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  A flying hotel has been proposed by Wimberley Allison Tong & Goo (but check out their space resort!), as part of a long-term campaign to design "entirely new kinds of destinations" – aka "successful destinations," leaving me, perhaps alone, to wonder what exactly an unsuccessful destination would be (a place at which you can never fully arrive...?).  WATG has even published a PDF – made out to look like a manuscript illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci – explaining their vision of this and other surrealistically imaginative resorts: they're creating the hotel of tomorrow. (Can anyone say Archigram?)  Perhaps no one will be surprised by this, but I find the project totally fascinating – even if it is designed by an international tourism consultancy firm (an industry brilliantly satirized by Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform [not for everyone]). I'm still into this thing. In fact, BLDGBLOG could buy one of these hotels and move our offices permanently into the stratosphere. I'd look forward to it.  (Spotted at Interactive Architecture dot Org; see also Deep Space Hilton).
 [Image: From the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale]. The stated subject of this year's biennale is "the meta-city, an agglomeration that extends beyond the traditional form and concept of the city." I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be looking at up there – but I like what I want to see in that image, which is either a reclaimed assemblage of highway overpasses, or a house built to look like an assemblage of highway overpasses. Either way, it's genius. Is it practical? Well, the ramps could be terraced, for starters, with floors at different levels, and steps cut into them, and toward the center of the cloverleaf could be a walled interior: bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, guest rooms, all with floor to ceiling windows. A readymade, full-surround deck. Easy parking. Plumbing and electrics would come up through one of the concrete trunks – along with a staircase, through which to enter the house or visit your own backyard (or "underyard" – unless that's too Freudian). It's the house of the future: built like a highway overpass. Built on a highway overpass.     [Images: From the Freeway series by Catherine Opie]. I suppose it's not even outside the realm of possibility to imagine, several hundred years from now, after nearly everyone's died of bird flu, AIDS, or open civil warfare, that freeways – those massive examples of widespread land use, the world over – could be reclaimed, domesticated, built upon as new foundations. Houses in the midst of highway flyovers, cloverleaf junctions given windows, bedrooms constructed on off-ramps. New feudal worlds of elevated flyovers, towns held aloft in the sky. In Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard, we enter such a world, framed by drainage culverts, feeder roads, ascent ramps and storm tunnels, and we meet a man, called Maitland, who finds himself marooned after a crash, stuck alone in an urban blindspot: out of sight, out of mind, on an off-road island made entirely of concrete. "In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations." The man looks for "some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways" – but finds none. He simply sees "vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned in advance of itself." Indeed, Maitland, our new Crusoe of the London motorways, is "alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines... an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness."  In any case, as freeways continue to form the only visible horizon for urban inhabitants worldwide, we may realistically find that houses soon come to look like them: back-looping knots of elevated platforms, curved nests of ramps that are suitable for living in, elevated over an empty world we've left behind.
   [Images: Like posters for an unreleased horror film, it's the Holga photography of nicolai_g, taken from his Spacetime flickr pool. Good stuff!].
This is an old story, but I still like telling it. Japanese researcher Shun Akiba has apparently discovered " hundreds of kilometers of Tokyo tunnels whose purpose is unknown and whose very existence is denied."
 [Image: From the LOMO Tokyo flickr pool; image by someone called wooooooo].
Shun, who believes he is now the victim of a conspiracy, stumbled upon "an old map in a secondhand bookstore. Comparing it to a contemporary map, he found significant variations. 'Close to the Diet in Nagata-cho, current maps show two subways crossing. In the old map, they are parallel.'"
This unexpected parallelization of Tokyo's subway tunnels – a geometrician's secret fantasy – inspired Shun to seek out old municipal construction records. When no one wanted to help, however, treating him as if he were drunk or crazy – their "lips zipped tight" – he woke up to find his thighs sealed together with a transparent, jelly-like substance –
Er –
Actually, he was so invigorated by this mysterious lack of interest that "he set out to prove that the two subway tunnels could not cross: 'Engineering cannot lie.'"
But engineers can.
