on site 29: geology

on site

art architecture urbanism landscape culture infrastructure

geology

29 $16 display until october 2013

Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 curated by Lateral Office As Nunavut celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2014, Arctic Adaptations will present innovative architecture proposals rooted in Nunavut’s distinct land, climate and culture, reflecting local traditions of migration and mobility. It will explore how, in light of dramatic environmental, social and economic forces transforming the Arctic today, architecture might help nurture robust Northern communities.

Venice Biennale in Architecture June 7 to November 23, 2014

The Canada Council for the Arts and the RAIC are working together to provide financial and project support for Canada’s representation in Venice. This collaboration is part of a larger project to promote the presentation and appreciation of contemporary Canadian architectural excellence in Canada and abroad.

canadacouncil.ca raic.org lateraloffice.com

geology on site review

fall 2012

contents violent land Dora P Crouch Giulia Piana Michael J Leeb Thomas Mical Ryan Coghlan

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Geology, Water and Antiquity: Ephesus, Prienne, Silenus Geological Rome Slippage: the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta Volcanic Auckland Shifting Cities: False Creek, Vancouver

mining Heather Asquith 18 Staking Claim in Cobalt, Ontario Martin Abbott 22 The Commonwealth of Australia: Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Broken Hill Greg Stone 28 Hollow Ground: Kiruna, Sweden geology of waste Shane Neill Dustin Valen Clinton Langevin, Amy Norris and Chester Rennie Karianne Halse John Calvelli

30 34 38 42 48

ASARCO: near, but not quite Ciudad Juárez, Mexico Constructing Geology: Singapore The Sisyphus Project Landscape Processes Becoming Mineral, in Oregon

going underground Vanessa Eickhoff Ted Landrum Will Craig Mary Kavanagh Nick Sowers

50 53 54 56 61

Hidden Stratum, Galt, Ontario Tunnelling Fear of Falling Into Thrihnukagigur, Iceland Atomic Tourist, Trinity Site, New Mexico Listening Prostheses

mapping surfaces Bradford Watson Trent Workman Joshua Craze Douglas Moffat Daniel Canty

62 66 70 74 76

Unstable Ground: the outer edges of Denver, Colorado Notes from the Field: the Assiniboine River, Manitoba Under the Soil, the People: Abyei, South Sudan Montréal Phonographe Montréal Phonographe

other things Stephanie White 2 calls for articles 79 masthead 80 cover front: Louis Helbig back: Nanaimo Community Archives

Introduction Call for articles: on site 30: ethics and publics, on site 31: photography and cartography who we are 1918-2012: scales of resource extraction 1 Highway 63 Bitumen Slick, Mildred Lake, Alberta Borehole Sections on Fox’s Farm, Nanaimo, British Columbia, 1918 On Site review 29 g e olog y

i n t ro d u c t i o n | w h y n ow ? by stephanie white

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geology

This issue, on architecture and things geologic, was suggested by the work of Smudge Studio and the Friends of the Pleistocene website. I came across them at a Musagetes Foundation café in Sudbury in September 2011, where they handed out their guidebook to New York, Geologic City: a field guide to the geoarchitecture of New York. This was followed by the symposium The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance, curated by Etienne Turpin of Scapegoat.

The geologic turn. No doubt it is happening, this interest in identifying deep history through geology, but why is it happening? and in the sense that new art is often activist, or critical, why now?

Land art has had a large influence on architecture ever since Robert Smithson’s jetties and islands of the 1960s, Alan Sonfist’s forests and Michael Heiser’s earthworks, encoded in critical books such as Lucy Lippard’s 1983 Overlay. Parallel, or coincident to, were Richard Long’s walking projects in Britain and Andy Goldsworthy’s leaf assemblages. These were all artists who intervened in the landscape either at an uncommodifiable scale, or else to draw attention to some condition, such as the loss of the countryside in Britain. The Boyle Family’s forty years of cast sections of the earth’s surface is a record of something we sense is under threat.

The growth of environmentalism and awareness of climate change – from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to the Sierra Club,

from David Suzuki’s activism to Greenpeace – was often a subtext to these investigations of space at the scale of the earth, rather than the canvas or studio or gallery. Land Arts of the American West, for example, has a program that tours installations in the southwest states of the USA, combining land art (visiting Heiser’s Double Negative for example) with the use of the American West’s vast, ‘empty’ territories for military testing – craters and irradiated landscapes, and for infrastructural projects – water management and mining.

In On Site review 26:DIRT we looked at the surface of the earth as the tray upon which we conduct our lives and work, but surface is just the top thin layer of the deep geology of the earth. When the crust is cracked open, either by meteors, or volcanoes, by heat from an over-thin atmosphere, or by mining, which is by definition below the surface – when the surface is cracked, life as we know it is changed and often endangered.

Environmentalism has moved beyond just the reclamation of small brownfield sites or disused mines and is now engaged at the scale of the planet; the inevitability of climate change is a global issue that transcends national projects and local political issues. The local invariably refers to the global, so one can see a similar escalation of scale in environmental art. The conversations are linked. There appears to be a recognition that surface intervention, at the scale of dirt, is only the top layer.

The deep movements and forces of the earth, its deep geological processes which we have either ignored, discounted or taken for granted, have more influence on our species’ future than we have previously thought.

This is new territory for artistic practice: activist, scientific, historic, at the scale of aeons not just the post-industrial era.

If we look at oil extraction, particularly bitumen, what we find is that where previously we focussed on the product and what use could be made of it, we now realise that the process of extraction releases many unforeseen conditions and other, usually toxic, products that were hidden deep in geological strata historically released slowly by erosion. Thus, for example, there is a concentration on the process in artist Mary Kavanagh’s works on the oil sands and the infrastructure it takes to collapse the slowrelease of arsenic or barium in amounts that do not threaten life in favour of a rush-release in the bitumen-extraction process.

We know that radiation occurs naturally in the atmosphere.

What we have developed is a way, through weaponry, to concentrate it in lethal amounts. It is this concentration of the earth’s products that has parallels with concentrated cancer cells, an uncanny metaphor as it is the concentrated release of things deep under the surface (uranium, asbestos, oil, carbon) that causes cancer in the human body.

The value of land and territory today is evaluated entirely on the basis of extractable resources, whether platinum (South African miners’ strike), bitumen (the 2012 US presidential election – selling the US to China in exchange for energy) or potash (the end of the Wheat Marketting Board as surface production of grain is marginalised by the under-the-surface production of potash, ironically, for fertiliser).

Wars are no longer fought for ideology or for humanitarian causes, but for geological reasons.

This is the general awareness within which we now work. There is a reason why there is a geologic turn now and here. It is because it is larger than consumerism, it is unthreatened by information technology (other than rare earth extraction) and it is, as many of the essays in this issue of On Site review show, omnipresent.

We start with a brief sampling by Dora Crouch of her brilliant 2003 book, Geology and Settlement: Greco-Roman Patterns. The complexity of tectonic plate movements in the eastern Mediterranean is both frightening and active, but there is a built record of up to 3000 years old that demonstrates the very roots of the geological imperative in building. Giulia Piana shows the influence of Rupe Tarpea in Rome, Michael Leeb – the Frank Slide, Thomas Mical follows with volcanic Auckland and Ryan Coghlan with Vancouver’s False Creek. In all these pieces, geological upheaval happens, we stumble out of the rubble.

Then comes a group of articles on mining and its impacts: Heather Asquith looks at Cobalt, Ontario, site of a silver rush in the early 1900s; Martin Abbott looks at hinterland mining in Australia with the astounding metaphor that massive excavation in the west is piled up literally and productively on the east coast of Australia’s dense urban shoreline. Greg Stone finds a company town in Sweden at the mercy of the mining corporation which seems able to move it around the countryside at will, and Shane Neill writes about lead, ASARCO and the remediation of a very scarred landscape.

Remediation and reclamation figures in the next grouping: Dustin Valen raises important questions about the technological ‘disappearance’ of waste which actually encourages the production of more of it; Clint Langevin, Amy Norris and Chester Rennie present a demonstration of this elision of waste dumps and pleasure, and Karianne Halse has sent a beautiful project for the re-use of a concrete plant at Fresh Kills landfill. John Calvelli thinks about mineralisation.

In the next section, the articles are connected through the sense that there are hidden worlds beneath the surface. Nick Sowers listens to it; Vanessa Eickhoff writes about a creek treated like a sewer pipe under a small Ontario town and Ted Landrum tunnels through life. Mary Kavanagh visits Trinity Site in New Mexico, the site of postwar nuclear tests now turned tourist site, and Will Craig goes into an Icelandic volcano and is very afraid. Bradford Watson presents a critique of Denver’s relentless suburban push into unsuitable geologies – because foundations are by definition hidden, politicians, developers and buyers remain unaware of the unsuitability.

Maps and the making of maps are the subject of Trent Workman’s work on charting the prairies and of Joshua Craze’s essay on determining the location of Abyei on the border between Sudan and the recently declared South Sudan. And to end, we have Douglas Moffat’s aural mapping of Montréal and Daniel Canty’s thoughts and words as he walks the island. The map is just the top layer of deep histories, deep geologies. c

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opposite page: Dora Crouch (see page 4) sent us this 1778 drawing by James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, the first published study of geological patterns.

This illustrates an unconformity at Jedburgh, Scotland. Near-vertical beds of Silurian sandstone are topped by angular detritus over which lie flat beds of Devonian sandstone, topped with vegetation, humans and horses.

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Giulia Piana (see page 8) sent a copy of this eighteenth-century etching of the uses of geology: Punition de Cassius, an de Rome 268. Joseph de Longueuil, after Silvestre David Mirys.

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karst geologies wat e r s ys t e m s by d o r a p c ro u c h

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i n m y s t u d i e s , i h av e examined entire wat e r s ys t e m s , f ro m f i n d i n g t h e wat e r at a s p r i n g i n t h e m o u n ta i n s , b r i n g i n g

geology water antiquity

i t to t h e c i t y ,

d i s t r i b u t i n g i t to houses, businesses

Diagram of climate changes over five thousand years, from 3000 BCE to 2000 CE, comparing the advance and retreat of European and North American glaciers, the rate of growth of bristlecone pines and the fluctuating levels of C14 in the atmosphere The trees and glaciers have matched phases, while C14 reflects solar radiation and hence climate warming A warm period coincided with the flourishing of the Roman Empire, 200 BCE-400 CE

a n d r e c r e at i o n a l s t ru c t u r e s , a n d c a r ry i n g away u s e d wat e r i n sewers. this whole interconnected pat t e r n c o n s t i t u t e s t h e wat e r s ys t e m .

a l l t h e i l l u s t r at i o n s h e r e a r e f ro m m y book, geology and

settlement: grecoro m a n pat t e r n s . ox f o r d u n i v e r s i t y press,

2003

Plate boundaries and motions in the eastern Mediterranean area (MacKenzie 1972) Plate edges in western Turkey and the Caucasus are shown only generally. Arrows show direction of motion, their lengths proportional to the relative velocity Double lines indicate extension across plate boundaries. A single heavy line indicates a transform fault. Crosshatching represents boundaries across which shortening is occurring Plates are numbered: 1 Eurasian 2 African 3 Iranian 4 South Caspian 5 Turkish 6 Aegean 7 Black Sea 8 Arabian. This simplified map suggests the complications of plate movements in the area.

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Water and geology is my specialty; I’ve spent a lifetime researching Greek and Roman water systems, starting with my PhD in art history from UCLA, a study of Roman-era Palmyra in Syria. At the time, although there had been some studies of individual Roman city water systems, no one had looked much at Greek water systems. Between 1970 and 1985 I met Henning Fahlbusch at the Technical University of Lübeck, found the Frontinus Geschellschaft, a society for the study of water systems, and helped organise the Cura Aquarum which conducted field trips to the ancient cities of the Roman and Greek empires.

Greeks and Romans ran their water delivery lines along the slopes of hills and through tunnels underground, depending on the terrain. Their technology was able to bore through existing rock formations, using them, for instance, at Syracuse in Sicily, where an important aqueduct is visible for part of its path

running diagonally along the inside edge of a cliff, carved into the stone. Today the aqueduct is broken, so no water runs in it, however, the object was to bring water into the settlement and to connect its outfalls with further sets of tunnels and pipes that carried away used, dirty water in a set of sewers set at a lower level, but that still flowed down hill by gravity and then poured into a river or the sea.

Sometimes water system elements are still visible, such as the channels in the Athenian agora, but often they have been destroyed or misplaced such as at Ephesus in Turkey or Merida in Spain – urban centres where pipes have collapsed and simply been piled up next to the houses or stored in the extant public structures of the site, in the storerooms (former shops), for instance, of the lower agora at Ephesus.

Ephesus shorelines and sacred harbours. One can see the first settlements were on the highest ground, and descended closer and closer to the shoreline, which kept moving away further and further into the sea. Sediment deposits that filled the valley between the hill above Ephesus and Pion provided an unstable building foundation. The temple of Artemisia is perched on the very edge of a calcerenite (a soft limestone developed from shell calcium) lens. below, right, the degree of sedimentary infilling of Aegean bays and inlets.

from K ra ft a nd Br ü ckn e r, co u r te sy Öste r re ich isch e s Arch äo lo g isc h e s I n st it u t

J o h n C . Kraf t , H e lm u t B r ü c kn e r, I lh an Kayan , an d H e lm u t E n g e l ma nn. Ge o a r c a e o l o g y : a n I n t e r n at io n al J o u r n al, v o l 2 2 , n o. 1 . p 1 3

In ‘Urban Design amid Flooding and Sedimentation: the Case of Ephesus’, a study I had done with the engineer Charles Ortloff on the Ephesus water system, it was made clear that one cannot discuss the water system, an inventive and sophisticated distribution of aqueducts and pipes to water-using buildings, without looking at the geological record of Ephesus, a Greek city, then a Roman one, now an archaeological site near Selçuk in Turkey.

appearance of the terrain at Ephesus was essentially the same as the arrangements of the Greco-Roman period. Not so!

In that earlier time, the shoreline had rapidly moved forward to the southeast, gradually filling in the entire valley. The earliest features of Ephesus are now more than several dozen kilometres inland. This process was repeated in both the Upper Meander and Lower Meander Rivers in the Ephesus area and in the PrienneMiletus area in the next valley to the south.

Peoples had arrived at what is now the Ephesus archaeological site, in the fourth millennium BCE, later exploiting the marble, limstone, dolomite, schist, hornstone and breccia of this terrain for tools and building materials, and for sources of water. The first people settled near springs at or near the later temple of Artemis, or beside creeks that drained the plain between the mountains and the sea, accommodating their settlement sites to the changing valley. The annual deposit of silt in the delta allowed farming; cattle grazed in the swamps; the bay and sea encouraged fishing and marine trade.

i ephesus and priene Between 200 BCE and 600 CE – over eight centuries, the shoreline at Ephesus was dramatically altered, with the location and construction of buildings moving around as the landscape changed. Political and geological processes and events destroyed and rebuilt structures many times within the core area. When I was studying Ephesus and its neighbour Priene, my first significant realisation at Ephesus was that archaeologists of the twentieth-century had taken for granted that the modern-day

Plan of ancient Ephesus with numbered buildings. The city lies between Bulbul Dag and Panayir Dag (mountains)

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Au st r ian Ar c h ae o lo gic al I n st it u t e , V i e nna

At Priene, lying in the next valley to the south of Ephesus, the water supply was closely related to the availability of karst water on the site, still visible today on the mountain above the city. When Alexander the Great was invading this area in the early fourth century BCE, he located his base camp for further campaigns on the platform that became the Greek city of Priene, still called by its ancient name.

In my 30 years of study of ancient Greco-Roman cities I was at first amazed and then enraptured by the interaction of these ancient Mediterranean peoples with the subterranean factors of the land they were building on. By the sixth century BC they had learned to harness the often invisible water to supply their common areas and individual houses. An awareness of geological processes and products flourished in a pre-scientific culture, because these people already had the most important facilitating attribute – the inquiring mind.

For example, Priene engineers of the fourth-third century BCE designed a sophisticated device – a mixing valve, which prevents a possible overflow of water from the central channel of the street that receives drainage from flanking residential districts. We found it built into the end of Priene’s main street, under the gate.

By the inclusion of a baffle below the gate, the water was diverted from the exit channel, spun in two different directions, trapping any debris that might be lodged in the water channel. Without moving parts, this device solved what was always an unpleasant and unhealthy problem.

Priene drain: operates in three dimensions. The left side of the gutter goes into a cul-de-sac that creates a horizontal eddy, the right side follows a dip in the gutter floor, creating a vertical eddy. Working together they collect rubbish in a gyre, out of which it can be scooped.

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In all water-related activities, Greeks and Romans were keenly aware of the geological base. Urban sites were chosen for their underlying workable stone and clay that could be used for defensive city walls and for the structures within. Cities in the Mediterranean area were almost always built on limestone – of all the cities I have studied, only Morgantina was built on sandstone, a decision which brought some awkward construction problems, especially at the theatre, where from lack of proper foundations, one side collapsed more than once, and an accompanying row of two-storey shops was never finished. City builders everywhere made a point of securing essential spring water for drinking, whether adjacent or at a distance from the city gates. The longest water line that I know of was a Roman one that stretched 60 miles into the northern hinterland of Constantinople – Istanbul today.

Geological section of Priene. The town’s centre is indicated by the three columns.

Varieties of marble are suggested by block patterns in the layers. Local builders preferred the gray, thick bedded massive stones comprising the terrace and mountainside under and behind the town. The alternation of marbles with schists facilitated the appearance of springs (Gungor and Alkan, 1998) below: Roman water supply and drainage system at Ephesus, based on extensive field work and computer modelling (Ortloff and Crouch 2001). Supply lines provided water for public display in fountains and baths, supplementing traditional springs, cisterns and wells. Drainage of used water and wastewater was by gravity flow to the harbour.

II Selinus Aesthetic differences from the use of different kinds of stone were consciously chosen. The finely carved edges and slender forms of the buildings on the Acropolis at Athens were possible because they used strong local Pentellic marble. Casual visitors might not realise that the softer calcaranite found at Selinus in Sicily forced the architects of the temples there to design and build columns with thicker drums covered with a stucco made from marble dust to preserve the surface from the strong winds off the nearby sea that caused pitting of the surface. An earlier temple at Selinus – built out of the same calcarenite – with wide stretching capitals to strengthen them for support of a heavy entablature above, was situated over a lens of calcarenite strong enough to support the weight of the temple. This site decision shows that the builders must have dug down, located the edge of the lens and deliberately pulled the temple back from the edge for the temple to better survive earthquakes which were known to happen there.

It has been my pleasure to work with engineers and archeologists on these investigations. Now I look forward to interacting with new interested persons — the readers of On Site review. c

Geological sections at Selinus. top: N-S acropolis section, with the sea to the south, at left. d – detritus subject to landslide, cb – whitish calcarenite, as clayey sand, cg – yellow calcarenite with calcareous modules and macro fauna, ma – clayey marl. above: N-S section of the east hill with south to the left. The ruins of Temple G overlie a thick lens of calcarenite, which thins to the right (north) below: one of the over-sized columns at Selinus, ca fifth century BCE

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Site map of Selinus and environs. left to right: Gagera spring area with remains of temples.

Citta (Manuzza) with acropolis and three temples to the south; and three more temples on east hill (with Casa Floris).

The site is divided E-W into three sections by the two rivers.

At the lower centre between Citta and the acropolis is the semicircular bastion of the north gate, connected to the perimeter wall along the right side of the acropolis.

The the north above Citta is a long, narrow ridge where cemeteries and quarries occupied the southernmost section, and quarries and spring the area farther north. C Cavallari and S Cavallari, 1872

urbanism | frightful landsc apes by giulia piana

geological rome

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Studying the geological origins of an urban area is about understanding the reasons for its form, and most of all, its primal underpinnings. Geology is much more fundamental than other instruments to explain the evolution of large historical cities such as Rome and its spatial and temporal scale.

The two factors here are the nature and hazards of the terrain and the topography generated by the millenarian interaction of geological activity. Geology is a common ground for the whole urban agglomeration, reducing the superficial heterogeneity of the city to a territorial homogeneity. Rome’s urban landscape is a wonderful but unresolved superposition of countryside, Agro Romano, and a constructed city.

