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Architectural Nonessentials

2012-01-30T10:18:00.001-05:00

306090, under the guest editorship of David Hays, is seeking "possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge." Hays asks, "What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future?"

These are architectural nonessentials: unexpected sources of spatial counter-expertise that are "currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized" (like, for instance, the peculiar architectural insights found in bank heists, the tactics of urban escape and evasion, or the tools of forced entry banned by California Penal Code 466-469).

Submissions are due March 30, 2012, and more info is available on the 306090 site.

(Via Alex Trevi).

Breaking Out and Breaking In

2012-01-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC.
[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!].

Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in prison escapes and bank heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.

Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that work as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kinds of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?

If burglary and prison breaks each require a kind of counter-manual of the city, then what might such a guide include—from precise time schedules and blindspots to the limits of surveillance—what points of weakness and unexpected parallels should it map, and what typologies of incisions or perforations would it posit to allow new routes through closed spaces?

The escape and the break-in here are both about illicit reinterpretations of space, sometimes violent, sometimes simply used against the grain, operating a building, we might say, in every way the architect—and the guards who police his or her creation—regrettably overlooked.

Conversely, how is space regulated and maintained from the standpoint of the police and the prison guard, or from the point of view of the homeowner who seeks to hide his or her private riches? What obstacles, blockades, misdirections, decoys, safe rooms, and security systems must be implemented to ensure that a given space is properly accessed?
[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath].

These are all recurring themes here on BLDGBLOG, where, over the years, we've discussed how to plan the perfect heist and how to perforate a skyscraper, as well as how to worm your way through the interlinked foundations of London; and perhaps we might say that 19th-century architect George Leonidas Leslie, who used his spatial skills to become "the head of the most successful gang of bankrobbers known," is, in a sense, our festival's mascot or patron saint.

Over the next four months, we will be discussing these questions and many more—from how certain sequences in these films were shot to the stage sets constructed to produce them—culminating in a public event at Studio-X NYC in April.

Of course, not all of these films are escapes from prisons as such or heists specifically aimed at banks; instead, we'll explore what it means to break out from an overly managed suburban life in The Truman Show and how an elaborate home invasion goes wrong in Panic Room; we'll watch the perfectly timed dream-physics kicks and corporate secrets of Inception as well as a team of German terrorists robbing the vaults of the Nakatomi Building of its negotiated bearer bonds. And our list is by no means exhaustive, with some films chosen less for their cinematic quality or the depth of their characterization than for their discussability or the originality of their spatial propositions.

So, in order of viewing, this distributed film fest of prison breaks and bank heists includes:

—Breaking Out—

Friday, January 27, 2012
Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)

Monday, January 30, 2012
A Man Escaped (dir. Robert Bresson, 1956)

Friday, February 3, 2012
The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963)

Monday, February 6, 2012
Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

Monday, February 13, 2012
Papillon (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)

Friday, February 17, 2012
Escape from Alcatraz (dir. Don Siegel, 1979)

Monday, February 20, 2012
Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981)

Friday, February 24, 2012
Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Monday, February 27, 2012
The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)

Friday, March 2, 2012
The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2008)

—Breaking In—

Monday, March 19, 2012
Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955)

Friday, March 23, 2012
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (dir. John Guillermin, 1960)

Monday, March 26, 2012
The Italian Job (dir. Peter Collinson, 1969) vs. The Italian Job (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003)

Friday, March 30, 2012
Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1975) vs. The Third Memory (dir. Pierre Huyghe, 1999)

Monday, April 2, 2012
Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)

Friday, April 6, 2012
Following (dir. Christopher Nolan, 1998)

Monday, April 9, 2012
Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002)

Friday, April 13, 2012
Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee, 2006)

Monday, April 16, 2012
The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008)

Friday, April 20, 2012
Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Again, you can watch the films wherever you might be, from the Lower East Side to Rotterdam, from Toronto and Mumbai to Beijing, and then join the relevant comment threads here on BLDGBLOG (posted, I hope, within a day or two of the screening date). Further, look out for some original analyses on Filmmaker Magazine as the festival unfolds.

Finally, stop by Studio-X NYC on the evening of Tuesday, April 24, for a free public discussion featuring a stellar group of panelists soon to be announced.

I hope many of you will participate in this experiment in film curation!

(New Yorkers, note that Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped happens to be screening this week at Film Forum, so it might be a good idea to catch it before it leaves the theater).

Landscapes of Dredge

2012-01-23T10:08:00.000-05:00

[Image: The expansion of Manhattan island, via Urban Omnibus].

For those of you in New York, consider stopping by Studio-X NYC for a short visual history of geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, engineered earthforms, and other monuments of the dredge cycle as Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth join Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon to present the work of the Dredge Research Collective (with Brett Milligan of Free Association Design, who, sadly, is unable to attend).

In the words of the event organizers:

The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.

For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.

The evening’s conversation, which is free and open to the public and will be followed by a lively Q&A, will also serve as a prelude to a limited-ticket Festival of Dredge tour in the summer of 2012, for which interview attendees will be given reservation priority.

Things kick off at 6:30pm on Tuesday, January 24, at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here's a map. Hope to see you there!

Space Jack

2012-01-11T16:27:00.000-05:00

[Image: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai, via Archinect].

Archinect is currently featuring a project called "White Elephant (Privately Soft)" by Jimenez Lai.

Lai describes it as "a building inside a building," falling "somewhere between super-furniture and a small house." It's a flippable object, able to be tilted and set on any side. It tumbles, in the architect's words, its cowhide-padded interior offering a place to sit in any orientation.

[Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].

I'm basically just posting this here as eye-candy, but there is something awesomely compelling about the notion of super-furniture: hypertrophied spatial objects that are more like portable rooms, perfectly inhabiting the otherwise inexact and under-explored midspace between architecture and a bed or couch, between a house and the ergonomic equipment that fills out.

In fact, the sight of this thing looming all alone in an empty room makes it seem more powerful than it really is, I'd suggest, as it appears, in many ways, to invalidate the walls around it. In other words, why use the walls at all—why even furnish your own apartment—when you can just drop two or three of these white elephants inside it, perhaps lit from within, completing the space with their bulk? Your "bedroom" becomes spatially and materially coextensive with the bed itself.

[Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].

It's a thus a kind of instant room you throw into your house, like spatial jacks, an inhabitable in-between, or burrow space, that both divides the place it sits within and defines an interior of its own.

[Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].

There are more photographs on Archinect showing the spatial object being flipped, as the following, truncated sequence demonstrates—

[Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].

—and Lai's diagrams reveal the variety of facets the project requires.

[Images: "White Elephant" diagrammed, by Jimenez Lai].

But it would also be interesting, given more time, to see many more spatial variations on the same basic idea, but also to explore the effect of different materials, finishes, and colors. Imagine building out a family of these objects the way you might build a BMW or specify a Mini Cooper. You select the geometry, the interior, the upholstery—maybe even small, medium, or large—and soon enough your very own piece of super-furniture arrives, ready for assembly.

[Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].

See more at Archinect.

Submarine City

2012-01-11T11:05:00.003-05:00

[Image: New York Harbor, mapped in 1966, courtesy of NOAA].

Going through old links this morning, I found a story originally published in New York Magazine back in 2009 about the waters of New York City—a maritime metropolis that, many forget, is also an archipelago.

"What, exactly, is down there?" the magazine asked, looking out at the urban waters. "For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms." There are also the now submerged ruins of "Coney Island’s great early theme parks," discarded in the waters after the fun ran out.

[Image: New York Harbor, mapped in 1957, courtesy of NOAA].

It's an incredibly interesting article, as it happens, but those silver bars might even inspire a few of you to change your life direction:

In 1903, a barge in the Arthur Kill—the oily, mucky arm of the harbor between Staten Island and New Jersey—capsized, spilling its cargo of silver ingots. It carried 7,678 bars; about 6,000 were recovered soon after. The rest are still down there. At today’s prices, they’re worth about $26 million. Every now and then, someone tries to find them. So far, no luck.

Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, actually wrote a follow-up piece later in 2009 about a treasure-hunting scientist named Ken Hayes. ("I'm a scientist, not a treasure hunter," says Hayes. "Treasure hunting is just an interesting application of the technology we utilize in the other things.") As of 2009, Hayes was "working on his favorite—and potentially most profitable—project: finding the lost Guggenheim silver, valued at around $26 million."

The whole story is pure Hollywood:

On the boat’s starboard side, shaded by the wheelhouse, Hayes produces a laminated photocopy of a New York Times article from October 17, 1903, which details the barge accident and recovery. It’s effectively a treasure map in article form, Hayes contends, replete with apparent red herrings that he believes could yield important clues. Since first hearing about the silver in the mid-’80s, Hayes has studied the piece like the Rosetta Stone, identifying words whose meanings have altered and dissecting logic gaps and inconsistencies in police reports. He’s plied local people for old rumors about the incident and tried to separate myth from historical fact. Tales abound of a local Native American man who resided in a nursing home with just one possession: an ingot of Guggenheim silver. Hayes never found him.

Here, below, is that 1903 article, if you're curious.

[Image: From the New York Times, October 17, 1903].

In any case, New York Magazine also mentions a somewhat disconcerting detail in which we learn that the roof of the Lincoln Tunnel is actually being slowly eroded of its soil coverage by new river currents that were generated by the pilings of nearby Battery Park City. It's a case of urban hydrodynamics at work:

The Hudson’s main current has, for all of recorded history, clung to lower Manhattan’s edge, skimming along the West Side. Battery Park City, built in the seventies, juts out into that flow, and since then, the current has been cutting a new channel, out toward the center of the river. That current is scraping mud off the top of the Lincoln Tunnel where it never did before; the underwater traffic tubes have lost 25 percent of their soil coverage in some spots. If the tubes ever became exposed, they would be at risk for shifting, cracking, and terrorist threats.

Check out these and other sites in New York's aquatic geography in the original piece.

(Originally via Gideon Shapiro and, I believe, kottke.org).

Drone Landscapes, Intelligent Geotextiles, Geographic Countermeasures

2012-01-07T15:38:00.002-05:00

[Image: The "buried cable intrusion detection sensor," courtesy of G-Max Security].

1) The Israeli-based company G-Max Security makes a "buried cable intrusion detection sensor" that is "totally concealed and operates effectively under any type of surface," from open fields and highways to mountains, snow, and ice. It acts as a "perimeter detection ring" that uses "Passive Magnetic Detection" technology—that is, a buried cable-sensor network—assuring "effective Early Warning of any perimeter intrusion attempt."

This security geotextile is, in effect, an electromagnetic nervous system in the ground.

[Image: The sensor after burial, courtesy of G-Max Security].

However, the system perhaps also foreshadows the implementation of much more complex, spatially ubiquitous, and locally intelligent geotextiles that could monitor, from below, in real-time, and with remarkable accuracy, everything that passes through the landscapes above them.

The most secure landscape in the world could thus someday be an open field—or friendly suburb—peppered with trees and flowers in which all of the surveillance technology is passive, omniscient, experientially invisible, and indistinguishable from the earth.

As a useful replacement for land mines and electrified fences, however, the very idea of a security geotextile brings an alarming potential for weaponization. For instance, what would stop such a system from being given the ability to electrify, stun, immobilize, or even kill a detected intruder? Perhaps this would be the malign or malevolent geotextile I ask about in my essay for Philip Beesley's recent book, Hylozoic Ground.

Either way, it will be interesting—and unfortunately necessary—to track the potentially emergent field of weaponized geotextiles.

2a) The Dutch engineering firm TenCate offers a product called the GeoDetect system. It is "the first sensor enabled geotextile on the market to provide soil reinforcement, structural health monitoring and an early warning system into one package."

It is a computational fabric that structurally strengthens and physically monitors the landscapes it is buried within.

"Our 'intelligent geotextile,'" the company points out, "is the first system designed specifically for geotechnical applications and offers a technical solution for monitoring geo-structures for changes in strain, temperature or the combination of the two." As such, it "incorporates a geocomposite fabric, fiber optics, instrumentation equipment and software to provide a innovative solution for the multi-functional requirements of a geotechnical application" (for example, stabilizing landfills and levees).

You can watch a short video about it here.

2b) To speculate a bit here, if TenCate's GeoDetect is basically a 2D computer or sensor network, then, given further processing power and mechanically augmented with servomotors, a future version of this system could perhaps not only engage in locally autonomous decision-making—a kind of 2D supercomputer disguised as a landscape—but could also physically rearrange itself to protect against impending disasters (such as levee failure or an avalanche).

We might thus find that sentient artificial landforms built from networks of computational geotextiles and mobilized from within by servomotors could literally redesign landscapes in place, on their own, at will. This would, presumably, be for practical purposes (flood mitigation or landslide control), but could also be purely for aesthetics. Imagine a new park of crawling landforms—slow ripples moving through the grass, forming constantly refreshed hills and valleys, the soil pulsing in waves.

[Image: A photo by Toshio Shibata].

These speculative geotextiles, otherwise invisible beneath the ground, could use their own algorithms to monitor visitor activity and thus compute the appropriate spatial response to those visitors' location in the park.

Given such a scenario, the entire Dutch coast could someday be, we might say, a robot: a self-intelligent system of interacting mechanical fabrics that rearrange on their own volition, on the scale of hundreds of miles, to keep Atlantic floodwaters at bay. The art of landscape photography is revolutionized. Bewildering art films are set amongst this crawling landscape. Slow hills move and dance in front of the sun.

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of concrete block installation atop a geotextile base, courtesy of the Directorate of Public Works, Ft. Jackson, South Carolina].

3) These technologies could, of course, be networked yet further, off-site, to other unmanned and interactive technologies. We might describe this as a semi-autonomous landscape-to-robot constellation.

In other words, a sensor-embedded stretch of earth—using a radio-transmitting variant of G-Max's buried cables—could communicate directly with unmanned aerial vehicles, steering them in for precise landings. It is a kind of invisible runway. Or long strips of buried sensors on the perimeter of secure sites could guide UAVs flying high above; pilotless machines bank and turn in a constant loop, following the geotextiles below. They are locked in place—they are steered and guided—by transmissions from inside the ground. (The same could be true of unmanned ground vehicles, following otherwise invisible electromagnetic "roads" embedded in the soil.)

[Images: "An MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft takes off July 17 from Joint Base Balad, Iraq. The Reaper can loiter over battlefields or targets for hours at a time without refueling and carries up to 3,750 pounds of laser-guided munitions, giving ground commanders unprecedented situational awareness and the ability to bring the right amount of force to bear on a target. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Richard Lisum)"].

In effect, this would terrestrialize the so-called robot-readable world: burying the signs and sensors that such machines require and disguising them in apparently natural circumstances. What appears to be a meadow is actually an electromagnetically active runway read and used by UAVs. What you think is a forest is a complex signaling landscape. What appears to be a garden is a computational geotextile interacting with driverless ground vehicles miles away.

4) In any case, all of the above ideas could, perhaps much more interestingly, be used to activate a kind of anti-drone defensive landscape. As the horrific possibility of drone proliferation looms, what spatial and geographic countermeasures could be implemented to mislead, confuse, detour (or détourn), and otherwise deflect pilotless vehicles?

The "perimeter detection ring" examined above, for instance, would instead be used to repel or otherwise blind "intruding" UAVs and UGVs; this could be used for everything from keeping a foreign power's drones out of your sovereign airspace to preventing the IRS from flying drones over your suburb for property tax purposes.

In mythological terms, this would be the geotextile as talisman, or terrestrial ring of protection.

[Images: Geotextiles, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Highway Administration].

So what possibilities exist for landscape architects to, as it were, resist drones, using signal-jamming geotextiles, electromagnetic dazzle effects, or even bizarre new forms of robot-readable camouflage, in order to make drone warfare all but spatially impossible?

Could anti-drone landscapes be added to existing cities—urban spaces or architectural forms lethally confusing to robots—and what might such additions actually look like (if they would be visible to humans at all)?

(Thanks to Rob Holmes and Brett Milligan for first alerting me to the GeoDetect system).

Remnant Infrastructure

2012-01-06T17:34:00.001-05:00

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of electric cables being installed in the Golden Gate Bridge, October 1935; courtesy of the NPS].

In an interestingly archaeological story from the world of digital infrastructure, engineers who discovered "an unused fibre optic cable in Mongolia" were able, after putting it back into service, to "shave milliseconds" from a British firm's internet traffic between London and Hong Kong. After all, there is "unused cabling infrastructure around the world," like forgotten limbs awaiting future reactivation.

"We're finding unused cables all time, everywhere [from] China and Russia to parts of Brazil," a manager named Scott Ritchie explains to Information Age. He continues:

Quite often, when electricity lines are put down, there's underlying optical fibre as well, because if you're digging a hole you may as well whack as many services in there as possible. Some of these assets have been decommissioned or just forgotten about after companies go bankrupt. And sometimes when military objectives change, all of a sudden a bunch of infrastructure becomes available.

And there are backstage geopolitics involved: "We found a cable that went from the Russian border directly down through Mongolia, which cuts out the Northern part of China," Ritchie explains. But, he asks, "Why would there be a secret substation on the Russian border? You would need to ask the Chinese government.'"

It's as if closed-door diplomacy and international espionage together work to leave spatial and infrastructural fossils: embedded fragments of obsolete, redundant, or otherwise forgotten—perhaps only recently declassified—systems that no longer serve their original purpose.

So they're resurrected for business and finance, requiring astute forensic detective work to uncover: "Discovering cables like these is a matter of technical analysis and local market intelligence. 'We have a dedicated team of network engineers whose sole job is to improve the performance of our network,' explains Ritchie. 'A major element of that is discovering new network systems'"—where "new," in this specific example, refers instead to the remote archaeological remains of cross-border espionage projects, old spies' wires brought back online for private telecommunicative purpose.

Imagine a modern descendent of Piranesi with a summer job for AT&T, sent off alone with a truck, a tent, and some wire-testing equipment to explore abandoned villages in the mountains, on the hunt for internets he must single-handedly reawaken.

(Thanks to Tim Stevens for the link!)

Loop Geography as Defensive Tactic

2012-01-02T12:37:00.004-05:00

In a fascinating detail from a long series of articles published two years ago in the Washington Post, recently expanded as a stand-alone book called Top Secret America, we learn about one way to hide classified government infrastructure in plain sight.

[Image: Photo by Michael S. Williamson, courtesy of The Washington Post].

"[J]ust outside Washington," authors Dana Priest and William Arkin explain, in the exurbs of depopulated office parks and "huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant windows," there can be found what the authors describe as "the capital of an alternative geography of the United States, one defined by the concentration of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them."

One such complex, called Fort Meade, "is the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States."

And it is cleverly camouflaged:

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don't realize when they're nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade's, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals.

It's an experiential trap street—an infinite loop—a deliberate cartographic error introduced into the mapping of the world so as to sow detour and digression. A kind of digital baffling, or recursive geography as state defensive tactic.

I'm also curious when we might see this privatized and domesticated—gated communities, for instance, blocking the GPS navigation of their streets in the misguided belief that this will help protect them from future burglary, effectively delisting themselves from public cartographic records. Perhaps the future of neighborhood security lies in the privatized repurposing of advanced signal-jamming technology, the misleading lamination of other, false maps onto the streets as they really exist.

(Detail spotted via @doingitwrong and [thisisaaronland]).

The Baffler

2012-01-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

[Image: From "Baffles and Bastions: The Universal Features of Fortifications" by Lawrence H. Keeley, Marisa Fontana, and Russell Quick, courtesy of the Journal of Archaeological Research (5 March 2007)].

In a paper called "Baffles and Bastions," published in the Journal of Archaeological Research, anthropologists Lawrence H. Keeley, Marisa Fontana, and Russell Quick offer a detailed history of militarized building design features such as "V-sectioned ditches, defended gates, and bastions."

All of the features they subsequently analyze occur at peripheries, borders, and thresholds. In their own words, "the militarily functional ditch and gate features and bastions discussed below, in fact and by definition, are all distinguished by being part of enceintes (that is, surrounding barriers or enclosures). Enceintes are barriers that prevent access to and, almost always, obscure vision of a particular location."

