|
|
 [Image: A parking meter photographed by shooting brooklyn, via a Creative Commons license].A story I missed earlier this summer reports that Oakland, California, is making up for falling tax revenue by " aggressively enforcing traffic violations." The decision is driven by the city's budget woes, which deep cuts to city services alone did not solve. Falling sales and property, property transfer and hotel taxes have contributed to a $51 million decline in revenues. It's worth asking, though, whether paying "aggressively" increased fees and fines for our everyday use of the city – whether this means road tolls and garbage collection fees or suddenly unaffordable parking meters – is the best financial model for a post-taxation metropolis. Put another way, if the ongoing recession has revealed, amongst other things, that a new type of city, run along very different financial lines, looms just weeks away – a kind of make-your-own-omelette city of fines, fees, and services, where every ingredient is individually priced – then perhaps the recession might also stimulate a wider debate about what could be called method of payment. That is, what method of payment do we wish to use when it comes to living in a functioning metropolis? If we find ourselves paying no tax at all, for instance – no income tax, no sales tax, no property tax – would we be happy to pay parking tickets that hit upper limits of, say, $2000 or more each time, if this is what it takes to keep the city running? Conversely, would we be happy to pay more sales tax in order to avoid things like road tolls altogether? How exactly do we mix and match these urban outlays and receipts? This would seem to cut to some of the most basic questions of what services constitute a city in the first place: what a government might provide and how it is that we will pay for what it offers. In a distant way, and by means of a long digression, I'm reminded of the oft-repeated idea that nationalized health care would be a mere "hand-out," not a central platform of what any government might do to protect its citizenry. For instance, one man at a recent but quite bizarre anti-health care rally – during which a U.S. senator apparently praised this very man for his publicly announced support of terrorism – said that "he could trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower and said 'they did not arrive holding their hands out for help.'" Ergo, this man should not "hold out his hands for help" and ask the government for a doctor's visit. Of course, this same argument would surely never be advanced against, say, calling the police, calling the fire department, or accepting the defense of the U.S. military. Yet these are all tax-funded government services. The bizarre irony for me throughout all of this has been that police officers, fire crews, and members of the military are all, to use this language very deliberately, the most socialized subsector of the U.S. economy. That is, they are paid through what many people would call "government hand-outs." On the other hand, it is these very social positions that are often held up – by these same critics – as triumphant examples of national service and personal heroism. Indeed, it is not entirely inaccurate to say that The Greatest Generation was a generation of near-total tax-funded employment. If the recent health care debates are to be believed, doctors are not subject to this same sense of national appreciation; they are mysteriously yet fundamentally unlike the police, we are meant to believe, offering services that only private money can afford. But where is the line between private health (diabetes) and public safety (tuberculosis) – and when might this solidify into actual government infrastructure? Doctors are not like the tax-funded fire departments who we freely call to save us from wildfires, this logic goes, and they are quite unlike the government-supported soldiers who we have stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Surely, then, anyone who relies on the U.S. military to protect them is "holding their hands out for help"? In this context, it's worth speculating what might happen today if fire departments had, until now, been entirely privatized, motivated to protect you only if your insurance policy was up to date (as, indeed, was the case with the first urban fire departments, and as is now re-emerging in places like California). What would be the reaction, then, if someone proposed that these services be folded into a more general package of government services? If fire crews, in this model, suddenly became tax-funded and available to all citizens – indeed socialized as part of a shared, city infrastructure – would there be the same level of outrage? One wonders if fire crews might ever attain the entirely deserved levels of public adulation they now receive, if their tax-funded nature was, once and for all, revealed. Protesting citizens, like the gentleman cited above, might never have the stomach to "ask for help" from the government, even if their houses are burning down around them. In any case, I mention all this because of the urgency with which we need to rethink the world of urban services and the economic basis through which we pay for them. If the tax system, as it is currently operated, cannot pay for the very activities that we once thought synonymous with urbanity, are radical increases in one-off fees a permanent, economically viable solution to this problem or simply an irritating and only mildly effective band-aid? Is it better to pay more, once a year, in order to avoid such fees altogether? Further, how are we best to judge the effectiveness of increased fines and pay-as-you-go services: by the psychological sense of irritation that a penalty-based system might cause – I'm reminded of parking attendants required to wear bulletproof vests during streetwork – or by the comfort that a lack of taxes might provide? Or, more measurably, do we judge them by their physical effect on the city? (Original article spotted via the denialism blog).
 [Image: "Lightning Bugs in York, PA," by tom.arthur, courtesy of a Creative Commons license].
While traveling last week, I managed to re-read W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn. At one point, Sebald describes two entrepreneurial scientists from the 19th century, who he names Herrington and Lightbown; together, we're told, they had wanted to capture the bioluminescent properties of dead herring and use that as a means of artificially illuminating the nighttime streets of Victorian London. Sebald writes: An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness. Sebald goes on to write, elsewhere in the book, that, "From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away." But it's the idea that we could use the bioluminescent properties of animals as a technique of urban illumination that absolutely fascinates me. In fact, I'm instantly reminded of at least three things: 1) Last month I had the pleasure of stopping by the Architectural Association's year-end exhibition of student work. As part of a recent studio taught by Liam Young and Kate Davies – which, incredibly, included a field trip to the Galapagos Islands – a student named Octave Augustin Marie Perrault illustrated the idea of a "bioluminescent bacterial billboard." From the project text: "A bioluminescent bacterial billboard glows across the harbour... We are constantly reminded of the condition of the surrounding environment as the bio indicators becomes an expressive occupiable ecology."
 [Image: Bioluminescent billboards on one of the Galapagos Islands, by Octave Perrault].
