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 [Image: From London After the Rain].onedotzero is hosting a film event this Saturday in London, promising "futuristic visions of London" and "surreal urban worlds." Screenings will include Ben Marzys's short film London After the Rain, produced for Nic Clear's Unit 15 at The Bartlett, previously mentioned here. The event costs £8.60, and things kick off around 8:45pm at Southbank.
In a short post on MadRegale, Wired correspondent Alexis Madrigal suggests that we should open a series of "Chinese air bars" so that people around the world can temporarily experience what it's like to breathe the polluted city air of China.  [Image: The "air" in Beijing on June 20, 2008, with the summer Olympics less than two months away. Photo by James Fallows].China, home to some of the most polluted cities in the world, could thus capitalize on its newest export: vials of urban atmosphere. They'll simply export the sky. They do it already, in any case, with huge oily clouds of industrial particulates blowing halfway around the world to land as dust on the streets of California; this way they'd just make a little money from it. Athletes training for this summer's Olympics could order it by the tankful. It'd be like bottled water – or like Marcel Duchamp's Paris Air, in which a 50cc phial of Paris air was exhibited as a readymade art object. Take something; bottle it; bring it to market. Leading me to wonder: if Marcel Duchamp had lived in a different historical era, would he perhaps have invented bottled water? It'd be interesting, though, to open not only a Chinese air bar, but a Haitian air bar, and a Paris air bar, and an LA air bar – a whole series of air bars – or just one huge air bar in which all of these airs are served. You could have even air flights: with a weird plastic mask attached to your face, staring deeply into the eyes of your date, you'd breathe in a succession of the rarest airs: Guangzhou followed by Cape Town followed by Rome is a particularly strong sequence. It brings out certain scents. You could even wrap these up into complex, synesthetic packages – call it Café Synesthesia, and you'd appear on the evening news. While eating skirt steak you breathe packaged air from Sacramento. When you sip your wine, the air supply switches to a light southern Italian blend. Pasta dishes go well with air from the mountains of Colombia – and, in fifty years' time, you can read Dave Eggers's books while breathing air from San Francisco stored in 2008. It's vintage. Stored under ideal conditions in steel tanks. Or listen to Mozart while inhaling air from the streets of Vienna. It's the rise of the boutique air industry. Cultural air archaeology. Air harvesters – the preferred summer job for backpackers in 2050 AD – are sent out to capture the sky in vast balloons. Air farms. The balloons are then kept in quarantine at international airports where stunned customs workers, earning minimum wage, look up at bulbous forms swaying inside hangars in semi-darkness. The balloons are labeled: Singapore, Marrakech, São Paulo. Next week your friends come round for a fish dinner – but it's not complete till you seal off the room, twist a valve in the corner... and the air of central Tokyo wafts silently around you. You've never eaten anything so good in your life. Air rooms. Café Breathe. Either way, Chinese air bars are just the start.
Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up branch here in London. I first found Shearcroft's work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through a book called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, Shearcroft's image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back – as if grafted there, or perhaps cloned – was a tongue in cheek glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, "the new biology of architecture."  [Image: "Grow Your Own" by Geoff Shearcroft].The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including Monsanto New Garden City, in which it was asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney...? What if they then turned it into an Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)? "Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems," the architects suggest. The economically depressed borough would present "new growing opportunities," thus "liberating the ground's agricultural potential." There's also a project known as Roof Divercity in which all the roofs of Croydon are activated as new social, economic, and agricultural spaces for the borough's residents.     [Images: Roof Divercity by The Agents of Change].Meanwhile, the AOC's recent proposal for the Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a sort of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England. It's geology meets housing, offshore.      [Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change].More germane to this year's London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, a temporary pavilion which they describe as "a new Parliament."  [Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change].In any case, I could go on and on, uploading images of their work all day. Shearcroft will be speaking at the Pop Up Storefront tomorrow at 11:30am – so come by to hear what he has to say.
