Manifesto, or: "the nihilistic ravings of insomniac bohemians"

For its landmark 50th issue, British architecture and design magazine Icon put out a call for manifestos "from 50 of the most influential people in architecture and design" today.

[Image: The cover of Icon #50].

The manifestants – manifestators? manifestees? manifestors? – "include Rem Koolhaas, John Maeda, Zaha Hadid, Hussein Chalayan, Jasper Morrison, Peter Eisenman, Peter Saville, Foreign Office Architects, Joep van Lieshout, the Bouroullecs and Ken Livingstone," the "rebel mayor" of London.
In Livingstone's case, he, Richard Rogers, and Peter Bishop have basically submitted a new press release for Design for London ("Design for London wants London to be a city that works for all its people, for its economy and for the environment"); in Zaha Hadid's case, she sent in what appears to be a three-part digital rendering of... London? From the air? Gone topographically sinuous and structurally cubic?
Or perhaps she's redesigned Peter Eisenman's recent Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by moving it to the banks of a river and constructing it from glass.
In any case, the issue also contains manifestos by design titans like Bruce Mau, John Thackara, and Stefan Sagmeister; architects such as Joshua Prince-Ramus, Thom Mayne, Bernard Khoury, Sam Jacob, Stephen Holl, Vito Acconci, Greg Lynn, Teddy Cruz, and UN Studio; curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paola Antonelli; and -ahem- an L.A.-based architecture blogger called BLDGBLOG.
As the only blogger included in the fifty manifestos, I'm a little stunned – even half-seriously convinced that some sort of mistake has been made – but hey: it's always fun to be asked for your own architecture manifesto.

[Image: Some page-spreads from Icon #50].

On the other hand, is BLDGBLOG really written by one of "the most influential people in architecture and design"...? Next to Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, Ken Livingstone, and Zaha Hadid? I would suspect not, frankly. I would imagine that there's a little bubble of influence somewhere; but globally? Historically? I wouldn't exactly complain if that were the case – if people really wanted a bit more J.G. Ballard, John McPhee, Jeff VanderMeer, terrestrial prostheses, heliocentric Pantheons, and undiscovered bedrooms in their architectural discourse – but I'm not actually convinced that's true.
I think people would rather learn where to buy designer couches.
Anyway, long-term readers of BLDGBLOG won't find any surprises in what I have to say:

There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure – but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and W.G. Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames – as well as in the toy sets of children. The suburbs are architecture; bonded warehouses are architecture; slums are architecture; NASA’s lunar base plans are architecture – as are the space stations in orbit [above] us."

But, still, if you run into a copy of Icon #50, be sure to check it out.
And I should also mention that the issue includes a positive review of Postopolis!, written by Bill Millard, who sat through all five sweaty days of the event with us, taking notes and asking questions. More on Postopolis! can be found here and here.

(Note: The phrase "nihilistic ravings of insomniac bohemians," used in the title of this post, is an excerpt from Icon editor Justin McGuirk's introduction to the 50 manifestos).

Some thoughts on desert gardens

[Images: Cacti at the Huntington Library in Pasadena].

My wife and I went out to the Huntington's Desert Garden yesterday. I have to admit to a certain wild amount of enthusiasm for high-end botanical environments like that.
Being a fan of Kew Gardens, for instance, or Longwood Gardens, or even small local greenhouses and the like, I have a huge soft-spot for regions of the Earth's surface that have been deliberately cultivated to support rare – or at least highly condition-dependent – plantlife.
In the case of Kew and Longwood, you walk through elaborate, mist-filled greenhouses, passing orchids and ferns – but the word greenhouse is actually a form of structural shorthand, saying, in fact, that architecture has been put to use in the evolutionary hybridization of plantlife: flowers, fruits, and other animate forms that would, naturally, have grown elsewhere.
By establishing micro-climates, with often extreme variation from building to building, in both temperature and humidity, architecture participates directly in botanical speciation.

[Image: Cacti at the Huntington Library in Pasadena].

In any case, these thoughts don't actually apply to the Huntington Desert Garden, which is entirely outdoors – or, at least, the part of it that we visited was entirely outdoors, in the dry heat of a spectacular, arm-sunburning day – but no matter: either way, it's hard to have a bad time walking around in the Huntington's linked network of curved paths past biomorphically avant-garde cacti and spiked trees so surreal they appear literally extraterrestrial.
Briefly, all of this reminds me of an incredible fact I read last week in the London Review of Books: Stefan Buczacki, the author of Garden Natural History, has "calculate[d] that private gardens [in England] occupy an area about the size of Somerset, and they play an important part in maintaining the populations of many species."

[Image: Somerset County, England].

That is to say: an area in England the size of Somerset is actually a kind of biological transplant: a deliberately cultivated micro-climate, or genetic testing site, with its own yet to be calculated effects both on native plants and animals and on the British climate.
At what point, then, do privately held and cultivated landscapes become naturalized as a region's terrain, or as part of that region's native biosphere?
It's a surrogate, or prosthetic, ecosystem – a kind of skin graft – masquerading as the thing that's been replaced.
Think of it as the English family garden as replicant.
In other words, if English private gardens proliferate to the point where an area not just the size of Somerset County, but of, say, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire combined, then do artificial landscapes become indicative of England itself?
Or, to use an absurd analogy, if the band Napalm Death now has no connection to the original band – because all of the original members have left – indeed, as Wikipedia points out, "by the second side of their debut album... they did not contain any original members" – is it possible that, in a thousand years' time, or in five thousand years' time – or even in fifty – that "England" will soon be England in name only, having been slowly replaced, piece by piece – a garden here, a garden there – until the Britannic landscape is entirely manmade and it's become impossible to locate even a trace of native vegetation? A kind of ecological bait-and-switch?
You book a trip to England – but you're visiting an island made entirely from private gardens, a vast, unnatural landscape ruled over by a King.
In any case, the Huntington Desert Garden is a spectacular place to visit, and as good a place as any in which to think about the local cultivation of non-native landscapes. So if you're ever in Los Angeles, consider stopping by.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Kew Brew, or: turning endangered landscapes into beer).

Liberation Hydrology: Miami, 2107 A.D.

[Image: Florida in 2007; via New Scientist].

In a subscriber-only article over at New Scientist, NASA climate scientist James Hansen describes what the planet might look like after a "runaway collapse" of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
The collapse, or melting, of the sheet, of course, would be caused by increased global temperatures – temperatures altered by the atmospherically unique quantity of carbon dioxide that's now floating around up there. That carbon dioxide has been released by human industrial processes.
"There is not a sufficiently widespread appreciation of the implications of putting back into the air a large fraction of the carbon stored in the ground over epochs of geologic time," Hansen writes.

[Image: Florida in 2107; via New Scientist].

In any case, the article points out that this future sea-level rise will actually increase over time, as the melting of the ice sheet itself accelerates.

As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.

That would be more than enough to flood London, as discussed in the previous post – not to mention Shanghai, New York, Mumbai, and so on.
From the article:

Without mega-engineering projects to protect them, a 5-metre rise would inundate large parts of many cities – including New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver, Mumbai and Tokyo – and leave surrounding areas vulnerable to storm surges. In Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and elsewhere, whole regions and cities may vanish. China's economic powerhouse, Shanghai, has an average elevation of just 4 metres.

This is obviously meant as a warning.
However, the main problem I have with using maps and scenarios like this to get people worked up about climate change is that these warnings often seem to have the opposite effect.
In other words, these things are actually so evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that it's hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea that you might get to see these things happen.
Nothing against Miami, but all of south Florida under several meters of water? With Cape Canaveral lost under a subtropical lagoon and St. Petersburg an archipelago?
The problem, it seems, is that climate change scientists, in describing these unearthly terrestrial reorganizations, are science fictionalizing, so to speak, our everyday existence. The implicit, if inadvertant, message here seems to be: hey, south Floridians, and all you who are bored of the world today, sick of all the parking lots and the 7-11s, tired of watching Cops, tired of applying to colleges you don't really want to go to, tired of credit card debt and bad marriages, don't worry.
This will all be underwater soon.
It could be called liberation hydrology.
Climate change becomes an adventure – the becoming-science-fiction of everyday life.

[Image: Northwestern Europe in 2107; via New Scientist].

It seems no wonder, then, that the more apocalyptic these scenarios get, the more we find the same blasé reaction: oh, you mean Manhattan will be underwater? In 100 years?
I think the way to get people truly concerned about climate change – if fear-mongering is, in fact, the correct strategy to use here (after all, if you don't like fear-mongering in the War on Terror, then why should you apply the same tactics to climate change?) – is not by talking about unprecedented and spectacular transformations of the Earth's surface. New archipelagos! Forests in Antarctica!
Drowned cities!
Instead, it would seem, you have to point out quality of life issues: you might starve to death, for instance, as organized agriculture and food distribution chains are interrupted. Malnourished, your teeth will fall out and your hair will grow thin. You may be living in a refugee camp, with neither privacy nor close friends nor personal safety. The governments of the world may have collapsed, overwhelmed by the logistical burden of displaced populations and by the loss of the world's economic centers, like NY, London, and Shanghai; there will thus be no police; you might be physically assaulted on a regular basis. There will be rats, roaches, and rivers of human sewage – followed closely by disease, infection, infant mortality, and premature death. And you won't just be able to drive away, leaving the catastrophe behind – because the roads will be potholed, without a government to fix them, and your car will probably have been stolen, anyway. Clean water will be a luxury; you'll be drinking radiator water out of abandoned pick-up trucks, rusting on the sides of highways outside St. Louis.
In any case, my point is just that the more outlandish and imaginatively evocative your predictions get, describing some new, fantasy geography of rising sea-levels and tropical lagoons – a whole new Earth, coming your way soon – the more people will actually want to see that happen. Of course, the same thing is no doubt true for what I just wrote, above, in describing the apocalypse: after all, there are many people who will actually want to experience that – unpoliced refugee camps included.
Still, showing maps of an unrecognizable future world doesn't scare people; it taps into their explorer instinct – new lands, terra incognita.
And it gives people some truly awesome scenarios to think about – like scuba-diving through the submerged remains of Cape Canaveral, or rediscovering Amsterdam, a city lost to the silt and seaweed.
If this is what people think climate change will bring them, then a whole lot of people are probably looking forward to it.

British Hydrology

[Image: A thoughtfully signposted British flood; photo by Matt Cardy for Getty Images].

I'm totally fascinated by the idea that adventure tourism firms might someday lead wreck-diving tours through the flooded ruins of London: in your expensive re-breathing gear, you'll roll backward off a boat, flashlight in hand... and the coral-specked vaults of St. Paul's are now yours to explore.
All the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, as seen through a diving mask. Or the Tube, full of moray eels, awaiting the truly brave.
Fantastically, that's not so unrealistic an image – because London, after all, is sinking.
Using satellite measurement, tide gauges, GPS, and a few other devices called "absolute gravimeters," a new study proves that London is moving downward into the Earth's surface in "a general pattern of subsidence of 1-2mm a year. With waters rising in the region by about 1mm a year, the combined effect is a 2-3mm a year rise in sea level with respect to the land."

The investigation confirms geologic studies that show the Earth's crust is still responding to the loss of the heavy ice sheet which covered much of Britain more than 10,000 years ago – with southeast England, including London, slowly sinking.

Do some basic math, and that puts London under three meters of water in roughly 1000 years – and London, incredibly, will have passed through the other side of the planet in less than – whoa – 
To help protect against these encoaching waters, the city contains or is surrounded by a rarely noticed hydrological labyrinth: "300km of tidal defences including embankments, walls, gates and barriers."
However, "at some stage, [these will] have to be adapted or moved" – at least until "new types of defences [are] created that make better use of the natural floodplain."
I love this stuff. In fact, I'm 100% convinced that if architectural magazines really wanted to discuss what the London of tomorrow will look like, they'd have stopped talking to architects a long time ago – and they'd have flood consultants on the phone.
The future of London will be determined by hydrological engineers.

[Image: The Tewkesbury flood of 2007, as seen from the air; photo by Daniel Berehulak for Getty Images].

In any case, London is also jostling up and down on the Earth's surface, everyday, bobbing up and down like a buoy with the tides; these micro-movements need to be taken into account by anyone who hopes to study the effects of so-called post-glacial rebound.

London itself will rock by 10mm, twice a day, with loading from ocean tides. The seasons also alternately load and unload the ground, making the Earth's crust "breathe" up and down over a longer period.

London, your tides are breathing you. An Albionic lung.
But if you want more stuff like that, this older post is rather heavy on British hydro-speculation.
Meanwhile, a "lost" village in Wiltshire might offer a glimpse of London's own future to come. From the BBC:

A team of divers who set out to solve the mystery of the drowned village of Bowood in Wiltshire has found the remains of buildings under a lake.

If that sounded easy, though, consider that "[p]revious attempts to find the village included a dive by Bowood owner Lord Lansdowne, the 9th Marquis of Lansdowne, who donned his scuba gear 20 years ago. His attempt was unsuccessful."
So will aquatic archaeologists someday dive into the kelp-choked canyons of what was once Islington High Street, looking for lost malls and cinemas...?
This blogger thinks so.
Moving on: in an amazing story that was reported – and repeated – all over the place last week, we learned that a thin ridge of chalk once connected SE England to NW France.
The image, below, is BLDGBLOG's own highly inaccurate, and grossly out of scale, representation of what that ridge might have looked like.

Calculated to stop the hearts of English people the world over, those maps show us a land-bridge, continentalizing Kent, putting Franco in the Anglo and de-Saxonizing the island from its royal isolation. And I have no idea what that sentence means, either.

[Image: A slightly more accurate map of both the chalk ridge and the glacial lake it held back; via the BBC].

According to New Scientist: "Half a million years ago, Britain was connected to mainland Europe by a broad chalk ridge that spanned what we now call the Dover Strait. But somehow that ridge was destroyed, forever separating England and France."
A new theory holds that this ancient chalk ridge was "breached and toppled by a monumental torrent that gushed from an overfilling glacial lake that the ridge had been damming on its northern side." As evidence of its passing, the catastrophic flood left "deep valleys gouged into the channel's bedrock," turning what is now England, Scotland, and Wales into one big happy island.
"At its peak," the BBC adds, "it is believed that the megaflood could have lasted several months, discharging an estimated one million cubic metres of water per second."
However, New Scientist quietly points out that Alec Smith, of Bedford College, London, once suggested this exact same idea, back in 1985 – and he was ridiculed. Nobody believed him.
Sorry, Alec.
Finally, it would have been hard to miss all the news about last week's floods across England – so I'll just supply these links and let the pictures do the talking.

[Image: The Tewkesbury flood of 2007, as seen from the air; photo by Daniel Berehulak for Getty Images].

But, of course, England has a deep history of flooding...

(Note: The Wiltshire lost village link was discovered via an amazing post at things magazine, a reliable source of great links and information – for anyone out there who doesn't already know it).

The Wit of the Staircase

Last summer, BLDGBLOG interviewed author Erik Davis about Davis's new book The Visionary State – a book that was originally sent to me on the advice of a woman named Theresa Duncan.
Theresa was the author of an often disarmingly sharp blog called The Wit of the Staircase.

[Image: Artist/photographer unknown. From an old post on The Wit of the Staircase].

When I announced that BLDGBLOG was moving to Los Angeles last September, Theresa and I got in touch, and we began emailing here and there, maybe once a month. Soon, I saw her at the first BLDGBLOG event, back in January; she and her boyfriend, artist Jeremy Blake, tried to meet up with me and my wife at David Maisel's L.A. opening gala (but our timing was off); and then, after she and Jeremy moved back to NYC, to live in the attic of a church in Manhattan's East Village, they stopped by the closing party for Postopolis!
She also sent me links here and there, and her emails were incredibly encouraging – in fact, she's one of the people I thanked when announcing the BLDGBLOG Book back in May.
So I was stunned, saddened, and horrified to learn, in the context of an otherwise casual email exchange, that Theresa committed suicide two weeks ago. Somehow I missed the news.
A few days later, her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, left behind a note in a pile of clothes on the beach and then "walked into" the Atlantic – and his body has yet to be found.
The story's been all over The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Modern Art Notes – basically everywhere – even as author Ron Rosenbaum has been using their deaths, somewhat irresponsibly, to speculate about what he wants to believe was a murder.
Of course, Theresa was well-known for her "paranoiac" writings about Scientology, the art world, CIA black ops, secret FBI files, and the like – this post, in particular, has received a huge amount of attention this past week (and it's a crazy thing to read) – but to throw her entire blog away as mere political ravings overlooks the vast majority of the site's actual content: short observations – often limited to single quotations and photographs – with an articulate precision and interpretive confidence other writers would only dream of achieving. She could be writing about supermodels, the occult, music, 9/11, Percy Bysshe Shelley, perfume, Los Angeles, or the films of Quentin Tarantino.
Not everyone will agree with the political views espoused in this essay, for instance, but Theresa wrote one of the best and most energetic reviews of Grindhouse I've ever read; and she posted a long interview with Father Frank Morales, an Episcopal priest, in which they talk about everything from Philip K. Dick and Jerry Falwell to the Moonies, Freud, Marx, science fiction, and Disneyland – all by way of a discussion about Jesus Christ.
Here's an excerpt:

Wit of the Staircase: You know, Philip K. Dick is really interesting on this, too, because he had a conversion experience in California – he famously lived next door to Disneyland – and a woman came to the door. She was wearing a fish sign, a Pisces sign that the early Christians used. And he claims he had this sort of mystical experience that was across dimensions of time. And he actually suddenly felt that time was an illusion. So he said ever after he had the feeling time was essentially created by Satan to prolong and delay the return of Jesus Christ, the Second Coming. So, under all of the supposed progress and all of the change, he says it's just an overlay over the same unchanging reality. It's still like the day that Christ died, and he felt the anticipation of resurrection, the thrill, he says, constantly.

Frank Morales: I totally agree with that.

Wit: So other than the hucksters, the Falwells and the L. Ron Hubbards of the world, there are these startlingly generous and original religious thinkers. P. K. Dick – obviously, he's a little wiggy, but he's an original thinker, and this old narrative was just completely alive for him. And Slavoj Žižek is great on the continuing radicality of Christian love and forgiveness, particularly in his book The Puppet and The Dwarf, which is also thankfully very good on Freud and Marx.

Morales: As a matter of fact, to use that metaphor again, without sounding preachy, reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's comments, why do you think they call the basic element of time "the second"? Because it's not the first.

Wit: Well, because P.K. Dick lived next to Disney World, he talked about the animatronics there – the servo operated puppets and the moving pirates and the fake birds – a place everything was artificial. And he said that that's like the second reality. But he said, someday a real bird was going to sing at Disneyland and uncover the first reality.

Morales: Ah, beautiful.

In any case, this is personal news creeping onto an architecture website – but I'm stunned. And I don't mean to imply that we were close friends – we weren't – in fact, we only communicated through email. But sometimes you look away and things just disappear.

Prison Town, USA

There's a great documentary on PBS tonight, called Prison Town, USA.
"What happens when a struggling rural community tries to revive its economy by inviting prisons in?" the film asks.

[Image: Prison Town, USA].

In focusing on the rural "prison town" of Susanville, California, the film presents "a riveting look at one of the most striking phenomena of our times: a prison-building and incarceration boom unprecedented in American history."
Indeed, this unprecedented "incarceration boom" hit the point where, "during the 1990s, a prison opened every 15 days."

The United States now has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yet this astonishing jailing of America has been little noted because many of the prisons have opened in remote areas like Susanville. Prison Town, USA examines one of the country's biggest prison towns, a place where a new correctional economy encompasses not only prisoners, guards and their families, but the whole community.

California's corrections industry, in particular – which now receives more state funding than does California's university system – is "hungry for space, new guards and low visibility," and so distant, rarely visited towns like Susanville seem perfect.
Meanwhile, in an interview with the filmmakers, we learn a bit more about this "correctional economy":

The prison boom came in the wake of traditional industries waning for decades since the 1950s. Ranching, mining and milling got outsourced. Then, when the political climate shifted and prison expansion began, people in the towns welcomed prison officials when they said: "We're going to build a prison, it's going to create jobs, and you'll be able to count the prisoners in your census numbers." But they didn't understand that the repercussions are huge. You get a lot of money that comes in through higher wages that the guards make, but there are Wal-Marts and fast food joints that just flow in after the prison. That's part and parcel of the prison expansion, and local businesses don't get that money, the big, big corporations do, so the money doesn't even stay in Susanville.

Further, there is an accompanying correctional geography, similar to what Bryan Finoki and others would call a carceral urbanism.

[Image: Prison Town, USA].

For instance, the fact that "prisoners are counted by the census in the towns where they're imprisoned rather than the towns they call home" leads to a "huge shift of resources – political, economic, social services, et cetera – from the urban areas where most of the inmates come from to these rural areas."
Specifically, as "federal and state money moves from urban areas to rural areas," "census lines are redrawn" and otherwise insignificant little towns like Susanville can gain "a lot of political clout" by inviting this national "prison expansion" in.
In any case, I got to see a copy of the film last night, and I'd really recommend seeing it. So, if you're near a television (and in the United States) tonight, give it a shot.
Here's the trailer.

Chemical Radiance: A review of the film Sunshine

[Image: The cast of Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

I saw Sunshine the other day, so I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about it here. However, please beware that this post gives away key plot details and spoils the end of the film – so do not read this post if you'd like to avoid such knowledge.
In brief, myself and two friends went to see the film together – and we had three totally different reactions. One of us was basically annoyed with it from the very beginning – and a weird plot twist, that I'll soon discuss, about 5/6ths of the way through the movie, just killed it for him; the other more or less liked everything about the film, even accepting said "weird plot twist" for interesting reasons of his own; and I really liked the film, with several reservations, until, yes, the aforementioned weird plot twist – which basically does the whole thing in for me. In fact, I'm still stunned that this one particular detail ever made it into the script.
In any case, what the film does – and it does this very successfully, in my opinion – is set up an increasingly melancholy sense of psychological isolation as an international crew of scientists, aboard a ship called the Icarus 2, flies toward the Sun. The Sun, we learn, is dying – and so it needs to be restarted with a "stellar bomb" the size of Manhattan. In fact, we learn, the bomb is so big that it contains literally all of the Earth's fissile material. Once detonated, it will form "a star within a star" – a surrogate astronomy, or Sun-replacement surgery, that will save everyone back on Earth from the perpetual winter in which they've been trapped.
Whether or not this would actually work, from the standpoint of an astral physicist, is beside the point; you're asked to accept this, as the basic plot of the film, and, as far as that goes, I accepted it.
Meanwhile, the visual and conceptual beauty of certain scenes – they witness a transit of Mercury, for instance – is extraordinary. Further, the possibility that they may not make it back to Earth, though still unlikely at the film's beginning, adds a distinct aura of extinction and exclusivity to everything they see.
No one will ever see these things again.

[Images: Screen-grabs from the Sunshine website; courtesy of DNA Films].

However, as the ship approaches its solar rendezvous, a kind of elemental, alien hostility begins to emerge – not from within the crew members, but from within the Sun itself. Far from being a beneficent source of light in the sky, generously tanning the bodies of we Earthlings below, the Sun is revealed as a monstrous and abiological source of mutative radiation, inhumanly immense, so bright you can't see it, disintegrating nearly everything that comes near.
One of the crewmembers – the resident psychiatrist – becomes addicted to the star: he can't stop burning himself with more and more quantities of sunlight, asking the ship's central computer to increase the unfiltered percentage that is allowed through the observation deck window. With his skin peeling and his mouth hanging open, he nearly disappears into a void made entirely of light – golden, enveloping him on all sides – yet we hear, incredibly, that he's only receiving 3.1% of the Sun's natural capacity. 4%, we're told, would destroy the psychiatrist outright – let alone 50% or 90%, or the Sun itself, unfiltered.
In fact, for me, the film very brilliantly illustrates the paradox that something can be so powerful that the ability to experience it is simply beyond the limits of human life – outside of human experience altogether.

[Image: The sun].

Anyway, if the first 4/5ths or even 5/6ths of the film are about this painfully beautiful, almost evaporative, encounter with an alien and threateningly vast – yet so ironically necessary to life on Earth – stellar object, then the "weird plot twist" that I mentioned above feels as if the ending to another film had been accidentally stitched on in the editing room.
In brief: Sunshine suddenly turns into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[Image: The ship from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

It's as if the film shies away from its own material, unable, or unwilling, to contemplate what might happen if people, aware of their own impending deaths, fly straight into the Sun – an origin point devoid of recognizability – and so they throw a serial killer in, almost literally out of nowhere.
The film could have been stunning: the crew is pared down, one by one, by accidents or oxygen shortages, and even a suicide, until only three or four of them are left. They know that they will never return; they know that they will die unprecedented deaths, obliterated by Apollo, by God, by the Sun – by whatever you want to call it; and they are terrified by that rapturous undoing, unable to narrate their final experience for anyone back home, truly cut off yet almost psychedelically alive in this moment of solar contact...
But that's not how the film ends.

[Image: The flight deck from Sunshine, in a screen-grab from the film's website; courtesy of DNA Films].

Midway through Sunshine, a distress beacon is heard. It's from the mission before their mission – the one that failed. That ship – called Icarus 1 – disappeared nearly seven years ago, somewhere in the irradiated gulf between Mercury and the Sun.
In a decision that, I'll concede, is necessary for certain things to come but is still so ridiculous as to make viewers question the competence of the entire crew – the last great hope of humanity! – they decide to deviate their mission in order to find the lost ship.
Lo! They find the lost ship.
Lo! They know exactly how to dock with it, despite – for obvious reasons – never having practiced anything of the sort.
Lo! Unbeknownst to them, the captain of the Icarus 1 is still alive – and he hides out on the Icarus 2, escaping notice. Like a comic book superhero, he's survived seven years alone on a disabled spaceship floating between Mercury and the Sun – without being pulled in by that star's gravity. As if serving simply to make the film's existential themes explicit, he has also pre-recorded an angry and completely unhinged theological rant about God's Will and the absurdity of Man trying to restart the Sun.
Even more unbelievably, it turns out that this guy isn't malnourished, semi-skeletal, or even psychologically catatonic: no, after seven years alone, eating hydroponic carrots in space, he's become a superstrong, sunburnt Hercules, capable of lifting two crewmembers at a time with one arm whilst chasing everyone else down and murdering them with a mechanized surgical scalpel.

[Images: Two views of the airlock from Sunshine, in screen-grabs from the film's website; courtesy of DNA Films].

Where did this come from?
And why?
At the risk of wildly exaggerrating the philosophical depth of the first 5/6ths of the film, this seems roughly akin to throwing in a serial killer for the last three chapters of Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Nietzsche is chased through the claustrophobic rooms of his mountain home – or adding the Son of Sam to the grand finale of the Tao Te Ching.
In any case, can you really be so scared of your own premise – the unwitnessed and lonely deaths of an oxygen-starved crew as they fly into the Sun, toting a "stellar bomb" the size of Manhattan (talk about mythological plotlines!) – that you have to add Freddy Krueger?
Even worse, the film had already established by then that no one would survive. The film had already established that the Sun was a source of great attractive power, far beyond the mere pull of gravity, and that it was possible to become hypnotized by, even addicted, to the very thing that would later annihilate you – and that this death would be more horrible than human pain can describe, yet something of such exquisite agony, and so spectacular, something uniquely sublime in the history of human experience, that you would actually want to feel it.
You would fall toward roiling continents of hydrogen and light, and you would be utterly consumed by your destination.
It would have been the science fiction film of the decade! An instant classic.
Instead, just when everyone has settled in for the ending, waiting for that golden burn, our mutant Hercules of unlimited arm strength appears, creeping up behind people in the dark and knifing them in the spine.
How could you cheat the audience and the characters out of the philosophical glory of solar absorption? Sunshine would practically have been a religious text, a near classic work of speculative philosophy exploring what it means not just to die but to be completely obliterated, atomically consumed in chemical radiance by the same two-faced point of origin that makes life on Earth possible in the first place.
Imagine if the Chandogya Upanishad ended not with the nature of time, space, life, and astronomy – but with an ax murderer.
Or Siddhartha: the Buddha is inexplicably hunted by an escaped convict with a chainsaw... (That sounds kind of fun, actually).
Does this mean that I am comparing the film Sunshine to the Chandogya Upanisad? Well... I suppose I am, out of over-enthusiasm – but I am also saying that Sunshine wildly misses that mark. Instead of going for cinematic magnificence, and it was well on its way to arriving there, it takes a disastrous step back – and reveals itself as a cheap, quasi-1990s space-horror misfire.
Was the knife-wielding lunatic evidence of tampering by the studio? In other words, did the film's producers demand more of a predictable impact? Or did Alex Garland write that guy into the original script? If so, why? Were the filmmakers pleased with the final result? Were they so unhappy with the idea of flying their own crew into the Sun that they added an interstellar He-Man, sunburnt and stronger than Arnold Schwarzeneggar?
Or was the knife-wielding lunatic a way to screen the filmmakers themselves from the imaginative power of their own subject matter?
Was there something about the premise itself – total absorption by a featureless, golden void – that forced them to retreat, and to insert something that they and, they hoped, the audience could recognize?

[Image: Cillian Murphy runs from a knife-wielding, sunburnt lunatic in Sunshine, a screen-grab from the film's website; courtesy of DNA Films].

Like I say, if the film hadn't already been on its way to the final credits, with no need for such a plot twist, I could perhaps have accepted the chromosomally damaged avenger. If it had been the ship's resident psychiatrist, for instance, psychotically consumed by the Apollonian power of astral radiance, at least it would have been neat and tidy – if still clichéd.
But since we were already on our way into the Sun, already past the point of even thinking that the crew might return home, already accepting the fact that everyone in the film would die heroic, astronomically unprecedented deaths, why did we need the murderous accelerant of a Sun-addled stowaway?
That does nothing more than rob the film of its poetic grandeur – so that the filmmakers could safely turn their back on philosophy and create Leviathan in zero-G.

(Thanks to Christopher and Michael for seeing the film with me – and for listening to me rant about all of the above for nearly two hours. Meanwhile, if you completely disagree with this review, please jump in and convince me otherwise. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The Oxygen Garden).

Proper Project Orientation

[Image: A wonderfully disorienting image, called Proper Project Orientation, by Vancouver-based photographer Bill MacEwen – an image so spatially evocative, with its labyrinth of scaffolding, ladders, surfaces, and stairways – a horizontal universe of painterly self-connectedness – that I'd rather not reveal what the photo actually is. Is it a billboard, re-designed by Lebbeus Woods? Or a painting? Perhaps it's a drive-in cinema after an atom bomb has hit... It's better just to stare and enjoy – while viewing the original photo here. (Thanks, Bill!].

Little Earth

[Image: Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

Speaking of surrogate earths, the science-minded arts group London Fieldworks has a project, from 2004, called Little Earth.
Little Earth was a "four channel synchronised video installation with surround sound," featuring scenes "shot on Haldde Mountain in the Norwegian Arctic, Ben Nevis in Scotland, and on the island of Svalbard, with computer animations of the Earth’s magnetosphere modeled by the Leicester Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group."

[Image: Another glimpse of Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

The Independent refers to these latter projections as being "an animated sequence of the Earth enmeshed within its magnetic field lines, which trail off into the solar system."
Here are some video stills of the project.

[Images: Film stills from Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

Meanwhile, London Fieldworks also produced a short publication about the project; the book includes essays on art, meteorology, and physics.
But I was interested to see that the project is at least partly about Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland. From the project's website:

The Little Earth project identifies two physicists, C.T.R. Wilson and Kristian Birkeland, as significant contributors to 'big science'. Both researchers were stationed at mountaintop observatories studying natural phenomena at the end of the 19th-century. They relied on naked-eye observation and simple instruments in extreme environments and were perhaps the last of the natural philosophers. Associated with the mountaintop experiences of Wilson and Birkeland are two celebrated machines: Wilson’s famous ‘cloud chamber’ and Birkeland’s lesser-known ‘terrella’. The instruments promoted understanding of phenomena at the micro and macro scale – signaling new frontiers for exploration.

Among many other reasons, this caught my eye because Birkeland and his "terrella" – which London Fieldworks describe as an artificial "plasma universe" – were the subject of one of the very first BLDGBLOG posts... a post which, in an almost freakish coincidence, I was re-reading just this morning, several hours before I discovered Little Earth (via we make money not art).
It's an old post, so it's strangely formatted and a little over-casual, but it's also one of my favorites – so check it out if you get the chance.
And if London Fieldworks sounds like an interesting group, you'll be pleased to know that there are several other cool projects described on their website.

(Note: Little Earth spotted over at we make money not art).

Inside these spans are circles

[Image: The construction of the Nicholson Viaduct; spotted a few days ago at Coudal. While you're at it, take a good, long look through Coudal's voluminous architecture archives].

The Oxygen Garden

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The sci-fi film Sunshine – which finally opens in the United States tomorrow – includes a set called the Oxygen Garden.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

As the film's official website explains: "Oxygen production is vital for manned long-term space flight." Accordingly, "a long-term mission should have a natural, unmechanical way of replenishing its oxygen supplies."
Making a few visual references to NASA's early experiments with "space gardens" – and to other artificial landscapes, such as Biosphere 2 – the film's artistic team thus wired together a network of plants, aeration devices, cylindrical grow chambers, and hydroponic vats.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The Garden is "one of the most interesting sets" in the film, the website claims, "as the cold, clean 'spaceshipness' is juxtaposed with the wild, dirty nature – this is the only set where there is anything 'green'. All of the plants you see on the set are real, there's not one plastic fern in there at all. When you walk in you are immediately struck by how the set smells. It smells alive."

