cyborg landscapes

Algae Harvesting from wastewater

2011-10-27T12:46:00.003+13:00

Aquaflow harvests algae from wastewater treatment plants and from lakes that have algal blooms and convert the algae to bio-fuel. I especially love the epiphytic Perching Lily Astelia growing on the gantry at the Blenheim waste water plant where the process has been tested.

Fantastic podcasts- Earth and Environmnetal systems

2011-10-05T15:53:00.003+13:00

I am working my way through Dr Christian Shorey's wonderful series of podcasts Earth and Environmental Systems. The more I listen to them, the more respect I have for the entire series. All the geological systems podcasts are great for landscape architects who need to know how the various hydrological, atmospheric and geological processes work. I am currently enjoying the history of the human species podcasts - these history podcasts connect our lives and the earth systems beautifully, so they are also really relevant for landscape architects (and everyone). Of course, the use of systems thinking to analyse everything makes these a must-listen.

Designing With Diagrams

2011-09-26T12:29:00.017+13:00

For someone designing storm water to minimize contaminants, the most important thing to track in your diagram is the level of contaminants. Above is a simple, bounded diagram of storm water with contaminants coming in.
One possible start to designing a new system is to look at the 'clouds' outside your usual design of the infrastructure. In the wider world, how and why are things coming in to your system? Can you manipulate them somehow before they become inputs?
You might be able to think of a way of doing that...
You might be able to design a physical intervention that prevents the contaminants coming in from source or you might be able to legislate or educate for behaviour change.
Or we can work at removing the contaminants once they are in the system.
The reed beds here can be diagrammed in a lot more detail. What parts of the system could you make even more visible?
On the other hand, if you are designing the storm water for flood control, you need to track volume in your diagramming:
The first step is to extend your thinking by looking into the clouds at either end of the system. We start with in - where is the water coming from? That is the subject of the second diagram below.

We know reasonably well what we can do about reducing the volume of water coming in to the infrastructure system; build permeable paving, use green roofs or collect roof water for use inside the building. Using the technique of connecting the loops, we connect outputs to places where they are more useful - within the buildings and to the groundwater.
As an example of bio-mimicry in design, lets look at a garden with plants. If we track what happens to water going through a planted garden, this is something like what happens:
It does not take too much thought to spatialize this diagram of a garden and turn it into a Landscape device, a rain garden.

Remember the groundwater reservoir can become 'full' - the level of the water table gets so high that it is higher than the ground level - a flood. The diagram of what is happening now looks like this:

When the groundwater & river are full, they can no longer accept water from the permeable surfaces or the network of pipes. So all the water that would have gone into the river or groundwater lies on the surface - a flood.
Because all these overflows act like multiple reinforcing loops, this means once the system has reached its limits, failure is compounded exponentially. This type of failure is called a 'catastrophic' failure of a system (even if the event is not catastrophic in a social sense).

To summarise the steps to take in re-designing your system:

1) Track the element that you most want to manage in your stock flow diagram

2) Research the cloud - the external system that feeds that element in to your system

3) Can you modify that element somewhere in the cycle before it enters the system?

4) Look at the outputs - can you connect them up to something useful rather than dumping them? Can they be useful inputs in to another system? Or can your own system use them somehow? Think of the methane that used to escape in to the atmosphere now being used to power the landfill

5) Can you introduce a balancing (or reinforcing if appropriate) loop into the system? These might be making a harmful activity more difficult, more expensive or more visible somehow.

6) Bio-mimicry: Draw a diagram of how this process is handled in nature. Replicate this process in your design

Solar Enclosure for Water Reuse (SEWR)

2011-08-30T13:30:00.003+12:00

Image via: ArchitectMagazine

I love these facade units - they take greywater produced in the house and once it is filtered, the water moves through these glass units. During this process, the water is heated to destroy pathogens. This heat from the water is captured and used in either the hot water cylinder or through a heat exchange system, and the cleaned water used again.
Imagine houses that are real machines for living; totally integrated into the landscape, rather than the parasitic entities they are now.
This is from clever people at CASE - Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology.

Update of Auckland's Transportation Visualisation

2011-08-07T16:32:00.003+12:00

Chris McDowell has updated my favourite infrastructure visualisation. Anyone who doesnt think a city should be manged as a living system just needs to watch this.

An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

Toilet Talk

2011-07-27T14:17:00.003+12:00

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has put out this video - a pretty successful way of talking about the stuff we don't like to talk about.
Not having good ways to talk about sewerage encourages compartmentalising and then excluding thinking about sewerage. It is an easy step from excluding thinking about sewerage to excluding the material itself from good re-use.

mushroom death suit

2011-07-21T12:14:00.003+12:00

Image: Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Death Suit

Image: Jae Rim Lee, Decompiculture Kit

Image: Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Death Suit

http://infinityburialproject.com/mushroom
Artist Jae Rhim Lee is cultivating a strain of fungus she is calling Infinity Mushroom. Lee is feeding strains of fungus her own body tissues and excretions. The plan is too create this Mushroom Death Suit which is infused with spores from the fungus. The spores will be activated by an Alternative Embalming Fluid (a slurry of spores). Any toxins from the decomposing body will be remediated by the fungus.
The project is not just about the physical process, but the mental processes as well. Lee belives the cultivation process will "promotes acceptance of and a personal engagement with death and decomposition."

The Foresight Engine for Christchurch

2011-06-27T16:08:00.006+12:00

After the long series of destructive earthquakes in Christchurch (to see how destructive, this great visualisation lets you pan across your computer screen - and as you pan, the image changes from before the earthquakes to after) searching for the best way to re-build.
Consultation is always a loaded idea - with whom does one consult? For how long? And differences of opinion are inevitable - how does one move forward when consultation has brought differences to the fore?
From the many discussions I have heard, it seems clear the Christchurch people are scared an impasse could arise and the destroyed inner city is immobilised in a consultation deadlock. At the same time, of course, people are certain they do not want to feel unheard or uninvoled in the decision making.
The solution is in social media and gaming. Many of the organizational delays in the consultation process melt away in the instantaneous, high speed and responsive platforms. There is also a transparency that is not built in to the more old-school consultation platforms. Of course, those who are not-so-digital are excluded from this process, but arguably those whose lives are fluid and mobile were somewhat excluded from the traditional civic body consultation process, too.
Share an Idea is a tweet inspired forum - submit a 140 character idea on what you want in Christchurch and the most frequently tweeted ideas rise to the top of the new council plan. The ideas could be submitted via email or on post-it notes as well, to include non-twitterers.
Gamification, using Jane McGonigal's Foresight Engine, (together with Magnetic South) has just been used to sort ideas. The best ideas get 'played' more frequently, rising to the top of the scoreboard. The advantage of this approach over Share an Idea is that unusual, creative plans can rise to the top even if they are so innovative that they would have been a numerically small contirbution to Share an Idea. Following this radio interview with Roger Dennis, unfortunately interest was so great the server in Silicon Valley that was hosting this crashed, so as I post this there is not much to see!
But the future of consultation is here, and it is good to see the positive ideas at Share an Idea.

