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 [Image: "Micro Marsh" by Troy Paiva, from his new book Night Vision. Troy's own beautifully surreal caption for the photo reads: "A marsh grows in the pool outside the gym at the long abandoned Air Force base on the mountain above San Jose, CA. Mysterious animals were splashing and rustling around in the pool."]Over the weekend, Ballardian posted a long interview with photographer Troy Paiva. Troy is the author, most recently, of Night Vision – the black-backgrounded pages of which practically leak color across your desk. In the interview, Troy explains one of many origins for his attraction to desert dereliction and decay: When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic "wild west" ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of "arrested decay" and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the center of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life. Read the rest at Ballardian – and stop by Troy's Flickr sets.  [Image: "Downtown" by Troy Paiva, depicting Darwin, "a (mostly) ghost town west of California's Death Valley."]Briefly, though, this reminds me of a moment in BLDGBLOG's earlier interview with author Patrick McGrath: BLDGBLOG: I'm also curious about weather and climate. For instance, a wet climate – with thunderstorms, humidity, and damp – seems to play a major, arguably indispensable, role in the Gothic imagination. Your own novels illustrate this point quite well: from rain-soaked country homes to the Lambeth marshes, from coastal fishing towns to Central American swamps. But can aridity ever be Gothic? In other words, if the constant presence of moisture contributes to a malarial atmosphere of decay, mold, infestation, and disease, might there be a whole other world of psychological implications in a climate where things don't decay – where there is no mold, where bodies turn to leather and everything can be preserved? Is indefinite preservation perhaps a Gothic horror of its own?
McGrath: Aridity does interest me. It’s an unusual application of the Gothic mood. You usually think of northern European or north American climates and landscapes, but that’s merely because, traditionally, that’s where these sorts of stories have been set. But I can very well imagine aridity being a place, or a site, for such a story.
I think you could safely say that one of the themes of the Gothic is the sins of the father being visited upon the sons – in other words, there is no escaping the past. The past will always haunt the present. And this is certainly true of Gothic stories that are set in crumbling old houses: there's always some piece of evil that has occurred in a previous generation that will work itself out on the current generation. So that continuation – or persistence – of the past is what you’re expressing: it’s the skeleton that can’t be disposed of. What new sorts of cultural hauntings exist, then, in the desert Gothic, where the past never manages to fade and we're left staring at a whole world of things that were supposed to disappear? It's the "sins of the father" in material form: here, in Troy's work, abandoned air warfare ranges, roadside automobile dumps, and entire lost towns lit by nothing but the moon.
For some reason, when our upstairs neighbors came home tonight, their footsteps sounded different – as if someone had come up a staircase I didn't know about, only to begin speaking inside a room I'd never known was there, located somehow behind the kitchen wall – which got me thinking.  [Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].You've been living in an apartment for almost a year, one of three apartments in an otherwise unremarkable building on a street somewhere in the city. You know the building fairly well; you've had brief glimpses inside the other apartments; and, with neighboring buildings directly on either side, there should be no major architectural surprises in store. But one day someone new moves in – and the acoustics of the building begin to change. You're suddenly hearing people walk up and down a staircase whose position in the house should be impossible, and you're picking up conversations that sound as if they're taking place in rooms that simply cannot be there – voices coming through the walls of the closet, or down through the ceiling of a room that's supposed to have no rooms above it. What is going on? Have your neighbors stumbled on some weird system of rooms that no one else ever knew about – and, if so, should they pay more rent? Or perhaps someone has moved into an apartment in the building next door – only it acoustically overlaps with yours in strange and unpredictable ways. It's like something out of Alice In Wonderland, or even Gormenghast. Schrödinger's Cat as retold by Rem Koolhaas: a potentially unreal maze of interconnected architectural spaces enshrouding you on all sides like a halo. Saint Crawlspace.  [Image: Via. As if we could travel infinitely upward through architectural space, mapping a labyrinth of trapdoors].So you begin an investigation. You even record brief snippets of these murmuring conversations to see if the voices match your new neighbors – after all, you've spoken to them in the building's foyer, and you don't remember them sounding anything like this. One night a TV seems to be playing – from behind a wall in your bedroom. It's too much. Except then you notice that many walls in the house, particularly down in the entry hall, are actually sealed-over doorframes – and some of the doors in your apartment had once simply been hammered right through the old walls. The interior of the house has been rearranged several times, you see – but of course: how else convert a single-family house into a three-apartment complex? You even find trace evidence in the back of the kitchen cupboard of a staircase that's no longer there. But you're not hearing ghosts – you don't believe in ghosts. So is some weird new acoustic effect being demonstrated? It is the rainy season, your best friend points out; maybe all that moisture in the air has somehow changed the way sound travels through the building... You should talk to an architect, he says, or just dig up old plans of the house. Phone your landlord.  [Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].Instead, you start knocking on walls, tapping around for hollow spots. You tell yourself after work each day that you'll bob into a hardware store and buy some kind of stud-finder, some technical way to peer through walls, looking for adjacent spaces. But you never do; you're too tired – and a stud-finder sounds expensive. You start daydreaming about radar: you will turn around slowly in the center of your bedroom, holding a machine in both hands, recording the electro-acoustic presence of unknown rooms around you. It'll be like that scene in Aliens, you joke to yourself, except you'll be detecting architectural space. Perhaps you'll even find a room that moves, you think. A distant but invisible space, approaching. Radio astronomy in architectural form.  [Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].But then it stops. The sounds go away. The conversations cease. There is no more radio hum or late-night TV chatter, and when your neighbors come home from work each night it sounds the way it did before. There are no more hidden stairways. No more unexpected rooms. And so you think it's all over – till you're hanging a picture one day. Your hammer goes through the drywall, revealing what looks like a newly furnished room, just hanging out back there in the darkness.
"At a time when the country is demanding political change, a group of architects has set up a contest to redesign one of the most powerful icons of American government: the White House itself." White House Redux on NPR.
I'll be in London next month, hosting an event at the Pop Up Storefront, so I was asked to put together a quick list of architectural events in the city; that list is now up.  [Image: The London Architecture Diary; view larger].It's by no means exhaustive, focusing almost entirely on the London Festival of Architecture which opens there later this month – and it refers only to events in June – but hopefully at least one lecture, place, event or exhibition on the list will be of interest. And I'll have more information about the Pop Up Storefront event within about two weeks...
As Spain heats up – "the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880," the New York Times reports – we are seeing the "Africanization" of its climate. The Sahara, you could say, is spreading north.  [Image: Monica Gumm for The International Herald Tribune].Previously lush hills are now barren of plantlife; soil is turning to dust; streams have dried up and farms are dying. But golf courses and casinos are still being built, and hotels, so far, have kept their pools full. "Grass on golf courses or surrounding villas is sometimes labeled a 'crop,'" we read in the New York Times, "making owners eligible for water that would not be allocated to keep leisure space green. Foreign investors plant a few trees and call their vacation homes 'farms' so they are eligible for irrigation water." It's the hydrology of leisure. "No one knows if it goes to a swimming pool," the head of a local water board says. On a purely bureaucratic level, this is genius: reclassifying your backyard as an agricultural zone so that you can get water rations from the government. But will this really be the last gasp of southern European civilization, as the dunes roll in, leaving unfinished resorts surrounded by dead olive tree orchards, burying half-drunk British tourists alive beneath surprise evening dust storms? Is well-watered leisure really the only option available to us here – or will a new kind of strategic xeriscaping save us from endemic thirst? More practically, all of this brings to mind an ongoing interest of mine in a future landscape design project: mapping zones of desertification in southern Europe. You go around for the summer with a landscape architecture class, a box full of GPS devices, and some graph paper, producing a new cartography of aridity. France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal. Whoever finds the northernmost point of desert – some strange and growing patch of dust outside Berlin – wins something. But the minute any territory anywhere in Europe is officially named part of the Sahara Desert will be a very surreal moment, indeed. After all, the Sahara " was once lush and populated" – and so was Europe, future caravans camped out around drained swimming pools will someday say.
I was recently interviewed by National Public Radio's On The Media for a show that aired this past weekend. We talked about architectural models, Die Hard, special effects and renderings, Saddam Hussein, Albert Speer, and so on. I sound pretty inarticulate, to be frank, but I'm still excited to have been on NPR. You can read a transcript of the show here, or you can download the MP3. The entire program was about urban and architectural space: check out all the segments through On The Media's website.
