BLDGBLOG Goes to Paris...

I'll be out of range for a while, only back and posting after the 9th or 10th of July. BLDGBLOG, in other words, is off to Paris... Till then, here's an updated Table of Contents of the site; if you're either new to BLDGBLOG or have simply forgotten this site's previous half-lives: now's your chance to click around. So I'll be back. And the Parisian visit is relatively tightly scheduled (it's work-based), but if you have any tips, let me know!


Wherever you go, bring your own subway entrance!
Should we use cloned meat to pave interstate highways? Or build whole cathedrals out of organ transplants?
The hidden valve chambers and underground hydro-works of New York City, photographed by Stanley Greenberg! More Manhattan tunnels, blasted straight through schisty bedrock!
Slum warfare, William Gibson, Ridley Scott, geopolitical "holes" and ecological footprints – it's an interview with Mike Davis! And here's part two!
A flying micronation made entirely of solar-powered helicopters!
Hurling Taj Mahals into the sky!
The lost city of Z! Albinos, lost maps, dead Brits and miles and miles of unexplored jungle!
Where will Niagara Falls be in a million years? And will London be more than a mile beneath the surface of the earth, buried in muck?
Living amidst highway flyovers – or, in this case, directly on them!
Why is today's architectural criticism so boring?
A group of 38 Ukrainian Jews escaped the Holocaust by living inside a cave system for several years!


Huge cubes of carbonic glass have taken over the world's landscape!
Architectural conjecture meets Parisian sci-fi noir!
Houses that aren't houses at all – they're disguised electrical substations!
Supercomputers, rivaling God, housed in deconsecrated chapels!
Offshoring labor, literally – using a permanently anchored tax haven off the coast of Los Angeles! Or this ship, moored for so long it becomes architecture!
A Shopper's Guide to Urban Catastrophe! And we didn't forget you, vegans!
Bored? Why not read this travel guide to an island that doesn't exist?
A Mexican library made from reused airplane hulls!
The gleaming, inhuman garages of Branislav Kropilak!
Flying hotel rooms! In silver shiny blimps!
Robo-Qibla™ meets the Gyro-Mosque® – in deep space!


Can we melt down London and use it as ink to print new cities?
Blueprints for rebuilding America's National Parks – arch by bolt by nail!
Tour the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model!
The icebergs of war!
The planet, re-mapped according to airplane passengers and tractor imports!
Deliberately manufacturing storms in your garden!
The abandoned Ballardian world of WWII bunker archaeology!
Mind-blowing tectonic maps of ancient North America as the continent slowly takes its present form!
Tatlin's Tower!
A musical machine made entirely from windows!
It's "a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence"!


London, mapped by the emotions of its inhabitants!
Cinematic urbanism!
Are the skyscrapers of Shanghai generating dangerous weather?
Spend the night in an eclipse camp!
Unbelievable photographs of the perfect vortex!
Labyrinthine plaster casts of ants' nests!
Films of those ants leaving phero-chemical trails!
A huge, inflatable sphere that turns earthquakes into music! More tectonic surround-sound!
What strange and secret cities exist beneath Tokyo?
Origami!
A fossil reef stretches from Portugal to Moscow – some say further – but what if the whole thing was eroded by weather over millions of years... to become a huge wind instrument embedded in the rocks of Europe?


Dismantling Gothic cathedrals arch by arch, on the beaches of equatorial archipelagos!
The world's largest diamond mine!
Rollerskating alone at night through subterranean knots!
A seed vault to avert planetary apocalypse!
Listening to the arched foundations of London instrument!
A man exactly reproduces his old apartment using colorful nylon sheets!
Weird geometries in the Kansas farmscape!
Slow landscapes of silt and the J.G. Ballard who loves them!
The lost gods of Europe hurl spheres at each other in space!
Valves, drains, and tunnels in the self-connected topology of underground London!
Entire cities snowing diamonds from Baroque domes!


Is that architecture or just a soundtrack hovering in space?
Helicopter photographs in the sububs of self-similarity!
The 7 New Wonders of the World!
Southeast London transformed into a maze of rooftop gardens!
A temporary public park – complete with bench and parking meter!
Lunar electricity!
Possibly the longest building on Earth – or at least in Illinois!
BLDGBLOG Presents: the Mars rover film! But bring some Kleenex!
The poet Shelley sets sail for a volcanic archipelago made entirely of glass!
A London superstadium full of ring magnets will capture the Northern Lights!
Beautiful maps!


The churches of Christopher Wren, transformed into a geomagnetic harddrive!
The World Trade Center was actually a gigantic tuning fork!
Jurassic park, Russian conservation style!
James Bond thwarts a San Franciscan attempt at tectonic warfare!
Slum dwellers and modular parasites of the urban world, unite!
An abandoned island off the coast of Japan!
Unearthly landscapes swarming with alien bacteria!
The suburbs: raw mounds and earthworks, before construction arrives!
Extraterrestrial life rained down on India!
The internal volume of Notre-Dame, Paris, carved into the surface of the moon!
Meat!


