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New York Canyonlands

[Image: Another ad for BMW – see the one featuring London – this time transforming New York City into a desert city on the Arizona-Utah border, perched on geological outcrops and overlooking slot canyons. Rumor has it, Lebbeus Woods has an image much like this...? Ad discovered via Design Bivouac, thanks to a tip from Kosmograd. View a slightly larger version].

New York City in Sound

[Image: Manhattan, as photographed by Dan Hill].

Back in April, BLDGBLOG interviewed Walter Murch. Murch has been a film editor and sound designer for nearly four decades; he has won three Oscars and two BAFTA Awards in the process (among many other accolades); and he is the subject of an excellent, often riveting, book-length collection of interviews, called The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, conducted and assembled by novelist Michael Ondaatje.
You can read the BLDGBLOG interview with Murch here – where you'll notice that I ask Walter, toward the end of our discussion, about sounds and the city: what makes cities sound the way they do?
Can these acoustic properties be artistically re-shaped, or somehow musically used?
In response, Murch cites a short essay written by filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni in which Antonioni describes what it feels like to listen to Manhattan – as one would listen to a distant symphony, or to the sounds of a unfamiliar instrument.
That essay, with a new introduction by Walter Murch, is now reprinted here, in full, on BLDGBLOG.

• • •
Manhattan Symphony
by Walter Murch
Manhattan: remorseless grid of right-angle streets rescued by a jumble-sale of architectural styles thrown together by history and human will-power. Paris (or Prague, or perhaps any other European city): ancient broken crockery of random-angled streets repaired by architecture of great stylistic and cultural coherence.

Confronted with the classically American paradox of Manhattan’s simultaneous rigidity and exuberance, the refined European sensibility discovers that...

—Franz, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Growing up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, I never questioned the stalagmites in which we lived: our gang would roam across the rooftops, scrambling up and down the two or three stories difference in height between adjacent apartment buildings, all erected in the 1890s in different vernaculars of the Italianate Palazzo style. The cornices that capped taller buildings would jut perplexedly into thin air, and the cornices of shorter ones would nuzzle up awkwardly against the window of someone's bathroom.

It was only years later when I was living in the Prati district – Rome's version of Manhattan's Upper West Side – that I saw cornices as they were intended: a continuous horizontal line atop several buildings, gathering them together in a single conceptual frame. When I returned to my old neighborhood in Manhattan, it now looked wondrously stalagmitic.

Sometime after the success of his film Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visited Manhattan, thinking of setting his next project in New York. Confused and overwhelmed by the city's visual foreignness, he decided to listen rather than to look: to eavesdrop on the city's mutterings as it emerged into consciousness from the previous night's sleep. Sitting in his room on the 34th floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Antonioni kept a journal of everything he heard from six to nine in the morning... Perhaps some inadvertent sound might provide the key to unlock the mysteries of this foreign world.

[Image: Looking down at the roof of Manhattan's Sherry-Netherland Hotel, via New York Architecture Images].

His New York film was never made, but the pages of Antonioni's bedside vigil survive, and were published at a conference on film sound that I attended in Copenhagen in 1980. The organizers of that conference – composer Hans-Erik Philip and filmmaker Vibeke Gad – have generously allowed BLDGBLOG to reprint Antonioni's poetic soundscape of a long-vanished Manhattan, filtered through the Italian sensibility of his acutely sensitive cinematic ear.

• • •
New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park
The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970
by Michelangelo Antonioni
There is a constant murmur, hollow and deep: the traffic. And another sound, intermittent: the wind. It comes in gusts, and in the pauses I can hear it sighing, far away, against other skyscrapers. Here, on the thirty-fourth floor, I can feel the vibration of every gust. It gives me a strange feeling as if, for a few moments, my brain freezes. A faint, short-lived siren comes and goes. The noise of two car-horns. A rumble that approaches but is impatiently eclipsed by a sudden buffet of the wind. A tram car.

It is six o'clock in the morning. Another rumble blends with the first, then drowns it. A faint explosion, far, far away. The wind returns, rising from nothing, spreading, it seems to stretch in the still air, then dies. The hint of a tram, faint, remote. It is not a tram, after all, but another kind of sound I cannot recognize. A truck. A second one, accelerating. Two or three passing cars. The roads in Central Park twist and turn. A line of cars. Their exhausts a kind of organ playing a masterpiece. A moment of absolute silence, eerie. A huge truck passes. It seems so close that I feel I am on the second floor. But that sound, too, quickly fades. A squeal. A ship's siren, prolonged and melancholy. The wind has dropped. The siren again. The murmur of traffic beneath it. A bell, off key. From a country church. But perhaps it is the clang of iron and not a bell. It comes again. And still once more. A car engine races, furiously, with a sudden spurt of the accelerator. In a momentary hush, the siren again, far away. The metallic echo rises. A terribly noisy truck seems just outside the window. But it is an aircraft. All the sounds increase: car-horns, the siren, trucks; and then they recede, gradually. But no, another rumble, another siren. Irritating, persistent, right across the horizon.

