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Did alien organisms rain down in a strange red dust on northern India?  At least two scientists think so. It all started when "scarlet showers containing the red specks hit parts of India in 2001. Researchers said the particles might be dust or a fungus, but it remained unclear." A new paper, however, "assesses various explanations for them and concludes that the specks, which vaguely resemble red blood cells, might have come from a meteor." Strangely, the cells contain no DNA – yet appear to be biological. Could this be close encounters of the viral kind? Space flu? Or the seeds of an alien botany, aterrestrial gardens waiting for design by landscape architects? Vast, tentacled hedge-mazes spreading through the Indian Himalayas. The BLDGBLOG Guide to Alien Topiary. (Spotted at Archinect; see also BLDGBLOG's look at our own alien planet).
Sergey Zimov – "a hardy Russian biologist" – "is trying to recreate a landscape not seen on Earth for nearly 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age – complete, if possible, with woolly mammoths. The project is called Pleistocene Park, but it's not a tourist attraction," New Scientist says. "Zimov wants to answer some fundamental questions about the impact early modern humans had on the environment."  [Image: New Scientist]. "During the late Pleistocene, north-eastern Siberia was part of the world's largest ecosystem, stretching from western Europe across the Bering Strait to Canada and from the Arctic to northern China – half the land area of the planet." It was densely populated with "huge herds of herbivores – mammoths, bison, elk, woolly rhinos, yaks, saiga, horses, reindeer, musk oxen and moose" – till 10,000 years ago, when "the large animals died out... and the grassland that supported them also disappeared, replaced by mossy forests and tundra." So what happened? Zimov blames the arrival of human beings (I'm imagining a century or two of intensely aromatic, Conan the Barbarian-style outdoor barbecues), and, to prove this, he's organized the Pleistocene Park. The park will sit "in 160 square kilometres of meadows, forests and willow shrublands in the Kolyma river basin," a "remote corner of Siberia, once a final destination for exiled Soviet dissidents." It may even be re-populated with cloned mammoths; then the ecological experiment will begin.  [Image: Spotted at Pruned]. Upon further reflection, I'm thinking at least four things: 1) it seems a very odd coincidence that the exact same thing is being proposed right now for central North America; 2) why only the Pleistocene? let's rebuild the Hadean era, or bring back some Devonian seas; 3) why does it have to be an ecosystem? why can't we rebuild the architectural world of, say, the Holy Roman Empire? or pre-war Europe? cool roads and little chapels everywhere, tiny villages – the Minoan labyrinth!; and 4) if a forward-thinking restaurant did this, they'd have the most amazing supply of ingredients in the world. [For other preserved landscapes, see BLDGBLOG's Silicon Gardens].
The International Space Station shouldn't be used only for scientific experiments, proposes the London-based group Arts Catalyst, which is currently studying ways to turn the ISS into an orbiting cultural institution. That's right: an art gallery in space.  "Attaching objects to the exterior of the ISS or launching things into orbit from the station are among the more intriguing concepts that have been proposed," writes Seed Magazine. More interesting, at least from my standpoint, is the idea of "creating artificial auroras in the Earth's atmosphere" (something already discussed on BLDGBLOG), or – and I love this, too – "sending artificial meteors into reentry burn." Yet others have proposed "using the ISS as a site in which to explore acoustics." Anechoic Bach.  In addition to so-called "artistic experiments in weightlessness," Seed describes the cinematic possibilities of anti-gravitation, including "a film, shot during parabolic flight, that observes the movements of Chinese chiming spheres in glycerine, oil and water as they move through the intense gravitational fields attained during the flight." (You can actually watch that film here). In any case, you can read a bit more about all this in The Guardian; while I sit here dreaming of ways to get BLDGBLOG a few weeks' residency aboard the floating gallery. Writers in space. Sponsored by Honda. Or new utopian cities built from sticks, hovering anti-gravitationally above your desktop. Post-terrestrial structures. Harvard's got some cash – surely they could send their best architecture grads into orbit for a while...
