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  [Images: More goodness from the wizard of pinholes, Nicolai Grossman, taken off his Spacetime set – click each image for original page. Is it possible for time itself to seizure? For temporality to get Tourette's? Is there a disease of the optic nerve in which moments echo – and would people sign-up for infection? Bruce Mau once wrote that tourists of the future will take "Disease Tours (complete with guaranteed cure)," riding bodily malfunction to a predictable end – but what do diseases of the eye look like from inside? More importantly: what if you built a house that actually looked like that?]. (See also The overlap and The blur, both with photos by Grossman).
 A few months ago, Pruned ran an excellent piece about farms for cloned meat. There, inside huge barns, rubbery mats of cloned muscle – stretched lumps of unBeef® – would vibrate, growing, pulsing, often ripping, beneath a steady stream of jelly-like vitamin wash. Nutrients would slide across those gleaming, fat-marbled surfaces... clumped and soapy. A handful of underpaid Mexican night-workers would then come through with industrial strength pizza cutters, chopping the meat-sheets into rectangular blocks. You would then buy one of those blocks, intending for your own kids to chew it and swallow it. This would be called "feeding them steak." "Chicken." "Pork."  But what really interests me here is whether such a scenario might pose a new future for landscape design. What if someone were to develop, for instance, a kind of organic bio-paving for the world's freeways, replacing asphalt? In which case: could you clone whole stretches of interstate? Cloverleaf junctions, skyways, off-ramps? Would summer road crews perform something more akin to skin-graft operations? Stretching huge films of living matter over the world's dual carriageways. Minimal surfaces. And so on.  [Image: Frei Otto's architecture of minimal surfaces]. The risk, of course, would be that there's some fatal, unknown flaw in your cloning technique and so, one day, the freeways wake up. They shake themselves free from the dirt and filth; they tuck their herniated loops of distant traffic circles up underneath themselves; and they walk away...  All of LA's sprawling anatomy of freeways and cloverleaf junctions arises with a tectonic shiver from the arid sands of southern California, artificially intelligent, blinking with traffic lights, and it wanders free into the American desert. Shining. A kind of moving, hyperdimensional squid made of asphalt and miswired traffic control programs shambling into the mountains, raining cars.
A while back, Tropolism announced Your Hidden City, an urban photography contest. Now, more than one thousand photographs later, the results are in... Instead of one overall winner, however, each juror will be posting his or her favorites, allowing for different standards, tastes, opinions, etc. So, as one of those jurors, I chose... the following: My personal favorite was this laundromat in Honolulu, which comes in under the category of "Best Hidden Place":  That would make an absolutely killer book cover, for instance. For "Best Natural/Urban Overlap," I chose this one:  For "Best Vantage Point," I went with the bean by sgoralnick:  For "Best Density," I chose another photo by sgoralnick (I really like this one):  And, for "Best Building," I chose this mausoleum-like horror movie grid/void, aka the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy, France, photographed by a good-looking Norwegian man:  C'est tout. It was fun. Maybe we can keep this going, do a seasonal thing... Actually, here's a runner-up for "Best Hidden Place": hevy, for his/her documentation of Miami's Ballardian back-side, of which this is just one example:  Thanks, everyone – and congrats – and check out the other jurors' picks, too: architechnophilia, Miss Representation, Polis, Life Without Buildings, and, of course, el tropolismo himself.