One of the main conditions for the spread of an urban area is the balance between the potential and the risks inherent in a site, both dependent on the level of technology reached by society. In the case of Rome, the hilly nature of its landscape has represented, since its origin, both a potential and a problem.

At the beginning of third millennium BC several villages settled along the left bank of the Tevere (Tiber River). The sites were strategically located in a volcanic area cut through by the Tiber fluvial network, leaving isolated tuffaceous cliffs that dominated the alluvial plain. Such a setting was favourable because of the

abundance of springs and building stones, very useful for the technological development of building and infrastructures.

The good microclimate of these higher elevations was a strong protection from malaria, endemic to the plains of the river and the Tyrrhenian coast. Rome was one of these proto-historic villages, settled on the Campidoglio (Capitol Hill), the closer of the seven hills to the Isola Tiberina (Tiber’s Island). This location permitted both easy defence and permanent control of the mercantile trade at one of the rare points where it was possible to cross the flow of the Tiber. Indeed, the proximity to the other six hills guaranteed a certain degree of continuity, despite the difficult topography.

The hilly landscape of the Campagna Romana originated in a Quaternary tectonic, erosive and volcanic phenomena that started one million years ago when the region was lifted out of the sea.

The sandy formations of Monte Vaticano were suddenly eroded by a fluvial network – at the time, the Paleotiber (the ancient Tiber River) started in the Appennines and had its delta in Ponte Galeria. Between 600,000 and 700,000 years ago the Monte Mario ridge emerged in the northwest of the area. Together with the Pomezia formation, the Monte Mario ridge forced the Paleotiber eastward, moving its delta nearer the Anzio village.

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opposite: Rupe Tarpea, Roma right: Climbing Via di Monte Tarpeo

At the same time exploding volcanic activity in the Sabatini district, 20 km northeast of Rome, and the Colli Albani district, less than 20 km to the southeast, made further changes to the region. All the water stagnating in a low area delimited by the Monte Mario-Pomezia ridge and the Appennine chain interacted with the magma, resulting in violent explosions. The morphology of the area at this point was that of four flattened plateaus (Trigoria, Tor de Cenci, Palatino and Cavaliere) eroded by the Tiber which, by this period, had reached its present course.

Valley erosion was repeated several times during the Quaternary through climate oscillation and huge volcanic material deposits; one of the most violent erosions gave birth to the seven hills.

For centuries the advantages of an irregular morphology with flattened summits were preferred to the hazards of the alluvial plains of the Tiber, drained and urbanised only in the last 150 years. This demonstrates that a society appropriates territory according, functionally, to its basic needs, which were those of defence and trade only up until the last two centuries. Despite this, the legend of the Rupe Tarpea (Tarpeian Rock) which dates from the Roman period, is an interesting metaphor of how threatening an un-planar topography can be.

Tarpeia, the daughter of Tarpeio, defender of the Campidoglio, loved the king of the Sabines, Titus Tatius, although at the time, Rome was at war with the Sabines. To build Rome, Romans needed women to increase their population; they invited the Sabines to a festival and abducted the women. Titus Tatius convinced Tarpeia to liberate the women; the Romans executed Tarpeia for treason by throwing her off a cliff, known since as the Rupe Tarpea.

A difficult topography, seen originally as a positive thing, developed another meaning: it was a site of punishment, a site of fear.

This sense of fear in the hilly territory of Rome is still visible in the way the contemporary city has spread. Entire zones have grown up following the crests of the urban valleys of the Agro Romano, leaving them isolated and sometimes dangerous. This urban fabric takes the form of rings; there is little desire to cross the empty space at their feet. Not unlike the pomerium beyond the city’s walls where any urban or commercial activity was forbidden, the uneasy topography is embedded with sacred historical boundaries. c

above: Balduina area seen from Parco Regionale Urbano del Pineto below: Valle Aurelia area seen from Parco Regionale Urbano del Pineto

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g i ul i a p i a na

slippage

w e at h e r | disaster by michael leeb t h e ‘ m o u n ta i n t h at m ov e s ’ is the loc al indigenous

Gravity having kinetic potential alone awaits an early morning Spring, of unseasonable rains the disparity of temperatures, an icy thaw among fissures, and the cold air inversion of a gale force wind.

n a m e f o r t u rt l e m o u n ta i n . the centre peak collapsed d u e to a n u m b e r o f c l i m at i c c o n d i t i o n s . a b ov e av e r ag e r a i n a n d s n ow fa l l , s t ro n g w i n d s a n d a r a p i d i c e t h aw w i t h i n m o u n ta i n to p f i s s u r e s d e s ta b i l i s e d o n e o f t u rt l e m o u n ta i n ’ s

An early morning storm unknown to most with a town asleep below and the mountain that moves above, now sets into motion

t h r e e p e a k s , c au s i n g a l a n d s l i d e t h at b u r r i e d t h e tow n o f f r a n k o n a p r i l 29, 1903. s e e t h e r e p o rt o n t h e g r e at l a n d s l i d e at f r a n k , a lta .,

a landslide

1903, b y r c m c c o n n e l l a n d r w b ro c k , e d m o n to n

of epic proportions.

geologic al society. e d m o n to n , a l b e rta . 2003.

Dust and boulders, slide rocks and mud That slip across the flats of the river valley below.

A mud slip that slides across marsh and meadow and runs down the slope, then across the valley beneath.

Velocity having destructive capacity alone won’t await

^

the mountain that moves and a storm set in motion

All over a mere single moment.

Limestone boulders of varying mass, a phantasm of features a not distant past.

The loosely bound mudstone, an amorphous mass; the conglomerate of pebbles, gravel and silt; a textural beauty of deep ochre colour.

now only perhaps a lithic memorial amidst the tragedy, of a not distant past.

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Geomorphology; a metaphor for change of bounded stone at the perimeter.

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d i f f i c u lt g e o l o g y settlement by thomas mical

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towards a geophilosophy of architecture

Volcanic Auckland

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N at io n al Librar y o f Au st ralia Map N K3 7 2 0 /2

The unique contingencies of the architecture and urbanism of Auckland derive from equally contingent geological, meteorological and social movements. Auckland’s volcanic geology, read as a geo-philosophy, allows us to project it upwards to Auckland’s urban architecture and landscape, specifically as dissonant outgrowths of the geologic drift or or buoys on the geologic flow, as an archaic field condition.1 Once-molten volcanic cones in and around Auckland, quarried and excavated since Maori settlement, form an uneven and unstable ground condition of irregular concentricity, which architecture networks must negotiate.2 The dynamic volcanic field condition produces unique social and spatial institutions, and as such it functions as a philosophical and a contextual grounding for design processes.

Geophilosophy, as a discipline, examines emergent socio-spatial networks as extensions and assemblages in, of and through a core of geological thought. It is concerned with processes of stratification – literal and metaphoric, and the interpretation of relations between geology, the built environment and structures of thought. Mobility, of people and ideas, tracked as excess and flow, allow the empirical prospect of geophilosophy to refigure architecture as an artificial landscape operation adrift in a much deeper and older series of densifications and stratifications.3 Speaking geophilosophically, architecture and its extension into the urban is an assemblage, always in flow, with minimal grounding, The necessary function of architecture

to selectively codify and frame desire and subjectivity as a contingent act, comes in the Deleuzian sense from “material process of connection, registration, and enjoyment of flows of matter and energy coursing through bodies in networks of production of all registers, be they geological, organic, or social”.4 The flows and processes, no matter how imperceptible, are what link the landscape, inhabitation and the reflexivity of both. If the Deleuzian ‘geological’ is a vast network of sorting computational machines, the volcanic model can be seen as an extreme geological mechanism.5 The current tranquility of Auckland’s volcanic field conditions mask vast apparati whose working parts are tectonic tension, heat pressure and molten depths. The volcanic field conditions belie the transportation of future sedimentation, the repetition of the genesis of automatic landscapes. On this physical and geological time scale, architecture would appear as etchings on the slow pouring surface.

This architectural etching leads us to a calligraphic-diagrammatic model of urbanism, one that demands a more insightful examination of the geological. The city as a geological extension is conceptually drawn as an urban pressure map, as a threedimensional mapping of stratifications, as metaphoric and conceptual fault lines in the socio-spatial assemblage, bringing us closer to answering De Landa’s question, ‘is it possible to find a diagram (or abstract machine) that operates across geological, meteorological and social formations?’6

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Sir G e o r ge G r e y Sp e c ial Co lle c t io n s , Au c klan d Librar ie s: N Z Map 6 4 0 9 , us e d wi th p e r mi s s i o n

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facing page: Ferdinand von Hochstetter. The Isthmus of Auckland with its extinct volcanoes. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1865. Originally published in Geologisch-topographischer Atlas von Neu-Seeland (Hochstetter and Petermann, 1863), and republished in English in 1864. above: Street map of Auckland City and suburbs circa 1950

Geology, climate, weather and society all subtly inflect the sedimentations of Auckland’s urban architecture. Its topography derives from the mechanics of its volcanic geology, its weather is closely tied to the mechanics of the ocean and Auckland’s social formations derive from a complex, contested, colonial and post-colonial, historical mechanism. Between Maori settlement in Aotearoa in the thirteenth century and British colonisation, volcanic formations had sacred and mythic status; the geologic understanding of the archipelago of islands, of which Aotearoa is but one, was as a mirror of the stars.7 Geology didn’t change with colonisation, but the emergence and the projected meaning of the geological did. Surveying and measuring soil-bearing capacity for architectural development scratches the geological surface while the volcanic landscapes dig deeper into our imagination. Although constructed urban towers, like a forest in a city becoming a forest of signs, might seem to have more in common with an arborescent model than the volcanic cones, these towers are also solar, thermal, aerodynamic and meteorological baffles and barriers; in their entirety a laminate upon the ground, a spongy layer of inconsistent smoothness, density and depth, rich in voids and openings. The city is sandwiched between a drifting volcanic field condition and multi-directional winds. Works of architecture in Auckland’s topography are, geo-philosophically, masses of porous stones, sponge-spaces, in brachiated coral reef configurations between street-channels. From plate tectonics to architectonics, these urban abstractions reframe architecture in a changing relation to site as depth-in-motion.

The short term of urban development is a sharp contrast to the eternal geological time scale. The fast temporal mix of latemodern life in the geo-philosophical city of Auckland holds our attention, as does the quick construction of new architecture.

This acceleration is always in dialogue with the manifold geological processes that serve as the bedrock to all architecture and urbanism.8 Now, consider architecture in urban geologic terms – consider architecture as mass, as configuration, as flow and as density.

Consider how and why settlement was consciously located where it is in the volcanic fields. From a topographical or aerodynamic model, the fabric of the city is differentiated along a spectrum from rough surface topographies to smooth field conditions, and is only partially determined by thought structures. However, the geo-philosophy of Auckland’s architecture is defined by the reciprocity between built structures, thought structures and geological structure.

2013 Auckland, from Mt Eden to the harbour.

Mount Eden was named after George Eden, First Earl of Auckland; before this it was named Maungawhau, terraced and used as a Maori defensive position until 1700.

g o o gl e ma p s

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Freud drew an analogy between the structure of the human mind and the rigid and complete archaeology of Rome – layers of repressed and buried memories, the present over-determined by submerged earlier structure. In contrast, Auckland’s volcanic geology is one of movement, flow and eruption, into which the transitory style and functions of architecture are loosely fitted.

In our Anthropocene era, the furnaces and the forges of the industrial revolution are themselves but domesticated volcanic processes. We could substitute site planning for a more telling mapping of volcanic thermodynamics and process-oriented design protocols – for example, using the heat signatures of the processes of making and dwelling in the city instead of master plans. From a meteorological position, the city of Auckland appears as thin surface clusters of crystalline growth and corallike formations upon extended volcanic beds. As an architectural proposition, the geo-philosophy of Auckland’s volcanic field conditions allows for these curious analytic models, however geo-philosophy also welcomes a projective mode of design.

The geo-philosophy of Auckland’s architecture would include design thinking around found and invented micro-climates, the fertility of slow-moving soil (and the magma engines beneath), the proximity and pressures of the oceanic and the changeable winds that create dynamic weather systems – all unorthodox but geologically-informed design generators and design parameters. c

1 The formal device of the field condition as organisational diagram is rendered a simplification in light of this pressure-based geological topography in Auckland, rich with contingencies of historical and geological fact. See Stan Allen, ‘Field Conditions” in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. pp 90-103 2 For a better understanding of this fascinating geological field condition, see the study by Ernest J Searle, City of Volcanoes: A geology of Auckland. revised by Mayhill, R D; Longman Paul, 1981. First published 1964 3 See Gregg Lambert, ‘What the Earth Thinks’ in Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, editors, Deleuze And Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp 220-234 4 Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze And Geophilosophy: A Guide And Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p 76

6 See Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, Critical Digital Studies: A Reader.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

7 For an introduction to the earliest readings of the location of Maori culture in the volcanic landscape, see R C J Stone, From Tãmaki-makau-rau to Auckland. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001. see also Ian Smith’s chapter, pp 367-380, in Geoffrey Clark, Foss Leach and Sue O’Connor, editors. Islands of Inquiry: Colonisation, Seafaring and the Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008. for a brief theory of the Auckland geological landscape, see Albert L Refiti and Anthony Hoete, ‘Sites Pacific’ in Anthony Hoete,editor, Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility. London: Black Dog Press, 2004. pp 228-237 8 See Ian E M Smith And Sharon R Allen, Auckland Volcanic Field Geology, vol.

5, by the Volcanic Hazards Working Group of the Civil Defence Scientific Advisory Committee, online at: http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learning/ Science-Topics/Volcanoes/New-Zealand-Volcanoes/Volcano-Geology-andHazards/Auckland-Volcanic-Field-Geology.

5 Manuel De Landa, ‘The Geology of Morals’ in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. p60

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urbanism | priorities by rya n c o g h l a n

shifting cities

r ya n c o g hl a n

The geology of a place is, in a very real sense, a record of change. Sediments pile on, compact, and form a record of what a place has been throughout its history. We can see when floods occurred, when glaciers came and went, when earthquakes struck. They tell us what has come and often what could come.

And if we follow these records about the ground to the cities above the record of change continues. Building styles have changed over time, cultures have come, stayed, left, and different groups have (or haven’t) managed to find a place within the geology of the city.

This record of a place, its geology, never remains still.

Buildings are dismantled and replaced, mountains are worn down by the wind, new groups migrate to an area and shape the cultures already there. Geological change can be welcomed, but they are more often unpredictable, even undesirable.

Our typical response to geologic shifts has been to build cities that are increasingly resistant to change. For instance, cities require buildings able to cope with more and more powerful earthquakes1 and enact zoning bylaws that to keep neighbourhood aesthetics static over time. On the face of it, these moves make sense – when faced with something as powerful as an earthquake and the unpredictability of what can follow, it is reasonable to want to preserve what exists now. And often these approaches manage to do what they plan to do – they preserve the existing geology of a city, or at least the aspects we want to preserve.

There are two gambles we make in this approach to geologic upheavals. First we gamble that what we have now is better than what could come after. And second, we gamble that we can

actually predict what can come and that we would want to resist it. But as numerous individuals and history have shown we are often wrong about the first and cannot do the second.2 So what is our alternative? Simply becoming passive riders on a shifting geology hardly seems better. Yes, we’re now open to a better city, but we are also open to the possibility of a much, much worse one. In between these extremes of total control and total freedom lies a middle ground. We can recognise that we can’t predict our cities’ futures with certainty, but also know we can predict and want to stop some specific changes from happening.

In short we can aim to create cities that can adapt along with their geology.

How adaptable should our cities be seems to depend on where in the city we are. We are probably more willing to accept change at our grocers then in our own house. But if there is no fixed amount of adaptability that will work for all places, we need a method to help decide what the right amount of adaptability is for a particular place. * To begin to think out what a method might look like, let’s examine a section of False Creek in Vancouver, BC and decide what’s the right amount of adaptability there. We first need to answer – adaptable to what? An area or city simply cannot be made to adapt to everything, so I’ll focus on asking how this area can adapt to earthquakes, given the city’s earthquake risk.

We need to determine what parts of the area are vital to it and absolutely cannot change. Here the residential skyscrapers and above: study area with adaptable areas in colour, resistant areas in gray below: study area post-shift

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r ya n c o g hl a n

nearby rapid-transit line are prime candidates as both would cause huge loss of life if they were damaged. Everywhere else seems at least open to change.

We need to know the area’s geology. Previously a highly productive tidal flat that was filled-in in the 1910s and developed, much of False Creek would likely liquefy if an earthquake hit, given its loose soil base. The waterfront would probably fall back into the sea and return to a flood plain form. This could be a huge boon for local ecosystems and allow us to create a distinctly local flood plain environment, where before there was mostly grass.

Thus the ground beneath the skyscrapers and transit lines must be able to withstand liquefaction while the waterfront and other non-vital areas could be allowed to change. We maintain what is vital while allowing for the possibility of a more productive and unique waterfront.

Clearly this is a simplified conclusion and there are many other factors to consider before redesigning this area for adaptability.

But this example provides an initial set of questions for those who want to create adaptable areas. Adaptable to what? What is vital to the area and can’t change? What does the place’s geology tell us? Through these questions we can frame our approach to adaption, decide where adaptation can occur, and how we can design adaptable and resistant spaces. Although answering these questions can quickly become complicated as we begin to add other factors such as changing demographics, we must start somewhere. Geology is the base condition. With these questions we can begin to build cities that can shift with, instead of against, their shifting geologies. c

p h o t o s c o u r t e sy o f Cit y o f Van c o u v e r Ar c h iv e s . r igh t , f r o m t h e to p : A M 5 4 - S 4 - 3 - : PA N N 8 6 (Take n by W.J . Mo o r e ), AM1 3 7 6 - : CVA 1 3 7 6 - 3 5 5 , AM5 4 - S 4 - : I N N1 2 - , abov e , f r o m t h e t o p : AM5 4 - S4 - : VLP 5 7 .3 , AM5 4 - S4 - : I n P1 .2 , C OV- S 5 1 1 - : C V A 7 8 0 - 5 0 5 , AM5 4 - S4 - : Air P2 6 (R o yal Can adian Air Fo r c e ), AM5 4 - S4 - 3 - : PA N N8 6 ( W J M o o r e ) , R yan Co gh lan

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1 Kirk Williams. (Mar. 17, 2011). ‘8,000 Vancouver buildings vulnerable to quakes’. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ story/2011/03/17/bc-vancouver-buildings-seismic.html 2 see: Klaske Havik, Véronique Patteeuw, and Hans Teerds, editors. OASE: Journal for Architecture – Productive Uncertainty (Issue 85). Nai Publishers : Rotterdam, 2011

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this page: East False Creek in Vancouver, late 1800s to to the present

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The early Cobalt mining camp with Conigas Mine in distance, 1910

b o o m tow n s | s i lv e r by h e at h e r a s q u i t h

c o u r t e sy o f Ar c h i ve s o f Onta r i o

cobalt staking claim

a s a s t u d e n t i n t h e l at e

1990 s

i pa rt i c i pat e d i n a

Reminders of a silver mining camp

c au s e s t u dy i n c o b a lt . t h e s e s t u d i e s , ru n b y

t h e o n ta r i o a s s o c i at i o n of architects, helped tow n s w i t h i d e a s f o r u r b a n r e n e wa l . a lt h o u g h w e w e r e n ot expecting a bustling

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urban centre in this f o r m e r m i n i n g tow n

500

k i l o m e t r e s n o rt h

o f to ro n to , w h e n w e

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r e ac h e d c o b a lt w e w e r e s u r p r i s e d at j u s t h ow l i t t l e wa s t h e r e . w e wo u l d s o o n b e a s to u n d e d to l e a r n w h at i t h a d b e e n .

Cobalt is a northern Ontario town of just over 1,000 people, located west of Lake Timiskaming near the Quebec border. When silver was found, largely by accident in 1903 during the construction of the Northern Ontario Railway, Cobalt became the site of one of the greatest mining rushes in Ontario history. Large veins of silver were found running along the surface of rock. Surface mining attracted experienced and inexperienced prospectors alike and quickly the town grew to a population of 10,000 with 100 mines in operation at its peak.