Another interviewee at tomorrow's event is Simon Bradley, editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and author of St Pancras, one of the titles in Mary Beard's ongoing Wonders of the World series.  [Image: Simon Bradley and St Pancras].The book is fantastically interesting, even for an American reader, like myself, who doesn't have regular contact with the structure; the building, it turns out, is full of built-in eccentricities, and its existence as part of a much larger Victorian rail network is significant of remarkable social – and even dietary – changes elsewhere. The internal spacing of the train shed, for instance, is based around a rather unique structural module: the dimensions of a barrel of Bass Ale. Bradley explains that William Henry Barlow, the 19th-century consulting engineer for Midland Railway, dispensed with the normal mid-Victorian structural system of brick piers and arches in favour of even ranks of some eight hundred uniform cast-iron columns. These supported a grid of two thousand wrought-iron girders, which in turn underlay the iron plates on which the tracks and platforms rested. The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the beer warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow's words, 'the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measure upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based'. This, in turn, has structural implications at other points within St. Pancras, ramifying these Burtonian measurements throughout the station's archways. There are loads of other points to bring up here but I'll have to resist, as 1) I'm working on a larger article about St. Pancras in which these other points will be explored, and 2) I'll be speaking to Bradley tomorrow live at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in South Kensington, in a joint interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series, at 10am.
Tomorrow at 2pm I'll be interviewing novelist Tom McCarthy at the Storefront for Art and Architecture here in London. McCarthy's excellent book Remainder – which just last month won the fourth annual Believer Book Award – is about a man in London who is hit on the head by "something falling from the sky." He thus goes into a coma; he is involved in a lawsuit upon waking; he's awarded £8.5 million in damages. This all takes place in the first few pages.  [Image: Tom McCarthy and Remainder].The rest of the book is about the narrator's attempt to figure out what exactly to do with all that money – as well as how he can recreate, to a hilariously precise extent, a building in which he might (or might not) have once lived. What happens is that he's struck by a moment of déjà vu while in the bathroom at a friend's party, and so he realizes, with a sense of overwhelming purpose bordering on religious epiphany, that he must use his new-found funds to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the moment to which that déjà vu referred. If he can't remember everything about that déjà vu in its entirety, in other words – well, then, he'll just physically recreate it. It's a "forensic procedure." After all, he's got £8.5 million. What else is he going to do? To facilitate this projective act of mnemonic reconstruction, he first gets in touch with real estate agents. In Chapter 5 – a chapter which should be required material in certain architectural design courses – we read: I spoke to three different estate agents. The first two didn't understand what I was saying. They offered to show me flats – really nice flats, ones in converted warehouses beside the Thames, with open plans and mezzanines and spiral staircases and balconies and loading doors and old crane arms and other such unusual features.
"It's not unusual features that I'm after," I tried to explain. "It's particular ones. I want a certain pattern on the staircase – a black pattern on white marble or imitation marble. And I need there to be a courtyard."
"We can certainly try to accommodate these preferences," this one said.
"These are not preferences," I replied. "These are absolute requirements. (...) And it's not one property I'm after," I informed her. "It's the whole lot. There must be certain neighbors, like this old woman who lives below me, and a pianist two floors below her, and..." Getting nowhere with the agents of already-existing London real estate, he turns to the services of a firm called Time Control. Time Control can make things happen – very precise things. He soon meets up with Nazrul Ram Vyas, a representative of the firm. "I have a large project in mind," I said, "and wanted to enlist your help." "Enlist" was good. I felt pleased with myself.
"Okay," said Naz. "What type of project?"
"I want to buy a building, a particular type of building, and decorate and furnish it in a particular way. I have precise requirements, right down to the smallest detail. I want to hire people to live in it, and perform tasks that I will designate. They need to perform these exactly as I say, and when I ask them to. I shall most probably require the building opposite as well, and most probably need it to be modified. Certain actions must take place at that location too, exactly as and when I shall require them to take place. I need the project to be set up, staffed and coordinated, and I'd like to start as soon as possible."
"Excellent," Naz said, straight off. He didn't miss a single beat. I felt a surge inside my chest, a tingling. They later discuss what some of these hired residents will do. "What tasks would you like them to perform?"
"There'll be an old woman downstairs, immediately below me," I said. "Her main duty will be to cook liver. Constantly. Her kitchen must face outwards to the courtyard, the back courtyard onto which my own kitchen and bathroom will face too. The smell of liver must waft upwards. She'll also be required to deposit a bin bag outside her door as I descend the staircase, and to exchange certain words with me which I'll work out and assign to her."
