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Yesterday, as James Joyce fans will know, was Bloomsday: June 16th. The day Leopold Bloom made his famous walk around Dublin in Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses.  [Image: Street map of Dublin].Ulysses – considered something of the ultimate in literary modernism, as much for its mythical remaking of everyday life as for its often impenetrable abstraction, presaging Joyce's later linguistic kaleidoscope, Finnegan's Wake – was, for me, utterly transformed when my brother suggested that it was actually an attempt at descriptive realism. That is, should you want to describe a man's walk around the city in as detailed and realistic a way as possible, capturing every minor event and instant, then you would have to include the circumstances of that walk in their often bewildering totality: every fragmentary thought process, directionless flight of fancy, and irrelevant detail noticed along the way, via a million and one dead-ends. Things remembered and then forgotten. Deja vu. That daydream you had early today? That was, Ulysses suggests, part of the infrastructure of the city you live in. The city here becomes a kind of experiential labyrinth: it is something you walk through, certainly, but it is also something that rears up mythically to consume the thoughts of everyone residing within it. To say that Ulysses, then, is one of the most realistic urban novels ever written surely sounds like a joke to anyone not connected to academia – yet, once the apparent absurdity of such a statement wears off, it seems utterly ingenious. After all, how do you map the city down to its every last conceivable detail? And what if cartography is not the most appropriate tool to use? What if narrative – endlessly diverting narrative, latching onto distractions in every passing window and side-street, with no possible conversation or observation omitted – is the best way to diagram the urban world? In such a constellated wealth of minor points, "realism" becomes a useless haze – like listening to every conversation at a party simultaneously. And that's before you add internal monologues and descriptive details from the pubs and sidewalks all around you. In any case, there are many secondary points to make here. For instance, I'd actually suggest that the narrative position just outlined actually describes not a person at all but a surveillance camera – that is, the Ulysses of the 21st century would actually be produced via CCTV: it would be Total Information Awareness in narrative form.  But the whole point of this post was actually to ask two things: 1) What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book? At the very least, this would be an awesome proposition for a design studio: read Ulysses and then design the city it describes... The differing responses would be fascinating. Further, this raises the question of whether a city has ever been built, directly inspired by a work of fiction. Of course, you could stretch the term fiction a bit, and say that those fundamental fictions of a nation's founding myths might have inspired a city – or an historic preservation district – or perhaps you could even say, as if channeling Michael Sorkin, that the city's zoning code is itself a monumental act of narrative modernism. But what about an actual novel? If you can take, say, Moonraker by Ian Fleming and turn it into a film – that is, Moonraker, directed by Lewis Gilbert – then could you also take a novel – here, Ulysses – and turn it into a city? 2) If you fed Ulysses into a milling machine – that is, if you input not a CAD file but a massive Microsoft Word document containing the complete text of Ulysses – what might be the spatial result? Would the streets and pubs and bedrooms and stairwells of Dublin be milled from a single block of wood? What if you fed Ulysses through a 3D printer? Oddly, I'm reminded here of something that has long fascinated me: quipu, the so-called knot language of the Inca. Quipu, to make a very long story short, is a way of braiding strands of animal hair or colored yarn together, using specific types of knot; these knots, arrayed in specific orders, thus communicate things to others – whether that's accounting information or perhaps even cultural myths. It was a form of writing, in other words, although its words were 3D shapes. As a brief aside, the possible paranoias of a quipu translator have always seemed particularly stunning to me: for instance, someone over-immersed in the world of Andean knot-languages becomes convinced that, in the drooping symmetry of a basketball net or in the shoelaces of strangers walking past on the street, there might be written messages: epic poems, secret codes, unintended diary entries. Instead of Freudian dream-analysis, you perform quipu knot-analysis, even examining the micro-fibers of strangers' clothing for hidden meanings... (It's worth mentioning that this exact idea actually appears in the unwatchably annoying film Wanted). In any case, I mention quipu here because I can't even believe how cool it would be if 3D printers might someday be used to create word-objects: little amorphous and abstract three-dimensional shapes that aren't just works of art, they are a new form of writing. Like quipu, they are 3D linguistics: words in space. The idea here that all those high-end design items you see lining the shelves of boutique shops in downtown Milan or Moscow or Manhattan are actually strange new, highly literal forms of communication, makes the mind reel. Spy films of the future! MI6's man in Havana goes into a specialty cookware shop where the salt and pepper shakers are not at all what they seem... Or, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the FBI begins leaving little figurines in empty hotel rooms, knowing that the next guest will be an undercover informer – and those abstract statuettes left behind in the cupboard actually encode the next location of rendezvous... And so on. So the point of this long tangent is this: if you fed Ulysses through a 3D printer, what might the resulting shapes be? What if the unexpected blobs and shapes could be considered a translation of the novel?  [Image: Historical maker for the birthplace of Leopold Bloom in Dublin].Inspired by Bloomsday, then, it seems well-timed to ask not only how our cities can best be mapped – and if narrative is, in fact, the ideal cartographic strategy – but what other physical possibilities exist for narrative expression. Put another way: what if James Joyce had been raised in an era of cheap 3D printers? After all, given the possibilities outlined above, we might even someday be justified in concluding that Dublin itself is a written text, and that Ulysses is simply its most famous translation.
