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 [Image: Caver Chris Nicola looks at markings left in Priest's Grotto; National Geographic Adventure/Peter Lane Taylor]. "In the spring of 1944," we read, "a group of 38 Ukrainian Jews emerged weak and jaundiced from a cave they'd used for nearly a year to escape the horrors of the Holocaust." Caver Chris Nicola rediscovered this story 13 years ago, after exploring Ukraine's Gypsum Giant cave systems. "While there, during an expedition into the tenth longest cave in the world, his team came across two partially intact stone walls and other signs of habitation." Learning about the Jewish families who had used these caves for survival, "Nicola grew determined to learn how people with no prior caving experience or specialized equipment were able to live in such a hostile environment for so long." So Nicola returned with a photographer, Peter Lane Taylor, and he learned more of the story. The Holocaust refugees' "first stop was Verteba, a well-known tourist cave where the families spent their first six months. There, the Jews struggled to find enough water and suffered from the toxic buildup of smoke from their cooking fire. Then on May 5, 1943, after narrowly avoiding capture at the hands of the Gestapo, the families relocated to a previously unexplored cave located beneath land owned by a local parish priest. It was called Popowa Yama, or Priest's Grotto, and it would be the Jews' refuge from the Holocaust for the next 344 days." They lived without sun for more than a year. "At the surface, Priest's Grotto is little more than a weedy hole in the ground amid the endless wheat fields stretching across western Ukraine. A short distance away, a low stand of hardwoods withers in the heat and is the only sign of cover for miles around." Here, "there's nothing to indicate that one of the longest horizontal labyrinths in the world lies just underfoot." The story is almost unbelievable. For instance, "one of the survivors, only four years old at the time, said she remembers playing with a bright, shining crystal in the cave. One of the largest crystals in the world is close to their campsite inside Priest's Grotto, and chunks of it will sometimes fall to the ground. When we saw the crystal, we realized that that was where she used to play." Or: "They had few candles, so light was limited to three short periods each day. After enough time spent wandering in the dark, they memorized the feel of the cave floor on their bare feet. It was like directions in braille." The inside of the earth, lined with language. [Thanks, Neddal!]
The Los Angeles freeway system is one of the most carefully filmed locations on the planet. The total number of cameras permanently dedicated to watching it can only be estimated; and the fate of those uneventful films is almost ritualistic: temporary storage, then erasure. But occasionally there's some action – and the true magic of the system begins.  LA's unacknowledged cinema – its highway network – was the focus of a recent article, by Tad Friend, in The New Yorker. During the OJ chase of 1994, Friend writes, "from the cameras above, the customary vantage for tracking the city's televised pursuits, you could see that this most sprawling and motorized of our great metropolitan areas is a huge web that is easily apprehended from the air – some forty police and TV helicopters keep busy doing just that – and that it is not the roadways but their surveillance that never ends." (My emphasis). Or, as Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz: "thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid." In other words, whether operated by FOX, CNN, or the LAPD, traffic helicopters give Los Angeles an urban coherence that few drivers and pedestrians may ever understand – till they see it on TV.  Within those surveilled streets – what Friend calls LA's "public stage, its Colosseum" – there have been as many as 5,596 car chases in one year (2004). Yet this should surprise no one: LA's "ten million occupants are all ceaselessly trying to go very different places by very elaborate routes that gum up everyone else's very elaborate routes. So the two people who stole a big rig filled with mixed melons last July and then led police on a four-hour meander around the 5, the 605, the 215, and the 15 freeways were, by local standards, behaving logically. And as for the trucker a few years back who fled deputies after a traffic collision, drove his eighteen-wheeler through the fence surrounding Long Beach Airport, overturned it on the main runway, set the cab on fire, and then ran away without any clothes on – well, fair enough, really." As a transportation technique, or genre of driving, the chase is an entirely sensible use of the LA highway system. In some ways that's what it's built for. "This is as much city planning," Friend writes, "as it is producing – a vision of a metropolis knit together by speed and spectacle."  [Image: David Maisel, from the Oblivion series]. What's even more interesting is that the LAPD have begun to change their tactics of pursuit, including radio communication strategies, so as not to bring undue televisual attention upon the chases, the chasers, or the chased themselves – who often see these high-speed extravaganzas as a kind of initial public offering, or debut role, a break-out performance watched by captivated millions. There is even a burgeoning visual style or cinematography associated with this tele-vehicular art form: "The frame of the pursuit – a cropped shot of an anonymous vehicle moving at ominous speed through a featureless landscape – has not been updated since the genre began."  [Image: OJ Simpson's infamous white Bronco; in a parallel universe, ruled by Philip K. Dick, this image would be used as the next American flag]. Meanwhile, whole subsidiary industries have arisen on the fringes of the car chase scene. Wired, for instance, writes about James Tatoian, who is "developing a system that uses microwave energy to interfere with microchips inside cars. Once the chip is overloaded with excessive current, the car ceases to function, and will gradually decelerate on its own." Then, in the slightly Orwellian field of "pursuit management" – a growth industry, I'm sure – StarChase LLC has developed a GPS dart system that consists of "a tracking projectile with a miniaturized GPS receiver, radio transmitter, power supply and a launcher which can be hand-held or mounted on a police car." Shoot this thing at a fleeing car – and you can track it via satellite. (More here). Yet another way to manage pursuits? As Tad Friend writes: "Within fifteen years or so, when all new cars will be equipped with OnStar-type security systems, the LAPD hopes to be able to override disobedient drivers using the quintessential weapon of the video age: a remote control." There's even a "Pursuit Intervention Technique, or PIT," which basically sets a fleeing car spinning – because a police car has just rammed into it.  [Image: A different kind of intervention technique]. In any case, what interests me here is not police pursuit technology in and of itself, but the fact that it has slowly become a regular feature of American urban life. Even more, the car chase, though illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous, is also one of the most logical responses to the American landscape: if you build "nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets" (Tad Friend) in one city alone, you're going to find at least a few people who want to put it to use. Add that to uncountable thousands of cameras installed there on lightposts, or carried by helicopters throughout the sky – the endless cinema of the everyday, an anthropologist's dream – and anyone driving in LA right now is literally only moments away from celebrity. Go a little further, a little faster – and fifteen minutes after you read this post, I might be watching you on TV. Be sure to wave. [Note: Perhaps this is needless to say, but if you go whizzing off into la la land and drive your car through a house – it ain't the fault of BLDGBLOG. Buckle up. And you can find more of this here].
"About 600 feet deep in the bedrock that supports Midtown Manhattan," we meet "a 450-ton tunnel-boring machine known as the Mole." The Mole is "digging City Tunnel No. 3 far beneath Manhattan's street level, part of a 50-year, $6 billion project to upgrade New York City's water system."  [Image: By Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times].As the New York Times describes, this is actually the "second phase of City Tunnel No. 3, a 60-mile tunnel that began in the Bronx in 1970 and is scheduled for completion in 2020. By then, the tunnel will be able to handle the roughly one billion gallons of water a day used in New York City that originates from rural watersheds to points throughout the city." And though the tunnel "is one of the largest urban projects in history, few people will ever see it. But beginning next week, many New Yorkers will certainly feel and hear the construction."    [Images: By Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times].The speed of the excavation process "varies based upon the hardness of the rock it encounters. The task of determining what type of rock lies in its path falls to Eric Jordan, a geologist hired by the city. By drilling down and hand-picking rocks from the tunnels, Mr. Jordan has created a precise map of the type of rock under Manhattan. His involvement in the tunnel project makes his geologist friends jealous. 