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 [Image: For a few heady weeks I actually thought I was going to be teaching at this thing... but no more. Alas. Still, though, how can you resist applying for a two-week architectural design studio in Sydney, Australia, themed around the spatial rehabilitation of a semi-derelict, post-industrial island, complete with "early convict settlement structures" and heavily incised sandstone foundations? More information, including how to apply, available here; larger, though low-res, version of the flyer available here. Have fun!].
 [Image: BLDGBLOG's second event! The flyer uses photos by Nicolai Morrisson].I'm excited, honored, flattered, stoked, etc., even slightly stunned, to announce that BLDGBLOG and Chronicle Books have teamed up to host an afternoon of talks about landscape and architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, from 2:30-5:00pm on Saturday, April 7th. The line-up, as you'll see from the flyer, above, includes John Bela & Matthew Passmore, of Rebar; Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State; Lisa Iwamoto, of both IwamotoScott Architecture and UC- Berkeley; myself, against all better judgement and in contrast to last time; and Walter Murch, three-time Oscar winner and co-author, with Michael Ondaatje, of the excellent and highly recommended book, The Conversations. Each speaker will have 15-20 minutes in which to do their thing; you'll have two different Q&A periods in which to ask questions, and there'll be a 10-minute break between the third and fourth speaker. Everything will be timed to within a millisecond... I'll be re-posting about all this in ten days or so, however, complete with more information about each speaker, including some examples of Lisa's work at IwamotoScott and a full-length interview with Walter Murch; so, for now, just mark your calendars! And if you're anywhere near San Francisco, I hope to see you there. Be sure to introduce yourself; I like people. Finally, if you want a larger version of the flyer, go here. Of course, if you like what you see, photographically, don't miss the other work of Nicolai Morrisson (formerly known as Nicolai Grossman).
 [Image: Art ©Peter Garfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York; from the New York Times].The New York Times Magazine published another issue on the state of Real Estate this past weekend. Some highlights include the above image, by Peter Garfield, used to illustrate an article about the housing bubble, and whether or not that bubble really exists – including a brief look at Robert Shiller's " housing futures" market, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But why not a landscape futures market...? The N.Y. Times then takes a look at crazy dorm rooms – most notably at DePaul University, in Chicago – where students can expect "loft- and villa-like settings, private bedrooms and baths, professional-style kitchens with granite countertops, weekly housecleaning services, plasma-screen TVs, wireless and high-speed Internet connections in every room, fitness centers, swimming pools, even hot tubs and tanning booths." All of which differs rather fantastically from my own experience of dorm life, which involved living on the 9th floor of a 10-floor high-rise called "Hinton James," with a roommate who drank huge amounts of Mountain Dew till nearly one o'clock every morning, had a poster of Top Gun above his bed, and wanted to run for President.  [Image: A dorm room at DePaul, as photographed by Nikolas Koenig for the New York Times]. Returning to the article, we read that "some parents are willing to pay as much as 50 percent more than the cost of a comparable campus dorm room for a private room in an outsourced, off-campus 'dormitel.'" The dormitel, as an architectural type, is surely now coming to an architectural design syllabus near you... There's also a longish history of home renovation and house-flipping shows, as recounted for us by Rob Walker. Walker opines that, whilst these shows may be entertaining and sometimes even quite thorough in their economic analysis of a given home improvement scheme, "much is left out. Buyer’s remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites." Meanwhile, Goa seems to be where "India's investor class" is now moving – helped along by a friendly Indian-American developer named Roy Patrao: Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa’s enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. “One billion people. Limited land supply. It’s a no-brainer,” he concluded. Back in the U.S., a man who looks remarkably like a young Dabney Coleman wants you to be rich – and, at least in the case of myself, I heartily agree. We're then meant to contemplate whether Richard Meier has designed a Brooklyn condo tower that "will be compared to Modernist masterpieces"? But if you mean compared favorably to said masterpieces, then BLDGBLOG would say: nope. But don't let that stop you from reading the article. Finally, at least for the purposes of this round-up, there is a frankly unbelievably interesting article about the Tejon Ranch, located 60 miles north of Los Angeles.  [Image: Tejon Ranch from the air; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].The ranch survives from the 19th century and is "roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island," but it may soon be broken into smaller parcels for the construction of a future instant suburb called Centennial – where Huxley-esque corporate land use planners are "engineering a balanced society, mainly through the use of real estate prices."   [Image: The land of Tejon Ranch, where there may soon be suburbs; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].It's a great article, actually, and seems to encapsulate, in its own abbreviated way, a lot of the arguments going on right now about land use in the United States, from Brand Avenue and Joel Kotkin to James Howard Kunstler. You've got questions of infill, sprawl, demographic change, resource depletion, the environment, transporation, regionalism vs. localism, and even centuries-long economic shifts from agriculture to domesticity. "Nevada and Arizona may still build one new city after another," we read in one pithy formulation. But "Los Angeles will thicken more than it will spread." In any case, check it out if you get a chance.
