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 [Image: Screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].One of the funnier works of atmospheric installation art I've yet seen is the so-called Geostationary Banana Over Texas. The project is described as "an art intervention placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky."  [Image: Another screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].The banana, we read, "will float between the high atmosphere and Earth's low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings." It will be 300m long, framed with bamboo, and filled with helium. I'm 100% behind the idea.    [Images: More screen-grabs from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage; the last image is particularly brilliant].After all, the project's organizers remind us, "a banana appearing in the Texas sky might seem like a 'message'." Indeed. (With a huge thanks to Michael Pace for the link! See also MetaFilter or Neatorama for more ).
 [Image: Courtesy of NASA/ESA/MASSEY, via the BBC]."Astronomers have mapped the cosmic 'scaffold' of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled," the BBC reports. Producing the map "involved nearly 1,000 hours of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope." But it was time well-spent: the map now "confirms that galaxy clusters are located within clumps of this invisible material. These clumps are connected via bridges of dark matter called filaments. The clumps and filaments form a loose network – like a web." We are thus surrounded by structures of the invisible. In an interesting analogy, we read that "the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street lights." But now they have the actual physical layout of the streets – or something like that. Having said all this, let me admit to an outsider's sense that either 1) the astronomers are wrong: there is no dark matter; dark matter is just a calculational artifact of the current model used to represent universal space (and, thus, this map actually shows something else); or 2) they're right about all of it – except the use of the word matter, which is referentially misleading; it is not matter at all. (Earlier: See Filaments of space-time, where you can read about "huge arc-bubbles of light colliding with themselves in glowing, superskeletal networks, filling space like translucent caulk").
 [Image: Science Building, London, England, 2003, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].In two beautifully realized and conceptually fascinating projects, Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman creates "architectural utopias, fictional ruins from fictional worlds."  [Image: Archives, Leeds, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].Zimmerman's Landmarks of Industrial Britain, for instance, is "a photographic series of fictional public buildings derived from small scale architectural maquettes." As the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia explains, the series "envisages a worker's state in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution." Zimmerman himself writes that his work preys upon "the apparent willingness of the viewer to accept a fabricated past." In the process, the lost industrial utopia he's created – a false history convincingly rendered through the use of immense landscapes and architectural monumentalism – comes to look like a world designed entirely by Etienne-Louis Boullée.  [Image: Museum, Birmingham, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].Zimmerman's earlier series, Lost Hamilton Landmarks (referring to Hamilton, Ontario), apparently kicked off the artist's ongoing interest in "Greek and Roman [architectural] prototypes." This "neo-classical architectural language," Zimmerman writes, attains much of its aesthetic power by "appealing to state authority and to instinctual desires for permanence and stability, security, sense of place, or even to the desire for the guidance of a parent."  [Image: Mount Hamilton Sanatorium, 1995, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].Zimmerman thus uses the authoritative language of neo-classical architecture to help convince his audience that these buildings once actually existed – and that they now stand ruined somewhere, cavernous, sublime, and empty.   [Images: Mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetary, 1996, and Mount Hamilton Hospital, 1996, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].After all, these are not real buildings.  [Image: Public Baths, Manchester, England, 2000, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].Quoting the justifiably enthusiastic reviewer Meredith Dault at some length: [Carl Zimmerman] makes photographs of imagined architectural spaces. He builds models, photographs them, and then digitally manipulates the photographs, creating vast, impossible spaces. Sepia-toned and laid out flat on tables in the gallery space, the photographs read, at first glance, like historical documents – they feel very much like 19th century architectural engravings – until you realize they can’t be because they’re all dated in the present. A closer look reveals that the buildings are set in huge, almost surreal, bleak landscapes – their titles want you to believe, however, that these buildings are plunked down in ordinary cities like Manchester and Leeds. Zimmerman's show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia appears to be over – but if it is still up, I would strongly recommend stopping by. Zimmerman's models were on display alongside the photographs, and the exhibition sounds like it was well worth seeing. What seems particularly interesting, to me, is that Zimmerman achieves a sense of near-total ruin, but he does so not through the depiction of structural collapse – he simply shows us grandiosity and silence.  [Image: War Memorial, Leeds, England, 2004, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].If you're feeling well-heeled, meanwhile, consider buying yourself some full-size prints of these images; you can do so at the frankly named buynewart. You can also see more deeply colored versions of Zimmerman's work by visiting Toronto's Stephen Bulger Gallery. (Thanks, John Devlin! See also BLDGBLOG's earlier look at the work of Oliver Boberg and Thomas Demand).
