an academic paper so thoroughly tossed into a gigantic, bland word salad that you lose all hope of ever discovering it?

This practice is similar to that which Timothy Morton has dubbed "Everything You Can do I can do Meta" and commonly referred to in our field as "design speak". This is not to say that all academic design writing is this way; in fact some of it is compelling, technical, and very clear. But it occurs with enough frequency to merit addressing. One of our initial posts lamented the metaphor fixation of contemporary design criticism, and we have been critical of the practice of "technophilic obfuscation" while optimistically hoping to goad more good design writers into engaging in popular discourse. Whether any of that is true or it is all misguided, the recent writings by Bogost and Dyer suggest that these tendencies come from a place of fear and a desire to intimidate, rather than resulting from a curious and honest investigation and analysis of reality. David Foster Wallace says it best:

It probably isn't the whole explanation, but, as with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE, the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer's own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar's vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer's erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak ("revenue enhancement," "downsizing," pre-owned," "proactive resource-allocation restructuring") that it's tempting to think AE's real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

--Harper's Magazine, April, 2001

Or, in the decidedly less intelligent words of our very own DRDLM: Write more better. Write more. Better.

On Landscape Ontology III: Potentiality

2011-07-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

[Dipsacus fulonum, common teasel, is simultaneously an invasive weed, a machine age implement, a gorgeous perennial, habitat, or an armature for collecting on, depending on who or what you ask]

A few days ago we posted DRDLM’s findings on some of the historical andcontemporary infrastructural efforts in Brazil. In that post the concept of potentiality surfaced as a consistent theme,a shiny medallion luring farmers, politicians and industrialists into thejungle. And while the post highlighted anumber of well-intentioned projects that met their demise, there have been justas many urban, industrial and infrastructural undertakings that have met withmore success, be it the garden-and-causeway urbanism of the indigenous peoplein the northeastern Amazon, or the contemporary hydrological infrastructures of Sao Paulo.

One of our ongoing efforts here at FASLANYCis to excavate and further develop an ontology of landscape*. In earlier ruminations we established the conceptsof territorialization and generative capacity as fundamental to landscapeontology. That is to say that Hernan deSoto, Johnny Appleseed, and Robert Smithson are all fundamentally concernedwith demarcating a piece of the earth’s surface and engaging this as a medium.

[the pre-inca complex of Caral, Peru; a sophisticated and urban-scale example of territorialization and generative capacity of the landscape dating back 5,000 years; image source]

The importance of territorialization- the demarcation and control of aspecific piece of the earth’s surface- can be seen in both the history oflandscape practice and by examining the etymology of the word itself. A simplified argument can be made with theSpanish words “pais” (country as in “nation”) and “paisaje” (landscape). The close etymological link between the ideasof “nation” and “landscape” is something we hope to explore further in futurework, but suffice it to say that surveying, map making, notational systems, orotherwise “taking stock” as well as bounding, fencing, patrolling, policing, orotherwise controlling the land are fundamental to landscape-making.

Generative capacity is defined by engagement with the medium oflandscape itself through abstraction, experimentation, cultivation or otherwise. It is in this way that landscape practicediffers significantly from engineering which is defined by a teleology. Generative capacity is best understood as anengagement with the land (a defined piece of the earth’s surface) as a medium,not merely something that can be deconstructed and quantified as assemblages ofgeologies, biologies, and social patterns. Denis Cosgrove and Donald Worster have done much work to clarify thisperspective, and a further exploration of the idea through the theories of MarshalMcLuhan would be helpful, were we not too thick to comprehend it.

[generative capacity and territorialization of the aqueduct-landscape of Ayacucho, Peru]

Today we propose that a concern with potentiality is the third pillarof landscape practice. Potentiality- purecapacity for becoming- is the ingredient that creates the ephemeral andcontingent qualities of landscape. Over on Larval Subjects LeviBryant has a great piece on this topic which helps to clarify our muddled thinking. In it, while discussing Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s thoughts on the subject, he states:

Qualityor local manifestation (the actual), by contrast [to potentiality], is purelycreative, a genuine and novel event in the world. This is because power, potency,or potentiality, in actualizing itself, must negotiate all sorts of materialdifferences to become what it is. As a consequence, the quality that an objectwill come to embody can never be fully anticipated on the basis of the powerthat an object possesses. Here I distinguish between “endo-qualities” and“exo-qualities”. Endo-qualities refer to qualities produced as a result of thecontingent path that internal processes of the object trace in actualizingthemselves. Objects must contend with their own past materiality in actualizingtheir powers. The thoughts that I have at this moment must contend with thethoughts that I have had, with the things that I have experienced, with thethings that I have written in reaching actuality. I have a power to think, yetthe actualization of this power must navigate this materiality or actuality ofmy being in becoming actual. As a consequence, the thought that I now havebecomes a novel event, a new creation, or something that couldn’t have beenanticipated based on the power to think alone.

