Liquid Quarries and Reefs On Demand

[Image: Micromotors at work, via UCSD/ScienceDaily].

Tiny machines that can extract carbon dioxide from water might someday help deacidify the oceans, according to a press release put out last week by UCSD.

Described as "micromotors," the devices "are essentially six-micrometer-long tubes that help rapidly convert carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate, a solid mineral found in eggshells, the shells of various marine organisms, calcium supplements and cement."

While these are still just prototypes, and are far from ready actually to use anywhere in the wild, they appear to have proven remarkably effective in the lab:
In their experiments, nanoengineers demonstrated that the micromotors rapidly decarbonated water solutions that were saturated with carbon dioxide. Within five minutes, the micromotors removed 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from a solution of deionized water. The micromotors were just as effective in a sea water solution and removed 88 percent of the carbon dioxide in the same timeframe.
The implications of this for marine life are obviously pretty huge—after all, overly acidic waters mean that shells are difficult, if not impossible, to form, so these devices could have an enormously positive effect on sea life—but these devices could also be hugely useful in the creation of marine limestone.

As UCSD scientists explain, the micromotors would "rapidly zoom around in water, remove carbon dioxide and convert it into a usable solid form." A cloud of these machines could thus essentially precipitate the basic ingredients of future rocks from open water.

[Image: A Maltese limestone quarry, via Wikipedia].

At least two possibilities seem worth mentioning.

One is the creation of a kind of liquid quarry out of which solid rock could be extracted—a square mile or two of seawater where a slurry of calcium carbonate would snow down continuously, 24 hours a day, from the endless churning of invisible machines. Screen off a region of the coast somewhere, so that no fish can be harmed, then trawl those hazy waters for the raw materials of future rock, later to be cut, stacked, and sold for dry-land construction.

The other would be the possibility of, in effect, the large-scale depositional printing of new artificial reefs. Set loose these micromotors in what would appear to be a large, building-sized teabag that you slowly drag through the ocean waters, and new underwater landforms slowly accrete in its week. Given weeks, months, years, and you've effectively 3D-printed a series of new reefs, perfect for coastal protection, a new marine sanctuary, or even just a tourist site.

In any case, read more about the actual process over at UCSD or ScienceDaily.

Subterranean Saxophony

[Image: Photo by Steve Stills, courtesy of the Guardian].

Over in London later today, the Guardian explains, composer Iain Chambers will premiere a new piece of music written for an unusual urban venue: "the caverns that contain the counterweights of [London's Tower Bridge] when it’s raised."

The space itself has "the acoustics of a small cathedral," Sinclair told the newspaper, citing John Cage as an influence and urging readers "to listen to environmental sounds and treat them as music," whether it's the rumble of a bridge being raised or the sounds of boats on the river.

In fact, Chambers will be performing one of Cage's pieces during the show tonight—but, alas, I suspect it is not this one:
It is rumored that the final, dying words of composer John Cage were: “Make sure they play my London piece… You have to hear my London piece…” He was referring, many now believe, to a piece written for the subterranean saxophony of London’s sewers.
Read much more at the Guardian—or, even better, stop by tonight for a live performance.

(Spotted via @nicolatwilley).

Abandoned Mines, Slow Printing, and the Living Metal Residue of a Post-Human World

"High in the Pyrenees Mountains," we read, "deep in abandoned mines, scientists discovered peculiar black shells that seem to crop up of their own accord on metal surfaces."

[Image: Metal shells growing in the darkness of abandoned mines; photo by Joan Santamaría, via Eos].

No, this is not a deleted scene from Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy; it's from research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, recently reported by Eos.

It turns out that, under certain conditions, subterranean microbes can leave behind metallic deposits "as part of their natural metabolism." Abandoned mines are apparently something of an ideal environment for this to occur within, resulting in "a rapid biomineralization process that sprouts iron-rich shells from the surface of steel structures."

These then build up into reef-like deposits through a process analogous to 3D-printing: "Electron microscopy revealed small-scale, fiber-like crystals arranged into lines growing outward from the steel surface. The shells appear to be formed layer by layer, with crystal size and composition varying across layers."

