[Image: An inflatable church on the beaches of Sardinia; via the BBC].
Inflatable infrastructure for churchgoers has arrived on the sandy beaches of Sardinia, as a bouncy chapel has been installed for Christians on holiday. "Using compressed air it takes only five minutes to inflate," the Times reports, and it "comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional." Inflatable mosques and temples will be next. An inflatable sacred grove for druids.
The size of your church is directly affected by how much money you can raise – because the only pumps strong enough to inflate the whole structure cost $50,000 or more. Once you get that far, though, you realize there are still more rooms and radiating chapels to inflate... but it takes an even larger – and far more expensive – air pump. Yet, even then, you find more – nearly impossible to inflate – rooms hidden away inside the structure.
"Who made this thing?" you ask one day, quietly, not wanting to draw attention to yourself; and you learn that there is a Holy Lab of Consecrated Inflatables housed in an unmarked room in the Vatican attics – attics the size of basketball courts – where priests trained in the art of shaping warm air read apocryphal texts on the breath of God, stitching vast sheets of polyethylene together to form Gothic geometries. It's rumored that the largest inflatable ever created is being designed by the monks of Mount Athos; it will require a small nuclear power plant to fill properly. Bombproof churches will be erected throughout Syria in what becomes known as the Inflatable Crusade. In particularly expensive models, assembled by private firms in the Netherlands, inflatable priests will pop out of hidden compartments in the floor when you twist small valves, triggering a recording of Agnus Dei. Children clap, endless cupolas unfold into the sky, and the real services of the evening begin.
Last week, The New York Times took readers to an isolated house called Clingstone, built by a Philadelphian named J.S. Lovering Wharton on a rock in the waters of Rhode Island.
Working with an artist, William Trost Richards, Mr. Wharton designed a shingle-style house of picture windows, with 23 rooms on three stories radiating off a vast central hall; its plan is less a blueprint than a diagram of arrows indicating sightlines.
He built it like a mill, Mr. Wood said, with wide planking, sturdy oak beams, diagonal sheathing and an odd flourish: an interior cladding of shingles...
The process of renovating the house, abandoned since the 1940s, was formidable, and the weather can be rough; we read, for instance, that "untethered doors at Clingstone are quickly smashed by the wind."
"This house is always going to have rough edges,” says current resident Henry Wood, an architect.
The house, an act of near-constant maintenance, is now on its way to being green:
Today, solar panels heat the water, and a wind turbine on the roof generates electricity. Rainwater is collected in a 3,000-gallon cistern, then filtered, treated and pumped through the house for cleaning purposes. (Mr. Wood claims it is safe enough to drink, “but my children don’t trust me so we don’t,” he said.) After years of using an activated seawater system that draws in seawater, then treats and filters the waste before releasing it back into the ocean, Clingstone now has the latest generation of composting toilets.
For the time being, Clingstone is the only structure on the island, watching through picture windows as Atlantic storms roll in.
The slideshow, with images by Erik Jacobs, is worth checking out.
[Image: Note the wind turbine. Photo by Erik Jacobs for The New York Times].
Meanwhile, over at Deputy Dog we were introduced to the rotating architecture of the Villa Girasole, a house in Italy that rotates on massing internal roller bearings and exposed tracks paved into the landscape.
The house, by engineer Angelo Invernizzi, "last rotated in 2002," we read in Chad Randl's new book Revolving Architecture, where many more photographs of the building appear. Randl writes:
Invernizzi and his design team used the villa project as a laboratory for trying out modern materials, from reinforced concrete to fiber-cement wall boards. In keeping with the project's experimental nature, a considerable amount of adaptation and refinement accompanied construction. On the exterior walls Invernizzi substituted aluminum sheet for the original cement finish when cracks appeared after the first trial rotations. As the foundation settled and the rotating mechanism was tested, small cracks also developed along the interior plaster walls of the moving part. Invernizzi concealed the damage by finishing the walls with a canvas covering...
Randl points out that the "layout and form of the moving section are well suited to rotation." Further, the house's occupants could "control rotation using a panel (with three buttons: forward, backward, and stop) in the foyer of the moving part."
