Landscape Futures

I'm increasingly fascinated by the ways in which climate change works hand in hand with, and even directly leads to, geographic change, or the physical alteration of existing landscapes.
What interests me even more, however, is the idea that landscape change can sometimes come first – a volcanic eruption, or a redirected river – sending the Earth's climate out of wack.

[Image: Lake Agassiz, an ancient glacial lake whose draining may have changed the global climate].

Roughly 13,000 years ago, for instance, Lake Agassiz, a gigantic freshwater lake "bigger than all of the present-day Great Lakes combined," broke through its ice dam and flooded up the St. Lawrence Seaway, roaring directly into the Atlantic. As a result, certain oceanic currents shut down and the existing pattern of global temperatures changed in a matter of months.
Or another example: 55 million years ago, the "volcanic eruptions that created Iceland might also have triggered one of the most catastrophic episodes of global warming ever seen on Earth," New Scientist reported last week.
In other words, the formation of Iceland was "accompanied by violent volcanic eruptions that built layers of basalt rock 7 kilometres thick." (!) All that new rock packed "a total volume of 10,000,000 cubic kilometres, enough to build a proto-Iceland in the newly-born north Atlantic."
In the process, though, this "huge volcanic eruption... unleashed so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that world temperatures rose by as much as 8°C."
The effect "was disastrous for most life... killing off many deep-sea species."

[Image: The completely unrelated, but nonetheless beautiful, Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica].

On the other hand, these sorts of changes can obviously work both ways: climate change comes first, affecting rainfall, thus forming deserts where there were once great plains – or any variety of other global warming scenarios.
In an article in The Guardian last week, Mark Lynas explained how the Sand Hills of Nebraska were once part of a vast desert, larger than the Sahara – "an immense system of sand dunes that spread across the Great Plains from Texas in the south to the Canadian prairies in the north," Lynas writes.
But if you overlook the existence of federal irrigation projects, and other government water subsidies, the only major difference between then and now is 1ºC.
In other words, it's only one degree cooler today than it was when huge sand dunes roamed across North America.
Meanwhile, Lynas goes on to explore how, with every jump of only 1ºC in the average planetary temperature today, wildly different landscapes become possible around the world.
The one possibility that truly blows me away – and even makes me want to make a science fiction film, or write a graphic novel, or even publish a BLDGBLOG book of short stories set in this insane new landscape – is this: once Europe is 4ºC hotter than it is today, "new deserts will be spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara will have effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar."
Imagining the cities of northern Italy buried in sand – with Renaissance statuary chest-deep in dunes...

[Image: The Sahara desert, waiting to spring upon the unsuspecting streets of Paris... Via Wikipedia].

Lynas continues:

In Switzerland, summer temperatures may hit 48ºC, more reminiscent of Baghdad than Basel. The Alps will be so denuded of snow and ice that they resemble the rocky moonscapes of today's High Atlas – glaciers will only persist on the highest peaks such as Mont Blanc. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech will be experienced in southern England...

And so on.
However, I don't mean to celebrate the annihilatory effects of global climate change here; I simply mean to point out that: 1) some of these changes are deliriously surreal and, as such, they're actually quite fun to think about; and 2) a very, very strange future awaits our descendents, should anything even remotely like this come to pass.
Actually, 3): it's also worth pointing out that, today, a novel set in an abandoned Rome, crawling with sand dunes, would be considered a work of science fiction – but, in one hundred years' time, such a setting may be much closer to social realism. In other words, literary genres will also be forced to adapt in an era of rapid climate change. (This same topic is actually discussed in BLDGBLOG's forthcoming interview with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson).
Finally, all of these speculative landscapes of the future have already begun to inspire something of a new golden age for international law. The future of Canada's "Northwest Passage" is a perfect example of this.
As ice continues to thaw throughout the Canadian Arctic, a fantastically convenient shipping route, reaching from the Atlantic through to Asia, is taking shape. This route cuts right through Canada's sovereign terrain – but, with such huge sums of money at stake for international trade, will the Canadian government be able to maintain control over the seaway...?
The question, then, involves whether the Northwest Passage should be considered a "transit passage" – and, thus, subject to Canadian law – or an "international strait" – thus, outside of Canada's reach.

[Image: The Northwest Passage, as imagined by Sir John Ross, 1819].

According to a recent essay in the London Review of Books, "Canada claims that the passage constitutes Canadian internal waters" – but the United States, perhaps unsurprisingly, "insists that the passage is an 'international strait'."
However, the essay goes on to explain that treating the Passage as an international strait – which means it will be free from Canadian regulations, controls, and other legal constraints – may actually pose unexpected consequences in the realm of international security.
Anyway – etc. etc.
Basically, what I think is cool here is that large-scale terrestrial transformation in an era of rapid climate change is already beginning to impact upon fantastically mundane questions – of law, property, sovereignty, and so on – showing that no matter how sci-fi a situation may likely be, you can always find some way to fit it into human legislation.
In any case, I'm sure I'll be returning to this topic soon.

The architecture of solar alignments

[Image: The solar-aligned ruins of Chankillo, Peru; via the BBC].

The Chankillo ruins, near the Peruvian coast, made the news a few months back when they were discovered to be an ancient solar observatory.
According to NASA, some archaeologists "have nicknamed the ruin’s central complex the 'Norelco ruin' based on its resemblance to a modern electric shaver."
Just southeast of the "electric shaver," however, are a series of structures called "the Thirteen Towers, which vaguely resemble a slightly curved spine."

[Image: Photo by Ivan Ghezzi, demonstrating solar alignments with the "slightly curved spine" of the Thirteen Towers; via the BBC].

Quoting NASA:

The Thirteen Towers were the key to the scientists conclusion that the site was a solar observatory. These regularly spaced towers line up along a hill, separated by about 5 meters (16 feet). The towers are easily seen from Chankillo’s central complex, but the views of these towers from the eastern and western observing points are especially illuminating. These viewpoints are situated so that, on the winter and summer solstices, the sunrises and sunsets line up with the towers at either end of the line. Other solar events, such as the rising and setting of the Sun at the mid-points between the solstices, were aligned with different towers.

The BBC quotes a man called Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy in Leicester, England: "These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long."

[Image: Like some kind of machine embedded in the surface of the earth, it's the Chankillo Observatory. Courtesy of GeoEye/SIME, via NASA's Earth Observatory].

For all that, though, the surrounding landscape at Chankillo is itself just extraordinary; you can't see it in the images above, however, so take a look at this image – or even at this huge version of that image, or even at this truly gigantic (3.4mb) version.
Meanwhile, I'm a genuine sucker for solar-alignment theories involving landscapes and architecture; in fact, I was just talking to someone about this the other day.
Yet I'm even more of a sucker for unintentional examples of such things – like houses with pitched gable roofs that accidentally line-up with the sun every summer solstice...
I've talked about this kind of thing on BLDGBLOG before – but that doesn't mean I won't do it again.
For instance: one day, a science writer in her late 30s gets an email saying that she's being sent to report on iceberg calving off the western coast of Greenland.
She takes a boat, along with some climate scientists and oceanographers, and they find themselves inside the region of study by the second week of June. Icebergs are flowing past the ship on all sides; no one can believe how many there are. Measurements are taken; the icebergs continue to drift.
The days grow longer.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

Then, on the morning of the summer solstice, our science journalist can't sleep. She's been up all night, flipping her pillow over and back, shoving the blankets off then pulling them tight again, etc. etc.
Finally, she gets out of bed and wanders out onto the deck of the ship – where she sees the sun of the summer solstice just hanging there.
Incredibly, though, a perfect line of drifting icebergs – ten, twenty, thirty icebergs – stretches out, one after the other, toward the horizon. The effect is uncanny; it looks as if the icebergs have been deliberately placed there, sculpted into an unbroken line by unseen forces – and right above them, of course, is the summer sun, casting a reflective line of golden light from one icy peak to the next.
It's as if, for that precise moment, from the deck of that particular ship, for that one woman alone, the Arctic seascape has been arranged to line up with the solstice.
In any case, I think there should be an ongoing competition – or at least some kind of internet archive – for photographic proof of unexpected solar alignments: four times a year, perhaps – on the solstices and equinoxes – you go out and search for weird alignments of the sun...
In a small town outside Albany, the windows of every house in one particular cul-de-sac light up, the sun shining straight through house after house, in a perfectly straight line, as if they'd been built for the purpose, a monumental solar observatory the exact size and shape of suburbia – till one family closes their curtains, and the effect is gone.

(Earth Observatory image found via del.icio.us/pruned).

Pay-to-Stay Imprisonment

"The California prison system," as reported by The New York Times today, is "severely overcrowded, teeming with violence and infectious diseases and so dysfunctional that much of it is under court supervision." As such, it is a system "that anyone with the slightest means would most likely pay to avoid."
Luckily for them, they can now do so.

They can pay-to-stay:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.

For fees ranging from $82 to $127 per night, inmates can apparently stay for up to four years. The NYTimes reports on one "prisoner," in particular, "who in her oversize orange T-shirt and flip-flops looked more like a contestant on The Real World than an inmate." They quote her: "I haven’t had a problem with any of the other girls. They give me shampoo.”
In what is surely the set-up for a new blockbuster comedy – starring Jim Carrey – we even learn that many pay-to-stay convicts are actually "granted work furlough, enabling them to do most of their time on the job, returning to the jail simply to go to bed."
There are obvious – and entirely justified – complaints: for instance that this system simply transforms the Californian penal system into a new kind of sociological adventure tourism, favoring those residents of the state with enough disposable income to avoid showering alongside gangs of neo-Nazis – totally violating any concept of punishment or rehabilitation in the process.
At the same time, though, sociological adventure tourism opens up a fascinating range of future business models that we would do well to think about, and prepare for, before they come to pass.
Pay-to-stay loans, for instance, or jail'otels – or even some weird outer Hollywood casting agency where you can try out for substitute imprisonment on behalf of paying clients. Should you be accepted, they'll take care of your student loans and buy your family weekly pizzas. Though I'm sure you can already be hired to go to jail.
Read more at The New York Times.

Ancient Lights

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

"Ancient lights" is a colloquialism for the "right to light," guaranteed under English law, whereby windows that have seen twenty years' worth of "uninterrupted" daylight cannot be blocked by the construction of new buildings.
Or, as Wikipedia explains it:

In effect, the owner of a building with windows that have received natural daylight for 20 years or more is entitled to forbid any construction or other obstruction that would deprive him of that illumination. Neighbors cannot build anything that would block the light without permission. The owner may build more or larger windows but cannot enlarge his new windows before the new period of 20 years has expired.

"Once a right to light exists," we read, "the owner of the right is entitled to 'sufficient light according to the ordinary notions of mankind'." Even better, British courts apparently "rely on expert witnesses to define this term."
Whether "this term" refers to sufficient light or to ordinary notions of mankind is hard to tell.
In any case, the Royal Institution of Charted Surveyors, or RICS, suggests that you should never "settle for living in the shadows."
The RICS believes, in fact, that "many people are allowing adjacent buildings to block their natural light, unaware that they have a legal right to it. Light blocking can be classified as a ‘nuisance’ alongside noise and air pollution and culprits range from large new commercial developments to a neighbour’s building extension or a new garden shed. Even a tall hedge can be a problem."
The tone of the RICS abruptly shifts at this point, however, as they begin to explain how you can actually prevent your neighbors from acquiring ancient light rights. There is a "need for vigilance to prevent neighbours acquiring a right to light," they warn; after all, such an acquisition "may hamper future development and investment possibilities" on your own property.
"It is possible to prevent a building acquiring a right to light," the RICS explains, "but despite the procedure being simple, it is rarely used." The "procedure" involves a man called Vinnie, and he –
The actual solution is a kind of ghost architecture. In other words, following consultation from the RICS, you draw "a notional screen of unlimited height," along with other "imaginary legal partitions," around your home, thus defining the light rights of your property.
You then ring your neighbor's doorbell, hand him an envelope, and explain what you've been doing. He nods quietly, ceases construction on his new guest bedroom – and then throws a brick through your window.
You retaliate.
The other neighbors soon join in, choosing sides, talking strategy, letting the air out of your car's tires and stealing your newspaper. Within a week, the quality of life on your street has plummeted; there are threats, loud noises, and an unexplained smell...
Meanwhile, "[i]n the center of London, near Chinatown and Covent Garden, particularly in back alleyways, signs saying 'Ancient Lights' can be seen marking individual windows."

('Ancient Lights' found via del.icio.us/fakeisthenewreal).

Tunnels, mines, and the "upwardly migrating void"

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

It's always worth checking in to see what Subterranea Brittanica have been up to – especially when they've been to such places as the Hanover Chalk Mine or the Scotland Street Tunnel – so I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the things now up on their site.
First of all, starting with the Scotland Street Tunnel, we find ourselves in Edinburgh, walking down through a former railroad tunnel that "measures 1000yds in length, 24ft in width, and 24ft in height with a gradient of 1-in-27 towards the north. The roof of the tunnel is just below street level at Scotland Street," they write, "but is 49 feet deep at St. Andrew Street and 37 feet deep under Princes Street."

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

In their field notes, our guides at Subterranea Brittanica quote novelist Robert Louis Stevenson:

The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly of paramount impressiveness to a young mind.

Not surprisingly, the site was re-used during WWII as an air raid shelter, forming what's referred to as a "hardened emergency control centre."
Post-war, then, the tunnel went on "to house... a traffic office with centralized traffic control. The traffic controller had telephone links to all signal cabins, goods yards and major stations and offices" in the city. This latter function partially explains the brick structures that were built inside the underground space.
Awesomely, we read, in the 1970s "the tunnel was used for growing mushrooms" – before it was then "used as a location for monitoring natural radiation."
Don't eat those mushrooms!

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

Many more images of the tunnel – all of which were taken by Nick Catford – including a lot more information, can be found at the bottom of this page.
Meanwhile, there's the Hanover Chalk Mine in Reading, England.
Access to the mine, we're told, can be "arranged via the [local] caving club." You physically enter the space by way of "a 50ft fixed steel ladder in a narrow vertical shaft below a locked iron cover."
In other words, you lift the iron cover – and descend into the surface of the earth.

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

However, if I may be allowed to mis-use a quotation from architectural theorist Mark Wigley (who was recently interviewed by BLDGBLOG): "These hidden layers are not simply below the surface. They are within the surface itself, knotted together to form the surface."
Wigley goes on to describe – in an essay that has nothing to do with British chalk mines – the "possibility that the ground... might actually be... the concealment of an abyss."
Which reminds me of an oft-quoted line by Jules Verne: "Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses."
In any case, the Hanover Chalk Mine was apparently "rediscovered" in 1977, after which "a new lining was installed in the shaft, and the workings inspected and surveyed."
Subterranea Brittanica themselves found that the mine "is generally very dry, with no obvious evidence of water seeping in through the ceiling or standing on the floors."

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

However, judging from small piles of rubble, some structural instability in the walls apparently relieved itself long ago through a partial collapse; this partial collapse is beautifully referred to as "an upwardly migrating void" that may yet cause "other collapses of the surface."

