Tree Museum by Ilkka Halso
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 11.25.08

They took all the trees
Put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
-Joni Mitchell

Joni sang about it, and Ilkka has designed it: the Museum of Nature. The artist writes:
I make plans and construct visually buildings, which protect nature from threats of pollution and what is more important, from actions of man himself.I visualize shelters, massive buildings where big ecosystems could be stored as at present. These massive building protect forests, lakes and rivers from pollution and what is more important from actions of man himself. At the same time I study different aspects of man's relation to nature as rare unique endangered place.
While putting nature into a museum you have to take under consideration aspect of audience/ consumer. Nature becomes joyride for tourists or beautiful landscape turns into a meditative theatre show.

Ilkka Halso via Next Nature PDF of project here
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I don't entirely understand. Since the word "visualize" is used a lot, does this mean the artist made these through Photoshop, or is this a real museum? I'm assuming it's Photoshop, but I've been wrong before.
Well, maybe now people will respect what's right in front of them all the time. Is it possible that we don't understand value until it's in a museum?
Lord, I hope not.
...
he means well,
but that just defeats the idea of "outdoors"
it wouldn't be natural, and the things he'd use to protect nature from "man" is essentially "man"
Please please please don't let it have to come to that
"I am combining freely
photographs of landscapes and computer genereted 3D-models." These are totally computer generated and not practical at all. This is a really stupid idea and if you read the article by the designer its written in extremely poor English. I agree-how can we 'protect' nature from man with man made items?
Until we realize man will always be a part of nature we will be on a path to this.
For the information of Anonymous and others who are in doubt: Halso (a Finn, as I am, sort of explaining the poor English) is not proposing to build such structures. Quite the opposite, as Kate Andrews puts so elegantly here:
"Challenging the audience’s interaction with the natural environment as endangered artifact, Halso manages to truly visualize a future we so desperately do not want to see become a reality."
Wow dude no way, that is way too cool.
jess
www.privacy.de.tc
the poem reminded me of Silent Running ... sad but a good movie.
great use of the song lyric that is still pretty popular on the radio these days. I would love to see this in person. it looks amazing. I know most people would rather it be natural but the engineer is a genious for creating this.
Its a brilliant work,
Even when Nature was put on Museum it was not interesting enough for Man, they had to add a loop on the rollercoaster...