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 Der Spiegel reports on Gazprom City: the future, rather evocatively named St. Petersburg headquarters for Russian energy giant Gazprom, currently the subject of a high-profile design competition.  This new "city," however, will just be a cluster of high-tech administrative buildings, although the main tower "is to rise at least 300 meters (985 feet) into the sky and symbolize the growing power of the firm. It is also to be situated just opposite the famed 18th century Smolny Cathedral on the Neva River in historic St. Petersburg." This location has proved rather controversial.   Because Gazprom City "is part of a longer range plan by Russian President Vladimir Putin to boost the prestige of his home city," however, it seems unlikely that the project will be held back. This, after all, may be St. Petersburg's newest architectural moment: "Much of the development that has occurred in recent years has benefited Moscow, whereas St. Petersburg has seen little change. Only recently, with the celebration of the city's 300th birthday in 2003, did the city begin awakening from its centuries-long sleep. But even as high-tech projects and a new theater designed by Sir Norman Foster have gone ahead, major changes to the city center, with its numerous UNESCO-protected royal residences and palaces, are considered taboo."  In any case, the winner of the competition will be announced on December 1st, and the actual tower should be fully constructed by 2016. Until that time, here's a quick bet that at least one person out there – whether they're a novelist, a filmmaker, a graphic artist or even just a refreshingly ambitious architectural student – will design, write, film, or draw some futuristic sci-fi dystopia called Gazprom City, simply because the name is so cool. Of course, you'll probably get sued. But think Perdido Street Station – described by this reviewer as " Metropolis meeting Gormenghast in the heart of Dickensian London" – goes to Renaissance Paris via, perhaps, Nostromo... and you get the picture. So: Gazprom City. Artists and writers, show us what will happen there. (Image credits: In order, these are designs by Daniel Libeskind, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Massimiliano Fuksas, and RMJM. Story found via things magazine).
 The fellows at Archfarm have added to their series of architectural PDFs – unfortunately referred to as "fascicles" – with Peter Yeadon's recent thoughts on nanotechnology. In that paper ( download the fascicle), Yeadon introduces us to structures in "an age of molecular manipulation," in which we'll see "the dawn of nanofactories, robust molecular machine shops that harvest atoms from a reservoir of molecules to make sophisticated materials, devices, and systems one atom at a time." What could such minuscule inventions possibly have to do with the making of architecture and cities? A nanometer is about a million times smaller than the diameter of a pinhead, and a thousand times smaller than the length of a typical bacterium... How could these tiny achievements possibly have any bearing on the work of an architect? Read his fascicle and find out.  Archfarm has also published an interview with Sonia Cillari (download the PDF), about emotion and interactivity in architectural design, as well as Usman Haque's rough guide to "open source architecture" ( PDF), published last summer.  The series veers a tiny bit too close to the world of Deleuzian eyeglasses and trendy jargon, I have to say, but it's a great format and I'll be interested to see where they go next. For instance, might I humbly recommend they publish The Pruned Guide to Futurist Geo-Hydrology... That, or BLDGBLOG will start its own series of PDFs – and then everyone can stare in awe at my fascicles.
 [Image: Little Moreton Hall, "an early model of energy efficiency," according to the Guardian Weekly]."The energy-efficient building of the future," we read, "was constructed 500 years ago," during the Tudor reign: Homes of the 1500s are still liable to lose less heat than their mock-Tudor counterparts constructed over the past few years, according to tests carried out for the power supplier British Gas. Tudor properties, with their oak beams plus wattle and daub infills, leaked 10 cubic metres of warm air an hour for every square metre of wall against 15.1 for a mock-Tudor home built in the 1960s... The surprise result is an indictment of recent government regulations but it has brought some pleasure to traditionalists of the architectural community such as the Prince of Wales. 'Wind turbines, solar panels and other hi-tech green devices might get the media attention, but the smartest way to save energy may be to live in a Tudor house and insulate the attic and repair the windows,' said Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment. In other words, the article concludes, "the Tudors may be able to claim sustainable homes as another first, alongside tennis and beer."
