[Images: Poison ivy, resplendent in high-CO2 environments. Photos by Steve Legato for The New York Times].
One of the oft-repeated myths of the present day is that climate change cannot possibly be bad for the living environment; plants will simply thrive in the increased levels of atmospheric CO2. After all, some people call it pollution while others call it life, right? Well, it turns out that at least one plant unfortunately does like all that carbon dioxide: poison ivy is not only thriving, it is growing more virulent. The New York Times today reports that "Researchers at Duke University who studied the weed between 1999 and 2004 in a controlled forest area near Chapel Hill, N.C., where high levels of CO2 are pumped into test plots, found that poison ivy not only grew more vigorously, but also produced a more toxic form of urushiol, the resin that causes its rash." First, let me briefly say that I've actually been to that forest. I once lived, and went to college, in the area, and I had friends who'd developed fascinating conspiracy theories about all those strange devices pumping something – some kind of invisible gas – into the forest... It was all very X-Files. Second, the article goes on to interview a local horticulturist who now makes a living killing poison ivy. However, he quietly expresses hope that Americans will someday "discover some use for the plant," referring to poison ivy as a kind of overlooked decorative resource. "In China and Japan," he says, "they made lacquer out of their resin plants, so they understand and value it... Whereas we just see it as that darn weed over there." Of course, it's interesting to project a direct relationship here between the amount of lacquered furniture being produced in the United States and the intensity of global climate change – that as the latter goes up, so does the former – but such speculation would miss a more interesting point, which is that climate change will not only alter the atmospheric composition of the planet, it will alter the chemical nature of the life that's able to thrive on it.
In response to the previous post, a reader kindly pointed me to the fascinating town of Baarle-Hertog, Belgium. Baarle-Hertog borders the Netherlands – but, because of its unique history of political division, the town is sort of marbled with competing national loyalties. In other words, pockets of the town are Dutch; most of the town is Belgian. You can thus wander from country to country on an afternoon stroll, as if island-hopping between sovereignties. Check out the town map.
[Image: The strange, island-like spaces of micro-sovereignty within the town of Baarle-Hertog; a few more maps can be seen here, and you can read more in this two-pagearticle].
Being in a bit of a rush at the moment, I'll simply have to quote Wikipedia:
Baarle-Hertog is noted for its complicated borders with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands. In total it consists of 24 separate pieces of land. Apart from the main piece (called Zondereigen) located north of the Belgian town of Merksplas, there are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. Six of them are located in the largest one and a seventh in the second-largest one. An eighth Dutch exclave lies in Zondereigen.
The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.
Sarah Laitner, at the Financial Times, adds that "women are able to choose the nationality of their child depending on the location of the room in which they give birth." Another website, apparently drawing from the Michelin Guide to the Netherlands, explains the origins of Baarle-Hertog's bizarre geography: it can all be traced back to the 12th century, it seems, when the town was first divided. The northern half of the town became part of the Barony of Breda (later home to the Nassau family), and the southern half went to the Duke of Brabant (Hertog means Duke in Dutch). But that same website also mentions this:
The municipality limits are very complicated. Nowadays, each municipality has its city hall, church, police, school and post office. The houses of the two nationalities are totally mixed. They are identified by the shield bearing their number: the national flag is included on it.
I hate to refer to Thomas Pynchon twice, in back-to-back blog posts, but there something's remarkably Pynchon-esque about this final detail. In any case, also check out this site for more historical information. While we're on the subject of micro-sovereignties, though, be sure to check out Neutral Moresnet, a tiny, politically independent non-state formed around a zinc mining operation in eastern Belgium. There's also Cospaia, "a small former republic in Italy" which "unexpectedly gained independence in 1440" after Pope Eugene IV sold the land it stood on. "By error," we read, "a small strip of land went unmentioned in the sale treaty, and its inhabitants promptly declared themselves independent." The Free State Bottleneck, Åland Islands, and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta are all also worth checking out. Finally, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out BLDGBLOG's earlier interview with Simon Sellars, co-author of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations.