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

Though it's divided up into northern and southern branches, each excavated for slightly different purposes, the mine has not always been a mine.
"One or both of the interlinked northern mines," we read, "are known to have been used for the secure storage of documents by Reading Council during World War II, and two corrugated iron shelters, a brick-built stove and chimney, and tea-chests are said to remain below ground. One of the shafts reportedly contains timber staging, and one is said to be 70 feet deep."
So where did all this chalk come from?
In his fantastically great book Earth, writer and natural historian Richard Fortey takes us on an imaginary aerial tour of the planet, drifting in a full circle around the globe.
During the tour, Fortey describes how we look down from great heights at the vast folded belts of continental plates, from buckled ridges and alluvial plains to tropical islands, Himalayan plateaus, and Pacific trenches – including, at one point, the ancient chalk landscapes of southern England.
Quoting Richard Fortey at great length:

Imagine flying higher and higher, until we can see that all the fine hotels and monuments and endless suburbs of London lie in a bowl of strata of Tertiary age. The River Thames is now no more than a silvery line following the centre of the bowl. Beneath these strata – mostly soft sands and clays – there are older rocks again; the white Cretaceous limestone known as the Chalk reaches the surface north and south of London on open downs, where sheep were once universal... South of the London Basin, the Chalk frames the Weald, which was the major source of iron in medieval times and now is thick with groves of sweet chestnut burying ancient hammer ponds. From high up, most of what you see is forested. Climb higher still and we can see that the Chalk, again, forms the white cliffs of Dover – to many English people perhaps the most sentimentally significant piece of geology there is. From this height we can see that the Dover cliffs are of a piece with facing cliffs in France on the other side of the English Channel, which is nothing more than a geological afterthought, breached by the eroding sea just a few thousand years ago. Geology knows no national boundaries and from here we can even make out the Chalk extending far across France, to underlie the endless plains in the north, where the grain that goes into making 100 million baguettes is grown in fields that have neither hedgerows nor apparently any end. And could we but follow the Chalk around the world we would find similar white limestones stretching from the Canadian Shield "all the way through to Texas and Mexico," as [Eduard] Suess said, to the Black Sea and well beyond in the Middle East. Chalk rock records one of the great transgressions of the sea onto the continents, one which happened close to 100 million years ago, and which painted great slabs of the world white for eternity with the sediment it left behind.

It seems a little strange to use the word "eternity" there, in a book that is, ostensibly, a very literate demonstration that nothing lasts forever in the world of tectonic geology; but that's a minor quibble.

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

I think it's more important simply to point out that these rocks, seamed with flint, so ready to form caves and pockets beneath the everyday landscape we normally walk upon, thinking more often about what lies ahead than what lies below, have an incomprehensibly specific and ancient history behind them.
If it wasn't for lost seas, nearly saturated with life, slowly depositing meter upon meter of organic matter in quiet bays and inlets and coves, this chalk would never have formed – and, of course, this mine would never have existed.
These photographs thus capture the almost unimaginably distant side-effects of landscapes that no longer exist – side-effects which have themselves come to form landscapes, in fact the very terrain that grounds our present era.
The history beneath that ground is indeed a kind of abyss.
Finally, while you're clicking around through Subterranea Brittanica, don't miss the artificially underground surreality of Barons' Cave.
"Nobody knows how old The Barons' Cave is," we read. "The oldest reference to it dates from 1586 when Camden describes 'an extraordinary passage with a vaulted roof hewn with great labour out of the soft stone.'"

[Image: Barons' Cave, as photographed by Nick Catford].

The various photos of Barons' Cave are well worth checking out – including close-ups of graffiti left by visitors who missed one another by hundreds of years.

(All images in this post are by Nick Catford, who holds the copyrights, etc. etc., and deserves loads of credit for the amazing work).

Pantheonic Astronomy

[Image: The interior of the Pantheon, as photographed by Soeren Dalsgaard].

An anonymous reader pointed out that the Pantheon was featured in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day last Friday.
"A testament to Roman architecture and engineering," NASA writes, "the Pantheon's dome is said to symbolize the vault of the heavens."

[Image: A "celestogramme," looking up from within at the dome of the Pantheon, by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

Seeing that, of course, makes it impossible for me to resist referring you back to BLDGBLOG's interview with Walter Murch, posted two weeks ago, in which Murch postulates a possible connection between the physical structure of the Pantheon itself and the heliocentric astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus.
In other words, does the dome of the Pantheon "symbolize the vault of the heavens," as NASA writes, but in an unexpectedly literal way?
In the interview, Murch explains how he "superimposed Copernicus’s drawing [of the planetary orbits] over an image of the Pantheon’s dome – and found that the ratios of the circles in his drawing and the ratios of the circles of the Pantheon line up almost exactly. Seeing that alignment was one of those wonderful moments where you suddenly feel a strong current of connection with the past."

[Image: Superimposition, by Walter Murch, of Copernicus's diagram of planetary orbits over a celestogramme of the Pantheon by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

So is it just an interesting coincidence?
Murch goes on:

The circumstantial evidence [for a real connection between Copernicus's drawing and the structure of the Pantheon] is compelling, but there is no reference to the Pantheon in any of Copernicus’s correspondence or in the various manuscript versions of de Revolutionibus – so we will probably never know for sure.
Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating thought: that this magnificent temple, built 1400 years before Copernicus ever saw it, designed by a pagan, Sun-worshipping Roman emperor, and later transformed into a church, may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos.

If you haven't seen the interview yet, be sure to check it out. It's worth the read.

Quick list 9

Can UPS save millions of dollars on truck fuel simply by cutting down on its drivers' left turns?
Apparently, the company has been trying "to re-engineer their fleet routing," the Financial Times reported last month, as a way to find more fuel-efficient modes of delivery – and part of this means they're now limiting left-hand (or cross-traffic) turns.

As the Financial Times explained:

[I]nformation technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass.

UPS route engineers are thus relying on "an underlying map database that can penalise or disable left-hand turns in the route planning process. The system is well suited to the delivery business because drivers can run circular routes, ending up where they started."
The FT goes on to explore the fuel-use implications of just-in-time delivery; air & truck delivery vs. water & rail transport; a "computer model that would create commercial freight routes in the way that MapQuest or Google Maps make maps for motorists"; and something called Gift: the Geographic Intermodal Freight Transport model.

Elsewhere, sudden transformations of the earth's surface, as a result of mudslides, floods, volcanic eruptions, and other topographical catastrophes, can make existing maps obsolete within seconds.
This is precisely what happened several weeks ago when an earthquake struck on the floor of the south Pacific, off the coast of the Solomon Islands, near Australia, raising coral reefs several meters out of the water – thus killing the reefs and creating a new, sun-bleached archipelago.
"Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide," Seed magazine reported.
The sudden terrestrial shake-up also "revealed a sunken vessel that locals believe is a Japanese patrol boat, a remnant of the fierce fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese in WWII."
Pulp sci-fi novelists may want to bear this in mind when coming up with future storylines.
For instance: an earthquake off the coast of Chennai thrusts a submerged geological ridge into the sunlight – revealing an unexplained metallic anomaly within those slabs of shell-encrusted limestone. Scientists called in to investigate are almost immediately hospitalized after visiting the site, suffering from headaches and nosebleeds. Local fishermen report identical symptoms.
Instruments, however, record a complete absence of radiation – so there must be something else going on.
Intriguingly, the exposed metal structure appears to be growing....
Etc. etc. Like I say: pulp science fiction.
Moving on, we learn that geothermal energy is on the rise in southern Germany.

[Image: Alpine geothermics; illustration by Rödl & Partner].

According to Monocle, "Munich and its hinterland have become the new frontier for deep-seated geothermal energy":

Drilling three to four kilometres into the earth's crust allows engineers to tap into boiling hot water, which can be used to heat buildings and run zero-emission power plants. The southernmost past of the state of Bavaria, along the Alps' foothills, is the literal hotbed of geothermal exploration, with planned investments of €3.2bn.

Siemens, unsurprisingly, is fast on the draw, with a new plant already under construction there, in a town called Unterhaching.
That same issue of Monocle also points us to the "hexagonal wooden islands" of architect Vicente Guallart (whose work was previously seen on BLDGBLOG here).
This "astonishing series of artificial islands," Monocle writes, comes "in two basic forms – flat or 'hillock' – and [they] have been a great success with sunbathing locals." In the architect's own words, these create "multiple coastlines," extending seasonal fun onto previously nonexistent landforms.

[Image: The hexagonal wooden islands of Vicente Guallart].

This also raises the interesting question, though, of designer terrain – or even branded landscapes, specific earthen features associated with, say, Nike or the Hilton Hotel chain – and whether or not terrestrial augmentation, such as Guallart's hexagonal wooden islands, will be the next step in boutique design. Rather than a boutique hotel, in other words, you'd have a boutique landscape.
A bit further afield, meanwhile, "shape-shifting 'smart dust' may explore alien worlds," New Scientist reports.

Thousands of miniscule wireless sensors, or "smart dust", could one-day be used to explore other planets, swirling across the landscape by subtly altering their shape.

These individual pieces of "smart dust" will "navigate by shape-shifting," as they drift in artificial clouds of nanotechnology – implying, incredibly, that machines may someday form entire weather fronts, with their own microclimates and atmospheric effects – crossing extraordinary landscapes, such as the "outcrop called 'Olympia' along the northwestern margin of 'Erebus'," on Mars.

[Image: Olympia Crater, Mars; courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell].

Finally, for now, it was announced this week that the US military "is building a three-mile concrete wall in the centre of Baghdad along the most murderous faultline between Sunni and Shia Muslims."

The wall, which recognises the reality of the hardening sectarian divide in Baghdad, is a central part of George Bush's final push to pacify the capital. Work began on April 10 under cover of darkness and is due for completion by the end of the month... Although Baghdad is full of barriers and checkpoints, particularly round the Green Zone where the US and British are based along with the Iraq government, this is the first time a wall has been built along sectarian lines. Its construction comes as the security situation appears to be deteriorating despite the recent US troop "surge".

The fact that physical structures, such as checkpoints and Bremer walls – in other words, pieces of architecture – are being used "to pacify" Baghdad fascinates me no end.

[Images: Concrete barriers (with no connection to Baghdad)].

Adding to the tactical surreality of this decision – after all, building a wall to separate warring neighborhoods will almost certainly result in more extreme mortar attacks and general social distrust – we find this glimpse of architectural construction under continuous military guard:

The Baghdad wall, which will be 12ft (3.5 metres) high, is being built by US paratroopers who left Camp Taji, about 20 miles north of the city, on the first night in a dozen trucks carrying stacks of huge concrete barriers, each weighing 14,000 pounds (6,300kg). Cranes, protected by tanks, winched them into place. Building has continued every night since.

The ultimate "strategy" here is to create "a series of gated communities, in which US and Iraqi troops control entry and exits."
More soon – and happy Earth Day, by the way.

(With two of these links found via Leah Beeferman and Telstar Logistics. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Quick list 8 – and onward from there...).

Solar Organ / Sky Piano

"Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun's atmosphere behave like a musical instrument," the BBC reported yesterday.

Even better, these "'coronal loops' carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ." In the process, each micro-flare – released by coronal looping and fueled by "the energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs" – sends "immensely powerful acoustic waves hurtling through the loops at tens of kilometres per second, creating cosmic 'organ music'."

Mixing our musical metaphors here, the sonic effect is then compared to plucking a guitar string – but, judging from this audio excerpt, it sounds more like the rolling percussion of an orchestra being tuned.
Of course, solar sounds have been featured on BLDGBLOG before; in Podcasting the sun, for instance, we looked into whether the sun is "ringing like a bell" or "clapping," and the answer seems to be both – only adding to the sun's repertoire of instrumental metaphors.

I would even postulate, given the evidence, that we can only understand the sun through metaphors – comparing it to scientific models, hydrogen bombs, musical instruments, gods and goddesses, etc. – which, as it happens, is the subject of a short essay by Jacques Derrida called "Ellipsis of the Sun" (though I think Paul de Man also has an essay about this – I just didn't bring any de Man books with me to LA...).
In any case, I was actually reminded of the "sea organ" in Zadar, Croatia, when I first heard of the sun's coronal symphonies.
"Spring 2005 saw Zadar gain something absolutely unique," we read; that "something" was "the world’s first pipe organ that’s played by the sea."

[Images: The Zadar sea organ, from this PDF].

The sea organ is appropriately named, then, as the natural motion of the sea "pushes air through" 35 pipes on the coastal edge of the city; at that point, "depending on the size and velocity of the wave," the residents of Zadar can sit back and listen as "chords are played."
So could you attach an organ like that to the sun...? That would play continuous solar music and sidereal sounds, reverberating over continents, everyday?
A kind of sky piano that rips and roars and shines atonally in chords across the Earth's magnetosphere? And if you stood at the edge of an Alaskan forest, with your antenna pointed up into the sky, headphones on, tuned into that solar presence, entranced, would you hear this? Thus literalizing the BBC's metaphor?
If so, would Jacques Derrida be proud?

(Note: More sunscapes at Pruned. Zadar sea organ found via the Kircher Society. Ethereal piano MP3, linked at the end of this post, by Myke Weiskopf and his newly revived audio resource ShortWaveMusic).

Of Cars, Dogs, Golf, and Bad Feng Shui: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba

[Image: Jeffrey Inaba].

Jeffrey Inaba teaches architectural theory and design studios at Columbia (where he is the founding director of C-Lab) and SCI-Arc (where he and Paul Nakazawa run SCIFI, the Southern California Institute for Future Initiatives); he heads Inaba Projects; and he regularly contributes to a wide variety of publications, not the least of which is Great Leap Forward: The Harvard Design School Project on the City.
Of course, Inaba is also a co-editor of Volume, along with Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley – both of whom BLDGBLOG recently interviewed.
Rounding out our look, then, at the editorial staff of Volume, BLDGBLOG spoke to Jeffrey Inaba about... well, as many topics as we could fit into one phone conversation: Archigram, sports cars, golf courses, feng shui, Donald Trump, Saddam Hussein, penthouse design and the rise of Tribeca, hedge fund managers, spatial surplus, sustainable development in China, the economics of suburbia and global megaslums, dog training as a political metaphor, science fiction novels as a form of architectural research – etc. etc.
It's a fun conversation, if I do say so myself; even better, if you're left wanting more you only have to click through to Archinect, where an ongoing discussion with Ole, Mark, and Jeffrey is even now underway.

• • •
BLDGBLOG: With Volume 10 you call for more “agitation” in architectural discourse. Could you go into this a bit more? For instance, do we need a new Archigram or another Superstudio? Where will this agitation come from?

Jeffrey Inaba: It’d be great if there was another Archigram or Superstudio. [laughs] I certainly wouldn’t be against it. I think the reason for producing an entire issue on agitation was specifically a response to consensus culture. There’s a collective feeling within the US that it is important to agree on things, to find points that can be discussed or shared, and that differences should be smoothed over by elevating the discussion in a way that diminishes an opposition on another level. That seems to be triggered by an underlying sense that you’re either with us or you’re against us.

What seems ridiculous about that – not even on a content level, but on a deeper, structural level – is that these alliances and antagonisms are based on the least substantial of terms. So if only by two people agreeing with each other on a review, as critics, that somehow this would be the basis for an alliance seems ridiculous – just as not agreeing on a topic could trigger a war between two perceived points of view or ideologies.

Furthermore, when alliances are developed in tenuous terms like this, it doesn’t necessarily generate more in-depth discussion. You might have somebody who, for lack of a better example, is interested in technology, and they might form bonds with somebody who does, say, 17th century history – but strange bedfellows like this aren’t generating a more interesting discussion. There’s more of a symbolic alliance, rather than one that’s actually productive.

