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 [Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
While we're on the subject of stepwells, I thought I'd post some photos taken of another well, this one in the town of Bundi, Rajasthan.
 [Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
While we were in India—or, more specifically, while we were traveling in Rajasthan—Nicola Twilley and I put stepwells very high on our list of things to go out of our way to see, having assembled a long list of architectural sites and sights to visit, from castles and towers to temples and, of course, these wells.
 [Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Being on something of an India binge the last week or two, I'll try to get more of these photos up. These are extraordinary buildings, in purpose, structure, and ornamentation. Framing the everyday act of water-collection in such otherworldly architectural circumstances is a work of extravagant genius, yet seemingly one of a piece with the grandeur given to waterworks elsewhere.
 
[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].
From the old brick sewers of London—beautifully sculpted hallways for water, all smooth knots and vortices below the city—to the strangely kitsch Greek columns of Philadelphia's Fairmount Water Works, and even the sprawling labyrinth of fountains and spigots that distribute water throughout Rome, hydrological infrastructure inspires and deserves these otherwise functionally unnecessary acts of monumental design.
 [Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
So the Raniji ki Baori is roughly 150 feet deep. A central stairway takes visitors down to the well itself, passing beneath an archway home to bats.
  [Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].
However, when you get down to the bottom of the staircase and you peer into the deep pit where fresh water was once collected, the dilapidated state of the facilities become instantly and sadly visible. The steps are covered in guano, dust, and litter. Pieces of broken pipe (or collapsed scaffolding) extend from the walls.
   [Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].
These photos—like those of Chand Baori—were taken during a trip to India earlier this year.
   [Images: Inside the stepwell; bottom photo (by Nicola Twilley) gives a sense of scale].
These, too, are available in slightly larger sizes if you open them in a new window.
I had the pleasure earlier this year of visiting a site I've long been obsessed with from afar, the magnificent stepwell of Chand Baori, in Abhaneri, India.
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Nicola Twilley and I hired a car and driver for roughly USD $50-$60, for what turned out to be a total of about 5 hours, and we drove out from Jaipur to the small town of Abhaneri. Here is the site from above, on Google Maps. For anyone else interested in taking this trip some day, it is well worth the drive from Jaipur (and you can also visit the surreal ruined temple of Harshad Mata, photos of which I'll try to post soon, as well).
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Taking information straight from the sign that greets you upon arriving at the stepwell—
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
—Chand Baori is the oldest stepwell in Rajasthan, having been constructed in the 8th-9th centuries A.D. It is 19.5 meters, or roughly 64 feet, deep. The overwhelming majority of its surface area consists of steps—thousands of steps—all of which lead down to the water table, turning weekly water-gathering trips by local families into a communal spectacle, a social event framed by this extraordinary act of excavation and architecture.
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Whether or not the following information is true, I don't know, but Nicola and I heard various versions of why Chand Baori was constructed where it was, the most compelling of which was that the nearby water tables of two oppositely flowing rivers in the region mixed underground here, leading to particularly clean water.
The algae-choked green soup now seen at the bottom of Chand Baori doesn't necessarily make an argument for this version of history, but it's a compelling vision, nonetheless: architecture as a kind of depth probe, spiked down into buried waters inside the Earth.
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
So this is what you see when you first walk in.
 [Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
The well suddenly appears there, its own horizon line, like a landslide of masonry, a sinkhole stabilized by stairs, and the vertiginous sense of being drawn down into the maw of this place is extraordinary.
  [Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
While we there, walking around the well's upper edge and peering into alcoves lined with sculptures and fragments of statuary, we got to watch a flock of pigeons fly back and forth over the site seemingly subject to its own tides, birds washing from one side to the other and back again every fifteen minutes or so, nesting on heavily ornamented rock walls above the site or landing en masse on the steps themselves.
     [Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
In any case, here are a bunch of images from our visit, looking down into the mouth of what is, in a sense, part pit, part building, part hydrological infrastructure, part ritual social space, an ocean of steps. Enjoy (and note that all images here are available in slightly larger versions if you open them in a new window).
        [Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Apropos of nothing, here is the route from Jaipur on Google Maps.
 [Image: "Lower Manhattan" (1999) by Lebbeus Woods, discussed extensively here].
