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 gravestmor's got the goods on Renaissance, a new sci-fi film set in "Paris 2054," directed by Christian Volckman.  Marcus, at gravestmor, describes the film as " Sin City meets Blade Runner meets Metropolis meets Waking Life" (though hopefully not the latter) – and, from the looks of it, I'd add Alphaville.  But, either way, the film seems further proof that students of architectural design should stop pinning all their hopes solely on architecture, and consider guerilla careers as film, or even game, start-ups, using their graphic ideas and energy to take over Hollywood. Invest in some Power Macs, buy some editing software, talk to your musician friends, get a writer – hire BLDGBLOG – and suddenly that M.Arch degree will put you behind the Oscar stand. Drooling champagne and groping Salma Hayek.    But I digress. These are film stills taken from the movie's press section – the film's in French, by the way – and a bit more info can be found at Twitch and Variety. Then start outlining your own cinematic debut.    [Images: ©Onyx Films/Millimages/Luxanimation/Timefirm Ltd/France 2 Cinema]. (Via gravestmor).
"Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment," New Scientist reports, "as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with 'evolutionary illusions'." An evolutionary illusion is when an animal "does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place." Like grilling chicken in bed at 3am. Or massaging oneself in public. New Scientist then explains how "cities are not just accidental homes for animals that really ought to be elsewhere. They are also hotbeds of evolutionary change, shaping the adaptations of their resident fauna as surely as the Serengeti plains or the Amazon rainforest." Interestingly, both of these articles seem to overlook any evolutionary changes cities might inflict upon humans – in addition to the squirrels, rats, songbirds, or coyotes who also happen to live there. The evolutionary illusion of the studio apartment, for instance: what strange pathology of life wrongly lived has made its appearance inside these domestic spaces? What new behavioral triggers have evolved? Pale-faced urban apartment dwellers staring at themselves in badly lit mirrors, popping zits, wondering where on earth the rest of the planet has gone. "Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations," Andrew Knoll writes, "but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group." In this context, you could re-read all of European existentialism as the philosophical by-product of an evolutionary struggle: humans, fighting to adapt to the biological niche of the isolated single apartment. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis makes the point that, soon, all future human population growth will occur inside cities – even within slums. Will this have a genetic impact on what we now consider the human species? And what new branches of philosophy might therefore arise? (See also animal urbanism and simian urbanism).
 [Image: Angkor Wat, Cambodia, a city reclaimed by the roots of trees; photographed by Kenro Izu, whose work benefits Friends Without A Border]. I just read a long and totally fascinating article by David Grann – called " The Lost City of Z" – from an old issue of The New Yorker. The article explores whether or not a city called "Z" really exists somewhere in the Brazilian rain forest – "a region nearly the size of the continental United States" – even while it tracks the life of a British explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who "disappeared in the forest, along with his son and another companion" in 1925. "Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last great amateur archeologists and cartographers," Grann writes, " men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose." Colonel Fawcett believed that, "in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries," lay Z, a ruined city lost to the jungles of time. "To bolster his case that the ruins of Z would be found in the region," Grann tells us, Fawcett "cited carvings that he had seen on rocks in the area, and documents that he had uncovered from Portuguese conquistadores in Brazilian archives. He quoted a Brazilan scholar, who declared, 'My studies have convinced me that... there may yet be found in our forests, as yet penetrated in few places, ruins of ancient cities.'" Because of Fawcett's disappearance, however, at least 100 other explorers have lost themselves in the Amazon, looking for his remains (or, more likely, looking for Z). There was, of course, one crucial problem: Fawcett, funded by the Royal Geographical Society, kept his expeditionary path completely secret, even releasing false latitudinal coordinates for fear that someone else might steal the final prize: discovering, mapping, and documenting Z. Fawcett was exploring at "the peak of the British Empire," we read, "a time when the English were constantly confronting and colonizing new, exotic civilizations; when imperial explorers such as David Livingstone were trying to map the so-called 'dark continent' of Africa; and when the Allan Quartermain novels by Fawcett's friend H. Rider Haggard, which chronicle the intrepid adventurer's discovery of ancient civilizations in Africa, were wildly popular." The last thing he needed, in other words, was another explorer hot on his trail. To make a (very) long story short, David Grann – the article's author – visits Colonel Fawcett's granddaughter in Cardiff, Wales, whereupon Grann discovers unpublished letters from Fawcett that reveal the expedition's true route through the jungle. Thus Grann sets off for Brazil. More and more information about Fawcett pops up. "One day, during a visit to a colonial archive in Rio de Janeiro," Grann reports, "Fawcett discovered a document, partly eaten by worms, that was titled 'Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city, without inhabitants, discovered in the year 1753.'" Within the document, Grann tells us, Fawcett learned about a Portuguese "soldier of fortune," who, along with his expeditionary team, "ascended a mountain path" to find "a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. The men climbed down, and discovered stone arches, a statue, wide roads, and a temple with hieroglyphics." Reading the account, Fawcett "became even more entranced with the idea of a lost civilization" – and, presumably, so did Grann. Now in Brazil, Grann – carefully tracking Fawcett's final self-enforestation – is taken by a guide to the ruins of an enormous ranch built deep in what used to be jungle; what he sees there shocks him: "The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear." Several pages ensue in which Grann hears contradictory tales of a kidnapped white man paraded through the territories of various tribes back in the 1930s; albino children; "very bad Indians"; and "a colossal man," named Afukaká, "his arms as thick as legs, his legs as big as a chest." Then my eyes started popping out of my head, because here Grann meets Michael Heckenberger, a "highly regarded professor at the University of Florida," who was doing field work in the upper Xingu basin.  [Image: NASA, satellite views of Brazil's Xingu National Park]. Prof. Heckenberger "had battled everything from malaria to snakes to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off and forced him to boil his garments twice a day." He looked "a little like a surfer." Heckenberger, familiar with Fawcett's story, turns to Grann and says: "I want to show you something." He grabs a machete, and they all walk more than a mile into the forest, "cutting away tendrils from trees, which shot upward, fighting for the glow of the sun." Then Heckenberger stops. He gestures at the ground: it's sloping. Why is it sloping? It used to be a moat. "What do you mean, a moat?" Grann asks. "A moat," Heckenberger answers. "A defensive ditch." It's nearly a mile in diameter and more than 900 years old. Heckenberger then shows Grann some excavation pits, where foundations of "palisade walls" are found, half-buried in black soil. Turns out the group of them are standing in "the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character than that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste." There were also the remains, Heckenberger explains, of "Roads. Causeways. Canals." So is it the city of Z? Or is Z still out there, waiting?