A "tennis dome/emergency center" outside Kobe, Japan, gets a quick review in the new issue of Architectural Record.  [Image: Shuhei Endo's "tennis dome/emergency center" (left), photographed by Kenichi Amano, next to the New Orleans Superdome, post-Katrina].Designed by Shuhei Endo, the building is both a sports complex and a regional disaster preparedness center – it can become a field hospital, refugee camp, and even perhaps a prison in times of national emergency. In the event of an earthquake or typhoon, supply trucks can drive directly into the 174,000-square-foot building, thanks to movable glass panels at four locations around the perimeter. But on normal days, athletes enter primarily through a domed foyer on the building’s east side. We've already seen the (as it happens, disastrous) transformation of sports infrastructure into emergency housing during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; but will we all find ourselves someday huddling under floodlights on repurposed football fields after the Big One hits? I'm reminded of that famous scene from J.G. Ballard's excellent novel Empire of the Sun, wherein the European prisoners of war are led into Shanghai's former Olympic Stadium: This concrete arena had been built on the orders of Madame Chiang Kaishek, in the hope that China might be host to the 1940 Olympic Games. Captured by the Japanese after their invasion in 1937, the stadium became the military headquarters for the war zone south of Shanghai. The prisoners – former doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and their families – are forced to camp out on the "wet grass" of the overgrown soccer pitch, "waving away the mosquitoes that had followed them into the stadium." The whole structure has been gutted, meanwhile, stuffed full with spoils of war – cars, tables, and Turkish rugs taken from the rich homes of the International District. Bedsteads and wardrobes, refrigerators and air-conditioning units were stacked above one another, rising in a slope toward the sky. The immense presidential box, where Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo might once have saluted the world's athletes, was now crammed with roulette wheels, cocktail bars and a jumble of gilded plaster nymphs holding gaudy lamps above their heads. Are similarly surreal scenes of material juxtaposition lying in wait for structures such as Shuhei Endo's "single, cavernous space that holds nine tennis courts," as earthquake-rattled survivors file in to take up residence amidst the dust and fallen walls of the city? And are sports infrastructure twinned with military-run refugee camps really the end-game of 21st century disaster urbanism?  [Image: Stacked washing machines, from the J.G. Ballard-inspired series Future Ruins by Michelle Lord].Of course, I'm also reminded of a scene toward the end of 28 Weeks Later, when the American military helicopter lands on the grass football pitch of Norman Foster's new Wembley Stadium: the grass, untended now for 28 weeks, is waist-high, like a wild English meadow, the stalks blowing in slow, flattening spirals from the crosswinds of the aircraft's blades. How ironic to think that sports stadiums – justifiably bemoaned by certain urban planners for their financial short-sightedness – might someday prove to be the most valuable buildings in the city.
Is the U.S. "operating ' floating prisons' to house those arrested in its war on terror"? The Guardian reports this morning that "the U.S. may have used as many as 17 ships as 'floating prisons' since 2001." Of course, the "floating prison" in this specific case is simply a warship – but actual, purpose-built floating prisons do exist, for instance, in Amsterdam. There, an illegal-immigrant detention center "sits on two concrete platforms, each in turn moored to large steel pilings," moving up and down with the tides, like a building only temporarily docked on the edge of the city. Bryan Finoki calls this the "ongoing narrative of sea-bound detention," drawing parallels between this and the practice of extraordinary rendition, wherein detainees are shipped through the skies of the world inside unmarked airplanes. So are airborne prisons far off? Clusters of hot air balloons in the mid-Pacific, "moored" to the Trade Winds, in a strange, post-sovereign airspace outside the reach of international law.
 [Image: A Mars polar panorama, taken by the Phoenix lander. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].Two unrelated bits of news this week strangely merged for me, to surreal effect. First, we learned that two monkeys were able to move a robotic arm " merely by thinking." The arm, which included "working shoulder and elbow joints and a clawlike 'hand'," was controllable after "probes the width of a human hair were inserted into the neuronal pathways of the monkeys' motor cortex." This field of research is referred to as "mind-controlled robotic prosthetics" – but the mind in control here is not human. Second, the New York Times reported that "NASA's Phoenix Mars lander has successfully lifted its robotic arm" up there on the surface of another planet. "Testing the arm will take a few days," we read, "and the first scoops of Martian soil are to be dug up next week." And while I know that these stories are not connected, putting them together is like something from a Thomas Pynchon novel: monkeys locked in a room somewhere, controlling the arms of machines on other planets.  [Image: A mountainous horizon; photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].As if we might discover, at the end of the day, that NASA wasn't a human organization at all – it was a bunch of rhesus monkeys locked in a lab somewhere, enthroned amidst wires and brain-caps, like some new sign of the Tarot, lost in private visions of machines on alien worlds. An experiment gone awry. Their "dreams" at night are actually video feeds from probes moving through outer darkness.
