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 [Image: Philip K. Dick's former apartment complex, Fullerton, CA; photo ©Michael Rauner].In The Visionary State, published last month by Chronicle Books, Erik Davis and Michael Rauner explore the religious landscape of California. The state's cultural topography, Davis tells us, mirrors the physical terrain, "an overlapping set of diverse ecosystems, hanging, and sometimes quaking, on the literal edge of the West": This landscape ranges from pagan forests to ascetic deserts to the shifting shores of a watery void. It includes dizzying heights and terrible lows, and great urban zones of human construction. Even in its city life, California insists that there are more ways than one, with its major urban cultures roughly divided between the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles. Indeed, Northern and Southern California are considered by some to be so different as to effectively constitute different states. But that is a mistake. California is not two: it is bipolar. Indeed, the state is animated from below with "titanic forces implied by its geology," Davis writes, and a "frontier strand of nature mysticism" long ago took conscious root.  [Image: The labyrinth in Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, Oakland; photo ©Michael Rauner].Over the course of the book, the authors visit California's "Buddha towns" and Vedantic ashrams, its National Parks and the properties of discontented theosophists. They try to fathom what strange mutations of 21st-century Christianity could produce Jesus, the "OC Superstar," in whose name compassionate self-sacrifice and divine generosity have been reduced to a grinning statue rather pleased with itself in a well-watered grove of palm trees. They even stop by California's hot springs, wineries, observatories, and mind labs – without forgetting the dark side of the state, where Charles Manson, "trippy folk songs," and a psychedelic obsession with "the Now" all meet. At one point Davis hilariously describes Anton LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible: Born Howard Levey in 1930, LaVey was less a freak guru than a Playboy-era steak-and-martini man. He hated hippies and LSD, played Wurlitzer organs in strip clubs, and had no interest in mystically dissolving the ego. Though essentially a con man, LaVey had enough psychological frankness and sleazy charm to attract scores to the black masses he held at his house in the Outer Richmond, a place he had, as the song goes, painted black. Meanwhile, fans of Blade Runner will be pleased to hear that Davis and Rauner visit the so-called Bradbury Building. There, in Ridley Scott's film, lived J.F. Sebastian, abandoned by everyone and prematurely old, designing his robotic toys.  [Image: The Bradbury Building, Los Angeles; designed by George Wyman, the interior of the building "shoots upward toward a gabled canopy of glass, a lattice of light suspended over the delicate wrought-iron trusses that float in the clerestory haze." Photo ©Michael Rauner].Though I found the book philosophically adventurous, strangely good-humored, and particularly well-photographed, I will add that my own sense of the sacred – if I can phrase it as such – felt constantly challenged throughout. In other words, almost every time the authors visited a new site, I found myself immediately engaged in a kind of comparative landscape theology, asking: why is this place sacred?Why on earth would they go there? After all, is an archaeological site sacred to the Chumash more sacred than a street sacred to Philip K. Dick – or a quarry sacred to the Center for Land Use Interpretation? Or vice versa? What about a site favored by Erik Davis and Michael Rauner themselves, as they performed literally years of research for the book? Such questions only lead to more of themselves. If the Mormons, for instance, launched a geostationary satellite over the city of Los Angeles, and they used it to broadcast radio sermons, is that precise location in the sky – a square-meter of rarefied air – to be considered sacred? Or is there a holy tide or blessed current that flows through the coves of Big Sur – whose landscape, a "wild harmony of impermanence and beauty," Davis writes, so stunned the poet Robinson Jeffers? Does that visionary landscape have a correspondingly sacred hydroscape, some undersea world of the dead discussed a thousand years earlier in tribal myths? Can the weather be sacred – or even a particular storm? And where does the geography of celebrity fit in...? How do you differentiate between the sacred and the postmodern – and even outright kitsch? • • •I decided the best thing to do was talk to Davis himself – and so I called him. What follows is a transcript of the conversation.    [Images: Swami's in Encinitas; a room in the Star Center, Unarius Academy of Science, El Cajon; and the Temple Room at Goddess Temple, Boulder Creek. Photos ©Michael Rauner].BLDGBLOG: What were your criteria for deciding if a location – a building, a landscape, a particular street in Los Angeles – was sacred or visionary? Was your list of sites determined by rigorous historical and anthropological research, or by your own subjective interpretation of the sites?Erik Davis: It was pretty clear, in an objective sense, where the major points were – the major locations to find. I was looking either for a new religious movement that had some literally visionary quality behind it, or for a novel, visionary development within an older and existing tradition. But there was always a grey area. On that level, I started to go a little bit on intuition – not just picking things that I