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 As if tapping into a rival spiritual tradition, Pope Benedict XVI will soon become "the first pontiff to harness solar power to provide energy for the Vatican," according to the BBC. "The deteriorating cement roof tiles of the Paul VI auditorium will be replaced next year with photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electricity." The BBC's all too short news item goes on to report that the Vatican "is considering placing solar panels on other buildings although St Peter's Basilica and other historical landmarks will not be touched." But why not touch them? Solar-powered cathedrals lining the bombed-out fields of Europe! How much more spiritually energizing can you get than plugging directly into that ongoing hydro-helium reaction in space? Teaching theology by the contained light of solar flares – astral disasters captured flashing, as power surges down consecrated halls of painted saints. Frescoes gleam. Christianity meets Mithraism in architectural form. John 8:12 – I am the Light of the World – taken literally. In fact, the whole book of John is arguably about the solar power industry.  In any case, are solar panels the new stained glass windows? And might Christianity be subtly transformed by this encounter with the celestial realm? Apollonian light burning where there once were candles? After all, Christianity has been turning its doctrinal face away from the stars for far too long.  Imagine this heaving, propulsive thing lighting up cathedrals and prayer books! Shining in libraries and guiding pilgrims through churches, casting shadows in the courtyards of monks. Christendom should have been solar-powered all along – installing astronomical monstrosity at the very heart of the Catechism. Seriously, though, do the metaphoric implications of the Vatican going solar outweigh any sort of practical message we might otherwise gain from this bit of news? Isn't solar power a major doctrinal shift for contemporary Christianity? Can everyday technology truly embody religious ideals? (Earlier on BLDGBLOG: In space, no one can hear you pray and The Heliocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch).
 [Image: The Postopolis! closing party kicks off; photo by John Hill of Archidose].
Well, I'm back in Los Angeles, after one of the longest and most surreal days of my life, flying nearly sleepless across mountains and canyonlands mere hours after saying goodbye to everyone at the Storefront, leaving New York before the music had ended, as the print-outs of our blogs were literally blowing off the walls and whole tubs' worth of ice – emptied of at least three hundred beer bottles within minutes – melted into rivers across the sidewalk, and before it even seemed possible that Postopolis! had really come to an end – but there it was: the whole thing was over, already something from yesterday, and now last week, and so I'm in Los Angeles again with no real proof that it ever happened, except for some bookmarks and some photos and some business cards I picked up along the way and this almost painfully happy nostalgia for every aspect of it, feeling more like a ghost who invisibly revisited the east coast, passing through the neutron star of New York City, Manhattan, a now artificial island so dense with structure that it bends the lives of those around it; but there we all were for a week, hanging out and talking about space, time, and architecture in the sweat and heat together.
   [Images: The Storefront for Art and Architecture; photos, top to bottom, by Nicola Twilley, Dan Hill, and BLDGBLOG].
And it was a blast.
All of which means I'll start posting again here, about Postopolis! itself – and the speakers who came through, and the city, and the people I met, and the weather systems that pass through Manhattan seemingly detached from the planet – and about regular old architectural news, from the private skyscraper of a man in India to the Italian fate of urban rubbish, soon enough.
But I just want to say a huge thanks, first of all, to my fellow Postopolitans: Dan Hill of City of Sound, Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat, and Bryan Finoki of Subtopia – I already miss you! How strange to spend nearly nine hours a day with someone, for an entire week, only to leap onto an airplane... and wonder if you'll ever see them again.
All the more reason to host Postopolis! 2 next year.
  [Images: (top) Jill Fehrenbacher and Dan Hill watch one of the speakers; (bottom) Bryan Finoki cools off by a fan. Photos by Nicola Twilley].
But I also owe a huge thanks to the staff of the Storefront for being there, and for setting up the place, and for slapping our logos onto the facade, and for finding us all a place to stay (more about our hotel soon – specifically the plumbing).
To my wife for the help, for the photos, and for putting up with my jangly nerves.
To everyone who attended – the audience was at least half the point of putting this thing together, and your questions, comments, complaints, flashing photo bulbs, and laughter were a huge inspiration.
To DJ /rupture and N-RON for vibrating all of southern Manhattan Saturday night with giant triangular slabs of bass blasting out and downward from the Storefront on Kenmare Street.
To all our speakers, for coming out in 1000% humidity to deliver un-air-conditioned speeches through sometimes squealing microphones as dumptrucks rattled by blowing air horns – the event would literally have been nothing without your participation! It was also great to meet so many people with whom I've been in email contact for months, if not years, and to realize that all those people out there on the internet, sending you things, are real: you can shake their hand, and have a glass of wine with them, and laugh.
And, of course, most of all, I owe a gigantic thanks to Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, who came up with the idea for Postopolis! in the first place; who invited me and everyone else out there to New York City to attend; who made all the ends meet administratively, spatially, technically, and financially; and who put up with the goofy, adolescent nervousness I know at least I personally experienced several times each day.