Beautiful Infrastructure Photography II: Andrew Brooks

2011-06-12T13:43:00.007+12:00

Photography by Andrew Brooks

Andrew Brooks has produced a series of completely beautiful photographs of Manhester's infrastructure, called Hidden Citites. These photos are composed of many, many sepreate exposures which he carefully stitches together to make incredibly high resolution composites. He doesnt use any auto-stitching techniques, as wants to craft the spatial qulaities of each image so that he can communicate the feeling of each particular site he is in.
There is a wealth of exquisite imagery on his website - go and have a look!

The Peepoo

2011-05-27T11:39:00.000+12:00

Image from www.peepoo.com

You have to love the name and the positioning of the Peepoo, a single use bag that sanitizes poo so that it can be used immediately as fertiliser. From the Peepoo people (called the peepoople) we hear the Peepoo is "... personal, as in personal computer; it is mobile, as in mobile phone; and micro, as in Microsoft. User-friendly and advanced, yet simple and cheap, the Peepoo offers a high degree of contemporary status."

http://www.peepoople.com/showpage.php?page=3_2

This little device is an example of atomized infrastructure - infrastructure that is not part of a network, infrastructure that is not managed by a relatively anonymous, monopolized conglomerate.
These little atomized items are valuable when:

governments cannot afford classical infrastructure- on an atomized path, people can have the health and economic benefits of infrastructure even when the governing bodies cannot manage the large capital investments
individuals want to distance themselves from the constructs created by infrastructure for political, environmental or lifestyle reasons
a resilient system is desired - being non-networked means individual infrastructure 'points' (rather than the traditional 'nodes') will continue to function even when connections have been destroyed by some disastrous event

But these infrastructure points change the economic environment. Instead of vast capital requirements, there is now a need for continual consumption of a product. How many of these would you need to purchase for even a month's use? What happens when branding becomes part of infrastructure? But I guess most telephone users know about the arcane pricing structures and aggressive marketing when that happens.

fog harvesting

2011-04-27T07:47:00.002+12:00

Fog Tower - Designed by Fernández and Susana Ortega
image via eVolvo

In the mornings I walk past lamposts dripping with dew that has condensed overnight and wonder if I lived somewhere drier than Wellington if it would be worth catching that water.
It turns out it is worth it in some places.

The Ortegas designed this for the eVolvo skyscraper competition to collect the Camanchaca, a type of dense cloud that flows on the coast of Chile. The fog is caught in the fine plastic mesh skin of the tower to spiral down the helix and into collecting tanks.

soil lamp

2011-04-24T09:54:00.003+12:00

http://www.mariekestaps.nl/?/Design/Soil-Lamp-2/

image: Marieke Steps

Marieke Steps designed this little LED lamp powered by mud, which is enclosed in copper and zinc cells.

Painting Invisible Infrastructures

2011-04-10T16:26:00.004+12:00

‘Immaterials: light painting WiFi’ by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen.

Long exposures capture the strength of WiFi networks, making this invisible infrastructure visible.

Iceberg Architecture:Blue Crystal

2011-04-03T22:17:00.000+12:00

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Blue-Crystal/238178

Images: Sven Sauer -see the Blue Crystal page

What a seductive project - an iceberg set in Dubai harbor like a diamond, carved into a swimming pool!
I am not sure if it is the general zeitgeist or my own responses that have changed, but post GFC this seems like a decadence from another era.
What do you think?

Beautiful Photographs by Christian Stoll

2011-03-19T09:21:00.002+13:00

Images: Christian Stoll

Beautiful, beautiful photographs of infrastructure by Christian Stoll

I would like to mention that a new school of Landscape Architecture is being launched in San Francisco at the Academy of Art University. It sounds like the school will be a setting to allow a lot of creative opportunities for students.

Post Quake Infrastructure in Christchurch

2011-02-25T17:12:00.006+13:00

Image: Greg O'Bierne - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gobeirne/5472154537/

Christchurch (in New Zealand) infrastructure was instantaneoulsy reconfigured last week when a terrible earthquake struck the city.The stretching of place enabled by all the networks of road, phone and internet were nearly completely broken. Cell phone coverage was intermittent as many transmission towers were damaged. A strange hybrid communication network was in place: people immediately adjacent to you in space were now your closest connections, where they would have been strangers pre-earthquake. At the same time, those very distant who could be texted or tweeted were close. It was the relationships with those that were more than several blocks away and without cell phones (often people one would communicate several times in a day - family and friends) that people were cut off from. Neighbourhood bonds are now stronger everywhere, but so are virtual bonds. People added their names to a twitter thread 'safe@christchurch' and updated their status on facebook. One Japanese student trapped in a collapsed building texted his family in Japan, who then told New Zealand search & rescue teams where to find him in the rubble. Armies of student volunteers are being organised with incredibly sophisticated online systems - these systems are truly impressive.

People who happened to have artesian wells on their suburban properties are giving out free water. These sites with wells are the new 'town centres', replacing the shops and civic buildings that are crushed or closed, with no supplies.
People who have supplies of food or clothes drop these off at the houses with wells, turning them onto distribution sites. People talk to each other and make friends while they stand in line for the water. The most basic of infrastructures, together with the most sophisticated are reconfiguring the damaged city.

The Sahara Forest Project

2011-02-21T13:27:00.008+13:00

'Hedges' of the Sahara Forest Project, showing greenhouses, re-vegetation and solar collector
Image source: Sahara Forest Project

The Sahara Forest Project has fantastic ambitions- to create a beneficial, isolated subsystem of the landscape systems we all depend on, with inputs and outputs carefully controlled and with the subsystems carefully integrated with each other.
The inputs will be:
Sunlight - Mirrors concentrate a solar beam for an energy plant.
Carbon Dioxide- The plants in the greenhouses consume CO2
Nutrients- for plant growth
Salt Water- piped in from the sea (using solar power for the energy to do this). The salt water will be desalinised, again using solar energy. This fresh water will become both an output and an intermediate product, used in the following ways:
To cool the greenhouses- salt water run over pads covering the greenhouses will cool the glasshouses as the water evaporates in the heat.
For plant growth- to water plants in greenhouses
Humid air- (from cooling the greenhouses) will escape to humidify the surrounding air, helping with re vegetation.
Plants- will be output both as food and bio-diesel.
Finally salt and the other minerals from the seawater will become outputs to be used.

After lots of testing, apparently already finding funds (from the King of Jordan and Norwegian environmental funds) , Sahara Forest greenhouses will form long hedges running through the desert. The plan is that these hedges will start to affect the micro-climate in their lee, increasing the creation of clouds and dew fall, to benefit bands of orchards planted alongside the greenhouses, along with tougher drought resistant plants banded further out. It is not hard to envisage this (eventually) creating a virtuous local climate cycle with ever more dew and cloud cover, a neat reversal of the desertification process.
Many of the projects I have looked at have never gone ahead because the political process was impossible (I think an indication that these heroic projects are too frequently designed without thinking about the cultural/social systems that these landscapes hope to integrate with). As I write this, political change in the Middle East may be even now altering the situation for the Sahara Forest Project.*
A good interview with Bill Watts, an engineer working on the project is here.
* I have absolutely no reason to suggest there is any problem with this project, rather I am only making a comment on the general flux in the region overall

Digital Infrastructure: Philip Belesky (part II)

2011-02-20T11:32:00.000+13:00

Illustration: Philip Belesky
More from Philip's design for a server farm integrated with the landscape plan at Wellington's CentrePort. Check out Eye of the Fish, a blog commenting on Wellington's urban design that Philip started up.