Quarter past six: the same series of sound in waves, each in turn, clearly defined. Brief intervals. A murmur continues. And, always, the siren. An abrupt car-horn, very far away. Another muffled beneath it. Somewhere on a distant street, a car, very fast, perhaps European. The wind swirls against the wall outside. A single gust., immediately swallowed by a raucous truck and then a newer vehicle, steadier. The throb of the two different motors driving off, merging into one. But it is not a truck, it’s an aircraft. No. Not an aircraft. A noise that rises and becomes deafening, only to fade unidentified. All that remains, obsessive, is the siren. And someone whistling (how can that be possible?) instantly drowned by an angry car-horn. Sounds of metal sheets thrown together. Clear and sharp, a winch. The sound of cogs. But it cannot be a winch, and this constant whine is not the siren. More sheets, more metallic. Then a hollow boom, barely audible, but lingering in the air. A faint hum suddenly stops. A car passes, another, then a third, fading, fading, fading. They mingle with other cars, other sounds. An aircraft seems to take off from right beside the building. And as suddenly as it appeared, it is gone. The very beautiful roar of a car, completely appropriate for this moment. It speeds past and dies, distinct, satisfying. Two tones shimmer. A gust of wind.

[Image: A view of Central Park, via Wikipedia].

Half past six: more gusts. A furious flurry of wind between the skyscrapers slides away and buffets across the park. Only a car-horn interrupts, like a slap in the face. The wind drops. A peal of bells in the stillness. And always, the siren. A tone higher now. It wasn’t bells. It is my Italian ear that hears it that way. The sheets of metal. A short clatter, like gunfire. A train passes, perhaps the elevated. A peal, prolonged, and then the siren, abrupt. Gone. The sounds change in a moment, they arise and die again immediately. The hum reasserts itself, advancing like a camouflaged army, approaches, closes in, on the alert, ready to take over completely. It is very close. One can distinguish the wind, the cars, the aircraft, a clash of iron, and the siren. They advance, determined, against this skyscraper hotel. In the forefront, the sound of iron, but the aircraft closes in and takes over alone. And now – nothing. The struggle is over. A small revolution quelled by the authority of a car-horn. The banging of wood. A pause. More banging. They must be moving tables. It sounds like a machine gun that is falling apart. The cars are under fire. They have to pull up and stop. Another siren, more real. The rumble of wheels, but it is not a car. It is the wind, which has risen again. Strong, but not strong enough to cover the aircraft.

Cars. A roar, as if from a cannon, echoless. Here and there, metallic sounds of various intensities. A roar of wind. The roar of a truck. The roar of the elevated railway. Two thuds in different tones. The noise grows and then stops suddenly, as if cut off by the thuds as they start again. Other sounds are born, clear yet unrecognizable. A long, startling car-horn. A sound that does not die, that will never die. I cannot hear it any longer, but it has left me with this certainty. But the sound of the siren is dying. A gust of wind pushes it away, but a truck rises. Then diminishes in turn and mingles with the wind. Some kind of bell.

A voice is heard. The first voice.

Seven o'clock: A blast from the siren, as if to remind me of its existence. Now imperceptible, yet insistent. The squeal of tires. A thundering, a rumble, somewhere underground.

Half-past eight: And now the sun has risen, but the sounds are still the same. With one exception. Drills. Nasty. Destroying a building. They are far away but occasionally, because of the wind, they are perfectly distinct. The other sounds remain. A whistle, shrill, anxious. It repeats – urgently. A noisy engine, I don't know what kind. And loud, yet distant, the drills. The only change is that it has all become stronger with the daylight. The wind, the cars, the siren. Only the car-horns are less strident, more discrete, a reflection on the drivers who obey New York’s traffic laws: they must use their horns only when absolutely necessary. They cannot afford the fines, and so they obey the law, which seems a little Teutonic. I imagine the drivers in this bewildering noise, melted together, inside their creeping cars: noise that hasn’t the courage to explode, but hovers in the air, in the spring-like, clear, clean winter air.

• • •
(BLDGBLOG owes a huge and genuine thank you to Walter Murch, Hans-Erik Philip, Vibeke Gad, and, of course, Michelangelo Antonioni for the permission to reprint this essay. Meanwhile, if this post appealed to you, I'd urge you to take a look at BLDGBLOG's interview with Walter Murch, where some of these points are developed further – or simply to pick up a copy of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, edited by Michael Ondaatje. Of course, Murch is both the subject and author of many other books and articles – links to which can be found embedded in the BLDGBLOG interview. Finally, keep an eye out for Antonioni's own The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, due out in November 2007).

The Sun, the Grid, and the City

Whilst doing research for an article I'm writing, I found myself browsing through some articles by Sam Roberts of The New York Times. I bookmarked one of them for future reference – only to realize, about half an hour ago, that it was published exactly one year ago today.
So I decided to put it up on BLDGBLOG.

