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As part of their new water-themed issue, the beautifully designed New York Moon has produced this interactive map of the water systems of Manhattan.  [Image: The New York Moon's interactive map of the water systems of Manhattan; map by Zack Sultan]."Beneath New York’s lattices of concrete, iron and landfill lie dozens of organic waterways," they write. "Using data from an 1865 sanitation map and contemporary satillite photographs, this projection depicts Manhattan as a vascular organ, whose obscure opperation has had powerful bearing on the fate of the city." Older issues of the Moon are definitely worth checking out, including their recent look at deserts, underground acoustics, and the idea of a four-dimensional document for "investigating time and space." While you're there, don't miss the floating bog-city of Lake Titicaca: Beginning with a sturdy floating bog, and then laying a base of totora reeds over it, the men, women and children of Uros work together, piling the reeds in a different direction every two weeks until they have created a latticework strong enough to hold six or seven homes and one kitchen on each island, a process that takes about eight months. All of the forty-odd islands are then anchored to sticks pitched into the lake's floor, making the community buoyant but stationary. Though the islands at conception are about three to four feet thick, they will double over time as dying reeds are covered with newer, stiffer ones, a process of renewal repeated until it is time to build an entirely new island. Note that I hereby pitch a jointly edited future edition of New York Moon, to be curated by BLDGBLOG and Pruned, around the theme of gardens. Late summer 2009.
I'm excited to announce that I'll be lecturing at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, in only two days' time, kicking off their Spring 2009 lecture series.  [Image: View larger].I've clearly got some very large shoes to fill with this series, however, as I've been lined up with everyone from Beatriz Colomina to Cynthia Davidson. Stan Allen, Juan Herreros, Richard Ingersoll, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Michael Weinstock, Peter Trummer – it looks like a fantastic series. For my own part, I think I've got a great talk planned – called "Cities Gone Wild" – expanding from the lecture I gave back in November, sponsored by the Complex Terrain Laboratory, at University College, London. This talk begins at 5pm on Wednesday, January 7; it's free and open to the public; and it will take place in Anderson Hall. I don't know how many readers BLDGBLOG has in Houston – or, for that matter, at Rice – but I'd love to see some of you there. And please introduce yourselves, too, as I love meeting new people. Also, at the end of my talk I hope to address the more general subject of blogging, if for no other reason than I can guarantee that there are students enrolled at Rice right now – and people living in Houston – who have something interesting to say and simply need a new platform from which to say it. I'd be happy to talk about establishing a blog and so on, as that's not a topic I've much addressed throughout all of these talks. Finally, I'll be doing thesis reviews at the architecture department all day on Thursday and Friday, so if you happen to be enrolled in the courses I'll be visiting, then cool. I look forward to meeting you! And come out to the talk – it should be fun.
 [Image: Standing stones beneath Lake Michigan? View larger].In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University College, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan. If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.  [Image: The stones beneath Lake Michigan; view larger].In a PDF assembled by Holley and Brian Abbott to document the expedition, we learn that the archaeologists had been hired to survey a series of old boatwrecks using a slightly repurposed "sector scan sonar" device. You can read about the actual equipment – a Kongsberg-Mesotech MS 1000 – here. The circular images this thing produces are unreal; like some strange new art-historical branch of landscape representation, they form cryptic dioramas of long-lost wreckage on the lakebed. Shipwrecks (like the Tramp, which went down in 1974); a "junk pile" of old boats and cars; a Civil War-era pier; and even an old buggy are just some of the topographic features the divers discovered. These are anthropological remains that will soon be part of the lake's geology; they are our future trace fossils. But down amongst those otherwise mundane human remains were the stones.  [Image: The "junk pile" of old cars and boat skeletons; view larger].While there is obviously some doubt as to whether or not that really is a mastodon carved on a rock – let alone if it really was human activity that arranged some of the rocks into a Stonehenge-like circle – it's worth pointing out that Michigan does already have petroglyph sites and even standing stones. A representative of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology has even commented that, although he's skeptical, he's interested in learning more, hoping to see better photographs of the so-called "glyph stone."  [Image: The stones; view larger].So is there a North American version of Stonehenge just sitting up there beneath the glacial waters of a small northern bay in Lake Michigan? If so, are there other submerged prehistoric megaliths waiting to be discovered by some rogue archaeologist armed with a sonar scanner? Whatever the answer might be, the very suggestion is interesting enough to think about – where underwater archaeology, prehistoric remains, and lost shipwrecks collide to form a midwestern mystery: National Treasure 3 or Da Vinci Code 2. Even Ghostbusters: The Return. But only future scuba expeditions will be able to tell for sure.
