hipercroquis

por juan freire

En Archinect han aparecido dos entrevistas (comentadas también en Pruned)
que proporcionan una visión alternativa del paisaje, las perturbaciones
humanas y la arquitectura del paisaje y la restauración ecológica.
Lejos de la visión idílica, y escasamente real, de la fotografía de la
naturaleza, se sitúa el trabajo de David Maisel. El trabajo de Julie Bargmann
no pretende convertir antiguos paisajes industriales en nuevos
jardines, sólo recuperarlos ambientalmente al tiempo que conservan su
valor cultural.

Geoff Manaugh (el autor de BLDGBLOG) entrevista a David Maisel,
fotógrafo que utiliza la imagen aérea para captar la estética y
evolución de paisajes alterados por el hombre (minas, zonas urbanas,
lagos desecados y contaminados, nubes de contaminantes, …). Un
“fotógrafo de la naturaleza” (un término en el que no se siente
representado) muy particular, que se interesa no por la belleza de la
naturaleza inalterada sino por los paisajes modificados por el hombre.
En su web pueden visitarse todos sus proyectos. Entre otros son especialmente recomendables:

Lake Project:

The history of this region [Owens Lake region] is the stuff of
California legend: a story of engineers, politicians, and big land
owners working together to divert water to the rapidly growing desert
city of Los Angeles, generating a thriving agricultural industry and an
environmental disaster in the process. Beginning in 1913, the now
infamous Los Angeles reclamation project effectively diverted water
from Owens Valley to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, providing a substantial
amount of the city’s water supply. By 1926, the lower Owens River and
Owens Lake were essentially depleted of water, leaving a vast exposed
salt flat with unusually concentrated mineral levels and extremely
vulnerable topsoil. The situation has been exacerbated by fierce winds
that sweep through the valley and dislodge carcinogenic particles from
the lakebed, creating a pervasive dust cloud known as the Keeler fog
(named for the town on the east side of the lake); the dust contains
carcinogens such as nickel, cadmium, arsenic, as well as sodium,
chlorine, iron, calcium, potassium, sulfur, aluminum, and magnesium.

Terminal Mirage (de donde prodceden las imágenes de este post):

For over 20 years David Maisel has focused his cameras on
specific US terrains as seen from low-flying planes, creating startling
images of disturbing yet beautiful environments. After concentrating on
copper and coal mines in the 1980s, he documented the nearly-drained
Owens Lake, which is located on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains in Southern California. He also shifted from black-and-white
to color images and considerably increased the size of his prints while
conceptually pushing the tension between abstraction and recognizable
realities. His most recent works feature another shift in subject —-
to the Great Salt Lake, and in the levels of abstraction as well as the
disturbingly engaging duality between beauty and repulsion.

Oblivion:

Certain spatial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and
Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can
approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls and gated
developments, highway entrance and exit ramps, lays unfurled over the
landscape like a sheet over a recalcitrant cadaver.

Por otra parte Heather Ring entrevista a Julie Bargmann de D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio.
Entre otros temas interesantes tratados en la entrevista, merece la
pena reseñarse su explicación del papel del diseño como herramienta
para hacer visible el trabajo de científicos e ingenieros que restauran
ecosistemas y su aproximación a la restauración que se aleja de los
paisajes idealizados (aparentemente naturales, pero totalmente
artificiales):

For the design
guidelines you set up for the EPA – and more generally — when you
collaborate with these environmental scientists and engineers – what do
you see as the role of the designer?

The key thing is for the designer to bring in a
holistic approach: cultural, economic, ecological, and even spiritual.
Make the process visible, physical. Engineers are thrilled because now
their work extends beyond just a functional requirement. Storm-water
management becomes poetic. A designer helps make legible the culturally
significant act of engineering these systems.

Scientists – often
tucked away in basement laboratories – are thrilled to have designers
test the applications of their work. The artist Mel Chin did this with phytoremediation.
He literally pulled the scientist Rufus Cheney out of the basement
laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture and put phytoremediation
on the map, because he basically made a garden and put it out there on
the world. The scientist Clayton Rugh has this laboratory on a major
thoroughfare in the Ford Rouge Plant. So passersby can say “Look,
there’s Dr. Rughe and his lab assistants, working in the garden,” with
the backdrop of the coke oven. So that’s the role of the designer.

…

Could you talk more about your conception of the
sublime? What is the “toxic beauty” in land scarred by with mine refuse
and waters laced with acid? And for that matter, how has your work been
received? Do you find resistance from communities that have more
traditional notions of beauty and nature?

That’s the
biggest challenge I face: regulations are a pain, but perceptions are
the bigger obstacle. For most part with landscape, expectations are
locked into a pastoral ideal. But when I’ve re-presented these
industrial landscapes to the community and posed the question, “Do you
think these are beautiful?” they will say, “You know what? It’s a
stretch for me – but they are.” And I think they’re responding to their
experience actually working on these sites. They realize, “This is
important to my memory.” Clearly they’re not proud of a toxic legacy,
but with that comes a memory of their hard work and supporting a family
- so to them, there’s a beauty to it.

But this is only if
they’re even given an opportunity to see that. There are so many people
working out there who only show the community a menu of idealized
landscapes – they don’t even give them a chance to respond to the
industrial landscape itself. When I was in Chicago, I asked, “Have you
taken Mayor Daley to see these quarries, basins and landfills?”
Revealing these landscapes makes some people incredibly nervous. At the
Mayor’s Institute, what you hear is: they’re ugly, they’re blight,
degraded, useless. But if you asked the current generation, they might
use the word “cool.”

Tanto David Maisel como Julie Bargmann nos muestran como
los paisajes, naturales o artificiales, son una construcción humana
(dependen de nuestra visión subjetiva). La destrucción del pasado
humano de un paisaje mediante su “ajardinamiento” se podría considerar
el extremo de lo artificial que logra una estética genérica y vacía. En
el fondo responde a un acto fallido del pensamiento políticamente
correcto que intenta borrar, avergonzado, cualquier traza de nuestro
pasado. Restaurar reconociendo la historia humana de un paisaje y
conservando la identidad de su relación con sus usuarios es un
ejercicio de responsabilidad y respeto hacia nuestra historia humana y
ambiental.

powered by performancing firefox