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Gardening for All

Posted in Gardens, Technology on 03/15/2012 | 7 Comments »

Backyard, community, and therapeutic gardens are becoming increasingly popular, but not everyone gets to participate in the very social act of gardening. Older people or those with back problems have trouble bending over. That’s been solved with raised beds. Still, many older people or disabled gardeners have been left out. A new collaborative garden project from France tries to remedy this. La Valise and the Mauves Allotment Society have created Terraform, a raised garden plot for wheelchair users.

The approach allows wheelchair users easy access. An ingenious “arched pod” offers a greater degree of comfort, enabling wheelchair-bound gardeners to seed and bed at table level.

The safe, UV-treated, recycled polyethylene pod is sculpted to fit around the wheelchair base. The team says the pod’s dimensions were carefully calculated to enable normal arm extension, preventing any repetitive stress injuries.

The terraform is insulated with a plastic layer to ensure water doesn’t damage the station. The team recommends a first layer of branches and packed soil, then a litter of leaves, fine branches, and growing medium. Finally, manure or compost can be added on top. Clearly, lots of plants can be grown in these:

Apparently, more features are in the works, including cabinets for tools, ergonomic accessories, and an integrated drip irrigation system.

In France, the team has promoted these as “healing gardens” for use in retirement communities, hospitals, and community gardens. A pilot launched in Nantes in 2010 was the first go at expanding the service there, and now some 100 kits have been installed across the country.

Given the project is still experimental, there’s no word yet on when this will be commercially available in the U.S.

Learn more about Terraform and see a brief slideshow of people using it.

Image credit: Terraform

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Time Keeps on Changing

Posted in Technology on 03/14/2012 | Leave a Comment »

In the new paperback version of Cartographies of Time, written by professors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grifton, the timeline, one of the most fundamental human tools, offers a frame for understanding Western intellectual history. In the first “comprehensive history of graphic representations of time,” we get a sense of how modern American and European knowledge and values shaped the understanding and modeling of time. As the authors, two professors of history, explain, the simple, linear timeline we all rely on now took a long time to get to. Evolving over time, the timeline itself is rich with history.

While the writing can be a bit confusing in parts as the authors jump back and forth in time (there doesn’t seem to be a very linear history for the timeline), the images, which have been carefully curated for the book, almost speak for themselves, providing a sense of how this “most important tool for organizing information” has changed since 1450.

Beginning with the ancient Western world (there’s no discussion of Asian maps), the authors describe how Greek and Roman scholars liked to make lists of lots of things: priests, Olympic winners, elected officials, etc. Finally, though, Eusebius of Caesarea, a fourth-century theologian, composed the “model for later timelines for centuries to come.” Moving through the ancient world, Eusebius used rows and columns to trace the rise and fall of empires, “coordinating all these histories,” but ended up funneling history down into a “single story.”

Still, not everyone in Medieval Europe got the memo about rows and columns. Trees, depicting families or histories, were popular, too. The authors point to Peter of Poitier’s work (see image above), which was created in the 1200s, as a “visually spare, elegant record of English history from Alfred the Great to Henry III.” They write that these could almost be viewed as a visual aid you might see in a classroom. It certainly helped royalty keep straight who was who.

Rich with visual examples, it’s difficult to select ones to highlight. Here are a few others worth seeing:

In the 1600s, Johannes Buno used “unforgettable figures, curios details, and riddles” to create a “virtual memory theatre.” This was a very old-school mnemomic designed to help people remember names and dates.

Zooming ahead to the mid-1700s, Rosenberg and Grafton spend a lot of time with Joseph Priestley, who’s New Chart of History is described as almost revolutionary. “Priestley regularized the distribution of dates on the chart adn oriented it horizontally to emphasize the continuous flow of history.” Here’s just a slice of one of his charts plotting the shifting of empires:

One favorite map is Edward Quinn’s An Historical Atlas, published in the early 1800s, which takes a step back and looks at the state of knowledge in the West. In a sequence of maps, Quinn rolls back the clouds, indicating how much of the world was known at different stages of history.

In the late 1800s, the diversity of chronologies increases, and more and more historical statistical data is presented visually, often to make a political case or boost a social cause. An example by Luigi Perozza beautifully plots male births vs. the number of war survivors over time.

While Florence Nightingale, one of the original “social entrepreneurs” who revolutionized sanitation, used historical diagrams to show how infection and disease caused more English deaths than combat during the Crimean War.

