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According to a short article in The Berlin Paper, "legendary" Berlin nightclub Tresor is set to reopen "in an old steam-heat generating plant" on Köpenicker Straße.  [Image: Tresor's new home; photo by Thilo Rückeis for Der Tagesspiegel, via The Berlin Paper].Tresor's original founder, Dimitri Hegemann, "wants to promote electronic music and electronic art" in the new space. Indeed, Hegemann "envisions hosting pieces similar in style to Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at the Tate Modern." The new location "boasts four levels, 20,000 square meters of space (215,278 square feet), and 30 meter ceilings (98 feet). It lends itself to the kind of third art space between the Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof that many in Berlin, including mayor Klaus Wowereit, have been calling for." A quick note on the original Tresor: it opened in 1991 in the vault of the old Wertheim department store, near Potsdamer Platz, on what would have been the east side of the Wall. There was an upstairs space, called Globus, for house music, and this insane basement – the actual Tresor – where low ceilings, hundreds of people, ridiculously loud music, and smoke so thick you sometimes couldn't see your own hand in front of your face made it feel like some sort of serial killer UFO-dungeon loose beneath the streets of the city.   [Images: The staircase down, and the dancefloor it led to; photos courtesy of Tresor].As Tresor's own website describes it: "the club’s rough, apocalyptic atmosphere ruled above all: condensation dripped down the raw concrete walls of the old vault rooms; rusty steel bars separated visitors from the bar; several hundred forced-opened safe-deposit boxes lined the walls that spoke of wealth long forgotten; strobe lights and fast, hard beats dominated the dance floor. Only here could electronic music correspond with such architecture – the senses were left equally numbed and brutalised." And I was there almost every Wednesday and Friday night for two summers in a row. Going deaf. Meanwhile, the new space could be open to the public as early as March 16th, 2007. Anyone want to fly me to Berlin...?  [Image: Humans beneath the surface of the earth, listening to music; photo courtesy of Tresor].(News spotted via Artkrush. Note: you can listen to old sets from Tresor via this link).
A few months after September 11th, the New York Times published a kind of geological look at the War on Terror. In a short but amazingly interesting – albeit subscriber-only – article, the NYTimes explored how ancient landscape processes and tectonic events had formed the interconnected mountain caves in which Osama bin Laden was, at that time, hiding.  [Image: The topography of Afghanistan, a sign of deeper tectonics. In a cave somewhere amidst those fractal canyons sat Osama bin Laden, in the darkness, rubbing his grenades, complaining about women, Jews, and homosexuals...]."The area that is now Afghanistan started to take shape hundreds of millions of years ago," the article explains, "when gigantic rocks, propelled by the immense geological forces that continuously rearrange the earth's landforms, slammed into the landmass that is now Asia." From here, rocks "deep inside the earth" were "heated to thousands of degrees and crushed under tremendous pressures"; this caused them to "flow like taffy." And I love this next sentence: "Just like the air masses in thunderstorms, the warmer rocks rise and the cooler ones sink, setting up Ferris wheel-shaped circulations of magma that drag along the crust above them. Over time, these forces broke off several pieces off the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland – the ancient conglomeration of South America and Africa – and carried them north toward Asia." Of course, Afghanistan – like most ( but not all) of the earth's surface – was once entirely underwater. There, beneath the warm waves of the Tethys Seaway, over millions of year, aquatic organisms "were compressed into limestone." Limestone, incidentally, is less a rock than a kind of strange anatomical by-product – something the living can become. In any case, these massive and shuddering tectonic mutations continued: Minerals from the ocean floor, melted by the heat of the interior, then flowed back up near the surface, forming rich deposits of copper and iron (minerals that could someday finance an economic boom in Afghanistan). The limestone along the coasts of Asia and India buckled upward, like two cars in a head-on collision. Water then ate away at the limestone to form the caves. Though arid today, Afghanistan was once warm and wet. Carbon dioxide from decaying plants dissolves into water to form carbonic acid, and in water-saturated underground areas, the acid hollowed out the limestone to form the caves, some several miles long. The story gets really interesting here, then; think of it as the CIA-meets-geology.  [Image: Via the Telegraph].What happened was that Osama bin Laden, in hiding after 9/11, started releasing his famous videotapes – but those tapes included glimpses of cave walls and rocky hillsides behind him. When John F. Shroder – a geologist specializing in the structure of Himalayan Afghanistan – saw the tapes, he tried to interpret their setting and background, looking for mineralogical clues as to where bin Laden might be. Like a scene from The Conversation – or, hermeneutics gone geo-cinematic – Shroder pored over the tapes, fast-forwarding and rewinding, scanning for subtle signs... It was the surface of the earth on TiVo. "Afghanistan's fighters find shelter in the natural caves," the New York Times continues. "They also make their own, often in the mountains of crystalline rock made of minerals like quartz and feldspar, the pieces of Afghanistan that were carried in by plate tectonics. 'This kind of rock is extremely resistant,' Dr. Shroder said. 'It's a good place to build bunkers, and bin Laden knows that.' Dr. Shroder said he believed that Mr. bin Laden's video in October was taken in a region with crystalline rocks like those south of Jalalabad." All of which makes me think that soldiers heading off to Afghanistan could do worse than to carry bulletproof copies of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth along with them. As another New York Times article puts it: "Afghanistan is a virtual ant farm of thousands of caves, countless miles of tunnels, deeply dug-in bases and heavily fortified bunkers. They are the product of a confluence of ancient history, climate, geology, Mr. bin Laden's own engineering background – and, 15 years back, a hefty dose of American money from the Central Intelligence Agency." Bin Laden et al could thus "take their most secret and dangerous operations to earth," hidden beneath the veil of geology. (Elsewhere: Bryan Finoki takes a tour of borders, tunnels, and other Orwellian wormholes; see also BLDGBLOG's look at Terrestrial weaponization).