Digital Infrastructure by Philip Belesky (part 1)

2011-02-19T15:53:00.000+13:00

Images: Philip Belesky

Philip created this plan for server farm integrated with a food producing glasshouse for a proposed development at the Wellington CentrePort site. Excess heat from server farms can be a real problem for global warming; the power consumption from their air-conditioning can be fierce. Proposals for dealing with this excess heat include shifting the 'live' farms around the globe as it turns, so that serving always happens where the planet is naturally coolest.
Philip was always an interesting student. He usually flipped out really intelligent work quickly. I always wanted to see what he could produce if he wasn't multi-tasking so much (see his web design portfolio)- I suspect it could be really fabulous.
I wanted to post this earlier, but I have struggled with the embedded images in the file I have. The layout still is not great, I am afraid.

2011-01-21T15:51:00.004+13:00

An Animated Map of Auckland's Public Transport Network was created by Chris McDowall. You can see more of his work at his blog Seeing Data. The deeply loveable aspect of this visualization is the spermatozoa-like rendering of the buses, trains and ferries - an organic aspect of the machinic.

An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

Carolyn Steel on Food and the Shape of Cities

2011-01-11T17:05:00.002+13:00

Carolyn Stee l is an architect who looks t food networks. She argues that our current food networks alienate us from food and cause us to devalue it. I have found that my current mission of trying to grow as much of my own food on my not-large suburban garden has profoundly changed my relationship to food. I was inspired by economy and pleasure to grow vegetables but I found I valued and respected every morsel of food in a way I had never done before.

Tim Flannery on 'Here on Earth: an Argument for Hope'

2010-10-22T16:08:00.002+13:00

Listen to a great interview with Tim Flannery about his new book Here on Earth: An Argument For Hope. He talks about climate change, complexity and processes (traced through Darwin, Dawkins, Lovelock & Wallace).
A quote from the interview:

"...we think of ourselves as objects or things but we are really processes. When we die, the processes stop. The object, the body is the same from one second before death and one second after, but the processes have stopped....we are fragments of the earth's crust animated by processes"

Making Water Bottle Use Visible

2010-10-04T22:38:00.003+13:00

MSLK's Watershed Project installed on Governor's Island
(image from NoD)

This installation represents one SECOND'S worth of water consumption from plastic bottles in the US!

Beautiful Data

2010-09-28T11:12:00.003+13:00

David McCandless shows how beautiful and important transforming data into visual format can be. I have posted earlier on using using diagramming to transform the engineering of infrastructure into physical design, and this TED talk shows how powerful this diagramming step is in understanding the world.

The Savant and Physical Processes

2010-09-17T16:46:00.002+12:00

"The savant, instead of seeing a field of wildflowers, sees 247 flowers. Similarly, we don't just see a world of physical processes, churning out complex plans, desires and needs. Instead, we see the handiwork of an infinite wisdom, the working out of a divine plan, the children of a creator."
Terence Deacon, The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain , London 1997, Chapter 14

I love thinking about this as the way an artist works, and is a way I try explicitly to explore in my work. A figurative artist must be this savant, and paint precisely 247 flowers in order for a viewer to experience a field of wildflowers.
Landscapes are often seen as the handiwork of infinite wisdom, the working out of a divine plan and my landscape architecture research has taught me to look at landscape as precisely a world of physical processes, a churning out of desires and needs, which expresses itself as the landscape we see.
So I am engaged in the investigation of these landscape processes, and by using these processes to create drawings/paintings, I am trying to dig out the idiot savant whenever I am in looking at a landscape.

I have posted this on my other blog, http://helenreynolds-imageaday.blogspot.com/. I am in the process of re-focusing this Cyborg Landscape blog. I am no longer teaching the course that inspired me to start this blog, but this way of investigating and considering the landscape is deeply important to my artwork.

Transport, Death & Lichen : Philip Bonifacio

2009-11-05T11:08:00.009+13:00

Images: Philip Bonifacio

Philip Bonifacio made a very exploratory and thoughtful design linking burial sites, transport infrastructure and lichen growth. While the transportation infrastructure could be more developed, this was a a deep engagement with integrated infrastructure .

More from Marita Hunt

2009-11-05T11:05:00.002+13:00

image: Marita Hunt

A further image from Marita Hunt's project.

Potable Water Infrastructure - Marita Hunt

2009-11-02T10:20:00.004+13:00

Images: Marita Hunt

The course this blog is associated with is over now, and it is time to show the work of some of the students.
The infrastructure Marita Hunt was dealing with was potable water, and she designed a development based around projected water uses. Large users of water are clustered at one edge of the development, progressing to lighter users. This clustering is an essential part of the water management - grey water from each building is treated within an internal courtyard for the block and stored. Buildings on that block can then use the treated grey water.
This project works very responsively and efficiently to water conservation and effectively breaks down the monolithic water infrastructure to a radical micro-scaled infrastructure.

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § Luke Jerram: Objectively Inspired

2009-10-20T10:53:00.001+13:00

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § Luke Jerram: Objectively Inspired

Posted using ShareThis

WanZhuang

2009-10-02T18:52:00.003+13:00

Images by Arup
Arup was designing Dongtan, a well-publicised eco-city development in Shanghai, that suffered from realpolotiks. But apparently lessons learnt from Dongtan have been refined and reused for a proposal in WanZhuang.
Peter Head, from Arup (engineers of the world's most exciting projects), discusses the change in attitudes since Dongtan a RIBAJournal article "There is a much greater awareness of the importance of density and the need for integrated planning. People didn't really think of energy/water/transport as being key to urban planning"(RIBA August September 09)

One Brighton

2009-10-02T13:46:00.004+13:00

Images: Feildon Clegg Bradley
Architect: Feildon Clegg Bradley Studios
One Brighton aims to be zero waste and zero carbon and has been able to learn from and build on the successes of BedZED. Unlike Bed ZED, One Brighton seems to not be interested in overt 'green' styling. "Inadvertently, green design and the funky, or whatever you want to call it, architecture of BedZED started to be seen as synonymous...We went with the humanistic modernism that FCB does so well"- Halsell quoted in RIBA Journal(August September 09)
172 units, 19 studios, commercial space on the ground floor
Cycling: built in bicycle storage, connected to existing cycleways
Driving: car parking is only provided for disabled and car club vehicles to discourage individual car ownership

Publish Post

Waste: Five colour coded chutes to sort recycling, with an on-site caretaker to help manage recycling
Energy: roof mounted PV - wind turbines were rejected as the developer wanted something for a mainstream market rather than an "unambiguous signifier of the developments nature" (RIBA Journal August September09) + biomass boiler
Food: community gardens and allotments gardens are on terraces
Water: rainwater is collected

BedZED

2009-10-01T08:13:00.005+13:00

Bed ZED (Beddington zero energy development) was designed by architect Bill Dunster. There are 82 houses, 17 apartments and 1,405 m2 of workshop space.
Everything is aligned for maximum solar gain, there is a central heating and power system that uses waste wood and waste water is recycled through the system below.
There is a BedZED car sharing club and the layout is intended to be walking and cycling friendly, with easy access to public transport.

BedZED's sludge system, which treated water to be reused for flushing. Described as a hybrid between a traditional activated sludge system which incorporates clarifying elements and plants from the 'Living Machine' system (http://www.wwuk.co.uk/bedzed.htm) - the only problem isnt seems this is not working properly!