The authors move through spirtually-inspired chronologies, all the way through to Modern ones, increasingly viewing timeline as an art form. Seen below is the Histomap, designed and produced by amateur historian John Sparks. According to the writers, Sparks would fill pads with names and dates, cut his notes into slips, and paste them onto a massive chart. That chart later became a bestseller for Rand McNally for over 50 years.

Rosenberg and Grafton end up looking at the Web, particularly Web 2.0, and discuss how start-ups are working on “new ways to aggregate and integrate chronological data from many sources.” Still, they wonder if all these user-generated timelines will be easy to use and “function well as a tool,” which is what all the successful timelines have done over time.

Read the book and check out a slideshow from The New York Times with more images.

Image credits: Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Published by Princeton Architectural Press, Hardcover 2010, Paperback 2012

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You Create Bluebrain’s Landscape Soundtracks

Posted in Landscape Architecture, National Mall, Public Spaces, Technology on 12/21/2011 | 2 Comments »

Washington, D.C.-based musicians and brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay released the first “location-aware album,” a free smartphone app, for the National Mall earlier this summer and then, just recently, an app for Central Park in NYC. Leveraging the global positioning system (GPS) technology of smartphones, Bluebrain serves up hours of music based on the physical location of listeners. As listeners move through these landscapes, they enter different zones, each with a different electronic yet soulful song. For the National Mall app alone, there are some 264 zones. Staying put will turn the song into a loop: a two-to-eight minute segment will simply repeat. Ryan Holliday said: “It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ of an album.”

The Washington Post writes that the National Mall album keeps you moving and exploring. “Approach the Capitol dome, and you’ll hear an eerie drone. Climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s twinkling harps and chiming bells. As you wander from zone to zone, ambient washes dovetail into trip-hop beats and back again. The music follows you without interruption, the way a soundtrack follows a protagonist through a movie or a video game. When you leave the Mall, the sound evaporates into silence.”

For the brothers, the National Mall album was a labor of love: “The brothers saw their first concert on the Mall — a Fugazi gig at the Sylvan Theater band shell in 1995.” Also, Hays remember visiting monuments at night and having his first date at the FDR memorial. For the teenage Hays, the National Mall lit-up became a “ancient-futuristic landscape.” Ryan added that “if you don’t think of that as a George Washington Monument, it’s just a really crazy-looking thing.”

After hearing exorbitantly costly quotes from potential producers ($80,000 and up), the brothers finally found Brooklyn-based developer Bradley Feldman, who saw a great opportunity and offered to put in a lot of time, pro-bono. To make the app work, Feldman created “Sscape,” which is somewhat similar to software used to create background music for virtual multi-player game worlds. But within this program, Feldman and the Holladay brothers set map coordinates for each song, establishing their temporal boundaries. In this instance, the real world is like the music-infused virtual game world. The music for each zone is set off as listeners approach.

The Washington Post says the project felt “magical” and represented a revolution in music. ”In an iPod era, where bite-size MP3s have threatened to vanquish the traditional album format, Bluebrain is helping redefine what an album can actually be.”

In addition, the just-released, free 400-song Central Park (Listen to the Light) app got equally rave reviews from The New York Times. As soon as a listener walks through the entrance of Central Park, “it sounds like an orchestra tuning up, a chaotic jumble of wind chimes, electronic moans and discordant strings. Push farther into the park, and a sweet violin melody emerges over languid piano chords.” Then, every 20 to 30 steps new musical themes appear, “as if they were emanating from statues, playgrounds, open spaces and landmarks.”

Different aspects of the landscape are represented in themes, which then layer over one another as you pass out of one zone and into another. “It’s a musical Venn diagram placed over the landscape, and at any time you might have two dozen tracks playing in your ears, all meshing and colliding in surprising ways.”

The brothers decided to go for a distinctly classical feeling for Central Park, sounding warm and mellow for some parts of the park and using symphonic elements to create drama in others. “The melodies are mostly stately, slow marches played on strings or the piano, usually involving a simple two- or four-chord progression, with some electronic chirps, loops and ambient sounds added in the higher registers or rumbling beneath the melody.”

Also, check out a brief video that explores how Bluebrain created Central Park (Listen to the Light):

The free apps have been downloaded 10,000 times so far. Create your own soundtrack in these iconic landscapes. Go to iTunes to download.

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City Landscapes, Urban Habitat

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Ecosystem Services, Technology, Urban Revitalization, Waste, Water Management on 11/30/2011 | 1 Comment »

The landfill of Kearny, New Jersey, is the site of Steven Handel’s early work restoring urban habitat. It is constructed on top of a wetland. The fill material specified for landfill cover make poor soils, and the railroads, interstates, and cloverleaf interchanges work as barriers to dispersal. His work began with a question: “What can a field botanist do to help this?”

