The Property

There was an interesting article in The New York Times this week about "161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands" that were purchased this summer by the Nature Conservancy.
The cost was $110 million – and the sellers had owned the land since the end of the Civil War.

[Image: The "View from Noonmark Mountain" by Robbie's Photo Art, found via Flickr; this photo is simply for illustrative purposes: as far as I'm aware, it does not show the property discussed below].

These 161,000 acres, "considered the last remaining large privately owned parcels in Adirondack Park," we read, "are an ecological marvel":

containing 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, more than 80 mountains and a vast unbroken wilderness that only loggers and a few hunters have ever seen. The property also contains unmatched natural features like the blue ledges of the Hudson River Gorge, OK Slip Falls and Boreas Pond, with its stunning views of the Adirondack high peaks, which naturalists have dreamed of protecting for decades.

While the article is actually about what the Nature Conservancy might be forced to do next, in order to live up to its own purchasing agreement, what I find extraordinary is the idea that these 161,000 acres of "unbroken wilderness," a long day's drive from New York City, have only been seen by "loggers and a few hunters" since the end of the Civil War.
So what else is out there...? And do we know?

[Image: Two stitched panoramas of the Adirondacks: (top) Valley View Ledge" / (bottom) "View from Catamount Mountain, both by retropc, found via Flickr].

Absurd questions, of course: it's New York state, not Borneo or even Utah – or Bosnia, for that matter – and so it seems relatively unlikely that some weird and amazing lost city or heretofore unknown species of hominid will be found out in the darkness by Nature Conservancy volunteers.
And yet I can't help but think of vague, sci fi-like scenarios of undiscovered archaeological sites – civilizations no one even dreamed existed, thriving here on the North American landmass before ice ages came and scraped the place clean – or monstrous fossils lodged in lumps of exposed bedrock, weird marks in the sides of distant hills corresponding to no known period of the earth's biological history... Crashed spaceships. The world's largest cave system. Medicinal flowers.
And so on.
Anyway, there's something about large, privately held plots of wilderness that absolutely fascinates me – and not because I advocate turning the public lands of the United States over to private interests, but because of what I might call the literary, even psychological, possibilities of owning wilderness.
In fact, I'm reminded of yet another New York Times article, this one about the large-scale private purchasing of former timber lands out west.
There is, we read, "a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests." There are thus "private ponds" – and private rivers and mountains and gullies. In fact, there are "vast national forests, grasslands and wilderness areas that in Montana alone add up to nearly 46,000 square miles, about the size of New York State" – however, "in many places, the new owners are throwing up no trespassing signs and fences, blocking what generations of residents across the West have taken for granted – open and beckoning access into the woods to fish, hunt and camp."
Then, surrounded by a few hundred acres of remote and unpopulated – and unpoliced – land, you start to do things... Gradually planning a bid for political sovereignty. Building things deep in the woods. Walking around alone at midnight, thinking about calculus, surrounded by 2000 acres of your own land.
This, in turn, reminded me of an old Clive Barker story called "Down, Satan!"
I may not have remembered the story correctly, having last read it in high school, but its premise is that a fabulously wealthy businessman decides to build Hell on Earth – literally to construct Hell – in order to summon forth the devil (or some such idea). He thus sets about designing and building a terrifying new complex full of torture machines and acid baths and vast graveyards somewhere on private land in Nevada.
At the end of the story, the police raid the place and the guy realizes that he has, in fact, summoned the devil to Earth – and it's him...

[Image: "Serene View" in the Adirondacks, by |ash|, found via Flickr].

In any case, we learn that these sorts of transactions, involving formerly public lands, are growing much more common – but also more complex and more ambitious. "Over the last 10 years," we're told, "at least 40 million acres of private forest land have changed hands nationwide." 40 million acres! That's very nearly the size of the United Kingdom.
Of course, the motivation behind all these purchases is not preservation – or even constructing Hell: it all comes down to logging. Even environmental advocates are now picking up their chainsaws.

In ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, environmentalists and representatives of the timber industry are reaching across the table, drafting plans that would get loggers back into the national forests in exchange for agreements that would set aside certain areas for protection.
Both groups are feeling under siege: timber executives because of the decline in logging, and environmentalists because of the explosion of growth on the margins of the public lands.
(...)
Many environmentalists say they have come to realize that cutting down trees, if done responsibly, is not the worst thing that can happen to a forest, when the alternative is selling the land to people who want to build houses.