In many ways, Perrault's billboards would be a bit like the River Glow project by The Living... only it would, in fact, be illuminated by the living. These bioluminescent bacteria would literally be a living window onto a site's environmental conditions (or, of course, they could simply be used to display ads). Liam Young, the studio's instructor, has also designed a version of these bioluminescent displays, casting them more fantastically as little creatures that wander, squirrel-like, throughout the city. They pop up here and there, displaying information on organic screens of light.
 [Image: Bioluminescent billboards by Liam Young].
I'm genuinely stunned, though, by the idea that you might someday walk into Times Square, or through Canary Wharf, and see stock prices ticking past on an LED screen... only to realize that it isn't an LED screen at all, it is a collection of specially domesticated bioluminescent bacteria. They are switching on and off, displaying financial information. Or you're watching a film one night down at the cinema when you realize that there is no light coming through from the projector room behind you – because you are actually looking at bacteria, changing their colors, like living pixels, as they display the film for all to see. Or: that's not an iPod screen you're watching, it's a petri dish hooked up to YouTube. This is what I imagine the world of screen displays might look like if Jonathan Ive had first studied microbiology, or if he were someday to team up with eXistenZ-era David Cronenberg and produce a series of home electronic devices. Our screens are living organisms, we'll someday say, and the images that we watch are their behavior.
2) As I mentioned in an earlier post, down in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales is a tunnel called the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel. It is a disused railway tunnel, bored through mountain sandstone 102 years ago, that has since become the home for a colony of glow worms. As that latter link explains: "If you want to see the glow worms, turn off your torch, keep quiet and wait a few minutes. The larvae will gradually 'turn on' their bioluminescence and be visible as tiny spots of light on the damp walls of the tunnel."  [Image: A map of the Glow Worm Tunnel Walk, New South Wales].
Incorporate this sort of thing into an architectural design, and it's like something out of the work of Jeff VanderMeer – whose 2006 interview here is still definitely worth a read. I'm picturing elaborate ballrooms lit from above by chandeliers – in which there are no lightbulbs, only countless tens of thousands of glow worms trapped inside faceted glass bowls, lighting up the faces of people slow-dancing below. Or perhaps this could have been submitted to Reburbia: suburban houses surviving off-grid, because all of their electrical illumination needs are met by specially bred glow worms. Light factories! Or, unbeknownst to a small town in rural California, those nearby hills are actually full of caves populated only by glow worms... and when a midsummer earthquake results in a series of cave-ins and sinkholes, they are amazed to see one night that the earth outside is glowing: little windows pierced by seismic activity into caverns of light below.
3) Several years ago in Philadelphia, my wife and I went out for a long evening walk, and we sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park – and everything around us was lit by an almost unbelievable density of fireflies, little spots of moving illumination passing by each other and overlapping over concrete paths, as they weaved in and out of aerial formations between the trees. But what if a city, particularly well-populated with fireflies (so much more poetically known by their American nickname of lightning bugs) simply got rid of its public streetlights altogether, being so thoroughly drenched in a shining golden haze of insects that it didn't need them anymore? You don't cultivate honeybees, you build vast lightning bug farms. How absolutely extraordinary it would be to light your city using genetically-modified species of bioluminescent nocturnal birds, for instance, trained to nest at certain visually strategic points – a murmuration of bioluminescent starlings flies by your bedroom window, and your whole house fills with light – or to breed glowing moths, or to fill the city with new crops lit from within with chemical light. An agricultural lightsource takes root inside the city. Using bioluminescent homing pigeons, you trace out paths in the air, like GPS drawing via Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. An office lobby lit only by vast aquariums full of bioluminescent fish! Bioluminescent organisms are the future of architectural ornament.  [Image: A bioluminescent tobacco plant, via Wikivisual].
On the other hand, I don't want to strain for moments of poetry here, when this might actually be a practical idea. After all, how might architects, landscape architects, and industrial designers incorporate bioluminescence into their work? Perhaps there really will be a way to using glowing vines on the sides of buildings as a non-electrical means of urban illumination. Perhaps glowing tides of bioluminescent algae really could be cultivated in the Thames – and you could win the Turner Prize for doing so. Kids would sit on the edges of bridges all night, as serpentine forms of living light snake by in the waters below. Perhaps there really will be glowing birds nesting in the canopies of Central Park, sound asleep above the heads of passing joggers. Perhaps the computer screen you're reading this on really will someday be an organism, not much different from a rare tropical fish – a kind of living browser – that simply camouflages new images into existence. Perhaps going off-grid will mean turning on the lifeforms around us.
 [Image: Inside Hagia Sophia; via].While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has "managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach," down there in flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul's heavily touristed religious structure. In the process, they have discovered 800-year old submerged graves containing the remains of "canonized children." This was just part of a larger, underwater archaeo-spatial survey: The divers and specialists explored the connection of the basins underneath Aghia Sophia with the aqueduct and the palace of Top Kapi. In addition they attempted to locate the secret tunnels from Tekfour Palace to the Islands. Those "secret tunnels" are presumably the rumored subterranean extensions of the Anemas Dungeons – but who knows. Either way, I have long been fascinated by the idea of scuba diving beneath – if not actually through – architectural structures, so I am definitely looking forward to watching Gülensoy's forthcoming documentary about these discoveries. That film, appropriately enough entitled In the Depths of Hagia Sophia, will begin screening at film festivals this autumn. "I believe what is beneath Hagia Sophia is much more exciting than what is above the surface," Gülensoy explained to the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review. There, we read about the flooded basins in more detail: Years ago, Erdem Yücer, one of the former directors of the museum, had shown Gülensoy a photograph that was taken of the foundations of Hagia Sophia. The photo showed researchers in a boat in a place filled with water, resembling the Yerebatan Cisterns. Seismic research had also demonstrated that the area underneath the big hall was empty. The team, which had previously lowered a camera down from the second door during the first exploration, was thrilled to see two passages extending to the center of the building and to the exit door – passages that might extend to Yerebatan and Topkapi. For somewhat obvious reasons, I'm reminded of the " huge underground lake" discovered underneath Budapest late last year. "Budapest is built above a maze of unexplored underground caves," The Sun reported at the time. In any case, the Hürriyet article includes short descriptions of the actual tunnels beneath Hagia Sophia, and it mentions plans for these otherwise archaeologically unknown spaces to be scanned for later study. This latter detail reminds me of the Bill Stone video that I linked a few days back. (With thanks to John Maas! Vaguely related: recreational fishing in the basements of Manhattan).