You can read more about the house's "rotational machinery" in Randl's book.
I wonder, though, if an interesting children's novel couldn't someday be written about a family who goes off on holiday for the summer in the mountains of Italy, renting a dust-covered and slightly eccentric old house. The young boy or girl, who is left alone all day, for whatever reason the novelist comes up with, finds a small panel one day in the house's towering attics.
Those strange paths in the garden, you see, aren't just paths, they're tracks – and this house doesn't just rotate it travels large distances...
In any case, in a bit of unrelated news, hurricanes of liquid iron have been raging at the earth's core for more than 300 million years, simulations suggest. These "subterranean cyclones" have been spinning for the most part below Asia, perhaps explaining the core's seismic asymmetry.
[Image: A new Los Angeles park, rendered by EDAW; spotted at Inhabitat].
Earlier this summer, EDAW released images from its intern design program wherein a new park atop a buried freeway for Los Angeles was the featured subject of discussion. Park 101, as they call it, would be the resulting swatch of artificial land created by covering up the 101 Hollywood freeway. EDAW describes its own plan as "a visionary, and realistic, urban design solution to cap... a relatively small area straddling the 101 freeway, situated in an existing maze of roadways." It will be "an iconic urban park in the heart of downtown Los Angeles... re-visioning the existing infrastructure that supports and encircles the core of the city – freeways, channelized rivers, streets, and public transit."
Considering that L.A. needs very seriously to consider pedestrianization plans, at a huge variety of scales across the whole city, this seems like as good a place as any to begin.
In fact, BLDGBLOG here proposes something like a Pasadena-to-Pacific walking trail: a purpose-built pedestrian boulevard – car-free its whole length, except perhaps for access to emergency services – leading from the beaches of Santa Monica all the way to the foothills of Pasadena, via Griffith Park, encompassing de-paved sections of major cross-city thoroughfares.
A north-south axis would be soon to follow – and the whole thing could perhaps then hook up with the Pacific Crest Trail.
Speaking of L.A., in response to the previous post, artist Sean Dockray sent in these unexplained images, apparently derived from "freeway loop detector data" on the perpetually clogged 405. We've covered Dockray's work before; in this case, Dockray also drops hints about "a radio station that would be nothing but a reading of [traffic] incidents around [Los Angeles] county (w background music)."
So what do these subtly morphing diagrams really mean?
Finally, Pruned was Alps-bound last week with this look at Gazex, an "explosively effective" anti-avalanche technology embedded in the snow-covered mountainsides.
According to the company's own website, "Gazex explodes an oxygen/propane gas mixture in specifically designed exploder tubes located at the top end of risk zones. The exploders are connected to gas storage tanks with capacities high enough to operate for the whole season without re-filling."
The company boasts that it is the "world leader in remote avalanche prevention control systems."
Clearly, though, it would not be hard to re-purpose this technology, installing hundreds – thousands – of these things in the mountains, anticipating warfare... and then hurling avalanches down upon the heads of invading armies.
BLDGBLOG got a nice shout-out today on Current TV.
[Images: From Current TV's short segment, "Building Blogs"].
In addition to Current's description of BLDGBLOG in that short video, they write: "What can you say? Right now, THE blog of the contemporary architecture world." Also deservedly mentioned in their brief tour of architecture blogs are Life Without Buildings, Tropolism, City of Sound, and Archidose – all bloggers I've actually met. For members of a globally distributed blogosphere, we're not as disembodied as you'd think... While I'm tooting my own horns here, though I don't normally point out things like visitor numbers, BLDGBLOG has been seeing more than 175,000 – and as many as 205,000 – unique visitors per month this summer; so I owe everyone a huge thanks for stopping by!
Alex Trevi sent me a link last week – which he later posted – about the so-called ANTS program. ANTS is an "autonomous nano technology swarm" developed by NASA for possible use in the "lunar base infrastructure" of tomorrow. ANTS consist of "highly reconfigurable networks of struts, acting as 3D mesh or 2D fabric to perform a range of functions on demand."
The ANTS approach harnesses the effective skeletal/muscular system of the frame itself to enable amoeboid movement, effectively ‘flowing’ between morphological forms. ANTS structures would thus be capable of forming an entire mobile modular infrastructure adapted to its environment.