 [Image: Her Majesty's Theatre, London; via Wikipedia]."British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber warns that the auction of a wireless spectrum in London could doom music theater in the city's West End," Marketplace reports. It's an unintended musical side-effect of high-priced aerial real estate, or London's property boom gone electromagnetic. "Britain's telecom regulator is to blame," Webber says. "The regulator is planning to auction off to the highest bidder the airwaves used by theatres and concert venues. A cell phone company with deep pockets is likely to win. The fees could then soar and the theatres could be priced out." In the future, perhaps actors can simply schedule a wireless conference call with their intended audience...
Princeton Architectural Press is still looking for the next installment in its Pamphlet Architecture series – which means they just might be looking for you.  "To promote and foster the development and circulation of architectural ideas," they write, " Pamphlet Architecture is again offering an opportunity for architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, and landscape architects to publish their designs, manifestos, ideas, theories, ruminations, hopes, and insights for the future of the designed and built world. With far-ranging topics including the alphabet, algorithms, machines, and music, each Pamphlet is unique to the individual or group that authors it." They want ideas that possess "rigor and excitement," with stimulating imagery and enthusiasm for the field. However, you only have 13 days left in which to make your ideas both coherent and presentable – and you have to register. And if you're unfamiliar with the series, and need some examples of small, concentrated doses of architectural speculation, then let me point out this particular pamphlet, of which I am a long-term fan – although I lost my copy a few years ago – and I wrote about Tooling back in July. If you still think you're at a loss for ideas, you can always find the outer edges of a potential pamphlet just about anywhere: the San Francisco Sewer System Master Plan Project, for instance; or the gradual but complete depopulation of Venice; the Earth without people; the tomb of Agamemnon; the brick-lined subterranean world behind Niagara; a proposal for the exact and to-scale geotechnical recreation of the Mississippi River's missing mountains; field results from your architectural experiments with Rogaine; some science-fictional extrapolations on London's CTRL Project, complete with site visits and interviews; or even some Herculean, hydro-architectural taming of the North Pacific Gyre (you build a swimming pool around it, designed by FAT, then charge admission). Etc. etc. – so get your brains firing, your fingers typing, and get published by Princeton. And if any readers of BLDGBLOG win this thing, let me know.
 [Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].On the front page of the LA Times today, greeting the new year, is a story about a man with a plan in Iowa: "Surrounded by cornfields that stretch to the horizon," we read, "in a place where molehills pass for mesas, avid outdoorsman Don Briggs has long dreamed of climbing a mountain. So he decided to build one."  [Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].He's not a geotechnical engineer, or some wildly charismatic salesman of earth-moving equipment; he's just a man with a water hose and access to a few corn silos. "Briggs spends most winter nights hosing down a quartet of grain silos on a friend's farm – and relies on the Corn Belt's frigid temperatures to transform the water into frozen walls of ice that tower nearly 70 feet straight up," the LA Times writes. "By the time he's done, the ice encasing the outside of the silos is 4 feet thick in spots – and ready for the onslaught of ice climbers drawn to this strange marriage of farming and extreme sports."  [Image: There would sometimes be "a heat wave," Don Briggs told the LA Times, "when the temperature got up to 40 degrees or warmer, and all the ice would fall off the silos and we'd have to start all over." Photo by Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].The transformation of architectural structures into geological objects is something worth pursuing; in a way, it reminds me of a fairly minor pet peeve of mine, which is that people like Colin Farrell, or Lindsay Lohan, come out to Hollywood or move to Manhattan, and they make tens of millions of dollars... and they buy liquor with it. Or crystal meth and expensive dresses. Or whatever it is that River Phoenix did. But when was the last time you heard about some hot young actor pocketing $20 million to star in a new Tony Scott film – then promptly disappearing into the plains of Iowa where he (or she) contracts out the multi-million dollar construction of a new mountain chain? Complete with manmade glacier? Rather than buy Escalades, diamonds, and a few bottles of Courvoisier, in other words, why not compulsively build whole transparent cities of plexiglass, uninhabited in the mountains of central Idaho? If you're going to get addicted to something, make your addiction interesting. Rather than donate all his money to Scientology, Tom Cruise funds the excavation of a spectacular series of show-caves, curling under the soil of Wisconsin. He sinks millions and millions of dollars into it, and dances on the couches of primetime news shows to sing the praises of subterranean topography. Which is nothing compared to Robert Downey Jr., who is now rumored to have addicted himself to producing large-scale earthworks, made of polished obsidian, in eastern Washington state... He takes jobs in Uwe Boll films just to buy more rock... (Thanks to N for the ice silo link!)