Elizabeth Mossop

2009-09-30T15:33:00.003+13:00

"Such a reexamination of infrastructural space involves the recognition that all types of space are valuable, not just the privileged spaces of more traditional parks and squares, and they must therefore be inhabitable in a meaningful way. This requires the rethinking of the mono-functional realm of infrastructure and its rescue from the limbo of urban devastation to recognize its role as a part of the formal inhabited city. Designers need to engage with this infrastructural landscape: mundane parking facilities, difficult spaces under elevated roads, complex transit interchanges, and landscapes generated by waste processes. Landscape urbanism also suggests that this happens by an instrumental engagement with ecological processes as well as Whit the function of infrastructure and the social and cultural needs of the community...This relationship between natural systems and the public infrastructure of the city begins to suggest a means of developing urban strategies through the development of networks of landscape infrastructure related to ecological systems."
Elizabeth Mossop "Landscapes of Infrastructure" in The Landscape Urbanism Reader , ed C Waldeheim, Princeton University Press, New York 2006, p121-122

Masdar City

2009-09-29T12:11:00.004+13:00

Masdar City is designed to be a new zero carbon city. As we move into a phase in our project of looking at integrating urban life and infrastructure, it is probably instructive to work through how this has been thought about in Masdar.
Abu Dhabi is HOT and SUNNY and a lot of energy is normally consumed by air conditioning. So creating shade by placing solar panels over the streets means the open spaces are more pleasant to be in, reduce the need for fossil fuels burnt to power air-cons and provide renewable energy all in one stroke.
For those of us working in Wellington, we only rarely seek shade in our occupation of public space.
A number of the projects I have seen recently urgently need to consider how the infrastructure they are designing can improve/make more delightful the conditions on site for the users.

Assignment Extension

2009-09-25T08:05:00.002+12:00

The individual assignment has been extended and is now due on October 5th at 5pm.
Submit one A1 poster and a booklet. The booklet and the poster should contain all the compulsory requirements and relevant supporting documentation between them.
Submit a digital copy to the hand in folder by/before 5pm.
Submit the print out to the box/table outside my office.
Because of this extension, we will have a longer critique session on October the 15th, when we will critique both the individual and the group work. Unfortunately this will be the only time available to do this.

More Solar Street Furniture

2009-09-25T07:45:00.002+12:00

Ross Lovegrove's solar trees in Vienna

Old (1971) Movie on Transport in Wellington

2009-09-16T09:47:00.002+12:00

The New Zealand Transport Agency is screening a movie they bill as "an entertaining snapshot of transport issues in the Wellington region - 'Notes on a New Zealand City' is showing September 22nd 12:15-1pm at the NZ Film Archives, 84 Taranaki St. Koha entry.
Apparently this movie questions the changes the car brought to Wellington and is full of great footage of Wellington life in the 1970s.

Geotechnical Information on the Waterfront

2009-09-15T14:49:00.005+12:00

For those who are looking for some detail on the reclamation and sub-surface conditions on the site, this article Geotechnical issues associated with development on Wellington’s waterfront may give you the information you desire.
The book Fresh about Cook Strait by Grahame Anderson (Methuen NZ, 1984) has a section 'Seawalls and Reclamations' which includes a series of maps showing the stages of reclamations over the years.

Drinking Water

2009-09-15T11:52:00.004+12:00

Images from Design Now!, ed. Charlotte &Peter Fiell, Taschen 2007 p503

CUBE is a concept design by Phillipe Starck, a water-purification station intended for a river near Beijing

Solar Street Concept

2009-09-15T11:32:00.006+12:00

Images from Design Now!, ed. Charlotte &Peter Fiell, Taschen 2007 pp 291, 293

Nikola Knezevic has designed a modular system for solar powered street furniture - newstands, phone booths, ATMs, bus stops and street lamps.

Guest Lecturer: Michelle Lewis

2009-09-15T09:32:00.002+12:00

Michelle is a principle performance analyst with the NZ Transport Agency. she has provided us with these links qand information on transport infrastructure:
"Ministry for Transport web site. Provides government policy on transport. Holds national trend data from household survey.
http://www.transport.govt.nz/
The Government Policy Statement provides the funding expectations for the New Zealand Transport Agency.
http://www.transport.govt.nz/ourwork/KeyStrategies/GPSonLandTransportFunding/
The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is a Crown entity established on 1 August 2008, under the amended Land Transport Management Act 2003, bringing together the functions of Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand to provide an integrated approach to transport planning, funding and delivery. http://www.nzta.govt.nz/
The NZTA provides guidance on land use and transport outcomes it seeks for local authority and state highway projects. [This guidance was prepared by the legacy organisations but is still the guiding documentation.] http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/travel/community/transport-planning-process/index.html.
Detailed operational guidance relevant to state highways only is given in http://www.transit.govt.nz/technical/view_manual.jsp?content_type=manual&=edit&primary_key=46&action=edit
The regional land transport committee prepares the Wellington Regional Land Transport Strategy which sets the long term direction for transport in the Wellington region. http://www.gw.govt.nz/section2372.cfm The regional council has responsibility for public transport in the Wellington area.
The Wellington City Council has responsibility for land use and local road issues (excluding public transport services). http://www.wellington.govt.nz/plans/index.html "

PARK(ing) Day

2009-09-09T16:19:00.002+12:00

PARK(ing) Day is on September the 18th -this "is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks." - (from the website)

At least one 'park' is planned in Wellington. Click on this map on the day to find out where it is.

This would be fun for lnadscape students to do...

Electric landscape - works on paper

2009-09-01T13:38:00.003+12:00

"Electric Fence Transformer" by Pouwels, J. 2009

Electric landscapes at the South Coast Gallery, Cuba St

Marine Energy Map

2009-08-31T16:47:00.002+12:00

Marine energy Map from NIWA

Solar Energy Map

2009-08-31T16:44:00.005+12:00

Annual total energy in gigajoules (GJ) per m2 under clear skies when collectors are mounted in different positions. - See the original image from NIWA for more detail

Wind Energy Map

2009-08-31T16:41:00.002+12:00

Wind Energy Map of NZ from NIWA

Micro-micro turbines

2009-08-31T14:51:00.004+12:00

MotorWave makes these tiny nylon turbines that start working at very low wind speeds - 2 meters per second. This example is mounted on an apartment balcony.

Guest Lecturer: Iain Dawe

2009-08-31T12:49:00.002+12:00

Iain Dawe is a geographer specialising in natural hazard analysis in the greater Wellington region, with expertise in coastal hazards and processes.

Qualifications: BSc majoring in geography. MSc (1st class Honours ) in geography/environmental sciences, thesis specialising in coastal geomorphology. PhD specialising in coastal processes and geomorphology, from the University of Canterbury.
As the natural hazards analyst he provides scientific analysis, commentary and research into natural hazards that affect the Greater Wellington region and provides expert input into policy that deals with managing the risks from natural hazards. He advises policy analysts, resource managers, consents officers, engineers and elected councillors throughout the region, and to business’s and the wider public. He is also team leader writing the natural hazards section of the Regional Policy Statement.

