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 [Image: The Tau Tona mine; courtesy of AngloGold].The gold mines of Johannesburg, South Africa, Herald Scotland reports, "are veritable underground cities, with tunnels winding for hundreds of miles more than two miles below the surface of the Earth." To counter temperatures often higher than 40ºC, mine operators "continuously pump down refrigerated air into the subterranean cities where miners and other workers wear special jackets packed with ice to counter temperatures so high that the rock itself is hot to the touch." Indeed, at the Tau Tona mine outside Jo'burg – "the deepest and biggest [mine] in the world with more than 500 miles of tunnels" – "miners will be working in temperatures as high as 50ºC, requiring cooling systems of enormous power and sophistication with capacities more [than] three million times that of a domestic refrigerator." These "capacities" include the production of at least "20,000 tonnes of ice a day, which is crushed and pumped along pipes that run down through the mine tunnels and galleries. As the iced water warms up it is pumped back to the surface to be re-frozen." Rig several dozen of these up to a small nuclear power plant, and you could gradually make your way to the center of the earth... That, or construct an artificial glacier outside Cape Town. Glaciers are the future of architectural design.  [Image: (left) Workers in a South African gold mine; via Voice of America; (right) "Miners cutting an exploratory tunnel in the Crown goldmine. Johannesburg, South Africa, c. 1935." (Via) ].In any case, the most fascinating aspect of this whole story for me is that, down in the "disused shafts and tunnels" beneath the city of Johannesburg, whole illegal communities have been found. Mineral smugglers – or those who would carry pieces of the earth's surface across political borders – "live for up to a year at a time below ground without surfacing, mining illicit gold estimated to be worth nearly £400 million a year for three international criminal syndicates." Quoting at great length: The unlawful miners 'hijack' closed-off sections of legitimate mines, plunder them and provide the syndicates with tonnes of gold to smuggle abroad. Armed with handmade grenades to fend off intruders, they face death by suffocation and even insanity [!] in the appallingly nightmarish conditions in which they live.
'There is no fresh air, it can be as hot as 38ºC, everything is very compressed and the humidity is very high,' said police explosives expert, superintendent Joe Meiring. 'They work there, they sleep there, they eat there. It is hot and dark, and they age very quickly. They even smoke down there, which is very dangerous because of the methane gas present in mines which can explode as a result of the slightest spark.'
Meiring was one of the commanders of a 20-strong police team, which had undergone months of special training, that last week invaded one of the illegal tunnel complexes and arrested 60 rogue gold-diggers. All of them were black, all of them typically desperate to do anything to earn a living in an economy where unemployment runs at more than 40%, where social welfare benefits are meagre, and where the gap between the fabulously wealthy – both black and white – and the overwhelming majority of the desperately poor is as stark as it is shocking.
Unable to drive out their neighbouring 'slum dweller' panhandlers, who use AK-47 assault rifles and beer bottle 'grenades' stuffed with explosives and iron waste shrapnel as deterrents, the mine companies turned to the police to begin tackling the problem. And therein lies a novel (or two). (Thanks, Bryan!)
