|
|
For the past four weeks, an orange robotic arm has been constructing a brick wall in south Manhattan.  [Image: Pike Loop by Gramazio & Kohler].Neither a new Berlin Wall nor part of a delayed realization of Superstudio's Continuous Monument, the machine was, in fact, built and programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler. It is now the focus of an exhibition, called Pike Loop, at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Tonight—Tuesday, October 27—at 7pm, Storefront will be hosting a public event in celebration of the project, down at the wall itself, free and open to the public. Here's how to get there from Storefront. Be sure to stop by.
Even knowing how much it annoys certain people whenever I mention The BLDGBLOG Book on this website, I'm ridiculously excited—and admittedly quite stunned—to see that the book is #92 on Amazon.com's list of the 100 Best Books of 2009.  [Image: Six of Amazon.com's 100 Best Books of 2009].To be on a list that includes J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, A.S. Byatt, William T. Vollmann, and many more is just totally astonishing to me. But it's a fantastic testament to the strength of the architects, photographers, writers, illustrators, historians, artists, cartographers, musicians, geologists, and more whose work appears in the book, as well as to the book's designers, MacFadden & Thorpe. So thanks, Amazon! In fact, there have been many fantastic books published this year, all worth checking out if you get a chance, including China Miéville's The City & The City, David Gissen's Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism, Leslie Chang's Factory Girls, James Lawrence Powell's Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West, Tom Zoellner's Uranium, Stephen Asma's On Monsters, the paperback reissue of Infrastructural City, Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, and a million more. (Thanks to Lauren Gilbert for pointing out the list!)
 [Image: The cooling towers of the Ferrybridge power station; photo by Eric de Mare].The above photo has really stuck with me since seeing it last week over at Millennium People—not only its juxtaposition of architectural types (the narrative ornamentalism of a small English church almost literally overshadowed by the minimalist hyper-functionalism of the cooling towers) but the photo's implied collision of material activities (prayer, say, vs. the illuminative processing of rare fuels). I might even suggest that it presents us with some strange, nuclear-Anglican revision of what Manfredo Tafuri would call the sphere and the labyrinth—that is, the altarpiece meets the reactor core—but the station is actually coal-powered, not nuclear at all. The image is nonetheless quite stimulating. Imagine disused cooling towers repurposed as a church—or a library—or Chartres Cathedral put to work as a nuclear power station, its filigrees of saints and masonry trembling as atoms split and machines spin wildly in the basement.
There are as many as sixteen 2-billion-year old nuclear reactors in the rocks beneath Gabon. Considering their age, they are also, unsurprisingly, completely natural.  [Image: The natural clocks and ticking stratigraphy of the Oklo uranium deposit, courtesy of the Curtin University of Technology]."In 1972," the Curtin University of Technology explains, "the very well preserved remains of several ancient natural nuclear reactors were discovered in the middle of the Oklo Uranium ore deposit." The university adds that each of these equatorial African reactors "operated on an intermittent basis for a period ranging from a few years to hundreds of thousands of years. The total time period over which the reactors operated is thought to be about a million years." In one specific case, we read in a report published five years ago by Physical Review Focus, a chain reaction in the uranium-rich rocks "cycled on and off every three hours." The idea that radioactive deposits beneath the Earth could self-react and undergo fission was first proposed by physicist Paul Kazuo Kuroda. The internal clock of a geological formation, Kuroda suggested, given contact with water, could simply start ticking away: In 1956, nuclear chemist Paul Kazuo Kuroda of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville predicted that a chain reaction could develop in natural uranium deposits, generating heat just as the reactor in a nuclear power plant does. His suggestion proved prophetic when, in the 1970s, others discovered several burned-out natural reactors in the Oklo uranium mines in Gabon. Amazingly, "researchers still don't know precisely how the fossil reactors managed to burn slowly for more than 150,000 years, when they could have exploded violently." The presence of underground water seems especially fortuitous in that regard—it helped to avoid a nuclear detonation. That's plausible because the water molecules would collide with neutrons whizzing through the uranium and slow them down, a process called moderation. Because slower neutrons more efficiently split the uranium nuclei in a chain reaction, the water would promote the reaction and cause the reactor to heat up. Eventually, however, the heat would boil away the water, shutting the reaction down until more water could collect. It was a pulsing rhythm, a geologic throb: based on present-day chemical measurements taken of specific isotopes in the nearby rocks, "the researchers estimate that the reactor ran for 30 minutes and then shut down for two and a half hours."  [Image: A diagram of the Oklo uranium deposit, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy].I'm reminded again here of William Burroughs's extraordinary and haunting suggestion, from his novel The Ticket That Exploded, that, beneath the surface of the earth, there is "a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal." Here, though, it is a mineral seam, or ribbon of heavy metal—a riff of uranium—that stirs itself awake in a regularized cycle of radiative insomnia that disguises itself as a planet. Brainrock. Gabon's " natural nuclear fission reactors," according to Wikipedia, "are the only known sites in which natural nuclear reactors existed. Other rich uranium ore bodies would also have had sufficient uranium to support nuclear reactions at that time, but the combination of uranium, water and physical conditions needed to support the chain reaction was unique to the Oklo ore bodies." Of course, this process created what we would now call nuclear waste—including plutonium. These otherwise extraordinarily dangerous waste products, however, have been entombed within the earth for two billion years. The Curtin University of Technology points out that "this is so long that all of the radioactive waste products (even those with million year half lives) have decayed away." They have also hardly even moved: the plutonium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, "has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago." Are there thus structural lessons to be learned from the rocks at Oklo? "By analyzing the remnants of these ancient nuclear reactors and understanding how underground rock formations contained the waste, scientists studying Oklo can apply their findings to containing nuclear waste today," the DOE goes on to suggest. This is another way of saying that the Oklo uranium deposits are being studied as natural analogues for how high-level nuclear waste might behave in an artificial repository like Yucca Mountain (watch for a long and fascinating interview with a geophysicist from Yucca Mountain here on BLDGBLOG next week). We might say, then, that a geological formation, like some nuclear version of Spanish architect Vicente Guallart's notion of geologics, has partially inspired an architectural form. The timescales are all wrong for this, meanwhile, but if geomythology is the study of ancient folk tales, oral traditions, and regional myths to see if they contain camouflaged references to real, but prehistoric, geological events—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and more—what geomythological influence might the throbbing and automechanized Oklo uranium mines play? How extraordinarily interesting would it be to come across a series of old myths about an intelligent presence in the rocks of equatorial Africa, a kind of mineralized Mother Nature winking at everyone from below—and to realize that they're referring to the reactions at Oklo. A spirit in the Earth. Finally, do these naturally occurring reactions come with the implication that our present-day nuclear reactors are, in a sense, simulated geological processes, not unlike artificial diamond-creation chambers? Nuclear reactors become models of already existing natural events. They are terrestrial reenactments, you might say. Scientific American has a five-page article about the Oklo phenomenon, if you'd like to read more.