Iain has provided these links to some good resources:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/ for cool aerial photos of the earth and human impacts incl. climate change
http://www.geonet.org.nz/ to see information on a wide range of natural hazards in New Zealand - including the latest earthquakes and volcano status
http://www.teara.govt.nz/EarthSeaAndSky/NaturalHazardsAndDisasters/en natural hazards database of real events that have occurred in NZ
http://www.gw.govt.nz/section70.cfm? the Greater Wellington hazards database and information on local hazards
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/ the pacific tsunami warning centre
http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/index.html NOAA centre for tsunami research
http://www.ipcc.ch/ IPCC website with access to all reports
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar for information on understanding climate change science from the NIWA website

Cyborg Manifesto extract

2009-08-31T11:20:00.003+12:00

Donna Haraway A Cyborg Manifesto
"In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics...the tradition of progress, the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture, the tradition of reproduction of self from the reflections of other - the relation between organism and self has been a border war...
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked: the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.
The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world."
from Design Studies; a reader, ed: H Clark & D Brody, Berg, Oxford, 2008, pg 262-264
also available on Google books here.

Transport Mapping

2009-08-30T10:50:00.001+12:00

from The Endless City, eds: Sudjic & Rode, Phaidon, 2007, p 260-261

Resilient Infrastructure

2009-08-28T13:11:00.000+12:00

"One primary lesson of studying traditional settlement patterns is that cities that develop unique local adaptations to live within the limits of their bioregion are typically more resilient than those that do not. Bioregions are most readily identified as distinct areas defined by topography and climate. These two factors - mollified by natural evolution of soils and plant communities over the millennia and cultural choices over centuries - make distinctive types and amounts of local resources available for livelihoods and cities. Historically, it was essential to have enough resources available locally without importing them. Likened to living within your means, the means are limited by the resources in the region. the more resources that have to be imported, the less resilient the city is. By reducing externalities and increasing internalities, the city becomes more resilient. This applies to food, water, air, energy, and any raw or processed materials that are needed in making and maintaining the city"
Hester, Randolph T. 2006. Design for Ecological Democracy. 1st ed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.p147

ECO CITY Hamburg

2009-08-28T08:40:00.004+12:00

ECO CITY Hamburg, TecArchitecture and Arup

Turbines mounted on top of the skyscrapers (providing 10% of electricity on site), solar water heating, green roofs to slow stormwater , green walls, solar site lighting, 40% open space...can LADN 342 make something lovelier than this for Wellington?

Cyborg + Infrastructure

2009-08-28T08:36:00.002+12:00

”The emphasis of the cyborg and the material interface between the body and the city is perhaps most strikingly manifested in the physical infrastructure that links the human body to vast technological networks. If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems..beyond the boundaries of the home itself we find a vast interlinked system of networks, pipes and wires that enable the modern city to function. These interstitial spaces of connectivity within individual buildings extend through urban space to produce a multi-layered structure of extraordinary complexity and utility.
The figure of the cyborg is at root a spatial metaphor.”
Gandy, Mathew, Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city, vol 29.1, march 2005, 26-49, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, p28

Diagrams

2009-08-27T15:18:00.000+12:00

Mapping is a 1:1 relationship but some information must be discarded (in a multi-variate situation, which the landscpae always is)

In 'mapping' as we commonly use it, the relationship of distance on the horizontal plane is preserved. When one 'diagrams' rather than 'maps', the relationship of distance is not preserved. this makes it in nature a topolgical exploration of the system.

Discarding the information of distance allows another relationship, a relationship that is not distance, to gain prominence.

Potable Water

2009-08-27T10:43:00.000+12:00

from How Things Work Now, ed: M Wright & M Patel, New Scientist, 2000, p30-31

Urban Density

2009-08-26T10:45:00.003+12:00

from The Endless City, eds: Sudjic, Rode, Phaidon, 2007, p 253

Tidal Power

2009-08-26T10:40:00.002+12:00

from How Things Work Now, ed: M Wright & M Patel, New Scientist, 2000, p 177

Wastewater Treatment

2009-08-26T10:36:00.002+12:00

Wastewater treatment diagram from How Things Work Now, ed: M Wright & M Patel, Scientific Americn 2000, p30-31

Wave Power

2009-08-26T09:49:00.004+12:00

Wave Power Diagram from How Things Work Now, ed: M Wright & M Patel, Scientific American p 177

Design with Diagrammes

2009-08-24T15:10:00.001+12:00

1
Work out a diagram for your landscape process and a diagram for your infrastructure. Include all aspects you can think of, but definitely include the inputs and outputs for each process. Ecological diagrams will usually include food, predators etc.
There will (almost inevitably) be some factor or element that is common to both diagrams. These factors may already be connected in some way, but for a number of cases, infrastructures will create disconnections in landscape processes.
If I use transportation as an example, roads create disconnections between organisms on different sides of roads. Organisms on different sides of roads are unable to mate with each other or feed on each other. Fauna will be unable to reach other habitats & water sources. Roads also disrupt geological processes like water flow and sand creation. The road infrastructure creates a physical barrier that interrupts these processes.
Sometimes the disconnection will be more chemical in nature. Oily runoff from roads will harm certain plants and insects that another species eats; again disconnecting an ecological diagram.
There may be connections rather than disconnections. Carbon dioxide emitted by cars is absorbed by trees, connecting the two diagrams of infrastructure and ecology.
2
Draw a new diagram based on the two individual diagrams, with potential connections/disconnections between the common factors highlighted.
3
The task is now to think boldly about a physical design move that can strengthen a positive connection, sever a negative connection or create a positive connection where none currently exists.
To do this, you can create ‘pipes’; forms that connect the two systems. You can create physical adjacency's in cases where two systems have been spatially separated. We can create boundaries or containers that separate two systems, in cases where the connections are harmful. Another operation is to adjust volumes in cases where the inputs and outputs in the two systems are mis-matched (i.e. carbon, cars & trees).
Examples of this are the planting of endangered species on traffic islands where they will not be browsed. In England there have been pilot programmes keeping small endangered creatures on traffic islands where foxes and so on cannot reach them. Another example is the Phyto-Pure design – shown a couple of posts down -where water use and bio-filtration are simply linked by extreme physical adjacency.
This will almost certainly be the aspect that requires the most thought in this project. A degree of ecological research will be needed to construct a wide-ranging diagram. This stage will also require creative exploration to find (dis)connections.
But in doing this, you will create a diagram, an understanding, and a concept design which has probably never existed before.
The creative act is in changing & re-aligning the connections in the diagram and then bringing the new (or adjusted) relationships into new physical form.
4
The next stage will be to connect your new infrastructure to the existing infrastructure on the site, and connect new ecologies/landscapes to existing ecologies.
You will also need to make sure your infrastructure capacity (litres, KWh, etc) will be sufficient for the projected population. This will mean ways of conserving/minimising use of your resources will need to be part of the design.
IF YOU ARE INSPIRED TO USE ANOTHER LANDSCAPE PROCESS, YOU MAY SWITCH- JUST DON’T MAKE IT TOO EASY FOR YOURSELF!

Diagram Examples

2009-08-24T12:26:00.008+12:00

from Lockwood, Arthur Diagrams; a visual survey of graphs, maps, charts and diagrams for the graphic designer, Studio Vista , London, 1969 page109

Professor David Lavigne, simplified Cod Web, from Visual Complexity

The top diagram would be a good example of a potential infrastructure diagram, the bottom diagram an example of a ecolgical diagram.

