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 Tomorrow I'll be down in San Luis Obispo, helping to judge a competition called Design Village 2008: In the Design Village Competition, teams from across the United States design and build a theme-based structure that meets several additional requirements: the structure's parts must be hand carried down a mile trail into the canyon; the structure must be assembled in 12 hours, without the use of plugged electricity; the team members must live in their structure for the entire weekend. The theme this year is Mission To Mars. Here is a gallery of previous contestants. I think it's open to the public, as well – so, if you're in the central coast region, come by, say hello, check out all the structures, and keep your fingers crossed for good weather.
 [Image: A flying logo, or Flogo].Over on LiveScience we learn that a new company has started using "a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium" to create "floating ads and messages" in the sky. Unfortunately dubbed Flogos, these floating logos can be made – or printed, really – every 15 seconds by "re-purposed snow machines," thus "flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500." I should start blogging with it. The sky texts aren't particularly large, however. They're only "about two feet long and nearly a foot wide" – but they "generally last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere." "They will fly for miles," their inventor adds – because they are "durable," capable of flying as high as 20,000 feet without breaking up. Gaseous typography. It won't just be meteorologists watching the skies, in other words, but graphic designers. Adjusting leading, kerning the clouds, ragging atmospheres. And what about abstract typography – printing random cloud-shapes on a massive scale? Future paranoias appear in the diagnostic handbooks of tomorrow's most expensive psychiatrists. Patients stumble in, demanding to know if those clouds are really signs... And, if so, who put them there, what they say – and what about that one... Flying through these atmospheric print-outs, meanwhile, is "like going through a cloud" – and thus, apparently, safe. Just a minor bit of literary turbulence as you pass through a challenging paragraph. But this ability to print aerial images also hints at what could be called the immersive sky-cinema of tomorrow: you get into the cockpit of a small airplane and you fly through artificial clouds – clouds that have been printed to look like a sequence of animated cells. You proceed to fly through this cloud-by-cloud narrative, perhaps even reading word bubbles and thought balloons – subtitles – or you play a carefully synched soundtrack on your iPod. Soon, you can leave commentary in the air with your own re-purposed snow machine. Metacommentary. Footnotes. Or perhaps music written in the sky + a local radio station playing that song = SkyKaraoke™. In any case, I originally saw this bit of news on MetaFilter – where we also find a link to an article published in the New York Times back in 1892. Here it is as a PDF and as a JPG.  [Image: From an article published in 1892 in the New York Times. Read as PDF or JPG].Apparently documenting the very birth of skywriting – that "interesting experiment" of typesetting the sky – the article relates what it describes as the "curious effect" of seeing letters and signs mid-air. Clouds of steam become a new textual presence in space. In any case, there is an obvious (and, frankly, rather uninteresting) reaction to all this – i.e. please save us from yet another form of corporate advertising, we don't need logos in the sky – but there are also artistic, and even literary, implications here that go beyond mere outrage.  1) If you put this into the context of weather control as an emerging technique for urban design – for instance, what we're seeing in Beijing with the Olympics – then these sorts of cloud-printing techniques open up a whole new front in any serious discussion of public space and the city. The question here might be: what are the political and/or municipal implications of being able to typographically format the skies? I'm reminded of Roberto Bolaño's novel Distant Star, in which a Nazi-sympathizing South American poet turns to skywriting, putting his poems in the clouds after a right-wing coup d'état, scrawling three-dimensional diatribes in the subtropical air. 2) If graphic design suddenly becomes atmospherically relevant, so to speak, will we someday read an issue of PRINT or an essay on Design Observer about well-rounded cloud forms – how, perhaps, the skies above Amsterdam are beautifully sans serif, whilst the skies of Rome are well-paragraphed but poorly spaced...? Then you play an April Fool's joke: you send a design critic to some city where they don't print the clouds at all – but you ask him or her to critique their newest font... Six pages of embarrassing sky criticism ensue. 3) If typography also bears information, of course, then perhaps tomorrow's literature will be skybound, no longer bound in books. Penguin's UK-based We Tell Stories initiative abandons the internet entirely to print stories in the skies above Bloomsbury or Liverpool or even Hay-on-Wye. Much was made years and years ago about William Gibson's self-erasing book Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), but why not repeat that performance with a book printed only once, in the air, off a dock on the east coast of England? It disperses across the Channel in a haze of typography – a particularly robust paragraph or two flying as far as Paris, where still intelligible letters float past the bedroom window of a 13 year-old hopeful game designer... who gets an idea.  4) Perhaps we all really should give up internet-based blogging and switch instead to the sky. I could buy a small shack on a hill somewhere in Los Angeles and grow a beard. Turning my back on representational form, I'll emit abstractions of well-made foam into the sky on windy days. Air sculptures, like something by Marcel Duchamp, floating over parking lots and across the yards of the rich and famous. Harrison Ford is interviewed by Variety: "I saw very strange clouds last night," he says, still visibly stunned, his voice shaken. "They were made of foam – and they... they were really quite beautiful." 5) For the rest of human history, no one trusts the clouds. No one knows for sure if they are natural. Everything appears to be printed. Like those infamous numbers stations – radio broadcasts of uncertain origin which appear to be involved with international espionage – strange cloud forms seen over factories in Berlin are studied for their possible meanings. Cloud cryptography. An aerial Enigma machine. New political departments – combining handwriting analysis, graphic design, linguistics, meteorology, advanced statistics, and spycraft – are formed by governments all over the world. 24-hour surveillance of the skies ensues. (Via MetaFilter).