Having arrived back in London to another massive stack of books, magazines, and other architectural publications – including one-off broadsides, pamphlets, and even a deck of urban-themed playing cards – I've been immersed in a sea of mind-bending spatial ideas. This morning, I've been specifically thinking about the publication of student work, as I've (finally) been able to read through a recently published catalog of the Bartlett School of Architecture's 2009 school year.  [Image: From Unit 23 at the Bartlett, taught by Bob Sheil and Emmanuel Vercruysse].The book includes some amazing imagery and ideas – from a cantilevered "salt spa," by Janinder Bhatti, partially held up on shadow-casting stilts, to a "sailing school" proposed for a trans-continental urban site on the Bosphorus by Nicholas Elias, by way of a "landfill tower" for Manhattan designed by Gabriel Chung. There are two entirely separate designs for blood banks (one in Brooklyn by Stefano Passeri and one on the U.S./Mexico border by Victor Hadjikyriaki); there are the extraordinary-sounding "archaeological prosthetics for the Schliemann excavations of Troy" by Fei Meng; there is an ingenious pitch for a "South African Land Registry and Claims Court," in the guise of exploring "political geology," by Joshua Scott; there is a "dissolvable pavilion" by Snow Cai, a "Museum of Dust" by Olivia Pearson, and a "Roosevelt Island Respiratory Clinic" by Chiara Montgomerie, all from Unit 8, taught by Johan Berglund and Rhys Cannon; there is a "flower therapy institute" by Sandra Youkhana; and there is something that I am dying to know more about, called "Pioneering Weather" by Martin Tang. This latter project appears to be a kind of nuclear-powered sky-alteration device, complete with conical cooling towers and a wharf-like extension, perhaps implying its use for coastal weather generation.  [Image: Unidentified student work from Unit 15 at the Bartlett, taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy].However, I have to point out right away that the publication heavily over-prioritizes the instructors' own studio descriptions, giving, in almost all cases, no descriptions (sometimes not even a title) for the student work. When I say, above, that Martin Tang's project "appears to be" something, it is not because I didn't read the caption or because I don't want to repeat what Tang himself intended; it's because there is no textual explanation of what these student projects actually are (and the images themselves are too small to help). In other words, we're given tantalizing imagery and the occasional project title – but that's it. In fact, this seems to be a trend in year-end school publications, and I think it's a bad one. After all, when we see an extraordinary image for something called "Phileas Fogg's Orchestral Landscape," as designed by student Okan Kaleli, what exactly does this tell us? What is an "orchestral landscape," for instance, and how does this relate to the writings of Jules Verne? I would genuinely like to know – and I have a feeling that Kaleli would like to tell us. Or, when we stumble upon an eye-popping collage of architectural sections by student Nancy NiBhriain, what exactly are we looking at? What is the story or idea behind the image? One more example: one of the most complex 3D-printed objects I've seen in years – like some sort of nautiloid architectural structure as devised by H.R. Giger after spending two decades lost in the geometric depths of the Alhambra – is captioned simply as a project by Yousef Al-Mehdari (but what is it? what's the scale? did Al-Mehdari give it a title? or a story? is it meant for a certain site or purpose? is it a prototype? is it 3D-printed at all?). Readers like myself – and, I have to imagine, these students – are left frustratingly curious as to what it is that actually occurred inside that studio. It is sadly the case that year-end school catalogs like these are the only times that many of these students' work will ever be published, and so it would be nice – if not emotionally important – even to see short, 50-word descriptions of each project. After all, these students have worked their asses off for years now, and they deserve the exposure.  [Image: From Unit 21 at the Bartlett, taught by Christine Hawley, A. Ashton, and A. Porter].Commendably, the instructors of 2009's Unit 14 – Stephen Gage, Phil Ayres, and Richard Roberts – do exactly this, including short descriptions of each image; and, as a reader, I hugely appreciate it. For instance, we read: "Max Pringle, Wearable Buildings: Max is following a long standing interest in the boundaries between architecture, furniture design and fashion. This project is part of a 'collection' that proposes a wearable table cloth that is shared between two people." Or this: "Sam McElhinney, Switchable Labyrinths: Sam develops a maze by switching between monocursal labyrinth forms. This is investigated digitally through the creation of intelligent maze forms populated by intelligent agents and then at 1:1 [scale] as an interactive maze." That's it – but at least now I know what Pringle's and McElhinney's projects actually were, and I'm even given a glimpse into a whole suite of other possible ideas – all in less than 40 words. Less than 40 words. As a writer, it feels absurd to be asking that these students be given 40 words' worth of attention, but it's absolutely better than nothing. It's better for the students, better for the readers, and, I'd assume, also better for the school. Put another (and much more cynical) way: when every architecture student in the world today is busy producing vast, triangulated web-structures that sort of sprawl all over the city, for no immediately obvious reason, it is often the idea behind the project (and not, in fact, the rendered visual quality of your bio-, phylo-, viro-, rhizo-, this, that, and the other thing) that will make or break the project in final reviews. Of course, this raises another question, which is: why on earth is everyone currently engaged in architecture producing viral triangular web-nets? But I think that's a conversation for another day. Finally, an expansion of focus on student content like this will almost undoubtedly require more pages in future editions of these catalogs, but I would also urge these publications to step away from heavy, coated paper toward thinner stocks that allow for longer books while hitting the same price-point and actually, in the end, being easier (that is, lighter) to carry. The students would, presumably, appreciate the extra attention – and readers like myself would love to learn more about what they've made. For my own part, I know that, five years ago, it was year-end reviews of student projects, published by Cornell and the AA, that really got me interested in the narrative possibilities of architectural design – and it's a shame to see this aspect of spatial education played down today.