In the summer of 2005, a Swiss architecture firm called Instant designed an inflatable addition to the Berlin art space KW.  [Image: Courtesy of Instant].According to I.D.'s Michael Dumiak, the inflatable, "fiber-reinforced PVC foil" design served as "a temporary summer entrance to the museum's bamboo garden," complete with its own staircase and balcony. The "surprisingly strong, see-through structure," Dumiak explains, "consist[ed] of inflated stairs leading to an enclosure cantilevered over an 18th-century lane in the formerly communist east." It was an internal prosthesis for the building, in other words, a new interior that could be deflated and moved elsewhere.  [Image: Courtesy of Instant].To function properly, and to support the weight of museum visitors, the project used an inflatable variant on structural tensegrity, a concept first developed by sculptor Kenneth Snelson with the input of Buckminster Fuller. From I.D.: "By attaching two spiral tension cables beneath the weakest part of a strut, and connecting the parts to an air-inflated shell, [Instant's project engineer Mauro Pedretti] found he could use thin and light – even transparent – materials and still carry heavy loads. One inflatable demo structure supports a light truck."   [Image: Two renderings of the project, courtesy of Instant]."Unfortunately," we read, in Instant's own project recap, "the structure was rigid enough to withstand the loads but not its aggressive social urban context. As much as it was successful as a catalyst during the day, it was repeatedly vandalized during the night." You can see films of the structure, both real and rendered, on Instant's website (click on "Detail," then go to "ON_AIR"). When I first saw the project, however, flipping through back issues of I.D. last night, I initially misunderstood it as being an entire museum addition, of perhaps indefinite duration – alas, it was a temporary installation, now long gone. While thus deluded, though, I found myself imagining what might happen if you could design inflatable additions to suburban houses: your in-laws come to visit, or your weird and apparently unemployed uncle who doesn't really talk to anyone stops by, but there's literally no room for them inside the house. No worries: the smiling matron of this lucky household pops open some hinges on the back French doors and voilà: the house's central air-conditioning doubles as an air pump, and you all watch in pleased awe as a twin house, identical in all respects to the one you're now standing in, takes bloated shape in the lawn behind you. Even your uncle manages to say he's impressed. Whole suburbs of inflatable houses! So I imagined a new chapter for Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which our untrustworthy narrator is taken out into the gardens of the king – whose courtiers proceed to inflate an entire palace, over a half-dozen acres, full of flamingos and orchids, unrolling in the summer heat. A thousand rooms. Turrets and hallways. Somewhere in the midst of all that is the chamber you'll be staying in... Which reminded me of Tobias Hill's novel The Cryptographer, in which an ultra-rich Bill Gates-figure purchases literally an entire borough of London, walling it off and transforming it into a private homestead (an agonizingly brilliant set-up for a book, although the story itself falls flat) – at which point I thought: you could inflate an entire borough that has never otherwise existed, sprawling across the marshy floodplains of SE London. Call it Hackney 2, or Stoke Airington. It's one seamless piece of fiber-reinforced PVC foil. It looks like a huge plastic bag lying across the landscape – until the fans kick in. Two days later there's a whole new city, complete with streets and traffic lights built into the plastic. The lamps have shades, the windows shutters. It's a Gesamtkunstwerk so total it would make Mies van der Rohe panic. To pay the investors back, you hire it out as a film set and produce award-winning mobile phone commercials there. Or strangely elaborate pornos, using transparent sets, described as "artistically stunning."  [Image: Courtesy of Instant].Finally, I came back to Instant and their inflatable design for KW. What if it had been slimmer and less bulky, for instance, taking up less space inside the museum – and, in a way, more ambitious, with better funding? In other words, what if you could show up at KW with a bunch of air pumps and a different design, and – after clearing the building – you'd inflate a whole new interior, perfectly matched to the architectural plan, subdividing galleries, adding stairways and lofted office space? You come back a day later and twist a valve, blocking air from entering one room – and so another room unfolds somewhere deeper in the structure. Which, in turn, causes a corridor to inflate, leading onward to another room – where you have a choice: you can either open a valve and inflate the rest of the ground plan, or you can leave the valve closed, and thus a four-story tower of inflated rooms will gradually lift itself above the courtyard... Leading me to wonder if there's some Hindu myth, or an obscure Upanishad, in which a multi-lunged god of air parades his wizardry of inflated worlds to stunned worshippers – or if there was a Christian heresy, from medieval Spain, in which the breath of God, a holy spirit animating base flesh, became interpreted as God, Inflationist, Lord of Balloons. Had the heresy survived, a new breed of cathedrals would now dot the European landscape, supported by inflatable buttresses – inaugurating the Aero-Gothic. Aero-Romanesque. Aero-Baroque. (To see how easy some of this could really be, take a long stroll through we make money not art's inflatable projects archive).