Like many people, I was—and remain—devastated to have learned that architect Lebbeus Woods passed away last night, just as the hurricane was moving out of New York City and as his very neighborhood, Lower Manhattan, had temporarily become part of the Atlantic seabed, floodwaters pouring into nearby subway tunnels and knocking out power to nearly every building south of 34th Street, an event seemingly predicted, or forewarned, by Lebbeus's own work.
I can't pretend to have been a confidant of his, let alone a professional colleague, but Lebbeus's influence over my own interest in architecture is impossible to exaggerate and his kindness and generosity as a friend to me here in New York City was an emotionally and professionally reassuring thing to receive—to a degree that I am perhaps only now fully realizing. I say this, of course, while referring to someone whose New Year's toast a few years ago to a room full of friends gathered down at his loft near the Financial District—in an otherwise anonymous building whose only remarkable feature, if I remember correctly, was that huge paintings by Lebbeus himself were hanging in the corridors—was that we should all have, as he phrased it, a "difficult New Year." That is, we should all look forward to, even seek out or purposefully engineer, a new year filled with the kinds of challenges Lebbeus felt, rightly or not, that we deserved to face, fight, and, in all cases, overcome—the genuine and endless difficulty of pursuing our own ideas and commitments, absurd goals no one else might share or even be interested in.
This was the New Year's wish of a true friend, in the sense of someone who believes in and trusts your capacity to become what you want to be, and someone who will help to engineer the circumstances under which that transformation might most productively occur.
  [Images: From War and Architecture by Lebbeus Woods].
Lebbeus mentored and taught many, many people, and I am, by every measure, the least qualified of any of them to write about his influence; but learning that Lebbeus has passed away, and under such utterly surreal circumstances, with his own city—literally, the streets all around him—flooding in the darkness as the oceans rose up, compelled me to write something for him, or about him, or because of him, or to him. I have been fortunate enough, or perhaps determined, to live a life where I've met several of my heroes in person, and Lebbeus is—he will always be—exactly that, a titanic and strangely omnipresent figure for me whose work set off special effects he himself would be puzzled—even slightly embarrassed—to learn that I've attributed to him.
Speaking only for myself, Lebbeus is a canonical figure in the West—and I mean a West not of landed aristocrats, armies, and regal blood-lines but of travelers, heretics, outsiders, peripheral exploratory figures whose missives and maps from the edges of things always chip away at the doomed fortifications of the people who thought the world not only was ownable, but that it was theirs. Lebbeus Woods is the West. William S. Burroughs is the West. Giordano Bruno is the West. Audre Lorde is the West. William Blake is the West. For that matter, Albert Einstein, as Leb would probably agree, having designed an interstellar tomb for the man, is the West. Lebbeus Woods should be on the same sorts of lists as James Joyce or John Cage, a person as culturally relevant as he was scientifically suggestive, seething with ideas applicable to nearly every discipline.
  [Images: From War and Architecture by Lebbeus Woods].
In any case, it isn't just the quality of Lebbeus's work—the incredible drawings, the elaborate models—or even the engaged intensity of his political writings, on architecture as politics pursued by other means or architecture as war, that will guarantee him a lasting, multi-disciplinary influence for generations to come. There is something much more interesting and fundamental to his work that has always attracted me, and it verges on mythology. It verges on theology, in fact.
Here, if I can be permitted a long aside, it all comes down to ground conditions—to the interruption, even the complete disappearance, of the ground plane, of firm terrestrial reference, of terra firma, of the Earth, of the very planet we think we stand on. Whether presented under the guise of the earthquake or of warfare or even of General Relativity, Lebbeus's work was constantly erasing the very surfaces we stood on—or, perhaps more accurately, he was always revealing that those dependable footholds we thought we had were never there to begin with. That we inhabit mobile terrain, a universe free of fixed points, devoid of gravity or centrality or even the ability to be trusted.
It is a world that can only be a World—that can only, and however temporarily, be internally coherent and hospitable—insofar as we construct something in it, something physical, linguistic, poetic, symbolic, resonant. Architectural.
 [Image: "Einstein Tomb" by Lebbeus Woods].