Perhaps proof that J.G. Ballard didn't really die, he simply took an engineering job at MIT, scientists at that venerable Massachusetts institution have designed a new concrete that will last 16,000 years. Called ultra-high-density concrete, or UHD, the material has so far proven rather strikingly resistant to deformation on the nano-scale – to what is commonly referred to as "creep." This has the (under other circumstances, quite alarming) effect that "a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today's concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete." (Emphasis added).So how long until we start building multistory car parks with this stuff? 16,000 years from now, architecture bloggers camped out for the summer in rented apartments in Houston – the new Rome – get to visit the still-standing remains of abandoned airfields, dead colosseums, and triumphal arches that once held highway flyovers? 16,000 years' worth of parking lots. 16,000 year's worth of building foundations. Perhaps this simply means that we're one step closer to mastering urban fossilization. (Thanks, Mike R.!)
Like an inversion of J.G. Ballard's first novel, The Wind From Nowhere – in which winds blow to hurricane strength around the world, flattening cities, decimating civilization, and making readers wonder why the book wasn't simply written as a short story – it seems that winds across the continental U.S. are slowing down.  [Images: Three covers from J.G. Ballard's first novel, The Wind From Nowhere: "London and New York reduced to rubble," the cover on the right side reads, "as nature goes mad"].As The New York Times reports, "wind speeds in the United States have dropped 15 to 30 percent over the course of about 30 years." There is absolutely no reason to assume that this trend will continue at the same pace – but, should it, the winds of America would come to a stand-still within just four or five generations. One of the suspected reasons behind this atmospheric deceleration is climate change, the NYT explains: As polar regions warm faster than the Equator... the temperature difference between them – and the pressure differential – shrinks. And, lower pressure differences mean slower winds. Of course, it shouldn't be surprising, meanwhile, that, "in scattered pockets of the country, wind speeds have risen." These sorts of changes are rarely homogenous: a cooling trend in one spot is matched by a warming trend in another; the death of breezes in one location is counteracted by increased number of hurricanes elsewhere. Nonetheless, how interesting to speculate what might happen if the atmosphere gradually did fail, falling still, forming the aerial equivalent of a glacier: hazy and unmoving, polluted and heavy, a kind of anti-hurricane with no less deadly effects in the long term. Certain plants would no longer pollinate. International travel, by both sea and air, would become unpredictable. The use of fossil fuels would skyrocket. I do wonder, then, if Ballard, given another few years in which to write, might have tried out this kind of anti-storm scenario, describing a world without aerial movement. The death of the sky.