Landscape practice is tricky and ambiguous because it is concerned notonly with possibilities (accepted operations within the territory- peoplesitting on a park bench, daylilies spreading in a planted bed) but withpotentiality which serves to open up routes of deterritorialization**. Inthe process of translating potentiality into a “quality or local manifestation”landscape practice is concerned with the transgression of the boundaries andlimitations set up by territorialization or the material qualities of the soilor flora in a particular place.

This dance based on the tension established between objects and relations(for example, a dogwood tree is a home to an oriole, but a sculpture to alandscape gardener, and a genome to a biologist) suggests an understanding of thelandscape as a spatial mythology or acosmological constellation (asopposed to a system); the landscape and its referents become protagonists in a heateddialogue with the other objects and their desires, and constantly enter in tonew relations, and break off old ones. Anighthawk and chrysanthemum weed arrive and flourish in a rubble strewn lot inToledo intended to stand vacant. A beecolony constructs a hive in someone’s favorite peach tree. High chromium and mercury levels from the abandonedthermometer factory allow ailanthus and black locust to flourish in the vacantedges because no humans dare excavate the soil.

[landscape representations might come to more closely resemble celestial maps rather than the engineer's diagram, if an authentic landscape ontology were more fully developed; image source David Rumsey maps]

The medium itself is loaded with the potential to inflect or define theconversation at a given time, always in a contingent and ephemeral way. And this potential cannot be exhausted by anyparticular relation or manifestation. Interms of landscape potentiality is the capacity of the medium that existsoutside of the act of territorialization- the land in service to humans. Concernwith these potentials, the indeterminant and contingent nature of landscapes, are fundamental to landscape practice.

[a shift inemphasis from classical composition to aggregated constellation- varied styles and aesthetics slammed together- doesn’t changethe fact that it’s still music]

*the aim in developing this ontology is to define how it is different;not through negation by asserting what it is not (it’s not art, it’s not architecture,it’s not engineering, etc.) but by affirming what it is becoming: what is the landscape-ness of landscapepractice?

** thanks to Nam Henderson for bringing this point up in earlier conversations

Post-Flood Occupancy

2011-07-21T04:41:00.000-07:00

[Aerial view of the literally emerging Argentine town of Epecuen, 2011; image source]

Tangentially related to mammoth's long-running and fascinating siftings on floods, the Atlantic profiles the case of the Argentine settlement of Epecuen. Settled in 1920 on the shores of an inland lagoon about 6 hours south of Buenos Aires, the town was a bustling resort that welcomed visitors from the city who came for the supposed healing properties of the saline waters of Laguna Epecuen. Between 1950 and 1970, the 1,500 inhabitants welcomed upwards of 25,000 visitors each summer to the bustling town protected from the lagoon's waters by a slender earthen dike.

Laguna Epecuen is the final lagoon in the saline hydrological system known as the Lagunas Encadenadas del Oeste de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, receiving water from the increasingly saline lagoons but having no outlet. As such, it is the largest and most variable of the lagoons, with the highest salt content (10x that of sea water). In the 1970's and 1980's, unusually large amounts of rain in the province slowly built up the water level in the lagoon system and increased pressure on the dike protecting Epecuen. In 1985 that dike gave way.

[Villa Epecuen on the edge of the lagoons in 2011; the town is re-emerging from the lagoon, completely salted over and mostly dead or dormant]

[the same spot in 2003, thanks to Google Earth's historical aerial imagery]

[Epecuen Lagoon and surrounding area, 2011; the white, crusty topography surrounding each of the lagoons, and Laguna Epecuen along the entire eastern and southern edge, give evidence of how high the 20 year flood waters were]

All inhabitants left save one, and the town remained underwater for the next two decades. In the last five years lower water levels in the lagoon have opened the town back up, and the lone inhabitant reports that people have been coming around to explore, shoot movies, reminisce, and try to reclaim materials or lands (this last task has proven a bit difficult, what with the crust of salt now covering everything it didn't already dissolve). If this wasted town can be considered terrain vague, this place is perhaps another example of what we have argued for before- that the role of terrain vague in the creation of new mythologies is paramount. And the mythical form (that which is ahistorical yet suggests a history) resulting from the fracturing of the historical narrative is one of the reasons these terrain vague sites are so interesting and meaningful.

[the stairs are all that's left of a house that has mostly dissolved, or not dissolved; image source]

[the former slaughterhouse of Epecuen; image source]

[a man compares the view of main street 25 years ago to that of today; image source]

Reports have surfaced that this lone, grizzled inhabitant who has supposedly spent the intervening 25 years alone, "reading the paper and riding his bicycle", is our very own Don Roman de la Mancha. We approached him about this topic, about which he had only one comment: "No comment."

[is this the mysterious Don Roman de la Mancha cooking on wood stove that burns salted sycamore trees scavenged from the town? "No comment".