My wife and I are sitting in Sydney International Airport, getting ready to return to Europe – where all sorts of interesting things are scheduled for the next month or so, including the ASAE 2009 conference in Lund, Sweden, and Digital Architecture London, organized by Ruairi Glynn. But we spent the day yesterday touring an underground commercial mushroom farm south of Sydney, walking past endless racks of shiitake mushrooms growing under fluorescent lights, all of it deep inside a disused railway tunnel cutting through the hills of Mittagong (some photos and notes coming soon) – and having gone "adventure caving" through the limestone hollows of New South Wales the day before that. It's an unexpectedly underground ending to our time here in Australia. It's almost impossible to believe, though, that this trip really is over – but six weeks can pass with surprising rapidity. Such is the calendar. (Sorry, again, by the way, for the lack of anything resembling regular posting while I was down here). In any case, some interesting things to read while we fly 22 hours and 45 minutes back to London: — Smithsonian magazine takes a look at ancient cities lost to the seas – in the process, reminding us all that underwater archaeology is easily one of the most interesting things in the world. —Is there an "enormous system of caves, chambers and tunnels... hidden beneath the Pyramids of Giza"? Discovery asks. "Populated by bats and venomous spiders, the underground complex was found in the limestone bedrock beneath the pyramid field at Giza." —The Seasteading Institute will be hosting its second annual conference next month in San Francisco. —A simulated mine roof will allow engineers to predict mine collapse more accurately; you might not be surprised to learn that it is "the only mine roof simulator of its kind." "Using up to 3 million pounds of vertical force and 1.6 million pounds of horizontal force, it offers researchers the chance to test integrity, stability, and performance under simultaneous loads in the vertical and horizontal directions." A simulant underworld. — Danny Wills, whose recently uploaded travel photos appeared in the previous post, has also documented his visit to Mike Tyson's abandoned mansion in Ohio. —There is a tunnel down here in New South Wales that is illuminated inside only by glowworms. — Hadrian's Wall was apparently first built from wood. It only later became the earthwork that it remains, in ruined form, today. —A 6,000-year old building has been discovered in London, on the shores of the Thames, due to the excavatory expansion of Belmarsh Prison. — Archinect's Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition is now underway and looking for your participation. What is the appropriate scale to remember a man who operated on everything possible - from the studied renovation of his own human form to the creation of an architectural-scale wunderkamer at Neverland Ranch? What design proposal can top his own unrealized plans to construct a 50-foot robotic replica of himself that roams the Las Vegas desert shooting laser beams out of its eyes? The impressive judges' panel includes Sam Jacob, Michael Bierut, and Christopher Hawthorne. You have till August 22 to submit. —Is farming a cure for addiction? An experiment in agricultural reform takes root in upstate New York. —Complete with several odd – and quite loud – musical choices, deep-caver and professional engineer Bill Stone describes his underground adventures... which segues into his intention to build a "gas station" on the moon. Many of his subterranean explorations take him several days – and nearly two miles – beneath the surface of the earth. More links soon! The plane is boarding. (A few of these links were found via the excellent Archaeological News service of Archaeology magazine and via twitter.com/johncoulthart).
      [Images: Six photographs by Danny Wills, from the often awe-inspiring sets of 475 and 194 images that he has uploaded within the past 48 hours, all taken during his recent travels through Spain; there is some great work up there].
Omnivoracious, the Amazon.com editors' blog, has just posted a relatively long interview with BLDGBLOG about The BLDGBLOG Book – and I think it turned out really well, in fact. If you're new to BLDGBLOG, or if you simply want to know more about the motivation behind this site or The BLDGBLOG Book, then it might be worth checking it out. From Franz Kafka to prison break films, haunted house novels to the effects of weathering on high-tech materials, Norse myths to Los Angeles traffic jams, artificial glaciers to the overlooked spatial opinions of private parking attendants, the interview really seems to run the list of things I've been trying to focus on here. A brief excerpt: For instance, what do janitors or security guards or novelists or even housewives – let alone prison guards or elevator-repair personnel – think about the buildings around them? What do suburban teenagers think about contemporary home design, when their own bedrooms are right next door to their parents – or what do teenagers think about urban planning, when they have to drive an hour each way to get to school? These sorts of apparently trivial experiences of the built environment are often far more important to hear about than simply learning – yet again – how a certain architect fits him- or herself into a self-chosen design lineage.
So perhaps we should stop talking to Frank Gehry and start interviewing valet parkers in Los Angeles – or crime novelists, or SWAT team captains. They all have an opinion about the built environment, and about the way that cities function, but no one tends to ask them what those opinion might be. If you get a chance, check it out – and if you haven't picked up a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book yet, definitely consider ordering one soon. And thanks!