To make a long story short, there are "seven riddles" about this underground world, a secret Subtokyo of tunnels; the parallel subways were only mystery number one: "The second reveals a secret underground complex between Kokkai-gijidomae and the prime minister's residence. A prewar map (riddle No. 3) shows the Diet in a huge empty space surrounded by paddy fields: 'What was the military covering up?' New maps (No. 4) are full of inconsistencies: 'People are still trying to hide things.' The postwar General Headquarters (No. 5) was a most mysterious place. Eidan's records of the construction of the Hibiya Line (No. 6) are hazy to say the least. As for the 'new' O-Edo Line (No. 7), 'that existed already.' Which begs the question, where did all the money go allocated for the tunneling?"
Shun even "claims to have uncovered a secret code that links a complex network of tunnels unknown to the general public. 'Every city with a historic subterranean transport system has secrets,' he says. 'In London, for example, some lines are near the surface and others very deep, for no obvious reason.'" (Though everyone knows the Tube is a weaving diagram for extraterrestrials).
Further, Shun reveals, "on the Ginza subway from Suehirocho to Kanda," there are "many mysterious tunnels leading off from the main track. 'No such routes are shown on maps.' Traveling from Kasumigaseki to Kokkai-gijidomae, there is a line off to the left that is not shown on any map. Nor is it indicated in subway construction records."
Old underground car parks, unofficial basements, locked doors near public toilets – and all "within missile range of North Korea."
What's going on beneath Tokyo?
(Thanks to Bryan Finoki for originally pointing this out to me! For similar such explorations of underground London, see London Topological; and for more on underground Tokyo, see Pillars of Tokyo – then read about the freaky goings-on of Aum Shinrikyo, the subway-gassing Japanese supercult. And if you've got information on other stuff like this – send it in...)
The (infamous?) Central Park coyote "was finally captured at about 10 this morning near Belvedere Castle, after an officer with the New York City Police Department's Emergency Service Unit shot it in the rear with a tranquilizer dart."  [Image: A perhaps deliberately Soderberghian montage by Paul Kreft]. The coyote was "dubbed 'Hal' by some police officers and reporters because it was first spotted near the Hallett Nature Sanctuary" – but everyone knows it was really named after the rogue computer in 2001... The coyote is now being "rehabilitated" elsewhere, after surviving its first appearance in the animal-media storm. But it will be back... leading me to wonder: as the cities of the world purge themselves further and further of nonhuman species, will even a passing bird be treated as a public spectacle? (For a somewhat contrary view of beasts in the big city, of course, see Simian urbanism).
About two months ago I came across the photography of David Maisel, and I was instantly blown away. I started posting excerpts from his various photographic series up on BLDGBLOG – before he and I eventually got in touch.
 
So I decided to interview him for Archinect, another site I'm involved with, and the result of that decision was a lengthy and interesting telephone conversation, some email exchanges, and a visit to his studio out in Sausalito, CA (roughly 20 minutes after seeing the Bay Model).
That interview is now up and public.
If you get a chance, swing by and see some incredible images – and read about the draining of Owens Lake, the land art implications of mine leaching heaps, Icelandic hydropower, whether or not photographers are ever tempted to use pollution as a way to spice up an empty photograph... and much more.
The interview is here – and David's website is here. Enjoy!
If you could partially melt the city of London – then refreeze it: what might that new city look like? Alternatively, if you could build a huge machine, a landscape printer, and feed molten rivers of the city – a new Thames of liquid windows, old domes of churches running like paint – through its cavernous gates and printheads, what might you actually print with it? Could you use the molten city of London as an "ink" for future cityscapes – store it in a vat, and print new continuous bridges, endless architecture, from Kent to northern Yorkshire? A diagonal ribbon of liquid London, solidifying across all of France.  [Image: Instead of colors, you'd have a cartridge full of Islington, full of Holborn, King's Cross, Little Venice...]. (For a related idea, see magmatic architecture).