If I have several blogging resolutions for 2009 – and I do – one of them is definitely to read InfraNet Lab more often.  [Image: Offshore energy islands, via InfraNet Lab].Easily one of the most interesting architecture blogs out there today – though it's really an infrastructure blog, hopefully heralding a new focus for design writers in the next few years – and written by Toronto-based architects Mason White and Lola Shepard, along with two contributors named Maya and Neeraj, it tracks massive infrastructure, waste, energy, and design projects across the global landscape, taking in geology, engineering, network economics, ecology, construction innovation, future fuels, and much more. Read it and you'll know how to "harvest energy from the earth's rotation" using mega-gyroscopes, you'll discover how a more efficient offshore seaweed industry might work, you'll pick up clues for how to design a mountain and then how to connect that mountain to others using aerial tramways, you'll get an architectural glimpse of habitat meshing, you'll take an hallucinatory tour through Taiwanese mushroom farms, you'll visit underground waste isolation sites in New Mexico, you'll turn around and go the opposite vertical direction – into the sky – to farm water from the atmosphere, and you'll even punt around the artificial inland waterways of Britain using strange mechanized structures and seeing that archipelago as hydrology first, geography later. So go check it out – and make 2009 the year of networks, grids, and infrastructures.
 Instead of putting people under house arrest – where they'd stay at home all day, unable to leave their own property for weeks or months at a time – you instead send them out to some perfect suburb in the middle of, say, Nebraska or Utah, a remote development where each house is fully furnished and tastefully maintained, but each also has only one inhabitant: a minor criminal of some sort, dwelling on the immorality of shoplifting or tax fraud and serving-out a short period of house arrest. They can even get their mail redirected there, and watch Netflix. But out on the far periphery are watchtowers, and the streets are lined with cameras.
"There are architecture photographers [who] refuse to photograph anything from November up to February," Michiel van Raaij writes on his blog Eikongraphia. "In their view the long shadows and dimmed light intensity of the winter season compromises their work. The effect is that – in the architecture media – not only the sun always shines, but that it is also never winter."
There are several interesting observations here, but I'm particularly struck by the thought that the spherical trigonometry of the earth's surface – and its angular effect on shadows – has an impact on how we might popularly view and represent architectural space.
By extension, then, if raised only on images of buildings in which there are no visible shadows – and in which surfaces thus appear to be all but shaved of ornament – are architects actually designing for a particular season of light? That is, buildings that are meant to look good, and photograph well, only in summer?
How amazing it would be to find that architectural styles begin to change – moving away from the Clement Greenberg-like flatness of international modernism toward a new era of ornamentally active deep surfaces – if something as simple as when photographs are taken were to change.
All the works of Frank Gehry, photographed in the anemic, angular light of midwinter. I sense a book idea here, if any enterprising photographers might be reading this...
In between discovering this thing the other day and sitting down to post about it this morning – it was cancelled. What was it? A fortifications tour through the United States and Europe, planned for 2009. And it sounded awesome.  As you can read in the trip's accompanying PDF ( 3.2MB), Cornell professor Arthur Ovaska, architects Austin + Mergold, and their students would "travel along the east coast of the US and traverse Europe north to south in pursuit of a transformation in space and history of a particular type. The typology is fortifications. It is neither building nor landscape, but a hybrid, shaped in response to thousands of years of war." We will study the architectural responses to conflict; their continuing evolution and adaptation to new technology, tactics and politics; as well as their impact on the national, urban and individual scale in the built environment and landscape... While architects no longer design for war, we have to reconcile with its aftermath through re-appropriation of killing fields for parks, the re-engagement of city centers choked by defensive rings, and the transformation of space formerly traversed by metal and fire into places of peaceful public interaction. Although I don't at all agree with the statement that "architects no longer design for war" – this might be true for, say, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, but it is in no way true for military spatialists employed on prototype base housing, prefab field shelters, or even secure urban embassy design – I nonetheless think the very idea of this trip is pretty amazing. The program will begin by travelling down the East Coast of the US (an area that has been fortified against the “invasion by sea from the east and by land from the west”) to look at urban and rural examples of Fortress America and their effects on our built situation today. We will then continue on to Britain and study results of nearly 2000 years of military history expressed in buildings and landscape. Then, traveling along the French-German border (a continuous battlefield for over a thousand years), we will