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Opening today in Paris is a new exhibition called Uninhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments. Featured artists include Catherine Rannou, Connie Mendoza, and Studio Orta, among many others.  [Image: From Numerical Desert by Connie Mendoza].Rannou's work has ranged from speculative building projects for spatially challenging sites in the city (seen below) to her work Colonisation 2041, featured in the exhibition. This latter project is "an installation reflecting the active and actual occupation that the development of scientific stations in Antarctica represents; energy dependence, waste management, roads and tunnels, planes, tractors, helicopters, and building materials all point to a form of 'urbanisation' that is clearly in progress."  [Image: Parentheses, an "habiter dans les interstices de la ville," by Catherine Rannou].Meanwhile, Connie Mendoza produces diagrammatic artworks, analyses of the optical landscapes of mirages, and fascinating quasi-documentary photo-projects, including the stunning Moon Landscapes and Numerical Desert. Numerical Desert, which will be on display in Paris, explores the Atacama Large Millimeter Array through black-and-white photos; it comes with "drawings based on the data of the astronomical observation of stars and galaxies in coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere." She's also got a blog.  [Image: Antarctic Village by Studio Orta].Studio Orta's work touches on political questions associated with empty landscapes – including the question of whether or not one could ever be a citizen of Antarctica. Their Antarctic Village, for instance, pictured above, falls somewhere between an experiment in extreme camping and a stab at temporary utopian space unaffiliated with national governments. Antarctic Village is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people. For more information about the exhibition, check out the website. (Thanks to William Fox for the tip!)
 [Image: From InfraNet Lab's submission to the WPA 2.0 competition, "centered on the twin dilemma of rising population and water shortages in the US southwest."] As a longtime fan of Mason White's and Lola Sheppard's work both at InfraNet Lab – an amazing web resource for anyone interested in cities, infrastructure, built landscapes, hydrological processes, international communications networks, and more – and at their architecture firm, Lateral Office – mentioned many times on BLDGBLOG before, from IceLink and A.I.R. Unit to Reykjavík's Runways to Greenways – and as an enthusiast for Princeton Architectural Press's Pamphlet Architecture series, I was absolutely thrilled to learn last week that InfraNet Lab will be authoring Pamphlet Architecture 30. Their book will be called Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, and it will be published in 2010. Along with Lola and Mason, Neeraj Bhatia and Maya Przbylski from Lateral Office will also be contributing – and this promises to be one of the best pamphlets yet. It's also fantastic news for Lateral Office, who well deserve this exposure for their ideas and work. Congrats, guys! I can't wait to see the results. (By way of a brief PS, Mason will actually be speaking at the North American launch of The BLDGBLOG Book on Saturday, September 26, at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, along with Lebbeus Woods, another Pamphlet Architecture author).
 [Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].One of the pleasures of participating in Urban Islands this past summer was meeting Johan Hybschmann, a recent graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-instructor, with Mark Smout, of one of the design studios hosted down there in Sydney. Johan is contagiously good-humored; even our pre-coffee, breakfast-less 7am ferry rides through cold winds across the Sydney Harbor in a surging boat were spent laughing. In fact, when I told him that my wife and I were about to celebrate our 7-year wedding anniversary... he started laughing. Johan's projects at the Bartlett were a fascinating mixture of ornate technical detailing and abstract ideas: simulation, reproduction, and the nature of spatial perception. "The idea of visually connecting spaces has been my architectural obsession for a long time," he wrote to me in an email after we had all returned from Sydney, "and I find that perceptual/referential recognition [of specific spatial details] often plays a key role." One of Johan's student projects, in particular, continues to astound me. What you're looking at in the images reproduced here (alongside Johan's answers to a series of questions I had posed over email) are painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark. The book's "content" is thus a three-dimensional, perspectivally accurate space.  [Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].From Johan: The inspiration came directly from the single shot film sequence in Sokurov’s Russian Ark, where the camera is taken through the timeless spaces of the Winter Palace, jumping decades from one room to another. The distortion of time is, of course, interesting in terms of the timelessness of the spaces – but I was interested in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the viewer never sees the full dimensions of these spaces, we are still left with a sense of coherence and wholeness. But what if the back of the room was mindblowingly different? It’s as if we constantly use the previous space to create an understanding of what should be behind us.