 For some reason, BLDGBLOG's recent look at architectural partitioning reminded me of something from The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. At one point, Sebald is describing the slow collapse of large manor houses as they fail to survive years of inadequate maintenance: Keeping up the houses even in the most rudimentary way had long been impossible. The paintwork was flaking off the window encasements and the doors; the curtains became threadbare; the wallpaper peeled off the walls; the upholstery was worn out; it was raining in everywhere, and people put out tin tubs, bowls and pots to catch the water. Soon they were obliged to abandon the rooms on the upper storeys, or even whole wings, and retreat to more or less usable quarters on the ground floor. The window panes in the locked-up rooms misted over with cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore the spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotten within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. Every so often, usually after a long period of rain or extended droughts or indeed after any change in the weather, a sudden, disastrous collapse would occur in the midst of the encroaching decay that went almost unnoticed, and had assumed the character of normality. Just as people supposed they could hold a particular line, some dramatic and unanticipated deterioration would compel them to evacuate further areas, till they really had no way out and found themselves forced to the last post, prisoners in their own homes. (More Sebald: The birds and Bunker Archaeology).
This happens all the time to other blogs, who are constantly popping up in things like BusinessWeek and Metropolis and Dwell – and so it's more or less a kind of meaningless chest-thumping to point this out – but I was quite excited to see that BLDGBLOG (under its nom de guerre of BLDG) was listed in this Saturday's copy of The Guardian –  – along with design*sponge and The Cool Hunter... Anyway, blah blah blah. I was just excited to see that. Sorry. (Thanks to John Coulthart for the tip!)
In New York, the BBC tells us, "Chana and Simon Taub, both 57, have endured two years of divorce negotiations, but neither is prepared to give up their Brooklyn home. Now a white partition wall has been built through the heart of the house to keep the pair apart." Incredibly, a New York City judge actually "ordered that the partition wall be built."  [Image: "A white drywall partition, in background at left, separates Simon Taub from Chana Taub in their Brooklyn home." Via MSNBC].I'm reminded of a few things, architecturally, including the Berlin Wall, the Israeli Wall, and House VI by Peter Eisenman. House VI, for instance, came complete with " a linear notch in the bedroom floor that prevented the [homeowners] from sleeping in the same bed." Eisenman's design, then, was a triumph of "antagonistic space planning" that put architecture itself front and center in the story of a marriage. In any case, the Taubs' new marital wall "divides the ground floor of the house, and keeps husband and wife penned into separate sections on different floors. One door linking the rival sections of the house is barricaded shut to prevent any accidental contact between the pair." Perhaps there's even a business model to be found in this story somewhere: you graduate from Princeton into a stagnant economy, unable to find work at any architecture firms... So you start your own company, called Partition, and you specialize in home renovations for broken families: you add security walls and panic rooms; you seal entire wings off and install surveillance cameras above certain doorways; you add spy holes and thin layers of lead to block cellphone communication. You redirect the plumbing. Finding great success in this line of work, you decide to produce a new series of reality TV shows in which perfectly healthy, loving families move into such structures, in a fake suburb erected somewhere in Glendale. You and the rest of the world then watch as each family descends into a state of catatonic rage and emotional abandonment, the spouses sexually blackmailing one another. Peter Eisenman soon offers you a job...
 [Image: A Mighty City Constructed On A Series Of Variably-Sized Hilly Islands Linked By Bridges by Leah Beeferman].Brooklyn-based artist Leah Beeferman, whose map of the Gowanus Canal appeared here in 2005 and who collaborated with BLDGBLOG on the Helicopter Archipelago, has a new project out, this time published in the full-color pages of this month's Blueprint. Called A Mighty City Constructed On A Series Of Variably-Sized Hilly Islands Linked By Bridges, the project is a kind of cartographic guide, or urban emblem, for a utopian city. It supplies working definitions of key terrain (a Bridge, a Hill, a Tunnel, an Island) and describes specifically numbered structures. "A bridge," for instance, according to Leah's definition, "is a structure built to connect two previously distinct areas or coasts. In most cases, it creates a route of passage that would otherwise be impossible or difficult. Bridges are often named after what they cross."  [Image: Excerpt from A Mighty City by Leah Beeferman].All of Leah's projects being worth paying close attention to, we then see that one of those bridges has actually been constructed "from a collection of the longest and tallest buildings in the world" – their spans and fragments stitched together to form a brand new structure. There is also a bridge "made out of a building," and a bridge "made from a collection of small hills." Further afield – and into the atmosphere – we find a strange hovering enginery above the skyline: "Flying machines for higher-up views of the city," we read, "provide an excellent view of the islands." There are even "propeller-powered balconies, for long-term viewing of the surrounding landscape – from the comfort of home!" Leah's Mighty City is apparently just one installment in Blueprint's ongoing look at imaginary cities or paper utopias, as it were; keep your eyes peeled for the rest – but don't forget to visit Leah Beeferman's website for more cool projects, including her amazing Step-by-Step Process of Building a Landscape of Freshly Fallen Hills into an Industrious Winged City.