The landscape architecture of Hell, its subsurface faults and magmatic geology!
Why not live inside your garage?
Is that a suburb growing out of your spine, or are you happy to see me?
3000km of concrete tunnels installed beneath the deserts of Libya!
The robotic, neverending cinema of Los Angeles traffic control!
Plus the real-time participatory surveillance of LA's freeway system!
A house of landslides, filled with geese!
Hypnotic films of motorway orbitals now available on DVD!
Surreal nighttime photography of Japan!
Measuring astronomy – solstice and stars – with a city modeled on Stonehenge!
Unbelievable maps and diagrams of interstellar astral incidence!


Then we hiked alone for a thousand years, and we renamed all the constellations!
The averaged images of suburban ennui!
Food! Cake!
Have you seen this hull before?
New Arctic seaways promise Lovecraftian visions to come!
On the colors of dismantled landscapes, photographed from the air!
Lego spaceships!
The radio sounds of the earth's magnetosphere! The meditative drone of urban security gates!
Famous architecture, blurred!
Photographs of Chernobyl, including an abandoned alphabet!
Morocco double-exposures!


The Earth in 7.5 billion years!
Fossilized cities!
The art of reforesting continents through tree bombs!
The deserts of the world are musical instruments!
Venice resonates with voices!
Huge and amazing maps of California hydrology!
The city as an avatar of itself!
The wonderfully weird, self-observing urban world of CCTV!
Sci-fi instant cities built above working limeworks pits!
The abandoned malls of Chicagoland!
WWII British sound mirrors used to musicalize mountain storms!


All hell is breaking loose in middle America!
San Jellocisco!
Catching near-earth asteroids using a gigantic baseball mit!
If you've got nothing else to do, why not go camping in an abandoned mine?
Inbred, zombified ex-idealists stumble through pressurized undersea utopias, listening to Mozart!
Biking through glass tunnels suspended above metropolitan Toronto!
An inflatable hotel – in deep space!
Folk maps of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal!
Cool bridges!
Houses, churches, places to hang: it's the afterlife of the Quonset hut!
A man jumps from a balloon, free-falls 20 kilometers through the stratosphere, and captures the whole thing on film!


King Kong!
Complicated volcanic pipe networks will extrude cathedrals directly from the earth!
Huge, interconnected white towers in the middle of Beijing!
A book of the Bible, reproduced as a textual landscape!
Should Mars have its own landscape pictorial tradition? Is this it?
Arches National Park, Manhattan branch!
Will the International Space Station soon be turned into a sculpture gallery?
An Indonesian mine and the technicolor stalactites it will form in a million years!
In a wilderness of mirrors we lost our own reflections!
Recording the secret music of bridges!
Amazing tree houses by Andrew Maynard!


[Note: All photographs in this post (so not the first or last image) were graciously supplied by the hugely talented and exhibition-deserving photographer Nicolai Grossman, whose blog, Photon Detector, is well worth a read, and whose Spacetime Set on Flickr is the source for all these photos. Thanks, Nicolai!]

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Blogger Matthew Bamberg said...

The statue of liberty in 7.5 million years would look like?

July 03, 2006 5:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You should definitely visit the Palais de Tokyo, lightly remodeled by Lacaton and Vassal. It's one of the most interesting spaces in terms of programming- for starters, the contemporary art gallery opens until 10 pm or so, and the small café place is a really nice space to just grab a bite an watch the skaters. Don't miss ut.

Eloisa

July 03, 2006 7:58 AM  
Blogger Geoff Manaugh said...

Thanks for the tips and emails - I'm back. The trip was great, and is even improving with memory, but now I'm nostalgic for Europe and for the non-English linguistic sphere. In any case, there were many, many things worth posting about, but I'll limit myself to this quick bit of celebrity-spotting: Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, and Drew Barrymore were all staying in our hotel. My wife and I nearly shared an elevator with Justin and Cameron, then we saw him again the next morning as he was smoking in the lobby with three other people. Didn't get his autograph. Didn't take his picture. Am not, in fact, a fan - and I like Cameron Diaz even less, so didn't talk to her either. Well: I don't know Cameron Diaz, so I shouldn't say that. I should say: I don't like her exuded televisual persona. In case she reads this...

And, at the risk of taking an unpopular position here: I want France to win the World Cup tomorrow. Zidane. Henry. Ribery! 'nuff said. Ribery alone could win the thing. Vive la France.

July 08, 2006 11:38 AM  
Blogger Geoff Manaugh said...

Oh well.

July 09, 2006 7:21 PM  

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