As it happens, then, Manhattan's mathematically rational street grid is actually rotated 29º off the north-south axis – and this angle has interesting astronomical side-effects.
In other words, because of the off-center orientation of Manhattan's street grid, you can only see the setting sun "down the middle of any crosstown street" on two specific days of the year: May 28 and July 13.
July 13 is, of course, next week – so watch out for it.
Manhattan is a solar instrument that only works twice.
So, because of historical decisions made about the logic and purpose of urban planning – and because of the declination of the Earth's poles – the streets of Manhattan are aligned with the setting sun only two times a year.
Which means that New York is a kind of Hugh Ferrisian Stonehenge: casting shadows on itself till the days when it can truly begin to shine.
In any case, Roberts points out, interestingly, that a rectilinear street grid was not the only arrangement of space considered viable for Manhattan during its earliest days of European settlement:

William Bridges, the city surveyor, explained that one of the commissioners' chief concerns was ''whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements, by circles, ovals and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effects as to convenience and utility.''Needless to say, the "circles, ovals and stars" lost out to squares and rectangles.
Manhattan is thus now "a nearly perfect place to practice taxicab geometry," Roberts continues: it is an island "in which the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line."
And yet Manhattan is also an island of astronomical coincidence that, like any structure standing on the surface of the Earth, lines up with the heavens in its own peculiar way.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The architecture of solar alignments).

Movement

The last twelve months have seen all kinds of hellzapoppin' for BLDGBLOG, from the move out to Los Angeles to the BLDGBLOG book, to a wide variety of other things, including Postopolis!; but the movement isn't over...
In just two months' time I'll be moving up to San Francisco to become a Senior Editor at Dwell magazine.

[Images: The most recent five covers from Dwell magazine].

The job itself looks awesome – and a lot of fun – and it's in a great office, near the Transamerica Pyramid, only one block away from an architecture bookstore, and I'll have some really cool co-workers, and a great boss with good taste in German beer, and I'll even be near my publisher during the book design process, so I'm excited. I can go for walks in the Muir Woods! And look at the Golden Gate Bridge and walk across the hulls of abandoned 19th-century frigates.
A few quick things:

1)

Dwell

2)

Dwell

speculative urban futures

3)

4)

Dwell

5)

Dwell

[Images: Five more covers from Dwell].

Anyway, it's strange to think that I'm leaving Los Angeles! I thought I'd be living here for at least the next 9 or 10 years, growing cancerous and leathery in the sunlight, throwing events about science fiction and the city, so there are loads – and loads – of things that I've been meaning to do here that I'll now just have to squeeze into less than eight weeks.
I'll miss everything!
The desert! Joshua Tree! Zion National Park! Arizona! The Center for Land Use Interpretation! Baja California! SCI-Arc! The Hollywood Hills! Hell, I'll even miss the ArcLight.
And I live right across the street from Sony Studios, so nighttime walks past huge, well-lit hangars inside of which films are being produced will become a thing of my southern Californian past...
Anyway, I'll be in San Francisco starting September 1st or thereabout. And, if you're in the market for something to read, consider subscribing to Dwell.

Gold Star Hurricane

[Image: A stunning photograph of the Rosette Nebula, taken by Ignacio de la Cueva Torregrosa, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive. View larger!].

A few bits of astronomical news seem worth repeating here on BLDGBLOG:
1) Weather has been observed on the surface of a star for the first time. Astronomers have now seen "mercury clouds" moving through the turbulent skies of "a star called Alpha Andromedae."

[Image: Weather on a star; via New Scientist].

Because the star does not have a magnetic field, however, scientists have been left scratching their heads over what causes the clouds to form; for the time being, then, no one really knows where these things come from.
I wonder, though, how far this "weather" metaphor really goes: are there storms, and hurricanes, and tornadoes? Is there actual convection up there, in the outer atmosphere of Alpha Andromedae, and, if so, is there ever precipitation – frozen mercury snowing down toward the star's core on slow currents of helium gas?
While we're on the subject, I'm also curious if there are any religious systems that use "hurricanes of mercury" as a kind of divine threat. You will be struck down by a hurricane of mercury...
After all, aren't Mor mons worried about being consumed by "hurricanes of fire"?
In which case a hurricane of, say, argon – or a tornado of germanium – isn't all that much of a stretch.

[Image: A reflection nebula in Cepheus, beautifully photographed by Giovanni Benintende, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day].

Or perhaps a hurricane of transition metals could come blowing in over the islands of Stockholm, coating that city in a smooth new shell of mineralogical forms...

2) Meanwhile, some stars are apparently plated in gold.
"Scattered through space," we read, "are some peculiar stars that seem to contain more gold, mercury and platinum than ordinary stars such as our Sun."
These stars are referred to as being "chemically peculiar."

[Image: Star Cluster R136, photographed by NASA, et. al.].

One star, in particular, which astronomers have named "chi Lupi," has 100,000 times as much mercury as the Sun, and 10,000 times as much gold, platinum, and thallium.
What's really, really cool about this, though, is that chi Lupi can apparently be thought of as a series of concentric shells, where each shell consists primarily of one element; the locations of these shells are determined by the atomic weights of the elements they contain.

[Image: The Carina Nebula, photographed by NASA, et. al.; view bigger!].

In other words, "the heavy metals in the star were pushed outwards by the radiation pressure of the star's ultraviolet light, but were kept from escaping by gravity." On chi Lupi, for instance, there is a shell of mercury in the "stellar photosphere."
Thin outer layers of gold can thus be found on this and other "chemically peculiar" stars throughout the universe.

[Image: The Cat's Eye nebula, photographed by NASA, et. al.].