Brazil and Potentiality

2011-07-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

[the estado do morumbi in Sao Paulo, on inauguration day in 1960; the stadium was opened only partially completed with a capacity of 70,000; the stadium once had a capacity of 120,000, though that has been reduced]

South American Correspondent Don Roman de la Mancha reports that thehysteria and speculation on Brazilian infrastructure is predictably heatingup. In the last decade the nation hasenjoyed economic growth and stability (going from an IMF debtor nation to acreditor within a six year span) while implementing progressive social reforms. Given this, it is not surprising that the expandingmiddle class is demanding more consumption. More interesting for our purpose is the appetite for infrastructure they are exhibiting (this post on Pruned gave some early indication of this trend).

[World Cup 2014 host cities, spread all over the country]

[a beltway under construction in Sao Paulo]

Both the World Cup and Summer Olympics are coming to this sprawlingnation within a two year span beginning in 2014. With host cities spread overan area larger than the whole of Western Europe*, and mega-cities such as SaoPaulo and Rio requiring significant upgrades to existing transit, sanitary,telecom and logistical systems, and a wealth of freshwater, productivefarmland, and hydrocarbon and mineral wealth, the demand for infrastructure isunderstandable. Partnerships with Peruto construct the inter-oceanic highway and open up further trading with Chinaand India, or buddy loans to Argentina allowing them to repay their own WorldBank debts and continued cooperation with Venezuela and the other nations ofthe MERCOSUR suggest that Brazil might be establishing an American hegemonicblock that is not dominated by the US sphere of influence established by theMonroe Doctrine. Truly, Brazil is takingthe fuck off.

Of course, this has happened before. Once a heavily populated region, the extent of which we may only now bebeginning to understand, the landscape claimed and settled by the Portugueseadventures in the 15^th century was not a virgin tropical paradise butrather an urbanized infra-natural landscape undergoing a massive andviolent process of what might today be called “re-wilding”. However, instead of an ill-conceived public housing project, this rewilding process was taking place on a continental scalein a landscape unlike anything ever seen by Europeans, who interpreted thelandscape as an untouched, pristine wilderness.

The allure of Brazil- what might be characterized by the unwieldy word “potentiality”-seduced the Portuguese across the Line of Demarcation, drew British surveyorsinto the interior, and inspired Kubitschek to make like Fitzcarraldo and build Brasilia. Drunkenly rifling through the annals offailed Brazilian utopias and underfunded exploratory and infrastructuralundertakings, DRDLM stumbled across the story of Fordlandia. Founded in 1928 by Henry Ford as a companytown in the middle of the Amazon, the town was intended to cultivate and manage a rubber plantation toprovide cheap tires for his booming car business. Unfortunately, Ford’s men choose infertile,rocky soil and planted all the same species of rubber tree close together in a plantation, allowing them to share pests and blight freely.

[aerial view of Fordlandia on the Tapajos River in Brazil in the 1930's]

[Lincoln's may not be the most suitable vehicle for the Amazon]

[the Fordlandia powerhouse in 1934]

The factory town was relocated downriver to Belterra in 1933 without havingproduced any industrial rubber. With theadvent of synthetic rubber production in 1945, the investment was considered amassive failure and abandoned. Musty,rotting ruins still stand and are undergoing rewilding once again, testament tothe contingent and ephemeral nature of Brazil’s potentiality.

[Fordlandia powerhouse today]

[Check here for information on the international competition to designthe Olympic Park in Rio.]

*loosely defined to include “western” and “northern” Europe as definedby the United Nations Statistic Division

Sediments: Here Comes Everything

2011-07-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Today’s post on sediments is the final excerpt from the Field Guide to Urban Industrial Canals which can be seen and downloaded for free from Issuu. If it interests you check it out, and if you find it particularly helpful, interesting, or weak in a particular area we would love to hear about it.

[the rio de la plata estuary; uruguay is on the left and argentina is to the right, with the city of buenos aires in grey; the estuary carries massive sediment loads from the heart of the continent- the basin includes five national capitals and Sao Paulo; the rio de la plata and its delta (in the foreground) is formed by the confluence of the rio parana and the rio uruguay]

[the sediments of rio de la plata add to argentina's coast line every year just south of buenos aires; here the petrochemical dock in 1927 at the mouth of the riachuelo, with the canal sarandi in the foreground; all of the watery area framed by the jetties in the center is now dry land occupied by the expanded port facilities; image source]

The sedimentation process is one of deposition and accumulation. In rivers it typically occurs in places where the current slows down. In a pre-industrial river the main sediments are bits of clay and sand and pebbles from upstream that form beautiful sandbars and oxbows and influence the river’s course over time. In an industrial river- one that has been canalized and is dredged and used for barge traffic- these pre-industrial sediments are mixed up into a frothy stew with all the industrial materials and wastes, as well as the runoff and suspended solids from the street gutters and sewer system of the surrounding city. All of these substances tend to settle out along the bottom of the canal and have to be regularly dredged in order to keep the channel clear for barges and boats.