The book is an attempt to spatially prolong that perceptual idea. Two different spaces from the film sequence have been cut into each half of the book, as constructed perspectives. When the pages spread, the silhouettes of the elements visually collide, and the space within the book changes in character as the user travels through it by flicking through the pages. You pick up a book, and you open the covers... and a series of rooms begins to pass by, like the frames of a film or sequences in a flipbook, and it's all due to laser-cut gaps and remainders. How amazing to think that we could slice entire works of architecture into all the books around us, so that "reading" a book would actually be a forward-moving optical journey through page-sized rooms and hallways.  [Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].The physical realization of this was actually quite difficult to work out. As Johan explained over email: The book is made from layered silhouettes with inbuilt distorted perspectives that are laser-cut into the individual pages of a standard sketchbook. There is a drawing for each page, and these are all cut separately: turning the page, loading up a new drawing and cutting, page by page. Aside from the seemingly overwhelming task of working out exactly how much or how little needed to change with each page, Johan also achieved a kind of spatial layering effect: the turning pages add (or subtract) from the structure of each "scene" you see.  [Image: The diagram of architectural outlines that was laser-cut into the book's pages, recreating the illusory volume of a cinematic space].Rooms and perspectives shift; spaces blur one into the other, edited by laser; and the book re-enacts, on a bibliographic level, the act of watching Sokurov's film.  [Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].This project has a lot in common with another of Johan's student works. In the following project, called "Replicating a Replica," he proposed "a redesign of the Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City." Johan basically created two buildings that would occupy the same place at the same time, visually interlocking but spatially separate. As you walk through the building, Johan explained, you would pass through a series of "choreographed viewpoints," or visual positions at which the spaces around you would shift. Here you would feel as if you are inside one particular building (a Museum of the Constitution, Johan suggests); there, even if only steps away, you would feel as if you were inside another building altogether (a Court of Law, for instance). Each building would exist as if tucked inside the optically complicated spaces of the other. After all, Johan added, he is "interested in the spatial potential of being in-between." The resulting model of the project was thus more like a small machine, moving between two states of being. In one state, it was simply a pile of loose wire frames and disconnected vaults; in the other, a battery-powered act of reanimation has brought these apparently discarded parts whirling back to life, forming a functional building space.   [Images: Another project by Johan Hybschmann].The final images are fantastic: a building comes to life from whirring motors stored below.   [Images: By Johan Hybschmann].Tying all of this together, and bringing us back to the laser-cut book project, Johan writes: There is a scene in the film Blade Runner where Rick Deckard uses a machine to visually move around corners within a regular photograph. The machine traces all reflective surfaces in the “still-life” setting, and it collects information from objects represented from different spatial positions – but only from one viewpoint. This allows the machine to travel around the corner of the threshold within the photograph, but also to give an assumed image of what otherwise cannot be seen. Even though Rick Deckard gets a picture of a woman laying in a bed, we still have to consider that the image is constructed from distorted surfaces of mirrors and glass objects. In some ways, the above description of Blade Runner could also be a description of the convex mirrors deployed throughout the Sir John Soane Museum, which distort and re-reflect the sarcophagi and Egyptian statuary scattered all around the place, making even the definition of a single room somewhat hard to settle on. But it also ties in very nicely with the optical themes from Johan's and Mark's studio this summer in Sydney (which I hope to write about before too much longer): how we see architecture, how we visually comprehend built space, and what we might try to design in order to make this everyday experience both more complicated and more interesting.
