About
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
February 22 2012
Sand Engine Reinforces Dutch Coastline
Now here is an hands-on example of ‘guided growth‘ as a way to steer complex systems.
Part of the Dutch coastline is currently being reinforced by creating a ‘sand engine’. This involves depositing 21.5 million cubic meters of sand in the shape of a hook extending from the coast near Ter Heijde. The sand is expected to be spread along the provincial coastline by the natural motion of wind, waves and currents. Ultimately the coast is expected to be broader and safer.
Simulation of the expected functioning of the sand engine
Click here to view the embedded video.
Website: Sandengine.nl Thanks to Premsela.org
February 20 2012
Surviving Progress
Click here to view the embedded video.
Montreal filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ documentary feature, Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement and reveals the risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. It is up to us to prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
Thanks Linda.
February 17 2012
Broersen & Lukács – Mastering Bambi
Click here to view the embedded video.
Media artists Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács created a remake of the Disney classic Bambi from which they stripped all the inhabitants. The removal of the cuddly, anthropomorphic animals makes the utopian construction of the pristine wilderness visible. Movie starts after 1:50 min introduction.
February 16 2012
Conservationists Turn Their Sights on Urban Habitats
For city-dwellers, the closest ‘true wilderness’ to be found is usually the weeds sprouting in abandoned lots. Snow-capped, postcard nature might be beautiful but is often inaccessible. The Nature Conservancy, a US-based charity that buys up land to stop development, is debating re-focusing its conservation ethic on the concrete jungle. With 50% of the human population now living in cities, the Conservancy is worried that a wilderness-focused message is loosing its relevance for urbanites.
Bill Ulfelder, the director of the Nature Conservancy in New York, sees the 22,000 acres of roof in the city as a vast potential habitat. “There’s a lot of talk about rooftop gardens and storm-water catchment,” Ulfelder says, “But this is also a great opportunity to put habitat back in the city. Let’s think about habitat for pollinators and birds.” A concentrated effort to bring wild organisms back into an urban environment may mean that we can soon welcome birds more exotic than the standard pigeons, sparrows, and redtail hawks. Let’s hope our kids still remember the word for ‘heron’ or ‘magpie’.
Story via Grist. Image via Wallyg. Thanks to twitter-er Namhenderson for the heads-up.
February 04 2012
Thijs Zonneveld – Let’s build a Mountain
Click here to view the embedded video.
“God created the world, except for the Netherlands. That the Dutch created themselves”, Voltaire remarked in the eighteenth century already to describe the overly cultivated Dutch landscape. But when the Dutch built the Netherlands, they forgot to add any mountains. Former cyclist and visionary Thijs Zonneveld was annoyed by the lack of cyclable heights and proposed to build a 2000-meter high mountain in the Netherlands. Ridiculous idea or summit of Dutch Design?
Unlike the earlier purely theoretical proposal by Jacob Tigges in Berlin, the people behind Die Berg Komt Er (That Mountain will be There) are taking their landscape-building mandate seriously. Their ‘mountain’ should really be understood as a very large building with all kinds of functions ranging from housing, to recreation, to sustainable energy source.
Watch the presentation Tijs gave at the Next Nature Power Show last fall. If you feel the Dutch Mountain should be realized you can buy a 50 euro certificate to support their feasibility research.
January 28 2012
Goats Replace Lawnmowers in San Francisco
They might not be as fast, but goats offer several advantages over diesel-powered lawnmowers. They’re quieter, they emit fewer greenhouse gases, and they fertilize soil as they go for no extra charge. They can easily climb slopes where mowers can’t reach, and can clear thick brush without the help of herbicides. City Grazing of San Francisco has capitalized on the benefits of goats, and leases out their 50-member herd for landscaping needs around the city.
These back-to-the basics of landscapers who replace mowers with goats, or farmers who replace tractors with horses, represent an unusual trajectory for the Hierarchy of Technology.* Technologies normally become accepted and widely-used before they are superseded by new technologies and sink out of sight. Except for meat production, livestock has largely lost out to machinery in industrialized settings. In a time where oil was cheap and global warming unknown, goats and horses were clearly obsolete. But in other contexts – greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, cuteness – it becomes clear that old-fashioned, four-legged technologies can become cutting-edge a second time.