"An army of inflatable, spherical robots might one day roll around on the Martian surface," New Scientist reports. These "rolling spherical rovers" could prove key in mapping other planets – and they might even be put to work spelunking deep caves here on earth. Or, say, exploring large architectural structures: unmanned drones bouncing down the steps of Angkor Wat.
In what sounds like a fairy tale written by Freud, a woman in Japan was arrested last week for living inside another man's flat – without his knowledge or consent. The Woman Inside. The man noticed food had gone missing from his refrigerator, and so he set up a home surveillance network... which revealed the woman coming and going from a small "cubby hole" in the floor of his closet. She had apparently been living there for nearly a year. BBC. (Thanks, Alex!)
 [Image: From The Transparent City by Michael Wolf; browse through the project on Wolf's website].I've got some essays coming out this year in books that might be of interest to BLDGBLOG readers; so while the blog has been a little slow over the past few months, I've been working like crazy on other projects. In any case, one of those books has already been published, and the others will be available in the next few months. The already published book is What is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina, edited by Rob Shields and Phil Steinberg.  For that book, published by the University of Georgia Press, my wife and I co-wrote a chapter about New Orleans and urban flood control, citing John McPhee, China Miéville, the floating houses of Dura Vermeer, the "engineered deterrestrialization" of the lower Mississippi through the implantation of genetically modified artificial marshlands, and maybe a hundred other things, including a short history of the Army Corps of Engineers. It was an extremely fun chapter to write, and it appears alongside some great papers; those run the gamut from geography and public policy to community activism and philosophy – and it would look great in your own university library... A book forthcoming this Fall, meanwhile, is Library of Dust by David Maisel.  [Image: From Library of Dust by David Maisel; read about the project on Maisel's website].If you haven't read the long interview I did with David a few years ago for Archinect, then I would urge you to check it out. For that book, published by Chronicle, I used a few scenes from Haruki Murakami's novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to discuss the universal presence of dust and what Walter Benjamin might call the auratic nature of historical artifacts (the essay does not use the word "auratic," you'll be happy to hear). Maisel's book also has essays by Terry Toedtemeier, curator of photography for the Portland Art Museum, and Michael Roth. Maisel's own description of the work is fantastic: Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patient from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. He continues: On my first visit to the hospital, I am escorted to a dusty room in a decaying outbuilding, where simple pine shelves are lined three-deep with thousands of copper canisters. Prisoners from the local penitentiary are brought in to clean the adjacent hallway, crematorium, and autopsy room. A young male prisoner in a blue jumpsuit, with his feet planted firmly outside the doorway, leans his upper body into the room, scans the cremated remains, and whispers in a low tone, "The library of dust." The title of the project results from this encounter. The book should be out in September.  Coming out even sooner is Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration by Troy Paiva; that's also published by Chronicle. For that book I wrote an introduction, citing W.G. Sebald, the Romanticism of desert ruins, and the strange visual appeal of catastrophe. Troy's Flickr page is a must-see as you wait for the book to be delivered; there's even a special set for Night Vision (and many others). Don't miss High Desert Nights. Troy's first book was Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West.   [Images: The Cube and Lenticular by Troy Paiva, from his forthcoming book Night Vision].And, last but not least, there's The Transparent City by Michael Wolf, which also contains an essay by Natasha Egan. Wolf is an amazing photographer; his Architecture of Density series is now legendary, and his many other projects are worth several hours – whole days – of your time. Glimpses of The Transparent City, shot entirely in Chicago, can be found on Wolf's website. My essay in that book draws heavily on J.G. Ballard's novel High-Rise, exploring the psychology of large architectural structures. Harvard's Project on the City also makes a brief appearance. You can read an excerpt from it here.  [Image: The Lake Shore Drive Apartments by Mies van der Rohe, photographed by Michael Wolf, from The Transparent City].So check those books out if you get the chance! Amazon Links: — What is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina edited by Rob Shields and Phil Steinberg — Library of Dust by David Maisel — Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration by Troy Paiva — The Transparent City by Michael Wolf
 The visually underwhelming London Olympics stadium, designed by HOK Sport, might actually be broken down into its constituent parts once the 2012 Summer Games are over and shipped off to Chicago – where it will be partially reassembled. Perhaps this act will open the door to a new choreography of reused, plug-and-play architectural structures, with fragments of existing buildings being FedEx'd around the world to fit one into the other in a delirium of improvised building space. Cathedral pods and office modules meet in a haze of stadium seating and hobby lobbies on the outskirts of San Francisco. New rooms are trucked in from somewhere east of Reno. You buy part of the London stadium for yourself and build a treehouse with it. Of course, does this also imply that there could be architectural stowaways? Crossing borders and exploring the complex fringes of territorial sovereignty by hiding out within pieces of mobile architecture – riding conference halls and classrooms throughout the circuits of global commerce... before stepping out, like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film, onto the tropical streets of Manila. You then jump into a nearby taxi and disappear. The taxi is then shipped to New York. Where surrealism meets the postal service. Or perhaps surrealism is a kind of postal service, with objects popping up where they are not supposed to be.
