Architectural Dermatology

According to the BBC, Indian officials have concluded that a "deep-cleansing mud pack may be the only way to return a yellowing Taj Mahal to the cultural landmark's former white marble glory."
By "caking the building in clay," we read, those same officials can actually "draw out surface impurities" – but how do they know whether or not they've purchased the right mud mask...?

[Earlier on BLDGBLOG: the oddly popular Hurling Taj Mahals into the Sky].

Postopolis! Update

A poster for Postopolis! will be coming out soon (without a red border), including the list of speakers as it now stands – and I'm unbelievably excited about this thing. I really can't wait.
So: scattered over the course of five days, from May 29 to June 2, from 1pm-8pm everyday, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, you'll be hearing from, among many others yet to be announced:
Lebbeus Woods, Laura Kurgan, Michael Sorkin & Mitchell Joachim, Stanley Greenberg, Joel Sanders, Susan Szenasy, DJ /rupture, Andrew Blum, Jake Barton, William Drenttel, Tom Vanderbilt, Michael Bierut, Lawrence Weschler, Robert Krulwich, Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch, Randi Greenberg, Allan Chochinov, Julia Solis, Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano, Scott Marble, Paul Seletsky, Robert Neuwirth, Wes Janz, James Sanders, Eric Rodenbeck, Kevin Slavin, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Quilian Riano, Miss Representation, Enrique Gualberto Ramirez, George Agnew, Chad Smith, Abe Burmeister, John Hill... and a lot more to come (including unannounced guests who just happen to be in New York that week).
So it should be a blast.
Stay tuned for specific times and so on, coming soon – and if you're anywhere near NY, please consider stopping by: it's not an academic conference, and the more people the merrier...
Finally, the other three blogs involved in planning all this are City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia – with the indispensible help of Joseph Grima, from the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Sci-Fi Mecca

So it looks like Wired liked our science fiction and film panel, held last week.

[Image: Courtesy of Mark Goerner – here's a large version].

The four panelists, Wired writes, showed "art that's rarely seen outside the film studio: pictures of otherworldy and futuristic cities that special effects crews and CGI geeks use as blueprints to build the backdrops for outer-space fights, alien worlds and castles fit for dragons."
Read more – and see a lot more images – at Wired.
Meanwhile, some more background on the event can be found here, on BLDGBLOG – or you can even check out ARCHITECT Magazine's coverage of the event (although, if you read that article, note that the date for our second screening has been moved from May 9 to May 22).
Finally, if you were there, thanks again for coming out!

The Space of the Bachelor

While researching another post I hope to write soon, about Franz Kafka and a small room in San Francisco, I stumbled upon something else that seemed worth putting up on the blog; it's from Kafka's Diaries: 1910-1923.
In an early entry, from 1911, Kafka describes the "unhappiness of the bachelor," an unhappiness that, for him, seems less dependent on loneliness or personal abandonment – or even on some catastrophic sense of being overlooked by the world, always – than on space: a bachelor never has enough of it.

A bachelor is alone, after all, which means that "so much the smaller a space is considered sufficient for him."
One could perhaps say that, for Kafka, a bachelor is never spatially respected...
In any case, looking for space – or for the proper space, the one that feels right and "has a few panes of glass between itself and the night" – our bachelor finds that he "moves incessantly, but with predictable regularity, from one apartment to another."
This goes on – and on – for the rest of his isolated existence until "he, this bachelor, still in the midst of life, apparently of his own free will resigns himself to an ever smaller space, and when he dies the coffin is exactly right for him."

An Island for Destroyed Cities

[Image: Ruins of the City Walls (1625-1627) by Bartholomeus Breenbergh].

In The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert Bevan describes, in almost numbing detail, how specific buildings – indeed, whole cities – have been targeted, damaged, or otherwise destroyed by war.
He writes of the "violent destruction of buildings for other than pragmatic reasons," claiming that "there has always been [a] war against architecture." This war is fought through the deliberate "eradication" of an enemy's built environment – that is, "the active and often systematic destruction of particular building types or architectural traditions."
Some of Bevan's examples, however, sound less like warfare than a kind of highly complex – and extremely violent – architectural ritual, played out over centuries between rival governments and religions. This is the "repeated demolition or adaptation of each other's buildings," and retaliation can sometimes take generations.
For instance, Bevan writes about the site of the cathedral, in Córdoba, Spain, which "started out as a Roman temple" before being destroyed by Christian Visigoths:

A subsequent church on the site was replaced by a mosque following the Arab conquest of the early eighth century. Some seventy years later this was itself demolished to create the first stage of a massive new mosque. The Christian recaptured Córdoba in 1236 and consecrated the building as a cathedral. (...) It is said that the mosque's lamps were melted down to make new bells for the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 800 km to the north. This probably seemed only fair, since the lamps had themselves been made from Santiago's original bells: when the Moors had conquered the city in 997 they had dragged the bells to Córdoba and melted them down into lamps.

Tit for tat.
Bevan also describes how the Bastille, having been stormed in 1789, was reduced to a heap of stones – but these stones were then "broken up and sold as souvenirs," in a "commodification process repeated with the fragments of the Berlin Wall 200 years later."
In any case, Bevan goes on to discuss mosques bulldozed in the Balkans, synagogues burnt to the ground in both Poland and Germany, Armenian monasteries reduced to foundation stones as, even today, they are dismantled and reused to build houses in eastern Turkey, the dynamiting of Loyalist mansions by Irish Republican militias, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and even archaeological sites fatally disturbed during the invasion of Iraq – among many, many other such examples, all found throughout Bevan's book.
These are all, he says, "crimes against architecture."

More to the point here, when Bevan points out that "the bulldozed remains of the Aladza mosque" were "dumped" by Serbian troops into a nearby river – the ruins were only "identified by the mosque's distinctive stone columns" – it occurred to me that fragments like these must be numerous enough that you could use them to reassemble complete buildings elsewhere.
You could construct a whole city from fragments of buildings destroyed by war.