Their diagrams of "baffled" entryways, seen above, are particularly interesting—a kind of archaeological variation on floor plan porn—revealing the various techniques used to at fortified points of entry to gain an advantage over invaders. Through a navigational encounter with architecture, attackers are forced to show their vulnerabilities. "Baffled gates force attackers who enter them to expose their flanks and rear to defenders’ fire," the authors write. "Ideally, they require attackers to turn left exposing their unshielded right side. Left-turning baffles also were useful against (typically) right-handed bowmen."

Bioluminescent Billboards

2011-12-31T15:12:00.000-05:00

[Images: A "living neon sign" made of bioluminescent bacteria; via UC San Diego].

Scientists at UC San Diego have made a bioluminescent bacterial billboard. They call it a "living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs." Making it all work "involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison."

These are referred to as biopixels.

Two summers ago, we looked at the idea of a "bioluminescent metropolis," where light-emitting organisms could be used to supplement—or even replace—a city's existing sources of illumination, as if scaling the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel up to size of a whole city (something that might be useful for places where streetlights are being turned off and even physically removed because paying tax in support of public infrastructure is socialist).

In that post, one of my personal favorites here on the blog, we looked at the work of architect Liam Young, who once proposed the creation of bacterial billboards, squirrel-like living screens that would crawl through and inhabit the city. They would nest in trees like LED ornaments and spring up whenever there's news (or advertisements) to display.

[Image: Bioluminescent billboards by Liam Young].

So could this vision of a bioluminescent metropolis be far off? UC San Diego suggests that their "flashing bacterial signs are not only a visual display of how researchers in the new field of synthetic biology can engineer living cells like machines, but will likely lead to some real-life applications." Surely it would not take much work—even if only as a media stunt—to make a full-scale functioning prototype of a bioluminescent streetlight? Or a bioluminescent bathroom nightlight for your kids?

But, then, of course, the inevitable escape from domestication, when invasive bioluminescent organisms, from genetically-modified kudzu and street weeds to super-bright worms and bacterial mats, conquer the city.

(Via Wired UK).

Ice Island Infrastructure

2011-12-31T13:08:00.001-05:00

[Image: "From Seismic Arrays on Drifting Ice Floes: Experiences From Four Deployments in the Arctic Ocean" by C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, from Seismological Research Letters].

In a paper published back in the July/August 2011 issue of Seismological Research Letters, authors C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research discuss the benefits of tracking deepsea earthquakes using "seismic stations mounted on drifting ice floes." Indeed, they write, because of the lack of fixed ground points, "mounting conventional land seismometers on drifting sea ice is the only way to acquire seismic data in the Arctic Ocean."

In other words, they want to turn drifting fragments of Arctic sea ice into floating research stations, mapping earthquakes at sea.

[Images: "From Seismic Arrays on Drifting Ice Floes: Experiences From Four Deployments in the Arctic Ocean" by C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, from Seismological Research Letters].

The authors have already seen considerable success with this method. In a short passage detailing how these systems are physically installed, we read that the seismic arrays "are deployed and recovered by helicopters operating from icebreaking vessels." However, "the time for station installation is very limited," due to weather and rough seas.

Station installation requires two people and a helping hand from the helicopter pilot, and takes about 30 minutes with the data loggers being programmed before the deployment flight. The limited time does not allow waiting for the sensor to equalize. Therefore, we only check the sensor response and locking of the GPS position before leaving the station.

While the authors compare this, briefly, to using buoys—indicating that their method is not all that different from other free-floating oceanographic instrumentation systems—the transformation of icebergs into scientifically useful platforms is a compelling example of how a natural phenomenon can become infrastructure with even the smallest addition of equipment. The iceberg has literally been instrumentalized: a temporary archipelago, too short-lived to appear on maps, turned into a scientific instrument.

In this context, it's worth revisiting the story of Drift Station Bravo, one of many inhabited icebergs in the Cold War era that had its own postal system, complete with historically unique stamp cancellations.[Image: Drift Station Bravo postage cancellation mark, via Polar Philately].

As explained on the website Polar Philately, Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher, commander of an Air Force weather squadron stationed in the Arctic, discovered "a large tabular iceberg... that had broken off the Arctic ice shelf... [and] gone adrift." This ice island was soon "codenamed T-1, taken from its original radar designation as a target." Future "ice islands" were codenamed T-2 and T-3.

On March 19, 1952, the U.S. Air Force led by Colonel Fletcher and some scientists landed on this ice island [T-3] in a C-47 aircraft, setting up a weather observation station. Fletcher established a research station that was manned at this big ice sheet for roughly the next 25 years, despite a grim quote given by the head of the Alaska Air Command at the time, a General Old, who was quoted in a Life magazine article of the time as saying "I don't see how any man can live on this thing."

It's worth repeating that Fletcher's team operated this weather station on a repurposed ice floe for 25 years.

Fletcher's Ice Island, and the research station that was located on it, rotated in circles in the Arctic Ocean, floating aimlessly along in the Arctic currents in a clockwise direction. The station was inhabited mainly by scientists along with a few military crewmen and was resupplied during its existence primarily by military planes operating from Barrow, Alaska.

The island—later renamed "Drift Station Bravo"—was inhabited long enough that it actually got its own postal network.

[Image: Letters postmarked from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

From Polar Philately:

During the period of active habitation, T-3 covers [postage stamps] were serviced, each stamped with a variety of hand-stamped cachets and markings, dated, and often marked with a manuscript notation of the geographic position of the drifting station on that particular day of ops. The T-3/Bravo covers were often cancelled at Barrow or at a USAF base in Alaska, and then placed in the mailstream.

In other words, envelopes would be stamped with the latitude and longitude of the iceberg at the moment of a letter's departure.

[Images: Postal marking and a letter from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

The story takes on clear geopolitical dimensions when we remember that Drift Station Bravo and its ilk—such as Drift Station Alpha, about which you can watch an entire documentary film—were created in direct response to the Soviet Union's own ice island program. The Soviets "already operated six drifting ice camps of this kind," we read in the documentary transcript, downloadable as a 27kb PDF, but, "owing to the particular strategic importance and sensitivity of the Arctic Basin, little information from these early Soviet stations had reached the West."

The transcript goes on to explain how the U.S managed to architecturally colonize these mobile platforms. Military civilization on the ice established itself as follows:

...a ski-equipped C-47 landed on the ice and deployed the first team of workers. It included an Air Force Major as camp commander and several soldiers with technical skills who had volunteered for 6 months duty on the ice, plus four of the typical tough and versatile Alaskan construction workers.

Modular buildings, called Jamesway huts, camp supplies, fuels, two small World War II Studebaker tractors, called Weasel, and a small bulldozer, were dropped by parachutes.

The story expands rapidly from here. In an article originally published in the September-October 1966 issue of Air University Review, we read that competitive Soviet drift stations apparently discovered a "second magnetic north pole... located near 80° N and 178° W, with magnetic medians extending across the Arctic Ocean," and that sulfuric gas fumes from a badly timed undersea volcanic eruption killed at least one unlucky crew member. A particularly eye-popping detail comes when we read that these researchers deliberately generated earthquakes in the iceberg they lived on: "we generated tiny earthquakes in the ice. The propagation of the compressional waves generated in this way are used to study the elastic properties of the ice."

This brings us back to C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, whose paper in Seismological Research Letters examines the problem of "icequakes," or seismic activity internal to the ice floe on which their equipment rests, thus interfering with accurate measurements. They even mention at least one occurrence of a so-called "bearquake," when a curious polar bear came by to nudge the seismometer and see what was really going on. The authors refer to these events as "special signals."

In any case, will this floating seismic network adrift in the waters of the Arctic also receive its own stamps and postal cancellations? Presumably not, but it would nonetheless be interesting to examine the becoming-infrastructure of these ice floes in a larger geographic context.

We Can Move It For You Wholesale

2011-12-31T08:44:00.003-05:00

[Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries].

In 1886, Los Angeles moved the Fort Moore High School. "A contractor who claimed he could accomplish the task hoisted the building onto scaffolding and, using rollers, horses, and human labor, slowly moved the schoolhouse toward its new location," KCET explains. "After work was underway, the contractor decided that the task was impossible after all. The building remained where his crew left it"—unfortunately, not marooned on the stilts seen here, like some steampunk Walking City, but on its new ground-level site blocks away. Once lowered back to earth, it was "repurposed as a schoolhouse for younger students while a new, grander high school was built atop Fort Moore Hill."

It's as if, in a dreamtime state before any of us can remember, buildings once moved around Los Angeles, nomadic titans settling down only with the end of prehistory. Perhaps they will wake up and walk again, criss-crossing valleys, crawling over hills, rearranging roadways around themselves.

Eventually, most of Fort Moore Hill itself was physically removed from the city. "In 1949, construction crews transported away most of the hill by the truckload," we read, turning it into one of the "lost hills of downtown Los Angeles." If only the hill had disappeared, however, leaving all the buildings built upon it stranded on wooden scaffolds in the sunlight, a tablecloth trick in architectural form.

Return of the Brick Swarm

2011-12-24T11:27:00.001-05:00

A short video has been released documenting the brick swarm project mentioned here last month, in which Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler deploy semi-autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure of foam bricks. However, it's as if the architects underestimate the interest of their own work, fast-forwarding through the bulk of the assembly process as if no one would want to watch such a thing (or perhaps their robots were less graceful than originally hoped). Either way, check out the results, embedded above.

(Thanks to phenrydelphia for the tip!)

Speleological Superparks

2011-12-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

[Image: Downtown Reno on a Saturday night with people queuing up to climb the BaseCamp wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

As part of an overall strategy to rebrand itself not as a city of gambling and slot machines—not another Las Vegas—but as more of a gateway to outdoor sports and adventure tourism—a kind of second Boulder or new Moab—Reno, Nevada, now houses the world's largest climbing wall, called BaseCamp, attached to the side of an old hotel.

[Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

BaseCamp is "a 164-foot climbing wall, 40 feet taller than the previous world’s highest in the Netherlands," according to DPM Climbing. "The bouldering area will also be world-class with 2900 square feet of overhanging bouldering surface."

You can see a few pictures of those artificial boulders over at DPM.

[Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Fascinatingly, though, the same company who designed and manufactured this installation—a firm called Entre Prises—also makes artificial caves.

One such cave, in particular, created for and donated to the British Caving Association, is currently being used "to promote caving at shows and events around the country. It is now housed in its own convenient trailer and is available for use by Member Clubs and organizations."

[Image: The British Caving Association's artificial cave, designed by Entre Prises; photo by David Cooke].

These replicant geological forms are modular, easily assembled, and come in indoor and outdoor varieties. Indoor artificial caves, we read, "are usually made from polyester resin and glass fibre as spraying concrete indoors is often not very practicable. Indoor caves provide the experience of caving without some of the discomforts of natural or outdoor caves: the air temperature can be relatively easily controlled, in most cases specialist clothing is not required [and] the passage walls are not very thick so more cave passage can be designed to go into a small area."

Further, maintaining the exclamation point from the original text: "The modular nature of the Speleo System makes it possible to create any cave type and can be modified in minutes by simply unbolting and rotating a section! This means you can have hundreds of possible caving challenges and configurations for the price of one."

It would be interesting to live in a city, at least for a few weeks, ruled by an insane urban zoning board who require all new buildings—both residential and commercial—to include elaborate artificial caves. Not elevator shafts or emergency fire exits or public playgrounds: huge fake caves torquing around and coiling through the metropolis. Caves that can be joined across property lines; caves that snake underneath and around buildings; caves that arch across corporate business lobbies in fern-like sprays of connected chambers. Plug-in caves that tour the city in the back of delivery trucks, waiting to be bolted onto existing networks elsewhere. From Instant City to Instant Cave. Elevator-car caves that arrive on your floor when you need them. Caves on hovercrafts and helicopters, detached from the very earth they attempt to represent.

This brings to mind the work of Carsten Höller, implying a project someday in which the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern could be transformed into the world's largest artificial cave system, or perhaps even a future speleo-superpark in a place like Dubai, where literally acres of tunnels sprawl across the landscape, inside and outside, aboveground and below ground, in unpredictably claustrophobic rearrangeable prefab whorls.

The "outdoor" varieties, meanwhile, are actually able "to be buried within a hillside"; however, they "must be able to withstand the bearing pressure of any overlying material, eg. soil or snow. This is usually addressed by making the caving structures in sprayed concrete that has been specifically engineered to withstand the loads. Alternatively the cave passages can be constructed in polyester resin and glass fibre but then they have to be within a structural 'box' if soil pressure is to be applied."

In any case, here are some of the cave modules offered by Entre Prises, a kind of cave catalog called the Speleo System—though it's worth noting, as well, that "To add interest within passages and chambers, cave paintings and fossils can be added. This allows for user interest to be maintained, creating an educational experience."

[Image: The Speleo System by Entre Prises].

As it happens, Entre Prises is also in the field of ice architecture. That is, they design and build large, artificially maintained ice-climbing walls.

These "artificial ice climbing structures... support natural ice where the air temperature is below freezing point." However, "permanent indoor structures," given "a temperature controlled environment," can also be created. These are described as "self generating real ice structures that utilize a liquid nitrogen refrigeration system."

[Images: An artificial ice structure by Entre Prises for the Winter X Games].

Amongst many things, what interests me here is the idea that niche sports enthusiasts—specifically cavers and climbers—have discovered and, perhaps more importantly, financially support a unique type of architecture and the construction techniques required for assembling it that, in an everyday urban context, would appear quite eccentric, if not even avant-garde.

Replicant geological formations in the form of modular, aboveground caves and artificially frozen concrete towers only make architectural and financial sense when coupled with the needs of particular recreational activities. These recreational activities are more like spatial incubators, both inspiring and demanding new, historically unexpected architectural forms.

So we might say that, while architects are busy trying to reimagine traditional building typologies and architectural programs—such as the Library, the Opera House, the Airport, the Private House—these sorts of formally original, though sometimes aesthetically kitsch, designs that we are examining here come not from an architecture firm at all, or from a particular school or department, but from a recreational sports firm pioneering brand new spatial environments.

As such, it would be fascinating to see Entre Prises lead a one-off design studio somewhere, making artificial caves a respectable design typology for students to admit they're interested in, while simultaneously pushing sports designers to see their work in more architectural terms and prodding architects to see niche athletes as something of an overlooked future clientele.

Brooklyn Vent

2011-12-22T16:16:00.001-05:00

[Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].

In the novel Foucault's Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People "walk by" this certain house in Paris, we read, "and they don't know the truth. That the house is a fake. It's a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld..."

[Image: The door to the underworld; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Two days ago, Nicola Twilley and I went on an early evening expedition over to visit the house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, with its blacked out windows and unresponsive front door.

This "house" is actually "the world's only Greek Revival subway ventilator" and disguised emergency exit.

[Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].

According to a blog called the Willowtown Association, "the ventilator was a private brownstone dating from 1847. The substation was built in 1908 in conjunction with the start of subway service to Brooklyn. As reported in the BKLYN magazine article, the building's 'cavernous interior once housed a battery of electrical devices that converted alternating current to the 600-volt direct current needed to power the IRT.'"

[Image: A view through the front door of 58 Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].

It is New York's more interesting version of 23/24 Leinster Gardens in London. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote last year, "the exit disguised as a brownstone leads to a grimy-lit set of metal stairs that ascend past utility boxes and ventilation shafts into a windowless room with a door. If you opened the door, you would find yourself on a stoop, which is just part of the façade."

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG].

You'll notice on Google Maps that the 4/5 subway line passes directly beneath the house, which brings to mind an old post here on BLDGBLOG in which we looked at the possibility that repurposed subway cars could be used someday as extra, rentable basement space—that is, "temporary basements in the form of repurposed subway cars," with the effect that "each private residence thus becomes something like a subway station, with direct access, behind a locked door, to the subterranean infrastructure of the city far below."

Then, for a substantial fee—as much as $15,000 a month—you can rent a radically redesigned subway car, complete with closets, shelves, and in-floor storage cubes. The whole thing is parked beneath your house and braked in place; it has electricity and climate control, perhaps even WiFi. You can store summer clothes, golf equipment, tool boxes, children's toys, and winter ski gear.
When you no longer need it, or can't pay your bills, you simply take everything out of it and the subway car is returned to the local depot.
A veritable labyrinth of moving rooms soon takes shape beneath the city.

Perhaps Joralemon Street is where this unlikely business model could be first tried out...

In any case, Nicola and I walked over to see the house for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the disguised-entrance-to-the-underworld is undoubtedly one of the coolest building programs imaginable, and would make an amazing premise for an intensive design studio; but also because the surface vent structures through which underground currents of air are controlled have always fascinated me.

These vents appear throughout New York City, as it happens—although Joralemon, I believe, is the only fake house—serving as surface articulations of the larger buried networks to which they are connected.

[Image: Two views of the tunnel vent on Governors Island; photos by BLDGBLOG].

The Battery Tunnel has a particularly noticeable vent, pictured above, and the Holland Tunnel also vents out near my place of work.

[Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].

As historian David Gissen writes in his excellent book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, New York's ventilation control structures are "strange buildings" that have "collapsed" the difference between architecture and civil engineering:

The Holland Tunnel spanned an enormous 8,500 feet. At each end, engineers designed ten-story ventilation towers that would push air through tunnels above the cars, drawing the vehicle exhaust upward, where it would be blown back through the tops of the towers and over industrial areas of the city. The exhaust towers provided a strange new building type in the city—a looming blank tower that oscillated between a work of engineering and architecture.

As further described in this PDF, for instance, Holland Tunnel has a total of four ventilation structures: "The four ventilation buildings (two in New Jersey and two in New York) house a total of 84 fans, of which 42 are blower units, and 42 are exhaust units. They are capable, at full speed, of completely changing the tunnel air every 90 seconds."

[Image: The Holland Tunnel Land Ventilation Building, courtesy of Wikipedia].

Several years ago a friend of ours remarked that she didn't like staying in hotels near Columbus Circle here in New York because that's the neighborhood, she said, where all the subways vent to—a statement that appears to be nothing more than an urban legend, but that nonetheless sparked off a long-term interest for me in finding where the underground weather systems of New York City are vented to the outside. Imagine an entire city district dedicated to nothing but ventilating the underworld!

[Image: The house on Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].

This is a topic I will no doubt return to at some point soon—but, for now, if you want to see a disguised entrance to the 4/5 line, walk down Joralemon Street toward the river and keep your eyes peeled soon after the street turns to cobblestones.

(The house on Joralemon Street first discovered via Curbed).

Drone Tax

2011-12-22T14:37:00.002-05:00

[Image: An otherwise unrelated image of the unmanned Draganflyer X8 system, courtesy of Draganfly].

A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the "small unmanned aviation system industry"—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.

Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that "has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes," and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.

Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city land archives, how soon will drones become a state tool for regional landscape management?

[Images: Might semi-autonomous systems such as this someday track residential property lines? Images courtesy of Draganfly].

"Imagine your local planning officer having access to your back garden at a moment's notice!" sUAS writes with alarm. "With the pullback from Iraq and other spots under way, this scenario is much easier to imagine. Perhaps it's already happening."

(Thanks to Ruth Lyons for the Achill Henge link).

A 7-Mile Rainbow for Kim Jong-il

2011-12-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

[Image: Assembling the 7-mile rainbow one ring at a time, by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben's diploma project, part of which proposed a farcical realization of a 7-mile rainbow reportedly seen on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's birth.

[Image: Assembling the rainbow; images by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Truckloads of vinyl are delivered to the capital city; teams of "volunteers" pump vast amounts of air into the unfolding structures—the imperial inflatable as architectural type; and, lo, the titanic pink and purple form ascends to its nostalgic place in the public firmament, assembled ring by ring across the sky.

[Image: The glorious 7-mile rainbow takes form].

While I have cherry-picked only one aspect of Ben's overall North Korean research project, and thus this might seem like a bit of a one-note flute, I have to say that the absurdly over-the-top scale of the proposal actually seems spot-on for an architectural critique of Kim Jong-il's surreal stage-managing of North Korean life.

In many ways, this spatial realization of the state's own ridiculous mythology serves as a sadly necessary—because totally delirious—over-compensation for the otherwise monumentally vacuous cityscapes of North Korean urbanism, as if the grotesque political spectacle of a pink rainbow soaring seven miles over the city might retroactively justify that city's empty stagecraft.