However, I was especially excited to see that the ANTS system has been hypothesized as "an architectural pathway to artificial life." Might the artificial biology of tomorrow be buildings that have come to life?
I'm reminded here of Philip Beesley's Implant Matrix, or Theo Jansen's Strandbeesten, machine-architectures that cross over into animation and back, convincingly evincing signs of life. But NASA's recent research into ANTS suggests that these units could actually be used to build whole bases and instant cities under extreme – and literally lunar – living conditions, where the village itself would not be just a substrate or infrastructure but a kind of artificially intelligent labyrinth of living architecture that coils round itself in a cascade of walls and air locks. All under the constant radiative glare of the sun.
These "autonomous remote systems," as NASA refers to them, are already coming into existence, of course; one need only look as far as the skies of the Middle East, for instance, which now buzz with unmanned aerial drones, or at the deep desert labs of the U.S. Air Force, where shape-shifting airplanes are taking (and re-taking) shape. But is there a drone architecture? Unmanned buildings – server farms, parking garages, airport terminals, and offshore cargo-processing warehouses (or RoboVault, say) – that, given mobility, could approach the condition of biology? And is this what the haunted house genre has always been about: a fear of architecture that has come to life?
[Image: Ron Herron's Walking City, first proposed in Archigram 4 (1964)].
It's NASA meets Archigram meets Manuel de Landa meets Theo Jansen – a walking city gone off-world, communicating via secure satellite to earthbound observers back home.
The British Geological Survey has teamed up with fledgling science organization OneGeology to show us what the earth would look like without soil – or water, or cities, or anything, really, but geology. View larger. I have to admit, on the other hand, that, as cool as this image is – revealing the semi-liquid mixtures of underground terrains that we walk over everyday – it's an absurd way to present the information. Badly colored and with a 1970s funk album sunrise coming round the planet? Surely, with such a signature image, they could have made a better globe?
A few years ago, the Boston Globe looked at what we might call the psychiatric impact of that city's Big Dig project. The Big Dig was a massively expensive urban engineering project that put Boston's Central Artery underground, freeing up space on the earth's surface for parks and businesses.
The project, however, was plagued with cost over-runs, engineering difficulties, and the periodic collapse of public support (even the periodic collapse of the ceiling).
From the Globe:
In the short term, mental health experts say, tempers may flare as the public deals with the logistical inconvenience of detours, lingering uncertainty about the safety of the tunnels, and mounting cynicism about the project. (...) And there may be long-term effects as well – ones that could subtly reshape the city's identity.
What interests me here is not the obvious fact that bad traffic might cause tempers to flare, but the idea that people might develop historically unique psychiatric conditions because of a work of public infrastructure under construction somewhere in their city.
A new tunnel, say, is being dug between Manhattan and New Jersey, and moods in the city begin to darken. Psychiatrists notice a strange surge in patients; people come in complaining of nightmares of forced reunion, being in the same room again with an annoying relative they thought they'd left behind long ago. Homeowners wake at 3am each night, convinced someone's trying to break into the basement. The whole island is ill at ease.
And it's all because of that new tunnel getting closer and closer to completion.
Or, say, a new flood barrier is under construction outside London – a gleaming wall of metal that will rise from the tidal murk. Would it change the dreams of city residents? Would this distant piece of hydro-infrastructure affect how Londoners feel about their city – or about themselves? A new confidence. Dreams of survival. Psychoanalysts report that no one dreams of drowning anymore.
On one level here, the answers are both uninteresting and obvious: of course, these sorts of projects would affect the dreams, thoughts, and nightmares of a city's residents – after all, those new landmarks would be a part of the world these people live within.
But a less obvious, or less easily tracked, impact might be postulated here – that, say, a new bridge between San Francisco and Oakland might subtly change how San Franciscans think about their peninsular city, and that this only becomes obvious in retrospect, when someone notices that prescription rates have changed or the divorce rate has plummeted: it was the psychiatric implication of a new bridge that did it.