'For a geologist,' he said, 'this is like going to Disneyland.'" Jordan's "precise map" of Manhattan bedrock would indeed be something to see; but until then, we can make an educated guess about the rock his tunnel will find by turning to Richard Fortey. In his highly recommended book, Earth, Fortey visits Central Park. First you notice the skyline of towers, he writes. "Then you notice the rocks. Cropping out in places under the trees are dark mounds of rock, emerging from the ground like some buried architecture of a former race, partly exhumed and then forgotten... That New York can be built so high and mighty is a consequence of its secure foundations on ancient rocks. It pays its dues to the geology. This is just a small part of one of those old seams that cross the earth... relics of a deeper time when millennia counted for nothing."  [Image: By Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times].John McPhee picks up this lithic line of thought in Annals of the Former World. Archipelago New York, he writes, is made of "rock that had once been heated near the point of melting, had recrystallized, had been heated again, had recrystallized, and, while not particularly competent, was more than adequate to hold up those buildings... Four hundred and fifty million years in age, it was called Manhattan Schist." Of course, we can also turn to the U.S. National Geologic Map Database, and find our very own bedrock maps –   – which, awesomely, include Times Square, Carnegie Hall, Rockefeller Center, and the Museum of Modern Art, all floating above a sea of solid Manhattan Schist. In any case, the new tunnel being dug to power the faucets of Manhattan are supplements to the pharaonic, 19th-century Croton hydrological network that keeps New York in taps (including the now derelict, yet Historically Registered, Old Croton Aqueduct). You can read about the Croton Dam, for instance, here or here; and there's yet more to learn about the Croton project, including how to follow it by trail, here.  [Image: Photograph by Robert Polidori, from "City of Water" by David Grann, The New Yorker, September 1, 2003].Finally, in 2003 The New Yorker published an excellent article by David Grann called "City of Water," about, yes, City Tunnel No. 3. I'll quote from it here briefly before urging you to find a copy at your local library and read it for yourself. Until Grann actually accompanied the tunnel workers – called sandhogs – underground, he "had only heard tales of New York City's invisible empire, an elaborate maze of tunnels that goes as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. Under construction in one form or another for more than a century, the system of waterways and pipelines spans thousands of miles and comprises nineteen reservoirs and three lakes. Two main tunnels provide New York City with most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water it consumes each day, ninety per cent of which is pumped in from reservoirs upstate by the sheer force of gravity. Descending through aqueducts from as high as fourteen hundred feet above sea level, the water gathers speed, racing down to a thousand feet below sea level when it reaches the pipes beneath the city." Two main tunnels, he writes – and, thus, City Tunnel No. 3. But I'll stop there – after I point out that toward the end of the ludicrously bad Die Hard III, Jeremy Irons temporarily escapes the less than threatening eye of Bruce Willis by driving out of Manhattan through similar such aqueducting tunnels. (For more tunnels: See BLDGBLOG's London Topological or The Great Man-Made River; then check out The Guardian on London's so-called CTRL Project, with a quick visit to that city's cranky old 19th-century sewers, the "capital's bowels"... Enjoy!).
 [Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman]. This is an amazing idea. A tourist brochure – for a fake destination – is printed on glossy paper, then distributed in the New York subway system. Confused would-be tourists leaf through the brochure, "intrigued to learn that this island city's leading industries are winemaking and bookbinding, and that it features a Vegetation Museum, the world's largest flea market, 'Pools of Certitude,' and a natural feature known as the Subterranean Honey Baths." 46% of its citizens are secular humanists. Yawning commuters look in vain for flights or cruises, any way to get there at all... Designed by Amanda Spielman, the brochure is "an aesthetic cross between McSweeney's and Edward Tufte," writes Metropolis. See for yourself by downloading the complete PDF.  [Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman]. Perhaps a small series of BLDGBLOG tourist PDFs coming soon: a rough guide to the neotropical manmade archipelago of... whatever I decide to call it. (Thanks, Scott! See also Brand Avenue's brief look at the island utopia).