liked, obviously, but picking things that seemed to complete or expand the story behind the book. A good example is Luna, the tree that Julia Butterfly Hill sat in. Is it religious, is it spiritual, is it visionary? Even from an anthropological perspective, you’re kind of left wondering about that – but I really felt like there was something powerful in the way the tree came to serve as an update for the story of nature mysticism in California. We actually had to work quite a lot to access Luna – because it’s on private land, and they don’t like people to know where it is – but we did finally get there, and we went to the tree, and we thought, you know: it’s an impressive tree, it’s got these weird braces on it that stabilized it from where somebody tried to chop it down... But around the back side of the tree, there was this hollowed-out, blackened hole – and it was full of little trinkets. People had come, sneaking onto the land, in order to pay homage. There was a Navaho dreamcatcher and a little bodhisattva figure and a teacup and a little glyph of a tree – it was this rag-tag mixture of objects that had transformed the tree into a kind of miniature shrine. I saw that and I thought: okay, I’m on the right track. [ laughs]  [Image: Tire Tree, Salvation Mountain, Slab City; photo ©Michael Rauner. This, of course, is not Luna].BLDGBLOG: At one point, you visit Gary Snyder's zendo , and you mention the Beat Generation in several places throughout the book – but what about visiting a few more locations from the Beats' literary heyday, like the apartment where Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl”?Davis: I tried to keep to things that were as explicitly religious or spiritual as possible – but, you can imagine, we had a long B-list of places we thought we could include. We were constantly asking for more space from the publisher! There are just so many elements that went into it: geography; wanting to keep a balance between urban and rural, north and south, different traditions – Buddhist, Christian, pagan, Native American. There were places that were famous vs. places that weren’t famous – this kind of high/low tension – but there were also things that just came out of the earlier sites. People start telling you stuff. Like at Watts Towers: one of the guys who worked there was a local, and we started talking about assemblage, and collage, and using different pieces of trash to make art – and he said, Oh, you know, there’s this great place called Self Help Graphics out in East L.A., and I never would’ve found that place if I hadn’t met the guy. So Michael Rauner and I went out there, and it was great. There were all kinds of synchronicities like that.  [Image: The Virgin of Guadalupe, Self Help Graphics & Art, East L.A.; photo ©Michael Rauner].BLDGBLOG: This is perhaps a question more appropriate for J.G. Ballard than it is for The Visionary State, but were you ever tempted to include things like the site where James Dean was killed? Or the exact route driven by O.J. Simpson as he fled the police? For that matter, what if you'd found out that the whole Los Angeles freeway system had been designed by some rogue Freemason – and so all those knotted flyovers and concretized inner-city access routes are really a huge, psycho-spiritual landscape installation? Something between the Blythe geoglyph and the maze outside Grace Cathedral?Davis: I would have loved that. [ laughter] But, you know, the further you go into these weird mixtures of imagination and space, inevitably that kind of thing comes your way. That’s the thing about psychogeography – because, in a way, what I was doing was a kind of relatively gentle psychogeography of the state. For instance, one thing I really enjoyed seeing was this witch’s map of California, where she’d laid the 7 chakras down onto different regions of the state – and I really wanted to work that in. But as far as the built, modern, commercial, secular landscape of California goes, if I had come across stuff like that – and I’m sure there’s some of it out there – then of course. That wouldn’t surprise me, for one thing – and it would excite me, for another. As I say, we have a long B-list.  [Image: The Witch House/Spadena House, Beverly Hills; photo ©Michael Rauner].BLDGBLOG: Finally, where do earthquakes and seismology fit in all this? For some reason, I was expecting the San Andreas Fault to play a much larger role in the book – but you don't really play that up. Which I actually then preferred.Davis: You're right – I didn’t play that too strongly – but it's definitely there as a kind of psychic twist inside the state. For me, the seismology thing really worked in a more gentle way, and that was by talking about the hot springs. In the hot springs you see how the seismically active underside of California has created an environment where you get natural springs, and those become centers of healing. When I started out, I thought there were going to be more explicit landscapes to include in the book – like Death Valley, and the San Andreas Fault – but the more we got into it, the more we found there were built structures just screaming out for inclusion. The book ended up shifting subtly toward architecture and the built environment, with the landscape providing the background, as it were, for these more specifically cultural places of spiritual and visionary power.  [Image: Huxley Street, Los Angeles, named after Aldous Huxley. By the end of his life, Davis tells us, Huxley had "concluded that people needed to change on an individual psychological level if civilization was going to avoid the disasters he glimpsed on the horizon: overpopulation, high-tech war, ecological catastrophe, and the sort of narcotized totalitarian propaganda depicted with such lasting power in Brave New World." Photo ©Michael Rauner].