 [Image: Untitled (2001) by Maurizio Cattelan, courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, via the New Yorker].The New Yorker has a fascinating and somewhat unbelievable article up right now – more like a story by Paul Auster – about a man named Nicholas White who once found himself trapped inside a New York City elevator for 41 hours. That experience apparently so traumatized White that his entire life went into free-fall: He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed. It's a very long article, but it's a fantastic read. Meanwhile, I wonder what sorts of urban myths might exist about lost elevators and the people trapped inside them – perhaps some still moving room deep inside an Upper East Side high-rise where an anonymous woman, long dead, traffics up and down without end, going nowhere. The elevator doors on each floor have been bricked over and the building's residents assume that the noise is really just the ventilation at work, or the plumbing. Till they notice a smell... It's like Edgar Allan Poe meets The Intuitionist meets Dark Water via BLDGBLOG. (Article spotted at MeFi).
There was an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about noise and the city of Cairo.  [Image: Cairo, photographed by Nick Leonard]."We’re not just talking typical city noise," the article says, "but what scientists here say is more like living inside a factory." This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away... That noise, we're told, is symptomatic of the fact that Cairo is "an increasingly unmanageable city, crowded far beyond its original capacity" – and the "main culprit is the two million cars, and drivers who jam the city roads every day." Urban planning and strategic noise control. The article goes on to talk to people who are shouting – without realizing that they're shouting – even while they rail against the all-pervasive noise; with people who are screaming – without realizing that they're screaming – even while denying that the city has become quite loud; and with one man who, oblivious to the cacophonous sounds around him, turns on his radio – and cranks it all the way up in order to hear it. The overall effect, then, is that the city now sounds more like a stationary airplane engine, an endless and deafening roar on the deltaic northern fringe of the Sahara Desert.  [Image: Cairo, as featured on an old postcard, originally uploaded by Flickr user ptrosss].But this also reminds me of two things. Provided I can ever get my act together on this, I've got a long and totally fascinating interview with Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture, coming up here on the blog, in which we discuss the sonic qualities of cities, focusing on New York and arriving there via Marrakech, Barcelona, and even Rennes, France. (Jace, sorry it's taken so long!)Second, I've mentioned this before, but I've got a short article coming up in Dwell about the future sounds of carless eco-cities – how entire urban soundscapes will change once cars go hybrid/electric, and the internal combustion engine slowly disappears. That's in the June issue. I really can't wait to talk more about that, actually – but I'll have to refrain, again, for now. But how much of this urban noise, like that described in Cairo, is purely circumstantial? You go to a bar or a party, for instance, and it's often the case that everyone's speaking loudly because everyone else is speaking loudly – so someone turns the music up to make sure everyone can hear it, which makes everyone speak louder, and the music goes up, and so on. Now distribute and multiply this process across a whole city – and you get a kind of metropolitan echo chamber, its streets amplifiers, its buildings resonating gourds and reverberatories. I'm tempted to organize something called World Noise Day. Make your city as loud as possible. Take advantage of car horns, personal stereos, supermarket broadcast systems, and the local radio. Play Merzbow all day, cruising loops in boom cars. Rebuild Luigi Russolo's intonarumori. Install Japanese war tubas and British sound mirrors throughout the city. Turn on hair dryers. Yodel. Record the sounds of noise in the morning – and play them again that night, much louder. In any case, perhaps everyone in Cairo now has really bad tinnitus – or ringing in the ears – and so masking their own bodies' constant silvery scream with massive amounts of background noise is the only way forward. The over-loud city becomes a kind of acoustic self-remedy: homeopathy through urban noise. (Thanks, Nicky!)
