For those of you who have signed up for the BLDGBLOG/Atlas Obscura "expedition to the geoglyphs of nowhere" trip tomorrow afternoon, March 20, part of the first annual international Obscura Day, I wanted to touch base briefly about what will actually occur out there.
First of all, I'm excited—I think this will be a lot of fun, and I look forward to meeting lots of you and exploring the abandoned geometry of a city that was never fully built in the first place (and about which you can read a bit more here). Even CNN is excited, writing that nearly "200 people have committed to a trip to California City, California, a planned city in the middle of the Mojave Desert that was never finished. It is now home to about 15,000 people, many of whom live within a surrounding network of crumbling roads, the vestiges of the abandoned city plan."
Second, it looks like at least 182 people have signed up for this, which I assume translates into roughly 75 cars making the journey—that's a substantial caravan. That being the case, our initial meet-up in the parking lot of the California City Rite Aid—as the current plan now stands—will actually be quite hard, if not impossible, to manage.
So I think we need to activate Plan B: we will still arrive via that Rite Aid (9482 California City Boulevard) at 1pm tomorrow, and you should still use it as a place to get something to drink or whatever else you might need (and there's a fast food place next door if you need a bathroom break), but if you do not actually speak to me, or to anyone else, for that matter—perhaps because you are a misanthrope attracted to abandoned cities in the desert—don't worry: just head out of the city, going northeast along Randsburg Mojave Road, onto 20 Mule Team Parkway. Here's a link to the most basic map of that road.
At that point, to be honest, you can just do whatever you're going out there to do: make films, take photographs, record sounds, write blog posts, Tweet things, interview people, do cartwheels, read Ballard and meet your future best friends. Fly remote-control airplanes with small nose-mounted cameras over the failed glyphs of a forgotten real estate dream. Build kites. Assemble simulated Iron Age tumuli in the dirt and gravel and dedicate them all to Anselm Kiefer. Establish a makeshift geothermal drilling operation and cause an earthquake. Call your mother.
This is not a guided tour, and we are not experts. This is a kind of documentarian flash mob, and together we'll produce the largest archive of contemporary California City photographs that exists anywhere in the world. We can start by filling out this Flickr group—but, again, feel absolutely free to do your own thing and save your own photographs wherever you choose to do so.
Finally, a brief bit of legalese—sorry, but I need to cover this stuff, too:
I understand and acknowledge that my attendance at and participation in Obscura Day is voluntary. I assume full responsibility for any injuries or damages resulting from my attendance at and participation in any related events or activities, including responsibility for using reasonable judgment in all phases of participation and travel to and from any event location. By attending an Obscura Day event, I, the attendee, in full recognition and appreciation of the dangers, hazards and risks inherent in such activities, do hereby waive, release, indemnify, hold harmless and forever discharge JPSF LLC., its officers, agents and employees, from and against any and all claims, demands, liabilities, causes of action, losses, costs and expenses of any nature (including, without limitation, attorneys’ fees) resulting from damages to personal property, personal injury or death, arising out of or relating in any way to my attendance and participation in these activities. I acknowledge that I have read and understand this entire Waiver of Liability and Release, and I agree to be legally bound by it. I further acknowledge that I am over the age of 18 (at or above the age of majority in the jurisdiction in which I reside, if different from 18). If not, I understand that my attendance and participation in any event is expressly conditioned on the acknowledgment of this Waiver of Liability and Release by my parent or legal guardian.
So bring sunscreen, fill up your gas tank, wear comfortable shoes, don't forget some water, and I will see you out there in the middle of nowhere.
This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that Architizer's official L.A. launch party is tonight down at the A+D Museum's new location on Wilshire Boulevard. Stop by Architizer for more details—but it should be a beautiful evening to be out and about, and things kick off at 6:30pm.
This is a further reminder, as well, that Peter Cook of Archigram and Crab Studio will be throwing open the doors for a new exhibition over at SCI-Arc tomorrow night: London Eight features work by professors and their "proteges" from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Tomorrow night—Friday, March 19—also includes a group discussion, moderated by Peter Cook, with Yousef Al-Mehdari, Pascal Bronner, Johan Hybschmann, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. That's at 6pm. Hope to see you at both events!
[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].