The University of Virginia department of landscape architecture recently hosted restoration ecologist Dr. Steven Handel of Rutgers University for a presentation and discussion of his work in restoring urban habitat. Handel is the Director of the Center for Urban Restoration Ecology (CURE), a joint partnership between Rutgers University and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In the last decade he has worked as a consultant with landscape firms such as SCAPE, James Corner Field Operations, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Ken Smith on projects that have helped establish restoration ecology as an important component of urban landscape design. His presentation focused on the importance of ongoing monitoring and adaptation and the concept of stewardship in the creation of vital urban landscapes.

Handel discussed some of his early work at the Keegan Landfill in Kearny, New Jersey, and how that project led to work on Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York, and, eventually collaborations on landscape projects in Europe, China, and across the U.S. This work is best characterized not by the resulting images and supporting data that have become key components of landscape architectural presentations, but by the ecological approach itself. Each project is a dynamic constellation of actors and agents: gravel contractors, city bureaucracies, ecology students, groundwater, and honey bees. In this constellation the ecologist is not the mastermind, but rather one of the primary catalysts. The ecologist joins this willow tree with that robin, this compost depot with that acre of landfill cover in the interest of creating landscapes that include a wealth of inhabitants, from mushrooms and chimney swifts to willow trees and teenagers.

Maintenance and Ecological Thinking

Looking south over Fresh Kills landfill in 2002 empty debris barges from the World Trade Center site can be seen in the lower right hand corner. Steven Handel’s partnership with the Department of Sanitation began here in 2000 and took on new significance after 9/11: “what was a hated place became a sacred place.”

In the presentation, Handel outlined the two most important objectives when beginning any urban ecological restoration project: what is the ecological target for restoration?, and how can we rebuild the soil? Everything else follows from those two questions. For any kind of restoration project, whether it a piece of colonial architecture or a 2,000 acre municipal landfill, defining the desired outcome is the fundamental problem. The second objective is particular to urban ecological restoration projects. Handel noted that urban soils are notorious for their inability to support healthy ecosystems due to compaction, contamination, and a lack of microbes. What is more, they are extremely varied — one block is contaminated with high levels of lead and the next is choked with concrete and asphalt dust.

For Handel, the maintenance budgets of city agencies are poorly conceived and misappropriated. Maintenance takes on an entirely new definition when it is informed by an ecological approach. Tasked with the unenviable job of trying to maintain landscapes in a static state, current maintenance practice too often resists the other organisms at work in the landscape while doing too little to monitor and observe change. Project budgets are designed for major capital investments up front followed by a maintenance plan that aims to protect the landscape from change. Handel throws into relief the fundamental misalignment between maintenance policies and funding mechanisms that tend toward static and compartmentalized concepts of landscape and an ecological approach to creating vital urban habitat.

In many urban projects, the ecological constraints – opportunity for dispersal, regeneration of soils, disturbance regimes – are in conflict with the regulatory structures set by rigid engineering norms. Handel noted that scale-dependent ecological processes rely on a lapse of time, and, therefore, landscape projects need instruments and mechanisms that can hold a portion of the budget in reserve so that monitoring can occur over 10 years and adaptations to initial strategies can be incorporated. For him, the idea of ecosystem services–a movement to quantify the benefits of natural systems as economic value– is useful in this discussion because it inserts the animals, plants, topography, and other aspects of ecosystems into the budget and profit strategies that dictate the terms of development and management of most of our urban land.

The Importance of Rhetoric

The concept of ecosystem services is contentious. In addition to being difficult to quantify, it suggest that costs that have traditionally been externalized (such as CO2 emissions) be accounted for. Nonetheless, in specific, localized situations, the idea that restoring a healthy ecosystem to a former municipal landfill so that it can serve as bird habitat and a community recreation area is one that is gaining traction and is worth an investment.

Handel noted that prior to 9/11, the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was a “hated landscape.” People wanted it gone, and if they could not make it go away then they certainly did not want to spend money on it. As the final resting place for the remains and debris from the World Trade Center, the landfill overnight became a “sacred landscape.” It was worth investing in. While undertaking his project there, he was working with communities and trying to help them understand the importance of bees in pollinating plants and creating healthy plant communities. He told an anecdote of going to a community meeting and trying to convince people that bringing bees back to this place would provide many benefits. This was not well-received. He realized that by simply referring to them as “pollinators” (the benefit they provide) and not “bees” (their cultural symbol with some negative connotations) the project won their support. This observation is the real contribution of Handel’s work: For him, ecosystems are not pristine examples of natural systems, but are messy networks of social and natural entities, all mashed together and trying to find ways of going about their business, whether that is pollinating a stand of service berries or trying to catch the 7 train.