For instance, all the gravel, dirt, and foundation stones from ruined buildings and cities around the world could be dropped into shallow waters off the western coast of Greece – forming the base of an artificial island, as large as Manhattan, on which to build your memorial to cities and spaces killed by war...
You draw up plans with a local architecture school, plotting a whole new island metropolis constructed from nothing but pre-existing pieces of annihilated architecture – fitting arches with arches and floors with floors.
Within a decade you've covered the island in a maze of Chicago tenement housing, Russian churches, Indian temples, and Chinese hutongs; there are Aztec walls and pillars standing inside reconstructed Romanian state houses – before most of pre-WWII Europe begins to appear, together with shattered castles, north African villages, and the weathered masonry of pre-Columbian South America, all the buildings merging one into one another, indistinct, with Mayan rocks and Kurdish roofing joined together atop bricks from Köln and Dresden.
Another decade later and the island-city is complete. There are no cars and no electricity – in fact, no one lives there at all. It sits alone in the waters, covered in wild herbs and home to songbirds, casting shadows on itself, eroding a bit in the occasional rainstorm.
Documentaries about it soon appear on CNN and the BBC.
Only 10 people are allowed on the island at any given time; most of them just take photographs or make sketches, or write letters to loved ones, as they wander, awe-struck, through the narrow streets of this barely remembered desolation, stumbling upon extinct building types and lost statuary – towers of churches destroyed by bombs – hardly even able to conceive how all these places could have been destroyed by human conflict.
They then brush the dust of structures off their shoes as they board the boat to go home, silent, looking back at this island, the sun setting a brilliant orange behind its almost pitch-black silhouette.

Tokyo Revelation

[Image: Ameyoko by Hisaharu Motoda; via Pink Tentacle].

On Wired today, we read that "Japanese photographer Hisaharu Motada [sic] envisions the radioactive and decomposing cityscapes of post-apocalyptic Tokyo in his Neo-Ruins series of photographs."

[Image: Ginza Chuo Dori by Hisaharu Motoda; via Pink Tentacle].

From Motoda's own website:

In his Neo-Ruins series Motoda depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. "In Neo-Ruins I wanted to capture both a sense of the world's past and of the world's future," he explains.

The resulting images are actually lithographs, heavily textured, like aged prints.

[Images: Kabukicho, Shibuya Center Town, and Electric City by Hisaharu Motoda].

Of course, Motoda's website hosts a number of other works, including this awesome image of Hashima, or Gunkanjima Island, the wonderfully creepy abandoned former mining island off the coast of Japan.

[Image: Hashima by Hisaharu Motoda].

So who's up for making lithographs of a post-apocalyptic Cairo...? Or Chicago, or Mumbai? I'll write the wall-text.

(Also found via Pink Tentacle).

Science Fiction and the City: Film Fest Recap

The event last night was a blast, and so I want to thank everyone for coming out, especially the four panelists, Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner, and Ben Procter; but I also want to thank Leslie Marcus, from the Art Center College of Design; Kyle Maynard, for his technical assistance; my wife, for photographing the whole thing; Scott Robertson, for putting me in touch with the panelists in the first place; and Jenna Didier & Oliver Hess of Materials & Applications, for helping put this whole event together.

[Images: The event, photographed by Nicola Twilley. From left to right, top to bottom, you're seeing the Wind Tunnel itself; BLDGBLOG introducing the speakers; Mark Goerner and James Clyne; the audience; Ben Procter; some of Ben's concept art for Superman Returns; Ryan Church, Mark Goerner, and James Clyne; Ben Procter presenting while Ryan Chuch looks on (two images); and Ryan Church presenting some of his concept art for Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, with Ben Procter and Mark Goerner visible either side].

There were some slips here and there – including nearly ten seconds of awesomely explosive feedback that put Merzbow to shame – and the Q&A period at the end barely got off the ground before we had to move on to screening the films; but I was really excited to see a full house – Wired magazine was even there – and to get a look at so many truly awesome works of concept art, from impossible structures and fantasy buildings to hybridized cities and a planet made from bridges – not to mention surreal juxtapositions of Czech cubism, military aerodynamism, automotive design, origami, Hieronymous Bosch, High Gothic machine-towers, and "what the Roman empire would have looked like if it had had structural steel."
It was also great just to meet the panelists themselves, finally, and to have contributed at least a tiny bit to the beginnings of a much larger conversation about film, science fiction, and architecture.
With any luck, then, there will be another event of the same nature soon – or possibly a web feature here on BLDGBLOG – so we can continue what we started: to look at more of this stuff, and to ask these guys more questions, and maybe even to find out what it means that architecture students, for instance, know all about Archigram and Piranesi and the Pamphlet Architecture series, and they know all about paper architects from Boullée to Lebbeus Woods, but so many genuinely exciting architectural ideas – from science fiction films and the background of Hollywood blockbusters – are only casually, if ever, discussed.
As it is, the canon of accepted architectural history excludes this stuff – for no real reason. Unless it's Metropolis or maybe Jacques Tati. But architects should be watching Minority Report as much as they read Charles Jencks or even Rem Koolhaas.
In any case, I thought the event was fun, though I apologize for the wild bursts of feedback and for the 5-minute delay in starting – but I'm glad you came out, if you did, and I hope you had a good time. And if you found the conversation cut too short at the end – as I did – then feel free to say what you wished had been said at the time, here in the comments.
Otherwise, watch out for a follow-up event/interview/feature at some point this summer.
Finally, thanks to the filmmakers who we featured last night. If you liked Bradford Watson's 2x4x96, in particular, here's more information, including how to contact Bradford himself; and if my description of Thorsten Fleisch's movie using crystals grown directly on film – or geology turned into cinema – here it is.
Next up: May 22nd, 8-10pm, in the same converted Wind Tunnel in Pasadena, nearly two hours' worth of short films about architecture, also brought to you by BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications...
Stay tuned.

The Film Fest Cometh!

More information about the event and a gigantic version of this poster are both available...
No RSVP is required; street parking should be ample; the building looks like this; it can be found here; 8:00pm is the starting point; and, if you show up, you'll hear concept artists Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner, and Ben Procter all discussing film, space, science fiction, and architecture. The films will be screened at the end.
Hope to see you there!
Meanwhile, a second night, entirely devoted to films about architecture, landscape, and the city, is still to come – once that date is finalized, we'll have another announcement.

(Image in poster by James Clyne; for more images, by all four artists, don't miss the film fest Flickr page).

Great streets, campuses, and pedestrian nostalgia

[Image: A street in Central Park, via Wikipedia].