3) Finally, we've all heard about things like this before, but "one of the largest and most luminous stars in our galaxy" is also "a surprisingly prolific building site for complex molecules important to life on Earth."

The discovery furthers an ongoing shift in astronomers' perceptions of where such molecules can form, and where to set the starting line for the chain of events that leads from raw atoms to true biology.That "true biology" can be tracked back to the stars is nothing new; but the fact that a star called VY Canis Majoris – "a red hypergiant star estimated to be 25 times the Sun's mass and nearly half a million times the Sun's brightness" – is burning with pre-biotic compounds, "including hydrogen cyanide (HCN), silicon monoxide (SiO), sodium chloride (NaCl) and a molecule, PN, in which a phosphorus atom and a nitrogen atom are bound together," is apparently reason to get excited.

[Image: The Ophiuchius reflection nebula, photographed by Takayuki Yoshida; courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day].

First, let me quickly say that I love – love! – the idea that biologists might someday study stars in their quest to understand the chemical origins of molecular biology; and, second, I'm curious if we could combine these three articles – asking: could storms of living matter form on the outer surface of a star, reaching hurricane strength as they blow in whorls and vortical currents across gold-plated skies?
The first astronomer to discover a living storm should win some sort of prize, I think.

[Image: The Carina Nebula, via NASA's awesomely fun Astronomy Picture of the Day].

In any case:

DNA

RNA

ATP

These chemicals "can later find their way into newborn solar systems" – although it had been thought that "any molecules that condensed from the cooling, expelled gas would later be destroyed by the intense ultraviolet radiation emitted by the star."
An expanding star, it was thought, like something out of the Greek myths, thus sterilized its progeny.

[Image: NGC 6302 – like some sort of exploding angel – photographed by A. Zijlstra and NASA].

But there's good news for we living creatures: the "ejected material" that later seeds fledgling solar systems with prebiotic compounds also "contains clumps of dust particles that apparently shield the molecules and can shepherd them safely into interstellar space."
Note the "shepherd" metaphor.
Anyway, this all seems to suggest "that the chemistry that leads to life may be more widespread in the universe and more robust than previous studies have suggested."

[Image: NGC 7000, the North America nebula, alongside the Pelican nebula; photographed by Nicolas Outters, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day].

These astrobiological studies will soon be helped along by a "high-altitude radio interferometer, consisting of 50 dishes – each 12 metres wide – currently under construction" in Chile's Atacama Desert.

[Image: Another view of NGC 7000; I can't find the origin of this photograph, unfortunately – but the minute I can credit this to the appropriate photographer or institution, I will do so!].

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The uttermost reaches of solar influence, Struck by loops, An electromagnetic Grand Canyon, moving through space, Bulletproof, and Planetarium Among the Dunes).

London Canyonlands (pt. 2)

[Image: A BMW ad, showing us London geologically mixed, across a series of bridges and viaducts, with, say, Rio de Janeiro, Angkor Wat, and maybe... Macchu Picchu? View larger. Found via things magazine].

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG London Canyonlands and Offshore (again)).

More space in the space hotel

[Image: Outside the space hotel... in space. You can see the Earth's curvature in the lower right-hand corner. Courtesy of Bigelow Aerospace].

The space hotel is back in the news.
According to the BBC, an "experimental spacecraft designed to test the viability of a hotel in space has been successfully sent into orbit" by a private company called Bigelow Aerospace.
The "inflatable and flexible core of the spacecraft expands to form a bigger structure after launch." Which is helpful, because Bigelow's ultimate goal is "to build a full-scale space hotel, dubbed Nautilus, which will link a series of inflatable modules together like a string of sausages."
However, two distracting bits of news then enter the story...
First, the BBC reports that "the company has sent a collection of pictures and other memorabilia from fee-paying customers keen to see their personal possessions photographed in space." And, second, we learn that the company "also hopes to activate a space-based bingo game to be played by people back on Earth."

1)

2a)

2b)

Trivial Pursuit

Disturbing Indeterminate Horizons of Fresh Architecture

[Images: Three covers from Springer's Consequence Book Series on Fresh Architecture].

Does anyone know anything about these books? More specifically, have you read them – and, if so, how are they? Well-produced? Interesting? Over-academic? Boring? Life-changing and amazing?
I can only find the most basic book descriptions online – and most of those are in German – and I would simply order one of these to see what they're actually like (I don't have access to an architecture library) but they seem a little bit over-priced. A 100-page pamphlet for $25.95...?
Anyway, if anyone's ever run across one of these, let me know. The three books, above, are by Nat Chard, Shaun Murray, and Chora/Raoul Bunshoten, respectively.
Thanks!

The Deck

[Image: Sergio Bianchi's Bellegra retreat, via Metropolis].

In an unfortunately subscriber-only article, Metropolis calls our attention to "an artists’ retreat in Bellegra, a small town 40 miles southeast of Rome."
The building, we read, was designed by Sergio Bianchi, whose "idea for a Modernist villa designed according to the principles of organic architecture," proved to be so controversial in the context of Italy's "archaic building laws" that it took more than six years to construct.
The design itself was "inspired" by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Metropolis writes that, "although the villa – which has a biological sewage system and a roof fitted for solar panels – is more visually and environmentally harmonious with the landscape than its neighbors, a group of squat clay-tile-roof stucco homes, it provoked strong resistance from local authorities."
Those authorities said, somewhat unbelievably, that the building "was too much like science fiction.”

[Image: Sergio Bianchi's Bellegra retreat, via Metropolis].

In any case, I'm posting this really just because I love the deck – in fact, I love the whole structure of this building.
I love how, as you can see in that first picture, above, there's a small room, not quite cantilevered, elevated over an outdoor patio – and that, above that room, there's a deck, poised under a slatted horizontal screen that allows you to watch the sky.
I also love the little walkway that extends beyond the right-hand side of the picture. The whole thing is like this maze of platforms, decks, patios, and cantilevered rooms, connected by terraces, hanging off a limestone core in the middle of the Italian countryside.
I'd like two, please.

Ground Conditions

[Image: San Francisco, photographed in profile from Sausalito].

In preparation for an overnight business trip to San Francisco this weekend, I was flipping through the Lonely Planet Guide to San Francisco – when I read something that is surely old news for anyone living in that city, but that nonetheless completely blew me away.
It turns out that part of San Francisco is actually built on the wrecked and scuttled remains of old ships.

[Image: A shipwreck that has absolutely no connection to San Francisco].

The Lonely Planet guide writes that "most of this walk [through the streets near the Embarcadero] is over reclaimed land, some of it layered over the scores of sailing ships scuttled in the bay to provide landfill."
Stunned – and absolutely fascinated by this sort of thing – I determined to learn more.
And it's true: a good part of coastal San Francisco is not built on solid ground, but on the forgotten residue of buried ships.
In an image that makes me want to cry it's so cool, the basements of some 19th-century San Francisco homes weren't basements at all... they were the hulls of lost ships.
"As late as Jan 1857," we read, "old hulks still obstructed the harbor while others had been overtaken by the bayward march of the city front and formed basements or cellars to tenements built on their decks. Even now [1888] remains of the vessels are found under the filled foundations of houses."
In other words, when you walked downstairs to grab a jar of preserved fruit – you stepped into the remains of an old ship.
It's almost literally unbelievable.

[Image: Another shipwreck – unrelated, as far as I'm aware, to San Francisco].

Best of all, those ships are still down there – and they're still being discovered.

discoveries of ships and ship fragments

I'm just waiting for some rare and world-destroying virus to be found, festering away in the subterranean hold of an abandoned schooner, forgotten by city historians...
Some random cable guy discovers it, digging down into someone's backyard to fix a transmission problem. His shovel cracks through the outer wooden shell of a 19th-century frigate, releasing a cloud of invisible bacteria... he inhales it... his brain begins to bleed... Eli Roth directs the film version.
But this also reminds me of the now classic film Quatermass and the Pit – a movie which genuinely needs to be remade, and I would gladly serve as a screenplay consultant – in which London Tube excavations uncover a buried spaceship... out of which emerge weird aliens intent on vanquishing the Queen's English. Or something like that.
But the question remains: do you really know what's beneath your house or apartment...?
An entire armada of lost fishing ships, now rotting in the mud, nameless and undiscovered, shivering with every earthquake.

If these reefs are islands

[Images: Japan's Okinotori Islands, via the BBC, next to an unrelated image of a different reef; all reef images used in this post are from different locations].

The BBC recently revisited the story of why Japan is now growing coral reefs in a bid to extend their territorial sovereignty into the Philippine Sea.

Successfully transplanting and cultivating these reefs would, in theory, allow Japan "to protect an exclusive economic zone off its coast"—expanding Japanese maritime power more than 1,000 miles south of Tokyo.

Law of the Sea

However, the major geopolitical question remains: are these reefs truly islands?

At the moment, the Okinotori Islands (as they're called) are merely "rocky outcrops"; but, by artificially enhancing their landmass through reefs—using reef "seeds" and "eggs"—Japan can create sovereign territory.

This means that they'll win economic control over all the minerals, oil, fish, natural gas, etc. etc., located in the area—providing friendly sea routes for American military ships in the process.

The U.S., of course, thinks that Japan's sovereign reefs are a great idea; China, unsurprisingly, thinks the whole thing sucks.

In fact, we read:

Chinese interest in Okinotori lies in its location: along the route U.S. warships would likely take from bases in Guam in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan. China's efforts to map the sea bottom, apparently so its submarines could intercept U.S. aircraft carriers in a crisis, have drawn sharp protests from Japan that China is violating its EEZ.Which means that these artificial encrustations of living matter, planted for political reasons at the beginning of the 21st century, could very well influence the future outcome of marine combat between the United States and China.

A tiny bit more information about all this is available at the Times.

So the rest of this story could go in any number of directions:

1) A speculative survey of other "rocky outcrops" and manmade reefs, to see who might be able to claim them and why. For instance, if Japan's reef-based territorial ambitions are successful, could this establish a legal precedent for other such experimental terrains?

Or perhaps it could mean that the U.S. will turn away from Treasury-depleting global military adventurism to spend money on more interesting projects within its own borders—funding a whole new series of Hawaiian islands, designed by Thom Mayne, that would extend Hawaii archipelagically toward Asia...