• • •At the book's end, Davis reconsiders sunset, an event that resets the westward clock to its cyclic eastern origins; it is, he says, "the holiest moment of the day." But sunset is too easily mythologized: it resets no clocks, and its cycles are not human but magnetic, thermochemical, turning on an alien timescale that knows nothing of earthly religion. In the myths that do arise, however, transforming westward motion into something yet more godly and epic, California plays a distinct – and vulnerable – role: In the American imagination, California's shores stage both the fulfillment and decline of the West, its final shot at paradise and its perilous fall into the sea. That is why the California dream encompasses both Arcadian frontier and apocalyptic end zone, Eden and Babylon. As Christopher Isherwood put it, "California is a tragic land – like Palestine, like every promised land."  [Image: Noah Purifoy Sculpture Garden, Joshua Tree; photo ©Michael Rauner].(Thanks to Erik Davis for his time and enthusiasm, and to Michael Rauner for the fantastic photographs. Meanwhile, Erik will be presenting The Visionary State at a number of locations; here's his schedule of appearances. Tonight, August 9th, for example, Davis will be speaking in Oakland at DIESEL Books. If you go, tell him you heard about it on BLDGBLOG).
 [Image: 10 Mile Spiral, "A Gateway to Las Vegas," by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch]. In their recent and immensely enjoyable book Tooling, New York-based architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch propose, among other things, a "10 mile spiral" that will "serve two civic purposes for Las Vegas": First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device... by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below. An aerial view of the spiral, in all its gas-guzzling glory, wound up like a snake on the periphery of the city:  [Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling]. Drivers will enter this vertical labyrinth of concrete, approaching a whirligig-like compression of the desert horizon and gradually lifting off into the sky. It's a kind of herniation of space through which you could theoretically drive forever. (Given enough gasoline). The spiral itself is beautiful –  – and absurd. Its form was generated algorithmically as "a helix whose radius varies randomly as it climbs and then falls back down to the valley floor." The structure's "intersection points" are then located, acting as stress-sites "through which the structure's loads are channeled to the ground." It's an internally buttressed Futuro-Suprematist cathedral to cars.  [Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling]. At the end of the book, Aranda/Lasch note that every project featured in Tooling was "constructed through simple steps, repeated over and over until something of substance was revealed": These steps are usually straightforward geometric transformations – short sets of rules that we develop – sometimes to build a custom tool that had not yet existed, but more often to better understand the forms we wish to make. Tapping the number-crunching power of the computer opens up new design possibilities and gives us the capacity to grow and proliferate structures that we otherwise could not, but probably more important is deciding when to curb their growth, cut their shape, or stop using them altogether. In this regard, their architectural projects have much more in common with, say, the calculation-dependent music of Autechre than with anything explicitly spatial – unless that space is the coiling inward voids of conch shells, perhaps, or the strangely mathematical scaffolding of radiolaria. At some point, Aranda/Lasch add, all the algorithmic tools they themselves used will be made available to anyone else who wants to explore them; to see if that's happened yet, check this website in a few months' time.  [Image: The spectacular glowing interior of that which has no outside: it's the 10 Mile Spiral from above, at night, lit from within by automobiles. Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling]. I can't end this post, however, without quoting J.G. Ballard; it's like a nervous tic, seeing so many roads – and out comes Concrete Island, Ballard's now-classic novel about an architect trapped by a car crash in the "compulsory landscaping" of Greater London's excess motorways: "In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations." The man falls prey to thirst, insomnia, delirium: "Gazing up at the maze of concrete causeways illuminated in the night air, he realized how much he loathed all these drivers and their vehicles." The man then searches for "some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways" – but finds none. He is trapped, a new Crusoe of roads, "alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines... an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness." Leading me to wonder: what new futures of human experience could arise in the 10 Mile Spiral?  [Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling]. (For more on Concrete Island, see BLDGBLOG's own Concrete Island, in which those same quotations appear. Then, after you've express-ordered your own copy of Tooling – because any book with a chapter called "Computational Basketry" should be required reading – you can visit Benjamin Aranda's and Chris Lasch's work at the University of Pennsylvania's Non-Linear Systems Organization, where they were recently research Fellows).