*For more about the Maslow-style Hierarchy of Technology, get your hooves on a copy of the Next Nature book.
January 25 2012
Greetings from the Ohio Turnpike
Apparently freeways have obtained a level of nostalgia that they are now suitable objects to be depicted on postcards (speaking of nostalgic objects). Perhaps one day in the future, freeways will be remembered as the fossils of a society dominated by auto-mobility. Peculiar image of the week.
January 20 2012
Tracy Metz – Nature is an Agreement
Click here to view the embedded video.
Writer and NRC journalist Tracy Metz dissects our Image of Nature, how it is constructed, by whom and for what reason. Her conclusion: “Nature is an Agreement. Just like the nude beach. Here you keep your breasts and your crotch covered, There you drop everything and act like it is the most ordinary thing in the world that everyone is suddenly walking around naked.”
Presented at the Next Nature Power Show in Amsterdam. Tracy also wrote a longer essay with the same title in the Next Nature book.
January 19 2012
Hidden Cities Emerge from the Amazon
Famed for its jaguars, orchids, and horrifying parasites, the Amazon is just as famous for what it lacks: human presence. For many years, the prevailing wisdom has been that throughout history, the Amazon rainforest has only been sparsely occupied by nomadic tribes. However, new evidence of permanent and complex human settlement is emerging from the forest floor. The role of these geoglyphs, trenches carved into the ground 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, are largely mysterious, but they may share characteristics with the Nazca Lines.
Researchers first became aware of the geoglyphs in the 1970s. As deforestation accelerates, more and more of the gigantic geometric shapes are coming to light. These discoveries are helping to upend traditional notions of the Amazon as a primordial, pristine wilderness. Large portions of Amazonia may in fact be a second-growth forest that regenerated after European warfare and disease wiped out massive portions of the native population.
The first Spanish explorers to the region reported finding settled towns and cities with palisades, roads, and fortifications. Though their accounts have usually been dismissed as exaggerations, their descriptions may in fact provide an accurate portrait of a lost civilization. According to geographer William Woods, “If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it.”
Image via Google Maps. For a history of the search for civilizations in the Amazon, read Finding the Lost City.
January 13 2012
Bruce Sterling – Next Literature
Click here to view the embedded video.
At the Next Nature Power Show 2011 American Science Fiction writer Bruce Sterling – ‘perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre’, according to Time Magazine – enlightened us with his vision Next Nature. According to Bruce the emerging of next nature also asks for a next literature.
January 07 2012
What is Next Nature?
Click here to view the embedded video.
At the Next Nature Power Show 2011, our master of ceremony Koert Van Mensvoort, gave a mini lecture on our changing notion of Nature. Where technology and nature are traditionally seen as opposed, they now appear to merge or even trade places. Time to explore how we can design, build and live in a nature caused by people. More powershow video’s ahead!
December 30 2011
SMS Skyscrapers
I reckoned Amsterdam did not have any sky scrapers, but I guess I wasn’t looking through the right lenses.
This sms-traffic Amsterdam skyline – made on new years eve 2007 – was created by information decoration wizard Aaron Koblin.
December 20 2011
A New Take on the Tree
Many people will have heard of the infamous swastika made up of larches that revealed itself every autumn in a forest outside Berlin. The trees, which turned yellow at the end of the year, stood out against the otherwise evergreen pine forest. The 60 sq yd Nazi symbol was only discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the new German unified government ordered aerial surveys of state-owned land. While it may certainly be the most notorious, the German swastika plantation certainly isn’t the first time man has manipulated living trees for his own, often crude, purposes.
National Designs
Visitors to the Castelluccio region of Italy are usually surprised to see a strangely familiar shape looming from one of the mountains that enclose the vibrant valley. Planted by some unknown patriot, a small forest in the shape of Italy has established itself on the otherwise meadowed mountainside.