Engineering News-Record has released its "Images of the Year" – and some of them are really fantastic.
 [Image: Merle Prosofsky, Edmonton, Canada; "Backlighting diffused by early-morning fog dramatizes the beginning of the five-hour erection of a 310-tonne vacuum distillation tower. The 37-meter-long, 8.5-m-diameter tower will extract oil for OPTI Nexen’s $3.6-billion Long Lake steam-assisted gravity drainage project from northern Alberta’s oil sands." Via ENR].
 [Image: Timothy J. Gattie, Boise, ID; "The $330-million Otay River Bridge in Chula Vista, Calif. rises into the morning mist. 'As the sun peeked through the fog, I couldn’t make out the bridge,' says Gattie, area engineer for Washington Group. 'So I put the sun behind the columns, and the picture came out.'" Via ENR].
 [Image: Leah C. Palmer; "The scaffolded 'village green' of the recently completed St. Coletta School charter school in Washington, D.C., felt like the belly of the beast to Palmer... Palmer, who studied architecture, is fascinated by the framework of buildings." Via ENR].
 [Image: Brian Fulcher, Walnut, CA; "A tunnel construction enthusiast, Fulcher took this shot of workers on the Gotthard Base Tunnel, Sedrun, Switzerland, a Bilfinger Berger-led joint venture. The crew is installing steel support ribs which, with the shotcrete applied to the tunnel’s forward wall, prevent collapse. This portion of the tunnel was bored through 'squeezing ground, which pushes in on the tunnel walls,' Fulcher says. 'It’s very dangerous work.'" Via ENR].
I've only uploaded four of my favorites; go to ENR for two dozen or so that I didn't choose. Many of the images are like photographic updates of Fernand Léger and his Constructors, including this bizarre sky bicycle, or these two guys with their roped bottles of water.
All rights belong to the photographers credited above.
I was thinking today about performance art pieces involving architecture, and I thought maybe someday there should be a man who travels around the world, visiting cities and jungles and deserts and islands – and it's all so he can take Flomax inside famous architectural structures.  [Image: A bunch of pills, via the European School of Oncology].It's the new art of pharmaco-architourism. Similarly, I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago about " gonzo" architectural journalism, and how most people seem to think that just means getting high before interviewing Rem Koolhaas, or taking hallucinogens, or a cannabinoid, etc., and then off you go on a plane to Dubai – but who's to say a building would be any less interesting if you experienced it all jacked up on prescription diuretics? Or high on Cialis, for that matter? Every church in Rome, visited in a libidinal haze – surely some interesting journalism would result? You could sign yourself "The Cialisian." Soon, you've got a monthly column in Vanity Fair. For Christmas, you receive a specially tailored set of loose trousers. Or you cover your head with a spot of Rogaine foam inside every building Mies van der Rohe ever designed – except, by the end of the piece, your hair is so long you're actually refused entrance to Berlin's National Gallery. Your book would be an instant, if controversial, bestseller. It would be called Mies van der Rogaine. Or you take heroic quantities of Prilosec in buildings built before 1500AD, and you pitch the resulting articles to Archinect. Pop some Adderall and plow through the High Gothic monuments of Europe, publishing your research in The New York Times. The next year it's Lipitor, or Effexor, or a whole rucksack full of Brovana inhalers, as you write about anything built by Le Corbusier. Because then, of course, there's Clozaril, for your upcoming feature on Gaudí...
