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 Brooklyn-based painter Angelina Gualdoni was in the midst of some photographic studies of what she calls "'terrain vague' areas around Chicagoland," when she became interested in " a mall that had been abandoned for the better part of twenty years." She started to produce a few paintings of it. Each painting required "several days of pouring and staining," after which she "employed taping to establish crisp architectural lines," using "thicker, more viscous oil paint to build up figures, whether it's weeds, dirt, or trash."  Of course, it turns out this is the infamous Dixie Square Mall of Blues Brothers fame, "in which police cars were driven through the stores and walkways." Now, after two decades of slow structural collapse, "multiple rapes and at least one murder have occurred there." "The place itself is strange, scary, sad, and amazing all at once," Gualdoni writes. "Inside the mall there's moss growing over much of the cement and laminate ground, trees (sometimes) growing inside the atrium, gangs that claim it with tags (though I've never encountered anyone else in there) and some wild dogs who call it home (I have been chased out by them). The place is entirely water-logged and creaky, damp and fetid. And used as a dumping ground, as well, for trash and toys, from both individuals and institutions." As Gualdoni is careful to point out: "it is illegal to enter, and is trespassing. Aside from the police, the dogs, and possible vagrants, there are also just genuinely concerned people at the day care center nearby who will drive through looking for you, if they see you enter the mall, concerned that you may be suicidal or crazy." Or perhaps undead. Of course, Gualdoni has other, equally eye-catching architectural work –  – on view at Chicago's Kavi Gupta Gallery, and it's certainly worth taking a look. And if Urban Exploration is your thing, don't miss BLDGBLOG's own tour through the self-intersecting topological knotwork of tunnels and abandoned bunkers coiling underneath Greater London. (Thanks to the DC madman, Lonnie Bruner, for putting Angelina and I in touch).
"In a journey that has stretched from the coastline of Namibia to the steamy jungles of Ghana, across crocodile infested lakes and the deserts of Northern Kenya, the cliff-side dwellings of the Dogon in Mali and onto the mysterious archaeological sites of the Egyptian Sahara," a new lecture, hosted by London's Royal Society, "explores Africa's ancient astronomical history."  The lecture is given by South African astronomer Thebe Medupe, whose constant grin is only one reason to check out his talk. This bloke is psyched.  Medupe introduces us to "celestial beliefs from different parts of the African continent and how some of these ancient African perceptions link with current scientific knowledge." Part of his expertise is in the "theoretical understanding of stellar oscillations in the atmospheres of stars." He has worked with the so-called Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), hoping "to turn South Africa into a serious scientific power capable of hosting astronomy's greatest prize, a vastly expensive project known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)." He's even got a Wikipedia entry. In any case, Cosmic Africa is the name of a 72-minute film, produced by and starring Medupe. (Reviewed here by Variety).  South Africa's official tourism page hypes the film: "Africans told stories about the sky, and saw giraffes, lions and zebras among the stars as naturally as people elsewhere saw bears and horses... To sample the richness of African traditions and achievements, Medupe and the filmmakers travelled around South Africa and to Mali, Egypt and Namibia, learning from local people and sharing modern perspectives."  So now that I've given the film all this free advertising, why is it even interesting? 7000-year old ruined observatories and desert megaliths – a so-called "Stonehenge of the Sahara" – have been casting shadows on themselves, marking the solstices, keeping time on abandoned calendars, entangling landscape design with astronomy. The "apparent patterns" in the sky Medupe talks about become architectural diagrams, inverted: the negative space between stars becomes walls, the stars themselves windows, pillars or standing stones. Human movement following a specific astral route, copying migrations of astrochemical fires burning in the vacuum above. Medupe talks about incidental jottings found in ancient astronomical books, Arabic vs. local languages, a competing marginalia of myth and science, the two fusing to predict next year's eclipse. "I think this is very exciting," he says, and then grins, looking down at his notes. Orion's belt is actually Three Zebras; Aldebaran is a hunter afraid to return to his wives – who are the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, with a neighborhood in London named after them. Geography meets geography.  But it's the constellations that fascinate me, the fact that no one today invents their own, or even talks about the stars – assuming they can see them – because the skies have already been named, claimed, put in textbooks. I once read that the Maya had "dark constellations," areas in the Milky Way with no light, absent geometries of the void; these were actually foxes and llamas. Similar star lore has inspired at least one self-styled historian to propose Polynesian roots for Andean astronomy, ancient mariners canoeing across the seas, those stars memorized or carved as diagrams into boats and oars. Should there be a kind of import tax on constellations? But what about 200 years from now, after bird flu and global flooding, after the UK is a new Siberia – or a neo-tropical lagoon – will kids wander north across the Franco-English ice bridge, looking up to locate another London, made of stars – formerly the Pleiades – a walled city of light installed there in the skies of a coming ice age? Or perhaps the Tottenham Court Road, a celestial Thames, Buckingham Palace and Wembley, new mansions of constellated locations in the night? Celestial doubles of our contemporary landscape. Times Square, rising every autumn; you harvest rhubarb by it. Alexanderplatz. Lake Shore Drive. Mt. Fuji. The Super Mario Cluster. Myths of twins: dragon-slayers. Perhaps we should renovate the sky.  