 [Image: The present tectonic structure of North America, mapped by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University]. While out in California last month, hiking through Death Valley – on a cloudy day it looked like a painting by Caspar David Friedrich: an earth of snow, not salt flats – I read that California is actually a welded-together mass of remnant archipelagos and former island arcs. In other words, down there in the Californian gravel are the buried edges of old island chains – and the whole state is still shivering with collision, making adjustments, popping loose and sticking, always on the move... then stopping. Much is made of the apparent poetry of driving over the San Andreas Fault, which divides California into a left-half and a right-half, a coastal zone and a continental shield; but what of the silent lines you walk across everyday, from one former island to the next, unaware that those lands had even once been separated? Midway through the trip, I picked up a copy of John McPhee's Assembling California, in which he describes residual structures of ancient geology with "no known bottom" because they cut so deep. He talks about "the metamorphosed remains of what had once been an island arc," and how, through constant collision and restlessness, entire "Newfoundlands, Madagascars, New Zealands, Sumatras, [and] Japans" have all jostled together, ramming one into the other, year after year, piling up, forming "the outermost laminations of new landscapes." This is "the docking of arc and continent," a mismatched mess of rock "now consolidated as California." "California," then, is just the temporary shape taken by these lost islands and unknotted seafloors. Of course, then I found these unbelievable maps by Ron Blakey last week and I almost passed out. Utterly ingenious, each map represents "the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history." You can actually watch as California comes home to collide.  [Image: The southwestern coastal archipelagos of North America, 310 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey]. But let's pull back and start 420 million years ago (bypassing some 130 million years' worth of Blakey's maps). This is North America, a tropical archipelago, covered in surreal vegetation, blowing seeds across itself – Shelley's "thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds" – cross-pollinating, hybridizing, surrounded by shallow seas, chugging northward over the equator.  75 million years later (below), what will eventually be North America has broken into pieces, partially flooded, surrounded by clusters of islands. These scattered subcontinents are about to collide with the north by northwestern edge of Africa – and unbelievable arcs, inlets, atolls, and bays all stretch across the landscape. What was it like to live in that geography? What sounds did the forests make? What did the stars look like? What half-legged fish swam through those waters?   Another 50 million years pass, and the collision with Africa is well underway. Deserts are forming in the American southwest. Global wind patterns shift due to the distribution of landmasses. Weird species that only live for a million years, and leave no fossil record, run unimpeded across giant landscapes of exposed bedrock.   Then the Atlantic rift begins; the Appalachian Mountains, which passed through Morocco, are now split onto three continents: North America, north Africa, and the embryonic British Isles, which drift northward, cultivating Albionic energy in ancestral swells of warm sea. William Blake will be born there – and Shelley, who'll write of a time "when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh."  150 million years ago. California is already starting to form: it's a distant horizon of islands in the Pacific. Those mountains of rock above water are coming in toward the mainland, slowly, lurching forward on broken faults, a conveyor belt moving masses east to raise hills in a ring around Los Angeles, propelling the Sierra Nevadas upward, walling-in the great Arizonan desert now temporarily beneath the sea. Could you map today's California according to the island chains it used to be? And look at Mexico: it's a weird spit of land, hooked and crooked through the oceans, collecting islands onto itself. What would it have been like, walking through those coastal mountains? And if you carved an entire island to look like the cathedral of Notre-Dame, what would it look like, breaking waves, coming toward you over ten million years, eventually colliding with the cliffs you stand on?   What's amazing in the above two images is that, in only 40 million years, an entire system of archipelagos has rammed into the mainland, assembling what will eventually become known as California, tipping the Rockies, torquing belts of metal into metamorphosed ribbons today exposed by roadcuts. What must that time period have been like? With thousands of small islands – a whole Indonesia – off the coast, groaning at night with tectonic pressure, shattering from strain, causing landslides, you could have boated from bay to bay, mapping species, collecting rocks – knowing that beneath your feet is what will someday be Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, Death Valley. But now, in the map below, look at Mexico again: it's a broken ridge of almost-islands, cooking in the Cretaceous sun. The Yucatan is an island. The whole Pacific coast is a weather-beaten cliff of caves and pockets. This was 65 million years ago.  Now the North American inland sea has sealed up, and a riverine bay several orders of magnitude larger than the Mississippi or the Saint Lawrence flows southeast across Texas. Then it, too, is gone (below), leaving behind the massive fossil reefs of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. There is no Florida yet; Alaska and Russia are one; the Caribbean is a malarial bog of proto-islands, choked with seaweed, overrun with electric eels and tide pools. Somewhere humans are chipping flints together and hallucinating spaceships.  Till North America hits its Ice Age. Thousands of acres of frozen arches stand whistling in frigid winds above the future site of Washington DC. Humans huddle in caves – then move south, populating the New Mexican desert. Global sealevels drop, revealing caverns in the coasts of every continent. The magnetosphere howls in the freezing air.  Then it's today. New oceans continue to form. Major geological events continue to happen. Someday the coast of California will drag along the edge of Alaska, depositing pieces of Culver City in the front range. Eventually the planet will melt, cities forming rivers of liquid stone. It's interesting in this context to note that, if the Antarctic ice cap melts, Antarctica itself may rise: "The continental shelf of the South Polar land lies four times lower than normal," New Scientist reported, "suggesting that if the ice (more than a mile thick below sea level at some points) were removed, the continental surface would rise." This is called post-glacial rebound. Fascinatingly, Antarctica's "present mountains would attain considerable heights and introduce new frictional opposition to prevailing winds, so new weather patterns would be created." In any case, every one of those maps above suggests about six hundred novels or short stories just waiting to be written; but the most exciting part of all of it is that we are already living in that world, of altered weather and island arcs, abraded coasts and rivers. It's what we're doing right now. Beneath the house I write this in are seams of lost continents. Outside the place you read this in are moving unmapped geographies yet to come. (Note: All maps in this post are by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University – perhaps, if enough people ask, we can get him to map North America as it will someday be).