The last few days have been pretty awesome. We've been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Libby Robin from the National Museum of Australia, and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI's ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters' near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI's full-scale virtual reality room.
I have some hilarious and amazing photos of Matthew Coolidge wearing black VR goggles, holding remote controls in each hand, while Bill Gilbert and Lucy Lippard look on, equally engoggled and optically stunned, flying helter-skelter over virtual terrains to chase simulated forest fires up canyon walls, the replicant ground dropping out from beneath them as we ran straight off a cliff, and I hope to post those here soon.
We had amazing conversations, as well: we're all gearing up for a big conference next year in Reno, hosted by the Center for Art + Environment at the end of September 2011. That will definitely be something to keep your eye on if you're at all interested in landscapes, the hydrosciences, water rights, mythology and the American West, archaeoastronomy, the contested history (and future) of weather modification, offworld exploration, the anthropology of mining, nature writing in its broadest possible sense, and much more. We're putting together something really fantastic, to be honest, and you have 18 months to make plans to be there.
Even better, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and Mark Smout of SmoutAllen were also on hand, winning stuffed animals together in the Circus Circus casino (Mark quipped that the casinos were simply "giant, ugly buildings with jewelry stuck on them, like earrings"), and so the three of us are now down in San Francisco, where we'll be picking up Sarah Rich tomorrow to drive down to LA—and I can hardly imagine a better group of people to hit the Californian road with. The roads outside Reno were eight-foot canyons of plowed snow till we hit the Bay Bridge and drove past Alcatraz blinking in the darkness.
In any case, if you're near San Francisco tonight, Tuesday, March 16, I'll be giving a talk at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) starting at 6pm. It costs $5, unfortunately, but it should be fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and colleagues again; as all of those friends and colleagues know, I wasn't a huge fan of San Francisco when I lived here, but it's good to be back in this rolling city of fog lines, abandoned bunkers that look like hills, tectonic trembling, lost ships, ghost streets, buried dunes, vinicultural microclimates, chemical weapons, a suicide bridge, and its artificially shrunken bay. I'll be talking about quarantine, The BLDGBLOG Book (which I'm thrilled to say has just gone into a second printing), the "Glacier/Island/Storm" studio and its accompanying blog-week experiment, blackouts, and more.
26 years ago, the Guggenheim hosted an exhibition of work by Will Insley, focusing particularly on Insley's project ONECITY.
[Image: ONECITY by Will Insley; image via The Nonist].
The New York Times described it at the time as depicting an "imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square." It is "'situated' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an 'Over-building' and an 'Under-building' and each containing nine arenas."
The artist described his own interests as having "very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present" and no relation really at all to the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''
[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].
Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’" These mythic fragments of a city that never was thus take their artistic power more from suggestion—of possible archaeologies and future extensions, impossible events this civilization of the plains might yet undergo—rather than any sense of intended realizability.
It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. "Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing," the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they "mutter a lot" and "often carry around personal abstract structures" that they exchange "according to mysterious rituals." And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.
ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.
In any case, you can see a few more images of Insley's Michael Heizer-like creation of excavations and voids over at The Nonist.
Pruned posted an image the other day by artist Nicolas Moulin (more of whose work can be seen over at Vulgare). Looking into Moulin's work further, however, I came across another series he produced a little more than a decade ago called Vider Paris. Here, we see Paris transformed into an abandoned maze of lifeless streets. Every building is sealed shut behind a seamless, Berlin Wall-like concrete monolith.
[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].
Vider Paris "is a series of computer-altered images of the streets of Paris," we read in a PDF portfolio of Moulin's work. "All traces of life are removed from the images: vegetal, urban furnishings, pedestrians, cars, etc." Further, "all the buildings are sealed with sheets of concrete up to the second floor."
[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].
The effect is oddly exhilarating; whether because these images have the appearance of being stills pulled from a much longer video, or simply because of their haunting, Ballardian overtones, Moulin's vision of an empty Paris seems tailor-made for Hollywood art directors or even for someone sketching out ideas at Thunder Game Works.
A dream of apocalypse, twelve centuries from now, when you wander into the concretized canyons of a Paris with almost no signs of life, its skies grey, the barest trace of weeds growing up through cracks in rain-filled gutters. There are sounds of distant animals rustling, the city's rhomboid geometries now animated by unpredictable acoustic effects. You see smoke somewhere, but it could be miles away. Looking for clean water, and a place to sleep before the sun goes down, you walk onward into the city core.