 [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].Constituting their own architectural typology, and falling perhaps somewhere between Lew Welch and Tom Kundig (someone hire Kundig to design the next Serpentine, please!), are the fire lookout towers of the Pacific Northwest. Search the photo archives – assembled and maintained by Rex Kamstra, complete with lookout tower trivia – from Oregon and Washington to the hills of South Dakota (or just check out the site's newsfeed) to explore these often extraordinarily remote structures in all their minimalist – and historically fascinating – glory. And did you know that you can actually adopt a fire lookout?  [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].While you're at it, don't miss the U.S. Forest Service's own catalog of these overlooked minor building types: fire lookout towers in Sequoia National Forest, for instance, and Umatilla. The fact that there are any lookout towers still standing at all is, it seems, slightly amazing. "In their heyday during the 1930s," the Forest Service explains, "there were over 8,000 fire lookouts that dotted mountain tops across the United States with over 600 in California. Today there are only a few hundred in operation. Once considered a proud symbol of our nation's conservation heritage, fire lookouts are a fading legacy. There are 10 lookouts left on the Sequoia National Forest."   [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].A definitive history of these timber structures and lonely cabins has not yet been written (attention Princeton Architectural Press!), although they constitute not only a distinctive family of structures, they also have a regional, ecosystemic importance that only the best pieces of civic infrastructure attain. They also figure into the national mythology in a way that few other forms of architecture do; from Jack Kerouac disappearing off into the mountains for a summer of fire-spotting, to the poems of Gary Snyder, these awesomely elevated perspectives on the natural world – as well as sites of enforced introspection – deserve their NorCalMod moment. That is, they deserve their architectural rediscovery.  [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].Instead of a definitive reference work, there are simply books (albeit still fascinating) like How to Rent a Fire Lookout in the Pacific Northwest: A Guide to Renting Fire Lookouts, Guard Stations, Ranger Cabins, Warming Shelters and Bunkhouses in the National Forests of Oregon and Washington; Adirondack Fire Towers: Their History and Lore; Lookouts: Firewatchers of the Cascades and Olympics; and the so-called " fire lookout research" of David E. Lorenz (now out of print). So people are clearly still interested in these structures. For instance, check out this photo-log of a hike up to the spectacular mountain views of the Mule Peak Lookout.  [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].Even better, take a long read through the Skagit River Journal's look at the fire lookout towers of the Cascades. This latter link includes some amazing material, including references to interviews with former fire watchers and their colleagues: They told many unusual stories of the watchers, who were prepared to be alone on a mountain ridge in a tower measuring less than 200 square feet. Towers were sometimes built on nearby ridges so that two watchers could combine their observations of a section of forest, which enabled them to triangulate and more accurately call in resources to fight fires. A broad spectrum of watchers developed, from college students to housewives to hermits and those who loved to be surrounded by wilderness and mountains. The authors discovered one watcher who was so frightened during a lightning storm that he ran all the way down the mountain. There is also the story of Maxine Meyers, a former forest lookout. More architecturally, the Skagit River Journal also gets into the ways and means of these towers' construction: "Before mountain roads were built of a size to accomodate trucks, the materials were largely packed in on backs or on mules, and then another team had to slog through the brush, stringing telephone wire before the use of two-way radios." Thus were distant structures assembled in the woods.  [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].Plus, where, now, are the people who actually lived in these structures – stationed there for whole seasons at a time to eat canned peaches and watch the stars, looking out for signs of distant fires? Are they still alive, and, like Maxine Meyers, could you interview them? It's an architectural form that comes with its own anthropology: narratives of use and inhabitation. Further, who designed these structures – based on what plan, and from what material inspiration? What would a fire lookout tower, built today, look like? Perhaps like the awesome " Prairie Ladder" by Anderson Anderson? And how do these towers frame the landscape, and to what extent could you put them into the visual tradition of things like panoramas? These towers, after all, aren't just towers; they have a kind of optical functionality, built specifically for the purpose of viewing the landscape in a certain, specific, highly regulated way. They spatially frame this act of disciplined surveillance. In a sense, they are like the British watchtowers so beautifully photographed by Donovan Wylie.  [Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].But, more to the point, where do fire lookout towers – as a minor design typology – fit into architectural history?