 [Image: Walking an "ancient road" in Vermont; photo by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times].Half-forgotten slashes of land, cutting through, around, and over the hills of Vermont, might actually be "ancient roads," dating back to colonial times – and a 2006 state law has given the residents of nearby towns a strong incentive for uncovering these buried throughways. According to The New York Times, "citizen volunteers are poring over record books with a common, increasingly urgent purpose: finding evidence of every road ever legally created in their towns, including many that are now impassable and all but unobservable." These "elusive roads" – many of them "now all but unrecognizable as byways" – are lost routes, connecting equally erased destinations. In almost all cases, they've barely even left terrestrial traces; in fact, as we'll see, their presence is almost entirely textual. If these roads can be re-discovered, however, then they can be added to official town lands. Accordingly: Some towns, content to abandon the overgrown roads that crisscross their valleys and hills, are forgoing the project. But many more have recruited teams to comb through old documents, make lists of whatever roads they find evidence of, plot them on maps and set out to locate them. And, in what is surely one of the most interesting geographical subplots in recent newspaper publishing, we read: "Even for history buffs, the challenge is steep: evidence of ancient roads may be scattered through antique record books, incomplete or hard to make sense of." Indeed, like something out of the poetry of Paul Metcalf, or even William Carlos Williams, the descriptions found in these old documents are narrative, impressionistic, and vague. They "might be, 'Starting at Abel Turner’s front door and going to so-and-so’s sawmill,' said Aaron Worthley, a member of the ancient roads committee in Huntington, southeast of Burlington. 'But the house might have burned down 100 years ago. And even if not, is the front door still where it was in 1815? These are the kinds of questions we’re dealing with.'"  [Image: A hand-written inventory of Vermont's ancient routes; photo by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times]. While making sense of cryptic references to lost byways is fascinating in and of itself, these acts of perambulatory interpretation are part of a much larger, fairly mundane attempt to end "fights between towns and landowners whose property abuts or even intersects ancient roads." In the most infamous legal battle, the town of Chittenden blocked a couple from adding on to their house, saying the addition would encroach on an ancient road laid out in 1793. Town officials forced a showdown when they arrived on the property with chain saws one day in 2004, intending to cut down trees and bushes on the road until the police intervened. The article refers to one local, a lawyer, who explains that "he loved getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads: parallel stone walls or rows of old-growth trees about 50 feet apart. Old culverts are clues, too, as are cellar holes that suggest people lived there; if so, a road probably passed nearby." Think of it as landscape hermeneutics: hunting down traces of a disappeared landscape. So what would happen, then, if you discovered that an ancient road actually passes through your house – that your living room is a former throughway, and old paths knot and twirl off to every side, one leading right through the guest bedroom? And then another road pops up, and another – and you realize that you live on the intersecting scars of a lost built environment, some old village that disappeared or was destroyed in some H.P. Lovecraft-like enigmatic disaster. I'm also curious, though, to see what might happen if such a law was passed in a city like London. In an old but interesting review of London: City of Disappearances, a book edited by Iain Sinclair, we're told that London "is a city of the forgotten." It is where anyone "can still disappear without trace." Indeed, London is a city "built upon lost things"; it "towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits." More to the point here, entire streets have disappeared: "Catherine Street, Jewin Street, Golden Place are just three of the vanished thoroughfares named in a litany of sorrowful mysteries," our reviewer points out. "Other streets have been curtailed. Swallow Street has been swallowed by burgeoning London. Grub Street has been renamed Milton Street." So what if someone who liked "getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads" were to set about such a task elsewhere? I'm reminded here of China Miéville's short story " Reports of Certain Events in London" – a perennial reference on BLDGBLOG – in which "unstable" streets appear and disappear throughout the city. One night they're there, the next night they're not.  [Image: An old Roman road in Britain; photo via Historic UK].But what to make of entire unstable geographies that flash in and out of county land registers, with distant echoes appearing in the hand-written captions of family albums and in old, yellowing letters between loved ones? Could you re-trace ancient roads based on such sources? What if the county's land archivist was Borges? Perhaps it'd be a bit like reconstructing all of postwar Berlin, or Dresden, or Hiroshima, based only on geographical descriptions found in the journals of former residents. How piece together a whole city from a position of extreme textual remove? I suppose the answer to that question might be found in Vermont over the next few months, with people jogging up and down hillsides, and in and out of archives, tracking down the specters of an older terrain – territorial marks of a vanished world on top of which they've been living all along. (Of interest, earlier on BLDGBLOG: Ancient Lights and Z).
The Guardian reports this morning that Donna Vassar, "part of the Vassar education dynasty, has launched plans to build a $300m (£150m) private getaway for stressed-out presidents and prime ministers who want to 'reconnect with their unique purpose in life'." And it might look like this.  [Image: Design by Chetwoods Architects, via the Architects' Journal].Referred to as the Universitas Leadership Sanctuary – or Destination Universitas – Vassar's desert complex, if built, will be "part monastery and part conference centre," and it will take the shape "of a four-storey globe on the shores of Lake Las Vegas, a privately-owned lake in the south Nevada desert." The site will then be nothing less than the place "where the most powerful men and women on the planet can get away from it all with a combination of reading, contemplation and even a spot of gardening." The main globe building will be on four levels. The ground floor will house a library and the first floor a debating chamber, while on the second floor will be technology to help make the building energy efficient. At the top, under a dome of glass, will be the spiritual heart of the development – the contemplation space where leaders will be encouraged to sit in silence. And sit in silence, I'm sure they will. The design is by Chetwoods Architects – though they are apparently working with artist and architect Doug Patterson, whose earlier House Mustique supplied Vassar with a spot of inspiration. More at the Guardian.
 [Image: The Super-Metropolis of 1975, via Paleo-Future; view larger!].
Yesterday, Paleo-Future pointed out a map from 1961, produced by the Chicago Tribune, in which the future urban landscape of the U.S. has been speculatively mapped – as it was projected to exist in the bright and futuristic year of 1975.
Ahead of its time in predicting the urban condition within which most of us now live, the map and its accompanying short article suggest that the "'regional cities' of tomorrow will be nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops and service places. Some will be strip or rim cities; some will be star-shaped or finger-shaped; others will be in concentric arcs or parallels; still others will be 'satellite towns' around a nucleus core."
Unfortunately, it gets the future of U.S. transportation all wrong: They will be saved from traffic self-suffocation by high-speed transportation – perhaps monorails that provide luxurious nonstop service between the inner centers of the supercities, as well as links between the super-metropolises themselves. Having ridden Amtrak somewhat extensively up and down the east coast, I would respectfully suggest that a different infrastructural future has come to pass.
Meanwhile, if you look at a bigger version of the map, you'll see cities like the Chicago Crescent, the Michigan-Ohio Fingers, and Los Angeles Rim City – but it's the sprawling urban complexes at the core of the country that seem so strangely interesting to me, like the Chattanooga Strip and the Central Missouri Metro, all linked together by arteries of high-speed rail.