"Understood," said Naz. "Who's next?" In any case, to make a long story short, the narrator goes on to audition actors – or re-enactors – and to become increasingly unhinged. Weird chains of events extending well outside the original architectural structure are acted out – including a robbery – and re-enactors are soon hired to re-enact earlier actions by the first group of re-enactors. The whole thing takes on the feel of a nomadic and vaguely schizophrenic opera troupe on the loose in Greater London, performing scenes from a life that never really happened, under the illusion that they're helping an eccentric millionaire to get his lost memories back. Three quick questions, then: 1) On the most basic level, how different are some of the narrator's requests from the precise, arcane, and well-practiced moves of 19th-century butlers and other house attendants? In other words, what appears to be mania in a person hit on the head by an unidentified piece of technology falling from the sky is seen as tradition, class structure, and ritualistic social role in the lives of others.
2) What on earth would it have been like to work for someone like the legendarily eccentric Howard Hughes, who had not £8.5 million to spend on strange projects but literally billions? Or, more interestingly, from the standpoint of a novelist, what other, far more ambitious demands could Hughes have made of his staff? I'm tempted to pitch a novella in which Howard Hughes has sent a small team of actors deep into the Andes where they are required to build a house just like his own, to change their names to Howard for exactly one year, and to act out forgotten moments from his own past on a precisely worked out schedule. There are bells, alarms, and inspections. Until one of them gets fed up...
3) There was an interesting article in The New Yorker several months ago about the use of immersive, 3D simulations of war scenes from Iraq to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder in returning soldiers. The general idea was that, by confronting, over and over again, the very thing that once traumatized you, you could nullify its long-term psychological effects. But what if these immersive simulations didn't have to take place on computer screens inside military labs? Perhaps a returning soldier – the son of a refrigeration billionaire – will take matters into his own hands on a large estate in South Dakota, building vast stage sets... Remainder 2: Return to Basra. So I'll be speaking with Tom McCarthy tomorrow, July 4th, at 2pm, in South Kensington. Feel free to stop by!
I'm in London – in fact, I'm sitting at a table in the basement of the Building Centre – with some great things lined up for the week. One event, in particular, though, seems worthy of mention here. This Friday, on the 4th of July, I will be moderating an all-day series of live interviews hosted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up London venue in the Exhibition Road, South Kensington, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.  [Image: The Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up space in London].Surrounded by architectural models installed by the Bjarke Ingels Group, I will be in back-to-back conversations with: I'm unbelievably excited about this, in fact, not least because I will finally be meeting in person so many people with whom I've long been in email contact – but also because I can hardly think of a better list of people with whom I'd rather spend the day here in London. The interviews are live, free, and open to the public – but bear in mind that the space is quite small, and BIG's models are, yes, quite big, and so there will be very little room for a comfortable audience. We're thus downplaying the live nature of these discussions, but we are videotaping all of them for later posting on the Storefront's website. I also hope that these will be transcribed for later publication. I really can't wait, actually. So if you are in London, please feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, whether you're a reader of BLDGBLOG or not. You'll be able to ask your own questions of the interviewees – and, who knows, maybe even get them to autograph a book or two. And I hope to be posting at an acceptable pace this week, as well. Finally, here is a map.
 [Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].The soil chemistry on Mars is apparently just right for growing turnips. After digging up soil in a region of the Red Planet nicknamed Wonderland, the Phoenix rover "found trace levels of nutrients like magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride," which is "the same basic chemistry as garden soil." These soil samples are also "fairly alkaline," we read, "with a pH of 8 or 9. This level of alkalinity is common for many Earth soils, and myriad bacteria and plants, including vegetables like asparagus and turnips, can thrive at such a pH." So could we develop Mars gardens in our landscape architecture classes – pre-emptive landscape grafts that we'll export off-world for future planting?
 [Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger].There was an interesting overlap the other week between Time Out London's cover story, "Swim City," about London's "best pools, ponds and lidos," and Polar Inertia's newest issue featuring beautiful photographs of abandoned swimming pools throughout the greater London area.  [Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger]."Great pools?" Time Out asked. "From marble-clad baths dripping in history to modern leisure centres echoing with lifeguards' whistles, London is swimming in them." Except, of course, many of its pools are also drained and forgotten.  [Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger].The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called "Absence of Water." The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali's own website.   [Images: Photos by Gigi Cifali; view larger: top and bottom].I'm reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun: Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water? Why, indeed. (All photos by Gigi Cifali).
 [Image: Diagram of Taipei 101's earthquake ball via the Long Now Foundation].