visit mediaeval castles, baroque garden-fortresses and WWII bunkers, in addition to post-bellum architecture such as Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. Next we will make our way into Switzerland and northern Italy to see some of the incredible natural defenses from the time of Napoleon and Garibaldi (area also featured in numerous James Bond movies and written about by Ernest Hemingway) as well as examples of modern architecture built in short spans of peacetime. Travelling down the fabulous Adriatic coast through several Croatian cities (including Dubrovnik – the ultimate walled city) we will observe traces of the Roman, Venetian, and Italian conquests as well as the recent civil war in the former Yugoslavia. After that we will stop in Greece to visit the famous last stand of the 300 Spartans and study the unique landscape of Thermopylae pass. And finally, finishing our Great March across Europe, we will arrive on the island of Malta: a fortified naval refuge of the Maltese order for the last 500 years that is now contending with its legacy of isolationism. Here's the actual itinerary:  [Image: View larger].You'd engage in design studios along the way – this sounds so unbelievably cool to me, imagine filling whole sketchbooks and blogs with images of well-fortified hill towns, walled cities, bunkers, and urban cores – and, lest you fear for their absence, we're reminded that "coffee & refreshments will be served."      You would even have studied "operational walls": This technology seminar will focus on the evolution of the fortified wall and earthwork construction dating back several thousand years and its influence on current architecture & landscape production. The primary topics in this seminar will include utilizing the vernacular landscape as a source for construction materials; examining construction methodologies and phasing for the production of an earthwork and wall assembly; analyzing the relationship between form and functional operation; exploring the danger/safety nature of the double-sided programmed wall; and dissecting the logic of wall details. Coursework will require a series of analytical sketches, photographic documentation exercises and a final measured project. I have to assume that the trip was cancelled because of lack of enrollment, or some other trickle-down effect of the financial crisis (after all, enrollment, airfare, accommodation, and so on was all estimated at a rather eye-popping $20,000 – perhaps I'm wrong, but I feel like BLDGBLOG could organize a cheaper version of this trip quite easily).  [Image: The pack and the bunker: equipment for landscapes].How exciting would that be, though? You get Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, Javier Arbona, Edwin Gardner, the Complex Terrain Laboratory, and a dozen others; you all buy a copy of Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology; and then you head over to Europe for five or six weeks of cheap hotel rooms, high-speed trains, rural bus routes, and some overgrown fortifications. You visit bunkers and tunnels and dungeons and barrows. You sketch things, make short films, and one of you draws a comic book. You read Beowulf and shave Javier's leg hair while he's sleeping... Etc. etc. Then you visit Spartan battlefields in Greece and update the rest of the world via Twitter. At the end, you all split a book deal. Perhaps a serious plan for 2010... Read more about the actual trip in the original PDF.
The new year begins with a look at sovereign geography as applied to movement through the atmosphere: a Ugandan baby girl was born aboard an airplane en route from Amsterdam to the United States – and so was given Canadian citizenship, because the plane was flying over eastern Canada at the time.  [Image: Three photos by greentheory./Sarah Palmer].Of course, one wonders what citizenship this baby would have been given if the parents had been flying over the middle of the ocean, for instance, or across the tangled borders of an enclave or exclave. A complicated mathematics of trajectory, speed, and height is unleashed by terrestrial scholars below in order to find the exact location of the plane at the moment of childbirth. Like something out of Borges, imperial trigonometricians are called in for consultation. Their calculations take days and arguments break out. Perhaps the child goes on to be famous – a political leader, a poet, a revolutionary, the next pope – and his or her exact aerial origin becomes increasingly important to determine. Weather data and wind speed, the weight of fellow passengers, tiny aerodynamic imperfections in the wings, and even gravitational anomalies in the earth's crust are brought to bear: how fast was the airplane traveling? Like the origins of the Sunni/Shia split in Islam, rival factions form: their battle lines are drawn, like wisps of cloud in a springtime sky. Perhaps, in a virtuoso application of air rights laws delivered to a stunned General Assembly of the UN, a property entrepreneur actually purchases the exact section of sky where he believes the baby was born. Rethinking the deal later, he buys the entire historic flight path. Soon, he owns vast corridors of air. I'm reminded of Allen Ginsberg, who once wrote of a "Subliminal Billionaire" who "owns vast Spheres of Air" – only, here, those carefully surveyed envelopes of atmospheric real estate are more like UNESCO Heritage Sites, international sky parks hovering somewhere over a border near you. (Note: The obituary of the man who invented air rights – please, oh please, someone commission me to write a longer article about this man! – was originally spotted last summer via Marcus Trimble's Super Colossal).