Though I'm not convinced anyone in the Philadelphia region actually reads BLDGBLOG – and that includes myself – I'll be giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department this Thursday at 6pm. In Philadelphia.  The talk will be exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long, and is part of talk20. I'll be joining Winka Dubbeldam, Ferda Kolatan, Anuradha Mathur, Jenny Sabin, and many others – so come out, drink wine, look at some pictures of offshore utopias, Christopher Walken, tunnels under London, replicant landscapes, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan – and so on. And listen as I slur my words, make things up, hiccup uncontrollably – then collapse into the arms of a horrified crowd...
A few marshes in north-central Mexico are so chemically unique that some scientists think they're "little versions of the primordial sea, before the dawn of nucleated cells."  [Image: New Scientist]. "Fed by underground waters coursing through the mountains' limestone layers and caves, as well as gushing up from deep and ancient aquifers, the pools – or pozas as the locals call them – have strange chemistries. Phosphorus tends to be in short supply, whereas calcium, magnesium and sulphur are richly available... Primitive microbes flourish here." Some of these marshes are choked with "microbial mats. Under certain conditions, some microbes, such as photosynthetic cyanobacteria, sulphur-reducing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and other helpful waste-eaters, glue themselves together into slimy cooperatives that are often layered like a cake. The incorporation of silt and minerals creates a harder structure, a 'living rock' called a stromatolite."  [Image: An underwater field of stromatolites, from MIT's geobiology lab]. These ecosystems are so chemically abrasive and oddly unlifelike that scientists from Caltech's Virtual Planetary Laboratory hope they might even reveal what forms organisms could take on other planets. (For a bit more on this see Lunar urbanism 3 or Super Reef; and for some very vaguely – in fact really not – related photographs, see this interview with David Maisel).
"Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group." – Andrew Knoll, Life on a Young Planet And so we live, every one of us, the potential origin of new species.
 [Image: Lost rivers and bedrock beneath today's rivers and bedrock].
     [Images: The Taj Mahal, the Ariane 5 rocket, the Space Shuttle – all buildings built to be hurled into the sky at high speed?].The Taj Mahal looks like a cluster of secret rocketry structures; so what if we tested it out? Built engines in freshly excavated subcellars, cleared the area, trucked in fuel...? What other buildings are rockets waiting to happen? Could the Empire State Building be a secret space shuttle – deep down in the tunnels of Manhattan, spelunkers find an unbelievable enginery locked inside tombs of bedrock? Or, if we discovered a way to hurl all the high-rises and skyscrapers of the world into space, could we form our own rings of Saturn – loose buildings aggregated in orbits, linked by bridges, turning in circles above a planet we've left behind? What would Arthur C. Clarke or Hugh Ferris have to say about this? And would the Indian government mind if we started with the Taj Mahal?
In the summer of 2005, the San Diego-based company SeaCode announced that they would permanently anchor a cruise ship off the coast of Los Angeles, in international waters, filling it with an army of "offshore" computer programmers.
This odd new micronation would beam the results of its cheap labor back to mainland clients via microwave and T3 internet connections. It would have a steady labor base, sovereign terrain, potentially even immunity from taxes – and loads and loads of code.
As the journal Application Development Trends writes: "the ship will retain all of its cruise ship facilities and will feed and house workers in style. During off hours, programming teams can partake of the ship’s recreational facilities or head for the lights of L.A. on a water taxi, since each worker will be required to have a U.S. tourist visa." (But check out the comments at the end of that link for some Archigram-worthy speculation).