I went to an event the other night about "great streets," held in a small theater on Venice Boulevard, in Los Angeles, about six blocks from my apartment. I walked there.
The point of the event was apparently:

1) To discuss the importance of greening the public realm... to make our communities inherently more walkable
2) To identify the most effective methods for funding these projects
3) To better understand the bureaucratic obstacles to creating more environmentally sustainable streets & sidewalks

There was also a fourth purpose: to figure out how urban space can accomodate "bikes, cars, pedestrians, flora & fauna, watershed management, open space, street vendors, retail, recreation & relaxation, [and] transit."
All of which sounds like a great event to me, with an awesome purpose, coming at an interesting time for urban planning; but the conversation almost immediately turned into something far stranger and infinitely less important – because the moderator turned the whole thing into a kind of "what's your favorite street in LA?" quiz.
Without going further into why that bothered me – such as the rather obvious fact that an event about "great streets" really has nothing at all to do with "your favorite street in LA," which both narrows the topic and makes everyone waste time thinking about how they can out-cool one another, coming up with more and more obscure streets that only they have the poetic sense to celebrate – I just want to point out a few quick things.
First of all, I think it was only mentioned twice that a street can be anything other than infrastructure devoted to automotive transport – in other words, "streets" inherently just mean space for cars.
For instance, the moderator reversed his own question at one point and asked: "What's your least favorite street in LA?" And he explained himself by adding something like: "You know, a street you get irritated on while driving."
The whole thing was about cars.
Not only did this totally contradict the way the event pitched itself – after all, it should have been billed as a public conversation in which you get to listen to strangers explaining what streets in LA they like to drive on and why (thus attracting a totally different audience) – but it missed so many opportunities in which to talk about great streets.
After all, it was an event about great streets.
Something that become immediately clear, for instance, was that no one's favorite street was a pedestrian-only walkway through New York City's Central Park, or, say, Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado (of course, neither of those are in LA – further demonstrating the weird absurdity of limiting a conversation about "great streets" to "cool drives across Los Angeles").
For that matter, no one mentioned that their favorite street was a walking path on the campus of UCLA or Oxford.
But that's because people seem to hear the word "street" and they immediately assume it means cars – a "street" means infrastructure for the near-exclusive use of trucks and automobiles.
A street means something I can drive my car on.

In fact, something I think about more and more lately is the possibility that Americans get as nostalgic as they do about college – identifying themselves as graduates of certain universities to a degree, and with a passion, that I genuinely think is alien to most cultures – whatever that means – not simply because college represents the only four years in which they might have pursued their real interests, but because, in the United States, college is a totally different lifestyle.
You walk everywhere.
The campus where you live and study has trees, and paths, and benches to sit on. It's really nice. No wonder you miss it.
You can go outside and throw a football, or throw a frisbee, and you can ride a bike – and you don't have to worry about being hit by a truck, or sprayed in the face by several pounds' worth of carcinogens (such as car exhaust).
In other words – and this theory is transparently absurd, but I nonetheless think that its rhetorical value is such that I'll give it space here – if you look at the particular colleges in the United States that seem to inspire the highest levels of lifelong loyalty, nostalgia, and even sports team fanaticism, you'll find places like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, or UCLA, or my own school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or even Penn State, or Georgetown – but the unifying factor there is not simply that all those schools have awesome sports teams, which they do, but that they all have really nice campuses.
So you graduate with your law degree and you move to Ft. Worth and you hang Michigan banners all over your office walls – but that nostalgic loyalty is not simply because you miss playing beer pong, it's because you miss being able to walk around everywhere.
It's a particularly intense form of pedestrian nostalgia.
In any case, college is like discovering a different world, tucked away inside the United States – and it's a world that's been built for human beings.
After all, you get at least a tiny bit of exercise everyday; you wake up, drinking coffee outside on the way to class or to work; you don't worry about parking, or about auto theft; you see familiar people hanging out, and you can even stop off and talk to them, standing under oak trees.
You can jump around and be a total moron in your own body, outside with the friends who actually know you.
But if you do that now, commuting to work in an automobile, you get pulled over by state troopers, tasered in the face – and then you show up on Boing Boing.
It's a different world.
It's not a world built for you anymore. It's a world built for cars.
In many ways, it's as if being an adult in the United States really means changing your everyday landscape. Instead of benches, paths, people, and sunlight, you get cars, parking lots, strangers, and road rage.
If you lived in a city that looked like a college campus, you could walk to the bank; you could walk to the grocery store; you could walk to work; you could even walk to the cinema and see Spiderman 3 – and you wouldn't have to do it alongside cars, or even crossing the paths of cars.
You'd live and work and commute on foot, walking on great streets under awesomely huge and beautiful trees – and there'd be benches to sit on, and people you know outside reading books, and you could actually understand what it means for "a day" to pass by. After all, there's evening, and there's mid-day, and there's morning – and so you'd actually experience the passage of time.
You wouldn't have to look back at the age of 35 and wonder where all that time went.
Anyway, I don't care if you're walking to a church or to a gun range, to a mosque or to a nightclub – the point is that you're out there walking, feeling proud – you're not mistaking a linked series of carcinogenic parking lots for the best your nation can do – and streets no longer have to mean cars.
Cars are awesome – I love cars, in fact I literally fantasize about owning a Toyota Tacoma. Which is a truck.
But cars are for highways, and for hauling things, and for escaping wild bear attacks. Cars are for going camping, and for driving to Baltimore because you're bored and DC sucks.
But cars are not for everyday urban use.