Mining a silver vein: Nippissing Mine, Cobalt 1910

The prospect of extracting more silver at increasingly rapid rates led to the development of new hard rock mining technology and techniques, providing expertise for future exploration in northern Ontario and the establishment of a mining college in nearby Haileybury. Local innovations fed the rapid growth and energy demands of both the town and mines: three new hydroelectric plants were constructed to replace coal-fired plants, and to feed power for ever-hungry mines and mills, the first compressed air plant was constructed at nearby Ragged Chutes supplying compressed air by pipeline.

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The Rush The discovery of silver provided a catalyst for enormous growth in this small outpost. A new town quickly emerged in hastilybuilt houses organised haphazardly amongst the mines. It was truly a camp and over the years spread itself across the rocky outcroppings with little planning. The only boundaries were defined by claims staked as prospectors established their operations. Miners’ shacks gradually replaced prospector’s tents and the town spread. Such was the speed of development and lack of planning that an electric streetcar line ran between Cobalt and the nearby town of Haileybury passed directly through some of the mine sites. Headframes were the town’s highrises and provided a constant reminder of its industry.

The excitement and energy of hardworking miners, prospectors and businessmen made for a lively and energetic place. Hotels, taverns and even a hockey team in the National Hockey Association, later the NHL, provided entertainment for those with newfound riches.

c o u r t e sy o f Ar c h iv e s o f O n t ar io

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c o u r t e sy o f Ar c h ive s o f Onta r i o

facing page top: Cobalt ‘s train station, 1922 bottom: Cobalt’s general store, built around headframe of mine shaft, 1962 this page: a map of the Cobalt Silver Camp showing ore production and dividends paid from various mines, 1913

c o u r t e sy o f D av id K J o y c e

Epilogue Like many a town hastily stripped of its valuable commodity the scars remain: voids where the silver veins were removed, open shafts, tailings and contaminated water. Acres of land were stripped of vegetation to expose silver veins near the surface. The trees have yet to re-surface. The land is left to rehabilitate itself – so few are the people left in Cobalt, no one seems to give much attention to the problem. Issues of environmental contamination and pollution of ground source waters, a fundamental by-product of mining, we leave to the earth to rehabilitate in its own slow process. The time and place of discovery is potent, but the rush is brief. The convalescence of the land will be long. c

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Cobalt Community Assist for an Urban Study Effort Study, 1995 Ontario Association of Architects Cobalt Mining Legacy: www.cobaltmininglegacy.ca Angus, Charles and Brit Griffin. We lived a life and then some: The Life, Death and Life of a Mining Town. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996

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Easy come easy go The silver began to run out in the late 1920’s. With World War II, the demand for cobalt, a by-product of silver extraction for which the town is named, increased. This kept mining operations active for a while, however eventually it too came to a close. Like other gold rush towns, today Cobalt struggles to keep this history alive, though there is little evidence of the mining camps except for the ghosts of headframe ruins dotting the surrounding landscape. Its remote location makes it too far off the beaten track for tourists and passers by to visit. The town nostalgically retells the story of its very proud past and recreates it in bits and pieces, in rock samples in museums, gem shops, galleries and books. But the silver and the town the discovery brought with it are long gone.

Perhaps latent in our perceived value of the mineral is an appreciation for the earth’s time and energy spent in creating it. Upon discovery, claims are staked and the value we see is commodified and quickly put into motion. Its energy is dispersed into invention, industry, propelling an economy of its own — Cobalt’s short life was alive with innovation building the fortunes of many businessmen, banks and leaders of industry. The earth’s slow creation of the silver took millions of years. The silver veins in Cobalt were extracted from the earth in only a few.

The common wealth of Australia The rich geology of a sun burnt land industrial urbanism | mining by m a rt i n a b b ot t i n c o n t r a s t to au s t r a l i a ’ s l a r g e c oa s ta l c i t i e s a r e t h e s m a l l r e m ot e m i n i n g tow n s i n au s t r a l i a ’ s

i s o l at e d i n t e r i o r . ta k i n g t h e m i n i n g boom as a point o f d e pa rt u r e , t h i s a rt i c l e e x p l o r e s au s t r a l i a ’ s

o u t b ac k u r b a n i s m ,

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i n t h e p ro c e s s i n t ro d u c i n g t h e tow n s at t h e centre of this

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surge in mineral e x p o rt s .

Kalgoorlie-Boulder and the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines (KCGM) Superpit 4 July 2012: the Super Pit produces around 850,000 ounces of gold a year; the town’s proximity to Australia’s largest open pit gold mine highlights the stark hold geology exerts over the town.

c o u r t e sy KCG M © by ale s s a nd r o b r i o s i

c o u r t e sy o f B r o ke n H ill Cit y Co u n c il

Australia is a vast island continent straddling three time zones on the edge of South-East Asia. It covers a geographic area similar in scale to that of Western Europe, yet is home to only 22 million people. Climatically diverse, it is as much characterised by its harsh dry outback landscapes as it is by its wet tropical north or little known snowy alpine regions in the south. These diverse natural landscapes are home to an abundantly unique range of animal and plant species and endowed with staggering quantities of mineral resources such as coal, iron ore and gas. This land is also home to an indigenous aboriginal people, whose rich culture and customs date back some 50,000 years.

The overwhelming majority of inhabitants of this sparsely populated island-continent live in cities that cling to a narrow coastal strip in the south-east stretching from Adelaide to Brisbane. Consequently, it is also one of the most urbanised countries in the world. These urban population centres located in the most fertile and environmentally comfortable ranges, have brought many environmental, economic and social advantages. However distance is still tyrannically defining in any understanding of them. This coastal urban reality contrasts strongly with the omni-present, iconic colonial idyll of Australia that still occupies the minds of many, of the resilient drovers (read cattlemen), living and working in the remote, sunburnt Australian interior. An updated version would depict a geologist, electronic device in hand, ready to board an early morning east coast flight to his workplace, a mine in the far north-west of the country.

observe a broad regional trend of growing national populations and rapidly expanding cities whose appetite for Australia’s raw materials shows no sign of slowing. The fantastic growth of cities across Asia, particularly in China and India, is highlighted by their ferocious appetite for steel and electricity. Steel, the bedrock of modern cities is used to construct anything from buildings to bridges and requires enormous quantities of iron ore and metallurgical coal to produce it. Electricity on the other hand, powers homes, offices and transport systems the world over and soaring demand is being met by a suite of mostly nonrenewable sources that includes thermal coal. On the back of this demand, Australia has become the largest exporter in the world of both iron ore and coal. According to the Australian Government, a combined total of more than eight-hundred mega tons or eight-hundred million tons of these two materials were extracted from the ground for export in 2012, an increase of 10% on the previous year. In financial terms, the value of the these two exports to the Australian economy is greater than $US 100 billion. Furthermore, the Australian Government expects Australia’s Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports to increase 23% this year. And as new LNG projects come online, Australia’s exports will overtake those of Qatar, the world’s leading LNG exporter around 2020.2 Continuing this trend is a recent major oil discovery in the Arckaringa Basin, close to Coober Pedy in South Australia. Similar to Canada’s vast oil sand reserves in terms of its unconventional status, the field is believed to contain up to 233 billion barrels of oil, worth a staggering $20 trillion with the potential to rival the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

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Despite repeated warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the catastrophic effects of climate change to the well-being of all nations, the overwhelming majority of Australia’s gigantic and growing energy exports are derived from non-renewable sources that further exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions, the primary reason global temperatures are rising.3

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Pertinent to Australia’s ongoing economic security is the rapid economic growth taking place across Asia that is itself, fueling a radical wave of urbanisation unknown in the Australian cities to the south. In Australia, there are no more than five cities with a population greater than 1 million. According to the UN, there are in excess of 90 cities in China with an equivalent or greater population and some with populations approaching that of the country itself.1 Looking beyond China’s borders, we can

Broken Hill: the Line of Lode – after years of underground mining, tailings have created an enormous hill through the centre of town.

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In contrast to Australia’s large coastal cities are the small, remote mining towns in the country’s isolated interior where the impact of mining on communities is clearly registered by the proximity of urban residential areas to operating mines. With specific reference to the towns of Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie, Port Headland and Newman, one must ask how this country’s rich geology, far from the population centres of the eastern coast, is feeding the growth of cities across Asia while seeding a new form of Australian outback urbanism. And are government agencies meeting the basic needs of communities as populations bulge in what were once small rural towns?

‘This is a telling juxtaposition. For, as much as Australia is building up in the east, it is digging down in the west actually digging city-sized holes and shipping the ore to the northern hemisphere to become other cities. Here is the

Australian urban paradox: building impossibly big cities that cling to the east coast, while running out of land and water and, at the same time, digging impossibly big holes in the west, which create organic urban forms that in themselves allude to future designs and possibilities for redemption. ‘ — John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, Now+When Australian Urbanism5 Kalgoorlie Boulder The town of Kalgoorlie - Boulder, population 30,000 is situated in the goldfields of central Western Australia along the IndianPacific railway line, 600km east of Perth – already one of the most geographically isolated cities in the world. The ‘Fimiston Open Pit’, more commonly referred to as the ‘Super Pit’ is Australia’s largest open pit gold mine and approximately 3.5 km long, 1.5km wide and more than 300 metres deep. Amazingly, some residential areas sit as close as 200 metres from its edge. The Super Pit wasn’t always so big and was initially comprised of a series of smaller underground mining operations located along a stretch of land known as the ‘Golden Mile’. Consequently, the Super Pit only came into being under consolidation by the infamous businessman, Alan Bond who managed to buy up many of the leases. The mine’s influence, imagined and real on Kalgoolie is near-unfathomable. It operates non-stop, twentyfour hours a day, every day of the year, employing more than a thousand people and producing up to 800,000 ounces of gold on an annual basis. Noise, blast vibration, blast overpressure, not to mention the tons of earth extracted in addition to the gold, all have a major impact on day-to-day life in the town. Daily blasting that quite literally shakes the town has in fact become a tourist attraction and draws visitors to mine look outs. Tourists can even call ahead to enquire about upcoming schedules. For now, the mine is expected to close in 2021 and although the mine’s life has been extended in the past, the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mine is already welcoming suggestions from the public as to the future use of this industrial-scaled asset. i

A recent report from the World Bank, ‘Turn Down the Heat’ expresses concern that any temperature increase of 4° will deliver more frequent extreme weather patterns, something that should concern all Australians after the Bureau of Meteorology added new colours to charts in order to accommodate higher readings during another summer of record temperatures and savage bush fires.4 The exploding demand from Asia for Australia’s mineral resources is forcing a complete overhaul of political and economic thinking. It is relocating vast numbers of skilled and unskilled workers to once anonymous locations all over Australia from the cities in the east. The remote northern city of Darwin is now the nation’s thriving gateway to Asia, providing access to other South-East Asian cities in less than half the time it takes to fly from Sydney. It is precisely this proximity to Asia that is of interest to the US military, who recently began rotating thousands of American combat soldiers through Darwin each year, beginning an agreement that that will see up to 2,500 troops visiting the area by 2017. Significant military developments such as these do not pass unnoticed and the reaction from Asia has been mixed, particularly in China, Australia’s largest trading partner.

above: Kalgoorlie - Boulder: the Fimiston open pit gold mine

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this page: Australia’s 2012 coal and iron ore exports

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The significant and rapid scale of economic growth in the region has come at some cost. In Port Headland for example, there is a severe housing and land shortage that local government believes is making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain staff. In turn, this negatively affects the government’s ability to maintain key city infrastructure and to deliver community services.6 ‘While this period of rapid expansion and development has brought many positive changes to the region, it also carries the challenge of balancing economic and commercial development with the needs of the local community.’

— Town of Port Hedland CEO, Mal Osborne in the local paper, The Pilbara Echo

One issue of common concern, is the fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) working culture that is used to attract people to work on remote mining sites. Many small towns see this as having a negative effect on their community and a parliamentary inquiry into the use of FIFO workforce practices in regional Australia has begun.

Broken Hill Perhaps the longest surviving outback mining town in Australia, Broken Hill also lends its name to the multinational mining company, BHP - Broken Hill Proprietary Company whose origins can be traced back to 1885 and a silver, lead and zinc mine in the town. Located more than 1000km west of Sydney and around 500 km north of Adelaide, the isolated town is an important regional centre and home to 19,000 people. In urban terms, it is distinguished by two distinct grids that are divided centrally by mining operations and a surreal lunar mullock heap. Formed after many years of underground mining, the tailings have grown into an enormous man-made hill that towers over the city. The hill hosts the town’s visitor centre and is a vantage point from which to view the urban and natural landscape beyond. Broken Hill’s historic built environment is renowned for its starring role in the Australian cult film, ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert’ and, equally, Broken Hill’s surrounding natural landscapes continue to attract many artists and visitors alike. Unlike other mining towns, there are local film studios and numerous galleries that play an important role in the local government’s attempts to diversify the mining-dominated local economy. i

Newman and Port Headland Other mines at the centre of this resource boom are yet more fantastic in scale. For example, the company town of Newman, population 4,000, is located in the Pilbara region of northwestern Australia. Newman exists to serve the Mount Whaleback iron ore mine that by time it is exhausted is projected to be some 5km long, 1.5km wide and 500 metres deep. Established in the 1960s after the discovery of large quantities of iron ore, the town is characterised by its low slung suburban houses that sit in a sea of water-dependent green grass, a stark contrast to the arid climate and desert landscape that abounds outside the confines of the town borders. It’s quasi-sister town, Port Headland is home to some 15,000 residents and hosts Australia’s largest port facility in terms of export tonnage. It is also the railhead of a privately-owned rail network that stretches a thousand kilometres across the Pilbara, connecting much of Australia’s rich iron ore belt. Locomotives ply the 426km distance from Newman to Port Headland, shunting multi-kilometre long ore trains from mine to international port. BHP - Billiton, the global resource company employs more than 13,000 people in the area.

The town of Broken Hill and the silver, lead and zinc mine that gave rise to the global mining giant, BHP - Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd.

As Australia exports its vast mineral wealth, it implicitly contributes to a growing environmental catastrophe. Australia’s carbon footprint is small in comparison to that of the USA or China, however per capita, it ranks among the worst. If the quantities of coal exported annually were included in this calculation, Australia would begin to rival the total emissions of much bigger economies. Sadly, the much lauded Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that began last July, an attempt to put a price on carbon, actually compensates some of the largest emitters, such as the coal-fired power stations.

Remote urban settlements at the centre of this boom have much in common. The mines dominate local economies, influence significantly day-to-day life in each town and in this way, generate wealth and employment, enabling communities to thrive. In the process they define much of the town’s cultural identity.

In Kalgoorlie-Boulder for example, the Super Pit has evolved into a tourist attraction in its own right, while in Broken Hill, decommissioned mining structures are included on heritage registers as items of historical importance and are actively being preserved. However, do these towns have viable futures without operational mines to support them? Australia’s isolated urban communities are resilient, and whatever their future, it is sure that they will adapt quickly and at a scale as equally fantastic to the mining operations they support, or else they will simply cease to exist. c

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1 World Urbanization Prospects, The 2011 Revision. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, esa.un.org/unpd/wup 2 Resources and Energy Quarterly, December quarter 2012. Canberra: The Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, The Australian Government, 2012 3 The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. www.ipcc.ch/ 4 ‘The Australian heatwave’ The Economist. www.economist.com/news/ asia/21569440-uncomfortable-time-australians-especially-climate-changesceptics-up-eleven 5 John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, Now + When Australian Urbanism, Australian Exhibition at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. Sydney: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 2010. p 10 6 ‘Town of Port Hedland announce key priorities to achieve ‘City’ vision ahead of election’ www.pilbaraecho.com.au/2013/02/01/town-of-porthedland-announce-key-priorities-to-achieve-city-vision-ahead-of-election/

g e o - au to c r ac y | m i n i n g c o m pa n i e s by g r e g s to n e the urban aesthetic of the mining i n d u s t ry

Hollow Ground

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Kiruna, 20,000 inhabitants in northern Sweden, 145 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, is literally trying to avoid collapse.

The town exists because it sits atop vast iron ore deposits. In 1890 the Swedish government established the mining company Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), built the first house in Kiruna in 1900 and began mining operations. Today, 100 per cent state-owned LKAB operates Sweden’s largest iron-ore mining operation directly beside Kiruna. Extraction, which angles 60° under the town, has hollowed out the ground underneath; already the railway has been rerouted to avoid areas of subsidence. In 2004, LKAB announced plans to expand the mine directly below the city centre, gradually extending the mine’s property lines to encompass what is now the commercial and residential heart of the city and, clearly, its underground infrastructure of water pipes and electricity lines. To avoid ensuing subsidence and massive structural collapse, the town must move its city centre three kilometres east of its original site.

The mine’s expansion will come in stages, but they are big stages. The first, set for next year, will undermine 313 apartments,

City Hall, the main highway going through town and several cultural buildings. Over the next 20 years, 450,000 square metres of city will be moved. Most buildings will be demolished and replaced in a new city centre, while some culturally significant buildings will be carefully dismantled and moved piece by piece to a new location. By the end of the move, more than 3,000 apartments, or 35% of Kiruna, will have been affected.

This urban transition will be more than physical. Right now, the general attitude among the Kiruna public is that the move is a necessary evil, but it is a difficult reality for many people to grasp.

Ulrika Isaksson, Information Officer for the Kiruna municipal government, has said “I’m not sure if people really understand that they’re leaving their houses. There are indicators of the move everywhere, but still it’s a tough reality”. One indicator was demonstrated in a press conference, when a LKAB representative pointed to one of Kiruna’s tallest apartment buildings and bluntly declared that in several years the property line of the mine would go straight through the building. “That was shocking for many people” says Isaksson.

opposite, above: LKAB’s iron-ore mine, chiselled into Luossavaara mountain, looms over Kiruna below: satellite aerial of Kiruna this page: LKAB moves a house at its sister mine Malmberget, Sweden, 150 kilometres down the road from Kiruna, where it will soon be a common sight

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model for other cities in the future, considering climate change and the threat of rising sea levels that perhaps will force cities to move to safer ground”. These new endeavours are indicators of Kiruna’s growing independence from LKAB. Most industrial towns live and die by their industries, a true inevitability when it comes to mining. Most Kirunans would argue that LKAB provides for the town, but in the grand scheme of things, what are they really providing? In the context of the move, provisions indicate a fairly shallow corporate social responsibility. Kiruna feels it has more to offer than minerals and that it deserves deeper roots and greater autonomy, something LKAB is reluctant to provide.

There is an architectural competition under way for the new Kiruna city centre. An exhibition at City Hall displays sketches and perspectives from competing firms that show glistening city streets, rosy-cheeked skiers, reindeer co-existing with local residents and promises of longevity and sustainability. Perhaps this new Kiruna will have more control over its future than the last one. c

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The Kiruna municipality bought the land for the new city centre from the Swedish state, which also owns LKAB. When the town moves, LKAB will purchase all of the land and buildings in the old Kiruna site, with full control over house compensation. Right now, old Kiruna is a cheap place to live with relatively low housing costs. Although LKAB has promised to purchase all houses at 125 per cent of their market value, that might not be enough for a new house in new Kiruna.

The move is a harsh reminder of Kiruna’s utter dependence on the mine; more positively, it has given Kiruna an opportunity to exercise its resilience, to diversify its economy and, as has happened recently, to pour money into the tourism industry. This is ‘Europe’s Last Wilderness’, with tour companies now offering northern lights tours, dog sledding trips and moose safaris. The City in Motion exploits the move: a guided, two and a half hour, $50 tour promises to show “the first area (of town) to be affected by the change”, and will offer “an insight into the near future”.

The resourceful Kiruna municipality is taking the opportunity to promote its resilience – their website states “Kiruna can be a

AsARCo ANthRopoCeNe ANxIetIes ANd the AesthetICs oF RemedIAtIoN c u lt u r a l p o l i t i c s r e c l a m at i o n by shane neill

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Arriving at site security, I sign a waiver acknowledging the presence of hazardous materials and heavy metals. I accept responsibility for my presence and actions. Protocols describe how I should avoid touching anything, how I should avoid inhaling or kicking up dust, and how I am to immediately wash my hands, clothes, and boots upon returning home. Soon this entire site will be exhumed, redistributed, capped, and covered with 1.5 metres of new, clean earth.