 [Image: 10 Downing Street, from the new virtual tour].The BBC reports that London's 10 Downing Street "has opened its famous front door to the public after more than 270 years, with a virtual tour for web users. Visitors can look at rooms, find out historical information and click on objects such as paintings and furniture for extra details. Tony Blair told the BBC the tour was 'an excellent way of showing the tremendous history of this building'."  [Image: 10 Downing Street, from the new virtual tour].So I immediately thought of security risks: people casing the place to check for back doors, routes, cameras, blindspots. What to steal, whether it's alarmed, where the nearest windows are. While all of that has no doubt been considered by the tour's developers and their legion of security consultants, it would still be interesting to know how they did it, what specific steps were taken to deter possible burglars, terrorists, midnight visitors, and other unwanted guests. Were the truly expensive objects removed from display? Were surveillance cameras detached from the walls, and hidden? Or, more architecturally, were whole internal stretches of the building somehow faked: some extra wainscoting and temporary wallpaper, all mounted on movable plasterboard, so that we, the unsuspecting public, never realize that the Prime Minister's main study actually has two more doors... leading back to a series of rooms that aren't in the tour at all – but that pop out and around to a dark corridor connected to the kitchen, through another door that's been conveniently blocked with a refrigerator digitally added after the fact? Who would know? If it's not uncommon for some governments to issue fake maps, or at least maps with whole cities missing – military bases left as empty mountain ranges, and so on – who's to say a virtual tour of the ruler's actual home would be any different? From the BBC: "The tour's developer, Aral Balkan, said: 'I thought it was too interesting a project to pass up. Working on it has been very exciting and a great privilege. Downing Street is an extraordinary place and I hope to have captured a real sense of the history and importance that comes from going behind that door.'"
 [Image: Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica]."Imagine if plate tectonics stopped tomorrow," New Scientist suggests. A world without tectonics would be a world without earthquakes, the continents frozen in place, coastlines locked where they are. New mountains could never form, islands would stop emerging from the sea, and apartment insurance would be considerably cheaper. While the end of tectonics is "not likely to happen any time soon," the article reminds us, "a controversial new theory says it could [come to an end] in about 350 million years." In fact, global tectonic activity may have ceased once before – "around 1.6 to 1.1 billion years ago, as a supercontinent called Rodinia formed." At that point, "all plate tectonics could have ceased for 100 million years." This caused the earth's surface to thicken, forming "a large band of granites" that now "stretches across the northern hemisphere." But the internal roiling heat and liquid rock of the earth's core and mantle gradually intensified, growing strong enough to punch through the earth's rocky surface; this, kick-starting an era of volcanic eruption strong enough to break the continents apart, "would have got plate tectonics going again." The belts of the earth were soon turning; new mountains began to rise; island chains drifted, crashing into one another; coasts trembled from below as their guts turned to gravel. And it all may happen again: according to Paul Silver, of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, the doors of the earth may slam shut in 350 million years, locking closed – perhaps initiating another one-hunded million years of terrestrial calm.