A NYC subway car in 1973. This is an ecology too.

Scientific Stewardship and a Future Ecological Ethic

The presentation culminated with the importance of stewardship of the land and the development of tools and methods for engendering a more responsible environmental ethic. The stewardship concept itself is contentious, with notable scholars such as Carolyn Merchant rightly pointing out that the idea dates back to the origins of Judeo-Christian society and comes with a whole host of gender specific and anthropocentric connotations. At the end of her book Reinventing Eden, she suggests that the idea of kinship–a partnership among equals–might be the future environmental ethic, a suggestion that seems more in line with ecological thinking.

This emphasis of Handel’s would seem to be antithetical to the ecological approach, with the honey bee and the fungus carrying an important role in the ecosystem, right alongside the park user and the bulldozer operator. As a steward, you might care for the land, but you still survey it, decide what should be done, and then go back to your dwelling. There is a hierarchy and the human is at the top. It is the opposite of amongst-ness. But then, Handel is actually out there, digging in the stinking muck of Keegan Landfill and counting preying mantis on Staten Island. You don’t get much more among things than that.

A new ecological policy for the landfills of Jamaica Bay is the legacy of Steven’s work. Located in the center at the top of the image, the landfills are currently being maintained as an ecological restoration project, with the mowed grassy hills slowly changing into thriving upland ecosystems on the edge of the bay.

This guest post is by Brian Davis, Master’s of Landscape Architecture candidate, University of Virginia School of Architecture, and editor of FASLANYC.

Image credits: (1) Landfill of Kearny, New Jersey / Google Earth , (2) Fresh Kills Landfill / Cryptome, (3) NYC Subway Car, 1973 / U.S. National Archives, (4) Landfills of Jamaica Bay / Google Earth

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Crowdsourcing Feedback on Public Spaces in San Diego

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Technology on 10/19/2011 | Leave a Comment »

As the smart phone market continues to grow, more and more people are using these devices to access social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The amount of location-based data (i.e. text, photos, video) being created everyday has created an unprecedented opportunity for landscape architects to learn more about how their projects, particularly major public spaces, are being used. In fact, the two-way communication of social networks coupled with GPS technology makes it possible for landscape architects to engage with users in real time. Social networks can also help facilitate a “community inventory” process as well as enable easier post-occupancy survey and analysis of built projects.

Throughout this year’s ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo in San Diego (October 30-November 2nd), a crowdsourcing event titled #LandarchSD will be held to demonstrate social media’s potential. However, in this case, we will use the Twitter hashtag, #LandarchSD, to harness the talent and expertise of the more than 6,000 landscape architecture professionals from across the United States and the world descending on San Diego. #LandarchSD will provide an opportunity for landscape architects themselves to collectively share their observations and discoveries about major public spaces in San Diego. In addition to creating a unique collection of information about the city’s public spaces and urban environment, sharing these insights from our perspective can raise the public’s awareness about how our profession enriches their use of public spaces and their lives.

Information will be captured through the use of mobile devices and shared by location-based posts on Twitter and the event’s Facebook page. Posts can contain text, photos, video, and more. Examples of content include statements, photos, or videos highlighting interesting design solutions or illustrating principles of good public space design in action, or comments on why users are using or not using a space and identifying opportunities for improvements.

If you are going to the ASLA Meeting or live in San Diego, we invite you to participate by using a social media application from your smartphone (whether it’s on a Android, Blackberry, or iOS browser) or your desktop computer. To participate or even just follow the event on Twitter, the hashtag #landarchSD will be used to compile the information. (For those unfamiliar with hashtags and their use, a hashtag is a word or string of words without spaces or symbols proceeded by the “#” symbol created by any Twitter user as a way to categorize messages. Hashtags facilitate finding related information or following conversation strings on Twitter. Learn more about what hashtags are. You can also just follow the hashtag.)

The event is being organized in conjunction with our education session “Social Media Strategies for Landscape Architects” held on Wednesday November 2, 1:30-3:00pm. At the education session, the panel will touch upon using social media for inventory and post-occupancy surveys and discuss the information collected through this initiative.

This guest post is by Brian Phelps, ASLA, Hawkins Partners, Inc.