Architecture has participated with astronomy for so many thousands of years, far longer than its current role as a calculated by-product of cost-benefit charts and insurance liability. Alignments, symbols, star gardens. I remember an article in The Guardian, by Kathleen Jamie, who decided to experience astronomy via neolithic architecture left eroding on the Orkney Islands, built to frame the winter solstice: "You are admitted into a solemn place which is not a heart at all, or even a womb, but a cranium. You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, as in a recording studio, or a strongroom. A moment ago, you were in the middle of a field, with the wind and curlews calling. That world has been taken away, and the world you have entered is not like a cave, but a place of artifice, of skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel the self-assurance." In any case, be sure to stop by Medupe's lecture; and then consider renaming your constellations. Maybe post the best ones, in a comment, below. An Astral I-95. Gemini becomes Bush-Blair. The entire bus route of the 19, from Finsbury Park to Battersea, somehow mapped across a supercluster. London Eye's wheel of light turning there in space.
 While much has been made of the so-called "home plate" formation – pictured above – recently discovered on Mars, there are equally intriguing, and beautiful, geological formations right here on Earth beside us.  Australia's " Great Sandy Scars," for instance, look like a huge rooster, or a mythical gryphon, bleached into the surface of the planet. "In a small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia," the actual explanation reads, "large sand dunes – the only sand in this desert of scrub and rock – appear as lines stretching from left to right. The light-colored fan shapes are scars from wildfires." Or this desert view of Iran – the geology of evil, perhaps.  It's the Dasht-e Kevir, or "valley of desert," the largest desert in Iran, "a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating." It looks like god came through with an abrader, geology on hyperdrive, polishing the planet down to stumps and fractal whorls. (USGS global satellite image database discovered via Pruned. See also BLDGBLOG's earlier satellite explorations of alluvial terrains, Libya, and the earth, observed).
 [Image: From Pruned: Paolo Soleri, 1969]. Be sure to stop by Pruned for some amazing new posts and images, including Asteromo, "an outside-inside ellipsoidal earth," designed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri, of course, was also the man behind Arcosanti, that monument to dust-covered magazines, old toilets, bureaucratic inactivity and failed utopias in the otherwise beautiful Arizona desert. In any case, Pruned compares Asteromo to other plans "using actual asteroids" as spacebound earth-surrogates, rescuing humans from a poisoned biosphere.  [Image: As Pruned quotes: "Man, standing head toward the axis of rotation, will be enveloped in a solid ecology” – surely a haiku if there ever was one. Or perhaps this is haiku as rediscovered by Aleister Crowley, a Tarot card for the Space Age. (Illustration by Roy G. Scarfo)]. An earlier idea, for instance, by "futurologists Dandridge Cole and Donald Cox," would have created a nomadic pseudo-earth by "fusing and sculpting" domestic space inside a captured asteroid. This would be done using "heat from solar mirrors." The result would be a "gigantic geodesic interior chamber," created "in much the same way as a glassblower shapes a small solid lump of molten glass into a large empty bottle." Yes – someone apparently thought that would work. (See here for loads more information about outerterrestrial bio-escape utopias).  [Image: Vent-Based Alpha; illustration by Kenn Brown & Chris Wren/ Wired]. Then, however, I was cleaning house last night when I found an old copy of Wired – I must be living in Arcosanti – which I promptly wasted more than an hour and a half reading in its entirety. But therein I re-discovered Phil Nuytten's plans for Vent-Based Alpha, an undersea hot-vent microtopia powered by geothermal energy. From the article: "'Essentially, it's like taking a cruise ship with several hundred people and parking it at the bottom of the ocean,' Nuytten says. 'After three or four generations, inhabitants would ask, Are there really people who live on the surface?'" Which is fair enough – the place will have gardens, for instance, and everyone will get exercise somehow, etc. – but, even aside from the obvious questions of population growth and a need for more space, I can't help but picture those people a bit further down the line, once several generations have been bred in the darkness, devolving into a state of permanent dementia, confused brains hardened from lack of sunlight and vitamins, stumbling through the pressurized halls of their own undersea prison, wearing stained clothing and listening to Mozart, talking to reflections, teeth yellow, repeating things, forgetful, screwing their own children, half-insane. Vent-Based Chainsaw Massacre. Screenplay by BLDGBLOG.