There's been a lot of interesting news lately about the earth's surface.  [Image: Via Wikipedia].First, deep beneath Beijing, there is apparently " a reservoir holding as much water as the Arctic Ocean." Two scientists have just "analysed more than 600,000 seismic waves generated by earthquakes" – only to find that "the waves weakened below eastern Asia at depths between 600 and 1200 kilometres, corresponding to Earth's lower mantle." They thus concluded "that there must be massive amounts of water in porous mantle rock muffling the seismic waves mainly below Beijing, China." That water, they estimate, took no less than 200,000,000 years to accumulate there, dragged down, in large part, by the movements of plate tectonics. But that's nothing.  [Image: Via Wikipedia].In other news, there seems to be "a huge hole in the earth's crust on the sea bed," described rather dramatically as " a gaping open wound in the Earth's skin." Last month, a group of British marine geologists discovered that part of "the Earth's crust was missing in an area covering thousands of square kilometres. The big gap is midway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They say the sea isn't going to be sucked away – although they admit the discovery defies science." This also means that the mantle is showing. As one of the scientists explained: "The oceanic crust is usually 6km to 7km thick but the Earth's crust seems to be absent in this area of the Atlantic. Instead we have a window into the interior of the Earth, that simply shouldn't be there, according to the standard ideas of how the Earth works." He asks: "Was the crust never there? Was it once there but then torn away on huge geological faults? If so, then how and why?" To help answer these questions they'll use "a robotic sea-bed drill to explore the area in more detail," hoping to "find out what bizarre mechanisms were in place to lead to the mantle being exposed." A whole slew of commenters on Metafilter then chimed in, pointing out this absurd plot summary of The Core... A film I will admit to never having seen. Meanwhile, it turns out there is also a gigantic crater hidden beneath the visible surface of north-central California. "The 5.5km-wide bowl is buried under shale sediments west of Stockton, in San Joaquin County," the BBC reports, and it "is thought to be between 37 and 49 million years old." It has been dubbed the Victoria Island Structure. "Data from a 3D seismic survey of an ancient sea bed clearly shows a circular structure buried 1,490-1,600m (4,890-4,250ft) below sea level" – but some think this "circular structure" is not a crater at all. Some think it is a buried spaceship, bearing the name of Jesu... In any case, the crater may actually have been created during an event known as "the late Eocene bombardment... an episode of multiple impacts" that took place roughly 35 million years ago. This "bombardment" also generated "one of the largest craters in the world – the 45km-wide (28 miles) Chesapeake Bay structure on the eastern shore of North America."  [Image: The Chesapeake Bay structure, via Wikipedia].Finally, you can take it with you: the surface of Ireland, I mean. Thanks to the Auld Sod Export Co., you can import " official Irish dirt" through "a new patented process." This "process" is not further explained. The company "allows Immigrants of Irish decent [sic]" – but no one else? – "to keep part of their heritage, the Irish connection to their land, in their new homes. Its uses vary but mainly it serves as a connection to home by giving all of life’s milestones a traditional Irish feel." They recommend scattering this official Irish dirt "over the casket or grave of a dearly departed loved one." Your portion of the Irish earth even comes with a refund policy. How much stranger, though, will geological surveys someday be! When bits of Ireland are found lining the graveyards of Boston! The shores of England are already part-French, for instance, as architect Sam Jacob pointed out last Spring. He writes of news that "Lyme Regis beach [is] being restored with French sand and Norwegian rocks. This will certainly puzzle future geologists, perhaps precipitating erroneous revisions to plate tectonic theory." So would this make The Auld Sod Export Co. a kind of rogue agent, resurfacing the earth in secret? A deliberate plan to forsake the science of geology? Might they even be responsible for the deepsea mantle-hole? And what would happen if someone places far too large an order? Could Ireland itself be ground up – and FedEx'd to a ranch in Texas? Our investigations will continue. (Thanks to John Devlin for the Californian crater link).
