another kind of oil town

Huntington Beach, Los Angeles. postcard, n.d.Oil wells at Huntington Beach, Los Angeles.  Not that historic, I went there once, and yes, the beach was on one side of the road, and heavy industry on the other.  

And, below, Echo Park, 1895-1901.  I can't imagine that driling technology, safety and escaping gas were done any better then than now.  Were all these people destined for a very short life?  No heroic socialist project here, but a different kind of compliance with modernity. 

Echo Park, 1895-1901.

La Cité du Pétrole

This is a trailer for Marc Wolfensberger's La Cité du Pétrole / Oil Rocks - City above the Sea, 2009.

And this, a map from liquidinfrastructure.info

flussbad, berlin

realities:unlimited. Flussbad, Berlin. 2011

Holcim has given a bronze award to this project by realities:unlimited, planned to start in 2019. 

From Holcim's press release: 'An urban plan for transforming an under-used arm of the River Spree in Berlin into a natural 745m-long swimming pool, the Flussbad project in the heart of the historic city creates a swimming zone equivalent to 17 Olympic-sized pools, and provides a public urban recreation space for both residents and tourists adjacent to the Museuminsel. The project, which includes a 1.8ha reed bed natural reserve with sub-surface sand bed filters to purify the water, was developed by a team led by architects Jan and Tim Edler of realities united, Germany.'

This is how it works:

realities:united

Patrick Keiller's London, 1994

I've been waiting to see this again for years, since 1994 in fact:

the Big Bend Highway

Map of Big Bend Highway from the commemorative booklet. 29 June 1940. Big Bend, Selkirk Mountains, British Columbia

Before Roger's Pass there was the Big Bend Highway, a long loop of road following the Columbia River between Donald and Revelstoke.  It went north from Golden up one long valley which separates the Selkirk Range from the Rockies, and then south down the next valley leading to Revelstoke.  A dam at the top of the loop at Mica Creek was built in the early 1960s, after the whole route was made redundant by the section of the Trans-Canada that goes over Roger's Pass. Another dam in the 1980s and much of the Big Bend highway was lost to the consequential new lakes.

Originally there had been a wagon road along the Columbia River, as there had been a gold rush on it in the 1890s.  In the 1930s relief camps were established in the Big Bend: single, homeless and unemployed men who, in exchange for housing food and a very small wage, logged the route for the highway and contributed to the building of the road which was to be part of the Trans-Canada Highway.  It was opened in 1940.

The Big Bend was never paved, indeed great stretches of the BC sections of the Trans-Canada remained unpaved until the late 1960s. I often wish it was still there, the Big Bend, as it avoided the steep elevation change of Roger's Pass.  But, like the Coquihalla Highway built in 1985 bypassing another longer but safer section of the Trans-Canada between Kamloops and Hope, and also subject to horrible winter weather and endless closures, these new sections of road cut the mileage.  Fine in the summer, often fatal in the winter.

Giuseppe Penone, finding younger trees

Giuseppe Penone. Versailles Cedar, 2000-2003

Louis Helbig: aestheticising the unconscionable

Louis Helbig. Bitumen Slick N 57.19.28 W 111.25.44 Syncrude Aurora North

Helbig writes of the image above: Booms confining bitumen floating near the edge of Syncrude's Aurora North tar pond.  This is where industry suffered its most serious massive public relations setback in the spring of 2008 when someone alerted the public and the authorities to flocks of ducks landing on its surface.  In this particular incident about 1,600 ducks were killed.  Syncrude was convicted in 2010 of breaching both federal and provincial environmental reglations.

He has a series of aerial photographs of the oil sands region, and although his view is activist, as one can see from the captions, the images are beautiful.  How is it that our visual acuity has been trained to find abstraction so sublime.  Context is removed and we gaze at such images with the appreciation other eras gave to flowers or girls with pearl earrings.  This is precisely what is so dangerous about the removal of context, scale, consequences and facts.  They are removed.  