 "Walking along the beach some years ago, I noticed a dark structure emerging from the mist ahead of me," J.G. Ballard writes in today's Guardian. "Three storeys high, and larger than a parish church, it was one of the huge blockhouses that formed Hitler's Atlantic wall, the chain of fortifications that ran from the French coast all the way to Denmark and Norway. This blockhouse, as indifferent to time as the pyramids, was a mass of black concrete once poured by the slave labourers of the Todt Organisation, pockmarked by the shellfire of the attacking allied warships."  This wall of now abandoned concrete bunkers, Ballard tells us, was but part "of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."  [Image: Richard Doody]. Ballard then climbs into one of the ruined blockhouses, and finds it reminds him "of the German forts at Tsingtao, the beach resort in north China that my family visited in the 1930s. Tsingtao had been a German naval base during the first world war, and I was taken on a tourist trip to the forts, a vast complex of tunnels and gun emplacements built into the cliffs. The cathedral-like vaults with their hydraulic platforms resembled Piranesi's prisons, endless concrete galleries leading to vertical shafts and even further galleries. The Chinese guides took special pleasure in pointing out the bloody handprints of the German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment."  [Image: Richard Doody]. And so on – we meet Modernism, ornament, Stalin, Hitler, London's National Gallery, the high-rise architecture of death and class warfare: read more at the Guardian. Of course, in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald takes us on a walking tour of the English coast, including Britain's own military landscapes. These abandoned weapons testing ranges, complete with odd concrete structures, Sebald writes, looked like "the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas, which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe."  [Image: Keith Ward]. For Sebald, "wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside these bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the showerheads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways." It is interesting to note that both Sebald and Ballard discuss an isle of the dead –  [Image: Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1883]. – specifically, in Ballard's case, Arnold Böcklin's famous 1883 painting of that title. In any case, you can also take a look at the site Atlantik Wall for more images and history; you can follow Subterranea Britannica's journey into some weird missile silos –  [Image: Nick Catford]. – built into the landscape of northern France; you can read Paul Virilio's now somewhat legendary exploration of abandoned WWII landscape architecture, Bunker Archaeology; and you can take a brief look at the observations made here, as part of a larger architectural travelogue that begins in London's Barbican. Of course, you can also take a look at an art project, from 1998, by Magdalena Jetelova –  – in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy's beaches.  Finally, here's a good interview with J.G. Ballard; and, though irrelevant to bunkers, I recommend Ballard's Super-Cannes in the highest possible terms. (Though it's certainly not for everyone who reads BLDGBLOG).
In 1919, Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin proposed a 400m-high Monument to the 3rd International.  Once constructed, it would have stood nearly 100m taller than the Eiffel Tower, giving physical expression to the social and artistic dynamism of the Russian Revolution. Intended as a kind of archi-sculptural testament to the strength of the world's workers, the Tower was ultimately never built. Or was it?  [Image: Sara De Bondt]. Recently, a British group called Henry VIII's Wives has made artistic waves with their proposal to build the Tower in its entirety – although in pieces, distributed throughout the world. Thus the Tower will exist, albeit in an unassembled, ironically incomplete form. An art gallery in Sydney, a wine cellar in Rome, a cupboard in outer Rajasthan – there you will find small, unique and official pieces of Tatlin's Tower. Advertisements for this future "unrealized Tower" even began appearing on the walls of the London Underground.  [Image: Sara De Bondt/Lucy Skaer]. Then, tonight, 19 March 2006, at an event in the Bern Kunsthalle, Switzerland, the group formally presented their plan – alongside Tatlin-inspired presentations by unbuilt-monument specialist Takehiko Nagakura, novelist Zoë Strachan and others. BLDGBLOG was also invited to submit a short text, which I've reproduced below. (Thanks to Bob Grieve for commissioning it!)  The unbuilt status of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International – or Tatlin’s Tower – is both befuddling and possibly contentious. In other words, are we sure that Tatlin’s Tower has not actually been built? Can this state of unconstruction be proven? Perhaps Tatlin’s Tower exists after all – but we’ve been looking in all the wrong places. There is, in fact, no logical reason to assume that Tatlin’s Tower, once built, would even be architectural. Indeed, there is no logical reason to assume that Tatlin’s Tower, in its full realization, its exact structural form, is something that can even be seen. But if Tatlin’s Tower does exist – and, as you’ll hear, it probably does – we may find that it’s been built not just once or even twice; we may find that the Tower exists in a constant state of construction, a never-ending condition of being-built. Tatlin’s Tower is constructed – and destructed – from scratch, everyday, every