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 From today's San Francisco Chronicle: "'These are some of the largest sand waves in the world,' said Patrick Barnard, a coastal geologist with the Santa Cruz office of the U.S. Geological Survey. 'They're certainly in the upper 10 percent.'" Unfortunately – or perhaps more interestingly – they're underwater, lining the bottom of San Francisco Bay like tectonic corrugation: "The sand waves range up to 700 feet long and reach heights of more than 30 feet, Barnard said. It is a dynamic system, he said, with the configuration of the individual dunes changing significantly with each tidal cycle. But overall and over time, the net change to the entire field is slight." In that regard, and if you were pretentious, you could say that the landscape inhabits a kind of fractal temporality...  As it is, "scientific interest in sand waves has been growing around the world because sonar technology has improved to the point that high resolution, three-dimensional maps can now be made of the ocean's floor" – which was actually explored in an earlier post on BLDGBLOG: The Geoacoustic Sea.  There we read the following: "It'd be interesting, meanwhile, if you could take geoacoustic data and release it as an MP3: you could then listen to the suboceanic landscape's raw sonic topography, compressed aquatic echoes, complete with deepsea ridges and audio-thermal vents. Non-visual mapping of unreachable landscapes. An MP3 of the surface of Mars. The rings of Saturn." And now we've read it again – because, for the record, I still think it'd be interesting. After all, if you can't actually visit the landscape, you could simply download it as an MP3... Audio geotechnics. Or convective audio cartographies, 3D podcasts of unexplored worlds. (Thanks to Bryan for the tip!)
 "You may not know his name," the New York Times wrote four years ago, "but you have probably enjoyed the public spaces he has created." He is Ken Smith, " the Elvis Costello of landscape architecture." "Perhaps," the Times continues, "you sat on an Art Deco bench and admired the Islamic geometric patterns of the paving stones at Malcolm X Plaza in Harlem or walked through the Glowing Topiary Garden he and Jim Conti, a lighting designer, installed three years ago at Liberty Plaza for the winter solstice. If you've been to Toronto, you may have walked through his idiosyncratic Village of Yorkville Park, with its 700-pound rock and miniforests and the rain curtain that freezes into icicles in winter." Smith, we read, has a "Seussian mind," which means that he freely combines glass elevators with bamboo gardens – moving, earthless landscapes; horticultural Cubism – and he adds "glacial hummocks, grasslands, [and] honey locusts," even while opening up space for ice skating. And so on. But what interests me here are Smith's so-called Dumpster Gardens, where you take a dumpster – or skip, if you're British – and grow a garden in it. Portable landscapes. In 2003, Smith installed three such Dumpster Gardens at Ohio State University –     – as these photographs attest. "Each of the three Dumpsters houses different plant life," Ohio State University's student newspaper tells us. "One contains a fragment of lawn and a second has juniper shrubbery and river birch. The third stands in front of Ohio State President Karen A. Holbrook's office with a bed of scarlet (celosia) and gray (artemisia) flowers. (...) Each of the Dumpsters is three feet deep and 20 feet long. The bottom is covered with gravel to allow for drainage and the rest is filled with planting soil." But Smith's dumpsters are not doomed to spend the rest of their days in the empty, mausolean fate of decorating university campuses; indeed, returning to the New York Times: "Dumpsters would also be a great way to enliven traffic medians, Mr. Smith said. 'You could grow corn, or have a portable meadow of Queen Anne's lace and juniper,' he suggested." Of course, you could also link them all together into a walled labyrinth, a postmodern hedge maze that twists and meanders through the city; you could grow hybrid flowers and Aspen trees, poisonous fungi and ergotic growths, in others, a kind of dumpsterized botanical taxonomy; you could tow gardens all over the country, even, driving every mile of the US highway system (and terrestrially out-performing Robert Smithson in the process); you could ship the things to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where they'd be permanently anchored, forming tax havens, utopian atolls, a new Earth; or, better yet, you could skip the dumpsters outright and use enormous wicker baskets: plant amazing and weird asymmetrical gardens in each, then attach them to hot-air balloons – bulletproof, Artificially Intelligent hot-air balloons. Set them loose in the sky. Aerobiology.  Gardens drift slowly above your head on trade winds, trailing creeper vines; a jellyfish, made of kudzu, flying through the stratosphere. New weed species auto-hybridize, evolving super-seeds, and they re-invade the earth from above. Literal new levels of biological warfare. Hugo Award-winning novels are written, documenting the vegetative horrors. One of the balloons then crashes in the forests of Papua New Guinea and, instead of a cargo cult, you find a cult of landscapes-that-fall-out-of-the-sky. Gardens in a space capsule. They re-enter Earth's atmosphere and crash outside London 5000 years from now. Ken Smith is there to greet it – turns out it was his idea in the first place... In any case, Smith also has a book. More info on some of his other projects here and here and here.
