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       [Images: The sheer, extraordinary beauty of these maps is hardly even the start of one of the biggest time-traps I've ever found on the internet: the National Geologic Map Database of the United States Geological Survey. You can click through regions, or go state by state, and some of the most giddily unbelievable, breathtaking images I've ever seen can be zoomed-in on to a detail that nearly pixelizes it's so close. Preliminary bedrock topography! Interpretive geologic cross sections of Death Valley! The possible mythic overtones make the brain reel. Mapping time-dependent changes in soil-slip-debris-flow probability! What!? The vocabulary alone is worth the visit. Distribution of hydrogeologic units – just look at this map! And this one! Map fetish! It's the weird and wonderful world of abstract terrestrial science. Look at this one! And this one! In fact, just click on Kentucky and you'll go nuts].    [For other unforgettable maps, don't forget these].
   [Images: Geoacoustic topographical maps of the seafloor outside Sydney, Australia, taken by the GeoSwath]. Geoacoustics basically means using sound to map a distant landscape. This includes the seafloor: you bounce soundwaves off the bottom, and the time it takes for the echoes to come back reveals landscape depth and other topographical details – sometimes even shipwrecks and alien cities – what – (You can read a bit more about geoacoustics through a series of PDFs at the Woods Hole Marine Seismology and Geoacoustics Group homepage). Bats, for instance, can be said to navigate geoacoustically. In any case, these images are geoacoustic landscape maps of the ocean floor outside Sydney, Australia –   – including an undersea plane wreck, also mapped with geoacoustics. It is unclear whether the plane is also near Sydney, however; either way, there are five or six other wreck maps to look at, and the detail is great. If you look, for instance, at the third image in this post you'll see a shipwreck! It's that little oblong geometric object in the bottom-center of the image – which you also see in the monochromatic version, above. Anyway, to satisfy your inner Steve Zissou, take a look at the Woods Hole Deep Ocean Exploration Unit; and check out these films of echo-scattering on submerged topography. (For another cool film – a simulation of last year's Asian tsunami – see BLDGBLOG's earth.mov). Finally, two more geoacoustic maps:  [Image: A geoacoustic map of the bottom of Lake Vattern, Sweden].  [Image: Geoacoustic map of a faultine off Indonesia]. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll be producing geoacoustic maps of a submerged New Orleans, or a London done under by tides and estuarial flooding. The undersea canyons of New York, former archipelago. It'd be interesting, meanwhile, if you could take geoacoustic data and release it as an MP3: you could then listen to the suboceanic landscape's raw sonic topography, compressed aquatic echoes, complete with deepsea ridges and audio-thermal vents. Non-visual mapping of unreachable landscapes. An MP3 of the surface of Mars. The rings of Saturn.
 [Image: Keith Robinson/B+C Alexander/ New Scientist]. The polar seas are filled with sound: unearthly vibrations that moan almost constantly through near-frozen waters. "'It's like a string orchestra all practising different tunes at the same time but then suddenly playing together,' says Vera Schlindwein, a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany." If you're hoping to stick your head underwater, however, and listen directly to the arctic seas: think again. "The sounds are not usually audible, but can be heard when recordings of seismic signals... are speeded up." And they sound like this.  [Image: Photographer unknown; from Shifting Baselines]. So what are the instruments behind this frozen music? Icebergs, of course. "A spectacular 16-hour 'song' in July 2000 helped pinpoint the cause," which was "traced to a 400-metre-high iceberg." As the iceberg scraped along the seafloor, "seawater running through crevasses in the ice would have continued to flow rapidly, causing the tunnel walls [to] vibrate." It was a kind of frozen saxophone, pounding into underwater geological formations. This is the iceberg as cello string (or perhaps kettle drum). The internal crystalline pressures of a half-submerged, mobile landscape soundtracking the arctic seas. Tectonics of ice in surround-sound.  [Image: Gustave Doré, " Over London By Rail" (1872)]. But what if you took note of this and went elsewhere, to London for instance, armed with contact microphones and an iPod? You could listen through headphones to the foundational moaning of old buildings, plugged directly in, the whole city an instrument of arches and railway viaducts, Tube tunnels and old churches, gravitational pressures. The unsettling groan of wet masonry. Like the creaking timbers of an old ship – or like an iceberg: a landscape under strain, singing all but inaudible music. Except you've got your contact mics, and your headphones on, and the reverbed shudder of a Georgian terrace house lulls you to sleep in a cafe. Arctic music, London-based. Or perhaps all the bedrock beneath Manhattan, hooked up to contact mics and recorded for three weeks: that recording sped-up to no less than ten minutes then played at high volume through loudspeakers. This is what your city sounds like, you say: the loose wobble of brickwork and glass. 70 floors of an iron tower humming in the darkness as snow falls. This is the city, settling in its marshes; this is London, instrument. (Via Archinect's mapper of the poles, Bryan Finoki).
