BLDGBLOG: The Year in Review: May 2007

Continuing our recap of BLDGBLOG in the year 2007, May included both the announcement and the beginning of Postopolis!, an event I still haven't quite metabolized.
BLDGBLOG then called for more walkable cities and was thus accused of everything from harboring conservative, crypto-nostalgic enthusiasms for the 1950s to being anti-car, anti-progress, and anti-free market. The political contradictions in such statements – including, let's face it, contradictions in my original post – were not fully inspected.
It was then proposed that all of the world's ruined cities could be partially rebuilt on a Mediterranean island.

Within a decade you've covered the island in a maze of Chicago tenement housing, Russian churches, Indian temples, and Chinese hutongs; there are Aztec walls and pillars standing inside reconstructed Romanian state houses – before most of pre-WWII Europe begins to appear, together with shattered castles, north African villages, and the weathered masonry of pre-Columbian South America, all the buildings merging one into one another, indistinct, with Mayan rocks and Kurdish roofing joined together atop bricks from Köln and Dresden.

We talked about Franz Kafka. We hosted the film fest mentioned in the previous post, and Wired magazine liked it. We explored the architectural side of near-death experiences.
The cooling towers of a nuclear power plant were demolished.

[Image: NASA's TransHab module, designed by Constance Adams; image found via HobbySpace].

We took an elevator to the underworld; we looked at "interiors in space"; we parsed through news about a firestorm from space that may or may not have wiped out early human civilization in North America; and we found out that parts of Manhattan island are actually made from British war ruins.
The BLDGBLOG Book was announced – and we spelunked through the surprisingly popular undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan.

(Earlier: Recapping January, February, March, and April).