What might a futuristic super-city in the hills and valleys of Tennessee really look like? What might a Mississippi mega-city really be?
(Via Paleo-Future, on a tip from James Petty).
Last autumn, an article in New Scientist asked: "What routes did our ancestors take as they moved into lands unknown and traversed uncharted seas? When did they move and spread?" The magazine thus included a two-page map – attempting to answer these larger cultural and evolutionary questions via cartography.  [Image: A map of possible human migration routes out of Africa and the Middle East; via New Scientist]."Until quite recently," the article tells us, " H. sapiens was thought to have evolved just 100,000 years ago. Over the past two decades, however, a consensus has grown that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa at least 160,000, and possibly 200,000, years ago." But how did humans spread? Skeletal remains from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago are the oldest known traces of modern humans outside Africa... However, all evidence of human habitation beyond Africa disappears around 90,000 years ago, only to emerge again much later. What happened later is the subject of the article – which goes on to encompass "signature" mutations, southern routes and northern routes out of Africa, "the gene associated with language," the colonization of Australia, bone-bearing caves on the coast of Sri Lanka, and so on. Little details stand out. For instance: "The earliest evidence of settlement by modern humans in south Asia, comprises stone tools and human remains discovered in the Fa Hien and Batadomba Lena caves in Sri Lanka, dating from up to 35,000 years ago." However – and I find this absolutely fascinating: "Although none of these artefacts is more than 35,000 years old, that may simply reflect the fact that sea levels are about 100 metres higher today than they were 50,000 years ago. Any artefacts or bones left by the first coastal migrants are now buried beneath the sea." (emphasis added)But it's the map, I think, that tells the story so clearly. My only major problem with it is that it shows the world as it looks today, with sea levels where they stand in the present. However, as we only just read, global sea levels were at least 100 meters (or 328 feet) lower back then, because so much water had been frozen into continent-spanning glaciers. Accordingly, the continents would have had very different outlines. Sri Lanka was not an island, for instance, but a peninsula connected to India, and many, many hundreds of smaller islands throughout Indonesia were actually connected into one large landmass.  [Image: A map of southeast Asia during the Ice Age; note how much dry land there could have been. This certainly isn't the greatest map in the world; it's just all I could find – and it comes from a site claiming that this somehow proves Atlantis was real...].Looking at a more accurate Ice Age geography, in other words, would make it substantially easier to comprehend how humans spread, for the most part on foot, to places as far away as central Australia. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest that, until you look at the world as it was back then, with lower sea levels, you will only mis-theorize these migration routes, devising ever more elaborate forms of seafaring and stellar navigation when it might simply have been the case that they walked. In any case, ancient human migrations just blow me away. What was it like, standing there on the sandy coasts of Iran or Saudi Arabia, 55,000 years ago? Walking around in the growing darkness as evening sets in, looking up at the stars, building fires – perhaps even dreaming of future towers on the very site where Dubai now rises. [Note: If anyone knows where to find good maps of Ice Age coastlines, let me know!]
In J.G. Ballard's otherwise unexceptional 1996 novel Cocaine Nights, we read about a Mediterranean resort called the Estella de Mar.  [Image: The Resort from the Ocean by buck82; note, however, that this particular resort is in Cuba].The Estrella de Mar is situated along a moribund stretch of the Gibraltar coast, where "a sluggish sea lapped at the chocolate sand of the deserted beaches." The coastal strip was a nondescript plain of market gardens, tractor depots and villa projects. I passed a half-completed Aquapark, its excavated lakes like lunar craters, and a disused nightclub on an artificial hill, the domed roof resembling a small observatory. A nearby town is described as being "without centre or suburbs." In fact, it "seemed to be little more than a dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools." The few humans who can still be seen in this oddly depopulated environment are out lying across old reclining chairs, barely talking to one another; but this is what happens, Ballard jokes, "when continuous sunlight is shone on the British."  [Image: Photo by David Monniaux, via Wikipedia].Into this world of automated tennis machines and monogrammed hotel ice buckets comes an English travel writer whose brother may or may not have committed a crime a few days earlier. We follow this outsider from the minute he arrives. He drives his rental car past "white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses." He soon parks, gets out, and goes for an afternoon hike, unsure of the culture he's now surveilling: I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds – British, Dutch and German – were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations.  [Image: Architecture in the Costa del Sol as photographed by Q-BEE].Ballard continues: Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools. More to the point, however, and in a quotation which I'm having trouble locating, the novel briefly raises the question of whether it might be more appropriate to send not a travel writer but a psychologist to cover a new resort hotel – perhaps even a neuroscientist. After all, this visitor would ask, taking notes for a kind of psycho-spatial analysis, what motivated the construction of such a place? Why would such a landscape – seemingly devoid of humans, animated only by pre-programmed swimming pool pumps – be constructed at all? This globetrotting neuro-tourist then relays the research to Malcolm Gladwell or Jonah Lehrer, signing a contract for a brand new book. It becomes a bestseller. The Mind on Holiday, it might be called. Landscapes of Pleasurable Forgetting. The neuroscience of built space. But it's a serious question: could we learn more about, say, Dubai or Las Vegas – or Cancun – if we sent psychologists instead of travel writers? Might there not be neurological reasons for the construction of certain buildings, or whole cities? They check into vast air-conditioned lobbies, with no recognizable humans in sight. As dusk settles, they walk alone amidst well-fountained paths, surrounded by ferns, listening to Muzak on hidden speakers – and they produce uncannily accurate diagnoses of the psychological states of the architects and developers behind these non-places. Then they turn their eyes on the other tourists... So is this what travel literature right now is sorely missing: that we should be performing – and publishing – neuro-tourism? (For a different kind of neuro-tourism, see io9).