 [Image: Via Fun Mansion]. From Fun Mansion: "Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Balaklava was one of the most secret towns in Russia. 10km south east of Sevastopol on the Black Sea Coast, this small town was the home to a Nuclear Submarine Base."    [Images: All images via Fun Mansion]. "The base remained operational after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 1993 when the decommissioning process started and the warheads and low yield torpedos were removed. Then in 1996 the last Russian Submarine left the Base." Apparently, there are now guided tours.  [Image: Via Fun Mansion]. (Originally spotted at Defense Tech; this post simultaneously published on Bryan Finoki's Subtopia; see also this LiveJournal blog – though it's in Russian).
 [Image: NASA]. Qibla is the direction that a Muslim must face when praying – specifically, toward the Kaaba, in Mecca. In order to align oneself properly with that religious axis mundi, all kinds of complicated mathematical techniques had to be used or developed. From compasses to azimuths – to spherical trigonometry – determining what angle to take in relation to the horizon became as much a mathematical, or geographic, pursuit as it was religious. So now, as Malaysia prepares to send three Muslim astronauts into space, the question of qibla has once again been revived: in what direction should an astronaut pray in order to face Mecca? As that last link reminds us, these astronauts "will also visit the International Space Station, which circles the earth 16 times in 24 hours, so another thorny question is how to pray five times a day as required by Islam." I'm imagining a bewildering series of gyroscopes, mirrors, magnets and platforms – called the Prayer Chair – with arms covered in quantum clocks, ticking off "days" where there are none, keeping time in space devoid of terrestrial references. Motors will click and whir, aligning the chair constantly, and whole new branches of robotics – RoboQibla™ – gyroPrayer® – will take off. Science academies throughout the Muslim world will start producing new and strange direction sensors, devices of alignment that'd make John Dee proud and Athanasius Kircher whistle. New space stations designed by architecture students in Dubai will show us the future of intercelestial travel: self-unfolding, solar-powered spaceships, ceaselessly rotating in space – whilst maintaining perfect ship-to-Mecca alignment. The Jesuits respond with floating cathedrals... flying buttresses in space. (Original article spotted at Off Center. Click the upcoming link for more on culture and astronomy in general; for more on the future of sacred architecture in space see Hurling Taj Mahals into the Sky; and for some thoughts on future church construction, see a personal favorite of mine, Church of Earth, Magmatic or Chuches of the void-grinder).
 [Image: A false-color "enhanced thematic map" of the involuted deltaic coastline of Guinea-Bissau; check out the fractal self-looping madness of NASA's incredible 4.6MB version].
 Exactly one hundred years ago to the day a " large horizontal displacement" along the San Andreas Fault devastated the city of San Francisco. In the century since then, hurricanes have battered Miami, levees have failed New Orleans, airplanes have become Weapons of Mass Destruction, and " prodigious snowfall combined with drenching spring rains" has conspired to wreak havoc on Grand Forks, North Dakota. American urban catastrophe, in other words, is everywhere. This post-disaster urban world – with no police, no public utilities, no clean drinking water, and, potentially, no hope – is something you can prepare for, however, by shopping.  In February 2003, Homeland Security’s then-chief Tom Ridge made life far simpler for Americans everywhere by unveiling a national catastrophe shopping list – at the top of which was duct tape. " Stash away the duct tape!" said Ridge, and millions did just that. It didn't matter that duct tape was widely alleged to be ineffective in the face of biological and chemical attack (or that Ridge later withdrew his own advice, complaining that there had been "some political belittling of duct tape"); the silver rolls flew right off the shelves, salving (or stoking?) the anxieties of a traumatized nation. The rest of Ridge's shopping list – Recommended Items to Include in a Basic Emergency Supply Kit – compares favorably with many other shopping lists or pre-packaged kits I came across in my urban catastrophe shopping reconnaissance. I was particularly impressed by the inclusion of eating utensils (a common omission), along with a wrench or pair of pliers to turn off any dangerous utilities.  The rest of the basics are predictable and quite consistent from list to list: water, whistle, can opener, first aid kit, copies of important documents, sleeping bags or warm blankets, waterproof matches, etc. The only thing missing is a Paul Oakenfold CD. Indeed, the core contents of catastrophe survival kits have barely changed since World War I, and, as such, allow little room for personal expression. However, all of the lists do recommend storing at least 72 hours' worth of food – and food customization is a field of endless opportunity. There are several things to bear in mind whilst considering what food you should buy to prepare for urban armageddon. Food should be relatively non-perishable (and you should remember to replace it before it expires), require little or no cooking, and be low-sodium so as not to provoke chronic thirst. Canned foods, powdered and instant foods, jerky and peanut butter are standards on the "do-it-yourself" list, with instant soup cups described as a " real boon."  Vegans and Atkins-aficionados, as usual, will find their choices more limited. In a CarbSmart article entitled " A New Day and New Priorities: Being Prepared For The Unforeseen," Di Bauer recommends that low-carbers stock up on canned clams (her suggestion: "bread" them with unflavored protein powder), Ragu Double Cheddar Sauce, diet soda, and an intriguing product called not/Starch. ("If the world ends, I am going to be buried with my not/Starch"). Vegans, of course, seem to be understandably concerned with post-catastrophe protein sources – but, from what I've read, they also seem to have a good handle on the cunning you'll need to survive urban collapse, suggesting "treats for bargaining," as well as "a small bottle of spirits," because "sometimes it's just what you – or others – need." (It can also be used "as an antiseptic"). In the run-up to Y2K, Carol Reid authored the delightfully-titled, Catastrophic Cooking: Eating Right When All Is Wrong, in which she shares the secret of her "Cardboard Box Oven," which was "designed by an Aerospace Engineer" and "will bake everything from bread to pizza at temperatures up to 475 degrees." The book is now out-of-print. Thinking outside the box – or the can – one Bay Area architecture and design student recommends growing your own emergency garden: she’s "planting a high-density orchard this winter, with varieties timed to ripen sequentially all year rather than all at once in July." Let’s hope a rather frightening man called The Everlasting Phelps doesn’t figure out where she lives, because his "plan is a little more simple. I have guns, ammo, and armor, and I plan to loot." At specialized sites such as TheEpicenter.com or Earth Shakes ("Are you prepared? Wait no longer!"), online shoppers are offered a choice between 3600-calorie, "pleasant tasting, shortbread cookie-like" foodbars, "6 Can Food Modules," "10 Year Super Vitamins," bags of " Survival Candy," and Heater Meals.  