Greece, inspired, would then expand the Cyclades with a cluster of designer islands, slowly growing to dominate the Mediterranean once again—a kind of inverse-Odyssey in which the islands themselves do all the traveling...

Or maybe there'll be a whole new terrestrial future in store for Scotland's Outer Hebrides, or for the Isle of Man, or for Friesland—or perhaps even a whole new Nova Scotia, extending hundreds of nautical miles into the waters of the north Atlantic, a distant, fog-shrouded world of melancholic introspection, visited by poets...

2) It's worth remembering that the possession of land and territory has not always been a recognized marker of political sovereignty—so the Earth, in the sense of geophysical terrain, is here being swept up into a model of human governance that has only existed for a few hundred years, and which may only exist for a few decades more. So, under a different political system, these artificial reefs would be quite literally meaningless.

3) The generation of new territory for the purpose of extending—or consolidating—political power is nothing new. As but one example, I happen to be reading The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, a book that "tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the last 250 years by reclaiming marsh and fen, draining moors, straightening rivers, and building dams in the high valleys."

The relevance of this here, in the context of artificial Japanese reefs in the south Pacific, is that Frederick the Great used hydrological reclamation projects—i.e. marsh draining and river redirection—literally to create new territory; this expanded the political reach of Prussia by generating more Earth upon which German-speaking settlers could then build farms and villages. All in all, this was a process of both "agricultural improvement and internal colonization," and it "increasingly assumed the character of a military operation."

As David Blackbourn, the book's author, further notes: "External conquests created additional territory on which to make internal conquests, spaces on the map out of which new land could be made." Indeed: "For Prussia, a state that was expanding through military conquest across the swampy North European plain, borders and reclamation went together."

4) Finally, last week New Scientist ran a whole bunch of little articles called "The last place on Earth..." In each case, that leading phrase was followed by a subheading, such as: "...to be discovered," or "...where no explorer has set foot."

Another of those articles was: "...to be unclaimed by any nation."

As the magazine comments in that piece: "States will go to great lengths to secure territorial claims over what appear to be worthless pieces of land." After all, "owning even a remote rock can significantly extend a nation's access to marine resources such as oil and fish."

But those "great lengths" to which the nations of tomorrow may someday go could include the outright geo-architectural construction of whole new landmasses, islands, and offshore microcontinents. These terrains will be governed by Kurtzian technocrats, with iron fists, whose unchecked cruelty will inspire the literary classics of the 22nd century...

In any case, all of these points seem to imply that architects may need to brush up on their marine geotechnical skills—as well as on the legal issues surrounding the archipelagic future of political sovereignty.

The Labyrinth and the Stairway

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord].

Artist Michelle Lord, whose "Future Ruins" we featured here on BLDGBLOG the other day, has another project on display this year as part of Architecture Week in the UK.
This project, the "City of the Immortals," inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story called "The Immortal," gives viewers a shadowy glimpse into Lord's ongoing "fascination with fictional or un-built environments."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a slightly bigger version].

This work in particular represents "a vast fictional topography that exists within the walls of a mythological Roman city." Within that city, according to the Borges story, "a lone figure traverses its magnificent, eternal architecture in search of immortality."
At one point Borges describes how this narrator ascends a ladder, pulling himself up toward "a circle of sky" – through which he promptly pokes his head, making a discovery: "I began to glimpse capitals and astragals," he tells us, "triangular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; see bigger].

The story continues:

A labyrinth is a structure compounded to confuse men; its architecture, rich in symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked any such finality. It abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas.In any case, Lord has physically constructed the architecture described by Borges; her interiors thus "intentionally evoke spatial and geometric confusion, where great pillars extend into infinity and endless staircases appear to intertwine like a three dimensional maze to form a ‘nonsense’ structure or architectural folly."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a moderately larger version].

Citing Piranesi as an influence, she assembles a "composite of both the real and the invented." This "demonstrates the power of paper architecture to convincingly simulate reality, where a freshly made model can evoke a lengthy history and its diminutive scale conjure up a life-size space. An intricate hybrid of photography, sculpture and architecture; the artificial eye of the camera subtly transforms these hand crafted models into a large sprawling complex, a new imaginary city."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a slightly bigger version].

Lord's "City of the Immortals" is on display till June 24 in Birmingham, England.

(Vaguely related: Edinburgh).

Future Ruins

[Image: From "Future Ruins" by Michelle Lord].

Over on Ballardian we read about a new project by artist Michelle Lord, called "Future Ruins."
Lord writes: “Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment, Future Ruins is a photographic critique of the urban planning of the 1970s and Ballard’s novels of the same period."

[Image: From "Future Ruins" by Michelle Lord].

"Set against a backdrop of Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures such as Spaghetti Junction, Central Library and New Street Station signal box," Lord continues, "Future Ruins aims to highlight the temporality of our landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself."

Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.The show is on display until June 23, as part of the UK's 2007 Architecture Week.
Lord, meanwhile, is also the artist behind "Four Corners," a photographic exploration of "fictional space."
According to the 24 Hour Museum: "The images featured in Four Corners tell the tale of a woman who becomes alienated from the room she occupies as it takes on a strange life of its own. Furniture defies gravity and ghostly figures emerge from the shadows in the dreamlike chamber depicted, understandably giving our subject the creeps as her room appears to transform itself."