Work teams will be broken up into "pods," with "pod leaders," and they will work around the clock.
Interestingly, both sides of the political spectrum seem outraged by the idea; right-ish and left-ish observers have responded with outright hostility, even making sarcastic comments about where the ship's toilets will flush.
But I like it; if there's some loophole in international maritime law that allows you to start a free state off the coast of Los Angeles – then I want several. A whole island arc of decommissioned cruise ships, with BLDGBLOG offices on a super-boat somewhere, helicoptering architects out on weekends for coffee; feeding sharks; shooting skeet; awarding novelist-in-residence titles to Jeff VanderMeer, J.G. Ballard, China Miéville, Don DeLillo... We can host the world's first Miss Micronation Pageant, as well as conferences on the state of plate tectonics. Grow orange trees on a hydroponic barge to stay healthy. Panic when storms come in.
Meanwhile, a fully inhabited ghost-archipelago of Chinese "zombie ships" has been found off the coast of West Africa – but it's a lot less interesting than it sounds. This account, by Greenpeace, doesn't like the ships – and has nothing to say about their implications for offshore architectural design. Or whether Constant would be pleased.
Nor does the article offer any thoughts about the first truly great horror film of our globalized times: a weird industrial accident in China has somehow turned all the local workers into flesh-eating zombies; for whatever reason, these zombies are put onto an archipelago of rusting ships in the Indian Ocean; a band of pan-European scientists studying deep ocean-floor tomography sees the ships on the horizon... and the film goes on from there.
(SeaCode discovered via Scott Webel and his Museum of Ephemerata; Chinese zombie ships found via things magazine).
 [Image: Julius Popp's Bitfall]. Bitfall, pictured above, is a kind of liquid computer monitor. As Ruairi Glynn, of Interactive Architecture dot Org, describes it, Bitfall uses carefully-timed drops of falling water "to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again." The sheet of falling water, then, becomes a screen – a liquid cinema – a monitor on which to surf the web.  All of which would be amazing enough were it not for some unbelievable landscape design possibilities. You're in Rome, and you decide to visit the Trevi Fountain – but you're confused. Is that an image you see in the cascading water...? You look closer and realize a television show is being played using the water itself. The whole city, in fact, is full of fountains, and they're all playing films, news shows, stationary images of art. It begins raining later that evening, and you swear you see films in the falling water... Then fountains are installed in red light districts around the world, showing porn... The next summer huge gates are attached to the top of Niagara Falls, and every August a film fest begins: you sit down on the Canadian side of the border and watch Hitchcock, Truffaut, Roberto Succo, an almost-subliminal cinema roaring downward into mist with the water.  A computer-controlled showerhead is installed in your home bathroom, and you watch the news, or put on a film and... do whatever while you watch it. Headlines falling on your shoulders from above. Hotel lobbies with fake waterfalls are transformed into newsrooms, with financial information trickling down the corporate surface of the falls. From different angles you receive different information; from further away you see different films. The New York Stock Exchange replaces its news tickers with fountains: the Dow, the FTSE, the price of mined tungsten. Mineral futures. All cascading inside smooth surfaces of water.  [Image: Asymptote's re-design of the NYSE]. Soon trees can be genetically altered to form images in their bark: tree-screens. You accidentally stumble into a test-forest, after a car accident in rural Bavaria, and all the trees around you seem covered in pictures, and certain angles make them all add up into a 3D film... Filmstills from award-winning directors of the past are put into genetically modified flowers; you look closely and it's Hollywood Ninja, frame by frame, growing in your bestfriend's garden. When breezes come, short scenes go animated, looped. Hypnotic. The film garden. Then flowers replace DVDs, and we go from libraries to planting special trees. Landscapes everywhere bear encoded information.  A huge dome is built over New York City. As rain falls the water is filtered, bit by bit through the dome to form texts: images, signs and financial information. You pay the city and your logo is displayed, coming down in curtains on the city, liquid. The weather-advertising complex. The rain industry.  [Image: Buckminster Fuller, glass dome for Manhattan]. Endless information, printed three-dimensionally in space. (Via Interactive Architecture dot Org, via Information Aesthetics).