Duct tape, food, and water are the first things the urban catastrophe shopper might purchase – but if the New Orleans Superdome taught us anything, it is the paramount importance of sanitation provision. This is an area best left to the professionals, and Earth Shakes seems to have covered all the bases: it offers a PETT, WAG BAGS, PUP, and TOTE ensemble. These are, respectively: a Portable Environmental Toilet, "weighing only 7lbs, yet the same height as a standard toilet"; Waste Alleviation and Gelling bags containing "Pooh Powder" (a unique product that "gels liquids, catalyzes decay, and removes odor"); Portable Utility Pop-up tent (to ensure privacy); and a TOTE backpack with which to carry everything around.  Assuming you can find and lift a manhole cover in the midst of catastrophe, the Japanese have even developed a WAG BAG-free option. You are instructed to install it immediately above a (hopefully still intact) municipal sewer system – then relax... I’d also like to draw your attention to the " Shower in a Bag" – ("No rinsing needed. Microwaveable too!") – and, for the shy or hijab-wearing, a " Deluxe Privacy & Shower Room." Truly, all the comforts of home. Meanwhile, if money's no object, there's the " disaster kit of the future." With this, CNET staff writer Stefanie Olsen introduces us to Seldon Laboratories' "nano mesh," which can be fabricated into a "waterstick," allowing fortunate survivors to "suck ditch water like they would using a straw in a glass of water." Another membrane technology works by fluid osmosis, with one side flavored "so it can turn dirty puddle water into Gatorade." Other tech-savvy toys include a blanket that heats to 104 degrees for eight hours, a flexible light-sheet made of semi-conductors which glows for up to eleven years, a $300 “emergency portable oxygen cylinder with enough air to last more than an hour,” and a full-body viral barrier jumpsuit, which protects against the terrifyingly re-named "Asian blood flu." There has even been promising progress in the world of rescue robotics. Howie Choset at Carnegie Mellon University has developed snake-bots, designed to "slither through collapsed buildings in search of victims trapped after natural disasters or other emergencies." In an industry breakthrough, "Breadstick" and "Pepperoni" – two prototype robots "about the size of a human arm or smaller" – can climb up and around household pipes. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Kyushu-based TMSUK has developed Enryu (or "rescue dragon"), which is "mounted on a tread similar to a military tank," and uses "two hydraulically operated arms with a reach of 5 meters" to lift as much as 500 kilograms. Finally, while down-to-earth sites such as the Red Cross simply recommend storing your catastrophe kit in a tough plastic box or backpack, manufacturers in the niche market of urban catastrophe preparation know that, while the kit’s packaging may not save your life, it could well influence your purchasing decisions. PingMag’s recent survey of Japanese earthquake preparation products directs us to a pink " girl’s emergency kit" –  – as well as this rather sharp offering from Muji. In the U.S., more time seems spent on the names of these kits than on their containers, so you're offered a double entendre-laden choice between the Triple Delight, the Family Royale, and the One Person Starter Disaster Fanny Pack. But I leave you with two parting thoughts: first, the world’s "ONLY Armageddon Survival-Kit" is available here. It does not appear to contain duct tape – but it does "guarantee immortality." Second, cash spent on urban catastrophe preparation gear is never wasted: even if you're lucky enough not to have to use it, today’s kit is tomorrow’s collectible. Phil Boguch’s World War II survival kit, containing both silk stockings and chocolates, is now on display at the Mercer Island Museum of Flight; and a World War I M-592 Backpad-Style Survival Kit is valued at $1000 at Stan Wolcott’s Lucky Forward Militaria. What could you possibly be waiting for?
 About six months ago I picked up a copy of David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground, on earthquakes and earthquake prediction. I started reading it in a hotel room – then finished it aboard an airplane, my own solid points of reference put temporarily on hold. The book really stuck with me, and I soon posted about it on BLDGBLOG. Then, a few weeks ago, I got in touch with David and we set up a telephone interview, during which time we talked about everything from the religious implications of earthquakes to the JFK assassination, from the particularly Californian subculture of earthquake predictors to the psychological role played by seismic instability in "the subterranean mythos of people's lives," how they find "identity in the turbulence of the land." (Quoting from Ulin's book). David was friendly, open, and generous with explanations. Throughout the conversation he spoke in great looping sentences, full of parantheses and clarifications; transcribing the tape took on the air of a topological exercise, finding where the punctuation might best fit. That interview is now online at Archinect, published for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. So check it out.
 LOT-EK has just proposed reusing more than two hundred discarded fuselages from Boeing 727 and 737 airplanes as the major structural components for a new library in Guadalajara.  The airplane shells would be "stacked in a north-south slant in relation to sun exposure for energy efficiency."  I think this is amazing! "The fuselage is the only part of a decommissioned airplane that cannot be effectively recycled," we read. "The cost of its demolition exceeds the profit of aluminum resale. A huge amount of fuselages lay in the deserts of the western states. Boeing 727 and 737 are historically the most sold commercial planes and therefore the most common in these graveyards. They are sold at very low prices completely stripped and in great structural conditions."   "The fuselage becomes the basic module of this building. It is insulated and furnished according to the program. The internal subdivision generated by the existing floor joists is used to respond to functional needs: the upper section is used for inhabitation while the lower one houses independent and interconnected mechanical systems: HVAC, electrical, cabling, and a conveyor belts network for the mechanical distribution of the books."  Read more at noticias arquitectura. (Via Archinect).