 " Blowup/Breakdown is an inflatable, biodegradable septic system that addresses sanitation and environmental issues at disaster relief and refugee camp sites. Fabricated using polyactide polymer (PLA) – a novel bioplastic – the Blowup/Breakdown system safely and ecologically isolates, treats and disposes of faecal waste in emergency situations minimizing human and environmental contact with harmful contaminants." Just don't over-inflate it...  Designed by Studiocycle – and a runner-up at this year's Metropolis Magazine Next Generation awards – the inflatable septic infrastructure has "a useful life of approximately two years." After that time, the whole system "biodegrades into carbon, water and biomass allowing both its components and contents to safely assimilate into the surrounding soil and cause minimal environmental damage to the campsite." This 10.3mb PDF will tell you much, much more – including technical specs on air pumps, folding gaskets, and structural rings.
I'm pleased to announce that the Summer 2006 issue of the Urban Design Review has been released; it's also the first issue for which I served as Senior Editor. There will be many more to come.  The issue includes some fantastic work. You'll find an amusing – and much-needed – analysis of New York Times Magazine real estate ads, written by Brand Avenue's own Chris Timmerman; Charles Jencks's Iconic Building is reviewed by Michiel van Raaij, the latter being one of today's most uncannily sharp-eyed critics of iconic architecture ( van Raaij's blog is worth a long visit); David Haskell gives us an essayistic look at urban event places, reviewing architectural attempts "to make the city a perpetual festival"; and, among many other texts – including short interviews with both Charles Jencks and Mike Davis – you'll find an interview with Jinhee Park and John Hong of SINGLE speed DESIGN. SsD is now justifiably famous for their work on the ingenious – and beautifully inspiring – Big Dig House, a single-family home built from old Boston highway parts. The Big Dig House was reviewed three days ago in USA Today. From SsD's own description of the project: As a prototype for future Big Dig architecture, the structural system for this house is almost wholly comprised of steel and concrete from Boston's Big Dig, utilizing over 600,000 lbs of recycled materials. Although similar to a pre-fab system, the project demonstrates that subtle, complex spatial arrangements can still be designed and customized from pieces of the I-93 offramps: Varying exterior and interior planes create an ascending relationship from ground to roof as large upper-level plantings blur interior and exterior relationships. Houses built from highways. The Urban Design Review is now all set to expand, through events and publications both, and it is always looking for more interested readers and writers; a forthcoming issue, in fact, is already in the works. It's not BLDGBLOG in paper form, however, but something much better: a sustained look at the built environment, on a global level, using reviews of texts and exhibitions, open dialogues between practitioners in the field, and essays by theorists, students, professors, artists, and so on. UDR is published by David Haskell's Forum for Urban Design. (David is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Topic Magazine). So check it out.
 [Image: © Renae Baker]. "Some of the coldest temperatures on Earth brought a rare cloud formation to the skies over Antarctica," SF Gate reports. "Meteorological officer Renae Baker captured spectacular images of the nacreous clouds, also known as polar stratospheric clouds, last week at Australia's Mawson station."  [Image: © Renae Baker]. Meanwhile, Wired introduced us last month to Werner Herzog's forthcoming science fiction film, The Wild Blue Yonder, which uses the undersea Antarctic seascape as a stand-in for liquid extraterrestrial environments.  [Image: Werner Herzog/ Wired – many more photos here]. "Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek," Wired writes. "He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created 'characters' from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts."  [Image: Werner Herzog/ Wired]. Apparently, whilst viewing "mesmerizing images of ethereal jellyfish and swarms of crystalline microorganisms mingling in a cobalt twilight beneath a 20-foot-thick sheet of ice," Herzog instinctively felt: "This is not our planet." (One assumes the sentiment should, in Herzog's case, be taken literally).  [Image: Werner Herzog/ Wired]. The film "opens with a wide shot," Wired explains: "A vast, vaulted ice canopy stretches over the horizon as two human silhouettes descend through a glowing portal into the dim indigo void. They fan out weightlessly, their breath echoing like whispers in an empty cathedral. Something approaches – a speck, silently swelling into what looks like a translucent bullet lined with undulating fringes of silk. The creature hovers in close-up, then darts away in a cascade of ice shards; dissonant music fades, then swells as the humans forge farther into the blue-green deep."  [Image: NOAA – who, elsewhere, presents us with the literature of abysses]. That "blue-green deep," however, is also an uncanny incubator of evolutionary weirdness. The deep sea octopus, for instance, first made its appearance in Antarctica's waters: "Australian researcher Dr. Jan Strugnell of Queen's University Belfast and the British Antarctic Survey says the formation of ocean currents around the continent millions of years ago provided the right conditions for ocean creatures to evolve," the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Amazingly, deep sea octopi appear to register, in their genes and anatomy both, the continental make-up of plate tectonics at the time of their earliest evolution – think of it as forensic landscape history at a biological remove: "About 34 million years ago, Antarctica separated completely from South America, with the opening up of Drakes Passage. This allowed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to form, which insulated the continent and allowed it to get really cold. As cold water is more oxygen rich than warm water, oxygen from Antarctic waters would have been able to then diffuse into the deep seas along with Antarctic octopuses, which then evolved into deep sea octopuses. 'The opening of the Drakes Passage fits in with evolution of the group,' says Strugnell." Which leads me to wonder if a specific mountain range in Africa – or Asia, for that matter – catalyzed an exact and specific thousand-year microclimate in which simian ingenuity could last across sufficient generations that some group eventually opposably-thumbed its way toward a larger brain. Or a certain valley, a specific rain corridor, a particularly comfortable belt of well-grassed savannahs – these landscapes could afford the time and space in which specific organisms would gradually develop themselves and evolve. Writing this, of course, I realize how obvious it is that that's exactly what did happen; but, then, assuming someday we discover the exact mountain (or gorge) that helped produce a rain-shadow that helped produce a climate that helped produce a fertile niche in which tool-using hominins could hang-out long enough to discover gods, writing, and warfare, shouldn't that specific landmark receive some kind of protected, even vaguely familial, status? The Ur-mountain. What if it's been turned into a copper mine? Or if there is no such thing? Reversing the question, of course, could you bulldoze, plow, till, and plant your way toward some wild mega-landscape specifically engineered – topographically, climatically, acidically, and so on – based upon how it will catalyze the evolution of new species in a hundred thousand years' time? Landscape architecture as a distant subset of genetic engineering: planting your garden based on what cross-hybridized evolutionary outgrowths may someday appear – but doing this on a continental scale, and with a time-frame of eons. Landscape futures, indeed. Werner Herzog can film the design process. A species will look back at its originary landscape, like an octopus drifting through Antarctic waters, overwhelmed with strange feelings of gratitude. (Big thanks to Bryan Finoki for the Antarctic clouds article!)
 [Image: "The Alliance to Rescue Civilization differs from other so-called doomsday projects. It envisions a lunar base where, in the event of global catastrophe, humans could carry on, protecting DNA samples of life on Earth and maintaining a bank of human knowledge." They will all be avid readers of BLDGBLOG]. "What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?" the New York Times asked this morning. Indeed. After all, any doomsday deserving of the word would surely destroy London – as well as every other city along with it. Perhaps even the whole planet. Thankfully, then, there's the so-called Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC. According to the New York Times, ARC is "a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge – the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah." It's interesting to read Biblical metaphors in the context of what amounts to science fiction, I have to say; at the very least, this raises the question of what officially banned Catholic heresies might once have existed – whose practitioners were all burnt at the stake for simply having reimagined the Bible as a kind of space opera written by Isaac Asimov. Emerging from the desert is a machine, full of light, called The Transubstantiator. Satanic anti-churches of dark matter spiral through magnetic voids... In any case, the "mission" of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization is, in their own words, "to protect the human species and its civilization from destruction that could result from a global catastrophic event, including nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague and asteroid collisions. To fulfill its mission, ARC is dedicated to creating continuously staffed facilities on the Moon and other locations away from Earth. These facilities will preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements, and of the species important to our civilization. In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth." The near impossibility of choosing exactly what "species [are] important to our civilization" is an issue for another day. Finally, the idea of building a post-terrestrial earth surrogate that will save – or even mischievously re-direct – the human future is nothing new; a somewhat similar project, for instance, is Asteromo, Paolo Soleri's space-based drifting utopia, an artificial asteroid within which astral pilgrims will breed. (Earlier: Lunar urbanism 6, Lunar urbanism 5, Lunar urbanism 4, Lunar urbanism 3 – and so on).