Put another way, if a new highway can have a measurable, and easily detected, impact on a city's economic health and administrative well-being, then could a new highway – or bridge, or tunnel, or flood wall, or, for that matter, sewage treatment plant – have a detectable impact on the city's mental health? After all, these sorts of massive public works "may carry a psychological burden," the Boston Globe wrote back in 2006.
It's the psychiatric infrastructure of the city.
(Thanks to Josh Glenn, Eric Fredericksen, and the Hermenautic Circle for the Boston Globe link).
[Image: The cover and a spread from 15 Lombard St. by Janice Kerbel].
15 Lombard St. is a book by artist Janice Kerbel, published back in 2000. It presents itself as "a rigorously researched masterplan of how to rob a particular bank in the City of London."
By observing the daily routine in and around the bank, Kerbel reveals the most detailed security measures such as: the exact route and time of money transportation; the location of CCTV cameras in and around the bank along with precise floor plans that mark the building's blind spots.
Kerbel's meticulous plans include every possible detail required to commit the perfect crime.
The book was pointed out to me by Sans façon in relation to an earlier post here on BLDGBLOG about the city re-seen as a labyrinth of possible robberies and heists that have yet to be committed – a geography of tunnels yet to be dug and vaults yet to be emptied.
But is there a literary genre of the crime plan? An attack or robbery outlined in its every detail. Is this fiction, or some new form of illicit literature, detailing speculative and unrealized crimes hidden in the city around us? Is robbing a building just another type of architectural analysis? Or does one put such a thing into the category of counter-geography – a minor cartography, a rogue map? Or perhaps radical cartography, as the saying now goes? Would there be an impulse toward censorship here?
There's a fascinating series of interviews waiting to be done here with people who work in building security – how a building is deliberately built to anticipate later actions. Or, should we say: how a building is built to contain the impulse toward certain, more radical uses.
When the burglars get to this door, they'll become frustrated and will try to break through the nearby window, instead – so we must reinforce this window and put a camera nearby.
The building has within it certain very specific possible crimes, the way this house contained a "puzzle." I'm reminded of the famous Bernard Tschumi line, and I'm paraphrasing: Sometimes to fully appreciate a work of architecture you have to commit a crime.
Architectural space becomes something like an anticipatory narrative – the exact size and shape of a future heist, nullified. It outlines future crimes the way a highway outlines routes.
It occurred to me that you could make a map—a whole book of maps—detailing all possible routes of bank robbery within the underground foundations of a city. What basements to tunnel through, what walls to be hammered down: you make a labyrinth of well-placed incisions and the city is yours. Perforated from below by robbers, it rips to pieces. The city is a maze of unrealized break-ins.
A whole new literary genre could result. Booker Prizes are awarded. You describe, in extraordinary detail, down to timetables and distances, down to personnel and the equipment they would use, how all the banks in your city might someday be robbed. Every issue of The New Yorker, for instance, includes a short, 600-word essay about breaking into a different bank somewhere in Manhattan, one by one, in every neighborhood. Ideas, plans, possibilities. Scenarios. Time Out London does the same.
It soon becomes a topic of regular conversation at dinner parties; parents lull their kids to sleep describing imaginary bank robberies, tales of theft and architectural transgression. Buildings are something to be broken into, the parents whisper. It's what buildings have inside that's your goal.
[Image: The brick-arched entryway to a "mysterious Chinese tunnel" in the Pacific Northwest (via)].
72 years ago, a man named William Zimmerman sat down to tell a story about "mysterious Chinese tunnels" to the U.S. government. That interview was conducted as part of the Federal Writers' Project, and it can be read online in a series of typewritten documents hosted by the Library of Congress. Zimmerman claims that "mysterious" tunnels honeycombed the ground beneath the city of Tacoma, Washington. These would soon become known as "Shanghai tunnels," because city dwellers were allegedly kidnapped via these underground routes – which always led west to the docks – only to be shipped off to Shanghai, an impossibly other world across the ocean. There, they'd be sold into slavery.