Although a small dose of nationalism can be expected from most rural folk, the plantations found along the rest of the mountain range – one in the shape of North America, one resembling Africa and another Australia – are perhaps more suited to a Benetton advert than the sedate Umbrian countryside.
Over in Kyrgyzstan, a mountain in Tash-Bashat, near the edge of the Himalayas, is also the unfortunate home to a living swastika. At more than 600 feet wide, the fir tree plantation is at least 60 years old. Rumoured to have been planted by German prisoners of war, the actual truth of the design is shrouded in mystery.
Nationalism also spawned another, less offensive forest design. Situated on the chalky South Downs that separate the UK city of Brighton from its northerly neighbours stands a plantation in the shape of a huge ‘V’ – planted to commemorate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1887. When planted, it consisted of 3060 trees costing 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence.
Future forests
There are numerous plans in the pipeline to create symbolic forests. One charity, Tree-nation, is currently planting eight million trees in the shape of a heart in the middle of the Niger desert – a feat that will be viewable from space. The planters hope that the trees will help fight continued desertification and reduce poverty.
While some may be content to think of a design and let the trees do the rest, others take a more hands-on approach to manipulating their plantations. British sculptor, David Nash, planted a ring of 22 ash saplings in 1977 to create his ‘Ash Dome’ – a space he only intended being able to appreciate in the 21st century. Over the years, Nash worked the trees – grafting, pruning, moving and training – until they came to form the dome that is only now taking shape.
Another of his projects – ‘Divided Oaks’ – saw him subject some 600 trees to a process called ‘fletching’. ‘I simply pushed the very small trees over and put a stake to hold them,’ he says, ‘while for the larger ones I cut out a series of V-shapes, bent them over, and then wrapped them so the cambium layer could heal over. This really woke the trees up. My intervention actually stimulated them, and they were obliged to grow. They are now growing and curving up.’
Living material
Nash isn’t the only sculptor to take an interest in trees as a malleable living product. Based in Florida, Dan Ladd has been shaping and grafting trees into architectural and geometric forms for more than three decades.
One of his current projects involves eleven American Liberty Elm trees that are grafted next to each other to form a long hillside stair banister in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Another of his works, entitled ‘Three Arches’ is comprised of three pairs of 14-foot sycamore trees that are grafted to form arches framing various city views of Pittsburgh from Frank Curto Park.
American-born Richard Reames began sculpting with trees in the early 90’s, coining the word ‘arborsculpture’ in the process. Reames’ current projects include six plantings he intends to grow into habitable homes within the next decade. Always quick to see an opportunity for a future book, Reames has named the process ‘arbortecture’.
A potential future where furniture, homes and living spaces can be coaxed out of trees is undoubtedly an exciting one to ponder – and certainly an improvement on the suspect symbolism of old.
December 18 2011
Hiking in Hypernature
An escalator to the top of the hill, for people who like nature but don’t like to hike. This photo was taken at the Montjuïc in Barcelona two years ago. Peculiar image of the week. See the original photo here.
December 17 2011
Skyscrapers for Pandora
We’ve previously featured architecture that imitates nature by opening its walls like a flower, or drifting like a cloud. However, maybe this is not imitation enough. The next award-winning example by designer Stanislaw Mlynski shows a building made of the Re-cell ecological wall, which promises to turn a high-rise into an ecosystem. The cells use organic waste as an input, and produce filtered water, grow plants, and reduce C02. Now apartment-dwellers get to experience nature outside their windows. Decide for yourself: Does this project offer a promising future, or does it merely replace nature?
From the architect’s website:
“Imagine a waste bin. Take that bin and fill it with compostable products like grass cuttings, tea bags, & cardboard (just do it). Now attach your new plant-worthy cell to the facade of an ugly building with thousands of other composting bins (don’t forget the plant). You’re all finished! Now watch it grow, reduce CO2, collect rainfall for reuse, and transform your least favourite eyesores into a recycled, green, and overall cool looking structure. Now wasn’t that easy?”
via Yanko Design
December 12 2011
The Living Room
Click here to view the embedded video.
The private atmosphere of a Dutch living room is interrupted by the disturbing presence of a large oak tree that slowly enters the room.