 [Image: Courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory]. There are a wide variety of overlooked and forgotten ways in which humans participate with, and alter, the biological systems around them. A few seeds, trapped in the soles of our shoes, can cross oceans with us in airplanes, bringing gardens, and weeds, and parasite species, to the other side of the earth; trace amounts of infectious diseases can cling to our clothes and decimate livestock several nations away; snakes, rats, spiders, mosquitoes – all can easily ride the ships and planes of globalization. Our economy is crowded with invasive stowaways intent on surviving elsewhere – even if survival means irretrievably altering the new host environment. In other words, travel itself can be something of a biological activity: we do the migratory work of other species for them. We take them with us. Importations of even the smallest microbe can sufficiently alter an ecological niche, opening it up to further changes – then compounding over time into whole new landscapes. What would happen naturally is accelerated: a thousand years in a decade. It shouldn't surprise us, then, to learn that strange things are afoot in Antarctica. (To read more, you'll have to visit WorldChanging – for whom this post was originally written).
For an exhibit during last month's London Architecture Biennale 2006, curator Matteo Cainer invited "architectural studios from outside the UK (...) to sketch a visionary project for London." Graphic speculation about another London yet to come, Cainer hoped, would "further consolidate architecture’s role in imagining a future for the city": Architects have been invited to take an outsider’s view, and as such submit a sketch for an imaginative project in the city of London. They are free to choose a site and focus, whether addressing issues of planning, landscape, infrastructure or building. The central challenge remains what it has been for centuries: to make architecture a vessel for new and controversial ideas. Gathering together architects with sketches, and critics with words, will entice visitors into a theatre of architectural imagination where a wide range of daring projects, conceived by some of the most inventive and newly emerging architects, come together in a panorama of architecture’s current potential and promise. This will in turn create a platform for discussion and a critical examination of today’s approach to architecture. The result was The World in One City – A Sketch for London, an exhibit beautifully designed by Cainer's own Design Research Studio at Fletcher Priest Architects.   [Images: © Chris Gascoigne]. After emailing Cainer expressing interest in the exhibit itself and in the architectural projects it featured, he responded with a PDF from which these images were taken. Here we see interior shots, offering a glimpse of the show's dominant theme: coordinate points of latitude and longitude, geographic sites of architectural speculation.    [Images: © Chris Gascoigne]. "The show tries to move beyond the current scene, dominated by cyberspace and video simulation," Cainer explains, "and beyond the familiar client restraints and the fashion parade of magazines." Instead, the exhibit's purpose is to focus on "the ‘sketch’ as the fulcrum of architectural imagination. Concepts and subsequent sketches are often underestimated: sketching is not only practical but also essential; it is the quickest, most accessible way for generating ideas." A website for the show is in the works, as well as a publication. Finally, let me just add that the idea for this exhibition is totally fantastic, and that every city in the world, frankly, should perform this kind of imaginative self-reflection at least once every few years. By openly speculating about conjectural urban futures – whether those include pedestrian malls, blimp-aquariums, or even insanely ambitious green roof projects – residents of cities everywhere can be reminded that their own urban environment is an ongoing project, and that everyday life itself can be upgraded, reprogrammed, better designed. After all, the architectural future is just a few words and sketches away. (Note: All photographs in this post are by Chris Gascoigne – whose website is chock full of more architectural photography).
 [Image: From Spam Architecture, © Alex Dragulescu]. Alex Dragulescu has some extremely interesting projects up on his website right now. For the most part, they're "experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets." However, this one – called Spam Architecture – totally blows me away: "The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures."  [Image: From Spam Architecture, © Alex Dragulescu]. Applying this to large-scale architectural design would be endlessly and hypnotically fascinating – not to mention quite profitable if you turned it into a kind of immersive, 3-dimensional version of Tetris. You turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into architectural structures; your Ph.D. thesis, exported as an inhabitable object; every bank statement you've ever received, transformed into a small Cubist city. Your whole DVD collection, informationally re-presented as a series of large angular buildings. Of course, you could also reverse the process, and input CAD diagrams of a Frank Gehry building – thus generating an inbox-clogging river of spam email. The Great Wall of China, emailed around the world in an afternoon. The collected works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In any case, Dragulescu currently works at the Experimental Game Lab at UC-San Diego – the same institution at which Sheldon Brown developed his Scalable City project. (Thanks to Brent Kissel for the tip about Dragulescu – and you can read more here – and to Brian Romer for Scalable City).