Image credit: #LandarchSD

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Friedman: We Need a Green Revolution

Posted in Climate Change, Policy and Regulation, Technology on 10/12/2011 | 1 Comment »

The 2011 GreenBuild in Toronto drew some 23,000 architects, landscape architects, planners, engineers, and product manufacturers. While sessions explored the nitty-gritty of designing and implementing green communities, landscapes, and buildings, Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times and co-author, most recently, of That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, took a step back and discussed the need to transform the growing yet still niche green building industry into a broad-based movement. Then, the U.S. Green Building Council, through its choice of headline speakers, also made the case that more effective public communications strategies, along with publicly-accessible data and clearer data visualizations, will be central to making this revolution happen.

Friedman, who took quite a while to get to the core of his argument at the GreenBuild opening session, eventually made some powerful statements: There’s a lot of greenwashing out there right now. Making things greener seems to be like a “big party,” where everyone benefits. However, what’s really needed is a green revolution in the vein of the information technology revolution, where companies survived or died based on how fast they innovated. In other words, an economic environment needs to be created in which businesses that fail to go green simply go out of business. The other side of a total and pervasive green revolution would be the removal of the word “green” before the “green building industry.” In effect, the U.S. Green Building Council would become the U.S. Building Council. Friedman believes all of this will happen only when the U.S. puts a price on carbon. (While his argument holds great merit, it’s also worth noting that Friedman didn’t discuss how many communities are putting prices on other types of pollution, like toxic stormwater runoff. Innovative cities like Philadelphia are setting the trend in ramping up fees for stormwater runoff, which has the added benefit of incentivizing green infrastructure).

To make this green revolution happen, GreenBuild organizers seemed to say via their speaker selection, there needs to be more effective public communications strategies, more publicly-accessible data, and clearer data visualizations. Natalie Jeremijenko, a funny and innovative artist, engineer, and professor at NYU (see earlier post), brilliantly illustrated how to communicate that the “environment is directly implicated in our collective health” through creative installations designed to garner attention.

John Picard, an early innovator in the green building movement, went on to call for an easy to understand Web-based tool for visualizing the energy buildings use, which could be accessed by both homeowners and building managers. He called this “game changer” SoftPower, and said it would be the “Facebook of Energy.” Picard then saw a new market coming out of energy efficiency, with energy-smart buildings becoming “ibuildings” that only grow in value. Data from all buildings would be hosted in the cloud, enabling comparisons across buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and countries.

Lastly, Lisa Strausfeld, formerly a top information architect and data visualization designer at Pentagram, explained the importance of smart energy data visualizations. She explained how “bruteforce” innovations like Google Maps and its amazing Google street view system, along with new “protocols” such as Twitter, Facebook, Email, and TCP/IP are changing the world. In the same vein, she said LEED is on the “same trajectory of success.” With all these powerful new technologies, data is “what’s next.” Furthermore, in order to measure our impact on the environment, we need to “visualize that data.” However, these visualizations need to be smart and turn the “unfamiliar into the familiar.” As an example, she pointed to her firm’s work for G.E. visualizing data on household energy use. Also, the visualizations need to make “real time data transparent,” so predictions about future energy use can be more easily made.

Image credit: ASLA 2011 Student Awards General Design Honor. Co-Modification Joseph Kubik, Student ASLA, Graduate, University of Pennsylvania. Faculty Advisor: Mark Thomann

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Neri Oxman’s Materials Revolution

Posted in Sustainable Materials, Technology on 10/07/2011 | Leave a Comment »

At the 2011 GreenBuild, Neri Oxman, director of Mediated Matter at MIT Media Lab and one of the few who made Fast Company’s top 100 creative people list, wants to “introduce a new dimension or sensibility” into materials production. Proposing to turn the design and engineering worlds on their heads, she said we should no longer “design against an objective function, but instead design for multiple functions in one system. It’s about continuity, not repetitive, modular approaches.”

Oxman is focused on how to use design processes to “mediate between matter and the environment.” She said the natural world uses a range of principles, which is why we easily recognize so many forms. Natural objects are the result of some internal logic that generated the form. She thinks this logic can be harnessed to create building, medical, and even furniture innovations, but is still trying to figure out whether this would lead to a more sustainable future.

She used a few examples that demonstrate how nature creates forms that serve multiple functions. A chicken egg, for instance, is nearly impossible to break if squeezed at the vertical ends. This is because it needs to be strong while it’s being warmed. The horizontal edges are soft, though, and easy to crack: This is because the chick will eventually need to break through. This is a smart “material distribution strategy.”