If I can be permitted to go on a tiny bit longer here, let me also mention one more thing.
Living out here in LA, I'm increasingly convinced that Americans simply don't see how much paved space they're surrounded by at any given moment.
There's an intersection in Los Angeles, for instance, just south of Beverly Center – and it's so ridiculously huge that I think you could fit Trafalgar Square, the Piazza San Marco, Rittenhouse Square, and, say, Berlin's Monbijouplatz all tucked safely inside of it. In other words, it could be a pedestrian wonderland of benches and trees and places to lie out in the sun, and throw a baseball, and whatever else it is that you want to do out there under the skies of California.
Instead, it's an intersection – and it's one of the largest expanses of concrete I've ever seen.
I genuinely believe that if you measured the total square footage of that intersection alone, you'd see that at least three or four of the "great squares of Europe" would fit right in. Conversely, if you took all the piazzas, squares, parks, and plazas of Europe, and you turned them into parking lots, even a city like Bologna could look an awful lot like Los Angeles.
In any case, this week's "great streets" event missed so many opportunities to discuss great streets as if they might be something other than just more space for automobiles – or that the open space between opposing buildings should be used for any other purpose than driving on.
There was no recognition that streets can be places to walk, or bike, or jog, or hang out with your kids, or flirt with foreign tourists, where you can read a book, and get a tan, and throw objects at your bestfriend so that he can catch them and throw them back at you, repeatedly, in a sportsman-like fashion – that would be a great street, too, in other words, and yet cars would be nowhere to be found.
Not even Toyota Tacomas.
As I say, finally, I'm not "anti-car" – despite that fact that we're running out of oil.
I just don't think that cars should be even remotely convenient when it comes to personal travel within cities.
Sorry.
It was just depressing to realize that the moderator at the event the other night was obsessed with a new plan out here to turn Pico and Olympic Boulevards into one-way express routes, running east and west across Los Angeles; which seemed to prove, somehow, that the infrastructure of the city should, in all cases, keep pace with car ownership.
What was genuinely never discussed, though, was not the idea that we need more highways and parking lots and one-way express lanes because everyone owns a car, but that everyone owns a car because they're surrounded by highways and parking lots and one-way express lanes.
What else are you supposed to do in that kind of landscape?
How else can you react?
In other words, the space comes first; with this many parking lots, you can't walk anywhere.
So, even as it was announced that Los Angeles is the most polluted city in the country, and even as LA is now expanding several highways and investing what appears to be absolutely nothing in cool transportation ideas – such as pimped-out mini-buses or light rail – this event, meant as a way to discuss "the importance of greening the public realm," so that our communities can become "inherently more walkable," turned into a celebration of driving in Los Angeles.
Which is great – I love driving in Los Angeles. I even have a few favorite streets here.
But:

1) A "street" is not simply space devoted to automobiles. It's a place of movement, outdoors, that connects different destinations.
2) Cities could be designed to look like college campuses, full of trees and paths and benches and interchangeable varieties of long walks between different locations – whether those locations are churches, bookstores, police stations, football stadiums, private homes, or hash bars.
3) The reason you need a car is because you're surrounded by highways and parking lots – it's not the other way around. City planners need to realize this.

But none of that ever came up the other night. It was a missed opportunity.
Not that I chimed in; lamely, I left the minute it ended and walked home to eat some dinner.

Postopolis!

A few months ago, I got a call from Joseph Grima, the director of New York's legendary Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery. Joseph wanted to put together some kind of event about architecture blogs – how blogs are participating in, redefining, and sometimes even leading the architectural conversation today, on the street, in the schools, at practicing design firms, etc.
If architecture blogs are now changing what people talk about in fields ranging from urban planning, public transport, landscape architecture, green design, architectural history, and even archaeoastronomy and documentary filmmaking, then surely there should be some way to celebrate that, and to mark it with a public event or exhibition?

[Image: New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture, with its famous hinged facade, designed by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci].

So I said yes, in an instant, then waited for things to develop – only to learn that the event would take place over five straight days of near-continuous activity, that I'd be flown all the way to New York City for it, and that Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat, Bryan Finoki of Subtopia, and Dan Hill of City of Sound would also be involved (Alex Trevi of Pruned couldn't make it).
The four of us would be given total freedom to plan whatever we wanted (provided it had at least something to do with architecture, space, landscape, and the city) – to take the same motivating energy behind our various blog posts, interviews, dialogues, plotlines, reviews, ideas, rants, histories, surveys, etc., and to recreate that in person, organizing lectures, panels, pecha kuchas, film screenings, live interviews, readings, casual mingling, wine drinking, purposeful caffeine experimentation, and maybe even some walking tours and site visits... and we'd do it at all from Tuesday, May 29, to Saturday, June 2, 2007.
The event would be called Postopolis! – exclamation point included.

[Image: The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City].

The four of us are still in the process of assembling speakers and guests, from architects and city planners to urban explorers, military historians, novelists, and documentary filmmakers – not to mention musicians, photographers, ecologists, climate change scientists, plate tectonicists, and so on – and we'll even be putting together an event within the event so that other architecture bloggers can join in.
After all, Postopolis! is meant to be about architecture blogs – not just about the four of us – so expanding the conversation to include as many other bloggers as possible only makes sense.
In any case, it should be awesomely and unbelievably fun – five days to talk about everything, nonstop, live from the Storefront in Manhattan.

[Image: The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City].

More info will continue to come out on all of our blogs over the next month, so check back often – but if you're anywhere near New York City that week, please feel free to stop by. You'll see City of Sound, Inhabitat (check out Jill gracing the pages of Vogue this month), Subtopia, and myself, in person, with hundreds of our favorite blog posts printed out and plastered all over the walls...

Finally, thanks to Joseph Grima at the Storefront for Art and Architecture for asking us to put this together!

Landscape Futures

I'm increasingly fascinated by the ways in which climate change works hand in hand with, and even directly leads to, geographic change, or the physical alteration of existing landscapes.
What interests me even more, however, is the idea that landscape change can sometimes come first – a volcanic eruption, or a redirected river – sending the Earth's climate out of wack.

[Image: Lake Agassiz, an ancient glacial lake whose draining may have changed the global climate].

Roughly 13,000 years ago, for instance, Lake Agassiz, a gigantic freshwater lake "bigger than all of the present-day Great Lakes combined," broke through its ice dam and flooded up the St. Lawrence Seaway, roaring directly into the Atlantic. As a result, certain oceanic currents shut down and the existing pattern of global temperatures changed in a matter of months.
Or another example: 55 million years ago, the "volcanic eruptions that created Iceland might also have triggered one of the most catastrophic episodes of global warming ever seen on Earth," New Scientist reported last week.
In other words, the formation of Iceland was "accompanied by violent volcanic eruptions that built layers of basalt rock 7 kilometres thick." (!) All that new rock packed "a total volume of 10,000,000 cubic kilometres, enough to build a proto-Iceland in the newly-born north Atlantic."
In the process, though, this "huge volcanic eruption... unleashed so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that world temperatures rose by as much as 8°C."
The effect "was disastrous for most life... killing off many deep-sea species."