(For those of you who like this sort of thing, Ballardian actually interviewed me about architecture, urban design, and the novels of J.G. Ballard, back in November).

The Storm Room

Instead of TV, it seems, you can watch 3D reconstructions of ancient storms – hopefully in surround-sound.
New Scientist reported a few weeks ago that researchers will soon "be able to visually recreate past typhoons, hurricanes and cyclones, then stand in the middle and watch as the weather pattern swirls around them." It's the storm room: a "simulator that crunches real storm data and turns it into 3D images that can be viewed with virtual-reality goggles."
What about the home entertainment version, though? Putting this thing to architectural use. You throw Hurricane Floyd – or Typhoon Tip – up on the walls and read a book while it spins...
Or a new kind of teenage rebellion breaks out in the suburbs of middle America: angry sixteen year-olds program tropical storms into the walls of their bedrooms and make their parents faint with vertigo.
It's the immersive, weather-reconstructive cinema of the future.

(A tiny bit more information is available at New Scientist).

Aerial Conversationalists

[Image: Two landscapes photographed from above by David Maisel; from Terminal Mirage].

I'm excited to announce that I'll be participating in a roundtable discussion, on June 28, hosted by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Some long-term BLDGBLOG readers might remember that I interviewed photographer David Maisel about a year and a half ago for Archinect; well, David will be leading a guided tour of his photographs (at noon on June 28) at the Nevada Museum of Art, followed by a lecture about those images (at 7pm, the same day), by writer William L. Fox – ending, finally, with a roundtable discussion featuring Fox, Maisel, and myself.
The Nevada Museum of Art describes Fox as an author and independent scholar who "has spent three decades studying and writing about the ways in which humans understand where they are in landscapes, often focusing on art, mapping, and cognitive science." His many, many books include Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA... and Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent. He's also got a website.
Fox's work has come up many times on this blog; see this post, for instance, about high winds in Antarctica, carving musical instruments out of the rocks, or this post, in which huge underground spheres in the south polar glaciers are used as a new kind of cathedral, or even this post, in which settlers on Mars confront seemingly inescapable geo-simulations...
Finally, if you haven't read it yet, don't miss the Archinect interview with David Maisel.And I owe a huge thanks to the Nevada Museum of Art for inviting me up to participate in the first place.

Home Again, Home Again

[Image: The future of the private home: a $475 million, custom Airbus A380; illustration by Bryan Christie for Wired].

According to Wired, an "undisclosed billionaire" has paid $475 million for a private Airbus A380 passenger jet.
The plane weighs 361 tons, is eight stories tall, and can hold up to 500 passengers – but this nameless billionaire will simply be using it as "one of the most expensive mobile homes in the world" (complete with $150 million in "custom upgrades").
For whatever mysterious reasons of his or her own, the plane's owner has taken to calling the custom airplane "Project Trinity."
Which is actually interesting, because I was just thinking the other day that there are no flying churches – at least for mainstream congregations – and I don't think there are any sky mosques.
In other words, the architectural history of the Church doesn't, to my knowledge, include any airplanes. Gothic cathedrals, sure – but no StratoPulpit™. No CloudChurches (©).
And Islam has no AirMosques®.
In fact, this would make an interesting addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series: speculative religious architecture, creatively re-using vehicles from the private air transport industry.
In any case, while we're on the subject of extravagant private homes, as everyone in the world heard at least once last week, Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is constructing himself a private skyscraper in Mumbai.

[Image: Mukesh Ambani's 60-story house; via the Mumbai Mirror].

Ambani's new home will be "over 170m tall," the BBC reported, and it will require "an army of 600 staff to manage it."
All said, the tower will cost as much as $1 billion to construct (or 1/20th of Ambani's reported wealth).
According to the Mumbai Mirror, the house has been named "Residence Antilia." The Mirror goes on to explain that Antilia is "a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean far to the west of Spain. This mythical island had several other names such as Isle of Seven Cities, Ilha das Sete Cidades (Portuguese), Septe Cidades, Sanbrandan (or St Brendan), etc." Some people say Antilia is actually Manhattan; others say it's one of the Canary Islands; and yet others say it would make an awesome summer project for architectural design studios: design Antilia, an artificial island – or series of islands – "far to the west of Spain."
Briefly, then, Residence Antilia will include:

Etc. etc.
The expenditure is appalling, and the obvious contrast to the poverty of everyday Mumbai is almost literally unbelievable; and yet I have a soft spot for weird architectural projects built by really rich people – and a private skyscraper would make such a fantastic setting for a novel or film, not to mention a wild place to be left alone for the weekend, that I have to be honest and admit that I find this project pretty interesting.
Is it well-designed (by architects Perkins + Will)? It's too hard to tell from these images. Is it socially just? Of course not.
But it's an awesome addition to the growing pantheon of extreme private homes – and the narrative implications that it presents for future Ballardian artworks (novels, films, videogames) are, for me, stunning.
At the very least: a Bollywood Home Alone.

(Vaguely related: $5.4 billion).