In David Toop's excellent book Ocean of Sound – a short history of ambient music – he quotes composer Brian Eno, at great length, on the connections between landscape, sound, time, and the city.  "There's an experiment I did," Eno tells us; it was "a good exercise that I would recommend to other people." I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater Road I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this – a 3-1/2 minute section, the length of a single – and I tried to learn it? So that's what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made a fade-up, let it run for 3-1/2 minutes and faded it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried to learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercise to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: "Right, then he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brilliant!" Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role. All of which is interesting already – but it makes me wonder if a band could then reproduce that tape, live, as a kind of cover song, in concert. Godspeed You! Black Emperor plays the sounds of Bayswater in their closing set, a perfect rendition of Eno's old tape... Instead of another Led Zeppelin cover band, you book a Times Square cover band for your daughter's Bat Mitzvah; they play the traffic, voices, and horns of a typical Times Square day, for hours. Even lifetime Manhattanites can't tell the difference. Or an International Space Station cover band, playing for you, live, acoustic versions of the Station's lonely clicks and whirs. A St. Louis Arch cover band – the St. Louis Arches® – reproducing the sounds of Eero Saarinen's structure on stages around the world. "It's just like being there," The New Yorker reports. "The effect is uncanny." An Elevators of the Empire State Building cover band. Alexanderplatz acoustically reproduced on guitar... by a busker in Alexanderplatz. The sounds of Death Valley – live, at the Hollywood Bowl. What the Kremlin would sound like if it had been built in the Piazza Navona – played live, in a small room outside Tokyo. Or a man who tunes the infrastructure of his building till it sounds exactly like a hotel he once stayed in in Paris. The ducts rattle in just the right way, and the door hinges creak... reminding him of better days. He then hires a band to reproduce those sounds at the office Christmas party. He is promptly fired. (Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Soundtracks for Architecture and Silophone resonance: architecture to play by phone. Coming soon: a great interview with Walter Murch, in which I ask him about the Brian Eno quotation, above).
 Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, of terraswarm, creators of the infamous 10 Mile Spiral as well as the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, will be unveiling a new project on Monday night in Manhattan. Called Color Shift, the installation "is an urban-scaled art project made by inputting a continuous stream of alternating colors into the FreshDirect video billboard, the largest in the country." As such, it's a kind of creative mis-direction of urban light pollution – a post- Duchampian optical relief in technicolor, throbbing through a dozen spectra across the roofs and walls of New York City.  You can watch a virtual version of Color Shift, installed online – it's a weird, hypnotic abyss of slow alteration that, at one point, made my eyes feel broken. Very Olafur Eliasson-esque. Ben and Chris will be speaking Monday night, March 19th, at 6:30pm in Columbia University's Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall. Tell them BLDGBLOG sent you.