 [Image: Professor Igor Panarin's six-fold vision of a disintegrated United States; I love how it will precisely follow today's existing state lines – and that Kentucky will join the European Union].In what sounds to be very obviously an act of wishful projection, a former KGB intelligence analyst turned public intellectual named Igor Panarin has explained to the Wall Street Journal that the United States only has about 18 months left to live. In the summer of 2010, it will "disintegrate" into six politically separate realms – and, conveniently for a thinker who clearly leans to the right, the borders of these realms will coincide with a new racial segregation. The fantasy of living amidst people who don't look like you will come to an end. Best of all, from Panarin's perspective, Alaska – Sarah Palin included, looking out with alarm from her office window – will "revert" to Russian control. Quoting at length: [Prof. Panarin] predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia. "People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right," the Wall Street Journal continues. Panarin then "cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union – 15 years beforehand. 'When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him,' says Prof. Panarin." In some ways, I'm reminded of Paul Auster's newest novel, Man in the Dark, in which a civil war has set multiple regions of the United States against one another and against the so-called Federal Army. Or, for that matter, there's also Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom in which the UK has been split up along emotional lines. But surely an ex-CIA operative, now milking the lecture circuit for all its worth, could also propose a realistic scenario in which the entire Russian east has been sold off, say, to a combination of Euro-American agribusiness firms and the Chinese government, who them embark upon an elaborate, generations-long act of industrial deforestation? Leaving Moscow a kind of irrelevant, feudal city full of Bulgari and handguns, its governmentally terrorized tower blocks populated almost entirely by unemployed and half-drunk retro-Stalinists? I don't mean to imply that I think the end of the United States is somehow politically unimaginable, but that, in a still-bipolar, post-Cold War international imagination, surely either side could convincingly outline the other's demise? (Via Alexis Madrigal. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: North America vs. the A-241/BIS Device and The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations: An Interview with Simon Sellars).
   [Images: From a short film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear's Unit 15 at the Bartlett].A few days ago, Ballardian posted a long, well-timed, and very interesting interview with Nic Clear, from London's Bartlett School of Architecture. I've long been a fan of Clear's work with his students; I wrote a short article about him for Dwell last spring (see image, below), and Clear organized last month's Science Fiction and Architecture panel in London.  [Image: A short article about Nic Clear from the March 2008 issue of Dwell].Huge sections of the interview, in which they discuss the value of extra-architectural ideas in helping to shape the "near future" of spatial design, are worth quoting in full; but I'll stick to a few specific moments here, and you can then go read the rest. What I like about Clear, though, is that he's 100% comfortable with – and seemingly relentless about pursuing – architecture not as a system of codified ornament or as a closed universe of citational conformity open only to grad students, but as a resource for ideas of every kind, whether or not they apply to your own local building codes or will ever lead to an act of construction. Want to write a novel? A screenplay? An essay about landscape and climate change? Want to direct a music video? Start a blog? Architecture offers fuel – and amazing visuals – for all of these things. The field becomes almost infinitely more exciting when you realize that architectural projects, by definition, entail the reimagination of how humans might inhabit the earth – how they organize themselves spatially and give shape to their everyday lives. Architecture is, within mere instants of discussing any idea or project, real or imagined, something with anthropological, economic, legal, libidinal, seismic, and even planetary implications. In fact, if architecture can be viewed as the material alteration of the earth's surface, then it is not a stretch to say that architecture has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet. Little wonder, then, if we do decide to go in this direction, that there appears to be a growing cross-over of interests between architecture and science fiction – as in, for instance, the work produced by Nic Clear's Unit 15.    [Images: From a short film by Dan Farmer, a tour through a landscape of abandoned hospital equipment, produced for Nic Clear's Unit 15 at the Bartlett].In any case, it shouldn't be surprising that Ballardian would then focus specifically on the architectural value of J.G. Ballard. When asked whether Ballard is a growing influence on today's practitioners, Clear answers: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture – maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian.’ Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues. Asked to define "Ballardian space," if such a thing exists, Clear says: "If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city – especially London – then you are pretty close [to Ballardian space]." Finally – because you can simply read the interview itself in full – Clear sums it all up: "We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings – that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from."