 [Images: The book and one of its authors, Simon Sellars].Simon Sellars runs Ballardian from his home in Melbourne, Australia. Our shared interest in J.G. Ballard led to Simon's interviewing me this past summer about architecture, urban space, psychopathology, international airport departure lounges, and Ballard's novels. In the process, however, our conversation came to include a great many things not included in the final interview; and one of those things was Simon's recent work as co-author, with John Ryan and George Dunford, of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations. BLDGBLOG and Leah Beeferman had only just announced their own micronation – The Helicopter Archipelago – and so a new interview began to take shape. The tables were turned. I was asking the questions. The results appear below. • • •BLDGBLOG: How did the book come about? Did you pitch it to Lonely Planet, or did they come looking for you?Simon Sellars: The book is the brainchild of John Ryan, who invited George Dunford and myself to co-author it. When I worked in-house at Lonely Planet as an editor, I overheard John talking about a pitch he was about to present to the bosses – regarding a book about micronations. When I later heard that the proposal had been given the green light, I pestered the poor bastard for about six months until he let me work on it. I began by hammering John with heavy emails about the political significance of micronations until he finally said, "Simon, we want it to be funny." Fortunately, there are a lot of laughs in the micronational world, so it was no problem toning down the revolutionary rhetoric. BLDGBLOG: What’s the origin of your own interest in micronations?Sellars: It comes from reading science fiction as a kid and getting right into the concept of parallel worlds and alternative universes. Anything that distorts or reflects or comments on the "real" world – or sets up an alternative world – sends me into an orgy of navel gazing. This can extend to even the most everyday scenarios. To give you an example: I'm not a huge sports fan, but I'm fascinated by the fact that American football sprang from rugby union. Actually, American football is a distortion, a twisted mirror image of rugby – amplified, stretched and extrapolated to degrees never thought possible by stuffy British types – in everything from the rules to the tactics to the uniforms. For similar reasons, although I've never been there, Canada fascinates me – as a parallel USA. BLDGBLOG: Which country would be the distortion in that case?Sellars: That's tricky. A lot of what I know about Canada has been learnt from South Park and David Cronenberg films. Cronenberg presents it as a parallel universe, recognisably North American, but cool, detached, ironic – America on sedatives. Whereas South Park paints it as crass, loud and derivative. And Canada did host the World Rock Paper Scissors Championship, a truly lame sporting competition worthy of any micronation. So, let's vote for Canada as the distortion. But I also remember reading a recent poll that claimed 38% of Americans wanted the US to annex Canada, and then reading an article that said British Canadians – aside from the more well-known Quebec separatists – wanted to secede from Canada. The US wants to go macro, Canada wants to go micro – polar opposites, then?  [Image: Canada].BLDGBLOG: Have you ever declared your own micronation?Sellars: Yes. I grew up in the suburb of Bentleigh, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an exceedingly boring place, like a retirement village – it seemed like I was the only teenager around at times. So I founded the Independent Republic of Bentleigh, declared myself President, and claimed the whole of Bentleigh as territory. Our national anthem was "We Can't Be Beaten," a song by the toughest band in the land, Rose Tattoo. BLDGBLOG: What happened to it?Sellars: We were beaten – the IRB was invaded by Poland. The Polish kid next door already hated me, but when he saw me poncing up and down the back yard draped in my IRB flag, he was enraged even more than usual. He jumped over the fence, punched me in the mouth and stole my lunch money – and that was all the IRB's assets gone, just like that. He also stepped on my toy tanks and melted my plastic soldiers with a cigarette lighter, which meant the IRB had no defence force, and that was the end of it, really. My mother banned me from starting up a micronation ever again, unless I could back it up with sufficient armoury and investment capital, which of course I never could, being a very lazy kid. BLDGBLOG: Are you still plotting revenge…?Sellars: No, no – it's fine. He was stronger, smarter, more committed and far more organised than me. It's a good lesson for any start-up nation: you will be at the mercy of predators, so you'd best bulk up.  [Images: The Republic of Kugelmugel (top); former President of the Republic of Saugeais, Gabrielle Pourchet, stands on her well-guarded border (bottom-left); and a postage mark from Akhzivland (bottom-right)].BLDGBLOG: Returning to the book, I’m curious if you found the travel guide format a bit limiting. Was there more to say beyond climate, history, population, and so on; or was the format actually a liberating way to organize your research?Sellars: It was liberating. You could write a heavy political treatise on the significance of micronations, but who would read it? Lonely Planet certainly wouldn't publish it. Our mantra was always to focus on places that travellers could actually visit – that is, micronations with actual land, rather than cybernations, or micronations on the moon – so the guidebook format seemed ideal. These places set themselves up as real countries, for the most part, and a good proportion of them take their statehood very seriously, so it was an interesting exercise to outline their "visa requirements" and their laws and regulations as a way of testing the validity of their claims. Take the Empire of Atlantium: it's described in the book as a "secular humanist utopia" that advocates a single world government, abortion rights and legalized euthanasia. By according the Empire the same weight (and the same text headings) as, say, the Netherlands in Lonely Planet's Western Europe guidebook, we can determine whether it really is, as Atlantium's Emperor Georgius claims, "a unique type of transitional progressive political and social group entity that maintains the forms and structures of a sovereign state as a means of giving concrete form to its general ideology, and as a way of wrapping up a diverse range of messages in a form that is easily understood and digested." So, does it have population of more than one? Yes. A currency? Yes. A citizenship program? Yes. A constitution? Yes. A postal agency? Yes. A flag? Yes. A pompous official portrait of the head of state? Yes. Has it been at war? Yes. Can you visit it? Yes. Does it have an eclectic socially tolerant agenda? Yes. Then it certainly does "maintain the forms and structures of a sovereign state in order to present a diverse range of messages" – much like the Netherlands, for that matter. We just aimed for the facts, and figured the rest would follow – we'll leave the grey areas for Wikipedia's sandbox.  [Images: Kevin Baugh, President of the Republic of Molossia (top-left); King Adam from the Sovereign Kingdom of Kemetia, shaking hands with his Minister of Security, Samuel Simpson-Crew (bottom-left); and King Nicholas, Chav Slayer, of the Copeman Empire (right)].BLDGBLOG: It seems many of the kings, queens, prime ministers, etc., featured in the book are actually teenage boys, or eccentric older men, many of whom have goatees.Sellars: Yes. It does appear to be an especially male enterprise, starting up your own micronation. It's like piecing together a model train set, I think – that common little-boy fantasy of building, managing and controlling every single aspect of a miniature world. But then again, little girls have dollhouses and tea sets, and that's a virtual world as well, with its own rules for social interaction. BLDGBLOG: John's introduction suggests that many of these micronations have been run as "enormous, time-consuming, intricate jokes." However, I'm curious what the book might have been like if you had included the "separatist cults," white supremacists, and "lunatic fringe" that you chose to exclude. Did you ever want to write-up these other, less humorous micronations – multinational private security firms, corporate tax havens, seaborne pirate states off Somalia – or would that have made the book too political?Sellars: Ah yes, the good old lunatic fringe. Quite often these types of micronations are not very well documented, and – at least the ones we came across – were riddled with incoherent policy and ill-thought out constitutions, with zero recognition from either the real world or the micronational world. I'm guessing that if a white-supremacist micronation came along that was intelligently modelled – and I'm talking geographically, of course – and that had interactions with other micronations, even if it was to invade them – plus some kind of tangible effect in the real world, such as being invaded by a real nation – then we might consider including it. It's not enough to declare yourself a nation – you have to interact in some way, preferably for the benefit of others, or at least in a libertarian manner. As it is, the micronations we've included have had some kind of independently verified interaction with a third party. Prime examples include Sealand, which was engaged in a diplomatic crisis with Germany after surviving an attempted coup, which successfully fended off the UK's claims on its territory, and which now has national mini-golf, football and slot-car teams that compete in international competition; the Republic of Molossia, which is a world leader in micronational affairs, having inaugurated the Intermicronational Olympic Movement and hosted the first Intermicronational Olympic Games; and the Hutt River Province, which seceded from Australia after a dispute over wheat quotas, and now exports wildflowers, agricultural produce, stamps and coins, and continues to have low levels of interaction with the Australian government. In the end, the mock-guidebook format sealed the selection criteria. On one level you could argue that the Waco compound was a micronation, although as far as I can tell they didn't print stamps, or formally elect a head of state, or draw up a constitution. I'm certainly interested in exploring the parameters outlined in your question, but that would have required a very different methodology. Edwin Strauss has covered it to some extent, in his book How to Start Your Own Country, which takes a pre-9/11 approach to micronationalism, including advocating the deployment of "basement nukes" to get your own way. The bottom line is that this is a dangerous area for a travel publisher to get into – and we are not white supremacists, cultists, or terrorists, so it would be a particularly bitter pill to swallow just for the sake of being inclusive.  [Images: Emperor Georgius II of the Empire of Atlantium (top-left); citizens of the Kingdom of Elleore (bottom-left); and King Leo III of Elleore (right)].BLDGBLOG: What kind of future do you see for the micronational model? Tourist gag or the next phase of political sovereignty?Sellars: Surely gated suburbs, housing only the filthy rich, are the future of micronationalism. Gated communities have their own security forces, their own infrastructure... it must be only a matter of time before the most powerful and self-contained of them secede. Going by this model, Johannesburg – by all accounts – will be composed of nothing but micronations. BLDGBLOG: Any plans for a Micronations 2 ?Sellars: The book is apparently selling quite well, so we'll keep our fingers crossed. I hope there'll be a sequel, for John's sake – he showed a lot of vision to get this happening, or to at least pitch the idea well before the recent television interest in micronations and some time before the current fad for fake guidebooks. This recent media attention has only validated that vision. Actually, I hope the book inspires more people to form their own micronations, so that we have no choice but to write a follow up – I think the urge is strong, if the popularity of Max Barry's Nation States site is any indication. BLDGBLOG: Finally, how does this work intersect with your interest in J.G. Ballard?Sellars: Ballard highlights the social Darwinism that occurs when communities are completely mediated by technology – whether it's the motorway feeder roads in Crash, the business park in Super-Cannes, the patch of underpass in Concrete Island, the urban war zones in High-Rise. All of these settings are implicitly micronational – and explicitly in Ballard's latest book, Kingdom Come, in which a shopping centre is overrun by consumers, sealed off by paramilitary goons, and declared an independent republic. Ballard's protagonists are forever setting up psychopathological thought labs, where people are free to test the limits of their perversions within controlled conditions, with the outside world fading into a background blur. Quite often their actions are gross inversions of real-world scenarios, and by stepping into this surrealistic inverse ratio, we are really seeing ourselves – and the world around us – reflected back at us. That's the classic gambit of science fiction, and Ballard's trick is to situate it in the present day, rather than the future. So, your typical Ballardian scenario is not a million miles away from Molossia, which has formulated its very own space program, consisting of the Rufus T. Firefly Memorial National Observatory (a single home telescope) and a probe launch – the "Hypérion Balloon Flight and Aerial Survey" – designed to photograph the nation from the upper atmosphere. Sadly, the probe, a camera attached to 40 balloons, was destroyed during take off, when it got stuck in a tree. Later, their home-made rocket, Astrocam, took just one blurry aerial photo that didn't reveal anything at all. Sounds a lot like the US space program to me... • • •The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations was written by John Ryan, George Dunford, and Simon Sellars. For a bit more about the book, check out this conversation between John Ryan and Alex Chadwick of NPR, originally broadcast on the morning of November 1st. For even more info, take a look at this interview, involving all three of the book's authors. Meanwhile, to win a free copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, enter BLDGBLOG's Invent-a-Micronation contest before December 8th...
 BLDGBLOG readers, now is your chance to shine: using 100 words or less, tell us what kind of micronation you would found – and where. Would it be an agricultural utopia, ruled by lottery, prone to war? Or a tropical island paradise, funded by bonds in coconut futures? Perhaps a polysexual fantasy on a hovercraft, roaring nonstop across the oceans of the world? Or a quiet Arctic refuge? A little mountain town somewhere, full of friends and wine? Winners – decided by yours truly, with some friendly advice from my colleagues, all of us reacting instinctively, without strict criteria – will receive a free copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, by John Ryan, George Dunford, and Simon Sellars. And, yes, you can draw, you can paint, you can do whatever you might need to do visually, but submit it all to me by email no later than Friday, December 15th, 2006. And put "Invent-a-Micronation Contest" in the subject line, or your little baby might get junk-mailed. If you need quick tips, examples, criteria, etc., see BLDGBLOG's brand new interview with Simon Sellars, one of the Lonely Planet book's co-authors – or take a look at Wikipedia's entry on micronations. And, why not: you can submit more than once. In fact, please do.
 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).
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[Images: Sze Tsung Leong, 