In Sausalito, CA, near a 7-11, one finds the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model.  The Bay Model was built in 1957 by the Army Corps of Engineers; it is "over 1.5 acres in size and represents an area from the Pacific Ocean to Sacramento and Stockton, including: the San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun Bays and a portion of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta." Which means it's larger than two American football fields. (I think).  The Model served "as a scientific research tool from 1958-2000 to evaluate circulation and flow characteristics of the water within the estuary system," allowing Army Engineers "to simulate currents, tidal action, sediment movement and the mixing of fresh and salt water. Pollution, salt-water intrusion, barrier and fill studies were a few of the important research projects that have been undertaken at the Bay Model." It's not in the greatest condition, and the faded primary color scheme leaves something to be desired, but the model is no less fascinating for that; any chance you get to walk the shores of a microcosm is a good chance to do some thinking.  If I may briefly quote William Blake – To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour – I'll then point out that the Bay Model exists within its own timezone: in the world of the Model, one day passes every 14.9 minutes. 30 full days elapse every 7.2 hours. Complete tidal cycles run 3.8 minutes. You can practically feel yourself aging in the presence of this copyscape, its wetlands and alluvial braids of artificial rivers running through fields of pumps and power cords. Look closely and you'll see a "Tide Hut" where little gods of the Model enact catastrophe and unleash floods upon the surrogate world spread out before them. Look closer, and you'll see damage from a "hundred years of waves, subsidence, and boat wakes" – which, in Model time, is almost exactly one human year.  But I soon got to thinking about the politics of architectural models. Imagine what would happen, for instance, if some Navy SEALS raided a cave in Afghanistan and found the Bay Model sitting there: what on earth does al-Qaeda want with San Francisco's water supply? FOX News screams. Or a model of Greater London's Thames hydrology, complete with flood gates, Barriers and overflow sewers, which is one thing if it's in the possession of Tony Blair, and quite another if found in the basement of, say, Abu Hamza or even Timothy McVeigh. What were they trying to do with it?It's the politics of architectural models: an object of scientific curiosity in one person's hands is an issue of national security in another's. Or: simulacra as a threat to national security. A plot for a new Philip K. Dick novel, or a film by Charlie Kauffman, then came to mind: a man, perhaps a young Al Pacino, breaks into the Bay Model in the middle of the night. He barricades himself inside, turns on the power, and starts flooding the model, demolishing bridges, rerouting estuarial confluences. He jumps up and down, causing modelquakes, and then accelerates the tides, obliterating Golden Gate Park under the force of a single wave. He calls all the local newspapers and takes responsibility for the disasters now befalling San Francisco outside; but what disasters? they ask, and he thinks they're conning him, denying his rage, because he's read William Blake and St. Thomas Aquinas and he believes that everything he throws at that simulacrum there before him will have effects in the real world... Because it's all building up to one moment, see, the big moment when he decides to flood the Bay Model's model of the Bay Model, opening up a rift in the universe and blasting him head-first through the macrocosm. Until the police break-in... (Thanks to Chad for the tip, and to Nicola for coming with me!)
 Well, BLDGBLOG has taken to the road, now typing to you from California. 10 days in LA, Death Valley, Owens Lake, San Francisco... back March 8th, assuming my plane doesn't crash. Till then, in lieu of regular posting, I've put together a table of contents for new readers, old readers, bored readers, impatient readers – so click around, see what interests you, leave comments, forward to others, have fun. And if you have tips for what to do out here, of course, leave a comment below... Thanks!  Dismantling Gothic cathedrals arch by arch, on the beaches of an equatorial island! The world's largest diamond mine! Rollerskating alone at night through subterranean knots! A seed vault to avert planetary apocalypse! Listening to the arched foundations of London instrument! A man exactly reproduces his old apartment using colorful nylon sheets! Weird geometries in the Kansas farmscape! Slow landscapes of silt and the J.G. Ballard who loves them! The lost gods of Europe hurl spheres at each other in space! Valves, drains, and tunnels in the self-connected topology of underground London! Entire cities snowing diamonds from Baroque domes! Is that architecture or just a soundtrack hovering in space? Helicopter photographs in the sububs of self-similarity! The 7 New Wonders of the World! Southeast London transformed into a maze of rooftop gardens! A temporary public park – complete with bench and parking meter! Lunar electricity! The poet Shelley sets sail for a volcanic archipelago made entirely of glass! A London superstadium full of ring magnets will capture the Northern Lights! Beautiful maps!  The churches of Christopher Wren, transformed into a geomagnetic harddrive! The World Trade Center was actually a gigantic tuning fork! Jurassic park, Russian conservation style! James Bond thwarts a San Franciscan attempt at tectonic warfare! Slum dwellers and modular parasites of the urban world, unite! An abandoned island off the coast of Japan! Unearthly landscapes swarming with alien bacteria! The suburbs: raw mounds and earthworks, before construction arrives! Extraterrestrial life rained down on India! The internal volume of Notre-Dame, Paris, carved into the surface of the moon! Meat! The landscape architecture of Hell, its subsurface faults and magmatic geology! Why not live inside your garage? Is that a suburb growing out of your spine, or are you happy to see me? 3000km of concrete tunnels installed beneath the deserts of Libya! The robotic, neverending cinema of Los Angeles traffic control! A house of landslides, filled with geese! Hypnotic films of motorway orbitals now available on DVD! Measuring astronomy – solstice and stars – with a city modeled on Stonehenge! Unbelievable maps and diagrams of interstellar astral incidence!  