Two years ago, Young's brewery began producing bottles of Kew Brew, a beer made from rare hops grown in London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. And preserving endangered landscapes by turning them into alcoholic beverages sounds like a good idea to me...  "Sales [of the beer] will help Kew’s conservation work as a donation per bottle is given to the Gardens which runs the international Millennium Seed Bank Project." Not everyone likes the taste, of course, but the beer is, at the very least, an amazing idea; from the perspective of landscape design and preservationist horticulture, it's even brilliant. Avant-gardeners will soon forget all about topiary mazes – and install huge vats of beer instead. Liquid gardens you internalize. Indeed, one wonders what other plants could be rescued from the brink of extinction simply for the purpose of becoming beer: extinct ferns, perhaps, cloned from scraps of DNA, are fermented in bottles of Jurassic Park Pale Ale... Rare African orchids, saved from planetary disappearance, aromatically flavor BLDGBLOG's new Lost Eden Stout. Hybridized roses suddenly explode in genetic vitality due to the appearance of Pruned's Meta-Botanical Bitter. Next up: architectural historians join in. Condemned Futurist masterpieces are ground up and served as salt at French dinner parties. You may not save the building – but you can season your shrimp with it... Stuff sausages with Philip Johnson. The Building Burger. Ionic Pie. (With thanks to Nicky!)
 "My Psychoacoustic Maps of Milton Keynes explore ways of translating visual compositions into sound environments," Timon Botez of the London-based design firm CO-Designers writes. Botez is describing an event and exhibition he organized as part of last month's Architecture Week 2006, hosted in London.  "I have composed a series of maps based on colours I like," he continues. "The maps are visual environments, snapshots of a time of day, a mood or an experience in Milton Keynes. I have built a software that analyses the images and produces sound based on the colours. This forms the basis for the audio compositions that accompany the maps. The psychoacoustic maps are not functional, but they use the geometrical forms of the original city map as a basis for artistic expression."  Some of the audio tracks are quite mesmerizing; but if you don't like drumless electronic space or digitally glitched crackling background drones, then Botez's shudder-filled sci-fi audio-maps of Milton Keynes are probably not for you. But I particularly like the track called FridayEvening (or FridayEvenening, if its file name isn't a typo): here's the MP3. There's also Commute1 ( MP3) and Sunday2 ( MP3) – as well as five others, all available here. At the very least, you can irritate dogs with them... To some extent, though, Botez's project reminds me of two other urban-acoustic works. One is a piece called Surface Noise, by Scanner, which used one of London's old double-decker buses as an acoustic focus. "Making a route determined by overlaying the sheet music from London Bridge Is Falling Down onto a map of London," Scanner writes, "I recorded the sounds and images at points where the notes fell on the cityscape. These co-ordinates provided the score for the piece and by using software that translated images into sound and original source recordings, I was able to mix the work live on each journey through a speaker system we installed throughout the bus, as it followed the original walk shuttling between Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral." The MP3s are downloadable from Scanner's site (scroll down), but certainly nothing to rush out for. The other project I'm thinking of is an old CD-R called .murmer, released by Patrick McGinley. As McGinley himself explains, studiously avoiding upper-case letters, because only Fascists capitalize: "the source recordings for .murmer were all taken during my first six months as a resident of the city of london. hence they document my exploration and discovery of a new home, as well as of a new medium. i purchased my first recorder and microphone upon arrival here, and began exploring their possibilities alongside exploring the city. however, these sounds are not a portrait of a location; i made no attempt to map a geography. they are more personal. many originate from within my private space (the refrigerator and grill provided in a bedsit; the wind through an apartment window) and all are tied strongly to my personal movements (the air vent on my local bus, the heater in my place of work)." And so on. Accordingly, McGinley's track ".errum" was made using the following urban sources: "air vent on a 73 bus, malfunctioning gas heater, feedback, escalator at pimlico tube station." Meanwhile, McGinley's photo diary –  – of which the above are several examples, apparently documents some of the more landscape-architectural references in his work; and his radio show – featuring "contextual and decontextualized sound activity" – can also be downloaded or streamed. Finally, here are links to McGinley's own music; it's sparse stuff, but not bad if you simply want acoustic company. The track " .meurm" (MP3), for instance, was built entirely from the mechano-solipsistic moan of McGinley's refrigerator and gas grill (as mentioned above). Soundtracks for architecture, indeed. (Earlier: Urban sound walks and How to podcast a landscape).