In that sense, it seems important to reintroduce the term agitation because its meaning has been diminished: it now means trouble-maker or rabble-rouser, or somebody who is disruptive for ill-founded reasons. But agitation can be a term that’s much broader: it can be an action that’s earnest, circumspect, interrogative, or subtle – as well as over the top. Our point would be to find means of agitating that aren’t just based upon the appeal of the rhetoric, or the loudness of the preaching. In that sense, we hope to expand the term agitation.

Once you re-introduce it, as well, you can begin to look out for it. That, for example, is how we came to do the piece on Pininfarina. I remember a hair stylist saying once that hair cutting would be so easy if it weren’t for ears. Similarly, designing super-sleek cars would be easy if it weren’t for the engine and the wheels – protrusions or obstructions that are essential to the object at hand and fundamental to what a car is. Hence the grill, the engine block, wheel well – all the things that produce bumps, or aesthetic agitations rather than streamlined forms. When looked at in this way, an entirely new vocabulary can be appreciated with Pininfarina.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: And part of this agitation is your interest in the favela – the slum? In Volume 10 you published a whole travel guide to favelas, called Alibi.

Inaba: Yeah. And it’s definitely not meant in an ironic way. The idea with Alibi was that you could produce urban research in the form of a travel guide, so that it could be readable for people other than architects. It was produced to raise architectural and urban issues – like dealing with water run-off, plumbing, garbage, and property boundaries – and to present that in a format digestible to others.

In that sense, the genre of a travel guide is intentionally meant as a way to convey architectural information.

[Image: The cover page of Alibi, from Volume 10. For more on favelas, meanwhile, don't miss BLDGBLOG's earlier, two-part interview with Mike Davis].

BLDGBLOG: But why favelas, in particular?

Inaba: You know, some of my other work has been on suburbia, and the thing that we’re more and more convinced by is that the 21st century megacity will be a space – or urban condition – not defined by 20th century concepts of density or urbanity. Instead, it will be determined by two things: the suburb and the favela – the informal. You can think of LA as a proto-condition for this.

But the places experiencing new architectural forms, new types of rapid growth, alternative patterns of collective development, extreme forms of communication, and a concern for planning stemming from necessity – these are all now happening in areas that are suburban, in areas that are informal. And that includes favelas.

These are the generative elements of the 21st century city.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: Favelas are architecturally interesting – but they’re economically generated. In other words, the architecture – the space – comes second. So where does the favela actually come from? Is a favela formed from the bottom-up, as an organic outgrowth of local conditions? Or is it formed from the top-down – as a kind of architectural symptom of globalization and economic inequality?

Inaba: That’s a really good question. You can find conditions in LA that you might think would be more typical of Mexico City, Cairo, or Lagos – and, yeah, I think you can read that through global capital flows, in the sense that now you have informal communities and suburbs next to one another, covering more area of the world than earlier forms of the city – like Manhattan, London, or Paris.

I’m not so interested in whether it’s top-down or bottom-up – or bottom-down, for that matter – but in acknowledging that there is more of it in the world now than there are 20th century downtowns.

BLDGBLOG: So these informal spaces and cities are sort of self-organizing? They generate more of themselves? They’re both productive and fractal?

Inaba: I don’t see favelas as being self-organizing, or that favelas should be celebrated for their spatial innovation – not at all. Nor do I think of the favela only as a victim of flows of capital investment.

What is interesting is that despite the potential of great amounts of capital to eradicate, favela urbanism is indestructible. It can exist right next to a central, concentrated corporate development. The only other thing that I can think of like that is the suburb.

The two have persistence – an ability to absorb growth and destruction. That used to be what was thought of as unique to the 20th century city. This alone merits why the suburb and favelas needs to be addressed in architecture schools.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: Perhaps you should train architecture students in suburban development! At the very least, that would shine a more architecturally interesting and creative light on all those cul-de-sacs.

Inaba: Another way to put it is that architectural form – what students learn and practice, what architectural programs produce – is focused on one marketplace: the marketplace of building design, not the marketplace of urban development. If the city is more complex and harder to understand at this given moment, because of globalization and environmental pressures, then – now more than ever – architects should be trying to explain it. I’m not sure that the technological investigation of form is the best use of our energy right now.

Now should be the very moment when we try to describe what the city is. It seems that advances in architectural form, as an expression of the contemporary moment, doesn’t in itself help to explain or understand these things.

BLDGBLOG: Changing tack a bit, in Great Leap Forward, much is made of feng shui, golf courses, and the idea of “politics, geography, and spirituality.” Could you tell me a bit more about your interest in this? I’m particularly drawn to the idea of “bad” feng shui – China’s building boom takes on a whole new meaning in this context.

Inaba: Today, in China, environmentalism – meaning eco-friendly cities – is the expression of “politics, geography, and spirituality.” Branding a development as environmentally friendly is both a marketing tool and a political enabler for even greater development.

Urban development in the name of environmentalism, and in the name of eco-friendly urbanism, could very well become the pretext for doing certain types of development that don’t actually reduce the rate of resource consumption: they set up conditions for even more rapid consumption, in the name of being politically, geographically, and spiritually sensitive.

Sustainable development is becoming an unquestioned process, embraced as a positive form of urbanism. It’s being over-used. In that way, it’s producing landscapes of bad feng shui.

BLDGBLOG: So, to some extent, feng shui really just means environmentally friendly?

Inaba: [laughs] Totally.

BLDGBLOG: Sustainability also lends a kind of critical immunity to new building projects – if something's sustainable, no one wants to critique it. Being carbon neutral is like being handed an aesthetic Get Out of Jail Free card.

Inaba: That’s exactly it – it’s irreproachable as a moral position. For example, Shenzhen has been criticized for being bad urbanism, based on the grounds of taste; it’s said to be ill-planned, quickly developed, and with poorly designed buildings. Meanwhile, other cities are deemed to be better examples of urbanism because of their environmental sensitivity – having a low carbon footprint – but, as such, they’re exempt from other criteria of judgment.

One of the main features of eco-friendly design is its predisposition for suburb-like developments. In order to get large cities to accommodate large populations, in an environmentally sensitive way, why is it that all the projects result in a default language of green space and detached, single-family dwellings?

One of the ways that suburbia is emerging in the megacity is through the rhetoric of ecology: an urbanism of eco-friendly villas. It’s like Laguna Niguel. [laughs] Only it’s happening in China.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 6].

BLDGBLOG: C-Lab has also produced some great work around the idea of excess space, or a kind of spatial surplus. For instance, you interviewed Robert A.M. Stern in Volume 6, and he points out that the quintessential sign of Manhattan luxury living – the penthouse – is actually just an unintended result of extra building space. The penthouse is a creative reuse of leftovers, so to speak. Could you talk about this a bit?

Inaba: There was an article in New York magazine by Jay McInerney about Tribeca now being the most expensive area in New York City – and, for that reason alone, there are people on the Upper East Side who want to move there.

BLDGBLOG: [laughter]

Inaba: His point is that it’s not because of the quality of Tribeca’s architecture, or because of the kinds of spaces you can buy there, or because of the urban experience. If design is said to add value, then it seems to add only fractional value: concentrated high real estate value adds value.

One of the things that’s also clear is that Tribeca now has the most penthouses.

What we wanted to show is that there is a new distribution in the luxury residential building type that responds to the demand for excessive space. If the penthouse used to be the top floor – one floor more exclusive than the other floors – then buildings now have multiple floors of penthouses: they are mostly “penthouses.” The piece shows that some buildings have more “penthouses” than non-penthouses.

Besides just chronicling this excess, we wanted to talk about our inaccessibility as a profession to this level of the city. There is a whole urban experience that we, as architects, don’t have access to. We don’t move in the same spaces, or social circles, or economic spheres. I, myself, don’t know anyone who manages a hedge fund; I don’t know, let alone dine with anyone in the private equity banking business who became super-super-mega-wealthy after Sarbanes-Oxley; I don’t have any access to that.

BLDGBLOG: How does one engage with that, though? Do you organize a house tour, or a photo essay, or some kind of conference between hedge fund managers and their architects, or...?

Inaba: It’s not an issue of gaining entry to this layer of New York for the benefit of architectural commissions, but to understand the economy and spaces of this New York, to be able to grasp what urbanism is today.

Architects can’t be involved in urbanism if we can’t experience it.

Just to reiterate the point: the city is going through a transformation where the most powerful economic stratum is not palpable on the street. In New York, during the banking boom of the late-80s and the tech boom of the 90s, feverish consumption and extreme wealth were evident. But this current period of even greater accumulation is hardly visible. Goldman Sachs gave out $19 billion in bonuses last year – but we don’t see the presence of that wealth in the general urban experience of New York.

So the general issue is less a matter of shaking hands with private equity guys, but figuring out how to respond to our professional dislocation from the city.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 6].

BLDGBLOG: In some ways, that reminds me of your interview with Kanan Makiya, also from Volume 6, about Baathist architecture. Saddam’s palaces, in a funny way, look like something Donald Trump might build – a kind of baroque desert penthouse. Is there a dictatorial vernacular emerging in architecture today?

Inaba: Actually, Benedict Clouette did that interview – it’s really good. When we were looking at the material later, we were both struck by how humanistic those buildings made Saddam look! [laughs] Meaning that the architecture of state power and the architecture of first world residences don’t seem that far apart. Saddam’s palaces, while they’re really supposed to be about state power, look not so different from houses in New Jersey. And the scale now of residential buildings isn’t so different from the scale of buildings that were once meant to symbolize state power, on an institutional scale.

The dictatorial vernacular is not so far off from the American suburban vernacular.

[Image: Two pages from Volume 6].

BLDGBLOG: So the palace of the dictator is a kind of McMansion in the desert?

Inaba: Yeah – the scales are the same. It’s a vernacular that could as easily be used in Arizona as by a Baathist regime.

BLDGBLOG: Finally, how did you end up interviewing Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer,” for Volume 10?

Inaba: It’s one of my favorite pieces that we’ve ever done. To some degree, it’s about the relationship between an animal sense and a human sense of the world, and Cesar’s ability to formulate that into a viable political message. He seems to be a person who would be an interesting politician for the US today, because he is overtly advocating domination – the way one animal dominates another within a pack. And, in fact, he wants to run for office.

His point is that, today, the UK and the US are run by weak leaders, leaders who are unstable, who don’t have enough discipline, and who don’t produce stability. By soliciting fear, they produce instability. So the way to respond to that is to create a clear form of dominance. For Cesar, assertiveness and physicality – the way a pack leader dominates a pack – is the type of logic that he wants to extend into politics. And he’s serious about it. If his initial popular appeal is that his methods are about this type of training exercised on your dog, I think the appeal of his show – which goes beyond dog owners – is that it affirms assertiveness in humans. It’s about the individual’s ability to be assertive.

I think it’s noteworthy to publish him because he wants to extend this onto a political level. For him, domination, physical assertiveness, discipline – these are all forms of a higher level of affection.

[Image: A page from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: The cruel father.

Inaba: In that sense, it’s not related to the urban, or to architecture; but we thought it was a really good articulation of a strategy of power – and so it was relevant to Volume magazine.

BLDGBLOG: Actually, one more question: I’m curious what you think about using other genres for architectural research. It seems that everyone today just writes long, footnoted articles for the same handful of academic journals – then they complain about lack of audience. But why don’t they write science fiction novels, or comic books, or even screenplays? Or a blog, for that matter? Do you think that these other, less traditional genres have any value for the future of architectural research?

Inaba: Absolutely. I think the point of issue 10 is that, for all the investment in architectural aesthetics at the moment, it seems like the terms that we use to discuss or define those aesthetics are surprisingly limited. We only have a few words to describe architectural form. By thinking through different genres – and their terms – we could expand our aesthetic vocabulary.

So you could operate on the level of a science fiction novel – but you could just as well embrace the travel guide, or the interview, or the photo-collage. These things, by their very diversity, have the ability to generate a range of aesthetics. We want to operate in other guises. When you look at a place through the lens of a travel guide, there are things about architecture that can be deciphered and explained with greater ease.

I think what’s important is our ability to extract things from the genre of science fiction, not to reproduce the look and feel of science fiction as a genre.

As architects, we can go beyond aesthetics – in the sense of beautiful buildings, or interesting buildings, or new buildings – and find public consequences both for architecture and architectural discussion.

• • •
Thanks to Jeffrey Inaba, for the conversation and for inviting me to critique some student projects at SCI-Arc this week, and to Benedict Clouette for setting all these interviews up in the first place.

Fortress Europe

[Image: A turret on the Maginot Line].

"As I have said many times before," Paul Virilio states in an old interview with CTheory, "I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance."

[Image: The Maginot Line].

"More specifically," Virilio continues, "under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St. Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers."

[Images: The Maginot Line – and, yes, I am aware that these are not the bunkers at St. Nazaire that Virilio just mentioned].

"But what I also discovered was that, during the War, the whole of Europe had become a fortress. And thus I saw to what extent an immense territory, a whole continent, had effectively been reorganised into one city..."
War, in Virilio's formulation, was thus a kind of terrestrial reorganization – a reshaping of the Earth's surface; it was, among other things, landscape architecture pursued by other means.

[Image: The Maginot Line].

(Thanks, Scott! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Bunker Archaeology).

Sim Staircase

[Image: A detail from Abgang, 2000, by Thomas Demand, a photograph now on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. "Although his large-scale photographs seem to capture specific places," Artkrush explains, referring to Thomas Demand, "they actually document large-scale models constructed in the artist's Berlin warehouse studio." To date, these "large-scale models" have included "the site of Princess Diana's death, Saddam Hussein's 'spider hole,' and a standard staircase." Demand, along with Oliver Boberg, popped up on BLDGBLOG back in 2005].

Precambrian Motorways

[Image: The geological time scale, in spiral form; via the USGS].

Upon seeing the above diagram, it occurred to me that you could – or should – redesign the 10 Mile Spiral so that it communicates geological information.
In other words, you could literally be driving up a diagram of the Earth's deep history.
Vacationing families tootle their way around the spiral, eating ice cream cones – twisting in loops, upward through space – reading signs posted on either side about Precambrian tectonics...

[Image: The 10 Mile Spiral, by Terraswarm].

At the very least, it would make the US highway system a bit more educationally worthwhile...
Every off-ramp of I-95, for instance, would tell you a quick story: the discovery of edicarans, as you pull off to get gas; the rotational history of the North Pacific Gyre, explained to you at a Georgia rest-stop; outside New York City you read in awe, slowing down at a toll-booth, about the ancient reversal of the Amazon River...
Signs like these proliferate, inspiring a whole new generation to take endless car trips: driving up and down the east coast of the United States, reading about geology.
Soon, though, all those curious kids and their millions of cars emit so much carbon dioxide the Atlantic weather system shifts, plunging them all into an ice age... a planetary event that will someday be described on a sign and posted next to a highway in Kentucky.

(Geo-spiral found via Leah Beeferman).

Other Landscapes

[Image: Michael Benson, from Beyond, via the New York Times].

The New York Times reports on Beyond, "a one-year exhibition of more than 30 large-format photographs of Earth’s planetary neighbors," opening soon at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
For what it's worth, by the way, the AMNH is easily one of the greatest – and most inspiring – museums in the world. I'm not sure I can even count all the times I've been there.
In any case, the NYTimes informs us that Michael Benson, "a writer, photographer and filmmaker, created the stunning series of pictures from the enormous archives of images taken over the years by robotic explorers of the solar system."