See this diagram in all it's interactive glory here

Assigned ecological/landscape connections

2009-08-24T12:02:00.002+12:00

MARITA:potable water, insects, DEAN: transport, birds CHARLOTTE sewerage, tectonics TOM C: sotrmwater, tectonics

CAT: sewerage, wind BELESKI: digital, decay DALE: ports, algae RICHARD: hydro, birds

TIM C: urban ecology, re-veg NATHAN M: hydrology, tectonics EMMA: waste, re-veg TIM H: energy, erosion

TOM H: waste, ocean bio-diversity MATT: stormwater, insects JAY: energy, tectonics JAIME: transport, insects

STEVEN: hydro, wind BONIFACIO: transport, algae (+lichen, funghi etc.) GARETH: urban ecology, erosion SYLVIA: energy, reptile habitats

CORY: transport, re-vegetation MATINI: soil, wind NATHAN: energy, ocean bio-diversity GEARGE stromwater, birds

Cycle Friendly Cities & Safety

2009-08-24T09:04:00.003+12:00

Interviews from National Radio on Cycle-friendly Cities and Road design for Safety - worth listening to - I haven't figured out how to add audio to the blog yet.

Transport Links

2009-08-17T13:33:00.002+12:00

Michelle Lewis from the Transport Agency has provided the following links for transport:
Ministry for Transport web site. Provides government policy on transport. Holds national trend data from household survey.
http://www.transport.govt.nz/

The Government Policy Statement provides the funding expectations for the New Zealand Transport Agency.
http://www.transport.govt.nz/ourwork/KeyStrategies/GPSonLandTransportFunding/

The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is a Crown entity established on 1 August 2008, under the amended Land Transport Management Act 2003, bringing together the functions of Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand to provide an integrated approach to transport planning, funding and delivery. http://www.nzta.govt.nz/
The NZTA provides guidance on land use and transport outcomes it seeks for local authority and state highway projects. [This guidance was prepared by the legacy organisations but is still the guiding documentation.] http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/travel/community/transport-planning-process/index.html.
Detailed operational guidance relevant to state highways only is given in http://www.transit.govt.nz/technical/view_manual.jsp?content_type=manual&=edit&primary_key=46&action=edit
The regional land transport committee prepares the Wellington Regional Land Transport Strategy which sets the long term direction for transport in the Wellington region. http://www.gw.govt.nz/section2372.cfm The regional council has responsibility for public transport in the Wellington area.The Wellington City Council has responsibility for land use and local road issues (excluding public transport services). http://www.wellington.govt.nz/plans/index.html

Soalr Forest

2009-08-17T13:27:00.001+12:00

Solar Forest by Neville Mars

Micro-infrastructure

2009-08-17T13:19:00.005+12:00

Phyto Purification Bathroom by Jun Yasamoto, Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse & Vincetn Vandenbrouck

Think Big Infrastructure

2009-08-16T19:21:00.001+12:00

Motonui Synthetic Petrol Plant- the one and only plant in the world to convert natural gas into petrol

The Think Big developments of the Muldoon government in the early eighties were intended to reduce New Zealand's dependence on imported energy in the aftermath of the oil shock in the late seventies. Infrastructure was called on not just to further economic independence, but to enforce a bold self-image of a strong, technologically capable New Zealand.

The Motonui synthetic petrol plant was buile, Marsden Point Oil Refinery expanded, a methanol plant built at Waitara. The Clyde Dam was built on the Clutha so more aluminium could be smelted. The state-owned electricity supplier had apparently over estimated the projected power use and something had to be done to convert the excess electricity into money.

The main-trunk line in the North Island was electrified as part of the Think Big push. TechHistory has a good history of Think Big.

A smelter was planned for Aramoana, but protest stopped this from happening. Much of Ralph Hotere's work at the time was devoted to Aramoana and stopping the 'development'.

Vive Aramoana

Ralph Hortere

1980

Guest Lecturer: FrankBoffa

2009-08-16T16:40:00.005+12:00

Pioneer of the profession of Landscape Architecture in New Zealand - there was no Landscape Architecture qualification in New Zealand when Frank decided to become one. He went to the USA to study at the University of Georgia and then became a lecturer at the newly created Landscape Architecture Programme at Lincoln University. Boffa Miskell was formed in 1971 with Tony Jackman.
Frank Boffa has been involved in many of New Zealand's main infrastructure projects, from the Taranaki energy projects, ECNZ and Solid Energy, as well as projects throughout Australasia and South East Asia.

Adaptable Bus Stop

2009-08-16T15:49:00.004+12:00

Another project from the MIT SENSEable City Lab, the Adaptable Bus Stop has a community noticeboard, interactive trip planner and connects with mobile devices. The form is also adaptable, so the bus stops can fit in with different surroundings.

Trash Track

2009-08-16T15:37:00.003+12:00

Professor Carlo Ritti from the MIT SENSEable City Lab has been embedding gadgets rather like RFIDs into various bits of rubbish and tracking their movement through New York, opening the waste infrastructure up - "making the removal chain more transparent" - Assaf Biderman

A Song About Public Transport

2009-08-16T13:48:00.003+12:00

Art Brut in favour of public transport here - Life In The Slow Lane from the Art Brut versus Satan Album

2009-08-11T14:50:00.002+12:00

Historic visual diary of spaceflight by cosmonaut Georgi Grechko

Edward Tufte has excellent work on diagramming, particularly with time. I have his book Envisioning Information in my room and the library has copies of his other books

Blender - design program

2009-08-11T14:36:00.002+12:00

Blender is the program Ross's students used to create forms for 3-D printing

Guest Lecturer: Yon Cheong

2009-08-11T14:34:00.001+12:00

Our guest lecturer this week is Yon Cheong, the Asset Planning Manager in Capacity Infrastructure Services, responsible for asset management planning for the cities of Wellington, Hutt and Upper Hutt in New Zealand. She is formally qualified in engineering, strategic asset management and environmental health. She has twelve years of experience in the water services sector and eight years of experience in public health. Her current role includes continuous improvement of asset management plans, policy and strategy development and implementation.

WPA 2.0 Competition

2009-08-11T14:10:00.000+12:00

Hi Helen,
We would love to have your students enter the WPA 2.0 competition. The only materials we have available are those on our website (see below if you do not already have the link). You may want to go through it thoroughly and check out the resources, the infrastructure matrix, and the reference projects. Also, we have a facebook page where we send out links to articles of interest. Please have them sign up as fans if they wish to receive updates. As long as the project you have in mind is applicable to a US site, then it is permissable. You may want to actively consider the similarities and differences of a specific American location. We look forward to your participation. Thanks for your interest in WPA 2.0!Linda-- UCLA cityLAbWPA 2.0http://www.wpa2.aud.ucla.edu/index.php/

Dynamic Infrastructure

2009-08-09T18:24:00.002+12:00

Dynamic:

Pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action; vigorously active or forceful; energetic
of or pertaining to force or power
marked by usually continuous and productive activity or change
affected by the passage of time or the presence or absence of power

INFRASTRUCTURE:
the basic physical and or organizational structures needed for the organization of a society or enterprise

DYNAMIC INFRASTRUCTURE:
The energy or effective action (vigorously active or forceful) marked by usually continuous and productive activity or change that organizes and structure a society.
The operations of a society affected by the passage of time or the presence or absence of power

Design Led Futures

2009-08-08T16:42:00.003+12:00

Visit Design Led Futures - water infrastructure people should definitely look at the Energising Water projects. Go Osaki's project in particular is a lovely piece of cyborg landscape work. It would be great if some landscape students enrolled in this paper next year...