But surely "selling the land to people who want to build houses" is not the only alternative.
Surely someone with loads of money could finally do something interesting, for instance, putting aside the cocaine addiction and the personal fleets of Range Rovers and the Malibu mansions and buying land, buying lots of land, buying as many tens of thousands of acres as they can afford – and not developing it, not re-selling it, not clear-cutting it, not even necessarily preserving it, just doing something out there in their own private wilderness, whether it's opening a system of public trails – or maybe you can subscribe to the land the way you subscribe to a magazine, and so you get access to new trails every few months – or building radio astronomical research stations, or a summer camp for landscape journalists, or the BLDGBLOG Academy, or a human clone farm, or whatever. Build a private cave. Who cares.
But, surely, with literally tens of millions of acres of land at stake here, and with more and more – and more – people becoming billionaires, let alone millionaires, someone with a little imagination will come along finally and do something interesting out there, away from the airports, alone in the darkness of North America, surrounded by maple trees, coming up with plans, changing history, supplying novelists with fodder for plots for decades to come.
Otherwise we'll just build more houses.

Event 40204628

We just had another earthquake.
The house jolted; the front door chain swung back and forth, tapping the doorframe; and I stood up, looking out the back window, realizing that if all hell breaks loose I'm really thirsty and I don't have any bottled water. The jolting became a dull vibration, and then it ended. I sat back down on the futon.
It was a 5.6 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was 5.7 miles beneath the Earth's surface.
It was Event 40204628.

Earlier: Event 14312160

Spies, Light-Writing, and the Surface of the City

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

This morning's post reminded me of a link someone sent in two weeks ago: Energie in Motion, a light-writing project by two guys in Germany.
Hey, little man! What are you doing outside by yourself? You look sad.

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

There's no need to hide!

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

It's just me...
For more images, stop by the Energie in Motion site itself. There's even a short video you can watch of the men at work, writing with light in Munich and Hamburg, turning parking meters into robots and animating street signs with little glowing arms and legs.
It'd be interesting, meanwhile, if you could install some sort of moving light sculpture in the center of the city. The sculpture appears to be totally abstract: casually and randomly, it switches back and forth amongst various positions, spinning little lights around, making arcs, circles, hops, jumps, and flashes, all to no real purpose or design – but then someone accidentally takes a photo of it using too long an exposure...
The resulting images, developed back at home in a basement darkoom, reveal that the sculpture is actually writing things in space.
Like this:

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

It just requires an elongated present moment in which to read it.
Turns out it's a new way for spies to communicate – and this random tourist with a camera has now uncovered a sinister plot...
Alfred Hitchcock directs the film version.

(Thanks, Joel D.! Vaguely related: Automotive Ossuary).

White Light

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

I stumbled on an old project from the summer of 2004 today, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio, called White Noise/White Light.
The project was on display in Athens during the 2004 Olympics:

Comprised of a 50' x 50' grid of fiber optics and speakers, "White Noise/White Light" is an interactive sound and light field that responds to the movement of people as they walk through it... As pedestrians enter into the fiber optic field their presence and movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LEDs and white noise from speakers below.

And though I wasn't in Athens to see the thing in person, it certainly did photograph well.

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

Juxtaposed with the Parthenon in the background, the effect, in fact, looks quite mesmerizing.
Electrical practicalities and issues of light pollution aside, it'd be nice to install something like this for a few nights along the rim of the entire Grand Canyon... Then fly over it in a glider, at 3am, taking photographs.

UPDATE: How strange: I came home from work today to find two copies of Architect magazine waiting for me in the doorway – and lo! On p. 49 of their September 2007 issue there's nothing else but "White Noise/White Light" by Höweler + Yoon... Architect says: "The experience and publicity that Höweler + Yoon gained from the Olympics project have led to new commissions and further explorations in up-to-the-nanosecond lighting technologies." Interesting overlap.

(Earlier: Archidose blogged it).

The Road

Flying into Vegas last night to speak at a conference hosted somewhere inside the Venetian Hotel by the Urban Land Institute, I read Cormac McCarthy's recent novel, The Road. It's a book I'd long wanted to read but kept putting off for some reason, and I'm glad I finally read it.