 [Image: Via Blogger News Network].The BBC reports today on China's so-called cancer villages. In Shangba, for instance, a "river runs to the side of the village, its shallow waters rippling over smooth stones. In the past," the BBC writes, Shangba's "villagers relied on the river for drinking water, and to irrigate their crops. What they did not know was that mines further upstream were dumping their waste into it." Run-off from the mines has now built up as "a thick red residue at the water's edge" – yet a suitable source for clean water has not been found. China's problems with cancer are obviously not limited to Shangba. "This is a situation repeated across China," the BBC continues. "Some 320 million people drink polluted water every day." The Telegraph calls these polluted sources China's cancer rivers. Last year, Common Dreams pointed out that the exact connection between pollution, drinking water, air quality, and China's rising cancer rate is actually harder to make than you'd think. For instance, "lack of evidence remains a problem as local government officials pressure doctors into staying silent over the link between pollution and the high cancer rate." Meanwhile, air pollution in China is so bad that the country has generated " toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California laden with microscopic particles of chemicals that cause cancer and diseases of the heart and lung." Thanks, China!  [Image: Via Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages].Parts of China now see "darkness at noon": Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the population, many of whom are heavy cigarette smokers, are paying the price for China's breakneck rush to riches and industrialisation – an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year. All of which continues to point toward the militarization of China's natural resources, wherein once wild rivers will be replaced with bottled water trucked in from afar – an artificialization of the riverine world explored last year on BLDGBLOG as "hydrology under military escort."
 Lawrence Weschler's Convergence of Convergences Contest over at McSweeney's revisits the above photo of a clear-cut forest in Sweden – where the void left behind by logging has visually reproduced the very thing that void destroyed. The return of the repressed, indeed... (Image of Swedish forest originally submitted to McSweeney's by Walter Murch).
Back in August, New Scientist reported that the landscape of Mars might be sterile due to the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The planet is bleaching itself, in other words, on a near-continual basis.  [Image: Via New Scientist].Specifically, we read, "large amounts of hydrogen peroxide could be produced on Mars as a result of wind-blown dust grains rubbing together." Because of these interactions – and the resultant electrochemical effects – hydrogen peroxide, "a harsh chemical used as a disinfectant on Earth may rain down on the surface" of the planet. "This process is similar to the way snow forms from water vapour in Earth's atmosphere, " we read. "However, the hydrogen peroxide falling on Mars would be in the form of microscopic grains." I find this image – the chemical snow of alien planets – quite striking. Meanwhile, similar electrochemical conditions have been found in Chile's Atacama Desert, where "photochemistry triggered by the region's harsh sunlight plays an important role in creating these electric fields" – electric fields, generated in the region's dusty soil, that produce trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide.
The New York Times reports on "a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland."  [Image: Jeff Shea/New York Times]."Despite its remote location," the Times explains, "the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines" – except that, until recently, the island was "bound to the coast by glacial ice." In other words, climate change – melting ice and rising sea levels – has turned a peninsula into an island.  [Image: Map of Greenland, courtesy of the New York Times]."With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits," we read, "Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created." I'm tempted to say that that last sentence should be reversed, however: that the maps are becoming obsolete as soon as new geography is created. For instance, there are the nunataks – or lonely mountains, in Inuit – which stick out from beneath the matrix of glacial ice. These features are now "being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape."  [Image: The mountains of eastern Greenland: a future archipelago. Via Wikipedia].From the New York Times: "We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon – of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it – is a real common phenomenon now." In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean. That image, of course, is both horrific and exhilarating – literally sublime: the discovery of terra nova, right here on a planet that once seemed topographically claimed. Surely our era is due for a new Jules Verne? Meanwhile, as Arctic temperatures continue to rise, and as the Greenlandic ice cap continues to liquefy, we'll see more and more spectacular – if catastrophic – shifts in global geography. (Whole new continents!) And this won't be limited to the Arctic: "Over the long term," we read, "much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands."  [Image: Greenland's thawing landscape; photo by Jeff Shea/New York Times].In any case, I was fascinated to learn that "summertime 'glacial earthquakes' have been detected within the ice sheet" of Greenland. I can hardly imagine such a strange and haunting sound – like bells shattering – of pure ice heaving beneath your feet, as mile after mile of blue caves and tunnels shift their chambers to realign. Is it possible, then, to drill contact microphones into the surface of Greenland and listen to this terrestrial baritone, the earth a reverberatory, to eavesdrop on breaking glaciers from within? (With the use of the word "reverberatory" indebted to John Coulthart. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Nova Arctica and When landscapes sing: or, London Instrument).
I once knew someone who owned a drum machine on which he had been, he claimed, programming extraordinary amounts of really great music. Being naive to the thieving ways of the world, however, this friend – or aquaintance, really, from Canada – in fact the best friend of the fiancé of my girlfriend's sister – came home one day to find that his drum machine had been stolen.  [Image: From Keith Kin Yan's Overshadowed, a site – and photographer – previously discussed here].This act of musical thievery propelled him into a state of unremitting paranoia so intense, and so interesting, that I still think about it, nearly fifteen years later. What happened was that every time he went out to hear music – mostly at raves in New York City – he claimed that, at some point in the night, he had heard one of his own songs. Flagrantly stolen from his own stolen drum machine, then inscribed to vinyl – only to be spun, live, to the dancing masses – his music popped up at least once every few hours. Wide-eyed, emotional, convincing: there he was, in front of us, the people who hung out with him, explaining that this song was his. Of course, I mention all this because I wonder what the architectural equivalent would be. Perhaps a man, or woman, who spends all of his or her time sketching strange buildings – detailing elevators that lead to elevators and hotel rooms that interconnect to secret swimming pools in which hundreds of people sit, talking – finds that his (or her) sketchbook has been stolen. Fifteen years later, then, this person is on vacation with friends – but the hotel they've chosen looks awfully familiar. Too familiar. It's his building. "I designed this goddamn thing!" he screams, rattling door handles and staring through rotating glass doors at the swimming pool. He's sweating, veins visible, pulsing on his forehead. Everyone takes a step back. Is my cell phone charged? one thinks. Should I call 911?"This is my hotel!" the man screams, kicking over an ice bucket. He gets so loud his friends start to panic, eventually punching him in the face, hoping it will knock him out; it doesn't work. The police arrive. Our architectural sketcher is immediately arrested. He is strapped face-down to a table and injected with horse tranquilizers. But the thing is: he's right. He really did design that hotel. It really did come out of his sketchbook. That swimming pool really was his idea. Even worse: so was the building across the street – a building he's about to see when the police release him from custody. And those buildings downtown? He designed them, too. He designed this whole city, see: he sketched the whole thing in his now lost book. Except he's the only one who knows it. Not a single one of his friends believes him. In fact, people make fun of him, call him "Charles Manson" and point out the window at different buildings as if to antagonize him. "Did you design that, too?" Everyone giggles. Soon, old friends are writing blog entries about him. To escape the madness, the man moves to a new city, packing his bags and buying a dog – only to realize that everything about even that new city was all his idea. (Perhaps coming soon: Sketchbook, starring Christian Bale).