The original ASARCO lead smelter burned to the ground in 1902 after fifteen years of operation. Reconstruction was fuelled by an ambitious expansion of production capacity that required the creation of an expansive flat ground. The terrain was steep and rugged, carved by numerous arroyos that channel runoff from the Franklin Mountains to the Rio Grande during the sporadic but intense seasonal rainstorms. To form a mesa 15-20 metres above the previous foundations, the arroyos were infilled with any material available on site: molten slag cooled in-place, re-deposited slag, crushed rock, brick, concrete fragments, asphalt, and native soils.1 Gambling that the waste was inert, the convenient and efficient land forming process continued for almost seven decades as the smelter further expanded. When the plant was shuttered in 1999, the mesa had grown to cover 120 acres.

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Anthropocene anxieties are increasingly present in our collective imagination. Images such as those by Ed Burtynsky or Sebastiao Selgado feed these anxieties, placing first-world pursuits in opposition to natural orders.2 Additionally, shifts from industrial to ephemeral production are coupled with the rapid growth of cities into previously exurban industrial lands. The moral impetus to restore our relationship to the landscape is given economic force by our consumption of land. Engineers have developed creative remediative strategies that satisfy health, environmental and economic mandates.3 Correspondingly, the responsibilities of architects and landscape architects have been marginalised to the end aesthetics of the site. Who then is charged with the ethical imperatives that come with the reinhabitation of remediated landscapes? Elizabeth K Meyer calls such sites ‘disturbed’ and notes that even after they have been decontaminated, their unsettling effects remain.4 Remediated sites require new and imaginative reinhabitations. The present-day remediation of the ASARCO smelter faces additional challenges. It sits on the USA border across from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and while the toxic territory wrought over a century envelops both sides of the narrow bi-national valley, the remediation stops at the border. While both the EPA and the ASARCO remediation trust lack international jurisdiction, they do not lack culpability. However, their plans do not even acknowledge the informal Mexican barrio of Anapra that faces the smelter. Our imagination of the future stops at the border.

1 Malcolm Pirnie Inc. ‘Final Remediation Action Work Plan’ (technical report to Texas Custodial Trust, El Paso, Texas. April 2011. www.recastingthesmelter.com/wp-content/themes/ recastingasarco/downloads/site_documents/asarco-final-rawp-with-appendices-04-2011.pdf ) p 2-4 2 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, ‘Black and White Photography as Theorizing: Seeing What the Eye Cannot See’, in Sociological Forum, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2011. pp 438-443 3 See, for example, C N Mulligan, et al. ‘Remediation technologies for metal-contaminated soils and groundwater: an evaluation’, in Engineering Geology, Vol. 60, 2001, pp 193±207 4 Elizabeth K Meyer. ‘Uncertain Parks, Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society’, in Large Parks, eds. Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

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The history and transformation of the site, rich with layers of past and present life, is immediately evident if one cuts into the ground. The section’s physiography reveals the life that gave form to the material: shards of colourful floor tiles, hand-made bricks stamped Hecho en Mexico, scraps of twisted nineteenth-century wrought iron rebar, held in a congealed framework of once fluid molten slag. Even more striking are the colours that manifest the chemical life of the slag. For nearly a century burnt orange (arsenic), yellow (cadmium), cyan (copper), teal (chromium), sea foam (iron), grey (lead) and maroon (selenium) leached into the ground and the Rio Grande.5 Our subjectivities are shaped and reshaped by the ways in which we are simultaneously connected to – and separated from – the landscapes we occupy. Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as the ‘distribution of the sensible’6 offers architects an understanding of remediation not as the restoration of an abstract environmental order, but as the re-distribution of diverse orders that offer new connections to landscapes.

From these connections, is there potential to create new subjectivities? Too frequently, as is the case with Martha Schwartz’s McLeod Tailings project in Geraldton, Ontario, remediated land formations are merely passing spectacles for speeding motorists.7 An unoccupied landscape cannot engage – never mind redistribute – our sense of that landscape.

Peter Latz’s reoccupation of the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord provocatively engages the memory of the visitors. Though he is able to critically occupy the landscape, whimsical programs such as the adaptation 5 Malcolm Pirnie Inc. p2 6 Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004 7 For a critique of relational aesthetics, see Carol Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110, Fall, 2004. pp 51-79

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8 Roberto Puga, “Former ASARCO Smelter Site Project Status Presentation” (report to Committee for a Future El Paso, El Paso, Texas, September 2012. www.recastingthesmelter.com/wp-content/themes/recastingasarco/

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of an ore bunker into climbing walls undermines collective memory and reinforces the place of recreation and distraction within dominant consumer culture. Perhaps the most aesthetically effective remediation elements are the objects that allow remediations to ‘live.’ The methane pumps at Field Operations’ Freshkills Park in New York are unapologetically mechanistic. Lacking the condescending shine of designed consumer interface, these pumps create a non-identification with the thin-skinned bucolic landscape and point toward the observer’s place within the cycle of consumption and waste, within the history of the city, to the problems of the collective future, and to the dross life that is covered over.

Rio Tinto, the world’s third largest mining group, has purchased a trove of minerals and matte ore recovered through the ASARCO remediation for $8 million USD.8 Along with other asset liquidation, the speculative value of this this mineral wealth is now the key to the restoration of the Parker Brother’s Arroyo, the largest arroyo on site and a critical channel for municipal storm drainage. These funds could also allow the site to be covered over with 1.5m of clean earth to accelerate the viability of future commercial development.

Fortunately, the future of the site is yet undetermined. There is now a critical opportunity to point our imaginations away from preconceived notions of landscape and urbanism, pointing them instead to the life, history, and reality shared underfoot and across the border. To respond to such problems and to critically reimagine how we reinhabit such sites, architects must craft the aesthetics of remediation into an ethical tool. c

© Na ti o na l Envi ro nme nt Ag e ncy o f Si ng a p o re , 2013. Al l r i g hts re s e r ve d.

constructing geology Eight kilometres off the southwest coast of Singapore, an island is being made

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Land-scarce and in league with some of the wealthiest countries in the world, the urbanised city-state of Singapore has –since 1979 – pursued a waste management strategy that is the consummation of Western waste ideology – reclaiming waste’s productive potential and approaching its elimination altogether.

Apart from toxic and hazardous materials, non-incinerable waste and recyclables, all solid waste in Singapore is incinerated.

Reducing the volume of waste by 90%, a network of incinerators and waste-to-energy facilities work to transform household trash and commercial garbage into dull grey ash while generating upwards of 4% of the energy consumed by 5 million Singaporeans whose air-conditioning demands exceeded 5,000 MW in 2010.1 Like trash and garbage though, the 600 tonnes of ash produced each day from spent waste has to be put somewhere. In 1987, and at an enormous cost of S$610 million, Singapore began to create the world’s largest offshore landfill.

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Transported at night by covered barge to prevent windblown ash, incinerated waste is taken to Semakau landfill, tipped into cells and compacted by bulldozers. Once filled, cells are covered with a layer of topsoil and left to seed with native vegetation.

Lined with a continuous impermeable membrane, the 7 km long perimeter bund, designed to isolate toxic leachate inside the fill, supports a thriving coastal ecosystem on its ocean side – a feature lauded by the country’s own National Environment Agency (NEA) whose 2012 guide to the landfill: Habitats in Harmony, is teeming with bright and colourful photographs of marine life found on and near the landfill. In a bid to raise awareness about Singapore’s ongoing war against waste, since 2005 visitors have been welcomed to the landfill site where they can participate in a surreal conflation of recreation and active waste management while on organised tours – sport fishing, bird watching, stargazing and low tide trekking along the landfill’s shores.

Despite a surfeit of enthusiasm over Semakau’s technical and ecological prowess, Singapore’s bid to eliminate waste by burning it up and burying it beneath the surface of the ocean raises a vexing set of social questions. By muddying the distinction between waste and gain, Singapore’s example casts serious doubt on waste’s current ‘crisis’ dimension by showing instead how waste can be economically, socially and even environmentally productive; refuting at the same time a legacy of criticism and hard won gains against wasting behaviours – from the high pitch of 1960s environmental activism to our present ethos of sustainability2 – by appearing to endorse pleasure and excess as a form of environmentalism.

The saying goes that Singapore is a ‘fine’ city: importing chewing gum into the country you risk a fine of S$1,000; vandalism, $5,000; smoking in a public place, $1,000; littering, $1,000; and (if you are crass enough to do so, and to be caught) not flushing a public toilet will set you back $250 [S$1 = C$.80].

Not just a clever t-shirt slogan, the country’s well-deserved moniker points to the fact that this densely populated country of immense wealth maintains at the same time a superclean sensibility. As Southeast Asia’s premier shopping destination, Singapore’s current war against waste is the result of its rampant modernisation and the price of its prideful entry into a pantheon of globalised western nations. As recently as the 1970s however, with garbage cast indiscriminately into waterways, cluttering the streets and exiting open brick fireplaces in thick curls of black smoke, Singapore presented a very different scene. With municipal garbage collection performed by handcart, dumping relegated to swamps and wetlands, refuse piled up along roads and in alleyways attracting flies, cockroaches and rates, and with the tropical heat working to produce a deplorable stench, the country’s own NEA describes its late modern, waste history as a ‘primitive affair’.3 With the country’s few landfills nearing capacity by 1970, a tremendous effort was mounted by public authorities to implement a sophisticated and costly waste regime, completing in 1979, at Ulu Pandan, the first waste-to-energy facility in Asia outside Japan and expanding by 2009 to include four incineration

facilities at Tuas and Senoko, with a combined daily capacity of 7,900 tonnes.4 But despite these developments there was no forestalling the inevitable. Landfills continue to fill up with incinerated ash and a desperate need arose for new space to store spent waste. With the last remaining landfill on Singapore’s mainland at Lorong Halus slated to close in 1999, this tropical, land-scarce country faced a crisis of wasteful proportions; the only option, the NEA felt, was offshore.5 The world’s first offshore landfill created entirely from new sea space, Semakau landfill is a staggering example of a modern waste ideology driven to its technological limits.

Effectively re-enacting in just three decades the aspirations of most Western countries since their industrialisation, Singapore’s remarkable transformation foreshadows several unanswered questions surrounding these new waste practices. If ‘good’ environmental behaviour rests on the belief that waste and wasting are fundamentally unsound environmental practices, what does it signify now that waste and wasting are being re-employed to create new ecologies, energy sources and even social programming? With the landfill at Semakau slated to become a protected marine park, we might, at this point, revisit the observations of Marcel Mauss in his 1923 study of exchange and debt in Pacific Island societies where he looked specifically at the Haida and Kwakiutl potlatch as a system that governs the transference of wealth within and between communities. 6 Mauss observed three basic rules that governed archaic exchange practices: the need to gift, the need to accept gifts, and the obligation to repay. And although he views these forms of exchange as fundamentally different from his own modern money economy – since to be modern, according to Mauss, is also to be individualistic – many critics since Marx have argued (and the events of 2008 succinctly shown), individual participants in a money economy are no less susceptible to the temperaments of a total system; one whose prestations are no longer ‘gifts’ but an intricate relationship struck between consumption and production that works – like gift giving – to ensure its own perpetuation.7 35 d us ti n va l e n

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Enter wasting.

On the one hand, wasting is fundamental to this total system since it is practically synonymous with consumption – but waste, too, fits neatly into the fold. And here one has to firmly believe in the value of waste and its contribution to economic production.

The impasse to this realisation are modern cultural attitudes that conceal the value of waste beneath layers of taboo, from a deeplyfelt revulsion towards uncleanliness to its association with moral and economic depravity. From the earliest use of excrement as fertiliser to Parisian rag pickers, the re-use of industrial wastes to waste-to-energy plants and, now, artificial islands, garbage has and continues to play a prominent role in our modern exchange system. And while it may be hard to imagine lining your pockets with garbage, consider the fact that in 2010 Oslo pursued a plan that would have seen 200,000 tons of Naples’ trash shipped northwards to fuel Oslo’s own under-capacity incineration plants that supply the city’s heating.

Once you assign a value to waste, both as an economic activity and in its basic material form, it is not entirely farfetched to see how its exchange conforms to Mauss’s basic rules: like gifts, waste is given and accepted, and its repayment engenders a kind of self-fulfilling total system. Where Singapore’s example is useful is in showing that no matter how effectively you destroy, reduce or put waste out of sight, Mauss’s basic rules still rings true: despite the abstraction of gifts into capital, energy and islands, waste’s ability to repay again and again only cultivates the production of more waste. As with gifts (I give to you, so you give to me, and so I give again to you, etc. etc.) so too with waste: the consumption of goods compels the purchase of more goods, the incineration of waste compels the incineration of more waste, waste’s burial ensures its subsequent burial. In essence, waste’s

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re-use and repayment is really just a prolongation of its exchange.

Considered from another angle, the only effective way to curb the production of waste might simply be to stop collecting it in the first place. If indeed the only way to break the cycle of repayment is for someone to outright refuse a gift in the first place (an act, according to Mauss, that usually results in an individual being socially cast out), what would it mean today to deny waste’s ability to repay, to prohibit its usefulness as a measure against its perpetual reproduction?

What is insidious about this analogy (and why, I think, Mauss laments the moral depravity of a money economy) is that the debt incurred through modern prestations is not a debt that exists between you and your neighbour, or even between two communities, but a debt that is owed by individuals to the total system itself. Like the burning up of gifts and their transference to the spirit world, as a result of the extensive material transformation waste undergoes over the course of its reclamation, and how few traditional problems associated with waste (sight, smell, health rists) linger after its transformation, the ontology of waste as it drifts from a material thing into something immaterial (energy,habitat and social programming, for example) raises a considerable problem of perception. What, after all, are the consequences of wasteful behaviour when trash is transformed into an innocuous grey sludge and buried eight kilometres offshore? At once central to the well-being of an economic system premised on consumption, the issues surrounding waste’s material/immaterial flux and its ability to return, in exchange, an economic and environmental benefit is, at the very least, a vexing and often overlooked problematic resulting from new waste practices.

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In all probability, the ‘ability to repay’ invested in waste ideology is an inappropriate measure of both waste’s consequences and value, separated from a more complex set of socio-cultural questions and moral ambiguities, without considering the fundamental role wasting plays in an economic system that hangs on consumption. Which is not to say waste’s utility and re-use is a bad thing. The real potential for harm occurs when current practices are misrepresented as a rejoinder to the legacy of environmental criticism levelled at wasteful behaviours and the relentless proliferation of garbage in the first place.8 If the history of waste practices can teach us one thing it is that time and time again that with each innovative turn as the modernity has drawn closer to eliminating the problem of waste once and for all, cultural and social transformations wrought by modern institutions themselves have in turn problematised the very same objective.

Facing one such promise today, now is the time to nurture a little foresight. c

1 ‘Singapore 2010 power demand hits record high’, Asia One News, 13 Apr 2011, Web. http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Singapore/ Story/A1Story20110413-273423.html (Accessed 15 Nov 2012); National Environment Agency of Singapore, Envision 1 (Jan 2011): 21.

2 See, for example, Vance Packard’s seminal The Waste Makers. New York: D. McKay Co, 1960, and his scathing critique of planned obsolescence therein; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962; or even Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and transcendence in postindustrial society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972; for an concise foray into contemporary debate, two recent issues of Harvard Design Magazine (both subtitled: Sustainability+Pleasure) are useful: HDM 30 (Spring/Summer 2009) and HDM 31 (Fall/Winter 2009/10).

3 Marcus Ng Fu Chuan. Habitats in Harmony: The story of Semakau Landfill, 2nd edition. Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2012. p 8 4 Ibid., 11.

5 National Environment Agency of Singapore, Envision 1 (Jan 2011): 23.

6 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West, 1966.

Meaning literally ‘to nourish’ or ‘consume’, during the Haida and Kwakiutl potlatch, gifts are exchanged and even set fire to. Through their exchange and destruction, writes Mauss, gifting “implies giving something that is to be repaid,” or “the belief that one has to buy from the gods and that the gods know how to repay the price”.i By blurring the distinction between waste and gain, the incineration of gifts in anticipation of repayment during the potlatch provokes a reconsideration of the widely held belief that wasting produces waste by showing instead how wasting can (paradoxically) result in wealth. Mauss states: “Outside pure destruction the obligation to repay is the essence of potlatch”.ii 7 Ibid p40. Also see Georges Bataille, The accursed share: an essay on general economy, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991 in which Bataille’s reading of French sociologist Marcel Mauss underlies his own general economic theory premised in part on the desire and need to eliminate excess capital and labour.

8 For their part, the NEA has initiated numerous publicity campaigns and educational programs designed to instil environmental awareness into Singaporeans. Since 1990, their “Clean and Green” initiative has grown into a year-long campaign with the stated objective (in 2013) of “[promoting] the right social values and [instilling] pride for our environment,” and includes a series of eco-workshops meant to promote recycling, resource conservation and energy efficiency. For an informative glance visit: http://app2.nea.gov.sg/clean_and_green_singapore.aspx.

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the sisyphus project

the energy crisis | mythical thinking by clint langevin amy norris chester rennie

The Sisyphus Project was a proposal for Land Art Generator Initiative’s 2012 competition which invited teams to produce site-specific installations which provide aesthetically and pragmatically compelling solutions for the twenty-first century energy crisis. In 2012 the selected site was Fresh Kills Park, formerly Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island in New York City. The Fresh Kills site is a key monument to the relationship between aesthetics and amnesiac consumption. It is a topography drawn from a massively distributed world of objects which were consumed centrally by New York and then hidden from view. Like a retreating glacier depositing till or a river moving silt, the deposit of garbage at the Fresh Kills landfill has had a transformative effect upon the topography of the former marshland. Though occurring over a 55-year time span, rather than the geologic time scale of these natural phenomena, this downstream accretion of the byproducts of human life and industry from the neighbouring city has nonetheless resulted in a comparable transformation of the landscape. The daily iterations of this type of industrial erosion and deposition have formed strata of compressed epochs on Staten Island.

The most recent strata added to the site is the synthetic overburden designed to contain and conceal the 150 million tons of waste deposited at the site. When the engineered cap is complete, what was once the world’s largest landfill will be mistaken for a grassy drumlin. Field Operations’ proposed park design for the site compellingly calls for the introduction of diverse local ecosystems and for the activation of the park as a cultural landscape through human agency. The proposal’s recognition of the role of human agency in the creation of this landscape however, begins in the present. It ignores the historic relationship that led to the creation of this alien geography. While the proposal technologically acknowledges the requirements of the evolving anthropic geology beneath the landfill cap, the design fails to engage visitors in a conversation about this nature. Instead the design employs a strategy of picturesque concealment.

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The Land Art Generator Initiative’s desire for clean energy generated by an infrastructure that poses as art is driven by the same desire to forget both the sources and remains of objects that led to the capping of the landfill. Design conceals the infrastructure of energy production by making the generation process aesthetically powerful and thereby under the cultural purview of art. It becomes sublime but inconsequential. It is rendered visually inert and distant from its connection to work. The aestheticisation of renewable energy asks us to forget two ways in which renewable energy remains intractably connected to the mode of consumption which produces objects like Fresh Kills. First of all, high technology requires a massively distributed material supply chain which hides the true carbon cost of production in faraway places. Most importantly however, the contract implicit in the production of renewable energy that argues that energy should be produced and consumed automatically and at increasing levels, is not questioned when the nature of consumption appears to be transmuted into an inert matter.

opposite, top: The newest infrastructure at Fresh Kills, a network of boulder alleys and pedestrian pathways, is opportunistically embedded into the steepest areas of the two slopes in order to harness maximal energy from the falling rocks. right: Options for longer or shorter climbs and a natural variation in boulder size accommodate a variety of Visitor-Lifters, giving rise to recreational opportunities such as fitness classes or annual competitions to see who can produce the most power in the shortest amount of time.