We need people such as Louis Helbig to keep explaining not just his photographs, but the abstract nature of the oil sands enterprise itself.  Whatever it does there is a diagram on the map with pipelines dotted in to Texas, maybe to Prince Rupert and on to China.  It is a series of mirrored glass office towers in Calgary and Houston. It is every plastic bag we throw hopefully into the recycling bin, it is the cloud of exhaust everytime we start our cars. 

rockfall net

Rockfall netting, Trans-Canada Highway, Kicking Horse Pass near Golden BCThis is a prosaic image of the steel mesh curtains in the Kicking Horse Pass just east of Golden, on a dangerous, narrow, steep, winding part of the Trans-Canada where there is only half a shoulder and no where to stop.  I usually pass these curtains in the winter and have seen them covered in hoarfrost, or wet and shimmering in the sun, or packed with snow.  They are very beautiful, but it is suicidal to try to take a photo of them while driving.  And one cannot stop.  

This is Burgess Shale territory and both the highway and the railway tracks sit on narrow ledges hacked out of the cliffs cut by the Kicking Horse River.  These cliffs, limestone and slate, shatter with the freeze/thaw cycle and crumble away landing on the road surface, thus the curtains which hang in front to catch falling rock.

A little farther east, the rubble beside the road is pale green, a particular formation that is compressed calcium carbonate, they say.  All this rock is fragile, it weathers easily and continuously.  The road is in a permanent state of repair and reconstruction and is often closed.  There is no radio signal, cell phones do not work: one is in the middle of a large stretch of unalloyed geology.  There are gabions, there are straw erosion bales, there are curtains, there are tiny cars and trucks hurtling their way through it all, there are accidents and a primitive understanding that this is still a dangerous landscape.

gabions 2

Gabions at Studland Beach, Dorset

Gabions counter erosion on beaches, usually under soft cliffs such as limestone and sandstone, or they protect roads and paths next to the beach. Lots of them in soft calcareous and slatey southern England: above, Studland Beach in Dorset, tidy genteel gabions made by a masonry culture – they look like dry stone walls.  Below, rough gabions in rough, granitey Scotland.

Duncan Astley. Gabions at Loch Hourn, Corran, ScotlandGabions are transparent to water, but obstruct larger things: sand and rock. A near-perfect solution, water is not thwarted, it comes and goes, but in a diminished way, its force absorbed by the gabion.  The fill would be formless and weak if not held in place by the wire cage which, with the lightest of touch, forms a fighting unit of rubble.

a luxury of bamboo sticks

bamboo scaffolding, Cambodia

Haven't much information on this photo, but it is from Vulgare, a most interesting landscape blog from France. 

Clearly this scaffold has something to do with cliff stabilisation: two weak systems pressed against each other to hold everything in place.  The tires at the bottom of the unscaffolded part are another such solution: gabions holding back the base.  And the shade arbour in the foreground, another fragile structure that in certain circumstances could be life-saving.  This is an unpeopled photograph of a scene dense with human need and activity.

the north

Terminology, very confusing.  As a child I learned that the difficulty in laying down the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s was crossing muskeg, which swallowed tracks and even whole trains.  This is what happened in the north, which I assumed was in Northern Canada, somewhere in the Northwest Territories, and as with things you learn in grade 8, I never examined it again until this past week in Sudbury.  

It is not that muskeg isn't a treacherous thing, great wetlands that form where there isn't drainage: bogs, full of decaying plant material, trapped moose and train tracks which eventually form peat and I suppose, ultimately coal.  No, the other treacherous thing is the word north.

The northern imagination written about by Northrop Fry, Margaret Atwood, embodied in the Group of Seven and Georgian Bay is not the north I thought it was, The North, north of the provinces.  It is actually western Ontario.   
This came as something of a surprise, given that Sudbury sits at 46°N and has a growing zone of 4b.  Calgary, which no one would consider north at all, sits almost 600km north at 51°N in zone 2b.