 Whilst BLDGBLOG was out exploring the underside of Manhattan, from the island's faucets to its outer city aqueducts, an email came through from Stanley Greenberg, photographic author of both Invisible New York : The Hidden Infrastructure of the City –  – and Waterworks : A Photographic Journey through New York's Hidden Water System. He's a fascinating guy. "I started photographing the city's infrastructure in 1992," he explained, "after working in NYC government in the 1980s. A few things led me to the project. I felt that the water system was being taken for granted, partially because the government is so secretive about it. Places that were built as parks and destinations were now off-limits to everyone – especially after 9/11. I'm concerned that so many public spaces are being withdrawn from our society."  The secrecy that now surrounds New York's aquatic infrastructure, however, is "really just an acceleration of a trend. City Tunnel No. 3, the new water tunnel, has been under construction since 1970, and its entryways are: 1) well hidden, and 2) built to withstand nuclear weapons. While there were always parts of the system that were open to the public, there were other parts that became harder and harder to see. But even worse, I think, is the idea that we don't even deserve to know about the system in ways that are important to us. It's that much easier to privatize the system (as Giuliani tried to do). The Parks Department here just signed a contract with a private developer to turn part of Randall's Island into a water park, which will not only take away public space, and probably be an environmental disaster, but will also institute an entrance fee for something that was free before. We don't know how well our infrastructure is being taken care of and we're not allowed to know, because of 'national security.' So how do we know if we're spending too little money to take care of it?"  Greenberg's photographic attraction is understandable. In his work, the New York City water supply reveals itself as a constellation of negative spaces: trapezoidal culverts, spillways, tunnels – cuts through the earth. His subject is terrain that is no longer there.  As Greenberg writes: "The water system today is an extraordinary web of places – beautiful landscapes, mysterious structures, and sites where the natural meets the man-made in enigmatic ways." These excavations, drained of their water, would form a networked monument to pure volume, inscribed into the bedrock of Hudson Valley.   "While the work is not meant to be a comprehensive record of the system," Greenberg explained over email, "it is meant to make people think about this organism that stretches 1000 feet underground and 200 miles away. I did a lot of research, and spent some time helping to resurrect the Water Department's archives, which had been neglected for 50 years, so I knew the system pretty well before I started. It got to the point where I could sense a water system structure without actually knowing what it was. My friends are probably tired of my telling them when they're walking over a valve chamber, or over the place where City Tunnels 1, 2, and now 3 cross each other (near the Brooklyn Academy of Music), or some other obscure part of the system." Such tales of hidden topology, of course, do not risk boring BLDGBLOG. One imagines, in fact, a slight resonance to the ground, Manhattan's sidewalks – or Brooklyn's – very subtly trembling with echo to those who know what lies below. Could the water system even have been built, say, as a subterranean extension to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a strange and amazing instrument drilled through rock, trumpeting with air pressure – a Symphony for the Hudson Valves, Bach's Cantatas played through imperceptible reverberations of concrete and clay?  "I did all my photographs with permission," Greenberg continues. "For one thing, it's hard to sneak around with a 4x5 camera. For another, many of the places are extremely secure. I went back and forth over several years, sometimes being allowed in, other times being a pariah (and a threat to national security, according to the city, since I knew too much about the system). For some reason in 1998 I was given almost total access. I guess they realized I wasn't going to give up, or that they would fare better if I were the one taking the pictures. I finished taking pictures in spring 2001. After 9/11, I'm sure I would have had little access – and in fact the city tried to stop me from publishing the book. I contacted curators, museum directors and some well-known lawyers; all offered their support. So when I told the city I would not back down, they gave up trying to stop me, and we went to press."   You can buy the book here; and you can read about Stanley Greenberg's work all over the place, including here, here, and here (with photographic examples), and even on artnet. Meanwhile, Greenberg has a show, open till 20 May, 2006, at the Candace Dwan Gallery, NYC. There, you'll see Greenberg's more recent photographs of "contemporary architecture under construction. Included in the show are photographs of works by Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, Yoshio Taniguchi, Winka Dubbeldam, and Bernard Tschumi." Earlier: Faucets of Manhattan. London Topological. Elsewhere: The LA River.
Well, if you came out to talk20 last night – thanks! It was great.  I figured if any attendees were looking for more info about the things that came up, I should do a quick – though almost absurdly link-intensive – summary here... which may or may not be useful. So: here's the abandoned island off Japan that both Herman Mao and I talked about – including this amazing gallery of black and white photography. The Helicopter Archipelago, then, designed with Leah Beeferman, takes flight here – where you'll also find information about the Maunsell Towers –  – which were extensively explored and written up by the lads at Underground Kent. Those tectonic maps of North America are by Ron Blakey. His timeline of paleogeographic evolution makes the brain reel. Meanwhile, Geoff Shearcroft's mouse with a house on its back –  – can be gazed upon lovingly here; Mr. Shearcroft is co-founder of the Agents of Change, a London-based architecture firm also responsible for these projects. And if you're into the genetically modified architecture thing – as explored by Ferda Kolatan last night, with his carrots – you might like these cloned motorways. That self-unfolding house was by Andrew Maynard. Click around and see what else he's done – or read this interview with him, on Archinect. Here are the silver blimp hotels, the water-drop printer (blasting Hitchcock films over Niagara Falls), the shadow billboard, and the gigantic, circular storm cells. And... the food landscapes, of course, which were featured earlier on BLDGBLOG here and here. Then there were the unstoppable, sewer-boating nutters of International Urban Glow – apparently run by a guy called Siologen. More info, and images, can be found here and especially here, that latter link being a personal favorite of mine – and an excuse to mention my novel, which is partially set in such subterranean locations. If you like all things underground, meanwhile, check out Sleepy City; the subterranean bunker cities of middle England; and Japan's secret sub-Tokyo of tunnels – the latter post having been plagiarized, along with several other BLDGBLOG posts – even BLDGBLOG's tagline – by a guy in Dubai.  If you liked the David Maisel images – and they're hard to dislike – check out this lengthy interview with him on Archinect. David's own website is totally amazing, however, so be sure to stop by – then lobby your local museum to host his current shows. There were also the Bangladeshi shipbreaking yards, including some speculation about how to dismantle Gothic cathedrals, football stadiums, etc., on the beaches of equatorial archipelagos. The photos were by the terrifically great Edward Burtynsky. And I didn't talk about this, but I should have: extruding cathedrals directly from the earth using magma from volcanic vents. Finally, the J.G. Ballard material, about a flooded London, can be found here, where you'll discover "a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past." The images, below, are by Bernhard Edmaier.  More J.G. Ballard here. And, speaking of London: what would its foundations sound like if you could listen to the city through headphones? There was also James Bond: how to weaponize plate tectonics – with Grace Jones in tow. After the event, I talked to a guy who was reading Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, a book which pops up in this post. And if you're still looking for more – which you probably aren't, frankly – there's this post, which acts as a nearly exhaustive, and certainly exhausting, narrative table of contents for BLDGBLOG. Have fun, keep in touch, see you next time – and a huge thanks to Alejandro and Benjamin for setting it all up. And to Detlef, who apparently supplied the wine and who keeps the ideas flowing – thanks!