The Marine Mammal Center (MMC) in Sausalito, California, treats elephant seals injured by "shark bites, gunshot wounds, and untenable toxins in their liquid habitat," Architecture magazine explains. "Half of all injured pinnipeds and cetaceans found in the United States – typically 700 over recent years, mostly reported by vigilant fishermen – are treated here." More relevant to the present website, however, the MMC is now receiving a much-needed, multi-million dollar architectural upgrade – and the new design fascinatingly incorporates a derelict "pair of Nike missile silos."  [Image: Architecture Magazine]. "A dozen anti-aircraft missiles were first secured here in two 3,000-square-foot underground berths," Architecture tells us. "Soon, one of those deep concrete wells will contain all of the hospital facility’s water processing equipment, keeping it away from the sun’s damaging rays and freeing the territory above ground for recovery functions... The other silo will contain long-term freezer storage of animal tissue specimens for study." Let's hope neither of them accidentally go off. Of course, reusing missile silos for architectural purposes is nothing new – and, in skimming the original article, I actually thought the silos would be turned into functioning aquariums – but the project still works as a brilliant engagement with existing site conditions. You can see one or two more images of the design at the website of Gyroscope, Inc., the project architects –  – where, for instance, we find the above diagram. "Because the center operates around the clock," Architecture explains, "illumination for night had to be directed in a manner sensitive to the fact that animals in the bay use light for migration. A portion of the pools will always be shaded by overhead awnings – many of which will be lined with photovoltaic panels, thanks to a generous donor – giving the animals a choice of where to hang out, and cutting down on cooling costs." On the other hand, at least one question remains: seeing as how the missile silos will not be turned into functioning aquariums, is there an aquarium avant-garde anywhere else – and, if so, what does it look like? My provisional vote is for a series of truly gargantuan blimps dragging huge, transparent, cable-tethered aquariums full of coral reefs, fish, and blue whales through the skies of Baghdad. The insurgency might end right then and there: dazzled, confused, feeling touched by the miraculous, the only thing the militias will know how to do is just put down their guns – and stare.
 In April 2006, a city-wide writing program began in Philadelphia. Called the Autobiography Project, the program's basic idea was to invite residents of the city to tell ther own life stories – or simply individual stories taken from their lives – using 300 words or less. The Project even sponsored community writing workshops for those Philadelphians unsure of their literary abilities – and some workshops were so successful that similar such groups may become regular fixtures at the institutions involved. More than 340 memoirs were submitted over a six-week period. A panel of local writers and cultural figures then chose 20 particularly memorable autobiographies, and these were printed as full-size posters, complete with a photograph of each author, and installed within bus shelters throughout the city. The posters were taken down on July 23rd. You can read more about the project at WorldChanging, where this post was originally published.
 [Image: A partially inflatable immigrant-detention center, photographed by The New York Times – though their article is now pay-per-view]. Between statelessness and Westphalian sovereignty you apparently get inflatable architecture, instant cities on the carceral edge between two systems of power: "As the Bush administration gets tougher on illegal immigration and increases its spending on enforcement," the New York Times reported last week, "some of the biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that have been building and running private prisons around the country." This is referred to as the "detention market," and it is "projected to increase by $200 million to $250 million over the next 12 to 18 months" – an astonishing increase of 400%. (Invest now).These "beds within the border region" are managed with Wal-Mart-like efficiency. Indeed, making beds "available quickly is considered an advantage in the industry since the government’s need for prison space is often immediate and unpredictable. Decisions about where to detain an immigrant are based on what is nearby and available. Immigration officials consider the logistics and cost of transportation to the detention center and out of the country." All of which defines a new political space wherein real-time logistics, transport infrastructure, the rise of the market-state, private investment, and post- Archigramian inflatable architecture strangely merge. Two quotations seem appropriate here, both taken from Philip Bobbitt's recent – and extraordinarily dense – look at historical mutations within the concept and practice of constitutional sovereignty. As the nation-state is superceded by the market-state, Bobbitt explains, we are witnessing a clash of tactical responsibilities: "What is appropriate for the market-state – with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment – seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation." Of course, this is exactly what we see today in the U.S. immigration debate: an argument for the economic necessity of immigrant labor, including financial opportunity for all, vs. an argument for national border security and the protection of legal citizens. "There is a grotesque disparity," Bobbitt writes, "between the rapid movement of international capital and the ponderous and territorially circumscribed responses of the nation-state, as clumsy as a bear chained to a stake, trying to chase a shifting beam of light." The almost Dr. Seussian world of inflatable immigrant-detention camps, as explored by The New York Times, is perhaps evidence of this sovereign clumsiness. (The NYT article was also covered by Bryan Finoki over at Subtopia; meanwhile, a rather old BLDGBLOG post explores the idea of " criminal aliens needing beds").