 Swiss Cheese City, by London-based architecture firm Agents of Change (AOC), proposes that "vacancy in cities" is really "a starting point for a new urban form." Accordingly, the project hopes to "generate new possibilities from holes in the built fabric," such as "Special Cultivation Zones (SCZs)." Special Cultivation Zones are an urban land-bank, defined by "temporary boundaries within which land can’t be bought or sold, and emerging skills, social networks and locally-grown produce are cultivated in the ‘vacant’ city fabric." (For more on urban farming, see Pruned or Inhabitat). Then there's AOC's Croydon Roof Divercity project –  – which radically rethinks the landscape of Croydon's roofs (and sounds really, really fun): "Taking the flat roofs of Croydon as our testbed," they write, "we propose a new roofscape for the city – beaches, ice rinks, golf courses, allotments, skateboard parks and pasture refresh Croydon's tired concrete." How about a shooting range? (For more on green roofs, see Inhabitat). After all, AOC asks, how could London be adapted "to an agricultural logic – the logic of rotation, seasons, ground and growth?" Thus, with a vision straight out of sci-fi, they describe Hackney New Garden City, complete with an "Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)." This would include "a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems... liberating the ground's agricultural potential."   [Images: Hackney New Garden City, before and after]. For another place you could put those ideas to work, see Philadelphia's Urban Voids; then check out these photos of "arbortecture" – or, plants growing out of buildings. (Via Pruned).
“Unknowingly, the architecture and building community is responsible for almost half of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions annually," we read at Ed Mazria's new Architecture 2030. "Globally the percentage is even greater.”  In a mind-blowing-if-true statistic, by 2035 "three quarters of the built environment in the U.S. will be either new or renovated. (!) This transformation over the next 30 years represents a historic opportunity for the architecture and building community to reverse the most significant crisis of modern time, climate change." Ed Mazria's interest in sustainability is long-standing; you can read more about him at Metropolis.
 [Image: What would happen, I suppose, if Toll Brothers went into genetic engineering: it's Geoff Shearcroft's " Grow Your Own" – probably not what New Scientist had in mind... but could you grow a whole city from the spines of cloned mice? Would anyone ever live there? What would a house fire smell like...?].
There was a show in London last summer, organized by RIBA, called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. (You can read a review of it here, with images). The show included this amazing bridge design, which has been tacked to a bulletin board behind my desk for nearly a year; I finally scanned it.  [Image: A bridge over the River Avon, by "W. Bridges"]. An excellent companion book was produced for the exhibition, making a worthy and stimulating start to the new year –  – yet that initial bridge also reminds me of a post on Pruned, about the unbuildable, speculative architectural designs of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, which included this insane kind of bio-architectural hedge-bridge. Houses growing atop houses.  Combining this and the bridge above, however, I'm left wondering if you could grow a bridge out of coral? A whole continent-wide system of Roman aqueducts? Somehow train the coral, or guide its barnacled growth, upward into an arc – then walk over it. Sail ships under it. Or would that form the first legally-recognized case of landscape abuse? Mistreating your living bridges? (See Pruned or the nonist for more; then order this book).
 [Image: The Brooklyn Bridge cutting over an arched labyrinth of brickwork; Keith Kin Yan/ Overshadowed].