 [Image: The offshore metropolis of Oil Rocks, Azerbaijan, via Wikipedia].There are a number of massive artificial peninsulas extending offshore from the Azerbaijani city of Baku. The most famous of these is known as Oil Rocks, and it is an offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea. It even appears on a postage stamp.  [Image: The Oil Rocks postage stamp, via Wikipedia].As Wikipedia informs us: The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some workers' dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex's 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure. These "new additions... grafted onto the existing structure" are at least partially responsible for the epic nature of the place, as it seems to push ever further outward into the tides and weather. Funded with private money, and created entirely for the purpose of extracting oil from the Caspian's shallow seabed, these and other peninsular extensions of Baku are functional urbanism at its most giddy: uni-purpose structures like something dreamt up by Guy Maunsell, by way of the obligatory reference to Constant's New Babylon. This metropolis of platforms would not be out of place in a design studio themed around micronations, the future of private urbanism, or even failed utopias.  [Image: Other artificial peninsular cities of Baku, seen from above. View larger! Via Google Maps].Oil Rocks, we read elsewhere, "is a full town on the sea: it has 200 km of streets built on piles and landfill... There are tall blocks of flats, a bakery, a cinema, a garden, [and] a school." There are also helipads, helping to shorten the journey from the city's outer architectural limits back to shore. According to Statoil, meanwhile, Oil Rocks "looks from the air like a cobweb scattered with large drops of water." Over-extending the metaphor a bit, they point out that a "closer inspection shows that the 'web' is made up of gangways across the sea, the 'spider' at its heart is the field centre and the 'water drops' are the many production installations." Structurally speaking, "Sand and stone were shipped out to create dry land, and steel pillars attached to the seabed as the foundation for huge living quarters." Of course, it would interesting to see if something similar could be created if only we could connect all the unused ships of the global, recession-hit shipping industry together with gangways and thus institute our own Armada – but, until then, this is still absurdly interesting.  [Images: Photos of offshore oil structures in the Caspian by Stanley Greene; spotted via Artificial Owl].In a recent issue of John Knechtel's Alphabet City, called Fuel, there is a proposal by architect Maya Przybylski called "Occupying the Caspian Sea: A One Hundred Year Plan." Przybylski specifically addresses the derelict – or soon to be derelict – extraction platforms of the Caspian. She approaches the sea as if seeing it "through the filter of oil operations: concession systems, contract blocks, pipelines, tanker ports and routes, national boundaries, bathymetric and climatic conditions, and the oil fields themselves." Przybylski focuses, among many things, on the fact that the architectural remains of the extraction industry are being gradually recolonized by the region's wildlife. She writes, for instance, that "many birds have claimed abandoned oil rigs as resting points along their routes," and that "the offshore oil installations have become an important alternative sanctuary," both for birds and for fish. Indeed, "birds have begun to fly from rig to rig during their migration, avoiding contact with the shore altogether." In many ways, and for obvious reasons, I'm reminded of the EcoRigs project (about which I've written a short paper for a forthcoming issue of New Geographies), which seeks to turn abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico into new endoskeletons for specially curated ecosystems at sea. While Przybylski does not, in fact, mention Oil Rocks, this stilted metropolis-at-sea is quite easy to think of it when she writes that, "When the oil companies begin to wind down their operations, the key to the proposed renewal of the sea will be the reexploitation of the relics they leave behind." If Oil Rocks is one of these relics, then, in all of its sprawling, labyrinthine wonder, what could we do with it? Whether subject to historic preservation or transformed into a Dubai-style resort, what might Oil Rocks yet become?
The second upcoming event that I want to announce is Digital Architecture London, organized by Ruairi Glynn. That will take place on Monday, September 21st, at the Building Centre here in London. "Introducing the latest developments in digital design practice," we read, "the conference will explore new spaces, social interactions, design and fabrication processes, and speculate on architecture’s post-digital futures."  A related book – Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands – edited by Glynn and documenting the parallel exhibition, will be released the same day. The program sounds amazing, and I'm really looking forward to this. The day's complete list of panelists looks like this: Rachel Armstrong, Tony Dunne, Marcos Cruz, and Rachel Wingfield will be discussing "Digital Architecture & Bio-Technology"; Usman Haque, Matt Webb, Tobi Schneidler, and Stephen Gage will look at "Digital Architecture & Interaction"; Brett Steele, Patrik Schumacher, Marjan Colletti, Alvin Huang, and Daniel Bosia will analyze "Digital Architecture & Form"; and Bob Sheil, Hanif Kara, Charles Walker, and Michael Stacey will discuss "Digital Architecture & Fabrication." I will be speaking on a panel featuring Alan Penn, Neil Spiller, and Murray Fraser, and our topic will be "Digital Architecture & Space."  [Images: Two projects from the Hinterlands exhibition: (left) MatArc by Patrick Usborne, (right) Crackology by Mayhem].Information about venue, timing, tickets, and more can all be found on the conference website.