(This is now the second post I've written from an airplane... flying somewhere over SW Nebraska).
Now that Landscapes of Quarantine is up and open for view—and will be until April 17—we're off for a quick vacation. The opening night was amazing; thanks to everyone who came out, to everyone who helped set up, and to everyone whose work appears in the show. Thanks, especially, to Glen Cummings of MTWTF for a fantastic exhibition design, and to Josh Hearn and César Cotta for sticking around all week for 3am vinyl installations, multiple coats of paint, and more.
I'm obviously biased, as the show's co-curator, but the works on display are awesome. They are:
Pages 179–187 by Joe Alterio Q-CITY: An Investigation by Front Studio/Yen Ha, Michi Yanagishita, and Joshua Cummings MAP 002 QUARANTINE by David Garcia Studio Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed? by Scott Geiger Field Notes from Quarantine, Katie Holten Hotel III, Camp II, Lab IV, and Cell V by Mimi Lien Cordon Sanitaire by Kevin Slavin Context/Shift, Brian Slocum Containing Uncertainty, Smudge Studio/Jamie Kruse & Elizabeth Ellsworth NYCQ by Amanda Spielman & Jordan Spielman Quick by Richard Mosse Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System by Daniel Perlin Precious Isolation: A Pair of Invasive Species by Thomas Pollman
And, for the opening night party only, Suck/Blow, a pair of sidewalk pavilions constructed from Tyvek and pressurized air, by Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB with former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, Joseph Grima.
I've included a few photos here, meanwhile, but will be posting more about the show once the next few days of travel are done.
I should also briefly add that this is the first post I've ever written while flying in a Wifi-enabled airplane—in this case, over the American midwest—riding through invisible geographies of air, turbulence bobbling us side to side in an experiential, transparent plate tectonics of the sky.
So thanks again for coming out for the exhibition opening. Regular posts will resume soon.
[Images: All photos, except the last five (two of which are by Nicola Twilley and Stacy Fisher), by Emiliano Granado (who appears, with tripod, in the final image)].
With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.
Ready or not, then, and half-covered in paint, our jeans ruined, in need of new shoes, dehydrated, our exhibition participants recently returned from Uganda and the eastern Congo with photographs and a film, mounting illuminated comic book manuscripts on the wall, exploring nuclear-waste repositories as symbolic geological centers of a future world, diagramming parallel split cities with quarantine spaces merely an arm's length away, and opening the facade panels of the gallery to allow bubbles and bulges and Tyvek screens to confuse the outside line with the street, and more, we will be there tonight, unloading dozens of cases of beer donated by Brooklyn Brewery, to celebrate this long project coming together at last in an exhibition space for everyone to see.
Stop by at 7pm tonight, March 9, if you're around and say hello—or drop in on Storefront for Art and Architecture during its regular opening hours any time before April 17. Orange will after-image through your brain for days to come...
[Image: National Geographic: "A spelunker in a glacier cave in Greenland gazes upon colors and shapes that look more like a swirling galaxy than a cave formation." Photo by Carsten Peter].
Having now spent every available moment of every day for more than a week stuck inside Storefront for Art and Architecture, painting the floors and walls, installing vinyl, coordinating deliveries, sweeping up loose tape and sawdust, and more, I've decided to upload a slightly longer than normal cache of links. It might be a few more days before I can post again.
I hope to see some of you at the exhibition opening, though, which takes place Tuesday, March 9, at 7pm: Landscapes of Quarantine.
[Image: The future is not what it used to be: MIT's thresholds seeks essays on critical futurism].
thresholds 38 | Futures: Call for Submissions: "Whether it is a revolt against the futures of the past or a curiosity towards the unknown, thresholds 38 invites methods, projects, practices and alternative kinds of critique that imagine unorthodox futures that can emerge from within this institution." Submissions due March 12.
Synthetic Aesthetics | Call for Participants: "We seek participants for a project on synthetic biology, design, and aesthetics. The project will provide funding to bring together scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology with artists, designers, and other creative practitioners."