Every once and a while there's a flash in the sky, lasting roughly twenty seconds, and – provided you look into these things in advance – you can accurately predict when the flash is coming. It's thus possible to be there when it happens.
You can point up at the sky for amazed friends, saying watch this – and a light appears, way up above you, beyond even where airplanes fly.
What's passing overhead in this instance is something called the Iridium constellation, an artificial pattern made of 66 telecom satellites (there were supposed to be 77, which would have corresponded with the number of electrons in an atom of iridium).
The whole thing was sold less than a decade ago for a mere $25 million to private investors – after being launched and constructed, in the 1980s, at a price of nearly $6 billion.
The company that initially sponsored the project went bankrupt in 1999 – raising the prospect, like something from Greek mythology as rewritten by Philip K. Dick, or perhaps something out of Arthur C. Clarke as rewritten by Homer, that our sky will someday be full of artificial constellations, their human creators having long since disappeared. Cold, dead objects, they'll encircle the world in silence.
Along these lines, a new exhibition of photographs by geographer Trevor Paglen opens here in the Bay Area next week, called The Other Night Sky. The Other Night Sky "looks to the night sky as a place of covert activity," we read: [W]orking with data compiled by amateur astronomers and hobbyist “satellite observers,” cross-referenced across many sources of information, [Paglen] tracks and presents what he calls “the other night sky.” Large-scale astro-photographs isolate barely perceptible traces of surveillance vessels amidst familiar star fields, and a digitally animated projection installation covers the globe with 189 currently orbiting satellites. In other words, Paglen has been tracking surveillance satellites – false stars that would otherwise have blended in with astronomy.
It genuinely amazes me to think that, 45,000 years ago, groups of cognitively modern humans were wandering around Australia and the Middle East and Africa and South Asia, and they were looking up at and navigating themselves by recognizable patterns in the sky – but, now, we can just install our own stars there and guide ourselves by them, instead.
 [Image: The International Space Station, from a series of photos by Dirk Ewers].
We are now partially building ourselves a new night sky – yet this surrogate astronomy is being put there simply so we can spy each other and make international phone calls.
In some ways, I'm reminded of a line from Richard Kenney's 1993 book of poetry The Invention of the Zero. At one point, Kenney writes: "Imagine, all new constellations!" as if it is some impossible, heroic act of celestial reinvention yet to occur in human history.
But the weird irony of life is that we've already done that – and we didn't overthrow the astronomers, or plan a coup in the planetarium of human thought, we just launched some telecom satellites and bought a bunch of mobile phones, and now we have it: we have new constellations – what Kenney calls "unfamiliar skies" – flashing through the night at timed intervals.
In any case, I've been tracking these constellations on a little Applet today – but there's a certain sinister side to all of this, too. Space warfare, we read, is the militarization of the earth's high atmosphere, weaponizing low-orbit space. You can thus strike anyplace on the earth within mere minutes of ordering an attack – including the infamous " rods from god," which are non-explosive tungsten rods dropped from extremely high altitude: These rods, which could be dropped on a target with as little as 15 minutes notice, would enter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 36,000 feet per second – about as fast as a meteor. Upon impact, the rod would be capable of producing all the effects of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, without any of the radioactive fallout. This type of weapon relies on kinetic energy, rather than high-explosives, to generate destructive force. All these coordinated astronomical stand-ins – patterned groups of satellites moving around the world – thus might also someday serve as malign horoscopes of impending war. To what zodiac would such military constellations correspond? What defensive measures might a person take when a strange metallic glint appears in the evening sky, a 20-second flash on the horizon?