People, in contrast, aren’t that smart when creating their own buildings and cities. “Nature has not designed buildings, habitable environments at mass scale.” (some sociobiologists may disagree with that statement). She said that biologists and architects have been discussing the ideas of architecture and ecology since Darwin released his theory of evolution. In recent years this dialogue has led to biomimetic design, a term she called “over or mis-used,” but is used to explain how to design and build using natural systems. For example, she showed images of a pine cone, and how the structure could be inverted to serve as a new can for Coca-Cola. It would hold more soda and be impossible to crush in transit. Shark skin, with its “micro-dermal teeth” served as a model for a new wall with patches that can respond to its environment. She also explored the idea of “form-finding, or discovering the form that a material wants to take.”

Within the architecture profession, she said there was a divide between the “formalists” and the sustainable designers. Formalists are primarily focused on, well, form, while sustainable designers are interested in following criteria, which usually leads to “new glass boxes that are more and more efficient.”

Also, since Mies Van Der Rohe first offered a design for a skyscraper in Chicago, the idea has been to create a form and then apply material. (However, some architects would disagree and say his skyscraper wasn’t possible without one material: steel). She said this skyscraper shows a process that hasn’t really changed for a hundred years: model, analyze, and then fabricate. In contrast, in nature, the modeler, analyzer, and fabricator are combined in one. A leg bone in a pregnant woman expands and grows denser as she puts on more weight, responding to signals from the body. Tree fibers change form depending on how much structural load is required to hold up a plant. “From trunk to leaf, it’s the same material.”

Some examples from her studio show her using natural logic to digitially fabricate forms that can serve multiple material functions. A chaise lounge is made up of just one silicon-like material broken into two types – soft and hard. Using the body to determine where the structural load would be greatest, she created a Zaha Hadid-like undulating form. “It varies its properties – it’s stiff and soft where it needs to be.” For the medical world, she said eastern medicine celebrates “continuity,” while western medicine separates everything into body zones. Using an eastern approach, she asked people suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome to create their own “pain map,” which she uses to generate a material, again, with hard and soft zones to provide both structural support and flexibility. In the realm of buildings, she wondered why concrete columns are solid all the way through, wasting materials, when they can be like bones or palm tree trunks, which are denser at the base and more hollow at the top. “We can relate to loading patterns instead of forms or ornamentation.”

Some future predictions: In 10 years, Oxman sees materials as “the new software,” and integrated into everything we do. The circuit board will be obsolete. The material itself will be smart. Materials will know how to change for its distributions. For example, buildings could have breathing skins that help modulate the interior temperature. By 2100, there will be “biofabrication and construction.” Then, one thousand years in the future, there will be “CAM-DNA.” In this example, a chair would be created out of DNA material and would grow with humans over their lifetime. Materials would think, respond, and compute things themselves. When hearing all of this, one professor at Harvard told her that the ideas were great, but the cost would be out-of control high.

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The Primacy of Pathways

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Technology, Urban Design on 09/23/2011 | Leave a Comment »

At Dumbarton Oaks, Suzanne Preston Blier, a professor at Harvard University, said not all landscapes are enchanted in the ancient Yoruban city of Ife in southwestern Nigeria, but many are. Combining landscape architecture with a rich cosmological system, the Yoruban kings and Ifa priestly castes laid out Ife as a giant turtle, with criss-crossing pathways embedded with deep cultural and religious meaning. Interestingly, much of this has been unknown to the outside world, until Blier and others at Harvard created AfricaMap, an amazing open-source geospatial mapping Web site, to unearth the patterns underneath the buildings and vegetation. She said “technology may actually be key to uncovering the past.”

Some scholars put the earliest settlements at Ife at 350 BCE, with the kingdom reaching its peak as an artistic and cultural center around 1300AD. Arriving in the area, Blier said she was “stunned by the landscape,” and the “amazing system of spatial engagement, buildings, and ritual pathways” that form the landscape of the city. The topography is like a “bolder hat,” with a palace and temple in the middle, and then a set of hills circling. The lowlands are continually covered in rain, providing fertile soils. Nowadays, the city is 50/50 Muslim and Christian. She said this “hybridity” is also reflected in the landscapes, which mixes baobab trees from the savannah with palm trees from the south.

The archeological elements of Ife follow closely the current city. Yoruban cities were “centrally planned.” Ife’s palace was an “ancient center, with a garden environment.” The back of the palace was a historic forest used to grow herbs and medicinal plants. Buildings formed a square courtyard in the center where rainwater was collected. In ancient Yoruban culture, when people died, they were buried in their living or bedrooms. She discussed how this was important in the distinction between interior and exterior spaces.