There are many, many interesting things to highlight here, which include but are not limited to:

SLOW PRINTING

We could literalize the analogy used above by exploring how a controlled or guided version of this exact same process could be used as a new form of biological 3D-printing.

To put this another way, there is already a slow food movement—why not a slow printing one, as well?

Similar to the project John Becker and I explored a while back, using genetically-modified bees as living printheads, damp, metal-rich environments—microbial ovens, so to speak—could be constructed as facsimile mines inside of which particular strains of microbes and fungi would then be cultivated.

Geometric molds would be introduced as "seed-forms" to be depositionally copied by the microbes. Rather than creating the abstract, clamshell-like lumps seen in the below photograph, the microbes would be steered into particular shapes and patterns, resulting in discrete, recognizable objects.

Boom: a living 3D-printer, or a room of specially cultivated humidity and darkness out of which strange replicant tools and objects could be extracted every few years. At the very least, it would make a compelling art project—an object-reef sprouting with microbial facsimiles.

[Image: Metal shells growing in the darkness of abandoned mines; photo by Nieves López-Martínez, via Eos].

DANKNESS INSTRUMENTALIZED

Historian David Gissen has written interestingly about the idea of "dankness" in architecture.

In an article for Domus back in 2010, Gissen explained that "dankness"—or "underground humidity," in his words, a thick atmosphere of mold, rot, and stagnation usually found inside closed, subterranean spaces—was even once posited by architectural historian Marc-Antoine Laugier as a primal catalyst for first inspiring human beings to build cleaner, better ventilated structures—that is, architecture itself, in a kind of long-term retreat from the troglodyte lifestyle of settling in caves.

Dankness, to wildly over-simply this argument, so horrified our cave-dwelling ancestors that they invented what we now call architecture—and a long chain of hygienic improvements in managing the indoor atmospheric quality of these artificial environments eventually led us to modernism.

But dankness has its uses. "While modernists generally held dankness in suspect," Gissen writes, "a few held a certain type of affection for this atmosphere, if only because it was an object of intense scrutiny. The earliest modernist rapprochements with dankness saw it as the cradle of a mythical atmosphere, an atmosphere that preceded modernity." The "atmospheric depths of the cellar," Gissen then suggests, might ironically be a sign of architectural developments yet to come:
Today, in the name of environmentalism, architects are digging into the earth in an effort to release its particular climatic qualities. Passive ventilation schemes often involve underground constructions such as “labyrinths” or “thermosiphons” that release the earth’s cool and wet air. The earth that architects reach into is one that has been so technified and rationalized, so measured and considered, that it barely contains mythical or uncanny aspects. However, this return to the earth’s substrate enables other possibilities.
In any case, I am not only quoting this essay because it is interesting and deserves wider discussion; I am also quoting all this in order to suggest that dankness could also be instrumentalized, or tapped as a kind of readymade industrial process, an already available microbial atmosphere wherein metal-depositing metabolic processes pulsing away in the dankest understructures of the world could be transformed into 3D-printing facilities.

The slow printheads for long-term object replication, mentioned above, would be fueled by and dependent upon Gissen's spaces of subterranean humidity.

HEAVY METAL COMPOST

If it is too difficult, too unrealistic, or simply too uselessly speculative to consider the possibility of 3D-printing with microbes, you could simply eliminate the notion that this is meant to produce recognizable object-forms, and use the same process instead as a new kind of compost heap.

Similar to throwing your old banana peels, coffee grounds, apple cores, and avocado skins into a backyard compost pile, you could throw metallic waste into a Gissen Hole™ and wait for genetically-modified microbes such as these to slowly but relentlessly break it all down, leaving behind weird, clamshell-like structures of purified metal in their wake.

Cropping teams would then climb down into this subterranean recycling center—or open an airlock and step inside some sort of controlled-atmosphere facility tucked away on the industrial outskirts of town—to harvest these easily commodified lumps of metal. It'd be like foraging for mushrooms or picking strawberries.

[Image: An "ancient coral reef," illustrated by Heinrich Harder].

THE COMING SUPER-REEF

Finally, this also seems to suggest at least one fate awaiting the world of human construction long after humans themselves have disappeared.

