Tuesday, April 21. 2009
For an ambitious landscape design project, Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has proposed a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a "green wall" against the future spread of the desert.
[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Larsson's project deservedly won first prize last fall at the Holcim Foundation's Awards for Sustainable Construction held in Marrakech, Morocco.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project, I think, is that this solidified dunescape is created through a particularly novel form of "sustainable construction" – that is, through a kind of infection of the earth.
In other words, Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a "microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone," he explains.
[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Larsson points out the work of the Soil Interactions Lab at UC-Davis, which describes itself as "harnessing microbial activity to solidify problem soils."
But the idea of taking this research and applying it on a megascale – that is, to a 6,000km stretch of the Sahara Desert – boggles the mind. At the very least, the idea that this might be deployed for the wrong reasons, or by the wrong people, in some delirious hybrid of ice-nine, J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, and perhaps a Roger Moore-era James Bond film, deserves further thought.
An epidemic of bacillus pasteurii infects all the loose sand in the world, forming great aerodynamic fins and waves in a kind of global Utah of glassine shapes.
[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Clarifying the biochemical process through which his project could be realized, Larsson explained in a series of emails that his "structure is made straight from the dunescape by flushing a particular bacteria through the loose sand... which causes a biological reaction whereby the sand turns into sandstone; the initial reactions are finished within 24 hours, though it would take about a week to saturate the sand enough to make the structure habitable."
The project – a kind of bio-architectural test-landscape – would thus "go from a balloon-like pneumatic structure filled with bacillus pasteurii, which would then be released into the sand and allowed to solidify the same into a permacultural architecture."
[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
The "architectural form" of the resulting solidified sandscape is actually "derived from tafoni," Larsson writes, where tafoni is "a cavernous rock structure that formally ties the project back to notions of aggregation and erosion. On a conceptual scale, the project spans some 6,000km, putting it on a par with Superstudio's famous Continuous Monument – but with an environmental agenda."
[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
I'm reminded of Michael Welland's recent book Sand. There, Welland describes "how deserts operate" (he compares them to "engines" of mechanical weathering); he points out that you can still find "sand-sized fragments of steel" on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, war having left behind a hidden desert of metal; and he mentions that the UK now maintains "the world's first database of sand" – but that it's used "specifically for police forensics."
Welland's descriptions of sand dune physics are particularly memorable. He writes, for instance, that an avalanche is really a sand dune being "overwhelmed by the huge number of very small events" on its surface, and that these "very small events" unpredictably lead to one decisive moment of cascading self-collapse.
[Image: A photomicrograph of sand grains].
Fantastically, though, and more relevant to this post, he then compares the internal structure of sand dunes to Gothic cathedrals: the grains of sand piled high form "microscopic chains and networks... in such a way that they carry most of the pressure from the weight of the material above them." This is the architecture of sand:
These chains seem to behave like the soaring arches of Gothic cathedrals, which serve to transmit the weight of the roof, perhaps a great dome, outward to the walls, which bear the load.
Briefly, though, this image can be sustained through Welland's descriptions of the great ergs, or sand seas, of today. These dune seas "are tangibly mobile, ever changing," Welland writes, "but there are larger areas of ergs past that are now fixed by vegetation."
Most of today's active sandy deserts are surrounded by vast stretches of old stabilized dunes, formed as the trade-wind belts and arid regions expanded in the cold, dry climate of the last ice age and immobilized as the climate changed. However, continuing shifts in the climate may bring these fixed ergs, granular reserves awaiting activation, back to life.
He mentions the Sand Hills of northwestern Nebraska, "formed originally from the debris of the glacial erosion of the Rocky Mountains."
The hills were stabilized eight hundred years ago but have had episodes of reincarnation since: a long drought toward the end of the eighteenth century resuscitated dunes on the Great Plains, whose activity caused problems for the westbound wagon trains decades earlier.
But if sand dunes are Gothic cathedrals, and if those dunes can come back to life, the resulting image of resuscitated Gothic cathedrals moving slowly over the American landscape is almost too incredible to contemplate.