Streets map the American Landscape

2009-08-08T16:23:00.005+12:00

All Streets, Ben Fry 2008

Ben Fry has mapped all the streets in the US. leaving out all other information. Alaska and Hawaii are the only states without enough roads to outline their shape - everywhere else the infrastructure can stand in for landscape. Above is the Appalachian Mountains map.

Wind Power from Kites

2009-08-08T15:57:00.003+12:00

KiteGen

Kites can reach higher altitudes than turbines and access stronger, more stable winds in the troposphere. So clever people are thinking of ways of using this energy to generate electricity. The kites fly at over 800m. KiteGen is one company and Saul Griffin of Makani Power has a TED talk.

Ray Kurzweil onTED

2009-08-08T15:27:00.004+12:00

Ray Kurzweil on TED

Bering Strait Bridge

2009-08-07T10:17:00.003+12:00

Competition entry by Rachdi Manal (France), architecture OFF (France)

The ultimate infrastructure project may be this ideas competition for a bridge between Russia and the USA.

Aesthetics and Infrastructure II

2009-08-01T18:29:00.003+12:00

Electric power sub-stations, Christchurch ca 1940
reference number:MNZ-0529-1 4-F
Alexander Turnbull Library

Richard Sennett on Open Systems and Infrastructure

2009-07-31T11:11:00.004+12:00

Richard Sennett has written many deeply thoughtful books on the city, notably Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization and The Conscience of the Eye. He has recently been thinking about open systems and the city. This is an extract form his essay Quant:

"Water plays a particular role in defining the difference between boundaries and borders. Up to the 1950s, the existence and shape of waterways has supported the economy and determined the shape of cities like Bombay, Shanghai, Istanbul, London, and New York -- water the material, urban medium for trade and circulation. But the docks and warehouses and water itself held little aesthetic interest for urban designers; water was just the utilitarian substance of the trading city. In the early 19th Century functional watery scenes began to be valued aesthetically, as when the European Magazine described in 1802 the original West India Docks in London of which Canary Wharf now forms a part: "...nothing can be conceived more beautiful than the dock. The water is of the necessary depth; its surface {thanks to the locks is} as smooth as a mirror, presents to eye a haven secure from storms." This view expressed, if you like, a porous join between commerce and aesthetics. But the join came to be contested among urban designers, expressed by the American urbanist Daniel Burnham in 1909: "the viewing of water is a solitary act, the regard of nothingness; in viewing water man turns his back, literally, on the conditions which support his life." Burnham realized this view in the design he made for Chicago's lake-front in that same year; the places where water meets land are visually important but socially neutral; Burnham put parks, promenades and other low-density uses at the join of water and land. This watery aesthetic provides another insight into how inert boundaries are created in cities: viewing space is opposed to working space. "
Retrieved from http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=16

Aesthetics and Infrastructure I

2009-07-31T09:47:00.005+12:00

photo: Marlborough Express

Infrastructure disguised as Suburbia

Two years of work has gone into enclosing a traditional substation in Blenheim with the shell of a suburban house. It seems that 'landscaping' has completed the transformation from infrastructure to suburban camouflage.
Dominion Post July 29 2009, page A9

Think Big Part I - Damn the Dam

2009-07-29T13:25:00.003+12:00

This connects to protest against the Think Big infrastructure projects of the 1970s. I have to posted the protest song before the actual projects because the song 'Damn the Dam' by John Hanlon is such a complete blast from the past...

There is a good page by, of all things, the New Zealand Folk Song Organisation, on the Manapouri Dam and it's role in the genesis of this song is here.

Open source infrastructure

2009-07-29T11:40:00.004+12:00

DON DRIVER Yellow Tentacle Pram 1980

An understanding of the power of the commons - and a response to the 'The Tragedy of the Commons' (Garrett Hardin) - is the idea of 'the triumph of the commons', a term in an Economist article referring to the generative power of open source systems, in particular open source software.

Can there be a similiar power to open source infrastructure?

The old-school tip or dump was an open source infrastructure system, not to mention the ultimate open-source waste experience, the kerb-side waste collection.

The outcome of this was common good that exceeds the potential common good of the current closed waste system. the old tip system was both socially open-source (anyone could wander around as long as they kept away from the bulldozers) and physically open-source (waste was hardly ever put into plastic bags, rather it was usually put straight into metal bins and delivered to the tip without being crushed).

a number of people earned their living by picking through waste and finding materials like scrap metal that could be re-cycled
it was great fun for children - we found all sorts of treasures that we played with for weeks
others would collect things like broken or scarred furniture and recondition them
artists would scavenge for materials. Creativity was bootstrapped - in New Zealand , Don Driver made many works from scavenged materials. Internationally, arte povera was a significant movement.
biological agents could easily access the waste, consuming and decomposing it

Some landfill sites have shops that sell some of the goodies that are dumped but these don't work in quite the same way as truly open landfills did. For a start, the stuff is not free and the gatekeepers do not operate with a child's eye - or an artist's eye. Last year I went to one looking for material to model with and left empty handed. Possibilities lay in the half pieces of machines and baskets that are not suggested in the whole articles salvaged as re-saleable by the landfill gatekeepers.

On-site sewerage

2009-07-28T09:47:00.002+12:00

...just in case you don't follow Pruned this Israeli company Ayala seems to do some very thorough on-site sewerage treatment, pictured on the right.
They also treat greywater, industrial wastewater and leachate from landfills.

Relatives of mine have just stayed at an eco-lodge called Mistletoe Eco Village that uses a Japanese system, the Kubota Submerged Membrane Bioreactor. The water that comes out of this sewerage system was so clean that it was re-used at the lodge for flushing loos.

Presentation Schedules

2009-07-27T12:59:00.000+12:00

July 30th
Charlotte
Matt
Tom Houliston
Marita
Dale
Jaime

August 6th
Cory
Nathan Mourie
Richard
Tim Haxell
Nathan Dods
Dean

August 13th
Cat
Gearge
Helen
Jay
Sylvia
Steven

Ross Stevens - Guest Lecturer

2009-07-21T13:51:00.009+12:00

jim nature [tv], 1994

Ross Stevens is a senior lecturer at the Design School of Victoria University. He co-founded the Design-Led Futures initiative that works in collaboration with fisher & Paykel, Methven, Nile, vodafone and others.

Ross's recent reserach has been on designing with change, using mobile phones as his test subject, and investigating generative algorithms as producers of form.

He has worked with Phillipe Starck, Plinius Audio, Thomson Consumer Electronics, B&W Loudspeakers and Ponoko
Work he has led industrial students in connects directly with our work - the possum-skin lined wind turbine his students designed a few years ago is particularly memorable.

below is a photo of the shipping container house he designed and built. Ross is currently working on a house in the Wairarapa and this is providing him with opportunities to work on residential infrastructural connections.

Ross will be using low-carbon virtual infrastructure to talk to us from the Wairarapa.

