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 There are about two dozen more of these images, taken during a trip through Morocco, September-October 2002, studies of light and proximity, architecture, routes and detours, space.  What I noticed in Marrakech almost immediately is that inside the networked markets that reflect one another through rows of glass lamps, bronze trinkets, polished rocks and small pieces of jewelry, laid out in tilted cases or stacked inside stalls, you find a collapse of expected proximities: everything's too close.  Toward the end of our trip, for instance, because of a gut parasite I'd picked up, I developed this insane fever that torqued the whole visual field into a funnel; then, while trying to figure out how I got that sick, we walked past a fruit stall – this was in Fes – immediately to the side of which, unprotected, out in the open, was a man taking a ball peen hammer to the skull of a dead cow, and chips of bone were flying everywhere, even landing on the fruit. People were buying the fruit, and serving it in restaurants. Everything was too close, in other words; hygiene and distance became unexpected synonyms.  What's interesting, though, is when you get out of the cities and into the desert, and a kind of hydro-topographical narrative begins: while there's water in the coastal plains, collecting in small valleys or oases, and supporting urbanization, as you pass away on looping roads into the hills the entire continental shield seems to dry out. The rocks are abstract and red; Mars conspiracists could probably argue NASA's rovers are actually tootling around in the iron-rich void of central Morocco. In any case, the continent is shattering; large rocks get smaller, weathered by thousands of years of wind and sandstorms – what Richard Fortey calls "the blast of erosion," in his awesomely great Earth – and you can actually watch as the terrain chips away at itself, getting closer and closer to the consistency of sand: sand which you then see on the horizon, in great dunes of the outer Sahara. Meanwhile, you've passed over massive fissures in the earth, the planet breaking open, and so the twisting claustrophobia of the urban market has been replaced by its apparent opposite: geological time, ripped open right in front of you in stratigraphic abysses that can rival the Grand Canyon. The continent is abrading to sand, there is no one in sight, the heat is amazing, and you've barely even set foot in the interior. But you realize that the complexity of the local architecture, especially in the markets and casbahs – which any labyrinth aficionado would fall in love with right away (I fell in love right away) – is not only a kind of terrestrial tactic, i.e. keeping small pieces of the planet (sand) out of the inner rooms, it's also a philosophical response to the utterly gigantic north African landscapes collapsing all over themselves, ground down to sandy fissures in the distance: you want to control space, and limit the perimeter. Keep the walls close.  Whole rooms, entire buildings, seem to overlap with everything else – till it's like walking through double-exposures. (All images: Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG; please link/credit if using elsewhere!)
"It's often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs are real," Metropolis writes.  "They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography – a complete overview, like military surveillance."  Barbieri "achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens – a method, he says, that 'allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don't read [it as an] image but one line at a time.'" It's geology disguised as sculpted chocolate; a Claymation paradise. Herculean examples of American civic infrastructure look like nothing more than cardboard, flimsy and ridiculous. (Amazingly, the second image, below, is a photograph of Hoover Dam).   "For Barbieri," Metropolis says, "it is 'the city as an avatar of itself.'" So if he did take photos of city models someday... would they look real?   I'm left wondering what this techique would achieve in the field of human portraiture. The blurred heads of Francis Bacon meet some kind of plasticized mannequinization of the subject... Pickman's Model. The results could be horrific. (See also BLDGBLOG's look at the work of Oliver Boberg; and click here for another photo by Barbieri. Meanwhile, thanks to Brent Kissel for the initiating email! Thanks, as well, to Dan who I think might have mentioned Barbieri once...).
 [Image: Irrigated geometries of the American West, courtesy of TerraServer].
 A composite of riverine meanders, ancient hydrological scars in the earth of California, Owens Valley, like glimpses of old Chinese landscape scrolls –  – taken from the satellites of TerraServer. Fossilized wakes and side-streams, eroding banks of fractal continents. Silt on silt. Everything ending in self-similarity.  Click-on to enlarge! Please! Meanwhile, see Pruned's uploaded set of geological investigations from the lower Mississippi alluvial basin.