[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Larsson's project descriptions maintain this somewhat hallucinatory feel:
I researched different types of construction methods involving pile systems and realised that injection piles could probably be used to get the bacteria down into the sand – a procedure that would be analogous to using an oversized 3D printer, solidifying parts of the dune as needed. The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids. If we allow ourselves to dream, we could even fantasise about ways in which the wind could do a lot of this work for us: solidifying parts of the surface to force the grains of sand to align in certain patterns, certain shapes, having the wind blow out our voids, creating a structure that would change and change again over the course of a decade, a century, a millenium.
A vast 3D printer made of bacteria crawls undetectably through the deserts of the world, printing new landscapes into existence over the course of 10,000 years...
[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Larsson goes on to contrast his method with existing vernacular techniques of anti-desertification:
Traditional anti-desertification methods include the planting of trees and cacti, the cultivation of grasses and shrubs, and the construction of sand-catching fences and walls. More ambitious projects have ventured into the development of agriculture and livestock, water conservation, soil management, forestry, sustainable energy, improved land use, wildlife protection, poverty alleviation, and so on. This project, apart from utilising a completely new way of turning sand into sandstone, incorporates all of the above. Inside the dunes, we can take care of our plants and animals, find water and shade, help the soil remain fertile, care for the trees, and so on. In this way, it's an environmental project that hopefully provides an innovation for other architects/builders to use and copy time and time again.
The following images show us the lab-based biochemical practices through which a landscape can be lithified. However, for me at least, these photos also come with the interesting implication that rogue basement chemists of the future won't be like Albert Hofmann or Ann & Alexander Shulgin; the heavily regulated underground rogue chemistry sets of the 21st century will instead synthesize new terrestrial compounds, counter-earths and other illegal geosimulants, rare earth anti-elements that might then catalyze a wholesale resurfacing of the world through radical landscape architecture.
Which leads me to ask: where is landscape architecture's Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, or even John Dee? Mystics of terrestrial form, hacking the periodic table of the elements inside makeshift labs.
[Images: Synthesizing rare earth compounds – bioterrestriality; from Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
In any case, Larsson's "solidified dunes," we read, would also "support the existing Green Wall Sahara initiative: 24 African countries coming together to plant a shelterbelt of trees right across the continent, from Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east, in order to mitigate against the encroaching desert."
[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Clearly having thought through the project in extraordinary detail, Larsson then points out that the structure itself would generate a "temperature difference between the interior of the solidified dunes and the exterior dune surface." This then "makes it possible to start building a permacultural network, the nodal points of which would support water harvesting and thermal comfort zones that can be inhabited."
[Image: The view from within; from Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].
Eventually, then, a 6000km-long wall of permaculturally active, inhabited architecture will span the Sahara.
Check out more images in this Flickr set for the project, or read a bit more about the project over at the Holcim Foundation.
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Via BLDBLOG
Personal comment:
Un de ces projets qui participent d'une nouvelle tendance d'"architecture-territoire" (et qui n'a pas forçément besoin de s'étaler à l'échelle du territoire, contrairement à ce projet).
Thursday, April 09. 2009
The Greater London Authority has published a report on London’s food related greenhouse gas emissions. It finds that food consumption in the capital accounts for 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year - a very significant figure. 44% of these emissions are attributable to the agricultural stage.
Suggested ways to reduce this:
Less meat and dairy, and more food from plants. According to latest figures from the United Nations, animal farming globally causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the cars, lorries and planes in the world put together, and the impact is increasing.
More local, seasonal and field-grown fruit and vegetables.
Food, such as organic, grown without artificial chemicals - particularly artificial fertiliser, the main source of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.
Further Information:
The GLA report can be downloaded here
Information about the links between food and climate change can be found on the Sustain website here:
For background information and regular updates on food and climate change research and scientific findings, join the Food Climate Research Network mailing list via:
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Via MetaboliCity
Personal comment:
Rachel Wingfield's new project: MetaboliCity (probably a research project).about urban farming, etc.
Here some interesting facts regarding CO2 emissions related to London's food consumption (grey energy maybe missing here)
Above is an image of 1301 fluorescent tubes powered only by the electric fields generated by overhead powerlines. It was created by Richard Box while artist-in-residence at Bristol University’s physics department.