 [Image: Ripping up British railroad tracks in Angola under Chinese supervision; New York Times].An excellent – if gigantic – article about international development, foreign aid, construction contracts, and " China's African adventure" was published last weekend in the New York Times. There, we find China reconsidered as a kind of economic event with infrastructural effects in distant landscapes. In Africa, for instance, "China has already begun, in myriad ways, to serve the interests of [developing nations], while the United States, preoccupied with terrorism, has seen its dominant status slip. Angola, once a cold-war pawn, can now serve as a kind of test case in the latest struggle to shape Africa’s destiny. Call it Chinese-style globalization." The article is quick to point out that China already has "a long history as a development partner; Africa is dotted with gigantic sports complexes and People’s Halls built by Chinese engineers at the behest of dictators." It will now be dotted with Chinese-built roads, railways, and conference centers. Quoting at length: Four or five miles along the asphalt road that runs east from Kaala, a small town in central Angola, a Chinese construction company has carved an unexpected right turn, a broad dirt path that runs over a rise through scrubby forest. The path, which has no marking, winds past a basketball court – recreation for the work force – and then empties out into a vast plaza of meticulously smoothed earth. Dump trucks ferry loads of dirt back and forth. At the far end of the plaza, obscured by tree trunks that have been uprooted and laid carefully on their sides, are train tracks. The whole scene, invisible from the road, conjures the stupendous designs of the evil genius in a Bond film.
The weed-covered tracks are the remnants of a railway built by British engineers a century ago to transport precious minerals from the heart of the continent to the port of Lobito, more than a thousand miles away. The Angolan government is paying a consortium of Chinese companies $1.9 billion to completely reconstruct the tracks, the bridges, the stations, the equipment, all shattered by a quarter-century of warfare and neglect. Like something out of a J.G. Ballard novel – or perhaps a Chinese rewriting of Heart of Darkness – we read how, throughout Angola, old urban plans are still visible "but the cities themselves had crumbled away." However, with Chinese help, a "new city, Luanda Sul, has begun to sprout above the vast, teeming slums of Luanda [Angola's capital]. On a hilltop south of the city, Sonangol has built a giant aluminum-and-glass conference center, a state-of-the-art facility for international conferences as yet unplanned, to be serviced by an international airport as yet unfinished. Portuguese and Brazilian construction companies are building their headquarters along perfectly smooth boulevards. Members of the new corporate class are spending $80,000 and up to buy one of the rose or pale green houses overlooking the sea. It’s a new world for a new, legitimate kind of wealth." It seems totally legitimate to wonder, then, what future literatures might emerge in such a setting. Will Chinese middle managers with a taste for spy novels write, under pseudonyms, the first great Graham Greenian thrillers of the 21st century? Mineral rights, emerging diseases, oil fields, ethnic tension, and weekend flights back home to Beijing... What future plots will take shape during the final years of "China's African adventure"? Will a Chinese Archigram publish its own delirious manifestos for instant development, modular villages built with oil money on the shores of manmade lakes? In any case, the New York Times continues: "The Chinese are a mysterious presence in Angola. Everyone seems to know about them and their assorted projects, but few people have actually seen them, and scarcely anyone can claim to have talked to them. The Chinese rarely venture beyond the encampments in which they live and work." Meanwhile, if your curiosity about China has been piqued, don't miss another gigantic article from the New York Times about that nation's industrially over-exploited Yellow River.  [Image: The city of Zhengzhou, on the banks of the Yellow River; New York Times]."The Yellow River, curving through regions only intermittently touched by the country’s boom, offers a tour of the pressures and contradictions bearing down on China, and of the government’s efforts to address them," we read. Most astonishing, cities beside the river like Yinchuan, Luoyang and Zhengzhou – places few Americans have ever heard of – are racing to become China’s next new regional urban center with almost hallucinatory building booms. Yinchuan, a modest, ancient capital, is building an entire city district for a vast government complex and is adding 20 million square feet of construction every year through 2011. Luoyang, once the capital of the Zhou dynasty, has built a cluster of futuristic sports stadiums that look like a grounded armada of metallic, alien spaceships. Finally, one more recent article from the New York Times... This one re-introduces us to Rem Koolhaas's topologically self-connected headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing.  That building, we read, will be "one of the largest ever constructed," and it will loom "like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district." It's due for completion by the end of 2007. Read a bit more about the project at BusinessWeek – or in Koolhaas's own, and ultimately somewhat content-less, Content. 