Yoruban mythology centers around two primary figures: Obatala and Odudua. Obatala was sent down from the heavens (on a chain or boat) to create earth, but instead got drunk on palm wine. So the supreme god sent down his younger brother who managed to finish the job. As a result, Obatala is considered the sky god, and is associated with ritual power, while Odudua is associated with earth, and earthly political power. “These are the cosmological heroes,” but they also stand for “the division of Ife and different dynastic rulers.” Obatala is connected with the first dynasty, while Odudua is with the second. Along with sky and earth, there is light, which is represented in the mica Yoruban kings where in their crowns. Mica is spread throughout the soil in Ife so “when it rains, the pathways become glittery and enchanged landscapes, powered by light.”

Unearthing the city’s turtle shape via AfricaMap, Blier found that each of the four main gods in Yoruban religion had different spaces associated with different roles, which “coincide with Ife divination.” There were also divisions according to family and a ward system that follows those lines. Each have different pathways. She emphasized the “primacy of pathways” and their role in preserving “time – past, present, and future.” Also, chiefly compounds with old and new dynastic leaders have specific locations around the palace, with guaranteed “viewsheds” that allow the priestly caste to “keep the king in view and in check.” The viewsheds actually represent the political landscape as well.

Blier also discussed how kings in Yoruba never die but turn into natural elements, “skeuomorphs,” kind of large stone sculptures. In the same vein, she said “buildings never die” here. Earth homes crumble and then locals reuse the mud to create new homes. Buildings are simply reinvested with new life. “You can see very modern buildings next to decrepit ones on the same street corner.”

Blier added that there is a larger renewal of life in Yoruban culture and “pathways are key to this.” The pathways to one temple, for example, need to be freshly cut for each ceremony, but according to ancient plans. Once cleared, these paths that “quietly engage with history” become “very public spaces” in which anyone can go in. There are also vertical paths or “holes” that priests use to connect with the spiritual world.

While each ancient city in Africa is unique and can’t really be compared, Blier said AfricaMap is also uncovering “similar” examples elsewhere. The ancient Dahomey kingdom is actually organized around the model of a serpent eating itself. “It has a python urban plan.”

Learn more about the Ifa religion and Yoruban culture through the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Also, check out Harvard University’s WorldMap, a beta version that builds on AfricaMap. Blier said it can be used to “overlay historical maps, including period maps,” provides “base mapping for different contexts,” along with geospatial visualizations of data on population, ethnicity, and economic and environmental indicators.

Image credit: Ife / Blackpast.org

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Programming the Moon’s Cycle

Posted in Land Art, Public Spaces, Technology on 08/31/2011 | 1 Comment »

Tidal Radiance, a new large-scale interactive sculpture by light artist and designer Leni Schwendinger, created for the new Port Pavilion on the pier along San Diego’s waterfront, is designed to be seen both by boaters on the water and strollers moving along the Embarcadero promenade. At night, this installation will be hard to miss given its lighting is programmed to follow the lunar cycle, while also changing for seasonal compositions, including whale watching and cruise season.

According to Schwendinger, during the moon cycle, the full moon phase emanates pale blues, while the new and quarter moon phases are represented by deep and medium blue hues (see image above). In addition, the lighting design moves beyond the sculpture to the base of the building: “Light projections onto the ground plane create an immersive environment–a visual and experiential installation to engage the public.”

The sculpture itself is purposefully a bit staid by day: the goal is to the set the stage for a dramatic nightime transformation. Schwendinger says: “I envisioned a monumental sea creature emerging from the shed at night.”

The project uses light to explore change, both natural and programmed: ”Whether animated patterns or a calendar of seasonal light sequences, one of my continuing challenges is to utilize the property of light to brighten, fade, and disappear – and to respond to controlled voltages through highly sophisticated computer programming. This element of controlled changeability – combined with color symbolism – allows me to create public art that not only pleases the eye but communicates and displays nuanced messages about the environment we live in.”

Indeed, Schwendinger, who has done major projects for the New York Port Authority, and is working on redesigning the lighting for a new pedestrian-friendly Times Square (see earlier post), has long used “controlled changeability” to powerful effect. Her work on the Coney Island Parachute Jump, “Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower,” transformed a theme-park landmark into a shifting beacon of light, reflecting seasons, holidays, and, again, the moon’s cycle.

Read an interview with Schwendinger and check out her blog, which covers her “NightSeeing Lightwalks,” or guided evening tours of lighting, in various cities.