[Images: Rainbow diagrams by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In the annals of dictatorial natural history—where, apparently, "even nature is mourning" the death of Kim Jong-il—the tongue-in-cheek architectural manifestation of an otherwise impossible worldly phenomena acts not as celebration but as spatial parody. It is sarcasm, we might say, given architectural form.

[Image: The rainbow under construction; image by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In any case, a few more images from the project are available on Ben's Flickr page.

Portfolio Futures

2011-12-16T10:54:00.000-05:00

[Image: From the Morpholio app].

A few of my colleagues at Columbia have just released a free portfolio app called Morpholio, with the aim of creating "a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture."

As such, the app aims to be "both a utility and a community"—part social network, part alternative portfolio. "Capable of communicating with multiple devices," the accompanying press release says, Morpholio "organizes image collections in a comprehensible and accessible format that makes sharing and presenting work seamless, and infinitely flexible."

[Images: From the Morpholio app].

As the app's co-creators explain it, "re-imagining the portfolio" like this in the form of interactive digital media was inspired by asking: "what would happen if you could merge processes of presentation, critique and collaboration into a single elastic platform?"

The app is optimized for iPad—so I haven't been able to test it out—but you can download it for free and give it a spin.

House of the Cave Bear

2011-12-16T10:14:00.002-05:00

[Image: The erstwhile basement hibernator, photographed by Brendan Kuty/Patch.com, via Gothamist].

I'm a sucker for tales of the after-market animal reuse of domestic architectural structures—such as wildcats taking over foreclosed California suburbs, bees colonizing the internal walls of a single-family house until honey drips from the electrical outlets, or the strangely elaborate saga of a pack of coyotes living in a burned-out home in Glendale—so I can't resist this story, in which a man from the cable company descends into a basement in Hopatcong, New Jersey, only to find that a black bear had taken up residence there and had apparently been living in the basement for weeks.

According to the police, the bear had even "fashioned a den of his own in the basement, bringing in twigs and leaves, in anticipation of a winter-long stay." The architecturally inclined bear—building a more comfortable bed for himself—was getting ready to hibernate.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

Mine Plug

2011-12-14T10:56:00.000-05:00

[Image: The museum inserted underground, by Brandon Mosley].

The town of Picher, Oklahoma, offers a range of spatial conditions that support speculative design projects.

On the most basic level, the town is "at risk of cave-ins" due to the "abandoned mines beneath the city"; this means that "trucks traveling along the highway are diverted around Picher for fear that the hollowed-out mines under the town would cause the streets to collapse under the weight of big rigs."

Further, the now-defunct lead mines generated so much waste that the town is now surrounded by massive artificial mountain ranges of carcinogenic material called "chat," as the creation of voids beneath the streets generated surreal landforms on the city's edge. Third, a great deal of the town was destroyed in a tornado in 2008—and that's all in addition to the fact that the town is under voluntary buy-out for the U.S. government, as it is considered too dangerous to live there.

[Images: Photos of Picher's artificial landforms, courtesy of the USGS].

In any case, Brandon Mosley, a recent graduate from Louisiana Tech University, explored some possible future architectures for the town of Picher.

Mosley specifically proposes a kind of museum of abandoned mines, inserted directly into one of the old entry shafts.

[Images: A museum of mines in Picher, Oklahoma, by Brandon Mosley].

The local history of the region can thus be physically re-experienced, as well as visually represented, with museum visitors descending into the old mineworks along a spiraling ramp that has been inserted into the earth.

[Images: Sections through the museum, by Brandon Mosley].

It functions like a giant periscope in reverse, peering down into the planet, as the ramp leads visitors into the darkness of an open cavern where, standing atop a glass floor, they can gaze out into the artificially generated terrestrial void that surrounds them.

[Image: Inside the "cavern observation room," by Brandon Mosley].

There is even a camera obscura there, for projecting images of Picher's current, semi-ruined state on the walls of the underground space, powerfully placing blame on these subterranean excavations for serving as the engine of the town's ill health and eventual demise. This is the landscape your creation destroyed, the project would seem to say.

As an idea for spatially explaining to visitors a region's economic and environmental history, this is a powerful and intriguing idea; and, as an architectural form—a more interesting version of the so-called groundscraper in Mexico City that's been making the rounds online recently—Mosley's project has much to recommend it. A museum of the earth, drilled into the earth.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Tar Creek Supergrid).

Psychometric Drawing Experiments, Architectural Non Sequiturs, and Free Association

2011-12-07T22:24:00.001-05:00

[Image: Pitching a tent].

New Yorkers, be sure to stop by Studio-X NYC on Saturday, December 10th, at 6:30pm, to catch architect Sam Jacob, from Fashion Architecture Taste and Strange Harvest, for a free drawing workshop. Called An Evening of Psychometric Drawing Experiments, Architectural Non Sequiturs, and Free Association, this latest edition of Studio-X's Night School series "will explore the potential of drawing to generate and represent the spatially impossible, using techniques derived from police artists, psychiatrists, and parlor games." No drawing skills are required, but please bring your own pens, pencils, and sketchbooks, if you have specific needs or preferences (only minimal drawing instruments will be provided).

In an interview with Jacob, published in The BLDGBLOG Book, I asked him about the role of supposedly non-architectural ideas, from literature and myth to NASA and the earth sciences, in helping to inspire new forms of architectural design and spatial thinking. He replied:

I think, if you say that these things that aren’t quite architecture actually are architecture, then you start to think: Well, how come architects aren’t involved in designing them? How come they don’t call up an architect when they need to build a massive gas pipeline all the way from Wales to central England? There are so many architectural moments that could happen within a project like that. Well, it’s partly because architects, on the whole, don’t want to get involved in that kind of stuff—but it’s also because it’s not perceived as something that you would need an architect for. I suppose you could say: if all of that stuff is architectural, then, as an architect, you should get involved in it, and you should argue why it’s relevant for an architect to be involved. That would mean, from a business point of view, expanding your possible client base so that you could work for all kinds of strange organizations. I suppose that’s not unusual, either—the Eameses were working for the U.S. military and Basil Spence worked in the second World War designing decoy oil refineries so that the Germans would bomb these bits of cardboard rather than the real things.
But I’m also interested in expanding the idea of architecture in terms of thinking about what the term means in a more general way. For instance, working with someone from an advertising background, or working with an artist, or a writer—that gives you an ability to look beyond the confines of what is normally considered architectural. With those sorts of projects you’re not building a building, you’re kind of making a scenario—which, if you think about it in the right way, at the right time of night, after the right amount of wine, is architecture. These are often temporary projects which hijack a moment that already exists, and turn it into a moment where something else could happen. Because, fortunately, architecture is not just about building stuff. You can have a pretty good career as someone involved in architecture, even as an architect, without ever building anything. If, as an architect, you sit there waiting for stuff to happen—it’s inevitable that you’re going to reproduce the status quo. I think that, in whatever way, architects can make stuff happen, whether it’s to do with ideas or to do with buildings.
Once you start to recognize these things as significant moments in the life of a city, or in someone’s experience of the city, then they offer up architectural scenarios.

You can check out the rest of the interview in The BLDGBLOG Book, of course, but you can also come by Studio-X NYC on Saturday night to talk to Sam Jacob in person. If you can, please confirm your attendance on Facebook—either way, we hope to see you there!

Urban by Nature

2011-12-06T14:07:00.001-05:00

[Image: Untitled, Diana Balmori (2010), via Architect's Newspaper].

On Thursday, December 8, at 6:30pm, landscape architect Diana Balmori will join architect Joel Sanders for a lively conversation hosted by the Museum of the City of New York, addressing what they call Urban by Nature: Healing the Landscape/Architecture Divide in NYC. From the event description:

Nowhere is the divide between nature and culture, country and city, seemingly more stark than in New York City, where concrete, glass, and steel long ago tamped down the native flora and fauna of Manhattan. How can architecture and landscape architecture, themselves the product of the nature/culture divide, help mend this physical and philosophical rift?

Balmori and Sanders recently co-edited the book Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. There, in his introductory essay, Sanders writes that it is "imperative" today for "design professionals—architects and landscape architects—to join forces to create integrated designs to address ecological issues." However, he mourns, "longstanding disciplinary divisions frustrate this crucial endeavor." In part, Sanders looks back to the very idea of wilderness—that is, a pristine world separate from human activity—as a limit to discovering these "integrated" practices. In his words, "the idea of wilderness is so engrained in the American conscience—through literature, philosophy, and even notions of gender and sexuality—that it has effectively shaped the design approaches and even codes of professional conduct that in many ways still define the relationship between architecture and landscape practice."

So how can this divide be overcome? What specific projects could we propose in order to demonstrate the "integrated designs" whose absence Sanders highlights? And if the remedy is not a design project at all but a more subtle, philosophical shift in how we think about—and even believe in the concept of—wilderness, what is the proper arena for definitive action?

Sanders and Balmori will discuss these and other questions in the context of their ongoing collaboration for a new linear park system and proposed streetscape redesign here in New York City, which they will also present in an opening slideshow. As you'll see on Thursday evening, that project envisions a truly massive pedestrian park stretching the length of northern Broadway, and their pitch for it is not to be missed.

I'm also thrilled to say that I will be moderating their discussion, bringing many themes and questions of my own and drawing, for instance, on the recent work of such figures as Emma Marris, Caroline Fraser, Janette Sadik-Khan, Liam Young, landscape anthropologist Clark Erickson, and others. The ensuing Q&A will thus range from future materials (such as robotic geotextiles) and controversial technologies (such as genetic modification) available to landscape architects; the legacies, both toxic and generous, of previous urban planning administrations; the incredible challenge of preemptive landscape design in the context of global climate change; and specific urban sites where ecological redesign is most clearly needed.

You'll find more information, including how to buy tickets, over at the Museum of the City of New York website. I hope to see some of you there!

Sutured San Francisco

2011-12-04T19:11:00.001-05:00

[Image: "Sunset Bulbs" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].

The Streets series by photographer Leigh Merrill perfectly captures the often unexpectedly suburban architecture of San Francisco, a city that—away from its famed Victorian houses and its picturesque skyline—can be relentlessly dull. The featureless white skies of that peninsular metropolis and the anemic pastels of its painted stucco facades always seem strangely out of synch with the city's otherwise vibrant human atmosphere.

[Images: (top) "Convergence" and (bottom) "Christmas" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].

"Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007," the artist writes, "I began looking at the complexity of its urban environment. The Bay Area presents a unique blend of residential living that sits between urban and suburban in a way that never quite reconciles one with the other."

Merrill's photos, on the other hand, are inventions.

[Images: (top) "White Street," (second from top) "Ocean Circle", (second from bottom) "Jean Street," and (bottom) "Caraway Street," all by Leigh Merrill from Streets].

She continues:

In investigating this landscape I photographed thousands of homes throughout the area and then digitally assembled these images together to create new and illogical structures and streets. At first these images look plausible, however, closer inspection reveals their fabrication. The reconstructed homes and neighborhoods appear skewed, revealing their underlying and sometimes unconscious intentions. These constructs highlight the ways in which our built environments pull from a variety of different architectural and landscape styles and reflect cultural ideas of beauty and perfection. In working with the Bay Area as a site for investigation, I explore what our built environments tell us about our own individual desires as well as our collective culture and ideals.

Similar to the work of Filip Dujardin, Merrill's images assemble believable structures just up to the limit of surreality. Weird topiaries and stained concretes reappear image to image and impossible vanishing points force odd symmetries on the opposing edges of single compositions.

[Images: (top) "Bushes" and (bottom) "Pebble Street" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].

San Francisco seems surprisingly well-represented by this technique, I have to say, and Merrill's digital skills are incredible. And, lest her approach somehow seem possible only within the repetitive suburban architecture of outer San Francisco, Merrill has embarked upon a similar project featuring the low-slung buildings and storefronts of north Texas with equally interesting results.

[Image: "The Dragon" by Leigh Merrill from Into the Sunset].

The idea of the imaginary view brings to mind the distortionary engraving techniques of Piranesi, who similarly fabricated exaggerated, impossible, and critical views of the city—in his case, Rome. Only, in this case, it's as if Piranesi had moved to the Sunset District or the Outer Richmond of San Francisco, that supposedly beautiful city, with a high-res camera and a copy of Creative Suite.

[Images: (top) "Ocean Place" and (bottom) "Ocean Street" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].

Meanwhile, Merrill's work is available in a new print from Small Batch Editions. Small Batch Editions "is dedicated to bringing together a carefully curated selection of photographs from around the world, and making them available for a wider audience. To this end, we proudly publish limited edition prints, working closely alongside each artist to ensure the highest standards of quality."

Check out their back catalog—and more of Leigh Merrill's work—when you get a chance.

(Thanks to Melissa Stafford of Small Batch Editions for the tip).

The Architecture of Banana Control

2011-12-04T19:05:00.001-05:00

[Image: A nearly empty banana truck; photo by the author].

I had the pleasure two weeks ago of tagging along on a field trip led by Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, for a seminar she's teaching this fall at Columbia's GSAPP. Called "The Artificial Cryosphere," the class is an extended look at spaces and technologies of artificial refrigeration, from morgues to ice cream plants, from sperm banks to indoor hockey rinks, from spacecraft testing rooms to the transportation needs of organ-donation networks.

The field trip itself started off early at a banana-ripening and fruit distribution warehouse in Queens, extending from there to one of the largest refrigerated food warehouses in the country and ending with a series of visits to semi-automated modified-atmosphere packing lines and other meat-processing facilities, complete with fat-covered chainsaws attached to the ceiling and mandatory hairnets.

Nicola has written up the first part of that trip, describing in detail her class's journey through the architecture of banana ripening. "Nearly two million bananas pass through these ripening rooms," we read on Edible Geography, "on their journey to New York consumers each week—a vital link in the largely invisible, highly specialized architecture of artificial refrigeration that has enabled the banana to become and remain America’s favourite fruit." Much of this is about dissimulation, artificially inducing the fruit-ripening process using "pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador." It is architecture pretending toward a condition of ideal nature.

Further, we learned how boxes of bananas are first designed—with holes in their cardboard boxes—and then stacked—in orderly aisles, leading to wall-sized fans that suck air through the room—so as to maximize ventilation, and that it is more or less an entirely nocturnal operation, with the warehouse only opening at 10pm. In particular, though, it's hard to forget walking into the ethylene-dosing chambers with their massive 20'-doors, like something out of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, promising some strange and vaguely sinister vegetative presence on the other side.

[Image: The Lovecraftian doors of the banana crypt; photo by the author].

In any case, Edible Geography has a much longer write-up, and it's well worth checking out in full.

The Rounds

2011-12-04T12:03:00.001-05:00

[Image: The defused Koblenz bomb is lifted to safety].

1) The German city of Koblenz was partially evacuated over the weekend so that two still active WWII-era bombs—including one weighing 1.8 tons—could be defused. The bombs "were discovered when water levels fell because of a prolonged dry spell," the BBC reports. As it happens, "600 tons of old munitions from two world wars [are] discovered every year" in Germany, with this perhaps being one of the few examples of discovery-by-drought.

2) Elsewhere, drought in parts of Europe has become so extreme that Switzerland's ski resorts have no snow. "The autumn has been the driest on record in the country."

3) Over in Texas, meanwhile, a record-setting drought has lent an archaeological air to the region's weather. "The historic drought that has devastated crops and forced millions of Texans in small towns and large cities to abide by mandatory water restrictions," the New York Times explains, "has had at least one benefit: As lake levels have dropped around the state, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades and even centuries are being revealed." Human skulls, tombstones, the bodies of suicide victims, and even "a piece of debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia" have been found in "roughly 200 previously unreported archaeological sites resulting from lowered lake levels." The chairman of a local historical commission quips that “everybody hates the drought, but I needed the drought." "I knew it was there," he adds, referring to a cemetery for freed slaves that has been revealed by the receding waters. The image is remarkable: a whole state of archaeologists, landowners, and historians waiting patiently on the shores of shrinking lakes for some forgotten landscape or artifact to be revealed.

[Image: Part of the Space Shuttle Columbia; photo courtesy of the Nacogdoches Police Department via the New York Times].

4) Politics by geography: "There are no guard towers, or Checkpoint Charlies, or even walls. But scores of American cities, counties and metropolitan areas are being divided again—splitting apart families, neighbors and, most important, voters with similar interests and needs—as states engage in the once-a-decade process of drawing the lines of new Congressional districts." However, "when urban and metropolitan areas are broken up and combined with rural areas, mayors say, fewer voices are left to vigorously push an urban or metropolitan agenda in Washington." And so cities are underserved by the political process. This latter point is perhaps reminiscent of an earlier discussion here on BLDGBLOG: Minor landscapes and the geography of American political campaigns.

5) "Imagine a lush forest: silent but for the chirping of birds flying through a dense canopy overhead, and damp, aromatic earth underfoot. Now picture a mountain of incinerated trash, 12 million tons of what was once a toxic heap of rotting fish and vegetables, old clothes, broken furniture, diapers and all manner of discarded items." This describes a new project by architect Tadao Ando called the Sea Forest. The Sea Forest "will transform 88 hectares of reclaimed land, a 30-meter deep mound of alternating layers of landfill, into a dense forest of nearly half a million trees" in Tokyo Bay. Ando adds that it is also an experiment in climate-engineering, or weather control as the future of urban design: "not only will [the forest] become a refreshing retreat for stressed out city workers, it will also create a cool ocean breeze to sweep through the capital and cool its sweaty denizens in summer."

[Images: Spreads from Project Japan, courtesy of Taschen].

6) The new book Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist is an incredible document, in both physical and intellectual terms. The design, by Irma Boom, is gorgeous, and the contents—consisting of long, illustrated interviews with such figures as Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange's Tange Lab, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, and many others, scattered amongst historical imagery and present-day site photos—offer a fascinating oral history of the Metabolist movement. As Koolhaas sums it up, Metabolism offered "a manifesto for the total transformation of the country" based on three specific principles. Still quoting Koolhaas:

a) The archipelago has run out of space: mostly mountainous, the surfaces fit for settlement are subdivided in microscopic, centuries old patchworks of ownership
b) Earthquakes and tsunamis make all construction precarious; urban concentrations such as Tokyo and Osaka are susceptible to potentially devastating wipeouts [ed. note: cf. today's calls for a "back-up Tokyo"]
c) Modern technology and design offer possibilities for transcending Japan's structural weakness, but only if they are mobilized systematically, almost militaristically, searching for solutions in every direction: on the land, on the sea, in the air...

Architecture thus becomes the literal geopolitical extension of the state, constructing new territory—such as floating forests and artificial islands—over which to govern. It's a kind of proactive gerrymandering, we might say: not redesigning the district map, but constructing new districts. In any case, I recommend the book.

7) Cities in the jungle:

a) "Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders."
b) "The inventor of the concept of cities with special laws designed to spur the lagging economies of failing states talks about the latest attempts by the Free Cities Institute to found a charter city in Central America."
c) "The newest—and nicest—road in Myanmar is, paradoxically, one of the emptiest as well: Only a handful of cars travel along the desolate four-lane highway to nowhere, or so it seems. But in fact, it leads to Naypyitaw, a new city in one of the world's poorest countries, carved out of the jungle and built from scratch by an aging, autocratic leader who then moved the nation's seat of government there, lock, stock and barrel."

[Images: Photos by Soe Than Win/AFP/Getty Images, courtesy of NPR].

8) Quantum geology: "A pair of diamond crystals has been linked by quantum entanglement." This is, as Nature describes it, "a weirdly connected quantum state... [in which] both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating." It's extraordinary to think about the possibility of much larger-scale quantum entanglement, for instance planet-scale mineral deposits vibrating in tune with one another, like the so-called "diamond planet" discovered earlier this year.

9) Galactic GPS: Autonomous spacecraft could someday navigate the universe based on directional information taken from pulsars. "Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that are observable as variable celestial sources of electromagnetic radiation. Their periodic signals have timing stabilities comparable to atomic clocks and provide characteristic temporal signatures that can be used as natural navigation beacons, quite similar to the use of GPS satellites for navigation on Earth."