Student Infrastructure Design Competition

2009-07-21T09:58:00.000+12:00

I have just come across a student infrastructure design competion run by CityLab and the dates work in pretty well with our schedule - registration closes on October 16th and projects are due November 2nd. Click here for the brief.
Citylab has organised infrastructures under 'points', 'lines', 'landscapes' and 'ecologies'. Their matrix of infrastructure is definitely worth exploring and there are lots of good precedent projects to look at on the site.

NEW CLASS TIME THURSDAY 12-3PM

2009-07-18T12:24:00.001+12:00

Dye Sensitised Solar Cells

2009-07-18T11:18:00.000+12:00

image: SonyNet

Dye-sensitised solar cells are a way of capturing solar energy that uses less embodied energy than the conventional silicon based solar cell technology. As a consequence, they will be less expensive.
For a designer, the colour, the transparency and plastic possibilities make the SDS a stunning field for exploration. Researchers at Massey, Wayne Campbell and Ashton Partridge, have been working on SDS's - Massey's link to their work is here.image from Korea Times

Structure of the ruthenium sensitizers from Gratzel, M, Solar Energy Conversion by Dye-Sensitized Photovoltaic Cells, Inorganic Chemistry 2005, 44, 6841-6851 retrieved from http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ic0508371 on 18.7.09

A technical discussion of dye-sensitized solar cells by Michael Gratzel is here.

Student Hydrology Projects

2009-07-17T21:46:00.000+12:00

Image: Ecotone Hydro Park by Tania Delage, a thesis project from McGill University

There are two recent posts in the blogosphere showing some very interesting ways of working with rainwater harvesting in Mumbai and an exhibition and an energy producing Hydro-park

2009-07-17T16:21:00.001+12:00

image: courtesy Tse-Hui Teh
This is an excerpt from Tse-Hui Teh's research on water infrastructure and urban form "The Agency of Water on Urban Form in Historic London' from the Networks of Design-Design History Society conference at the University of Falmouth, Cornwall, 2008

In the New Zealand context, the central street of Auckland, Queen St is a now buried stream. In Wellington the 'Golden Mile' deserves a similar type of research - the historic shore line and port infrastructure, which has been completely built over, still seems to have a huge impact on our urban morphology.

Bernd & Hilla Becher

2009-07-17T15:50:00.001+12:00

From the series Typologies image IV: Water Towers
Bernd and Hilla Becher
2007

The Darkness Principle or; the City of Flows

2009-06-30T13:12:00.001+12:00

The start of Chapter 2 from my thesis An infrastructure of interaction; complexity theory and the space of movement in the urban street

Infrastructure accompanies places of habitation, systems to organise the flows that are part of human life. Flows of water, power, sewerage, waste, food, money, news, stories, sex, friendship, kinship, trends, TVs, iPods, blankets, cars, trains, buses and people themselves. Infrastructure acts as conduits for these flows. Rural and suburban areas have infrastructures, but it is in the cities that infrastructure intensifies, becomes knotted and entwined. The city is viewed as a thickening of infrastructure in a particular place, with a multiplicity of infrastructures carrying flows. If place “is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations articulated together at a particular locus”( D. Massey, cited in Larsen et al., 2006:14), then the place of the city is created by these flows and their infrastructure.
This city, where flows and built form are linked in a complex system, shows itself as a morphoecological entity, with potential for self-organising and/or emergent behaviour. The races made by these movements, these flows, this “threadwork of intensities” (Amin & Thrift, 2002:81) create the drawing of the city (also envisaged as writing the city). This drawing, this track making,
“allows[s] the city to be known. We negotiate the city through used tracks and construct imaginaries around them of the known city. This is one way in which a city, with all its complexity, size and change is named” (Amin & Thrift, 2002:22).
These flows are all embedded in space by their infrastructures. The depth of their embedding varies, from lightly in the case of networks created by the mobile phone, to the deep buried
water pipes and the huge geographical infrastructures of rivers, harbours and seas.
While the more lightly embedded infrastructures have stretched the spaces of the city, simultaneously separating geographically adjacent and connecting geographically distant (Amin & Thrift, 2002:22), landscape architecture has a tradition of working with the deeply embedded infrastructures, and a current interest in connecting the infrastructure, city and ecology in landscape urbanism.
Landscape urbanism claims process in time as central concepts of landscape architecture and the city (Corner, 2006), with infrastructure as the ordering mechanisms of the urban field (Waldheim, 2006:39). Stan Allan states, “[i]nfrastructure works not so much to propose specific buildings on given sites, but to construct the site itself” (Allan, 1999:54).

This leads to an understanding of the city not as a collection of buildings, but rather as a collection of flows. As Nigel Coates says, “…here a lighter, less territorial urban condition has formed; one that reads the environment in terms of energy and process as well as physical space…Here, the medium of architecture has transformed from one of bricks and mortar to one of shifts and flows” (Coates, 2003:93).
This knotting, this concentration of infrastructures, this complexity, means that interactions between the infrastructures arise. Therefore urbanism cannot be just about the form of the infrastructures, or about the orderings of the infrastructure/flow networks but “everyday urbanism has to get into the intermesh between flesh and stone, humans and non-humans, fixtures and flows, emotions and practices" (Amin & Thrift, 2002:9).
De Landa examines this intermesh in 1,000 years of non-linear history. He describes the built form of cities as accretions of the complex systems of humans concentrated spatially.

“...human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sun-dried clay became the building materials for their homes, which in turn surrounded and were surrounded by stone monuments and defensive walls. This exoskeleton served a purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town's walls. This external exoskeleton also regulated the motion of many other things: luxury objects, news and food, for example. In particular, the weekly markets that have always existed at the heart of most cities and towns constituted veritable motors, periodically concentrating people and goods from near and faraway regions and then setting them in motion again, along a variety of trade circuits.” (De Landa,P27-28)

The built exoskeleton in turn regulates the flows and processes of interaction within and between cities and, in this way, continues to influence the mineralization of the cities. De Landa shows the city to be a morpho-ecological entity, created by the interaction between its physical formation (mineralization) and simultaneous flows of information. The evolving physical city modifies the nature and type of information flow, and information feedback itself influences the creation of the city. Virilio describes the ways in which flow construct the city:

“This technological deregulation of various milieux is also topological to the extent that – instead of constructing a perceptible and visible chaos, such as the processes of degradation or destruction implied in accident, aging and war – it inversely and paradoxically builds an imperceptible order, which is invisible but just as pracitacal as masonry or the public highways system. In all likelihood, the essence of what we insist on calling urbanism is composes/decomposed by these transfer, transit and transmission systems, these transport and transmigration networks whose immaterial configuration reiterates the cadastral organization and the building of monuments.” (Virillio,p 286 )

WORKS CITED

Allen, Stan 'Infrastructural Urbanism' Stan Allen architects: points + lines, diagrams for the city ,1999, Princeton Architectural Press
Amin, Ash & Thrift, Nigel Cities; reimagining the urban, 2002, Polity Press, Cambridge
Corner, James , 'Tera Fluxus', The landscape urbanism reader, 2006, Princeton Architectural Press
De Landa, Manuel A thousand years of non-linear history, 1997, Swerve Editions, NY

Virillio, Paul 'The Overexposed City' from Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility, ed Hoete, 2003, Black Dog Publishing, NY
Waldeheim, Charles 'The landscape as urbanism' The landscape urbanism reader, 2006, Princeton Architectural Press