Earlier this week I stumbled across a series of genuinely beautiful architectural prints by Nathan Freise. These were first exhibited back in July 2008 at New York's School of Visual Arts, and it would have been a real treat to see them in person.  [Image: "The Garden of Machines" by Nathan Freise, from his extraordinarily well-produced Unseen Realities series; perhaps it's Andrew Wyeth meeting the U.S. interstate highway system in a world art-directed by Guillermo del Toro].Nathan, of course, is the brother of Adam, and the two of them together – as the Freise Brothers – also directed a short film called The Machine Stops, whose website is also worth a visit if you get the opportunity.  [Image: "The Garden of Machines (Dwell)" by Nathan Freise, from Unseen Realities; this one brings to mind some 22nd-century Charles Darwin watching the machine-birds of tomorrow's eco-motorways, where billboards become breeding grounds for species we've never seen before].The specific images here are described as follows: Freise’s series of inkjet prints depict experimental architecture projects. His hybrid illustrations combine multiple forms of media – ink, graphite, photography and marker – with computer graphics. Freise’s representations of utopian worlds question our current conditions of suburban sprawl and urban master-planning. They are absolutely worth checking out in their original, full size; click through to the Freise Brothers' website and open them in their full, 1000-pixel glory.  [Image: "Transience (The Nomads)" by Nathan Freise, from Unseen Realities]. What I like so much about these is not just their technical quality but their combination of pastoral, near-Edenic landscapes with semi-unconstructed megastructures straight out of scifi. Technicolor screenprints of the architectural future! A new Hudson River School arises, in which the flowering concrete foundations of incomprehensible buildings can be seen, scattered throughout the wild valleys, glinting with fragments of steel as the sun goes down.  [Images: "Transience (Decay and Renewal)" by Nathan Freise, from Unseen Realities].In any case, hopefully someday someone will commission him to make more.
 [Image: From Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].For his final project at Urban Islands – hosted the other week in Sydney and previously discussed here, here, here, here, and elsewhere – Sean Regan produced a heavily-illustrated fake article for a distant-future issue of National Geographic.  [Image: Image and text from Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].Piecing together found imagery to create his own narrative exploration of Cockatoo Island, Sean addressed the following question: What would happen to the island if it was no longer historically preserved but deliberately, often violently, altered by the tourists who came to visit it?   [Images: From Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].That is, what if tourists were given a more or less complete freedom to carve, excavate, blast, construct, drill, tunnel, and alter their way across the island landscape?    [Images: From Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].Because of the nature of the studio itself – which was based around the idea of random program generation through the design and distribution of Cockatoo Island-themed "Tarot" cards – this would take the specific form of tourists being handed a series of cards upon arrival at the island. On these cards would be actions, sites, tools, materials, and so on that the visitors would be free to interpret – acting out their conclusions in physical form through often drastic and completely unregulated interventions into the structure of the island itself.   [Images: From Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].Over thousands of years, then, Cockatoo Island would be transformed through tourist excavations into an increasingly subterranean mazescape of new, improvised passageways – think of it as a kind of geotechnical free jazz, burrowing its way through new forms and structures of geology. The walls themselves become gradually covered in post-aboriginal myths and cave paintings, and anthropologists from around the world come to Sydney to study the altered massing of Cockatoo. It was pointed out in the final studio crit, as exhaustively documented by fellow participant Nick Sowers over on Archinect, that this sort of anything-goes approach to managing Cockatoo Island's future is diametrically opposed to the strange and disappointing historical stasis in which the island is currently trapped. The island needn't be frozen in place, in other words, becoming a museum of its last role (an industrial shipbuilding yard); it could, in fact, be endlessly transformed, over decades, centuries, and even thousands of years, to become a palimpsestic reduction of eras, needs, and fleeting intentions. After all, it was pointed out, that's exactly what Cockatoo is already: a delirium of excavations. It is sliced through with tunnels. Its cliffsides are artificial. Its shorelines have been expanded. Its native species have been replaced. But it's as if Cockatoo's preservationists have been saying, "We will celebrate this island... by transforming it into the very thing it is has never been: static." In this context, perhaps Sean's project isn't merely a speculative fantasy of permanent excavation – proposing a future state of geological amnesia in which constant, superficial erasure reacts mindlessly to the past – but a necessary demonstration of how historic preservation often fails to reveal the very essence of the sites it seeks to celebrate.  [Image: Cockatoo Island is now a warren of artificial caves extending for kilometers into the earth's surface below. From Sean Regan's final project at Urban Islands 2009].In any case, the sandstone plateau of the island, the project suggests, will eventually be scraped away to levels far below the waves of Sydney Harbor, requiring the construction of massive ring dams to hold back the sea. The entire island is thus placed into a state of dry dock. By the year A.D. 5009, Cockatoo is nothing more than an opening into the underworld, the island's terrestrial presence having been replaced with the thousands of tunnels now spiraling away into the earth below. Of course, the images that appear here have been deliberately aged to look as if they were found in an excavation several thousand years from now, but Sean's collaging skills, disguised beneath those stains and discolorations, are extraordinary. It was a genuine pleasure to watch this project take shape over the second half of our two-week studio.