Earlier this week, the Long Now Foundation looked at earthquake dampers inside skyscrapers, focusing specifically on Taipei 101—a building whose unanticipated seismic side-effects (the building's construction might have reopened an ancient tectonic fault) are quite close to my heart.
As it happens, Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of thick steel cables hung way up toward the top of the building. This secret Piranesian moment of inner geometry effectively acts as a pendulum or counterweight—a damper—for the motions of earthquakes.
 [Image: The 728-ton damper in Taipei 101, photographed by ~Wei~].
As earthquake waves pass up through the structure, the ball remains all but stationary; its inertia helps to counteract the movements of the building around it, thus "dampening" the earthquake.
It is a mobile center, loose amidst the grid that contains it.
 [Image: Animated GIF via Wikipedia].
However, there's something about discovering a gigantic pendulum inside a skyscraper that makes my imagination reel. It's as if the whole structure is a grandfather clock, or some kind of avant-garde metronome for a musical form that hasn't been invented yet. As if, down there in the bedrock, or perhaps a few miles out at sea inside a submarine, every few seconds you hear the tolling of a massive church bell – but it's not a bell, it's the 728-ton spherical damper inside Taipei 101 knocking loose against its structure.
Or it's like an alternate plot for Ghostbusters: instead of finding out that Sigourney Weaver's New York high-rise is literally an antenna for the supernatural, they realize that it's some strange form of architectural clock, with a massive pendulum inside—a great damper—its cables hidden behind closet walls and elevator shafts covered in dust; but, at three minutes to midnight on the final Halloween of the millennium, a deep and terrifying bell inside the building starts to toll.
The city goes dark. The tolling gets louder. In all the region's cemeteries, the soil starts to quake.
(Thanks to Kevin Wade Shaw for the link!)
RoboVault describes itself as a Maximum Security Robotic Storage facility. Hurricane-resistant, fully insured, and protected by biometrics, RoboVault is proposed for "an extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport."  [Image: A glimpse inside RoboVault]."No one enters the storage part of the facility," we read; this has the effect of "minimizing the risk of theft or damage." Indeed, "This revolutionary concept in storage uses robotic parking garage technology, allowing you to operate your rented storage unit automatically, so you can store and retrieve your possessions when you want." Which raises the question: How much longer must we wait before robotic parking garage technology crosses over into other architectural typologies? Single-family homes (you move your bedroom to the ground floor every morning), libraries (where's that book? oh, that's right... whoosh), football stadiums (your seats greet you at the entry gate). In fact, for me, this whole complex sounds more like something out of a design studio at SCI-Arc, combining transport infrastructure, personal consumption, import/export laws, national sovereignty, exurban geography, climate control (the building offers "atmospheric consistency," we're told), new business models, biometrics, and the mechano-Derridean future of the archive – together with the narrative possibilities of architectural representation. "What's your building's story?" the concerned professor asks. You could even invent a new – presumably quite boring – party game. Take a proposed building or business model from anywhere in the world and then work backward: Try to imagine the design studio in which that project would first have been proposed. Try to imagine what they read. Try to imagine the keywords.  [Image: The biometrics of RoboVault].In any case: Here’s how it works: If you rent a RoboVault Space, you simply place your prize possession on the elevator, use the retinal eye scan and keypad security features and your property is safely stored away in a matter of seconds. You use the same process to retrieve your possession. Since there are no floors or entries, you don’t have to worry about theft or vandalism. With RoboVault Spaces, you’re buying peace of mind! It all seems to have been designed solely to be featured in an as-yet-unannounced Jerry Bruckheimer film.  [Image: RoboVault's "extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport"].If you'll excuse the long quotation, this reads like the opening scene of Bad Boys III or Mission Impossible IV – or even Blade: Miami Nights: A vehicle arrives at the overhead door and notifies the office of their impending entry. The overhead door is raised and the vehicle drives into the building after which the overhead door is then closed. The client is the only person/vehicle in this secure area. The client removes the contents to be stored from the vehicle and accesses the interior door by use of a pin code and biometric scan. When this occurs, the office staff is notified and meets the individual to provide access into the safe deposit box room. Once inside the dual locking system can be accessed by the client and RoboVault staff. The client then has the option to enter into one of two small viewing rooms. Exiting of the safe deposit box room will occur much in the same manner. An important feature is that there is one entry and exit out of the safe deposit box room. Each member of RoboVault personnel is bonded and have gone through background checks to ensure complete reliability. Et cetera. I love the idea, though, that certain building types – certain works of architecture – can actually catalyze new business models, complete with ripple effects outward into the worlds of insurance, tax law, and even the private behaviors of everyday citizens.  [Image: RoboVault].And then you'll franchise this building type, and build one in London, and wild new filmic possibilities arise. Bank Job 2. National Treasure 3. Architecture built only for the purpose of inspiring Hollywood sequels. (Thanks to Adam S. for the link!)