 [Image: Steve Pike].I picked up a few books yesterday at Hennessey + Ingalls, including a collection of student work from Unit 20 of the increasingly exciting Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The book is edited by Marcos Cruz and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, and its projects date from 1999-2002. It's also amazingly interesting. I can't find any links to it online, however, so I'll just give you a random walk-through of the book's contents...   [Image: James Foster].There's James Foster's "Inhabitable Growthscape," a "series of incubators" which he constructed from vacuum-formed perspex and electronic circuitry; the system's larger architectural applications are pictured above: it's part boatyard, part aeroponic farm for the cultivation of "disease free cloned plants." There's then a ten-page spread by Kevin Chu illustrating the industrial use of "clustering robots." Chu describes a colony of "mining robots breeding on a lake in Helsinki," as well as a cluster of similar robots "forming a silicon mining factory in Tenerife." These are "small-scale insect-like robots which form a tactile and transformable surface," although "the overall form alters according to the relocation of individual entities." In other words, it's an Artificially Intelligent swarm of robots transforming the surface of the earth into a quarry... In fact, if I can interject something here, the book is a little preoccupied with insect shapes and machinery – to the point of looking like a deleted scene from Minority Report 2 – so I will say that architectural studios should be wary of turning themselves into machine-development classes; but that's a minor complaint, and a larger discussion.  [Image: Lisa Silver].We then turn to RIBA Award-winner Lisa Silver, whose architecture consists of "alien objects... fused, subverted and juxtaposed to form a unified whole." Specifically, Silver presents a space defined by "surfaces and meshes of varied transparency," made from roof suspension systems and ramps. The result is a bricolage of car chassis and old farm implements, assembled on the banks of the Mississippi River.  [Image: Lisa Silver].Tom Foster, then, proposes a "swarm of hyper crystallisation submersible robots" that will spend an entire winter underwater in the Gulf of Helsinki, "artificially enhancing the ice sheet from underneath." This – referred to as "ice periphery management" – is done in the service of an "ice suburb" that "will exist [out on the ice] for 5 months of each year." The ice sheet can be strengthened with "coolant filled reinforcement bars," and the ice suburb will generate its own energy "from high winter winds and sea/ice movements." So you've got an entire sci-fi trilogy, economically compressed into a few renderings and photo captions.  [Image: Annika Schollin].Returning to land, Annika Schollin writes about urban decay, abandoned buildings, and the formation of "micro-jungles within the urban structure." Concentrating specifically on London's Brick Lane, Schollin describes how the unmaintained city is soon "reeking of rot and humidity." Her project is a way of "[c]elebrating decay," she explains, "as the organic inhabitants of the site begin to take over, weaving through, ambivalently undermining and reinforcing the built structure." The actual architectural proposal appears to involve constructing a kind of permanent exoskeleton around the ruined markets of Brick Lane, complete with "water dispensing ducts" and a "hydro percolating roof." So – almost literally to repeat myself – architectural design becomes more and more like science fiction.  [Image: Annika Schollin].Other projects have a distinctly biological theme – including open bacteriological collaboration with the microbiology lab at University College London. Steve Pike, for instance, outlines an "algaetecture" of blown glass and high transparency acrylic. Inspired by the industrial manufacture of car windshields, these glass structures look simultaneously deformed, alchemic, and bio-anatomical.   [Images: Steve Pike's "vitreous occupational chambers" and "monitor vessel support infrastructure"].Pike explains how he built glass Interaction Vessels, Monitor Vessels, and Transformer Vessels, studying so-called algaetectural "parallels to human occupation." He has an essay later in the book about contamination, the London Underground, and "non-sterile environments," in which he proposes a catchment mechanism for airborne particles (the illustrations of which look like a scene from Alphaville). I could go on and on here. I just think the ideas are great (excuse the enthusiasm, if this isn't your thing). For instance, there's a project by Mark Mueckenheim called "London Urban Farming." Mueckhenheim points out that the decline of farmland throughout the EU will necessitate "bring[ing] farming into the urban fabric." He thus proposes a food processing plant "with a fish hatchery attached to its façade."  [Image: One of Mark Mueckenheim's urban farms; again, note the insectile nature of student work produced for this unit].The rest of the book confronts us with acoustic wind membranes; the city of Chicago as a kind of machine made out of retractable bridges; health clinics and sports research institutes; a hydroponic farm, by Stephen Clements, apparently modeled after the human nervous system; and even a Finnish fish farm, by Natalia Traverso Caruana, where "research labs and fish nets creat[e] a new luminous landscape" in the sea.   [Image: Natalia Traverso Caruana's cultural HQ for Texaco].Caruana's next project is a "cultural branch" for the headquarters of Texaco – it's magnificently colored and practically leaps off the page. There are strange photographic labs, and elevators that appear to analyze their passengers' DNA. There's even a plastic surgery lounge, or "Body Transformation" complex, proposed for Heathrow Airport, by Jia Lu (something tells me this will actually be constructed). Andy Shaw jumps in at the very end of the book with some robotic machine-space studies for "technical appliances based on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi." Etc. etc. etc. In other words, I like the book. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to exist anywhere online, so you'll just have to take my word for it – or you can visit the Bartlett's various Unit 20 homepages. Finally, my larger point in citing and describing so many of these projects is to demonstrate, in perhaps exhaustive detail, that some of today's most imaginative artistic, technological, and even literary work is being produced in architectural studios. Whether you like their projects or not, in other words, architecture students are out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-performing novelists, hands down. It is now architecture that lets us rethink the world anew.