[Image: The completely unrelated, but nonetheless beautiful, Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica].

On the other hand, these sorts of changes can obviously work both ways: climate change comes first, affecting rainfall, thus forming deserts where there were once great plains – or any variety of other global warming scenarios.
In an article in The Guardian last week, Mark Lynas explained how the Sand Hills of Nebraska were once part of a vast desert, larger than the Sahara – "an immense system of sand dunes that spread across the Great Plains from Texas in the south to the Canadian prairies in the north," Lynas writes.
But if you overlook the existence of federal irrigation projects, and other government water subsidies, the only major difference between then and now is 1ºC.
In other words, it's only one degree cooler today than it was when huge sand dunes roamed across North America.
Meanwhile, Lynas goes on to explore how, with every jump of only 1ºC in the average planetary temperature today, wildly different landscapes become possible around the world.
The one possibility that truly blows me away – and even makes me want to make a science fiction film, or write a graphic novel, or even publish a BLDGBLOG book of short stories set in this insane new landscape – is this: once Europe is 4ºC hotter than it is today, "new deserts will be spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara will have effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar."
Imagining the cities of northern Italy buried in sand – with Renaissance statuary chest-deep in dunes...

[Image: The Sahara desert, waiting to spring upon the unsuspecting streets of Paris... Via Wikipedia].

Lynas continues:

In Switzerland, summer temperatures may hit 48ºC, more reminiscent of Baghdad than Basel. The Alps will be so denuded of snow and ice that they resemble the rocky moonscapes of today's High Atlas – glaciers will only persist on the highest peaks such as Mont Blanc. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech will be experienced in southern England...

And so on.
However, I don't mean to celebrate the annihilatory effects of global climate change here; I simply mean to point out that: 1) some of these changes are deliriously surreal and, as such, they're actually quite fun to think about; and 2) a very, very strange future awaits our descendents, should anything even remotely like this come to pass.
Actually, 3): it's also worth pointing out that, today, a novel set in an abandoned Rome, crawling with sand dunes, would be considered a work of science fiction – but, in one hundred years' time, such a setting may be much closer to social realism. In other words, literary genres will also be forced to adapt in an era of rapid climate change. (This same topic is actually discussed in BLDGBLOG's forthcoming interview with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson).
Finally, all of these speculative landscapes of the future have already begun to inspire something of a new golden age for international law. The future of Canada's "Northwest Passage" is a perfect example of this.
As ice continues to thaw throughout the Canadian Arctic, a fantastically convenient shipping route, reaching from the Atlantic through to Asia, is taking shape. This route cuts right through Canada's sovereign terrain – but, with such huge sums of money at stake for international trade, will the Canadian government be able to maintain control over the seaway...?
The question, then, involves whether the Northwest Passage should be considered a "transit passage" – and, thus, subject to Canadian law – or an "international strait" – thus, outside of Canada's reach.

[Image: The Northwest Passage, as imagined by Sir John Ross, 1819].

According to a recent essay in the London Review of Books, "Canada claims that the passage constitutes Canadian internal waters" – but the United States, perhaps unsurprisingly, "insists that the passage is an 'international strait'."
However, the essay goes on to explain that treating the Passage as an international strait – which means it will be free from Canadian regulations, controls, and other legal constraints – may actually pose unexpected consequences in the realm of international security.
Anyway – etc. etc.
Basically, what I think is cool here is that large-scale terrestrial transformation in an era of rapid climate change is already beginning to impact upon fantastically mundane questions – of law, property, sovereignty, and so on – showing that no matter how sci-fi a situation may likely be, you can always find some way to fit it into human legislation.
In any case, I'm sure I'll be returning to this topic soon.

The architecture of solar alignments

[Image: The solar-aligned ruins of Chankillo, Peru; via the BBC].

The Chankillo ruins, near the Peruvian coast, made the news a few months back when they were discovered to be an ancient solar observatory.
According to NASA, some archaeologists "have nicknamed the ruin’s central complex the 'Norelco ruin' based on its resemblance to a modern electric shaver."
Just southeast of the "electric shaver," however, are a series of structures called "the Thirteen Towers, which vaguely resemble a slightly curved spine."

[Image: Photo by Ivan Ghezzi, demonstrating solar alignments with the "slightly curved spine" of the Thirteen Towers; via the BBC].

Quoting NASA:

The Thirteen Towers were the key to the scientists conclusion that the site was a solar observatory. These regularly spaced towers line up along a hill, separated by about 5 meters (16 feet). The towers are easily seen from Chankillo’s central complex, but the views of these towers from the eastern and western observing points are especially illuminating. These viewpoints are situated so that, on the winter and summer solstices, the sunrises and sunsets line up with the towers at either end of the line. Other solar events, such as the rising and setting of the Sun at the mid-points between the solstices, were aligned with different towers.

The BBC quotes a man called Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy in Leicester, England: "These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long."

[Image: Like some kind of machine embedded in the surface of the earth, it's the Chankillo Observatory. Courtesy of GeoEye/SIME, via NASA's Earth Observatory].

For all that, though, the surrounding landscape at Chankillo is itself just extraordinary; you can't see it in the images above, however, so take a look at this image – or even at this huge version of that image, or even at this truly gigantic (3.4mb) version.
Meanwhile, I'm a genuine sucker for solar-alignment theories involving landscapes and architecture; in fact, I was just talking to someone about this the other day.
Yet I'm even more of a sucker for unintentional examples of such things – like houses with pitched gable roofs that accidentally line-up with the sun every summer solstice...
I've talked about this kind of thing on BLDGBLOG before – but that doesn't mean I won't do it again.
For instance: one day, a science writer in her late 30s gets an email saying that she's being sent to report on iceberg calving off the western coast of Greenland.
She takes a boat, along with some climate scientists and oceanographers, and they find themselves inside the region of study by the second week of June. Icebergs are flowing past the ship on all sides; no one can believe how many there are. Measurements are taken; the icebergs continue to drift.
The days grow longer.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