Synthetic biology is broadly defined as the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing biological systems for useful purposes. Design is central to synthetic biology, as the living world becomes a product of design and manufacturing choices, rather than evolutionary pressures alone. Thus, it becomes important to ask what role design--and the related concept of aesthetics--play in this burgeoning field. Other forms of engineering and manufacturing work in close conjunction with creative practitioners: structural engineers work with architects; mechanical engineers with product designers. Can synthetic biology benefit similarly from such collaborations?
Applications due March 31.
Open Agenda | Call for Submissions: "Open Agenda is a new annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental Australian architecture. Open to recent architecture graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment... Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration." Register by May 1.
[Image: The Niagara Falls without their water, photographed by Flickr user rbglasson, via mammoth].
mammoth | Absent Rivers, Ephemeral Parks: "For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were 'de-watered' as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was drip-irrigated, like some mineral garden in a tender establishment period, by long pipes stretched across the gap, to maintain a sufficient and stabilizing level of moisture. For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape."
BBC | North Tyneside high street "revived" by fake shop front: "Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside... The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required."
InfraNet Lab | Terrestrial Discontinuities: "...these [energy corridors in the western United States] range from 3,500-feet wide to upwards of 5 miles wide. With these widths, we could almost begin to see these corridors as an ecology in and of themselves—rather than an ecology competing with National Parks, they could become the New National Parks, infrastructural vectors, protected as natural reserves by virtue of their very danger to us."
Guardian | Greece should sell islands to keep bankruptcy at bay: "Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art works to cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands..." It might be ethically wrong, as well as politically dubious, and I have no money, but BLDGBLOG would certainly buy one. The Sovereign Neo-Cyclades.
[Image: Tactical drone seed-bombing, courtesy of Design Under Sky].
Design Under Sky | Ludic Guerrilla Gardening Drone Warfare: "...with recent advancements in augmented reality and virtual gaming, I can't help but imagine that a new style of drone-based urban landscape replenishment isn't a far off possibility."
Post-Traumatic Urbanism | Mediterranean Union: "A [high-speed rail] line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region—linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe—all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees. The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?"
City of Sound | Notes on New Songdo City (Part 1): "...it occurs to me that the logical thing to do would be the greatest engineering project of the next centuries; quite possibly the greatest diplomatic and economic project of the next centuries too, linking Japan with China via Korea via a high-speed rail link across gigantic bridges."
Spaceinvading | Sandwiched by INABA: "As part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Jeffrey Inaba's firm INABA was commissioned to design a pop‐up café located in the museum's interior courtyard. The project consists of three large‐scale lanterns that occupy the courtyard's double‐height space; a 24‐foot long service counter; communal tables; high‐top counters; and 'droopy' seat cushions."
SCI-Arc | London Eight Exhibition: "SCI-Arc presents London Eight, curated by renowned English architect Sir Peter Cook. A founding member of the 1960s futurist group Archigram and a visiting faculty member at SCI-Arc, Cook invited five architects who currently teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where Cook was professor from 1990 to 2005, to participate in an exhibition at the SCI-Arc Library Gallery. These architects were then asked to select a 'protege' whom they had mentored through their studies at the Bartlett to exhibit alongside their own work in the gallery." Includes work by Smout Allen, Johan Hybschmann, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz, Yousef Al-Mehdari, CJ Lim, and Pascal Bronner.
Hudson Valley Seed Library | "The Hudson Valley Seed Library strives to do two things: to create an accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners; and, to create gift-quality seed packs featuring works designed by New York artists in order to celebrate the beauty of heirloom gardening."
Urban Forest Map | "The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative project among city agencies, tree advocacy groups, and citizen foresters like you to map every tree in San Francisco, which will help protect and expand our urban forests."
GOOD | Fallen Fruit's Tree-planting Dreams Are Uprooted In Madrid: "For the last 10 days Fallen Fruit had been scouring the area [around Madrid], leading urban foraging trips to find what other fruit-bearing trees existed in the neighborhood around the city-funded Matadero art space, plotting the best locations for future apples, peaches, plums, pears, and apricots... The plan was to have the trees planted before their final presentation that night, giving the people of Madrid a map to all the public fruit they could eventually eat."
Cleveland Plain Dealer | Galleria mall is giant greenhouse, raising organic crops in Cleveland: "...by late spring or early summer, there will be fresh tomatoes for sale among the shops and galleries at the downtown Cleveland mall. Very fresh—as in vine-grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center that stretches between East Ninth and East 12th streets."