 [Image: The dark skies above Galloway Forest Park, Scotland, via the Guardian].Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.2009 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope. The excitement is starting early, with Galloway Forest Park in Scotland announcing its plans to become Europe’s first “dark sky park.” The forest, which covers 300 square miles and includes the foothills of the Awful Hand Range, rates as a 3 on the Bortle scale. The scale, created by John Bortle in 2001, measures night sky darkness based on the observability of astronomical objects. It ranges from Class 9 – Inner City Sky – where "the only celestial objects that really provide pleasing telescopic views are the Moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters (if you can find them)," to Class 1 – Excellent Dark-Sky Site – where "the galaxy M33 is an obvious naked-eye object" and "airglow… is readily apparent." Class 3 is merely "Rural Sky," meaning that while "the Milky Way still appears complex... M33 is only visible with averted vision."  [Image: The Pleiades, photographed by Thackeray's Globules, photographed by Hubble].Nonetheless, Galloway Forest Park contains the darkest skies in Europe, and Steve Owens, co-coordinator of the IYA plans in the UK, is determined to gain recognition from the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) as a lasting legacy for the 2009 celebrations. The certification process is challenging. According to the Guardian, "to earn dark sky park status, officials in Galloway will submit digital photographs of the night sky taken through a fisheye lens. Their application must be supported by readings from light meters at different points in the park, and a list of measures that are being taken within the forest to prevent lights in and around the handful of farm buildings from spilling upwards into the sky and ruining the view." The IDA website itself contains everything that "locations with exceptional nightscapes" need to know to submit their application to be certified as "International Dark Sky Communities (IDSC), International Dark Sky Parks (IDSP), and International Dark Sky Reserves (IDSR).” Currently, there is only one dark-sky community in the world (Flagstaff, AZ), and just two dark-sky parks (the first, Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah, and the slightly less well-known Cherry Springs State Park in northern Pennsylvania). There are no actual reserves yet; indeed, the concept is still being thrashed out in partnership with UNESCO (who issued their own Starlight Reserve framework in 2007).    [Images: The "center of the Milky Way," photographed by the European Southern Observatory at al.; the galaxy NGC 281, photographed by Ken Crawford of the Rancho Del Sol Observatory; and the Pleiades, photographed by Philip L. Jones].The idea of a human-created dark sky park is fascinating, of course, as are the architectural and landscape modifications that must be undertaken by town councils and park management services in order to secure a qualifying Bortle score. For example, Observatory Park in Montville Township, Ohio, has been awarded provisional IDSP status (Silver Tier), contingent on "the completion of the park’s outdoor lighting scheme, visitor’s center, and enactment of outdoor lighting ordinances in surrounding townships." The Geauga Park District submitted their 34-page Lighting Management Plan (read the PDF) in August 2008, detailing various proposals for the reduction of local skyglow (as opposed to natural airglow), light trespass, and glare. These include full shading for all light installations and lighting curfews, as well as strategic tree planting. The concept of shaping the ground to frame and enhance the sky is not new (for instance, James Turrell’s Skyscapes are an architectural attempt to achieve " light effects and perceptual events" centered on a complex reframing of the sky). Nonetheless, the idea of rebuilding and landscaping an entire community specifically for the purposes of experiencing darkness is an exciting one – as is the idea of UNESCO, official protector of World Heritage Sites, attempting to safeguard dark skies as a "natural and cultural property." Scotland, with its northerly latitude and constant rain (which cleans the atmosphere of dust), has perhaps discovered its global tourist niche: A spokesman for VisitScotland, which is working closely with Dark Sky Scotland, ventured that "the night sky could be as important for tourism as the landscape."
 [Image: Sludge makes itself at home in Harrimann, Tennessee; photo by J. Miles Carey/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated Press/New York Times].Earlier this week the retaining wall of a massive sludge dam gave way 40 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee, resulting in a coal ash spill that now lies "thick and largely untouched over hundreds of acres of land and waterways." Houses and business have been buried whole or swept off their foundations by the potentially toxic material; amidst its unnaturally concentrated ingredients are selenium, arsenic, and lead, all of which produce "neurological problems" and cancer. "The breach occurred," the New York Times explains, as if describing a painting by from a little-known Appalachian Series by Caspar David Friedrich, "when an earthen dike, the only thing separating millions of cubic yards of ash from the river, gave way, releasing a glossy sea of muck, four to six feet thick, dotted with icebergs of ash across the landscape. Where the Clinch River joined the Tennessee, a clear demarcation was visible between the soiled waters of the former and the clear brown broth of the latter." An updated aerial survey now suggests that more than 5 million cubic yards of this possibly neurologically-active waste has been released – "enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep" – forming a new self-organized landscape of industrial byproducts, a future stratigraphic surprise for our next millennium's archaeologists. Or perhaps this is the metallization of the world long ago dreamed of by the Italian futurists. Adventures in metallized deterrestrialization.
 [Image: By Craig Hodgetts, from his prospective drawings for a film adaptation of Ecotopia].Over on the Architect's Newspaper Blog, Ken Saylor takes a look at the novel Ecotopia, recently discussed by The New York Times. Amusingly, that novel's key phrases, according to Amazon.com, include "extruded houses," "ritual war games," "forest camp," and "San Francisco." However, what the NYT fails to mention, Saylor adds, is that, in 1978, architect Craig Hodgetts "produced a wondrous set of drawings for a Hollywood movie adaptation of the pulp classic. With plenty of savvy and pop-culture sensibility, the script was translated into awe-inspiring architectonic visuals. The drawings were exhibited and published, but alas, the project never made it to the silver screen." The images include solar-powered, high-speed maglev trains that "utilize a 'lifting body' profile to reduce gravity forces at speed, allowing lightweight bridges that act in tension rather than compression," as well as "balloon generators over San Francisco Bay," complete with their associated "maintenance gondolas." Check out the original post for more images – with captions by Hodgetts himself – and more information about the unfortunately undeveloped film adaptation. However, I have to add, briefly, that architecture is by its very nature a specific form of science fiction: whether we're using it to design luxury high-rises, modular refugee camps, solar towers, or complete urban ecotopias, architecture gives us the means, on par with literature and mythology, through which we can re-imagine the world. Architecture, by definition, is speculation about the future.