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The Sisyphus Project proposes a series of mechanical power generators which capitalise upon the anthropic topography of Fresh Kills park, and provides park visitors with an opportunity to become an integral part of the power production system. Upon entrance to the Sisyphus project, park visitors are given the opportunity to select a rock from a pile. This rock is to be carried or rolled to the top of the mound where the visitor is encouraged to roll the rock down a number of precision engineered gutter slopes. After the release of the rock, the visitor relinquishes control to forces of gravity, collision and friction. Depending on the style and force of the release the rock may follow one of two gutter slopes connected to each release point. These gutter slopes are graded to allow the rock to tumble freely down, releasing the gravitational energy gained during its trip to the top of the mound. The gutter slopes contain

top: The sole emissions generated by the device are the boulders that make their way in time to the base of the slopes. The rocks accumulate over time, generating a gravity-fueled land art installation. above: Exposing the energy mechanism of the High Impact Low Level (HILL) power generators allows visitors to witness and comprehend the transfer and production of energy. They can also produce energy directly by climbing onto a platform and turning the flywheel crank.

opposite, top: A schematic section through a typical HILL power generator, the engineered cap, and the hidden landfill geology that enables the generator. below: The energy generation mechanism.

1. Rocks rolling down gutter paths collide with the steel strike plates.

1. The rocks rolls off the platform and moves to a collection area.

2. The counterweight falls, moving the impact plate back to its initial state.

3. The flywheel continues to rotate, storing the kinetic energy of the impact.

4. The energy stored in the flywheel is converted into power through a built-in dynamo.

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The drive to conceal and forget the reminders of our consumption is the result of an inability to accept the scale and nature of our own geologic force. The Sisyphus Project is an invitation for visitors to remember the tie between work and energy, and reflect upon the scale of consumption which our energy infrastructure allows us to achieve. c

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the tumbling of the rock, ensuring that it does not release its energy outside of the generators in an uncontrolled manner. The moment of each impact is very important to both the function and spectacle of the HILL power generator system. Here the precise transference of energy from matter can be observed by visitors on the device platform. The gutter slopes narrow as they approach the generators, focusing the energy of the kinetic body upon the point of impact and maximizing the probability of an efficient energy transfer between the falling kinetic body and the HILL power generator. At the focal point of the gutter slope, the rock disappears underground where it meets the strike plate. The strike plate, once impacted, transfers the energy of the rock to a rack and pinion system connected to a fly wheel. The rack and pinion is forced away from the impact, and the rotation of the pinion is transferred to the motion of the flywheel. Visitors observe a distinctive ‘shudder and spin’ effect during this sequence. The energy from the rock is now stored in the flywheel, a consistently rotating mass in the centre of the platform. Energy can be removed from the flywheel and fed into the grid at times of need by tapping its rotation with an electromagnetic dynamo.

1. The impact of the collision pushes a rack and pinion.

2. The rack raises a counterweight to signal impact while the pinion gear turns an axle connected to a bevel gear.

3. The bevel gear turns another bevel gear connected to another axle.

4. The axle turns a gear which turns the flywheel.

SKY: In their grand masterplan schemes for the world, architects seem to find the ‘final solution’ to all possible situations.

SMITHSON: They don’t take those things into account. Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entrophic change.

SMITHSON: [...]There is an association with architecture and economics, and it seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. They never seem to allow for any kind of relationship outside of their grand plan. [...] And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there. So it’s rather static way of looking at things. I don’t think things go in cycles. I think things just change from one situation to the next, there’s really no return.

— ‘Entropy Made Visible’ (1973)

Alison Sky, interview with Robert Smithson

a e s t h e t i c s o f e n t ro p y | at t h e c o n c r e t e p l a n t by karianne halse

Landscape processes approaching architectural conditions 1 Prelude The landscape Processes Conditions

The anthropogenic landscape we inhabit consists of different layers, traces, geological and man-made mechanisms and processes. Despite the fact that we experience it as immutable, the land we inhabit is inherently unstable. Natural actions like active tectonic plates and geological processes of natural agents such as air, water and the sun are, together with human activities like industry, cultivation and consumption of land, triggers of a constant modification of the landscape.

The inevitable processes of entropy1, decay and chronotopic changes initiates the setting for this narrative, which seeks to explore the relationship between a dynamic landscape and the creation of process architecture. The intention is to explore a way of comprehending the processes and forces of the landscape as an operational field, and use the transformational potential to generate architecture as conditions of mutual impact and interdependence on the landscape.

Entropy was a loaded term in the American land art artist Robert Smithson’s vocabulary: ‘it customarily means decreasing organisation and, along with that, loss of distinctiveness’. Basically, Smithson’s idea of entropy was concerned not only with the deterioration of order, though he observed it avidly, but rather with the clash of uncoordinated orders. Examples of entropy range from minor changes over a long period of time, such as increasing vegetation and sand displacement, to enormous destructions such as eroding coastlines, natural catastrophes and human devastations. The impact and speed of entropy may be generated at various paces creating varying characteristics, but it is always an irreversible process.

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Architecture as conditions

In the field of architecture, there is a common fear of unplanned changes caused by time; our work exists in its ideal condition the moment it is constructed – then the struggle of keeping it in a fixed state begins – a fight against different weather phenomena, decay, growth of weeds and daily wear and tear caused by users. There is a tendency to rather work against the landscape and the processes, restricting both the site and architecture within fixed frames, instead of focusing on the potentials of this transformation. By taking these matters into account, a new approach of possible aesthetic, functional and spatial qualities within architecture is conceived.

1 Entropy: the second law of thermodynamics – nature tends from a distinguishable order to a disorder in closed systems, leading to a state where all the differences are indistinguishable. This loss of energy can be seen as decay and deterioration

Investigations of landscape processes Flushing Bay NYC Concrete Plant

The different processes2 and forces within a landscape are unfolded through the optic of a concrete plant, located in Flushing Bay, NYC. The site is an eminent example of an area transformed by an intricate balanced system of geological and man-made processes. The coastline of Flushing Bay has been transformed due to human actions like constructions of piers, ports and other interventions, where the water acts as a transformative agent of erosion and sedimentation.

The bottom of the bay can generally be characterized as silt/ clay with some areas of sand. The runway extension at La Guardia Airport is held responsible, as the main channels are cut off causing a low level of energy. As a result particles of silt and clay settle in the area leading to an accumulation of mud. It might seem like a static landscape, but mud saturated with water is incredible unstable, and is prone to change any time.

The term angle of repose, which appears in both the geological3

The process of mixing

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and mechanical4 vocabulary, is essential to comprehending this subject. This term is embedded in all types of changes, and interpreted as a shift between conditions. It is a complex balance of forces - the level between stability and dynamics, which involves aspects of speed, time and movement.

The site, an industrial territory producing concrete, is a system based on its own logic and order. Every component is limited to a programmatic purpose, and the motivation of the actions is purely functional. By focusing on the term ‘landscape’ as a comprehensive metaphor, the area is transformed into an object of aesthetic sensibility. Through this approach, the man-made landscape is no less nature, in a way, than what is considered a ‘natural’ landscape generated by geological processes.

A classification of the processes of producing concrete, based on both the pragmatic and phenomenological aspects, reveals an interesting duality between the practical operations and the unintentional aesthetic effects upon the landscape:

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Constant topographical change

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2 Process, noun – a natural or involuntary series of changes – a systematic series of mechanised operations performed

in order to produce something 3 In geology the term describes the slope stability as the steepest angle that a cohesionless slope can maintain without losing its stability When a slope possesses this angle, its shear strength perfectly counterbalances the force of gravity acting upon it. Imbalance in the relationship between forces as gravity and resistant force can cause erosion, deposition and mass movement as landslides, rockfall and mud flow.

4 In mechanics it refers to the maximum angle at which an object can rest on an inclined plane without sliding down. This angle is equal to the arctangent of the coefficient of static friction between the surfaces.

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Pragmatic; Piles of gravel and sand are stored separately in different chambers, and subsequently transported onto the conveyor belt – leading into an immense machine which mixes the different components into concrete. The concrete is then transferred to concrete mixer trucks and directly transported to construction sites in the city.

Aesthetic optic; The area is a dynamic landscape of piles - an ever changing terrain of sand and gravel, framed and controlled by dividing, static concrete chambers.

The process of spooling

/ Ephemeral

accumulations of water

Pragmatic; Subsequent to delivering the concrete, the concrete mixer trucks turn back to the area where the next step is to rinse the tank and empty the containing mix of water and remains of concrete, ‘process water’, into the submerged settling basins at the site.

Aesthetic optic; The water level of the basins increases, and puddles of different sizes and depths occur near the water pipes.

Ephemeral traces of actions materialise, emphasising directions and frequency.

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The process of recycling

/

Particles obscuring the atmosphere

Pragmatic; The concrete is crushed by a machine and the pieces sorted into two different piles by size – to be transported and stored separately in different chambers.

Aesthetic optic; The air is filled with dust, spread and intensified by the wind - blurring the area into an epic scenery.

2 Barnacle removal plant The process of unfouling 5

As a testing ground for developing architecture as conditions a restoration plant removing barnacles from boats is implemented in this dynamic landscape. The process of removing barnacles can be seen as a negentropic operation, where energy is added to maintain the boats in an ideal condition. This activity is not a complicated operation and can be carried out using simple tools, but it is an extremely frequent and laborious kind of work. Also, there is a lot of biological and chemical waste involved, where the contaminated remnants from anti-fouling paint need to be stored and recycled in a proper way.

The unfouling-plant is characterised by a contradictory and dialectical relationship between the negentropic process and the increasing entropic effect. This demonstrates the concept of entropy; it is impossible to preserve something in a fixed position. The barnacles need to be removed on a constant basis – a repetitive, cyclic process. When energy is added in one place to keep the entropic effect away, the disorder is relocated to some other place in the system.

Step1: Removal of shells

/ Water chamber The boats are pulled up and high-pressure cleaned with water to remove the outer-shells of the barnacles.

In the chamber beneath, which serves as a water recycling chamber, a membrane delays the running water, creating a moist environment where the spatial condition is slowly changed by mud, algae and other processes of fouling.

The shells are subsequently transported onto a conveyor belt and stored in chambers at ground level. The slow process of storing and filling up the chambers with barnacle shells takes years. The calc of the shells will be dissolved when exposed to rain, which will lead to a new process; an allogenic succession where the vegetation is increased over time, radically changing the character of the industrial landscape. Through the dry ground and between the concrete structures, a great diversity of plants will grow.

The architectural scheme is based upon two layers: an active ground floor where all the mechanical processes are performed - and a series of sub-terrain chambers, serving both rational and phenomenological purposes. The steps of the operation are:

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5 Fouling, noun: – the accumulation of unwanted material on solid surfaces to the detriment of function. Fouling is usually distinguished from other surface-growth phenomena in that it occurs on a surface of a component, system or plant performing a defined and useful function, and that the fouling process impedes or interferes with this function.

Step2: Removal of barnacles and husks

/ Chemical

chamber

The biological waste containing remains of anti-fouling paint is removed and piled up as a landscape element in an open container, which is immersed and connected to an underground chamber, thus preventing the contaminated content from being released into the environment. The lower part of the container collects the polluted water, which results from waste being exposed to rain and excess seawater.

The constant process of filling the container leaves no visible signs until the water reaches its maximum level and the gravity is greater than the resistant force of the shutter. The water is released in the instant of a moment, manifesting the shift of forces – the angle of repose. This sudden shift will cause various effects within the chamber underneath, such as a more immediate moist environment, traces of chemical fluids, and ephemeral aspects such as sound resonance of water and the falling shutter. The blackbirds that eat the biological waste from the container above - connected to the chamber with adjustable hinges - will instantly respond to the shift, recoiling the action. The sky turns black, filled with screaming, flying birds - making the event perceptible at distance around the Flushing Bay area.

Step3: Chemical cleaning

/ Chemical chamber Positioned at the same spot, the boat is cleaned with chemical solution. / Dust chamber The boat is polished and sanded - a pipeline transports the dust into a glass-chamber connected with the service area. The container also serves as a window between the space and the outside, filtrating the light through particles of dust.

section, chemical chamber

Step4: Polishing and sanding

Step5: Painting

Finally, the boat is painted with anti-fouling paint, and released into the water in clean state. In a few months this operation will be performed once again.

Underground chambers

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The system of passive underground chambers is operated and affected by active structures, for the pragmatic purpose of closing and opening the chemical chamber at day/night time; others are closed off or subdivided based on the seasonal changes that affect the plant. The temporary absence of the structures generates open slits, instantly changing the spatial condition by altering the light and creating new connections and relations. Besides the abrasion6 between the fixed concrete chambers and the movable structures, which, over time, leaves traces of forces, processes and actions - this additionally exposes the chambers, making them more vulnerable to external phenomena like moisture, rust, algae and mud.

6 Abrasion (geology) noun – the process of scraping or wearing away; – the mechanical scraping of a rock surface by friction between rocks and moving particles 7 The category of passive locomotion includes movement by fluid stream or air transport, physical attachment to another moving body, and gravity – all conditions in which the object moved does nothing itself to produce motion. Initiative locomotion, is defined as locomotion through an environment of any medium (water. soil, air, wood, etc.) by virtue of the entity’s own controlled kinaesthetic and kinetic abilities.

3 Epilogue ‘[...] the very concept of energy prevents us from drawing any concrete conclusions as energy transforms each conclusion into a new beginning and opens up new opportunities for thinking and acting. Each end contains both the nostalgia for what it lacks and also the promise of the novel and unforeseen.’

—S. R. Pansera, ‘Beyond Entropy’

/ nature’ The ambition has been to explore the dialectical relationship between the machine and the landscape, weaving the structure into the complex, intertwined systems of processes on the site.

The relationship between the architecture and the landscape concerns both passive7 and active8 locomotion, where the landscape affects the architecture - spanning from the elements being displaced, which leads to a new revelation of a secret space – to the reverse situation where phenomena like rain and seawater trigger an integrated mechanism. This allegory establishes a translation of the vocabulary and terms which apply to geology and ecology, into man-made landscapes - and moreover to architectural matters which become a sort of conglomerate of building and landscape, nature and machine.

Synthesis ‘architecture

8 Movement is a characteristic inherent in all machines; operations where material or non-material is moved, or shaped. Mechanics, though, do not work the same way a motor does: in mechanics, movements are simply propagated, not created.

process of erosion / sedimentation

Architecture of suspense

SMITHSON: I mean planning and chance almost seem to be the same thing.

— ‘Entropy Made Visible’ (1973) Alison Sky, interview with Robert Smithson

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Time is of great importance and presents a diversity of experiences - through the linear changes, as abrasion on surfaces and structural displacements, to the cyclical aspect where changes applies to specific seasons or changes at an hourly basis; from the gradual change to the instant occurrence of the event. The different factors involved, such as the quantity of boats being cleaned, the amount of shells and biological waste, the volume of rain, the number of people working and visiting, etc., determine the speed and frequency of these changes.

By developing some ‘focal points’ based on assumptions of probable changes, potential change is embedded within the architecture. In other areas, the unpredictable forces of nature take control and the structure constitutes a framework that time and processes can work with and within. The place will perform differently from one instance to the next; a theatre of staged uncertainty. It will require attention to discover some of the changes - others will be predictable even before the action takes place, leaving the place in a state of suspense. c

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Lot awaiting development, off of Interstate Avenue in Portland, Oregon, 2006

A photograph of geology records the activities of the seemingly static, suggesting the direction a future might take based on remnants of a past. It was noted by Manuel De Landa that, as mammals, we are part of a prehistory of the mineralisation of the world; our cities with their first rock walls expressing the making-mineral of our species. Human biological time is a short intensity of force upon the earth; geological time an enduring and enveloping clause of planetary force majeure.

We are remnants of the mineral, to which we will return. The camera, whether iPhone or Hasselblad is a sophisticated mineralisation producing the illusion of an image, whether fixed by light on silver or platinum or by the placement of carbon or ink deposited on paper or pixels on screen. The time it takes to capture an image, say of an ancient city onto a sensor, is but an infinitesimal moment within the time it took for the concatenation of forces to produce the human and earthly conditions of its possibility. The ancient city loses its mass to become a perspective, an ephemeral transparency.

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There is a dignity and pathos in this modest encounter. Face-to-face with the scene we are to capture, we are instead captured, enraptured by the time on display of our seemingly infinite other. We are but a slice and remnant of this time. Of our photograph it can be said that it is a remnant of a remnant, a partial mineralisation of what we will become. c

The Painted Hills, within the John Day formation in central Oregon. Deposits beginning circa 35 million years ago. 2006

becoming mineral g e o l o g i c a l p ro c e s s e s lithific ation by j o h n c a lv e l l i

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in the summer of

2012

plant architect

inc developed a semi-permanent o u t d o o r i n s ta l l at i o n i n d ow n tow n c a m b r i d g e , o n ta r i o , and a permanent web i n s ta l l at i o n t i t l e d

‘channelled buried m ov e d l o s t : w h e r e d i d m i l l c r e e k g o ?’ i t wa s c o m m i s s i o n e d f o r cambridge galleries’

‘common exhibit.

g ro u n d ’

t h e p ro j e c t u n r av e l l e d o u r d i s c ov e ry o f m i l l c r e e k a n d i t s h i s to r i c t r a n s f o r m at i o n s .

h i s to r i c a l r e c ov e ry rivers by va n e s s a e i c k h o f f

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hidden stratum

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The intention of this project was to make a specific installation next to a large, constructed culvert for Mill Creek, where the creek went from an open flowing channel to disappearing under the town of Cambridge (the re-named town of Galt). The installation was to reflect this abrupt burial of the creek and its subsequent outlet at the Grand River, making possible a visual connection between both daylit ends of the creek. As research for the installation unfolded, so did the questions. Like treasure hunters on an expedition, we saw hints, were led on false leads, were privy to rumour and hearsay until we pieced together the real and altered trajectory of the form that was buried.

Investigation Defining Mill Creek

Maps are visual representations that provide information on the complex nature of site. They are generated to document research, to make a historic record or to relay specific types of information. We turned to current maps, historic maps and aerial photos of Mill Creek and the town of Galt. In this initial research we found conflicting information between recent aerial photos from GoogleMaps, the Grand River Conservation Authority and GIS maps generated online. On each, the creek’s route, its form through Galt and its outlet into the Grand River were shown differently. This was the first indication of how ‘lost’ Mill Creek was in the community, as we could not confirm even this basic information. We knew Mill Creek was channelled underground at the culvert, disappeared under the town, but not its route through town or where it met the Grand River. James Corner writes in Taking Measures Across the American Landscape ‘in contrast to the motion of traveller, the static nature of the photograph [and in our case, maps] is unable to convey the temporal experience of passage, the emerging and withdrawing of phenomena, and the strange ways events unfold’.1 We set out with research in hand to walk around Cambridge looking for clues of where we could find Mill Creek.

The Grand River creek outlet confirmed the location shown in the aerial photo. From here, there was a clear visual path along a small road with views of ascending elevation change – a good sign. As we rounded the local bowling alley, a large piece of bridge infrastructure and old foundation walls retained a significant elevation change between the bowling alley and a newer street above. The buildings we had seen along this route thus far were more recently built, but these foundations appeared to be much older.

There were no signs of the creek but this old fragment of infrastructure was promising – from the top, the roadway was aligned directly with the culvert that took Mill Creek underground.

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1 Corner, James. Taking Measures Across the American Landscape.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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We went back to the Grand River to look at the other outlet location shown on the GIS maps. This led us to a former knitting mill with a blocked outlet in its foundation wall which also serves as an embankment wall on the Grand River. This was most definitely the historic outlet for the creek. From this location, we encountered a series of mill buildings aligned along what we guessed were once the banks of Mill Creek. Parking lots now fill the spaces between the buildings, but the positioning of the buildings matched the route shown on the GIS maps. We continued ‘upstream’ until a large bus transit plaza stopped us – this extensive concrete island had wiped out any traces of Mill Creek. Our only sign of water here were storm drains. As we crossed the bus plaza, our original culvert location came into view so we knew this route was also possible.