I've organized an event down in Los Angeles, coming up on Tuesday, April 15, for Dwell magazine. This is not a BLDGBLOG event, in other words, and I will only be moderating – but I would strongly encourage anyone in the L.A. area to come out. It should be a fantastic evening, and I'm extremely proud of the line-up.  We've got Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Frances Anderton, host of KCRW's Design and Architecture radio show ( DnA) and Los Angeles Editor of Dwell; and Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and easily one of the most interesting critics working in the field today. The theme of the evening is "architecture and the media." How, for instance, does one discuss architecture over the radio – or in the newspaper, or in a gallery space? How are architectural ideas communicating through these various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms? For instance, as the New York Times reported last year, Govan hopes to engage on a curatorial project "to collect houses": His idea – one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum – is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators. Govan himself explains: "It started with an effort to rethink the museum, looking at the resources that are both locally powerful and internationally relevant," he said. "It's clear that the most important architecture in Los Angeles is largely its domestic architecture. I've talked certainly to a number of people who have interesting architecture, and I’m beginning to talk to other people about raising funds to preserve these works." This would have the interesting effect of distributing the museum, so to speak, throughout the city; it would also be architectural history exhibiting itself in itself, collapsing the distinction between the exhibition space and what that space displays. Now put this into the context of architecture as a radio conversation and architecture as a subject for newspaper editorials, and you've got three very different approaches to how the public can engage with or come to understand the built environment. The event will be in my former hometown of Culver City, at the Museum of Design Art and Architecture – which is located here. Doors open at 7:30pm, and the event itself begins at 8, lasting roughly one hour – followed by drinks and mingling. Check out this website for more information about tickets and so on.  Also, this will only be the first of many such events: Dwell Conversations should be a really fun new series of talks, taking place in three cities over the next several months.
 [Image: The self-weaving complexity of I-95 and I-695, north of Baltimore].For a variety of reasons, it seems worthwhile to do a kind of combined recap of my recent talks for the AIA in Baltimore and at the University of Pennsylvania. If you were present at either one of those events, then this should hopefully serve as a nice trip down memory lane; if you weren't there, this should give at least some idea of the topics covered, themes discussed, images seen, and so on. Of course, if this sounds even remotely interesting, I'd be more than happy to give a similar talk at a venue near you... I've been having a blast doing these things. In any case, I was in Baltimore two weeks ago on a joint invitation from the AIA and Preservation Maryland, to discuss architectural preservation, broadly conceived, with at least some relation to Baltimore proper. So I began my lecture with a story from the science journals back in fall 2005. It turns out, we learned, that a specific highway junction north of Baltimore – where I-95 and I-695 meet – is topologically unique, exhibiting something called " non-trivial braiding." However, because of that structure's inefficiency as a traffic conveyor, the merging on- and off-ramps were going to be rebuilt, reconnected, and otherwise altered beyond mathematical recognition. Its topology, in other words, would be ruined.  [Image: A diagram of the "non-trivial braiding" that awaits you on the eastern seaboard; via New Scientist].A little bit of roadwork, and that mathematical object would be gone. "I don't want to encourage more cars onto the roads," New Scientist wrote, "but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late." So the question becomes: at what point do we preserve something not for its historical value but for its topological interest? If a bridge, or a highway overpass, becomes functionally obsolete, is it still subject to the rules of architectural preservation – whether or not it's mathematically unique or culturally intriguing? Surely infrastructure is just infrastructure – i.e. when it breaks you replace it? You don't preserve infrastructure. Or do you?  [Images: Google Maps of the famed intersection].Meanwhile, at what point does the exchange value of culture and history trump the use value of function and design? And should mathematicians have any say?  [Image: Knot diagrams by Robert Scharein. Could we treat these as infrastructural blueprints and redesign the U.S. highway system to form a catalog of complex knots? You could then study experiential mathematics from behind the wheel of your car...].Perhaps there's a middle ground here. Perhaps we can, in fact, preserve something like a highway traffic exchange without forcing people to use its outdated twists and turns. This brings us to the idea of the stabilized ruin. If we could remove the intersection, for instance, from everyday use and simply build around it, we could then stabilize it as a ruin – turning it into a kind of abstract sculptural form, like something by Barbara Hepworth – and, at the very least, create an interesting site for mathematically inclined tourists.  [Images: Three sculptures by Barbara Hepworth – build these big enough and they'd be pieces of urban infrastructure].For visual reference here I mentioned architect Alberto Campo Baeza's 2002 proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum. Might Campo Baeza's structure be a model for what the I-95/695 intersection would look like if it was detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways? It'd be a kind of modern-day Stonehenge, made from on-ramps, surrounded by wildflowers, with well-designed signs to explain its fine geometry. Loops of concrete in space.  [Images: Proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum by Alberto Campo Baeza].Of course, there are other stabilized ruins – and here, trying to keep things regional, I pointed out Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, highlighting photographs taken there by Shaun O'Boyle. We see some examples of O'Boyle's work here in this post – and O'Boyle, of course, was featured in BLDGBLOG's earlier look at Bannerman's Island. "After 142 years of consecutive use," the penitentiary's website explains, "Eastern State Penitentiary was completely abandoned in 1971, and now stands, a lost world of crumbling cell blocks and empty guard towers." It was one of the only two U.S. sites that Charles Dickens went out of his way to visit, on a trip in 1842; the other was Niagara Falls.   [Images: Four photos of Eastern State Penitentiary, taken by Shaun O'Boyle].So if stabilization is a viable preservation strategy, then what are its limits? What is too small to worry about – and what is too large even to consider? Back in the late 1990s, photographer and urban sociologist Camilo José Vergara controversially proposed that a "skyscraper ruins park" be built in downtown Detroit. In his book American Ruins, Vergara suggested that, "as a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis." Continuing this line of thought in a later article for Metropolis, Vergara wrote: We could transform the nearly 100 troubled building into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley... Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals – squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects – would live in the empty behemoths, adding their call, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings. Of course, fantasies of ruined cities are alive and well, so to speak. One need only look as far as the disastrous film I Am Legend, or turn to Alan Wiseman's recent bestseller The World Without Us to see that the appeal of dead cities never quite fades.  [Image: A poster for I Am Legend].Indeed, I'm tempted here to pitch a new breed of entertainment complex to some oil-rich emir or investment group: the idea is that you would build a ruined city on the shores of an artificial island somewhere south of all the luxury developments in Dubai, and you'd invite tourists to explore those haunted canyons of steel and broken glass. For the low-low price of only $75,000 a day, you can rent the entire park for yourself – and thus be Will Smith for a day, wandering through ruined department stores and sunbathing in weed-filled plazas. At the very least, imagine the political implications of such a park: touring the ruins of the west by visiting Dubai – where the shattered remnants of Euro-America are nothing but a theme park for global tourists. With recognizable buildings from London, New York, Chicago, Paris, Rome, and so on, I suppose it'd be a little like the film Resident Evil: Extinction, where we see the lost lights of Las Vegas buried in desert sand. Only here it's a simulacrum of the entire western world, and it's laid out as waste at the feet of Dubai's glass towers and air-conditioned boulevards.  [Image: A poster for Resident Evil: Extinction].In any case, with accidentally good timing, we moved on from there into a discussion of architect Albert Speer's notorious plans for the Nazi super-city of Germania: a vision of what Berlin would become, given the presumed global triumph of Hitler and his skeletal empire. Of course, Speer's by now well-known architectural theory was that all buildings should be designed so that they will look good in the future as ruins. He called this ruin value. I say "good timing" here, because Germania is actually the focus of a well-publicized exhibition in Berlin, going on right now, called Myth Germania. It comes complete with a detailed model of Speer's urban vision – bits of which can be seen here in old photographs.  [Images: Albert Speer's Germania].Although ruined cities appear again and again here on BLDGBLOG – and will continue to do so – there is a stage beyond ruin, something that comes after dereliction and abandonment. As long as we are willing to think along geological timescales, in other words, then we can talk about what I've called urban fossil value. What will our cities look like when they have fossilized? Who else but New Scientist approached this very topic nearly a decade ago, explaining that, hundreds of millions of years from now, many of our cities will indeed become fossils. These fossil cities will be "a lot more robust than [fossils] of the dinosaurs," geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Kim Freedman wrote, and those fossils will consist of “the abandoned foundations, subways, roads, and pipelines of our ever more extensive urban stratum” – becoming “future trace fossils” of a lost form of life. The already subterranean undersides of our modern cities, from Tube tunnels to secret government bunkers, “will be hard to obliterate. They will be altered, to be sure, and it is fascinating to speculate about what will happen to our very own addition to nature’s store of rocks and minerals, given a hundred million years, a little heat, some pressure (the weight of a kilometer or two of overlying sediment) and the catalytic, corrosive effect of the underground fluids in which all of these structures will be bathed." Plastics, for instance, “might behave like some of the long-chain organic molecules in fossil plant twigs and branches, or the collagen in the fossilized skeletons of some marine invertebrates.” A hundred thousand Evian bottles, then, might someday be transformed by compression into a new quartz: vast and subterranean veins of mineralized plastic. Of course, all of this depends on the future tectonic fates of certain regions. Los Angeles, for instance, “is on an upward trajectory,” the geologists explain, “pushed by pressure from the adjacent San Andreas Fault system," and so it is "doomed to be eroded away entirely.” But if a city is flooded, buried in sand, or otherwise absorbed downward, then “the stage is set to produce ideal pickling jars for cities. The urban strata of Amsterdam, New Orleans, Cairo and Venice could be buried wholesale – providing, that is, they can get over one more hurdle: the destructive power of the sea.”  [Images: Fossils, via the Fossil Museum].Rather than talk about ruin value, then, which is so Romantically 18th century, why not strive for fossil value instead? Tens of millions of years in the future, when all of this urban infrastructure has turned to sludge, and radiative terrestrial heat has cooked old bricks into something resembling trace fossils, our cities could still be beautiful. Can we design for this fate? Can we plan urban fossils ahead of time? Can we give our constructions urban fossil value?