A Google Maps mash-up by Sydney-based design firm CarlosLabs has us looking at what nuclear explosions would do to cities all over the world.  [Image: London nuked, courtesy of CarlosLabs]."This mapplet," we read, "shows the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion. Search for a place, pick a suitable weapon and press ' Nuke It!'" The image you see above is London as decimated by an atomic bomb equivalent to the freakishly terrifying Soviet Tsar Bomba test of 1961. Everything as far as Guildford has been damaged – the entire center of the city simply gone. Below, we see Chicago obliterated by the same size of explosion. Looking closely, we see that the difference between a first- and second-degree burn – and this information is explained a bit more, below – passes directly through the distant suburban town in which I was born, Highland Park.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].Waters along the shore of Lake Michigan would be instantly evaporated, forming radioactive rainstorms over northern Indiana, perhaps for days. The size of the bomb can be varied, of course; here we see Los Angeles hit by any typical nuclear warhead carried by an American fighter jet, circa 1991; and, below that, we see New York City hit by a bomb equivalent to Fat Man, the device dropped on Nagasaki.   [Images: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].And here, below, is Rome hit by Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – and the first nuclear device ever used as an act of war. If it's any consolation to Catholics – or architectural historians – the extreme, northwestern fringes of the Vatican would escape immediate harm.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].Alternatively, let's drop Little Boy on Edinburgh.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].All of this is visually arresting – seeing vast bruises like bull's eyes consume whole cities – but what does it really mean? What is each colored circle supposed to represent? In the following image of Mumbai being hit by a nuclear missile equivalent to those used by the Chinese military, we see concentric rings of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree burns expanding outward from the detonation – a geometry of necrosis, suffocation, and death. Blisters and cancer would affect tens of thousands of people for miles in every direction (depending on prevailing winds).  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].For some unexpected astronomical context, though, CarlosLabs has added a bizarre final option: seeing how asteroid impacts might compare with inter-urban nuclear war. Tokyo – where the following image is centered – is not merely erased; struck by an asteroid, it's been placed at the heart of a planetary event, complete with rings of sunburn-equivalent injury spreading out across whole continents.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].Returning to the realm of historical likelihood, the image that somehow clarifies this the most for me – if, for no other reason, because I live there – is the following glimpse of San Francisco. The entire peninsula has been blasted into absolute, smoking oblivion by an explosion equal to Tsar Bomba. The fact that you would be more or less screwed as far south as Fremont – and well east of Oakland – seems sobering, indeed. You could be sitting in the west-facing window of an Oakland high-rise, watching an atomic fireball explode over San Francisco – which quickly expands to melt the glass you're looking through.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].A few quick points, meanwhile: 1) This will mean very little, and have no effect, but I am 100% behind complete nuclear disarmament. The U.S. taking the lead in this seems like something well worth pursuing. 2) In this context, I have to say that the books of Richard Rhodes cannot be recommended highly enough. His The Making of the Atomic Bomb – which I have to confess to having read only partially – is required reading for anyone interested in what intensive, well-funded efforts of design can – in this case, unfortunately – produce. The bomb as an act of national infrastructure. 3) Michael Light's book 100 Suns, a photographic survey of nuclear weapon tests, is as horrifying as it is visually spectacular, especially for anyone with an interest in human history (and its explosive intersection with enriched geology). 4) Gary Snyder has a great poem that I still think of now and again, 17 years after first reading it, called "Bomb Test." Originally written, I believe, in Kyoto in 1986, the poem presents nuclear weapons as a kind of new terrestrial element, something geologically unprecedented both in and on the surface of the earth – highly processed samples of mineral chemistry (uranium, plutonium) put into military service by rival superpowers. "The fish float belly-up, for real," Snyder writes. "Uranium in the whites / of their eyes. They've been swimming
Deep down where it's black when a
Silvery snow of something queer
glinted in
From cirrus clouds to the seamounts,
Through all the food chains,
Shrimp to tuna, the currents,