 [Images: Two shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley's Secret Underground Cities site].Last night I came across a review of the album Copenacre, by C4I, in an old back issue of The Wire. Apparently inspired by Nick McCamley's legendary book Secret Underground Cities, the musicians behind Copenacre tried "to evoke the dead air and constant low level hum of Copenacre Quarry's now abandoned navy testing and storage facility" in England. In other words, it's the soundtrack for an underground city.  [Images: Two more shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley's Secret Underground Cities site]."It's not easy to understand the sonic appeal of these places," The Wire continues, "until you've actually visited one." On the CD, we read, strange sounds "flash through tunnels and massive steel doors clang and lock to disconcerting effect." Here are two examples: MP3 1. MP3 2. Both of those excerpts, however, remind me of the early work of Lustmord, the nom de musique of LA-based sound designer Brian Williams. Lustmord's discography became somewhat notorious in the early 1990s for, among other things, having been partially recorded inside abandoned mines, in the crypts of churches, and inside caves and cellars. The resulting, planet-shaking resonance and sub-bass could often put listeners' headphones out of commission. On an almost ridiculously great CD called The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, Williams achieves a similar effect – but he gets rid of the caves and architecture. Instead, we plunge headfirst into nearly an hour and twenty minutes of machinic astronomy; we rumble and drone inside with what sounds like a WWII airplane buzzing through deep space, recording the slow magnetic death of stars. Gigantic radar systems bounce and reflect off nothing. Needless to say, it's not for everyone. (See also BLDGBLOG's look at Subterranean bunker-cities).
 Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who came out yesterday – and an apology to those who showed up but couldn't get in. I really had no idea the crowd would be as big as it was, and it seems a good 50 or 60 people were left standing outside on the sidewalk! But for those of you who did get in, and who sat through two hours of tightly-packed darkness, I hope you saw some cool things, had a good time, and enjoyed the presentations.
So I just wanted to say thanks; I had a great time, and I'm already looking forward to the next event. Thank you especially to Matthew Coolidge, Steve Rowell, and Sarah Simons of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, both for lending their space and for helping set-up for the event; to Mary-Ann Ray; to Robert Sumrell; to Christine Wertheim; and to Margaret Wertheim; and last, but not least, to my wife, for helping me put everything together.
More soon.
 If you're in LA and you're reading this before 3pm, Saturday, January 13th, consider stopping by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, in Culver City, to catch BLDGBLOG's first public event. More information on the proceedings available here. Thanks!
I'm a bit late but no less excited to announce a new issue of the Urban Design Review, published by David Haskell's Forum for Urban Design, and for which I serve as Senior Editor.  The new issue starts off with my own review of Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture by Simon Sadler. "Sadler does a wonderful job," I suggest, "explaining the intellectual frustrations and professional disappointments that led each future Archigramee to seek their design revolution in the first place. The psychological dynamics within the group are fascinatingly, if too briefly, explored: Enthused designs gave Archigram a relentlessly upbeat group persona that belied the romantic melancholy dwelling within. For each optimist in the group poring over a drawing board late at night, one might have found another member brooding uncertainly over the purpose of architecture, though such vocational misgivings were barely apparent to Archigram's public. Even the group's shared technophilia blurred a varied set of personal responses to architecture. The short treatment this topic receives is a pity; I, for one, appreciate seeing the apparently univocal edifice of Archigram chiseled down to its component personalities." In any case, I then interview Sadler – and find, interestingly, that much of what he has to say preempts some of my larger thematic or structural problems with the book. Thus the value of dialogue.  The issue then turns to Eugenie Birch, Chair of the City and Regional Planning Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Birch takes us through the new Planning and Urban Design Standards, as they've been codified by the American Planning Association. The book is "the Gray's Anatomy of city and regional planning," Birch writes – referring, of course, not to the American television serial. "While the book is remarkably comprehensive and well-organized," she continues, "some substantive and conceptual gaps exist. For example, the Building Types discussion in 'Structures' is so thorough (including rarely discussed airport and waste-management facilities) that the absence of sections on retail (shopping centers, retail strips, big-box stores, power centers and fast-food places), sports facilities (stadiums and arenas) and group facilities (jails, drug treatment and other group homes) is astonishing."  Birch's review led me to something of a literary epiphany, however. While I have long argued that what makes the novels of J.G. Ballard so architecturally interesting is that they are set in a world of abstract suburban environments – business parks, media centers, etc. – it had never occurred to me that you could simply flip through something like the Planning and Urban Design Standards guide and choose such settings at will. In other words, if you're sitting at home right now trying to write a Ballardian novel – or even just a novel – then you could do much worse than simply skimming the Planning and Urban Design Standards and selecting an airport, a big-box store, a sports arena, and a drug treatment facility (grabbing one each from Birch's lists of building types, above – or a waste-management facility, a shopping center, a baseball stadium, and the local hospital – because, either way, you've now got a Ballardian landscape fit for fiction. Though that last combination sounds more like Don DeLillo. Which just proves my point, really: if you select a few random and abstract locations, such as those descibed in Birch's review, then you more or less have at your disposal the necessary physical infrastructure for writing a contemporary novel. I know that sounds incredibly, even stupidly, obvious; but imagining J.G. Ballard reading Planning and Urban Design Standards out in some bar near Woking suddenly seems like a realistic possibility. Is it possible that today's novelists don't need the Iowa Writers Workshop at all? A resounding yes. Is it possible that today's novelists simply need a copy of the Planning and Urban Design Standards guide...? The jury's still out on that one.  