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Who knew how fun the US government could be? Because here they've given us a downloadable origami earth balloon that would make Buckminster Fuller faint out of sheer professional jealousy –  [Image: National Geophysical Data Center – also available as a dodecahedron]. – a rad little animation of the December 2004 tsunami, and this crazy-color poster that depicts the tectonic ages of the earth's ocean crust –  [Image: National Geophysical Data Center]. – this last one available in a whopping 12.5MB poster. Surely a whole book could be written about the United States government and its encounter with the earth? An oral history of the US Geological Survey. An ethnography of the Department of the Interior. How the State manages its terrestrial other. Law against Geology.
 "If this concrete structure makes it off the drawing board," the New Scientist says, "it will smash every record in the book. It will stand a staggering 1 kilometre tall, and its base will sit at the centre of a shimmering field of glass and plastic 7 kilometres across." So what is it? If built, it will be "Australia's biggest solar power plant," a kind of chimney for hot light. "Air heated by the sun will rise up the tower, where 32 turbines will generate about 650 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to meet the demands of 70,000 Australians."  And if it sounds novel – it isn't. "People have been harnessing the energy of rising columns of air for centuries," we're reminded. As recently as the 1980s, for instance, a similar tower was constructed in Manzanares, Spain: "Rising 195 metres into the air and surrounded by an array of plastic sheeting 240 metres across, the Manzanares tower proved the concept worked. The plastic sunlight collector warmed the air underneath by up to 17°C, enough to draw it towards the central tower, where it created a strong enough updraught to drive a turbine and generate electricity. There were no fuel costs to pay, and no climate-damaging greenhouse-gas emissions." The efficiency of such a tower, we learn, "can be increased by using a larger collector to increase the air temperature at the base. And the taller the tower, the lower the ambient atmospheric pressure at the top." This means that a "1000-metre tower will be five times as efficient as the 200-metre Manzanares tower." The taller the better.  Such a project is not without problems, however, "such as how to keep some 4000 hectares of greenhouse [at the foot of the tower, where the air is heated] clean enough to trap solar radiation in the first place. Legions of squeegee-wielding window cleaners will clearly not be the answer. And there are worries that the plastic sheets used to build the collector might deteriorate under the glare of the Australian sun, as they did in Manzanares." On the other hand, nothing is without its difficulties, and concerns of basically any kind at all are not holding back the scientists behind this and other so-called " mega-engineering" projects. Global warming? We'll just build huge mirrors, or use reflective balloons, to bounce all that extra solar energy back into space. "Edward Teller," for instance, "father of the hydrogen bomb... [once] proposed putting shards of metal or specially made 'optical resonant scatterers', which reflect light of particular wavelengths, into the stratosphere." Apparently all you'd need is "a million tonnes of tiny aluminium balloons, each around 4 millimetres across, filled with hydrogen and floated into the stratosphere... for as little as a billion dollars a year." Not that tiny, metal balloons filled with hydrogen could interfere with wildlife, or fall into the oceans, but hey: just picture it – millions of little silver balloons floating through the stratosphere... Installation art as climatic engineering. Or vice versa. One wonders what else is under consideration.  How about the giant space-mirror? Lowell Wood, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wants to build "a giant diaphanous mirror in space a thousand kilometres across (!) and park it between the sun and the Earth to reflect solar radiation away from our atmosphere. Some 3000 tonnes of shield could compensate for a doubling of CO2 levels. The cost could run into hundreds of billions of dollars." 