He got the idea for the installation after a chance conversation with a friend. ‘He was telling me he used to play with a fluorescent tube under the pylons by his house,’ says Box. ‘He said it lit up like a light sabre.’ Box decided to see if he could fill a field with tubes lit by powerlines. After a few weeks hunting for a site, he found a field, slipped the local farmer £200 and planted 3,600 square metres with tubes collected from hospitals.
A fluorescent tube glows when an electrical voltage is set up across it. The electric field set up inside the tube excites atoms of mercury gas, making them emit ultraviolet light. This invisible light strikes the phosphor coating on the glass tube, making it glow. Because powerlines are typically 400,000 volts, and Earth is at an electrical potential voltage of zero volts, pylons create electric fields between the cables they carry and the ground.Box denies that he aimed to draw attention to the potential dangers of powerlines, ‘For me, it was just the amazement of taking something that’s invisible and making it visible,’
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Via Interactive Architecture dot Org
Tuesday, April 07. 2009
If you're like us, you're constantly looking for things in your neighborhood, whether it's [restaurants in zurich] or a new [dentist in houston]. If you specify your location in your query, we often show your results on a map. But we've noticed that much of the time users make simpler searches, like [restaurants] or [dentist].
We like to make search as easy as we can, so we've just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don't type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you. (Click on the image to view larger.)
How do we guess your location? In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the "Change location" link on the top right corner, above the map. We try to make our guesses as good as they can be so that whether you're shopping for [groceries], [sporting goods] or [flowers], or looking for your [bank], your [gym], or the [post office], you can just say what you want, and we'll try to find it right where you are. You can also search for specific stores or street addresses near you, like [cornelia st cafe] in New York, for example.
Or [111 8th ave] in New York.
We hope this new feature will make it just a little bit easier for you to get where you're going.
Posted by Jenn Taylor and Jim Muller, Software Engineers
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Via Official Google Blog
Personal comment:
Une évolution de Google Maps qui tend à faire des résultats de chaque recherche quelquechose de personnalisé et "localisé". C'est une tendance, littérallement un "trend" actuel du design d'information. Tout comme les résultats d'une recherche standard sur Google sont désormais personnalisés en fonction de l'historique de nos recherches passées, sauvegardées chez Google.
Ainsi, ce que l'on voit sur notre écran est personnalisé, "individualisé". C'est encore une fois une tendance actuelle, viser l'individu et la singularité (la surveillance tend également à ça). C'est "bien", mais d'un autre côté, on a parfois également besoin de partager la même chose avec un grand nombre de personne, pouvoir comparer avec d'autres (ce qu'étaient dans le fond jusqu'ici les "mass médias").
A mon avis il ne faut pas tout individualiser (interfaces, résultats de recherches, contenus, publicité, etc.) car cela forme un sentiment d'isolement. Il faut pouvoir choisir, customiser ou "tuner" entre une version individualisée et une version mass-médiatisée.
(Pictures of space-time trails in CatchBob!, nothing really related to the paper below, just found it illustrative of this digital trail notion)
Perusing “Where Were We: Communities for Sharing Space-Time Trails” by Scott Counts and Marc Smith, I was interested by this notion of “space-time trails”.
Constituted by the movement of people in space indeed forms an interesting social object. Space-time trails incorporate both a collection of spatial positions with relationships to one another along with sensor and community-based annotations (photographs, video, environmental sensor data, physiological attributes, community-based content such as tags and comments). According to the authors:
“We argue that space-time trails, or routes, include an intentionality on the part of the user that contains more information than a collection of points. A route has a start and finish, as well as properties like time, distance, speed, directional orientation, numbers of stops, and so on. When browsing, retracing, mining, recommending, and searching, these collective and relational attributes can be leveraged for a significantly richer end-user experience than could a collection of points.
(…)
The sum of these changes could be considered to be a kind of “pervasive inscription revolution”, an era in which practices of inscription explode to include almost all human actions and interactions. The signs of the expansion of inscription are visible in the behavior patterns seen in many online services.“
Why do I blog this? interested in how “routes” and “trails” becomes social documents enriched with other forms of information (beyond synchronous/real-time location-awareness). Some interesting new practices can emerge out of this and lots of issues regarding privacy are about to be discussed.
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Via Pasta & Vinegar
Personal comment:
Trails as social documents, relational & social objects.
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