  [Images: "In & Out" and "In the City" by Fabrice Fouillet; images originally purchased as postcards last week in Paris – though easily found online. There is also his " RDV." (Very vaguely related: Xing Danwen's Urban Fiction, via WMMNA)].
 [Image: Graphing storms. This is the "3-D structure of a storm’s water vapor content," as it approaches southern California. Also available in a huge 1.2MB version. Courtesy of – where else? – NASA's Earth Observatory].
 A new block of flats on the edge of Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels and Julien De Smedt of PLOT, was toured, analyzed, and photographically documented in last month's issue of Metropolis. The article is by Tom Vanderbilt, a writer whose career I find well worth following. (Here's his book). The article will tell you a lot more about the project than this brief and hurried post will – but, basically, the building is like a huge game of architectural Tetris, with a bewildering variety of interlinked floorplans. Specifically, there are "76 floor plans in 221 units," Vanderbilt writes, "with none repeated more than a dozen times and well over a dozen of them unique." Further, he says, "flipping through the sales booklet, which has pages of unit plans, is like reading the assembly blueprints for some massive urban machine with interlocking component parts." So what does it look like? First, here are some 3D shape-diagrams for the "V block" of the building; they almost look like proteins – enzymes of European domesticity.   Below is the "M block."   As Vanderbilt explains, the "V" and the "M" building shapes only entered into the design process after the architects "experimented with any number of permutations, the totality of which – collected on a display board – looks like some strange alphabet. They eventually settled on fashioning the south-facing block into a V and the north-facing block into an M. 'By bending the shapes,' Ingels says, 'you open up the maximum toward the two canals, which ensures that the apartments, instead of just looking at one another, all have orientation toward the landscape.' It also ensures that both evening and morning sun can enter the courtyard. The move shatters what would be a dense rectilinearity into a kind of crystalline parallax-view refraction of light and circulation." The whole complex was also finished with very tastefully bold, solid neo-Modernist colors. These eye-popping central corridors will, at the very least, wake you up every morning as you stumble out the door for work.    Finally, a note to property developers: "all 221 units sold out in three weeks, 80 percent on the first day." Good design pays. Read more in Metropolis.
 [Image: NASA's Earth Observatory points us to this incredible series of images, showing the southward migration of agricultural fires across Africa over the course of 2005: "Season after season," they explain, "year after year, people set fire to African landscapes to create and maintain farmland and grazing areas. People use fire to keep less desirable plants from invading crop or rangeland, to drive grazing animals away from areas more desirable for farming, to remove crop stubble and return nutrients to the soil, and to convert natural ecosystems to agricultural land. The burning area shifts from north to south over the course of the year, in step with the coming and going of Africa’s rainy and dry seasons." Of course, if you want to know – or see – more, this page has an eye-popping quantity of global fire maps, spanning no less than six years and offered in three levels of resolution. While you're at it, then, check out the somewhat less exciting MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program or the so-called Web Fire Mapper. Pyro-cartographers, rejoice].
 "Bacteria can be persuaded to produce wire-like appendages that conduct electricity," New Scientist reports. These wires are shown in the image, above: a bio-geometrical tangle. "A deficit of metal atoms in the close vicinity of the bacteria can cause a bottleneck," we read, "so the proliferation of nanowires allows the bacteria to consume more fuel." In other words, the bacteria can use these metal atoms as structural parts of their own "bodies," as they interact with and metabolize the immediate environment – in which case, does this constitute a kind of living metal? That simultaneously doubles as an electrical appliance? "Now a study by Yuri Gorby of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington State, US and colleagues reveals that several other kinds of bacteria produce similar nanowires." And in ten years' time, your own dear son will start sprouting extension cords... You can plug Hoovers into him. Meanwhile, Gorby studies something called biogeochemistry. So will the electrical network installed in the walls of your house become a living thing someday, an organism of light and electricity, made of wires, prone to growing so you have to prune it back on Saturdays, a new chore – electro-topiary? Or you'll grow whole gardens of the electrically self-modified, vines and ivy coiling through the undergrowth, lit up like Christmas lights, shining. Wire gardens.