Adventures in home foreclosure continue: empty homes in the U.S. hurricane belt run the risk of becoming "wind-propelled debris." As the Associated Press reports, "communities at the epicenter of the nation's housing crisis are coming to realize that this year's hurricane season, which began this month, represents yet another pitfall." In other words, "hurricanes could make hazards of thousands of foreclosed-upon houses" – turning those homes into airborne projectiles. Building-storms. After all, the AP asks, "who will secure all the foreclosed homes if a storm does approach?" It must be an eery feeling, I'd suspect, when you realize that all those empty houses sitting around you might someday be weaponized: latent storms of wood and vinyl siding just waiting for the moment when they can pick up and whirl through the streets, like something out of Transformers 3. But do you tear the houses down in advance of a storm that might never arrive? Or do you surround your own home with vast nets and deflection shields for protection against inevitable debris? Ironically, as Steve Silberman – who first sent me this link – points out, there is simultaneous interest in using these very foreclosed homes as hurricane shelters. As the Florida Courier points out, this idea, if implemented, would also "address a source of concern among emergency specialists in Florida: the growing number of vacant homes that could be splintered into construction debris by a hurricane if no one secures them with shutters and plywood."
 [Images: Three aerial photos of suburban Arizona by Daquella Manera, used through a Creative Commons license].Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News. Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner's permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks. The result is that "neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days." First we were surrounded by ruins, and then those ruins began to sing. (Thanks to Steve Silberman for the link!)
 [Image: Photo by John Gay: an F/A-18 creates a condensation cone as it breaks the speed of sound].An email was sent out last week from the Regional Public & Private Infrastructure Collaboration Systems (RPPICS) – an organization with no web presence – warning many businesses in and around Los Angeles that city residents "could hear up to a dozen sonic booms this morning [June 11] as some NASA F/A-18 aircraft fly at supersonic speeds around Edwards Air Force Base." While the "loudness of the booms will vary," we read, these are only "preliminary calibration flights for an upcoming NASA study" that will research how "to reduce the intensity of sonic booms." Part of this will be studying "local atmospheric conditions," including air pressure, wind speed, and humidity, as these all entail acoustic side-effects. It's a sonic cartography of the lower atmosphere: an echo-location exercise. The geometry of noise. Sound-bombing L.A. from above in order to know the exact acoustic shape and structure of the sky.
Why a firm based in Bangalore could be so unbelievably stupid that they think leaving dozens and dozens of comment spam messages on BLDGBLOG is a way to drum up business is beyond me – but, should you be looking for awful work produced by morons, then be sure to waste your money hiring a Bangalore-based firm that has comment-spammed an architecture blog near you.
 The city of Venice has begun to rebrand its tap water, calling it Acqua Veritas, in an attempt to woo both residents and tourists away from the environmental hazards (and waste collection nightmare) of bottled water. After all, Italians are "the leading consumers of bottled water in the world," the New York Times reports, "drinking more than 40 gallons per person annually." Further, "Venice’s tap water comes from deep underground in the same region as one of Italy’s most popular bottled waters, San Benedetto" – so turning Venetians on to the miracles of the tap (and setting an example for cities elsewhere) is clearly overdue. However, as we saw earlier on BLDGBLOG, in a guest post by Nicola Twilley, bottled water now sits on the cusp of becoming as pretentious as the wine industry, complete with a developing vocabulary for taste preferences and even an emerging geography of aquatic terroir. In other words, it will be hard to break the Duchampian habit of seeking water in a bottle. Why Duchampian? Because bottled water is the ultimate readymade object; I'd even suggest that Marcel Duchamp very nearly discovered the bottled water industry when he first captured 50 cc of Paris Air, in an artwork of the same title, back in 1919.  [Image: Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art]. It's hard not to wonder what might have happened had Marcel Duchamp been alive just slightly later, and able to exhibit his artwork alongside – or even simply to hang out with – Andy Warhol; combine the readymade object with Warholian mass reproduction, substitute pure glacial water for Paris air, and perhaps today we'd all be drinking L'Eau de Duchamp. In any case, if cities around the world engaged in marketing campaigns similar to this one in Venice, however tongue-in-cheek it may be, might people finally regain interest in their own municipal water supplies? Croton Silver: The Taste of Manhattan™. (Vaguely related: The next bottled water industry? Chinese Air Bars).
