Month: July 2014

[Image: Photo by Jesse Rockwell/Rex Features, via The Verge].

You might already have seen this small gallery of images showing an abandoned shopping mall in Bangkok, now partially flooded and “infested with koi carp and catfish.” The images—taken by Jesse Rockwell—were originally published on the photographer’s own blog back in October.

“At some point in the early 2000s,” Rockwell explains there, “an unknown person began introducing a small population of exotic Koi and Catfish species. The small population of fish began to thrive and the result is now a self-sustained, and amazingly populated urban aquarium. I will not tell exactly where it is, as locals somewhat discourage people visiting it. In fact we had to wait for a policeman who was parked on his motorcycle in front of the gate to leave before we timidly entered.”

The sight of an eviscerated old escalator dissolving with rust, its internal cables now exposed to the air like the roots of some future tree, surrounded by the white blurs of fish, is particularly evocative.

[Image: Photo by Jesse Rockwell/Rex Features, via The Verge].

Perhaps offering us a glimpse of things to come, this Bangkok mall inadvertently reveals what the outer coastal suburbs of the U.S. east coast might look like in the century to come, as the waterlogged edgelands of cities will be slowly but totally reclaimed by rising waters. Escalators, subway stations, and basements all turned into polluted fish farms for the deeply impoverished, families and entrepreneurs harvesting their protein in what used to be lobbies and parking lots. From malls to salt marshes.

Put another way, perhaps the real future of urban agriculture is actually urban aquaculture: slithering pens of marine life bred amongst the ruins of lost megastructures.

[Image: From Flooded London by Squint Opera].

If you recall Squint Opera’s 2008 project, Flooded London, with its images of people fishing in the streets of a semi-submerged metropolis, then you’ve probably got a good sense of what things might eventually come to look like, as scenes like these—appearing poetic and even whimsical to us today—will be nothing more than the sad, everyday conditions of a coastal disaster to which our descendants will somehow have to learn to adapt.

Catching eyeless fish in abandoned shopping malls and living in networked tents attached precariously to the dark ceilings high above, our distant and greatest grandchildren will see images like these and wonder how we ever found them extraordinary.

(Link to sea level rise after 2100 via Rob Holmes).

It’s hard to believe, but BLDGBLOG began exactly ten years ago today. It’s been a life-changing and incredibly unexpected decade for me, and, although 10-year birthdays justifiably mean little in the world of online publishing, I nonetheless wanted to mark the date with a quick post and a thanks: thanks for reading, commenting, critiquing, and following along, whoever and wherever you are.

The magic of a more or less anonymous audience is such that you never really know who you are writing to—after all, every post is also like a letter, an open postcard, a note directed outward at some unidentified reader or future friend—but that also means that the energy and support I have found over these last 10 years have both been all the more surreal and exciting.

For now, I just wanted to say thanks both to linkers and to haters alike—and a quick happy birthday to this strange digital thing I never thought would be anything more than a textual sketchbook. Here’s to ten more, be they weeks, years, posts, or decades.

[Image: Photo taken by Your Captain Aerial Photography, via Wired].

Here are two short, conceptually related pieces to read, both of which revolve around the notion of a buffer landscape: a marginal, otherwise unused land that is nonetheless deliberately maintained as a spatial intermediary between two very different zones.

1) The first of these pieces describes an acoustic buffer grooved into the landscape around Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Wired writes that “these mysterious-looking formations”—a crystallographic ridged pattern of lines and diamonds designed by artist Paul de Kort and visible in the above photo taken by Your Captain Aerial Photography—is actually a series of “noise-deflecting ridges.” It is a garden of aeronautical silence, designed to nullify noises from the sky.

People identified only in the abstract as “researchers” apparently noticed that recently plowed agricultural fields near Amsterdam’s airport had an unintended side-effect: they dampened the constant, very aggressive sounds of airplane engines that had been coming out of Schiphol. Taking these “grooved landscapes” to their logical conclusion, Paul de Kort simply exaggerated that topography using what Wired describes as “GPS-guided robot excavators” to produce an abstract terrain that would precisely cancel-out the sounds of airplanes.

Their height and location thus corresponds not to some overlooked aesthetic tradition of Dutch landscape architecture, but to wavelengths of airplane noise.

Acting as the spatial equivalent of a giant mute button, these ridges and furrows thus help to silence local aircraft, erasing their otherwise deafening and thunderous engine noise for the sake of nearby suburban homes. Those same planes would normally drone and roar over the vast flatlands around the runways, where, as Wired writes, “noise can travel unobstructed for miles.”

As it happens, I’ve written before about one of my favorite landscapes in England, a small forest planted entirely for acoustic reasons outside of Heathrow Airport, southeast of London. This grove—a visually nondescript bank of trees that I’ve passed at least half a dozen times on my way to the airport—exists not for visual or aesthetic reasons but for its sonic effect on the space around it. The trees absorb echoes and reverb, roars and booms, and would never have been planted in the first place were it not for their function as an acoustic intermediary between domestic suburbia and international air travel.

In fact, these same acoustic buffer zones and sound forests have also been documented by photographer Bas Princen in his excellent book, Artificial Arcadia.

[Image: UN Border zone in Cyprus, photographed by Athena Lao, via War is Boring].

2) The other is a short but interesting interview over at War is Boring about the often literally changing nature of those spaces known as “no-man’s-lands,” or militarized dead zones.

These are landscapes, described in this Q&A with geographer Noam Leshem, that function as “a very significant space economically,” yet are also “a space that is constantly inhabited, governed, monitored and practiced.” As Leshem explains, however, the notion of no man’s land is actually “much older than 1915, i.e. the Battle of the Somme. It dates back to the 14th century and to London during the months preceding the plague, when the bishop of London buys a lot of land outside the city to prepare a mass grave ahead of the bubonic plague.”

Leshem’s current project is an attempt to learn “what do no-man’s-lands in the 21st century mean?” Check out the full interview for more.

(Thanks to Andrew Elvin for the Wired link).