 A Belgium events-planning firm, optimistically called Fun Group, has designed a restaurant – or board meeting, or conference room, or work-desk – in the sky. It's a space, it's a thrill-ride, it's a spectacle – it's 7,900 euros for 8 hours. (That link is a PDF). So, first, you're strapped into your seat, then hauled into the sky by a crane –  – where you're dangled, securely, over Vespas and the glass facades of European modernism.   But lest you forget your Marxist theories of industry and labor, it all boils down to this guy –  – who can pretty much hold you hostage up there while you snack on crudites and drink endless glasses of Rioja, unaware that the tide has subtly turned...   Meanwhile, all images above are actually screen-grabs from this short film, produced by Fun Group; watch for the stickers that advertise Fun Group's apparent parent company, or perhaps a mere co-sponsor, Benji Fun. Coming soon? A building with no structure at all, the whole thing consists of unconnected rooms moving through the sky in unpredictable whorls, swinging crane to crane, everyday, every morning, a constellation of event-spaces casting shadows on the dull corporate plaza next door. The CEO as adventure tourist. Whole motorways lifted by crane into the sky, rerouting the M3 to Paris. Or a bridge is temporarily delinked from the roads that lead to it – and turned into a flying restaurant... Buildings that incorporate helicopters. The airplane as architectural extension into the stratosphere. More gondolas. Etc. (Via spurgeonblog and Springwise).
 [Image: Tambeni Mosque; Sebastian Schutyser, 2001].
Belgian photograper Sebastian Schutyser spent nearly four years photographing the mud mosques of Mali. A collection of 200 such black & white photographs is now online at ArchNet.
The project "began in 1998," Schutyser explains: "For several months I traveled from village to village by bicycle and 'pirogue', navigating with IGN 1:200.000 maps. The inaccessibility of the area made me realize why this hadn't been done before."
  [Images: (top) Noga Mosque, (bottom) Tenenkou Mosque; Sebastian Schutyser, 2001].
Within a few years, however, and over a period lasting roughly till the Spring of 2002, Schutyser managed "to travel faster, and reach the most remote parts of the Inner Delta. To increase the documentary value of the collection, I worked with 35mm color slides, and photographed every mosque from different angles. Whenever I encountered a particularly pretty mosque, I also photographed it on 4-5 inch black & white negative, to add to the 'vintage' collection."
Those color photos—all 2,070 of them—can be seen in these five batches of approximately 400 images each: 1-400, 401-820, 821-1250, 1251-1675, and 1676-2070.
  [Images: (top) Sébi Mosque, (bottom) Tilembeya Mosque; Sebastian Schutyser, 1998].
"With 515 mosques photographed," Schutyser writes, "this collection shows a representative image of the adobe mosques of the Niger Inner Delta. Advancing modernity, and a lack of appreciation for this 'archaic' approach to building, are serious threats to the continuity of this living architecture."
I might also add that each building is a kind of ritually re-repaired ventilation machine capable of generating its own microclimate: "During the day," ArchNet explains, "the walls absorb the heat of the day that is released throughout the night, helping the interior of the mosque remain cool all day long. Some structures, for example, Djenné’s Great Mosque, also have roof vents with ceramic caps. These caps, made by the town's women, can be removed at night to ventilate the interior spaces. Masons have integrated palm wood scaffolding into the building's construction, not as beams, but as permanent scaffolding for the workers who apply plaster annually during the spring festival to restore the mosque. The palm beams also minimize the stress that comes from the extreme temperature and humidity changes typical of the climate."
Finally, each tower is "often topped with a spire capped by an ostrich egg, symbolizing fertility and purity."
Schutyser's images have been collected in a beautiful book, co-written with Dorothee Gruner and Jean Dethier, called Banco: Adobe Mosques of the Inner Niger Delta.
 [Image: Sinam Mosque; Sebastian Schutyser, 2002].
(All images in this post are ©Sebastian Schutyser).
 [Image: Apparently, "space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces, such as roads and parking lots, which are impervious to water, can indicate where large amounts of storm water runs off." In other words, these new cartographic tools can be used to predict where urban flash floods might flow – hydrology at a distance. The map you're looking at, above, shows the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area (in false-color). Here's a massive 4.2MB version. Courtesy NASA/Earth Observatory].
A lake has disappeared: "Four sinkholes beneath a 285-acre lake in central Florida, and one in a nearby ridge, caused the lake to drain completely earlier this month, flooding two nearby homes and killing wildlife. An engineering firm in Lakeland, where Scott Lake is located, is repairing the damage."
 [Image: Scott Lake, minus Scott Lake. (Via)].