 An all-girl gang of teenage apartment burglars has been arrested in Santiago, Chile. According to the BBC, the girls "were infamous for climbing up buildings in Santiago to burgle luxury apartments... Lurking in the gardens of expensive parts of Santiago, the four girls hurled ropes and hooks up to balcony railings, hauled themselves up and walked through the flat windows. They then walked out of the buildings as if they were visitors."  Incredibly, two of the girls were "heavily pregnant," yet "they still managed to climb up to the third floor of some flats." (Story via tiny nibbles; photos of Santiago via Wikipedia).
 [Image: Manuel Roig-Franzia/Washington Post].Panama's Hotel Campestre now caters to an unusually specific clientele: endangered frogs. There, frogs "get the full spa treatment. Daily cleansing rinses. Exotic lunches. Even 24-hour room service." In fact, it is "the frogs' own Hotel California," we read, "a place where they could check in but could never check out." Mixing metaphors, the hotel is nothing less than "a Noah's Ark for frogs," its residents arriving in the specimen boxes of concerned volunteers and scientists. There are "glass frogs with skin so translucent that their organs are always on full display." There are "frogs that look like rocks and eat freshwater crabs, aggressive tree frogs and shy, nocturnal toads." There are even frogs with "a taste for the good life." This means that the males of the species "happily hop on the backs of the much larger females, who carry them around for as long as 80 days searching for just the right spot to breed." I've tried this method, and the results are spectacular. Perhaps coming soon: Honeymoon at the Frog Hotel, a new film by Pixar... (Thanks, Nicky!)
 [Image: "An orbiting array of reflective balloons focuses sunlight onto the surface of Mars, providing extra heat and solar power for human colonists." Via New Scientist. The plan being illustrated here would specifically use "300 reflective balloons, each 150 metres across, arranged side-by-side to create a 1.5-kilometre-wide mirror in orbit." This would thus create "Earth-like conditions" on Mars – and perhaps inspire some strange future version of the Narcissus myth, in which a whole civilization turns its eyes to the nighttime skies... only to be confronted with an unmoving reflection of itself. What new astronomies are we doomed to construct? Of more earthly concerns, could we build small clouds of mirrored balloons, and – when our teenage neighbors aren't shooting them down – amplify urban solar power intake during the off-season? Manhattan, masted to a thousand clouds of silver balloons, all shining]. (Thanks, Bryan! Related: Pruned's Let there be light!)
 Utopia, pictured above, is a "digital typeface that portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities." In other words, all the letters look like buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, jumbled up in Brazilian proximities.   [Images: BLDGBLOG written in Utopia; the whole font, posterized].Utopia was designed by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain; because their site uses Flash, however, you can't directly link to the font. But it's there. So if somebody stumbles on a city full of Oscar Niemeyer buildings... will they suspect hidden messages in every glance?
 [Image: Chengfu Lu, Haidian District, Beijing (2004) by Sze Tsung Leong].Apparently Beijing hopes "to ease congestion and other urban growing pains plaguing the city" by going underground. "City planners have identified 17 key areas of the city for subterranean development, and envision an eventual ' underground town' spanning 90 million square meters by 2020." This new subterranean Beijing "would quadruple the amount of underground space now being utilized in the city, which is currently at about 30 million square meters... Underground floor space [has] expanded by three million square meters in Beijing annually, [accounting] for 10 percent of the city's total floor space completed each year" – much of which has been "devoted to parking and other traffic use." (Thanks, Alex P.!)
  The Dirt introduces us to this business card slash micro-terrain by Tur & Partner, landscape architects. It's a portable garden: impregnated with seeds, in the photosynthetic presence of sunlight and water, the paper eventually sprouts. Which reminds me of a birthday card my brother once bought: if you buried the card and watered it, small seeds incorporated into the cardstock's fibers would germinate. Which, in turn, makes me wonder if you could use this exact same method to smuggle rare plants out of totalitarian regimes intent on crushing botany within their borders... whether or not such regimes actually exist. Or future trans-botanical geneticists, fleeing persecution, will hide their greatest seeds inside the pages of fake landscape guides, woven into the actual paper; they then bury their libraries in the soil of distant hillsides, and cloned roses and hybrid flowers soon grow. (Card also featured at anArchitecture, among other places).