Tom Vanderbilt – author of the excellent book Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, as well as the recent Traffic, and subject of a short but interesting interview in The BLDGBLOG Book – has a long article out in the The New York Times Magazine about the architecture (and energy implications) of large-scale data centers. This is the world of "increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers" that now dot the global landscape. What is this new type of space? "Call it the architecture of search," Vanderbilt writes: "the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year – often built on, say, a former bean field – that lie behind your Internet queries." Such buildings often blend in with the everyday urban landscape. For instance, Vanderbilt describes "NJ2, a data center located in Weehawken, N.J., just through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan." It is "an unmarked beige complex with smoked windows"; inside it "hum the trading engines of several large financial exchanges." The interesting thing here is that the machines stored inside NJ2 are stored there so that they can be as close as possible, geographically, with other machines: the ones that handle trades on Wall Street. Spatial proximity, in this case, cuts down on information-relay time, thus enabling large-scale financial processes to unfold nearly in real-time. We might say, then, that the built environment you see here – the distances between buildings and their urban or geographical locations – is thus an articulation not of architectural theory or of the stylistic assertions of one particular architect, but of the processing power of today's supercomputers. Future changes in processing speed might then ramify outward to further tweak the built environment. Vanderbilt explains that when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange moved its computers north, into NJ2 – a distance, we read, of 80 miles – they saved three milliseconds on every trade. Lest we laugh that off as the spatial equivalent of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we're told that "it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent." It's an awesome article – check it out if you get a chance.
 UCLA's cityLAB has launched a new design competition called (somewhat lamely) WPA 2.0, where the WPA refers to the Works Progress Administration. But the competition itself looks cool. Its tagline? Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City. It's a call for new visions of urban infrastructure: We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning. Sounds good in the abstract, but what are they specifically looking for? Quite a range: This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including but not limited to parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, "green" infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities. Judges include Stan Allen, Cecil Balmond, Elizabeth Diller, Walter Hood, Thom Mayne, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor – two of whom (Allen and Diller) I'm proud to say that I've served I've been on design juries with in the past. Here's the competition brief as a downloadable PDF. Read more at the competition website – and good luck!
 [Image: Evidence of an ancient hunting site; photo by John O'Shea, courtesy of ScienceDaily].In more archaeological news, evidence of an ancient human settlement, including "caribou-hunting structures and camps," has been found deep beneath the waters of Lake Huron: "More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron," ScienceDaily reports, "on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes." Of course, this goes rather well with our earlier look at the so-called " Lake Michigan Stonehenge." All told, then, it sounds like the Great Lakes need their own version of the North Sea Paleolandscapes project, an unbelievably interesting archaeological program, run by the University of Birmingham, that hopes "to rediscover Doggerland, the enigmatic country which once linked the Yorkshire coast with a stretch of Continental Europe from Denmark to Normandy but which now lies beneath the North Sea." (Spotted via Archaeology Magazine).
In a quick read through the consistently – and often amazingly – interesting links supplied by Archaeology Magazine, I came across an example of what is easily one of my favorite nonfiction plot twists: someone discovers that what they thought was a natural hill somewhere on their family property is actually an extremely ancient building. It has an interior, perhaps even underground corridors linking to other, nearby hills. It is not the surface of the earth, in other words, but a piece of architecture. Your backyard, to this way of thinking, might actually be a roof; you simply have to discover a way inside the building deep below.  [Image: The artificial hill at Cuween, an Orkney burial cairn, perhaps anticipating by thousands of years the architecture of Vicente Guallart; photos by Sigurd Towrie of Orkney Jar].In this case, we read, a farmer in the Orkney Islands of northwest Scotland, while plowing a relatively untouched field on his family land, uncovered a Neolithic chambered tomb just sitting there beneath the soil. It was a room – and suddenly he had access to it. "The structure itself is neat drystone construction," a local archaeologist explains, and "the wall curves round tightly and is beehived in by corbelling at the top. On the opposite side to the wall is a space topped by lintels, and indeed it was breaking one lintel that caused the site to be found. It’s early days yet, but it may be a Neolithic chambered cairn, some five or six thousand years old." Of course, readers of The BLDGBLOG Book, finally published this week in the United States, will recognize this same idea from the beginning of that book's "Underground" chapter (where the discovery of a tomb now known as Crantit Cairn is described in slightly fictionalized form). The bare bones of that story, however, are worth repeating here: one day, back in 1998, we read, a farmer "decided to plough [his] field in a different direction to normal – a seemingly insignificant decision that led to the discovery of what was hailed as one of 'the greatest archaeological finds of recent years.'" Specifically, "While ploughing, the tractor disturbed the roof of the tomb, dislodging a roofing slab. The slab fell to reveal a hole and daylight streamed into the underground chamber for the first time in millennia." With today's penchant for green roofs and other forms of " vegitecture," one wonders if similar such experiences might become exponentially more common in the distant future; two kids, playing around in the garden, pull a stone up from the flowerbed only to discover that they are standing atop the main gallery of a science museum constructed back in 2009 A.D. Zork Begins. In fact, as I mentioned in my lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York back in April, a similar sort of idea made a cameo appearance in The Day After Tomorrow. There, we watch as Dennis Quaid and his two colleagues are hiking across a rapidly forming glacier – only for one of them to crash through a skylight into the snow-buried mall below. It was not a glacier at all, in other words, but an unrecognized architectural form. In any case, perhaps the great human adventure of the year 45,000 A.D. will not be in outer space at all, but a terrifying Dantean super-tour through the deeply buried cities of our present age. People stumble through this seemingly endless underground labyrinth, spanning nearly the whole surface of the globe, utterly unaware of who created these buildings and why. In this context, old Celtic/Britannic myths of the Hollow Hills take on an especially interesting architectural resonance. I'm yet further reminded of many bunkers in the hills around San Francisco; seen from one side, these buildings appear to be mere mounds covered with gravel and weedy vegetation, like a gently rolling, even bucolic American landscape – but, from the other side, you find that they have heavily rusted metal doors... The implication here, that you could open a door and walk inside a manmade earth, where the hills around you are actually the roofs of old buildings, will never cease to amaze me.
What do you do when you're trying to shut down a high-profile prison for unofficially accused international terrorists? Ship the prisoners off to a nation of disappearing islands. The U.S. might shortly begin sending Chinese Muslim prisoners from its facility at Guantanamo Bay – itself an extra-judicial territory, or semi-sovereign administrative enclave, that both is and is not part of the United States – to a terrestrially complicated new situation in the Pacific island nation of Palau. Palau, of course, is disappearing. From one black hole to another, then. (Via @pruned).
 [Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed being towed through Venice towards the Arsenale basin, against a backdrop of Italian palazzi].Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.The 2009 Venice Biennale opened this week with an unexpected and quite beautiful piece of performance art. Artist Mike Bouchet had built a one-to-one scale replica of a typical American surburban home that he planned to install on floating pontoons in the Venice Arsenale basin. He called the project Watershed. David Birnbaum, the Biennale's curator, told camera crews filming the installation that he thought the project "sounded a bit megalomaniac," but the sight of the oversized house, clad in beige vinyl, flimsily bobbing up and down against a backdrop of palazzi and piazzi as it was towed through Venice's canals, was breathtaking. It was an architectural icon of the American Dream revealed in all its formulaic absurdity. Amazingly, then, one of the pontoons capsized, and the entire house sank to the bottom of the canal—an unintentional yet utterly perfect coda to the house's own built-in commentary. Now, a fake generic American suburban home will add its ruins to the underwater archaeology of Venice.  [Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed goes down].A two-minute video of the house's journey, and eventual fate, can be seen in full on YouTube. (Originally spotted on Flavorwire).
Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.Over the past two weeks, in two separate cities, multiple sightings of IDEO-like user-generated adaptations have reframed the motorbike as an intriguing addition to the emerging category of street furniture.  [Image: Photo by Lucy Crosbie, used under a Creative Commons license].The first example was spotted outside Richard Rogers's Channel 4 building in London, where a cluster of bike couriers had put their feet up onto their bikes' handlebars, tipping their helmets down over their faces, and allowing the seats to form a gently curved cradle for their spines. They thereby squeezed in a quick nap between jobs. Then, last week, as the streets of Trastevere overflowed with Romans celebrating the Festa della Repubblica, an unlucky Vespa parked next to a bustling enoteca was claimed as a bar stool and drink stand by several different groups over the course of the evening. In both cases, the bikes suddenly appeared remarkably well-designed for their off-menu functionality: the hammock-like seat cushion and broad, flat rear looked purpose-built for backs and beer, respectively. In fact, with just a few adaptations and some thoughtful urban planning, their potential as mobile street furniture could be taken to the next level. Simple additions—such as a gently vibrating seat cushion to work out muscle knots while couriers are snoozing, or flip-out cup holders behind the seat of the Vespa—combined with reserved parking spots for motorbikes outside bars and popular brunch spots, would surely enhance city life. Ambitious entrepreneurs could carve out a seasonal niche by deploying a fleet of specially customized motorbikes as on-demand mobile seating. Perhaps tourists visiting Rome for the day could even rent motorbikes in a shady side-street so as not to miss out on their expected siestas. And, particularly in London, where dedicated outdoor beer gardens—a losing proposition for at least three hundred days of the year, but the most desirable real-estate in the city on those few hot, sunny days—smart publicans would eagerly pay to rent a dozen Vespa bar stools for their clientele to enjoy. In each case, the motorbikes would be gone by the time pedestrian and vehicle traffic started up again—their mobility ensuring that streets and sidewalks remain uncluttered at peak flow. It would only be a matter of time before low-platform flat-bed trucks had rentable sofas installed in the back and were then parked at scenic overlooks, while empty lorries were re-purposed as hammock dormitories, circling airport terminals to snap up jet-lagged travelers intent on maximizing layover time. The first international Mobile Street Furniture Conference in Milan would be swiftly followed by the creation of an industry-sponsored urban planning lobbying arm, high-profile design contests, and premium membership schemes, allowing unlimited worldwide street furniture rental... [Previous posts by Nicola Twilley include The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion, among many others].
Just a quick note that I'm off to Turin tomorrow to participate in a conference called I Realize: The Art of Disruption, if any readers out there are in that city of long shadows and automobiles.  [Image: The massive Mole Antonelliana, Turin (1875); view larger].The point of the conference is to look at "breaking radically with the past, moving the horizon and embracing ambitious challenges." Even better, it takes place inside a "Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park" (here's a map) – and the other speakers include the one and only Bruce Sterling, legendary designer Peter Saville, architect Andrea Branzi, Nicolas Nova, Jennifer Higgie, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Nicola Perullo (director of Slow Food Italia), and many, many others. If you're around, be sure to introduce yourself (although my Italian, unfortunately, è inesistente).
 [Image: A Roman Triumph following the sack of Jerusalem].Amongst the many books I'm reading here in Rome this month – including Tobias Jones's surprisingly good Dark Heart of Italy, the incredible Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (J.G. Ballard wrote that he "found Paxton's post-mortem deeply unsettling, with its strong hint that the corpse [of fascism] might sit up at any moment and seize us by the throat" – Exhibit A here might be Andrew Brons's election this week to the European Parliament), and Roger Deakin's Waterlog – I'm making my way through two books by Mary Beard. Beard, of course, was the subject of a long, two-part interview with BLDGBLOG back in 2007. What I want to mention here comes from her book The Roman Triumph; it's only a brief quotation, but I like it. At one point Beard refers to the "theaters and porticoes" built in ancient Rome using wealth taken during Pompey's "eastern campaigns" in Armenia and elsewhere. However, she writes: The term "theaters and porticoes" hardly does justice to this vast building complex, which stretched from the present day Piazza Campo del Fiori to the Largo Argentina, covering an area of some 45,000 square meters. A daring – and, for Rome, unprecedented – combination of temple, pleasure park, theater, and museum, it wrote Pompey's name permanently into the Roman cityscape. Even now, though no trace remains visible on the ground, its buried foundations (and particularly the distinct curve of the theater) determine the street plan and housing patterns of the city above; it remains a ghostly template which accounts for the surprising twists and turns of today's back-streets, alleyways, and mansions. The not entirely surprising realization that the present-day street grid of Rome is actually an articulation of other, previously buried cities – cities not lost to history, then, but accessible in outline through the indirect archaeology of contemporary urban planning – reminds me of something that came up back at Postopolis! LA.  [Image: Fallen Fruit's map of the lost orchards of Silver Lake].During their presentation, the ingenious duo Fallen Fruit mentioned that, when they were mapping fruit trees in today's Los Angeles, they stumbled upon the borders of much older, abandoned fruit orchards. In other words, what appeared simply to be a random fig tree growing in someone's front yard was, when seen on a map together with other such trees, actually the remnant presence of a now-forgotten farm. Those trees, to use Beard's term, are the "ghostly template" from an earlier phase of land use. There is a different grid inside the grid, you might say – where each tree becomes something like a legal document, marking the outer boundaries of a lost landholding. Of course, both of these examples together bring to mind the lost airports of Los Angeles, those geographies of aerial experience that now sit buried and all but forgotten beneath millions of tons of pavement throughout the greater L.A. region. Other such examples are easy to come by – but their interest, for me, never dissipates. Whether it's the lost rivers of London still giving shape to the street plan above (or lost streams of Manhattan turning into underground fishing ponds), there are remnant geographies and ghostly templates everywhere. In fact, as I recently wrote in an introduction to photographer Shaun O'Boyle's forthcoming book Modern Ruins: Architectural Monuments of the Mid-Atlantic – definitely check it out upon publication in 2010 – this even includes our own bodies: forgotten anatomies still make themselves known through the structure and layout of our nerves and bones. But Rome, Los Angeles, London – these urban examples simply give our ghostly ancestors architectural shape.
Reader Louis Schultz has pointed out the work of Lithuanian-born artist Aleksandra Kasuba, who used curved surfaces of fabric stretched and attached between space frames in order to create inhabitable rooms and corridors.  [Images: The Live-in-Environment (1971) by Aleksandra Kasuba; the project "was built on a parlor floor of a brownstone house in New York City," we read. "The intent was to abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature"].These ephemeral installations were intended, spatially, as a way to "abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature." I love that latter caveat: to retain the experiential impact of unexpected natural vistas without simply copying, or simulating, the spatial details and material palette of the natural world. Instead, a somewhat stark world of undecorated surfaces curves around us – call it biomorphic minimalism – thus eliding the differences between architecture and large-scale tailoring. In any case, her Live-in-Environment, from 1971, seen in the images above, is a great example of this – but don't miss the Roof Deck Study from 1974; the Barbarella-meets-IBM world of torqued geometry from her Office Renovation Study (1975); the aerial tunnels of Art-in-Science I (1977), which look like some megafaunic form of undersea life, stretched through the canopies of a North American thicket ("With the assistance of three students during an eight week stay," Kasuba writes, "we explored the topology of 78 fabric structures, hardened 32 with resins, and erected 4 weather structures"); and the simplicity of Blue Shade (1978). Better yet, Kasuba supplies a section called How It Was Done – where you can learn how to create finishes, arches, and doors, for instance – and this includes Kasuba's extraordinary, lo-fi guide to shells, tube structures, and minimal surfaces. It's what The North Face might have become had their tent division been bought by Kenneth Snelson.
 [Image: Little Rome Ruins by Bernat Gallemí].An early burst of thunder woke me up this morning, before a brief wash of rain blew through – but what was extraordinary was that the sound of the thunder didn't pass all at once: it kept opening and echoing, as if moving outward through the city to trace the shapes of piazzas, streets, river banks, and alleyways. There was a kind of Dopplered geometry to it – an acoustic version of Rome exactly opposite the city's angles and walls. Live here long enough, and perhaps you could even tell when a storm has reached the Campo del Fiori – echolocating yourself amidst urban geography – because the thunder has opened out again, getting louder, or more resonant, only then to dampen itself back in a tight squeeze through surrounding alleyways. The sound moves through the city like a spider. You might say that thunder could be used here as a kind of horizontal space-detection device. It's urban radar: an acoustic sensing of the city that moves through that city, seeking out cracks and passageways. Only to fill those empty spaces with sound. A guild of blind mapmakers uses thunderstorms to pursue prehistoric radar cartography. It occurred to me, though, that every city – or, at least, every city with a different street grid – must react to thunder differently. Urban design becomes a direct sonic engagement with the atmosphere through storms, using the unique form of your city as a precise acoustic frame for the sky. Could there even be building types that funnel the sound of thunder? Like Athanasius Kircher's talking statues, they would be talking buildings: acoustically activated by thunder for the purpose of public spectacle. You could actually test people with this: put them blindfolded in different locations during foreign thunderstorms and ask them to deduce where they are from the widening concussions of sound around them. Moscow, Cairo, Rome, Fez. London, Barcelona, New York. All with their own sonic signatures: you pinpoint an aerial detonation and acoustically trace its spatial after-effects.