Dredging operations ceased for many canals sometime in the mid-twentieth century, usually around 1950, when the size of ocean going traffic became much larger and the canals weren’t able to easily be widened because of the constructions along their banks. As the sediments piled up, the capacity of the water channel for moving water was seriously reduced and in some cases flooding problems are exacerbated as is the case in the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires.

Continually dredging a canal where industrial operations have all but ceased is a difficult expense to justify when municipal budgets are tight, despite the flooding and environmental issues. Once the canal begins to silt up, it becomes impossible for the neighboring water-dependent and water-enhanced industries (such as scrap yards, coal yards, steel mills) to use it; once all of the neighbors have turned their back on the canal, the falloff in water quality can be precipitous. This suggests that, whenever possible, new uses for canals that require a navigable channel would improve water quality and might help reduce flooding and environmental problems.

Sediments on industrial canals inevitably contain serious substances that are harmful to many organisms, including humans. For that reason they are often left “down there” below the surface of the water, where no one has to worry about them too much, unless you happen to live nearby. Companies and governments usually have politically expedient reasons for not dredging the sediments- they are highly contaminated with toxic substances. In addition to stirring up the pcb’s and heavy metals and tars that are mixed in on the bottom of the canal, the sediments that are dredged cannot be disposed cheaply- hazardous waste dump sites are incredibly expensive.

[sediments along the gowanus canal, brooklyn, 2010]

[sediments along the riachuelo canal, buenos aires, mid 1930's; image source]

The sedimentation process occurs on the banks of canals as well, where tides, flood waters, street runoff, as well as people deposit all sorts of jetsam and flotsam. This material is most often considered a nuisance- shopping carts are deposited at street ends, plastic bottles and old wood scraps find their way into the chain link fencing that edges many places along the canal. While this material is mainly a nuisance and it is rather difficult to think of a possible reuse for it other than simply cleaning it up, the deposits are evidence of material eddies in the city. The contemporary urban environment is like a highly regulated waste stream, with food and water and consumer goods coming in, being consumed, and then deposited and whisked out of the city- the municipal solid waste system. Appropriate mobilization and management of this system is perhaps the key catalyst to any urban project. The biological capacities of canals to consume human waste when properly managed, and their tendency to accumulate the trash that escapes the waste stream suggests they should be an area of focus for sanitation departments in cities.

Specific sedimentation patterns could be strategically utilized- the canal is an eddy in the urban ecology of waste, transportation, and also everyday use. They offer an alternative to the highly programmed recreational park, the commercial shopping mall, or the office park. It is something of a no man’s land, and by providing simple access around the border and across its width, and finding a way to reduce the exposure to the toxic substances, entire ecosystems of local populations of plants and animals including humans would spring up along its banks. Indeed, to a limited degree this already occurs and need only be encouraged in the lightest possible way to generate a fecund alternative to the overly programmed recreation park, the commercial shopping mall or street, and the office tower. People and things might come here and to sit outside of the rushing city currents for a while, watching the sediments swirl by.

[the gowanus as brooklyn eddy]

Canal Ecologies: Transportation

2011-06-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

Today's excerpt from the Field Guide to Urban Industrial canals is on the ecology of transportation. For earlier posts on canal ecologies see here, and to see or download the whole guide see here.

[the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires; at first glance the transportation structures seem to be a smashed-up menagerie of civil engineering agglomerated over two centuries; in the foreground the Autopista al Sur- one of the main commercial highways in the country]

Transportation: The Wall of Sound

Transportation in American cities is supposedly all about the car. The automobile dominates our perception on the street- horns honking, engines humming, brakes squealing- but it is not so important in the history of industrial canals. Canals had their heyday in the mid-1800’s, well before the Model T got rolling. While some canals initially had the jump on the railroads and so were used to span great distances such as the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or most famously the Eerie Canal, the majority were quickly turned into a complimentary component of a sophisticated mash-up of an industrial transportation system made up of local roads, docks, and regional rail roads. In fact, two of our examples- the River Rouge and the Riacheulo- continue to function today in just such a capacity.

In the case of the River Rouge, the canal is now surrounded by bands of regional highways and railroads. Zug Island, located right at the mouth where the canalized River Rouge meets the larger Detroit River, is traversed by a major rail line and accessed by a single road. The island was once a marshy peninsula on the edge of town unfit for settlement. A new channel was cut through to create a straighter shipping route, and Zug Island was the byproduct. It was purchased and reconstructed as a giant landscape factory for steel production and now receives loads of coal via dock to refine into coke for the steel-making operations which then gets shipped out via rail line. However, the rest of the canal is ribboned with the freeways and highways that serve the number one export of the car capital of the twentieth century.