 Artist Florian Dombois's Auditory Seismology project plays you the sound of earthquakes. Using time-compression to accelerate the vibrational waves of global seismic activity, Dombois makes landscape events audible to human ears. Specifically, he writes, "if one compresses the time axis of a seismogram by about 2000 times and plays it on a speaker (so called ' audification'), the seismometric record becomes hearable and can be studied by the ear and [by] acoustic criteria."  In this map of global tectonics, for instance, you can listen to the weird, rubbery snapping of plate boundaries. Dombois: "The sound of earthquakes at spreading zones differs much from earthquakes at subduction zones. Whereas earthquakes produced by plates that are drifting against each other appear as sharp and hard beats, an earthquake from a parting mid ocean ridge sounds more like a plop."  Meanwhile, Dombois also introduces us to the sonic seismicity of southern California, where the aftershocks of 1994's Northridge quake sound like loose bits of metal banging against the side of a speeding bus. Then we go to Japan, whose plentiful subterranean dislocations come out like snaps of a drum. Finally, of course, we confront distance (the graph, featuring Earth's surface, mantle, and core, that appears at the top of this post). Clicking on the seismic stations listed round that graph, you get short ambient works that weave together to form endless varieties of terrestrial drones. Click on more than one at the same time, and you can waste whole minutes of your life tuning faultlines and making dissonant chords of plates; the earth becomes your instrument. Dombois's exhibition of Auditory Seismology closes November 18th, at the galerie rachel haferkamp in Cologne. (Thanks, Alex! Earlier: Fault Whispers, Dolby Earth, resonator.bldg, Sound dunes, and, to some extent, Podcasting the sun).
 [Image: Resembling the birth, or perhaps death, of the universe under studio lights – or a black & white alternate ending to The Fountain – this is a sculpture by Michel Blazy from 5 Billion Years Later, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, photographed by booce. The image is best seen in its original size].
 Going on right now in a New York City near you is Payphone Warriors: "You and your teammates must dash across the blocks around Washington Square Park in a bid [to] control as many payphones as possible. You simply make a call from a payphone to the game system and enter your team number to capture a phone. For each minute your team controls that phone the team scores one point. Grab more phones for more points."  And if someone complains that they actually need to use that phone... you know what to do. (Brought to you by Abe Burmeister of Abstract Dynamics).
 [Image: The surface of the earth peeled away to reveal rock and fissures – a perfect excuse for one of my favorite quotations: "Look down well!" Jules Verne once wrote. "You must take a lesson in abysses." Image produced by R.C. McDowell, G.J. Grabowski, and S.L. Moore for the U.S. Geological Survey; this is Kentucky. An alternative map, by A.C. Noger, is no less topo-optically extraordinary]. (Earlier: BLDGBLOG's Topographic Map Circus – although most of the links in that post are now broken).
 [Image: Tativille; a scene from Playtime. As Jacques Tati later explained, "there were no stars in the film, or rather, the set was the star, at least at the beginning of the film. So I opted for the buildings, facades that were modern but of high quality because it’s not my business to criticise modern architecture" – it was only his job to film it].The idea that an abandoned film set could be archaeologically mistaken for a real city, ten, twenty, even a thousand years in the future, has popped up on BLDGLBOG before. However, it turns out that there's an equally interesting story to be found in Tativille, the instant city and film set built for Jacques Tati's now legendary Playtime. "Tativille came into existence," we read in this PDF, "on the 'Ile de France' on a huge stretch of waste ground [in Paris]": Conceived by Jacques Tati and designed by Eugene Roman, it was strictly a cinema town, born of the needs of the film: big blocks of dwellings, buildings of steel and glass, offices, tarmacked roads, carpark, airport and escalators. About 100 workers laboured ceaselessly for 5 months to construct this revolutionary studio with transparent partitions, which extended over 15,000 square metres. Each building was centrally heated by oil. Two electricity generators guaranteed the maintenance of artificial light on a permanent basis. During pre-production, "Tati visited many factories and airports throughout Europe before his cinematographer Jean Badal came to the conclusion that he needed to build his own skyscraper. Which is exactly what he did." In fact, he built Tativille: an entire city inhabited by no one but actors – who left after each day of filming. One estimate puts the total mass of built space and material at "11,700 square feet of glass, 38,700 square feet of plastic, 31,500 square feet of timber, and 486,000 square feet of concrete. Tativille had its own power plant and approach road, and building number one had its own working escalator." Those hoping to visit the set's cinematically Romantic remains are out of luck: "I would like to have seen it retained – for the sake of young filmmakers," Tati claimed, "but it was razed to the ground. Not a brick remains."  [Image: Tativille; from Playtime].Notes for future screenwriters (who credit BLDGBLOG): in the summer of 2009 a delightful Ph.D. candidate from Columbia University, studying architectural history and writing her thesis on the lost sets of mid-20th century French cinema, will fly to Paris for three months. There, she rents a flat near the Seine, sketches buildings in blue ink on cafe napkins, reads Manfredo Tafuri, then sets up her most important interviews – but all is not well. She has strange dreams at night; she thinks she's being followed; she has a mysterious run-in at the Musée D'Orsay; and she begins to suspect, upon deeper research, that Tativille wasn't destroyed after all... Till, one day, in a beautifully shot scene at the French National Library – all weird angles and reflective glass walls – our heroine discovers that a small note has been slipped into her jacket pocket. The note is actually a map, however, with directions addressed solely to her. For, outside the city, in an arson-plagued banlieue, an old cluster of import warehouses silently waits. She takes the train – and a small pocket-knife. Then, standing alone inside one of those warehouses, torch in hand, she finds – (Thanks, Nicky! Of earlier interest: City of the Pharaoh).