 [Image: The water selection at Claridge's, curated by Renaud Grégoire, food and beverage director].Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.The concept of terroir has its origins in French winemaking, as a means to describe the effect of geographic origin on taste. As a shorthand marker for both provenance and flavor, and as a sign of its burgeoning conceptual popularity, it has spread to encompass Kobe beef, San Marzano tomatoes, and even single-plantation chocolate. But can water have terroir? What about the influence of the earth on water? In late 2007, Claridge's (a luxury hotel in Mayfair, London) caused a minor stir by introducing a "Water Menu." The list features more than thirty mineral waters from around the world, described in terms of their origin and suggested flavor pairings. Leaving aside a few obvious issues (such as the environmental impact of bottled water and the sheer economic wastefulness of sending multiple varieties of it to one hotel in England), it is hard not to appreciate the poetry of three-line exotic water biographies. Take Mahalo Deep Sea Water, at £20 for 71cl, which comes from "a freshwater iceberg that melted thousands of years ago and, being of different temperature and salinity to the sea water around it, sank to become a lake at the bottom of the ocean floor. The water has been collected through a 3000ft pipeline off the shores of Hawaii." According to the Daily Mail, Mahalo has a "very rounded quality on the palate" and it "would be good with shellfish."  [Image: The Daily Mail's taste test results].Meanwhile, Danish Iskilde's "flinty, crisp style" apparently derives from the Jutland aquifer's complicated geology, consisting of interlaced deposits of quartz sand, clay, gravel, and soil. The most expensive (and possibly the most exciting) water on the menu is 420 Volcanic from New Zealand. Sourced from the Tai Tapu spring, which bubbles up through more then 650 feet of rock at the bottom of an extinct volcano, it is apparently "extremely spritzy on the palate with a tangy mineral finish." Claridge's has since been joined by the Four Seasons in Sydney, and, according to The Guardian, "a handful of five-star Los Angeles hotels now employ water sommeliers to advise on the best water accompaniment to spiced braised belly pork or fillet of brill with parmentier of truffled leek." This same Guardian article goes on to recount the origins of Elsenham Water, which is described as " absolutely pure" and "very earthy— almost muddy," depending on who you ask. Elsenham was discovered almost accidentally by Michael Johnstone, a former jam manufacturer; it is filtered over a 10-year period, in a confined chalk aquifer, half a mile below his abandoned jam factory and a neighboring industrial-sealant plant. Now, staff in white coats and hair nets fill up to 1,000 bottles daily "from an acrylic tank connected to pipes running into a hole in the ground." Each bottle, priced at £12 for 75cl, is then polished by hand before it leaves the building. According to Michael Mascha, former wine critic and author of Fine Waters: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Most Distinctive Bottled Waters, "water is in a transition from being considered a commodity to being considered a product." There is an undeniable Wild West gold-rush type of excitement to the idea of drilling for water in geologically auspicious locations. However, Mascha's comment also implies that we might even begin to see the engineering of gourmet water products. Loop tap water in a closed pressurized system for twenty years, through thick beds of pure northern Italian dolomite, and enjoy the lightly acidic result with chicken and fish. Better yet, blend it with water forced through a mixture of Forez and Porphyroid granite chips sourced from southwest France, stacked in a warehouse outside London to mimic in situ geological formations, to add a citrusy top note reminscent of Badoit. A final spritz of oxygen ensures a silky mouthfeel—combined with the right designer packaging—and the burgeoning ranks of water connoisseurs will be lining up at your industrial plant for a taste. [Previous posts by Nicola Twilley include Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion].
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