[Image: King's Vineyard, London by Soonil Kim, via Pruned].
Pruned | King's Vineyard, London: "One can certainly imagine such a network [of aerial vineyards and urban viticultural installations] built to grow others things, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, cash crops, commercial flowers and plants, with the winery turned into a farmer's market."
Independent | Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered: "Dr. Mason explains that he 'went for a walk' into the eastern perimeter of the site—an area that hasn’t been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it’s likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East’s Neolithic Period—a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC – 4300 BC. It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe."
New York Times | A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature: "From Washington to New York State, a series of 'snowmageddons' have wreaked a particular form of havoc for Orthodox Jews. The storms have knocked down portions of the ritual boundary known as an eruv in Jewish communities... Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house. Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them—Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically."
Spillway | Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us: "One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realize that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years."
Lebbeus Woods | High Houses: "The High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995. Their site is the badly damaged 'old tobacco factory' in the Marijn dvor section near the city center."
Serial Consign | Toronto Sound Ecology: "Toronto Sound Ecology is a web mapping project dedicated to archiving field recordings collected in and around Toronto."
Some landscapes | Alpine Symphony: "Birdsong, thunderstorms and flowing water are pretty standard, but... would it be possible to move away from the sublime and the picturesque, to convey more unusual settings or simply nondescript landscapes through purely orchestral sound?"
Google Earth Blog | Solving a Murder With Google Earth: "On January 24, 2006, Jennifer Kesse vanished. The police quickly determined that she was abducted, but nothing solid has turned up in the past four years... During this time, users on her site discussed the new events and came to a stunning revelation: using Google Earth's historical imagery, they found an image from approximately one month after she disappeared. The image seems to show some promising information."
Related from last summer: Sydney Morning Herald | Mugging suspects snapped by Google Street View: "Dutch police have arrested twin brothers on suspicion of robbery after their alleged victim spotted a picture of them following him on Google Map's Street View feature."
National Geographic | Quintana Roo Underwater Cave Project: "Beneath the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, [Sam] Meacham and his team are exploring and mapping the longest underwater cave system in the world." See also: Blue Holes Project: "Blue holes can run extremely deep underground, with one Bahamian blue hole exceeding 600 feet (180 meters) below sea level, and contain a series of mazelike passageways going miles in many directions. These cave systems can transition from giant rooms to tiny holes that divers must remove all of their gear in order to squeeze through. To add to the challenge, currents reverse in the ocean caves, making timing of dives critical."
Architizer | Los Angeles Launch Announcement: "We are happy to announce that on March 18th, we will be hosting a party in Los Angeles at the new A+D Museum space [at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard]. In partnership with Haworth, Dwell Magazine, LA Forum, SCI-Arc, and BLDGBLOG, the event will be an evening to meet fellow Los Angeleno architects as well as a celebration of Los Angeles architecture culture." Here is a map. If you're in LA, stop by and say hello!
I'm absolutely thrilled to have curated this show, with Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography, and I can't wait to see it finally open for view. On the other hand, this week is an absolute mania of painting, material deliveries, installation, cleaning, and more, which means I'll probably be a bit thin on posts for the next few days.
The last four or five months, of course, have seen a wide variety of quarantine-themed interviews and posts here on BLDGBLOG, but it's worth reminding both myself and others why quarantine is worthy of architectural attention in the first place—as a spatial experience of waiting, isolation, and, often, emotional claustrophobia.
At its most basic, quarantine is the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a strategy of separation and containment—a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty. From Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion to the artificial quarantine islands of the New York archipelago, and from camps set up to house HIV+ Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay to the modified Airstream trailer within which returning Apollo astronauts once waved at President Nixon, the landscapes of quarantine are as varied as they are unexpected.
Each of the works on display in the exhibition responds to some aspect of quarantine, from the "dark math" of triage and the ethical challenge of enforced isolation to the geological timescale of nuclear-waste sequestration. The works range from a wall-sized infographic comparing the infrastructural bubbles inside of which illegally imported orchids and the President of the United States, respectively, live, to a tear-off & take-home short story inspired by the idea of a Quarantine Administration bureaucracy. There are designs for a new, multi-player iPhone game called "Cordon Sanitaire"; field notes and sketches from North Brother Island, the final home of Typhoid Mary; a special issue of David Garcia's Manual of Architectural Possibilities (M.A.P.); and much more.