 This weekend in Lund, Sweden, Sir Peter Cook and Abelardo Gonzalez will be hosting the 2009 ASAE conference, the theme of which is Communicating Architecture. ASAE is an annual symposium at the School of Architecture, Lund University, Sweden. It celebrates the beginning of the academic year. This year's ASAE will be a two-day event with lectures, seminar, critique, exhibition and more. I'm still pretty stunned to find myself listed as a speaker, alongside people like Thom Mayne, Odile Decq, and Hernan Diaz Alonso; but I'm also excited by the opportunity to bring blogs again into this sort of organized discussion. Unfortunately, I'll be speaking first thing Saturday morning! But I'll be giving a talk called "Optioning Architecture." There will be at least two major themes to be developed: 1) What are the options available to architects when it comes to communicating spatial ideas? Are renderings, plans, and diagrams still the most communicationally effective media to use (from the perspective of the interested public) or simply the most industrially useful (from the perspective of fellow architects and contractors)? What happens when, say, Bernard Tschumi's next building is not announced to the public via well-rendered images and a press release but in the form of a novel? There is also much to discuss here by inverting this scenario and asking: what happens when novelists, screenwriters, poets, and so on begin creating buildings to communicate their literary and narrative ideas, instead of producing texts? While this obviously risks repeating the textualist arguments of an earlier decade, it still seems worth asking what might have happened if James Joyce, for instance, had been a junior architect at KieranTimberlake: what effect might his literary urges have had upon that firm's built output? Put another, slightly cheesy, way: if Mervyn Peake had been a successful architect, what strange and sprawling manor houses might now exist somewhere in the English countryside? In any case, what, in the end, are the communicational options available to architects?  2) What possibilities exist for "optioning architecture," in the sense that a book, short story, or screenplay can be "optioned" by Hollywood for production in another media? That is, what might happen to the world of architectural design if your final graduate thesis project was to be optioned by Steven Spielberg or David Fincher? Would this be similar, in some ways, to the relationship between Rem Koolhaas's co-authored graduate thesis project, "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," and Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom? To what extent is the latter a novelization of the former? Finally, would it be possible for someone from DreamWorks to come along, see a new museum under construction in Chicago or Baltimore, and then option it, the way he or she might option a promising novel? Could you literally translate the spatial dynamism and implied narrative logics of a building – could you option them – into an act of mainstream cinema? How might such a process work – and is there a reason why this hasn't yet occurred (i.e. it would be a totally ridiculous thing to do)? Of course, there are other types of architectural options that we could discuss here – but I'll be focusing on the two ideas described above. The complete conference line-up includes Florencia Pita, David Garcia, Drura Parrish, Megumi Matsubara, and Daniel Golling. Read more on the conference blog.
 [Image: From Procedural Modeling of Cities by Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller].Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol.In 2001 Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller spoke at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California, to present a mathematical city. Their presentation contained an algorithmic approach for modeling city-like topologies. The results were remarkably realistic, and were one among a host of city-like generative systems to appear at the start of the decade. Another, Jared Tarbell's Substrate (pictured) remains a fantastic example of how a mathematical approach to generating apparently urban patterns can also be artful.  [Image: From Jared Tarbell's Substrate].But it was looking at the work of Parish and Müller that inspired game designer Chris Delay to develop his most recent project: the cryptic (and as-yet-unexplained) Subversion, of which little is known, other than it relies on large, procedurally generated cities for the backbone of its game world. Having already been burned by the problems of creating content "by hand," Delay set out to let algorithms do the work of building buildings in his new game. Not only that, but he was determined to create an artistically interesting experience without artists.   [Images: From Chris Delay's Subversion].Of course, videogames have long been the home of procedurally generated landscapes where numbers and mathematical equations played the role of the visual designer. Early paranoid classic The Sentinel made use of these techniques to create an astonishingly atmospheric 10,000 levels in simple vector graphics, from just a few kilobytes of data. Other games have used similar techniques as a shortcut to creating solar systems and vast fractal landscapes. But when it came to cities, well, it took a long time for anyone to take up the challenge.  [Image: From The Sentinel by Geoff Crammond].Rather than opt for procedural techniques, game designers usually elect to build their cities by hand, often with startling results. The re-imagined contemporary New York that features in last year's Grand Theft Auto 4 required a small army of well-paid artists and designers to hand-craft the entire world. Their accomplishment is unmatched, but the cost to the company behind the project is in the tens—and perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars. To build up a living city from blank polygons is one of the most expensive possible projects in game design. Delay, whose project is being undertaken with a tiny budget and by just a handful of staff based in Cambridge, UK, does not have the luxury of vast content teams. His vector-drawn city is far less realistic than Rockstar's textured, heaving metropolis, but there's nevertheless a beauty to it. It's a kind of mathematical map of the essential urban environment: there are roads, sidewalks, and a no-man's land of corporate moats around great skyscrapers... Identify the key equation that define urban patterns, and you, too, can summon a city into existence. Delay has begun to show off how his cities emerge from the ground up in a series of videos, and he spoke to me about the process. "I started out with road layouts, and then began to modify the parameters," he explained. "Sometimes you'll get lovely radial, spiral patterns, or you can tell it to create a really rigid Manhattan-style grid." One set of numbers delivers the block logic of American cities, another is rather more like the spirals of Medieval European sprawls. The two merge to create something even more believable. "Every subsequent layer builds on the previous layer," Delay points out, "so the very next layer looks for the spaces between layers, and makes judgments about 'is this likely to be a skyscraper, or to be a house?' Then you zoom in, and carry on. You do another procedural generation process for each layer of detail, filling in that world."  [Image: From Chris Delay's Subversion].A few weeks after speaking with Delay I attended Thrilling Wonder Stories—a seminar at the Architectural Association in London, curated by Liam Young and BLDGBLOG—where I watched conceptual designer Viktor Antonov explain how he had created a science-fictionalized Paris (for a now-cancelled videogame called The Crossing). Antonov approached the problem by altering just a few parameters in the standard architectural model. For instance, Antonov had noticed a few fundamental details about how the mid-nineteenth century neo-classical core of Paris had been constructed: big street-level floors, smaller attic spaces, complex chimney stacks. By increasing the emphasis on the lower floors, and stretching them out—and by emphasizing the height and complexity of the chimneys—Antonov was able to create a thematically consistent science fiction Paris. Simply by altering a few basic architectural parameters, he said, you were able to fictionalize the city, whilst at the same time retaining its fundamental identity. His designs were still recognizably—even mathematically—Parisian, in other words, but they were also otherworldly.  [Image: By Viktor Antonov].This idea instantly connected back to Delay's project: what parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor. And perhaps this is not such an outlandish thing to aim for—especially when you consider the speed at which procedural city projects have been appearing across the tech landscape. Could one of these cities potentially be refitted to allow for this type of radical tweak? Projects like Shamus Young's impressive PixelCity, or Marco Corbetta's Structure seem ripe for such strange fictions. Corbetta's system is particularly impressive in its verisimilitude: he aims to create a basic engine for rapidly generating the kinds of cities that games like Grand Theft Auto 4 require, and consequently doing so for much cheaper. Could Corbetta's engine come with a Paris or a Barcelona preload, which could then be put through Photoshop-style filters for alternate reality logic in its architecture? A stronger skyline, weirder street furniture.  [Image: From Marco Corbetta's Structure].More exciting, at least for the thrill-seeking gamer in me, is the fact that Corbetta is aiming one notch higher than any of his peers: he's aiming to make these cities procedurally destructible. His site contains a demonstration video of neatly arrange office interiors and a domestic library being blown to pieces with a machine-gun. What good is an imaginary city if you can't go inside the buildings? What good is a virtual downtown if you can't go crazy with a bazooka? Corbetta's work preempts these questions. Further, it conjures visions of massive demolition exercises in parallel worlds—entering an Antonov-algorithm for neo-Rome, where gladiatorial escapades see us going through the walls of the coliseum and into the randomly generated plazas beyond. That, perhaps, is the greatest promise of procedural cities: that soon they'll be real enough that their destruction will seem like tragedy. [Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol appeared on BLDGBLOG in May, and he has written a previous guest post, Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds].
 [Image: View larger].Last week, Josh Williams, formerly of Curbed LA, emailed with an amazing link to an article, reportedly published back in 1934 by the L.A. Times, about a race of "lizard people" who once lived beneath the city. "Did strange people live under site of Los Angeles 5000 years ago?" the article asks, supplying a bizarre treasure map through the city's undersides in the process.  [Image: View larger].Although you can read the article in full through these links, I wanted to give you a taste of the story's strange mix of gonzo archaeology, Poltergeist-like pre-Columbian cultural anxiety, and start-up geophysical investigation squad: So firmly does [a "geophysical mining engineer" named G. Warren Shufelt] believe that a maze of catacombs and priceless golden tablets are to be found beneath downtown Los Angeles that the engineer and his aides have already driven a shaft 250 feet into the ground, the mouth of the shaft behind on the the old Banning property on North Hill Street overlooking Sunset Boulevard, Spring Street and North Broadway.
And so convinced is the engineer of the infallibility of a radio X-ray perfected by him for detecting the presence of minerals and tunnels below the surface of the ground, an apparatus with which he says he has traced a pattern of catacombs and vaults forming the lost city, that he plans to continue sending his shaft downward until he has reached a depth of 1000 feet before discontinuing operations. The article goes on to suggest that this ancient subterranean city was "laid out like [a] lizard"; we visit a Hopi "medicine lodge," wherein geophysical secrets are told; there are lost gold hoards; and, all along, the engineer's "radio X-ray" apparatus continues to detect inhabitable voids beneath the metropolis. "I knew I was over a pattern of tunnels," Shufelt is quoted, "and I had mapped out the course of the tunnels, the position of large rooms scattered along the tunnel route, as well as the position of the deposits of gold, but I couldn't understand the meaning of it." Perhaps this is what we'd get if Steven Spielberg hired Mike Mignola to write the next installment of Indiana Jones. (Thanks to Josh Williams, and to vokoban, who originally uploaded the scan. Vaguely related: The Hollow Hills and Mysterious Chinese Tunnels).