 [Image: Photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].Photographer Richard Mosse, who BLDGBLOG has interviewed in the past and who is one of many participants in this autumn's " Landscapes of Quarantine" design studio, has just published a new series of photographs in Time magazine documenting the flow of goods into and out of the Gaza Strip. This economic flow is literally underground, however, as it passes beneath the supervision of both Israel and Egypt, through a network of often quite sophisticated tunnels; channeled under pressure through tiny pores, it exhibits a surprisingly low viscosity, we might say. "The tunnels vary in size and scale," journalist Abigail Hauslohner explains in the accompanying article. "Some are fragile dirt shafts; others feature wide, wood-reinforced passageways." There are, according to the users and builders of these spaces, "hundreds of tunnels—some weaving right over one another at different depths—that are mostly used to import commercial goods that range from food and baby formula to computers and even cars." Livestock is frequently herded across the border, through electrically lit tunnels, sometimes uphill. "Centered around the town of Rafah," Hauslohner explains, these tunnels "are virtually the only way that goods have reached the residents of the tiny territory since 2002, when Hamas took control of it and Israel imposed a blockade on the its land and sea borders."  [Image: Flexible infrastructure: "The tunnels' electric and phone systems are a study in improvisation," we read; photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].The required physical infrastructure for these constructions spills out to include "warehouses that sell the tools used to physically shape the tunnel industry: shovels, rope, pulleys and electrical cords, plus pickaxes, hammers, nuts, bolts and screws in all sizes. The industry of making the tunnels is a booming business on its own." In the following image we see "tunnel heads," where the subterranean structures breach the Earth's surface and allow exit or entry.  [Image: "Dirt from the digging litters the landscape," Time explains. "The smugglers say that Israel's blockade gives them no choice. Says one Rafah shopkeeper, 'Even if Israel destroys all of the tunnels entirely, I'm quite sure that the they will only be dug again and again.'" Photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].Check out the rest of the photographs over at Time; but be sure to browse through Mosse's own website for some other, incredible work.
 [Image: A mobile biosafety containment apparatus in a simulated medivac exercise, via the CDC].
Jonathan Richmond is director of Jonathan Richmond and Associates, Inc., a private biosafety consulting firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. He founded the company after nearly 35 years with the Centers for Disease Control.
The firm has a particular expertise in "facility design" for biosecure environments, with a strong emphasis on international biosafety education efforts. Richmond has worked on projects with NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the World Health Organization Biosafety Program, to name a few, and he has participated in supervisory visits to the remote bioweapons labs of the former Soviet Union.
As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Richmond about his firm’s work, about the technical specifics of biosafety, about the difference between biosecurity and quarantine, and about his own professional history.
• • •
BLDGBLOG: First of all, what exactly is biosafety? How is the term most commonly defined?
Jonathan Richmond: Biosafety is focused on issues related to microorganisms that cause diseases of humans or animals—and, if not the microorganisms themselves, the toxins that those organisms might produce. Achieving biosafety relies on a combination of the facility in which you’re going to work—that is, the engineering controls; the personal protective equipment that you’re able to wear; the medical surveillance programs that you’re involved with; whether you can be immunized against the disease agent, and so on—and then the practices and the procedures that you follow while you’re doing the work. The latter, ultimately, is perhaps the most important and most critical thing.
BLDGBLOG: Can you explain the difference between quarantine and biosafety?
Richmond: Quarantine is typically defined, or set up, when you have somebody who is already ill and you want to keep them from spreading their disease to other people. Our containment recommendations usually involve a range of biosafety practices, including quarantine. Some examples of that, of course, are all of the plans right now for the H1N1 swine flu. If you look at any of the websites that are talking about the precautions or procedures in college settings, for example, one of the things they emphasize is hand-washing—which is a practice or procedure that you can do to prevent the spread of a bug—but most go on to suggest that, if you are ill, then you should stay in your room. That’s a form of self-imposed quarantine. We saw quarantine go into effect on a very large scale with the SARS virus outbreaks, primarily in SE Asia and Canada: there was an absolute need to isolate the people so that they did not spread the disease further.
Edible Geography: There seem to be different levels of biosafety. Someone staying in their dorm room is not biosecure, for instance; it’s just a form of social isolation. Richmond: Yes, but that’s typically what one would do: keep the person isolated, either at home or, in the case of SARS, in hotel rooms, because they didn’t have appropriate isolation units in the hospitals. It depends, I suppose, on the extent of a disease outbreak: how many people are actually infected? In a normal hospital setting, if you have only a single case, that person would be set up in what’s called an isolation area or isolation room. But as you get overwhelmed with cases, public health takes on other aspects, including trying to keep people quarantined in their own homes. This was the standard set-up back at the turn of the last century. People would get various diseases going through the community, and public health people would go around and put a quarantine sign on your house. You were unable to have visitors; you weren’t supposed to go out. That’s basically the way things were contained.
 [Images: Biosafe labs and research facilities].BLDGBLOG: Beyond these social and behavioral safeguards, what about the actual design of biosafe spaces? Richmond: We look at four different levels of biocontainment. Level one is basically no containment. Level one is for working with microorganisms that aren’t known to cause human illness. This is the kind of laboratory that, for example, you might see in a high school, or in an introductory course at the college level—even a lab that’s doing E. coli studies at your local sewer plant. It’s not much of anything at all, except simple behavioral guidelines—like don’t stick things in your mouth! Level two is for working with microorganisms that are generally circulating in the community. Those are things that may cause illness; they’re probably the childhood diseases that everyone experienced early on, or that you’ve already been vaccinated against. In these particular laboratories, there’s a lot of emphasis on such things as hand-washing, wearing gowns, and wearing gloves. The facility itself is relatively simple; it’s more like a hospital laboratory. In the scope of things, this is where 90% or more of microbiological work is done. These labs are throughout the country and around the world. With level three laboratories you begin to see some extraordinary engineering controls. These laboratories are the ones that are designed to work with microorganisms spread by the aerosol route. Level two are for ones that are spread by contact. At level three, you would see the engineering controls that give you things like directional-inward airflow. You would be looking for special filtration on exhaust air that’s leaving the labs. People would work inside biological safety cabinets, which are designed to protect the worker, to protect the product that you’re working on, and, indeed, to protect the environment – the micro-environment of the lab or the external environment. Those are really quite sophisticated in their design and in their operation. There is where a lot of work on, for instance, tuberculosis takes place in this country. A fair number of the organisms that are being considered as potential agents for bioterrorism are worked with at level three. Then the level four laboratories are super-containment labs. They’re called maximum containment labs. These are labs where people would ordinarily wear a positive pressure suit while working—so they would have air supplied to them. The diseases they’re working with are the ones for which we really don’t have any vaccines and that, for the most part, we really don’t have any method to cure you if you get ill. These are the really dangerous pathogens—things like Ebola viruses, Marburg viruses, smallpox, etc.. At level four, you have bladder gaskets around the doors and you take chemical showers when you come out so that your suit gets decontaminated—and then you take that off, and you take a regular shower (which you generally would do at level three, also). A lot of attention is also paid to the liquids at level three and four—collecting these and decontaminating them, either through chemical means or through heat treatment. Anything that comes out of a level three or four lab has to be decontaminated. Small