[a plan of the street car rail system of Detroit in 1941; Zug Island and the River Rouge is legible in the bottom left hand corner but was not a component of the commuter transportation system]

In Buenos Aires the Canal Sarandi serves the main receiving docks of the petrochemical port as a spur off of the Riachuelo River. This area of town is a prime location for the port because of the canal and its proximity to the railroad and Autopista al Sur which connects to the rest of the country without having to cut across the central city. A hundred and fifty years ago when the canal was first being constructed the port was on the southern edge of the city, a fortuitous occurrence that kept the industrial factories and pollution segregated from the city proper. As the city population grew from 1 million in 1850 to 13 million in 2000 the city reoriented itself around the river and the port, drawn by the cheaper lands to the south and the economic engine of the port and its concomitant industries. This southern part of Buenos Aires has grown up around the freeways and railways that serve the port, the local municipal grids filling in around the lines of infrastructure, sometimes in an unplanned ad hoc way.

The freight rails, passenger trains, and commercial highways, and local street grids that are brought together at the industrial canals is a pattern that holds even for canals that are no longer used. The abandoned canals, with their large vacant tracts and adjacent industrial zones were prime candidates for interstate freeways when the great highway projects of the 50’s and 60’s came through. The effect today can be a wall of sound, especially in the evening as cars pour out of the city and into the suburbs. But this wall is different than being in the rush hour traffic on Broadway. The difference is due to an effect of displacement that occurs when one is along an old industrial canal. And this displacement effect can be one of the special aspects of a canal.

[the Riachuelo in the 1930's; in the distance the Avellenada Bridge carries commuters gondola-like over the canal]

While canals in the city have historically attracted the great, hulking commercial infrastructures of transportation such rails and highways, they have simultaneously severed the local municipal street grid- the roads, the bus routes, and the sidewalk end here. As a result the local traffic is usually at a minimum, while the commercial and regional traffic is loud and at a distance. The effect can be magical- a quiet forgotten place in the city with privileged access to the great humming and rumblings of the modern city.

In Brooklyn the Gowanus Canal maintains just this attraction. It is a sublime landscape with the old ruined factories and rubble heaps and scrap yards interspersed among garages and warehouses. The F/G trains and the Gowanus Expressway cross overhead and at night the little lights in the subway cars are beautiful. If you go there on the right night and watch the subway crawl along the tracks and see the distant skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan, if you notice the bats diving for insects against the dark silhouettes of the strange warehouses and factories around you will feel that New York City is the place for you; that despite our propensity for creating ugliness, beauty is bigger than us.

Canal Ecologies: Vacancy

2011-06-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Today's excerpt from the Field Guide to Industrial Canals is on the topic of vacancy. For earlier posts on hydrology and toxicity see here, or click here to peruse or download the whole guide.

[a vacant house on Admiral's Row in Brooklyn, by the decommissioned naval yard; the yard has been turned over to the city of New York, though the vacant buildings on Admiral's Row are dministered by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard; image source]

Vacancy: Borderlands of Intentionality*

If one wants to explore an industrial canal on foot and attempts to walk along its banks, they are likely to find that their way is frequently blocked by the fenced off, abandoned industrial properties. Because of this, the best way to explore the canal is actually by canoe as one can move freely up and down, experience the water firsthand, and possibly get out to explore the shore should something catch your attention. But why is it that vacancy, especially boarded up and walled off vacancy, is so prevalent along industrial canals? And what can we make of it, in terms of our study to understand the generative capacity of the canal landscape within the city?

We should first acknowledge two much larger, more prevalent, and readily understandable trends regarding vacancy: it is fundamental to the concept of real estate in general, and much industry in the Americas has been shifted to Asia in recent decades. But we won’t dwell too much on those. What is about the American industrial canal that makes it particularly susceptible to vacancy, and what does this ecology of vacancy mean? It is there for two reasons, one seen, and one unseen.

The unseen we know a bit about- the toxic ecologies of the canals drive away people. Who wants to pay top dollar for a city apartment on top of an open sewer? Who wants to worry that their kids are being exposed to damaging amounts of chromium or pcb’s? But the seen- the old factory, the coal silo, the conveyor system rusted still- is something that we might dwell on for a minute, it is the thing that holds our gaze and draws us down to the canal.

The canals were constructed according to the logistical needs of modern industry, and the great “bodies” of modern industry immediately sprang up at its edges. In the Americas, this happened quickly; if industrial development was limited until after independence, the floodgates burst open soon after and a flurry of factories and mills were built in a hurry. These were built intentionally, for specific purposes in a moment in time. Compared to other forms of city building, they did not evolve- they were instant. Great boxes and cylinders and trusses of brick and wood and steel were created at impressive scales. But when the canals were no longer the primary platform for industrial traffic- having been replaced by interstates- companies left the canal banks for cheaper rents in the suburbs or anywhere along the highway. The old factories, storage yards, conveyance systems, and silos were left. Some of these were knocked down, but many of the well-built ones were left standing precisely because it is expensive to demolish something that is well-built.