Adi Shamir then takes us through a new volume published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. That book discusses sense and the city, or how urban space is materially experienced by moving bodies. David Haskell then interviews Mirko Zadini, the book's editor, giving Zardini a chance to respond to Shamir's review. Last but not least are two great reviews, one by The Dirt's former blogmeister general, David Connell; the other by the Forum for Urban Design's own Michelle Kang. In the former review, you can read about German stormwater management practices, as well as avant-garde public fountains; in the latter, you can read about the community gardens of Manhattan's Lower East Side, which Kang beautifully refers to as the "renegade greenery" of New York City.  Finally, then, the issue ends with a short interview with FAT, or Fashion Architecture Taste. Specifically, I talked to Sam Jacob – whose blog Strangeharvest is always worth a look, including yesterday's post about the most visited site in the UK (it's not Stonehenge) or this older post about a cave shaped like Nelson's Column. Jacob discusses the music (Joy Division), films (Mike Leigh), and even cow horns that have inspired his architectural practice. Here's Jacob talking about novels: There’s this great book, called Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. It’s about a dissolute Parisian who decides that he's had enough of his life of debauchery, and he wants to separate himself from the rest of the world, so he moves out to the suburbs of Paris somewhere and he buys this house. The first thing he has to do is to fix it up, and he ends up almost torturing himself over exactly what shade of orange to use – how it looks in the daytime, how it looks by candle light – and he even builds a kind of ship's cabin as part of the house. It gets more and more ridiculous. He buys a big Turkish rug, which he thinks is great – but then he thinks, Oh, hold on a minute: It’s too static. So he buys a giant tortoise to move around on it – but then he thinks, Oh, that’s a bit too dark. And so he has the shell of the tortoise encrusted with gold and gems.
As a look at this architectural idea of the relationship between lifestyle and building, I think it's great. It's kind of like MTV Cribs, only more extreme. It's a satire of how design is appreciated. And if any of the above sounds interesting, be in touch: we're always looking out for books to review or people to write for us. (Previous issue of the Urban Design Review discussed here).
It's too small to see clearly, but you're looking at an ad for Komatsu in which the entire top of a mountain has been sheared clean off. The tagline? "Call the experts for any challenge."  And there they are, driving away in yellow earth-moving equipment – mobile crushers, vibratory rollers, and minimal swing radius excavators – if you look carefully at the left side of the advertisement. In a press release on their site, Komatsu writes how "[n]ew ways to develop hard terrain – sandstone, lava rock and basalt – had to be learned once the easily developed land was taken. As a result," they write, "contractors are facing great challenges." Including, it seems, the obliteration of whole mountain peaks... Not ones to be intimidated by geology, however, Komatsu arrives with their "advanced land development practices" – " the absolute top" of the industry, they say – and their "world-class machines," whose "powerful dozing and ripping force" puts the surface of the earth back in its place: as something we will build more suburbs on. In any case, I'm tempted to propose the plot of some new, geotechnically futuristic version of Paradise Lost – perhaps the world's first book about the geological invasion of Heaven (in which "devilish enginery" has been assembled inside a "hollow cube," whilst an army of demons "turn[s] wide the celestial soil" to unleash "sulphurous and nitrous foam" upon a heavenly landscape "soon obscured with smoke") – but a version that's been written specifically for Hindus. In other words, rather than Milton's legion of demons, who rip minerals from the earth and hurl clouds of rock at the gathered phalanx of angels surrounding God, you'd read instead about a rogue group of anti-mountain engineers – tens of thousands of them, wearing hardhats and carrying bagged lunches – who have begun dismantling Mount Meru one hunk of granite at a time. They drill, blast, doze, and mobile-crush their way upward, in an endless fleet of bright yellow trucks, reducing the Himalayan vaults of their own gods to mere gravel. (Thanks, Ben! And thanks, Alex!)
 [Image: Circle Line Pinhole 32, from Rob Gardiner's excellent and inspired photographic project, Walking the Circle Line, London].
Rupert Thomson's recent novel Divided Kingdom is set in a world where the whole of Britain has been broken up into four sectors, the population itself forcibly "rearranged" according to emotional temperment.
Well-disciplined over-achievers are sent to one quarter; despair-wracked introspectionists another; pick-up truck driving nutters prone to violence take a third ( I came I saw I lost my temper, its postcards read); and some other group I'm overlooking at the moment gets the last bit.
Walls and fences begin to appear; soon people complain of "border sickness" as they are further hemmed in by a series of Internal Security Acts. "Throughout the divided kingdom," we read, "the walls of concrete blocks had been reinforced with watch-towers, axial crosses and even, in some areas, with mine-fields, which rendered contact between the citizens of different countries a physical impossibility."