Further research at the City Archive and Public Works helped us to piece together enough information to understand Mill Creek’s wandering route. The changes to Mill Creek, the community memory of its physical location and its impact on the community of Galt (now Cambridge) have changed much since initial settlement. This is not atypical of communities whose origins are tied closely to a river or some other water source. These rivers and creeks adapt to changes in community interest and ultimately, their specific economies. As the community lived with the creek, they learned to manipulate it and use it in many constructed ways, moving from agricultural uses to industrial ones. When the railway brought new opportunities for shipping and receiving in this area, the creek was compromised to accommodate the tracks. When industry shifted from mills to other kinds of land development, the transportation focus shifted from trains to cars and the creek became a hindrance. The economics of the town changed, the creek was sent underground, its visual presence was lost.

Tools Conveying the timeline

The timeline of changing configurations, constructed boundaries and historic uses of Mill Creek underpins an installation that reconstructs the creek for travellers along its route.

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The physical changes that happened to Mill Creek are covered by four words – channelled, buried, moved and lost – which developed the framework to map the historic but phantom creek at ten locations across Cambridge.

Each site highlights a moment in Mill Creek’s history and allows a person to connect the creek with an action and a location, even though the water may no longer be visible. A family of descriptive graphics was developed to tell the story at each point, allowing for the installation to be experienced both as a route and as individual sites. Mill Creek’s history of almost 200 years is mapped onto the ground in a visual way, allowing one to experience the whole timeline all at once – a type of new fiction for Mill Creek. c

The ten-point walk is paired with a website, millcreekgalt.ca, that showcases archival maps and photographs of the lost creek, its ponds and bridges. And the process described in this article can also be found at branchplant.com/design/cbmlex

l a p i da ry l ay e r s wo r d s by t e d l a n d ru m

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Tunnelling Through the runaround superficial

Tunnelling through

Wins Maps Plants

the race, the tortoise and the hare fallacies of Zeno fortuity - and loot!

Tunnelling through

Heaves-up Reaps Slips-into

ego-shed sarcophagi utilities more certain worlds forgot what we never knew we knew

Tunnelling through

Stores Speeds

chores (that yet may stir long lain masses) what firm roots seek

Tunnelling through

Finds Faces

equivocal-antinomy-forks matriculate down purple’s red, orange’s yellow, green’s blue

Tunnelling through

Disappears Catches

while others (waiting) melt time below its belt

Tunnelling through

Channels Smuggles Stretches

wilderness Buddha dreams latent limits of categorical truth

Tunnelling through

Remembers

what weather means, for Zeus

Tunnelling through

Cuts Zones Digs

all sames differences too (inner and outer) pleasure-measuring diversity shares

Tunnelling through

Tempers Pacifies Loosens Flushes

what is new instantaneity the bowels of history demagoguery poop

Tunnelling through

Drains Tickles Tames

logic shaken through a sieve the ramparts of antipathy and fear volcanic arts, in advance of mortal fire

Tunnelling through

Cultivates Picks

micromagnanimities petty lockets’ infra cagey turf war Zoos

Tunnelling through

Mingles Humbles Connects

our lingering bones eternity finite me to impossible infinite you

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Undermines Shortcuts

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Tunnelling through

fear of falling vo l c a n o e s iceland by will craig

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Entering a volcano in Iceland, one of the most active volcanic regions in the world, is something that should not appeal to an ill-equipped tourist such as myself. However, subterranean expeditions have long been a fascination for travellers of the imagination. As I look up at the chamber and the brilliant hues formed in this furnace through a thousand years of intense heat, I am reminded of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’1, featuring a descent into Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull volcano by Professor Lidenbrock and his companions – into the mysterious and treacherous bowels of the earth. This once-extreme form of tourism is now accessible through tourist brochures. Through a trial tour, operating with restricted access, I am able to glimpse the remarkable residues of geological activity within the Thrihnukagigur volcano. To allow more paying customers to view the site, a new tunnel is proposed to take visitors deep inside.

Iceland itself is a remote island, with less than 320,000 inhabitants, mostly concentrated in the capital city, Reykjavik. It lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, marking the border between the Eurasian and North American Plates. It is a geological hotspot with many active volcanoes; in March 2010 Eyjafjallajokull erupted for the first time in nearly 200 years. This eruption, which lasted several days, sent ash high into the atmosphere, cancelling over 100,000 flights and grounding 3.5 million passengers around the world. It also happened when Iceland was on its knees financially, its banking sector in ruins and ongoing negotiations for significant financial bailouts from the International Monetary Fund. 2 Initially, the Eyjafjallajokull eruption was detrimental to Iceland’s tourist and aviation industry due to reduced travel.

Then things started to change. Global media coverage in the wake of the volcano came as a blessing, with widespread interest in the volcano. At first, some local companies started offering helicopter tours and ‘lobster on the lava’ dinners. 3 Then came a tourism centre with artefacts, exhibits, films and photographs of the volcano. Within a year, there was a 15.8% increase in international visitors, the largest visitor increases from China (69.1%) and North America (half from the USA, a third from Canada). 4 Exploding Eyjafjallajokull, captured in all its infamy by the global media, drew the attention of thrill seekers the world over. As blockbuster eruptions are events which recur relatively regularly, and although Iceland is financially rock-bottom and volcanoes have plagued its people for centuries, the land of fire and ice may now have been delivered a lifeline.

We clamber up the unforgiving rock, the wind beats down on us. Just yards away, the ground, shaped over millennia, tumbles into a bottomless cavern. The rest of us wait quietly as they lower a small group of people into the opening. Soon it is my turn – I am harnessed in.

The swing stage used to lower us seems basic but operationally sound. I am fascinated but fearful. The ground beneath me is replaced by darkness. It is not the thought of falling that concerns me so much as the fact that I am now descending into a magma chamber.

What the erupting volcano provided for many was an interruption to everyday life. Eyjafjallajokull was, for the vast majority of people, a thrilling story experienced through reproductions in the global media. The tourist frenzy which followed was sold upon widespread imagery of the eruption.

Similarly, our experience of being inside a 4000 year-old magma chamber is enhanced through brochures, televised imagery as well as the informative tour itself. In the The Tourist, Dean MacCannell describes this process of authentication as ‘sight sacralisation’, whereby a tourist attempts to re-live an event through reproductions of it. 5 Through artefacts and imagery surrounding the event, rather than viewing the sight for the first time, we feel as though we are rediscovering it, as if we are on an archaeological expedition.

Standing inside an extinct volcano, we become aware of the quite terrifying significance of our location. The importance of places which have become markers of events are explained by John Urry as a way of directing the tourist’s gaze. 6 Although we have no actual memory of the events, we are compelled, like Indiana Jones or characters from a novel, to re-trace them as if they were our own memories.

As we descend beneath the earth’s scorched surface, we simultaneously conjure an adventure from our own delusions.

We imagine a time and a place unseen by humans, lurking for centuries below the earth’s surface. The territory of this past event is untouchable, yet somehow we find a way to remember it. This is a theme of Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil: “We do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten”. 7 The film begins with a scene of three children on an Icelandic road in 1965. The narrator of the film appears to be reading letters written by an imaginary, foreign source. There is a heavy use of cinematic montage, the collaging of different images, spanning across continents, discarding traditional concepts of time and place. Marker makes the point that images or representations of events are fleeting and cannot be substitutes for real or felt memory.

The significance of the first scene and the difficulty Marker has in truly representing the event become evident when the film finally returns to Iceland, to the town of Heimaey, an island off the south coast of Iceland, which literally means ‘home’. In 1973, when this final scene was filmed, a lava flow engulfed the island and buried half of the town. Returning to the original scene of the three Icelandic children, Marker reminisces, “I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year ‘65 had just been covered with ashes”.

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1 Jules Verne. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1871. [first published in France as Voyage au centre de la terre. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1864] 2 The New York Times, ‘One Word: Eyjafjallajokull’ [3/26/2010] http:// thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/one-word-eyjafjallajokull/ 3 USA Today, ‘From Iceland to Hawaii, Volcano Tourism is Suddenly Hot’ [4/23/2010] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/ destinations/2010-04-22-volcano-tourism_N.htm 4 Icelandic Tourist Board publication ‘Tourism in Iceland in Figures, April 2012’ [2012] available at http://www.ferdamalastofa.is 5 Dean MacCannell. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976 6 John Urry. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies.

London: Sage, 1990 7 Chris Marker. Sans Soleil. Argos Films, 1983

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Tourism may have an ability to revive geological phenomena in human consciousness. Ironically however, what tourists are compelled by is their mystery and lack of human interference.

Geological phenomena are potent markers in our history, affecting communities and scarring landscapes – like Heimaey, Pompeii and Krakatoa. These are events which literally burned human history, and are not easily forgotten. In this way, these events may remain truly authentic, even sacred. A fear that has terrorised humanity (and strangely, delighted tourists) is the inevitable recurrence of the event, perhaps on this island, inside this cavernous cellar. I fear we could be buried alive. c

Convoy at dawn to Trinity Site, October 6, 2012

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Our small convoy passed fields thick with yucca, rising tall against the dawn sky. Before reaching the missile range, from the car window I snapped blurred photos of dense desert growth, evidence of the paradoxical effect of vast tracts of militarised land untouched for decades, regenerating to a pre-peopled state.

We arrived at Trinity Site at 7:00 a.m. While the crew set up their tents and information booths, I walked the gravel path to ground zero, spending a solitary hour crisscrossing the fenced perimeter in the flat morning light.

As the day passed, crowds swelled then tapered, long lines of visitors streamed through the gates, an unlikely pilgrimage to the place where the first atomic bomb was tested in a remote area of the New Mexican desert at 5:30 am, Mountain War Time, July 16, 1945. Conducted after the end of the European conflict during World War II by the top-secret Manhattan Project, the test was codenamed Trinity by lead theoretical physicist, Dr J Robert Oppenheimer. Under U S President Roosevelt, the project team raced to be the first to design and build an atomic device.1 The Manhattan Project established three large facilities: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where gas diffusion and electromagnetic process plants were built to separate uranium 235 from its more common form, uranium 238; Hanford, Washington, where nuclear reactors produced a new element called plutonium; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, established to design and build the bomb. At Los Alamos many of the greatest scientific minds of the day laboured over the theory and construction of the device. The scientists settled on two designs for an atomic bomb, one using uranium 235 and another using plutonium. Because of its more complex design, project leaders decided a test of the plutonium bomb was essential before it could be used as a weapon of war. 2

trinity site d i s p l ay | a p o c ry p h a by m a ry k ava n ag h

The Atomic Age was born when the nuclear device, codenamed ‘The Gadget’, was successfully exploded, the resultant mushroom cloud rising 38,000 feet and the flash being described as a light brighter than a dozen suns. The 19-kiloton-yield explosion took place on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, about 230 miles south of Los Alamos. Every living thing within a mile of the blast was obliterated. Surrounding ground zero was a crater almost 2,400 feet across and about 10 feet deep.3 Desert sand was fused into a green coloured glass called Trinitite.

This glass, which still litters the site, remains radioactive, with radiation levels in the fenced, ground zero area ten times greater than the region’s natural background radiation. Today this 3,200 square mile range is named the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) and is actively used for non-nuclear weapons testing.

1 Several nations in active development of an atomic bomb tried to determine the progress of the Nazis under physicist Werner Heisenberg.

2 Both uranium 235 and plutonium are fissionable and can be used to produce an atomic explosion. The uranium bomb was a simple design and scientists were confident it would work without testing. The plutonium bomb was more complex and worked by compressing the plutonium into a critical mass which sustains a chain reaction. The compression of the plutonium ball was to be accomplished by surrounding it with lense-shaped charges of conventional explosives. They were designed to all explode at the same instant. The force is directed inward, thus smashing the plutonium from all sides.

3 Many scientists and support personnel, including General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, watched the explosion from base camp ten miles southwest of ground zero. All the buildings at base camp were removed after the test. Most visiting VIPs watched from Compania Hill, 20 miles northwest of ground zero. Although no information on the test was released until after the atomic bomb was used as a weapon in Japan, people in New Mexico knew something had happened. The shock broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many at least 160 miles away.

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Trinity Site. top row, left: a replica of Fat Man, codename for the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki by the United States on August 9, 1945. It was an implosion-type weapon with a plutonium core, similar to The Gadget, the experimental device detonated at Trinity just 3 weeks earlier. top row, right: one of the archive photos mounted on the perimeter fence at Trinity Site shows The Gadget completely assembled atop a 100-foot steel tower. middle row, left: tower footings that remained after the atomic blast. middle row, right: in another historic photograph on the perimeter fence, a soldier examines the footings months after the test. bottom: the Atomic tourist experience

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I visited Trinity for the first time on October 6, 2012, one of over 3000 visitors that day.

One after another, they stepped up to be photographed next to the modest obelisk that now marks the blast site. Some brought tokens to leave behind or pictures to hold, some brought their children, others their dogs. Everyone brought cameras. They were patriots, peace activists, veterans and scientists. They were history buffs, seasoned travellers, curious citizens and honeymooners.

One man asked me if I could feel it, the residual energy of the momentous event that had occurred here. He wondered if it was possible to know nothing of what had happened and to feel it anyway. This was the question we carried while scavenging for signs of the site’s original expression. Here so many bodies seemed heavy with the weight of history, this legacy of mass destruction and death contained in a narrative of national pride and scientific heroism.

Since the end of the Cold War atomic tourism has been on the rise.6 Many sites associated with former WWII nuclear programs have been opened to the public and attract an ever-increasing number of visitors. The idea of top secrecy seems to be a powerful tool of attraction. High on the list of popular atomic tourist destinations are the sites linked to the Manhattan Project.

Atomic tourism is not a new phenomenon. It inadvertently started in the early 1950s when U S President Harry Truman designated a large piece of the Nevada desert to be used as a test site for nuclear weapons, tests deemed necessary in case such weapons were used against American citizens. If there were any concerns about the risks of the nuclear explosions, they were effectively erased by a major government publicity campaign that helped the people of Las Vegas to abandon their misgivings about the detonations, and eventually market the atomic explosions to promote their city. 7 While nostalgic notions of duck and cover and the fear of nuclear apocalypse belong to the Cold War era, the perception of historical distance creates the conditions for people to collectively reflect on that era, while the continually changing face of military policy, technology and war, ensure a cyclically renewed urgency around the subject of advanced weaponry.

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At Trinity, the culminating site of the so-called Nuclear Trail, a thousand-mile trip up the I-25 from the Mexican border to Wyoming and along memorable sites of America’s nuclear past, visitors are moved by a sense of awe and mystery associated with the bomb’s destructive power as well as with those responsible for its creation. Trinity was declared a national historic landmark in 1975. The 51,500-acre area includes base camp, where the scientists and support group lived; ground zero, where the bomb was detonated; and the McDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core of the bomb was assembled. In addition, one of the old instrumentation bunkers is visible beside the road just west of ground zero.

The U S Army has been responsible for Trinity’s status as a tourist destination. The site, deep in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, does not lend itself to heavy traffic. However, on two days each year, the first Saturday in April and October, the site is open to the public and visitors in the thousands travel to experience where the atomic age first began. Public interest in Trinity Site has remained intense since it was opened to the press for the first time on September 9, 1945, shortly following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Photographs of General Groves and Dr Oppenheimer talking with reporters as they point out the remains of the tower holding the device, were widely distributed in the press. In 1953, after the site clean up led by the Atomic Energy Commission, visitors attended the first public open house.

Since that time, the steady increase of visitors along with the effort to interpret its past, testifies to the continued importance of Trinity in the larger story of the Manhattan Project. Despite the fact that Trinity might be described as visually anti-climactic, thousands of people visit the site each year. 4 Visitor surveys show that the majority of tourists are from New Mexico and neighbouring states, with fewer from distant states and other countries.5

Tourists browse the perimeter fence encircling ground zero at Trinity Site

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4 Museums and parks dedicated to telling the story of nuclear technologies, legacies of the arms race and the Cold War, are being created and visited at an astonishing rate. Recently, an increasing number of critics have been looking at atomic tourist sites for their ‘unreal’ representations of atomic history. Nuclear museums in the United States continue to struggle to control rhetoric that informs public understanding of nuclear weapons development. American cultural critic, Marita Sturken has argued that the representation of political history has become a place of much controversy, a place where historians, preservationists, museum directors, government representatives, human rights advocates and the public come together to navigate the often-contested terrain of national political narratives. (in Berger, footnote 5) 5 Jenna Berger. “Nuclear Tourism and the Manhattan Project,” Columbia Journal of American Studies, 2003.

6 Atomic or nuclear tourism, a growing global phenomenon, attracts millions of visitors each year to significant sites of atomic history, such as museums dedicated to interpreting and preserving atomic research and production, vehicles that carried atomic weapons, sites where atomic weapons were detonated, or sites of nuclear accidents. Public interest in these sites parallels the increasing interest in preservation and heritage tourism, as well as an emerging trend of disaster tourism, in which people visit sites of devastation (Katrina, 9/11 ground zero) keeping pace with occurrences of real life devastation, and extreme or adventure tourism, defined as thrill seeking or a search for authentic experience even at the cost of personal risk.

For example, since 2011, Chernobyl tours have consistently sold out, and museums of atomic history have reported an increase in attendance by 1220%, with museum officials attributing the increase to a renewed interest in nuclear reactors and nuclear radiation as a result of Japan’s Fukushima accident of March 2011. (Chicago Sun-Times, April 27, 2011) 7 Las Vegas. An Unconventional History. PBS documentary, 2005.

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Shuttle bus running between ground zero and the McDonald ranch house where the bomb was finally assembled Arriving at the ranch house, partially restored to its pre-WWII condition and the takeover of the ranchers’ land by the US government during the formation of what was to become White Sands Missile Range The Plutonium Assembly Room in the ranch house where technicians performed final assembly of The Gadget The shuttle bus waiting to leave from McDonald ranch house to go back to ground zero.

below: Trinity Site with its obelisk, Fat Man replica and members of the U S Army below: Atomic tourists at the obelisk, erected in 1965 to mark ground zero

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Backfilled, buried building that covers the original crater floor with its coating of still-radioactive trinitite, sand turned to glass by the heat of the bomb

Trinitite and 1951 packaging, on display at Mineral Museum, Socorro, New Mexico right: San Lorenzo Catholic Cemetery, Socorro

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On the way out of Socorro, I stopped at San Lorenzo Catholic Cemetery, maintained by the families of the deceased. Socorro, 75 miles south of Albuquerque and the closest city to Trinity Site, is situated at the north end of the White Sands Missile Range, about 70 miles away. Socorro has a fine mineral museum on the campus of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with spectacular mineral and rock specimens from the southwestern United States. It was at this museum that I saw my first piece of trinitite on display before finding tiny pieces littering the ground at Trinity Site.

Between rows of unassertive grave markers, fallen crucifixes and faded flowers, I found solace: this death, at least, I recognised.

A tattered American flag flapped erratically in the wind and I felt this was the right place from which to take a sample of sand, something I did at each significant research destination.

As I crouched by the side of the road just outside the fence, a wicked needle-like thorn pierced cleanly through the skin of my heel. Blood spilled onto the sand and I felt a shock of understanding: that in order to take from this deceptively benign place, I must leave some of myself behind. c

Listening prostheses sound | e a rt h ly n o i s e by n i c k s ow e r s

Horn Antenna, Holmdel, New Jersey, circa 1960

Anechoic chamber at the Harvard Acoustics Research Laboratory, 1943-1971

Doug Aitken, Sonic Pavilion drawing, 2009. The pavilion was built at Inhotim, Brazil

An anechoic chamber is also a kind of prosthesis, serving to eliminate sound reflections in a room. Bell Labs built the first one; Harvard’s Acoustics Research Laboratory followed. John Cage famously sat in Harvard’s anechoic chamber for a period of time and emerged with a striking observation: I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.

Cage’s conclusion was that there could therefore be no such thing as silence. As long as we live, a fundamental, background hum, pervades our experience.

If silence is not possible, if a pure signal can never be achieved, a counter-project to the one of noise reduction emerges, which is to amplify that background sound. Such is the allure of the Sonic Pavilion by Doug Aitken – a mile deep boring into the earth with microphones and accelerometers at varying depths. We hear the sounds of the earth, of seismic plates shifting, of a background geologic hum, transposed to the range of human hearing. This representation is not at all trying to hear anything, to cull any particular signal or data set. It is simply a project about listening. Listening for the sake of listening, for the pleasure of recording that which is buried, masked, and otherwise unlistenable.