In a subscriber-only article published back in 2001 by the London Review of Books, author Neal Ascherson describes "the Akwizgran Discrepancy." There "may or may not have been," he writes, "something called the 'Akwizgran Discrepancy'." It's now just "a forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore."
Before we get there, though – and before I sidetrack myself pointing out that "diplomatic folklore" would be an amazingly interesting literary sub-genre – Ascherson's paper is about the fluid nature of "international space." He focuses particularly on the changing natures of both terrain and sovereignty – and how the definition of one always affects the definition of the other. Ascherson's geography is, for the most part, European; he discusses nation-states from the early 20th century through to the end of the Cold War. During that time, we read, there were a number of "less durable spaces" – for instance, the "parallel but unlicensed institutions" of Solidarity-era Poland. He points out that, "in the early 20th century, there were a number of spaces which were not absolutely unpopulated but whose allocation to empires or nation-states was undecided." From an imperial standpoint, these unofficially recognized lands and institutions – mostly rural and almost always located near borders – represented "a dangerous breach in space." They were "intercellular spaces," we're told, and they functioned more like "gaps, crevices, interstices, [and] oversights" within much larger systems of sovereign power. In fact, these "unlicensed" spaces "appear whenever some new international system attempts to demarcate everything sharply, menacingly and in a hurry." At one point, then, Ascherson refers to the Akwizgran Discrepancy. Quoting at length:
...when the new Kingdom of Belgium emerged in 1831 – much to the annoyance of the Congress Powers who had imposed the Vienna settlement on Europe after 1815 – there had been a demarcation error at the point where the borders of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands met. Somewhere between Aachen and Verviers, there existed a tiny triangular space, big enough to contain a house, a patch of field and a few fruit trees, which belonged to nobody. (...) I have never been able to find the Discrepancy, which probably never existed. But the thought of it is dear to people.
There is something seemingly timeless in such a fantasy. In the face of sovereignty you propose a space of no sovereignty, a PermanentAutonomous Zone which is not in itself a state, it is simply a space unclaimed by other states. In this particular Discrepancy, though, that space is "big enough to contain a house" – a detail which is surely dear to libertarian homesteaders everywhere. How exciting it would be to realize one day that your little house, on its plot of land in Manhattan, is actually outside the control of all existing nation-states. You owe taxes to no one. In fact, they owe back-taxes to you. You live inside a Discrepancy. It's like something out of Thomas Pynchon. Your house is an Embassy for Utopia, so to speak, an anti-state from nowhere under no one's jurisdiction. Your patron saint is Captain Nemo, who is cousins with Homer's Nobody. So is the Akwizgran Discrepancy real – or just something made up in Ascherson's article? (Try Googling it). I suppose I'd say that that's beside the point – that the real point is that the Akwizgran Discrepancy, in many ways, is the only place that is real; it is the exception to sovereignty upon which claims to sovereignty are based. It is the remainder, the outside, the infinitely necessary unclaimed surplus upon which the legitimacy of nation-states has always been premised: discrepancies are the space that is yet to be conquered. Yet to be absorbed. They exemplify the lack of control that governments claim to protect you against, even as they give you a kind of strange attractor for political fantasies: they are an escape-valve to self-rule. Discrepancies are autonomous spaces of liberation to some – mere Lebensraum to others.
John Ng has sent in some photos that he took last week during the event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in London. You can see now that we were all sitting inside a kind of miniature putting green – actually part of an architectural model by the Bjarke Ingels Group – which made me think that perhaps all architectural interviews should take place on miniature putting greens: you rent a miniature golf course for the day and host a second Postopolis! there, open to all.
[Images: Interviewing Smout Allen (top) and Alex Haw (bottom); photos by John Ng].
Thanks again to the speakers, meanwhile, and to John for sending in the photographs. We'll hopefully have all – or at least some – of the recordings online soon, as well. And if you were there and have more photos to share, please feel free to send them in!