From A.R.T. Jonkers, Earth's Magnetism in the Age of Sail: "In 1904 a young American named Andrew Ellicott Douglass started to collect tree specimens. He was not seeking a pastime to fill his hours of leisure; his motivation was purely professional."
 [Image: David Maisel, from Timber: Clearcutting and the Undoing of the Western Forest].
"Yet he was not employed by any forestry department or timber company, and he was neither a gardener not a botanist. For decades he continued to amass chunks of wood, all because of a lingering suspicion that a tree's bark was shielding more than sap and cellulose. He was not interested in termites, or fungal parasites, or extracting new medicine from plants."
 [Image: Bjørn Sterri, untitled; Oslo, 1997].
"Douglass was an astronomer, and he was searching for evidence of sunspots."
 [Image: Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy].
Stars leave their imprints everywhere; even "getting a tan" is an interaction with astronomy played out on the level of skin. If you want news of the universe, in other words, simply look at the people around you: stars leave scars on bodies.
 This is just one of several extraordinary photographs taken in Guangxi Province, China. Scroll through the rest and see huge terraces that look as if carved from the earth with a fretsaw; agriculture everywhere imposes its own geometry. (Discovered via gravestmor).
 [Image: An architectural "super-prosthesis" by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo]. Quite a while back I got an email from Wes Janz, who runs something called onesmallproject, a fascinating look at standards of housing and urbanism – including the absence of the former – around the world. What does home look like elsewhere? How do people find shelter? Are we perhaps approaching a planetary urbanism? Etc.  Arguably, this would all begin a series of questions that could lead back to Heidegger; for instance: is architecture an appropriate response for those who dwell in a state of homelessness – Heidegger's state of "harassed unrest"? Is dwelling always an architectural activity? What of "those buildings that are not dwelling places" – or those dwelling places that are not buildings? And so on. In any case, here are some statistics from the project's facts pages to consider: • by 2030, 1 person in 4 will be a slum dweller • every day, 200,000 people move to cities worldwide (which is 73 million people urbanizing every year) • half the population of Istanbul lives in slums • Caracas has 5 police forces, wearing 5 different uniforms • 10-30% of U.S. waste comes from architectural demolition and construction Where it gets interesting, however, is in offering solutions, proposing something, offering ideas. Everyone knows how to complain; imaginative responses are welcome for their sheer infrequency.    The images I'm showing, for instance, are by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo, a member of onesmallproject, taken from Parejo's own website.  Parejo's work explores a kind of do-it-yourself tactical urbanism, using modular frame structures and prefabricated building units in a way that "exploits gaps in administrative structures, governmental bodies’ supervisory energies, official procedures, and where the law falls short." In the process, Parejo transforms vacant lots and peripheral spaces into what he calls "subversive urban occupations." This has included working with scaffolding: constructing nest-like "urban reserves" in the spaces defined by construction scaffolds, enlarging houses parasitically. The architectural prosthesis, in fact, is something Parejo frequently explores by constructing temporary, unofficial extensions to existing buildings – including this capsule on stilts, "installed orthopaedically... as a spatial and functional prosthesis," in a place called the Finland Pavilion.  There is a lot more information – including dozens of projects – at both Parejo's site and at onesmallproject. Of course, as a side note, even as I write this a new exhibition continues apace at the NLA, called Prefabulous London.  There, you can gaze all you like at plans and photos of affordable, high-density urban construction techniques using prefabricated structures, including a few parasite-like microbuildings. If you're not sure you want to go, or live elsewhere – attempting to dwell while located otherwise – you can always download the exhibition's catalog here (1.8MB PDF); or click through some other coverage of the show at Inhabitat (who link to an interesting article in Building Design) or the London-based City of Sound.