 [Image: Leah Beeferman/BLDGBLOG, The Helicopter Archipelago, a flying micronation/airborne utopia; originally published in Blend].In 1964, Ron Herron of Archigram proposed a Walking City: urbanism gone ambulatory, a metropolis on the move. The Walking City, strutting along on iron stilts, was imagined as an “escape hatch from environmental conditions,” Simon Sadler writes. It was an “architecture of rescue” – a city in shining armor – “partly inspired by the tents and field hospitals of humanitarian relief efforts."  [Image: Ron Herron/Archigram, The Walking City].Herron also had openly utopian intentions for the project. If the city didn’t like where it was, for instance – if its residents found their surroundings boring, oppressive or even quasi-fascist – the whole thing could simply stand up and walk away, re-settling itself elsewhere, freed from the constraints of law and geography. But what if you didn’t live in the Walking City – indeed in any city at all? What good would it do you then? For those of us trapped in a cultural desert, Archigram had another solution: the Instant City, flown in by hot-air balloon and helicopter and deposited anywhere in the world. The roofs, domes and canopies of a new metropolis could earn an official post-code in the blink of an eye. There is no reason, however, to limit those helicopters to a role as mere delivery vehicles. The helicopters themselves could be liberated to form their own city – an airborne utopia, endlessly aloft, wandering through the planetary atmosphere. A helitopia, perhaps. They could form, in other words, a helicopter archipelago, or flying island-chain, a brand new player in the sphere of geopolitics.  [Image: Leah Beeferman/BLDGBLOG, close-up of The Helicopter Archipelago].Running on solar power, the helicopters would stay perpetually airborne – even as new machines latch on with rope ladders, the shape of the archipelago changing as its population expands. Pilots and passengers both could move between “islands” on bridges and zip-lines, which rearrange as the choppers switch position, moving in and out of formation. All repairs would take place mid-flight. A kind of flying Hawaii, or anti-gravitational Micronesia, with tanned deck-hands leaping across aerodynamic tailfins to the soundtrack of ceaseless enginery, the helicopter archipelago would act as an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty. Its government would be a parliament of pilots, led by experts in storms, whose access to climatological data – future weather, air speed, barometric pressure – would determine the nation’s route and direction. Never leaving the international airspace of unregulated trade winds, the archipelago would be impossible to map. Atlas-makers and manufacturers of globes will simply include a pack of removable stickers, featuring small clouds of helicopters, to approximate the country’s location… Of course, these helicopters would not be the first manmade archipelago. Today in Dubai, for instance, private hoteliers are developing both “The World” and “The Palm,” two artificial island chains of robotically-displaced sand upon which hotels and housing are being constructed.  [Image: Photographer unknown; creating an archipelago in Dubai. (Via Pruned)].As the global oil economy begins to run dry, Dubai hopes to market itself as a tourist destination par excellence, boasting 7-star resorts –  [Image: The Palm (Via Pruned)].– and an underwater hotel, where guests will look out through glass walls at schools of exotic fish. Dubai supplies an interesting model, here, because if the helicopter archipelago ever found itself in need of a few extra – dollars? euros? pounds? – it could simply open itself up as a fantasy hotel. When the pressure of living terrestrially becomes too much, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes could raise their kids there. But if a flying resort of 7-star helicopters is too bourgeois for you, another manmade island chain worth considering is the aesthetic ancestor of Archigram’s Walking City: England’s Maunsell Towers. Built by the British Army during WWII, and named after their architect, Guy Maunsell, the Maunsell Towers were an offshore military fortress from which Army gunners could shoot down Nazi aircraft en route to bomb London.  [Image: Photographer unknown; the Maunsell Towers – for more information see Underground Kent].Now rusting and derelict, the Towers have become eccentric tourist stops – yet the Maunsell Towers are just one example of offshore structures put to new use. Sealand, for instance, is a self-declared country, constituted and run on a former anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea; today, it remains economically active as a data haven and pirate radio station, and it even issues passports – for which it has earned the status of micronation.  [Image: ©Ryan Lackey, Sealand].So could the helicopter archipelago itself become a micronation? If so, how would it support itself, nutritionally or otherwise? Could it have a seat at the U.N., or join the E.U., perhaps even train an Olympic team? There might be flying gardens, for instance, bulging hammocks of soil cultivated to bear fruit. Almond trees, apiaries, chicken coops. A flying aquarium, with cloned fish suspended in pools above the Gulf Stream. An arts center, hospital and gymnasium. The archipelago could issue stamps –  [Image: Leah Beeferman/BLDGBLOG, postage stamp for the Helicopter Archipelago].– produce a permanent flag –  [Image: Leah Beeferman/BLDGBLOG, flag for the Helicopter Archipelago].– and compose folk songs. Babies born onboard will be declared instant citizens, and the archipelago will welcome immigrants, incorporating whole new helicopter clusters at a time. Once the archipelago is aloft for more than a century, the International Geological Society will declare it a flying continent, the world’s first airborne tectonic plate. Some speculate that two million years from now the archipelago’s ruins will still hover in the sky: a ghostly blur across the north Atlantic horizon…  [Image: Leah Beeferman/BLDGBLOG, close-up of The Helicopter Archipelago].(Note: Leah Beeferman is a Brooklyn-based artist and the graphic designer for Cabinet Magazine. [Cabinet, in fact, has a whole issue on micronations, if you're curious]. Leah's work has appeared on BLDGBLOG once before. Meanwhile, Lonely Planet is getting into the spirit with their forthcoming Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, co-written by none other than Simon Sellars of Ballardian.com).
 Nope – I can't read that, either: so go to the original PDF and check it out. A generous, exciting, and high-caliber design writing award has just been announced, with co-sponsorship by AIGA and the Winterhouse Institute. The latter, of course, is a joint project by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand of Design Observer, easily one of the best design sites on the web today. Winterhouse, for instance, publishes this book – which I really want to read – and The Voice Impersonator by Thomas Bernhard. So what's the deadline? 1 June 2006 – and you can win $5000. See the rules and guidelines for all other info... and good luck!
  [Images: More goodness from the wizard of pinholes, Nicolai Grossman, taken off his Spacetime set – click each image for original page. Is it possible for time itself to seizure? For temporality to get Tourette's? Is there a disease of the optic nerve in which moments echo – and would people sign-up for infection? Bruce Mau once wrote that tourists of the future will take "Disease Tours (complete with guaranteed cure)," riding bodily malfunction to a predictable end – but what do diseases of the eye look like from inside? More importantly: what if you built a house that actually looked like that?]. (See also The overlap and The blur, both with photos by Grossman).