 [Image: President Nixon addresses quarantined astronauts from the Apollo program; via NASA].I'm incredibly excited to announce not only that BLDGBLOG will be living in New York City this fall, but that my wife and I will be hosting a design studio there called Landscapes of Quarantine – the results of which will be the subject of a public exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in early 2010. Meeting one evening a week this autumn in Manhattan, from October 6 to December 5, 2009, up to 14 studio participants will discuss the spatial implications of quarantine, each developing an individual design project in response to the studio theme. Quarantine is both an ancient spatial practice and a state of monitored isolation, dating back at least to the Black Death – if not to Christ's 40 days in the desert – yet it has re-emerged today as an issue of urgent biological, political, and even architectural importance in an era of global tourism and flu pandemics.  [Image: "Fear of Flu" by Mike Licht].Quarantine touches on serious constitutional issues associated with involuntary medical isolation, as well as on questions of governmental authority, regional jurisdiction, and the limits of inter-state cooperation. Quarantine is as much a matter of national security, public safety, and agricultural biodiversity as it is an entry point into discussions of race, purity, and unacknowledged discrimination. Quarantine is also a plot device increasingly seen in novels and films – from the aptly named Quarantine and Albert Camus's The Plague to I Am Legend and The Last Town on Earth – even as it has become a source of arcane technical debate within plans for Martian exploration and Antarctic drilling rights. The design implications of quarantine stretch from the ballast water of ships to the way we shape our cities, from the clothes in travelers' suitcases to stray seeds stuck in the boot treads of hikers. Quarantine affects the pets we keep, the programs we download, and the machines we use in food-processing warehouses, worldwide. Quarantine is about managing perimeters, controlling influence, and stopping contamination.  [Image: Cages for the laboratory testing of rats and mice by Innovive].So how do we treat quarantine as a design problem? Whether we design something to demonstrate that the very notion of quarantine might not be possible; whether we produce actionable plans for quarantine units, ready for implementation by the World Health Organization in hot zones around the world; whether we create quarantine-themed graphic novels, barrier-based urban games, or a series of ironic public health posters to be mounted around the city, how can we design for quarantine? Quarantine also offers fertile territory for investigation through cartography and cultural documentation. After all, if we mapped the contents and locations of quarantine facilities worldwide, designed infographics to analyze the spread of invasive species, or recorded the oral histories of the quarantined, what sorts of issues might we uncover? Bringing these very different techniques, media, and approaches together in the confines of a dedicated design studio will give participants an exciting opportunity to explore the overlooked spatial implications of quarantine.  [Image: A poster for Quarantine, directed by John Erick Dowdle].We have already confirmed a fantastic list of participants, whose backgrounds include architecture, photography, illustration, games design, sound, landscape, food, and more; we are now opening the studio to a general call for interested participants. The brief – which you can download here as a PDF or that you read as a JPG on Flickr – explains more; but potential applicants will be working with a truly stellar group as they meet once a week this fall and produce work eligible for inclusion in the "Landscapes of Quarantine" exhibition to be held at Storefront for Art and Architecture in early 2010. If you are interested, please download the brief – which includes all necessary application info – and contact us at futureplural @ gmail by September 19, 2009.  [Image: Australian quarantine signage].For ease of reference, I have decided to include the studio brief in full below: Landscapes of Quarantine is an independent, multi-disciplinary design studio, based in New York City, consisting of eight Tuesday evening workshops, from October 6 to December 5, 2009, in which up to 14 participants will gather to discuss the spatial implications of quarantine. Quarantine is an ancient spatial practice characterized by a state of enforced immobility, decontamination, and sequestration; yet it is increasingly relevant—and difficult to monitor—in an era of global trade, bio-engineering, and mass tourism.
Studio participants will explore a wide variety of spatial and historical examples, including airport quarantine facilities, Level 5 biohazard wards, invasive species, agricultural regulations, swine-flu infected tourists confined to their hotel rooms, lawsuits over citizens' rights to resist involuntary quarantine, horror films, World Health Organization plans for controlling the spread of pandemics, lunar soil samples, and more.