A few comments at the end of a recent post reminded me of something from David Toop's Ocean of Sound, an excellent and highly recommended survey of "sonic history," focusing on ambient music, post-Debussy.  Roughly midway through Toop's book we find this review by composer Paul Schütze: "Recently listening to Thomas Köner's Permafrost," Schütze writes, "I found that by the end of the disc my sense of aural perspective was so altered that the music seemed to continue in the sounds around me. Tube trains passing beneath the building, distant boilers, the air conditioning, and the elevator engines had been pulled into the concert. This effect lasted for about forty minutes during which I could not get anything to return to its 'normal position' in the 'mix' of my flat." What would have been yet more fascinating, however, is if Schütze had been wrong. What if the disc, in other words, had still been playing – and he didn't live anywhere near the Tube, nor did his building have elevators...? What if those subtle and distant architectural sounds had actually been part of the CD? This would be music as the illusion of architecture.You could move into a house without a basement – so you purchase this CD, or download these tracks, and you uncannily achieve the sonic effect of having more floors below you. Or perhaps you want an attic, or even a next-door neighbor: you would buy soundtracks for architecture, architecture through nothing but sound. For instance, think of the Francisco López album, Buildings. Buildings is "a work composed entirely of sound fragments López procured while wandering around big buildings in NYC," recording the "sounds of elevators, air conditioning systems, cables, pipes, air ducts, boilers, clocks, thermostats, video cameras, and so on." (You can actually listen to a brief excerpt). So instead of an addition, or a home renovation – you would commission a piece of music; and for as long as that music is playing, your house has several thousand more square-feet... and a Tube line nearby... and distant boilers... (With thanks to Dan Hill at City of Sound for pointing me toward Buildings).
There's an interesting competition afoot to design a house for an ecologist, specifically "a live/work dwelling for an ecologist in residence at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)," in Shephedstown, West Virginia, on a site near the Potomac River measuring 350' x 250'.  "The ecologist in residence, a fictitious position, will be an annual fellow who will receive a stipend and expenses to live and conduct research on site and in the field." Such research will include "working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people." Some ideas? I think we should try learning from Dubai, and build the house underwater: the ecologist can then go to sleep watching fish swim by. Or the house should be partially floating, with reinforced glass foundations through which terrestrial and aquatic events can be observed. And it needs a roof garden. And maybe it could do this:  [Image: Holl House by Andrew Maynard]. A lot more information, including maps and images, can be downloaded from the AIA competition homepage. Registration deadline is 1 March 2006, however – so be quick.
I'll be serving as a jury member for Your Hidden City, a photo contest sponsored by Tropolism. So submit early, and submit often... Tropolism's official press release for the contest reads as follows:  "After a week of very subtle buildup, Tropolism is pleased to announce the first open-sourced architectural contest, Your Hidden City. The contest is simple: post your photos (with a caption) to our public Flickr pool (or email them to us for posting), and our jury will select their favorites in five categories. The winners will be posted to Tropolism. The theme of the contest is uncovering the Hidden City, your Hidden City, the one you see every day. It may be in plain sight of everyone else, but it is your eye that finds the extraordinariness in a particular street corner, a unique stair, a crazy intersection, a visually arresting approach, or a particular tree in the city. The photographs can be of a beautiful (and perhaps unpublished) park, or as simple as the sun hitting a particular building at a particular time of day. Please include a caption, or a Flickr annotation, about what makes it extraordinary to you. The entries should have one thing in common: they demonstrate, to you, the pleasure of living in the city. The jury is a set of bloggers who write about architecture, urbanism, and landscape design. They are: • Lisa Chamberlain of Polis, who also covers real estate for the New York Times • David Cuthbert of architechnophilia• Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG • Shawn Micallef of Toronto Psychogeography Society Blog • Miss Representation • Jimmy Stamp of Life Without Buildings The 5 Categories are: • Best Hidden Place • Best Density • Best Natural/Urban Overlap • Best Unofficial Landmark • Best Building We will keep the contest open until March 10, 2006, and post winners the week of March 20. Good Luck!"
In Crystallography, poet Christian Bök describes "a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors." This treatise, Bök tells us, suggests that when two mirrors reflect one other, the endless abyss of mirrors-in-mirrors created between them might form a kind of spectral architecture.  Further, the medieval treatise says, "any living person who has no soul can actually step into either one of the mirrors as if it were an open door and thus walk down the illusory corridor that appears to recede forever into the depths of the glass by virtue of one mirror reflecting itself in the other. The walls of such a corridor are said to be made from invulnerable panes of crystal, beyond which lies a nullified dimension of such complexity that to view it is surely to go insane. The book also explains at length that, after an eternity of walking down such a corridor, a person eventually exits from the looking-glass opposite to the one first entered." And it gets more interesting: The treatise's author, Bök explains, "speculates that a soulless man might carry another pair of mirrors into such a corridor, thereby producing a hallway at right angles to the first one, and of course this procedure might be performed again and again in any of the corridors until an endless labyrinth of glass has been erected inside the first pair of mirrors, each mirror opening onto an extensive grid of crisscrossing hallways, some of which never intersect, despite their lengths being both infinite and perpendicular." The author of the treatise warns, however, that one could become "hopelessly lost while exploring such a maze" – for instance, "if the initial pair of mirrors are disturbed so that they no longer reflect each other, thus suddenly obliterating the fragile foundation upon which the entire maze rests." In which case whole crystal cities of mirrored halls, in right-angled topologies of non-self-intersecting self-intersection, would simply disappear – along with anyone exploring inside them.  A kind of rogue experiment might ensue, aboard the International Space Station: an astronaut, crazed with loneliness, sets up two mirrors... and promptly escapes into a hinged labyrinth of crystallized earth-orbiters, his radio crackling unanswered in the control panel left behind.
