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 More aerial photographs by David Maisel, this time of California's Owens Lake. But I'm totally addicted. I can't even believe how beautiful his images are.  As Maisel himself explains: "Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats." (For any film buffs out there, this is the same hydro-political event that inspired Roman Polanski's Chinatown).  "For decades," Maisel continues, "fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. The lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, and other materials."    At this point, the "concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that I find compelling." (Read more at The Lake Project; and you can search Maisel's work – then give him a grant or something – on his website; see also BLDGBLOG's Terminal Lake and Silt).
 In 2003, photographer David Maisel "began to make aerial photographs around the perimeter of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as part of a project that will ultimately cover much of the Great Basin. The Great Salt Lake is considered a 'terminal' lake, in that it has no naturally occurring outlets. Around its edges are industries of varying types, including evaporation ponds that cover some 40,000 acres along the eastern and southern shores of the lake."  Accordingly, all photographs in this post are by Maisel – but his work is so ridiculously great, and so retina-scarringly colorful, that I have to urge you in the strongest possible terms to go check it out. (Just look at these! And these! And these! I'm going crazy here! They're so beautiful you might have a heart attack).      (And don't forget BLDGBLOG's earlier look at the literary hydrologies of silt and other drainscapes).
 [Image: David Maisel, from his series Oblivion; the site includes Maisel's brief text on the project]. The Grass Collective has recently uploaded a short, amazingly hypnotic aerial video of nighttime Los Angeles traffic – and I was embarrassingly excited to find that you can actually order a whole DVD (!) of the stuff. There's only a minute or two available on the site, but I can imagine quite a juicy first date starting off with nothing but an LA traffic DVD, a bearskin rug, maybe fill your bedroom with some car exhaust... Hot.   [Images: David Maisel – who is not actually connected to the Grass Collective video, I just like his stuff – from the Oblivion series]. (Traffic video spotted in Dwell Magazine. See also BLDGBLOG's Knot Driver, including an earlier piece on the geometry of Los Angeles traffic control; for more of David Maisel's photography do not miss Terminal Lake).
 [Image: 13 feet of snow have fallen on Nagano Prefecture, Japan; Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images/New York Times].
 [Image: Construction in Beijing, by Sze Tsung Leong; read more about his work here]. "The bleak wetlands of Dongtan seem an unlikely place for a neo-industrial revolution," The Guardian reports from the mouth of the Yangtse River, China, "but if the project being planned for its muddy shores is successful, it could arguably change the course of global economic development." That project is "nothing less than a new city," one that "does no appreciable damage to the earth's environment." Known simply as Dongtan, the city will be part of a much larger, "futuristic plan to develop thousands of square miles of the mouth of the Yangtse." New forms of international construction finance have been put to use, and sustainable building technologies never before seen on this scale are all part of the plan. "This is the biggest single development anywhere in the world, bigger even than the Beijing Olympics" – not to mention something of an embarrassment for the U.S. rebuilding of New Orleans. To help me avoid quoting the whole article, however, go see for yourself; and more can be found at the site of Arup, Dongtan's engineers. (Spotted at Archinect – though BLDGBLOG has reported on Dongtan before: that post includes a look at other Chinese infrastructural projects, and is worth a quick read).
 "People around the world," the BBC reports, "are being invited to vote in a survey for the New Seven Wonders of the World. A privately funded organisation, the New 7 Wonders Foundation, has put forward a shortlist of 21 landmarks from across the globe. They include Rome's Colosseum, Jordan's ancient city of Petra, Britain's Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China." Joining the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, what are some other contenders? How about Kowloon Walled City? Or the Mall of America? The Brooklyn Bridge? London's sewers or other wonders of the industrial world? The International Space Station? Easter Island? A nuclear submarine? The Cosmodrome at Baikonur? What about the Maunsell Towers?  "To be included on the new list," the BBC says, contenders must be "man-made, completed by 2000, and in an 'acceptable' state of preservation." (So could you nominate a cloned animal?) What else...?
Did alien organisms rain down in a strange red dust on northern India?  At least two scientists think so. It all started when "scarlet showers containing the red specks hit parts of India in 2001. Researchers said the particles might be dust or a fungus, but it remained unclear." A new paper, however, "assesses various explanations for them and concludes that the specks, which vaguely resemble red blood cells, might have come from a meteor." Strangely, the cells contain no DNA – yet appear to be biological. Could this be close encounters of the viral kind? Space flu? Or the seeds of an alien botany, aterrestrial gardens waiting for design by landscape architects? Vast, tentacled hedge-mazes spreading through the Indian Himalayas. The BLDGBLOG Guide to Alien Topiary. (Spotted at Archinect; see also BLDGBLOG's look at our own alien planet).