10) I meant to link this months ago: an office complex in Santa Monica uses trained falcons to ward off other birds. It's called "falconry-based bird abatement." In a weird sort of bird-building cyborg assembly, the falcons are kept "tethered to 10-pound blocks" on the edge of an artificial lake in order "to keep them from flying off and landing in harm's way in the congested area around 26th Street and Olympic Boulevard." The falcons are even "equipped with tiny transmitters" in case "they get disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings of Santa Monica. But they always respond to [the trainer's] call when it's time to take up their positions around the courtyard pond." It gets weirder: "They spend their nights in large perch boxes in the Water Garden's subterranean parking garage." Perhaps all buildings should come with living bird-ornaments...

11) ...or robots. By now, you've no doubt read that "robotic prison wardens" are set "to patrol [a] South Korean prison." According to the BBC, "the machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behavior." What could possibly go wrong?

12) Or we could combine animals and robots in the name of urban safety: "Insect Cyborgs May Become First Responders." According to ScienceDaily, tiny "cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment" could be mounted directly on the backs of insects, and "we could then send these 'bugged' bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go."

[Image: An "insect cyborg" via ScienceDaily].

13) A former U.S. military base in Iraq has been turned into a surreal new hotel where "guests are greeted by a jumble of concrete blocks, sand bags and barbed wire—the hotel’s front gate." The hotel "relies on hundreds of American military residential trailers, known as CHUs, from the acronym for containerized housing unit. They had once accommodated guards." Now, however, hoteliers have "installed indoor plumbing in some, creating the guest rooms." On the other hand, the New York Times adds, "besides the few upgrades to the trailers, the prison remains unaltered and eerily empty, the wind whistling through the old guard towers." Trailers go for roughly $190 a night.

[Image: Photo by Andrea Bruce for the New York Times].

14) There is a growing incidence of archaeological looting in the U.S. led by meth addicts. According to a recent study, "since meth labs are often found in isolated areas, just like archaeological sites, geographical coincidence may explain the complaints. Meth addicts are known for repetitive behavior and may find digging at sites soothing." This would make an interesting premise for a film: desperate meth heads excavating unmarked burial mounds in the middle of the night, loading up their trucks under the moon.

15) Finally, for now, were the first human architects actually Neanderthals? "Neandertals are stumping for bragging rights as the first builders of mammoth-bone structures, an accomplishment usually attributed to Stone Age people. Humanity’s extinct cousins constructed a large, ring-shaped enclosure out of 116 mammoth bones and tusks at least 44,000 years ago in West Asia," ScienceNews reports. "The bone edifice, which encircles a 40-square-meter area in which mammoths and other animals were butchered, cooked and eaten, served either to keep out cold winds or as a base for a wooden building." Elsewhere: Who was the Archigram of mammoth bones?

(Some links via Archinect, @nicolatwilley, @namhenderson, and elsewhere. Previously: Quick Links 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1).

Horizon Repair

2011-11-29T13:19:00.001-05:00

[Image: Window by Susanna Battin, courtesy of the artist].

If you're out driving in Los Angeles this coming Friday, December 2, consider using the second lane from the left, heading south on I-15 immediately after the 91 Freeway interchange and before the East Ontario exit: artist Susanna Battin's new work, Window, will be on display on a digital billboard overlooking the highway, and will be best viewed from that lane. There, "Los Angeles freeway commuters [will] briefly witness the billboard transform into a window," Battin explains, in "an attempt to repair the visually severed mountain range" beyond. Battin's elevated digital image also accounts for "thirteen of San Bernardino’s varying smog conditions," so the overlap will hopefully work by blending in with the local weather.

Here's a map of where to be.

Meanwhile, I'm curious if you could achieve something vaguely similar, but without the digital billboard—something like the optical effects of Felice Varini, but applied at a particular curve in the freeway, using different overlapping space frames partially installed on different rooftops, or various painted outlines distributed across other billboards and facades. They would all lock together for a brief and fleeting instant, from one very specific angle, perhaps even too fast to notice, and thus "repair" the surrounding landscape. I suppose, in some mythical world where insurance liability is not an issue, Felice Varini, Susanna Battin, and Caltrans could team up to make the California highway system itself into a massive and perceptually instantaneous optical installation, visible in full effect only at certain exact velocities and angles.

In any case, if you see the installation, and don't risk crashing your car, consider taking a picture and sending it in; I'd love to see if this works.

The Limits of Preservation

2011-11-27T12:33:00.001-05:00

[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort].

The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to animals and vegetation.

[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort].

"Left over munitions and landmines from the wars in the early 1990s still litter the countryside in Bosnia," Van Ort explains.

According to BHMAC (the Mine Action Committee for Bosnia and Herzegovina), just over 3.5% of the land area of the country is still contaminated by landmines. Many of the deminers in the field believe roughly 10% of the country can still be deemed a landmine area. They also feel that nowhere in the countryside is safe, as they may clear one area but a torrential downpour may unearth landmines upstream or upriver; consequently, these unearthed landmines find their way into vicinities that were deemed safe weeks, months or even years ago.

While visiting the landscapes himself, Van Ort adds, "some people told me not to walk into nature at all."

[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort].

The photographs seen here juxtapose shots of natural landscapes considered safe—that is, free of landmines—with portraits of the mines once buried there.

"The viewers of these photographs," Van Ort suggests, "should ask themselves: which of these landscapes would they feel comfortable walking into?"

[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort].

The project closes with a particularly dark observation: "I see the idea of hand-placed landmines protecting the natural setting and allowing the environment to regenerate itself as an ironic twist on our inability to conserve and see into the future."

[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort].

More photos from the series—including a taxonomy of artificial limbs necessitated by encounters with the landmines—are available on Van Ort's website.

(Thanks to Jon Rennie for the tip! See also the DMZ Peace Park Project).

Brick Swarm

2011-11-27T11:56:00.001-05:00

[Image: From "Flight Assembled Architecture" by Gramazio & Kohler].

Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler "will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks" next month—starting 2 December 2011—at the FRAC Center in France. The result, they hope, will be a "3.5 meter wide structure."

[Image: From "Flight Assembled Architecture" by Gramazio & Kohler].

According to the architects, this will serve as an experimental test-run for the construction of a hypothetical future megastructure—presumably requiring full-scale, autonomous, GPS-stabilized helicopters. However, I'd think that even a small insectile swarm of robot bricklayers piecing together a new low-rise condominium somewhere—its walls slowly materializing out of a cloud of rotors and drones—would be just as compelling.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Flying Robotic Construction Cloud and Robotism, or: The Golden Arm of Architecture).

Detection Landscapes

2011-11-21T10:47:00.001-05:00

[Images: Botanical photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt].

I've been going through a lot of old files and papers recently, and I thus found a short piece I clipped from New Scientist five years ago. I absolutely love stories like this, and I swoon a little bit when I read them; it turns out that "plants growing over old sites of human habitation have a different chemistry from their neighbors, and these differences can reveal the location of buried ruins."

The brief article goes on to tell the story of two archaeologists, who, in collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: "Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads."

The idea that your garden could be more like an indicator landscape for lost archaeological sites—that, below the flowers, informing their very chemistry, perhaps even subtly altering their shapes and colors, are the traces of abandoned architecture—is absolutely unbelievable.

[Images: More extraordinary photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt].

So why not develop a new type of flower in some gene lab somewhere, a designed species that reacts spectacularly to the elevated presence of nitrogen-15 from ruined settlements? Ruin Flowers® by Monsanto acting as deserted medieval village detection-landscapes, as thale cress does for mines.

You plant these flowers or trees or vineyards—future archaeological wine—and you wait three seasons for the traces to develop. Now imagine a modified tree that can only grow directly above ruined houses. Imagine an entire forest of these trees, curling and knurled to form floorplans, shaping out streets and alleyways, rooms instead of orchards and halls instead of groves. Now imagine the city beneath that forest becoming visible as the woods slowly spread, articulating whole lost neighborhoods over time.

[Image: Summer in a city by Jacek Yerka].

Genetically-modified plantlife used as non-invasive archaeological research tools would, at the very least, add a strange practicality to summer gardening activities, in the process turning whole surface landscapes into an unexpected new kind of data visualization program.

It's the earth's surface as browser for what waits undetected below.

(Blossfeldt images found via but does it float).

Aerial Sheriff

2011-11-20T14:14:00.001-05:00

[Image: A U.S. Predator drone, photographed by Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia].

The Send Equipment for National Defense Act, sponsored by Texas Representative Ted Poe, would "require that 10 percent of certain equipment returned from Iraq—like Humvees, night-vision equipment and unmanned aerial surveillance craft—be made available to state and local agencies for border-security operations."

Poe denies that this would militarize the border, as reported by the New York Times; but John Cook, mayor of the border city of El Paso, strongly disagrees, suggesting that only "a whole lot of ignorance" could inspire the plan. Cook points out that "moving war zone equipment to the border would send the wrong signal to Mexico and potentially damage the robust symbiotic economic relationship between the two countries."

This comes at the same time that Miller-McCune warns that "armed police drones"—or weaponized UAVs—might soon be flying through a sky near you. While Miller-McCune focuses specifically on the sheriff of Montgomery County, Texas, it's worth pointing out that so-called Leptron Avengers—"battery-operated helicopters designed to take high-resolution video and photos and that can be equipped with night-vision cameras or thermal-imaging equipment"—have also been requested by the Texas city of Arlington, perhaps making Texas—alongside such places as Syria, North Korea, and China—the go-to site today for witnessing civilian adaptations of military surveillance technology.

[Image: The ShadowHawk unmanned police helicopter by Vanguard Defense Industries, via Miller-McCune].

The current version of this equipment, called the ShadowHawk, "won’t carry weapons," we're told, but "the drone’s manufacturer, Vanguard Defense Industries, boasts that it’s strong enough to carry a shotgun or even a grenade launcher." The firm itself adds that the "ShadowHawk can maintain aerial surveillance of an area (i.e. house, vehicle, person, etc.) at 700 feet without being heard or seen unlike full sized aircraft. Imagine the advantage provided to an entry team in the following scenarios: high risk warrant, hostage rescue, domestic violence, etc."

Mechanized urban surveillance is hardly news. Indeed, the currently existing network of CCTV cameras already installed in cities all over the world is equally "unmanned," in an exactly comparable sense; they are fixed-point drones. One could thus make an argument that the ShadowHawk is simply a camera with wings: you have a camera outside CVS or Tesco, ergo you have a camera in the sky above the city. It's easy to see how "mission creep," as Miller-McCune calls it, could occur.

Or compare this, for instance, to plans aflight in the UK, where police "are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the 'routine' monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance." This will take the form of unmanned airships hovering over the English capital, as if simulating the barrage balloons of World War II.

[Image: Barrage balloons above London, courtesy of Wikipedia].

The drones "are programmed to take off and land on their own, stay airborne for up to 15 hours and reach heights of 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground," and they will be launched "in time for the 2012 Olympics." (An Afghanistan-based version of this program is described as follows: "This fall, there’ll be a new supercomputer in Afghanistan. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.")

[Images: From an October 2009 presentation by Major General Blair Hansen to the U.S. Strategic Command and Defense Intelligence Agency].

Briefly, I'm reminded of the opening scene from Christopher Dickey's book Securing the City, in which a helicopter that falls somewhere between aerial war machine and advanced Hollywood film equipment is breathlessly unveiled: "The winter air is cold and the light hard-edged as the unmarked New York City Police Department helicopter meanders through the winds above the five boroughs," we read.

It is a state-of-the-art crime-fighting, terror-busting, order-keeping techno toy, with its enormous lens that can magnify any scene on the streets almost one thousand times, then double that digitally; that can watch a crime in progress from miles away, can look in windows, can sense the body heat of people on rooftops or running along sidewalks, can track beepers slipped under cars, can do so very many things that the man in the helmet watching the screens and moving the images with the joystick in his lap, NYPD Detective David Zschau, is often a little bit at a loss for words. "It really is an amazing tool," he keeps saying.

This technology—whose unlimited vision seems so mind-boggling as to cause aphasia in those who encounter it—should inspire as much moral and political discomfort as an unmanned version of the same helicopter; in other words, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this very kind of spy equipment already exists and has already been deployed. That is, the unnerving implication that we are being watched from above by undetectable robots should not let us forget that being watched from above by human pilots is just as invasive.

In any case, the ShadowHawk, described above, can also be put to use in fire and rescue situations, able to track down "heat sources and cut through the smoke and haze with it’s Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) or SWIR"—short wave infrared—cameras. Indeed, the company points out that "the vast capabilities of the ShadowHawk are ideal for mitigating and handling disasters whether natural or manmade. From locating victims, serving as an airborne communications relay point or conducting damage assessment, the ShadowHawk will significantly expand response capabilities." In light of this, it is foolish to reject, universally and in principle, the very idea of unmanned systems operating in non-military environments; but it's equally foolish to welcome them without a simultaneous demand for strong regulation and oversight.

To be honest, though, it seems only a matter of time before armed police drones are a reality in the United States, and it would thus be great to see a long discussion of the legality—or, at the very least, the societal implications—of such equipment, before we are faced with a scenario none of us adequately understand. For instance, is there a law course somewhere examining the rights and implications of autonomous urban police technologies? Combine this with a look at repurposed military hardware used in patrolling national borders, and the syllabus from such a course would be well worth exploring in detail.

(In addition to the London example, cited above, another rebuke to the moral self-congratulation of the Miller-McCune piece comes from Northern Ireland, where the use of unmanned aerial systems in urban policing might soon take the form of "mini drones" used "to combat crime and the dissident republican threat"—in other words, autonomous police drones are by no means limited to cities in the United States).

Debt Cemetery

2011-11-20T12:05:00.001-05:00

Spanish cities are "buckling under bills for empty swimming pools, shuttered sports facilities and unpopular vacation complexes," according to Miller-McCune. Their economies are "saddled with thousands of publicly funded construction projects made in the starrier moments of a mid-2000s property boom. While in the United States, the real estate crash has hit private homeowners hardest, in Spain it was the city governments that gorged themselves, committing to massive projects on the assumption that taxes, like home prices, would always rise."

These public over-commitments include the long-empty and seemingly perpetually unfinished Castellon Airport, where "the only proof that [it] is an airport at all, or will be anytime soon, are dozens of bright blue road signs that claim so along the nearby highway." But is this "15-year effort to build an airport without planes," as the magazine describes it, "a case of epically bad public administration that helps us understand the crisis Europe is facing? Or was it a crime—a case of corruption—that puts Europe’s crisis in a far harsher light?"

Of course, these infrastructural examples should be seen alongside Peter Eisenman's City of Culture of Galicia, which was "born in the Spain of excess and is opening during an economic collapse, as a sort of monument to [the] construction bubble." Eisenman's highly over-budget project is "a cemetery for money," as one critic memorably describes it.

Infra

2011-11-17T11:10:00.000-05:00

[Image: Men of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)].

Photographer Richard Mosse, whom long-time readers might recognize from his two interviews here on BLDGBLOG, will be celebrating a new show tonight, Thursday, November 17th, at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.

[Image: Lava Floe, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)].

Richard will be showing new work from his Infra series, taken on a series of trips to the Congo, visiting tribal reconciliation gatherings, deserted battlefields, UN-administered aid camps, active war zones, and remote mountain villages in the extraordinary rolling landscape.

[Images: (top to bottom) Flower of the Mountain, House Of Cards V, and Come Out (1966) II, all by Richard Mosse, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011)].

From the gallery description:

For centuries, the Congo has compelled and defied the Western imagination. Richard Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued military surveillance technology, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.

However, infrared film "also found civilian uses among cartographers, agronomists, hydrologists, and archaeologists," the gallery adds, "to reveal subtle changes in the landscape"—and it was in this capacity that Richard first picked up on the conceptual power of the technique.

He began visiting the Congo, using infrared film to document the line between the living and the dead in the war-torn landscape, as living vegetation when exposed on this film appears in blood-like shades of burgundy, pink, and violet, and artificial materials—from army uniforms to discarded weapons—fall flat, appearing nearly black & white like blurs and specters in the terrain.

[Images: (top) Nowhere To Run, South Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010); (bottom) Taking Tiger Mountain, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011), by Richard Mosse].

However, does the surreal transformation of the landscape here make the reality they depict seem that much more dreamlike and politically unreachable—as if we've stumbled upon some strange and very alien race of warriors living amidst military hardware and forests the color of chewing gum, like strandees in a spectacular videogame, where pure white clouds hover above an earth the color of merlot?

Or is that part of a deliberate strategy, a comment on the seemingly impossible task of representing African conflict? Put another way, what specific interpretive role does the filmstock itself play in this scenario?

[Image: Blue Mask, Lake Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010) by Richard Mosse].

In any case, stop by the Jack Shainman Gallery tonight to talk to the artist and see the work at full scale.

Pole Farm

2011-11-15T12:11:00.001-05:00

[Image: Photo by Alissa Walker of Gelatobaby].

An overlooked urban land-use typology is the telephone pole farm, used for honing the climbing skills of telephone-repair personnel, as seen here in a photograph from Los Angeles by Alissa Walker. Along these lines, it might be interesting to explore a training facility for tree-trimming crews—a test-forest populated by genetically-modified trees grown for the complexity of their branches.

(Via Pruned and @nicolatwilley).

Architecture at the Breaking Point

2011-11-15T11:42:00.001-05:00

The call-for-submissions for Bracket 3 has been announced—and it sounds awesome. "What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?" the issue asks.

Specifically, Bracket 3 "will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?"

Submissions of "critical articles and unpublished design projects" are due by 20 February 2012, and the guest editorial board this time around includes Julien de Smedt, Keller Easterling, Michael Hensel, Alessandra Ponte, Francois Roche, Hashim Sarkis, and Mark Wigley. The issue will be overseen by Maya Przybylski and Lola Sheppard of the recently rather quiet InfraNet Lab.

See Bracket's homepage for more—and watch out for Bracket 2 in stores later this winter.

Project Ice Shield

2011-11-15T10:22:00.001-05:00

[Image: "L.A. Ice" by Victor Hadjikyriacou, produced for Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of last year's Landscape Futures Super-Workshop].

The city of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, will attempt to keep itself cool over the summer by way of a kind of artificial glacier.

According to the Guardian, this "geoengineering trial" will try to "'store' freezing winter temperatures in a giant block of ice that will help to cool and water the city as it slowly melts during the summer." Project directors "hope the process will reduce energy demand from air conditioners and regulate drinking water and irrigation supplies." The cool air will presumably be pumped through the city via a continuous and monumental network of ducts.

So how will it work?

The project aims to artificially create "naleds"—ultra-thick slabs of ice that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through cracks in the surface to seep outwards during the day and then add an extra layer of ice during the night. Unlike regular ice formation on lakes—which only gets to a metre in thickness before it insulates the water below—naleds continue expanding for as long as there is enough water pressure to penetrate the surface. Many are more than seven metres thick, which means they melt much later than regular ice.

Fascinatingly, naleds have already been used as foundations for infrastructural projects elsewhere; in North Korea, for instance, the Guardian reports, the military has utilized naleds "to build river crossings for tanks during the winter and Russia has used them as drilling platforms."

The specific architectural technique of the ice bridge can be explored in this helpful PDF from the Alaska Division of Forestry. Quoting at great length, here are the skills you need to bridge remote rivers with artificially augmented ice packs, should such a scenario ever befall you or your loved ones. These are "guidelines for ice-bridge construction":

The ideal site has the following characteristics: deep, narrow, slow flow in a single straight channel with gradual approaches to the ice; no tributary streams, creeks or lakes immediately upstream; and it is located near an existing road network. The site should also be free of warm springs and sand bars and not subject to major snow drifting. Being downstream of riffles/rapids may be conducive to supercooling and frazil ice formation that might accelerate ic e formation and growth at the bridge site. (...) Once natural ice cover has progressed across the channel thick enough to bear the weight of personnel and light equipment, existing snow cover is removed to accelerate ice growth at the bottom of the ice sheet. Variation exists in whether snow is removed or just compacted. Snow removal is recommended on upstream and downstream sides of the road for a distance of 23-30 meters (75-100 feet) as well as on the road itself. Subsequent to ice growth in response to snow removal, surface flooding is recommended to build up ice thickness on the road surface. (...) Lateral barriers of snow, logs or boards are used to contain floodwater on the road surface. Water should be applied by layering, allowing full freezing of previous water applications before the next. Conflicting recommendations exist as to whether brush or logs should be incorporated into the ice. One study did document the increase in ice strength after incorporating geo-grid material during the ice buildup process. A regular regime of ice drilling and monitoring of ice thickness is recommended.