Beginning in 1995 Mr. Benson spent years sifting through hundreds of thousands of photographs, looking for those that offered an aesthetic punch. He then painstakingly combined images, using digital tools like Photoshop, to eliminate dropouts and blurs from individual photos beamed back across millions of miles of space. A lovely picture of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, gliding in front of the swirling atmosphere of that planet, for example, is a blend of some 70 frames sent back by Voyager.

Benson's got an entire book of these photographs, called Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, complete with essays by Arthur C. Clarke and Lawrence Weschler. The book is very positively reviewed, being referred to as "breathtaking," "resplendent," "miraculous," "sublimely exhilarating," and "supremely reproduced."
Best of all, from my end, I'll be in NY next month, so I'll get to see the show...

Stylin'

I was perhaps a little over-excited to see that Time Magazine included BLDGBLOG in its "Style & Design 100" list for 2007...

Other blogs on the list include Greenopia, Apartment Therapy, MoCo Loco, and designboom.
I have to admit, though, to a certain amount of stunned optimism when a blog about Copernicus, Don DeLillo, science fiction and architecture, Mars, and... whatever this post was about makes it into Time Magazine.
Does that mean, in other words, that there's some huge and untapped audience in the United States for articles about urban exploration, inflatable architecture, and W.G. Sebald? Are people in this country really looking for more information about micronations, offshore oil platforms, mud mosques, Greek myths, and futuristic outbreaks of statue disease? Does the U.S. secretly demand more Alpine thrillers...?
Is there a national need for Mark Wigley?
It makes me really happy, actually, to think that people out there want to read about this stuff – this machine, for instance. Or this lost city. Amidst more news of Don Imus there's... the London Tornadium. And J.G. Ballard.
Anyway, congrats to everyone on the list. Congrats to everyone, in fact – I'm in a good mood.
Congratulations!

Architectural Weaponry: An Interview with Mark Wigley

[Image: The cover of Volume 10 and Mark Wigley].

Mark Wigley is Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University. He is also the author of Constant's New Babylon and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt, among others, and he is co-editor of The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond.
Mark is also a co-founder, with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, of Volume magazine, the 10th issue of which was recently published. BLDGBLOG posted an interview with Ole Bouman several weeks ago, discussing the strategy, purpose, and future of Volume; this week, we talk to Mark Wigley.
However, even beyond Volume, I'm also interested in Wigley's tenure as Dean of the GSAPP. In an interview last year with Kazys Varnelis, Varnelis explained:

Under Mark Wigley’s deanship a new way of thinking about the role of the architecture school has emerged at Columbia. A number of labs are being developed there to serve as an interface between the school and the rest of the world – places where the school can undertake projects involving people both inside and outside the school, where a new kind of experimentation can develop.

I thought, then, that while I talked to Mark about Volume and the relevance of the magazine as a publishing format, I would slip in a few questions about the nature of architectural education, the role of sustainable design at Columbia, and whether books by Gilles Deleuze or science fiction novels are more useful to assign for a design studio...
Along the way, we discuss editorial collaboration, the global building boom, today's generation of students, architecture as a limitation of freedom, and the real politics of Constant's New Babylon.

• • •
BLDGBLOG: First, if one of the editorial goals of Volume is to agitate – or to introduce turbulence into architectural discussions – then what is the actual strategy through which you hope to realize that goal?

Mark Wigley: Well, the mechanism of Volume is to try to produce a form of conversation that takes away the traditional categories of a school, an office, and a magazine. I think what’s great about having a kind of triangular partnership at Volume is that it works like a conversation. One person says one thing which gets misinterpreted by the other two, so they then launch another version of it, and it spins around – but what’s really shared is a deep conviction that the shape of the journal, and the shape of the institution, and the school, needs to shift.

The pretension of it is to have everybody lose their normal identity by collaborating – and each issue comes out as kind of a shock to all the people who produce it. In a certain way, agitation therefore is the aim of the project, and so the Agitation issue is also thinking about what the Volume collaboration values the most. It’s an attempt to locate alternative role models. So, in the last issue, the thought is that an expert dog trainer is just as likely – if not more likely – to offer us clues about future directions of architectural discourse as a famous architect or a non-famous architect. Everything has to be continually placed alongside things that don’t normally appear there – and, in an old format like a magazine, this requires a kind of curatorial delirium. I mean, you have to go with things whose purpose is not clear and whose final effect is not clear, risking some bad articles – but also having some really great ones.

BLDGBLOG: Is that strategy changing over time?

Wigley: We have changed the structure a little bit. Now, in each issue, one of the three sides of the editorial triangle takes the lead and defines what’s going to go on in that issue; but the other two sides of the triangle then contribute material toward that idea.

For instance, the Agitation issue came out of C-LAB. And C-LAB, of course, is headquartered at the school – but it precisely is not representing the school. Or the way it represents the school is the extent to which it has an autonomous capacity. So if Columbia is a radically experimental school, one of the signs of that is there are things going on there that don’t have to be tied back to what the rest of the school is doing. C-LAB has a sort of semi-autonomous, freelance capacity to connect with the world and with other people.

More and more I’m trying to cultivate, or construct, a wild west that takes advantage of the fact that we can bring all the resources of the university to bear. So nothing necessarily that’s in Volume is going on inside this school. So could you have a school which is entirely of that spirit? A kind of free-ranging conversation?

BLDGBLOG: To some extent it seems like the lack of agitation in today’s architectural discussions comes from the format those discussions occur within. In other words, you get five people who already know each other and you put them on a panel; they then talk about something they’ve already talked about before – and, two hours later, nothing’s happened. So it would seem that, if we really want to introduce turbulence into architecture, as you say, then we need to structure our conversations differently, to explore new formats. If that is the case, what formats lie beyond the seminar, the lecture, the panel discussion, etc.?

Wigley: It’s a great question. I don’t think Marshall McLuhan can go far wrong – the medium/message thing. I mean, what you’re saying is: does the medium, the technology, of education and communication in our field limit the kind of things that we can say? And the answer is absolutely yes.

One of the primary roles to be played by the experimental activists in architecture is not to come up with new ideas of what architecture should be, but to come up with new ways to talk about it – new media. In that sense it’s absolutely crucial that we foster new techniques of communication – with all of the incredible care and precision that we use to foster new forms of design. We need equal care and equal attention to incubate new forms of communication. For instance, if a student project gets to be really interesting, but then we just dump it into the typical format of a magazine, or a monograph, then it can never do what it is really able to do. If we work with a bad medium, you know, it’s all bad.

Take a school, for example. A school is, or should be, an incubator for new forms of architecture and new forms of conversations about architecture. But what you’re really trying to incubate is not a delicate creature but something that has real force in our community. You’re trying to incubate a weapon, if you like. And that requires that schools allow an incredible diversity of experiments to go on, because none of us can be sure what’s the next step. I think most schools of architecture don’t honor that need for the field itself to grow. Or, to put it another way: the real, interesting mission for a school is not a particular shape of building, but a particular shape of architect. A particular shape of operator – not a new operation. I think that’s an incredibly exciting mission, and you never get, I think, better students or better teachers than in a school of architecture.

Volume, therefore, is part of that. But it will not be part of that if it’s just another school magazine. It has to be a laboratory. It has to be a space in which even the school is shocked, not just the people who produce it or the people who read it. That’s the spirit.

[Image: A page from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: There also seems to be a huge reliance today on extra-architectural theory, like Gilles Deleuze. But if students were instead locked in a room with some science fiction novels, or even a comic book, it might actually stir up some new ideas. At the very least, science fiction actually addresses architecture. So perhaps the problem is one of reference? Or even of genre? Or just specifically Deleuze?

Wigley: To cut to the chase, if it’s a choice between being locked in a room with a science fiction book or being locked in a room with Deleuze, go for the science fiction book, for sure. No doubt about it. But that’s not a choice against theory – because, in fact, science fiction is an incredibly important mode of theorizing about technology and about space, and the people who produce science fiction are often incredibly canny theorists.

So the problem in the current discussion about theory is that when people say theory they really mean a particular thing. For example, when you say: what do I think about the use of these extra-architectural theories? That makes sense only if we know what architecture is. In fact, what’s so exciting about architecture is that its limits are not clear. It’s a way of thinking; it’s not a fixed territory. In a way, you can reach what seems a long way away – to somebody like Deleuze – in order to get a feel for how those limits are moving. At certain moments in time, Deleuze might seem to be totally inside the limits; at other moments, he might seem a long way away – but that’s not necessarily a move toward or away from theory. Mies’s famous saying: build, don’t talk. Well, that’s a theoretical statement. He had a theory about practice. It’s amazing how many people quote him saying that – they quote a piece of theory against theory.

The more important question is: which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction? I, myself, would like to be locked in a room with a science fiction book – but that’s just me. Someone else would like to be locked in a room with Deleuze, and generate some thinking for architects that seems much more urgent and seductive and accurate. And somebody can read science fiction and come up with trash – I mean, there’s a lot of junk science fiction out there, and there’s a hell of a lot of bad architecture out there, too.

But I think it’s great that people are reading different books now than they were reading five years ago. There’s no subject an architect won’t talk about. And that sort of restless promiscuity is entirely positive. What’s interesting is that architects have often been informed by a very precise theory, whether technological or political or scientific and so on; but we also learn a lot by just paying attention to the seemingly ordinary details of the city around us. And architects are fantastic at stitching ideas to objects. That’s what we’re really good at.

Architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders.

[Image: Two pages from Volume 6, illustrating large-scale building projects in the Middle East].

BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting, then, to note that all of the construction going on today, from Dubai to Beijing to midtown Manhattan, is specifically referred to as the building boom – not the architecture boom. There’s a huge difference there. To what extent, then, are we surrounded by more architecture than ever – or less architecture than ever before?

Wigley: I’m really tempted to say it’s less. You can have a building boom and it will actually be an architecture deficit. So architecture can be in decline at a moment of massive building. I think that would be a fantastic subject for debate.

You could say that, in the current explosion of building, architects are getting more and more opportunities to not live up to the potential of their field. [laughter] You could say: all across the globe, architects are blowing it. Of course, they blame the client, the money, the economy, and so on. But you could say that we have more lost opportunities than ever – but there are more opportunities. And that’s important.

So what is the model that we work with here? Some people might say: the way the world works, 99% of things that go on are boring, but there is that 1% that explosively changes the landscape. The real issue would not be: is the planet being covered with beautiful new projects? But: over the whole globe, are we getting, every year, four or five projects that force every architect to think again? See, I would rather have four or five projects a year that make us all feel like we have to argue passionately about our field, than have 90% a little better than before. And I would say that the staggering statistic is how few buildings are produced globally that literally force us to change our mind about our field.

That’s obviously one of the pleasures of working with Rem Koolhaas – of course, he has that capacity, as a writer and as an architect. But the number of people who can do that is very, very small. But that’s the Darwinian thing, the new species – where is that coming from? And I think that can come from anywhere. I’m super-impressed with the emerging generation of designers right now. I think the kinds of expertise, and the kinds of unexpected strengths that are emerging in students right now, are going to change the landscape. I think it’s going to be harder to grind these people down. They have real tricks. They are totally articulate, literate, mobile, canny – I think we can give them incredible training, and the world better be careful.

But two things: almost nobody – I mean, very few people – are doing things with theory, with words, with books, with buildings, that are shockingly demanding us to change our mind. Very few. But you get the feeling that there’s a generation cooking. A generation that can overcome, let’s say, some of the resistance. And what you said earlier I think is right to the point: can we generate new communication systems that will allow this network of emerging thinkers to redefine the landscape and empower themselves? Because, of course, all the traditional magazines, all the traditional schools – everything – is set up to reinforce a certain slow evolution of the field. Architecture is obsessed with being slow. We can make the most exciting thing dull. We have that expertise. Our social role has been that: to be slow, to be stable, to be a reference point for change. It’s, in a sense, how we have been so clearly the enemies of turbulence – and the question is: how do you foster turbulence? It’s the question for every teacher: how do you foster turbulence without freezing it? Without stopping it?

You know, we live in a world where everybody wants their future to be absolutely predictable from their present state. I think what would be really interesting is to take away that absolute desire to control your own future and to take a risk. And I think architecture needs to take a risk. That’s a pretentious way of saying it, but I think that’s the case.

[Image: The iceberg as architecture; a page-spread from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: In one of Ole Bouman’s essays he talks about “unsolicited architecture” as a way of introducing new ideas. In other words, you can offer a whole new vision of London or Manhattan – and not because anyone asked you for it, but because it’s shocking and unexpected and futuristic and fun. It makes people see their own city differently. So I’m curious what role you think unsolicited architecture might play in the quest for agitation and turbulence.

Wigley: I’m not sure I know what Ole meant by unsolicited – and that’s actually part of the collaboration. It’s not that we speak with one voice. There are, let’s say, many voices on the C-LAB side and many voices on Ole’s side and many voices on Rem’s side. So nobody’s entirely in synch, and the syncopation, being slightly out of synch, is what generates the whole thing. So my reading of what he means would probably be different from what he means. But I think there are two senses of unsolicited architecture: one is exactly like you say – which is producing stuff that was not asked for – and I think that’s an amazing resource. I think there’s a long and wonderful and important tradition of architects inserting counter-proposals – forcing the discussion to move differently. I think that’s a really interesting approach.

There’s also unsolicited architecture, which is something that didn’t even think that it was architecture. You point to it and say: maybe this is architecture. And what’s unsolicited about it is that the person didn’t even think that they were making a proposal for a new landscape; but if you point to it and say, hey, from the point of view of an architect, this could be really interesting…

I think one of the purposes of Volume is to keep saying to the reader: is this architecture? And the answer could easily be: no. Or the answer could be: wait a minute, maybe… So unsolicited means two things: that the person delivering something wasn’t asked to deliver; and that someone else was just told that they’ve delivered something they didn’t mean to deliver.

BLDGBLOG: Earlier, you mentioned the idea of the architect as operator – that we need new kinds of architects as much as we need new kinds of spaces. As far as education and training go, then, how does one cultivate this or implement it? Is it just a question of being more interdisciplinary?

Wigley: My personal feeling is you should reinforce all of the divisions, to get out of them whatever you can, and then you engineer the contamination. So you reinforce the individual character of architecture vs. urban design vs. preservation vs. real estate vs. planning – so that what’s juicy in each of those distinct silos can be really exploited – and then, when you engineer a crossover between all those programs, you actually know what you’re crossing over from. You actually know what it is that each group is able to do. You create, within the space of an institution, a kind of wilderness of promiscuous mutations.

All the various things that architects think about: allow each and every one of those to be exposed to radical forms of research, drawing on everybody. That dialogue is rich, and it’s unpredictable, and you create these moments of connection – basically exchanging genetic material, to create a kind of complex ecology in which new species emerge, and the whole point is you don’t know what this new species is. You really don’t know. And you don’t want to exchange genetic material all the time; you want to exchange it – and then see what happens. And then exchange some more. What you’re looking for is productive mutations, that make us hesitate. The greatest gift of the architect is to produce something that makes society hesitate and think. Another way of saying that the architect has been such an enemy of turbulence is that we have not interrupted enough. We have reinforced patterns; we’ve not interrupted them. And probably the architect, more than any other professional, has been called on by society to monumentalize existing patterns.

