Tag: Winter

The Sky Roads of Kauttua

AbrahamBosse[Image: A 17th-century engraving by Abraham Bosse, scanned from the excellent Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge by Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier].

Thanks to airborne ice crystals reflecting street lights into the sky—an effect known as light pillars—the small Finnish village of Kauttua was greeted with an astral image of itself, as seen in a photo that made the rounds earlier this week. The town’s night-lit streets and buildings became uncanny constellations: the village as self-reflecting planetarium.

“How is that possible?” asks a helpful blog post by Fiona MacDonald. “When the temperature gets close to freezing,” she writes, “flat, hexagonal ice crystals can form in the air—not just up high, but also close to the ground. When this happens, these crystals essentially form a collective, giant mirror that can reflect a light source—such as a streetlight—back to the ground.” They are like ladders of light, or perhaps optical arrow chains, pulling images of our world up to space.

While the effect is already amazing, it’s worth noting that Kauttua is also the site of an ongoing search for an Iron Age village buried beneath the existing streets and property lines.

“The oldest archive source, a cadastral map from the year 1696, presents a homestead of 10 houses by the bridge leading across Eurajoki River,” we read over at Day of Archaeology. “A later cadastral map from 1790 presents large holdings of one farm at the same site and around it.” Today, however, there is little more than one surviving building, “an area of black soil” next to it, and “two light lines, presumably the earlier roads,” revealed in aerial photographs taken in 2008.

While there is obviously no connection between a lost Iron Age village and the ghostly street map that appeared in the sky over Kauttua last week, there is nonetheless something quite striking about the idea of a small village in the far north poised between two versions of itself: an underground web of old buildings and streets, now turned to black soil beneath the wheat fields, and this perfect, far more ethereal version, hovering there in a crystallography of light.

It’s almost as if a strange and other-worldly calendar exists, where, every summer, the town turns downward, scraping through soil and rock to uncover what it used to be, and then, each winter, it turns its eyes to the skies to see an inverted cartography, like some municipal zodiac, of its thriving streets.

(Thanks to Finnish novelist Hannu Rajaniemi, who first pointed this out to me on Twitter. “In Finland,” he wrote, “we make city maps in the sky out of light and snow crystals.”)

Joyful Rendezvous Upon Pure Ice and Snow

[Image: Snow-making equipment via Wikipedia].

The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing are something of a moonshot moment for artificial snow-making technology: the winter games will be held “in a place with no snow.” That’s right: “the 2022 Olympics will rely entirely on artificial snow.”

As a report released by the International Olympic Committee admits, “The Zhangjiakou and Yanqing Zones have minimal annual snowfall and for the Games would rely completely on artificial snow. There would be no opportunity to haul snow from higher elevations for contingency maintenance to the racecourses so a contingency plan would rely on stockpiled man-made snow.”

This gives new meaning to the word snowbank: a stock-piled reserve of artificial landscape effects, an archive of on-demand, readymade topography.

Beijing’s slogan for their Olympic bid? “Joyful Rendezvous upon Pure Ice and Snow.”

[Image: Snow-making equipment via Wikipedia].

Purely in terms of energy infrastructure and freshwater demand—most of the water will be pumped in from existing reservoirs—the 2022 winter games will seemingly be unparalleled in terms of their sheer unsustainability. Even the IOC sees this; from their report:

The Commission considers Beijing 2022 has underestimated the amount of water that would be needed for snowmaking for the Games but believes adequate water for Games needs could be supplied.

In addition, the Commission is of the opinion that Beijing 2022 has overestimated the ability to recapture water used for snowmaking. These factors should be carefully considered in determining the legacy plans for snow venues.

Knowing all this, then, why not be truly radical—why not host the winter games in Florida’s forthcoming “snowball fight arena,” part of “a $309 million resort near Kissimmee that would include 14-story ski and snowboard mountain, an indoor/outdoor skateboard park and a snowball fight arena”?

Why not host them in Manaus?

Interestingly, the IOC also raises the question of the Games’ aesthetics, warning that the venues might not really look like winter.

“Due to the lack of natural snow,” we read, “the ‘look’ of the venue may not be aesthetically pleasing either side of the ski run. However, assuming sufficient snow has been made or stockpiled and that the temperature remains cold, this should not impact the sport during the Games.”

Elsewhere: “There could be no snow outside of the racecourse, especially in Yanqing, impacting the visual perception of the snow sports setting.” This basically means that there will be lots of bare ground, rocks, and gravel lining the virginal white strips of these future ski runs.

[Image: Ski jumping in summer at Chicago’s Soldier Field (1954); via Pruned].

Several years ago, Pruned satirically offered Chicago as a venue for the world’s “first wholly urban Winter Olympics.” With admirable detail, he went into many of the specifics for how Chicago might pull it off, but he also points out the potential aesthetic disorientation presented by seeing winter sports in a non-idyllic landscape setting.

“Chicago’s gritty landscape shouldn’t be much of a handicap,” he suggests. Chicago might not “embody a certain sort of nature—rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc.,” but the embedded landscape technology of the Winter Games should have left behind that antiquated Romanticism long ago.

As Pruned asks, “have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?”

Seen this way, Beijing’s snowless winter games are just an unsustainable historical trajectory taken to its most obvious next step.

[Image: Making snow for It’s A Wonderful Life, via vintage everyday].

In any case, the 2022 Winter Olympics are shaping up to be something like an Apollo Program for fake snow, an industry that, over the next seven years, seems poised to experience a surge of innovation as the unveiling of this most artificial of Olympic landscapes approaches.