If you want something a little more hi-tech, on the other hand, the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center has slowly been amassing insight into the construction of ice roads and ice bridges.

[Image: "A water truck passes over the ice road spreading a thin layer of water to thicken the ice so it can support heavy equipment transport"; photo courtesy of the U.S. Army].

"Building an ice bridge/road takes a lot of time, hard work and favorable weather conditions," the Army reports. "The water must be frozen down to the riverbed, which requires breaking the ice down to the bottom and allowing it to freeze from the bottom up. The Engineers had to pump thousands of gallons of water onto the bridge/road to get the ice thick enough to support heavy equipment, while at the same time smoothing it out so vehicles could drive across it easily." The engineers involved in this particular story "established an ice bridge/road that was 28 inches thick in the beginning of January. With work scheduled to continue through the end of February, the engineers will add another 2.5 inches of ice every day."

And, as it happens, these experimental ice bridges grown by military personnel in the Arctic, like something out of Norse mythology, are a regular occurrence every winter.

[Image: "Soldiers from the 6th Engineer Battalion, Fort Richardson, Alaska, clear water lines during construction of an ice bridge at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greely, Alaska, Jan. 12, 2011." Photo by Sgt. Trish McMurphy, U.S. Army Alaska Public Affairs Office].

This year, for instance, the story repeated itself:

The engineers built field-expedient water tanks, berms of snow and crushed ice, to keep the water in designated areas for freezing. They move about 70,000 gallons of water per day using a gas-powered water pump and water lines. Once the bridge is capable of holding the weight, they will use 5,000 gallon water trucks to help speed up the process by delivering water faster than the pump.

The frames and techniques used for building with frozen water, then, are very similar to those used when dealing with concrete; in either case, it is the architecture of hardened liquids.

All told, the resulting ice bridge "will [be] slightly longer than a mile. It will be 24 inches thick and 75 feet wide. The bridge will grow and expand naturally with the weather changes, requiring some personnel to stay longer to maintain it." There are custodians of artificial ice forms and instant cities built from snow at the top of the world.

In any case, the massive ice block used to cool Ulan Bator—I almost forgot what this post is about—will presumably undergo the initial stages of sculpting and augmentation quite soon, as the true cold of winter sets in; we'll have to wait till next summer to see if it's successful.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Artificial Glaciers 101).

Unnatural History

2011-11-14T20:07:00.001-05:00

[Image: Liam Young flying self-illuminated drone quadcopters in Holland for a celebratory nighttime crowd].

Architect Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today is apparently speaking in only a few hours at the CCA in San Francisco. Be sure to check it out, if you're anywhere nearby; Liam will be discussing everything from his specimens of unnatural history to future machine-species and the mythological potential of urban infrastructure. The show starts at 7pm, and is free and open to the public.

State of Air

2011-11-06T13:08:00.001-05:00

[Image: Via China Digital Times].

China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live."

"Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people," the Broad Group claims.

[Image: Via China Digital Times].

While it's neither shocking nor even particularly interesting to note that those who can afford it will install air purifiers in their homes and offices, the implication that the Chinese government—who are probably "purposely obscuring the extent of the nation’s air pollution," the Times suggests, and who already eat from their own separate, organic food supply—is in the process of atmospherically seceding from the rest of the nation is extraordinary.

I'm reminded of NBA star Gilbert Arenas, who, as reported here a billion years ago, once "hired a company to reduce the oxygen content in his house" so that he could "train under high-altitude conditions similar to those in Colorado." The creation of a special atmosphere breathed only by Chinese officials could just as easily be achieved by way of architecture, framing all politburo meetings, all official residences, and all fortified state vehicles with plane-like airlocks and breathing masks. In what could be thought of as the architecturalization of Piney from Sons of Anarchy, a government-run space would always be known for its ornamental breathing apparatus—a prosthetic atmosphere—as if scuba-diving through the murk of everyday life around them.

[Image: An artificial meteorology hovers over China; via China Digital Times].

In a specifically spatial sense—that is, not political or ideological—it would seem that architects like Philippe Rahm are the future of Chinese architecture: designing for the control and manipulation of internal atmospheres, and evaluating the success or failure of a given space through such criteria as air pressure, humidity, and the thermal movement of air.

Or, to bring politics back into the argument, as historian David Gissen wrote several years ago in the Journal of Architectural Education, "Powerful spatial relationships emerge with the heating, cooling, and ventilation of space that connect urban spaces and other social aggregates in a complex social, political, and economic network. Understanding the complexity of these relationships requires reinterpreting the literature on environmental technological systems with literature drawn from urban geography and urban environmental studies."

Here, though, we clearly see the value of also adding literature on the politics of this atmospheric phenomenon—the spatial politics of governmentally regulated and maintained spaces of filtered air—as if, again, we might someday recognize a space of Chinese state sovereignty not through such things as armed security teams or surveillance cameras, but through the quality of the air being breathed there. In fact, the spatial relationship between governmentality and the atmosphere only becomes more extraordinary when we put this in the context of Chinese attempts at weather control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Perhaps the future of state sovereignty, then, is no longer about the terrestrial control of territory—i.e. land—but about, in a very literal sense, who controls the air. The notion of air power takes on a whole new meaning here.

In any case, I was also intrigued to learn this morning that you can follow Beijing's air on Twitter.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

The dirty politics of taste

2011-10-29T09:54:00.003-04:00

Charles Jencks will join Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob of FAT on Monday, October 31st, at the Architectural Association, celebrating Halloween with a discussion of "radical postmodernism" and launching their new, co-edited issue of AD.

That issue "marks the resurgence of a critical architecture that engages in a far-reaching way with issues of taste, space, character and ornament. Bridging high and low cultures," the editors explain, radical postmodernism "immerses itself in the age of information, embracing meaning and communication, embroiling itself in the dirty politics of taste by drawing ideas from beyond the narrow confines of architecture. It is a multi-dimensional, amorphous category, which is heavily influenced by contemporary art, cultural theory, modern literature and everyday life."

The event is free and open to the public, and kicks off at 6pm.

Dye-Tracing Archaeology

2011-10-27T13:53:00.001-04:00

Toxic chemicals leaking from an old wastewater treatment plant in Alabama have unexpectedly led to the discovery of a 1,700-year old "pre-historic village" buried in the ground nearby. Chemicals "have seeped into the ground surrounding the old plant," according to a local news station, so "the soil needs to be removed and taken to a toxic waste facility."

However, a survey of the contaminated site soon revealed that the ground also contained extremely well-preserved artifacts "from a village that once thrived" there. "Lo and behold," the head excavator remarked to the news show: "we found a massive late-middle Woodland period village."

It's not hard to imagine someone another 1,700 years from now accidentally discovering the forgotten city of, say, New York—or Chicago, or Bangkok, swallowed by mud—after a chemical leak at a nearby factory: radioactive liquids drain down through the topsoil, flowing around buried walls and ruins, forming iridescent pools on floors in basements—slow and toxic streams tracing the shapes of old stairways, lighting a path for future excavation and descent. Like giving the earth a radiopharmaceutical, you fire up a ground-scanning machine, trace the pollution underground, and, lo and behold, the dark outlines of buried cities start to glow.

[Images: Dye-tracing cave systems; note that the chemical used is supposedly non-toxic].

In fact, I'm reminded of dye-tracing techniques used for mapping otherwise impenetrable or overly complex cave systems. In James Tabor's wildly uneven 2010 book Blind Descent, for instance, we read about legendary caver Alexander Klimchouk, who set about dye-tracing caves on the Arabika Massif, including Krubera Cave, currently the deepest known cave in the world.

"In 1984 and 1985," Tabor explains, "[Klimchouk] poured fluorescein dye into several caves, including Krubera, high on the Arabika. Traces of that dye later flowed out of springs on the shore of the Black Sea far below. More traces tinged the water 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, miles offshore," indicating genuinely—in fact, record-breakingly—huge dimensions for the overall system of caves.

[Images: Dye-tracing caves].

But even the most remote, fictional possibility that future spelunking archaeologists might someday map lost cities—London, Moscow, Beijing, Rome—by using dye-tracing packs to illuminate that underground world of collapsed halls and buried rooms is extraordinary. Cartographers in mountaineering gear and helmet-mounted floodlights descend into the New York subway system in 5,161 A.D., following luminescent trails of fluorescein dye, crawling, walking, rappelling into the underworld on the trail of shining rivers as subterranean ruins begin to shine.

(Alabama story found via @ArchaeologyTime).

El Resplandor

2011-10-26T11:49:00.003-04:00

[Image: "Meelas Yadee" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Nettle's newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel in Dubai. It is sonic architecture fiction.

Less a horror film, however, than its predecessor, Nettle's version seems instead to offer a melancholy audio glimpse of a world in decline: the album's family lost in circumstances far too large—and too alienating, too foreign—to comprehend fully, unraveling alone in the hotel's empty rooms and hallways.

[Image: "Fatima's Kitchen Cupboard" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

El Resplandor's liner notes feature these photographs by Lamya Gargash, depicting extravagantly furnished rooms in afternoon darkness, empty kitchens, halls, and ruined stairways in the UAE.

As the artist herself explains, many of the houses seen here "are recently vacant, whereas others have been deserted for a long time. There were some houses that still had people living in them when I started my project; the families residing there were preparing to move to newer homes." Many more images from the series can be found here.

[Images: (top) "Blue Purple Chair" (2005-2006) and (bottom) "The Staircase" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Jace Clayton and Lindsay Cuff of Nettle will be at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 on Friday afternoon, October 28th, to talk about the album, the entirety of which will be streamed throughout the day.

[Image: "Mona Lisa" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Stop by if you're in the area, not only to learn more about the concept behind the album—after all, there's something highly compelling about the idea of a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake (perhaps this could be the first soundtrack optioned by Hollywood for a film it later serves to score)—but also about the technical set-up used by the band during studio production and live sets. Nettle's more sonically aggressive earlier work, Build a Fort, Set that On Fire, is also worth a listen in the meantime.

Thrilling Wonder Stories 3

2011-10-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design.

On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of architectural spaces—including real buildings, but also film sets, computer game environments, and spatial simulations—in propelling, staging, catalyzing, or otherwise framing narrative storylines. This requires speaking not only to architects, but to novelists, game developers, screenwriters, film set designers, and even Hollywood directors to discuss their own particular requirements for, and relationships to, the built environment—but also to ask, more specifically, how the spaces they design, describe, feature, or build affect the development of narrative.

This is the cultural dimension of the event—the "wonder stories."

On the other hand, Thrilling Wonder Stories has also looked both to science and science fiction as resources of ideas that might play spatial roles in future design projects—where I use the word spatial, not architectural, very deliberately, so as not to limit this to a discussion of buildings. This means bringing in robot makers and biologists, geologists and geneticists, not to ask them about architecture but simply to learn about their work. The point, in other words, is not to extract architectural ideas from their research—as if fully formed building programs could somehow be pulled from a presentation about synthetic organisms—but simply to add to the overall mix of scientific (and science fictional) ideas available for reference in future design conversations.

This is the "thrilling wonder" side of the series.

[Images: Photos from Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the Architectural Association].

To date, Liam Young, the event's co-organizer, and I have hosted comics author Warren Ellis, architect Sir Peter Cook of Archigram, game critic Jim Rossignol, TED Fellow and architectural biologist Rachel Armstrong, novelists Will Self and Jeff VanderMeer, spatial provocateurs Ant Farm, designer Matt Webb of BERG, and more than a dozen other figures from the worlds of film, gaming, architecture, literature, engineering, science, interaction design, and more.

[Image: From "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

This year, we're trying out an ambitious new format. Not only are we teaming up with Popular Science magazine as our media partner and co-organizer—so watch for content on popsci.com in the lead up to and during the event—but we are leading two simultaneous events: one at the Architectural Association in London, the other across the pond at Studio-X NYC.

So, on Friday, October 28th, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3—sponsored by the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, and Popular Science—kicks off in London with a truly phenomenal line-up. It's an all day blow-out, lasting from noon to 10pm, featuring:

VINCENZO NATALI*
Director of Cube, Splice, and forthcoming feature films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author, commentator, and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and theorist of "how algorithms shape our world"

ANDREW LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception, compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for computer games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor—to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR. RODERICH GROSS AND THE NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield—to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Duncan Jones's film Moon

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Los Angeles-based Near Future Laboratory

RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA
Theremin-led electro-acoustic ensemble

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

Better yet, Matt Jones of the ultra-talented design studio BERG will join Liam Young to serve as co-host for the day. Here's a map for how to get there; the event is free but space is limited.

[Image: "Glass Weed" from Super-Natural Garden by Simone Ferracina; Ferracina will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

That same day—Friday, October 28th—over at Studio-X NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 will kick off at 1pm local time, lasting till 4 or 4:30pm. Speaking that day are:

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men, Transmission, and The Impressionist

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer, senior editor of Popular Science, and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s new album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

[Image: One of many evolutionary robotic research projects by Hod Lipson, featured in this PDF; Lipson will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

Then, Saturday, October 29th, everything comes to a close with an epic second day—from 2-7pm—at Studio-X NYC, featuring:

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer for the Washington Post and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design, featured in Wired UK's 2010 "Year In Ideas"

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing at Cornell University

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect, winner of the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards, and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

MORRIS BENJAMINSON
Bioengineer of in-vitro edible muscle protein and CEO of Zymotech Enterprises

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

The events in New York will be moderated by myself, Studio-X NYC co-director Nicola Twilley, and PopSci senior associate editor Ryan Bradley. In both locations, events are free and open to the public; however, if you plan on attending the Studio-X NYC event, please register as limited space will be available. Here's a map.

[Image: The "plastic" extruded by New England's Colletes inaequalis bees; photo by Debbie Chachra].

Finally, if you can't make it in person, consider following Thrilling Wonder Stories on Twitter—and keep your eye out at the end of summer 2012, for the Thrilling Wonder Stories book, published by the Architectural Association.

But I hope to see some of you there!

*Vincenzo Natali will be speaking via Skype.

Eye Roller

2011-10-20T10:29:00.000-04:00

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that "can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras," Wired UK explains. "Its operator sees the image in 3D on a screen."

It apparently comes with knobby treads or without.

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The sphere is currently "undergoing trials" with the Swedish Defense Forces for use "in airports and other locations in need of surveillance," but the system also has potential applications in urban mapping, remote terrain exploration, and even post-disaster search and rescue. While the GroundBot can only reach speeds a bit more than 6mph—which means it won't be breaking any speed records, and it certainly won't be hard to outrun—the idea that failed criminals of the future might be seen sprinting away from swarms of autonomous black spheres the size of car tires is quite extraordinary.

[Images: The GroundBot system by Rotundus on patrol].

See the Rotundus site for more info.

Film Grenade

2011-10-17T08:48:00.000-04:00

[Image: The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" by Jonas Pfeil].

The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera," designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air.

The camera "captures an image at the highest point of flight—when it is hardly moving." It "takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." You can see it at work in this video:

Pfeil explains in detail:

Our camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. Our camera contains an accelerometer which we use to measure launch acceleration. Integration lets us predict rise time to the highest point, where we trigger the exposure. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in our spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.

It's easy enough to imagine such a thing being mass-produced and taken up by the Lomo crowd; but it seems equally likely that such a technology could be put to use aiding military operations in urbanized terrain, with otherwise disoriented squad leaders tossing "robust" optical grenades up above dividing walls and blocked streets to see what lies beyond.

Either way, a throwable camera strong enough to withstand bad weather and strong bounces—and able to store hundreds of images—sounds like an amazing way to start documenting the urban landscape. In fact, the very idea that a "photograph" would thus correspond to a spherical sampling of all the objects and events in a given area adds an intriguing spatial dimension to the act of creating images. It's a kind of reverse-firework: rather than release light into the sky, it steals traces of the light it finds there.

(Spotted via Popular Photography).

Do Black Swans Dream of Electric Sheep?

2011-10-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

In just a few hours here at Studio-X NYC—an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia's GSAPP—we'll be hosting a live interview with Ilona Gaynor. Gaynor is a London-based concept artist, filmmaker, and multimedia designer, as well as the most recent recipient of the Ridley Scott Associates award, where she currently serves as artist-in-residence.

As Gaynor explains it, her work "largely consists of artificially constructed spaces, systems and atmospheres navigated through fictional scenarios," her intention being "to intensify, fantasize and aestheticize the darker, invisible reaches of political, economical and technological progress. Grounded in rigorous research, consultation and collaboration," she continues, "my aim is to reveal these worlds by exploring the imaginary limits within them both as critique and speculative pleasure."

Most of Gaynor's work has a strong financial bent, as you'll notice from her portfolio, whether it's the photographic series "Corporate Heaven," a research project on insurance and risk, the short film Suspicion Builds Confidence, or even a "fictional artifact designed for the corporate world of tomorrow."

Her most recent short film, Everything Ends In Chaos, embedded at the start of this post, presents "a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and films that reveal the intricate trajectories of an artificially designed and reverse engineered Black Swan event." A Black Swan, in Gaynor's telling of it, based on the economic work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the idea that humans "are collectively and individually blind to uncertainty, and therefore often unaware of the impact that singular events can have on [their] lives: economically, historically and scientifically, until after their occurrence." Her film is thus an attempt to "reverse-engineer" such an event, piecing together chaos from order; the film's backstory, which is unfortunately quite hard to detect from the imagery alone, involves an elaborate kidnapping plot, stolen jewels force-fed to doves (which then escape from their cage and fly away), and an actuarial committee in charge of insuring against this event.

In another work, nature—that is, non-human lifeforms, especially plants—has become so expensive and, thus, so out of reach for everyday workers—in Gaynor's future, for example, a single Ficus tree costs £450,000—that indulging in any interaction with the natural world becomes an experience of "unapologetic decadence." That film, 120 Seconds of Future, is embedded below:

Gaynor kicks things off at 7pm tonight—Wednesday, 12 October—to be followed by an open Q&A. We'll be at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610. Here's a map.

Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP, if possible, to studioxnyc at gmail dot com—but I hope to see some of you there!

(More on Studio-X NYC, earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Literary Climatology

2011-10-10T20:56:00.000-04:00

[Image: The Blue Angels create their own cloud systems over the San Francisco Bay; view larger].

My week in San Francisco, now at an end, coincided with Fleet Week—and, thus, the arrival of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's "Flight Demonstration Squad." While the often overwhelming noise of the Blue Angels—rattling whole buildings at a time and setting off car alarms—is extremely polarizing, both acoustically and politically, I continued to have incredibly interesting, albeit very brief, conversations about them, extending beyond mere love or hate.

1) Performance Physics
After a friend of mine drove into town for a meeting, he described to me how the individual planes—high-speed military jets flying often disconcertingly low over the city in geometrically complex configurations—would disappear behind one of San Francisco's many hills... only to pop out behind a different hill altogether, visibly out of synch with the Doppler'd roar of its passage (which seemed to echo hilltop to hilltop across the Bay).

But then another identical jet—or was it the same?—would appear behind a different hill, or it would come circling up from another direction entirely, and it began to feel, my friend explained, as if he had inadvertently driven into the middle of a kind of quantum event, with the same—or was it?—airplane appearing and disappearing, over and over again, reappearing and swooping back from different angles, all the while mis-timed with its own acoustic side-effects.

It was, we might say, not performance art but performance physics: an immersive, urban-scale demonstration of quantum dislocation, one object—or multiple?—and multiple objects—or just one?—constantly out of self-synch in a single setting. It was not the military-industry complex but airborne physics: the skies of San Francisco temporarily modeling an inter-dimensional event.