A vacuum has been developed that can suck invasive seaweed off of coral reefs. The machine is called the Super Sucker:
To create the Super Sucker, biologists modified a system designed for gold dredging. Seaweed from reefs is sucked up and dumped onto mesh sorting tables on a barge. Native organisms inadvertently vacuumed are removed and returned to the reef and the seaweed is eventually used by farmers as fertiliser.
Now we just need a job board where you can apply for the position of Reef Sucker: you fly around the world vacuuming weeds off reefs. You drink a lot of coffee and get up at 5am, and you dream of moray eels. So will they develop a special, dry land version of this thing for cleaning the ornaments of Gothic cathedrals? A huge vacuum chamber beneath the streets of Rome that you can tap into with hoses in order to suck all the dust from the city. Or perhaps a special type of handheld saw, or modified sander, will be made to go along with the Sucker – the Sander and the Sucker – so you can sculpt coral reefs through precise cuts and abrasions. The Great Barrier Reef becomes rather Bauhaus in appearance. And the reefs of south Florida – well, those now look like something from the Amsterdam School. South Pacific atolls are carved into rings of underwater statuary. So much for the natural. The world is more interesting when it's all been Sucked & Sawed™.
Back in March, Pruned posted a short video of a Japanese earthquake van – a video which I'll embed here for ease of reference:
If you don't know what a 9.0 earthquake really feels like – and, thus, how to stay safe when one hits – then you can just build a mechanical representation of a 9.0 earthquake, a kind of robotic stand-in for the earth's surface – call it RoboHeidegger® – and let the public step in for a ride. You've got yourself an educational experience – and an interesting small business model, at the same time. But maybe you don't need a van like this to simulate earthquakes; maybe there are other ways of experiencing seismicity that geologists have so far overlooked. It occurred to me last week while flying over Canada that turbulence is a kind of unappreciated seismic resource. For instance, our plane hit a strange quilt of winds – an atmospheric event, like an earthquake in the sky – over the Canadian Arctic and so the plane began to lurch, rattle, drop, and slightly tilt, and this went on for several minutes. To quote Wikipedia, we hit "invisible bodies of air which are moving vertically at many different speeds." As far as I can tell, then, those "invisible bodies of air" are a permanent part of the sky geography of the Canadian Arctic; like a mountain range on land, these curling, rising, marbling, and sifting winds move invisibly through Arctic airspace like a permanent feature of aerial terrain, ready to rock passing airplanes.
In any case, it seemed like aerial turbulence might be a very good analogy for the structural motions of earthquakes. In fact, you could install some sort of in-flight dashboard – with a BLDGBLOG Seismology Plug-In™ – that tells you, in real time, as you experience aerial turbulence, how that turbulence would register on the Richter Scale. I think people would be shocked to realize that they have very likely experienced a 6.0 earthquake in the sky – only it was called turbulence and they were sitting inside an airplane. 3.0s and 4.0s would be so common as to be coextensive with air travel. So you take geology students up on an airplane in a thunderstorm – and they'd soon understand what an 8.5 feels like. Or a 7.2, and so on. Of course, a few questions arise – such as how accurate this analogy really is, and whether I have any idea what I'm talking about. But I also wonder, if this does hold, whether airplane design has anything to teach engineers who work in seismic zones. Should the foundation of a Tokyo high-rise, or a single-family home in Los Angeles, be designed more like an airplane fuselage? And could the exact same thing be said for ships at sea – that certain large waves, or certain stretches of choppy water, are like a 6.0 earthquake – and could this also extend, then, to particularly bumpy stretches of road – that, at 35mph this road is a 4.0 earthquake, but at 75mph it's a 9.3 – and could the same even be true for railroad travel and bumpy subways? Could you deliberately build roads – with bumps and holes and bad paving – to simulate certain types of earthquakes? You then drive on these roads at certain, specific speeds, taking notes with Caltech geologists. In which case, perhaps a car chassis would offer an intriguing structural analogue for future home designs in seismic areas...? All these earthquake analogues – experiences awaiting their Richter Scale – constantly surrounding us.