Made by roderickhietbrink.nl
December 11 2011
City Living Splits Up Blackbirds
Some blackbirds have found city living so much fun (the theater scene! the restaurants!) that they have given up migrating south for the winter. Cities are usually warmer than the surrounding country, with lots of discarded food for the birds to scavenge. If the non-migratory birds start breeding sooner, the two populations may eventually split into different species. Even if we can’t predict what fully urban blackbirds will look like, we do know that they will likely be smarter than their country counterparts.
Photo via TarikB
December 07 2011
Conquering the Skies
Everywhere we go, we conquer the land and shape it to our preferences. The next place to build might as well be the clouds. Tiago Barros, designer and architect, has decided to move away from our hectic schedules on Earth’s surface and design a cloud where we can carelessly float around.
The Passing Cloud is a series of zeppelin-like spheres with a fence-like structure on top to keep us from falling back to our stressful routines. The only resource needed is the stainless steel and nylon that form the spheres. Practically no power is needed to move the structure but the wind. But once we board Barros’ floating city, where is it headed? Only nature can tell.
November 30 2011
Birds Change Along with Us
A ‘treasure in the trees’ reveals the exchange of materials between man and animal. This beautiful house finch nest, made of natural resources and manmade garbage, demonstrates how ‘bird architecture’ is able to make use of materials which are useless to us. For some people it might be art, but from another perspective this nest is a pure representation of how humans contribute to nature’s development. Certain bird species use their nests to compete for mates. High-tech-garbage, which contains materials like plastics, textiles or wires, might take their mating rituals to the next level (and to the next nature).
Image from Sharon Beal’s Nests: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them.
October 30 2011
Ancient man impacted environment already
The human environmental impact on our planet is hardly underestimated nowadays. Scientist agree humans are to blame for Global Warming – some are already dreaming up scenario’s of geo-engineering to undo the damage. Untouched old nature is almost nowhere to be found anymore besides perhaps some small areas on the South pole, in the deep sea or if one looks up at the stars – although the brighter ones may well be satellites. “We were here”, is written all over. So when did the writing begin? Much earlier than thought.
According to the common perception the human impact on the environment is fairly recent and thought to have started in concert with the 19th centuries industrial revolution. Presumably, in earlier times humans lived in harmony with their environment. That popular romantic view however, is increasingly being challenged.
HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT BEGAN MUCH EARLIER THAN THOUGHT
Various evidence exist that humans already in the Stone Age, wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Around 2,000 years ago, when the aboriginal Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, over half of the native species of birds became extinct. Some even argued humans are to blame for the extinction of Neanderthaler man.
And the crime scene continues: According to a recent book on the Human Impact on Ancient Marine Ecosystems, edited by Torben C. Rick and Jon M. Erlandson, early human influence wasn’t limited to the extinction of other species: people already influenced whole eco-systems tens of thousands of years ago. People who lived on California’s Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape. The Anthropologists found shell middens full of sea urchins, implying that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed. “Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick, said in an interview with the New York Times.
Luckily not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative. “When people in the Channel Islands hunted otters, they presumably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish. The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for clams, which they harvested and ate.”
CATALYSTS OF EVOLUTION
These discoveries of early influence of humans on the environment might shed another light our position in nature. Unlike other animals, mankind has never been placed in an environment to which he is specifically equipped. While other animals have specific organs, skills and reflexes that enable them to survive in their proper environment, people are cultural beings by nature.
So, instead of feeling fundamentally guilty about our influence on our environment and finding ways to limit and undo our footprint we might as well take pride and responsibility in who we are: catalysts of evolution. That may sound bombastic, yet this does not mean we are controlling the universe – quite the contrary. In our attempts to cultivate old nature, we cause the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever: Nature changes along with us. For better or worse, we can be sure of one thing: we will get the nature we deserve.
Image: Banksy. NYTimes article: Ancient man hurt coasts, paper says. Time article: Did Humans Kill Neanderthalers? Related: Exploring Next Nature, Join the Neolitic Revolution, Doggerland – mapping a lost world, If the implications of Global Warming were fair, Humans to blame for global warming.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