The listening prosthetic is ultimately about itself, which is partly why that photo of the Horn Antenna is so compelling. Yes, as a piece of technology, it is out-dated. Like the sound mirrors, it is a ruin. It is no longer fired up to listen to the background waves of the Universe. But the larger project of augmenting the act of listening continues. Let it be a monument to listening. c

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I came across this image of the Horn Antenna by chance, just flipping through images of Bell Laboratories. The image itself speaks of a colossal effort to listen to something. Was it a particular sound that was sought out here? Not sound, but another kind of wave energy would be collected in this ear in the landscape. This ear, with its ability to rotate and point to a particular part of the sky, could subtract out all the radar and radio waves inundating the electro-magnetic landscape.

This engineering effort to eliminate noise led to a most unexpected discovery. In the 1960s, research at the Bell Laboratories was conducted in concert with NASA’s Project Echo using the above-pictured Horn Antenna. The antenna was constructed to eliminate noise in order to receive a precise microwave signal reflected by a satellite in orbit.

The Horn Antenna is significant because of its association with the research work of two radio astronomers, Dr Arno A Penzias and Dr Robert A Wilson. In 1965 while using the Horn Antenna, Penzias and Wilson stumbled on the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. Cosmologists quickly realised that Penzias and Wilson had made the most important discovery in modern astronomy since Edwin Hubble demonstrated in the 1920s that the universe was expanding.

Granted, the ‘noise’ was not audible in Penzias and Wilson’s microwave radiation, but the concept is directly analogous to sound waves. Sound mirrors along the UK’s southern coast, built to detect aircraft in the decade leading up to WWII, were, like the Horn Antenna, used for a very specific purpose. These concave concrete shells permitted a listener – or a microphone – at the focal point of the reflection to pick up the droning sound of approaching aircraft before the planes were visible. The giant mirrors become outdated before the war, effectively replaced by radar. No great scientific discoveries would be made here, nevertheless, the project is critical as we turn our attention to new possibilities for listening prostheses. What other vast engineering efforts with the aim of sharpening signals have potential for other listening purposes?

Some level of defiance towards nature has always been at the core of the built environment. We construct simple lean-to roofs that protect us from the elements, be they rain, snow, wind or sun.

We expand these constructs to protect not just the inhabitants, but also our things. They evolve to become more enclosed and permanent so that we can better defend against the environment and ultimately control the conditions in which we live.

i n f r a s t ru c t u r e | f o u n dat i o n c o n d i t i o n s by b r a d f o r d wat s o n strive on

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t h e c o n t ro l o f

n at u r e i s wo n , n ot g i v e n

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the engineering building of t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f w yo m i n g

They become connected to an infrastructure of plumbing, electrical, communication and transportation systems allowing us to dictate our environment. The same expanding lineage occurs in the progression from the worn path to the paved superhighway. I am interested in these efforts to create our place and the hidden infrastructures that are part of this ‘Control of Nature’.

Unstable Ground Swelling Soils in the Front Range

This specific line of investigation focuses on the ten most populated counties in Colorado, all located along the Interstate Highway-25 corridor of the Front Range make up 81% of the population in the state. This region is growing at a rate of 16.3%, slightly lower than the entire state at 16.9%, but significantly faster than the U S national rate of growth at 9.7% (all numbers 2000 – 2010 change in population). These areas of development are located in a region where 69.7% of the soil contains clay having ‘high swelling potential’. Swelling soils in Colorado were legally defined as ‘soil and rock that contains clay which expands to a significant degree upon wetting and shrinks upon drying’ in House Bill 1041 (1974). This bill also requires development in areas designated as geological hazards to be engineered and administered in a manner that will minimise significant hazard to public health and safety or to property.

This condition dramatically impacts the construction methods and systems along with increases in time and resources when compared to construction in areas of the country that do not have swelling soils. While most areas of the United States contain some amount of expansive soil, F H Chen stated in Foundations on Expansive Soils (1988) that states like Colorado are particularly susceptible to damage from expansive soil movement because of the large amount of surface clay and alternating climate from rain to drought. Jones and Holtz estimated in 1973 that swelling soils contributed to $2.3 billion in damages in the United States, impacting twice as many people as floods. In 1987 this number was updated by Jones and Jones to be $9 billion in damages to buildings and infrastructure. It is within this framework that following photographs, collages and objects have been created.

The combination of rapid population increase in the counties surrounding Denver, Colorado, and the presence of ‘swelling soils’ or expansive clay soil conditions in those counties, has prompted the development of expensive, complex and, in the end, hidden foundation conditions.

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b ra d fo r d wa ts o n

left from the top: 1 Soil with swelling clay during excavation 2 Formwork and reinforcing over drilled piers and void form to accommodate soil movement 3 Drilled pier and grade beam with over-excavation to allow for ground swelling

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above, from the top: 4 Installation of moisture prevention 5 Placement of hollow core structural plank on grade beam prior to topping the slab with over-excavation soil pile, seen in the distance 6 Consequent slab for low-rise construction ready for the framing of walls

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Construction: This series of photographs, taken over a five month period, show the installation of 200 drilled piers and grade beams, with a moisture prevention membrane, to support an approximately 40,000 square foot primarily single story structure in the Front Range of Colorado. The Geo-Technical Report for this site called for a minimum of 12-inch clear space between any horizontal structural member and the undisturbed soil to allow for the ground to swell without impacting the structure.

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Testing Need Desire This series of collages examines the relationship between the Need Desire for development and the testing / structure needed in swelling clay (or expansive soil). Here a series of prototypical Desires are examined by a series of assembled testing apparatus.

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The argument can be made that the measures taken by the State of Colorado to modify the construction requirements for building in this geological region, will reduce the cost of repairing buildings and infrastructure in expansive clay soils – less than the cost of repairs for buildings built prior to these codes. However, this does not address whether there should actually be development in this region, as we are still hindered by the position that nature can be controlled.

As we peel back the veil of the ground surface to examine the infrastructure below (see the model on the facing page), we do not find any added benefits such as an underground train system connecting the city or an infrastructure of communications.

Rather, we find a structural system coping with a geological condition that significantly increases the costs of building the same sprawl found elsewhere, where land is perceived to be cheap. There is an uncalculated cost incurred for this public and private denial of the conditional demands of swelling soils.

Density may be one solution to this issue, concentrating cost and amortizing it over large-scale construction and shared infrastructure – i.e. this would be the role of the city. The other approach is to embrace this condition and to develop it for its advantages, freeing us from a constant and expensive battle against control. c

Testing Support This series of collages examines the relationship between the structure above and the structural support in swelling clay through acknowledgement of the weight supported above on thin contrived supports. Here the Tool for Testing the Soil is held in an upright position based on the model’s pose, being both highly contrived and relaxed at the same time.

Unstable Ground This model explores a prototypical development on swelling clay without the mask of the ground. By removing the cover that is perceived to be the terra firma, one can see the tenuous condition that is created by the structural strategy for support.

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Videograms of process – Assiniboine River

Notes from the Field mapping | l ay e r e d l a n d by t r e n t wo r k m a n

Or the intersection of time geology and the prairie

The movement of water traces and retraces a prehistoric path on the land. The Assiniboine River, which flows eastward across the Canadian prairies, is a fluvial remnant of a vast glacial lake that once covered the majority of the province of Manitoba. To see and experience this river first-hand is to synthesise the disparate time scales, human and geologic, operating in a singular moment. Â To oscillate between the deep time of the river and the anthropocentric transformations of the territory requires a shift in how one reads the landscape.

The act of ‘reading’ is an essential part of landscape architecture: radically subjective, it places the designer both in the landscape, to read, record and interpret, and also in the studio to represent and communicate. These initial, emotional responses to landscape provide a platform for design. The process of constructing The Plan of the Dead Glacier included here is my preliminary interpretation as a young designer of the geologic timescale in the prairie territory.

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Base of The Plan of the Dead Glacier mapped in chalk

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Tr e nt Wo r k ma n

N o t e top l eft i m a g e: ‘ M a p o f th e be ach e s an d de ltas o f th e glacial Lake Agassiz in so u t her n M a ni toba ’ . In Of Explor ation of the Gl aci al Lake Agassi z in Man i tob a.

G e ol og i ca l a nd Na tura l Hi s to r y Su r ve y o f Can ada,1890. p 74.

Projecting Lake Agassiz on chalk

In 1890 American mineralogist Warren Upham combined his first-hand field observations of end moraines, beaches and fluvial channels as comprehensive evidence of the existence of glacial Lake Agassiz1. At the time, the glacial lake was still a contested theory. Upham superimposed the outline of the pro-glacial lake on the most accurate image of Manitoba of the time, a 1890s survey map, which included lakes and rivers as well as the recently administered quarter-section grid. Upham’s approach of layering the former glacial lake onto a contemporary map compressed the deep time of Lake Agassiz with the present, confronting the current landscape with its shaping forces.

The Plan of the Dead Glacier expands the scope of Upham’s work to include the area covered by the ice sheet that melted or died in its place over millennia. Contemporary representations of the prairie region often focus on political boundaries, reinforcing the idea of a neutral, divided landscape. The Plan neglects these boundaries, shifting to a view of the land as a field of relations. The base of this map emphasises the snow cover that is characteristic of the region. On this aerial sketch, snow cover reveals the underlying geologic condition by the subtle differentiation of the soft soils of the interior, and the exposed bedrock of the surrounding Canadian Shield.

The scale of the prairie is almost unimaginable. I begin the drawing with a grid as a reference [image on p37]. Each segment represents 250 square kilometres. The Assiniboine River slides along the bottom of this drawing, collecting water from this vast region on its path eastward to Manitoba. The sketch captures the territory in a single view, expressed in chalk to connect to its temporary state. Philosopher André Corboz proposed the idea of the territory as a palimpsest, where uses and inclinations exist for a period of time and are subsequently erased with only traces of a former existence.2 Transferring this logic to the Assiniboine River is to consider its current state as transitory, a result of sedimentary processes, erosion and increasingly, human intervention. Drawing out this territory is an active process, a way of synthesising experience and representation. The sketch offers insight between the river I can experience and the territory I can only imagine in fragmented segments.

As a preliminary reaction to the territory in progress, I have begun to construct a hybrid cartography that addresses the relationship between observer and understanding fundamental to relevant critical projects in the landscape. This subjective attitude expands the context of the Assiniboine River past its provincial borders in an attempt to shift the time and scale of the fluvial channel. By the spring, the Assiniboine River will attempt to accommodate a deluge of snowmelt, precipitation and runoff drained from the vast territory mapped here in chalk. It is in these illuminating territorial moments where competing understandings of time come to the surface and spill into public consciousness. While rational approaches to flood design and engineering have focused on the controlling of the river, the fragmented approach described here aims to shift the discussion to the temporal state of the river and moreover the inescapable geologic agency of the land. c

To understand the territory’s time dimension I add a layer to this base. I project the extents of the melting ice sheet onto the snow cover. The duration of ice sheet’s death is a long event, occurring over thousands of years. The melting of the ice sheet was in response to Earth’s rising temperature. Lake Agassiz appeared in the midst of this process to accommodate the waters once held up in the ice sheet’s mass.3 Over the course of an hour I film, draw and represent the ice sheet, as well as the emergence and decline of Lake Agassiz careful to observe the shifts between stages. To mark the changes, I delineate their outline overtop of the base. In this action I compress these thousands of years into a duration I can readily perceive. Trusting this process I am able to reflect on the depth of the territory before me. Recording these actions allows me to visualise layers of the landscape I could not imagine.

1 Geological and Natural History Survey of Canada. Of Exploration of the Glacial Lake Agassiz in Manitoba. Montreal: William Foster Brown & Co, Upham, Warren, 1890 2 Corboz, André. Le territorie comme palimpseste. Doigène, 1983. pp 121, 14-35

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3 Teller, James. Natural heritage of Manitoba: legacy of the ice age.

Winnipeg: Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, 1984.

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l e g i t i m ac y | maps by j o s h ua c r a z e

Under the soil the people I In June 2012, I saw resplendent herds of cattle along the SudanSouth Sudan border. We toiled together along muddy roads as cloudbursts announced the definitive end of the dry season. The rain seemed to erupt from the very air around me, as if it had grown tired of its liquid burden. It was difficult to see more than five metres ahead.

What I could see were those cows. In Pariang County, on the southern side of the border, one particularly proud herder drove his cows ahead of him, as we slipped and stumbled in the mud.

The small brown cows of the Baggara Arabs, out of place in South Sudan and struggling in the rain, mixed with the large black bulls of the Mbororo, their skin slick and glistening, and jostled with the prized cattle of the Nuer, their horns decorated with tassels, and with whom the young cattle-guards stole whispered conversations, as if with illicit lovers.

The history of the border region can be found in a herd’s makeup. Those small brown cows leading the herd were a testament to decades of raiding between border communities, whilst the tasselled cattle told tales of marriage between the Dinka and the Nuer, the two largest groups in South Sudan, both of which use cows for bridewealth.

Cows continually cross lines, both political and geological.

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II The contested border region between Sudan and South Sudan marks the edge of two distinct ecological zones. North of this region, the desert begins. Below, there is the ironstone plateau and lush greenery, fed by South Sudan’s rains. The rainy season lasts four months each year and is often catastrophic, creating floods that sweep away fields and huts.

On one side of the border, there is too much rain. On the other, not enough.

The border region itself contains open grasslands nourished by a network of rivers that flow longitudinally though the north of South Sudan, and provides vital grazing for the herds of transhumant people in both countries.

For many groups now on the northern side of the disputed border—such as the Mbororo and the Baggara—South Sudan’s independence in 2011 has meant being cut off from crucial grazing land, as state institutions and military check-points replace the complex inter-community grazing agreements that dictated movement in the border region long before there was talk of an international frontier cutting across it.

Sudan achieved independence in 1956. Since then, there has been forty years of war. After a peace agreement was signed in 2005, a fragile calm has prevailed in the border region,

continually interrupted by raids and military clashes.

Now, as South Sudan struggles into existence, one of the major challenges both countries face is how to deal with pastoralists groups whose movements in the past have paid scant regard to political borders. Nowhere are these challenges more pressing than in Abyei.

III Two groups inhabit Abyei, an area the size of Lebanon whose sovereignty is contested by the two countries. Until May 2011, when the Sudanese army invaded the area, Abyei’s principal inhabitants were the Ngok Dinka, a transhumant group that is part of the larger Dinka people of South Sudan. Every dry season, the Misseriya—a nomadic Arab group that primarily live north of Abyei itself—migrate into the area in search of pasture for their cattle. Meetings between the elders of the two groups would traditionally determine the flexible path of these migrations according to a delicate calculus of ecological conditions and historical ties.

The second civil war changed all that. The Sudanese government tried to defeat the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the principally southern group fighting for the overthrow of the government. It sponsored groups of Misseriya militias that razed Ngok Dinka villages, and consolidated Sudanese control of Abyei’s main oil fields.

In 2005, at the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that brought Sudan’s twenty-year-long second civil war to an end, Abyei was such a controversial issue that the protocol determining its future was written by the American team at the negotiations, in an effort to break the deadlock. According to the Abyei Protocol, the extent of the area was to be determined by a committee of international experts (the Abyei Boundaries Commission, or ABC), which was ordered to “determine the area of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905”.

An international dispute, made even more complicated by changing patterns of pastoralist movement in the twenty-first century, was to be resolved in reference to a colonial decision made at the turn of the twentieth.

If only things were so simple.

It is important to look carefully at mandate of the ABC. It assumes that there was an area that was transferred, and that this area is equivalent to the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms. If both these contentions were correct, then the commission’s work would merely be a question of searching the historical archive relating to 1905 for the elusive Ngok Dinka.

left: Captain Percival’s Sketch Map from his 1904 journey through Abyei. Percival was a British officer whose sketch maps were used to make the provincial maps of Bahr el Ghazal province. In December 1904, he proceeded south via Keilak and crossed what he thought was the Bahr el Arab, before fording another river, which he reported to be the Kiir, some fifty miles south. Because the court case this essay deals with was mandated to rule on whether the Abyei Boundaries Commission had exceeded its mandate (to determine the area of the nine Ngok Chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905), maps of the period became a crucial source of evidence.

The maps, however, are problematic. Take Percival’s. He reports crossing the Bahr el Arab, and then the Kiir. But the Bahr el Arab is the Arabic name for a river that is known in Dinka (the language of the people of Abyei) as, you guessed it, the Kiir: leaving us no way of knowing which rivers he actually crossed (an error he later acknowledged in 1907). We can assume, as the Abyei Boundaries Commission did, that the references to the Bahr el Arab are actually to the Ragaba ez-Zarga (or the Ngol, as it is known in Dinka),a river to the north of the Kiir, but there are so many tributaries, it is hard to be sure. below: an extract from Percival’s sketch map

right: a photograph of the accessions register of the Sudan Survey Department from 1905-6.

It gives a sense of the slow accumulation of details (and errors) in the colonial record. This, and Percival’s sketch map above, were used by the Abyei Boundaries Commission in their report on Abyei’s borders.

for a group: the Ngok Dinka, a group that—being transhumant— didn’t even inhabit a strictly delimited area, but rather moved around between camps, alternating between rainy season and dry season grazing sites. So on the basis of a colonial transfer of responsibility for a transhumant group, a new international border was to be determined. The ABC attempted to forrmalise the grazing areas of the Ngok Dinka, transforming flexible paths into firm territorial lines.

The ABC’s report, when it came out, was immediately refused by the Sudanese government, and by the Misseriya, who rightfully feared that if the area of Abyei included their dry season grazing, and was controlled by the Ngok Dinka that they had raided during the second civil war, they would lose access to vital land.

Following an outbreak of violence in the territory in 2008, and with continuing deadlock over the ABC’s report, the dispute over the borders of the area was referred to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which was mandated to determine whether the ABC had exceeded its mandate, and if it had, to suitably amend the borders of Abyei.

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But there is no mention of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms in the historical record for 1905. No mention at all. There is talk of the territory of Sultan Rob, as the colonial officers called him (otherwise known as Arop Biong, Chief of the Ngok Dinka), but one must either assume his territory is equivalent to the area of the nine chiefdoms—and, even worse, there is no map of the territory of Sultan Rob—or one must assume that the area that was transferred was not that of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms.

There are no maps of the transferred territory. The colonial officers responsible for Abyei made only occasional trips to the area, and when they did visit, they came during the dry season— the period of Misseriya migration—which meant that their view of the area’s habitation was partial at best.

The maps are also full of errors. Captain Percival’s 1904 sketch map, on the previous page, details him crossing a river he calls the Bahr el Arab (the river of the Arabs, literally translated), before fording another river, which he calls the Kiir (or ‘river’ in the Dinka language), some forty miles further south. The Bahr el Arab and the Kiir are the Dinka and Arabic names for the same river, leading to no little uncertainty as to Percival’s actual journey.

Confounding the mandate of the ABC, it is quite likely that an ‘area’ of land was not transferred at all, but colonial responsibility

left: This 1961 map indicates the way transhumant movements are not simply lost wanderings, but something more like the path of a boomerang., dictated by the changing seasons. below: This map was made by the last assistant district commissioner for West Kordofan, then the homeland for the Misseriya.

B a r b our’s The Republ i c of S o u th Su dan : A Regio n al Ge o graph y (1961), p1 5 0

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IV In The Hague, corpulent lawyers from Cambridge, representing a Sudanese government that decried the hand of imperialism, insisted that the ABC had exceeded its mandate by considering oral histories. The colonial record, the lawyers of the antiimperialists argued, was perfectly adequate for understanding the extent of Abyei.

The Cambridge legal team did legal battle with Gary Born, a fiery Yale lawyer, representing the SPLM, who claimed – with some justification – that one can’t determine very much by looking at the patchy colonial archival record and that other sources should be consulted.

The cows, so to speak, took the stand. The territory of the Ngok Dinka, the SPLM lawyers argued, could be determined by reference to geology. Misseriya cattle, they claimed, were shaped by different environmental conditions: their short legs, like those of the Baggara cows, could not handle the muddy southern rainy season and its difficult black soil. Ian Cunnison, a veteran ethnographer who could hardly have imagined that his fieldwork – carried out in the 1950s – would be used as evidence in a twentyfirst century court case, took the stand. Dinka cattle, he observes in his work, can “stand mud better” than those of the Misseriya.