In the process, engineers have concluded that "a permanent plug must be installed in the throat of the sinkhole to stop the water drain. The lake shoreline, parts of which have sunk into the sinkhole, must also be restored. The firm must also determine how to refill the lake." Good luck!
This, of course, reminds me of Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. There, an oil-drilling crew accidentally punctured the upper dome of a salt mine located directly beneath the lake in which the crew had been stationed: Texaco, who had ordered the oil probe, was aware of the salt mine's presence and had planned accordingly; but somewhere a miscalculation had been made, which placed the drill site directly above one of the salt mine's 80-foot-high, 50-foot-wide upper shafts. As the freshwater poured in through the original 14-inch-wide hole, it quickly dissolved the salt away, making the hole grow bigger by the second. The water pouring into the mine also dissolved the huge salt pillars which supported the ceilings, and the shafts began to collapse... Meanwhile, up on the surface, the tremendous sucking power of the whirlpool was causing violent destruction. It swallowed another nearby drilling platform whole, as well as a barge loading dock, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, trucks, trees, structures, and a parking lot. The sucking force was so strong that it reversed the flow of a 12-mile-long canal which led out to the Gulf of Mexico, and dragged 11 barges from that canal into the swirling vortex, where they disappeared into the flooded mines below. Perhaps now the mines will become a scuba-diving park...
I'll be out of range for a while, only back and posting after the 9th or 10th of July. BLDGBLOG, in other words, is off to Paris... Till then, here's an updated Table of Contents of the site; if you're either new to BLDGBLOG or have simply forgotten this site's previous half-lives: now's your chance to click around. So I'll be back. And the Parisian visit is relatively tightly scheduled (it's work-based), but if you have any tips, let me know!  Wherever you go, bring your own subway entrance! Should we use cloned meat to pave interstate highways? Or build whole cathedrals out of organ transplants? The hidden valve chambers and underground hydro-works of New York City, photographed by Stanley Greenberg! More Manhattan tunnels, blasted straight through schisty bedrock! Slum warfare, William Gibson, Ridley Scott, geopolitical "holes" and ecological footprints – it's an interview with Mike Davis! And here's part two! A flying micronation made entirely of solar-powered helicopters! Hurling Taj Mahals into the sky! The lost city of Z! Albinos, lost maps, dead Brits and miles and miles of unexplored jungle! Where will Niagara Falls be in a million years? And will London be more than a mile beneath the surface of the earth, buried in muck? Living amidst highway flyovers – or, in this case, directly on them! Why is today's architectural criticism so boring? A group of 38 Ukrainian Jews escaped the Holocaust by living inside a cave system for several years!  Huge cubes of carbonic glass have taken over the world's landscape! Architectural conjecture meets Parisian sci-fi noir! Houses that aren't houses at all – they're disguised electrical substations! Supercomputers, rivaling God, housed in deconsecrated chapels! Offshoring labor, literally – using a permanently anchored tax haven off the coast of Los Angeles! Or this ship, moored for so long it becomes architecture! A Shopper's Guide to Urban Catastrophe! And we didn't forget you, vegans! Bored? Why not read this travel guide to an island that doesn't exist? A Mexican library made from reused airplane hulls! The gleaming, inhuman garages of Branislav Kropilak! Flying hotel rooms! In silver shiny blimps! Robo-Qibla™ meets the Gyro-Mosque® – in deep space!  Can we melt down London and use it as ink to print new cities? Blueprints for rebuilding America's National Parks – arch by bolt by nail! Tour the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model! The icebergs of war! The planet, re-mapped according to airplane passengers and tractor imports! Deliberately manufacturing storms in your garden! The abandoned Ballardian world of WWII bunker archaeology! Mind-blowing tectonic maps of ancient North America as the continent slowly takes its present form! Tatlin's Tower!A musical machine made entirely from windows! It's " a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence"!  London, mapped by the emotions of its inhabitants! Cinematic urbanism! Are the skyscrapers of Shanghai generating dangerous weather? Spend the night in an eclipse camp! Unbelievable photographs of the perfect vortex! Labyrinthine plaster casts of ants' nests! Films of those ants leaving phero-chemical trails! A huge, inflatable sphere that turns earthquakes into music! More tectonic surround-sound! What strange and secret cities exist beneath Tokyo? Origami! A fossil reef stretches from Portugal to Moscow – some say further – but what if the whole thing was eroded by weather over millions of years... to become a huge wind instrument embedded in the rocks of Europe?  