  [Images: (top) Joseph Grima peers out through the facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture (photo by Nicola Twilley); (bottom) Joseph Grima, photographed by Dan Hill].
Thank you, Joseph!
Finally, thanks to the BLDGBLOG readers who didn't really care about Postopolis! and who don't live anywhere near Manhattan, yet who sat through all these more or less content-less updates while the event spun on. Regular posts will continue shortly.
More soon – but, seriously, thanks again to everybody involved with Postopolis!
I had a sleepless and amazing time, and I already miss everything.
But now I'm home.
 [Image: Looking down at the desert of greater Los Angeles, with Postopolis! already far too far behind us; photo by Nicola Twilley].
(PS: If you're looking for more photos and some video feeds of the event, don't miss all the stuff up on YouTube or BLDGBLOG's Postopolis! Flickr set and the public Postopolis! Flickr pool).
 [Image: Bryan Finoki talks to Michael Kubo, North American editor of Actar books, through an opening in the facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture... Photo by Nicola Twilley].After having an entire post deleted this morning by Blogger, I only have time to get today's schedule up before the day really begins. In any case, it's already 1:30 on the last day of Postopolis!, and my logo on the front of the building now says BLDG B OG, turning me into an ad for toilets – but hey. City of Sound is now City f Sound... And so on. A bit of news, meanwhile: Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, scheduled for appearances today, have both inconveniently relocated themselves at the last minute to Lisbon and Montreal, so we'll have to try to rope together some kind of phone interview with them. Which means the schedule looks like this: 2:00pm: Live telephone interviews with Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina3:30pm: Keller Easterling4:15pm: Randi Greenberg answers questions about Metropolis magazine, online journalism, and architecture blogs 4:40pm: A group discussion about Archinect school blogs with Archinect school bloggers – turning into a converation about Archinect itself with some Archinect editors5:15pm: Blogger open house with George Agnew, Alec Appelbaum, Abe Burmeister, John Hill, Ryan McClain, Miss Representation, Enrique Ramirez, Chad Smith, and others to be announced 7:30pm: Closing party with lots of free booze and some live sets by DJ /rupture and N-RONMore soon!
 [Image: Standing outside the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Photo by City of Sound].It's that time of day again: I'm on my way south across the island, heading down to the Storefront for Art and Architecture, for Day 4 of Postopolis! Dan Hill has continued his coverage of the event, so if you're looking for regular updates – as opposed to my half-efforts here, full of nothing – I'd urge you all to go check out City of Sound. There's also a Postopolis! Flickr pool, if you're looking for some images of the proceedings – and I promise to start posting normal BLDGBLOG content as soon as possible (and I apologize to readers who are tired of these meager asides!).  [Image: DJ /rupture, speaking yesterday at the Storefront; in some late-breaking but huge news, /rup will be spinning the Postopolis! closing party, Saturday night! Photo by Nicola Twilley].Meanwhile, here's today's schedule: 1:30pm: Julia Solis2:10pm: Andrew Blum3:00pm: William Drenttel, Tom Vanderbilt, and Michael Bierut 4:10pm: James Sanders4:50pm: David Benjamin & Soo-in Yang5:30pm: Kevin Slavin6:10pm: Eric Rodenbeck6:50pm: Laura Kurgan7:30pm: Lawrence WeschlerHope to see you there! And don't forget the Saturday night closing party, with live sets by DJ / rupture and N-RON.
 [Image: Looking through the porous facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture].We're into day three of Postopolis! now. If you want to learn more about what exactly it is that's going on here, Dan Hill, over at City of Sound, has been doing a bang up job keeping track of all the speakers, offering his summaries of – and commentary on – their talks. Given time over the next few days, I'll try to do my own quick version of this; there's been some fantastic stuff so far – and I think we've sorted out most of the technical issues, so there's less to worry about, and, hopefully, more time to blog. In any case, the schedule today looks like...: 1:30pm: DJ /rupture2:50pm: Gianluigi Ricuperati3:30pm: Monica Hernandez4:10pm: Jeff Byles4:50pm: Wes Janz5:30pm: Lebbeus Woods6:10pm: Robert Neuwirth6:50pm: Jake Barton7:30pm: Joel Sanders [Image: Dan Hill, live-blogging Postopolis!].So come on down. And don't miss the slowly growing Postopolis! Flickr pool for some images of the event. More soon. (Photos by Nicola Twilley).