2) Sky Forensics
During the two-day "blogging workshop" that I led this past weekend at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the participants—artist Alex Shepard—noted that the passage of the Blue Angels had been setting off car alarms all over the city. But, he added, the locations of the car alarms always—of course—coincided with the physical passage of the airplanes, following around right behind them; so, he suggested, you could actually reconstruct the aerial trajectories of the planes through entirely indirect means, using nothing but AAA data and SFPD noise complaints.

These street-level data, collated with enough ambition and accuracy, could thus be seen as a kind of fossil record for the Blue Angels' weekend performance: a distributed motion-capture device parked throughout the peninsular city. The planes, in other words, left more traces than just artificial clouds: they mapped their own passage through car alarms.

In twenty years' time, then, forensic historians could reconstruct the skies of Fleet Week 2011 using nothing but data from parked cars.

[Image: The literary medium of clouds: J.G. Ballard's "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D" and Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño].

3) Literary Climatology
Because we met up for a blogging workshop, the students at the SFAI and I began to talk about other media for literary self-expression—beyond paper and digital screens—and we briefly got onto the subject of skywriting. A Geico ad had been spotted earlier in the day, one of them pointed out, drifting from the back of a skywriting plane, as if in competition with the more abstract cloud shapes produced by the Blue Angels (who, seemingly seduced by San Francisco, took to drawing hearts in the sky).

That led us to the subject of J.G. Ballard's short story, "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," in which a small Pacific island—if I remember the story correctly—serves as the setting of a peculiar cultural contest: the advanced cultivation of artificial clouds, using kites and small by-planes.

From there, we got onto the premise of Roberto Bolaño's novella Distant Star. There, Bolaño tells the story of Carlos Wieder, a poet who—to quote the Daily Telegraph, as I am ironically on board an airplane right now, flying over central Wyoming, and thus do not have access to my copy of the book—"wears the uniform of the Chilean air force and pilots an old Messerschmitt—with which he writes stirring poetic phrases in the sky. The generals and their wives think these aerial stunts are wonderfully entertaining, but Wieder's professed ambition is to inaugurate a new, populist poetry of "barbarism", which abandons old literatures and flies into the glorious future."

The idea of blogging in the sky through the medium of artificial weather—chemically produced, aerodynamic clouds draping the city in a haze of literary climatology—thus presented at least one more alternative way of looking at the highly polarizing urban presence of the Blue Angels.

Foamed Infrastructure

2011-10-10T14:08:00.000-04:00

[Image: The weird artificial geology of "soil equivalent" landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].

On the way over to the west coast last week, I read Universal Foam: Exploring the Science of Nature's Most Mysterious Substance by Sidney Perkowitz. Amongst references to "applied foam science," "computational foam" studies, and even a "power-producing sonoluminescent foam" that might someday be used to generate electricity for the national grid, there were two ideas for future infrastructure that seem worth repeating here.

1) Foam Roads
While discussing the buffering quality foam can offer as protection against explosions, Perkowitz points out the logical next step in the neutralization of land mines: he writes, roughly 11 years ago, that "a quick-hardening rigid polyurethane foam is being tested at Sandia"—already manufacturers of a successful "decontamination foam"—"for use in nullifying mines on land or in water by buffering soldiers and equipment against their explosive force, or to lay down a safe ribbon for vehicles to travel."

This "safe ribbon" is, of course, a road—a road made entirely of foam, laid down over active land mines so as to protect vehicles against detonation from below. A whole new class of transportation infrastructure arises: unexplodable foam roads fanning out across military landscapes; instant roads-in-a-can, like shaving cream, that you spray over dangerous terrain; even foam bridges spanning rivers and caves.

Whether or not we'll see roads-in-a-can coming soon to a Home Depot or city works department near you, however, I'd be shocked not to see foam-road weapons in a computer game shortly—foamed infrastructure brought to you in a flash as new roads and bridges bubble out and harden over otherwise inaccessible terrain. Post-geologic weaponized foam activities.

[Image: Applying "soil equivalent" landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].

2) Foam Geotechnics
Later in the book, Perkowitz refers to "the possibility that foam could extinguish the twenty-year old Percy Coal Mine fire in Pennsylvania," as well as to "the use of an acidic foam to destroy asbestos installed in buildings by simply spraying it on." In both cases, you would fill a closed space with foam, which would thus go to work extinguishing underground fires or chemically dissolving asbestos.

However, this segues directly into a brief exploration of the geotechnical implications of quick-hardening foam. Chemist Paul Kittle, Perkowitz explains, "worked out a way to cover garbage landfills with foam" back in the 1980s. Quoting at length:

A significant portion of a landfill is occupied by plain dirt, which according to EPA guidelines must be piled six inches deep every night to cover that day's trash. Kittle came up with an environmentally benign shaving cream-like foam that would adhere even to steep slopes and would not blow away. The foam stopped rats and bugs, and prevented odors from rising. But unlike dirt, it dissipated after thirty-six hours, no longer taking up room when it was no longer needed under newer trash. For this reason, says Kittle, using his foam could save up to 15 percent of landfill space.

Geotechnical foams are now used in places like the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles, using equipment manufactured by Rusmar Foam; Rusmar offers foams of various durations, from 12 hours to 180 days, and with scents such as Vanilla and Wintergreen. Best of all, their product is called "Soil Equivalent Foam"—it is an earth-surrogate, a replicant geology.

But this leaves Perkowitz with what he calls "an image to relish": Perkowitz closes that section of his book imagining "the huge track vehicle Kittle designed, patiently spreading liquid foam to cover acres of garbage made partly of indestructible foamed plastic peanuts, coffee cups, and McDonald's clamshells." Inside a plastic earth, in other words, we simply find more plastics, in an artificial geology sealed with geotechnical foam. Literally what on earth might future geologists think?

Carry That Weight

2011-10-08T13:41:00.000-04:00

From the annals of moving large objects come two stories, one of a rock, the other a bridge.

[Image: Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

A very large boulder is on its way to Los Angeles, we read in the New York Times this morning: a 340-ton rock on a journey moving "through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns."

The rock is going there for an installation by artist Michael Heizer, called "Levitated Mass," and it was "dynamited out of a hillside" 60 miles from Los Angeles.

[Image: The rock in question; photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

"The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid," Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times.

In fact, the rock's specific route never relied on one path through that "bewildering thicket," but has been constantly updated and changed; as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Heizer's rock will be displayed, points out, "the State of California is always reviewing the state of its bridges and roads. So a route plan that would have worked a couple of days ago doesn’t work today."

This has the effect of doubling the distance covered: "Door to door," Nagourney writes, "the distance is 60 miles, though the actual drive is going to be closer to 120 miles, as engineers plot a route that can accommodate the huge size of what is known as the Prime Mover, and one that steers clear of low bridges and wires. Any route must have stopover spots to park the rock as it waits for night."

[Image: Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

The museum's $10 million boulder-displacement project has, of course, faced some public criticism—but Govan has a response for that: "we are putting more people to work here in L.A. than Obama," he quips. This includes "teams of workers... deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges."

I remember once reading once about the construction of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which required an elaborate ballet of shutting down whole streets and intersections in the middle of the night, when traffic would already be low, to truck massive girders and beams in past the mansard roofs and streetside cafes of a sleeping city. The building was first a distributed network of large, chaperoned objects, taking shape load by load, before it briefly served as a gleaming sign of the architectural future.

In any case, read more at the New York Times.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, thieves have dismantled and stolen an entire steel bridge near Pittsburgh. "Pennsylvania State Police are looking for a steel bridge worth an estimated $100,000 that was dismantled and taken from a rural area in Lawrence County," we read. "Police said they believe a torch was used to cut apart the bridge, which measured 50 feet by 20 feet, near Covert's Crossing in North Beaver Township."

If you see the bridge—or its parts—moving slowly down a remote Appalachian road somewhere, I'm sure the police would appreciate a heads up.

(Bridge story via @wired).

Tar Creek Supergrid

2011-09-28T12:37:00.000-04:00

For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S."

[Image: Inside the Picher, Oklahoma, supergrid, by Clint Langevin and Amy Norris].

The specific site for their project is the Tar Creek Lead and Zinc Mine in Picher, Oklahoma, which long-term BLDGBLOG readers might remember as the town at risk from cave-ins. As the Washington Post reported in 2007, "Trucks traveling along the highway are diverted around Picher for fear that the hollowed-out mines under the town would cause the streets to collapse under the weight of big rigs." The unlucky town was then gutted by a tornado in 2008.

Langevin's and Norris's work highlights the area's surreal, almost Cappadocian landscape: "Dozens of waste rock piles, some up to 13-storeys high," they write, "and contaminated ground and surface water are the legacy of mining operations in the area, which produced a significant portion of the lead used in the World Wars."

[Images: Photos of waste rock piles in Picher; (top) Jason Stair, (bottom) Moonlight Cocktail Photography. Photos via the architects].

The architects specifically propose "a structure that raises the solar energy infrastructure off the ground [and] creates the opportunity to host other activities on the site, as well as to remediate the polluted ground and waterways. The concrete structure, pre-fabricated using waste rock material from the site, is assembled in a modular fashion from a kit of parts that accommodates a variety of programs."

[Image: The "kit of parts"].

"Importantly," the architects add, "the hollow structure also acts as a conduit to carry water, energy, waste—all the infrastructure for human habitation—to all inhabited areas of the site."

The result is a three-tiered plan: the topmost layer is devoted to solar energy development and production: testing the latest solar technology and producing a surplus of energy for the site and its surroundings. This layer is also the starting point for water management on the site. Rainwater is collected as needed and transported through the structure to one of several treatment plants around the radial plan. The middle layer is the place of dwelling and exploration of the site. As the need for space grows, beams are added to create this inhabited layer: the beams act as a pedestrian and cycling circulation system, but also the infrastructure for dwelling and automated transit. Finally, the ground layer becomes a laboratory for bioremediation of the ground and water systems. Passive treatment of both the waste water from the site and of the acid mine drainage is coupled with a connected system of boardwalks to allow inhabitants and visitors to experience both the industrial inheritance of the site and the renewed hope for its future.

It's a bit of a Swiss Army knife—in the sense that it tries to solve everything and have a solution for every possible challenge—with the effect that the architects seem to under-emphasize the titanic supergrid that clearly defines the overall proposal. It's as if the proposal is so large—more landform building than architectural undertaking—that even the architects lose sight of it, focusing instead on individual systems in their description.

[Images: A wanderer above the sea of white cubes gazes at the Picher supergrid].

But inside this continuous and monumental space frame, whole communities could live—the "infrastructure for dwelling" and "pedestrian and cycling circulation system"—surrounded by a toxic geography for which the grid itself serves as both sublime filter and possible remedy.

[Images: More views inside the supergrid; second image is simply a detail from the first (view larger)].

The model for the project is pretty great, and I would love to see it in person: a cavernous grid envelopes the site's artificial topography, wrapping tailings piles and hills of waste rock, whilst treading lightly on ground too thin to hold the weight of architecture.

[Images: The model, by Clint Langevin and Amy Norris].

You can see more—including aerial maps and structural details, such as the placement of solar panels—at Langevin's and Norris's site.

Sea Caverns of Singapore

2011-09-28T11:25:00.000-04:00

[Image: Singapore expands beneath the Pacific Ocean; via the BBC].

Singapore has embarked upon the excavation of an underground oil reserve, expanding the city's industrial port beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It is "no ordinary construction site," the BBC tells us, but an elaborate project of engineering and infrastructure currently underway "several hundred feet underground, below the seabed in Singapore."

There, workers are "laboring around the clock to carve out an enormous network of caverns that will eventually store vast amounts of oil."

[Images: Singapore expands beneath the Pacific Ocean; via the BBC].

More specifically, "Five oil storage caverns are being dug out under the seabed of Banyan Basin, off Jurong island, a series of mostly-reclaimed islands that house most of Singapore's petrochemical industry."

Artificial caverns built offshore from manmade islands?

The terrestrial mechanics of Singapore's existence are increasingly interesting, if ecologically problematic. As Pruned's recent look at the city's sand-importation economy shows, the island-nation exists through a near-ceaseless act of geological accumulation, piecing itself together and expanding from the inside out using deposits of earth taken from neighboring countries.

Singapore, Pruned writes, "has been reclaiming land from the sea since the mid-1960s, expanding its total land area by nearly 25% as a result. And it's still growing. With no hinterlands to supply it with natural resources, however, it has to import sand, the primary landfill material. But exactly where, the Singaporean government does not disclose. Its supply lines are not public information."

Earlier this year, we looked at the idea of forensic geology, whereby even a single piece of sand can be tracked back to its terrestrial origins. As that link explains, the source of electronics-grade silicon is often deliberately occluded from public documents, treated as an industrial trade secret. Here, though, it is not microchips but internationally recognized political territory that is being mined, traded, and assembled—a black economy without audit or receipts.

Singapore's off-the-books experiment in sovereign expansion—not through military conquest but through intelligent geotextiles, Herculean dredging projects, and, of course, new undersea caverns—is perhaps a kind of limit-case in how nation-states not only utilize natural resources but literally build themselves from the ground up (and down) as political acts of landscape architecture.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Artificial Caverns Expanding Beneath Chicago).

A Spatial History of Trapdoors

2011-09-25T11:34:00.000-04:00

[Image: Poster for "The Queen of Chinatown" by Joseph Jarrow, courtesy of the Library of Congress].

Someone should write a short history of the trapdoor as spatial plot device in Broadway plays, literary fiction, Hollywood thrillers, and even dreams, CIA plots, Dungeons & Dragons modules, and more. How does the trapdoor, as an unexpected space of strategic perforation and architectural connection, serve both to move a plot forward and to give spatial form to characterization?

The "Queen of Chinatown" poster seen above, for instance, with its sprung floor collapsing beneath the weight of a hapless sailor, seems to promise an entire urban district—"Chinatown" as an Orientalist fantasy of inscrutable passageways and other devious spatial practices—illicitly Swiss-cheesed with unexpected wormholes. Chutes, pits, wells, and shafts are perhaps distributed throughout the neighborhood, we're led to imagine, giving the erstwhile "Queen" her strategic mastery of the area. Chinatown becomes a hive of "mysterious Chinese tunnels," a porous space guarded not through high fortress walls or even by watchmen or CCTV, but through a camouflaged network of surprise openings, like architectural sinkholes, that no one can predict and of which only one person knows the true extent.

The above poster, meanwhile, seems almost like a deleted scene from Christopher Nolan's recent heist film, Inception: there are the slumbering opium addicts stacked in a warren of bunkbeds in this off-the-books dream academy, and there is a man—an anonymous military agent of the state—crashing through the window into a world of broadly Asiatic decor, a multi-layered space seen sliced through in section. This is Inception as an 1890s heist caper, serialized on the popular stage.

[Image: A still from Inception, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

In any case, a spatial history of trapdoors—in film, literature, myth, dreams, and theater—would make an amazing pamphlet or book, I think, and I would love to see such a thing someday, perhaps part of a larger series of pamphlets looking at other minor architectural typologies—like log flumes and National Park trail structures and hay mazes.

[Image: "Then let it be the kiss of death!" Courtesy of the Library of Congress].

The two posters reproduced here, both available through the Library of Congress, are at least one place to start.

Altered Landscape

2011-09-23T10:01:00.000-04:00

[Image: The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment edited by Ann M. Wolfe].

I just received a copy of The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment, edited by Ann M. Wolfe, and it's well worth highlighting here.

The book primarily documents the "Altered Landscape" photography collection at the Nevada Museum of Art. Its images "show the phase of natural history that is sometimes called the anthropocene, when human alterations of the environment have begun to surpass natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes," in the words of art historian W.J.T. Mitchell. As Mitchell adds, these images are more complex than simple calls for environmental action: they paradoxically include "what I can only describe as the aesthetics of sublime melancholy that cannot avoid celebrating, even as it criticizes, the gargantuan scars and inscriptions that the human species is carving into the planet."

[Image: "Howl" (2007) by Amy Stein; from The Altered Landscape edited by Ann M. Wolfe].

Works by Terry Evans, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Amy Stein, Edward Burtynsky, Michael Wolf, Kim Stringfellow, Emmet Gowin, Michael Light, Sharon Stewart, Toshio Shibata, Todd Hido, and dozens more fill the book, depicting California suburbs and deep desert weapons-testing facilities, oil pipelines, hydroelectric dams, and quarries; there are clearcut forests and solar plants, Arctic radar fields and National Park parking lots.

In "Howl" by Amy Stein, seen above, a wolf lost in the glare of light pollution breaks the silence of an abstract landscape, turning to the artificial astronomy of the municipal grid—its surrogate moons and constellations of streetlamps—to reorient itself in the snow. However, it's worth pointing out that the wolf is, in fact, stuffed: Stein's work simultaneously stages and documents what she calls "modern dioramas of our new natural history."

[Image: "Coolidge Dam, San Carlos, AZ" (1997) by Toshio Shibata; from The Altered Landscape edited by Ann M. Wolfe].

Short essays by the book's editor Ann M. Wolfe, Nevada Museum of Art director David B. Walker, W.J.T. Mitchell (as it happens, my former thesis advisor), writer/curator Lucy Lippard, and myself round out the book.

The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment is published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name, which opens at the Nevada Museum of Art tomorrow, Saturday, September 24th.

Tunnel / Countertunnel

2011-09-22T13:21:00.000-04:00

For a variety of reasons, I was recently looking at a May 2011 report from the Air Force Research Laboratory on "Robotics: Research and Development."

[Image: From an Air Force Research Laboratory presentation on "Robotics: Research and Development"].

There—amidst plans for unmanned robotic ground convoys and autonomous perimeter defense systems for future bases and cities, not to mention fleets of robotic bulldozers field-tested for use in mine-clearance operations—there was one slide about something called "counter tunnel robotics."

Being obsessed with all things underground, this immediately caught my eye—especially as this is a program whose goal is to "develop an unmanned system with the capability to access, traverse, navigate, map, survey, and disrupt operations in rough subterranean environments." A "miniature mapping payload" is under development, one that will allow for accurate cartographic surveys of complex underground spaces; but, because current methods "will not work in the more challenging (non-planar) tunnel environments," the Air Force explains, the new focus for R&D "will be on developing 3D mapping techniques using 3D sensors."

From last month's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International—or AUVSI—conference in Washington D.C., where this technology was discussed in detail:

The [Counter Tunnel Robotics] system is an innovative all-terrain mobility platform capable of accessing tunnel systems through a small (8 inch) borehole and traversing adverse tunnel terrain including vertical obstacles up to 2ft in height and chasms up to 2ft in length. The system’s function is to provide a platform capable of carrying a small sensor package while navigating and overcoming terrain obstacles inside the tunnel. Counter tunnel technologies are needed to support intelligence gathering and safety of troops and personnel in unmapped and unknown tunnel environments. The system is the initial step in achieving a fully autonomous counter tunnel system.

A few things worth pointing out here include the mind-boggling image of "a fully autonomous counter tunnel system" operating on its own somewhere inside the earth's surface, like something out of a Jonathan Lethem novel, surely fueling the imaginations of scifi screenplay writers the world over—a planet infested with artificially intelligent tunneling machines. But it is also worth noting that these systems will very likely not be confined to use on—or in—the earth. In fact, autonomous tunnel-exploration robots will find a very hearty market for themselves exploring caves on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids, and perhaps elsewhere, in a fairly clear-cut example of military research finding a productive home for itself in other contexts.

However, I also want to mention how fascinating it is to see that the Air Force Research Laboratory is involved in this, as it actually penetrates the surface of the earth and is very much a project of the ground. It is a landscape project. But the implication here is that these autonomous spelunking units are perhaps seen as a new type of ordnance—that is, they are intelligent bombs that don't explode so much as explore. They are artillery and surveillance rolled into one. Imagine a bomb that doesn't destroy a building: instead, it drops into that building and proceeds to map every room and hallway.

But, much more interestingly, there is perhaps also an indication here that a conceptual revolution is underway within the Air Force, where the earth itself—geological space—is seen as merely a thicker version of the sky. That is, the ground is now seen by Air Force strategists as an abstract, three-dimensional space through which machines can operate, like planes in the sky, navigating past "terrain obstacles" like so much turbulence. In a sense, the inside of the earth becomes ontologically—and, certainly, technically—identical to the atmosphere: it is an undifferentiated space that can be traversed in all directions by the appropriate machinery.