 [Image: The Perseus Cluster, photographed by Jean-Charles Cuillandre & Giovanni Anselmi].
And what would we do if we found out that Orion, say, or the Southern Cross, was not a natural constellation at all, but something placed there, installed above us, in our imaginations, in our myths?
(Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky, from which this post's title was taken, opens June 1st at the Berkeley Art Museum).
 [Images: An exploding star's "light echo," as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2002. View larger!]."In January 2002," NASA reported half a decade ago, "a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun." This "mysterious star" produced, in the process, a "light echo" that "uncovered remarkable new features" in that star's astral architecture. "These details promise to provide astronomers with a CAT-scan-like probe of the three-dimensional structure of shells of dust surrounding an aging star." In the above sequence of images, then, you are looking at "continuously changing cross-sections of the dust envelope" – a visual effect compared by NASA to "a spelunker taking a flash picture of the walls of an undiscovered cavern," where the "cavern" in question is an exploding sphere of light. A spectacular geology, indeed. Imagine if the most beautiful thing in the universe only exists for a billionth of a second. Imagine if no one sees it.
 [Image: Photo by Dave Bullock for Wired; these images are only visually related to this post].Flipping through back issues of New Scientist, in a late spring cleaning of the BLDGBLOG office, I came across two plans for radio astronomy parks that I thought worth mentioning here. On the one hand, there's the Square Kilometer Array ( SKA). The Array, which will consist of "thousands of antennas with a total collecting area of 1 square kilometre," requires a " radio-quiet reserve." That is, it can only function properly given "little or no interference from radio signals of human origin." There are two sites now in competition to host it: South Africa's northern Karoo region and someplace in the Australian outback. The South African site refers to itself as a Radio Astronomy Reserve; the Reserve, if protected by South Africa's so-called Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act, could include as much as 12 million hectares of landed radio silence (close to 31 million acres).  [Image: Photo by Dave Bullock for Wired].On the other hand, there are plans for a radio astronomy reserve that would not even be with us here on Earth: Paris-based radio astronomer Claudio Maccone "is calling on the United Nations to recognise a 1820-kilometre-diameter zone on the moon's far side as the ' Protected Antipode Circle'. A crater called Daedalus within this area would be suitable for a future radio-astronomy base," Maccone suggests – implying that "the moon's far side will one day be a haven for radio telescopes, free from the electronic chatter of Earth and the many satellites now orbiting it." Briefly, I wonder if this future lunar radio base should be open to an architectural design competition. And what of the site in South Africa – could we invent some sort of new architectural typology here: the radio astronomer's hut, complete with sleeping quarters, skylights, and stacks of back-up harddrives? Both terrestrial and otherwise, these "optimal radio environments," as New Scientist describes them, would exist within interesting overlaps of land use policies, preservation statutes, and massively coordinated techno-financial investment networks – complete with quite sizable maintenance and security bills. How strange it would be, then, to be an armed guard standing there alone at night in the darkness with your back to a machine, its towering dish pointed upward, a mere silhouette in the sky, tracking galaxial magnetism and the slow evolution of stars – till the quiet whir of recalibration tilts that hulking mass a fraction of a degree back down toward the horizon. It's the only sound you hear for the next two hours. The radio astronomy reserve as a new site for experimental forms of human solitude.
 I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night – a film I'll resist reviewing here, despite the temptation – but there is at least one scene that I want to point out. I won't give away any real plot details, but you might not want to read this post if you plan on seeing the movie. So, quite early in the film, Indiana Jones escapes from a U.S. military warehouse at night on a remote base in Nevada, where he's been taken by alien-obsessed Russian captors. After the sun comes up the next morning, he finds himself climbing over a fence into a cul-de-sac of detached houses. It's a suburb in the middle of nowhere, impeccably maintained. He knocks on one of the doors, hears nothing, and so goes inside, calling for help. A TV is blaring in the other room – but when Indiana Jones walks through to the front of the house, he finds that the house is full of mannequins. There are mannequins watching TV – fake, plastic people with their eyes fixed to the screen. So he goes out onto the street – and the street, too, is lined with mannequins, little brown-haired kids on bikes and men outside in driveways as if to wash their family cars. And then a distant, amplified voice booms out over the roar of an air raid siren: the weapons test will begin in ten... nine... eight...Because he's just walked into an atomic bomb testing village – and now he has to find someplace to hide.