 [Image: Dan Hill and Bryan Finoki sit inside the Storefront for Art and Architecture].Well, day one of Postopolis! is now history – and it was a blast. We had some phenomenal presentations, from Robert Krulwich, Tobias Frere-Jones, and Stanley Greenberg; we heard from Michael Kubo, of Actar, about architectural book publishing; we managed our way through a pecha kucha featuring this blog, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia; we drank beer; and I thought the whole thing was great.  [Image: Bryan Finoki, Jill Fehrenbacher, and Joseph Grima at the Storefront for Art and Architecture; unlike Jill and Joseph, Bryan is actually watching a baseball game...].There are some problems with audio, on the other hand, which means that a great deal of the evening's visitors didn't actually hear anything... but we'll work on that. (If you did come out and heard nothing, I apologize!) Meanwhile, City of Sound has just posted some great action shots from the day, including a live-blogged summary of Robert Krulwich's presentation; and I've got a small Flickr set forming, and there is a Postopolis! Flickr group taking shape, as well. Today, meanwhile, Wednesday, May 30, you'll be hearing from: 1:30pm: Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch2:10pm: Matthew Clark4:00pm: Panel on sustainable design with Susan Szenasy, Allan Chochinov, Graham Hill, and Jill Fehrenbacher (moderated by Jill) 5:30pm: Scott Marble6:10pm: Paul Seletsky6:50pm: Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano7:30pm: Michael Sorkin & Mitchell JoachimSo please come out! And say hello. Be advised, meanwhile, that Michael Sorkin might not be able to attend; we'll only know when the time comes round.   [Images: (top) Jill Fehrenbacher and Bryan Finoki watch either Geoff Manaugh or Dan Hill give a presentation; (bottom) Bryan Finoki, Joseph Grima, Geoff Manaugh, and Dan Hill set up for the day, inside the Storefront for Art and Architecture].And I'll keep updating everyone as the week goes on – but, for those not in NYC or who frankly don't care about Postopolis!, I'll hopefully have at least one or two new posts in the forthcoming days. (Photos by Nicola Twilley).
 [Image: The Postopolis! crew: (l-r) Joseph Grima, Jill Fehrenbacher, Geoff Manaugh, Bryan Finoki, Dan Hill, and Gaia Cambiaggi (photo by Nicola Twilley)].The doors of Postopolis! burst open tomorrow. First up, at 3:00pm: Robert Krulwich3:40pm: Tobias Frere-Jones 5:00pm: Stanley Greenberg5:45pm: Michael Kubo, North American editor for Actar, discusses books, blogs, and the future of architectural publishing with Kevin Lippert, founder of Princeton Architectural Press6:45pm: Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, introduces BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and City of Sound, who will talk about their blogs and then lead a pecha kucha So if you're in NYC, please stop by...! And there's a lot more news coming soon.
Among many other interestings things to read in Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles – who will be speaking at Postopolis! on Thursday afternoon – is the fact that part of Manhattan is actually constructed from British war ruins.
 [Image: Winston Churchill visits the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, 1942; courtesy of the Library of Congress].
Toward the end of the book, Byles describes how "[m]ore than 16 million people saw their homes wrecked by bomb destruction during World War II, with more than 4.5 million housing units completely toasted."
Further, "[w]ith London and Coventy knee-deep in rubble by the fall of 1940, a phalanx of 13,500 troops from the Royal Engineers got busy ripping down war-ravaged structures."
But what to do with all that rubble...? Byles: Around that same time, New York's FDR Drive was being constructed, which ran along the east side of Manhattan. "Much of the landfill on which it is constructed consists of the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Second World War by the Luftwaffe's blitz on London and Bristol," the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote. "Convoys of ships returning from Great Britain carried the broken masonry in their holds as ballast." When you're driving around on the FDR, in other words – or, for that matter, when you're simply looking out over the east side of Manhattan – you and your gaze are passing over fragments of British cathedrals and London housing stock, flagstones quarried from Yorkshire, the shattered doorframes and lintels – and eaves, and vaults, and partition walls, and bedroom floors – of whole towns, pieces of Slough and Swindon perhaps, embedded now in asphalt, constituting what would otherwise have passed for bedrock.
Down in the foundations of the city are other cities.
(Elsewhere: We learn that the British coast has become geologically French, further complicated our future sense of geological belonging – raising the interesting possibility that one can exist in a state of geological alienation... Psychoanalysts will have a field day. [via]).