Your TV is helping to alter the metallic structure of the earth. New Scientist reports that the planetary supply of "minor metals" – such as ruthenium, bismuth, and indium – is being depleted. Depleted how? By going into cellphones and flat-screen TVs, into resistors and harddrives.  [Image: Like a print by M.C. Escher, it's a landscape featured on TV – a TV made of the landscape it features. It's the television as simulated micro-geology, an elemental landscape in miniature]."To meet demand," the magazine reports, "tech firms must mine the growing mountains of electronic waste to recover the materials." Growing mountains? So what future geographies of electronic waste might our descendents someday explore? There will be the Plateau of Circuitboards and the Cliff of Printers – the Dot-Matrix Range – each showing up on new maps of distant continents. Outside magazine will run a series of articles about a man camping in central Africa, in the shadow of 200,000 used photocopiers; their scanning beds still intact, the copiers reflect the man's stunned face in moonlight as he walks by, notebook in hand... A day later he crests a ridge, crunching through the gravel of broken office machinery – only to look down into a whispering abyss: uncountable ten millions of discarded radios sit, chattering to themselves between stations with the last traces of power still trapped in their rusting batteries, speaking in tongues. A thousand years later, a Third Testament will be added to The Bible, and this place – known as the Valley of Voices – will figure prominently. For it seems that our rugged explorer heard something there... something he'll never forget... and it soon becomes the stuff of legend. An absent broadcast around which future religions take shape. Endlessly re-intepreting the missing words that only one person ever heard. (Note: For a more serious – not to mention practical – look both at recycling electronic goods and at the environmental problem posted by these mountains of waste, click around the site of Earthworks Action; for some cool photographs of discarded mobile phones, meanwhile, check out the work of Chris Jordan).
 [Image: Tower demolition in Philadelphia, as photographed by werdsnave. Perhaps that room at the very top could be rehabbed and kitted out with a small suburban house... or some version of this thing... making it worth the climb. Elsewhere: A tunneling project by werdsnave on Pruned. Earlier: Chicago's Inner Flute-Ruins].
 [Image: From "Splitting," by Gordon Matta-Clark].
"A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck," Reuters reports.
The man then "picked up his half with the forklift truck and drove to his brother's house where he has since been staying."
The police seem less than outraged. "The man said he was just taking his due," one of them stated.
And you thought building a wall was a bad way to get divorced...
(Read more about Gordon Matta-Clark in BLDGBLOG's Museum of Assassination).
 New Scientist reports that "lane markings on roads could one day be changed at the click of a mouse." If electronics firm Philips has its way, roadway markings will no longer use paint; instead, "ultrathin plastic strips would be attached to road surfaces," utilizing "a hard-wearing version of the electronic ink used in emerging flexible displays for e-books" – transforming roads into a kind of literary hieroglyph, or infrastructural e-book. Paving the way for Da Vinci Code 2: Road to Calvary, in which a strange message is found encoded in the pavement outside Mel Gibson's Malibu home... More prosaically, this just means that "lane marking or speed limits [could] be changed at will." But whose will...? And does that mean that you could program the M25 to be like I-95 for a day, and vice versa? Exploring cultural exchange via roadway markings? Of course, if these programmable markings do become an everyday reality, it will inevitably mean that every fifteen year-old on the planet will waste hours and hours trying to hack the local roadways, engineering gruesome pile-ups. J.G. Ballard will be arrested, remote control in hand, staring glassy-eyed through a window at the final crashes he has staged. And, who knows, maybe somebody will figure out how to make these magic roadways show films. The face of Cary Grant, shining upward from a freeway in Montana. Earth Surface Television™. Brought to you by BLDGBLOG.
"365 acres with frontage on, and under, Lake Champlain is for sale in northern New York," the Center for Land Use Interpretation reports.  "The property comes with a 19th century fortification, Fort Montgomery, that while in need of some repair, is still largely intact. Furthermore, the property abuts the Canadian Border, making this an excellent opportunity to add to the defense of the nation." And it can be yours for a mere $10 million. Best of all, Fort Montgomery is located "on an artificial island, linked to the shore by a causeway." Further, the fort "was built in a five-pointed star formation, in a manner more typical of a coastal fortification, and a type that is rarely found in the interior of the country. It has 40 foot tall stone walls projecting out of the water, though portions of it were removed in the 1930s during the construction of a nearby bridge." So why not add it to your portfolio – along with this lovely ghost town?