London itself is "divided so as to create four new capitals," and each major bridge over the Thames is "fortified, along with watch-towers at either end and a steel dragnet underneath." However, "in stretches where the river itself had become the border all the bridges had been destroyed. The roads that had once led to them stopped at the water's edge, and stopped abruptly. They seemed to stare into space, no longer knowing what they were doing there or why they had come."
 [Image: From Under Blackfriars Bridge, London, by Rob Gardiner].
There is even a "tourist settlement called the Border Experience" constructed near one of the crossings – apparently learning from Venturi, complete "with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops."
In one sector, all the motorways "had been converted into venues for music festivals or sporting events, and others had been fortified, then turned into borders, their tall grey lights illuminating dogs and guards instead of traffic, but for the most part they had simply been allowed to decay, their signs leaning at strange angles, their service stations inhabited by mice and birds, their bridges choked with weeds and brambles or, as in this case, collapsing altogether. In time, motorways would become so overgrown that they would only be visible from the air, half-hidden monuments to an earlier civilization, like pyramids buried in a jungle."
 [Image: Circle Line Pinhole 16, from Rob Gardiner's Walking the Circle Line, London].
While still a young boy, the narrator develops "border games" with a mate; they "prowl among the cement-mixers and scaffolding poles" next to "a section of the motorway that was in the process of being dug up," and they use cardboard tubes to spy on guards stationed several acres away.
In any case, parts of Divided Kingdom read like descriptions of Dubai – or what Mike Davis refers to as Dubai's "monstrous caricature of futurism," as that city strives "to conquer the architectural record-books."
There is something called the Underground Ocean, for instance. Thomson's narrator and his entourage are led down into a basement warehouse, where they stand beside a lifeguard on a boardwalk in the dark: The lifeguard's voice floated dreamily above us. Any second now, he said, the scene would be illuminated, but first he wanted us to try and picture what it was that we were about to see. I peered out into the dark, my eyes gradually adjusting. A pale strip curved away to my right – the beach, I thought – and at the edge furthest from me I could just make out a shimmer, the faintest of oscillations. Could that be where the water met the sand? Beyond that, the blackness resisted me, no matter how carefully I looked.
"Lights," the lifeguard said.
I wasn't the only delegate to let out a gasp. My first impression was that night had turned to day – but instantly, as if hours had passed in a split-second. At the same time, the space in which I had been standing had expanded to such a degree that I no longer appeared to be indoors. I felt unstead,y, slightly sick. Eyes narrowed against the glare, I saw a perfect blue sky arching overhead. Before me stretched an ocean, just as blue. It was calm the way lakes are sometimes calm, not a single crease or wrinkle. Creamy puffs of cloud hung suspended in the distance. Despite the existence of a horizon, I couldn't seem to establish a sense of perspective. After a while my eyes simply refused to engage with the view, and I had to look away.
"Now for the waves," the lifeguard said. It is interesting to note that, at the end of the book, in the Acknowledgements, Thomson cites S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas as having been a literary resource.
 [Image: Circle Line Pinhole 52, from Rob Gardiner's Walking the Circle Line, London].
While it seems rather obvious that the book is not meant to present the next likely development in national governance or urban planning, many readers – i.e. Amazon reviewers – seem upset by the premise, and repeatedly point out that this "could never happen." But surely that's not the point? As with all of Thomson's novels the writing is exquisite, at times dreamlike yet descriptively precise; the book is also one of the few examples I can think of where I actually wished the book had been substantially longer (it's 336 pages).
If you do read it, let me know what you think.
 [Image: Circle Line Pinhole 64, from Rob Gardiner's Walking the Circle Line, London].
(Thanks to Steve & Valerie Twilley for the book! Meanwhile, for more of Rob Gardiner's photographs, see Gardiner's blog; I'm a particular fan of his London work).
I'm immensely pleased to announce BLDGBLOG's first event, on January 13th in Los Angeles, to be hosted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The event is meant as a way to mark BLDGBLOG's recent move to Los Angeles; to kick-start the new year in a conversationally exciting way; to celebrate being one of Yahoo's top 25 web picks of 2006; and to meet a few of the one million readers who have now clicked through to read BLDGBLOG (some much-needed statistical caveats about that statement appear below) – and, thus, an event seemed like a good idea. It also just sounds fun. So this Saturday, January 13th, from 3pm-5pm, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, Los Angeles, I'll be introducing five speakers: Matthew Coolidge, Mary-Ann Ray, Robert Sumrell, Christine Wertheim, and Margaret Wertheim, who will speak for 15-20 minutes each. Matthew Coolidge is Director of CLUI; as such, he's one of the larger influences on BLDGBLOG, up there with J.G. Ballard, John McPhee, and Piranesi – so it's immensely exciting for me to have him as a participant, and equally exciting that he and the CLUI staff are willing to host this event in their space. If you're curious about CLUI's work, consider purchasing their new book: Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or just stop by the Center at some point and say hello.  