Flying and tunneling thus become elided, revealed as one and the same activity; and the Air Force is understandably now in the business of the underground.

[Image: "A U.S. Air Force F-22A Raptor Stealth Fighter Jet Executes A Maneuver Through A Cloud Of Vapor"—that is, it tunnels through the sky—"At The 42nd Naval Base Ventura County Air Show, April 1, 2007, Point Mugu, State of California, USA"; photo by Technical Sgt. Alex Koenig, United States Air Force; Courtesy of Defense Visual Information and the United States Department of Defense].

That, of course, or it was simply an issue of the wrong office receiving research funds for this, and, next fiscal quarter, the Army dutifully takes over...

(For a bit more on underground military activity, see this older post on BLDGBLOG).

On the Beach

2011-09-22T12:10:00.000-04:00

I'm quite late hearing this for the first time, but I was thrilled to discover composer Pierre Sauvageot's Harmonic Fields project, a participatory landscape of wind-activated musical instruments temporarily installed on the beach near Birkrigg Common, Cumbria, England. The haphazard plinks, drum rolls, whistles and drones is often mesmerizingly beautiful, as the following video makes clear. It's a kind of weather plug-in, constructed as a sequence of very different movements in space.

It was intended as an actual sound trail—"a symphonic march for 1,000 aeolian instruments and moving audience," in the composer's words, quoted by the Guardian, and "it's important that it is not just a circuit of weird noises," he quickly adds. "The experience develops through individual movements."

From the Guardian:

You are introduced to the quarter-mile trail with a prelude for 300 Balinese wind chimes, followed by an adagio slalom of tuned bamboo pipes, which gives way to a reflective passage for suspended cellos and deckchairs and a pentatonic interlude of turbine-driven glockenspiels. It concludes, like a proper symphony, with a coda drawing together all the elements in a climax of either frenzied dissonance or a soft, extended diminuendo, depending on the weather conditions.

There is a hint that this might come to New York City, which would be a dream for at least this new east coast resident; and, even better, Sauvageot is described as a "true meteorological connoisseur," with an obsessive eye on wind systems and local weather around the planet, always looking for a new place to install his work. "The dry, warm sirocco of north Africa; the crisp, chilled chinook in the Rocky Mountains—I'd love to hear how they might sound," he tells the Guardian.

Personally, if Harmonic Fields does come to New York, I'd love to see it installed on or near my favorite buildings in the city, which are the subway and tunnel ventilation structures visible on the watery fringes of the archipelago—

[Image: The Holland Tunnel Land Ventilation Building].

—and sometimes in the heart of the city. After all, there are also weather systems artificially generated inside the earth by construction projects and large-scale pieces of urban infrastructure, whole subterranean climatologies of moving air that would not otherwise exist without the implanting hand of architecture, as if surgically grafted there. Atmospheric cut-and-cover. A weather reserve beneath the sidewalk.

In any case, the idea that a region's climate—its seasonal weather systems and thermal particularities—might become something more than mere background through a simple act of musicalization—that you could install Sauvageot orchestras in places all over the world to turn storms into symphonies—is amazingly suggestive for future design projects. From low-pressure systems in central Russia to the Santa Ana winds of suburban Los Angeles, architecture becomes a musical generator, an acoustic ornament activated by the sky.

Landform Building

2011-09-17T13:45:00.000-04:00

[Image: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects].

This evening, Saturday, September 17, down at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, Marc McQuade and Stan Allen will be celebrating the release of their recent book Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects.

[Image: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects].

The book is a sustained look at "the evolving relationship between architecture and landscape," with a specific focus on geomorphic megastructures—that is, buildings that look like mountains and other earth forms—vegetative ornament, including green roofs, and complex interpenetrations between architecture and the surface of the earth (semi-subterranean structures, structures penetrated by bedrock, and so forth).

You can see some shots of the book itself here—

[Images: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects; see more].

—and you'll learn much more about the publication at tonight's book launch. There, you'll hear from McQuade and Allen themselves, but also from Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Lucia Allais, Eric Sanderson, and Nina Katchadourian.

[Image: Landform Building launch at the BMW Guggenheim Lab].

I'm excited to be participating in this evening's event, as well, with a short, pecha kucha-style presentation, looking at everything from constructed hills in Rome to artificial glaciers, and from the particularly vertiginous paranoia of a manmade earth to Celtic myths of the Hollow Hills. The quasi-mystical appeal of ground-penetrating radar, muon detectors in the rain forest, and methane-ventilation technology used in landfill construction will all make brief appearances.

Things kick off at 6pm; here is a map. Hope to see some of you there!

2011-09-17T13:21:00.000-04:00

The last few weeks have been a logistical nightmare, having found that the new apartment we'd been told we could move into by August 22 was, in fact, only ready a few days ago, which means—among other things—that instead of settling in here in New York, getting Studio-X NYC up and running again, and maintaining BLDGBLOG, I've been lost in a labyrinth of wastefully overpriced hotel rooms, rental cars, long drives back and forth between NY and the Philadelphia suburbs, and endless personal favors asked of my family there; and, even now that we are surrounded by boxes again in our own place, a month late, and things are theoretically back to normal, we're having absurd internet installation problems. So I'm beginning to feel that I'm cursed. Either way, expect intermittent posting—at best—over the next week or two here as things continue their glacially slow process of getting back on track.

The Shape of War

2011-09-12T00:20:00.000-04:00

I'm excited to invite everyone to another evening at Studio-X NYC, with photographer Simon Norfolk and journalist Noah Shachtman, who will participate in two back-to-back live interviews discussing new spaces and technologies of conflict in the 21st century.

[Image: Photo by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

Long-term readers of BLDGBLOG will remember Simon Norfolk from his interview here on the site back in 2006.

[Image: Photo by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

Tuesday's conversation will revisit many of those same themes, but it will do so in the provocative context of Norfolk's newest project, a photographic tour of Afghanistan in the footsteps of photographer John Burke:

In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke. Norfolk’s photographs reimagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict. Conceived as a collaborative project with Burke across time, this new body of work is presented alongside Burke’s original portfolios.

We will take a look not only at the resulting photographs—a selection of which appear here—but at the often overlapping responsibilities of the photojournalist and the artist in documenting political events in conflict zones around the world.

[Image: Photo by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

As you can see in the photos reproduced here, Norfolk has an eye for complex stratigraphy: where US and UK basecamps overlap with Afghan townscapes, which in turn visually—and politically—repeat earlier scenes from a different era of misbegotten imperial adventures in Central Asia.

It is all simply "a cycle of imperial history," Norfolk suggests, one in which a "lack of historical perspective on the part of the West allows them to blunder back for the fourth time thinking that you can turn Afghans into western liberal democrats and feminists by bombing them." Norfolk doesn't mince words: "the prosecution of the war makes me furious," he explains in a long conversation hosted on his website.

[Images: Photos by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

Noah Shachtman's reputation as a journalist and editor has been firmly solidified over nearly a decade. Beginning with DefenseTech, a site Shachtman founded in 2003, and continuing with the current reign of Wired's Danger Room, Shachtman has been prolific, engaged, and highly active in helping to set the agenda for national defense coverage in the post-9/11 world.

[Images: Photos by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

We'll be asking Shachtman about everything from the limits of the battlefield—where war chaotically begins and unclearly ends—to new technologies of surveillance, and from the strategic requirements of a journalist covering today's sites of conflict to the possible urban futures Shachtman might detect in current military headlines.

[Images: Photos by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

I'm genuinely looking forward to this, and hope to see many of you there. The format will be as follows. From 6:30pm to shortly after 7pm, we will be engaging with Simon Norfolk in a live interview about his work; then, till roughly 7:40pm, we will be interviewing Noah Shachtman. These will be stand-alone interviews, conducted back-to-back.

The final stretch of the night, from 7:45 to 8:30pm or so, will be an open conversation with both Norfolk and Shachtman, featuring questions from anyone who might have them. This will allow us to discuss similarities and differences between their work, and to tease out other themes that might have been passed over in the individual interviews.

[Image: Photo by John Burke, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by Simon Norfolk].

Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP to studioxnyc [at] gmail [dot] com if you plan to attend. Otherwise, the event is free and open to the public.

You will find us at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, in Manhattan. Here is a map.

[Images: Photos by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

Meanwhile, please feel free to go back through BLDGBLOG's interview with Simon Norfolk in full—it's one of my personal favorites on the site, and is a great read—and to click through Noah Shachtman's own website, including the overall resources of Danger Room.

[Image: Photo by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

As Norfolk says in the BLDGBLOG interview, and which perhaps serves as a useful conceptual umbrella for the entire forthcoming evening:

All of the work that I’ve been doing over the last five years is about warfare and the way war makes the world we live in. War shapes and designs our society. The landscapes that I look at are created by warfare and conflict. This is particularly true in Europe. I went to the city of Cologne, for instance, and the city of Cologne was built by Charlemagne—but Cologne has the shape that it does today because of the abilities and non-abilities of a Lancaster Bomber. It comes from what a Lancaster can do and what a Lancaster can't do. What it cannot do is fly deep into Germany in the middle of the day and pinpoint-bomb a ball bearing factory. What it can do is fly to places that are quite near to England, that are five miles across, on a bend in the river, under moonlight, and then hit them with large amounts of H.E.. And if you do that, you end up with a city that looks like Cologne—the way the city's shaped.

So I started off in Afghanistan photographing literal battlefields—but I'm trying to stretch that idea of what a battlefield is. Because all the interesting money now—the new money, the exciting stuff—is about entirely new realms of warfare: inside cyberspace, inside parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Eavesdropping, intelligence, satellite warfare, imaging—this is where all the exciting stuff is going to happen in twenty years' time. So I wanted to stretch that idea of what a battleground could be. What is a landscape—a surface, an environment, a space—created by warfare?

I hope to see you at 6:30pm on Tuesday, September 13th.

[Image: Photo by Simon Norfolk, from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan].

Impact / Collapse

2011-09-11T13:01:00.000-04:00

[Image: A ghostlike "sonographic image" taken from part of Mark Bain's sound file].

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, sound artist Mark Bain has released the full audio file of the sound of the Twin Towers collapsing, a melancholic howl terrestrially amplified by the region's geology. You can listen to it here:

What you're hearing is the "audification of the seismological data record," as Bain explains it, "which occurred in the area of New York State, New Jersey, and New England during the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on September eleventh, 2001."

The data streams were acquired from Columbia University's Geological survey lab, which run a network of earth monitoring stations in the area; with the closest being 34 km away from the epicenter of the event. A process of data conversion and signal translation was used to make the normally inaudible seismic waveforms both audible and to play back in real-time as the event unfolded. No other processing or effects were added to the tracks. The registration includes four events, two impacts and the two collapses along with the inbetween sounds of the drone of the earth. The heaviest impact of the collapse registered 2.4 on the Richter scale, a signal which traveled throughout the earth.

The piece is not intended as a memorial, Bain adds, but as "a bell-like alarm denoting histories in the making."

2011-09-07T19:38:00.000-04:00

Also, as a quick reminder, consider following @StudioXNYC on Twitter for general urban news, including event updates specific to Studio-X NYC.

Salt

2011-09-07T14:34:00.000-04:00

Designer and cartographer Meg Studer will be presenting her maps of the global road salt trade tomorrow night at Studio-X NYC; more details here.

[Images: The global road salt trade, mapped by Meg Studer].

The maps seen above will be on display, as full-scale posters; be sure to stop by and see them in more detail.

Geologic City

2011-09-07T14:23:00.000-04:00

[Image: Geologic City by Smudge Studio].

Tomorrow night at Studio-X NYC, we'll be hosting a book launch for Geologic City, a new pamphlet by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio and Friends of the Pleistocene.

Things kick off at 6pm, at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here's a map. At least for the time being, we unfortunately must ask that you RSVP, to studioxnyc [at] gmail [dot] com, but the event is otherwise free and open to the public, and copies of Geologic City will be for sale.

[Images: Spreads from Geologic City by Smudge Studio].

In the tradition of such books as Richard Fortey's The Hidden Landscape—or his more recent magnum opus, Earth—Geologic City looks at the geological understructure of the city of New York. In the authors' own words, it "takes you to 20 sites where you can sense the geologic pulse of New York City."

More than just a handbook for finding exposed outcrops of bedrock, however, the pamphlet explores the broader material economy through which the city is constructed and managed, from strategic gold reserves to scrapyards and cemetaries. As they write in the booklet's introduction:

In 2010, we set out to create a field guide for New York City residents and visitors who want to sense for themselves the forces of deep time that course through the City and give it form, dynamism and material reality. We began to identify geologic materials that make up iconic pieces of New York architecture and infrastructure, trace them to their origins, and place them on the geologic time scale. But we soon realized that the materials and forces we were encountering were not things. They were lively actors.

Liz and Jamie will also be using the 16th-floor windows at Studio-X NYC as framing devices through which to point out and narrate regional sites of geologic influence on urban form and function.

[Images: Window and floor diagrams in place for tomorrow's launch of Geologic City by Smudge Studio; photos by Nicola Twilley].

Presenting work alongside them tomorrow night will be sound artist Kevin Allen and Meg Studer, whose maps of the global road salt industry are worth exploring in detail (and will appear in a forthcoming post here on the blog shortly).

Hope to see some of you there tomorrow night! And congrats to Jamie and Liz for seeing the pamphlet through to completion.

Test City

2011-09-06T23:22:00.000-04:00

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of Playas, New Mexico—a different kind of "test city"—taken by Steve Rowell for CLUI].

A private consulting firm in Washington D.C. is developing a "test city"—one "with no permanent population"—in the New Mexico desert, according to the Albuquerque Journal. It will be "a privately financed, small city on 20 square miles in New Mexico for testing and evaluation of new and emerging technologies," run from afar by Pegasus Global Holdings.

This as yet unnamed location will be devoted to the "'real world' testing of smart grids, renewable energy integration, next-gen wireless, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability," making it a life-size trial for private sector urban management—Cisco's city-in-a-box and IBM urbanism wrapped in one.

I'm inclined to ask what it might look like if other corporations were to launch their own "test cities" in the desert somewhere—an REI city, complete with artificial whitewater rapids, campfires, and outdoor climbing walls; a Playboy city, complete with unlockable shared doors between neighboring bedrooms; an AMC city, with screens and streetside auditoriums, and massive projectors on cranes like new constellations in the sky.

What if the city you live in is simply an immersive product demonstration for a group of private companies? Or is that what cars did to the American city long ago?

(Thanks to Chris Kannen for the tip!)

Bridges are Acoustic Information

2011-08-31T12:06:00.000-04:00

Sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink have teamed up to organize a new audio project called Bridges.

[Image: From Bridges].

The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to "react" to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics—a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us.

[Images: From Bridges].

As The Wire explains in a short article about the project, Zuydervelt and Hiddink "paired the eight musicians not to play together, but to react separately to the field recordings, which he then mixed together with the primary field recordings."

The resulting sound works have just been released, and can be previewed here.

[Image: Album design by Gerco Hiddink for Bridges].

As it happens, there's a surprisingly strong artistic interest in turning bridges into sound.

A few years ago, for instance, a project called "Singing Bridges" made the news. It was "a sonic sculpture, playing the cables of stay-cabled and suspension bridges as musical instruments," and the artist behind it—Jodi Rose—wrote that she aimed to "amplify and record the sound of bridge cables around the world."

Artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, meanwhile, explored the acoustics of an urban bridge with their project "Harmonic Bridge" (which I had the pleasure of hearing during its run at MASS MoCA). That project, as the museum explained it, produced a roiling "eddy of sound in the midst of intersecting streams of traffic. Cars pass by heading north or south on Marshall Street and east or west on the Route 2 bridge, but this linear motion is counterpoised by a rolling, humming C as calming as the rhythm of ocean waves."

More broadly, the artists add, "The bridge becomes an instrument played by the city revealing hidden harmonies within the built environment."

[Image: "Harmonic Bridge" by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, courtesy of MASS MoCA].

Releasing drone-bursts, buzzes, rumbles, and bells, bridges are the ignored instruments of the city, strongly suggesting that the urban context so often prized by architects and designers should also include an awareness of that region's acoustics—a neighborhood zoned for singing bridges and harmonic roads, given rhythm by the thumping and amplified tectonics of the subways. The bridge becomes an Aeolian harp—infrastructure gone acoustic—its formal sonic properties activated by the turbulent motions of the environment around it.

(Environmental sounds elsewhere: Dancing About Architecture).

Green Man

2011-08-31T00:11:00.000-04:00

[Image: An unrelated photo by BLDGBLOG].

The other day I mentioned a poem by John Balaban, taken from his book Locusts at the Edge of Summer, which I discovered again during Hurricane Irene; but there's another poem in there with an incredible image that seems worth posting here.

In it, Balaban describes how villagers growing rice during the Vietnam War—where Balaban, a conscientious objector, served with the International Volunteer Corps—stumble upon an extraordinary feature in the landscape:

Beyond the last treeline on the horizon
beyond the coconut palms and eucalyptus
out in the moon-zone puckered by bombs
the dead earth where no one ventures,
the boys found it, foolish boys
riding buffaloes in craterlands
where at night bombs thump and ghosts howl.
A green patch on the raw earth.

This "green patch" has an usual shape, however. Balaban continues:

In that dead place the weeds had formed a man
where someone died and fertilized the earth, with flesh
and blood, with tears, with longing for loved ones.
No scrap remained; not even a buckle
survived the monsoons, just a green creature,
a viny man, supine, with posies for eyes,
butterflies for buttons, a lily for a tongue.

And the sight of this "green creature" proves too fertile, unforgettable, haunting all the villagers who've seen it:

Now when huddled asleep together
the farmers hear a rustly footfall
as the leaf-man rises and stumbles to them.

Out of the darkness, convinced by the life they give to the land around them that they might not yet be dead, the missing-in-action pull themselves from the tangle of the earth and rise and walk again.

Studio-X NYC

2011-08-29T17:19:00.000-04:00

I am thrilled to say that I have moved east to New York City, leaving California after five unforgettable and productive years, to take on a new role as co-director, with Nicola Twilley, of Studio-X NYC at Columbia University.

Studio-X NYC is an off-campus event space, gallery, classroom, and urban futures think tank, part of a global network run by Columbia's GSAPP. It is closely connected with other Studio-X locations in Beijing, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Amman—with others, we hope, soon to come.

As Mark Wigley, dean of the GSAPP, describes the overall Studio-X initiative:

In recent years, GSAPP has adopted the label "Studio-X" to refer to its most advanced leadership laboratories for the future of the built environment that have to evolve at the same rapid speed as the urban environment itself. The label tries to capture the sense that we have to be ready to face many unknown questions that will arise and need to be engaged urgently, creatively, and responsibly with a range of different partners. A Studio-X offers a protective space for private and collegial exchange of ideas still in formation and a public gallery/lecture space, website and publication program for the exhibition, communication and discussion of the thoughts and designs that result from this exchange. Such laboratories will be located around the world in a dynamic interactive network dedicated equally to practical problems in the city and to emergent thinking.

Further:

With locations in Amman, Beijing, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, it is the first truly global network for real-time exchange of projects, people, and ideas between regional leadership cities in which the best minds from Columbia University can think together with the best minds in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

As such, each location of Studio-X acts as a "platform for incubating a whole new kind of conversation about the future of the built environment—intense collaborative workshop by day, energizing event space by night."

We both think this is an amazing opportunity to reengineer what it means to discuss cities today, and Nicola and I are committed to pursuing this goal in as wide-ranging and open a way as possible.

[Images: Spatial formats for events at Studio-X NYC, from Gavin Browning's recent Studio-X Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation].

Fulfilling the remit of the space would never work, however, without the extraordinary range of potential collaborators, colleagues, experts, and everyday users of the built environment that New York City offers—including the greater Mid-Atlantic region, and the global circuits of travel and professional connection that are based here.

I think, speaking for both Nicola and myself, that one of the most invigorating aspects of all this is the ability to work with people in radically different fields and professions—from policing to public health, archaeology to architecture, literature to film, international finance to amateur sports, subway engineers to sidewalk eccentrics, mayoral candidates to venture capitalists—all of whom have a perspective on, and vested interests in, how cities function. Nicola and I thus anticipate a surge of new collaborations, friends, and, of course, critics—and we hope to see many of you in person, at any number of our forthcoming meetings, events, exhibitions, tours, film festivals, book launches, panel discussions, and more.

