Lunar urbanism

Apparently 'learning from nature', François Roche and Behrokh Khoshnevis are working on a concrete spray-nozzle that 'spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place'. They're now wedding that with Roche's own 'viab' device: 'a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.'
They want to build skyscrapers on the moon.
There's a movie coming out this summer called *Stealth* with Jamie Foxx that looks really, really bad. An AI bomber put to use by the Air Force - or Navy - gets struck by lightning, thereby rewiring its circuits into a predatory killing machine... What would be at least moderately more interesting, however, would be if a Roche/Khoshnevis viab/concrete nozzle assembly is struck by lightning, or perhaps reprogrammed by some strange shift in the local geomagnetic curtain: it thereafter starts building uninhabitably complex architectural structures out of a near-infinite supply of concrete from a nearby gravel plant. After only six days we're talking Tower of Babel proportions. Soon you can see the results from six, seven, eight miles away; soon from the International Space Station.
A group of grad students volunteers to go out and waterproof it, sealing and perhaps painting it, and the autonomous viab/nozzle takes on literally mythic proportions. Soon Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of these States, starts an epic poem based on the legend of Theseus and the Cretan labyrinth, rewriting it with the viab/nozzle as hero.
It just goes and goes and goes. Soon all of the American southwest is a hive of concrete. Skateboarders flock en masse to try out its arcs and curves, deep bowls and slopes perfect for next year's X-Games. The galleries of New York fill with photographs and watercolors; avant-garde black-and-white films are released to great fanfare at European festivals; the President visits, complaining that it blocks access to resources vital to the extraction industry.
Soon the original - and real, mind you - purpose of the viab/nozzle is achieved: they are sent up to the moon, and Mars, and beyond - perhaps even to the bottom of the sea - in order to begin a more inhabitable, humanly useful construction.
They gaze back lovingly at the Earth, at the deserts of America, and the results of their ancestor's first workings. The future origin myth for a race of interplanetary architect-machines.
(All quotations from Bruce Sterling, 'An Architect's Wet-Cement Dream' in *Wired*, Feb 2005).

'Animaris Mammoth'

At the risk of repeating another article, I'll just quote liberally instead: Lakshmi Sandhana writes in *Wired* (24 Jan 05: *Wild Things Are on the Beach*) about Theo Jansen, an artist 'evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind.' 'His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterward. (...) He says a future version - a 12-ton behemoth, big enough to have several rooms inside - could be called the Animaris Mammoth.'
A friend of Jansen's, Carl Pisaturo, another robotics designer, refers to a collapsed Jansenian creature as 'a tipped-over, short-circuited machine half-buried in beach sand' - surely outdoing the end of *Planet of the Apes*, or at least competing.
So could you do that with a bldg? It captures wind in huge flexible sacks that gradually return to normal size, pumping the air into a complex network of pneumatic tubing; these then power the elevators, vents, and whatever else you need. The plumbing perhaps. When you go through the doldrums of a windless Spring, the bldg effectively shuts down. But in a windstorm...: you'd be forgiven for thinking the bldg was artificially intelligent. Constant motion, unpredictable internal rearrangements.
Artificial intelligence through wind. An architectural version of the Aeolian harp. Covered in sails and windsacs. A huge architectural lung, traveling slowly over the coastal landscape, fourteen thousand years after humans have gone extinct.
And then it collapses...

2 architectural suggestions for stopping time

While not 'architectural,' really - though I'm reminded of Norman Foster's assertion that the 747 airplane is the single most important architectural design of the 20th century (giving a whole new perspective to September 11th: it was an architectural competition, and the skyscraper lost) - two architectural suggestions for stopping time are as follows:
1) Build a solar-powered airplane and fly it at exactly the speed of the rotation of the earth, against the earth's rotation. Do this at high-noon, over the equator. The plane will always be in the glow of the sun, never leaving its precise and comfortable position at high-noon. Having become a geostationary structure in a low-atmosphere orbit, the airplane, barring mechanical failure, will never advance forward in time. It will always be noon, technically on the same day. It will be architecture that's seceded from the aging of the universe.
2) Build a box of perfectly reflective internal surfaces. Light will never be absorbed or dissipated, but endlessly recycled and returned through the box's mirrored interior. Whatever moment it captures - that is, whatever was happening when the box was sealed: the event, or location, that bounced its reflective way into the box's hermetic closure - will remain in a constant state of cross-reflection, never dissipating or fading. The image, a kind of 3-dimensional holograph of the event it refers to, can then be sent floating outward from the earth, drifting through space, reflecting, never aging, one moment stuttering through itself over and over again till universal heat-death does us in.
And in both cases - within those two spatial instances, those two pieces of 'architecture' - time will effectively be stopped.
(Or so he tells himself.)