 A few months ago, Pruned ran an excellent piece about farms for cloned meat. There, inside huge barns, rubbery mats of cloned muscle – stretched lumps of unBeef® – would vibrate, growing, pulsing, often ripping, beneath a steady stream of jelly-like vitamin wash. Nutrients would slide across those gleaming, fat-marbled surfaces... clumped and soapy. A handful of underpaid Mexican night-workers would then come through with industrial strength pizza cutters, chopping the meat-sheets into rectangular blocks. You would then buy one of those blocks, intending for your own kids to chew it and swallow it. This would be called "feeding them steak." "Chicken." "Pork."  But what really interests me here is whether such a scenario might pose a new future for landscape design. What if someone were to develop, for instance, a kind of organic bio-paving for the world's freeways, replacing asphalt? In which case: could you clone whole stretches of interstate? Cloverleaf junctions, skyways, off-ramps? Would summer road crews perform something more akin to skin-graft operations? Stretching huge films of living matter over the world's dual carriageways. Minimal surfaces. And so on.  [Image: Frei Otto's architecture of minimal surfaces]. The risk, of course, would be that there's some fatal, unknown flaw in your cloning technique and so, one day, the freeways wake up. They shake themselves free from the dirt and filth; they tuck their herniated loops of distant traffic circles up underneath themselves; and they walk away...  All of LA's sprawling anatomy of freeways and cloverleaf junctions arises with a tectonic shiver from the arid sands of southern California, artificially intelligent, blinking with traffic lights, and it wanders free into the American desert. Shining. A kind of moving, hyperdimensional squid made of asphalt and miswired traffic control programs shambling into the mountains, raining cars.
A while back, Tropolism announced Your Hidden City, an urban photography contest. Now, more than one thousand photographs later, the results are in... Instead of one overall winner, however, each juror will be posting his or her favorites, allowing for different standards, tastes, opinions, etc. So, as one of those jurors, I chose... the following: My personal favorite was this laundromat in Honolulu, which comes in under the category of "Best Hidden Place":  That would make an absolutely killer book cover, for instance. For "Best Natural/Urban Overlap," I chose this one:  For "Best Vantage Point," I went with the bean by sgoralnick:  For "Best Density," I chose another photo by sgoralnick (I really like this one):  And, for "Best Building," I chose this mausoleum-like horror movie grid/void, aka the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy, France, photographed by a good-looking Norwegian man:  C'est tout. It was fun. Maybe we can keep this going, do a seasonal thing... Actually, here's a runner-up for "Best Hidden Place": hevy, for his/her documentation of Miami's Ballardian back-side, of which this is just one example:  Thanks, everyone – and congrats – and check out the other jurors' picks, too: architechnophilia, Miss Representation, Polis, Life Without Buildings, and, of course, el tropolismo himself.
 [Image: The present tectonic structure of North America, mapped by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University]. While out in California last month, hiking through Death Valley – on a cloudy day it looked like a painting by Caspar David Friedrich: an earth of snow, not salt flats – I read that California is actually a welded-together mass of remnant archipelagos and former island arcs. In other words, down there in the Californian gravel are the buried edges of old island chains – and the whole state is still shivering with collision, making adjustments, popping loose and sticking, always on the move... then stopping. Much is made of the apparent poetry of driving over the San Andreas Fault, which divides California into a left-half and a right-half, a coastal zone and a continental shield; but what of the silent lines you walk across everyday, from one former island to the next, unaware that those lands had even once been separated? Midway through the trip, I picked up a copy of John McPhee's Assembling California, in which he describes residual structures of ancient geology with "no known bottom" because they cut so deep. He talks about "the metamorphosed remains of what had once been an island arc," and how, through constant collision and restlessness, entire "Newfoundlands, Madagascars, New Zealands, Sumatras, [and] Japans" have all jostled together, ramming one into the other, year after year, piling up, forming "the outermost laminations of new landscapes." This is "the docking of arc and continent," a mismatched mess of rock "now consolidated as California." "California," then, is just the temporary shape taken by these lost islands and unknotted seafloors. Of course, then I found these unbelievable maps by Ron Blakey last week and I almost passed out. Utterly ingenious, each map represents "the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history." You can actually watch as California comes home to collide.  [Image: The southwestern coastal archipelagos of North America, 310 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey]. But let's pull back and start 420 million years ago (bypassing some 130 million years' worth of Blakey's maps). This is North America, a tropical archipelago, covered in surreal vegetation, blowing seeds across itself – Shelley's "thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds" – cross-pollinating, hybridizing, surrounded by shallow seas, chugging northward over the equator.  75 million years later (below), what will eventually be North America has broken into pieces, partially flooded, surrounded by clusters of islands. These scattered subcontinents are about to collide with the north by northwestern edge of Africa – and unbelievable arcs, inlets, atolls, and bays all stretch across the landscape. What was it like to live in that geography? What sounds did the forests make? What did the stars look like? What half-legged fish swam through those waters?   Another 50 million years pass, and the collision with Africa is well underway. Deserts are forming in the American southwest. Global wind patterns shift due to the distribution of landmasses. Weird species that only live for a million years, and leave no fossil record, run unimpeded across giant landscapes of exposed bedrock.   Then the Atlantic rift begins; the Appalachian Mountains, which passed through Morocco, are now split onto three continents: North America, north Africa, and the embryonic British Isles, which drift northward, cultivating Albionic energy in ancestral swells of warm sea. William Blake will be born there – and Shelley, who'll write of a time "when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh."  150 million years ago. California is already starting to form: it's a distant horizon of islands in the Pacific. Those mountains of rock above water are coming in toward the mainland, slowly, lurching forward on broken faults, a conveyor belt moving masses east to raise hills in a ring around Los Angeles, propelling the Sierra Nevadas upward, walling-in the great Arizonan desert now temporarily beneath the sea. Could you map today's California according to the island chains it used to be? And look at Mexico: it's a weird spit of land, hooked and crooked through the oceans, collecting islands onto itself. What would it have been like, walking through those coastal mountains? And if you carved an entire island to look like the cathedral of Notre-Dame, what would it look like, breaking waves, coming toward you over ten million years, eventually colliding with the cliffs you stand on?   What's amazing in the above two images is that, in only 40 million years, an entire system of archipelagos has rammed into the mainland, assembling what will eventually become known as California, tipping the Rockies, torquing belts of metal into metamorphosed ribbons today exposed by roadcuts. What must that time period have been like? With thousands of small islands – a whole Indonesia – off the coast, groaning at night with tectonic pressure, shattering from strain, causing landslides, you could have boated from bay to bay, mapping species, collecting rocks – knowing that beneath your feet is what will someday be Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, Death Valley. But now, in the map below, look at Mexico again: it's a broken ridge of almost-islands, cooking in the Cretaceous sun. The Yucatan is an island. The whole Pacific coast is a weather-beaten cliff of caves and pockets. This was 65 million years ago.  Now the North American inland sea has sealed up, and a riverine bay several orders of magnitude larger than the Mississippi or the Saint Lawrence flows southeast across Texas. Then it, too, is gone (below), leaving behind the massive fossil reefs of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. There is no Florida yet; Alaska and Russia are one; the Caribbean is a malarial bog of proto-islands, choked with seaweed, overrun with electric eels and tide pools. Somewhere humans are chipping flints together and hallucinating spaceships.  Till North America hits its Ice Age. Thousands of acres of frozen arches stand whistling in frigid winds above the future site of Washington DC. Humans huddle in caves – then move south, populating the New Mexican desert. Global sealevels drop, revealing caverns in the coasts of every continent. The magnetosphere howls in the freezing air.  Then it's today. New oceans continue to form. Major geological events continue to happen. Someday the coast of California will drag along the edge of Alaska, depositing pieces of Culver City in the front range. Eventually the planet will melt, cities forming rivers of liquid stone. It's interesting in this context to note that, if the Antarctic ice cap melts, Antarctica itself may rise: "The continental shelf of the South Polar land lies four times lower than normal," New Scientist reported, "suggesting that if the ice (more than a mile thick below sea level at some points) were removed, the continental surface would rise." This is called post-glacial rebound. Fascinatingly, Antarctica's "present mountains would attain considerable heights and introduce new frictional opposition to prevailing winds, so new weather patterns would be created." In any case, every one of those maps above suggests about six hundred novels or short stories just waiting to be written; but the most exciting part of all of it is that we are already living in that world, of altered weather and island arcs, abraded coasts and rivers. It's what we're doing right now. Beneath the house I write this in are seams of lost continents. Outside the place you read this in are moving unmapped geographies yet to come. (Note: All maps in this post are by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University – perhaps, if enough people ask, we can get him to map North America as it will someday be).