Phoning glaciers at 3am

[Image: Iceland's Vatnajökull glacier].

The Guardian tells us today about a "unique work of art" that "invites viewers to phone a glacier in Iceland – and listen to its death throes, live, through a microphone submerged deep in the bitterly cold lagoon."
The weatherproof microphone thus "relays the splashes, creaks and groans as great masses of melting ice sheer off and crash into the water."

[Image: Iceland's Vatnajökull glacier].

You just have to call the following number: +44 (0) 7758 225698 (a British mobile phone – non-Brits, beware huge long-distance fees!) to "make direct contact with the polar icecap."
However, the article warns us: "Only one caller at a time can get through: [artist Katie] Paterson recommends the small hours of the morning."
So, if you're extremely rich and cursed with insomnia, you can always lull yourself to sleep, sitting up at 3am near the kitchen window with your telephone pressed hard against your ear, listening to the groan of distant glaciers...
I tried to get through a few hours ago, but dialed the wrong number – connecting instead to the subterranean roar of Mt. Hood.
Perhaps there should be a telephone directory for natural phenomena.

(Thanks, Alex! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: To eavesdrop on breaking glaciers from within and When landscapes sing: or, London Instrument).

Blogger Open House @ Postopolis!

[Image: The blogger open house at Postopolis! Photo by Susan Surface].

I can't stop thinking about Postopolis! – now that I'm back on the west coast, it's like it may not have really occurred...
I also just like the image, above – taken by Susan Surface – so I thought I'd put up another quick link about one of the events at Postopolis!
So: in the above image you're looking at the blogger open house, from Saturday, June 2, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.
From left to right you see: Miss Representation, Chad Smith, Enrique Ramirez, Abe Burmeister, me (looking down at a laptop), John Hill, Alec Appelbaum (standing in back), George Agnew (holding microphone), and Ryan McClain.
First of all, thanks to all of them for coming out. Second, I thought it was a great conversation – and a lot of fun. We obviously talked about blogging, but we went on to discuss architecture, self-publishing, anonymity, women in the age of Web 2.0, working with & without an editor, real estate in the city, extra-architectural posts – from Abe's nomad economics to Enrique's ship-salvaging tools – and their popularity on our respective sites, passing through diversions on starchitecture, who all this writing is actually intended for, and the sheer number of architecture blogs – and blogs in general – now kicking around out there in the ethersphere.
It was also great to meet some of these guys for the first time – one of the best things about Postopolis! in my opinion was simply that it got everyone together in one place, all of us – separated by keyboards and coffee cups and full-time jobs – coming together at the Storefront finally to reassure ourselves and others that the human experience is still alive and well in the 21st century, that conversations can, in fact, still happen, and we're not all pale, deformed misfits sweating into our desktop computers...
In any case, it's always worth clicking through the blogs, linked above – as well as through some of the other blogs who were invited but, for whatever reason, couldn't make it: Curbed, Apartment Therapy, Polis, Brownstoner, Progressive Reactionary, and so on.
And expect more updates and recaps when the mood hits.

Rotating Liverpool

[Image: Turning The Place Over by Richard Wilson; image via the Daily Mail].

In a project that "will astonish the commuters of Liverpool," sculptor Richard Wilson has turned part of a building's facade inside-out.
As if learning from Gordon Matta-Clark, Wilson sliced an "egg-shaped section" out of the building's facade – "fixing the eight metre diameter piece on a pivot" so it can spin.

[Image: Turning The Place Over by Richard Wilson; image via the Daily Mail].

The "rotating facade" will thus "reveal a glimpse of the interior" – for the low, low price of £450,000.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

One first senses a disquieting buzzing sound

[Image: A glimpse of Chizhevsky Lessons by Micol Assaël; image courtesy of ArtForum].

Named after a Russian scientist "who explored the correlation between solar activity and historical events," Chizhevsky Lessons is an art installation in Basel, Switzerland, by Micol Assaël.
The gallery it's displayed in looks a bit like an empty room. You do see a series of copper plates hanging above you in space, and there's a triangle, attached to wires, hovering alone in the center, like a Modernist chandelier.
But aside from those somewhat occultish pieces of interior decor, the place looks perfectly normal.
Still, it doesn't feel right:

Upon entering, one first senses a disquieting buzz sound, followed by a tickling of the skin as one’s body hair stands on end. It’s the loaded atmosphere that precedes a thunderstorm, but re-created artificially with a cascade generator, a transformer, copper plates, and, hung three meters above the floor, a thin wire net that fills the room with negatively charged ions. One cannot help but experience an immediate physical reaction...Sure, it's basically just a huge science experiment – but I can't stop myself wondering what a slightly less powerful, much more well-hidden model could do for you.
If you installed it in, say, a corporate board room: the CEO looks down upon her minions with derision and rage – because they didn't finish the monthly report. As she speaks they hear a disquieting buzzing sound, followed by a tickling of the skin as one's body hair stands on end...
It'd be like the Greek myths, reenacted through 21st century technology. The divine encounter: install six of these in St. Peter's.
Or, for that matter, install one, secretly, in your bedroom – and wait for the sparks to fly.

(Thanks again to Dan Polsby!)

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