Another noteworthy project from the recently completed Urban Islands design studio down in Sydney was Yael Kaufman's short horror comic book, Cockatoo: Isle of the Dead.  [Image: Scanned & collaged comic book images appear alongside a photo from the Dogleg Tunnel on Cockatoo Island by Yael Kaufman, Urban Islands 2009].Kaufman's Isle of the Dead tells the story of three friends who have gone out for an evening joyride on a boat in the Sydney Harbor – only to capsize, finding themselves split up, disoriented, and washed by currents onto the dark shores of Cockatoo Island.  [Image: From Cockatoo: Isle of the Dead by Yael Kaufman, produced for Urban Islands 2009].There, two of the them get back together – only to stumble upon an industrial-scale project for the resurrection of the dead. The island's former inhabitants – from prison wardens and ship captains to young reform school boys and girls – are being brought exhumed en masse and back to life by a horrifically repurposed shipbuilding crane.  [Image: More collaged comic book images and photos from Cockatoo Island by Yael Kaufman].It's a short tale of architectural history wrapped up as a tongue-in-cheek horror comic – and it's even got a trick ending... Of course, the reason for putting together this sort of project came from the motivating constraints of the studio itself. As mentioned on BLDGBLOG before, the studio's overall conceptual goal was to create 78 playing cards (designed by the students themselves and inspired both by Tarot cards and by Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck); each card was based on one of the key sites, structures, events, spaces, and/or personalities from the incredible insular history of Cockatoo. These were then randomly distributed amongst the students, who were required, finally, to produce individual design projects based upon the cards that they had received. Kaufman was dealt The Crane, Tides & Currents, and the island's Former Inhabitants – and so the narrative that she assembled from those elements resulted in the comic book of which we see a few spreads here. During the process of putting it all together, during the extremely limited time frame of only four days in studio, Yael and I looked at House, a wordless graphic novel by Josh Simmons, as well as an English-language version of MetroBasel, a narratively elaborate graphic novel and site analysis produced by Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Manuel Herz, and Ying Zhou of ETH Studio Basel. Of course, if I had it with me in Australia, I would also have pointed Yael toward BIG's recent Yes Is More exhibition catalog/comic book. But whether or not you like the idea of using horror stories as a way to explore a given architectural site's history, the graphic novel as an analytic tool is something that deserves greater strategic attention – as well as something that appears quite rapidly to be catching on as a genuine option.  [Image: From Cockatoo: Isle of the Dead by Yael Kaufman, produced for Urban Islands 2009].After all, if you can open up the range of media – and even, in Yael's case, the range of genres (why not a love story? why not a pop song? why not a murder mystery?) – through which we discuss, argue about, and analyze architecture, then surely the range of participants in architectural conversations will simultaneously expand as well. Put another way: comic books and graphic novels – and, yes, horror stories – are going to be written and produced, whether or not architects play any role whatsoever. Why not, then, at the very least, slip some interesting ideas and structures into those narratives and help to expand the popular image of what constitutes architectural design?
On a sunny morning in Cairns, I'm flying back into the range of internet reception, having just spent some time up in Cape Tribulation and Daintree National Park. Cape Trib is interesting for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it is off of the national power grid – everything is lit either by generators or solar power – and it is also where the paved road ends; the famous Bloomfield Track extends north toward Cooktown, through the imaginations of Range Rover fans, and up to connect with other dirt roads along the bewilderingly remote Cape York Peninsula, where abandoned WWII airfields sit amidst empty fuel drums being slowly entombed by jungle. So I've been totally absent from posting for the past week, but we were staying on an exotic fruit farm, watching the lizard who lived in our light fixture, listening to Main against an acoustic backdrop of endless tree frogs, within walking distance of two World Heritage sites: the coastal intersection where the Great Barrier Reef meets the mangroves of Daintree on a small beach covered in stumps of coral, semi-submerged beneath tide pools. We even saw a cassowary. But BLDGBLOG will be in Brisbane all week now, within the curtain of the internet, and I've got a million and one awesome links to share – such as the person who now lives totally alone inside a brand new Florida high-rise and the " rubber village" built for military training in Israel. More soon!
As the previous post suggested, a number of great projects came out of this year's Urban Islands.  [Image: The front and back of an architectural trading card, designed by Mitchell Bonus for Urban Islands 2009].I've mentioned it before, of course, but Urban Islands is a biannual architecture studio hosted out on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor. For two weeks, students and their visiting international instructors – I had the huge pleasure of serving as an instructor this year – explore the spatial possibilities of Cockatoo's abandoned landscapes. For now, focusing solely on the work of my own students, I want to highlight five or six particularly interesting responses to the design brief (a brief I'll describe in a later post). The previous post was one project; the following project is by Mitchell Bonus. Tongue firmly in cheek, Mitchell has called for Sydney's apparently much-needed second airport to be built out on Cockatoo in the form of a solar-powered zeppelin field. The style of his pitch, however, was strategically ingenious, well worth both study and emulation elsewhere. Acting on the assumption that, if you want to see a new building or project take shape, then you have to stop relying on design competitions, architecture blogs, or industry publications to get the word out – that is, you need to find another way to convince the public that your design should exist, making its material realization seem more like an afterthought – Mitchell created a series of trading cards, modeled after sports cards. He then sealed, laminated, and stuck the cards inside bags of potato chips, cigarette packs, and boxes of morning cereal. The idea was thus that people would open up a bag of smoky bacon-flavored chips and find an architectural proposal awaiting them. Inside their morning oat bran would be a trading card-sized vision of the future. Falling out of the cigarette box as they light up on the sidewalk would be a portrayal of some strange island future yet to come.  [Image: The fronts and backs of four architectural trading cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].After all, why not skip Archinect, ArchDaily, Inhabitat, and Dezeen altogether and simply mass-produce trading cards of your own speculative building plans? Then just hide those cards inside cereal boxes and wait till the ideas trickle out, burning into the collective cultural consciousness. Gradually, it will dawn on people that, of course, there should be a new airport for zeppelins out on Cockatoo Island – or of course there should be aerial gondolas traversing Manhattan, or of course there should be a vast wheel of glass rooms, fourteen hectares in diameter, rotating over the rain forests of Papua New Guinea. It's like subliminal advertising for a parallel future. Why not slip these architectural speculations into pop culture at large? Why not bypass clients and experts and just bring your vision to everyone? Isn't that what Hollywood set designers and concept artists have been doing all along?  [Image: Four more architectural futures cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].Mitchell's project – executed in less than one week (as with all the projects that came out of my studio) – was thus presented simply as a bunch of sealed chip packets, cigarette boxes, and so on. Viewers of his presentation were handed a bag, some cigarettes, or a cereal box and, as they opened up their personal booty, they found not just an edible lunchtime snack but a well-produced act of architectural speculation. How incredibly interesting would it be to find that, in every box of Total or, hiding at the bottom of every canister of oatmeal you open, new visions of the cities around us are patiently hiding...? A whole new urban redesign of Tokyo awaits anyone who buys a bucket of popcorn at the start of 2012.  [Image: The front and back of one card by Mitchell Bonus, from Urban Islands 2009].It's a genuine challenge: publish your next architectural project not as a short article in Log, or as a press release on Dezeen, but as a series of trading cards hidden inside popular consumer goods all over the world. Slip your vision of the future into mass consciousness both slowly and subliminally. See what happens.