I'm still reeling from the announcement of Postopolis! – but the good news keeps on coming.  To make a long story still rather long... Back in January, Alan Rapp, the art, design, and photography editor for Chronicle Books, attended a BLDGBLOG event hosted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation here in Los Angeles. Alan and I met, kept in touch, had a pizza, talked about David Cronenberg; and then, last month, we organized an event together in San Francisco. Somewhere in there the idea of a BLDGBLOG book came up – which I soon turned into a formal proposal... and now it's official: Chronicle Books will be publishing a BLDGBLOG book in Spring 2009 – and my head is spinning! BLDGBLOG: The Book! The BLDGBLOG Book!I just can't even believe how many possibilities there are with this thing. It's a little crazy. In a nutshell, though, it'll be divided up into three major sections – Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures – covering everything I've already covered here and more... From plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered Manhattan bedrooms, via offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, fossil cities, statue disease, inflatable cathedrals, diamond mines, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, the architecture of the near-death experience, Scottish archaeology, wreck-diving, green roofs, W.G. Sebald, flooded Londons of the climate-changed future, William Burroughs, Andrew Maynard, LOT-EK, Rupert Thomson, The Aeneid, shipbreaking yards, Die Hard, Pruned, Franz Kafka, Rem Koolhaas, tunnels and sewers and bunkers and tombs, micronations, underground desert topologies, Mars, Earth, lunar urbanism, sound mirrors, James Bond, the War on Terror, earthquakes, Angkor Wat, robot-buildings and the Taj Mahal, Archigram, the Atlas Mountains, refugee camps, Walter Murch, suburbia, the Maunsell Towers... and about nine hundred thousand other topics, provided I can fit them all in. There will be interviews, essays, quotations, photos, original artwork – and hopefully even a graphic novel, strung throughout the book. And it will be well-designed and affordable! And it will put all existing architecture books to shame. Every single one of them. Except maybe a few... And, importantly, even if there's someone out there who's read every single post on this site – I know I haven't – they'll still find loads of new material.  Further, since I'll more or less be writing this thing over the next six months, I'd love it – love it! – if BLDGBLOG readers wanted to make suggestions, or send me links, or leave comments, or tell me what to avoid... In fact, half the joy of writing BLDGBLOG has always been the comments, so I hope I can even figure out a way to include the best of them in the book somehow, either chasing down anonymous readers for permission or... something, I don't know, but the whole point is to be open to everyone's input and ideas. A BLDGBLOG book Flickr pool, perhaps... Or a design contest... A questionnaire... What's your favorite bus stop in the world and why? Who knows – but this should be an absolute blast – and I'll make sure that the book is actually worth picking up. You won't just get a bunch of crap you've already read, reprinted word-for-word from the blog, served back to you for $30 (or $20, or $25...). But, man, I don't even know how many blogs make the leap into book-form! So I'm also nervous. But excited. And a little delirious with possibilities. Hoping that I do it right. So look out for BLDGBLOG: The Book, or The BLDGBLOG Book, or whatever it will eventually be be called, coming soon to a Borders near you. Spring 2009. Chronicle Books. In a deal that never would have happened had it not been for Alan Rapp. And, of course, without so many hundreds – and hundreds – of people out there, who went out of their way to help BLDGBLOG find an audience – or who just did or wrote or built or made or said something cool, thus supplying me with material – I might never have started blogging at all. So I don't want to jump into some kind of Academy Award acceptance speech here, but I really do have to say thanks to dozens and dozens and dozens of people, including, but in no way limited to – hold your breath: my wife, for editing almost literally every single post I've written on this thing and making everything, universally, on all levels, better; Javier Arbona, Bryan Finoki, John Jourden, and Paul Petrunia, in particular, of Archinect for the early break, as well as the entire Archinect crew for putting up with me there; Alex Trevi at Pruned; Marcus Trimble of gravestmor; Simon Sellars at Ballardian; Sarah Rich and Jill Fehrenbacher; Jonathan Bell of things magazine; David Maisel; Cory Doctorow, Jason Kottke, William Drenttel, Jim Coudal, Bruce Sterling, Steve Silberman, Robert Krulwich, Lawrence Weschler, Douglas Coupland, Warren Ellis; The Kircher Society; all the people I've interviewed; all the people who have participated in BLDGBLOG events; all the commenters out there, both regular and one-time only, including people who have disappeared (or who no longer leave comments – I miss you!); all the people who have sent me tips; Christopher Stack; Dan Polsby; friends of mine who were part of BLDGBLOG at the very, very beginning, before it even had a logo, including Jim Webb, Cathy Braasch Dean, Neena Verma, and Juliette Spertus; David Haskell of the Forum for Urban Design; William Fox; Ruairi Glynn, Abe Burmeister, Dan Hill, Régine Debatty, Chris Timmerman, Chad Smith, Dave Connell, John Hill, Jaime Morrison, Andrew Blum; Scott Webel; Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, and Steve Rowell of the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Materials & Applications; Leah Beeferman; John Coulthart; Theo Paijmans; my del.icio.us network for linking to so many interesting things; Joerg Colberg; Siologen, Dsankt, and Michael Cook; Theresa Duncan; Curbed LA and SF; Jörg Koch; Steven Ceuppens; Yahoo!, Time Magazine, MSNBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Architectural Review, Mark Magazine, Artkrush, Planetizen; Thomas Y. Levin and Annette Fierro, for letting me sit-in on their classes, free, way back in 2004, leading directly to the birth of this blog; my family (including in-laws!); Blogger; and about ninety-nine million other people, things, places, friends, writers, editors, architects, and on and on and on. BLDGBLOG would have folded up and disappeared long ago were it not for the encouragement of people who it would take me literally the next two days to thank completely. So thanks – again – especially to Alan Rapp and to Chronicle Books. Meanwhile, expect to hear more about all this as I set about actually writing it... And I'll hopefully see some of you in New York City next week for Postopolis!(Note: I'll add more links and such in a little bit – including the names of people who I'll realize, with horror, that I forgot to mention).