[an abandoned tug is hauled out of the Riachuelo canal as Argentine Naval officers oversee cleanup operations]

Today we are left with a particular ecology of vacancy along industrial canals, each one a mix of demolished buildings with the rubble strewn across the lot and abandoned brick factories and warehouses that have been left to slowly decay. And each canal offers particular attractions and repulsions.

The demolishing of a building leaves the property utterly exposed; there is no shelter either for plants or animals or people. In addition the entire lot tends to be covered in several inches of rubble as the primary method of building demolition on these sites is to bring in the wrecking ball. Afterwards the spoils are simply spread out over the site, as this is much cheaper than paying someone to cart it away. Unfortunately, this rubble makes it difficult for anything to take hold here, but it does make a prime staging ground. For that reason these places are sometimes repurposed as a salt storage lot for local departments of transportation, or occasionally they mutate into some local initiative- a community garden of raised beds or local tree nursery. But mostly these places stay unused, coated in the destroyed rubble of their former usefulness, colonize by only a few of the hardiest weeds and insects.

The other vacant lots are perhaps more interesting for our purposes, those where the buildings and facilities still stand. Their walls create shade and shadowy places, areas that are protected from wind, perches for birds and protection from lines of site from the streets. Weedy trees and grasses spring from the protected cracks attracting kestrels and nighthawks, offering beetles protection and shade for mycelia, cover for rodents. Some of the buildings are reused by punk artists. The building known as the Bat Cave along the Gowanus Canal, actually an old Con Edison powerhouse, supported an entire rave scene for years before a leaking roof ultimately drove all of the squatters away. Even now, it supports a thriving fusion ecology of weedy trees and shrubs and grasses, all munching away at the pavement and rubble below, turning it slowly into a sheltered place for insects, microbes and birds. As rosy as that picture is, the opposite is also true- abandoned buildings can offer refuge to criminals and runaways and can serve as incubators for illegal or illicit activities that threaten the larger community.

This phenomenon brings us to one of the most interesting characters yet on the canal- the mythical form. These mythical forms attract us to them; ahistorical but immediately understandable, strange yet familiar, these forms are from our shared past which is constantly being erased. The old factory or pier, the silo, the concrete bunker- coming across these forms in the city stimulates the mind and attracts new agents, suggesting a history while recoiling from revealing itself.

[the Salt Lot on the Gowanus Canal; formerly the site of four warehouses, this now vacant lot is used for road salt storage in the winter]

Canal Ecologies: Toxicity

2011-06-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

[a fitting tip of the cap]

Today’s excerpt from the Field Guide to Urban Industrial Canals is on the subject of toxicity. For the first installment on hydrology see yesterday’s post, or check out the entire guide here. We suppose it’s only right to acknowledge an obvious debt of gratitude to Reyner Banham’s seminal Architecture of Four Ecologies. This chronicle of Los Angeles was an obvious inspiration, and is a great read if you have a chance on a lazy summer day. Though we can’t compare with the lucid prose or critical analysis of Banham’s work, it is in a similar sense that we use the term “ecology”.

Toxicity: Eccentric Substances

Toxicity is a tricky theme regarding the subject of canals, and industrial cities in general. There are many ambiguous terms such as pollution, contamination, degradation, sewage, and landfills as well as a number of euphemisms such as brownfields or “post-industrial landscapes”. For the most part these leave people confused, with vague sentiments resembling “that doesn’t sound too bad, but I don’t want to live near it” or “it’s fine as long as it stays over there”. By being specific about certain substances, we may however be able to avoid this conundrum.

Toxicity relates to any substance which impedes the normal biological functioning of an organism. One key to remember about toxicity is that it is almost always in relation to exposure. That is, most substances considered toxic are not harmful until exposure reaches a certain amount, be it nuclear radiation or road salt. Toxicity in urban industrial canals comes from two main sources: the stormwater and sewage from the surrounding city, and industrial sources such as factories and storage yards along the banks of the canal. The first is directly a result of the hydrological patterns of the canal and the city; as the canal is usually in a low point, all of the brake dust and motor oil and estrogen and caffeine that is contained in our sewers or lining our streets dumps into the canals during a storm. This is because the canals are usually the output for sewer overflows, which become taxed by the extra water flower through the system during a storm. The toxic inputs from these sources are usually ongoing. In fact, one of the primary uses of canals after their industrial life was to turn them over to waste transport systems. In the case of the Chicago River, the urban section of the larger Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal it was said to “run black” on the day that industrial operations ceased because the canal began carrying barely treated sewage from the city.