If you think of the architects that we love the most, the ones that have really affected us, they didn’t simply build what they were asked to build – they built something that was surprisingly better than what they were asked for. They changed the desire. The good architect is the one who makes you realize that your desires could be more adventurous, and then who satisfies those new desires in ways that are very, very positive. That – that – is a really important social mission. If you say that the traditional architect monumentalizes existing desires, that doesn’t sound like such a hot mission anymore.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 10, pointing out who did what at what age, and when they died; the conclusion? Complete your "breakthrough work" before you turn 32...].

BLDGBLOG: On an educational level, what role does sustainability play at Columbia?

Wigley: What’s happening is sustainability now plays a huge role in the school at every level, because that’s where the students and the teachers are leaning. But what’s interesting – and this is where my own thoughts come in – is that nobody’s really interested in that word sustainability. That sounds like not ambitious enough. We do a lot of work that could be described as a search for more sustainable options – but, really, what it is is a search for a more radical ecological model. So the school’s not aiming toward sustainability, but aiming beyond that.

If you had asked me the same question five years ago, I would have said it’s occupying 10% of our attention – whereas now it’s occupying, like, 35%. That’s not because the new generation of students wants architecture to follow the latest code on sustainability, but because they think it’s one of the most interesting philosophical and technical challenges to the architect. There’s the responsibility – and I think we’ve got a more responsible group of students and teachers coming along – but it’s also exciting to them. They find the whole concept exciting.

Maybe five years ago, if you were for sustainability, you saw yourself as virtuous, and you saw yourself standing against radical avant-garde practices in architecture, which were, by definition, scandalously wasteful of resources. They neglected 99% of the human population and didn’t do anything good for anyone anywhere. But that’s not true anymore. A really radical ecological approach to architecture generates some of the most experimental avant-garde design. That old split between sustainability and being cool, so to speak – that’s gone. I think that’s a real difference between sustainability, as a defense against a relentless enemy, and sustainability as the opening up of a whole new series of potentials. And, of course, I love the latter. However, it may be that the former is more realistic. We’re not living in a good world. But I think it’s the job of architects to be optimistic, to invent new forms of optimism, to actually contaminate us all with the possibility that we could live differently.

[Image: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, I’d like to talk about your work on Constant. Specifically, everyone who writes about New Babylon seems to want so badly for that project to be considered liberationist – the epitome of human freedom – but it really appears to be the opposite. For instance, in your own writing you refer to New Babylon as "a mechanism that repeats itself endlessly, automatically," even though that mechanism "is not meant to be experienced as such." In other words, a hidden "mechanism" shapes and controls the everyday environment, even while no one can directly engage with that mechanism – which sounds, to me, like a perfect description of ideology! You also point out that residents of New Babylon will exist through a “collective revolutionary restructuring of the everyday environment” – but that’s only true insofar as they never leave the world that Constant built for them. It might sound a little hyperbolic to phrase it like this, but New Babylon actually seems to be an example of architectural Stalinism – a world of total control. Why do you think this aspect of Constant’s work is almost always overlooked?

Wigley: Well, I think that’s a terrific analysis. If I can just elaborate a little bit on what you’re saying: New Babylon is imagined as a playground. The model for it is a children’s playground. Of course, the traditional model is that, as a child, you get to play – but then, as you get to be an adult, you have to work. You lose the freedom to say and do as you want, to run free. You become narrow. You become a slave to the system – etc.

So New Babylon begins with this thought: what if you never had to work – so you could be a child your whole life? New Babylon begins with the thought that a real revolutionary society would not be one in which the workers overthrew the bosses, or, in Marxist terms, a society in which capitalism would eat itself and give way to a new order; the real revolution would be that technology would take away the political advantage of the boss vs. the worker. A real revolutionary society would be a society of the unconscious, and the freedom with which children explore whatever comes into their minds would be the sign of a liberated society.

But what I think you’re saying is: that’s all very well, if you think that a playground is really a space of free movement. Because, of course, a playground is also a space of total control – it has an inside and an outside; there are only so many things you can do inside it; and there is always somebody watching. So the playground is also a space of surveillance and so on. You could say that the nightmare of Constant’s project is that you never get out of the playground.

So you’re absolutely right to stress the extent to which a supposed society of liberation is actually a control society. But it’s interesting to look at Constant’s own criticism of the project.

He does New Babylon for about twenty years – till he becomes convinced that he’s made a terrible mistake. He realizes that, if you give everybody a playground in which they can unleash their desires, then it won’t be a 60s paradise of love and solidarity and all that – people will actually kill each other, because we’re dark, miserable creatures. He was very affected by the failure of May ’68 in Paris, and by the Vietnam War, and by the death of a child of a close friend of his – so he really started to see people as their own enemy.

He spent the last four years of the project showing the horror of what it would be like to live in New Babylon. He’s the only architect – or let’s say quasi-architect – I’ve ever known that spent not just one image but four years’ worth of images to show how horrible life would be in his own city.

[Images: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: [laughter]

Wigley: And if you look at Constant’s New Babylon, you never see a single person in it. He’s not going to show the people of the future, because he doesn’t know what they’re going to look like. He says: that’s what we’ll do, we’ll design our own bodies, even. But then he brings the people in, in the last four years – and they’re basically dying, and killing each other, and there’s a huge amount of blood.

So, if he was with us in this conversation, and if you said to him: don’t you think there’s a kind of Stalinesque quality – you have this global, technocratic machinery out of which there’s no escape, and you have freedom, but it’s the freedom, let’s say, to swing in the jungle gym? I don’t know what his answer would be. But, definitely, he sees the dark side of this project.

I kind of want to finish the answer to your question in a particular way: I think you’re right – but the way in which you’re right would perhaps be true of any architectural project that offers its inhabitants some kind of freedom. Because the question is: what is the nature of that offer? If I build a beautiful loft in which you can divide the rooms whichever way you want: okay, that’s a kind of freedom, but it’s like the freedom to choose what part of the prison cell you’re going to occupy. So it could be that the architect, as an architect, is never really able to offer freedom – and, in particular, political freedom – and that there’s something in the substance and organization of form that resists human potentials. If you look at, for example, the writings of Georges Bataille, that’s exactly what he said: that architecture, no matter what it is, in any form, is a prison.

But I think your example of Constant is a great example to demonstrate this argument. In other words, you say: even somebody dedicated to play, in the end, produces a control society. I’m just trying to reverse the question a bit and say: can we think of an architectural practice which, in a genuine sense, liberates the user? In a real, genuine sense? And I don’t know. I think the work of Gordon Matta-Clark is particularly interesting in that sense; he also sees architecture as a kind of dark force, and his surgical cuts tried to expose that. But he doesn’t really offer a moral – it’s not like he was saying: I’ll show you how nasty architecture is, and, as a result of that, you’ll be liberated. He was a pretty depressed guy.

[Image: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: Another example might be the utopian promise of the mobile home – but, again, you’re only free to go anywhere you want insofar as you never leave the US highway system. So it’s a very precise and circumscribed form of personal freedom.

Wigley: You make me think of something else. You know, Enrique Walker, one of the teachers at this school, thinks that architecture is always about constraint, and that architects don’t acknowledge that enough. We really build constraints – we don’t build freedoms: we build reductions of freedom.

I think what’s great is that, if you think that way, you really have to take more responsibility for every decision, right, because every decision is a kind of narrowing of options. I mean, it’d be great. What would happen is, in a school of architecture, we would just tell everybody: every line you do, every decision, every statement, as an architect, is going to limit more options than it opens up.

And then the question is: what are you going to do? How are you going to behave?

What’s your role?

• • •
With a big thanks to Mark Wigley for taking the time to have this conversation – and to Benedict Clouette, for putting the two of us in touch.
Meanwhile, be sure to check out BLDGBLOG's interview with Ole Bouman – and, coming soon, an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which will round out BLDGBLOG's recent conversations with the editorial team behind Volume...

The disorienting mass of fog-bound outcroppings

[Image: Orogenesis: Man Ray/Duchamp, 2006, by Joan Fontcuberta. Courtesy of Zabriskie Gallery, via the ICP].

"Rather than venturing out into nature," the International Center of Photography explains, Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta "creates plausible, even spectacular landscapes using Terragen, a computer program originally created for military and scientific uses that turns maps into images of three-dimensional terrain."
Fontcuberta's work was featured in the ICP's show Ecotopia, alongside work by David Maisel and Simon Norfolk.
The above image features "a disorienting mass of fog-bound outcroppings," generated from a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, taken by Man Ray.
If the inputs can be that random, however, I have only to point out that the imaginative – and technical – possibilites are literally endless. Whole world-surfaces could be generated from tourist snapshots; photos of Manhattan turned into the undersea canyons of a distant sea; Fontcuberta's work itself used to produce even more landscapes, three or four times removed from their source material.
Even more intriguingly, though, if you could reverse-engineer Fontcuberta's photographs to find the original image by Man Ray mathematically encoded somewhere deep inside all that repetitive geometry of detail, what would happen if you applied the same analysis to, say, your family photo album...? Only to discover, lurking there, within those dusty prints, something monstrous and ill-formed, some original hidden mystery from which you and your loved ones derived.
Leading me to speculate, on a fairly unrelated note, that the great conspiracy plot of the future – filmmakers take note! – will involve some guy in an apartment building spending all this time reverse-engineering political photographs and news reels – presidents and heads of state and ambassadors and kings – only to realize, as the camera pulls away revealing his shaking hands, that deep beneath all those images is a...

(Thanks, Steve!)

Autumn leaves to black flowers

[Image: "The greenery on other planets may not be green," New Scientist reports. Indeed, alien vegetation may be orange and yellow – "so the foliage would wear bright autumn colours all year round" – or even black: flowers the color of charcoal blooming over electrically charged soil. But why not transparent vegetation...? Vast equatorial jungles full of transparent plantlife, rooted on blocks of quartz, glowing from within as twin suns set behind wooded plateaus in the distance. (Above illustration by Doug Cummings @ Caltech)].

Quick list 8

It's been a really busy few weeks, so I've missed a lot of interesting stories that would've been perfect for the blog; but it's better late than never, right? So I thought I'd do another Quick List...

[Image: Architectural Design by Rolf Mohr; Modeling and Rendering by Machine Films. Via New York magazine].

First, Lisa Chamberlain, of Polis, had an immensely popular article in New York magazine two weeks ago exploring the idea "that 'vertical farm' skyscrapers" designed by a man named Dickson Despommier "could help fight global warming."

Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.

Despommier's towers could also free up cropland so that literally hundreds of thousands of acres of corn, wheat, potatoes, cotton, oranges, lemons, artichokes, strawberries, spinach, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, etc., could return to – or be turned for the first time into – forest. This, in turn, might help reverse global warming (though it also might not).
At the very least, it'd be cool.

[Image: Architectural design by Rolf Mohr; modeling and rendering by Machine Films; interiors by James Nelms Digital Artist @ Storyboards Online. Via New York magazine].

Chamberlain cites an example of how this could work: "Depending on the crops being grown," she writes, "a single vertical farm could allow thousands of farmland acres to be permanently reforested." For instance, she continues, "after a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by Hurricane Andrew, the owners built a hydroponic farm. By growing strawberries indoors and stacking layers on top of each other, they now produce on one acre of land what used to require 30 acres."
This 30:1 densification rate could radically transform the American landscape.
The actual details of a "vertical farm" are fascinating, meanwhile, and for that reason alone I would recommend reading the whole article; I particularly like the "Evapotranspiration Recovery System," which will be "nestled inside the ceiling of each floor"; there, it will "collect moisture, which can be bottled and sold."
In any case, Pruned actually covered this story, albeit in far less detail, two years ago, before anyone – including Boing Boing – took off with it. More on topic, though, if you like the idea of skyscrapers being turned into vertical croplands, then don't miss Future Feeder's look at so-called urban underground farming, also from 2005.
Lisa's piece wasn't the only look at farming in recent weeks, however; The New York Times reported that, due to a rising industrial demand for ethanol – a biofuel product derived from corn – American farmers this year will be planting "a staggering 90.5 million acres [of corn], the most since World War II and 15 percent more than last season."
The fact that the American landscape thus gives physical form to distant legislative decisions meant to regulate the ethanol content of gasoline absolutely fascinates me. For every freeway and gas station, there is a cornfield somewhere – but, for very obvious reasons, the reverse is also true.
But perhaps we should combine Lisa Chamberlain's article with the rise of biofuels... and free up all these excess cornfields for something a bit more biologically adventurous. Like entire forests full of living knots and ladders.

[Image: The water behind stored Hoover Dam is down more than eighty feet; photo by Jim Wilson for The New York Times].

Speaking of landscapes, then, The New York Times also reported on a growing, nearly decade-long drought in the American southwest. "Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers," we read, "as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fights."
With a wonderfully Ballardian twist, we learn that the drought's effects "can be seen at Lake Mead in Nevada, where a drop in the water level left docks hanging from newly formed cliffs, and a marina surrounded by dry land."

[Image: One of several "docks left hanging from newly formed cliffs" on the edge of a receding Lake Mead; photo by Jim Wilson, for The New York Times].

Even more interesting:

Preparing for worst-case outcomes, the seven states that draw water from the Colorado River – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico in the upper basin and California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin – and the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, are considering plans that lay out what to do if the river cannot meet the demand for water, a prospect that some experts predict will occur in about five years.

Five years! Is part of their plan to drain the Great Lakes?
We then read that Las Vegas actually wants to build a pipeline drawing water all the way from northern Nevada – so that water currently used by ranchers can, instead, spray out of faux-Italian fountains at the sagging chests of morbidly obese vacationing children who are too big to fit in the hotel kiddy pool.

[Image: Workers remove turf from a Nevada golf course, revealing the desert sand beneath; photo by Jim Wilson for The New York Times].

To their credit, "[r]anchers and farmers in northern Nevada and Utah are opposed to the pipeline plan"; they have, in fact, "vowed to fight it in court, saying it smacks of the famous water grab by Los Angeles nearly a century ago that caused severe environmental damage in the Owens Valley in California." This "famous water grab," of course, was dramatized by Roman Polanski's film Chinatown – and the water grab's long-term effects have been beautifully documented, in a series of aerial landscape photographs, by David Maisel, who I had the pleasure of interviewing last Spring in a Feature on Archinect.
David Maisel refers to sites like Owens Lake as "dismantled landscapes, abandoned, collapsing on themselves."

[Image: The scarred bed of a drained Owens Lake, as photographed by David Maisel; the water of Owens Lake was stolen by the city of Los Angeles nearly one hundred years ago].

Maintaining our temporary focus here on landscape and pollution, the BBC reported last week about the "toxic truth" of a "secretive Siberian city."
Reporters from that news organization apparently "entered a remote region of Russia normally closed to foreigners that produces almost half the world's supply of palladium – a precious metal vital for making catalytic converters." Like an image from William Blake – if he'd perhaps been raised in a different era, watching too many films by Andrei Tarkovsky – we read that, deep in the smelting plants, "[v]ast furnaces roast the ore extracted from the mines, eventually disgorging streams of red-hot liquid metal into containers that dwarf the workers standing nearby."
Huge and poisonous clouds then belch upward from smokestacks, like an artificial weather system hanging above the city.
Greenpeace warns that all this pollution "has created a 30km (19 mile) 'dead zone' around the city and quotes scientists as saying the acid rain has spread across an area equivalent in size to Germany."

[Images: From the BBC].

From there, the BBC leads us into a landscape of industrial destruction; this treeless waste, in what should really be a forest, "stretches across an area so great it has been described as perhaps the largest man-made desert in the world."
You can find this "desert" on the Kola peninsula, also in Russia.