 [Image: Keith Kin Yan/ Overshadowed]. While researching my post for Inhabitat – on light pollution and other forms of photonic trespass – I came across this account of the Tribute in Light, those blazing towers of floodlit clouds and sky used by Manhattan to memorialize the fallen World Trade Center: "The beams were visibly filled with birds for their entire height, looking like clouds of bugs. Their twittering was audible. There were so many birds, it was impossible to track any one individual for any length of time. I did see one bird that circled in and out of the uptown beam six times before I lost track." The birds, in other words, had been fatally mesmerized, often spiraling thereafter to the ground – or into the windows of nearby buildings. A kind of bird-tornado.  [Image: Keith Kin Yan/ Overshadowed]. This circular disorientation of birds – winged animals thrown athwart by the optical effects of architecture – also makes an appearance in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. Here, the narrator recounts a friend's visit to the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: "The four glazed towers themselves, named in a manner reminiscent of a futuristic novel... make a positively Babylonian impression on anyone who looks up at their facades and wonders about the still largely empty space behind their closed blinds. (...) And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which had lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading-room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud, and fell lifeless to the ground." Other species, killed by the mirrored archives of national history. None of which is meant to imply that I didn't enjoy the Tribute in Light – without it, in fact, I would not have eaten roast pigeon for three weeks... In any case, perhaps this could serve as a new form of avian predation, a duck-hunter's paradise: you build a well-lit public memorial – then throw open some nets. Conversely, of course, the birds might obliterate the city. Hitchcock's revenge. I'm reminded of the beautifully descriptive title of an old (and fairly awful) song by Coil: Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night. Against whose murderous flocks Paris deploys a mirrored library...
 [Image: A house that "sits in front of a baseball/soccer field in the small town of Amenia, New York," and whose owners probably don't sleep too well; photo by David Allee]. With apologies for BLDGBLOG's recent silence – very few posts in at least as many days – I also want to point out something I've written for Inhabitat, and which went up today, about light pollution, urban astronomy, the mating habits of glowworms, hunting by floodlight and some photographs by David Allee. And I'll start posting again on BLDGBLOG soon...
 [Image: The fractal soilbeds and hydro-geological basins of northern Maharashtra, a merge of these two maps]. I recently stumbled upon " the soil maps of Asia" – not just some soil maps, mind you, or merely a few soil maps: these are the soil maps of Asia, originally produced under the direction of the Thematic Mapping Organisation. Leaving me to wonder if they take special orders. In any case, these maps are amazing:  [Image: The soils and terrestrial capabilities of central India, a merge of these two maps. See also this eye-popping 3.5MB version of the right-half of that image].  [Image: The soils of Gujarat; a merge of these two maps].  [Image: Soil map and land capability of southern India, including the Andaman Islands; see also this 2.5MB version]. Here, the Thematic Mapping Organisation explains its own origins, complete with avant-garde uses of English grammar: "The first national Atlas of India in Hindi popularly known as Bharat Rastriya Atlas having a multi-colour maps with a scale of 1:5 million portraying a comprehensive physical and socio-cultural structure of the country was published in 1957 and was acclaimed the world over as a unique publication. Consequent upon the success of as Bharat Rastriya Atlas, the organization has decided to prepare an ambitious project containing 300 plates. It covers all the aspects of the land, people, economy of the country. This atlas is being issued in 8 volumes, which is available for sale." Finally, for those of you with a lot of time to kill: you can search equally colorful and totally mind-boggling soil maps of Africa (2000+), Canada, Central and South America, including the Caribbean (as well as hydrological maps of the Amazon River), Europe (here's the UK), the rest of Asia, and the United States. (Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The topographic map circus. Further note: I just discovered [12 Feb 06] that Cartography, the weblog of the Canadian Cartographic Association, featured these soil maps back in January).
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