[the US Army Corps map of the Chicago River, an urban canal part of the larger Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal; this canal is one of the reasons Chicago became an important city, offering a logistical shipping connection between the Great Lakes region with the Mississippi basin waterways]

The second source of toxicity- the historical industrial uses along its banks- is a bit more insidious. The list of industries is long and remarkably consistent from city to city: manufactured gas plants, tanneries, chemical manufacturers, liquid gas storage, concrete plants, slaughterhouses, grain storage, steel production, glue factories, tobacco warehouses, road salt storage, ship building, and junkyards. There are several more but I highlight a few of the common ones that appear in most American cities. The reason for this remarkable consistency has to do with the technologies of the time period, and the role of the canal in industrialization. The most important use of the canal was the transport of bulk materials that were fundamental to the industrial processes of modernizing American cities. Massive quantities of grain, building stone, coal, cow hides, and road salt from the hinterlands as well as other cities was vital to these expanding economies, and industrial canals became widespread in the Americas at a time when the only overland option for transport were horse carts. The railroad did not come into widespread use until several decades after the canal boom had commenced.

[a diagram of a combined sewer system; this is the prevalent system in most American industrial towns; the term "combined" signifies that both stormwater and sewage from domestic, commercial, and industrial applications pour into the same pipes; during rain events overflows are frequent; often the release valve is into a canal]

Many of the burgeoning industries, including the manufacturing gasworks and tanneries, located themselves along the canals where they could receive their large daily shipments of coal and carcasses. In addition to using the canals to receive shipments, it was also common to use the canals to dump the wastes and byproducts resulting from the tanning of hides, the drawing of candles, or the stamping of rivets. In the case of the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires, newspaper reports of the river “running red with blood” from the livestock warehouses were reported right from the start. Writer Thomas Wolfe, writing in the 1920’s in Brooklyn, notes of the Gowanus in Brooklyn:

And what is that you smell?

Oh, that! Well, you see, he shares impartially with his neighbors a piece of public property in the vicinity; it belongs to all of them in common, and it gives to South Brooklyn its own distinctive atmosphere. It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smoldering rages, the odors of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incence of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.

And how does he stand it?

Well, one gets used to it. One can get used to anything, just as all these people do. They never think of the smell, they never speak of it, they'd probably miss it if they moved away.

Many of the toxic substances in these places such as the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) and polycholorinated biphenyls (PCB’s) from the manufactured gasworks still persist in the canal sediments. High concentrations of solvents and oils are often leaked into the canals from the surrounding bus depots, and heavy metals including cadmium and lead from industrial processes and car exhaust tend to concentrate in the sediments and along the banks. Sometimes, when the currents change, releases of oil from the soil can cause large slicks on the surface. In addition, sewage overflow and stormwater runoff into these canals from the adjacent combined sewer outlets and city streets continually add to the nitrogen and phosphate loads in the water as well as oil and dust from the city streets. Lastly the innocuous-seeming domestic chemicals, from cleaners and solvents we use to wash dishes to the estrogen and caffeine we use in our bodies, can become concentrated here and have huge detrimental effects to amphibious or aquatic life in the canal.

[the molecular structure of PCB's, just one of the toxic residuals often associated with urban industrial canals]

The presence of toxic substances and perceptions and assumptions that come along with those substances are also responsible for creating so many of the opportunities that we find today literally lining these canals. Because canals are so often spurned, considered outside of the normal urban geography, different people, plants and animals are able to find purchase here. With regard to the folks hanging out here, one can imagine easily that it is the homeless, the prostitutes, the teenagers skipping school that spend time here. And they do sometimes. But you also have many people from surrounding neighborhoods who filter down here looking for a quiet place. Canoe clubs set up shop in small shacks along their banks, birders come to watch the nighthawks, and rogue gardeners starved for a patch of land come here to find a place of experimentation. The key in these ongoing activities and the new possibilities the canal creates is limiting and monitoring exposure to the toxic substances.

Canal Ecologies: Hydrology

2011-06-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

[the cover of the industrial canal field guide]

Here at FASLANYC we are concerned with urban industrial canal landscapes throughout the Americas. The reasons for this are many but the most important are 1) they are ubiquitous- during the canal boom early in the industrialization of the Americas canals were built in every region throughout North and South America. If you live in an American city that dates to the beginning of the 19th century or before you probably have an old canal or its vestiges nearby. 2) they are heavily polluted- the industrial operations along the canals have left a legacy of heavy metals and petrochemicals soaked into the surrounding environment, almost without exception. Due to their location in the heart of industrial and post-industrial cities that are also population centers, the health and safety risks associated with the canals, and public awareness of them, is an important issue. 3) they are generative- we’ve looked at the ways that canals and other terrain vague sites can generate new modes of operating- recreating, working, and living- in the otherwise highly structured city. This is precisely because of their industrial forms, the presence of water and land together, their surrounding context, and their state of abandon offer an opportunity to agents- weeds, birds, skateboarders, and explorers- that might not otherwise find space in the city.

In recent months we’ve assembled a field guide to urban industrial canals in the Americas and just uploaded it to Issuu. It is divided up into three main sections- ecologies, taxonomies, and operations, in addition to defining some of the history and terms useful for understanding this landscape typology. If it’s useful and you get a chance to use down on your local canal, we would love to hear about that. In the meantime, this week we’ll be publishing excerpts from the Ecologies section of the canal field guide. Today’s excerpt- Hydrology.