Architecture, for Lebbeus, was a kind of counter-balance, a—I'm going to use the word—religious accounting for this lack of center elsewhere, this lack of world. It was a kind of factoring of the zero, to throw out a meaningless phrase: it was the realization that there is nothing on offer for us here, the realization that the instant we trust something it will be shaken loose in great convulsions of seismicity, that cities will fall—to war or to hurricanes—that subways will flood, that entire continents will be unmoored, split in two, terribly and irreversibly, as something maddeningly and wildly, in every possible sense outside of human knowledge, something older and immeasurable, violently shudders and wakes up, leaps again into the foreground and throws us from its back in order to walk on impatiently and destructively without us.
Something ancient and out of view will rapidly come back into focus and destroy all the cameras we use to film it. This is the premise of Lebbeus's earthquake, Lebbeus's terrestrial event outside measured comprehensibility, Lebbeus's state of war.
 [Image: "Einstein Tomb" by Lebbeus Woods].
Because what I like about Lebbeus's work is its nearly insane honesty, its straight-ahead declaration that nothing—genuinely and absolutely nothing—is here to welcome us or accept us or say yes to us. That there is no solid or lasting ground to build anything on, let alone anything out there other than ourselves expecting us to build it.
Architecture is thus an act—a delirious and amazing act—of construction for no reason at all in the literal sense that architecture is outside rational calculation. That is, architecture—capital-A architecture, sure—must be seen, in this context, as something more than just supplying housing or emergency shelter; architecture becomes a nearly astronomical gesture, in the sense that architecture literally augments the planetary surface. Architecture increases (or decreases) a planet's base habitability. It adds something new to—or, rather, it complexifies—the mass and volume of the universe. It even adds time: B is separated from C by nothing, until you add a series of obstacles, lengthening the distance between them. That series of obstacles—that elongated and previously non-existent sequence of space-time—is architecture.
 [Image: "Einstein Tomb" by Lebbeus Woods].
As Lebbeus himself once wrote, it is through architecture that humans realize new forms of spatial experience that would have been impossible under natural conditions—not in caves, not in forests, not even while out wandering through fog banks or deserts or into the frigid and monotonous vacuity of the Antarctic. Perhaps not even on the Earth. Architecture is a different kind of space altogether, offered, we could say, as a kind of post-terrestrial resistance against unstable ground, against the lack of a trustworthy planet. Against the lack of an inhabitable world.
Architecture, if you will, is a Wile E. Coyote moment where you look down and realize the universe is missing—that you are standing on empty air—so you construct for yourself a structure or space in which you might somehow attempt survival. Architecture is more than buildings. It is a spacesuit. It is a counter-planet—or maybe it is the only planet, always and ever a terraforming of this alien location we call the Earth.
In any case, it's the disappearance of the ground plane—and the complicated spatial hand-waving we engage in to make that disappearance make sense—that is so interesting to me in Lebbeus's work. When I say that Lebbeus Woods and James Joyce and William Blake and so on all belong on the same list, I mean it: because architecture is poetry is literature is myth. That is, it is equal to them and it is one of them. It is a way of explaining the human condition—whatever that is—spatially, not through stanzas or through novels or through song.
 [Image: "Einstein Tomb" by Lebbeus Woods].
If you were to walk through an architecture school today—and I don't recommend it—you'd think that the height of invention was to make your building look like a Venus flytrap, or that mathematically efficient triangular spaceframes were the answer to everything, every problem of space and habitability. But this is like someone really good at choosing fonts in Microsoft Word. It doesn't matter what you can do, formally, to the words in your document if those words don't actually say anything.
Lebbeus will probably be missed for his formal inventiveness: buildings on stilts, massive seawalls, rotatable buildings that look like snowflakes. Deformed coasts anti-seismically jeweled with buildings. Tombs for Einstein falling through space.
 [Image: "Einstein Tomb" by Lebbeus Woods].
But this would be to miss the motivating absence at the heart of all those explorations, which is that we don't yet know what the world is, what the Earth is—whether or not there even is a world or an Earth or a universe at all—and architecture is one of the arts of discovering an answer to this. Or inventing an answer to this, even flat-out fabricating an answer to this, meaning that architecture is more mythology than science. But there's nothing wrong with that. There is, in fact, everything right with that: it is exactly why architecture will always be more heroic even than constructing buildings resistant to catastrophic rearrangements of the earth, or throwing colossal spans across canyons and mountain gorges, or turning a hostile landscape into someone's home.