Basements in the ruined cores of today's cities will bloom in the darkness with ever-expanding metallic reefs, as the steel frames of skyscrapers and the collapsed machinery of the modern world become source material—industrial soil—for future metal-eating microbes.

Quietly, endlessly, wonderfully, the planet-spanning dankness of unmaintained subterranean infrastructure—in the depths of Shanghai, London, New York, Moscow—humidly accumulates these strange metallic shells. Reefs larger than anything alive today form, crystallized from the remains of our cities.

A hundred million years go by, and our towers are reduced to bizarre agglomerations of metal—then another hundred million years and they've stopped growing, now hidden beneath hundreds of meters of soil or flooded by unpredictable shifts of sea level.

Clouds of super-fish unrecognizable to today's science swim through the grotesque arches and coils of what used to be banks and highways, apartment blocks and automobiles, monstrous and oyster-like shells whose indirect human origins no future paleontologist could realistically deduce.

Forest Megaphone

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

These architectural objects are "gigantic wooden megaphones" for the forest, part of an acoustic installation in Estonia's gorgeous Pähni Nature Centre for amplifying the sounds of the landscape.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

"According to interior architect Hannes Praks," we read in a newly published press release, "who leads the Interior Architecture Department of the [Estonian Academy of Arts] that initiated the installation project, the three-metre diameter megaphones will operate as a 'bandstand' for the forest around the installation, amplifying the sounds of nature."

The actual design is by a student named Birgit Õigus.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

Part building, part furniture, part recreational folly, they're meant to focus visitor attention on the smallest acoustic details of the site—rainfall, branches brushing against one another in the breeze, distant footsteps, thunder.

[Image: Photos by Tõnu Tunnel].

Sit in them, read books, whisper to friends, listen to birds.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

Not having visited these in person, I can't speak to their performance—i.e. whether they function as planned—and the relatively orderly placement of each structure in the woods might very well lead to some unfortunately conservative acoustic effects.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

Nonetheless, it's a great idea for a project, and the geometric simplicity of the stained timber frame is compelling.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

Of course, these bring to mind the so-called "acoustic mirrors" of coastal Britain that we looked at here more than a decade ago (!).

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

In turn, makes me wonder how these forest megaphones might appear six or seven decades from now, when small groups of hikers stumble upon the moss-covered forms of this old acoustic infrastructure, trying to determine amongst themselves if the strange audio effects and interrupted echoes they notice still filtering through the wooden forms are a curious accident or an engineered goal.

[Image: Photo by Tõnu Tunnel].

Water & Power

[Image: Via the Library of Congress].

While going through a bunch of old photos of Los Angeles on the Library of Congress website for a project I'm doing at USC this year, I was amazed by these interior shots of the F. E. Weymouth Filtration Plant at 700 North Moreno Avenue in L.A.

Despite being designed for the administration of an urban water-processing site, the interiors seem to play with some strange, Blade Runner-like variation on Byzantine modernism, where federalist detailing meets a hydrological Babylon.

[Image: Via the Library of Congress].

As the open plan interior of a contemporary home, this place would almost undoubtedly show up on every design website today—imagine a better railing on the central staircase, a galley kitchen on one side, a bed lit by retro-styled fluorescent tubes at the far end, some bold moments of color—but it's just a piece of everyday municipal infrastructure.

[Image: Via the Library of Congress].

In any case, continuing the vaguely sci-fi feel, there is even a tiled fountain—a Mediterranean concession to the building's role in water filtration—on one wall, emphasized by these amazing lighting features, yet it looks more like a film set, both ancient and futuristic.

[Image: Via the Library of Congress].

Alas, I'm not a huge fan of the exterior, although it is, in fact, a fairly amazing example of municipal design gone more sacred than profane. But an equally streamlined modernism in keeping with those interiors would have made this place totally otherworldly.

[Image: From the Library of Congress].

Finally, the marbled lobbies continue the surreal mix-up of styles, eras, and materials with something that could perhaps be described as Aztec corporatism with its huge graphic seal and other geometric motifs.

[Image: From the Library of Congress].

For shots of the actual waterworks, click through to the Library of Congress.