Well, I'm off for New York City this weekend for Postopolis! – but there's a whole lot of news to announce in the meantime, including some new speakers and a relatively up-to-date schedule.  So... Since I last posted about this thing, we've added Keller Easterling, author of Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, in which you can read about Indonesian piracy, POW camps, hydroponic tomato farms, special economic zones, golf courses, Hindu temples, offshore wind farms, cruise ships, and other "spatial formats" of global capitalism; Jeff Byles, author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition, where we learn about "the peculiar sounds of failure" as buildings collapse, architecture turning to dust with the help of high explosives (it's a great book!); Beatriz Colomina, author of Domesticity at War, where she suggests that "postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications," turning domesticity into a kind of spatial appropriation of warfare; Monica Hernandez, who'll be coming in from Lifeform, a NY-based architecture firm whose work focuses on "green building, including material innovations, new technologies, and waste management issues"; Michael Kubo, the North American editor of Actar, who will be discussing blogs, books, online media, and the future of architectural publishing; Matthew Clark, an engineer at Arup; Tobias Frere-Jones, an internationally renowned typographer, discussing typography, signs, and the city; and several others, yet to be announced. We've even printed a bookmark – so you'll be saving your place in architectural texts with Postopolis! for years to come. The official schedule, meanwhile, subject to one or two last-minute changes, looks like this: 3:00pm: Robert Krulwich3:40pm: Tobias Frere-Jones5:00pm: Stanley Greenberg5:40pm: Michael Kubo6:30pm: Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, introduces BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia, who will talk about their blogs, tell bad jokes, sweat through their clothes out of nervousness, then lead a pecha kucha, free and open to the public 1:30pm: Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch2:10pm: Matthew Clark4:00pm: Panel on sustainable design with Susan Szenasy, Allan Chochinov, Jill Fehrenbacher, and others to be announced 5:30pm: Scott Marble6:10pm: Paul Seletsky6:50pm: Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano7:30pm: Michael Sorkin & Mitchell Joachim1:30pm: DJ /rupture2:50pm: Gianluigi Ricuperati3:30pm: Monica Hernandez4:10pm: Jeff Byles4:50pm: Wes Janz5:30pm: Lebbeus Woods6:10pm: Robert Neuwirth6:50pm: Jake Barton7:30pm: Joel Sanders1:30pm: Julia Solis2:10pm: Andrew Blum3:00pm: William Drenttel, Tom Vanderbilt, and Michael Bierut 4:10pm: James Sanders4:50pm: David Benjamin & Soo-in Yang5:30pm: Kevin Slavin6:10pm: Eric Rodenbeck6:50pm: Laura Kurgan7:30pm: Lawrence Weschler1:30pm: Conversations with Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina3:30pm: Keller Easterling4:15pm: Randi Greenberg5:00pm: Blogger open house with George Agnew, Alec Appelbaum, Abe Burmeister, John Hill, Miss Representation, Aaron Plewke, Enrique Ramirez, Quilian Riano, Chad Smith, and others to be announced 7:30pm: closing party with food, spilt drinks, and music, open to everyone  [Image: What the facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture will look like if we get to plaster it with our logos... View larger].Hopefully posts will continue to appear throughout the week – but if you're anywhere near New York in the next ten days, please come by, say hello, ask questions, stare at Bryan Finoki, use the restroom, become obsessed with architecture, give us hell for not having a single novelist in the line-up (we tried), and so on. Here's a map.
 [Image: Future climate map of Europe; the cities have been relocated based on what present locations their future climate will most resemble... or something like that].Last week, the Guardian took a look at what London might look like in 2071. The city, they suggest, will be defined by "heat, dust, and water piped in from Scotland." To illustrate the point, that article includes a somewhat cryptic climate map, produced by scientists at the University of Bremen. The map relocates Europe's capital cities to the present region that most closely resembles their impending future circumstances. In other words, London, in 2071, will be more like a city on the coast of Portugal today; Paris will feel how central Spain now feels; Berlin, unbelievably, will be like north Africa (one of the coldest summers I've ever experienced was in Berlin) – and so on. These regions are those cities' "climate analogues." In any case, one of the scientists behind the map says that it's also meant to "help architects and officials who plan buildings, streets and services to adapt to the likely impacts of global warming. 'If you look at the map you see that Paris moves to the south of Spain. It's scary that just a few degrees rise will make such a difference. Paris is currently designed to deal with a very different climate, which means designs in future will have to be very different.'" For exameple: "Houses and buildings in northern Europe typically have windows to the west to make the most of meagre winter sun... 'But in warmer countries you will never find windows to the west because the sun just pours in all afternoon during the summer.'" What isn't mentioned, however, is that architecture will have to change gradually, decade by decade, even year by year; after all, it'd be inappropriate to get rid of all west-facing windows today – and it might still be premature, come 2030 – but, by 2071, perhaps all west-facing windows will be entirely phased out... Or skylights, or rain catchment systems, or winter insulation, or whatever. But you'll be able to track changes in the European climate based on what styles of architecture still exist, and where. Read more at the Guardian. (Story originally spotted at Kottke).