[the canalized portion of the riachuelo in buenos aires at the turn of the 20th century; the canal was for a time the main port facility for the burgeoning industrial town]

Hydrology: Bathing in the Ether

To obtain the slackwater (slowly moving water) needed for canal traffic, any navigable canal is constructed using some combination of three techniques: cutting a new channel where none existed, dredging, or canalization of an existing waterway. Dredging operations are almost always used during and afterwards in order to maintain the canal channel and is really a horse of different color. Nonetheless, all three operations have in common their effect on the hydrologic ecology- they regularize it. And they do this in both its route as well as the shape of the water channel itself.

The regularization of the waterway usually means making the route straighter, the sides more vertical, and the bottom flatter. It is important to remember that a hydrological system is a dynamic thing that usually wants to shift and change according to a change in global climate patterns, a shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates, a particularly high tide, or simply yesterday’s thunderstorm.

This regularization is realized with structures known as bulkheads that essentially make a hard edge between the water and the land. The reasons for this are twofold which we will look at in a bit of detail: canals are made for barge traffic, and urban canals were located in cities. Barges are essentially large floating platforms for the transportation of heavy bulk materials- coal, iron ore, grain, vats of petroleum- this is the stuff that the industrial revolution was made from. In huge quantities. These barges are designed to carry tons of this stuff and allow it to be loaded and unloaded easily and quickly, first by men and mules, later by gantry cranes and conveyors. Of course, this means that they have specific dimensions and maneuvering capabilities which are not very flexible, and so the canal edges had to be designed and constructed so as to allow them to maneuver and dock. This meant no more meandering streams with soft edges and boulders and sand bars in the bottom- the course is straightened, the edge is reinforced, and the bottom is deepened and flattened.

As for the urban canal, the lands adjacent to the waterway were often too valuable to leave as sloped earthen banks. Often factory yards, docks or loading equipment needed to be directly adjacent to the canals in the city because the factories were there and the materials needed to be unloaded. This called for not only a reinforced edge, but a vertical one, as more flat usable land could be claimed this way, and the barge could dock right next to the loading yard and equipment.

[the pre-industrial hydrology of the Gowanus Creek in Brooklyn, before the canal infrastructure was grafted on top of it]

[On the edge of Detroit Zug Island, home of US Steel operations and one of the only operational coke plants in the United States, exists at the confluence of the Rouge River canal and the Detroit River]

The effect of these measures on the pre-industrial hydrology can be imagined. The plants, animals, and microbes that rely on a moisture gradient and open ground along the banks of the former waterways are all obliterated. An iconic example of this is the Gowanus Oyster of Brooklyn, New York. Once upon a time the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was once a meandering tidal creek whose brackish waters produced oysters so succulent and sizable they were harvested by the Dutch settlers and shipped back to Europe by the barrel-full. In the 18th and 19th century before the advent of the hot dog stand it was oyster carts that dotted the intersections throughout Brooklyn. With the growth of industry and the concomitant population explosion in Brooklyn in the middle of the 19th century, the old Gowanus Creek was channeled and deepened to create the 1.8 mile-long canal, finished in 1869. This allowed for brown sandstone ("brownstone") and other construction materials quarried in New Jersey and upstate New York to be brought into Brooklyn, where they were used to erect the future mecca of Hipsters and Hassidim. This development entailed the utter annihilation of the Gowanus Oyster.

The channelization of the banks has further implications, especially regarding the rate of water flow- it increases it. Increased flow rate serves to help scour the bottom of the channel, lessening the need for constant dredging. But a canal in an urban setting can also be imagined as a river, wilth all of the gutters and storm sewers and streets acting as ephemeral streams shooting surface water into the canal during rain events. In addition, many canals are affected by tides and may contain brackish waters, such as the case of the Newtown Creek in Queens, New York. This twice daily ebb and flow and mixing of nutrients and salts can work to stimulate biological communities, flush out chemicals that have accumulated in the canal, and cause metal structures to corrode or alter faster. Because of this, the canals in cities along coastlines exhibit some of the most drastic change over time, and present great opportunity.

Ultimately, the structures and operations of canal-making might be seen as a kind of prosthesis grafted on top of an existing hydrological pattern. Usually the result is intensified disruptions- storms cause higher rises in water level, faster rates of flow, and a more severe line between what is wet and what is dry. With the passage of time, many of the patterns attempt to reassert themselves, pushing down bulkheads, depositing sediments and if constant work is not done to counteract this change, then the hydrology will begin to alter or destroy the bulkheads depending on their construction, or deposited sediment will accumulate. Whatever the state of push and pull between the water and the structures in any given canal, it is the presence of this water- and all of the nutrients and chemicals and sediments in it- and its effects on the surroundings that is responsible for a great deal of the possibility and generative capacity of the landscape.

[industrial coal silos, bulkheads, and new fusion ecologies on the edge of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn]