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I attended a panel discussion in New York City last night, sponsored by David Haskell's Forum for Urban Design. The attendees, as you'll see on the invitation, below, represented a number of hefty publications – meaning the combined critical and journalistic weight of the writers in the room was almost enough to redesign Manhattan...  Ultimately, the conversation was both stimulating and worth the trip – but I came away thinking two or three points still needed to be made. Although some of this did come up afterward, without controversy, whilst talking to David Haskell and the panelists, I do want to expand on and clarify some things. First, early on, one of the panelists stated: "It's not our job to say: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks..." But of course it is! That's exactly your role; that's exactly the built environment as it's now experienced by the majority of the American public. "Architecture," for most Americans, means Home Depot – not Mies van der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you'd have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan – or San Francisco, or Boston's Back Bay. You'd also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique – or celebrate – these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey – citing Le Corbusier – then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night's panelists. Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don't realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Waitrose, can be criticized – if people don't realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized – then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space. And no one says a thing.  To use a musical analogy: you can have a thousand and one interesting, inspired, intelligent, widely referring, enthusiastic, even opinion-changing conversations about music with almost anyone – including what that person listens to, why, what soundtracks they own, what "bip-hop" really means, whether or not "post-techno" exists, what they actually want to hear on the radio, should file-sharing be legalized, is Chris Cornell this generation's Sammy Hagar (answer: yes), etc. But to infer from that conversation – because nobody mentioned Stravinsky or Bach – that those people are philistines who don't care about music is absurd. In other words, maybe my cousin can't cite Deleuze and maybe he has no idea who Fumihiko Maki is, or even Frank Lloyd Wright, but does that mean he doesn't care about architecture? As it is, one critic writes for approval by another critic, who writes for another critic, who writes for some editor somewhere, or for the head of a department, and no one wants to step out of line. You want to talk about a videogame, or a Tim Burton film, or castles as described in the books of J.K. Rowling – but nope: it's all Zaha, all the time. Meanwhile, subscription rates are plummeting.  [Image: A single issue of The Architectural Review now costs US$22.99]. Further – though this may contradict what I say above – strong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about. In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly "parametric," then you shouldn't be surprised if anyone who's not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car – and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing. All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture – but you've missed a perfect chance to join in. Which brings me to two final points, and I'll try to be quick: 1) Architectural criticism means writing about architecture, not writing about buildings. Incredibly, in the midst of the talk last night, one of the panelists mentioned Archigram – almost wistfully – commenting that, despite a lack of built projects, Archigram still managed to dynamize and re-inspire the architectural scene of its era. This was done through ridiculous ideas, cheap graphics, a sense of humor, and enthusiasm. But, wait, what was –? Oh, that panelist must have forgotten, because he immediatetly went back to discussing buildings: not ideas, not enthusiasm, not architecture. Architecture is not limited to buildings! Temporary Air Force bases, oil derricks, secret prisons, multi-story car parks, J.G. Ballard novels, Robocop, installation art, China Miéville, Department of Energy waste entombment sites in the mountains of southwest Nevada, Roden Crater, abandoned subway stations, Manhattan valve chambers, helicopter refueling platforms on artificial islands in the South China Sea, emergency space shuttle landing strips, particle accelerators, lunar bases, Antarctic research stations, Cape Canaveral, day-care centers on the fringes of Poughkeepsie, King of Prussia shopping malls, chippies, Fat Burger stands, Ghostbusters, mega-slums, Taco Bell, Salt Lake City multiplexes, Osakan monorail hubs, weather-research masts on the banks of the Yukon, Hadrian's Wall, Die Hard, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Akira, Franz Kafka, Gormenghast, San Diego's exurban archipelago of bad rancho housing, Denver sprawl, James Bond films, even, yes, Home Depot – not every one of those is a building, but they are all related to architecture. Every item in that list should be considered fair game for truly exciting, dynamic, and intellectually adventurous forms of architectural criticism. (And, obviously, many people already are writing about these things – including some of the panelists from last night. I'm just making a point). 2) Finally: The Archigram of today is not studying with Bernard Tschumi and openly imitating The Manhattan Transcripts. The Archigram of today works for Electronic Arts, has no idea who Walter Gropius is, and offers more insights about the future of urban design, space, and the built environment to more people, in more age groups, in more countries, than any practicing architectural critic will ever do, writing about Toyo Ito. Videogames are the new architectural broadsides.  Being an architectural critic means writing about architecture – even writing about Le Corbusier and Toyo Ito, sure – but that means writing about architecture in its every manifestation: whether it's built or not, designed by an architect or not, featured in a videogame or not, found anywhere other than inside a novel or not, whether it's still intact or not – even whether it's on planet Earth. If a critic can get people to realize that the everyday architectural world of garages and malls and bad haunted house novels is worthy of architectural analysis – and that architecture is even exciting to discuss – then maybe the trade journals can get some of their subscribers back. At the very least, it's worth a try. Even if that means saying: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks.
 "HAL 9000, the chatty computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, has come a step closer to reality," New Scientist claims. "A team crewing NASA's Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated planetary environment in the Utah desert, has been experimenting this week with software that can talk to the crew about the status of their spacecraft's systems."  "Using wireless headsets," the article continues, "crew members ask the computer questions such as Is the generator providing power to the batteries? The computer then interrogates sensors embedded in the spacecraft systems, and provides the answer in spoken form. In this week's trials, the software dealt with simulations of a malfunctioning power system." Next week: the crew battles inadequate refrigeration of their much-needed beer: Computer, are you providing enough refrigeration for our beer?Soon NASA faces papal excommunication as their computer undergoes theological breakdown – it doesn't believe it was programmed at all... Raising the question: is Artificially Intelligent architecture a form of religious heresy? (Images courtesy of NASA. See also Mars Rover: A New Film by BLDGBLOG, Mars and its stunt double and the very, very old 'Instant City' on Mars).
 [Image: 1M3 Light, 1999, by Olafur Eliasson, described by Metropolis as "a cubic meter of fogged space." From the article: "Using light as others might use bricks and mortar, Eliasson turns luminosity into an architectural element. Often water is the facilitator. He partitions space with curtains made of drops of water frozen by strobe lights... or he converts fog into a building material, neatly carving a cubic meter of emptiness by slicing through a foggy room with spotlights." Photo by Jens Ziehe]. (Earlier: More Eliasson at Four-dimensional films).
"In any given instant," the Discovery Channel reminds us, "one or more rocky plates beneath Earth's surface are in motion, and now visitors to a California museum exhibit can hear virtually every big and small earthquake simultaneously in just a few seconds off real time. Scientists have captured earthquake noises before, but this is believed to be the first instantaneous, unified recording of multiple global tectonic events, and it sounds like the constant, dull roar of the world's biggest earthquake chorus."  The planet, droning like a bell in space. Of course, the musicalization of the earth's tectonic plates has come up on BLDGBLOG before, specifically in the context of 9/11 and the collapse of the Twin Towers. Among many other things, 9/11 was an architectural event which shook the bedrock of Manhattan; the resulting vibrations were turned into a piece of abstract music by composer Mark Bain (more info at the Guardian – and you can listen to an excerpt here). Meanwhile, if somebody set up a radio station – perhaps called Dolby Earth – permanently dedicated to realtime platecasts of the earth's droning motions... at the very least I'd be a dedicated listener. A glimpse of what could have been: Earth: The Peel Sessions. In any case, if I could also remind everyone here of an interview with David Ulin, in which he discusses the intellectual and philosophical perils of earthquake prediction – the topic of his excellent book, The Myth of Solid Ground. One of the predictors, for instance, discussed in Ulin's book, spends his time "monitoring a symphony of static coming from an elaborate array of radios tuned between stations at the low end of the dial." Dolby Earth, indeed. (Thanks to Alex P. for the Discovery Channel link! Related: Sound Dunes)
 [Image: From Archeology of the Future]. In response to an earlier post, Mark Brown from Archeology of the Future pointed out the Greenwich Emotion Map, a hand-held, GPS-based cartographic project centered around the soggy parks and traffic crossings of London's meridian peninsula: "Artist Christian Nold has been invited to collaborate with local residents from the Greenwich Peninsula to explore the area afresh and build an emotion map of the area that explores people's relationship with their local environment."  [Image: A "Bio Mapping device," from Greenwich Emotion Map]. "The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited." The map itself, colored like a graph of heat-imprints, thermal tags of emotion moving through southern London's space, is actually quite beautiful. More tangentially, Mark Brown's own description of his day out with the biomappers is worth a read, especially this geo-emotional tour through New Labour's failed Millennial geography, the tarnished corpse of the Millennium Dome stranded sadly in the background: "For all of the order imposed by the rigid, controlling architecture and traffic flow design," Mark writes, "the Peninsula is still home to the higgledy-piggledy overlapping of different periods and types of industry so beloved of location shoots. We even saw a film crew huddled in the middle of a mud coated concrete yard, dwarfed by huge boilers, all pipes and ladders like primitive space craft now lying on their sides and rusting in the rain. There are deserted houses. There are twisting pipes and strange smells behind chainlink fences. Wharfs jut into the grey river with machinery corroded to a halt. Great machineries sprout into the sky, some with chimneys burning off excess gas. There are yards full of scrap, huge piles of rubble. We see a decaying warehouse, one side collapsed, a rusting boat nuzzling it from the water. Despite of of the rhetoric, despite the notions of control and renewal, the Millennium Project failed."  [Image: From Mapchester]. Two other projects of note, pointed out by Régine of we make money not art: 1) Mapchester (more info here) and 2) OpenGeoData's London GPS animation, assembled from coordinates taken from bike couriers riding their routes through London. Have fun.
 [Image: Archaeological traces on the surface of the Isle of Wight]. Islands are ideal testing grounds for the weird, the puzzling, the crazed – even the miraculous. The Biblical Book of Revelation, for instance, psycho-cinematically revealed itself to John in a dark grotto on the Greek island of Patmos. But an island's spatial limitations also give it a kind of intellectual thrill: by limiting your territory for you, an island seems to promise total knowability. You could walk the whole thing, memorize every detail. This, in part, may have been at least one motivation for an upcoming event in southern England, hosted on the Isle of Wight. There, New Scientist explains, "satellite mapping enthusiasts from all over Europe" – and beyond – hope to produce "a completely free digital map of the whole island. These high-tech cartographers will drive, cycle and ramble all over the island, using their GPS receivers to record the co-ordinates of roads, natural landmarks and points of interest. They'll use this data to create a completely digital map which will be available online to anyone." An entire island, digitized. Check out their website if you'd like to get involved. Meanwhile, a much more analogue example of this impulse toward total cartography comes to us from Ireland's Aran Islands, off the coast of County Clare.  [Image: The Aran Islands]. There, a totally fascinating and almost impossibly ambitious example of modern cartography – a truly encyclopedic knowledge project – unfolded. "In the summer of 1972," the Guardian tells us, a man, named Tim Robinson, "came from London to Árainn, the largest of the islands, to live." The living wasn't easy: "Big Atlantic storms, brief days, and 'an unprecedented sequence of deaths, mainly by drowning or by falls and exposure on the crags,'" almost forced Robinson and his wife to return to the city. "But they stayed, and Robinson – a mathematician by training, an artist by vocation, and a draughtsman of skill – began to cast around for a way to respond creatively to the islands. So began one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out. Robinson conceived of a two-volume study of the islands – a local epic – which would be accompanied by a new map of the islands that he would survey and draw."  [Image: The Aran island of Dun Aonghasa; note, of course, that half the fort has crumbled into the sea]. Robinson mapped everything – the locations of buildings, what those buildings housed, who owned them, how often people visited, what their local history was, even what tectonic and mineral lineage the rocks themselves contained. "Long before psychogeography became a modishly over-used and under-comprehended term," we read, "Robinson was out on the dérive – talking to the islanders, walking the rimrock, surveying, dreaming, recording. In bad weather, of which there was plenty, he would hold his notebook and pencil inside a clear plastic bag, tied shut at his wrists, and proceed in this manner: a deranged dowser wandering the mists and the storm-spray." Robinson recorded "the deep entanglement of the human and the mineral" via "the fading mazes of the past." "In exploring this terrain," Robinson wrote in volume one, which I read several years ago, "it is best to let oneself be led by its inbuilt directionality." But pen and paper, along with superhuman energy, are not the only tools one needs in order to map every inch of an island. There is GPS, as we've seen – and there's also CCTV. Surveillance. Cartographic interests of a more Orwellian kind were tested on a small island off the coast of Maine a few years back. As Wired informed us in May 2004, "Ayers Island, the site of an abandoned paper and textile mill in Orono, Maine, will be spied upon by a comprehensive network of video cameras, motion detectors and sensors. Lurking behind all of those sensors will be an artificial intelligence system that will decide who can be trusted and who is deserving of greater scrutiny." This will apparently prove "that AI, combined with ubiquitous sensors, may be able to provide civil authorities with comprehensive, real-time intelligence about the whereabouts of individuals and cars, and the status of buildings and other structures within a particular geographical area." In other words, whether through surveillant videography, satellite mapping, deep local history, or even epic poetry, islands respond well to the cartographic impulses they themselves seem to inspire. Just look at The Odyssey. (Earlier: The Island of New Ephemera. Gunkanjima Island).
 gravestmor's got the goods on Renaissance, a new sci-fi film set in "Paris 2054," directed by Christian Volckman.  Marcus, at gravestmor, describes the film as " Sin City meets Blade Runner meets Metropolis meets Waking Life" (though hopefully not the latter) – and, from the looks of it, I'd add Alphaville.  But, either way, the film seems further proof that students of architectural design should stop pinning all their hopes solely on architecture, and consider guerilla careers as film, or even game, start-ups, using their graphic ideas and energy to take over Hollywood. Invest in some Power Macs, buy some editing software, talk to your musician friends, get a writer – hire BLDGBLOG – and suddenly that M.Arch degree will put you behind the Oscar stand. Drooling champagne and groping Salma Hayek.    But I digress. These are film stills taken from the movie's press section – the film's in French, by the way – and a bit more info can be found at Twitch and Variety. Then start outlining your own cinematic debut.    [Images: ©Onyx Films/Millimages/Luxanimation/Timefirm Ltd/France 2 Cinema]. (Via gravestmor).
 [Image: Angkor Wat, Cambodia, a city reclaimed by the roots of trees; photographed by Kenro Izu].I just finished reading a long and totally fascinating article by David Grann called " The Lost City of Z," from an old issue of The New Yorker. In it, Grann explores whether or not a city called "Z" might exist somewhere in the Brazilian rain forest – "a region nearly the size of the continental United States" – while tracking the life of a British explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who "disappeared in the forest, along with his son and another companion" in 1925. "Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last great amateur archeologists and cartographers," Grann writes, " men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose." Colonel Fawcett believed that, "in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries," lay Z, a ruined city lost to the jungles of time. "To bolster his case that the ruins of Z would be found in the region," Grann tells us, Fawcett "cited carvings that he had seen on rocks in the area, and documents that he had uncovered from Portuguese conquistadores in Brazilian archives. He quoted a Brazilan scholar, who declared, 'My studies have convinced me that... there may yet be found in our forests, as yet penetrated in few places, ruins of ancient cities.'" Because of Fawcett's disappearance, however, at least 100 other explorers have lost themselves in the Amazon, looking for his remains (or, more likely, looking for Z). There was, of course, one crucial problem: Fawcett, funded by the Royal Geographical Society, kept his expeditionary path completely secret, even releasing false latitudinal coordinates for fear that someone else might steal the final prize: discovering, mapping, and documenting Z. Fawcett was exploring at "the peak of the British Empire," we read, "a time when the English were constantly confronting and colonizing new, exotic civilizations; when imperial explorers such as David Livingstone were trying to map the so-called 'dark continent' of Africa; and when the Allan Quartermain novels by Fawcett's friend H. Rider Haggard, which chronicle the intrepid adventurer's discovery of ancient civilizations in Africa, were wildly popular." The last thing he needed, in other words, was another explorer hot on his trail. To make a (very) long story short, David Grann – the article's author – visits Colonel Fawcett's granddaughter in Cardiff, Wales, whereupon Grann discovers unpublished letters from Fawcett that reveal the expedition's true route through the jungle. Thus Grann sets off for Brazil. More and more information about Fawcett pops up. "One day, during a visit to a colonial archive in Rio de Janeiro," Grann reports, "Fawcett discovered a document, partly eaten by worms, that was titled 'Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city, without inhabitants, discovered in the year 1753.'" Within the document, Grann tells us, Fawcett learned about a Portuguese "soldier of fortune," who, along with his expeditionary team, "ascended a mountain path" to find "a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. The men climbed down, and discovered stone arches, a statue, wide roads, and a temple with hieroglyphics." Reading the account, Fawcett "became even more entranced with the idea of a lost civilization" – and, presumably, so did Grann. Now in Brazil, Grann – carefully tracking Fawcett's final self-enforestation – is taken by a guide to the ruins of an enormous ranch built deep in what used to be jungle; what he sees there shocks him: "The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear." Several pages ensue in which Grann hears contradictory tales of a kidnapped white man paraded through the territories of various tribes back in the 1930s; albino children; "very bad Indians"; and "a colossal man," named Afukaká, "his arms as thick as legs, his legs as big as a chest." But then my eyes started popping out of my head, because here Grann meets Michael Heckenberger, a "highly regarded professor at the University of Florida," who was doing field work in the upper Xingu basin.  [Image: NASA, satellite views of Brazil's Xingu National Park].Prof. Heckenberger "had battled everything from malaria to snakes to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off and forced him to boil his garments twice a day." He looked "a little like a surfer." Familiar with Fawcett's story, the archaeologist then turns to Grann and says: "I want to show you something." He grabs a machete and they walk together, more than a mile into the forest, "cutting away tendrils from trees, which shot upward, fighting for the glow of the sun." Then Heckenberger stops. He gestures at the ground: it's sloping. Why is it sloping? It used to be a moat. "What do you mean, a moat?" Grann asks. "A moat," Heckenberger answers. "A defensive ditch." It's nearly a mile in diameter and more than 900 years old. Heckenberger then shows Grann some excavation pits, where foundations of "palisade walls" are found, half-buried in black soil. Turns out the group of them are standing in "the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character than that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste." There were also the remains, Heckenberger explains, of "Roads. Causeways. Canals." So is it the city of Z? Or is Z still out there, waiting?
 [Image: Via Fun Mansion]. From Fun Mansion: "Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Balaklava was one of the most secret towns in Russia. 10km south east of Sevastopol on the Black Sea Coast, this small town was the home to a Nuclear Submarine Base."    [Images: All images via Fun Mansion]. "The base remained operational after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 1993 when the decommissioning process started and the warheads and low yield torpedos were removed. Then in 1996 the last Russian Submarine left the Base." Apparently, there are now guided tours.  [Image: Via Fun Mansion]. (Originally spotted at Defense Tech; this post simultaneously published on Bryan Finoki's Subtopia; see also this LiveJournal blog – though it's in Russian).
 [Image: NASA].
Qibla is the direction that a Muslim must face when praying – specifically, toward the Kaaba, in Mecca. In order to align oneself properly with that religious axis mundi, all kinds of complicated mathematical techniques had to be used or developed. From compasses to azimuths – to spherical trigonometry – determining what angle to take in relation to the horizon became as much a mathematical, or geographic, pursuit as it was religious.
So now, as Malaysia prepares to send three Muslim astronauts into space, the question of qibla has once again been revived: in what direction should an astronaut pray in order to face Mecca? As that last link reminds us, these astronauts "will also visit the International Space Station, which circles the earth 16 times in 24 hours, so another thorny question is how to pray five times a day as required by Islam."
I'm imagining a bewildering series of gyroscopes, mirrors, magnets and platforms – called the Prayer Chair – with arms covered in quantum clocks, ticking off "days" where there are none, keeping time in space devoid of terrestrial references. Motors will click and whir, aligning the chair constantly, and whole new branches of robotics – RoboQibla™ – gyroPrayer® – will take off. Science academies throughout the Muslim world will start producing new and strange direction sensors, devices of alignment that'd make John Dee proud and Athanasius Kircher whistle. New space stations designed by architecture students in Dubai will show us the future of intercelestial travel: self-unfolding, solar-powered spaceships, ceaselessly rotating in space – whilst maintaining perfect ship-to-Mecca alignment.
The Jesuits respond with floating cathedrals... flying buttresses in space.
(Original article spotted at Off Center).
 [Image: A false-color "enhanced thematic map" of the involuted deltaic coastline of Guinea-Bissau; check out the fractal self-looping madness of NASA's incredible 4.6MB version].
 Exactly one hundred years ago to the day a " large horizontal displacement" along the San Andreas Fault devastated the city of San Francisco. In the century since then, hurricanes have battered Miami, levees have failed New Orleans, airplanes have become Weapons of Mass Destruction, and " prodigious snowfall combined with drenching spring rains" has conspired to wreak havoc on Grand Forks, North Dakota. American urban catastrophe, in other words, is everywhere. This post-disaster urban world – with no police, no public utilities, no clean drinking water, and, potentially, no hope – is something you can prepare for, however, by shopping.  In February 2003, Homeland Security’s then-chief Tom Ridge made life far simpler for Americans everywhere by unveiling a national catastrophe shopping list – at the top of which was duct tape. " Stash away the duct tape!" said Ridge, and millions did just that. It didn't matter that duct tape was widely alleged to be ineffective in the face of biological and chemical attack (or that Ridge later withdrew his own advice, complaining that there had been "some political belittling of duct tape"); the silver rolls flew right off the shelves, salving (or stoking?) the anxieties of a traumatized nation. The rest of Ridge's shopping list – Recommended Items to Include in a Basic Emergency Supply Kit – compares favorably with many other shopping lists or pre-packaged kits I came across in my urban catastrophe shopping reconnaissance. I was particularly impressed by the inclusion of eating utensils (a common omission), along with a wrench or pair of pliers to turn off any dangerous utilities.  The rest of the basics are predictable and quite consistent from list to list: water, whistle, can opener, first aid kit, copies of important documents, sleeping bags or warm blankets, waterproof matches, etc. The only thing missing is a Paul Oakenfold CD. Indeed, the core contents of catastrophe survival kits have barely changed since World War I, and, as such, allow little room for personal expression. However, all of the lists do recommend storing at least 72 hours' worth of food – and food customization is a field of endless opportunity. There are several things to bear in mind whilst considering what food you should buy to prepare for urban armageddon. Food should be relatively non-perishable (and you should remember to replace it before it expires), require little or no cooking, and be low-sodium so as not to provoke chronic thirst. Canned foods, powdered and instant foods, jerky and peanut butter are standards on the "do-it-yourself" list, with instant soup cups described as a " real boon."  Vegans and Atkins-aficionados, as usual, will find their choices more limited. In a CarbSmart article entitled " A New Day and New Priorities: Being Prepared For The Unforeseen," Di Bauer recommends that low-carbers stock up on canned clams (her suggestion: "bread" them with unflavored protein powder), Ragu Double Cheddar Sauce, diet soda, and an intriguing product called not/Starch. ("If the world ends, I am going to be buried with my not/Starch"). Vegans, of course, seem to be understandably concerned with post-catastrophe protein sources – but, from what I've read, they also seem to have a good handle on the cunning you'll need to survive urban collapse, suggesting "treats for bargaining," as well as "a small bottle of spirits," because "sometimes it's just what you – or others – need." (It can also be used "as an antiseptic"). In the run-up to Y2K, Carol Reid authored the delightfully-titled, Catastrophic Cooking: Eating Right When All Is Wrong, in which she shares the secret of her "Cardboard Box Oven," which was "designed by an Aerospace Engineer" and "will bake everything from bread to pizza at temperatures up to 475 degrees." The book is now out-of-print. Thinking outside the box – or the can – one Bay Area architecture and design student recommends growing your own emergency garden: she’s "planting a high-density orchard this winter, with varieties timed to ripen sequentially all year rather than all at once in July." Let’s hope a rather frightening man called The Everlasting Phelps doesn’t figure out where she lives, because his "plan is a little more simple. I have guns, ammo, and armor, and I plan to loot." At specialized sites such as TheEpicenter.com or Earth Shakes ("Are you prepared? Wait no longer!"), online shoppers are offered a choice between 3600-calorie, "pleasant tasting, shortbread cookie-like" foodbars, "6 Can Food Modules," "10 Year Super Vitamins," bags of " Survival Candy," and Heater Meals.  Duct tape, food, and water are the first things the urban catastrophe shopper might purchase – but if the New Orleans Superdome taught us anything, it is the paramount importance of sanitation provision. This is an area best left to the professionals, and Earth Shakes seems to have covered all the bases: it offers a PETT, WAG BAGS, PUP, and TOTE ensemble. These are, respectively: a Portable Environmental Toilet, "weighing only 7lbs, yet the same height as a standard toilet"; Waste Alleviation and Gelling bags containing "Pooh Powder" (a unique product that "gels liquids, catalyzes decay, and removes odor"); Portable Utility Pop-up tent (to ensure privacy); and a TOTE backpack with which to carry everything around.  Assuming you can find and lift a manhole cover in the midst of catastrophe, the Japanese have even developed a WAG BAG-free option. You are instructed to install it immediately above a (hopefully still intact) municipal sewer system – then relax... I’d also like to draw your attention to the " Shower in a Bag" – ("No rinsing needed. Microwaveable too!") – and, for the shy or hijab-wearing, a " Deluxe Privacy & Shower Room." Truly, all the comforts of home. Meanwhile, if money's no object, there's the " disaster kit of the future." With this, CNET staff writer Stefanie Olsen introduces us to Seldon Laboratories' "nano mesh," which can be fabricated into a "waterstick," allowing fortunate survivors to "suck ditch water like they would using a straw in a glass of water." Another membrane technology works by fluid osmosis, with one side flavored "so it can turn dirty puddle water into Gatorade." Other tech-savvy toys include a blanket that heats to 104 degrees for eight hours, a flexible light-sheet made of semi-conductors which glows for up to eleven years, a $300 “emergency portable oxygen cylinder with enough air to last more than an hour,” and a full-body viral barrier jumpsuit, which protects against the terrifyingly re-named "Asian blood flu." There has even been promising progress in the world of rescue robotics. Howie Choset at Carnegie Mellon University has developed snake-bots, designed to "slither through collapsed buildings in search of victims trapped after natural disasters or other emergencies." In an industry breakthrough, "Breadstick" and "Pepperoni" – two prototype robots "about the size of a human arm or smaller" – can climb up and around household pipes. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Kyushu-based TMSUK has developed Enryu (or "rescue dragon"), which is "mounted on a tread similar to a military tank," and uses "two hydraulically operated arms with a reach of 5 meters" to lift as much as 500 kilograms. Finally, while down-to-earth sites such as the Red Cross simply recommend storing your catastrophe kit in a tough plastic box or backpack, manufacturers in the niche market of urban catastrophe preparation know that, while the kit’s packaging may not save your life, it could well influence your purchasing decisions. PingMag’s recent survey of Japanese earthquake preparation products directs us to a pink " girl’s emergency kit" –  – as well as this rather sharp offering from Muji. In the U.S., more time seems spent on the names of these kits than on their containers, so you're offered a double entendre-laden choice between the Triple Delight, the Family Royale, and the One Person Starter Disaster Fanny Pack. But I leave you with two parting thoughts: first, the world’s "ONLY Armageddon Survival-Kit" is available here. It does not appear to contain duct tape – but it does "guarantee immortality." Second, cash spent on urban catastrophe preparation gear is never wasted: even if you're lucky enough not to have to use it, today’s kit is tomorrow’s collectible. Phil Boguch’s World War II survival kit, containing both silk stockings and chocolates, is now on display at the Mercer Island Museum of Flight; and a World War I M-592 Backpad-Style Survival Kit is valued at $1000 at Stan Wolcott’s Lucky Forward Militaria. What could you possibly be waiting for?
 About six months ago I picked up a copy of David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground, on earthquakes and earthquake prediction. I started reading it in a hotel room – then finished it aboard an airplane, my own solid points of reference put temporarily on hold. The book really stuck with me, and I soon posted about it on BLDGBLOG. Then, a few weeks ago, I got in touch with David and we set up a telephone interview, during which time we talked about everything from the religious implications of earthquakes to the JFK assassination, from the particularly Californian subculture of earthquake predictors to the psychological role played by seismic instability in "the subterranean mythos of people's lives," how they find "identity in the turbulence of the land." (Quoting from Ulin's book). David was friendly, open, and generous with explanations. Throughout the conversation he spoke in great looping sentences, full of parantheses and clarifications; transcribing the tape took on the air of a topological exercise, finding where the punctuation might best fit. That interview is now online at Archinect, published for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. So check it out.
 LOT-EK has just proposed reusing more than two hundred discarded fuselages from Boeing 727 and 737 airplanes as the major structural components for a new library in Guadalajara.  The airplane shells would be "stacked in a north-south slant in relation to sun exposure for energy efficiency."  I think this is amazing! "The fuselage is the only part of a decommissioned airplane that cannot be effectively recycled," we read. "The cost of its demolition exceeds the profit of aluminum resale. A huge amount of fuselages lay in the deserts of the western states. Boeing 727 and 737 are historically the most sold commercial planes and therefore the most common in these graveyards. They are sold at very low prices completely stripped and in great structural conditions."   "The fuselage becomes the basic module of this building. It is insulated and furnished according to the program. The internal subdivision generated by the existing floor joists is used to respond to functional needs: the upper section is used for inhabitation while the lower one houses independent and interconnected mechanical systems: HVAC, electrical, cabling, and a conveyor belts network for the mechanical distribution of the books."  Read more at noticias arquitectura. (Via Archinect).
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[Image: Steven Holl's 