3000 tonnes of shield – is not a phrase you read very often. So what else could we do? We could try "spreading billions of small reflecting objects, such as white golf balls, across the tropical oceans;" and if "golf balls and space mirrors prove to be too far-fetched, John Latham of the US government's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has suggested a more down-to-earth option: making clouds whiter." Sounds down-to-earth to me. But how does it work? Latham, we read, "calculates that doubling the number of droplets in clouds over all the world's oceans would shut down several decades of global warming. Ingeniously, he proposes doing this by deploying giant wind-powered machines" – one of which "looks rather like a giant egg whisk" – "to fling salt spray from the sea into the air." (Incredibly, this machine was designed by a man named Salter). "A full-size version would be 70 metres high, and hundreds of them across the oceans could whiten clouds across thousands of kilometres." Godzilla v. The Cloud-Salter. Then there's Klaus Lackner, recently featured in the Alanis Morissette-narrated "Global Warming" TV special. Lackner is a scientist at Columbia University, and he has proposed the construction of massive "forests" made from synthetic trees. According to Lackner, each synthetic tree would look "like a goal post with Venetian blinds," not like a tree at all.  [Image: Columbia University Earth Institute]. "But the synthetic tree would do the job of a real tree... It would draw carbon dioxide out of the air, as plants do during photosynthesis, but retain the carbon and not release oxygen." Each tree, as the BBC describes it, "would act like a filter. An absorbent coating, such as limewater, on its slats or 'leaves' would seize carbon dioxide and retain the carbon. Dr Lackner predicts that the biggest expense would be in recycling the absorber material." The catch is that you would need at least 250,000 of these "goal posts with Venetian blinds" studded all over the earth, located inside cities, standing like optical illusions receding over the horizon. (Smaller, domestic versions are under consideration). In any case, all of these eco-friendly (or almost) mega-projects are barely a fraction of the actual proposals out there, passing from one desk to the next, being sent via email from one mega-engineering firm after the other, getting filed away or submitted to venture capital firms. Yet I'm tempted to issue a call of sorts here: that any BLDGBLOG reader who gets a kick out these ideas – building artificial, carbon-absorbant forests, for instance, or the giant space-mirror (I like the tiny balloons) – should perhaps scan the classified ads each week to see if war-profiteer/engineering firms like Halliburton, Anteon, Northrop-Grumman, and their ilk are hiring. Then get a job there, work your way to the top, and pull out of the war industries altogether. Start building solar towers, and absorbant forests, and, while you're at it, pump millions of dollars into modular architecture and prefab housing, not for more military training villages, but to build refugee camps and post-disaster instant cities, realizing the goals of Archigram, Greenpeace, and Architecture for Humanity, all at once. Just a thought. (And if you have your own mega-eco-ideas... leave a comment, below).
Adding to BLDGBLOG's earlier photographs of the Mirny Mine, here is one more – in a highly suspect color scheme – as pointed out to me by Anonymous. A substantially larger version is available if you click on the image –  – which also reveals the rather astonishing difference in scale between the city and the hole itself, which, of course, is the world's largest diamond mine. The photograph, meanwhile, reminded me of something my friend Dan once told me, that an American scientist had devised a plan to use, yes, nuclear bombs to open up a hole in the earth's crust. Nuclear bombs. Turns out, it's Caltech's David Stevenson, whose plan "involves creating a crack in the Earth's crust either by detonating a nuclear warhead or by using something which would release a similar amount of energy."  [Image: BBC]. As Stevenson himself explained to the BBC: "You fill that crack quickly with liquid iron and with a small, solid probe immersed in that liquid iron. The probe would be perhaps the size of a grapefruit. The iron being heavier than the surrounding rock causes the crack to keep propagating down and closing up behind as it does so. It goes down to the Earth's core at quite high speed, on a timescale of days. As it reaches the core, the probe will send back, using seismic signals, information about what the Earth is made of." Surely, then, it would be worth nuking a self-propagating crack into the earth's crust? What could possibly go wrong? Turns out he's kidding – sort of. (See PDF).