Riding the waves. This "silvery snow," he suggests, is something outside biological experience altogether. Ironically, though, this is exactly what makes radioactive fallout perhaps the only true, long-term marker of human presence on the earth. It is our greatest fossil, so to speak. Even now, the globally nomadic residues of nuclear weapons tests form a ghostly stratigraphic marker that can be found literally around the world, an all but permanent part of the earth's sedimentary record. So, in the images that illustrate this post, we see what effects this geological discovery – the explosive power of rare elements – could have on the built geography of our species. Nuclear war thus poetically equates to hurling enriched fragments of the earth's surface at your rivals. Call it weaponized geology: minerals made altogether unearthly, if not post-terrestrial, through anthropological intervention. 5) Here is a random assortment of nuclear bomb photography. These were all Cold War-era tests – but, someday, perhaps soon, architects and architecture bloggers will be looking at similar images, images that have captured the obliteration of constructed environments from Mumbai or Karachi to New York, London, or Tehran. This will happen, I would say; it might well occur within our lifetimes, or at least within the next century; and any even partially accurate future assessment of global urbanism must still take nuclear weapons into account. Nuclear weapons present us with a kind of demonic skeleton key, capable of catastrophically unlocking any city in the world, no matter how dense or well-fortified, in mere seconds.  Finally, here is what would happen if a nuclear bomb was dropped on a relatively non-urban environment: in this case, the town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  [Image: Courtesy of CarlosLabs].But this could just as easily have been Ann Arbor, Santa Cruz, Austin, Shrewsbury, Castleton, Aberystwyth, Marburg – it could just as easily have been anywhere on earth. The overwhelming obliterative power of nuclear weapons turns them into a kind of ubiquitous anti-landscape, something that no geography, built or natural, can successfully resist. All of which is simply a long-winded way of saying that while we now tend to measure threats against our cities in terms of armed gangs or contextually minor moments of staged terrorist assault, it's still interesting to remember that, hovering over all of this, is something that could simply annihilate cities altogether. If we're going to study cities, in other words, then we should also study that which is radically anti-city. (Spotted via Alexis Madrigal and Wired Science).
Homes in the Swedish town of Halmstad, the hometown of soccer star and former men's underwear model Freddie Ljungberg, will soon be using excess heat from the town's crematorium to stay warm each winter.  "Officials in the western Swedish town came up with the idea," the Telegraph reports, "after a recent environmental review concluded that the crematorium's chimneys were pumping far too much smoke into the air. Inspectors said the crematorium would have to buy new ovens in order to meet basic environmental standards." "It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad. "For starters we will heat our own premises. But I hope we can connect to the district heating network in the future." A bit more on how it would work: When a body is cremated, toxic materials are released from the corpse. For example, fillings in the teeth, when heated to high temperatures, release mercury. In order to filter out the toxic materials before they are released into the air, the crematorium must cool the smoke from around 1,000ºC to 150ºC. But, with the heat now directed into the public heating system, the smoke will already be much closer to 150ºC and the crematorium will spend less on materials, including water, to cool it down. This might be the most obvious – and least interesting – thing I could say right now, but this sounds an awful lot like the premise of a film – starring Paris Hilton, say – in which joy-riding teens stumble upon an idyllic small town in northern Vermont, or perhaps Minnesota, only to realize that all the homes around them, including the nice B&B in which they've booked a room, are warmed by an underground labyrinth of pipes and tunnels... that gets all its heat from burning corpses. What sound like distant screams coming in through the bathroom air vent at 2 in the morning leads one of them to explore... But what constitutes a morally acceptable source of alternative energy? Who decides? (Thanks to John Devlin for the link!)
 [Image: John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, 1824].Almost exactly a year ago, the Guardian wrote that "huge tracts of Britain's landscape should be reclaimed from farming and go back to nature to lock up carbon dioxide and counter global warming." This would mean, for instance, that "traditional farming would be wound down in marginal areas while some landscapes should be 're-wilded' to absorb more water and reduce flooding downstream. Peat bogs, which can store carbon, must be conserved and restored." The change would not come quick, and it would be controversial, a government ecology expert adds; after all, "There's a deep cultural resistance to the idea of land no longer being farmed," even if that land does have "other values which are now probably much higher for society." Would similar strategies be useful here in the United States? Like some scene from a future, sci-fi-inflected John Steinbeck novel, we'd abandon entire corporate agribusiness complexes to leave those now-lost farms in a state of second nature, re-wilded, gone to seed, subject to a different kind of valuation.