It might seem that the SPLM lawyers are the good guys here, arguing for a more encompassing understanding of transhumant habitation, and fighting for a people who have been repeatedly forced off their land by Misseriya militias backed by the Sudanese government. But, as with everything else when it comes to Abyei, things are not so simple.

The SPLM lawyers were arguing for a type of geological determinism, in which soil is not simply fertile ground for agriculture, but the rigid grid from which one can determine which people live where. Under the soil, the people. Though I never thought I would write this, I agreed with the Sudanese government during the arbitration, when it said that soil types, rivers, and mountains, never determine actual boundaries between people.

T ibbs , M. & T ibbs , A., A Su dan Su n se t (p r ivat e ly p u blish e d, We lkin , 1 9 9 9 ) p 5 0 (SM An n ex 4 7 ) p 5 0

V The PCA was handed a mandate every bit as impossible as the ABC’s. In the end, in what was widely interpreted as a decision intended to placate the Sudanese government, it reduced the area of Abyei, and placed Heglig, the area’s largest oil field, outside the territory.

That was four years ago. I remember listening to the decision in France, having followed the oral pleadings in the Netherlands.

Since that day, I have spent most of my life studying and thinking about Abyei. Since then, the territory has endured raids, bombings, and endless political negotiations. The Ngok Dinka remain largely displaced, and the territory’s status is still contested.

The ramifications of the PCA case, though, are more iniquitous than simply the situation in Abyei. All along the Sudan-South Sudan border, communities have begun maximising their claims to territory, transforming claims to areas of shared rights into claims of exclusive ownership: as if each transhumant group was its own little state.

People make arguments on the basis of geology. This is our soil, I often hear, meaning not simply that it is owned by us, but that we are the only ones who have a right to it, and that our way of life is consonant with the soil.

Up on the Unity State-South Kordofan border, in Pariang County, there are herds that betray a different history: a history of coexistence that takes place on top of the soil, and isn’t limited by it. c

L i enha rdt , G . D ivin ity an d Ex pe r ie n ce . T h e Re ligio n o f th e Dinka. O x fo r d: Clar e n do n Pr e ss , 1 9 6 7 . p 8

left: A map from the greatest ethnographer of the Dinka.

It was used by the government in the PCA case to argue that the Ngok all live below the River Kiir (they are marked as just below what on this map is called the Bahr el Arab). below: A history of Abyei’s peace agreements.

Cra ze , J . Cr e at in g Fac t s o n t h e G r o u n d: Co n f lic t D y n am ic s in Abye i. G e n eva : S ma l l A r ms S ur ve y, p 1 7

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far left: A basic map indicating the location of Abyei.

FAO

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left: Land cover. This map indicates the geological split referenced here in the article

m e r e di th c a r r uthe r s

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sound | land happens by d o u g l a s m o f fat

1 Promenade Bellerive 2 Pine Beach 3 Parc du Bout-De-L’Île 4 Natatorium 5 Allan’s Hill Park 6 Parc Alexandre-Bourgeau 7 Port of Montreal 8 Avenue Fortin 9 Île Girwood 10 32e Avenue 11 Hydro Corridor 12 Parc-nature du Cap-Saint-Jacques 13 Hydro Quebec 14 Stade Olympique 15 Parc de Versailles 16 Lakeview Memorial Gardens 17 Carrière LaFarge 18 Rue Hortie 19 YUL 20 Parc Nicolas-Viel 21 Rue Griffith 22 Parc Arthur-Therrien 23 Cedar Avenue 24 Avenue Troie 25 Centre

me r e d i th c a r r uthe r s

What would Montréal sound like if played on a vast turntable?

Montréal Phonographe is a record of what might be heard as a needle traces across the island’s varied surfaces, cuts through its snow banks and jumps its highway barriers. It is a document of a landscape transduced into sound.

A spiral trajectory was plotted across the island, from the wet edge of the coastline, across snowy November plots and inwards to the quiet centre of Parc Mont-Royal. Twenty-five sites were selected along a volute path sectioning the island into smaller and smaller segments.

Each mark of the pin on the map revealed its own ragged circle of terrain: a distinct amalgam of surface textures and weather conditions. A one-minute recording was executed at each site by moving a stylus across the chosen locations. A path was drawn across hard-packed snow, slick asphalt, spalling concrete, heavy mud, tidy brickwork, glassy ice and brittle leaves.

The rough-hewn, but sensitive, all-terrain stylus was built out of landscaping tools, plumbing parts and poplar lumber. The balsa-wood needle was shaped and mounted in an anti-shock chassis. The needle was fitted with a pair of contact microphones then jacked into the recorder.

The resulting twenty-five tracks were lightly edited for release. There is no post-processing, other than the ears of the artist, the mastering engineer and the engineer who cut the dub-plate, who all adjusted the equalisation and final levels.

Montréal Phonographe becomes a kind of map, resisting the shifts of scale between physical observation and cartographic notation. Any attempt to navigate with this map demands that one stops and listens while every curve, crack and furrow are revisted once more, in turn. c

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vi d e o st il l s f r o m mo n tr e a l ph o no g ra ph e . c a

4 Natatorium 8 Avenue Fortin

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15 Parc Versailles 17 Carrière LaFarge 21 Rue Griffith

the edge, harboured fantasies of distant places while toiling away their days. They could not ignore who owned the vistas offered them. Times change, money changes hands. Some truth masquerades as eternal currency. Today, only the nouveau riche, suspended high in the aeries of luxury living, can aspire to rival with the incomparable views of the old captains of industry.

Given such a cluttered perspective, is it better to submit, turn your eyes away? No. Whoever is kept from looking ahead can discover the truth at the tip of their shoes.

Bend your head, prick up your ears, open yourself to whatever trembles, shudders, quivers, and yet persists. Above all, ignore the master’s voice. Listen to the feeble signals that manage to naturally escape the ambient noise. Isn’t the seagull’s displaced call, lured by its appetite for fish n’ chips and lost among the downtown pigeons, enough to remember the water?

Isn’t it enough for the wind to slide through the open window, stroke my neck like a friend detailing a secret message with their index finger? An electrostatic shiver courses up my spine to the ends of my hair, incites the desire to leave this window, where I interfere with the signal’s purity, and go pronounce my solidarity with the insular cause. Goodbye! See you later! I leave to stretch fragile lines along the streets, stir the world with the tips of my shoes.

Even the grain barons, the captains of industry, did not give themselves the right to build higher than the cross that radiates electrically at the mountain’s summit. The lords of this lowly world know they must pretend that higher powers exist to bolster their claims to omnipotence. Celebrate the Lowly One! The mountain nailed to the m e r e dit h c ar r u t h e r s

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montreal phonographe

montreal | to p o g r a p h i e s by da n i e l c a n t y

5 Allan’s Hill Park 11 Hydro Corridor 12 Parc-nature Cap-St-Jacques

Cities are not just built on ideas.

I like work well done and I’ll never content myself with following an island’s contours on a map. Maps don’t lie; they gracefully distort the truth. We once believed the world was flat. What did we know of islands then? Did we imagine them afloat on water, unmoored from any subsoil anchors, like the Earth itself, planted in the void, holding the sun and firmament at arm’s length? Who could reasonably consider such ideas when faced with the reality of islands?

At the foot of the mountain, its silent heart, the city shields the island. The highest towers reflect one another in their numerous windows. They speak amongst themselves in a language that ignores us, and which we will not learn. The river’s odours dissipate in the effluvia of traffic, the haze of modern living, long before they reach us. Here is the core of the illusion. Take a deep breath. Go back to the beginning of the story.

Once upon a time, the masters of the port, the grain barons, traded the evidence of our insularity for a promise of prosperity. They built a city that became ours by hiding the island’s reality. The immoveable ramparts of the grain silos, solid pyramids at the end of the avenue leading to the port, the brick facades of the ancient factories, conceal the way to the river. Let’s not fool ourselves: if we blast away this stony decor, we would only find another hiding behind. Beyond the concrete and the brick, an iron curtain: the suture of rails, the metal of containers, the moving armature of the port’s ships, evident as stones, slow as icebergs as they start to sail again, wailing like antediluvian beasts. Long ago, the labourers and warehouse workers, perched high along me r e d i th c a r r uthe r s

22 Parc Arthur-Therrien 24 Avenue Troie 25 Centre

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island’s midriff reminds that our island does not float in the void; that it is a fold of the subsoil, and that humanity evolves on the surface of a submerged landscape.

We live our lives in the zone of revelations. When the new snow silently comes to drape its immaculate shroud over everything, softly espousing the land’s folds and bends, detailing the signal’s amplitude, its thickness, will you at last recognise what sculpts the void’s glorious mass? Ideas of eternity last only so long: as long as we hang on to them.

When I receive the signal, I leave my window and venture out to measure the vague contours of the island. Incapable of flight, I intimately know the network of the island’s streets, its suture of rails, its canals’ ravines, all that scars and digs into it. I’ve learned how to weave through its labyrinth, move far from the babble of its pretend core, slip beyond its decor of industry, and find viewpoints from where I snatch glimpses of our forgotten shore.

I shouldn’t deceive myself about the work that awaits. My steps crunch through the snow, remind me that I am here, floating, furrowing through the core of things. The world might speak in a foreign tongue; it cannot be written without us. Look at the clouds. At the foot of the sky, I form sentences whose true meaning escapes me. Look at the water, the ice flows. A flat world is only an image. A sound saves me.

Answers with its unknown name, which is also my name. I advance in the ephemeral temporal zone; retrace its frontiers; fold and connect its edges. The shore is only an idea of itself. Step by step, I measure the fleeting perimeter, the uncertain coast of the island. Surface. Signal. Seam. The operation is endless, yet it imprints a direction. c m e r e di th c a r r uthe r s

coming issues call for articles On Site review comes out twice a year. Each issue’s call for articles is announced here, 6 months before the next issue comes out. The proposal deadlines are January 1 for the Spring issue and July 1 for the Fall issue. Six weeks after the proposals have been reviewed, the final articles are due, with all the images, credits, permissions and footnotes.

We have specs, we have guidelines. They can be seen at www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles.

issue 30: ethics and publics fall 2013 ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st July 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles

What is good design? Who decides, and who is design actually for?

Architecture and cities: both are used, occupied, loved, hated, and ultimately adapted by people very distant from original design processes.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff has pointed out that the discussion of ‘ethics and publics’ is relevant to both recent discourse and practice given the sort of ‘ethical turn’ in architecture of the last 15 or so years. He cites relational aesthetics, assemblage theory, actor network theory and dialogism as the theoretical underpinning to such discussions.

We would add Eyal Weizman’s work to this topic.

More generally, we are interested in what it means to intervene significantly into the lives and the environments of others. We want examples. What is this alleged turn to ethical architecture? What constitutes an ethical urbanism, and whose ethics are they?

And who are our publics: must we know and understand them, or are they an abstract genre of users? Is our obligation to the here and now, or to the future?

On Site review is called On Site because we are interested in projects, events and situations on site, i.e. not just on paper or as text. This issue could be very theoretical, but we want to bring the theory to built work. Your work.

See Thomas-Bernard Kenniff ’s full call for articles at www.onsitereview.ca/call for articles

issue 31: photography cartography maps and pics spring 2014 ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st January 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles

On Site review has always had a phobia about architectural photography: those wide-angle shots that make buildings look impossibly dynamic, all thrust and soar, so we ask our contributors to take their own photos of whatever they are talking about, presenting the world as they find it as designers.

Early Canadian Architect covers from the 1960s were all drawn and the inside pages are mostly drawings and diagrams. Now, in most architectural magazines, you mostly see photographs; drawing is a CAD file and the hand is absent. When Jack Diamond published a book of his travel sketches – hand, pencil, watercolour, there was a sense that photography is not trusted as much as the drawing, yet there have never been more photographic images in circulation.

Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket, everything is potentially a photodocumentary. With issues about representation, about authenticity, about instrumentality, are photographers gatekeepers, interpreters or simply recording instruments? Is there such a thing as raw data; should there be such a thing?

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Thus, On Site 31, on the transmission of information through image, rather than text.

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Maps have always been particularly coded descriptions of the world: who owns it, who claims it, who names it, what is important to know about it. Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning, published in 1989, was a revelation: one cannot trust that maps have anything to do with ‘truth’ but instead are drawings of world views. Since then, the term ‘mapping’ has come to describe almost any kind of information array.

Because architects and urbanists have long used drawings as the texts of their trade, we would like to look at maps in a very wide sense: we can read a plan and section as we read a map: a diagram of a set of relationships, sometimes structural, sometimes geographic, sometimes social. And city plans, although they bear a resemblance to maps, are often merely diagrams of intention, loosely laid onto a topography. Should we give up the term drawing and replace it with mapping? Are they the same?

contributors

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martin abbott is a Master of Architecture graduate from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and currently lives in Delhi, India. His fascination is the city and the social, political and economic interdependencies which define their existence. www.futurestudio.info heather asquith is an architect interested in the rural landscape and its ties to urban places. She practices in Toronto, Ontario. heather.asquith@sympatico.ca

spring 2013 On Site review is published twice annually (Spring and Fall) by the Association for nonprofit architectural fieldwork [alberta] which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

john calvelli is a design theorist and photographer who teaches in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta College of Art and Design. His work may be found at Academia.edu daniel canty is an author and director living in Montreal. His work touches upon the realms of literature, film, new media, theatre, visual arts and design. Wigrum (La Peuplade, 2011), his first novel, is soon to be published by Talonbooks in a translation by Oana Avisilichioaei ryan coghlan is a landscape architecture student based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Currently he’s interested in how spontaneity and adaptability can create more vibrant cities and where to find the perfect espresso. mail@ryancoghlan.com will craig is a designer of architectural and urban projects with DIALOG and maintains a (slightly obsessive) interest in ideas for exploratory urbanism. He studied architecture at Westminster in London, UK achieving distinction for his work. www.fortysevendesign.com joshua craze once thought that an anthropologist must act much like a geologist. If the latter sees the peregrinations of the years in the strata of the rock, the former was to do the same for human beings, and see the way the centuries accumulate in our practices and languages, like ruins. www.joshuacraze.com dora p crouch is retired, Professor Emerita of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the author of a long and critical list of books on architecture and geology, ancient water systems and settlement traditions. She currently lives in San Diego and gives credit to Kingswood/Cranbrook in Michigan where in high school she learned to work academically. vanessa eickhoff is an Associate and Landscape Architect at PLANT Architect Inc. She is currently project manager at PLANT Architect for Nathan Phillips Square Revitalisation in Toronto, Ontario. karianne halse, cand. arch. Currently teaching at the BA.program, Unit 2+3D ‘Atmospheric Laboratory, at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark, which she graduated from in January 2012. www.karianne-h.dk mail@karianne-h.dk louis helbig (MSc, London School of Economics) is an artist and social commentator, best known for his aerial documentation of the oil sands. beautifuldestruction.ca His photographs of the lost villages of the St Lawrence appeared in On Site 27. sunkenvillages.ca louishelbig.com mary kavanagh is an associate professor of visual art in the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge. She maintains her studio and research practice in Lethbridge, Alberta. www.marykavanagh.ca ted landrum has practised and taught architecture in the US and Canada. He is currently building a collection of archi-poems called Midway Radicals. For more archi-poems see Quality Out of Control (Routledge) and umanitoba.ca/schools/art/ted_landrum_o1 clinton langevin and amy norris are Toronto-based architects, currently captivated by the problems and potential of our industrial heritage. chester rennie is a Toronto-based landscape and urban designer. michael j leeb is a visual artist (University of Lethbridge, Fine Arts) and currently the Writer-in-Residence, Gushul Writer’s Cottage in Blairmore, Alberta where he is at work on a poetry project. jleeb@telusplanet.net thomas mical is a US-trained design researcher, currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at University of Southern Australia. His teaching and research examines architectural theory, uncanny landscapes and media-philosphy. douglas moffat explores the relationship between sound and the constructed landscape, to create spaces built for listening. Trained in landscape architecture, sculpture and architecture history, his work mixes field recordings, electroacoustics and sculptural processes with the methods of contemporary landscape design. shane neill is a designer and cellist. His current endeavours examine antagonisms on the U S -Mexico border, seeking to undermine the border as a power apparatus and recasting it as a space of appearance. www. shaneneill.com giulia piana graduated in Architecture at Sapienza, Università di Roma. She is based in Rome and Paris, focussing her interests in the landscape and geology of these cities. giulia.piana@gmail.com www.giuliapiana.com

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nick sowers is an architect based in San Francisco. He is the founder of Soundscrapers, where he practices the construction of space with sound and 2x4s. His architectural work seeks the sonic sublime. www.soundscrapers.com

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greg stone is a Master’s student in Sustainable Development at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he thinks about sustainable urban planning. He also thinks about street art, bottom-up city development, and South American psychedelic cumbia.

On Site invites theme-based submissions — reviews, commentary, photo-documentation, project descriptions, critical essays. www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles For any and all inquiries, please contact: editor@onsitereview.ca Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review and ANPAF[A] All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. cover price $16 subscriptions — per year/two issues: $24 two years/four issues: $38 three years/six issues: $50 in Canada: shipping and handling included. for USA: add $12/year for International: add $24/year back issues: $7.50 Libraries: order through SWETS, Harrasowitz or EBSCO subscription forms: www.onsitereview.ca/subscribe PayPal or cheque to On Site 1326 11 Avenue SE Calgary, Alberta T2G 0Z5 editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary, Alberta distribution: Magazines Canada 1+416 504 0274 Ubiquity Distributors USA 1+718 875 5491 On Site gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of our contributors, our volunteers, our subscribers and the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts through their Publishing Grants to Arts and Literary Magazines.

dustin valen is an intern architect and graduate of the John H Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design where he completed the thesis: Something Smells; Sympathies between Design and Waste Management Practices. dustin.valen@gmail.com bradford watson is an architect and assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Montana State University in Bozeman. www.bradfordawatson.com trent workman is a graduate student in Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. He is interested in the intersection of time, process and mapping in the practice of landscape architecture. stephanie white is the editor of On Site review. Her 40,000 thoughts on geology can be seen at www.onsitereview.ca/miscellanea/tag/geology

On Site also acknowledges the support of Calgary Arts Development, City of Calgary.

Chandigarh Casablanca

Walls Between People Des Mures Entre les Hommes

Opens 19 November 2013

a photographic presentation of eight modern barrier walls

Alexandra Novosseloff + Frank Neisse 14 January-14 April 2013

Pierre Jeanneret, architect and photographer.

Gandhi Bhawan, Punjab University Campus, Sector 14, Chandigarh. c. 1960-1964. Gelatin silver print. 16.8 x 16.6 cm. Fonds Pierre Jeanneret, CCA Collection. ARCH258392 Exposing the contradictions found in an open and globalized world, this exhibition focuses on the use of graffiti on contemporary barriers in

Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato curate an exhibition that suggests a new historiography of modern urbanism based on two major urban experiments in the Global South.

Chandigarh was planned by a team consisting of Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Frey, Drew and local architects and planners whilst Casablanca was conceived by Michel Ecochard and a team of young French and Moroccan architects. The exhibition fosters fresh discussions on the engagement of local particularity with the universal in the framework of the growing economic and political cooperation promoted by the United Nations and other global organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. Partly based on the Pierre Jeanneret archive recently donated to the CCA, the exhibition and accompanying publication will include new photographic commissions by Yto Barrada and Takashi Homma offering a contemporary reading of these two cities.

Cyprus North Korea and South Korea India and Pakistan Northern Ireland Israel and Palestine The Spanish Enclaves Mexico and the United States Western Sahara These barriers are tangible signs of permanent tension and are points of unresolved conflicts frozen in time. They stand as embodiments of the many contradictions found in our open and globalized world.

Beyond the immediate goals of security and protection, the ultimate objective of the barrier wall is separation from one’s own neighbour.

www.themilitarymuseums.ca

www.cca.qc.ca

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front: Louis Helbig.

Highway 63 Bitumen Slick.

N57.00.43 W111.35.03 Syncrude Mildred Lake, Alberta back: borehole chart for Fox’s Farm, Nanaimo, BC, 1918. Nanaimo Community Archives