 [Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].Last week, Jonathan Shainan of Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper sent in a link to their recent article about a rather interesting mall over in China. That mall, we read, is "not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins." What sets the South China Mall apart from [other dead malls], besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires. Briefly, this description reminds me of some towns along the Hudson: originally built out as if to attract their own Manhattanization – all lights, retail, grand theaters, and futurity – they found that those storied residents of tomorrow never came. Schenectady, Troy, Albany. But one need only look as far as the subprime super-suburbs, on the rims of U.S. cities and elsewhere, to see that speculative developments of this kind are not at all a thing of the past. Like the South China Mall, these are spaces that don't simply go into decline: their expected populations just never show up.  [Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].In any case, the architecture of the South China Mall is itself meant to inspire: The big attraction of the South China Mall was supposed to be its “foreign” design. Learning from Las Vegas, where replicas of European monuments and New York landmarks draw throngs of tourists, the Dongguan mall modeled seven zones after various exotic world locations. Its rooftops reflect at least twenty different influences, from Czech town halls to Turkish mosques. The mall even includes "fake herons in an indoor rain forest," a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe, a "553-meter flying railway known as Kuayue Shi Kong, or 'Moving Through Time and Space'," and, perhaps best of all, an entire wing, modeled after Venice and Amsterdam, whose construction was never completed. The buildings there thus have "ornate, generically European facades, but their insides remain shells filled with puddles, unrailed staircases, and random stacks of tile and concrete. The exotic palm trees lining the sidewalk have been invaded by homegrown south-China weeds."  [Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].The article's author, Michael Donohue, soon finds himself walking past drained indoor water park rides, bored security guards, and "escalators sheathed in dust-covered plastic." "It's not very exciting," a 23 year-old shopper comments to Donohue. She is sitting on the edge of a decorative pond somewhere deep in the emptiness. The rest of the article is worth reading. It explores how leasing difficulties led to this situation in the first place, and how China's burgeoning "mega-middle class" has simply not arrived on time to coincide with the opening of the mall. But what kind of future might such a giant space hold? I'd suggest that it'd make an ideal setting for an architectural studio, if such a thing hadn't been done before. Boing Boing readers suggest turning it into a venue for paint ball, or even a set for future zombie films.  [Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].Less tangentially, Jonathan Shainin also sent me this link to an earlier article in The National about globe-trotting mega-mall designer – turned architect of whole Middle Eastern cities – Eric Kuhne. Kuhne – who is not responsible for the South China Mall, and I don't mean to imply that he is – has become somewhat notorious for his work designing Bluewater, the giant retail "city" outside London in northern Kent. Interestingly, that mall stands in the footprint of an old quarry. My own first sense of the cultural hostility directed at Bluewater came while reading the 2002 novel Flood by Richard Doyle, wherein the whole complex is obliterated by the rising waters of an insurgent Thames. If I remember correctly, one of the characters is trying on clothes in a changing room when water begins to seep upward through the carpeted floor. The National article suggests that, because "Kuhne himself described Bluewater as 'a city rather than a retail destination,' it is safe to assume that his cities may resemble his malls." This possibility excites Kuhne; he has faith in retail. “Retail,” he tells [an] audience in Dubai, “is the only industry that can manage our city centres… We are the only ones who deal with experience. We are the only ones that understand how to customise and modify and release and replan and reorganise and administer a luscious experience for a group.” Kuhne goes on to explain that malls should be "retail destinations," not "soulless concrete boxes," and that, through retail, these malls will "dignify the heroic routine of everyday life." "He views himself," the article suggests, "not as a megamall designer turning cities into supermegamalls, but as a humanistic master planner creating 'mixed use' spaces that help people live and thrive together gracefully." In any case, what imaginative role will the South China Mall, like some massive architectural folly, play in the region? Will it take up a place in urban legends, or in video games, or in films? Or perhaps the South China Mall will be flooded in a new, bestselling novel by a young writer from Shanghai... Perhaps, on the other hand, China's fabled mega-middle class will arrive just in time to make it thrive. This strange ruin will then see its walls replastered and its escalators fixed, and crowds of children will walk through its cavernous toy stores unaware that the space all around them had once been an uninhabited shell. (Thanks to Jonathan Shainin for sending both article links and the photographs by Philip Gostelow!)