Though I'm not convinced anyone in the Philadelphia region actually reads BLDGBLOG – and that includes myself – I'll be giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department this Thursday at 6pm. In Philadelphia.  The talk will be exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long, and is part of talk20. I'll be joining Winka Dubbeldam, Ferda Kolatan, Anuradha Mathur, Jenny Sabin, and many others – so come out, drink wine, look at some pictures of offshore utopias, Christopher Walken, tunnels under London, replicant landscapes, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan – and so on. And listen as I slur my words, make things up, hiccup uncontrollably – then collapse into the arms of a horrified crowd...
A few marshes in north-central Mexico are so chemically unique that some scientists think they're "little versions of the primordial sea, before the dawn of nucleated cells."  [Image: New Scientist]. "Fed by underground waters coursing through the mountains' limestone layers and caves, as well as gushing up from deep and ancient aquifers, the pools – or pozas as the locals call them – have strange chemistries. Phosphorus tends to be in short supply, whereas calcium, magnesium and sulphur are richly available... Primitive microbes flourish here." Some of these marshes are choked with "microbial mats. Under certain conditions, some microbes, such as photosynthetic cyanobacteria, sulphur-reducing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and other helpful waste-eaters, glue themselves together into slimy cooperatives that are often layered like a cake. The incorporation of silt and minerals creates a harder structure, a 'living rock' called a stromatolite."  [Image: An underwater field of stromatolites, from MIT's geobiology lab]. These ecosystems are so chemically abrasive and oddly unlifelike that scientists from Caltech's Virtual Planetary Laboratory hope they might even reveal what forms organisms could take on other planets. (For a bit more on this see Lunar urbanism 3 or Super Reef; and for some very vaguely – in fact really not – related photographs, see this interview with David Maisel).
"Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group." – Andrew Knoll, Life on a Young Planet And so we live, every one of us, the potential origin of new species.
 [Image: Lost rivers and bedrock beneath today's rivers and bedrock].
     [Images: The Taj Mahal, the Ariane 5 rocket, the Space Shuttle – all buildings built to be hurled into the sky at high speed?].The Taj Mahal looks like a cluster of secret rocketry structures; so what if we tested it out? Built engines in freshly excavated subcellars, cleared the area, trucked in fuel...? What other buildings are rockets waiting to happen? Could the Empire State Building be a secret space shuttle – deep down in the tunnels of Manhattan, spelunkers find an unbelievable enginery locked inside tombs of bedrock? Or, if we discovered a way to hurl all the high-rises and skyscrapers of the world into space, could we form our own rings of Saturn – loose buildings aggregated in orbits, linked by bridges, turning in circles above a planet we've left behind? What would Arthur C. Clarke or Hugh Ferris have to say about this? And would the Indian government mind if we started with the Taj Mahal?
In the summer of 2005, the San Diego-based company SeaCode announced that they would permanently anchor a cruise ship off the coast of Los Angeles, in international waters, filling it with an army of "offshore" computer programmers. This odd new micronation would beam the results of its cheap labor back to mainland clients via microwave and T3 internet connections. It would have a steady labor base, sovereign terrain, potentially even immunity from taxes – and loads and loads of code.  As the journal Application Development Trends writes: "the ship will retain all of its cruise ship facilities and will feed and house workers in style. During off hours, programming teams can partake of the ship’s recreational facilities or head for the lights of L.A. on a water taxi, since each worker will be required to have a U.S. tourist visa." (But check out the comments at the end of that link for some Archigram-worthy speculation). Work teams will be broken up into "pods," with "pod leaders," and they will work around the clock.  Interestingly, both sides of the political spectrum seem outraged by the idea; right-ish and left-ish observers have responded with outright hostility, even making sarcastic comments about where the ship's toilets will flush. But I like it; if there's some loophole in international maritime law that allows you to start a free state off the coast of Los Angeles – then I want several. A whole island arc of decommissioned cruise ships, with BLDGBLOG offices on a super-boat somewhere, helicoptering architects out on weekends for coffee; feeding sharks; shooting skeet; awarding novelist-in-residence titles to Jeff VanderMeer, J.G. Ballard, China Miéville, Don DeLillo... We can host the world's first Miss Micronation Pageant, as well as conferences on the state of plate tectonics. Grow orange trees on a hydroponic barge to stay healthy. Panic when storms come in. Meanwhile, a fully inhabited ghost-archipelago of Chinese "zombie ships" has been found off the coast of West Africa – but it's a lot less interesting than it sounds. This account, by Greenpeace, doesn't like the ships – and has nothing to say about their implications for offshore architectural design. Or whether Constant would be pleased.  [Image: P. Gleizes/Greenpeace]. Nor does the article offer any thoughts about the first truly great horror film of our globalized times: a weird industrial accident in China has somehow turned all the local workers into flesh-eating zombies; for whatever reason, these zombies are put onto an archipelago of rusting ships in the Indian Ocean; a band of pan-European scientists studying deep ocean-floor tomography sees the ships on the horizon... and the film goes on from there. (SeaCode discovered via Scott Webel and his Museum of Ephemerata; Chinese zombie ships found via things magazine).