During the studio, participants will develop individual design projects in response to the problem of quarantine, with guidance and inspiration provided by readings, screenings, group discussions, and an evolving line-up of guest speakers and critics. These projects will then be eligible for inclusion in "Landscapes of Quarantine,” an exhibition hosted by the internationally renowned Storefront for Art and Architecture in early 2010.
By the end of the studio, each participant will have produced a complete design project. This could range from the speculative (plug-in biosecurity rooms for the American suburbs) to the documentary (recording the items and animals detained for quarantine on the U.S./Mexico border), and from the fantastical (plans for extra-planetary quarantine facilities) to the instructional (a field guide to invasive species control).
Landscapes of Quarantine is looking for applicants who are intrigued by the spatial possibilities and contingencies of quarantine, and who already possess the technical skills necessary to produce an exhibition-quality final design project or installation in their chosen medium. We hope to hear from people at all stages of their careers—from graduate school to retirees—and from a wide variety of design backgrounds. We are particularly excited to announce that we have already confirmed a select group of talented participants from fields as diverse as architecture, illustration, gaming, photography, and sound design.
The studio is both unaffiliated and independent (there is no college credit), and it is also free (though applicants will be responsible for all costs associated with producing their final project). We will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis until Friday, September 18, 2009, or until all studio positions have been filled. To learn more, and to submit an application, please email futureplural @ gmail with the information listed below.
1) Name
2) Email address
3) Telephone number(s)
Please indicate the best time to reach you
4) Mailing address
5) Education
• University/college name and country
• Dates attended
• Degree
6) Current affiliations and/or employment
7) 50-word (maximum) bio
8) Publications and/or personal blog
9) Portfolio
Attach a PDF of no more than 8 pages, or supply a link to online work
10) 300-word (maximum) statement of interest in the topic of quarantine
11) Candidate’s declaration
By submitting your application, you declare the following:
• I certify that the work submitted is entirely my own and/or my role is clearly stated
• I declare that all the statements I have provided are correct
• I agree that, if accepted into the studio, I will participate fully, attend all studio meetings unless previously discussed with the studio directors, and produce a finished final design project
12) Email addresses for two references
Landscapes of Quarantine is produced and organized by Future Plural, a project-based, independent design lab launching in October 2009 from a temporary base in New York City. Future Plural is Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography). Finally, a major motivation behind starting Future Plural and hosting the Landscapes of Quarantine studio is to found a new institution without permanent location, dependence on grants, or academic affiliation. After all, as bloggers, why can't we create our own groups, faculties, cultural spaces, and more? By bringing people together, on a project-by-project basis, to explore ideas and issues in a cross-disciplinary environment, we hope to demonstrate that, even in a time of recession, there is a broadly shared enthusiasm for creating something new.
Amongst the huge stacks of reading material that I always seem to accumulate, even while traveling, I have just picked up a copy of Philip Parker's new book The Empire Stops Here. In a nutshell, the book documents Parker's epic tour around the former edge of the Roman empire, "visiting all its astonishing sites, from Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain to the desert cities of Palmyra and Leptis Magna," the book jacket explains. We're reminded that "the Empire guarded and maintained a frontier that stretched for 10,000 kilometres, from Carlisle to Cologne, from Augsburg to Antioch, and from Aswan to the Atlantic." So why not explore the whole thing?  [Image: Hadrian's Wall].On page one Parker writes that "I have concentrated deliberately on the edge of the Roman world, on the lands that promised victory, booty and glory and yet so often left the bitter taste of compromise or defeat instead. Here, unique societies developed, distinct from that of the mother-city" – frontier micro-cultures amidst border country that, even today, remains populated with architectural and anthropological evidence of these long-ago evaporated Roman outposts. Outpost tourism, perhaps. Edge-traveling. It would be a curious project, indeed, to try something similar for a nation-state today, when borders are often fluid and even exportable. In fact, I'm reminded of a plan to "take the UK border overseas," as the Times reported last year, dematerializing the actual national border and replacing it with a series of offices and points of entry maintained far away in the country of origin. Right when you think you've found the perimeter of Britain, it's relocated yet further away, pushed to an airfield or embassy two thousand miles in the distance. How interesting would it be to set out to explore the edge of a country – only to be unable to find it? China Miéville meets Tlön by way of the UK Border Agency. For now, Parker's book only seems to be available in the UK – but I've got high hopes for it and plan to report back as I read further. You can listen to a brief interview with the author here.
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[Images: All photos by 