Then, on the morning of the summer solstice, our science journalist can't sleep. She's been up all night, flipping her pillow over and back, shoving the blankets off then pulling them tight again, etc. etc.
Finally, she gets out of bed and wanders out onto the deck of the ship – where she sees the sun of the summer solstice just hanging there.
Incredibly, though, a perfect line of drifting icebergs – ten, twenty, thirty icebergs – stretches out, one after the other, toward the horizon. The effect is uncanny; it looks as if the icebergs have been deliberately placed there, sculpted into an unbroken line by unseen forces – and right above them, of course, is the summer sun, casting a reflective line of golden light from one icy peak to the next.
It's as if, for that precise moment, from the deck of that particular ship, for that one woman alone, the Arctic seascape has been arranged to line up with the solstice.
In any case, I think there should be an ongoing competition – or at least some kind of internet archive – for photographic proof of unexpected solar alignments: four times a year, perhaps – on the solstices and equinoxes – you go out and search for weird alignments of the sun...
In a small town outside Albany, the windows of every house in one particular cul-de-sac light up, the sun shining straight through house after house, in a perfectly straight line, as if they'd been built for the purpose, a monumental solar observatory the exact size and shape of suburbia – till one family closes their curtains, and the effect is gone.

(Earth Observatory image found via del.icio.us/pruned).

Pay-to-Stay Imprisonment

"The California prison system," as reported by The New York Times today, is "severely overcrowded, teeming with violence and infectious diseases and so dysfunctional that much of it is under court supervision." As such, it is a system "that anyone with the slightest means would most likely pay to avoid."
Luckily for them, they can now do so.

They can pay-to-stay:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.

For fees ranging from $82 to $127 per night, inmates can apparently stay for up to four years. The NYTimes reports on one "prisoner," in particular, "who in her oversize orange T-shirt and flip-flops looked more like a contestant on The Real World than an inmate." They quote her: "I haven’t had a problem with any of the other girls. They give me shampoo.”
In what is surely the set-up for a new blockbuster comedy – starring Jim Carrey – we even learn that many pay-to-stay convicts are actually "granted work furlough, enabling them to do most of their time on the job, returning to the jail simply to go to bed."
There are obvious – and entirely justified – complaints: for instance that this system simply transforms the Californian penal system into a new kind of sociological adventure tourism, favoring those residents of the state with enough disposable income to avoid showering alongside gangs of neo-Nazis – totally violating any concept of punishment or rehabilitation in the process.
At the same time, though, sociological adventure tourism opens up a fascinating range of future business models that we would do well to think about, and prepare for, before they come to pass.
Pay-to-stay loans, for instance, or jail'otels – or even some weird outer Hollywood casting agency where you can try out for substitute imprisonment on behalf of paying clients. Should you be accepted, they'll take care of your student loans and buy your family weekly pizzas. Though I'm sure you can already be hired to go to jail.
Read more at The New York Times.

Ancient Lights

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

"Ancient lights" is a colloquialism for the "right to light," guaranteed under English law, whereby windows that have seen twenty years' worth of "uninterrupted" daylight cannot be blocked by the construction of new buildings.
Or, as Wikipedia explains it:

In effect, the owner of a building with windows that have received natural daylight for 20 years or more is entitled to forbid any construction or other obstruction that would deprive him of that illumination. Neighbors cannot build anything that would block the light without permission. The owner may build more or larger windows but cannot enlarge his new windows before the new period of 20 years has expired.

"Once a right to light exists," we read, "the owner of the right is entitled to 'sufficient light according to the ordinary notions of mankind'." Even better, British courts apparently "rely on expert witnesses to define this term."
Whether "this term" refers to sufficient light or to ordinary notions of mankind is hard to tell.
In any case, the Royal Institution of Charted Surveyors, or RICS, suggests that you should never "settle for living in the shadows."
The RICS believes, in fact, that "many people are allowing adjacent buildings to block their natural light, unaware that they have a legal right to it. Light blocking can be classified as a ‘nuisance’ alongside noise and air pollution and culprits range from large new commercial developments to a neighbour’s building extension or a new garden shed. Even a tall hedge can be a problem."
The tone of the RICS abruptly shifts at this point, however, as they begin to explain how you can actually prevent your neighbors from acquiring ancient light rights. There is a "need for vigilance to prevent neighbours acquiring a right to light," they warn; after all, such an acquisition "may hamper future development and investment possibilities" on your own property.
"It is possible to prevent a building acquiring a right to light," the RICS explains, "but despite the procedure being simple, it is rarely used." The "procedure" involves a man called Vinnie, and he –
The actual solution is a kind of ghost architecture. In other words, following consultation from the RICS, you draw "a notional screen of unlimited height," along with other "imaginary legal partitions," around your home, thus defining the light rights of your property.
You then ring your neighbor's doorbell, hand him an envelope, and explain what you've been doing. He nods quietly, ceases construction on his new guest bedroom – and then throws a brick through your window.
You retaliate.
The other neighbors soon join in, choosing sides, talking strategy, letting the air out of your car's tires and stealing your newspaper. Within a week, the quality of life on your street has plummeted; there are threats, loud noises, and an unexplained smell...
Meanwhile, "[i]n the center of London, near Chinatown and Covent Garden, particularly in back alleyways, signs saying 'Ancient Lights' can be seen marking individual windows."

('Ancient Lights' found via del.icio.us/fakeisthenewreal).

Tunnels, mines, and the "upwardly migrating void"

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

It's always worth checking in to see what Subterranea Brittanica have been up to – especially when they've been to such places as the Hanover Chalk Mine or the Scotland Street Tunnel – so I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the things now up on their site.

First of all, starting with the Scotland Street Tunnel, we find ourselves in Edinburgh, walking down through a former railroad tunnel that "measures 1000yds in length, 24ft in width, and 24ft in height with a gradient of 1-in-27 towards the north. The roof of the tunnel is just below street level at Scotland Street," they write, "but is 49 feet deep at St. Andrew Street and 37 feet deep under Princes Street."

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

In their field notes, our guides at Subterranea Brittanica quote novelist Robert Louis Stevenson:

The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly of paramount impressiveness to a young mind.

Not surprisingly, the site was re-used during WWII as an air raid shelter, forming what's referred to as a "hardened emergency control centre."
Post-war, then, the tunnel went on "to house... a traffic office with centralized traffic control. The traffic controller had telephone links to all signal cabins, goods yards and major stations and offices" in the city. This latter function partially explains the brick structures that were built inside the underground space.
Awesomely, we read, in the 1970s "the tunnel was used for growing mushrooms" – before it was then "used as a location for monitoring natural radiation."
Don't eat those mushrooms!