 [Image: Playing Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].I'm excited finally to look back at some of the work produced by my students at Urban Islands last month in Sydney, not only to bring them much deserved attention but to show how the course itself worked out. So, with the caveat that it has been extremely difficult for me to find reliable internet access here, and that this will only get worse over the next ten days as my wife and I head north into Daintree National Park, I wanted to take advantage of some blazing wifi to start a review of the studio's most stimulating projects. Here, then, kicking things off, is an entire board game, called Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition, invented, painted, and produced in less than a week by Tristan Davison. Missing uses Cockatoo Island – the abandoned industrial site, former shipbuilding yard, and derelict prison in the Sydney Harbor that formed the site of Urban Islands – as its primary setting and game-play environment.  [Image: Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition by Tristan Davison].The object of the game is to re-assemble the missing buildings of Cockatoo. Players progress by strategically accumulating Action Cards and Building Cards, with the game concluding atop the island's central sandstone plateau. Cockatoo, for those of you who have not visited the site, is an island somewhat famously denuded of many of its former historic structures. Indeed, the island's lost buildings are some of its most conspicuous features, their interiors still framed with a grid of iron rails in the flattened ground.  [Images: Building Cards from Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition, produced in less than one week].If it's not visibly obvious, by the way, I should say that Tristan is jaw-droppingly talented, producing this entire game and many other pieces over the course of Urban Islands right there in the studio, using watercolor and ink. I was able actually to watch as many of these were outlined and colored.  [Images: Action Cards from Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].The board itself is incredible, for instance, layering the pathway of the game atop an aerial view of Cockatoo Island and including various safety zones that can be exploited by players along the way.  [Images: The board of Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].Over the coming weeks, expect to hear more about the basic interpretive mechanism at work behind the studio, which will help to explain why Tristan produced a board game in the first place. For now, the sheer handiwork on display here, and the rapid evolution of what were basically improvised game rules, continues to amaze me. Stay tuned for more student projects from Urban Islands!
One of many projects collected in the first issue of P.E.A.R., released last month, is the Bat Spiral by London designers friend and company.  [Image: The Bat Spiral by friend and company].Serving as further evidence that architecture is not solely built for humans – after all, other species build architecture, respond to architecture, and colonize architecture quite readily – the Bat Spiral offers an elevated habitat for seventeen species of British bat. From the architects: Twenty-four different types of timber roosts are positioned within the concrete spiral as if they were the spokes of a wheel. Each roost position is determined by the orientation of the sun, shade and prevailing winds. The roosts are painted black externally to maximize heat gain from the sun... Inside, amidst gaps, reclaimed wood beams, and concrete spans poured in-situ, are "four levels of habitation," including feeding perches and access holes. Optional "mating roosts" can also be added as demand requires. Prefab modular animal housing. More images of the project are available in P.E.A.R.. I'm led to wonder, however, what non-human future might await something like Aranda\Lasch's 10 Mile Spiral if it were to be constructed – and later abandoned – amidst an ecosystem for bats... Perhaps we are inadvertently building the future infrastructure of an animal world.
 [Image: "The ghost cinema" by Phill Davison, used through Creative Commons].An article posted today on New Scientist suggests that, over the course of a 150-minute film, audience members will miss an incredible fifteen minutes simply through the act of blinking – but also that people watching a film tend to blink at the same time. It's called "synchronized blinking," and it means that "we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don't miss anything important" – with the addendum that, "because we tend to watch films in a similar way, moviegoers often blink in unison." That is, they blink during "non-critical" moments of plot or action, creating a kind of perceptual cutting-room floor. On the one hand, then, I'm curious if this means that clever editors, like something out of Fight Club, might be able to insert strange things into those predicted moments of cinematic calm – moments deemed safe for blinking – simply to see if anyone notices, but I'm also left wondering if there is an architectural equivalent to this: a spatial moment inside a building in which it seems safest for us to blink. In other words, do people not blink when they first walk into a space like Rome's Pantheon or into Grand Central Station – or is that exactly when they do blink, as if visually marking for themselves a transition from exterior to interior? It would seem, then, that if film has moments of synchronized blinking, then so might architecture – but when do we choose to blink when experiencing architectural space, and do those moments tend to occur for all of us at the same time? How could we test this?  [Image: The Pantheon, photographed by Nicola Twilley].Further, if there is, in fact, a moment inside a building somewhere where almost literally everyone blinks– say, in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, or in a bathroom corridor in the history building at your own university – could we say that that space is somehow yet to be fully seen? It is the spatial equivalent of those fifteen minutes of a film that no one realized they missed. After all, perhaps there's a detail in your own house that you've never actually seen before – and it's because you tend to blink as you walk past it. Your own body assumes, outside conscious awareness, that this must be a safe space for blinking; it's near a window, or the colors are very dull. Perhaps that's how spiderwebs build up: you literally don't see them. On a much larger scale, meanwhile, are there stretches of highway somewhere outside town where the scenery gets a bit boring – and so everyone starts to blink, more or less at the same time, thus visually removing from collective cultural awareness that McDonald's, or that abandoned house, tucked away over there beside the trees? And could you locate that exact moment of blindness – could you find blinkspots throughout the urban fabric – and start to build things there? Architecture becomes a three-dimensional test landscape for the neurology of blinking.  [Image: A human blink, via Wikipedia].For instance, if people driving 65 mph travel, say, five feet with every blink, then what spatial and architectural possibilities exist within that five feet? What are the spatial possibilities of the blink? I'm reminded of certain zoning laws in which you need to consider the exact amount of shadow your building will cast on the neighborhood around it before beginning construction. But what about zoning for blinks? Can you zone a building for maximum blinks? Or perhaps the opposite: a new genre of architecture, specially designed for Halloween fun houses, in which it's too stressful to close your eyes even for a micro-second... (Spotted via @jimrossignol).