 [Image: NASA's TransHab module, attached to the International Space Station. TransHab designed by Constance Adams; image found via HobbySpace].Last week, Metropolis posted a short article by Susan Szenasy discussing a recent talk given by NASA architect Constance Adams. Adams designed the TransHab, an inflatable housing module that connects to the International Space Station. Her work, Szenasy explains, shows how architects can successfully "interface people with... interiors in space" – with strong design implications for building interiors here on Earth.  [Image: NASA's TransHab module; image via HobbySpace].As Metropolis reported way back in 1999, Adams's "path to NASA was a circuitous one. After graduating from Yale Architecture School in the early 1990s, she worked for Kenzo Tange in Tokyo and Josef Paul Kleiheus in Berlin, where she focused on large projects, from office buildings to city plans. But in 1996, when urban renewal efforts in Berlin began to slow down, she returned to the United States." That article goes on to explain how her first project for NASA was undertaken at the Johnson Space Center; there, she worked on something called a " bioplex" – a "laboratory for testing technologies that might eventually be used" on Mars, Metropolis explains. The bioplex came complete with "advanced life-support systems" for Mars-based astronauts, and it was thus Adams's job "to design their living quarters." A few years later came the TransHab module. If one is to judge from the architectural lay-out of that module, we can assume that domesticity in space will include "bathrooms, exercise areas, and sick bays," as well as "sleeping and work quarters," an "enclosed mechanical room," a few "radiation-shielding water tanks," and even a conference room with its own "Earth-viewing window."  [Image: The TransHab, cut-away to reveal the exercise room and a "pressurized tunnel" no home in space should be without. Image via Synthesis Intl. (where many more images are to be found)].For more info about Adams and her architectural work, see this 1993 interview (it's a pretty cool interview, I have to say); download this MP3, which documents a conversation between Constance Adams and journalist Andrew Blum (the latter of whom will be speaking at Postopolis! next week); or click way back to BLDGBLOG's slightly strange, and now rather old, look at Adams (and many other astro-structural subjects) in Lunar urbanism 3. So I'll just end here with a few images, all of which are by Georgi Petrov, courtesy of Synthesis Intl.. According to Metropolis, these "show the different levels and spatial configurations for SEIM, a semi-inflatable vehicle created for both flight and planetary or lunar deployment." It was developed for NASA; you're looking at Level 3.    [Images: Georgi Petrov, courtesy of Synthesis Intl.].[Note: Susan Szenasy, the Editor In Chief of Metropolis magazine, will also be speaking at Postopolis! next week. Stay tuned for an up-to-date schedule].
 [Image: A green Trafalgar, via the BBC]. There's a new landscape installation in London. "More than 2,000 sq m of turf has been laid as part of Visit London's campaign to promote green spaces and villages in the city," the BBC reports today. The grass will cover the square for two days during which visitors will be able to soak up the sunshine in specially laid-out deckchairs or enjoy a picnic.
The turf, which has been sourced from the Vale of York, will then be moved to Bishops Park in Hammersmith and Fulham. Certainly not the most exciting idea in the world; but I love the underlying concepts: 1) Take a distant landscape (something "sourced from the Vale of York," for instance) and install it in the center of London. This gives rise to all sorts of possibilities – like recreating the Brecon Beacons throughout the streets of Westminster (you do it in the dead of night and don't tell anyone what you're doing). Or: 2) You swap landscapes, installing Trafalgar Square somewhere in the Vale of York to promote urban spaces and cities in the local farmland. Then again: 3) You simply install lawns everywhere: inside movie theaters and churches and airplanes and hot air balloons... Airborne landscapes and gardens! Flying yards. You then form a company, incorporated in Maryland, called, yes, the Flying Yards and you perform distant landscapes in the sky for stunned crowds. 4) You transform London into what it will look like after it's been taken over by wild grasses and tree roots and weeds – perhaps even fencing off whole parts of Camden for several years as a complicated work of land art: the city gone feral. Someone at Goldsmiths writes a PhD about you... But more soon on such future visions of a new London to come.
During an event the other night, I had a brief olfactory encounter with a waterless urinal. While I know that waterless urinals are environmentally fantastic – they save literally tens of thousands of gallons of water a year – I also think that they can smell extraordinarily bad. The instant you put one to use, in other words, you're made instantly aware of all the people who have been there before. In fact, the experience made me wonder if you could prevent burglary by making houses smell like that: no one, not even a burglar, would come near.  If you could make your house smell like urine, in other words, all your possessions would be permanently safe... So I was thinking, specifically, that you should attach some kind of scent-emission device to your home burglar alarm – or above the windows and beside the front doorway – before you go away for the weekend. You then just have to choose what scent will be emitted; you type in your PIN; and you go. Because then, if someone actually does break into your house... an invisible puff of scented air – a defense cloud™ – goes misting out into the hallway, settling down onto your erstwhile burglar – who thus finds himself greeted with an alarmingly strong scent of urine. The scent gets worse by the minute, and seems to be coming from all sides. What is this place...? the burglar thinks. Do they manufacture waterless urinals here? He recoils in horror. But should the determined home invader persist in his folly, the scent-alarm simply kicks it up a notch, through different aromas, making everything that much worse – moldy potatoes, rotten chicken parts, gangrenous limbs and human corpses – till only someone without a nose, or a true sociopath, could even contemplate sticking around. In which case your scent-alarm phones the police. Only a few unfortunate customers have reported product malfunction. A scented car alarm is now in development.