 [Image: Julius Popp's Bitfall]. Bitfall, pictured above, is a kind of liquid computer monitor. As Ruairi Glynn, of Interactive Architecture dot Org, describes it, Bitfall uses carefully-timed drops of falling water "to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again." The sheet of falling water, then, becomes a screen – a liquid cinema – a monitor on which to surf the web.  All of which would be amazing enough were it not for some unbelievable landscape design possibilities. You're in Rome, and you decide to visit the Trevi Fountain – but you're confused. Is that an image you see in the cascading water...? You look closer and realize a television show is being played using the water itself. The whole city, in fact, is full of fountains, and they're all playing films, news shows, stationary images of art. It begins raining later that evening, and you swear you see films in the falling water... Then fountains are installed in red light districts around the world, showing porn... The next summer huge gates are attached to the top of Niagara Falls, and every August a film fest begins: you sit down on the Canadian side of the border and watch Hitchcock, Truffaut, Roberto Succo, an almost-subliminal cinema roaring downward into mist with the water.  A computer-controlled showerhead is installed in your home bathroom, and you watch the news, or put on a film and... do whatever while you watch it. Headlines falling on your shoulders from above. Hotel lobbies with fake waterfalls are transformed into newsrooms, with financial information trickling down the corporate surface of the falls. From different angles you receive different information; from further away you see different films. The New York Stock Exchange replaces its news tickers with fountains: the Dow, the FTSE, the price of mined tungsten. Mineral futures. All cascading inside smooth surfaces of water.  [Image: Asymptote's re-design of the NYSE]. Soon trees can be genetically altered to form images in their bark: tree-screens. You accidentally stumble into a test-forest, after a car accident in rural Bavaria, and all the trees around you seem covered in pictures, and certain angles make them all add up into a 3D film... Filmstills from award-winning directors of the past are put into genetically modified flowers; you look closely and it's Hollywood Ninja, frame by frame, growing in your bestfriend's garden. When breezes come, short scenes go animated, looped. Hypnotic. The film garden. Then flowers replace DVDs, and we go from libraries to planting special trees. Landscapes everywhere bear encoded information.  A huge dome is built over New York City. As rain falls the water is filtered, bit by bit through the dome to form texts: images, signs and financial information. You pay the city and your logo is displayed, coming down in curtains on the city, liquid. The weather-advertising complex. The rain industry.  [Image: Buckminster Fuller, glass dome for Manhattan]. Endless information, printed three-dimensionally in space. (Via Interactive Architecture dot Org, via Information Aesthetics).
  [Images: All but perfect for album art, these are new photos of Jupiter's South and North poles, respectively; see also this ridiculously beautiful landscape scroll of Jupiter unrolled into a ribbon. Meanwhile, one wonders if you could actually be alone there, flying through hydrogen storms, breathing helium, reading Ovid, self-exiled... In any case, does Jupiter sound like this?].
The New York Observer thinks BLDGBLOG is "adorable," and that its author has taken to impersonating Brad Pitt on Archinect...  ...but neither is true. However, I will be playing Brad Pitt in an upcoming documentary about male virility. Watch for it.
 [Image: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, another cover of which pleads: Lord, have mercy on London...]. Is Trafalgar Square doomed to become an avian flu hotspot? New Scientist implies as much in a short piece published last week: "Pigeons could carry H5N1 bird flu into city centres," we read, "increasing the chances of humans being exposed to the virus." But does this tiny factoid mean anything at all – let alone that public squares all over the world will soon act as disease vectors for bird flu's apparently impending sweep through the human genome? If it does mean something, and if pigeons are a major risk for spreading influenza, will we first hear reports of human-human infection coming from hospitals in central London? Again, if so, will the pigeons of Trafalgar Square be to blame? And do infected pigeons mean that Venice's Piazza San Marco is also a European vector for the disease? Or am I just giving away the plot for BLDGBLOG's first feature film...?
 [Image: California Academy of Sciences]. While BLDGBLOG just explored the possibility that reefs might actually be huge musical instruments, it turns out that a group of Scotsmen have been testing that exact hypothesis: "Stephen Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues set up 24 artificial reefs, each with a speaker system, near Australia's Great Barrier Reef. On six consecutive nights they played recordings of natural reefs at half the sites. A reef that was noisy one night was silent the next and vice versa. Reefs with the audio cue attracted four times as many cardinal fish and nearly twice as many damselfish." This "audio cue" is elsewhere described as the "'frying bacon' sound of snapping shrimps," and it "can be picked up from 20 kilometres away." All of which is another way of saying that reefs already are musical instruments: vast landscape saxophones being played by shrimp underwater...  Having said that, what if you switched Simpson's recordings and played, say, the sound of Madison Avenue along one of the reefs – what new ecosystems might result? Conversely, what if you played the sounds of a reef through speakers down Madison Avenue? And could you imitate the sounds of a reef at a Hong Kong karaoke bar? Rather: what would happen in you did? What is the future of abstract karaoke? If you totally scramble the soundtracks of the world – what happens?
 [Image: 2012; see also their bit on Hollow Earth Cities]. "I declare that the earth is hollow," U.S. Army Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. wrote in the early 1800s, "and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking." Somewhere along the line, Himalayan space ships, Nazi explorers, remnant Stone Age tribes, undersea caves, north-flowing Siberian rivers, and Edmund Halley all get involved... setting up BLDGBLOG's upcoming pitch for Indiana Jones 5...
"Deep beneath our feet, rock is constantly on the move."  According to New Scientist, massive avalanches of molten rock inside the earth's mantle may affect the speed of the earth's rotation – briefly accelerating the planet. "Like an ice skater pulling in their arms," these internal landslides shift mass towards the earth's core, making the earth spin faster. Over the long term, the earth is actually slowing down – yet weird anomalies in the planet's geological record suggest that short bursts of acceleration come, as if from nowhere, and last roughly ten million years before fading. "For the trilobites," for instance, "530 million years ago, one year contained about 420 days and each day lasted about 21 hours. Now we get a mere 365 days every year and our days last for 24 hours." Interestingly, "as time goes by, days and nights will continue to stretch" – meaning that every single day, albeit probably by only a few nanoseconds, is literally longer than the day before. (PS: don't forget to set your clock forward tomorrow night). So, when a runaway chunk of the earth's mantle starts to slide, it "carries on going, sliding through the lower mantle like a stone dropped into a pond," meaning that "a massive blob of rock the size of the Moon has shifted towards the centre of the Earth."  What I'd like to know is: could you deliberately bomb the internal fissures of the earth – using a new hydrogen bomb, nicknamed The Jules Verne – starting huge mantleslides that accelerate the planet's rotation so fantastically... that the skyscrapers of New York go flying into space?
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