 [Image: “A woman crossing a stretch of India’s improved national highway system in a village in the northern state of Rajasthan.” Tyler Hicks/ New York Times]. More Asian highway news: “The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at $6.25 billion, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent’s railway network the century before.” As the New York Times opines: “The effort echoes the United States’ construction of its national highway system in the 1920’s and 1950’s. The arteries paved across America fueled commerce and development, fed a nation’s auto obsession and created suburbs. They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete inner cities.” India’s automotive modernization, however, allows the New York Times this quick throwaway line: “Goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus the state – mile by mile, India is struggling to modernize its national highway system, and in the process, itself.” A part of me wonders if the article’s author only wanted to cover the story in order to write that sentence...  [Image: “Migrant workers carrying cement at night to fill a section of a bridge under construction west of Aurangabad, in the state of Bihar.” Tyler Hicks/ New York Times]. “At its heart,” the author continues, “the redone highway is about grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that has always taken the long view.” Always? In any case, as the monolithic abstract surfaces of desert highways begin to coil and stretch themselves over the often rugged Indian topography, the mountains and swamps, passing through collapsing cities on shores, perhaps we will see a new kind of Indian Futurism arise, taking over from the outdated and Italianate F.T. Marinetti and Antonio Sant’Elia, an art of speed and travel and roadside architectural abstraction; or perhaps the fresh start of a counter-Bollywood, a traveling, digital, hyper-realist cinema that maps the outer edges of this newly autobahn’d Indian subcontinent with hand-held cameras and cheap cars, filmmakers traveling together at 90mph. DIY psychovideography, roadborne. What, then, would happen when all this links up with the Asian Highway Project? When our possible future routes stretch from Finland to Tokyo, via Tehran and Outer Mongolia? What then? What future arts and structures will we make then? A BLDGBLOG Guide to the Asian Highway Project. Interested funders, be in touch.
 [Image: "At more than 500 metres, Taipei 101 in Taiwan is the world's tallest building. But now geologists fear that its size and weight may have transformed a stable area into one susceptible to earthquake activity. (Photograph: Wally Santana/AP)"].Taipei 101, temporarily the world's tallest building, is causing earthquakes. The "sheer size of the Taiwan skyscraper has raised unexpected concerns that may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made megastructures. Taipei 101 is thought to have triggered two recent earthquakes because of the stress that it exerts on the ground beneath it." This is 700,000 tons of stress – and it "may have reopened an ancient earthquake fault."  [Image: Emporis].This reminds me of the film Ghostbusters. Toward the end of the film it's revealed that Sigourney Weaver's residential tower – the metal in its walls, the iron infrastructure, the whole shootin' match – is actually an antenna for ghosts and fire-breathing hell-oxen, which she finds hiding in her refrigerator. The entire building, in other words, exerts stress on occult faultlines that run throughout New York City, attracting evil spirits toward it like a vortex of the dead. Here, however, Taipei 101 acts as a grounded antenna attracting tectonic forces. Tectonic shortwave. Or, architecture as tectonic warfare pursued by other means: China says sure, mate, we'll send you our best engineers and architects. Why not? Only three years later the CIA discovers everything China built was specially designed to exert strain on ancient tectonic faults; geotechnical battle tactics in architectural form. For the price of some construction, and with a little patience, you destroy another country through earthquakes. War averted. No troop deaths. We learned it from Taipei 101!, they'll say. The military manuals of the future – will be entirely architectural.