  [Images: All but perfect for album art, these are new photos of Jupiter's South and North poles, respectively; see also this ridiculously beautiful landscape scroll of Jupiter unrolled into a ribbon. Meanwhile, one wonders if you could actually be alone there, flying through hydrogen storms, breathing helium, reading Ovid, self-exiled... In any case, does Jupiter sound like this?].
The New York Observer thinks BLDGBLOG is "adorable," and that its author has taken to impersonating Brad Pitt on Archinect...  ...but neither is true. However, I will be playing Brad Pitt in an upcoming documentary about male virility. Watch for it.
 [Image: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, another cover of which pleads: Lord, have mercy on London...]. Is Trafalgar Square doomed to become an avian flu hotspot? New Scientist implies as much in a short piece published last week: "Pigeons could carry H5N1 bird flu into city centres," we read, "increasing the chances of humans being exposed to the virus." But does this tiny factoid mean anything at all – let alone that public squares all over the world will soon act as disease vectors for bird flu's apparently impending sweep through the human genome? If it does mean something, and if pigeons are a major risk for spreading influenza, will we first hear reports of human-human infection coming from hospitals in central London? Again, if so, will the pigeons of Trafalgar Square be to blame? And do infected pigeons mean that Venice's Piazza San Marco is also a European vector for the disease? Or am I just giving away the plot for BLDGBLOG's first feature film...?
 [Image: California Academy of Sciences]. While BLDGBLOG just explored the possibility that reefs might actually be huge musical instruments, it turns out that a group of Scotsmen have been testing that exact hypothesis: "Stephen Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues set up 24 artificial reefs, each with a speaker system, near Australia's Great Barrier Reef. On six consecutive nights they played recordings of natural reefs at half the sites. A reef that was noisy one night was silent the next and vice versa. Reefs with the audio cue attracted four times as many cardinal fish and nearly twice as many damselfish." This "audio cue" is elsewhere described as the "'frying bacon' sound of snapping shrimps," and it "can be picked up from 20 kilometres away." All of which is another way of saying that reefs already are musical instruments: vast landscape saxophones being played by shrimp underwater...  Having said that, what if you switched Simpson's recordings and played, say, the sound of Madison Avenue along one of the reefs – what new ecosystems might result? Conversely, what if you played the sounds of a reef through speakers down Madison Avenue? And could you imitate the sounds of a reef at a Hong Kong karaoke bar? Rather: what would happen in you did? What is the future of abstract karaoke? If you totally scramble the soundtracks of the world – what happens?
 [Image: 2012; see also their bit on Hollow Earth Cities]. "I declare that the earth is hollow," U.S. Army Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. wrote in the early 1800s, "and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking." Somewhere along the line, Himalayan space ships, Nazi explorers, remnant Stone Age tribes, undersea caves, north-flowing Siberian rivers, and Edmund Halley all get involved... setting up BLDGBLOG's upcoming pitch for Indiana Jones 5...
"Deep beneath our feet, rock is constantly on the move."  According to New Scientist, massive avalanches of molten rock inside the earth's mantle may affect the speed of the earth's rotation – briefly accelerating the planet. "Like an ice skater pulling in their arms," these internal landslides shift mass towards the earth's core, making the earth spin faster. Over the long term, the earth is actually slowing down – yet weird anomalies in the planet's geological record suggest that short bursts of acceleration come, as if from nowhere, and last roughly ten million years before fading. "For the trilobites," for instance, "530 million years ago, one year contained about 420 days and each day lasted about 21 hours. Now we get a mere 365 days every year and our days last for 24 hours." Interestingly, "as time goes by, days and nights will continue to stretch" – meaning that every single day, albeit probably by only a few nanoseconds, is literally longer than the day before. (PS: don't forget to set your clock forward tomorrow night). So, when a runaway chunk of the earth's mantle starts to slide, it "carries on going, sliding through the lower mantle like a stone dropped into a pond," meaning that "a massive blob of rock the size of the Moon has shifted towards the centre of the Earth."  What I'd like to know is: could you deliberately bomb the internal fissures of the earth – using a new hydrogen bomb, nicknamed The Jules Verne – starting huge mantleslides that accelerate the planet's rotation so fantastically... that the skyscrapers of New York go flying into space?
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