objects—things like the used clothing, small animal carcasses, and used laboratory equipment—would be run through steam autoclaves. That will sterilize things. But the large volumes of liquid effluent that you might get, say, from showers, would be collected in a very large tank, typically directly underneath the laboratory, and then heat treated or chemically treated with chlorine. Heat treatment means that you take it up to very high temperatures for certain designated periods of time before you can then cool it down and release it into a sanitary sewer. BLDGBLOG: I’d love to hear about two or three specific projects that you’ve worked on in the past. How did those projects foreground questions of biosafety or quarantine in an interesting or perhaps unexpected way? Richmond: I used to work at CDC, and CDC is the only place in the United States—indeed, it’s one of only two places in the world—where you can work with smallpox virus. Smallpox was eradicated back in the 1970s and, at that time, a lot of work was done to make sure that any smallpox still held in laboratories was either destroyed or sent to CDC. But the other laboratory where smallpox can be worked on is at an institute called Vector, out in Russia. It’s in Siberia. I had an opportunity to visit that particular laboratory a number of years ago, to see how our Russian colleagues had their containment system set up. This was so we would could compare it to how we have things set up in the U.S. I was one of the very few Americans who were ever allowed inside that containment facility; it was an honor to go there and it was extraordinarily interesting.   [Images: From artist Luke Jerram's extraordinary Glass Microbiology project].Edible Geography: What differences did you notice in their set-up? Richmond: The Vector labs, like so many things in Russia, are built on a much larger scale than in the U.S. Buildings seem to be bigger there, and the general way they do things—things are just bigger. At the time I was there—and this would have been in the mid to late 90s—the control systems for things like airflow, which is so critical in these labs, was basically handled on a laptop computer in the U.S. Over there, however, it was all controlled by this big bank of flashing lights, and they had two or three people who simply sat there all day long and watched the flashing lights, making sure that they continued flashing. Their technology was not as far advanced. Also, the suits they wore were of a slightly different design—but they accomplished the same thing. I actually thought it was a pretty good suit. I’ve also had a chance, in the past, to work with NASA, as they began to think about sending people to Mars. If you remember, back when we sent people to the Moon, there was a concern that the astronauts might bring something back from outer space. Although they built some pretty robust facilities for it, the way they handled it was not quite the way we would do it today. In fact, I had a chance to visit the NASA facility where all of the moon rocks are stored. I was able to get inside the laboratory and fiddle around with some moon rocks. But the work for the future was looking at new issues. It started with a straightforward question: what happens if we bring samples back from Mars? In that case, there was a dual concern. On the one hand, if the samples that came back happened to have an infectious agent in them, then we wanted to make sure we could protect the workers—and that’s pretty much the same way you would protect the workers in a level four facility. But the other thing that NASA wanted to be very sure of was that we did not contaminate the samples with normal earth microorganisms. Because then you could say: oh, look, we found life on Mars! When, in reality, it was something that had been introduced once the sample got back. So we got to talk about design concepts where you would have the same biosafety technology that we have here, such as negative air pressure, to prevent any organisms from escaping the facility. On the other hand, we would normally use positive air pressure to keep bugs out of a system, say, in a facility where you’re developing of vaccines or drugs. So we had to come up with a dual system that would allow for both positive and negative air pressure at the same time.   [Image: The returning Apollo astronauts relax inside their Airstream trailer/quarantine station, and their highly regulated route back from the moon].Edible Geography: How did you manage that? Richmond: The concept designs that we developed used cabinets. Biological safety cabinets come in three basic formats: class one, two, and three. The class three cabinets are hermetically sealed devices; your arms go into the cabinet in these big gloves that are sealed to the cabinet itself. What the designers came up with was that, since the cabinet is normally operated under negative pressure, they put a second layer around the cabinet, and that would be under positive air pressure. You could do it other ways, obviously, but that was the one we came up with. This design challenge then got extended by a project that we worked on through the National Academy of Sciences. They were thinking ahead to the point where the question became: How would we protect the astronauts if they went to Mars? How could we set up a laboratory there? That was very interesting, to learn about the geology and the geography of Mars, and to learn about some of the issues that we would have to deal with there. For example, one of the biggest problems is the dust that just covers the surface of Mars. Regolith, they call it. If you’re running any kind of air-filtration system, it would very quickly clog if you had a dust storm going on. Finally, I also had the opportunity to build a level three biocontainment laboratory in Africa—and that posed some very interesting questions. For the most part, in these developing countries, you don’t have all the things that we might expect to have, like running water or a reliable source of electricity. So the question there was: How do you design around those limitations? Edible Geography: When you were working with NASA and the National Academy of Sciences, did concerns with quarantine also run the other way—in other words, quarantining materials from earth that we send to Mars, so as not to contaminate Mars? Richmond: Yes. In fact, there’s a very interesting position in NASA; it’s called the Planetary Protection Officer. The person I met at the time who was Planetary Protection Officer was probably a combination of an engineer and a biologist—I don’t know what specific background he had. But that person oversees, and provides certain controls on, what is sent out from earth and what is returned to earth. There are different criteria for this. For example, if a rocket is just going to go out, and there’s no intent for it to land anywhere—if it’s just going to send back information—then there’s less concern for what’s called “ forward contamination.” But if we were to land that rocket on Mars, on an asteroid, or anywhere else, then there are things that we need to set up in order to sterilize a spacecraft before it can go. Then, if it comes back, there are even more concerns. We spent a lot of time talking about how we could bring a rocket back from Mars. For instance, could it land on earth? Would they have to eject a capsule and parachute it down into the desert somewhere? How exactly could we do this? There was a lot of thought given to that. The whole issue of quarantining samples, and bringing them back, also came up when the European Space Program wanted very much to be part of any Mars sample-return mission. In that case, if we can safely transport a sample from a containment lab somewhere in the U.S. to another lab in Europe, then could we also transport a subset of that sample to another country—say, to England—so that they could work on it over there? We actually have developed some very robust mechanisms for the transport of infectious materials, globally, so I think the application of those same kinds of technologies to NASA sample-return missions would help assure us that we aren’t contaminating something that we’re shipping—or it wouldn’t break open and contaminate the world. The Andromeda Strain, you know. BLDGBLOG: Is there a regulatory body that determines international standards of astronomical quarantine? For instance, what if China were to bring back a sample from Mars, but scientists in the U.S. thought it should be quarantined? How would this be regulated or enforced? Richmond: Whether there’s such an agency or not, I don’t know. But I’ve been doing a lot of work in China recently, and in southeast Asia, and they are very concerned about biocontainment. They have pretty much adopted the same standards that we have in the U.S. The CDC’s book on biocontainment has actually been translated into at least seven languages, and it has pretty much become the accepted standard around the world. So I think if you started to play around with something that you were bringing back from outer space… It’s such a small community of people, and they all have the same concerns. I am not terribly worried about the possibility of disagreement there.  [Image: Biosafety cabinet and suited worker].BLDGBLOG: I’m very interested in your own career trajectory, and in the nature of the private company that you’ve founded. Could you talk about the market niche—private biosafety consulting—that you stepped into with this? Richmond: It was a pretty logical next step, when I left CDC after about 35 years of biosafety work, because I just have a wealth of knowledge and I didn’t want to let it all disappear. I’ve done a lot of publishing, and I’ve got a lot of stuff out there; but there’s a lot more to it that just comes from experience. So we set up a very small company just to provide these services—either working with architects and engineers in the design phase, or even in the commissioning phases, or auditing the labs once their built, to make sure that they’re actually functioning the way they were intended. We also do a lot of teaching for the people who work in the labs, and for the people who support the labs, to make sure that they understand how to work safely. It’s been very interesting to be out and about. When I was at CDC, I also had lots of international travel experience. That means I’ve been able to work with ministers of health in different countries, or to work with them through different agencies. Shortly after I retired, I spent three months at the World Health Organization working with them on developing their biosafety program. I was there about two weeks—maybe three weeks—when they said, listen, we have a SARS laboratory-acquired infection in China. We want you to go and investigate it. That was really neat, to be on the ground, doing that kind of work. Edible Geography: So in that case, you were investigating a biosafety failure? Richmond: Yes—we were looking to understand how it occurred. Was there one thing—or two things, or six things, or a convergence of things—that allowed for this to happen? That’s actually something that we often do in the field. Every institution that has experienced a laboratory-acquired infection spends a lot of time trying to determine what went wrong so that we can spread the word. Was it a failure of equipment? Was it a failure of procedure? What exactly happened? This, incidentally, is the model that was established by Arnold Wedum, who is considered to be the father of biosafety. Back in the 1940s, Wedum was a physician at Fort Detrick, Maryland; at that time they were studying offensive biological warfare. He had a small team of people and, any time something went wrong, they would spend a lot of time trying to figure out what happened. What was it that allowed for an agent to escape from the tube or from the centrifuge? That work continues today, following the same guidance document, in order to figure out what’s going on. Edible Geography: How did you first get started in this field? Richmond: Years and years ago, when I first started, I was at a place called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. That’s located just off the tip of Long Island. We did a lot of what if? scenarios there—not just about Plum Island itself. For example, we were once talking about foot-and-mouth virus: how do you contain it? And how do you eradicate it? It was an incident like that that got me out of the lab as a full-time virology researcher and into the field of biological safety. We had a breach of the containment at Plum Island back in the 1970s, and the director came to me and he said, “Richmond, we need a biosafety officer—would you like to be that?” And I said, “What’s that?” [ laughs] Because the term biosafety officer really had not been coined until 1976 or thereabouts, at the Asilomar Conference in California, where the first recombinant DNA research was presented as scientific fact. The scientists there got quite concerned—almost frightened, I suppose—not knowing what this research was going to be lead to. They called for a moratorium on this type of work until the director of the National Institutes of Health could assure them that it was safe. It took about a year of research at NIH before they came up with the guidance document about biosafety levels. But, in this document, it said that if you’re going to do this type of work then you need to have a biosafety officer. That’s how we got things started.  [Image: The H5N1 "bird flu" virus]. BLDGBLOG: As far as your current work goes, who, for the most part, is your clientele? In other words, are you working mostly for private firms or for state-affiliated clients? Richmond: It’s some of everything. We’ve done a lot of work in Brazil. Brazil has built a very robust biosafety program over the last dozen years. I’ve done perhaps 20% of my work in southeast Asia—a lot of work in Singapore and China. In Singapore it’s all quasi-governmental, because of the nature of their dictatorship. And in China—who knows what it is. [ laughter] But most of the work I’ve done there has been with CDC China—the equivalent of the CDC in Atlanta. I also work with private industry—companies that say, hey, we’re doing this kind of work and we need someone from the outside to come by and take a look, to make sure we’re meeting the standards. Back in 1996, a program started at CDC that, by its very nature, fell into my lap. That was to look at what has been called the " Select Agent Program," which is a bunch of microorganisms that have the potential for being used in biowarfare. Laboratories that are working with these agents have to be registered with the CDC or with the Department of Agriculture—or with both, depending upon the agent. In order to get that registration, or to keep that registration, they have to be inspected by CDC or USDA roughly once every three years. There’s a growing concern that some of these labs are not going to pass the inspection. So they contact me to do a pre-CDC inspection—we just help them to clear up the things that might stand in the way of getting, or not getting, their approval. That’s the kind of work that we do. The stuff I like to do the most, though, is teaching. Getting out there and teaching people what we call the principles of biosafety—and, how, once they’ve learned those, they can get out and start teaching them to other people in turn. To give you an example: in the mid-90s we did a program in Brazil called a “Course for Multipliers.” We had one representative from each of the seven federal laboratories, and one from each of the twenty-three state laboratories, and we gave them all a week of training. We gave them materials—Powerpoint presentations and books, all translated into Portuguese. Over the next three years, they went on to train 4,000 more people. That’s why I say that they have taken to this big time. We’ve also done training in China, and we’ve been working with Pakistani and Indian folks, first of all to get biosafety associations started there but also to do some training. The Pakistanis have since started a biosafety association; the Indians are planning to, but they haven’t actually done so yet. Edible Geography: Finally, what issues, innovations, or trends for biosafety do you see looking into the future? Richmond: That’s an interesting question. A few years ago, the United States set out to build more containment laboratories. This actually started before 9/11, as we tried to get more hospitals to have their TB work done at level three, rather than at level two. But, then, of course, after 9/11, a lot of money got pumped into the system, and there have been a whole bunch of labs built since then, both level three and level four. However, I also think we’re going to see more international growth of the field. I have a project I’ve been working on for the last five or six years now, trying to see if we can establish a standard for biosafety professionals that would be recognized globally. The World Health Organization recognizes 196 different countries, and probably only 20 of them have what you would consider a reasonable biosafety program. I think we’re going to see this gradually grow. Our concept of the world is shrinking all the time, in terms of how quickly we can move and how quickly agents can move around. And these little bugs don’t carry passports and they don’t honor borders, and we have to be vigilant. We have to take a look at whatever’s coming down the pike next. The avian flu and, now, the H1N1—and who knows what it will be next year. But there’s more and more international cooperation on this kind of stuff, and I think it’s wonderful. • • •This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own. For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes, The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford. Many more interviews are forthcoming.
 [Image: A mobile, military field hospital and medical instant city].If you happen to be in Montreal this week, I will be giving a lecture tomorrow night at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. I have to admit to being a long-time fan of the CCA, so it's quite a thrill to be speaking there. The lecture is free and open to the public, it's on Thursday, October 22, and it kicks off at 7pm; it's called " Cities of the CDC." For the most part, I'll be addressing the topics of urban form, epidemic disease, and the spatialization of public health, by way of my recent research into spaces of quarantine. The point is to look at a number of questions, including: What might have happened, architecturally speaking, if Archigram, when it came time to design their Instant Cities, had teamed up with the CDC?  [Image: A modular, "containerized" field hospital complex by the Red Cross and UN].Put another way, what might have been the result if the CDC had been asked to design a planned city like Masdar, and not Norman Foster? Is there such a thing as a medical utopia? And how do our cities help to shape the diseases that infect us? Along with this will be some new, previously unpublished material taken from the ongoing series of quarantine interviews that I've been doing with Edible Geography. In any case, if you're in Montreal tomorrow night, be sure to say hello!