 [Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].
Some of the coolest photographs I've seen recently are these long exposure shots of crowds in St. Petersburg, Russia. They were taken by Alexey Titarenko for a project called " City of Shadows."
What I think is so interesting about this is that an otherwise unremarkable technique – the long exposure – has the effect of transforming these assemblies of people into demonic blurs, black masses moving through the city. These look more like scenes from Jacob's Ladder or Silent Hill.
In the photograph below, for instance, the repeating glimpse of a hand pulling itself up the banister seems strangely unnerving –
 [Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].
– and, in the next photo, the crowd takes on the appearance of a machine, hauling itself through human gears up the stairs of old buildings. A mechanism of bones from the afterlife.
 [Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].
But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could see the residue of everyone who's ever passed through – a vast, multi-limbed creature made of tens of thousands of human bodies, winding its way through streets and buildings, looking for some place to go.
See more from this project and others at Alexey Titarenko's website.
(Thanks to Adam Billyeald for the tip!)
 [Image: The world's oldest Christian church? A cave in Jordan, via the BBC].Some archaeology for a Tuesday evening: 1) Is a cave in Jordan the world's oldest Christian church? "The cave is beneath the ancient church of St Georgeous, itself one of the oldest known places of worship in the world," the BBC reports. "According to Dr. Abdul Qader Al-Hassan, the director of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, the cave site shows clear evidence of early Christian rituals that predate the church." This subterranean place of worship has been tentatively dated at 70 A.D.  [Image: The re-discovery of Egypt's missing pyramid, photographed by Amr Dalsh of Reuters and Nasser Nasser of the Associated Press].2) This is the same week, of course, that a "lost" pyramid was re-discovered in Egypt – re-discovered, because it had previously been lost.. and discovered... only to be lost... and re-discovered. According to CNN, "the pyramid, of which only the base remains, is believed to be that of King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years more than 4,000 years ago." It seems to have been first dug up in the 1840s by a German archaeologist – only to disappear again beneath the desert sands.  [Image: Macchu Picchu photographed by Flickr-user Eric in SF].3) Another German archaeologist was recently in the news, however: Augusto R. Berns, who "discovered" Macchu Picchu back in 1867, a good four decades earlier than anyone thought, only to "ransack" the place. From the Telegraph: In a letter [Berns] boasts of finding "significant rustic buildings and underground structures that have been closed with stones," believed to be the first written description of Machu Picchu.
These, he speculates, would "undoubtedly contain objects of great value and prove part of the treasure of the Incas."
In the same document, he claims that he has the backing of the "Supreme government" to access and sell the treasures. So where might all those treasures now be? Sitting in a library somewhere, gathering dust? Or are they set to be rescued in a future film starring Shia LaBeouf? 4) And while this last bit is neither news nor to be believed, I find it interesting nonetheless. Is there a " subterranean city located beneath the former Inca capital of Cuzco"? In 1952, a mixed group of twelve French and American explorers managed to gain access [to this underground city] with enough provisions to last for five days as they embarked upon what they termed “the greatest discovery since Machu Picchu.”
The team ventured into the [tunnels] and nothing further was heard from them until fifteen days later, when French explorer Phillipe Lamontierre emerged from the hole suffering from acute dementia, with visible signs of malnourishment and even the bubonic plague... The broken survivor indicated that his fellow adventurers had died, and some of them had even fallen down unfathomed abysses. Among the objects he brought back was an ear of corn made of solid gold, which was later entrusted to the Cuzco Museum of Archaeology. 5) This doesn't really have anything to do with this, but I'm increasingly curious what the world's reaction would be if we someday discovered that the Andes – in all their continent-spanning, mountainous immensity – were really manmade. You're on a road crew, blasting through the mountains outside Quito, deep in the compression and strain of old bedrock, with incomprehensible stratigraphies arching with strike and dip all around you... when you scrape away some rock and find a serial number. The mountains were manufactured. There's even a number you can call for customer complaints.
 [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.
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