Dismantling Gothic cathedrals arch by arch, on the beaches of equatorial archipelagos! The world's largest diamond mine! Rollerskating alone at night through subterranean knots! A seed vault to avert planetary apocalypse! Listening to the arched foundations of London instrument! A man exactly reproduces his old apartment using colorful nylon sheets! Weird geometries in the Kansas farmscape! Slow landscapes of silt and the J.G. Ballard who loves them! The lost gods of Europe hurl spheres at each other in space! Valves, drains, and tunnels in the self-connected topology of underground London! Entire cities snowing diamonds from Baroque domes!  Is that architecture or just a soundtrack hovering in space? Helicopter photographs in the sububs of self-similarity! The 7 New Wonders of the World! Southeast London transformed into a maze of rooftop gardens! A temporary public park – complete with bench and parking meter! Lunar electricity! Possibly the longest building on Earth – or at least in Illinois! BLDGBLOG Presents: the Mars rover film! But bring some Kleenex! The poet Shelley sets sail for a volcanic archipelago made entirely of glass! A London superstadium full of ring magnets will capture the Northern Lights! Beautiful maps!  The churches of Christopher Wren, transformed into a geomagnetic harddrive! The World Trade Center was actually a gigantic tuning fork! Jurassic park, Russian conservation style! James Bond thwarts a San Franciscan attempt at tectonic warfare! Slum dwellers and modular parasites of the urban world, unite! An abandoned island off the coast of Japan! Unearthly landscapes swarming with alien bacteria! The suburbs: raw mounds and earthworks, before construction arrives! Extraterrestrial life rained down on India! The internal volume of Notre-Dame, Paris, carved into the surface of the moon! Meat!  The landscape architecture of Hell, its subsurface faults and magmatic geology! Why not live inside your garage? Is that a suburb growing out of your spine, or are you happy to see me? 3000km of concrete tunnels installed beneath the deserts of Libya! The robotic, neverending cinema of Los Angeles traffic control! Plus the real-time participatory surveillance of LA's freeway system! A house of landslides, filled with geese! Hypnotic films of motorway orbitals now available on DVD! Surreal nighttime photography of Japan! Measuring astronomy – solstice and stars – with a city modeled on Stonehenge! Unbelievable maps and diagrams of interstellar astral incidence!  Then we hiked alone for a thousand years, and we renamed all the constellations! The averaged images of suburban ennui! Food! Cake! Have you seen this hull before? New Arctic seaways promise Lovecraftian visions to come! On the colors of dismantled landscapes, photographed from the air! Lego spaceships! The radio sounds of the earth's magnetosphere! The meditative drone of urban security gates! Famous architecture, blurred! Photographs of Chernobyl, including an abandoned alphabet! Morocco double-exposures!  The Earth in 7.5 billion years! Fossilized cities! The art of reforesting continents through tree bombs! The deserts of the world are musical instruments! Venice resonates with voices! Huge and amazing maps of California hydrology! The city as an avatar of itself! The wonderfully weird, self-observing urban world of CCTV! Sci-fi instant cities built above working limeworks pits! The abandoned malls of Chicagoland! WWII British sound mirrors used to musicalize mountain storms!  All hell is breaking loose in middle America! San Jellocisco! Catching near-earth asteroids using a gigantic baseball mit! If you've got nothing else to do, why not go camping in an abandoned mine? Inbred, zombified ex-idealists stumble through pressurized undersea utopias, listening to Mozart! Biking through glass tunnels suspended above metropolitan Toronto! An inflatable hotel – in deep space! Folk maps of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal! Cool bridges! Houses, churches, places to hang: it's the afterlife of the Quonset hut! A man jumps from a balloon, free-falls 20 kilometers through the stratosphere, and captures the whole thing on film!  King Kong! Complicated volcanic pipe networks will extrude cathedrals directly from the earth! Huge, interconnected white towers in the middle of Beijing! A book of the Bible, reproduced as a textual landscape! Should Mars have its own landscape pictorial tradition? Is this it? Arches National Park, Manhattan branch! Will the International Space Station soon be turned into a sculpture gallery? An Indonesian mine and the technicolor stalactites it will form in a million years! In a wilderness of mirrors we lost our own reflections! Recording the secret music of bridges! Amazing tree houses by Andrew Maynard!  [Note: All photographs in this post (so not the first or last image) were graciously supplied by the hugely talented and exhibition-deserving photographer Nicolai Grossman, whose blog, Photon Detector, is well worth a read, and whose Spacetime Set on Flickr is the source for all these photos. Thanks, Nicolai!]
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