 [Image: A ruined dock at the Philadelphia Lazaretto; photo by David Barnes].
David Barnes is associate professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on medicine and public health. His most recent research project involves the Philadelphia Lazaretto, a 19th-century quarantine station located on an island in the Delaware River.
As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Barnes about the origins and history of the now-abandoned Lazaretto, including ongoing attempts to preserve the site today. In the process, our conversation covers the legal nature of Colonial-era quarantine, the cultural impact of epidemic disease, and the psychological effects of involuntary medical isolation,
 [Image: The Philadelphia Lazaretto, via Wikipedia].
• • •
BLDGBLOG: How did you first get into the study of quarantine, and specifically of the Philadelphia Lazaretto?
David Barnes: The history of quarantine was actually not my idea of a burning historiographical problem. In fact, I was working on two completely different projects when I first saw the Lazaretto—but the sight of it just really stuck in my mind. I decided to read everything that had been written about the history of this place—but I soon found that essentially nothing had been written, in a city where it seems like half the buildings in Center City have two or three books written about their history. This is the oldest surviving quarantine facility in the Western hemisphere, and the seventh oldest in the world—and almost nothing has been written about its history.
BLDGBLOG: Why do you think it’s been so overlooked?
Barnes: I don’t really know. I don’t have a good answer for that, even though I’ve asked myself that question many times. It’s possible that it’s just an accident, and the right person at the right time simply hasn’t come along. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that the history of quarantine is a large, robust subfield of the history of medicine. Generally, historians have written about specific diseases or specific outbreaks; in many of those works, quarantine figures only fairly marginally.
 [Image: Philadelphia's abandoned Lazaretto as it now stands, photographed by David Barnes].
Edible Geography: Can you describe the Philadelphia Lazaretto, and tell us something of what you have found out about it?
Barnes: Sure. The first law relating to quarantine in Pennsylvania was signed by William Penn in 1700, in response to an epidemic of yellow fever in 1699 in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded by William Penn and his gang in 1682, of course—so yellow fever wasn’t far behind. But quarantine itself was not a systematic policy until later in the eighteenth century.
Sometime around 1743, the Pennsylvania colonial government bought an island at the mouth of the Schuylkill River, where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware near Fort Mifflin (which was also built around the same time). It was called by various names: Fishers Island and Province Island, and then later it became known as State Island. It’s just northeast of where the airport is today.
I should say that I’ve developed a little bit of a pedantic pet peeve about the word quarantine, because people use quarantine to refer to what I call isolation. Whenever there is the threat of swine flu or whatever other contagious disease, there are always various policies or proposals to isolate patients or isolate the households of patients or infected people—in other words, impose some form of voluntary or mandatory house arrest or hospitalization somewhere. To me, that’s not quarantine, that’s isolation. Quarantine, in the strict sense, refers to trying to prevent a disease from entering a community from the outside: basically, the interception and detention of vessels, vehicles, cargo, people, or whatever, for a period of time. That’s what quarantine is to me.
Anyway, in the 1740s, Fishers Island/Province Island was bought by the colonial government of Pennsylvania, and structures were built for the accommodation of vessels, passengers, cargo, and patients. Those structures are occasionally referred to as the Lazaretto, though it’s usually referred to as the Marine Hospital. Occasionally you’ll see it referred to as the Pest House, or just Province Island.
Quarantine was enforced on a sporadic basis at that location for the rest of the eighteenth century. As the city grew, the inhabited part of the city got closer and closer to the island. What was a pretty remote location in 1740 was not that far away at all from the city by the 1790s, and it was not at all hard for people in the city to have contact with people at the marine hospital. So you have friends and relatives trying to make contact with people undergoing quarantine; you have merchants trying to pick up their cargo from ships undergoing quarantine; you have people passing messages back and forth… It was just not very hard for Philadelphians to get there and to have contact with people under quarantine, even though it was against the law.
Then comes 1793. There was a devastating epidemic of yellow fever that year, the likes of which had not been seen before. The best estimate is that ten percent of the city’s population died in two months. A huge percentage of the population fled. Basically, anyone who had anywhere to go, left, including many of the doctors. It was a calamity.
By then, the United States was an independent nation, and its capital was Philadelphia. The Federal Government was sitting here, the Supreme Court, the President—they were all there in Philadelphia. They mostly hightailed it out of town, too, and the national government was brought to a standstill.
The scenes of devastation that are written about in letters and surviving testimony are absolutely heart-wrenching. It was terrifying, it was gruesome—but it was also heroic, poignant, and inspiring, because some people didn’t leave. Some people selflessly volunteered to tend to the sick, and to help keep the city going in the midst of an emergency. Dr. Benjamin Rush—a titan of American medicine—stayed, and he cared for patients from before sunrise to long after sundown. Of course, he also bled them profusely and gave them huge doses of what was, essentially, mercury—he was a controversial figure because of his treatment methods.
Others, including a community of free blacks in Philadelphia, led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, organized groups to take patients to Bush Hill, the emergency hospital that was set up in the city, and to provide clothing, food, and care for the sick people and their families. It was believed by many that black people were immune to yellow fever; the idea was that, because blacks were native to tropical climates, they were immune to tropical diseases. But, of course, that was not the case, and many blacks did die in that epidemic.
So there are stories of heroism, and stories of tremendous suffering. The reason I’m going on at length about 1793 is that I have come to believe that this experience was nationally formative. I think there was sort of a 9/11 effect, for lack of a better term, that took place after a catastrophe like that. There were many other yellow fever epidemics, in many other port cities, but 1793 in Philadelphia was, in a sense, like Ground Zero. It was something that nobody believed could happen; it was in the capital; it was just unimaginable.
The yellow fever went away with the first frost, as cooler temperatures arrived—but what is perhaps most terrifying of all was that it came back. It didn’t come back in 1794 or in 1795, but it came back especially severely in 1797, 1798, and 1799. A deep trauma, I think, was inflicted by those recurring epidemics. Clearly, quarantine at the Marine Hospital was not protecting the city against disease.
 [Image: A painting of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, "probably by Frank Taylor, noted Philadelphia illustrator, ca. 1900," Barnes notes].
BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting that the Marine Hospital was not a bio-secure facility in any modern sense; it was simply geographically isolated enough to function as a site of quarantine. Its medical usefulness was undone by urban sprawl.
Barnes: Exactly. The reason the hospital was there in the first place was because it was on the river. Ships could anchor there conveniently. Most importantly, though, it was far away from the city. It’s not as though the air on Province Island was especially healthful or clean—it was just the distance from downtown Philadelphia.
However, by the 1790s, it was clearly not working. Many people believed it was simply too easy for those undergoing quarantine to have contact with people from the city. There are countless stories of violations of the quarantine laws—people leaving ships or people coming on board the ships.
The Board of Health of Philadelphia was established in response to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. It started meeting in 1794, and it quickly determined that the city needed a better quarantine facility—one that was farther away and that had much more rigorous enforcement.
 [Image: An aerial view of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, ca. 1929].
BLDGBLOG: Did that come with any constitutional issues, as to whether or not the Board of Health was violating the rights of the people it held in quarantine? How much of that sort of discourse was there at the time?
