Stratus, Cirrus, Cumulus: Meteorologists recognise ten different types of clouds. The common feature for all of them is that they float in the sky far above the ground. At the Himalaya Art Museum in Shanghai, one cloud came nearly close enough to touch. As if riding through the window on a breeze, it hovered over the staircase like it happened all the time. The force behind this seemingly surrealistic event is Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde.
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As part of his Nimbus series, Smilde has created many of these unexpected encounters since 2012 by perfecting the art of creating ideal conditions for cloud formation indoors. Transported from their natural context, the artists stages, with the aid of precise illumination, the cloud as if it were a volatile yet beautiful sculpture. After just seconds it evaporates as if it had never been there. Accordingly, photos taken at the right moment are the only opportunity to experience and exhibit Smilde’s gossamer-fine art.
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Nests, dams and lodges: Animals can be very gifted builders indeed! On his trip around the world, photographer Ingo Arndt spent time taking pictures of animal-built architecture – from the ingenious construction of beaver dams to the structural wonder of anthills.
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In both open and hidden places, in the light and in the dark: Animals such as bats, otters, birds and fish have all made our cities their homes. Nevertheless, we hardly include them in our planning efforts. There is hope, however: The Network of Biophilic Cities, a cooperative project among cities all over the globe that values residents’ innate connections and access to nature. See here, how the city of Edmonton, Canada, became part of the network.
Learn more about the Network of Biophilic Cities in Topos 101! Order your personal copy here!
Animals are inherently close to us, but at the same time stranger than ever. Our understanding of these creatures and our relationships with them are formed by media mechanisms. This is not a bad thing. But these images cover up an existential element of human insecurity when we are confronted with the world of the beast. In Topos 101 Alexander Gutzmer, Editor in Chief of Baumeister – The Architecture Magazine, contributes a cultural studies-informed essay based on the films of “Sharknado”. Who else remembers the cult trash thriller series?
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War of Gazes – an excerpt
Sometimes, you have to get close to the plagues that haunt you. We are taught this by one of the most hilarious scenes Hollywood has ever produced, i.e. a scene from the series Sharknado. In the films, cities are attacked by sharks flying through the air. In the above mentioned key scene, which is the culmination of the tone-setting 2013 opener, hero Fin, having performed a number of mind-blowing deeds of heroism, deliberately jumps into the mouth of one giant shark, only to cut his way out again with a chain saw. In this way, he kills the final member of the plague of swimming, and later flying, sharks attacking Los Angeles. He gets right in the middle of things. Only by actually seeing and learning about the animals’ intestines is he able to get rid of the plague.
“Sometimes, you have to get close to the plagues that haunt you.”
Through this scene Sharknado becomes a strange symbol for the highly ambiguous relationship between man and beast. It is an awkward representation of the way in which we engage with the animals around us, and with the idea of the “animal kingdom” in general. On the one hand, we get ever closer to animals, understanding them better and cultivating the idea that we can engage in a meaningful relationship with them. The feeling that we are Mowgli is in all of us. Animals are still dominated by humans, but no longer only through deadly adversity, but instead by proximity. We don’t kill the strange beast, but instead try to get cuddly with even the scariest of them…
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In Topos 101, our author Ute Strimmer reports how bee colonies accidentally settled down on the roof of the opera in Paris and how urban beekeeping has emerged as a new agratrend in our cities on the heels of urban gardening. This trend is possible because bees are now able to find a more varied diet in the cities than in the country. Learn here more about urban beekeeping and bee activism in L.A.!
The push for the legalisation of urban beekeeping in L.A. began in 2011, led by the nonprofit called HoneyLove. Not before 2015, four years later, backyard beekeeping got finally legalised in Los Angeles.
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What does the public expect a wildlife photographer to do? Of course, get as far away from the city as possible, search for wild animals in their natural habitat and take pictures of them. The British photographer Sam Hobson follows a different approach – his target of attraction are the animals that live in the city. Armed with his camera, he tracks their nocturnal path through the urban jungle, depicting the animals within our immediate surroundings. In the following video Sam Hobson tells us how he works.