Urban Islands continues apace down here in Sydney, with Day Five beginning in about an hour. While I'll describe the actual studio process in some detail later on, it seems worth recounting our trip out to Cockatoo Island – a derelict shipbuilding site and former prison in the Sydney Harbor – earlier this week.
 [Image: The dimensions of an island: a sign posted on Cockatoo].
We went out as a massive group of about 70 people and spent a bit more than five hours there, wandering around through old turbine halls and tunnels, walking past fenced-off but still functioning lift shafts cut directly through an eroded plateau of sandstone, and exploring former convict barracks, exercise yards, a Submarine Weapons Workshop, and the lost interiors of buildings demolished long ago, their internal walls, spaces, and bays still marked by iron rails set rhythmically in the concrete.
The first step was for our students to install small models that they'd built the night before, fitting them into cubbyholes inside an old warehouse near the turbine hall.
The cubbyholes themselves were all very strangely labeled, however, referring to old tools and other handheld pieces of industrial equipment; but the words written on them in black lettering were more like a set-list by the Aphex Twin than a serious description of useful implements: Vodex Elect, Murex Vodex, Yorkshire Flux.
After that first exercise was over – and there were some fantastic projects on display, from a conic room-amplification device to mirrored boxes and temperature-sensitive geometries – we broke up into our respective tutorial groups, approximately 16 students per group, and headed outside to sit amidst that old iron grid in the concrete, looking out through a missing interior that still seemed to haunt the island's perimeter.
 [Image: The gridded rails of a lost interior, Cockatoo Island, in Sydney Harbor].
I'll explain in another post what it is that I'm having my students do – though I will say that it involves what I hope is an exciting mix of formal landscape analysis, combinatorial mythology, and Tarot cards (yes, Tarot cards) – but this first day out on the site was more of an introduction to the spectacular historical landscapes on display there in the harbor.
From recently discovered "convict structures" under active excavation at the top of a hill to the long stories of ships constructed on Cockatoo – warships drifting outward in an endless archipelago of micro-islands – by way of the extraordinary Mould Loft, where massive ribs and geometries for future ships were outlined with chalk drawings on the floor, cut into wood, sent down piece by piece to be remade in metal, and then assembled again, like dinosaur skeletons, into boats and submarines, Cockatoo is a three-dimensional catalog of unique situations and spaces.
When does a ship cease to be a part of the island that created it? Perhaps ships are to Cockatoo as pollen is to flowers.
There is electrical equipment still sitting there like something from The Prestige, converting DC current from mainland Australia to the island's AC needs; there is a locked switchboard room inside of which phonecalls used to be connected through grids of wires; and there are entire missing hillsides – artificial cliffs still marked with drilled incisions for dynamite – that you then realize aren't missing at all, they've simply been transformed into the ground you're standing on, the island having been expanded in size nearly fourfold through a coastal growth that pushed the island's perimeter further and further out to the sea, like terrestrial rings for a maritime Saturn.
There are moving walls formerly used to plug-up the dry docks; there is ship-launching equipment; there was the deliberate feeding of harbor sharks to turn them into a living security fence against the island's 19th-century prisoners; and there is the incredible angular cross-bedding of ancient sand dunes now frozen into permanent form as the island's central plateau.
There is a filled well; a campground for tourists; inflatable "slave docks" that could temporarily expand the outer edge of the island; and all around us were things that had yet to be constructed, from viewing platforms planned by the Harbour Trust to our own students' future installations.
 [Image: Cockatoo Island in profile].
While I suppose all islands lend themselves well to mythology, Cockatoo seems particularly well-suited to a kind of over-the-top symbolic analysis – the bizarrely preserved film set from Wolverine, the space of the Turbine Hall so immeasurably huge that they had to install visual guide tags for laser-based surveying equipment, the escaped ship that beached itself on a neighboring island – that it seems impossible to believe architects working there could not foreground the narrative potential of the site. Even if only as a way to recombine and situationally understand the possibilities of an island, delving into the mythology of Cockatoo seems both incredibly fun and architecturally necessary.
It's an history full of plane crashes and visiting aviators, with a backwards warship that arrived without a bow to be temporarily repaired by workers on inflatable slave docks, and there are the hollow voids of old grain silos visible in section on the sides of collapsed hills, connected onward to an internal network of rock-cut drains and reservoirs...
Obviously, I hope my own studio here – breaking down Cockatoo into its major and minor spatial types and material details for the purpose of performing an oblique combinatorial analysis – will draw on these histories and forms, but we'll have to see if two weeks is enough time even to begin exploring such extraordinary symbolic potential.
(For a bit more about Urban Islands, check out Design + Build and these two posts by Nick Sowers of Soundscrapers fame).
|
|