 [Image: New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; photographer unknown].One of very many interesting points made by Jan Zalasiewicz in his new book The Earth After Us is that rising sea levels in an era of global climate change might actually – ironically – increase humanity's long-term chances of urban fossilization. "If we and our children are very unlucky over the next few decades," he writes, "and the waters rise swiftly, then many of our cities may be as well preserved as Pompeii, as though in aspic." After all, he adds, "if the sea rises quickly enough, and there is not time for the waves to do their work, landscapes may be drowned entire. Only a few meters beneath sea level, and what was the land now lies below the destructive surf zone. A hundred meters below sea level, and even the most violent storm waves can scarcely be felt. So, let the sea flood in, with its level jumping by meters over centuries or decades – or perhaps even years – and there simply will not be time for this wave energy to erode the landscape."  [Image: The aquatic aftermath of Hurricane Ike, photographed by Carlos Barria for Reuters; via The Big Picture].Then, once everything's underwater, the silting will begin. The planet's submerged coastal and river-delta cities will thus be "covered with sand and mud," entombed within the very landscapes upon which they once rested. This would immediately put these regions beyond the reach of erosion – except perhaps for a little localized scouring by strong tidal currents – and into the kingdom of sedimentation. Our drowned cities and farms, highways and farms, would begin to be covered with sand, silt, and mud, and take the first steps towards becoming geology. The process of fossilization will begin. And then, like some gigantic ribcage from a species no one will fully comprehend, bits of New Orleans and Amsterdam and Hanoi will be unearthed amidst the mudstones of a future geography. So might rapid climate change mean not the complete erasure of humanity's material traces but, with fantastic irony, civilization's geologically long-term preservation?
 [Image: Art by Joe Alterio; view larger].
I'm thrilled to announce that BLDGBLOG and Wired Science have teamed up with Swissnex to host a live interview—free and open to the public—with University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, from Oxford University Press.
The event will be from 7-9pm on Wednesday, December 17th, at Swissnex, 730 Montgomery Street, in San Francisco; here's a map.
Zalasiewicz's book offers a fascinating and sustained look at what will happen to the material artifacts of human civilization 100 million years from now, when cities like Manhattan are mere trace fossils in flooded submarinescapes, Amsterdam is an indecipherably fragmentary presence in the lithified mudflats of a new, future continent, and cities like Los Angeles and Zurich have been eroded away entirely by a hundred million years of rockslides and weather.
To quote an early chapter from Zalasiewicz's book at length: The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of – and in large part because of – the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity. One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth's surface will have been wiped clean of human traces.
(...)
Thus, one hundred million years from now, nothing will be left of our contemporary human empire at the Earth's surface. Our planet is too active, its surface too energetic, too abrasive, too corrosive, to allow even (say) the Egyptian Pyramids to exist for even a hundredth of that time. Leave a building carved out of solid diamond – were it even to be as big as the Ritz – exposed to the elements for that long and it would be worn away quite inexorably.
(...)
So there will be no corroded cities amid the jungle that will, then, cover most of the land surface, no skyscraper remains akin to some future Angkor Wat for future archaeologists to pore over. Structures such as those might survive at the surface for thousands of years, but not for many millions. The book goes on to explore buried cities, flooded cities, and cities destroyed by erosion; the long-term traces of different materials, from concrete and steel to nuclear waste and industrial plastics; and the future magnetic presence of urban metals that have been compressed into the thinnest bands of underground strata. We'll be talking about cities like New Orleans, London, Hanoi, and Shanghai; New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, and Geneva. What "signals" of their one-time existence will these cities offer in 100 million years' time? About Mexico City, Zalasiewicz writes: Mexico City has a good short-term chance of fossilization, being built on a former lake basin next to active, ash-generating volcanoes; but its long-term chances are poor, as that basin lies on a high plateau, some two kilometers above sea level. The only ultimate traces of the fine buildings of [Mexico City] will be as eroded sand- and mud-sized particles of brick or concrete, washed by rivers into the distant sea. With visions of cities become not spectacular, vine-covered ruins but but vast deltaic fans of multi-colored sand, the book looks at the future geological destinies of everything from plastic cups to clothes.
Alexis Madrigal, from Wired Science, and I will also have five copies of Zalasiewicz's book to give away to attendees, and there will be drinks and light food after the event, so it will be well worth coming out.
If you get a chance, please RSVP at the Swissnex site, so that they can keep track of expected visitors.
(With special thanks to Joe Alterio for the artwork!)
 [Image: From Power from the Wind by Palmer Cosslett Putnam]."In May 1931," author Palmer Cosslett Putnam wrote in his 1949 book Power from the Wind, and "after two years of wind measurement, a wind-turbine 100 feet in diameter was put in operation on a bluff near Yalta, overlooking the Black Sea, driving a 100-kilowatt, 220-volt induction generator, tied in by a 6300-volt line to the 20,000-kilowatt, peat-burning steam-station at Sevastopol, 20 miles distant." As if anticipating BLDGBLOG's recent look at infrastructural domesticity, Putnam points out that "a streamlined house" containing generators was held aloft behind the turbine – but this "house" also offered a temporary place of rest to the maintenance workers who checked up on the turbine's workings. Accessible via a long flight of stairs, this airborne space added a small touch of domestic comfort to an otherwise industrial piece of machinery in the sky. [Sent in by Alexis Madrigal, who also had this image scanned from Putnam's book].
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