In another instance, the Ring of Fire is generally known as the zone of earthquake and volcanic activity that rings the Pacific Ocean, where the Pacific tectonic plate grinds against the North American plate, the Eurasian, Australian and Nazca plates.  In the west we hear a lot about it, especially in Vancouver where all buildings have been essentially rebuilt to earthquake standards.

But in Ontario, Ring of Fire is a mine in the James Bay region where chromium was recently discovered and for which a smelter is planned, much to the purported benefit of First Nations in the area.  It is seen as a revitalisation of Ontario's mining interest and will be introducing Chinese development interests to Sudbury.   I only know this because I watched Steve Paikin's Agenda last night on TVO where there was a debate on whether industrial development or species protection was more important in the north.  Their north.  The wishy-washy conclusion was that we should have both, which means that mining and forestry will proceed with glee and with a few ameliorative concessions to fish, birds and migrating herds. Who do not vote.

It is a different country, Ontario.

Preparing the ground for flatland housing development. Lonely yellow hydrant awaits.  
Anyway, this train of thought was triggered by a new subdivision (above) on a ridge that looks down on Sudbury.  Downtown Sudbury has a problem with drainage, sitting as it does on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield.  Water sits in lakes or in muskeggy wetlands, (they'd be called sloughs on the prairie, bogs on the coast).  In older districts, streets and the little houses lining them in the bottom of the basin in which downtown Sudbury sits, regularly flood, the streets become culverts and swales, the water hasn't got a lot of options.  Thus, new development perched on ridges above the city has a certain appeal.  

Putting in services for new development requires, by convention, that they be underground.  But there is no underground here, it is solid rock, so ground is created in a cut and fill way.  The rock is blasted into rubble and shifted around to make flat sites for houses with the sewer and water safely installed beneath.  
There are a lot of similarities between Sudbury and Yellowknife, where new development does exactly this, rock blasted into coarse gravel for developer houses on cul-de-sacs one could find anywhere in Canada.  Aleta Fowler wrote about this in On Site 14: does one go to the north to live as if one was in a southern Canadian suburb?

Kenneth Hayes has introduced the term geo-cosmopolitanism to the discussion of urban development which, in its rough outlines means being aware of and taking into account the deep geo-logic of place.  The naming is important, we can put geo-cosmopolitanism in all its complexity onto a different way of looking at cities, more deeply rooted in their history, their industries, their place in the world. 

Primary Russian Oil and Gas Pipelines to Europe

Living in oil & gas industry-obsessed Alberta, I find this map very interesting.  This is why Russia must be kept on side.  This is the underpinning to the cold war; this is all more important than the arms race/reduction treaty. 

Passeig de Gràcia, 1908

Barcelona en tranvia, 1908. Filmoteca Española

oh for trams, trolleys, street cars.  oh for a slow city.

click on the image above and it will take you to Europa Film Treasures and a short film taken from the front of a tram when the streets were full of children, dogs, people going somewhere.

Chile

What more is to be said about the Chilean mine rescue, given the acres of print about the seamy side of whatever story there is.  Why do we, in the developed nations, do this?  Why are we so intent on turning everything into a sleazy soap opera?  Is there a real problem with how right-wing is the president and whether or not the mining minister, having gone to Stanford and by definition is a member of the comprador bourgeoisie and whether or not miner 18 was separated and was living with someone else – does it matter? 

It was the most amazing saga I can remember since the invasion of Iraq, which I also watched in 24 hrs a day coverage on BBC World.  I remember thinking when the US had reached Baghdad airport, 'holy crow, that is the same distance away from where I live as if a hostile army had reached Calgary airport, a 20-minute dash up the Deerfoot'.

With the miners, yes the Mapuche hunger strike was concurrent, yes, the other miners thrown out of work by the same company that was mining the San José mine are protesting, but the world is now watching.  The attention on Chile is acute.  Canny politicians moving their underdeveloped country into first world status are not able to sweep anything under any sort of rug now. 