Back in 1997, then, I found myself in Rotterdam where I went to the Netherlands Architecture Institute several days in a row to use their architecture library; the NAi's exhibit at the time was about Daniel Libeskind. While this proves that I'm possibly the world's lamest backpacker, it also resulted in my stumbling across a copy of Mary-Ann Ray's Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets, a book I highly recommend to just about anyone – and a book that may or may not even be responsible for my current interest in architecture. So when I saw last week that Mary-Ann still lives in LA, and that her firm had actually worked on the facade of the Museum of Jurassic Technology – located right next door to the Center for Land Use Interpretation – I immediately gave her a call; and now she's a speaker at the event.  [Image: Mary-Ann Ray, from Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets].Robert Sumrell, meanwhile, is co-director of AUDC. AUDC's work explores the fields of diffuse urbanism and network geography, whether that means analyzing Muzak as a form of spatial augmentation or photo-documenting the town of Quartzsite, Arizona. Interestingly, Sumrell also works as a production designer for elaborate fashion shoots and other high-gloss, celebrity spectacles. If you're a fan of Usher, for instance, don't miss Sumrell's Portfolio 2; if you like topless women surrounded by veils of smoke, see his Portfolio 1. I like Portfolio 1.  [Image: From Robert Sumrell's Portfolio 4].Then we come to Christine and Margaret Wertheim, co-directors of the Institute for Figuring, here in Los Angeles. "The Institute’s interests," they explain, "are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring." Margaret will be presenting a hand-crocheted hyperbolic reef, "a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft." The reef is part craft object, part mathematical model in colored wool.  [Image: An example of "mega coral," crocheted by Christine Wertheim].Margaret is also an ace interviewer; don't miss her conversation with Nicholas Gessler, for instance, collector of analogue computers. While you're at it, don't miss her " history of space from Dante to the internet". Meanwhile, Christine's interests lie more in the realm of logic and its spatial representations. Christine has curated an upcoming show at the Museum of Jurassic Technology around the work of Shea Zellweger, an "outsider logician" and former hotel switchboard operator who developed a three-dimensional, internally rigorous representational system for logical processes. Christine will thus be speaking on what could be called an illustrated spatial history of logic.  [Image: Part of Shea Zellweger's logical alphabet; image courtesy of Shea Zellweger, via the Institute for Figuring].Finally, the statistical caveats I mentioned above. While it is true that my Sitemeter is now above one million – recording visitors to the site – it is also true that if you come to BLDGBLOG four times a week for a year, then you will be counted as 208 different people... So the accounting is a bit off. Also, it is inarguably the case that at least 350,000 of those 1,000,000 visitors only visited one of the five following posts, which, thanks to Fark, Digg, MetaFilter, Boing Boing, etc., are overwhelmingly the most popular posts here: World's largest diamond mine, Scientological Circles, "The city as an avatar of itself", Transformer Houses, and Gazprom City. Possible runners-up for that list – though those five really do take the cake – include, and I apologize for this blatantly self-indulgent yet strangely irresistible nostalgia trip: the interview with Simon Sellars, the interview with Simon Norfolk, the Aeneid-inspired look at offshore oil derricks, Chinese death vans, how to buy your own concrete utopia, Architectural Criticism, Where cathedrals go to die, the story of Joe Kittinger, London Topological, and L.A.'s high-tech world of traffic control. Actually, this one had a lot of readers, and the mud mosques were also quite popular... But now I've wasted twenty minutes, assembling those links. So I'll link to others, instead. BLDGBLOG would still only be read by myself, my wife, and possibly two or three others if it hadn't been for the early and/or ongoing enthusiasm of other websites who link in – including, but by no means limited to: Pruned, gravestmor, Archinect, things magazine, Inhabitat, Gridskipper, Boing Boing, Design Observer, Coudal, Artkrush, we make money not art, Subtopia, Ballardian, The Dirt, Apartment Therapy, Curbed LA and Curbed SF, City of Sound, Future Feeder, Archidose, Brand Avenue, Tropolism, hippoblog, Land+Living, Abstract Dynamics, Worldchanging, Warren Ellis, The Nonist, The Kircher Society, Conscientious, Centripetal Notion, and whoever it is that occasionally puts links to BLDGBLOG up on MetaFilter. In any case, my final point is just to be honest and say that a million visitors is more like "a million visitors" – i.e. not quite a million visitors – and that, on top of that, many of those people only came through to see five or six particular posts in the first place. And that's not even to mention the fact that many websites have more than a million visitors per month, and so the whole thing is not exactly awe-inspiring. But who cares. If you're in LA this weekend, consider dropping by; it'll be a fun and casual event, not an academic conference, and you can tell me in person whether cone beats sphere. (There's also a full-size version of the event poster available).