[Image: A landscape of death in the Kola peninsula; photo via the BBC].

This is turning out to be a rather depressing post at this rate, but I was also interested to read that urban air pollution is considered, according to a recent study conducted in England, "more than dangerous than Chernobyl":

The study suggests high levels of urban air pollution cut short life expectancy more than the radiation exposure of emergency workers who were sent into the 19-mile exclusion zone around the site straight after the accident.

But cities aren't all bad...
Even in the filth and ruin and degradation; the anonymity, violence, and emotional free-fall; amidst so much friendlessness and abandonment, we can still find our own strange epiphanies.
In a great interview with writer Luc Sante, for instance, we're greeted with this wonderful excerpt from his work:

In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.

The use of the word "interzone," however, immediately conjures up the literary ghost of William Burroughs, who used the term to indicate a city "where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum." More, the Interzone is a "Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market"; its architecture consists of "perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void."
In any case, Sante continues: New York "was a wild, one-in-a-million conjunction of circumstances, a sort of black pearl of world history, when New York City was at one and the same time both the apex of Western culture and the armpit of the Western world."
This isn't entirely relevant, meanwhile, but I'm going to quote it anyway; here is a long excerpt from that interview, describing the "founding myth" of the U.S.A.:

Well, think about it: the founding myth of this country involves pushing farther and farther out into terra incognita, cutting ties to family and background, maybe adopting a new name and a completely concocted new identity, and somehow making lots of money, the existence of which in sufficient quantity is enough to stifle any questions about its provenance. The land that formerly belonged to the Sioux, the copper that formerly belonged to the Navaho, the skins that formerly belonged to the beavers, the stake that formerly belonged to the miner who caught diphtheria – they’re yours now, pal. Call yourself “Colonel” and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you’re a solid citizen, the embodiment of hard work and rugged individualism. You’re no criminal. The criminal is the guy who comes up short, who gets caught, who fails to adopt a respectable cover. But after a while the solid citizen gets to missing those wild years, even as he is ensconced in his forty-room Carrera-marble Beaux-Arts palace on upper Fifth Avenue. He thinks wistfully of how he used to hop freights, sleep in culverts, drink white lightning in hobo jungles, take a sash-weight to his competitors, go through the pockets of the recently dead. He envies those who live that life now denied him forevermore. It seems to him that he’s a prisoner of his own success and that those yeggs out there are truly free.

Meanwhile, all this talk of "perilous partitions" and "multi-levelled platforms... swinging over the void" reminds me of another story I neglected to link last week: the now well-known tale of a Russian gangster who built himself a castle made of planks.

[Image: The gangster's castle; photo by Dmitry Beliakov, via the Telegraph].

"Dominating the skyline of Arkhangelsk, a city in Russia's far north-west," the castle "is believed to be the world's tallest wooden house, soaring 13 floors to reach 144ft – about half the size of the tower of Big Ben."
This "remarkable architectural feat," the Telegraph says, "defies easy description."

A whimsical jumble of planking, from a distance it bears a resemblance to a Japanese pagoda, but draw closer and it seems more like a mix between a Brobdignagian tree house and the lair of a wicked fairytale character.

The castle's designer and builder – the "gangster" himself – now spends his time giving "death-defying tours that involve criss-crossing rotting planking and climbing icy ladders."

[Image: The gangster's castle; photo by Dmitry Beliakov, via the Telegraph].

All of which pales slightly when faced with the quote-unquote "looming sink-hole crisis."
It seems we should all be very afraid: "Last year was the worst ever in the U.S. for sinkholes. Almost every state in the country experienced record problems."
In what is surely one of the most ridiculous examples of scare journalism I've ever seen, we read the following:

In San Diego, the mayor held a news conference near a yawning abyss. A 64-year-old Brooklyn woman fell into a 5-foot-deep sinkhole in front of her house.
In Los Angeles, a broken water main created a sinkhole 30 feet deep and shut down half of Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. At the same time, a broken sewer pipe shut down the adjacent beach.
In Northern California, an 8-foot-deep sinkhole stunned the occupants of a nearby office building. In Grand Rapids, Mich., residents had to boil water after a sinkhole cut off their water service.
And this year is shaping up to be even worse.

The article goes on to urge almost literally everyone to fix their old pipes – because a broken pipe means leaking water, and that means underground erosion... which just might produce another sinkhole.
What makes the article even more absurd – just totally and stunningly, even amazingly, absurd – is that its author is the "president and chief executive of a large sewer, water and oil pipe repair company."
I think I'll leave it at that; these Quick Lists are getting longer and longer. Apologies, meanwhile, for not covering any of these stories when they first hit the web – but I'm hoping to get back on a regular posting schedule soon... Busy times!

(With thanks to Jill, doilum, Carl Douglas, Jon Haeber, Lisa Chamberlain, and others for the tips. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Quick list 7, Quick list 6, etc.)

The Event

Well, I'm back in LA and so I wanted to give a quick and public thanks to everyone who came out on Saturday afternoon for the event in San Francisco; to the speakers themselves: John Bela & Matthew Passmore, Erik Davis, Lisa Iwamoto & Craig Scott, and Walter Murch; and to everyone else involved with the proceedings, including Alan Rapp & Chronicle Books, Fred Dolen & the CCA, and our two indefatigable technical assistants.
We videotaped everything, as well, so once I figure out whether we'll be putting those tapes online or simply transcribing them, I'll let you know.
But it was a great event, I thought. There were some moments in which the screen turned magenta and we went rather beyond the scheduled time slot, but it was a nice mesh of topics, approaches, ideas, and imagery, and some really cool conversations ensued at the end.
So thanks again – and, if you did come out, I hope you had a good time! If you didn't have a good time, of course, please feel free to tell me why...

The Heliocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch

[Image: Inside the Pantheon; via].

Through both film editing and sound design, Walter Murch has worked literally behind the scenes of Hollywood to give shape and structure to the films we see. In the process, he's won three Academy Awards; he's directed his own feature-length film, the creatively subversive Return to Oz; and he's worked with some of the greatest directors of modern times, including Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, on some of their greatest films, from The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now to The Conversation and THX-1138.
But it is due only in part to Murch's stellar career in film that I wanted to talk to him for BLDGBLOG.
As it happens, Murch's interests go far beyond the reach of cinema, encompassing architecture, astronomy, music theory, and mathematics – among an almost impossibly broad range of other subjects. When a friend of mine casually mentioned that Walter had "discovered" something about the Pantheon, in Rome, and that this discovery had something to do with Nicolaus Copernicus and the origins of heliocentrism in Western astronomy, I was determined to write about it for BLDGBLOG. Within only a few weeks, Walter and I were in touch.
Of course, Murch is already very well-known as an interviewee; as only one example of this, novelist Michael Ondaatje recorded an entire book's worth of interviews with Murch, later published under the title The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.
That book is never less than fascinating, if frequently enigmatic; at one point Murch claims, for instance, referring to his sound work for film: "If I go out to record a door-slam, I don't think I'm recording a door-slam. I think I am recording the space in which a door-slam happens."
Or, continuing that thought:

I spent a lot of time trying to discover those key sounds that bring universes along with them. I tend not to visualize but auralize, to think about sound in terms of space. Rather than listen to the sound itself, I listen to the space in which the sound is contained.

Murch and I spoke for roughly an hour, and we continued our conversation through email; we managed to discuss the Pantheon, Copernicus, the Mithraic religion of the ancient Mediterranean, urban acoustics, the music of the spheres, Brian Eno, Single Speed Design, the architecture of film, and whether CCTV surveillance of city streets should be considered a new cinematic avant-garde.
It's worth noting, finally, that this interview goes online only a few hours before Murch is due to speak at an event in San Francisco, co-organized by BLDGBLOG and Chronicle Books; there, he will be discussing his thoughts on Copernicus and the Pantheon in more detail.

• • •
[Image: Exterior view of the Pantheon].

BLDGBLOG: I’d like to start with your research into the Pantheon – in particular, how that building’s structure may have influenced the astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. Could you tell me a bit more about that?

Walter Murch: Well, the Pantheon still holds its mysteries: Who designed it? How was it used? What does it mean? But Copernicus still has his mysteries, too: Why did someone like him, a high official in the Church, 500 years ago, dedicate his life to the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun? Not only did this contradict common-sense and the teaching of the Bible, but it also capsized 1400 years of Ptolemaic, geocentric astronomy. And Ptolemy, it turns out, was writing his classic book on astronomy – the Almagest – while the Pantheon was being built.

At any rate, Copernicus was born in 1473. He studied astronomy at the University of Bologna, along with medicine and law, and while he was there he became an assistant to Domenico Novara. Novara was a well-known astronomer who may have exposed Copernicus to the 3rd century BC theories of Aristarchus.

Aristarchus believed that the Sun was the center of the universe. He also believed that the Earth not only revolved around the Sun, along with all the other planets, but that it rotated on its axis once every 24 hours, and that the moon, in turn, revolved around the Earth. So – more than two thousand years ago – Aristarchus described the solar system essentially the way we conceive of it today; yet his theory was rejected at the time, and his writings were subsequently lost.

Scholars in the Renaissance were only able to learn about Aristarchus through a book called The Sand Reckoner, by Archimedes, where Aristarchus’s theory is described – but it’s used as the premise for an impossibly large universe. Aristarchus’s heliocentrism is almost certainly the source of Copernicus’s inspiration – but why did Copernicus take it seriously when no one else did?

In 1500, a Jubilee year, Copernicus took time off from his studies in Bologna and he moved to Rome. This is where the Pantheon comes in. Circumstantial evidence would suggest that if you were a young man of 27, footloose in Rome, the Pantheon would be high on your list of places to visit: it was probably the most famous building in the world at that time – the only intact structure from Ancient Rome – and it featured the world’s largest dome: 142 feet in diameter. It remains, to this day, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the history of architecture.

The Pantheon had survived mainly because it was consecrated in 609, yet the overwhelming feeling when you walk into that building is pagan: a series of concentric circles surrounding a single bright source of light – which is the oculus in the center of the dome. It’s pretty certain that the Pantheon was designed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and Hadrian was a Mithraist – a worshipper of the Sun.

The only writing about the Pantheon from around the time it was built appears in the History of Rome, by Dio Cassius. Dio Cassius mentions that some people believed the name Pantheon (which is Greek for all gods) came from the statues of the many different gods which decorated the building, “but my own opinion of the name is that, because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens.”

That powerful image of the central source of sunlight surrounded by a series of concentric circles must have been an overwhelming experience for Copernicus, primed by his knowledge of Aristarchus. He would have been standing in a church (St. Mary All Martyrs) built 1400 years earlier as a pagan temple, looking up at Aristarchus’s theory “in the flesh” so to speak.

[Image: The dome of the Pantheon, a "celestogramme" by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

BLDGBLOG: Are there any writings or images by Copernicus that might prove he interpreted the building this way?

Murch: There is a drawing in Revolutions, at the end of Chapter Ten, where Copernicus, for the first time, schematically illustrates his conception of the Universe. It’s a series of concentric circles, the outermost being the “Sphere of the Fixed Stars,” with progressively smaller circles representing the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury. In the center, of course, is the dot of the Sun. Copernicus’s exact words accompanying the drawing are significant:

At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the Sun. For in this most beautiful temple (in hoc pulcherimo templo) who could place this lamp in another or better position than the center, from which it can light up the whole at the same time? For, is not the Sun called 'the lantern of the universe' and, 'its mind' and by others 'its ruler'? Hermes Trismegistus calls the Sun 'a visible god', and Sophocles' Electra calls it 'the all-seeing'. Thus indeed, as though upon a royal throne, the Sun governs the family of planets revolving around it.

What leaps out from that text are the allusions to this beautiful temple, illuminated by a central lamp – and lantern was the architectural term used in Copernicus’s time to refer to the central opening in a dome – which lights up the whole. Then there are the classical references to Hermes Trismegistus and Sophocles. These are not the words of a cautious medieval ecclesiastic, but someone deeply influenced by the ancient pre-Christian world.

[Image: A diagram of the planetary orbits, by Nicholas Copernicus].

BLDGBLOG: So, in that passage, he was simultaneously describing the structure of the Pantheon and his theory of the solar system?

Murch: In a sense.

Inspired by that description, I then superimposed Copernicus’s drawing over an image of the Pantheon’s dome – and found that the ratios of the circles in his drawing and the ratios of the circles of the Pantheon line up almost exactly. Seeing that alignment was one of those wonderful moments where you suddenly feel a strong current of connection with the past.

[Image: A superimposition, by Walter Murch, of Copernicus's diagram of planetary orbits over a celestogramme of the Pantheon by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

BLDGBLOG: Wow! That's not just a coincidence? Copernicus actually meant for that to happen?

Murch: The circumstantial evidence is compelling, but there is no reference to the Pantheon in any of Copernicus’s correspondence or in the various manuscript versions of de Revolutionibus – so we will probably never know for sure.

Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating thought: that this magnificent temple, built 1400 years before Copernicus ever saw it, designed by a pagan, Sun-worshipping Roman emperor, and later transformed into a church, may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos.

BLDGBLOG: As far as the organization of the solar system goes, you’ve also been doing some interesting work with Bode’s Law, which has to do with finding a mathematical pattern in the orbits of the planets. How did you first discover that Law, and where is your research going?

Murch: Well, it was something I ran across a number of years ago in Arthur Koestler’s book The Sleepwalkers – a history of our conception of the universe from ancient Greece through Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to Newton. Bode’s Law is just mentioned as a footnote.

Kepler, in particular, had been obsessed with finding a pattern in the orbits of the planets – his famous Three Laws were discovered almost incidentally along the way to that goal, and he would probably be very upset to find that we remember him for his those laws (which he did not number or particularly esteem) and that we’ve forgotten the planetary harmonics to which he devoted his life. But, even by the middle of the 1600s, Kepler’s harmonies were considered a lost cause.

Then, sometime in the 1760s – more than a hundred years after Kepler – a German professor of physics inserted a formula into a French book he was translating: a simple bit of algebra which seemed to indicate there was, indeed, a pattern to the planetary orbits. That professor was Johann Titius, and his formula was later appropriated and published by the director of the Berlin observatory, Johann Bode. Bode had a much bigger megaphone than Titius, so the formula became known as Bode’s Law – but it should really be named after Titius.

When I read Sleepwalkers I was right in the middle of finishing a film – and it was odd, because I was under a tight deadline, but this idea really got under my skin. So at 11:30 at night I started fooling around with the Bode numbers, and within half an hour, I came up with a formula that generated the same set of ratios, yet was different from the original – and that really made the hair on the back of my neck stand up! That was what started me down this road, about ten years ago.

[Image: The rings of Saturn; courtesy of NASA].

BLDGBLOG: What’s the specific idea behind the Law itself? In other words, what exactly is Bode's Law?

Murch: It’s a relatively simple exponential function, sprinkled with a few arbitrary constants – you put whole numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) in at one end and a series of different numbers come out the other (.4, .7, 1.0, 1.6, etc.). It turns out that these new numbers are very close to the average distances of the planets from the Sun, measured in Astronomical Units (AU). For instance, the Earth is (by definition) 1 AU from the Sun. Bode’s Law says that there should be a planet at .7 of that distance – and Venus is actually found at .72 AU.