instant – and the Tower will go on being built, ritualistically, every moment for eternity. If that’s really the case, however, where are we supposed to find it? It is hard, after all, to misplace a 400m high Communist Tower; if it now stands, where exactly is it standing? For starters, perhaps stand is the wrong word. It is important to realize that the Tower is a vertical grid of spatial relationships, a physical rhythm of structure in space. Once we establish that, we see that the proportion of gap to girder forms a mathematical ratio that can be applied anywhere – at the very least, it can be perceived anywhere. It is then that the Tower’s helical super-symmetry becomes evident on every scale, in every location. The Tower already exists. As but one example, in the time spent between visiting a pub once, then visiting it again – and then again, two weeks later – there is the structure of Tatlin’s Tower, measured precisely, to the second, in the chasm between drinks. You have lived the rhythm of the structure, its buttresses and cantilevered gantries. One day, two days, one hour: the ratios and rhythms match exactly to the Tower’s form. The Tower, in other words, does not have to be architectural. I even discovered while writing this text that the space between myself and the computer screen, if you include the short distance to the floor, forms an oblong triangle; and it dawned on me: this is a section of Tatlin’s Tower, right here, surrounding me, inscribed into the space I inhabit. Tatlin’s entire 400m-high Babel can be reverse-derived from the data. In this context it is quite extraordinary to reveal that Dr. Simon X, a musicologist from Leeds University, has found indisputable evidence that Tatlin’s Tower was translated into a series of Indian ragas. Whilst vacationing in Tamil Nadu in 1974 – and suffering from a stomach bug due to questionable local hygiene – Dr. X found that the nightly concerts he and his wife had been attending were actually musicalized versions of the mathematics found inside Tatlin’s Tower. He didn’t know if the musicians had planned this. X’s recordings have become something of a myth in the field of Tatlin’s Tower-spotting, but his musical logic remains impeccable, even obvious: you can very clearly hear the outline of Tatlin’s symmetrical structuring in the recurrence of certain south Indian octaves. Indeed, X’s recent papers suggest, if one were to transcribe Tatlin’s Tower directly as a musical score, the folk songs of Tamil Nadu would be as accurate a result as any. But it gets yet more interesting, when one considers contemporary cinematic choreography. Tatlin’s closest friend from university went on to marry a woman whose sister taught dance, first in Moscow, then in Paris, then in New York in exile. The school she started in New York to support herself during the war included, at one point, a young Beatriz X – who would later befriend world famous film editor Walter Murch. It is rumored now that Murch – editor of such features as Apocalypse Now – would edit raw film stock into the proportions suggested by a poster of Tatlin’s Tower pinned up on his studio wall. Intriguingly, then, the movements of characters through the cinematic space of Apocalypse Now – or the more recent Iraq War film, Jarhead – actually carefully circumscribe the upward coiling vertical movement of Tatlin’s monumental iron tower. This can be glimpsed most clearly in a scene from The Conversation, which Murch also edited, in which Gene Hackman, taller than the other actors he appears with, seems to mimic the precise angle of tilt at which Tatlin’s Tower was meant to repose. And so forth. The importance, here, is in the realization that if the Tower was designed to be of the people, a monument to international popular sovereignty, then it is also in the people, and amongst them, literally: it is medically present in the space between cells, resonating in cobwebs of bone marrow, as much as it is traced again and again within the four dimensions of urban space by the passage of workday pedestrians. The sliver of empty asphalt between your car and the lorry overtaking you, multiplied by the time it takes to get anywhere, inevitably adds up to frame the gantries in Tatlin’s Tower. The Tower is everywhere. It is something we enact, performed here in the present, indeed in the hesitations between every letter that I type. It is negatively present in the foundations of buildings, in natural crevasses carved by streams through the ice of Antarctic deserts. Even American astronaut Neil Armstrong, some have claimed, found evidence of Tatlin’s Tower impressed into the surface of the moon, an almost exact reproduction eroding there in faint stratigraphies of colorless rock. The ultimate "Communist monument," then, if there is such a thing, is the one that we’re living inside of, the proportional numerologies that frame and contain us. The brilliance of Tatlin’s Tower was that it was already built from the moment he first designed it – or perhaps I should say: transcribed it. Tatlin knew this; now so do we.  [Note: Not every claim made in this text should be considered factual].
    [Images: Landscape design through interventionist Aristotelianism (action-at-a-distance): Utah's test bombing ranges. You need airborne explosives that inflict damage in the exact patterns of the royal gardens at Versailles. The Air Force Corps of Landscape Engineers. Launch missiles at the moon and Angkor Wat appears inscribed into the lunar surface. You bomb Kew Gardens – and it turns into Longwood Gardens. Bombing landscapes with new landscapes. (These photos via Pruned – via Polar Inertia. See also: Tree Bombs and Digging with Bombs)].