Then we hiked alone for a thousand years, and we renamed all the constellations! The averaged images of suburban ennui! Food! Cake! Have you seen this hull before? New Arctic seaways promise Lovecraftian visions to come! On the colors of dismantled landscapes, photographed from the air! Famous architecture, blurred! Photographs of Chernobyl, including an abandoned alphabet! Morocco double-exposures! The Earth in 7.5 billion years! Fossilized cities! The art of reforesting continents through tree bombs! The deserts of the world are musical instruments! Venice resonates with voices! Huge and amazing maps of California hydrology! The city as an avatar of itself! The wonderfully weird, self-observing urban world of CCTV! Sci-fi instant cities built above working limeworks pits! The abandoned malls of Chicagoland! WWII British sound mirrors used to musicalize mountain storms!  All hell is breaking loose in middle America! San Jellocisco! Catching near-earth asteroids using a gigantic baseball mit! If you've got nothing else to do, why not go camping in an abandoned mine? Inbred, zombified ex-idealists stumble through pressurized undersea utopias, listening to Mozart! Biking through glass tunnels suspended above metropolitan Toronto! An inflatable hotel – in deep space! Folk maps of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal! Cool bridges! Houses, churches, places to hang: it's the afterlife of the Quonset hut! A man jumps from a balloon, free-falls 20 kilometers through the stratosphere, and captures the whole thing on film! King Kong! Complicated volcanic pipe networks will extrude cathedrals directly from the earth! Huge, interconnected white towers in the middle of Beijing! Arches National Park, Manhattan branch! Will the International Space Station soon be turned into a sculpture gallery? An Indonesian mine and the technicolor stalactites it will form in a million years! In a wilderness of mirrors we lost our own reflections! Recording the secret music of bridges! Amazing tree houses by Andrew Maynard!  That should hopefully last you a week... but don't forget the other posts, below – especially the Mars rover film. I'll be back!
Among the finalists for eVolo's recent design competition on the future of the skyscraper was Loren Supp. Having met Loren two years ago, I thought I'd get back in touch with him and ask a few questions about his project.  [Image: Loren Supp, Shanghai Vertical Marketplace, close-up of top floors]. First, some historical context: "In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million," Mike Davis writes; "today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050." It seems obvious that this global hyper-urbanization will transform our species in unpredictable ways. Which is where Loren comes in. The skyscraper, he says, has become "the only viable architectural response" to such a future – but only after "a complete re-thinking of skyscraper iconography" has taken place. The "stacked plate mentality," in other words, "is about to go out the window."   [Image: Loren Supp, Shanghai Vertical Marketplace, close-up with project display boards]. Loren's project is a "vertical marketplace" for central Shanghai. To generate its biomorphic structure and vaguely botanical contours, Loren "mapp[ed] the city's market economy" using "fluid dynamics software," which produced a complex diagram that "would have been impossible just a few years ago." The building is thus designed to fit into its "dynamically-constructed context." The building works as "an alleviation of the single-layer congestion that defines the horizontal cityscape. If you have ever been to Shanghai, one of the lasting impressions you take back is of the city's congested market economy. People sell everything, everywhere. The ultimate result of this phenomena is forced localization." Loren's tower, on the other hand – or perhaps a cluster of them, linked by gondolas (sorry) – would vertically stretch Shanghai's urban marketplace, growing a new, upward layering of the city. (Speaking of growing: look at the first image again, and you'll see a kind of internal buttressing, as if growing from pod to pod within the building).  [Image: Loren Supp, Shanghai Vertical Marketplace, close-up]. Design-wise, Loren says, the "only space made is that which is necessary. Uniting these 'exploded plates' with the market circulation that created them completes the skyscaper." Here, then, Loren's thinking what I'm thinking: "Can the project actually be built? That question will be answered through the same technological construct that allowed its design process. Complex formal architectures can, and will, be facilitated by the logic used in the software to visualize them. The terminology of isoparm, NURBS, and SubD, are infecting (and altering) the construction process, and the future of the skyscraper will inevitably depend upon them." So, perhaps some future questions for Loren in another post: Could there be such a thing as a prefabricated skyscraper? What might it look like? Could these towers be shortened – then clustered – yet still achieve the same urban effect? What about a single-family home – a whole suburb – of Shanghai Vertical Marketplaces? What would that look like...? For more of Supp's project – and many interesting others – stop by eVolo. Meanwhile, check out these frightening plans for a kilometre-high skyscraper in Kuwait; and take another look at the Beijing Boom Tower and the future urban-modular... (Originally spotted at Archinect).