Andrew Maynard's Holl House starts off as a vertical column, then unlocks into a horizontal network of hinged structures –   – in a process described by this diagram:  Sure, there could be loads and loads of stress fracture problems, pinched fingers and drunken accidents – the whole damn thing folding up as you hit the wrong button, collapsing into bed – but put several of these things together and you've either got the most exciting micro-city in the world, or an Oscar-winning set for a new science fiction film. Or both. If I were rich, I'd buy fourteen of them. But meanwhile, the designer, Andrew Maynard, appears to have no shortage of great ideas. I only today got around to reading a whole profile of his work posted on Archinect last month, and I was practically laughing out loud some of it's so good. Check out his prefab entry to the 2004 VicUrban affordable housing competition. "How can the housing industry make exciting, well designed and cheap housing?" Maynard asks. "Easy, mimic the car industry."  "The dimensions of the basic module are dictated by the maximum dimensions available to be transported legally on Australian roads without permits."  The house is then assembled on-site –  – where "work is minimised to the installation of a steel 'train track' footing system allowing the prefabricated modules to simply be slid into place. The prefabricated module is based on a rigid galvanised steel frame with plasterboard internal finish and stained farmed pine external skin."  Soon you could have an entire community: "Alternating between single storey and double storey allows estates to have a visual diversity based on a single modular form. The flat bituminous roof also allows rooves to easily become trafficable outdoor areas for second storey spaces."   Then there's Maynard's Styx Valley Protest Structure, which was designed to assist anti-logging protests in Tasmania's Styx Valley Forest. As Maynard writes: "The Styx Valley Forest is a pristine wilderness in south western Tasmania. It is home to the tallest hardwood trees in the world averaging over 80 metres... Many of the trees are over 400 years old... Unfortunately the Styx Valley falls just outside [Tasmania's] South West National Park and it is now under attack from logging companies." How does the Protest Structure work? "Rather than inserting the structure into the canopy of a single tree, the structure is designed to attach itself to three trees," so that only "a small number of structures can secure the well being of a large area of pristine wilderness."   I would think, however, that even without this ostensibly protective purpose, such structures would be amazing places to spend time. Somewhere between Swiss Family Robinson and Return of the Jedi, they could serve as little writing labs, up in the trees, or just places where you can clear your mind and breathe.  Again, BLDGBLOG would buy fourteen of them if it could. Somewhere between furniture and inhabitable architecture, there are some really great ideas on Maynard's site; check out the Design Pod, the 2nd Sproule House, the Conceptual Library for Japan and the Cog House for starters. Here are some images of the 2nd Sproule House – but check out the site for more:      (For some other cool and prefabulous structures, see BLDGBLOG's own Garage conversions, and Inhabitat's frequently updated prefab database).
 The Quonset hut was a portable, easy to construct architectural unit that allowed for the rapid deployment of forward bases in war zones. A hut could be flown in by helicopter and just as easily removed. Whole cities could be built in a day. The Quonset contributed, in many subtle and overlooked ways, to the global, mid-20th century spread of U.S military power. By enabling a new kind of nomadic military utopia – or, modular instant cities maintained on inhospitable terrains – the Quonset hut literally sheltered America's overseas Army presence.  "During the housing crunch of the late 1940s," however, as a press release from the National Endowment for the Humanities explains, "thousands of people across the nation converted these surplus military huts into unconventional homes, churches, and restaurants. Today, the Quonset has largely vanished from most of the American landscape – and most people's memory." A new book and exhibition hope to correct that fading memory. As these photos from that book show, the Quonset has many cool uses – and could even experience something of a renaissance in today's pro-prehab architectural climate.      I, personally, would love a little BLDGBLOG village out in the desert somewhere, made entirely of Quonset huts: I could write books, use solar power, watch the stars... (Via Archinect's omnipresent Bryan Finoki).
 There's a secret prison city in Florida: "It looks like your normal neighborhood, but you won't find this place on any map. The county property appraiser doesn't even have a record of it. In this secret community, some streets have names, others do not. When we plugged in one street name, mapquest said it doesn't exist." The town is called Starke. According to the Florida Department of Corrections it consists entirely of "staff housing" for a nearby prison. Starke's "lawns are personally cut by the prisoners." The whole place exists behind high-security barricades, and the news team which wrote the above-linked story was refused entry.  For some reason, however, when I first heard of Starke, I immediately thought of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's 18th century plans for the royal saltworks at Chaux, in Arc-et-Senans, France. Chaux may not have been a prison, but it was a quasi-utopian (read: radial) community of workers, each of whom had their own assigned home and workspace. The whole thing was overseen by what was in effect a plantation master. With all the workers living on-site, the community formed a kind of early industrial "factory town," a total-living experience – that, for some reason, seems oddly like Starke. Maybe not. It is Chaux whose images you see here.  [Image: Ledoux's saltwork utopia, from Gallica]. (Via Archinect's own live-in avant-garde, Bryan Finoki).
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