 [Image: A map of Wiltshire's Ridge quarry/bunker system; see below]. An article I've not only forwarded to several people but planned whole screenplays around, frankly, reveals that there is a sprawling complex of tunnels located beneath Belgrade. There, a recent police investigation "into the mysterious shooting of two soldiers has revealed the existence beneath the Serbian capital of a secret communist-era network of tunnels and bunkers that could have served as recent hideouts for some of the world's most-wanted war crimes suspects. The 2-square-mile complex – dubbed a 'concrete underground city' by the local media – was built deep inside a rocky hill in a residential area of Belgrade in the 1960s on the orders of communist strongman Josip Broz Tito. Until recently its existence was known only to senior military commanders and politicians." So how big is this concrete underground city? "Tunnels stretching for hundreds of yards link palaces, bunkers and safe houses. Rooms are separated by steel vault doors 10 feet high and a foot thick. The complex has its own power supply and ventilation." But hundreds of yards? That's nothing.  A secret, 240-acre underground bunker-city has recently come onto the UK housing market.   With 60 miles of tunnels, located 120 feet underground, the whole complex is worth about 5 million quid.   The complex was constructed "in a former mine near Corsham in Wiltshire where stone was once excavated... for the fine houses of Bath." This subterranean city, as the Times tells us, "was a munitions dump and a factory for military aircraft engines. It was equipped with what was then the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation." Radio broadcasts echoing across a landscape of craters.    And now it's for sale.    [A note on these images: these are all photographs – by the very talented and highly prolific Nick Catford – of the Ridge Quarry, in Corsham, Wiltshire, which geographically matches with the Times description, above. That said, the description of the Ridge Quarry provided by Subterranea Britannica does not seem to indicate that we are, in fact, looking at the same mine/quarry/bunker system. (There is a discrepancy in the amount of acreage, for instance). Anyone out there with info, thoughts, or other et ceteras, please feel free to comment... Either way, however, they're cool images, and Subterranea Britannica is always worth a visit now and again].
 [Image: Dante's Inferno, as imagined by Barry Moser].
It would seem fitting, on Halloween, to take a quick look at the landscape architecture of Hell—its topography and geographical forms, perhaps even its subsurface geology.
Inspired by a comparison someone made a while back between Edward Burtynsky's photographs of the Bingham Pit—an open pit copper mine—in Utah, and an illustration by Botticelli of Dante's Inferno, my interest in Hell's topography was piqued.
The original comparison:  
You're looking at "Kennecott Copper Mine No. 22, Bingham Valley, Utah" (1983), by Edward Burtynsky, and... Botticelli.
As Adrian Searle describes Botticelli's work: Terraced, pinnacled, travelling forever downward, the ledges, cities and basements of hell are furnished with sloughs, gorges and deserts; there are cities, rivers of boiling blood, lagoons of scalding pitch, burning deserts, thorny forests, ditches of shit and frozen subterranean lakes. Every kind of sin, and sinner, is catered for. Here, descending circle by circle, like tourists to Bedlam, came Dante and Virgil. Following them, at least through Dante's poem, came Botticelli. The ledges, cities and basements of hell. But then I found loads of other images, including this skewed and unattributed manuscript scan, showing another mine-like Hell, or Hell as an extraction complex–
—complete with interesting subsurface faults and fractured bedrock, in section. One could easily imagine an obscure branch of the Renaissance academy in Rome publishing tract after tract on the exact geotechnical nature of the Inferno. Is it made of granite? Is it kiln-like? Is it slate? Is it ringed by rivers of uranium tailings?
It's the literary-cosmological subgenre of Hell descriptions.
In any case, making a much less explicit visual or even Dantean connection here, there's also Bartolomeo's Hell.
And, finally, making no attempt at all to sustain the visual thread, there's William Blake–
—a perennial favorite of mine, which shows us Dante and Virgil both, walking hand-in-hand through a shimmering geomagnetic curtain, a Northern Lights inside the earth. The gates of hell redesigned as a crackling, prehistoric, residual electricity that blasts in vaulted arcs from the faulted walls of granitic stratigraphy, prehuman, technicolor, properly infernal. Hell, as industrially re-designed by Nikola Tesla.