Titius’s formula not only correctly described – to within a few percentage points – the average distances of the six planets known at the time, but it also predicted that there should be planets at certain distances where there seemed to be empty space. Then, in 1781, Uranus was discovered – the first planet ever to be discovered with a telescope – and its average distance turned out to be 19.2 AU, within 2% of the predicted 19.6. In 1801, Ceres, the first and largest asteroid, was discovered at 2.77 AU, within 1% of the predicted 2.8.

It was a kind of astronomical apotheosis: Titius’s formula seemed to be both descriptive and predictive: the holy grail of science. It fit all the known planets – even newly-discovered ones. So, even though nobody knew why it worked, Titius’s formula was assumed to be a Law. Unfortunately for Titius, who died in 1796, it became popularly known as Bode’s Law.

Everything was fine for the next fifty years, but then disaster struck: in 1846, another new planet was discovered – Neptune – but it didn’t fit. It should have been at 38.8 AU, but it was orbiting at 30, off by almost 30%.

It was a fatal blow. Bode’s Law fell into obscurity, where it remains to this day. Now, when you take astronomy 101, if Bode’s Law is mentioned at all, it’s presented as a historical curiosity. Or a cautionary tale of wrong thinking – luring unwary astronomers into the swamp of numerology.

But, then, when Pluto was discovered in 1930, it fit to within 2% the orbit where Neptune should have been. So rather than throw the whole thing out because one planet didn’t fit, I thought it would be interesting to set Neptune aside as a renegade and see what I could learn by applying the formula to other orbital systems.

I eventually discovered that there are parts of the formula that are linked to particular and unique aspects of our own solar system – and that these particularities are responsible for some of the arbitrary constants in the formula. I found if I could purify the formula of these constants, then I could also make it simpler and more general, and yet it would still yield the same set of ratios.

[Images: The rings – and a moon – of Saturn; courtesy of NASA].

BLDGBLOG: How did you purify it?

Murch: Well, one of the unexamined assumptions in Bode’s Law is that the unit to which everything is mathematically compared is the distance of the Earth from the Sun. This seems perfectly natural – it’s the Astronomical Unit, and the Earth is where we live. But this comparison requires the formula to perform a kind of mathematical jiu-jitsu: it has to generate a series of ratios and compare all of those ratios to the Astronomical Unit.

So it seemed more logical to abandon the Astronomical Unit and just concentrate on the ratios. Once you do that, the formula gets much simpler: it doesn’t have to do two things at once. This new formula is not only simpler, but it’s also lost its “Earth-centricity.” Now you can apply it to other orbital systems – the miniature “solar systems” of the moons around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, for instance, and you find the same set of ratios cropping up!

Of course, it’s not that the moon systems of those planets somehow duplicate the solar system – they don’t. It’s rather that, underlying all of these moons and planets, there is a pattern of ratios, like the musical ratios underlying a keyboard. Just as you are restricted to playing certain musical ratios on a keyboard, so it seems to be with the arrangements of these moons. Some systems “play” – or occupy – certain orbits that others don’t.

Applying the same formula to different systems is potentially very fruitful. By comparing orbital systems you find that, in each of system, there are a few renegades – like Neptune in our solar system – but each of these is a renegade in the same way as Neptune: all of them fall exactly at the midpoint between two adjacent Bode-predicted orbits. So there is an underlying similarity even to the exceptions.

[Image: Bode-predicted planetary orbits compared to those orbits as they are now scientifically understood].

BLDGBLOG: The “music of the spheres” is perhaps an inevitable metaphor to use here – but I’m curious if you have actually found a real, numerical correspondence between the structure of Western music and the orbits of the planets, or if it's just a convenient metaphor.

Murch: That’s one of the startling things about this. If I wrote the simplified Bode formula down on a piece of paper and showed it to music theorists, they would ask: “Why are you showing us a formula from the overtone series…?”

In other words, Bode’s Law gives a series of orbital ratios which are mathematically identical to intervals in musical theory. They’re primarily variations on what we call the 7th chord: C, E, G, B-flat. Bode’s predicted ratio between Earth and Mars, for instance, is the same as the 5:8 musical ratio between E and C. And if you divide the distances, in kilometers, of the four Galilean moons by a common denominator you get the notes Ab, E, C, Bb. And so on.

[Image: The moons of Jupiter].

BLDGBLOG: Have you discussed these ideas with actual astronomers? How did they react?

Murch: I’ve given this, as a lecture, in various forms – at the National Convention of Digital Astronomy in Italy in 2004; at NYU in 2005; and then, last year, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. I think it was well-received in each case, but it’s still a work-in-progress, and I’m looking for feedback from people who are interested in this kind of cross-disciplinary thinking. For most astronomers it’s hard to contemplate reviving a long-discredited 18th century law of celestial mechanics, let alone the music of the spheres! [laughs] The conventional wisdom about Bode’s Law is that it’s just a fluky coincidence.

[Images: The world as a series of chords; via].

BLDGBLOG: So there are similarities between this and music theory – but what about between this and film theory? Is there a kind of Bode’s Law of film editing? The relationships between scenes and so on?

Murch: I think the common thread to both astronomy and film-editing is this search for patterns. Now, at least as far as we can tell, filmmaking is not amenable to the same kind of mathematical rigor that applies to astronomy [laughs] – there may be a mathematical rigor, but we certainly haven’t discovered what it is yet.

Think how difficult it would be to explain musical notation to someone from ancient Egypt, when they did not even suspect the underlying mathematical laws of harmonics, let alone a way of writing it all down. Instead, for thousands of years, music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved. Music evaporates as soon as it is performed. So this idea – that marks could be made on paper, and that this paper could then be sent hundreds of miles away, allowing different people to play the same music years later – I think would have seemed very strange, even impossible, to people in ancient times.

Maybe someday, though, we’ll turn a conceptual corner and suddenly discover the equivalent of musical theory and notation in film. Maybe we are still “Ancient Egyptians” in that regard.

BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?

Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.

Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.

So with fourteen “untemplated” angles a minute, a well-shot action sequence will feel thrilling and yet still comprehensible: just on the edge of chaos, which is how action feels if you are in the middle of it. If it’s less than fourteen, the audience will feel like something is lacking, and they’ll disengage; if it’s more than fourteen, so much new information is being thrown at the audience that they’ll also disengage, though for different reasons.

At the other end of the spectrum, dialogue scenes seem to need an average of four new camera angles a minute. Less than that, and the scene will seem flat and perfunctory; more than that, and it will be hard for the audience to concentrate on the performances and the meaning of the dialogue: the visual style will get in the way of the verbal content and the subtleties of the actors’ performances.

This rule of “four to fourteen” seems to hold across all kinds of films and different styles and periods of filmmaking.

BLDGBLOG: Returning to the idea of music and sound for a moment, are there any places or buildings that you’ve visited, anywhere in the world, that particularly seemed to highlight the connection between a space and the sounds that occur in it? A kind of acoustic urbanism, where how a place sounds totally transforms what you see happening there?

Murch: Actually, I had that exact experience – but it was while watching a film. [laughter] Grand Central Station had been used as a location for one of the scenes. And this was despite the fact that I grew up in Manhattan, had been in Grand Central many times, and had developed an interest in sound recording as a teenager. But I was deaf to the kind of acoustic urbanism you’re speaking of until I saw Seconds by John Frankenheimer, in 1965.

There was just a single hand-held shot gliding down the main staircase, but accompanied by this…. bwoooaaahmmmm… the sound of that great room in all its wonderful complexity. It hit me very hard, emotionally, even though in retrospect it was quite obvious: the realization that you could join a certain tonality with a certain architectural space to create an emotion in the audience. And, if you wanted to, that you could then manipulate or distort that tonality to create a different sense of the visual space and a different emotion.

I’ve been pursuing that idea ever since. On every film I try to think as deeply as I can about the implied acoustic space of each scene; I then try to tailor the reverberant quality of the sound, and the tonality, to the spaces that we’re looking at. It’s endlessly fascinating, particularly because this technique flies “below the radar” of the audience. The filmmaker can have an effect on the audience without the audience knowing where that effect is coming from. Which I would guess is something that architects enjoy playing with, too.

[Images: Grand Central Station; via].

BLDGBLOG: As far as an acoustically rich space goes, is there a specific place – or a building or a landscape – where you like to record sounds for use in a film? How does the actual space affect the sounds you can record in it?

Murch: Well, first of all, I record a sound without any atmospheric envelope around it. I then take that recorded sound and find an acoustic space that is as close as possible to the acoustical space in the film; I play the sound in that space; and I record the resulting reverberation on another device, placed to extract the maximum reverberation. Then, in the final mix, I have the ability to blend those two sounds: the “dry” sound itself, alongside a sound which is almost all reverberation.

In musical terms, you could say it’s like the relationship between the string of the violin and the reverberation and amplification added by the body of the violin itself.

By first separating and then balancing those two elements together, I can custom-fit what seems to be the right dimension of sound implied by the space on screen. If you have too much reverb, and you don’t hear enough of the original sound itself, the result is too diffuse and ethereal to be realistic – but sometimes that lack of realism is exactly what you want. On the other hand, if you play proportionately too much of the dry sound, it doesn’t seem to connect to the space you’re looking at. But maybe that’s exactly what you want – that kind of dislocation. It all depends on the dramatic intent of the moment. But these two elements give you the handles to control the final result.

Over the last forty years, this time-consuming technique of physically “worldizing” the sound has been gradually replaced by increasingly sophisticated digital techniques, though the principle is the same. Now we can record a digital “snapshot” of a real acoustic space, using tone bursts and frequency sweeps, and then impose the resulting parameters on any sound we want, back in the studio.

BLDGBLOG: In a still unpublished interview I did with a Boston-based architecture firm called Single Speed Design, I asked one of the principal designers whether he liked ambient music – and his answer was interesting. He said that he didn’t like ambient music at all because it already included all the reverb, echo, and other effects that should have been introduced by the space in which the music was played. In other words, ambient music does the work of architecture for you, on the level of acoustics.

Murch: Exactly. He was reiterating, in an architectural sense, exactly what we do as a sound recordists.

BLDGBLOG: Another anecdote I think is interesting here comes from the British composer Brian Eno. Eno once said that he would make field recordings in different parks around London, then listen to the tapes until he’d memorized them – the way you would memorize a Beatles song. So he would know exactly when the church bell rang, and the mother called out to her child, and the birds flew overhead – or a distant truck rumbled by. He memorized the space according to the sounds that occurred within it.

Murch: There’s a wonderful essay by Michelangelo Antonioni, notes for a film that he was going to make in New York. To familiarize himself with the acoustic space of Manhattan (where he had never made a film) he sat in a room 34 stories up in a hotel somewhere on Fifth Avenue, writing down exactly what he heard over a period of three hours from dawn through rush hour. He came up with the most wonderful metaphors for sounds that were mysterious and unfamiliar to him, but which would be run-of-the-mill to a New Yorker. It’s a great read: a kind of meditative poetry, or song, just like Brian Eno said. It can evoke a whole series of emotional responses if you’re sensitive to that kind of stuff.

BLDGBLOG: Speaking of which, is there a specific place, like Leicester Square or some forest near San Francisco, where you thought to yourself: I could do this better – I could make this place sound better?

Murch: [laughs] Back in the late 60s we used to think of hiding a series of playback devices around a house to improve the sounds of the doors closing, the toilets flushing, and so on. Creating a real-life alternate acoustic universe.

Certainly the dominant thing that’s happened over the last hundred years is the universal spreading of white noise – just the general mush of traffic, air-conditioning, and jet planes. Whereas if you were in Leicester Square a hundred years ago, it might have been just as noisy – but the sounds would be more specific, less mushy and ill-defined because of the lack of the internal combustion engine and the constant whir of rubber tires on asphalt. For a number of years Aggie and I lived very near a freeway, on a Sausalito houseboat, and that constant mushy sound eventually became a kind of water-torture for me.

So I don’t have a specific answer for your question – but, generally, it would be to try to find some way to eliminate the white noise and to make people more sensitive to the individual sources of sound and reverberations within the space. Church bells can do that: they attract the ear with their tonality and reverberation, making you aware of the space between you and the church, and making you less aware of the underlying white noise.

[Image: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) gets to know his surveillance equipment; from The Conversation. Courtesy of American Zoetrope].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, I’m curious how you, as a film editor, see the rise of video surveillance – CCTV – in cities around the world. It seems that cinema has become the default condition of urban security. So I have two questions: do you think that a new kind of cinematic avant-garde is evolving in the control rooms of private security firms? In other words, these epic, nine-hour shots of parking lots seem more Warholian than Andy Warhol. And, second: if you were suddenly faced with all of the surveillance footage generated in a city for a day, do you think you could edit it into a convenient, albeit imaginary, narrative? You could take all those non-events and edit them into something – with action, and a storyline, and rhythm?

Murch: Well, there was a short film made a few years ago where the filmmaker had worked out the location of all the surveillance cameras along a cross-section of London, and how many of those cameras were operated by the municipal authorities. If the cameras were operated by the city, then he could get access to the footage. So he mapped out a pedestrian trip for himself across town knowing that, at every moment he would be on CCTV: as soon as he was out of range of one camera, he would come into focus on another. So he walked the walk, wrote to all the relevant authorities, got the footage, and then edited it all together into a continuous narrative. It’s very amusing in a dystopian, Warholian kind of way. You only “get” the joke after a few minutes of watching.

But George Lucas’s THX-1138 was kind of like that, except it was made in 1971. Much of the action takes place on video surveillance cameras. In fact, the job of the girl in the film is to monitor banks of surveillance cameras. She eventually gets fed up, stops taking her Prozac, or whatever, and tries to escape this completely video-monitored world – which, it turns out, is completely underground because of some disaster that had happened on the surface many years earlier.

Also similar, in some ways, is The Conversation – which is about audio surveillance – made around the same time. Part of the visual style of that film was a dispassionate “surveillance camera” look. There are a number of moments in the film where Gene Hackman walks into the shot, lingers for a moment, and then he walks out – but the camera doesn’t follow him or cut, as it normally would. Until, maybe five or ten seconds later, it slowly pans left, in a very mechanical way, over to where he is, and then it watches him for a while. But then he gets up and moves out of range again, and so on.

This is all in 35mm, not video, but the effect is disorienting just the same – perhaps even more so. It’s as if the camera has a motion-detector behind it, not an intelligence. It will stay still as long as there is activity – but then, if it detects a lack of activity, it will wait five seconds before searching out where the activity might have gone. The film both begins and ends like that – a long slow mechanical zoom at the beginning, then ending on an oscillating camera that pans back and forth mindlessly. And there are a number of scenes in the middle that are shot similarly.

[Image: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) realizes his apartment is bugged; from The Conversation. Courtesy of American Zoetrope].

BLDGBLOG: So do you think that video surveillance is a kind of unacknowledged form of cinema, or even a counter-Hollywood on the rise? The next avant-garde?

Murch: Something may be emerging. For instance, Mike Figgis’s Timecode is similar in its use of the simultaneous action of a four-way split screen telling four stories which sometimes interconnect.

You know, the other aspect of this is that these CCTV images are recycled and abandoned regularly. They are preserved for a certain length of time, and then they’re obliterated if there is no call for them. There is a temporality to it all which I think needs to be taken into account. It’s amazing, when you think about it, how rapidly this technology has spread – for economic reasons that have nothing to do with creativity. Insurance companies will now put cameras up at intersections where there have been lots of accidents. Then, if there is an accident involving one of their clients, they can use the footage to prove that the other person is at fault. Even when their client may be dead. Especially when he is dead.