 [Image: The earth is coming to get you... A dust storm in Iraq, via Pruned]. "Someday the U.S. military could drive a trailer to a spot just beyond insurgent fighting and, within minutes," we read, " reconfigure part of the atmosphere, blocking an enemy's ability to receive satellite signals, even as U.S. troops are able to see into the area with radar." They'll roll up, in other words – and throw storms at you...   [Images: The Grand Island Supercell, photographed by Mike Hollingshead; these temporary parts of the earth, airborne geographies, surviving now only in photographs]. But imagine what an architect, or landscape architect, might do with such a thing: some atmosphere-reconfiguration technology disguised inside pillars, towers and arcades. An 18th c. English garden maze, lined with lichen-covered statuary, and each standing figure is an atmosphere-machine, generating clouds or clearing them. A cure for British weather. You can turn them all on, in the right order, fast enough, and form tornadoes. The murderer of birds, whirled to their doom. And if it's too close to Heathrow, your garden becomes a national security threat. Harry Potter and the Garden of Storms.  [Image: Another supercell, photographed by Mike Hollingshead]. A new tower is built in midtown Manhattan, attracting storms, upper floors constantly awash in sleeves of cloud cover. Ghostbusters III. Transmitters hidden inside marshland graveyards far east of London: Dracula Returns. Or none of the above, just a military unit on a border somewhere, staring through binoculars, preparing to hurl hurricanes, the grand wizardy of war: Bride of Climate Change. A weaponized earth.   [Images: An almost theologically intense supercell, photographed by Mike Hollingshead].
A few months ago, BLDGBLOG explored suggestions by physicist Paul Davies that alien life may exist on Earth – though it would be unrecognizable to microbiologists, and thus ignored or wrongly identified.   Paul Davies now reviews a book by Peter Ward in New Scientist – and Davies writes some extraordinary things. The planets in our solar system, for instance, "are not completely quarantined from each other. Debris splattered into space by comet and asteroid impacts gets distributed around the solar system. Mars and Earth in particular have been trading rocks throughout their history, and it is clear that microbes could hitch a ride and be transported in relative safety from one planet to the other." Which could make for an award-winning Pixar film... Finding E. Coli. "Martian organisms might not be alien at all," Davies concludes, "but merely members of another branch on the terrestrial tree of life."  Even better is "the intriguing idea" – mentioned above – "that alien organisms may lurk all around us, unrecognised for what they are because they fail to respond to standard biochemical analysis" – or they're very bad at conversation. "For example, there could be microbes that use RNA instead of DNA, or employ a different genetic code." There is even a chance "that some viruses could be relics of ancient alternative forms of life." Which blows me away! In other words, an infection is really an encounter with ancient life. Living fossils inside injuries. But my enthusiasm here is ultimately more inspired by the possibilities for landscape design, say, using gardens as a form of astrobiological research. It's not a garden, it's a laboratory; it's not your backyard, it's a kind of skin graft from an alien planet, a celestial infection of the earth. Patches from elsewhere. J.G. Ballard's "nightmare world of competing organic forms" – an " insane Eden," indeed. One could even imagine a series of classified landscapes, grown by infrared in a cave beneath Los Alamos National Laboratory, incomprehensible genetic lines cultivated into a kind of aterrestrial Versailles. Fountains of amino acids washing slowly over alien flowers. Weird topiary mazes made of symmetrical creeper vines from space.  (For more of this, see BLDGBLOG's Alien Rain on India).
     [Images: Borderville by Invertebrate; scanned from Issue #18 of Cabinet Magazine. These were "assembled out of objects ripped from (...) movies featuring border crossings," including Salvador, The Great Escape, Three Kings, Traffic, The Day of the Jackal, Not Without My Daughter, Bad Boys II, The Wild Bunch, From Dusk Till Dawn – etc. In other words, these are absolute borderlands, in-between spaces, a " backlash landscape" of political division. (Invertebrate: be in touch!)]. (Simultaneously posted on subtopia).
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.
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