 [Image: Illustration by Holl Liou, courtesy of Wired].Wired reports on "a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires" who hope to develop "a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters." They call this practice seasteading. The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform." In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top. The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy. Build enough of these spar platforms and you've got yourself a "deep-water city-state." The group's 300-page book on the managerial practicalities of running "modular seastead groups" references everything from Sealand, the offshore micronation, to the Texas Tower, to houseboats, to the dangers of tropical storms.  [Images: The Maunsell Towers (top), unmentioned by the libertarian seasteaders, and the Texas Tower (bottom)].They touch on the political and economic circumstances involved in steading the high seas, including SOLAS, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, and UNLOS, the United Nations Law of the Sea. They mention the process of buying a Flag of Convenience, in which hopeful microsovereigns can "shop around for a country that has the least objectionable laws and rates, and count on the seller’s apathy to minimize restrictions. A seastead is potentially high-profile, and if it proves a serious embarrassment to a registrar it may lose its flag." The seastead's power storage needs are then discussed in terms of electrochemical batteries, gravity batteries, and supercapacitors, and the production of this power will, the authors presume, come from wind and solar systems, and even one or two fuel-powered generators. Of course, there's also the power of the sea to consider – and the authors' "favorite" method for harvesting "wave power" is something called Isaac's Wave Pump.  [Image: Tapping into oceanic motion with BioPower Systems].In any case, one can fantasize forever about endless small changes in the construction of a functioning seastead. (Note to Chronicle Books: publish an architectural guide to seasteading; it'll be a huge hit on Father's Day).What interests me here, aside from the architectural challenge of erecting a durable, ocean-going metropolis, is the fact that this act of construction – this act of building something – has constitutional implications. That is, architecture here proactively expands the political bounds of recognized sovereignty; architecture becomes declarative. The stakes for design have gone up, in other words. It's not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it's a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain. Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn't just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.
 [Images: Garmin GPS devices]."For their recent trip to Namibia," a short blurb in Wired magazine explains, "Greg and Anja Manuel packed light: PowerBars, clothes, and a Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler's Africa version 8.02, a user-generated map brimming with 50,000 points of interest. That last item meant they didn't have to hire an experienced guide." Fair enough. The map looks beautiful, the idea is cool, and, within two or three trips, the GPS device does indeed save money; however, I can't help but wonder what this might foretell for local economies, all over the world, based on guided tourism. For instance, a small group of American tourists comes through your village, eating PowerBars and looking at handheld GPS devices. They don't go to any restaurants; they don't ask any questions of anyone; perhaps they don't even rent a hotel room. For all economic purposes, it's as if they were never there. They were more like surreal poltergeists wearing Vasque boots, reading Jonathan Safran Foer on a Kindle. What better way to avoid meeting Namibians! Just use their electrical grid to recharge your gadgets, pay no taxes, and leave.  [Images: Three examples of maps displayed on Garmin GPS devices].I'm left imagining the inverse of this situation, of course, in which a small group of Namibians shows up in London. They ask no questions, eat at no restaurants, and avoid all hotels – before going off to wander round the countryside, sleeping in tents. It would all seem rather mysterious. In any case, do handheld technologies mean that we'll soon be digitally replacing the native populations of the Third World, never needing them again for guidance, travel advice, or even insights into medicinal plantlife? You fly down to the Amazon to try ayahuasca, but you don't hire any local shamans or native botanists because you've got everything you need to know already saved on a 300GB iPod – as if that might be the atomized fate of the West in general: desperately seeking visions, alone in the wild, surrounded by portable gadgetry. "Your tradition is right here," the tourist says, holding his Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler's Africa version 8.02 over the heads of impoverished villagers. "I don't need you anymore." Next year, someone gives you a small handheld device with an interestingly honest tagline. Go Everywhere, it says. Meet No One.
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