 [Image: "The Polecat UAV is pictured flying at 15,000 feet by a chaseplane. Polecat's airframe was 'laser printed' rather than machined." New Scientist Tech]. The same week we found out that jets of the future will be made with plastic, we also read that the U.S. military has been working toward printable airplanes – unmanned drones made by "rapid prototyping." As New Scientist Tech reports: "In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part – a wing strut, say – is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes." Of course, 3D printing is nothing new; several months ago, for instance, just about everyone in the universe learned that 3D buildings and cityscapes can be printed using images from Google Earth.    Even more strangely, you can also print fully-functioning body parts using "droplets of 'bioink'," which are "clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter." In other words, if you "alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed 'biopaper', with the bioink droplets," and if you "build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance," then, through bio-printing, these will become the "successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins."  This Frankenstein-meets-Hewlett-Packard technology can be used to "print any desired structure." Indeed, there are now "printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster." (What about a photocopier?) Finally, skeptics will benefit from learning that "cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. 'After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner.'" (A bit more on this here). The Oliver Twist of tomorrow, then, will be a poor boy, printed in obscurity... So the question naturally arises: what if you were to combine all these? You'd get a vast, self-printing city-organism, whose skies are criss-crossed with machine-birds of prey; when buildings reach the age of senility, forgetting how many floors they contain, they are melted down into rivers of ink and pooled in living reservoirs to be printed once again; molds and fungi and architectural infections bloom, growing atop one another till new parasite structures form, small Gothic rooms in which the homeless live. All of which reminds me, somewhat disjunctively, of the following rather unoriginal statement: the default condition of all literary genres will soon be science-fiction. You simply will not be able to write about the world without incorporating these weird new technologies. Science-fiction and social realism will become one and the same thing. Look at the recent genre-defying work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, David Mitchell, Rupert Thomson, Alex Garland; soon even Ian McEwan will be writing sci-fi. Note, as well, that whilst mainstream American literary novelists appear increasingly incapable of doing anything other than reimagining their own national past – Philip Roth, say, or the forthcoming Thomas Pynchon – as if endlessly recycling historical micro-narratives will result in something new – Anglo-European fiction appears to have accepted, with great success and enthusiasm, the futurist inclinations already so obvious in everyday life. To be rather broad here – for instance, does Michael Cunningham invalidate my argument? do I even have an argument? – it seems that while British fiction in particular has already accounted for the slippage of contemporary life into sci-fi, even welcoming this phenomenon with a newfound literary ambition, mainstream American fiction is content simply to enroll itself in unnecessary MFA programs, writing 800-page novels about family farms, the period between WWI and II, shopping, or the supposedly "atmospheric" end of the 19th century. Run-of-the-mill student architectural proposals are already more stimulating than most of today's American novels. Architectural proposals have ideas. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has already discovered the future, and it's no real wonder that the U.S. publishing industry is in the midst of a kind of slow financial crisis. In fact, you only have to look at the ongoing revival of interest in Philip K. Dick – sci-fi novelist and volunteer FBI informant – to see that Americans don't exactly lack a literary taste for the future; it's just that all the wrong novels keep getting published here. In any case, there are a million exceptions to this argument; feel free to rip it apart. For example, where does The Da Vinci Code fit in all this? Etc. etc.
These images are spatio-structural urban fantasies taken from Urbicande. Les cités obscures, the source material, is a 12-volume graphic novel by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, in which "references to our world abound, especially in regard to architecture." It is a " parallel universe," we read, full of utopian construction projects and urban expeditions, strange villages and—
—moving machine-labyrinths made from decontextualized walls. Its "coherence is constantly growing with time."
All images, including those below, are copyrighted by and fully credited to this creative team.
     
(Thematically related: gravestmor introduces us to The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, and Pruned gives us some Brodsky & Utkin. In the process, don't forget BLDGBLOG's own look at cinematic urbanism, or Archidose's reconsideration of the strangely inspiring film, La Jétee).
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