Barnes: There wasn’t much discourse about infringement of liberties, at least in the way we would see it today. However, the Board of Health was always politically controversial. There were controversies about the division of powers between the state and the city authorities, and there were always arguments about the extent of the Board of Health’s power.
Complaints by individual people who were enduring the unpleasant experience of quarantine usually did not take the form of complaints about their rights being violated. Rather, it was that they had other things to do. It’s boring; they need to be somewhere else; it’s interfering with their business; it’s interfering with their lives and it’s taking too long. Those sorts of more mundane, less philosophical complaints predominate.
On the other hand, there are constant complaints about the way that this authority was used—that the Board of Health was overdoing it, or overreaching, or interfering excessively with commerce. In fact, “interfering excessively with commerce” is the number one complaint I’ve found.
In any case, in 1799 the Board of Health chose and bought a new location on Tinicum Island, which is the site of the Lazaretto that I’m studying—the one that is still intact today. That site was roughly twelve to fourteen miles from the city proper. It was much more remote, and nobody lived nearby. The new Lazaretto they built there was a state-of-the-art facility—there was nothing like it anywhere else in North America and possibly even the world. They opened it in 1801, and it operated continuously until 1895.
Edible Geography: What does “state-of-the-art” mean for a Lazaretto at that time? What design rubric or template were they using?
Barnes: That’s a really good question. One of the main things was its size. It’s a ten-acre site, and the main building is huge. Today, it still looks like a very large, very stately building. It’s even, I would say, beautiful.
In terms of outbuildings, there was a separate two-story house for the Lazaretto physician, and another separate two-story home for the Quarantine Master. There were bargemen’s quarters and a watch-house right on the edge of the river. There was a United States Customs Facility right next door with a large warehouse for the storage of cargo undergoing quarantine. There were also smaller outbuildings like a kitchen and a barn, or carriage house.
Interestingly, the main gate to the Lazaretto site still survives—it’s a gorgeous, ornate, wrought-iron gate that’s a little bit overgrown with vines now. That was where all transactions with the outside world took place. You had to get written permission from the Board of Health before approaching the gate of the Lazaretto. In other words, all relatives and friends visiting those who were undergoing quarantine, or visiting those who lived and worked at the Lazaretto, had to get permission simply to approach the gate.
Then there was another hospital that was sometimes called the Dutch hospital, or the smallpox hospital. It was a fairly decent-sized, two-story building, built in 1804-5 on the northwestern corner of the property. It does not survive today.
Basically, it was a very expansive facility. It had the ability to house a large number of patients and to provide for the daily needs of the crew and passengers undergoing quarantine. I certainly don’t think it operated any differently, medically-speaking, from other hospitals or quarantine hospitals of the time. It was fairly well-staffed with full-time employees, at least during the quarantine season. The quarantine season varied. For most of the nineteenth century, the season was, by law, June 1st to October 1st—but the Board of Health could declare an early start or a late finish to quarantine. In really bad years, where there were lots of epidemics, or reports of epidemics, in various geographic regions, the quarantine season could last all year.
I think it’s really the size and extent—the staffing and capacity—of the Lazaretto that made it state-of-the-art at the time.
 [Image: Photo by David Barnes].
BLDGBLOG: How exactly would one preserve the Lazaretto today—would you be preserving only the buildings themselves, or could you somehow preserve, even recreate, the experience of quarantine? Further, at what stage of its life would the Lazaretto be most usefully preserved—as it was built in 1801, or as it was closed down in 1895?
Barnes: All excellent questions. I’ll take your last one first.
The site did change over time, but it didn’t change all that much. The grounds certainly changed—gardens and ornamental hedges were planted. The most detailed surviving description of the site that I’ve been able to find is from a newspaper article in 1879. It’s a very, very detailed description of the buildings and grounds. We also have a gorgeous watercolor, but it’s undated; the best guess of the archivists and curators who have studied it is that it’s from the middle of the nineteenth century. That doesn’t tell us much, but you can make some educated guesses based on the way the people are dressed in it. We also do have some photographs from the 1880s and onwards.
Interestingly, the site and the buildings later went through several incarnations. It became the summer home of the Philadelphia Athletic Club—so it was a summer resort retreat for the wealthy elite of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Athletics baseball team, which are today the Oakland A’s, played at the Lazaretto. They played on the northern half of the grounds. There are even some depictions of it laid out as a baseball field. Then, beginning around 1920, it was the first seaplane base in North America—an aviation training school for seaplane pilots. That’s what it was for most of the twentieth century.
As far as preservation goes, I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent thinking about this. My own fantasy is of a great historic site and museum. The site has unparalleled historical significance. Various people have called it Philadelphia’s Ellis Island—but, in some ways, I think it’s more significant than Ellis Island. Ellis Island has tremendous historical significance because of the volume of human cargo that passed through there. The sheer number of people who passed through Ellis Island is huge, as is the number of Americans today who can trace their ancestry back through the inspection station there. But Philadelphia’s Lazaretto is a century older—as well as completely different. It was the quintessential nineteenth century institution. To me, it’s a no-brainer that this would be a destination.
Having said that, it costs money to preserve and save historic sites. It costs a lot of money to restore the buildings and the grounds, and to maintain them. And museums, with a few exceptions, are not doing all that well; they don’t generally tend to pay their own way. It’s not a no-brainer financially, by any means.
The latest proposal I’ve heard is that the outbuildings could be dedicated to historical interpretation, and the main building itself would be dedicated to commercial office space. It’s all still up in the air.
 [Images: Out-buildings on the grounds of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, photographed by David Barnes].
Edible Geography: Your work suggests that quarantine is quite an overlooked dimension of everyday life in the early United States—as well as something of a forgotten chapter in the immigrant arrival experience. Why is that?
Barnes: Well, it was an unpleasant fact of life—that’s really the best way that I can put it. In one of the papers I’m writing about this, I call it “a most unloved institution.” Really, nobody liked quarantine at all. Merchants, of course, hated it—their cargo spoiled, time is money in business, and this was a huge delay, a waste of time, and an obstacle to commerce.
Everybody on board a ship couldn’t wait to get to their destination. Whether they were immigrants, as many of them were, or they were engaged in commerce—or simply visiting—everyone was desperate to arrive. They’re so close to getting there—but then they’re detained. They can write letters—but they can’t get off the ship unless they’re very sick and have to be taken to the hospital. Many refer to complete and utter boredom, and to impatience—sometimes to fear of getting sick. After all, you’re trapped on board a filthy ship with filthy people who have been confined together for weeks at a time. They are, in a sense, imprisoned on this vessel. All they can do is write letters and complain.
The paradox for me, historically, has been: how did quarantine survive so long, even into the twentieth century, when everybody hated it so much? Crews and captains hated it, passengers hated it, and doctors denounced it. Many doctors, throughout most of the nineteenth century, said quarantine was completely worthless, and that we should be devoting our attention to cleaning up our cities instead, because it was sanitation that would prevent epidemics. Other doctors didn’t go quite so far, but they did complain that quarantine was enforced arbitrarily and needlessly aggressively.