This "12th century chapel and priory," located "between Poitiers and Limoges in the Vienne region of France," is for sale.  The property "includes cellars, seven bedrooms, eight main reception rooms (!), a small library, bathrooms, kitchen, double garage and further attics capable of conversion. The chapel’s porch is registered as a Historic Monument. It has central heating and a security system. The grounds extend to some 3000 sq m and is planted with a range of trees etc."
 [Image: Thomas Heatherwick's Sitooterie II, a "small outdoor retreat" made from "square, hollow tubes... Each tube points to the exact center of the structure, so a single light source can illuminate them all. They also serve a structural purpose, supporting the whole building like a bed of nails." Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired – larger version here]."When he was 6," we read in the new issue of Wired, British artist-engineer Thomas Heatherwick "would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor": He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension – and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato. 31 years later, Heatherwick has become "a modern da Vinci." Scattered throughout Heatherwick's King's Cross studio, Wired reports, "are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls." A 2004 profile in the Observer describes this same studio as "an unconventional set-up that includes experts in landscape architecture, architecture, product design, theatre design, civil and structural engineering and metal working." Wired goes on to relate how, one "cold winter morning," Heatherwick showed the visiting reporter a photograph of "a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College." The bridge was made of glass: In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides. The three photographs below, then, each taken by Donald Milne for Wired, show another of Heatherwick's bridge projects: the deservedly famous "hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats." Of course, that's the bridge that can "curl itself into a ball" – not the canal. Or the Thames. Though I would like to see that.    [Image: Thomas Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge. Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired].To "retract" the bridge, Wired explains, "an 11-kW hydraulic pump drives a master cylinder 16 inches in diameter, which in turn drives a series of 6-inch slave cylinders. These power 14 vertical shafts beneath the bridge’s hinged handrails. As the shafts rise, the railings fold in, causing the 39-foot span to curl. Because all the cylinders are driven at a constant rate regardless of the load on each bridge segment, the structure moves smoothly, taking two minutes to open or close. The pumps and related equipment are housed in the basement of an adjoining building, so the bridge is almost silent as it operates." Bear in mind, however, that the "canal" this bridge crosses is really only nine or ten feet wide, as well as the maritime equivalent of a cul-de-sac – so the bridge is more of an artistic curiosity than a real piece of city infrastructure. Nonetheless, it's awesome. In an older interview with PingMag, Heatherwick explained, referring to his work in general, that "[b]ehind all this, it always remains important that something is achievable! You can have a perfect wonderful plan, but if it never happens it doesn’t really matter to anybody anyway." So, speaking of achievement – and as everyone in the universe already knows – Heatherwick has also designed B of the Bang, the tallest sculpture in Britain – beautifully photographed, while under construction, here.
 [Image: A Zoroastrian "tower of silence," on top of which corpses would be left, arranged in rings, exposed to sun, weather, and vultures].
 You wake up in a New York hotel room, your vision cloudy. You have hazy memories of guests arriving, all grins and champagne glasses, coming in the night before to snort coke as you watched the Weather Channel – only you don't remember inviting anyone over, and you can't seem to figure out who they were. Nevermind, you think: you like champagne. Sometimes a bit too much. It's only after rising with a headache like iron clamps strapped to your temples, squinting at the morning light, that you remember the syringe, and the struggle, and the fact that someone must have drugged you. But why you? That's when you see that: 1) you are still dressed; 2) your suitcase is gone; and 3) there is a small note taped to your bedside table, next to a free copy of International Salesman. The note says: Shakespeare's Hamlet is being performed in an elevator somewhere in Manhattan. You have ten hours to find it. This is terrible news.