Image credits: Leni Schwendinger Light Projects

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Harnessing the Power of Social Media

Posted in Climate Change, Education, Environment, Technology on 08/25/2011 | Leave a Comment »

In Yale University’s Environment 360, environmental journalist Caroline Fraser argues that social media, like many technologies, may alienate people from nature and be a major time-waster, but also has the capacity to connect scientists with the public and empower a “green army” to act on their behalf. This decentralized army of naturalist volunteers can do some useful grunt work by monitoring species, observing behavior, reporting the presence of invasives, and documenting changes in climate, populations, or plant life, all while learning about nature in the process. For scientists, interacting with the public via social media may be key to getting a “grasp on complex ecological change,” made even more complicated by climate change. For society as a whole, social media could, hopefully, also be used to get people to care about biodiversity again.

Fraser bemoans the current state of awareness on today’s environmental crises: “Last year, the spectacle of 80 million people flocking to the faux greenery of FarmVille, a social networking game on Facebook, held particular irony for environmentalists who have ritually bemoaned low levels of public interest in biodiversity. Every traditional method and media has been tapped to penetrate this elephantine indifference, from documentaries to dire predictions.” However, she also notes that the Web has made citizen science or “natural history” even easier to do for those who are already enthusiasts. New technologies also empower scientists. In this regard, new technologies may be a “force multiplier.” A few powerful examples of this force multiplier in action: Namibia’s government announced a new SMS hotline people can use to call in anonymous rhino poaching tips (Five fives for rhino). In an other example, the U.S. Smithsonian institution issued an “emergency call” on Facebook asking specialists to identify some 5,000 fish specimens collected from Guyana for export paperwork. “Within 24 hours, ichthyologists around the world supplied partial or complete answers for almost 90 percent.”

There are a number of open source taxonomy and monitoring projects that try to harness social media. Project BudBurst from NEON/Chicago Botanic Garden enables users to share observations on plants first leaf, flower, and other phases. “Many offer training in species identification and invite the public to post targeted observations: the number of gray vs. fox squirrels (Project Squirrel), the appearance of buds in spring and other seasonal plant phases (Project BudBurst), the migratory behavior of Monarch butterflies (Monarch Watch) or hummingbirds (Operation Ruby Throat).” Other Web projects seek to analyze the data collected from BioBlitzes (see earlier post).

Cornell professor Harry Greene, a snake specialist who increasingly connects with members of the public who e-mail him photos of local snakes, worked with one of his graduate students to create NatureWorm, a social media site designed to spark widespread interest in nature. One community site, iNaturalist.org, which was created by students at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, enables users to upload photos and discuss sightings of different species. A more commercial site, Project Noah, is an app developed by an entrepreneur and students at NYU and now has more than 100,000 users who have made more than 60,000 sightings. “Recent caches feature everything from the inevitable white-tailed deer and common garden flowers (‘rose,’ ‘lantana’) to images of a red-eyed tree frog, an Arctic fox, a Plains zebra rolling in dirt, a griffon vulture in flight, and mating common Indian toads.” Contributors to Noah earn “patches” and join “missions,” scientific projects. The National Geographic Society is getting in on this and investing in the project.

While some view these sites as the “amateurization of everything,” Project Noah’s founders believe these sites are “gateway drugs” into more “hardcore science.” Still, beyond the educational value, there is also some useful data being collected. For example, “Project BudBurst, sponsored by NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, has registered nearly 12,000 volunteer observers since 2007. Participants have uploaded tens of thousands of observations on their chosen plants’ first leaf, first flower, first pollen, and other phenological phases (lilac is among the most popular), yielding datasets that have allowed scientists to extend a 50-year botanical study of Cook County, Illinois. Comparing historical data with three years of BudBurst observations has revealed that, as temperatures rise, forsythia is blooming 24 days earlier, black locust 19 days earlier, and red maple 14.”

Online multiplayer environmental games may also have great influence, Fraser believes. The University of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Game, an “interactive computer simulation,” enablers users to see change over a 20 year window, and allows teams to play the part of “oysterman, crabbers, dairy farmers, real-estate developers, and policy-makers, everyone with an impact on one of the world’s most endangered watersheds.” By role-playing, teams can learn about the tough trade-offs between economic development and environmental quality. Its 10,000 data points have proven to be so useful IBM has selected it for the World Community Grid program.

Other sites have extended the reach of mass environmental movements: Bill McKibben’s 350.org used its site to organize more than 5,000 events in 180 countries. Also, “Avaaz, the Web-based social justice movement, has inspired more than a million to sign a petition to protect bee populations by banning neonicotinoid pesticides in the U.S. and EU.” Unfortunately, Fraser says, none of these Web-driven social movements have made much real-life impact yet.

Read the article.

Also, it’s important to add that the Web and social media sites have also made collaboration between scientists easier and more open to the public. An important site in this regard was started by E.O. Wilson: The Encyclopedia of Life.

Image credit: iNaturalist.org

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