William Blake meets Jules Verne, who has become a mining engineer and is working on his own translation of Dante. They load-up on blank notebooks and descend together toward the vast, gyroscopic rotations of an electrical hell, taking notes on geology, mapping the stratigraphy of torture machines, where solid rocks mutate and minerals bleed. An epic poem starring geotechnical engineers, and rogue electricians. A hell-mapping expedition.
The climactic scene is a dialogue between Blake and Tesla, who argue, in front of huge glowing domes of black electricity, above vast canals of uranium, that there is an energetic basis for eternal life – or damnation...
Or perhaps the British Museum sends its imperial topographical unit deep into Siberia, where a giant hole has been discovered... Electrical storms form in its overgrown mouth and screams can be heard...
Anyway – Happy Halloween. Don't forget your hell map.
 Yep – more Edward Burtynsky, this time from his "Tailings" and "Oil Fields" series.    Or "Oil Fields" and "Tailings," as it were. But these are just great, I think. The human encounter with geology all over again, desert landscapes processed for their petroleum wealth. The above oil fields are, specifically, in Belridge, Taft, and McKittrick, California, towns pump-fucked by industrially re-evolved gigantoid mosquito-machines, solitary insects of metal, lubricated by the very oil they're sucking on. But then we shift latitudes and cross the border to Canada, visiting Elliot Lake, Ontario, where uranium mining has produced a weird white hydrology, rivers of fractal uranium tailings, a run-off landscape, powdery, radioactive, self-silting, where an exhumed, abiotic mineral has replaced the multi-hued autumnal earth with an abstract, gesso-like backdrop, framing dead trees against absence.    The micro-fractal landscapes of pollution, now here with us for perhaps millions of years. Landscapes without time limits. Landscapes without expiration. What future botany will appear here on this white, skeletal crust?
  
[Images: From a 1999 RIBA Gallery exhibition I attended; tear-off pads were affixed to the walls, with each pad bearing one of these mini-festos, repeated 200-250 times. And, yes, that means I've been saving these things in a file for 6 years... These are my own (crappy) scans. But the tear-off pad as a method of architectural publication is absolutely great and full of DIY potential; imagining here a guerilla reprinting of everything ever posted to BLDGBLOG, with each entry assigned its own pad, then a gallery tacked full of the things... Anyway, click on images to enlarge (and read): it's the late return of the architectural mini-manifesto].
 I ran across this image at SPROL, and immediately thought of Robert Smithson's "Yucatan Mirror Displacements," in which Smithson put mirrors on the ground and in the trees throughout the Yucatan, and then photographed the resulting inversions of sky, land, earth, heaven... left, right, etc.  [Image: Robert Smithson, from "Yucatan Mirror Displacements, 1-9," 1969]. And though the first image, above, is actually an array of solar power generators, the machines it pictures rearrange and visually disrupt the landscape in such an exciting way that I'm tempted to suggest they should be installed everywhere just for the visual effect. Thousands of these things on the roofs of every building downtown, installed in the smoky corners of clubs, part fractal-mirror-machine, part-echo-wall. Rotating inside jewelry shops, turning everything into a seamless, through-linked chain of exact-faceted geometric self-similarity. Install ten thousand of these in the sky, rotating above Manhattan: babies will wake-up from afternoon naps and see sparkling heavens of mirror-bright skies flashing like cameras, reflecting towers, clouds, seas, rivers, a world made alive through reflective technology. There's something oddly attractive – even Greek mythological – about a mirror that can store the sun's energy: it can copy the sun, in other words, or imitate it. It's a kind of rearing-up of the son, the prodigal copy – a return of the repressed – to slay and replace the source, the original. In fact, imagine a retelling of the Narcissus myth, updated for the 21st century, populated entirely with solar-powered technology and written by Jean Baudrillard – and you'd get something like these mirror-displacing reflection machines.
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