The oldest miner, Omar Reygadas, says of course he will go back to the mines.  He is a miner.  It is a reminder of when being a miner was a source of immense pride in the developed nations.  The miner's strike, broken by Margaret Thatcher, put paid to mining in the UK.  The Cape Breton miners, the men of the deeps, went to the wall along with the cod fishery.  However, Canada is still a mining country; we are a primary resource nation.   Would Christian Paradis have spent 50 of the last 70 days at, say, the tar sands, or a potash mine if there was a crisis involving the workers?   Somehow I doubt it.

Hesco bastion

German forces filling Hesco bastions in IraqJimi Heselden died last week in a Segway scooter accident. He was, according to his obituary notices, the epitome of the entrepreneurial inventor from the gritty side of Leeds.  He developed the gabion into an international manufacturing company that provided flat-packing wire and canvas frames that, when filled with sand or gravel or building debris or whatever is at hand, forms a heavy wall against erosion, mortars, bullets, landslides.  The R-House is a fortified building: a square of bastions with a heavy canvas top strapped over for a roof: 'living space for six to eight people against the potentially devastating after-effects of any disaster'. 

Hesco is divided into humanitarian, civil and military applications with many variations of the basic frame filled with rubble.  RAID is a 400m concertina wall packed into a 20' container.  It pulls out of the containter, a meter wide and 2.2m high, providing instant cover.  On the website it shows a truck shooting down a track the RAID wall flooding out behind it. Once standing it can be filled, or used for storage, but its main use is as an instant forward operating base.  It's a terrific concept – fast, effective; thundering music in the little video demo brings home that war needs ideas, and it needs someone to put those ideas in place.  Lives depend on them.

The Hesco website is full of information and photographs of the most amazing products.  Heavily copyrighted, thus no images here.   However, when looking up the history of the gabion, I find it is an ancient war defence, once used by Leonardo da Vinci for foundation fortification.  

Heselden gave away millions  to charity, he bought Segway just last year as the future of personal transportation able to be developed in many different ways.  He was on one when it tumbled over a cliff near his home.  A freak accident cutting short a canny, clever, generous, visionary life. 

hardware and robotics

A hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, near Bicester, in Oxfordshire. Photograph: English Heritage
The Guardian reports that this bunker is 'one of the best preserved Cold War landscapes in Britain' and it is now on the schedule of monuments to be protected from development.  It is a hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, built in 1967 after the unprotected Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground by Israel.  Decommissioned in 1994, it was a piece of little America with hamburgers and a supermarket.  

As I was considering this, and the rather crouching appearance of a hardened aircraft shelter, part one of Robo Wars by Stephen Sackur came on the radio.  He described a British lieutenant sitting in Nevada controlling drones in Afghanistan, doing his shift then driving home to his wife and kids.  Clearly this beats flying out of Kandahar and living in a dusty FOB. 

Sackur's investigation is about the nature of combat when it is conducted by robots dependent on satellite systems.  The country with the best hackers will win I suppose, however, all these things still deliver bombs which will still land on civilians who aren't hackers, and who will be the statistics that indicate success or failure.   The ultimate direction of all the handheld electronic toys that keep being launched on our wallets is not literacy with Kindle, or connectivity with the iPad, it is probably their weaponisation.

Jaclyn Shoub

Jaclyn Shoub. At This Point in Time. 2004Jaclyn Shoub works with large photographs, removing information in a process of distillation.  They are highly painterly as the removal of much of the photograph is done with a brush and solvent: one knows one is looking at a photograph, but so much content is leached from the surface that these landscapes become magical.  Shoub removes everything about the landscape except for the marks of human occupation which appear small and fragile.

For On Site 23: small things, we have been sent a narrative, a short story written in notes, as the beginning of an architectural process.  This narrative, which you will read when 23 is published in May, also has a delicacy – it describes the process of removing a building from public perception, so that the architecture is everything but the building. 