Photographer Frank van der Salm beautifully captures architecture on the edge of surreality: uninhabited and lit from within, it's a world before its people arrive – or half a second after they've left.   [Images: ©Frank van der Salm. Sequence (2004) and Square (2006)].Van der Salm's work, according to critic Solange de Boer, "has been increasingly influenced since 1998 by other disciplines – ranging from the work of artists like Richard Long, Gerhard Richter and Andreas Gursky to the architecture of Renzo Piano." De Boer describes the "reality content" of these photos, and how that content "is undermined in various ways – by introducing movement in the image, by alternating focus and lack of focus, his use of color and the role played by light and artificial light."  [Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Link (2004)].However, as impressed as I am by Frank van der Salm's work – and I am – I have to say that most of the essays re-published on his website are almost unreadable. Art historians – and art critics, in general – are constantly moaning about there being some sort of crisis in whatever field it is they're writing about – say, a remarkably well-funded New York photographer loses interest in her chosen subject matter and so becomes glum and sarcastic at cocktail parties, which gets all her other New York photographer friends depressed about the state of the industry, and so Artforum reports a "crisis" in contemporary portraiture – but the "crisis," if it even exists (and it doesn't – what was all that about fear-mongering in politics...? fake emergencies announced to receive more funding...?), is that it's almost impossible to read about art anymore. He says, stoking the fires of fear. Instead, an outdated vocabulary with no analytic or practical use gets combined with a weirdly unnecessary check-list of theorists and their books; and, all the while, the general public awareness of art in the world becomes limited to Apocalypto. Which just means that someone at Yale will declare a "crisis in contemporary cinema," and they'll promptly be awarded a Mellon Fellowship. Thus armed, they spend a whole year outlining their new Horkheimerian approach to cultural discourse theory – which is a field they appear to have invented. Only then to declare a crisis in it.  [Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Quarter (2002)].In any case, while you're on van der Salm's website, reading about the "crisis in landscape" – which was experienced by approximately three people, I believe – click on "Artist," then click on "Text," then click on "Kopsa." You'll soon read that there's "a kind of unspecified specificity" to Frank van der Salm's photographs. Indeed, van der Salm's imagery "relieves the specific" – which only "heightens the impact of the unspecified, the 'artificial', if you will." Van der Salm "shows the specific and the unspecified at the same time, creating from the specific real a (new) unspecified, average." Apparently, Rosalind Krauss can even prove this. Having said that, however, Frank van der Salm's images are not "average in the dull sense of the word" – not at all: "they are just the opposite." And if you're feeling confused while looking at these images, that is because "we see, recognize and understand" what they depict, but we "cannot accept" them. It even seems "as though we are being alienated by the sheer 'logic', by the sheer 'neutrality' of these banal images while our mind incessantly runs around in circles, wrapping itself up in the (to it) irrational equation specific + unspecific = artificial." I see.  [Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Loop (2005)].(Frank van der Salm's work first spotted at Conscientious).
 [Image: From At This Rate, by Giles Revell and Matt Wiley].Logging roads in tropical rainforests expose whole landscapes to disease, fire, drought, longterm human settlement, and uncontrolled future deforestation. "Every second we lose an area the size of a football pitch," Giles Revell and Matt Wiley write, describing the ecological motivation behind their new photographic series, At This Rate. "Every day we lose an area larger than all five boroughs of New York City... Every year we lose an area three times the size of Sri Lanka."  [Image: From At This Rate, by Giles Revell and Matt Wiley].Revell and Wiley produced At This Rate for a publication by the Rainforest Action Network; the project is "aimed at increasing awareness of the rapid destruction of our rainforests. If this destruction continues, half our remaining rainforests will be gone by 2025 and by 2060 there will be absolutely nothing left."    [Images: From At This Rate, by Giles Revell and Matt Wiley].However, what at first appear to be satellite images of obliterated rainforests are actually lone photographs of disintegrating leaves. These "resemble maps of cities, emphasising the rate of deforestation," fellow architecture blogger Kosmograd writes. (Originally spotted at Kosmograd).
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