In the very near term, we have a few things scheduled. Kicking off a new series of conversations that we call Live Interviews @ Studio-X—or LI@SX—we will be hosting a public conversation with Deborah Estrin at 12:30pm on Thursday, September 1st.

Deborah is director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at UCLA. She will be discussing her work with self-monitoring applications, participatory sensing campaigns for community data projects, and citizen science, as well as larger issues of surveillance, privacy, and information filtering in the digital city.

The live interview format will take the form of an informal, one-on-one conversation—moderated in this case by Nicola Twilley—which the public is invited both to attend and to join. For those of you unable to be there in person, the LI@SX series will be recorded for posterity, webcast whenever possible, and eventually transcribed and published online.

[Images: Liam Young installs "Specimens of Unnatural History" at the Nevada Museum of Art; photos by Jamie Kingman].

Later that same evening—at 6pm, Thursday, September 1st—we will be hosting a Landscape Futures Night School with London-based architect Liam Young. This is an experiment with a different format: the Night School is a more interactive exploration of ideas, by definition hosted in the evenings, taking the form of everything from lectures and slideshows to design challenges and debates. The Night School series will be flexibly themed and very different each time it's run.

Liam Young is co-founder (with Darryl Chen) of the design collective and futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, as well as leader (with Kate Davies) of the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic design studio based at the Architectural Association (newly returned from a summer expedition to Chernobyl and Baikonur). Liam will be joining us to introduce some of his Specimens of Unnatural History, recently installed as part of the Landscape Futures exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

Following Liam's presentation of his work, I'll be engaging with him in a public conversation, whiteboard brainstorm, and armchair journey around the world, exploring fieldwork as a form of research, the role of the sketchbook, the importance of narrative in architectural design, and the architect as investigative traveler. Expect to hear about everything from Australian kangaroo culls and the control of invasive species to conflict metals, the open-pit gold mine as designed landscape, and the difficulties of piloting a boat up the Congo.

The Landscape Futures Night School kicks off at 6:00pm; however, you must RSVP if you would like to attend: studioxnyc AT gmail DOT com.

[Images: Spreads from Geologic City by Smudge Studio].

Next week, meanwhile, we will be hosting a launch party for Smudge Studio's new pamphlet, Geologic City, a look at the rocky underpinnings of New York, both temporary & abstract (gold reserves, fiber optics, magnetic strips on subway cards) and massively real (bedrock, landslides, urban mineralogy). Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio—co-authors of the blog Friends of the Pleistocene—will guide attendees through the pamphlet, as well as through the deep time of the city, utilizing Studio-X NYC's 16th-floor windows overlooking southwestern Manhattan and the Hudson River to point out specific sites of geological influence on New York itself.

Jamie and Liz will be joined by Meg Studer, a designer and cartographer with a sustained interest in ecological systems; and Kevin Allen, a sound artist working with terrestrial acoustics. Together, Geologic City, Meg Studer's maps of the road-salt industry, and Kevin Allen's sonic installation will remain in Studio-X NYC for two weeks, open to public view.

[Images: Salt maps by Meg Studer].

Also on our schedule for the near future is an evening with photographer Simon Norfolk, whose work should be familiar to long-term readers of this site; BLDGBLOG's 2006 interview with Simon is still one of my personal favorites, and is well worth reading in full. Simon will be engaged in a wide-ranging discussion with both myself and Noah Shachtman—editor of Wired's excellent blog Danger Room—and this will kick off a year-long series of events themed around conflict and the city: urban military action, urban violence, urban police technology, urban warfare, divided cities, and much more. (While he's in town, don't miss Simon's lecture at the School of the Visual Arts on Wednesday, September 14).

The rest of the autumn promises a huge array of exhibitions, events, and public meetings—design charrettes, walking tours, all-day interviews, film fests, panel discussions, standalone lectures, slideshows, night schools, and more. To whet your appetite, our schedule is currently shaping up with a distributed film festival, exploring bank heists and prison breaks as architectural phenomena, co-organized with Filmmaker Magazine; a series of literary launches hosted in collaboration with GQ and Farrar, Straus and Giroux; live conversations with Benjamin Bratton, Luis Callejas, Peter Eisenman, Christian Parenti, Janette Kim, Chris Woebken, and Jon Calame, among many others; and much else beside, including ongoing collaborations with the GSAPP's own stellar faculty.

In any case, I'll be reporting back regularly about goings-on at Studio-X NYC—though you can also follow us on Twitter for updates and urban links—and keep your eyes out for the launch of a new cities blog, published by the Studio-X global network, later this fall. And, now that Landscape Futures is finally open in Reno and our move to the east coast is nearing completion, I will be back to posting on BLDGBLOG at a more normal pace next week.

***All events at Studio-X NYC are free, open to the public, and take place at 180 Varick St, Suite 1610, in New York. Here is a map. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, we reluctantly require an RSVP to studioxnyc AT gmail DOT com with your name and the event you would like to attend. Thanks!***

Polygon Sublime

2011-08-28T22:47:00.000-04:00

[Image: Via Jim Rossignol/Big Robot].

"Having stripped everything out of game two, except the terrain," game developer Jim Rossignol recently tweeted, "we again are left with a geometric painterliness. I am actually happy just wandering around these spaces, discovering extraordinary formations and unexpected floating mesas."

Fake Lake

2011-08-28T21:21:00.000-04:00

[Image: A satellite view of the corporate water feature become roadway hazard thanks to a landscaping crew in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania].

Out in the suburbs, where we've temporarily taken up shop on our way to New York City, the damage of Hurricane Irene has mostly been limited to large fallen branches on wooded roads, with the necessary but unexpected orange cones, caution tape, wrongway turns, and over-hill detours associated with such minor obstacles.

Is there an oral history of road detours—the friends met, the appointments missed, the geographies discovered—and, if not, should one be written?

But I was thrilled by the oddly Ballardian experience today of driving around on a spectacular and cloudless post-storm evening to see that two landscapers working overtime had begun to pump the flooded excess from an artificial corporate lake—a kind of ornamental moat surrounding an office complex in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania—directly onto the street.

Cars were braking and swerving out of their lanes as the roadway flooded, and this doubly-fake water feature visibly bloated, engulfing two lanes of traffic, even as the artificial lake from whence it came seemed to recede, deflating back to preplanned limits amidst the sculpted hills and parking lots.

Urban Hurricane

2011-08-28T00:29:00.000-04:00

[Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

I'm sitting out the winds of Hurricane Irene in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where the basement of this house is starting to flood, a siren is going off somewhere, and the power has flickered off—and on, and off, and on—for the last hour, though the full brunt of the storm has yet to hit.

But everything I own is in a creekside storage depot in Queens, as we wait to move into our new place next week; I'm thus finding it hard to fall asleep thinking of the fact that we've moved back to the east coast just in time, potentially, to have everything ruined and swept away into an industrial canal in New York City. But that's the way things go.
[Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

In any case, artist Chris Woebken, with whom I've had the pleasure of working as part of the Landscape Futures exhibition over in Reno, has been posting some photos today, showing New York City on lockdown, with plywood walls appearing in what once were windows and new facades popping up in a flash atop old storefronts.

Extreme weather brings its own architectural ornament, a whole family of plug-in and bolt-on designs that would otherwise have lain dormant as everyday materials, sleeping on the shelves of Home Depot.

The photos in this post are by Chris Woebken, and are taken from his Flickr account.
[Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

But being back out in the suburbs of my teenage years—and hurriedly evacuating the family basement—also means that I've stumbled upon a bunch of old books, and it seems vaguely appropriate to quote a brief excerpt from a poem by John Balaban.

Balaban treats the impending weather above him as a kind of aerial organism, a gargantuan meteorology of displaced marine life passing ominously through the sky:

Toward dawn, two nimbus clouds drifted in,
the larger—trailing down tendrils of rain
like a Portuguese man-o'-war—began to pulse
with lightning, brightening its belly like a huge lantern,
arcing a jagged streak
to ignite the smaller cloud.
Pulsing and flaring, striking each other,
dragging the earth with rain,
they drifted off over the mountains.
All about them the sky was clear.

The storm is a memorable presence, entering lives and leaving again, both animate and terrible.

Farmland World

2011-08-22T13:55:00.000-04:00

[Image: "Farmland World" by Design With Company (Allison Newmeyer and Stewart Hicks)].

One of the runners-up for the recent Animal Architecture Awards is also one of my favorites from the competition: "Farmland World" by Allison Newmeyer and Stewart Hicks of the Chicago-based Design With Company.

The project is an ironic investigation of how humans relate to farm animals—more specifically, how the ongoing spatial separation between humans and the animals they rely on for food and other forms of agricultural work can make animals seem to be nothing more than utilitarian machines.

[Image: From "Farmland World" by Design With Company; view larger].

In the architects' words:

The everyday life of the average American is almost completely disconnected from the land and animals that support them. Even farmers perform their duties primarily through automated mechanisms that remove them from the subject of their industry. The constructed distance between the human “us” and the animal “others” is increasing to the point that distinctions between machines and animals look blurry purely from distanced detachment. From our removed perspective, the extreme demand for cheap food production and the diversion of the pet economy distorts animals until they look more like utilitarian machines (bacon) or anthropomorphic projections to entertain and decorate (tea-cup terrier). As we relate to animals and machines similarly, where each begins to exhibit characteristics of the other, their converging trajectories point to an impending crisis at their collision.

Farmland World makes the human-animal encounter spectacular, proposing an absurdly over-the-top farm animal theme park—a "human/machine/animal hybrid adventure-land."

[Image: From "Farmland World" by Design With Company].

Farmland World "is a chain of agro-tourist resorts sprinkled across the American Midwestern countryside":

Part theme park and part working farm, guests arrive to the resort via train and stay as part of 1-day, 3-day or 5-day experience packages. Capitalizing on both recent governmental investments in high-speed rail infrastructure and the plentiful subsidies for farming, the network of resorts combine crowd-sourced farm labor with eco-tainment.

"As train-loads of itinerant fantasy farmers arrive," Newmeyer and Hicks drily write, "they are herded to the Grazing Coliseum to receive their complimentary overalls. From there, the adventure begins."

[Image: From "Farmland World" by Design With Company; view larger].

Foregrounding the idea that humans have increasingly come to confuse animals with machines, Farmland World is populated by robots, rides, and representations.

Inflatable mega-pigs and hollow, roving "cow combines" act as "robotic performers," in the designers' words. Animal replicants, these false creatures "extend the tradition of machines using and mimicking animals for moving, operating, branding and processing food crops."

[Image: From "Farmland World" by Design With Company; view section in more detail].

Meanwhile, the architect adds, "temporary farm excursionists"—paying visitors—"work, sowing and harvesting fields, becoming part of the herd. Farmland World embraces this hybrid human-animal-machine relationship, reinvigorating the rural landscape."

[Images: The robotic super-cows of "Farmland World" by Design With Company; view section in more detail].

As you can see in the project's overall guide, there are a whole series of these giant robot animals. A "chicken planter" stands beside a mechanical "sheep baaaler," which, in turn, is neighbors with a pig plow and a mechanical horse that spreads real horse manure from its techno-derriere. Think of it as Westworld in an age of vast industrial farming—a livestock Disneyland.

[Image: From "Farmland World" by Design With Company; view larger].

On the project plan, you'll also see such places as "Beeville" and "Veggie Row," the latter promising an internally-animated range of machine-plants sprouting from beds of artificial soil.

Having gone to elementary school in a small town in rural Wisconsin, I vividly remember being taken to see farm animals over at UW-Madison, including one that had had a window surgically implanted into its side; you could actually watch the cow, in section, digesting its food.

To go from this—a bovine proto-cyborg—to Design With Company's beautifully rendered "Farmland World" doesn't actually seem like such a stretch.

In any case, congratulations to Allison Newmeyer and Stewart Hicks for placing as second runner-up in the Animal Architecture Awards; for more, see the Animal Architecture website as well as this earlier post today on BLDGBLOG.

Animals in the Optoelectronic Metropolis

2011-08-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

[Image: LEVEL 1 from "Theriomorphous Cyborg" by Simone Ferracina].

Last week, while I was lost in the process of moving east from Los Angeles to New York City, the Animal Architecture Awards were announced, a design competition for which I was proud to serve on the jury.

I'll be posting at least two of the projects here, starting with what was ultimately the competition winner: a project called "Theriomorphous Cyborg" by Simone Ferracina.

[Image: LEVEL 2 from "Theriomorphous Cyborg" by Simone Ferracina].

Ferracina's project takes "a bewildering non-human gaze and the mysterious worlds it may engender" as its starting point, effectively plugging human beings into animal technologies, devices of transformative spatial cognition.

"Set in a near-future environment teeming with locative media, sensors and portable devices and co-constructed by virtual objects and information overlays," Ferracina writes, "the project aims to establish and activate new relations between human cyborgs and their 'sentient' environment. The animal Umwelt becomes a metaphor for designing and opening up new perceptual realities and fields of experience—and reach previously invisible worlds."

[Image: LEVELS 3-4 from "Theriomorphous Cyborg" by Simone Ferracina].

In this sense the project is similar in spirit to "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada—now on display at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of Landscape Futures—but it is also not strictly speaking architectural.

Concerned more with space itself—that is, with the spatiality of sensing: how animal bodies perceive, navigate, and interactively change their environments—the augmented sensory overlays of "Theriomorphous Cyborg" nonetheless instigate transformations in the urban terrains within which they function.

The project is designed as a game, complete with different sensory "levels." Quoting at length:

Inspired by migratory birds and their ability to perceive the Earth’s magnetism, LEVEL 1 superimposes the participant’s field of vision with an additional signal consisting of directional color patterns. The gamer learns to navigate space according to his/her own magnetic compass. LEVEL 2 overlays synchronous retinal signals with asynchronous digital recordings, thus causing time to appear fluid and heterogeneous. Upon reaching LEVEL 3, all direct visual reception is shut off. Participants engage their surroundings relying entirely on the broadcast of cyborgian "eyes"—a network of hacked CCTV cameras activated by proximity. LEVEL 4 explores communication between the human and animal kingdoms, and Ernst Haeckel’s notion that language is the discriminating factor between them. A voice-changing device—the mouther—transforms the gamer's utterances into incomprehensible animal sounds, preventing him/her from normal human interaction. LEVEL 5 changes the player’s appearance with theriomorphic features dependent on random sets of alternative geographies. LEVEL 6 mixes the consummatory cycles of gamers and bees. Optoelectronic devices paired with recognition technology mask billboards and signs with images of flowers, thus neutralizing their imposed top-down message. LEVEL 7 augments objects with electronic hairs, quills, scales, tails and feathers based on readings of atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and temperature.

And this game is potentially infinite. As Ferracina writes, "Hundreds of potential levels follow, each representing both a pause in the self-absorbed routine of everyday survival and a window into the partial objectivities of human and animal 'others.' Rather than describing a progression culminating in the player’s victory and the software’s apparent defeat, the game folds continuously back upon itself, weaving new dynamic relations—new feedback loops—between living beings and their post-natural environments."

[Image: LEVELS 5, 6, and 7 from "Theriomorphous Cyborg" by Simone Ferracina].

It's a compelling, and highly provocative project; congratulations to Simone Ferracina for taking first prize.

The Cloud

2011-08-11T14:26:00.000-04:00

[Images: Assembling "Surface Tension" by Smout Allen, a room-sized kinetic device, hydrological model, and terrain computer commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions].

Architectural formations that make matter into objects of history

2011-08-11T14:02:00.000-04:00

[Images: Two glimpses of "Museums of the City" by David Gissen (renderings by Victor Hadjikyriacou), commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions; the title of this post comes from David Gissen].

Layerscape

2011-08-11T13:56:00.000-04:00

[Image: Milled terrain from "The Active Layer/Next North" by Lateral Office & InfraNet Lab, part of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions at the Nevada Museum of Art].

Island of Darwinian Machines

2011-08-11T13:53:00.000-04:00

[Images: Liam Young constructs a robot Galapagos for "Specimens of Unnatural History," part of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions at the Nevada Museum of Art].

Switch

2011-08-11T13:45:00.000-04:00

[Images: Marble run details from "Surface Tension" by Smout Allen, commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions].

Installment Plan

2011-08-11T13:39:00.000-04:00

[Image: A mechanical cloud of A-frames from "Surface Tension" by Smout Allen].

I'll be posting some photos taken last week during the installation process for Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. The exhibition opens this Saturday, August 13, and will be up until February 12, 2012.

[Image: Landscape Futures, "to be enlarged a lot"].

These are photos I took myself, so they are not professional installation shots; but they should give at least some sense of how the exhibition is taking shape and what you can expect to see in the galleries. See forthcoming posts for more.

Landscape Futures is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The New Robot Domesticity

2011-08-01T13:43:00.000-04:00

[Image: Optically tagged "robot-friendly bed sheets" from With Robots by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty].

Diego Trujillo-Pisanty, currently a student in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in London, has looked ahead at how future homes might be redesigned to accommodate domestic robots.

Rather than build entire new forms of architecture, however, Diego suggests that we'll first begin quite simply: retrofitting our interior environments, in often deceptively small ways, for optical navigation by autonomous mobile home systems. This will primarily take the form of peripheral additions to everyday objects, as well as a new range of optical tags that will allow certain tasks—folding blankets, for instance, or setting the dinner table—to be accomplished much easier by machines.

These tags will define both physical limits and the spatial operations appropriate within them, coding the everyday home environment for the rise of machine intelligence.

[Image: From With Robots by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty].

Homeowners will even help their robots learn through computational games—like Fröbel blocks for machines.

"Every living space is different," the project description explains, "not only in the architectural layout, but also in the tasks that the tenants require robots to do. For this reason, robots ship only partially programmed so that through a learning algorithm they might adapt to the home they operate in. To accelerate the learning process, special learning tools have been designed to help the robot integrate to a 3D environment." The photograph seen below "shows a living room after a robot self-training session. We can see it has now mastered the physics of equilibrium. It is also evident that it has mistaken one of the house's dinner plates which it has broken with robotic precision to complete its piece."

[Image: From With Robots by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty].

"Robot-friendly" handles will also be added to coffee mugs, the project suggests—which then ripples outward, effecting other spatial dimensions of the domestic environment, including where those mugs are stored. Thus, we read, "the cupboards in which these cups rest have also been altered in order to accommodate the robot. Not only are there tags marking the position of objects, but the doors have also been removed as they were not fit for A.I."

[Image: From With Robots by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty].

Cooking itself will also be altered; the next image seen here "shows how meat has been precisely cut into cubes without leaving any cut marks on the chopping board. The board itself has notches to facilitate robot interaction. In the background the meat package can be seen; it too has been labelled to suggest that the robots operate beyond a single house."

[Image: From With Robots by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty].

In a recent, highly recommended TED Talk, games designer Kevin Slavin discusses how the design of the physical world is being increasingly optimized for algorithms—and one of his central examples is the Roomba self-guided home vacuum cleaner.

[Image: A Roomba reveals its algorithms in this photo by Signal Theorist, via IEEE Spectrum].

The Roomba, in this context, becomes emblematic of the rise of a new kind of device, one with direct spatial and optical effects on the architecture inside of which it functions.

In fact, it is not difficult to imagine, as both Diego Trujillo-Pisanty's and Kevin Slavin's work suggest, a world in which everyday furniture has been subtly redesigned in order to fit the Roomba's spiraling subroutines—and not the other way around—or even whole rooms peppered with strange, ankle-high optical tags on certain walls, doors, or objects, used to steer the Roomba this way or that at specific points in its room-cleaning operations.

Like a tomb from Egypt's Valley of the Kings, our houses will be covered in hieroglyphs—machine-hieroglyphs, not legible as much as they are optically recognizable.

Now scale this up to the size of, say, Wall-E, and you get With Robots: a spatial environment slightly, almost invisibly, somehow off, idealized not for human beings at all, but for the spatial needs of intelligent objects.