 [Image: Antarctica by Christopher Michel].I've written about the sounds of Antarctica before, but, as it happens, we can now listen directly to " an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape." This "live stream" is recorded via hydrophones attached to "an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf." The observatory is called PALAOA – the PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean – and its purpose is "to record the underwater soundscape in the vicinity of the shelf ice edge over the duration of several years." Bizarrely, the Institute reminds us that "this transmission is not meant for entertainment" – it is meant "for scientific research." Twenty-five people sitting around in a Manhattan apartment, popping open some more wine at 2am, listening to the sounds of Antarctica. Or next year's Super Bowl half-time show: an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape. Adrenalin goes through the roof. (Via del.icio.us/kio).
 [Image: Istanbul Birds in Flight by Tim O'Brien].City birds have begun to sing new songs. "Gone is the familiar dawn chorus, with its rich mix of enchanting melodies and calls," New Scientist writes. "In its place is a strangely depleted music – abrupt, high-pitched and sometimes ear-piercing." It seems that constant background sound in cities is having an alarming effect on bird species. Some species simply are not able to make themselves heard above the ever-growing racket and are finding themselves squeezed out of the city. Others are beginning to change the way they communicate. In the long term, new species may evolve. If noise levels continue to rise, it seems inevitable that urban bird life will change dramatically. Birds such as house finches, blackbirds, and – yes – great tits are learning how to adapt. Researchers found that great tits in the city, for instance, will actually sing "higher-pitched tunes than their forest-dwelling counterpart" – indeed, that city tits even tune in to different noises now because they're drowned out at other frequencies.  [Image: Bird subcommittee on traffic by Rosanne Haaland].This, too, could have huge implications. If singing and hearing diverge enough, urban birds may be less likely to find the vocals of rural birds attractive, or even to recognise them as members of the same species. These changes could serve to eventually split populations into genetically distinct urban and rural species. Alternatively, different populations of the same species might adopt differing strategies to cope with urban noise, leading eventually to a species split occurring in birds living in the same neighbourhood. Roads and other forms of transport infrastructure – such as airports – are a major part of the problem. In Holland, we read, "the construction of a road near a particular [warbler nest] reduced the number of warbler breeding pairs from around 10 to just two. When the road was closed for repairs for two years, five more pairs moved into the area, although the subsequent return of traffic drove them away again." Everyone, and everything, is just looking for some peace and quiet. I'm reminded of something I've written for a future issue of Dwell about the role of urban sound control in massive eco-design schemes – but I'll leave that unexplored till the (albeit very brief) article comes out.
 [Image: A spread from Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects].Earlier this month, Pentagram released a pamphlet called Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects. In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work. The work thus presented is based on research performed by Myra Warhaftig, and it is available both online and in a small, beautifully designed booklet. Four of the images you see here are spreads from that publication, courtesy of Pentagram.   [Image: Spreads from Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects].As Warhaftig wrote in an introduction to the project: On 1 November 1933, a few months after the German National Socialist Government came to power, a decree was issued banning Jewish architects from the Reichskulturkammer für bildende Künste, the state-governed association of fine art to which membership was required to practice architecture. Their academic titles were revoked and they were denied the use of the professional title "architect." Just short of two years later, on 15 September 1935, another law was adopted, further excluding from the association all so-called Half-Jews and those who were married to Jews. In total, nearly 500 architects were affected by the ban and forced to leave Germany. Those who stayed had to go into hiding or were deported to ghettos or concentration camps.  [Image: A spread from Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects].She continues: After long and circuitous routes, I have succeeded in locating relatives of the deceased architects. Scattered across all continents, they were able to offer additional authentic material. These historical documents and biographies, as well as photographs of the architects' buildings, are published for the first time in my book German Jewish Architects Before and After 1933: The Lexicon. Many of the buildings these architects produced were absolutely extraordinary – and, frankly, it seems impossible not to look at these images and judge 20th century Germany in light of the catastrophic stupidities that led to its murderous exile of the creative classes, whether those were physicists, novelists, abstract expressionists, or even architect members of the Bauhaus. Indeed, it's impossible to look at today's European landscape in general and not spot absences, or losses, voids here and there punctuating the 21st century town and city.  [Image: Tietz Department Store in Solingen (1930?), designed by Georg Falck; photo via Archive Dr. Hagspiegel].The images here show some of the buildings that Myra Warhaftig's research, performed up until her death only three weeks ago, uncovered. Many more shots are available on Pentagram's project website.       [Images: Showcase House, Werkbundsiedlung Breslow, by Moritz Hadda (1929); Terraced Houses, Berlin, by Alfons Anker (1929-30); Arnold Zweig Residence (1929-30), Eisner Residence (1927), and Schulze Residence (1928-29), all in Berlin and all magnificent designs by architect Harry Rosenthal; and a police station in Berlin by Richard Scheibner (1930-31)].Referring to the architects whose work is featured in the above seven photographs: In 1933, Georg Falck fled with his family to the Netherlands: "In Amsterdam they survived in hiding until the end of the war. Falck died in a New York Hospital in May 1947, just six weeks after he and his family had emigrated to the USA." Alfons Anker's business partners joined the Nazi party in 1933; six years later, he "managed to flee to Sweden, but never succeeded in re-establishing his career as an architect. Anker died in Stockholm in 1958." Harry Rosenthal, architect of three houses featured above, "was born in Posen (today Poznan, Poland) in 1892. He lived and worked in Berlin where he ran a successful architectural practice. In 1933 he managed to flee to Palestine, but suffered from the subtropical climate. In 1938 he emigrated to England, where despite numerous attempts, he did not manage to re-establish his architectural career. He died in London in 1966." In 1941, Moritz Hadda "was deported to an unknown location." Richard Scheibner's "fate is unknown." (Thanks to Michael Bierut and Kurt Koepfle at Pentagram for sending the booklet and spreads).