As to the experience of quarantine itself, I have only scattered bits of testimony. One of the letters I’ve found was from a Philadelphia-based merchant in 1804; I think his name was John Reynolds. I’ve found several letters that he wrote to his mother and sister in Philadelphia from the Lazaretto, where he was undergoing quarantine.
In each letter he says, “I hope to be liberated from here in a few more days.” And in the next letter, written five days later: “I cannot wait to escape from this place of my captivity.” He’s impatient. He’s not complaining that his rights have been violated; he’s just desperate to get out of there.
In one letter to his sister, he says, “It has been so long since I’ve been on shore. It has been so long since I have been home. I am dying to see some of those Pennsylvania beauties. You must introduce me to some as soon as I arrive.” This was in a letter to his sister.
It gets lonely where you’re trapped in this sort of sardine can!
Edible Geography: On average, how long were people held there?
Barnes: There is no general rule. The length of time varied from a day to two weeks, or even more. On occasion, vessels were detained for 30 days.
What’s interesting about the enforcement of quarantine is that there were three objects of detention: the vessel, the cargo, and the people on board. They were often treated very differently. I have lots of examples of vessels detained, and their cargo allowed to go on, but the people were kept on board. I have many other examples of the people being allowed to go, but the cargo being considered very dangerous and having to be cleansed and purified, usually by means of fumigation or with some kind of disinfectant spray.
Really, though, I think at the heart of quarantine is the idea of the cleansing power of time. The passage of time alone will make certain things better. If there is something dangerous in the vessel or in the cargo, it will declare itself within a period of time—or it will simply burn itself out. It can’t last indefinitely. Further, everybody knew from experience that things were fine after the first frost, so you would never detain any vessel, cargo, or people longer than the first frost.
 [Image: Painting of the Lazaretto attributed to T. Barnea (undated);
courtesy of the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia].
BLDGBLOG: There’s an interesting point to be made here vis-à-vis long-haul travel to extremely distant destinations. If a place took long enough to get to, in an era of wind-powered ships, quarantine wasn’t often necessary; any disease on board would already have burned itself out, as you say, by the time of arrival. But when steam-powered ships came along, and, then airplanes, people could arrive before a disease cycle came to its natural end—so quarantine stations became necessary. In other words, an entire class of architectural structures comes into existence because of the lengths of certain journeys or the types of transportation involved.
Barnes: That’s fascinating. Time is crucial in quarantine—and there is always a negotiation about how long is long enough. There was a tug of war, for instance, between the Lazaretto physician, who was the leading authority on the site, and the Board of Health, whose dictates that physician was required to obey. But you also had to factor in news reports of epidemics on various Caribbean islands, and you had to factor in the testimony of the captain and crew about what the health status of their port of origin—whether there were any illnesses there, what broke out during the journey, and if anyone had died. But is the captain reliable, or is he known to be a liar? And you also had to inspect the passengers and the crew physically. All of these were factors in the quarantine decision.
Time will always be a critical element of that calculus.
• • •
This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.
For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen, and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford.
Many more interviews are forthcoming.
 [Image: Image 1, "Eternal Punishment," from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story's architectural landscape. Hillier's project was called The Emperor's Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige. The Emperor’s Castle originates from a mythical and ancient tale hidden within a woodblock landscape scene created by Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker, Ando Hiroshige. This tale charts the story of two star-crossed lovers, the weaving Princess and the Cowherd, who have been separated by the Princess’s father, the Emperor. These characters have been replaced by architectonic metaphors creating an urban theatre within the grounds of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. The result is astonishing; the images here have been presented in order, so you can follow the flow of the tale, with descriptive text supplied by Hillier. I would advise, however, that you also check out the Flickr set I put together for the project, where much larger versions of these images (and more text) are available.
The first two images, Hillier says, are taken from his "research storybook." They are hand-cut paper collages, and they show us "two acts from a series of five that illustrate and explore the narrative structure of the tale." The scenes thus supply "a series of clues, which can inform the future architectural proposition."
 [Image: Image 2, "The Last Meeting," from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
As Hillier writes: Image 1 (Act 3, Eternal Punishment) illustrates the Emperor’s anger over his daughter’s relationship with a cowherd. He separates the couple, placing them back in their original locations. The Emperor wanted to be sure they would never meet again, so he closed the castle and opened the heavens. Rain fell, causing the castle’s moat to flood, creating an island of the castle surrounded by a deep and swift lake unassailable by any man.
Image 2 (Act 5, The Last Meeting). Seeing the sadness of their friend, the Princess, the birds and animals came together to decide how to stop the torrent of her tears. So the sky became black as all the magpies and crows, with their wings spread wide, formed a bridge across the lake. When the Princess realizes what the birds have done, she stops crying and rushes across the feathery bridge to embrace the Cowherd and renew their pledge of eternal love. The next three images "are hand-cut exploratory paper collages" illustrating "the architectonic character transition" through which the story's human figures are transformed into pieces of architecture.
In a way, it's the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as retold for Late Edo Japan.
   [Images: Image 3, "The Emperor's Origami Lungs"; Image 4, "The Princess's Knitted Canopy"; and Image 5, "The Cowherd's Mechanical Cow-cutters"; from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
From Hillier's project text: Image 3 (The Emperor’s Origami Lungs). The Emperor’s lungs come alive through differing gestures and surface transformations based on geometrical tessellations adopted from origami crease patterns. The lungs imitate the motion of breathing through expansion and contraction creating a bellowing volume that allows the Emperor to project his emotions both visually and audibly. They rise and fall, creating a bobbing motion, which produces a rippling affect onto the surrounding skin. The severity of these ripples will depend on the anger of the Emperor, and can cause the newly knitted areas of skin to become loose and break, stopping the Princess from ever reaching the cow herder.
Image 4 (The Princess’s Knitted Canopy). The Princess, a flexible, diaphanous knitted membrane, envelopes the spaces below and is fabricated using the surrounding ‘Igusa’: a natural rush material used in the fabrication of tatami mats. Igusa expels a soothing scent as the skin undulates, which is said to calm body and mind. This scent acts as a perfume of remembrance to the cow herder and his time spent running hand in hand through the meadows with the Princess.
Image 5 (The Cowherd’s Mechanical Cow-Cutters). The cowherd has been reinterpreted architecturally as the grass band, which wraps the perimeter of the site, encompassing the Emperor’s lungs and Princess’s knitted skin. Embodying the cowherd are the mechanical cows, which act as wind-up grass-cutting devices that constantly wander the grazing land, cutting the grass and fanning the aroma towards the Princess as a reminder of the cowherd. These cows are waiting and hoping for the moment the Princess knits her skin over the mechanical waves towards them, re-enacting the connection between the two star-crossed lovers. The mechanical symbology of the resulting landscape—with "the Princess's knitted membrane knit[ting] itself ever larger... to reach the grass parkland perimeter representing the Cowherd"—is outlined in more detail in the project text (again, as seen in the Flickr set).
 [Image: Image 6 from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
The rest of the images—including the full model, above—showcase Hillier's exquisite craftmanship.
