ryanpanos:

How Amsterdam’s Airport Is Fighting Noise Pollution With Land Art | Via

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, located just 9 km southwest of the city, is the third busiest airport in Europe and one of the busiest in the world. In an average year, more than 63 million passengers pass through Schiphol in as many as 479,000 flights to and from various international destinations. That’s an average of about 1,300 flights every day, or nearly a flight every minute. In other words, Schiphol is very busy and very loud.

When the Dutch military first built a landing strip here in 1916, they chose the site because it was a polder —a broad and flat lowland that used to be the bed of a vast lake. Over the decades the flat expanse of the Haarlemmermeer polder became one of the most densely populated areas of the country, and the noise produced by the airport became an annoying problem for the residents.

For years, residents complained about the incessant rumbling din produced every time an aircraft took off. This type of noise, called ground-level noise, propagates across the flat and featureless Haarlemmermeer landscape that has nothing in between—no hills, no valleys— to disrupt the path of the sound waves. When the airport opened its longest runway in 2003, residents could hear the din more than 28 km away.

To tackle the noise problem, the airport brought in an unlikely candidate—an architecture firm called H+N+S Landscape Architects and artist Paul De Kort.

The idea to engage a landscape artist to solve a technical problem was born out of an accident. In 2008, after a failed attempt to control noise, the Schiphol Airport officials discovered that after the arable land between the runway and the surrounding settlements were ploughed, the noise dropped.

So Paul De Kort dug a series of hedges and ditches on the southwest of the airport, just past the edge of the runway. The distance between the ridges are roughly equivalent to the wavelength of the airport noise, which is about 36 feet. There are 150 perfectly straight and symmetrical furrows with six foot high ridges between them. These simple ridges have reduced noise levels by more than half.

mitochondria-eve:

UM EXCUSE ME THOS E ARE FUCKING PIXELS HOW

(Source: elosilla, via emmirylikescoffee)

ryanpanos:

Cityscape of Hong Kong | Via

In Hong Kong, space has always been at a premium. The small autonomous territory, part of the People’s Republic of China, houses more than 7.3 million residents within just 426 square miles (1,104 sq kilometers)—resulting in one of the highest population densities in the world: 17,150 people per square mile (6,650 people per sq kilometers). In such a limited and popular environment, developers tend to build as tall as possible, leading to a bristling cityscape that has led some to call Hong Kong a concrete forest. Reuters reports that home prices in Hong Kong have risen by 120 percent since 2008, with prices in the luxury market being pushed up by wealthy buyers from mainland China. The market has cooled in recent months as investors wait to see which direction China’s slowing economy will trend.

Pastel tests of boredom.

ryanpanos:

Landscape i | David Umemoto 

archatlas:

Tom Climent

Irish painter Tom Climent produces paintings of figurative, urban and landscape subjects, sometimes referencing the history of painting in his works. His most recent work tends to focus on the creation of a structured space, while investigating the boundaries between abstraction and representation.

These investigations are performed using paint. As traces of memories and feelings accumulate and overlap on the canvas, construction and deconstruction become active tools in the creation of his paintings.

Referencing landscape, various types of structures and natural phenomena, the compositions range from the visually complex to simple basic structures. His manipulation of materials, scale and weight of these structures obscures their basic properties and any identifiable purpose. It focuses on our relationship with the spatial, formal and emotional qualities of architecture, while referencing a narrative but never actually revealing what that might be.

Images and text via Tom Climent

(via alwaysinstudio)