 As the above text describes – and as you can read here – architect Chris Hardwicke has recently proposed a network of elevated bike trails – glass tunnels soaring above Toronto, in a "dynamic air circulation loop" – that would allow city residents to travel by bicycle at speeds of up to 40kph. It would look like this:  Two thoughts: 1) the Tour de France of the future will be a Tour de Sky Tunnels of Toronto; and 2) why not build a moving version, nomadic, hinged, flexible, a kind of glass octopus of dynamic sky-routes, accessible only by pedestrians, going nowhere except into itself, knot-like, a mobile marathon route torquing above the city at night, reflective, looping over Roncesvalles, utopian junctions in space? (Spotted at Archinect).
 [Image: A repositioned image from TerraServer of a motorway interchange in Lynwood, California. It could almost be a set for Léger's Ballet méchanique (whose music is intriguingly described here). See earlier].
I just saw this at Tropolism, and was amazed: turning abandoned buildings – into sculptures.   Would you still be able to use those rooms?, I wonder. To work in them and go to sleep in them and take stairways up the legs between levels? All the while living inside this Empire Strikes Back/robotect sculpture? The head, for instance, could be rented out as a two-bedroom flat... "As each vacated building is subsequently recycled and transformed into a sculpture," the architects write, "abandonment and demolition is no longer viewed as a negative process but becomes a celebration for cultural creation, urban revitalization, and identity building."   What other sculptures of I-beams and rebarred floor plates exist within skyscrapers, from London to Chicago, LA to Beijing? A selective pruning of a high-rise's insides, and a new skyline takes shape, pierced by breezes. Which leads me to wonder if you could sandblast all the buildings of Manhattan into rounded landscape sculptures, rock, brick, glass, and steel ground down to geometric smoothness. Aerodynamic. Like a rock-tumbler, turning backyard gravel into perfect spheres, eggs, and ovals, could you polish the city down to a gleaming rock park of half-abraded office towers, adjoined buildings sanded one into the another like the lips of wooden bowls – just throw the whole island into a rock-tumbler? Sandblast new sculptures out of every brownstone. Or could you declare war on a city not with bombs and missiles but with high-powered industrial abraders and sandblasting machines? Turn Manhattan into a smooth series of sandstone arches and contours, all of New York a hulking Utah-like world of "balanced rocks, fins and pinnacles... highlighted by a striking environment of contrasting colors, landforms and textures"?  It's Arches National Park: Manhattan Branch. All that bedrock, geology and form released – by the geotechnical avant-garde. City sculptors. Sandblasting the torqued ruins of Manhattan; then moving back to re-colonize those polished canyons. 
 "Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. The room is a ' doomsday vault' designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies." And I'm on my way... "The $3 million vault" – which seems a remarkably cheap price to "safeguard the world's food supply" – "will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but 'the mountains are patrolled by polar bears', says [Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project]." "This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude," says Fowler. Rumors are the vault was designed by Jerry Bruckheimer – and it's not seeds they're keeping in there... but Noah's Ark. Wait – (A somewhat related, and very interesting, story: global seed-hunters, as reported in The Guardian).
 [Image: Banksy (Marble Arch, London, 2004); via Enjoy Surveillance]. "Residents of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive ' Asbo TV' – television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets. As part of the £12m scheme funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister," the Times reports, "residents of Shoreditch in the East End will also be able to compare characters they see behaving suspiciously with an on-screen 'rogues’ gallery' of local recipients of anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos)." This is part of a "New Deal for Communities to regenerate poor districts" – by watching those districts on TV. It's the future of televised entertainment. So will advertisers buy every wall in view of a camera...? (For more, see BLDGBLOG's earlier piece on CCTV and urban psychovideography; as well as a quick post on wmmna).