[Image: By Trevor Manternach, found during a Flickr search].

If you don't know the book, the basic gist is that the United States – and, we infer, everything else in the world – has been annihilated in what sounds like nuclear war. But all of that is just background for the real meat of the book.
The Road follows a father and son as they walk south, starving, toward an unidentified coast. They cross mountains and prairies and forests; everything is burned, turned to ash, or obliterated. The father is coughing up blood and the skies are permanently grey.
Briefly, I'd be interested to hear, out of sheer curiosity, where other people think the book is "set" – because it sounds, at times, like the hills of New York state or even western Massachusetts; at other times it sounds like Missouri, Tennessee, parts of Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast; at other times like the Sierra Nevadas, hiking down toward the rocky shorelines just north of, say, Santa Barbara. Sometimes it sounds like Oregon.
In any case, the only glimpse we get of the war itself is this – and all spelling and punctuation in these quotations is McCarthy's own:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.

After this, the landscape outside is described as "scabbed" and "cauterized," heavily covered in ash.
McCarthy memorably writes: "They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn."
The wife soon gone – indeed, she's only ever present through flashbacks – the father and son stumble south pushing their food supplies, a few toys, and some "stinking robes and blankets" in an old grocery cart. They come across Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like houses, as some bands of bearded survivors have taken to cannibalism.
Interestingly, every house seems vaguely terrifying to the young boy in a way that the dead forests and dried riverbeds simply do not. Empty houses on hills with their doors left open.
So their journey down the road continues:

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. (...) Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

And then they approach what appears to have been a place actually struck by those distant concussions of sound and light, the perhaps atomic bombs of an unexplained war:

Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I dont think you should see this.

It's a good book. It's not perfect; a friend of mine quipped that it ends with "a failure of nerve," and yet the nostalgic tone of the book's final paragraph suited me just fine.
Which just leaves us, readers of things like this, preparing in whatever small ways we can to survive some undefined possible apocalypse of our own time here, the future politicized, the reservoirs drying, the religions hording arms and the oceans full of plastic. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

N.A.W.A.P.A.

With drought on my mind, it was interesting to come across two new articles in The New York Times today, both about the United States of waterlessness.

The less interesting of the two tells us that "[w]ater levels in the Great Lakes are falling; Lake Ontario, for example, is about seven inches below where it was a year ago" – and, "for every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads... or risk running aground."

[Image: The Great Lakes are draining; photo by James Rajotte for The New York Times].

What's causing this? "Most environmental researchers," we read, "say that low precipitation, mild winters and high evaporation, due largely to a lack of heavy ice covers to shield cold lake waters from the warmer air above, are depleting the lakes."

I'm reminded of something Alex Trevi sent me several weeks ago, in which writer and comedian Garrison Keillor speculates as to what might happen if the state of Minnesota sold all the water in Lake Superior.

Keillor describes a fantastical project called Excelsior, in which the Governor of Minnesota "will stand on a platform in Duluth and pull a golden lanyard, opening the gates of the Superior Diversion Canal, a concrete waterway the size of the Suez. Water from Lake Superior will flood into the canal at a rate of 50 billion gal. per hour and go south."

It will flow into the St. Croix River, to the Mississippi, south to an aqueduct at Keokuk, Iowa, and from there west to the Colorado River and into the Grand Canyon and many other southwestern canyons, filling them up to the rims – enough water to supply the parched Southwest from Los Angeles to Santa Fe for more than 50 years.

The drained landscape left behind will be renamed the Superior Canyon – and the Superior Canyon, Keillor says, will put the Grand Canyon to shame. "It's bigger, for one thing," he writes, "plus it has islands and sites of famous shipwrecks. You'll have a monorail tour of the sites with crumpled hulls of ships. Very respectful."