 [Image: Mr. Housing Bubble; via Archis].First, some landscape links: "Mount St. Helens is drumming out a warning beat," New Scientist reports. "Regular, repetitive earthquakes around the volcano are being triggered by the movements of a rock plug, reverberating in the neck of the volcano." Incredibly, the plug is moving upward "at the rate of about 3 to 5 metres per day," pushed from behind by "magma pressure" – which "could signal the build-up to some kind of eruption." On the other side of the world, meanwhile, Mt. Everest's frozen peak is apparently sucking ozone out of the stratosphere; the ozone then cascades down the sides of the mountain in "katabatic winds," or walls of cold air propelled downward by gravity. At its worst, these winds are "equivalent to mildly polluted city air and could pose respiratory problems" for climbers. Sticking with New Scientist, we then learn that there are possible links between oxygen in the atmosphere and the pace of animal evolution – discovering, in yet another article, that too little oxygen can actually lead to Alzheimer's disease. In other words, it seems like non-senile humans are only possible on this planet within a very narrow range of oxygen saturation. So don't forget to breathe.  [Image: Photo by Manfred Cage, via New Scientist].Then there's the ongoing possibility that we are already surrounded by thriving alien lifeforms – only we don't know how to spot them. "What if life elsewhere is different," for instance, "based on an exotic alien anatomy and biochemistry?" Our planet could thus be teeming with organisms so alien that they don't even appear to be alive. This is a familiar topic on BLDGBLOG; see Unrecognized for what they are, or (the identically illustrated) Alien Planet.  [Image: Moon dust].In other landscape news, scientists have developed artificial moon dust – a material otherwise referred to as a lunar simulant. The scientists simply "don't have enough real moondust to go around," we read, so manufacturing a replica was the only way to go; they've now "also begun work on more demanding simulants representing various locations on the Moon." Word has it, there is someone on the moon right now, building a small replica of the Earth... within which a small replica of the moon is under construction. For some reason, though, the lunar simulant story reminds me of Lateral Architecture's "garden of soils" project – in which intact, three-dimensional samples of soil from throughout Québec were collected and publicly displayed in rectilinear containers, forming what look like colored chimneys of red and brown earth. It's the surface of the Earth, transformed into a readymade art object.  [Image: From Soil Horizon, 2005, by Mason White and Lola Shepherd of Lateral Architecture. This project is also featured in this book].Meanwhile, don't forget the " storm the size of a planet" now whirling its way across Saturn's south pole, complete with "a well-defined wall of towering clouds ringing a dark eye." I continue to believe that the landscape architect of the future will somehow learn how to cultivate weather: microclimates and permanent storms hovering over desert gardens... A storm the size of a planet would simply be icing on the cake.  [Image: Polar auroras on Saturn, via Space.com; this is not the "storm the size of a planet," on the other hand – I just like the picture].Yet controlling the weather isn't as far-fetched as it might sound. They're already doing it in Beijing, for instance; and, here in California, the use of " hail cannons" appears to be on the rise. The Ventura County Star describes how a "thunderous boom from a 20-foot cannon echoes over John Diepersloot's apricot and peach orchards... breaking up hail stones before they can form." Specifically, hail cannons, "which switch on when storms are approaching, are the latest high-tech device aimed at protecting crops from the volatile weather that hits California's agricultural heartland, where a single hail storm or freeze can destroy a crop – and a local economy – overnight."  [Image: A 19th-century hail cannon; see also that site's look at Using Energy to Forcefully Alter the Weather].Moving on to some urban and/or architectural links now: It seems that " surveillance cameras in the city of Groningen have been adapted to listen out for voices raised in anger. Microphones attached to the cameras feed the sound signals to software that can detect voices that are aggressive in tone." Though this is supposed to "prevent fights breaking out," it will probably: 1) do nothing of the sort; 2) have an unexpected deadening effect on conversations throughout the city: whereas two friends might once have passionately debated the literary merits of Jonathan Franzen, now they will just shrug defeatedly, break eye contact, and order more beer; or 3) 15-year old boys making loud farting noises will take over the streets at midnight. Not to be deterred by such cynicism, the forces of surveillance have also developed a "device the size of a laptop that can see through walls." This "will leave criminal suspects no place to hide from police or security forces."  [Image: The Prism 200, courtesy of Cambridge Consultants].The so-called Prism 200 system "uses radar to detect moving objects on the other side of a wall, and displays their position in three-dimensions on a built-in screen. It is sensitive enough to detect a person breathing," we're told. Perhaps implying a future use for architectural design students, the Prism 200's " through-wall radar" technology "can map an area in plan view, side view or in three dimensions." Meanwhile, Metropolis introduces us to " neighborhood intensification," or "eco-density": Recently Portland and Vancouver established zoning and design guidelines to encourage the development of smaller houses, as long as they meet exacting design criteria. A new program in Vancouver that falls under the mayor's overall policy of "eco-density" encourages the reconfiguration of lots in certain single-family districts. In Portland a new set of ordinances and guidelines seeks to promote "skinny houses," intended to fit lots less than 36 feet wide.  [Image: An example of "neighborhood intensification," or building smaller houses on smaller lots. Photo by John Morefield, courtesy of David Sarti, via Metropolis].Speaking of the phrase "skinny houses," articles continue to appear debating whether architecture can make you fat. The Guardian, for instance, reports that England's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment recommends that architects try "designing cities and housing that encourage exercise." The reporter immediately sees "an image of a futuristic metropolis fitted with endless MC Escher stairwells and humiliatingly narrow doorways," but the real solutions are much more obvious than that. Architects and urban planners can start by "incorporating cycle paths and pedestrian areas into their designs," for example. "Parks and other green spaces encourage people to exercise, and if a shop is within walking distance, people are more likely to leave the car behind." Etc. All of which reminds me of a more or less unspoken theory about contemporary urban space: which is that we don't need so many countless thousands of roads and parking lots in our cities because everyone drives a car; it's that everyone drives a car because there are so many countless thousands of roads and parking lots in the way. You can't get anywhere for all the parking lots surrounding you – and so you have to buy a car just to get out of there. In any case, Inhabitat introduced us last month to a new high-rise project in Miami, designed by Chad Oppenheim. The building incorporates wind power into its very facade.   [Images: Building by Chad Oppenheim; images via Inhabitat].As Inhabitat writes, the building works by "integrating green technologies including wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water generation" into its structure. The outer "exoskeleton" is really "a hyper-efficient structure that provides thermal mass for insulation, shade for residents, and architectural elements such as terraces and armatures that support turbines." It also looks good at sunset.  [Image: Building by Chad Oppenheim; image via Inhabitat].However, this building also makes me wonder if the public's negative reaction to wind farms might be different if we used more attractive windmills. In other words, instead of those free-standing, vertical helicopter blades – as most farms now use – why not try a sleek line of embedded turbines... a kind of Great Wall of Wind Power stretching across the landscape?  In the arches of bridges, turbines. Finally, BLDGBLOG's Sitemeter quietly ticked past the 1,000,000 visitors mark this past Friday; thanks to everyone who comes through now and again – hopefully it's worth it. Expect more news about that soon. (With some of these links supplied by none other than Alex Trevi).
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[Image: A brief homage to 