Subterranean space here clearly exists within an interesting overlap of projections: fantasies of race, exoticism, and simply subconscious fear of the underworld. White Europeans had expanded west all the way to the Pacific Ocean – only to find themselves standing in a swamp, on earthquake-prone ground, with a "mysterious" race of Chinese dock workers tunneling toward them through the earth, looking for victims... It's like a geography purpose-built for H.P. Lovecraft, or something straight out of the work of Jeff VanderMeer: down in the foundations of your city is a mysterious network of rooms, excavated by another race, through which unidentified strangers move at night, threatening to abduct you. It's urban historical anthropology by way of Jean Cocteau – or Sigmund Freud.
[Image: Another "mysterious Chinese tunnel" in the Pacific Northwest (via)].
In any case, because "construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad required large numbers of railroad laborers," Zimmerman's tale begins, "many Chinese coolies" had to be smuggled into the "rapidly growing city of Tacoma." They "arrive[d] mysteriously," he says, "smuggled in on ships, and even Indian canoes, from British Columbia." At that point:
Several opium joints were known to be operating in Tacoma. And there was no question in the minds of many people that the narcotic was smuggled in through tunnels from their dens to cleverly hidden exits near the waterfront. They were also convinced that the tunnels were dug by Chinese, either as a personal enterprise or at the behest of white men of the underworld, as no white workmen would burrow the devious mole-like passageways and keep their labors secret.
Zimmerman adds that the Chinese "were forcibly expelled from Tacoma in 1885, but ever [sic] so often the story of the Chinese tunnels bobs up whenever workmen come across them in excavation work." It's even rumored here in the BLDGBLOG offices that a mere 5% of the original tunnels have so far been discovered – until a graduate student in anthropology from the nearby University comes across a clue in an old government document, leading her to a small, bricked-over window near a drain in the downtown fish market... Directed by Gore Verbinski.
[Image: Entries to Tacoma's mysterious Chinese underworld? Photo by Stephen Cysewski (via)].
Meanwhile, that same year – 1936 – a 39-year old man named V.W. Jenkins sat down with a representative of the Federal Writers' Project, and he had this story to tell:
In the spring of 1935 when the City Light Department was placing electric power conduits under ground, workmen digging a trench in the alley between Pacific Avenue and 'A' Street at a point about 75 feet south of 7th Street, just back of the State Hotel, crosscut an old tunnel about ten feet below the surface of the ground. This tunnel was about three feet wide by five feet high, and tended in a southwesterly direction under the State Hotel, and in the opposite direction southeasterly toward Commencement Bay. I entered the tunnel and walked about 40 or 50 feet in each direction from the opening which we had encountered. There it went under the hotel the tunnel dipped sharply to pass under the concrete footings of the rear wall, proving that the tunnel was dug after the hotel had been built. In the other direction the tunnel had a sharp turn to the left, and after several feet, a gradual curve to the right, so that it was again tending in the same direction as at the opening. About 50 feet from the opening on the Bay side the tunnel began to dip and in another ten feet began to decline very sharply so that it would have been necessary to use a rope to descend safely on the met slippery floor. The brow of the bluff overlooking the waterfront is but a short distance from this point, explaining the need for the rapid downward slope, although it is probable that farther on there is a turn, either right or left, and that the tunnel was dug at an easier grade before emerging at a lower level.
Jenkins then offers this bizarrely wonderful explanation for what else might have formed those tunnels:
Some persons contend that these openings found in the vicinity of Tacoma were caused by trees buried in the glacial age, and after decaying, left the openings in the glacial drift. If this is the true explanation for the tunnel I have described, then the tree that made it must have been a giant that grow such in the shape of a corkscrew.
Of course, there are also "Shanghai tunnels" beneath Portland, Oregon. "All along the Portland waterfront," we read, "...'Shanghai Tunnels' ran beneath the city, allowing a hidden world to exist. These 'catacombs' connected to the many saloons, brothels, gambling parlors, and opium dens, which drew great numbers of men and became ideal places for the shanghaiers to find their victims. The catacombs, which 'snaked' their way beneath the streets of what we now call Old Town, Skidmore Fountain, and Chinatown, helped to create an infamous history that became 'cloaked' in myth, superstition, and fear." That same site describes the actual process of Shanghai'ing:
The victims were held captive in small brick cells or makeshift wood and tin prisons until they were sold to the sea captains. A sea captain who needed additional men to fill his crew notified the shanghaiiers that he was ready to set sail in the early-morning hours, and would purchase the men for $50 to $55 a head. 'Knock-out drops' were then slipped into the confined victim's food or water.