 [Image: The final night of the architecture and film festival. From left-right, top-bottom: the wind tunnel entrance; the set-up; the intro, by Jenna Didier of M&A; and a scene from At Rest: The Body in Architecture by Michael and Alan Fleming. Photos by Nicola Twilley].Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the final night of the film fest; it was a bit intimate – but it was still fun, and we made it through two cases of beer, so... you can't beat that. Anyway, I owe a huge thanks to Leslie Marcus of the Art Center College of Design for her patience, interest, and organizational help; Oliver Hess and Jenna Didier of Materials & Applications, for inviting me to help put all this together in the first place; Architecture Tours LA and Michael Maltzan Architects, our sponsors for last night's show; and to all the filmmakers who took part – and the people who came out to see their work. And hopefully we'll see you again next year!
 [Image: A scene from Peter Kidger's The Berlin Infection, produced as part of Kidger's work with the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 15 in London].This year's architectural film fest, jointly organized by BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications, concludes tomorrow night, Tuesday, May 22, in the wind tunnel at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. Wired liked the first event – so hopefully we can keep the good energy flowing...  [Image: Outside the wind tunnel – a building rehabbed by Daly Genik. More info about it here].This time round, we'll be screening something like an hour and forty minutes' worth of films, beginning at 8pm. No tickets or reservations are required – and the wind tunnel can be found here (950 South Raymond Avenue, in Pasadena). There's even free valet parking. And it should be fun: we've got some awesome films lined up – with running times coming in anywhere between two minutes and half an hour – and I'm really looking forward to this. You'll be seeing, in this or another order: Vancouverism in Vancouver, Robin Anderson and Julie Bogdanowicz Glen Festival School, Fernando Iribarren, Ayers Saint Gross (2007) LaSubterranea, Raimund McClain and Jesse Vogler (2006) At Rest: The Body in Architecture, Michael and Alan Fleming (2007) Spiral Bridge, Dennis Dollens (2007) Vert-ual, Adam and Nathan Freise (2005) Alternate Ending, David Fenster, Field Office Films (2007) London After the Rain, Ben Olszyna-Marzys (2007) The Berlin Infection, Peter Kidger (2006) Matched Pair, Bradford Watson (2004) Declarations of Love, Andre Blas (2006) Wax On/Wax Off, Benjamin Smith and Wilhelm Christensen (2006) So come on down – and say hello and drink a coffee (there's no cafe on site, however) and have a cool Tuesday night, hanging out in a wind tunnel, watching movies about architecture... And if you get restless, you can always walk around and explore Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living, which is simultaneously on display in the exact same space. Hope to see you there!
 [Image: An underground "coffin lift or 'catafalque'," from London's West Norwood cemetery catacombs. "The blocked aperture in the ceiling led to the now demolished Episcopal Chapel above. The stairs on the right (now blocked) also led up to the chapel." Photo by Nick Catford, the wildly great and seemingly omnipresent photographer behind Subterranea Britannica]. London's West Norwood cemetery opened to the public in 1837; it boasted "two chapels with a series of vaults or catacombs constructed beneath the Episcopal Chapel." Fantastically, the catacombs came with "a hydraulic coffin lift or catafalque to transport the coffins from the chapel to the vaults below." Although "[b]oth chapels were severely damaged during the war and the Episcopal Chapel was finally demolished in 1955 and replaced by a walled rose garden, the catacombs below were undamaged and remain intact and accessible today." A lot more information is available at Subterranea Britannica, but, if you don't feel like reading text, be sure to check out Nick Catford's photo gallery. Some of those images are genuinely creepy; some quite beautiful; others just really, really cool.
 [Images: Photos by Neil Burns capture the destruction; via the BBC].The BBC posted a short photo-spread today that looks at the implosion of four cooling towers at the Chapelcross nuclear power station, in Scotland, where the UK used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. "The towers were brought down in 10 seconds, generating an estimated 25,000 tonnes of rubble," we read.   [Images: Photos by Andrew Turner and John Smith; via the BBC].I think it's interesting, though, that the towers seem to crimp and torque in some of these pictures, almost whirling, or folding, down onto themselves like some kind of self-imploding Richard Serra sculpture, made of lead-reinforced concrete. Might demolition somehow reveal other geometries and architectural forms – otherwise unknown material tendencies held at bay by engineering?  [Images: Via The Scotsman].In loosely related news, meanwhile, I'm excited to announce that Jeff Byles, author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition, will now be speaking at Postopolis! next week – so if you've got a soft spot for demolition, and the various arguments surrounding it, please stop by! More speakers to be announced shortly, including an up-to-date schedule.