By 2006, Keillor speculated (he was writing from the Hootie & the Blowfish-filled year of 1995):

Lake Superior will be gone, and its islands will be wooded buttes rising above the fertile coulees of the basin. A river will run through it, the Riviera River, and great glittering casinos like the Corn Palace, the Voyageur, the Big Kawishiwi, the Tamarack Sands, the Clair de Loon, the Sileaux, the Garage Mahal, the Glacial Sands, the Temple of Denture, the Golden Mukooda will lie across the basin like diamonds in a dish. Family-style casinos, with theme parks and sensational water rides on the rivers cascading over the north rim, plus high-rise hotels and time-share condominiums. Currently there are no building restrictions in Lake Superior; developers will be free to create high-rises in the shape of grain elevators, casinos shaped like casserole dishes, accordions, automatic washers. Celebrities will flock to the canyon. You'll see guys on the Letterman show who, when Dave asks, "Where you going next month, pal?" will say, "I'll be in Minnesota, Dave, playing four weeks at the Pokegama." Tourism will jump 1,000%. Guys on the red-eye from L.A. to New York will look out and see a blaze of light off the left wing and ask the flight attendant, "What's that?" And she'll say, "Minnesota, of course."

All of which actually reminds of Lebbeus Woods, and his vision of a drained Manhattan.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan; view larger].

But perhaps such a willfully fictive reference overlooks the reality of the drought(s) now creeping up on the United States.

In a massive new article published this weekend in The New York Times, we're given a long and rather alarming look at the lack of water in the American west, focusing on the decline of the Colorado River.

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River – which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains – has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government.

And it will happen; this "unfathomable" situation will someday occur. The American West will run out of water.

[Image: Simon Norfolk, a photographer previously interviewed by BLDGBLOG, taken for The New York Times].

Or will it?

At one point in his genuinely brilliant book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner describes something called N.A.W.A.P.A.: the North American Water and Power Alliance. N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the gonzo hydrological fantasy project of a particular group of U.S. water engineers. N.A.W.A.P.A., Reisner tells us, would "solve at one stroke all the West's problems with water" – but it would also take "a $6-trillion economy" to pay for it, and "it might require taking Canada by force."

He quips that British Columbia "is to water what Russia is to land," and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam. Canadians, we read, "have viewed all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice" – but what exactly is "all of this"?

Reisner:

Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia – dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles – reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature's second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent's hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long.

And that's barely half the project!

The project would ultimately make "the Mojave Desert green," we read, diverting Canada's fresh water south to the faucets of greater Los Angeles – thus destroying almost every salmon fishery between Anchorage and Vancouver, and even "rais[ing] the level of all five [Great Lakes]," in the process.

After all, N.A.W.A.P.A. also means that the Great Lakes would be connected to the center of the North American continent by something called the Canadian–Great Lakes Waterway.

But N.A.W.A.P.A. is an old plan; it's been gathering dust since the 1980s. No one now is seriously considering building it. It's literally history.

But who knows – perhaps 2008 is the year N.A.W.A.P.A. makes a comeback. Or, perhaps, in January 2010, after another dry winter, Los Angeles voters will start to get thirsty. Perhaps some well-positioned Senators, in 2011, might even start making phonecalls north. Perhaps, in 2012, some recent graduates from water management programs at state-funded universities in Illinois or Utah might catch the itch of moral rebellion; they might then start redrawing their personal maps of the continent, going to bed at night with visions of massive dams in their heads, writing position papers for peer-reviewed hydrological engineering magazines.

Perhaps, in 2017, ten years from now, BLDGBLOG – if it's still around – will even be reporting from the rims of these gigantic structures, thrown up overnight in the remote and untrafficked darkness of riverine western Canada. Long, perfectly calibrated concrete sluices and pumps will bring water thousands of miles south through redwood forests to the open basins of California's reservoirs, and photographs of their incomprehensibly expensive and exactly poured geometry will elicit whistles of embarrassed awe from readers on the streets of Weehawken.

[Image: A fish-cleaning station in Las Vegas Bay, now abandoned by the West's sinking waters; taken by Simon Norfolk for The New York Times].

Or perhaps it won't be N.A.W.A.P.A. after all, but some titanic new project identical in all but name.

Will California wait for the coming drought to destroy it – or will the state take drastic measures?

Las Vegas and the Future of Urban Real Estate

Just a quick note that I'll be speaking in Las Vegas on Wednesday afternoon, October 24, as part of the Urban Land Institute's 2007 annual meeting.
I'll be on a panel with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times; Neil Takemoto of CoolTown Studios; and Ted Bardacke of Global Green.
So if you're in Las Vegas – though you have to register for the conference – be sure to stop by.
Wildly, it's also the day to catch Queen Noor of Jordan; she has a B.A. in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton – and, who knows, maybe she's a dedicated reader of BLDGBLOG (I'm not holding my breath).