[Image: A close-up of the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

I have to admit to a certain fascination with surrogate earths: those portable versions of our planet, and its climate, that pop up everywhere from hydroponic gardens, terrariums, and floating greenhouses to complex plans for manned missions to the moon.
If only for the purpose of growing vegetables, how can we use technology – fertilizers, UV lights – to reproduce terrestrial conditions elsewhere, in miniature?
Under rigorous interpretations of, say, The Bible or The Koran, would this be considered a sin?

[Image: A glimpse inside the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

And, finally, what does it mean that the earth itself can enter into a chain of substitutions – a whole economy of counterfeits and stand-ins, referring, through simulation, to a lost original – only to produce something so unearthly as a result?

Sponsored Living

Last month I received a press release announcing that Park Fifth, a new condo development here in Los Angeles, has started to offer 5-year memberships in the local Museum of Contemporary Art to anyone who buys a home in the high-rise.
These memberships come as part of an elite residential package, complete with "generously sized balconies or terraces," a few "entertaining areas" scattered throughout the building, and even some "rooftop pools" – all in what will soon be "the tallest residential building west of Chicago."
In other words, a little art will come with your luxury.

From the press release:

Much in the same way that MOCA has become a culturally inspiring part of Downtown Los Angeles, Park Fifth intends to weave exquisite taste and a luxurious artistic atmosphere throughout its entire development while giving a spacious, yet Californian feel to it.

The project manager of the building then speculates that "homeowners who are attracted to the bold, modern architecture and design aesthetic of Park Fifth will also appreciate the benefits of MOCA membership.”

[Image: A screen-grab from the Park Fifth website].

The reason I'm posting this, though, is not to make fun of the condo project, but because I love the idea of applying fringe benefits to residential real estate. Anything to make people sign on the dotted line.
Your $800,000 condo comes with... a free subscription to The New Yorker. Or maybe a pre-assembled IKEA bookcase full of Penguin Classics.
You get a luxury condo and cultural literacy. Dating has never been easier.
After all, such benefits wouldn't even cost a developer that much to include. A 5-year Household Membership at MOCA only costs $500 – but folding that into your new $1 million condo purchase has psychological impact: you may have spent that money on something else, for instance, and, this way, you can feel unthreateningly forced into a socially useful lifestyle change.
For instance, you could buy a new home in the suburbs... and get 250 Vintage contemporary fiction paperback books thrown in as a signing bonus. Within two years you'll know everything there is to know about American fiction at the turn of the 21st century. Your house could even come with a Borders Rewards card. Hell, you could get a free two-year membership in the Microbrewed Beer of the Month club.
Or everyone on your street in the desert outside Phoenix gets a free Smart Car. Residential brand synergies go into hyperdrive.
It'd be like those celebrity goodie bags that people like Leonardo DiCaprio and Tyra Banks apparently get on Oscar night – only it'd be for homeowners. In other words, the developers of your building have partnered with the local small business bureau, so that the 2 bed/1 bath home you and your spouse just bought comes complete with 2 free tickets, every week, to the local cinema – as well as 10% off at the nearby Italian restaurant and a free double espresso on your birthday from the Starbucks in the ground floor lobby.
Or season tickets to the Eagles.
It's the couponing of the residential experience. Toll Brothers signs a marketing contract with Playboy (NSFW), and so that new bungalow you just bought in the Chartresian labyrinth of cul-de-sacs outside Tuscaloosa comes complete with every single issue of Playboy magazine.
Houses sell out within days and the neighborhood divorce rate skyrockets.

[Image: Another screen-grab from the Park Fifth website].

Or Richard Branson goes into home development: Virgin Homes. Virgin Condos. Thus, you buy a Virgin Flat and you get two free round-trip tickets, every year for five years, on Virgin Airlines. Anywhere in the world.
It's the future of sponsored living. Corporate residentialism.
Having said all this, I have to admit – or perhaps it's obvious – that I think offering 5-year memberships at MOCA to all future tenants in the Park Fifth is actually a brilliant marketing move. In fact, at the risk of sounding more enthusiastic than I really am about the commercial possibilities inherent in domestic property ownership, I think fringe benefits of this kind are undoubtedly the future of successful real estate marketing – and that more and more corporate partnerships, between property developers, magazines, airlines, hoteliers, restaurants, book publishers (a free copy of the BLDGBLOG Book for every KB Home customer!), film production companies, beauty products firms, grocery supply chains, health clubs, etc., will wildly proliferate over the next decade. Whether you want them to or not.
Buy your house now – and get a complete line of L'Oreal for Men delivered to your door every three months. And a complimentary ticket to Disneyworld.

To delete this building, press 3

A few weeks ago, I posted about the "typical dream" of a New Yorker, in which said New Yorker one night discovers a whole extra room hidden away somewhere in an otherwise cramped Manhattan apartment – opening up a disguised door, in the back of the closet... and finding a fully furnished 20'x20' master suite. With a bearskin rug. Or a new bathroom, with gold-plated taps and a trouser press. Or an entire backyard, full of gas grills, hidden behind the living room wall.
The ecstasy of having more space in Manhattan.
I then suggested that someone should go around New York interviewing people who have had this dream – or asking people who have never had this dream to ad lib, describing what sorts of extra rooms and spaces they would most like to find, tucked away behind the limited square-footage of walls and apartment living.
You'd then edit all the responses up into a radio show – and broadcast it live at rush hour, without explanation.
The city goes wild.
Manhattan is full of extra rooms! people scream. There are secret hallways everywhere! People start knocking on walls and rifling through closets, desperately searching for a place of their own. Maybe an undiscovered planetarium in the basement crawlspace.
In any case: we're now doing it.
We're making the radio show.