If everyone who used buildings were to form a union, how might they go on strike? They could demand faster escalators, better lobbies, wider halls – and they could boycott the buildings they work in. After all, if everyone got together and declared themselves the Building Users Union – We are the users of buildings, they say, and here is our list of demands – how might the built environment be forced to change? In other words, if architects can unionize – a big if – then why not the people who use their buildings? Can an audience go on strike? The users of buildings march on Washington – on Whitehall, on the UN – demanding action, and the strike goes on for years. People are soon camping in the streets, sleeping in makeshift tent cities, and refusing to enter architecture until their demands are met. The world of interiors is lost to them. Children are born in parks; schools are founded beside undammed rivers; religious services take place in wooded groves. Architects are beside themselves. They live alone inside distant high-rises, opening windows here and there, wondering where everyone has gone.
A few months ago we took a look at plans for a new zoo in Vincennes, France, being developed by landscape architects TN PLUS. I've since been in touch with the firm, who have sent in more images of the proposed landscape. I thought I'd post them here, then, even as I also refer everyone back to the earlier post.
I have to register my fascination again, however, with the idea that zoos actually represent a kind of spatial hieroglyphics through which humans communicate – or, more accurately, miscommunicate – with other species. That is, zoos are decoy environments that refer to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo. One could perhaps even argue here that there is a grammar – even a deepstructure – to the landscape architecture of zoos. Zoos, in this way of thinking, are at least partially subject to a rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are intended to communicate – and how has this meaning been produced? Landscape architecture becomes an act not just of stylized geography, or aesthetically shaped terrain, but of communication across species lines.
Of course, this can also be inverted: are these landscapes really meant to be read, understood, and interpreted by what we broadly refer to as "animals," or are these landscapes simply projections of our own inner fantasies of the wild? Or should I say The Wild? While this latter scenario sounds much more likely to be the case – humans, like a broken cinema, always live inside their own projections – nonetheless, the non-human communicational possibilities of landscape architecture will continue to fascinate me.
1) Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates initiative, in which small homes for animals are constructed to house the native, pre-human population of urban landscapes around the world. Haeg explains that he "creates dwellings for animals," and that these "prototype Animal Estates will be established in a variety of environments. (...) Each will be designed to attract and welcome a particular animal back into an environment that has been dominated by humans. The design for each estate will be developed with a local specialist on that particular animal."
2)Temple Grandin, who could perhaps be described as an autistic animal theorist. Grandin has been campaigning for the re-design of slaughterhouse environments in order that they be less terrifying for animals; but what's particularly interesting about her campaign is that – if I've understood this correctly – she has extrapolated from her own subjective experiences of autism in order to model how animals might experience slaughterhouse architecture. Human autism here becomes strangely elided with animal subjectivity. Grandin has thus developed an entire phenomenological architecture that takes advantage of natural animal behaviors – circling, herding, grouping, and so on – by spatializing these behaviors into the built environment. Animal movements trace out spatial parameters that the architecture itself later takes. The animals are thus doing what they would have been doing "naturally" as they enter the spinning blades...
In any case, I don't at all mean to imply that zoos and slaughterhouses are somehow identical environments; I do mean to imply, however, that each environment, seen as a particular type of landscape, has been spatially organized around animal subjectivity and, more importantly – and, for me, substantially more interesting – around non-verbal communication with other species. To put even more of an academic spin on this, zoos are speech acts.
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 pollutedcityair 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 2050AD – 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.
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.
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.
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 MaryBeard, 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.
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 HowardHughes, 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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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?
[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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
[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!)
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 –
– 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.
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.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
[Images: Poison ivy, resplendent in high-CO2 environments. Photos by Steve Legato for The New York Times].
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