 More aerial photographs by David Maisel, this time of California's Owens Lake. But I'm totally addicted. I can't even believe how beautiful his images are.  As Maisel himself explains: "Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats." (For any film buffs out there, this is the same hydro-political event that inspired Roman Polanski's Chinatown).  "For decades," Maisel continues, "fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. The lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, and other materials."    At this point, the "concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that I find compelling." (Read more at The Lake Project; and you can search Maisel's work – then give him a grant or something – on his website; see also BLDGBLOG's Terminal Lake and Silt).
 In 2003, photographer David Maisel "began to make aerial photographs around the perimeter of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as part of a project that will ultimately cover much of the Great Basin. The Great Salt Lake is considered a 'terminal' lake, in that it has no naturally occurring outlets. Around its edges are industries of varying types, including evaporation ponds that cover some 40,000 acres along the eastern and southern shores of the lake."  Accordingly, all photographs in this post are by Maisel – but his work is so ridiculously great, and so retina-scarringly colorful, that I have to urge you in the strongest possible terms to go check it out. (Just look at these! And these! And these! I'm going crazy here! They're so beautiful you might have a heart attack).      (And don't forget BLDGBLOG's earlier look at the literary hydrologies of silt and other drainscapes).
 [Image: David Maisel, from his series Oblivion; the site includes Maisel's brief text on the project]. The Grass Collective has recently uploaded a short, amazingly hypnotic aerial video of nighttime Los Angeles traffic – and I was embarrassingly excited to find that you can actually order a whole DVD (!) of the stuff. There's only a minute or two available on the site, but I can imagine quite a juicy first date starting off with nothing but an LA traffic DVD, a bearskin rug, maybe fill your bedroom with some car exhaust... Hot.   [Images: David Maisel – who is not actually connected to the Grass Collective video, I just like his stuff – from the Oblivion series]. (Traffic video spotted in Dwell Magazine. See also BLDGBLOG's Knot Driver, including an earlier piece on the geometry of Los Angeles traffic control; for more of David Maisel's photography do not miss Terminal Lake).
 [Image: 13 feet of snow have fallen on Nagano Prefecture, Japan; Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images/New York Times].
 [Image: Construction in Beijing, by Sze Tsung Leong; read more about his work here]. "The bleak wetlands of Dongtan seem an unlikely place for a neo-industrial revolution," The Guardian reports from the mouth of the Yangtse River, China, "but if the project being planned for its muddy shores is successful, it could arguably change the course of global economic development." That project is "nothing less than a new city," one that "does no appreciable damage to the earth's environment." Known simply as Dongtan, the city will be part of a much larger, "futuristic plan to develop thousands of square miles of the mouth of the Yangtse." New forms of international construction finance have been put to use, and sustainable building technologies never before seen on this scale are all part of the plan. "This is the biggest single development anywhere in the world, bigger even than the Beijing Olympics" – not to mention something of an embarrassment for the U.S. rebuilding of New Orleans. To help me avoid quoting the whole article, however, go see for yourself; and more can be found at the site of Arup, Dongtan's engineers. (Spotted at Archinect – though BLDGBLOG has reported on Dongtan before: that post includes a look at other Chinese infrastructural projects, and is worth a quick read).
 "People around the world," the BBC reports, "are being invited to vote in a survey for the New Seven Wonders of the World. A privately funded organisation, the New 7 Wonders Foundation, has put forward a shortlist of 21 landmarks from across the globe. They include Rome's Colosseum, Jordan's ancient city of Petra, Britain's Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China." Joining the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, what are some other contenders? How about Kowloon Walled City? Or the Mall of America? The Brooklyn Bridge? London's sewers or other wonders of the industrial world? The International Space Station? Easter Island? A nuclear submarine? The Cosmodrome at Baikonur? What about the Maunsell Towers?  "To be included on the new list," the BBC says, contenders must be "man-made, completed by 2000, and in an 'acceptable' state of preservation." (So could you nominate a cloned animal?) What else...?
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