We, in this case, is BLDGBLOG and DJ /rupture (who spoke at Postopolis! last month); we'll be putting your extra room fantasies on the air...
Specifically, /rup's got a weekly radio show on WFMU – 91.1 FM in New York City – and, to collect your dreams, we've signed up for a free, joint voicemail account.
It's voicemail as public recording booth.
So what's your extra room fantasy? You don't have to live in New York to answer. If you woke up in the middle of the night and found a door... where would you want it to go?
Call +1 (206) 337-1474 and let us know. If we like your story, we'll put you – anonymous, woven into a background of music, without explanation – live on the air in New York City, then podcasted around the world and available via MP3.

Meanwhile, there are ten thousand other potential uses for a voicemail account and a weekly radio show.
Over the next few weeks and months, then, DJ /rupture and I will be switching things up: asking new questions and looking for new material. For instance, there'll be a field-recordings-by-phone project – where someone standing on the Oregon coast can call +1 (206) 337-1474 and record two minutes' worth of coastal ambiance, which will later be played live on the radio – and a sound-of-your-favorite-bus-stop-as-recorded-by-a-cell-phone project, and a sound-of-your-empty-office-elevator project, and any number of other possibilities.
The sound of migrating geese, recorded by cell phone.
The sounds of 5th Avenue, recorded using every public phone booth on that street – a kind of sonic history of public space.
Maybe even the sounds of famous architectural structures: you're standing inside an empty room in the Empire State Building – so you give us a call: +1 (206) 337-1474. The volumetric reverb of the Taj Mahal. Summer rain pattering against the windows of the Gherkin.
Or you're standing on a terrace outside L.A.'s Griffith Observatory, recording the desert wind on an iPhone.
It's the voicemail account as musical instrument. Field recordings by phone. How to listen to a landscape. Podcasting space. The unexpected future of audio surveillance.

[Image: DJ /rupture, live in France; DJ /rupture – aka Jace Clayton – speaking at Postopolis! (photo by Nicola Twilley)].

So stay tuned to WFMU, 91.1 FM in New York City, on Wednesday nights, to hear the results of the voicemail project – the first voicemail fantasies should appear within two weeks – mixed in with some kickin' rekkids by the one and only DJ /rupture.

(For a little more about the idea behind this project, see The undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan).

Cinematically mobile in the curved underworld of greater London

It's interesting: videos like these – made by Tube drivers in the tunnels under London as they route trains through the stations of the city – became controversial last week... but not for the reason I would have expected.

On Thursday, the BBC reported that "Tube drivers caught video-recording their journey and posting them on the internet could face disciplinary action" – and so my immediate thought was that this was because the videos would compromise Tube security.
In other words, wannabe terrorists would simply study these and other such videos in order to find points of vulnerability in London's infrastructure: soft spots, weaknesses, CCTV-free zones.
But no: apparently the real worry is that the drivers aren't paying attention. As one commuter explained to the BBC: "I'll wait for the next [train] because I feel the driver isn't focused and not doing what he should be doing."
After all, instead of paying attention to sudden and inexplicable deviations in the tracks ahead, the driver's too busy constructing a new subterranean Hollywood-on-Thames, cinematically mobile in the curved underworld of greater London.

(BBC story – and YouTube links – spotted on Metafilter. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: London Topological).

Wirebus

[Image: The Wirebus Concept by Mike Doscher. "What if you had a city... where the most common way to get around were cablecars?" Doscher asks. "Can you make a cablecar look cool?" Spotted at Core77].

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Gondolas of New York).

We'd all be living in dams

[Image: A "contour map" of Hoover Dam; view bigger].

I've found myself in an ongoing thought experiment for the last few months, trying to imagine what it would look like if theoretically non-domestic architectural styles were used to build the houses, or cities, of the future.
There are some obvious examples – designing houses like football stadiums, Gothic cathedrals, military bunkers, or nuclear missile silos – or even like Taco Bells, for that matter, or air traffic control towers – but there are also some less obvious, and far more interesting, possibilities out there.
Dams, for instance.
Why not build your house like a gigantic gravity dam? It wouldn't have to hold back water – so there'd be no flooding to worry about – and you'd have big windows on either side.
You'd span canyons and have an incredible roof deck.
In fact, when I first saw the image, below, posted on The Cool Hunter back in December, I nearly passed out.

[Image: A development in Songjiang, China, via The Cool Hunter].

Alas, it's not a dam at all, but the inner wall of a quarry (I still like it).
In any case, instead of building habitable bridges, like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence –

[Images: The Ponte Vecchio in Florence].

– or the Old London Bridge –

[Images: An image of "new houses" built across the river, followed by a spectacular image, by Peter Jackson, of the Old London Bridge itself].

– with the former example surely having been at least a subtle influence on the design of Constant's New Babylon –

[Images: Constant's New Babylon – not the same as this New Babylon, of course... though that would be interesting].

– you'd build habitable dams.
A whole suburb full of dam-houses, holding back no water. Great arcs of concrete towering over the landscape, full of kitchens. And there's not a river in sight. Or dozens of micro-dams, only three or four stories tall, forming Oscar Niemeyerian monoliths arranged around a cul-de-sac.
Families barbecue dinner in the backyard, shaded from the late summer sun by volumetric geometries of well-rebar'd slabs – great dorsal fins of engineering, sticking up from the landscape on all sides.

[Image: The "mechanisms" of Hoover Dam; view slightly larger. Imagine living inside a valve, or inside a penstock...].

You'd come home to this!

[Image: The Eder Dam on the Edersee, Germany].

Your own little love-nest, nestled between hills – or standing out in the middle of nowhere.
The bachelor pad of the future... is a diversionary dam.
But habitable dams aren't even the main source of structural ideas that, I think, have been sadly neglected when it comes to designing houses; what really gets me going is thinking about how to use elevated highway ramps as a new form of single-family housing.

[Images: A truly awesome image of an elevated highway-house, architect unknown (if you know, please inform!); and some L.A. freeways, photographed by satellite].

But that will have to wait till another post...