Sergey Zimov – "a hardy Russian biologist" – "is trying to recreate a landscape not seen on Earth for nearly 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age – complete, if possible, with woolly mammoths. The project is called Pleistocene Park, but it's not a tourist attraction," New Scientist says. "Zimov wants to answer some fundamental questions about the impact early modern humans had on the environment."  [Image: New Scientist]. "During the late Pleistocene, north-eastern Siberia was part of the world's largest ecosystem, stretching from western Europe across the Bering Strait to Canada and from the Arctic to northern China – half the land area of the planet." It was densely populated with "huge herds of herbivores – mammoths, bison, elk, woolly rhinos, yaks, saiga, horses, reindeer, musk oxen and moose" – till 10,000 years ago, when "the large animals died out... and the grassland that supported them also disappeared, replaced by mossy forests and tundra." So what happened? Zimov blames the arrival of human beings (I'm imagining a century or two of intensely aromatic, Conan the Barbarian-style outdoor barbecues), and, to prove this, he's organized the Pleistocene Park. The park will sit "in 160 square kilometres of meadows, forests and willow shrublands in the Kolyma river basin," a "remote corner of Siberia, once a final destination for exiled Soviet dissidents." It may even be re-populated with cloned mammoths; then the ecological experiment will begin.  [Image: Spotted at Pruned]. Upon further reflection, I'm thinking at least four things: 1) it seems a very odd coincidence that the exact same thing is being proposed right now for central North America; 2) why only the Pleistocene? let's rebuild the Hadean era, or bring back some Devonian seas; 3) why does it have to be an ecosystem? why can't we rebuild the architectural world of, say, the Holy Roman Empire? or pre-war Europe? cool roads and little chapels everywhere, tiny villages – the Minoan labyrinth!; and 4) if a forward-thinking restaurant did this, they'd have the most amazing supply of ingredients in the world. [For other preserved landscapes, see BLDGBLOG's Silicon Gardens].
The International Space Station shouldn't be used only for scientific experiments, proposes the London-based group Arts Catalyst, which is currently studying ways to turn the ISS into an orbiting cultural institution. That's right: an art gallery in space.  "Attaching objects to the exterior of the ISS or launching things into orbit from the station are among the more intriguing concepts that have been proposed," writes Seed Magazine. More interesting, at least from my standpoint, is the idea of "creating artificial auroras in the Earth's atmosphere" (something already discussed on BLDGBLOG), or – and I love this, too – "sending artificial meteors into reentry burn." Yet others have proposed "using the ISS as a site in which to explore acoustics." Anechoic Bach.  In addition to so-called "artistic experiments in weightlessness," Seed describes the cinematic possibilities of anti-gravitation, including "a film, shot during parabolic flight, that observes the movements of Chinese chiming spheres in glycerine, oil and water as they move through the intense gravitational fields attained during the flight." (You can actually watch that film here). In any case, you can read a bit more about all this in The Guardian; while I sit here dreaming of ways to get BLDGBLOG a few weeks' residency aboard the floating gallery. Writers in space. Sponsored by Honda. Or new utopian cities built from sticks, hovering anti-gravitationally above your desktop. Post-terrestrial structures. Harvard's got some cash – surely they could send their best architecture grads into orbit for a while...
 Swiss Cheese City, by London-based architecture firm Agents of Change (AOC), proposes that "vacancy in cities" is really "a starting point for a new urban form." Accordingly, the project hopes to "generate new possibilities from holes in the built fabric," such as "Special Cultivation Zones (SCZs)." Special Cultivation Zones are an urban land-bank, defined by "temporary boundaries within which land can’t be bought or sold, and emerging skills, social networks and locally-grown produce are cultivated in the ‘vacant’ city fabric." (For more on urban farming, see Pruned or Inhabitat). Then there's AOC's Croydon Roof Divercity project –  – which radically rethinks the landscape of Croydon's roofs (and sounds really, really fun): "Taking the flat roofs of Croydon as our testbed," they write, "we propose a new roofscape for the city – beaches, ice rinks, golf courses, allotments, skateboard parks and pasture refresh Croydon's tired concrete." How about a shooting range? (For more on green roofs, see Inhabitat). After all, AOC asks, how could London be adapted "to an agricultural logic – the logic of rotation, seasons, ground and growth?" Thus, with a vision straight out of sci-fi, they describe Hackney New Garden City, complete with an "Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)." This would include "a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems... liberating the ground's agricultural potential."   [Images: Hackney New Garden City, before and after]. For another place you could put those ideas to work, see Philadelphia's Urban Voids; then check out these photos of "arbortecture" – or, plants growing out of buildings. (Via Pruned).
“Unknowingly, the architecture and building community is responsible for almost half of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions annually," we read at Ed Mazria's new Architecture 2030. "Globally the percentage is even greater.”  In a mind-blowing-if-true statistic, by 2035 "three quarters of the built environment in the U.S. will be either new or renovated. (!) This transformation over the next 30 years represents a historic opportunity for the architecture and building community to reverse the most significant crisis of modern time, climate change." Ed Mazria's interest in sustainability is long-standing; you can read more about him at Metropolis.
 [Image: What would happen, I suppose, if Toll Brothers went into genetic engineering: it's Geoff Shearcroft's " Grow Your Own" – probably not what New Scientist had in mind... but could you grow a whole city from the spines of cloned mice? Would anyone ever live there? What would a house fire smell like...?].
There was a show in London last summer, organized by RIBA, called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. (You can read a review of it here, with images). The show included this amazing bridge design, which has been tacked to a bulletin board behind my desk for nearly a year; I finally scanned it.  [Image: A bridge over the River Avon, by "W. Bridges"]. An excellent companion book was produced for the exhibition, making a worthy and stimulating start to the new year –  – yet that initial bridge also reminds me of a post on Pruned, about the unbuildable, speculative architectural designs of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, which included this insane kind of bio-architectural hedge-bridge. Houses growing atop houses.  Combining this and the bridge above, however, I'm left wondering if you could grow a bridge out of coral? A whole continent-wide system of Roman aqueducts? Somehow train the coral, or guide its barnacled growth, upward into an arc – then walk over it. Sail ships under it. Or would that form the first legally-recognized case of landscape abuse? Mistreating your living bridges? (See Pruned or the nonist for more; then order this book).
 [Image: The Brooklyn Bridge cutting over an arched labyrinth of brickwork; Keith Kin Yan/ Overshadowed].
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[Image: Urban optometry, the 