 [Image: "The world's first inflatable folly is displayed at the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, England." Hint: it's not the woman sitting front-left. BBC]. In 1784, utopian designer and speculative architect Etienne-Louis Boullée designed a Cenotaph for Newton, or tomb for Isaac Newton. It was ridiculously huge, its dome pierced by small holes to shine as new constellations, illuminating visitors from above with artificial stars.  [Image: Etienne-Louis Boullée; more here (including a cool triangular version)]. Not to be outwitted by their fanciful neighbors across the Channel, however, Britain now has "the world's first inflatable folly," on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.  Modeled after Boullée's Cenotaph and named for a song by Joy Division, In a Lonely Place gives us a "7 meter inflated black sphere punctured by a half-timbered structure. Inside, a stair leads up to a viewing platform, from where the surrounding void is broken by small pinpricks of light, made by transparent panels cut into the sphere."  These, too, are constellations – of a different kind: they're maps to the stars of Hollywood, terrestrial residences of artificial stars, a Californian pantheon to guide us through the night.  Designed by FAT, the folly is up till 2 May 2006, so check it out! And you can see photographs of the folly under construction here. Meanwhile, one of the first things this made me think of for some reason is a tool that may not even exist, but what I want to call a surgical balloon: you open up someone's body (in a surgical context), insert the balloon, expand it, and this lifts away the surrounding tissue so that a safe operation can take place. I have no idea if this really exists, but it sounds quite useful. So what I'm thinking is: could architects design small buildings, in the form of surgical tools, that are temporarily erected inside people's bodies? A hip replacement that looks remarkably like the Barcelona Pavilion, for instance – or a medical device that references Boullée. Small versions of Boullée's cenotaph begin appearing everywhere, in surgical theaters, worldwide. Inflated inside people's bodies. Hissing. The Boullée Balloon. It might happen. [All unlabeled images in this post come courtesy of Sam Jacob/ FAT].
 The Arbonian Sea is back in the news – and it's got Hollywood written all over it: "Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed – and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter." [extreme close-up; words inaudible] "And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean." [title screen]  [Image: Anthony Philpotts]. However, ocean is a blatant exaggeration; it's a sea, really – the Arbonian Sea. It will simply pry off the Horn of Africa, and form a kind of parallel Red Sea in the space left behind. It's not destined to be a new Indian Ocean, or a new Atlantic. Even a Mediterranean, for that matter.  [Image: Dereje Ayalew/Addis Ababa University]. Yet every time geologists return to study the area, "new crevices are discovered. Fumes as hot as 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) shoot up from some of them; the sound of bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur rise from others. The larger crevices are dozens of meters deep and several hundred meters long. Traces of recent volcanic eruptions are also visible." This is all screaming for a BLDGBLOG field-trip. (Funders be in touch!)  [Image: Asfawossen Asrat]. The whole region, called the Afar Triangle, is "sinking rapidly. Large areas are already more than 100 meters (328 feet) below sea level. For now, the highlands surrounding the Denakil Depression prevent the Red Sea from flooding these areas, but erosion and tectonic plate movement are continually reducing the height of this natural barrier." So if the next James Bond is worth its snuff it will feature a crazed geotechnic engineer bulldozing new flood paths through those highlands, ready to flood the valley... Where Britain has some kind of outpost... A space program... A germ warfare lab... Or maybe it's Bond doing the bulldozing...  [Image: Tim Wright/University of Oxford]. In any case, the Denakil – or Danakil – Depression sounds like paradise to me. Not only does it have the hottest average temperature on earth – it "tops 34°C every day of the year and soars to 55°C in the summer" – but it is chock full of "geological treats." For instance, New Scientist tells us, a "splendid shield volcano more than 50 kilometres wide called Erte Ale occupies much of the depression. The volcano is one of the few in the world with an active lava lake. Nearby, volcanic smoke holes have created crystal pools, lava cones called hornitos and colourful structures formed from sulphur, halite and other minerals. Elsewhere the floor is littered with marine reefs, silt plains and ancient shorelines." Add all to that the nearby Arbonian Sea, and it seems a good time to be terrestrial, indeed. (Thanks, Alex!)
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