Both these two works are the opposite of abstraction, where one thinks of an essence and then displays that essence.  These start with the large and complex environment, urban or rural, and remove everything but a thin line of meaning.  What we are looking at is almost incidental to the fullness of life and world but, incidental or not, is extremely important to us.

Park Bridge, Golden BC

Park Bridge in construction, 2006. Kicking Horse Canyon, east of Golden, BC

One of the most spectacular bridges on the Trans-Canada is the new (2007) Park Bridge on the descent into Golden.  Now that it is open you barely know you are on a bridge, so wide and smooth is it, but during the several years of its construction you drove on the old highway underneath it (the highway and the CPR tracks show in the image above).  The central piers are about 150 feet high, tall and elegant; from the old highway it was clear we were all going to pitch off into space way up the hill, shoot across the ravine and catch the hill on the other side, bypassing the dangerous twisting old road all together.  You can't see any of this now from the new road, it is all just more highway, safe and fast and that marvellous registration of the extreme topography is lost. 

Anything under construction is so exciting.  It is when concept, theory and practice are all evident to the eye, and the architecture, in its widest sense, is diagrammatic and understandable.  Construction workers give the scale, one understands the size of the project.  Once it is all done, scale is subsumed by a comfortable opacity, the process of building has become an object, with a function, and we use it unthinkingly.

Placing the girders on the piers

This photo is from the Park Bridge girder launching on the Kicking Horse Canyon highway construction website photo gallery.  This is the link to the girder launching, but the rest of the site is worth a look.

the Dominion Grid

an image that everyone on the prairies has: incoming weather, driving in a straight line, fall fieldsThe Dominion Survey turned land into property in the tradition of the Enclosures Acts in Britain, where land commonly and traditionally farmed was enclosed by fences and walls by often self-appointed land-owners.  The Dominion Survey prepared the ground for the CPR and western settlement. Land held for millennia and used in accordance with constantly re-negotiated peace treaties, all of a sudden within a few years in the 1880s, was ruled off into one-mile squares, 6 mile sections, 36 square mile townships.  Road allowances were made at the edges of the sections and the first nations were bundled into reserves.

Metes and bounds, the survey system that measures land between this rock and that river, this mountain ridge and that path at least acknowledges that land has form, and in determining reserves in eastern Canada often the boundaries were negotiated according to an organic and aboriginal understanding of land use.  Not so for the Sarcee Reserve, now the Tsuu T'ina Nation, which was given three townships sitting in a row, a 36 x 6 mile rectangle running from 37th Street in south Calgary to the mountains.  Rivers and streams cut into this block and out again.  One could perhaps understand the same area being defined by the watershed of the Elbow River perhaps, but not this indifferent and random assignation of land. 

If you can measure land, you can draw it and if you can draw it, you can sell it.  Is this not at the base of survey systems?  I grew up with a western Canadian and an architect's love of the Dominion Grid, its absolute rationality that was nonetheless full of errors, correction lines that occur because of the curvature of the earth, delightful incongruities as a road slices over a hill and down a valley, standing on an escarpment and seeing the road go to the horizon twenty miles away.  Old Saskatchewan farmers could still reel off the legal description of homesteads they'd left in the 30s:  Section 22, Township 26, Range 2, West of the 4th Meridian.  I thought all this was magical, and in some sense still do.  But I also see it as a commercial project.  The CPR was given astounding bonuses for building the railway connecting BC with eastern Canada: $25 million (about $500 million today), 25 million square miles (exactly half the land) in a 50-mile zone either side of the main line and a monopoly on rail connections to the US.  Why does most of Canada live within a hundred miles of the US border?  Does the CPR have something to do with this? Are section roads straight?

CPR land was evenly dispersed, effectively limiting the size of a homestead (obtained free from the Canadian governmnent) to one section.

Cyclophobia

2nd Street SW. Calgary, Alberta