 I'm incredibly excited to announce that Materials & Applications and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to curate an architectural film fest, as part of this year's Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles. In fact, we're putting together a ton of interesting stuff; I'll be making more announcements here on BLDGBLOG soon. But part of our little sub-festival will be an entire evening full of short architectural films – so we thought we'd put out a general call to anyone with a film of their own that they might want to see screened for the adoring, semi-famous, and well-tanned crowds of southern California. The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment – or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn't just backdrop. Even more specifically, we'd love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces, such as the short films generated annually by the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 15. (International submissions are encouraged). Need more ideas? Then check out cinematic urbanism; stop by the glass avenues of Paris 2054; or watch one of these two films. If that's not enough, consider reading this article by Jonathan Glancey, in which he claims that: Of course – though Glancey doesn't explicitly state this – many of the most exhilirating films to watch are architecural in both structure and reference, whether this means Die Hard or Stalker or even David Fincher's Panic Room – or Aliens, Tativille, and The City of Lost Children, for that matter.  [Image: From Christian Volckman's architecturally awesome Renaissance].Less abstractly, perhaps you've just recorded a video interview with an architect or urban planner – and it's actually interesting – or you've just driven around Manhattan fifty times, filming each circuit, speeding the whole thing up till it's less than three minutes... Or whatever: we just want films about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment. There's a whole lot of leeway there. Your film has to be at least a minute long – though it can consist of multiple, smaller films, edited together – and no longer than ten minutes. It also has to be good. Finally, to be included, your film has to be submitted either to BLDGBLOG or to Materials & Applications before Friday, April 6th, 2007. Include your name; your affiliation, if you have one; the title of your film; its running length; and a short description of the actual film. We'll then go through all the submissions and choose the ones that will be featured at the festival (specific date, time, and location to be announced shortly). Pending further developments, eligible formats for submission include Region 1 DVDs ( email me for my address, or just ship it to Materials & Applications) or files sent via services like YouSendIt and MegaUpload. So get cracking! Who knows who will see your film. This time next year, you could be directing X-Men 4 and flipping the bird at all the kids you went to architecture school with...
When it was announced at the beginning of January that Australian researchers had developed a kind of wind battery – an "electricity storage system that promises to transform the role of wind energy" – I immediately thought of a scene from Virgil's Aeneid.  [Image: The wind bank and the battery, via New Scientist].There, we read about a place called "Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle," where all the winds of the world are stored: Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus
Rules the contending winds and moaning gales
As warden of their prison. Round the walls
They chafe and bluster underground. The din
Makes a great mountain murmur overhead.
High on a citadel enthroned,
Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury,
Else they might flay the sea and sweep away
Land masses and deep sky through empty air.
In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away
In caverns of black night. He set above them
Granite of high mountains – and a king
Empowered at command to rein them in
Or let them go. (Book 1, 75-89) In other words, King Aeolus, "high on a citadel enthroned," ruler of these "contending winds and moaning gales," serves as a kind of literary precedent for the new wind bank project off the coast of Australia. Less abstractly, New Scientist explains how a local utility company on King Island has "installed a mammoth rechargeable battery which ensures that as little wind energy as possible goes to waste": When the wind is strong, the wind farm's turbines generate more electricity than the islanders need. The battery is there to soak up the excess and pump it out again on days when the wind fades and the turbines' output falls. The battery installation has almost halved the quantity of fuel burnt by the diesel generators, saving not only money but also at least 2000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year. The battery actually works through an ingenious system of chemical mixture and separation. It is thus referred to as a "flow battery": In the lead-acid batteries most commonly used, the chemicals that store the energy remain inside the battery. The difference with the installation on King Island is that when wind power is plentiful the energy-rich chemicals are pumped out of the battery and into storage tanks, allowing fresh chemicals in to soak up more charge. To regenerate the electricity the flow is simply reversed. Interestingly, this bit of news arrived at the same time as an article about offshore oil rigs, on the Gulf coast of Texas, being retrofitted to act as gigantic windmills.  [Image: Via Wired].In other words, an offshore energy firm is hoping to "mount conventional windmills on decommissioned oil platforms," and then anchor those platforms, like artificial islands, out at sea, where the planet's winds are at their strongest. Combining both these stories, though, I can't help but picture a suitably mythic vision of gigantic flow batteries, standing on iron strutworks and gantried legs, like some sci-fi sea-city on the Texas horizon, dispensing power to all those who visit it: a modern-day version of Aeolia, in other words, the weather-breeding isle. In any case, all of this takes a turn inland when we add yet another article, published last month in Metropolis. Metropolis introduces us to a man named Mark Oberholzer. Oberholzer has proposed "integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes," which would thus "harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy."  [Image: Via Metropolis].By tapping into an otherwise overlooked urban energy source, Oberholzer's plan transforms a space of pollution, waste, and indulgence – i.e. the modern interstate highway system – into a place of energetic productivity. Better yet, his system capitalizes not on already existing wind patterns, such as those roaring across the ocean waters of the world, but on inland breezes generated by human activity. His highway-based turbines thus exhibit an interesting, if problematic, symmetry when it comes to anthropocentric climate change: these devices rely entirely on the passage of automobiles, even as they generate an electrical supply that doesn't itself burn fossil fuels.  [Image: Via Metropolis].Returning to the Classical theme with which this post started, though, there is one aspect to all of this that perhaps even Homer himself would like to hear. I'm referring to the Anemoi, Greek gods of wind, each associated with one of four cardinal directions. There was Boreas, the north wind; Eurus, the east wind; Notus, the south wind; and Zephyr, the west wind. To these, though, Oberholzer's highway project would seem to add a new wind, and another direction: the wind of Man and Cities, those agitated inland breezes from our architectural world, where constant motion now generates its own unruly weather. An even larger symmetry opens up here, then, when we realize that Oberholzer's inland winds of highways and boulevards might yet be stored, years from now, in wind batteries like those on King Island, Australia. In other words, these new winds of modernity – urban weather – would be welcomed back into the embrace of King Aeolus, tying the knot, joining those older breezes locked deep inside the isle of Aeolia, where their energy will be stored for another day. (This post originally appeared on Worldchanging).
 [Image: Mt. Nemrut stone statue heads].Naturally occuring soil bacteria, called Bacillus pasteurii, could someday "be used to help steady buildings against earthquakes." These microbes " can literally convert loose, sandy soil into rock." Through a kind of geological infection, they cause "calcite (calcium carbonate) to be deposited around sand grains, cementing them together," transforming "loose, liquefiable sand into a solid cylinder." This alone could help buildings survive an earthquake. Interestingly, "similar techniques have been used on a smaller scale, for example, to repair cracks in statues, but not to reinforce soil." But hearing this reminds me of an article published last year in New Scientist, about " a disease which gradually turns people into living statues." Officially known as sporadic fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, it's "a disease in which muscle gradually turns into bone." According to Wikipedia, this "mutation of the body's repair mechanism causes fibrous tissue (including muscle, tendon, and ligament) to be ossified (turned to bone) when damaged. In many cases they can cause joints to become permanently frozen in place. The growths cannot be removed with surgery because such removal causes the body to 'repair' the area of surgery with more bone." So the idea here would be to give "statue disease" to the Earth itself: wherever the planet is wounded, it turns itself to rock – or bone, as the case may be – saving us from earthquakes.  But what amazing architectural structures might result if the world was swept by statue disease! The crowds of Paris, frozen hard as rock in an epidemic of Gothic statuary, webbed together in one vast church of bone. All of Rome becomes a sculpture gallery. Discovering that you, too, are infected, you deliberately seek out a crowd of others, wearing hospital gowns, and you join together in a group to form huge gymnastic shapes – knowing that your joints will soon fuse, becoming an artwork that will outlast Manhattan. Future archaeologists will burst into tears as they scrape away layers of the Gobi Desert, revealing ten million human statues in an abandoned Beijing...
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[Image: "Stout members of the sixth column dislodge an enemy machine gun post on the dome of St. Paul's," by 
[Image: The abyss, courtesy of 