[Image: Scotland Street Tunnel, Edinburgh, as photographed by Nick Catford].

Many more images of the tunnel – all of which were taken by Nick Catford – including a lot more information, can be found at the bottom of this page.
Meanwhile, there's the Hanover Chalk Mine in Reading, England.
Access to the mine, we're told, can be "arranged via the [local] caving club." You physically enter the space by way of "a 50ft fixed steel ladder in a narrow vertical shaft below a locked iron cover."
In other words, you lift the iron cover – and descend into the surface of the earth.

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

The Hanover Chalk Mine was apparently "rediscovered" in 1977, after which "a new lining was installed in the shaft, and the workings inspected and surveyed."
Subterranea Brittanica themselves found that the mine "is generally very dry, with no obvious evidence of water seeping in through the ceiling or standing on the floors."

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

However, judging from small piles of rubble, some structural instability in the walls apparently relieved itself long ago through a partial collapse; this partial collapse is beautifully referred to as "an upwardly migrating void" that may yet cause "other collapses of the surface."

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

Though it's divided up into northern and southern branches, each excavated for slightly different purposes, the mine has not always been a mine.
"One or both of the interlinked northern mines," we read, "are known to have been used for the secure storage of documents by Reading Council during World War II, and two corrugated iron shelters, a brick-built stove and chimney, and tea-chests are said to remain below ground. One of the shafts reportedly contains timber staging, and one is said to be 70 feet deep."
So where did all this chalk come from?
In his fantastically great book Earth, writer and natural historian Richard Fortey takes us on an imaginary aerial tour of the planet, drifting in a full circle around the globe.
During the tour, Fortey describes how we look down from great heights at the vast folded belts of continental plates, from buckled ridges and alluvial plains to tropical islands, Himalayan plateaus, and Pacific trenches – including, at one point, the ancient chalk landscapes of southern England.
Quoting Richard Fortey at great length:

Imagine flying higher and higher, until we can see that all the fine hotels and monuments and endless suburbs of London lie in a bowl of strata of Tertiary age. The River Thames is now no more than a silvery line following the centre of the bowl. Beneath these strata – mostly soft sands and clays – there are older rocks again; the white Cretaceous limestone known as the Chalk reaches the surface north and south of London on open downs, where sheep were once universal... South of the London Basin, the Chalk frames the Weald, which was the major source of iron in medieval times and now is thick with groves of sweet chestnut burying ancient hammer ponds. From high up, most of what you see is forested. Climb higher still and we can see that the Chalk, again, forms the white cliffs of Dover – to many English people perhaps the most sentimentally significant piece of geology there is. From this height we can see that the Dover cliffs are of a piece with facing cliffs in France on the other side of the English Channel, which is nothing more than a geological afterthought, breached by the eroding sea just a few thousand years ago. Geology knows no national boundaries and from here we can even make out the Chalk extending far across France, to underlie the endless plains in the north, where the grain that goes into making 100 million baguettes is grown in fields that have neither hedgerows nor apparently any end. And could we but follow the Chalk around the world we would find similar white limestones stretching from the Canadian Shield "all the way through to Texas and Mexico," as [Eduard] Suess said, to the Black Sea and well beyond in the Middle East. Chalk rock records one of the great transgressions of the sea onto the continents, one which happened close to 100 million years ago, and which painted great slabs of the world white for eternity with the sediment it left behind.

It seems a little strange to use the word "eternity" there, in a book that is, ostensibly, a very literate demonstration that nothing lasts forever in the world of tectonic geology; but that's a minor quibble.

[Image: Hanover Chalk Mine, as photographed by Nick Catford].

I think it's more important simply to point out that these rocks, seamed with flint, so ready to form caves and pockets beneath the everyday landscape we normally walk upon, thinking more often about what lies ahead than what lies below, have an incomprehensibly specific and ancient history behind them.
If it wasn't for lost seas, nearly saturated with life, slowly depositing meter upon meter of organic matter in quiet bays and inlets and coves, this chalk would never have formed – and, of course, this mine would never have existed.
These photographs thus capture the almost unimaginably distant side-effects of landscapes that no longer exist – side-effects which have themselves come to form landscapes, in fact the very terrain that grounds our present era.
The history beneath that ground is indeed a kind of abyss.
Finally, while you're clicking around through Subterranea Brittanica, don't miss the artificially underground surreality of Barons' Cave.
"Nobody knows how old The Barons' Cave is," we read. "The oldest reference to it dates from 1586 when Camden describes 'an extraordinary passage with a vaulted roof hewn with great labour out of the soft stone.'"

[Image: Barons' Cave, as photographed by Nick Catford].

The various photos of Barons' Cave are well worth checking out – including close-ups of graffiti left by visitors who missed one another by hundreds of years.

(All images in this post are by Nick Catford, who holds the copyrights, etc. etc., and deserves loads of credit for the amazing work).

Pantheonic Astronomy

[Image: The interior of the Pantheon, as photographed by Soeren Dalsgaard].

An anonymous reader pointed out that the Pantheon was featured in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day last Friday.
"A testament to Roman architecture and engineering," NASA writes, "the Pantheon's dome is said to symbolize the vault of the heavens."

[Image: A "celestogramme," looking up from within at the dome of the Pantheon, by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

Seeing that, of course, makes it impossible for me to resist referring you back to BLDGBLOG's interview with Walter Murch, posted two weeks ago, in which Murch postulates a possible connection between the physical structure of the Pantheon itself and the heliocentric astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus.
In other words, does the dome of the Pantheon "symbolize the vault of the heavens," as NASA writes, but in an unexpectedly literal way?
In the interview, Murch explains how he "superimposed Copernicus’s drawing [of the planetary orbits] over an image of the Pantheon’s dome – and found that the ratios of the circles in his drawing and the ratios of the circles of the Pantheon line up almost exactly. Seeing that alignment was one of those wonderful moments where you suddenly feel a strong current of connection with the past."

[Image: Superimposition, by Walter Murch, of Copernicus's diagram of planetary orbits over a celestogramme of the Pantheon by Wolfgang Wackernagel].