BLDGBLOG: [laughs]

Murch: There’s also footage now being made available, showing the July 7 London bombers rehearsing their terror plan two weeks ahead of time – all caught on publicly-operated CCTV cameras – and it is almost like the first example I mentioned, of crossing London on foot – lots of continuity of action. Except that it was real, and many lives were lost.

One hope I have is that someone will put a HiDef camera into orbit, giving a full-frame view of the Earth spinning below, and this will be made available to everyone on HiDef cable channel 427 or whatever. Then, when plasma screens – or liquid crystal, or digital wallpaper – get large enough, this image can then occupy the entire wall of a room in your house. You’ll be able to go into that room and do other things – read a book, or listen to music, and occasionally look up – and one entire wall of the room is the Earth as it actually is at the very moment that you’re looking at it. It would be as if your room were in orbit.

You’d begin to see Earthly events in context – a volcanic eruption in Peru, or the pollution coming out of New York harbor, or the hurricane threatening New Orleans, floods in Bangladesh – and it will begin to change our awareness of our relationship to the Earth in a profound way, the way the mirror changed our relationship to ourselves, and deepened our sense of identity as individuals. Given the technology that we have today, I’m interested that it hasn’t already happened yet. Given the state of the world at the moment, I hope it happens soon.

[Image: The Earth; image courtesy of NASA].

• • •
I owe an enormous thank you to Walter Murch, both for taking the time to do this interview – even following up via email from London – and for speaking at BLDGBLOG's event, co-organized by Chronicle Books, tomorrow afternoon in San Francisco. If you're anywhere nearby, be sure to stop in.
I also owe a huge thanks to Lawrence Weschler for first putting me in touch with Walter, and for introducing Walter to BLDGBLOG; and to Anne-Marie Cowsill, Chad Keig, and James Mockoski at American Zoetrope for sending me images from the filming of the The Conversation. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Nicola, for helping edit all this together while we drove up to San Francisco – it was also Nicola who suggested the interview's title.
Meanwhile, I would urge anyone even remotely interested in the topics covered by this interview to pick up a copy of The Conversations. It's compulsively readable, and well worth the time. Murch's own book, In the Blink of an Eye, is particularly useful for anyone working in film.
Finally, Charles Koppelman's Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema is a detailed look at the film-editing experience itself, focusing on Murch's decision to use an off-the-shelf software package in the editing of Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain.

Of jellyfish, loops, site constraints, and canopies

[Image: Jellyfish House by IwamotoScott].

One of the speakers at the big event this Saturday will be Lisa Iwamoto, of IwamotoScott Architecture and Assistant Professor of Architecture at UC-Berkeley.
Lisa and her firm's co-principal, Craig Scott, seem to be everywhere lately. IwamotoScott was a finalist, for instance, in the 2006 Next Generation contest sponsored by Metropolis; they both taught at the Urban Islands design studio in Sydney, Australia, last summer; they were finalists for this year's PS1 courtyard competition in New York; they just spoke as part of the Architectural League's Emerging Voices series; their work is featured in "Innovation by Design," on display now at SF MOMA; they're featured in "Open House: Architecture and Technologies for Intelligent Living" in Pasadena; and Lisa was even on the judging panel for last year's Bottom Line Design Awards.
For all of that, however, I've hardly even cracked the long list of credits that IwamotoScott has amassed; for more comprehensive coverage, visit their site and click on Profile.

[Image: Jellyfish House by IwamotoScott].

Lisa will be presenting two projects on Saturday; those projects are the Jellyfish House and the PS1 competition entry, and they're both worth hearing about.
I don't want to pre-empt her talk by giving away too much information, however – so I'll just show you a few images, quote a few soundbites, and urge you to stop by the event if you're anywhere near San Francisco.
So the Jellyfish House, we read, "is modeled on the idea that, like the sea creature, it coexists with its environment."

[Image: Jellyfish House by IwamotoScott].

As such, the house is designed "as a mutable layered skin, or 'deep surface', that mediates internal and external environments."
That "external environment" is rather interesting, in this case, because the proposed site is actually an artificial island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The island once served as a military base, which means that there is a legacy of "toxic soil" to clean-up – but the project, being impressively imagined on a variety of levels, has detoxification schemes built directly into it.

[Image: Jellyfish House by IwamotoScott].

The house, then, is part of a much larger landscape proposal involving wetlands, soil remediation, and a complex "water filtration system" that operates within the very walls of the house. There are "phase change materials," and even a "water jacket" featuring "quilted baffles."
In any case, the house is really cool and well thought-out, and I'm excited to hear more about it.

[Images: Jellyfish House by IwamotoScott].

Then there's IwamotoScott's PS1 competition entry.
The PS1 competition is an annual event in which entrants are asked to design a temporary installation for the PS1 courtyard; that space will then serve both as a venue for events and as a place for the public to congregate.

[Images: PS1 courtyard competition entry by IwamotoScott].

Unfortunately, I don't have very much information about this project – all the more reason for me to attend my own event and find out – but I can perhaps justifiably speculate that it uses a webbed canopy stretched across the courtyard to define and frame individual spaces...

[Image: PS1 courtyard competition entry by IwamotoScott].

There are several other projects on IwamotoScott's website worth checking out. There's the Loop House, for instance, the Split House, the FiberOpticRoom, and the 2:1 House, for starters.
That latter project is particularly interesting, as its proposed site comes with some fiendishly unique ground conditions – what the architects call "an extreme set of site constraints."
These "site constraints" include the following:

A steep 2 to 1 upslope and extremely long, narrow access; a limited zoning envelope due to the irregular shape of the property; a stand of protected Coast Live Oak trees that cannot be removed; reuse of an existing foundation on the upper part of the site; and a panoramic view from the top of the site encompassing San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate and Mount Tamalpais.

The resulting "house" is more like an inhabitable land-bridge spanning downward along the hillside, several feet off the ground, turning at just the right moment to avoid the oak trees (thus forming a "trapezoidal void that accommodates the protected trees").
The house/bridge/structure also appears to consist, internally, of multiple stairways, turning each room into something more like a terrace. This is referred to as the project's "internal terrain."
Meanwhile, IwamotoScott also has a housing project called FaceSide, several different images of which I've here assembled into one.

[Image: FaceSide houses by IwamotoScott].

And then there's the Moire Tower. I've cropped an image, below, so as to zero-in on the latticed and woven structure of the tower itself.

[Image: The Moire Tower by IwamotoScott].

Finally, for this post at least, there is the LiveWorkShop House, a "case study house" proposed for Cleveland, Ohio.
Among other things, the house uses "a hybrid structure – combining steel with off-the-shelf, lightweight, prefabricated structure and enclosure systems." This allows for "a flexible menu of finish materials" by which future residents can customize their individual homes. "The proposed final design," in other words, is not final at all; it is "but one demonstration of a number of possible permutations."
Of course, as with almost all good prefab, it feels – and looks – a bit like a game of Tetris.

[Image: The LiveWorkShop House by IwamotoScott].

So come out on Saturday to hear Lisa discuss both the Jellyfish House and the PS1 competition design – though feel free to ask her questions about the other projects, too. In the meantime, be sure to check out IwamotoScott's website.

(A few more images are available in my IwamotoScott Flickr set).

Monocular Landscapes, Unmanned Drones, and the Orbital Future of Australian Archaeology

The new magazine Monocle has been getting loads of press lately, from both lovers and haters; and while I can't necessarily say that I'm one or the other, I will admit to erring on the side of enthusiasm.
There's some great stuff in there, and it's hard not to get excited.

I've only got the first issue, however, so I'm not exactly an informed reader; and I won't be performing a rigorous review of the magazine here – discussing its design, intentions, etc. etc. etc. I simply want to point out a few cool articles that have an architectural or landscape bent.
Which is quite a large part of the magazine, as it happens.
First, for instance, we take a brief trip to Paris, where we step down onto the Champs-Elysées and learn that a Citroën "flagship showroom" will soon open up, putting shiny cars with waxed bonnets on display in the window. Then there's a glossy photo-essay on Le Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, "the city were timing is everything" (they manufacture watches). And there's a quick visit to the nearby town of Sedrun, Switzerland, where the Gotthard Base Tunnel "is being dug more than 600m below the [earth's surface], through nearly 58km of Massif stone." A subterranean train station, located at the midpoint of the tunnel, will be "linked to the surface by the world's tallest lift." Long-term readers may note that this same tunnel was mentioned on BLDGBLOG back in December.

[Image: Gotthard Base Tunnel, via Wikipedia].

Awesomely, Monocle then turns its cyclopean gaze onto the empty skies above Kemijärvi, Finland, north of the Arctic Circle, where "a test centre for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)" has opened. The test center is run by a firm called Robonic; Robonic "has taken advantage of the vast, virtually unused airspace – a rarity in Europe – above Finnish Lapland to create the only private test centre in the world devoted solely to UAVs." This would also seem to be the perfect setting for a new novel by J.G. Ballard. Or an Alfred Hitchcock film: unmanned drones fly state secrets across the Arctic Circle...
Meanwhile, could you use these launchers, I wonder, to hurl small buildings into the sky? And if you could, would you do it?
Frustratingly, the article doesn't ask these questions.

[Image: The launcher for a UAV; courtesy of Robonic].

Moving on, we read, Budapest wants to clean up its river; as it is, the Danube is now "a muddy grey-brown, thanks in part to the sewage gushing out underneath Elizabeth Bridge" – which is a structure, not a woman.
Apparently a "warehouse district" will soon be built, modeled after the Docklands in London.
There's also a great article on China's bankrolling of infrastructural construction projects throughout Africa:

China's influence in Africa is growing at an unprecedented rate. Across the continent the Chinese are building stadiums, parliaments, roads, offering their expertise as well as they wallet. But China is not just giving to Africa, it is taking too. By the end of next year China will have become the world's largest importer of oil, and most of it will come from Africa. China is also in desperate need of minerals such as copper, aluminium and iron ore – and African nations are willing to provide them.

This topic was also previously explored on BLDGBLOG.
I'm going on a bit here, I have to say, but there's even a feature-length exposé on Bartenbach LichtLabor (BLL) and their "daylight-redirection" scheme in Rattenberg, Austria – a project Pruned told us about so long ago.
Monocle explains how BLL plans "to create an elaborate system of heliostats and fixed mirrors that could bounce sunlight from a nearby mountaintop on to a hill opposite and into the main street's gift shops and cafés." Without these mirrors – and their "secondary mirrors," in turn – the town would spend "almost four months of the year in the shadow of Rat mountain." In the shadow of Rat mountain!
The English name alone would cause depression.

[Image: The lighting technologies of Bartenbach LichtLabor].

To test these devices, BLL has constructed an "artificial sky... packed with fluorescent lamps, translucent lamps and LEDs." It's referred to as "the ultimate toy for a lighting geek."
Anyway, I could go on and on – it's an impressive magazine.
However, I do have to mention, finally, the one article I was actually intending to write about here before I started drinking coffee: on page 70, there's a short, one-column piece about Alice Gorman.
Gorman is an Australian archaeologist whose university homepage states her interests as "material culture relating to space exploration, including terrestrial launch sites like Woomera (South Australia), Kourou (French Guiana) and Hammaguir (Algeria)." She also studies "orbital debris" and "planetary landing sites."
Gorman's got a blog called Space Age Archaeology; she's got a research abstract online discussing "the archaeological record of human endeavours beyond the atmosphere" (!); and she's got a downloadable PDF about all of the above. Vaguely similar topics, meanwhile, pop up in an old – and somewhat confusingly typeset – BLDGBLOG post called "White men shining lights into the sky"...
Monocle further tells us that Gorman has been "calling on the United Nations this month to create a protected 'heritage list'" for orbital objects, "including the Vanguard 1 satellite, launched in 1958 and now the oldest man-made object in orbit."
Gorman: "Maybe the only evidence that a country has a right to be in geostationary orbit will be [the presence of] an old satellite." As space fills up with more and more junk – not to mention working satellites – she says: "It's not impossible that being able to claim access to an orbit could be a bit like Aboriginal people in Australia being able to say, 'This is where my ancestors camped.'"

[Image: The International Space Station].

A few things: 1) Last week I interviewed science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson for BLDGBLOG and I asked him about this very topic – directly referencing Monocle: will we yet see an archaeology of space, complete with in-orbit excavation sites, etc. etc. etc.? I hope to have that interview up and public within the month.
2) The very idea of an orbiting, geostationary archaeological site strikes me as so amazing, and so fun to think about, that I almost can't believe it. What will happen, say, in 400 years, or 900 years, or 1500 years, when the International Space Station has become like Petra or Skara Brae or even Macchu Picchu – the lost and dusty relic of a dead civilization – visited by space tourists with a thing for archaeology, snapping photos of themselves beside old push-button consoles as the sun rises through command windows in the background...? Masked grad students earn summer credits in Forensic Anthropology, roping off portions of the Station, mapping ancient social dynamics as dictated by architectural space...
Ruins in orbit around the earth!
Anyway, I found the first issue of Monocle to be really exciting and well-done, and I'm looking forward to issues two, three, four, etc.
Although... note to Monocle: it is actually cheaper to buy the magazine issue by issue here in the States; subscribing is nearly 30% more expensive.

Don't Forget!

The Museum of Nature

[Image: Museum 2 by Ilkka Halso, featuring a protected mountain. If you look close enough, you'll also see the roller-coaster, pictured below, as it wraps around the bay...].

A few years ago, I picked up an old copy of Framework: The Finnish Art Review because it looked really good and had some cool images in it – and, even now, I think it's an interesting magazine. I don't regret the purchase.

[Image: Museum 1 by Ilkka Halso].

So I was flipping through it again the other night, looking for something, when I re-discovered a bunch of photographs by Ilkka Halso. I had forgotten about them.
The images are all part of an amazing series called the "Museum of Nature," and I'm frankly still in awe of the project.

[Image: Roller-coaster by Ilkka Halso].

The basic premise of Halso's digitally manipulated work is that "nature" has been transformed into a museum display – yet the public's interaction with this new, endangered artifact is limited to spectacular roller coaster rides, perfectly reflected in the still waters they pass over. Alternatively, you can visit this steamy, delirious, quasi-Parisian gallery of iron and glass roofs built arching into disappearance over pine forests.

[Image: Kitka-river by Ilkka Halso].

These are "shelters," the artist writes, "massive buildings where big ecosystems could be stored."
The more I think about this project, though, the more exciting it gets; someone should write a novel set in this place – a kind of eco-catastrophic sequel to Westworld, perhaps – or, at the very least, someone should put Halso's images on display in the United States. They'd also make a gorgeous spread in Wired.
In any case, be sure to spend time clicking around through Halso's site. It's worth it. And check out another of Halso's projects, featured on Pruned back in 2005.

Bulletproof

The above photograph shows "supersonic 'bullets' of gas" shooting through "clouds of molecular hydrogen in the Orion Nebula." These "bullets" are moving "more than a thousand times faster than the speed of sound."
On the other hand, to call them bullets "is somewhat misleading since these objects are truly gigantic. The typical size of one of the bullet tips is about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun." (!) Which is to say that objects made of iron, larger than our solar system, are moving 250 miles per second through huge, interstellar curtains of colored gas... I wonder if you could build houses on them.
Meanwhile, don't miss this photo of the Gemini Observatory itself, a kind of hilltop Cyclopean building-machine shining lasers into the sky.