I've been looking at Ron Blakey's maps of the tectonic evolution of the earth's surface again, and I just absolutely love these things.  [Image: The earth 600 million years ago, in the late Precambrian Era; mapped by Ron Blakey].In fact, I think Blakey should be given some sort of science prize for putting these together; these help to visualize broad historical processes in a way that is visually clear, conceptually unforgettable, and imaginatively provocative, to say the least. And these images, posted here, are only one series among many that Blakey's assembled – and these aren't even all the images in that series. For that, you'll have to visit Blakey's site. So what you're looking at here is continental drift over a period of 600 million years, beginning with the Late Precambrian Era, above, through to the present day, in the penultimate image, below.     [Images: The tectonic paleo-history of the earth; mapped by Ron Blakey].That sequence of four images, above, gives us the earth as a kind of northward spray of island arcs and micro-continents, small landmasses moving toward evolutionary isolation. What must it have been like, I wonder, if we could somehow have taken a sailboat in and around those tropical seas, weaving through vast semicircular island chains, finding reefs and bays, lagoons and inlets, anchoring offshore and camping on the beaches of an absolutely dark earth, electricity-less and lit from above by stars – with all the constellations different back then, as even the galaxy itself is still unfolding, full of alien patterns in the sky.    [Images: The tectonic paleo-history of the earth; in the last two images, you can see recognizable landmasses just beginning to form. Maps by Ron Blakey].Something else that fascinates me – and you can see this in the next three images – is the fact that, until relatively recently, Europe was actually an Indonesia-like archipelago, distributed throughout warm northern latitude waters. One of the residues of this geography is a massive fossilized reef that I wrote about here on BLDGBLOG almost exactly two years ago. Referring to that reef in an article from 1991, New Scientist wrote that, "if we could travel 160 million years back in time," we would find a reef "that occupied most of what is now Europe." At first sight this reef and its communities have striking similarities to the Great Barrier Reef. But this ancient reef structure is unique; its main architects were not corals, but multicellular marine sponges, many of which have no match today. And this reef was even bigger than the Great Barrier Reef. Its fossil remains stretch about 2900 kilometeres from southern Spain to eastern Romania, making it one of the largest living structures ever to have existed on Earth. If you look at the following three images, then, you'll see how and where "one of the largest living structures ever to have existed on Earth" was able to form.    [Images: The earth from roughly 150 million years ago to 50 million years ago; mapped by Ron Blakey].Then, of course, we hit the present day – pictured below. Suddenly this arrangement looks rather impermanent.  [Image: The earth in its present continental configuration; mapped by Ron Blakey]. It's extraordinary to realize, then, that this sequence of images represents only 600 million years of geological time – because the earth has something like seven and a half billion years to go before solar extinction. And though plate tectonics may actually cease someday, let's say that a healthy billion and a half more years of continental rearrangement are still in store for this world; what fantastic inland seas and archipelagos might yet be waiting to form? Extrapolating from these very images into the future, as our planet continues to delink and spread, maneuvering its surfaces around in endless reconfigurations, is a time-consuming but worthwhile thought experiment; if we could get Blakey to speculate upon the tectonic future of the earth, for instance, that would indeed be something to see. Of course, this is something that New Scientist actually wrote about this past winter, suggesting three possible evolutionary scenarios for where these nomadic fragments of our planet's surface might end up: Geologists now suspect that the movements of the Earth's continents are cyclical, and that every 500 to 700 million years they clump together. Unfolding over a period three times as long as it takes our solar system to orbit the centre of the galaxy, this is one of nature's grandest patterns. So what drives this cycle, and what will life be like next time the continents meet? The article then gives us the hypothetical outlines of three possible supercontinents.  [Image: Three possible supercontinents, as mapped by New Scientist: Novopangaea, Amasia, and Pangaea Proxima; view larger].As if these things are a matter of preference, let me absurdly point out that I am actually not a big fan of supercontinents; I think they're boring. Luckily, they seem to crack apart based upon their own weight and bulk; in other words, like many Americans, supercontinents are too heavy for their own good. Personally, I like archipelagos and island arcs. In fact, might there be some way to hack the earth's surface and ensure a supercontinent-free planet to come? We could somehow help certain portions of the earth's surface to unzip, forming new island chains, and we could perforate continental shields the world over to assist with their future fragmentation... In any case, what's also interesting about these maps is that, taken as a whole, the last 600 million years appear really to have been a kind of mass northward migration of landmasses, as if the continents were pulled from one pole to the other by temporary, if monumental, spreading and subduction zones. Again, though, these are not all the images in the series; for that, you'll have to check out Ron Blakey's website. And, seriously, someone needs to give this guy a fellowship or an award or something – these maps are just fantastic. [Image: These images are also available in a small Flickr set].
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