The exhibition will be up until Saturday, April 17—but, if you want even more, there will be a series of ticketed, quarantine-themed dinners in early April.
The reception kicks off at 7pm on Tuesday, March 9; it is free and open to the public (and there will be free beer, generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery). I hope to see some of you there!
While we're still on the subject of artificial weather, the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, designed by UNStudio, can repurpose its internal ventilation system to form an artificial tornado.
"The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize," Autoblog explains, "and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building's corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof." It is also more than 100 feet tall—making it the official world-record holder for the World's Largest Artificial Tornado.
Watch the video of how it forms:
A reader, Daan Koch, pointed this internal atmospheric feature out to me—the tornado as ornament—adding that this "dramatic way of ventilating an atrium... could be nice for the Guggenheim in New York, as well." I couldn't agree more.
Or perhaps horizontal tornadoes could roll through the New York subway system every night from 2-5am, cleaning out the underworld of its dust and potato chip bags. Perhaps even inside this New Haven parking garage, shown below, with its "fabulous concrete circulation drum" as recently photographed by Charles Holland. Complicatedly angled fans and vacuums suck new wind systems into existence near Yale.
[Image: New Haven parking garage as Tornadodrome; photographed by Fantastic Journal].
Or your new house in the Chicago suburbs seems absolutely perfect for you and your family—till the first hot day of the year sets in and you turn on the A/C. Some sinister combination of ill-conceived vents and over-tall foyer begins to rope together winds—pulling in air from the living room, from the basement, from the kids' bedrooms—and within a mere twenty minutes a tornado-strength twister takes visible form.
It then spins for days, suffocating the residents in their sleep by robbing them of oxygen, and lifting their limp bodies into the air, where they turn in lazy circles like pirates drowned at sea. Their bodies dance aloft, as if caught in an aero-spirograph, eerily lit by dim suburban lamplight and visible through the front door windows—a vision of the vortex—accidentally killed by HVAC.
[Images: Two views inside UNStudio's Mercedes-Benz Museum; photographer unknown].
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
For those of you who have signed up for the BLDGBLOG/Atlas Obscura "expedition to the geoglyphs of nowhere" trip tomorrow afternoon, March 20, part of the first annual international Obscura Day, I wanted to touch base briefly about what will actually occur out there. 
Second, it looks like at least 182 people have signed up for this, which I assume translates into roughly 75 cars making the journey—that's a substantial caravan. That being the case, our initial meet-up in the parking lot of the California City Rite Aid—as the current plan now stands—will actually be quite hard, if not impossible, to manage. 
At that point, to be honest, you can just do whatever you're going out there to do: make films, take photographs, record sounds, write blog posts, Tweet things, interview people, do cartwheels, read Ballard and meet your future best friends. Fly remote-control airplanes with small nose-mounted cameras over the failed glyphs of a forgotten real estate dream. Build kites. Assemble simulated Iron Age tumuli in the dirt and gravel and dedicate them all to Anselm Kiefer. Establish a makeshift geothermal drilling operation and cause an earthquake. Call your mother. 
Finally, a brief bit of legalese—sorry, but I need to cover this stuff, too:
This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that 
[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by 
[Image: Photo by George Steinmetz/CORBIS for 
[Image: ONECITY by Will Insley; image via 
[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley, via 
[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].
[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].
[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of 
[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of 
[Image: Outside-in: looking into 
[Image: Photo by 
[Image: Photo by 
[Images: All photos, except the last five (two of which are by 
[Image: 
[Image: 
[Image: 
[Image: The future is not what it used to be: MIT's 
[Image: The Niagara Falls without their water, photographed by Flickr user 
[Image: Tactical drone seed-bombing, courtesy of 
[Image: 
[Image: King's Vineyard, London by Soonil Kim, via 
[Image: The "
[Image: Rendering of the new 
I'm absolutely thrilled to have curated this show, with Nicola Twilley of 
[Image: The 
[Image: New Haven parking garage as Tornadodrome; photographed by 
[Images: Two views inside UNStudio's 