So is it just an interesting coincidence?
Murch goes on:

The circumstantial evidence [for a real connection between Copernicus's drawing and the structure of the Pantheon] is compelling, but there is no reference to the Pantheon in any of Copernicus’s correspondence or in the various manuscript versions of de Revolutionibus – so we will probably never know for sure.
Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating thought: that this magnificent temple, built 1400 years before Copernicus ever saw it, designed by a pagan, Sun-worshipping Roman emperor, and later transformed into a church, may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos.

If you haven't seen the interview yet, be sure to check it out. It's worth the read.

Quick list 9

Can UPS save millions of dollars on truck fuel simply by cutting down on its drivers' left turns?
Apparently, the company has been trying "to re-engineer their fleet routing," the Financial Times reported last month, as a way to find more fuel-efficient modes of delivery – and part of this means they're now limiting left-hand (or cross-traffic) turns.

As the Financial Times explained:

[I]nformation technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass.

UPS route engineers are thus relying on "an underlying map database that can penalise or disable left-hand turns in the route planning process. The system is well suited to the delivery business because drivers can run circular routes, ending up where they started."
The FT goes on to explore the fuel-use implications of just-in-time delivery; air & truck delivery vs. water & rail transport; a "computer model that would create commercial freight routes in the way that MapQuest or Google Maps make maps for motorists"; and something called Gift: the Geographic Intermodal Freight Transport model.

Elsewhere, sudden transformations of the earth's surface, as a result of mudslides, floods, volcanic eruptions, and other topographical catastrophes, can make existing maps obsolete within seconds.
This is precisely what happened several weeks ago when an earthquake struck on the floor of the south Pacific, off the coast of the Solomon Islands, near Australia, raising coral reefs several meters out of the water – thus killing the reefs and creating a new, sun-bleached archipelago.
"Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide," Seed magazine reported.
The sudden terrestrial shake-up also "revealed a sunken vessel that locals believe is a Japanese patrol boat, a remnant of the fierce fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese in WWII."
Pulp sci-fi novelists may want to bear this in mind when coming up with future storylines.
For instance: an earthquake off the coast of Chennai thrusts a submerged geological ridge into the sunlight – revealing an unexplained metallic anomaly within those slabs of shell-encrusted limestone. Scientists called in to investigate are almost immediately hospitalized after visiting the site, suffering from headaches and nosebleeds. Local fishermen report identical symptoms.
Instruments, however, record a complete absence of radiation – so there must be something else going on.
Intriguingly, the exposed metal structure appears to be growing....
Etc. etc. Like I say: pulp science fiction.
Moving on, we learn that geothermal energy is on the rise in southern Germany.

[Image: Alpine geothermics; illustration by Rödl & Partner].

According to Monocle, "Munich and its hinterland have become the new frontier for deep-seated geothermal energy":

Drilling three to four kilometres into the earth's crust allows engineers to tap into boiling hot water, which can be used to heat buildings and run zero-emission power plants. The southernmost past of the state of Bavaria, along the Alps' foothills, is the literal hotbed of geothermal exploration, with planned investments of €3.2bn.

Siemens, unsurprisingly, is fast on the draw, with a new plant already under construction there, in a town called Unterhaching.
That same issue of Monocle also points us to the "hexagonal wooden islands" of architect Vicente Guallart (whose work was previously seen on BLDGBLOG here).
This "astonishing series of artificial islands," Monocle writes, comes "in two basic forms – flat or 'hillock' – and [they] have been a great success with sunbathing locals." In the architect's own words, these create "multiple coastlines," extending seasonal fun onto previously nonexistent landforms.

[Image: The hexagonal wooden islands of Vicente Guallart].

This also raises the interesting question, though, of designer terrain – or even branded landscapes, specific earthen features associated with, say, Nike or the Hilton Hotel chain – and whether or not terrestrial augmentation, such as Guallart's hexagonal wooden islands, will be the next step in boutique design. Rather than a boutique hotel, in other words, you'd have a boutique landscape.
A bit further afield, meanwhile, "shape-shifting 'smart dust' may explore alien worlds," New Scientist reports.

Thousands of miniscule wireless sensors, or "smart dust", could one-day be used to explore other planets, swirling across the landscape by subtly altering their shape.

These individual pieces of "smart dust" will "navigate by shape-shifting," as they drift in artificial clouds of nanotechnology – implying, incredibly, that machines may someday form entire weather fronts, with their own microclimates and atmospheric effects – crossing extraordinary landscapes, such as the "outcrop called 'Olympia' along the northwestern margin of 'Erebus'," on Mars.

[Image: Olympia Crater, Mars; courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell].

Finally, for now, it was announced this week that the US military "is building a three-mile concrete wall in the centre of Baghdad along the most murderous faultline between Sunni and Shia Muslims."

The wall, which recognises the reality of the hardening sectarian divide in Baghdad, is a central part of George Bush's final push to pacify the capital. Work began on April 10 under cover of darkness and is due for completion by the end of the month... Although Baghdad is full of barriers and checkpoints, particularly round the Green Zone where the US and British are based along with the Iraq government, this is the first time a wall has been built along sectarian lines. Its construction comes as the security situation appears to be deteriorating despite the recent US troop "surge".

The fact that physical structures, such as checkpoints and Bremer walls – in other words, pieces of architecture – are being used "to pacify" Baghdad fascinates me no end.

[Images: Concrete barriers (with no connection to Baghdad)].

Adding to the tactical surreality of this decision – after all, building a wall to separate warring neighborhoods will almost certainly result in more extreme mortar attacks and general social distrust – we find this glimpse of architectural construction under continuous military guard:

The Baghdad wall, which will be 12ft (3.5 metres) high, is being built by US paratroopers who left Camp Taji, about 20 miles north of the city, on the first night in a dozen trucks carrying stacks of huge concrete barriers, each weighing 14,000 pounds (6,300kg). Cranes, protected by tanks, winched them into place. Building has continued every night since.

The ultimate "strategy" here is to create "a series of gated communities, in which US and Iraqi troops control entry and exits."
More soon – and happy Earth Day, by the way.

(With two of these links found via Leah Beeferman and Telstar Logistics. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Quick list 8 – and onward from there...).