 A bunch of new Archinect t-shirts arrived this week. The three pictured above are my personal favorites – but check 'em out for yourself. Then buy ten thousand. Clothe an army with them. Wear one to bed. Run marathons in it. Wash cold. (Note: Title is a reference to this post).
 [Image: Emiliano Granado, Night 1].Two months ago, Ballardian interviewed J.G. Ballard – something previously linked and summarized here – but now, insanely, BLDGBLOG has the wildly flattering privilege of being interviewed itself – joining Ballard, Bruce Sterling, and Iain Sinclair, among others. Over the course of the interview, Simon Sellars and I talk about J.G. Ballard's novels, from Concrete Island to Super-Cannes, The Drowned World to Crash – not to mention High-Rise – and we get there via a look at corporate office parks, Richard Meier, science fiction, Le Corbusier, the Paris riots, Archigram, Norman Foster, Sigmund Freud, sexual deviance, Daniel Craig, gated communities, the Taliban, Victor Gruen, future flooded Londons in the era of nonlinear climate change, Steven Spielberg, sports-car dealerships, Margaret Thatcher's son, public surveillance, Rem Koolhaas...  [Image: Emiliano Granado, Environments 2].Etc. Read how speculative architectural treatises are actually "an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard." Discover how "the buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in." Learn how "perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up." Argue whether or not "the problem with architecture is that it’s still there in the morning; you can’t turn it off." While you're at it, gaze upon the fantastically Ballardian photography of Emiliano Granado, whose work both accompanies the interview and appears here.  [Image: Emiliano Granado, Environments 11].Then join commenter #1, at the end of the interview, in disagreeing already with what I have to say... And have fun. (Earlier, J.G. Ballard-inspired posts on BLDGBLOG: Concrete Island, Bunker Archaeology, 10 Mile Spiral, Silt, The Great Man-Made River, White men shining lights into the sky, Cities of Amorphous Carbonia – and so on).
 Thanks to a perceptive reader, the Statoil ads that originally inspired BLDGBLOG's Offshore post have been located. So here they are...     You're looking at offshore, utopo-stilted versions of Russia, Rome, New York, Baku, and the Sahara. Design enough of these and you could probably get an M.Arch. degree... All images by McCann. (Via elisabethsblog – with huge thanks to Joakim Skajaa. And don't miss Offshore).
 The Economist reports today that the SW London borough of Richmond "is taking radical steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions": In October its Liberal Democrat council announced a plan to price parking permits according to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by residents' vehicles. If the council passe[d] the proposal in a vote [that happened yesterday], the cost of an annual permit for cars in Band G – the worst polluters, such as SUVs, Renault Espaces and Jaguar X-Types – will triple to £300 ($568) from January 2007. Band A electric vehicles would be allowed to park for nothing; Band B cars, such as the hybrid Toyota Prius, would get a 50% reduction. Residents owning more than one vehicle would have to pay another 50% for each extra car. Thus a household with two Band G cars would see its annual parking bill rise from £200 to £750. The article is quick to add that "Richmond residents emit more carbon dioxide per head than any other Londoners." (Earlier: Drive Britannia).
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[Images: Sze Tsung Leong, 