The surface of the planet renews itself through geothermal hydrology, sulfuric lakes, new continents of silt –    – as natural acids scour shapes in slow terrains. These are all photographs by Bernhard Edmaier, whose work can be found on his own website –   – and in the beautiful (if unfortunately named) Earthsong. (Earth- what?) Meanwhile – though I repeat myself – these bring to mind J.G. Ballard's novel The Drowned World, with its vision of a flooded, neo-tropical Europe, London become a backed-up toilet full of silt and Jurassic vegetation, "a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past." Huge iguanas laze around in the heat. Buildings left and right are collapsing, their lower six floors immersed in polluted seawater, "miasmic vegetation... crowding from rooftop to rooftop." The city is fossilizing. As Ballard writes: "A few fortified cities defied the rising water-levels and the encroaching jungles, building elaborate sea-walls around their perimeters, but one by one these were breached. Only within the former Arctic and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable."  [Image: The Drowned World's rather unimpressive cover...] So the story goes that a research biologist is touring this neo-tropical London, boating from hotel to hotel across fetid lagoons, recording the types of plants that infest the city. Meanwhile monsoons are coming up from the south, everyone is dying of skin cancer and no one can sleep. The intensity of the sun's radiation is making everything mutate. In between some eyebrow-raising moments of ridiculous, pop-Nietzschean pseudo-philosophy – the surviving humans find themselves psychologically regressing down the totem pole of evolution toward... something or other; it's all very psychedelic and 2001 – there are some cool descriptions of these new urban tropics: "Giant groves of gymnosperms stretched in dense clumps along the rooftops of the submerged buildings, smothering the white rectangular outlines... Narrow creeks, the canopies overhead turning them into green-lit tunnels, wound away from the larger lagoons, eventually joining the six hundred-yard-wide channels which broadened outwards toward the former suburbs of the city. Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade... Many of the smaller lakes were now filled in by the silt, yellow discs of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden." In any case, one could easily imagine Bernhard Edmaier's photographs here bearing much in common with Ballard's new alluvial world of fresh earth, architecture reduced to deltas of sand. Old eroded reefs of brickwork. Lagoons of pollution.  Erosion and hydrology, the most powerful urban forces on earth.
 [Image: G.B. Piranesi, from the endlessly stimulating Complete Etchings]. Happy 2006...
 A series of articles on gold mining continues again at the New York Times, this time focusing on the state of Nevada's groundwater. "Nearly 10 million gallons a day draining away in the driest state in the nation... is just one of the many strange byproducts of Nevada's tangled love affair with gold."   [Images: Barrick's Goldstrike Mine, Nevada; all photos by Ashley Gilbertson/ New York Times]. "Large-scale open-pit mining takes a lot of water, millions of gallons, mostly to dilute the cyanide that miners use to soak their ore and separate its microscopic bits of gold." This, in tandem with mass pumping and the use of settling ponds, "could change both the quantity and quality of the groundwater, and even the shape of the aquifer."  Nevada, however, seems to have escaped the attention of the environmental movement: "'Nevada is mostly not prized by environmentalists,' said John D. Leshy, who was the top lawyer for the Department of the Interior in the Clinton administration. 'Nevada is being written off as a sacrifice area for gold.'" (For more information see the actual article; and for a bit on gold in Indonesia, see BLDGBLOG's earlier post).
 [Image: Philipp Scholz Rittermann]. I scanned this interior view of a ship's hull from a postcard I received yesterday. The voluminous, cathedral-like reinforced buttressing of the ship's inner hull is all the more remarkable when you realize that this is the Exxon Valdez Under Construction. Do future catastrophes offer hints in the details of the past? (Thanks, Dan).
BLDGBLOG's year-end look at cool student projects continues now with the Scrap Lung by Russell Pearce, winner of a Serjeant Award at this year's Royal Institute of British Architects' President's Medals ceremony.   The project comes with these awesome little machine-diagrams –  – that show "hydro-arms... constructed from degrading machinery."  It then proceeds through a series of exquisite mechanical studies illustrating "the motion of canal pumps and grapple cranes across the envelope of the architecture" –    – before framing the spatial realization of the ultimate form (a "degrading membrane, leached with iron oxide"), in the process demonstrating how the building will be used and inhabited.   Pearce's design statement includes the following rather cryptic description: "Conversations formed amongst degrading machinery and hydrolysis limbs, etching time based vectors into their tissue and leaching iron oxide poetically across the architectural membrane. Capillaries of canal fluid percolate through its skin, chemically distilled, generating energy to clean, paint, heat, and breathe new temporary fabrics towards the city." It's architecture come to life, breathing itself through a scrap lung. Someone sign this man a film contract. (Spotted via Archinect).
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[Image: Urban optometry, the 
