Flock House is an airborne habitat that imagines, projects, and adds another level onto the city’s skyline. On June 20, it will be a living prototype, inhabitants will imagine and experience some level of the capsule living in a future dependent on mobile cities (the flock house will have wheels on the bottom) while the elevated habitat will be able to cope with rising sea levels.

In 2025, the Global Urban Observatory predicts that city dwellers will reach 5 billion. New Yorker’s can: move to the water, inhabit Governor’s Island, crowd Long Island, and/or take to the sky. Flock House is a proposal for a space where “the sky’s the limit...”

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day three

As much I can’t stand the prevalence of the trash I gather…it really is overwhelmingly everywhere…I do have to admit to finding aesthetic beauty in the weird mini-landscapes that I discover (and thus ruin) when I set out to forage.  Today I decided to document one specific set of these kinds of trashscapes: trash lodged within waterfront rocks.

Today’s trash contained a lot more styrofoam than previous days.  I think I’d been subconsciously avoiding the foam pieces I saw because it’s so obnoxious the way it falls apart even as you try to pick it up.  The claim that our oceans are swiftly becoming a soup of toxic plastics and other chemicals seems all the more real if you have ever tried to keep even a tiny (say 10’ x 10’) plot of waterfront 100% clean.  It’s impossible. 

The big stuff, the stuff I tend to collect in projects like this, is the easy part.  It’s those millions upon millions of shredded plastic bags, scraps of styrofoam cups, crumbling insulation foam, fragments of beach toys, straws, plastic cutlery, decayed water bottles, shattered lighters, bottle caps, and the like that you just can’t pick up, can’t get out of the rocks, the sand, or the water.  When you note that plastics such as these didn’t exist 60+ years ago and multiply by the exponential population explosion and…well, we really will be what we eat (and drink) soon enough.

On a lighter note, I found this today:

My first thought was that it was a sad find: a corrective shoe for a baby with malformed legs.  Then I wondered if it was some sort of ridiculous dog-owner paraphernalia, like a tiny Timberland work boot for a pedigree pup.  As I cleaned it off, I discovered exactly what it is (and yet another answer to the question “why do they hate us so much?”): it is a tiny suede hiking boot for a Build-A-Bear brand teddy bear.  Accessories for your teddy bear, now floating in our oceans, lakes, and rivers.  Delicious.

So after arranging all the trash that I found this morning…

…I drew a couple of pictures and ranted a bit…

…and watered the Flock House plants.                                                          

-paul

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