Unconscious, they were then taken through a network of tunnels that 'snaked' their way under the city all the way to the waterfront. They were placed aboard ships and didn't awake until many hours later, after they had 'crossed the bar' into the Pacific Ocean. It took many of these men as long as two full voyages – that's six years – to get back to Portland.
It all sounds like some prehistoric narrative of the afterlife – a shaman's tale: you're blacked out and led through mysterious tunnels inside the earth's surface, only to wake up surrounded by the oceanic, on your way to another world. This site offers quite a lot of history of the Tacoma tunnels, and ten minutes of Googling will reveal at least a dozen blog posts and assorted minor newspaper articles about the phenomenon; but there's something particularly intriguing about an official oral history, conducted by the U.S. government itself, in which tales of subterranean geography are revealed. It's like a form of national psychoanalysis, where each session takes the form of geographic speculation. More practically, such interviews are a fantastic premise for a short novel or film.
[Image: Photo by Michael Cook. "Looking into the bottom of the William B. Rankine G.S. wheelpit from the Rankine tailrace"].
Briefly, though, I'm also reminded of BLDGBLOG's interview with Michael Cook, posted last summer. Cook is an urban explorer based in Toronto. Toward the end of that interview, I asked Cook "if there's some huge, mythic system out there that you've heard about but haven't visited yet" – some long-rumored underworld that might only be speculation. Cook replies:
I guess the most fabled tunnel system in North America is the one that supposedly runs beneath old Victoria, British Columbia. It’s supposedly connected with Satanic activity or Masonic activity in the city, and there’s been a lot of strange stuff written about that. But no one’s found the great big Satanic system where they make all the sacrifices.
You know, these legends are really... there’s always some sort of fact behind them. How they come about and what sort of meaning they have for the community is what’s really interesting. So while I can poke fun at them, I actually appreciate their value – and, certainly, these sort of things are rumored in a lot of cities, not just Victoria. They’re in the back consciousness of a lot of cities in North America.
(With huge thanks to Alexis Madrigal, who sent me a link to the Tacoma tunnels last summer).
I've uploaded an edited MP3 from BLDGBLOG's interview with Mark Smout and Laura Allen, recorded two weeks ago in London at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. We discuss everything from active vs. passive landscapes to mudflats, river deltas, and the architectural form of managed retreat on the British coast; from the design implications of climate change to artificially refrigerated Chinese tundra in Tibet; from Smout Allen's educational work with Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture to their work as documented in the excellent and highly recommended Pamphlet Architecture book Augmented Landscapes.
[Images: Sketches by Smout Allen; these images are also briefly explored in the forthcoming BLDGBLOG Book].
The MP3 comes in at about 37 minutes. If you have any thoughts, let me know! I'd love to discuss this further. Special thanks go out to Mark Smout and Laura Allen themselves, and to Joseph Grima and the Storefront for Art and Architecture for hosting the event.
I've uploaded an MP3 from BLDGBLOG's interview with novelist Tom McCarthy, recorded on the 4th of July at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in London. We cover a range of topics, from memory and architecture to trauma and the spatial nature of repetition, via Italo Calvino, Marcel Proust, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Burroughs – plus a bit of James Joyce – during a long talk about McCarthy's novel Remainder (previously described here). The file is available for download at this link; if you've never used Megaupload before, just enter the letters that you see, wait 30-40 seconds as per the instructions, and then knock yourself out. Of course, I'd love to discuss this discussion further, so if you have any thoughts, please feel free to chime in. Thanks again to Tom McCarthy for coming out for the conversation, and to Joseph Grima and the Storefront for Art and Architecture for hosting it.
[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.
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.
I stumbled on Buckminster Fuller's patent drawings for geodesic domes today – so I thought I'd re-post them here. 
Where structural innovation and the U.S. government intersect.
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[Image: Entries to Tacoma's mysterious Chinese underworld? Photo by Stephen Cysewski (
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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. 
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