    [Images: Images 7, 8, 9, and 10 from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
Image 7, above, shows us "the contoured landscape underneath the knitted canopy, exposing the series of connecting walkways that allow the Emperor’s army to run from one lung to another," while Image 8 reveals "the Emperor's origami lungs." Image 9 reveals how those lungs operate; there, we begin to see "the lung movements" of the Emperor, Hillier writes, as they "generate a bellowing volume of air." This air is then "forced upwards, sending the woven lung collars into a thrashing frenzy, visually increasing the impact of the Emperor’s anger." In another context, it might be interesting to explore the use of pneumatic metaphors to explore the nature and function of imperial power; but such an essay will have to wait for another day.
Image 10, meanwhile, zooms in on the Emperor's "Mechanical Moat," a machine-hydrology that surrounds and delimits the project landscape.
And then we reach the finale.
 [Image: Image 11 from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
The images below are "the final triptych," Hillier writes. They offer "a section through the urban theatre [that] illustrates the frenetic ‘life’ of the building. This 1.8m x 0.8m piece is the culmination of all the research and design synthesis carried out above."
    [Images: Images 12, 13, 14, and 15 from The Emperor's Castle by Thomas Hillier].
Hillier's project is a beautifully realized example of something I've long been curious about—for instance, if a book like Ulysses had been "written" not with a typewriter but with a 3D printer, what sort of architectural world might result? The Emperor's Castle offers at least one possible answer for how literature could be translated directly into urban and architectural space.
Now reverse-engineer this: take a landscape garden somewhere—or an accidental assemblage of parks, buildings, rivers, and homes—and interpret that setting as if it is literature. Do a reverse-Hillier, so to speak: start with the landscape and extract characters and motivated dramatic actions from the objects placed within it.
In any case, again, check out the Flickr set for more text and much larger images; and don't miss Johan Hybschmann's " book of space," also produced this year at the Bartlett.
 [Image: Photo by Vienna-based photographer Wolfgang Thaler].Journalist Christoph Hinterreiter recently teamed up with photographer Wolfgang Thaler to document a nuclear bunker called D-0 in what is now Bosnia. As Hinterreiter wrote in an email: The bunker was the largest structure of its kind, and was for use by the upper echelon of the former Yugoslavia. The premises are still fully furnished and equipped with military apparatus—code books are positioned beside telexes and restrooms are equipped with originally wrapped paper towels. Its construction lasted for 26 years (1953 – 1979) and it cost 4.6 billion USD. The bunker's construction required "20,000m3 of excavated material," Hinterreiter adds, all of which "was secretly transported from the site. A major part was further processed in the nearby JNA quarry and disguised as construction material." The photos and text quoted here were originally published in issue #56 of a Croatian magazine called ORIS; they have been reproduced with kind permission of Hinterreiter and Thaler.   [Images: Photos by Wolfgang Thaler].Reminiscent of the book Waiting for the End of the World by photographer Richard Ross—of which you can see many examples over at GOOD—Hinterreiter and Thaler show us a strangely preserved world of plastic-wrapped couches and vintage telephones, track lighting and glass-framed photographs. Hinterreiter specifically zooms in on these details for his article in ORIS: All basic functions are organized in simple metal structures, aligned within a tunnel-like space. In the centre of the horseshoe-shaped footprint lies an elevated block, whose design exceeds purely functional considerations. It is elevated above the rest of the facility and contains interior design components not found elsewhere in the fallout shelter. It was for use by upper echelons of the Yugoslav government. Variously ornamented wall papers, kept in garish colors, cover most walls and arches. Patterns and shades of green vary from room to room and characterize each space. The surface driven spaces provide no clue about the nature of their organization or construction. It was a kind of subterranean Motel 6 in which guests could wait-out the apocalypse.    [Images: By Wolfgang Thaler].Such patience would require an extraordinary technical apparatus, however, something that might allow a state of self-imposed quarantine to exist; between the bunker-dwellers and the obliterated surface of the planet above them stood complex networks of ventilation equipment and back-up generators.  [Images: By Wolfgang Thaler].As Hinterreiter further explains: Twice a day, air-handling units pump fresh air through a labyrinth of air ducts to maintain 21-23°C temperature at 60-80% humidity. Two transformers are on alternating duty to supply electricity. The water reservoir is filled with potable water from the adjoining Bijela Neretva river. Still modestly filled fuel tanks are ready to supply stand-by emergency generators. Various archaic-appearing mechanical systems would have guaranteed automatic seclusion from the outside world and the engagement of self-sustainable building systems, providing an autarkic survival space for 350 people over a period of months. What was in the event of a nuclear attack supposed to ensure the survival of the political and military elite of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia now fills solitary spaces with fresh air and illuminates Cold War military artifacts for visitors, interested in the fiction-like premises of nuclear bunker D-0. The motivation for building this structure where it is was fundamentally geographical: The geographic advantage of Bosnia and Herzegovina, being completely surrounded by other Yugoslavian republics, led to the establishment of strategically important industries in the country’s inaccessible valleys. A network of underground control posts, ammunition factories and power plants lies beneath the country. But then, of course, all geographies come with strategic implications; filling the valleys of Bosnia and Herzegovina with military installations should thus come as no surprise.  [Images: Wolfgang Thaler].Earlier this week, meanwhile, there was some speculation that perhaps the original Labyrinth at Minos had been discovered; we read in the Independent that "a disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels" could very well be the original site where the myth of a minotaur hiding at the heart of an architecturally elaborate underground space was inspired. The history of these quarry-caves is fascinating (with shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark thrown in at the end): The caves, which are known locally as the Labyrinthos Caves, consist of about two and half miles of interlocking tunnels with widened chambers and dead-end rooms. They have been visited since medieval times by travellers looking for the Labyrinth, but since Knossos was rediscovered at the end of the 19th century they were neglected, and were even used as a Nazi ammunition dump during the Second World War. I mention this because the urge to build labyrinths—in stone or in tufa or against the detonations of nuclear war—often seems to transcend those labyrinths' purported use-value. As Hinterreiter himself might say, constructing a labyrinth of any kind "exceeds purely functional considerations," sliding off into mythology before too long and adding an oddly sinister veneer to any civilization that pursues it. In other ways, I'm reminded of stories like Seymour Cray and his obsession with tunneling, or William Gass's unreadable novel The Tunnel, even the Mole Man of Hackney. Of course, it would be wrong to over-blur these contexts and ignore the clear, functional purpose of a nuclear bunker; but it's hard not to wonder about the psychological implications of living underground for extended periods of time or, indeed, what strange impulses might compel a society to seek refuge beneath the surface of the earth—Hinterreiter's "automatic seclusion from the outside world"—in the first place. This is what BLDGBLOG has previously referred to as " psychology at depth."  [Images: Wolfgang Thaler].In any case, the ORIS article ends with a quotation from Paul Virilio. He suggests that the now-purposeless and abandoned bunker pictured here "joins a row of defense installations such as the Atlantic Wall along the French coast or the DEW Line in North America, which are not only heritage monuments of contemporary history. They remain to remind 'us less of yesterday’s adversary than of today’s and tomorrow’s war'." Check out Hinterreiter's website for even more photos and text.
|
|