Architecture is about the lack of stability and how to address it. Architecture is about the void and how to cross it. Architecture is about inhospitability and how to live within it.
Lebbeus Woods would have had it no other way, and—as students, writers, poets, novelists, filmmakers, or mere thinkers—neither should we.
Here are some old photos of mines and quarries, like antique views of the planet being disaggregated into rocks and waste heaps. Here, human civilization is nothing more than a thin lace of extraction camps and train tracks, blast patterns and crowbars, men sweating over landscapes they've learned to dismantle. Photos courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The first two are the Dolese & Shepard quarry in Hawthorne, Cook County, Illinois; no date given.
  [Images: Dolese & Shepard quarry, Hawthorne, Illinois; no date given. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
The next two are the Colorado Yule Marble Company quarry in Gunnison County, Colorado; also no date given. Look closely and you'll see small buildings attached to the cliff face like monasteries, piered upward and buttressed by wood scaffolding. These are amazing vernacular structures, mundane but otherworldly, and the massive high-res version available at the U.S.G.S. website is worth a look. (Although, if you're into old industrial buildings, don't miss this sloped and mountainous tower in the woods, like something by Daniel Dociu).
Rails and stairways begin to appear embedded in the cliffs—
  [Images: Colorado Yule Marble Company quarry, Gunnison County, Colorado; no date given. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
—which is nothing, really, compared to the descent seen in the next image, a series of ladders that backtrack down into the newly revealed depths of the Vermont Marble Company quarry in Tokeen, Alaska.
 [Image: Vermont Marble Company quarry, Tokeen, Alaska; circa 1912. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
On the upper edge of that same quarry, we see leveled platforms emerge with dark blots of equipment perched on them—
 [Image: Vermont Marble Company quarry, Tokeen, Alaska; circa 1912. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
—as men try to figure out how to take apart the landscape they stand on, reducing it to a raw geometry of cubes and blocks, measured shapes juxtaposed with the wilderness behind them.
    [Images: Various quarrying scenes, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
It's all a strange scene of humans and machinery, working in collaboration to take apart the world.
 [Images: The "lowest floor" of a Vermont Marble Company quarry, Alaska; 1912. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
I'll end with two images I love—but not before pointing out that all of the above photographs were taken by a man named E.F. Burchard for the U.S. Geological Survey. From my (admittedly very brief) search, it appears that Burchard has all but escaped being documented or written about—at least in terms of popular history—yet his life and work seem ripe for, on one hand, a thesis project somewhere, in a history or photography department perhaps, exploring mines, railyards, quarries, and other sites of Herculean extraction infrastructure throughout the American west, from Chicago to Arizona, Colorado to Alaska, and the relationship between photography and national expansion; or, on the other, a popular biography of this photographer who always seemed present at the right time, anywhere humans began poking new holes in the planet or peeling up the surface of the world to find what lies beneath.
Until then, here are two non-E.F. Burchard photos, awesome dioramas of men at work against geology, like paintings by Fernand Léger. These are photos taken by W.H. Jackson, and they depict an interesting behind-the-scenes moment for American architecture.
  [Image: Quarrying rock for the Mormon Tabernacle, Utah; 1872. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey].
From the U.S.G.S. caption: "Quarrying granite in Cottonwood Canyon, 17 miles south of Salt Lake City, for the Mormon Tabernacle. The ground is completely strewn with immense boulders and detached masses of granite, which have fallen down from the walls of the canyon on either side, some of which are from 30 to 40 feet square. All the quarrying is confined to splitting up these blocks. Salt Lake County, Utah. 1872."
You can find many more related photos at the U.S.G.S.'s " Mines, Mills, Quarries, Etc." collection, but it's the work of E.F. Burchard in particular that I find so interesting. It's like those great descriptions of geology and geological warfare from Book VI of John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Milton writes that things "Deep under ground" have been infernally unearthed, "materials dark and crude": "up they turned / Wide the celestial soil, and saw beneath / The originals of Nature in their crude / Conception ... / ... hidden veins digged up ... / ... of mineral and stone."
(Vaguely related: Venue's interview with photographer Edward Burtynsky, including some thoughts on his "Quarries" series of images).
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