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New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced an interest in building a network of gondolas across New York City.  [Image: Santiago Calatrava]. Well... not quite a "network" – "across New York City" – but one route, "linking Brooklyn to Manhattan by way of Governors Island on a tramway." Governors Island, incidentally, is a small island in the New York harbor: "The city and state of New York bought the island in 2002 from the U.S. government for $1. Until 2000, it had been the longest continuously used U.S. military facility, dating back more than 200 years." $1!  [Image: Governors Island, upper left; Manhattan, upper right. The rest is Brooklyn. The gondola would go zipping back and forth]. In any case, the gondola, "estimated to cost $125 million, would be designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava, and would greatly change the face of Upper New York Bay. But there is a catch," we read: Bloomberg "acknowledged that the system was still only an idea. He said, however, that he hoped it would eventually become reality and in the meantime inspire others to come up with big ideas for the development of Governors Island." Like a Shakespearean theatre? Well, here's an idea: More routes. More gondolas. Gondolas you can rent as a live/work space. Private gondola routes, from high-rise to high-rise, with windows of bulletproof glass. Night-club gondolas. Church confessional gondolas. Flying prison cells, an Alcatraz of the sky, reforming criminals through scenic views.  [Image: Keith Kin Yan]. Different architects and engineering firms should design the gondolas – Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, Michael Sorkin, Halcrow, even BLDGBLOG – and they shouldn't stop there: gondolas linking to gondolas, which in turn link to more gondolas. Gondolas switching through Ferris wheels. Gondolas connecting to the space elevator – which leads upward to gondolas in space... then back to Greenwich Village. Return trip: two hours. The city could recoup its investment by selling film permits to Hollywood. Die Hard 4. Gondola greenhouses that follow the sun in a heliocentric circuit round Manhattan, growing mutant flowers. An airborne hospital for the depressed. Rumors break out that there is a hidden gondola somewhere, itself unreachable by gondola – Kabbalists and Aristotelians argue that, in fact, this is impossible, citing Maimonides. Entire websites go up, dedicated to finding it. Folk maps are produced, printed in the back of Time Out, charting the fastest route, the most interesting route, the longest route, the scenic route. A listserv begins, describing gondola hacks: how to make your gondola do a 360º. You can win the Olympics with it.  [Image: Santiago Calatrava]. Alternatively, forget the gondolas: Governors Island, in its 172-acre entirety, should be uprooted, dismantled, geologically ground-down to soil and dust – then hung from a series of sacks and hammocks off the side of the Empire State Building. Hanging gardens, indeed. (Spotted at Archinect).
 While editing a recent post about the Mars rover, I got to thinking – as you would – about how to make an animated, feature-length children's film, starring another such rover, set in the immediate future...  In the film, the rover would go tootling around in its cute little animated way, wheeling across unbelievable landscapes, snapping Ansel Adams-like photographs of alien tectonics, volcanoes and basins, systems of canyons that redefine the sublime.    Hills, arches, gorges; mountains surrounded by clouds of methane. Erosion; windstorms; evidence of ancient floods. Plus, it's a cute little rover. Kids love the thing. They pressure their parents to name family pets after it. Burger King sells a small plastic version of it with their happy meals, or whatever they make there. T-shirts. Pajamas.  In any case, our erstwhile hero, the little rover, is Artificially Intelligent – and he's funny. Maybe his voice is by Paul Giamatti. And he gradually sort of wakes up, comes to consciousness, and falls head over heels – monitor over wheels – in love with the world, in love with landscapes, with everything – with emotion and memory – in love with love, and hope, and fear – and he starts to wax poetic over a radio-link back to mission control, his friends and creators, they're cheering, and to television viewers sitting on sofas at home, going on about how wonderful everything is. How beautiful that world, in which he travels alone, can really be. It's not lonely, see. He's on fire inside. His own little robot mind is as deep as the canyons he explores. He smiles.  Kids in the cinema aren't blinking at this point; it's too amazing. Everyone's in love with this little rover. It's like bloody Dead Poets Society out there; everyone's feeling it. Everyone's alive. Cynics are vomiting into popcorn boxes. But then the Martian seasons change, and the rover has to shut down – to be shut down, by mission control. The kids in the cinema start to worry. Frowns appear. Dads grow nervous, re-crossing their legs, only vaguely reassured that the film is rated PG. You see people on-screen, back at mission control, wringing their hands, preparing to remotely shut off the rover – but the rover loves life, damn it, he loves what he's seeing, he wants to see more! He wants to live – and he's funny – and he's got a friend back at mission control who has to push the button, but she can't because she loves him – what do you mean shut him down?! – she loves his silly robot eyes, and his enthusiasm, and his stupid voice, and these amazing things he's been showing to everyone back on earth, and she can't do it. She can't kill the little guy.  Some kids are crying now; she's crying. Not the little guy! With his tiny wheels pushing further into life and alien landscapes. Not him! Enter some sinister, technocratic boss figure – with a voice by Robert Duvall – and he forces her: the button is pushed, mission control sends the command, and our friendly, naive robot hero of off-planet landscape exploration, in the midst of a sad why are you doing this to me? weepy monologue, his AI-eyes wide and worried and scared of that darkness into which his circuits will go – overlooking the most beautiful canyon he's discovered so far – suddenly he is no more.  The rover's little eye-lights fade. Martian winds erase his tracks. Grown men wipe away tears before their wives can see them. The credits roll. Kids leave the cinema howling. Moms give out hugs left and right. Oscar nominations roll in. I retire to Arizona on the proceeds and begin carving strange topological forms into the desert floor. Movie producers: you know where to find me.
 [Image: The Milky Way reflected in the dish of a derelict telescope, left unused and eroding in Chile's high Atacama Desert. Perhaps this is what night will look like in 10,000 years, after bird flu and nuclear terrorism, war and water shortages, have reduced humans to a few breeding pairs in the Arctic: a landscape of ruined pavilions once dedicated to space – Ballard's " deserted planetarium among the dunes" – beautifully lit by nothing but stars].
   [Images: A " faux Mars" being air-brushed and constructed in a lab in southern California "to simulate the environment" on the red planet. Contrast that with a photo taken by Spirit, the robotic Ansel Adams of Mars, showing " Larry's Lookout, a pit stop along the robot's uphill trail as it explores the red planet." Pop quiz for conspiracy theorists: is Spirit really on another planet...?].
 [Image: It's back – and it's a real photo. "From space," we read, "Kansas farms look more like a geometric puzzle than sources of corn, wheat and other crops." From Earth, Kansas farms look more like ( censored)].
 A friend of mine emailed, reminding me of an earlier post – then someone left a comment comparing BLDGBLOG to creme brulée. (I hope that's a good thing).  So I decided to revisit the world of dessert landscapes.  Yes, dessert landscapes.  These are all culinary creations by Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle, whose own website is both handicapped by excess Flash and chock full o' chocolate goodness.   The pair have used kiwis, pastries, mushrooms, watermelons – and, of course, more desserts. But to sidestep the Flash agony, check out this blog for more images – or just look through BLDGBLOG's own earlier review.  (Thanks, Megg! Foodscapes originally spotted back in October through things magazine).
 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.
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