A friend of mine once told me about the "typical dream of a New Yorker," as he described it, wherein a homeowner pushes aside some coats and sweaters in the upstairs closet... only to reveal a door, and, behind that, another room, and, beyond that, perhaps even a whole new wing secretly attached to the back of the house... Always fantasizing about having more space in Manhattan.  And so I was thinking today that you could go around Manhattan with a microphone, asking people who have had that dream to describe it, recording all this, live, for the radio – or you ask people who have never had that dream simply to ad lib about what it might be like to discover another room, and you ask them to think about what kind of room they would most like to discover, tucked away inside a closet somewhere in their apartment. What additions to space do the people of New York secretly long for? Of course, you'd probably need to record about 5000 people to get a dozen or so good stories – but then you'd edit it all down and listen to the unbelievable variations: people who find secret attics, or secret basements, secret closets inside closets, or even secret children's bedrooms, secret bathrooms, hidden roof gardens, even a brand new 4-car garage plus screened-in porch out back. One guy finds a sauna, and a cheese cave, and then a bicycle-repair shop... What does it all mean?And if you once dreamed about finding a secret UPS loading dock attached to your back door... would Freud approve? So you get all these stories together and you make a radio piece out of it. A month or two later, it's broadcast during rush hour, on a Friday night, as you want to give people something to think about over the weekend. But soon commuters are pulling over to the side of the road and staring, shocked, at the radio – because you've given no introduction, and no one out there has any idea what this is. Some guy found a boathouse attached to his apartment in Manhattan...?, one driver thinks. And the stories keep coming. There's a skyscraper with a whole hidden floor...? someone thinks, momentarily amazed – before driving into the car in front of her. A woman on the Upper East Side found what ? Or: All along he had a basketball court behind the bedroom wall? The NJ turnpike gets backed up for miles and the Brooklyn Bridge is at a stand-still. It's mass hysteria. Where are all these secret rooms...? People want to know. And why don't I have one...? Manhattanites are knocking on walls, taking measurements. drafting letters to the rent control board. But then the credits roll, and the radio station cuts to commercial, and everyone realizes that those were all just stories. Dreams. There are no secret rooms – they think. So they pull back onto the highways – and you go down in radio history. Within two weeks you've signed a six-figure deal with Henry Holt to turn it into a book, and Paul Auster volunteers to write the forward. You call it: The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan. It gets accidentally shelved with Erotica. People cry as they read it. A sequel is planned, interviewing residents of London and Beijing. (With thanks to Robert Krulwich, who puts up with emails from me full of ideas like this...).
New Scientist reports that certain architectural hallucinations associated with near-death experiences – such as bright lights at the end of long hallways and tunnels – might actually be the product of a sleep disorder.  [Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].Neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson, New Scientist tells us, thinks that near-death experiences (or NDEs) "may be little more than dream-like states brought on by stress and a predisposition to a common kind of sleep disorder. If he's right, as many as 40 per cent of us could be primed to see the light." But what I think deserves more exploration is the tunnel – the architectural space within which NDEs seem to occur. For instance, is there a particular type of structure that people see when it comes to almost dying? If so, are those structures simply optical phenomena – or are there cultural and historical influences at work? If you're an architect, are your NDEs particularly detailed? And what if you see a bright tunnel, inverted, ending in a space of pure darkness...? The article doesn't really address these issues.  [Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher]."Written accounts of NDEs go back more than two thousand years," we learn instead, and they "have been reported all over the world. Most include a 'point of no return' that if crossed will lead to death, and a person who turns you away from it." But what about the archtecture? Does everyone see the same hallway – or do some people see large rooms, or skylights, or even underground car parks, or caves, or maybe some huge mechanical garage door that slowly creeps open...? Is there an architecture of death? Can it be measured and taught to others?  [Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].If death does have a structure – or, at least, if near-death experiences do spatialize in certain pre-existing ways – if death has a spatial format, you could say – then clearly death could also be architecturally reconstructed, based on eyewitness accounts, here on earth, in the present moment, with us. We could visit it, in groups, and emotionally prepare... So what would happen if an architect teamed up with an anthropologist (who studies cultural narrations of the near-death experience) and with a neurophysiologist (who understands the underlying cortical mechanisms), to design themed environments specifically meant for triggering NDEs? It'd be a kind of post-Buddhist thanatological fun ride, complete with people passing out – then waking up, blinking and vibrant, determined to change their lives, giving hugs to others and starting things over again. Hallways of Rebirth, they might be called – and the first person to make it to the end of that hall without passing out wins $10,000.  [Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].It's harder than it sounds. (All photos from Jill Fehrenbacher's Tunnel Vision series).
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