[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].
A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: "According to the International Olympic Committee," we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city's unseasonal condition of snowlessness, "the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue," however, "carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes."
This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.
The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100 miles (6500km) across china, traveling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.
Kander "photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source"—a daunting task, for, as Kander points out, "more people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet."
Part of Kander's visual goal was "showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man," the photographer adds, "has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work."
The images featured in this post have the feel of a film set—more cinematography than photography—as if Kander has unknowingly captured a mise-en-scène, some wrongly cut dramatic moment, unfolding on the river banks.
Actors, perhaps unsure of their larger narrative role, seem overwhelmed by their infrastructural surroundings.
The stage set-design theories of Edward Gordon Craig come to mind. Craig was an early 20th-century stage set designer (and son of an architect), whose "architectonic scenery," according to M. Christine Boyer, foregrounded architectural backdrops so strongly that his props ultimately became the only on-stage action an audience was meant to watch.
Craig "proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors," Boyer writes. "The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination." It is a stage devoid of actors, in other words, just large pieces of equipment moving about according to the rules of their own choreography.
What happens, then, if this depopulated dramaturgy becomes blown-up to the scale of national infrastructure?
In one sense, this perfectly empty landscape into which humans try vainly—and at great emotional cost—to situate themselves is the hallmark of J.G. Ballard. We might even specifically ask, looking at Kander's photos: when will a Yangtze River-based rewriting of Ballard's Concrete Island come along, exploring these spatial questions?
Concrete Island, of course, is Ballard's 1974 novel about a London motorist—as it happens, an architect—who is stranded on his way home by a car accident. Freeing himself from his ruined vehicle at sundown, he finds himself trapped beneath the yawning arches of the motorway, stranded in a peripheral world of drainage culverts, ascent ramps, sliproads, and storm tunnels, a kind of urban blindspot (read Mike Bonsall's awesome forensic archaeology of London's Westway, a spatial interrogation of the built environment in order to discover where Ballard's novel was meant to be set).
With no rescue in sight, Ballard's architect is left to fend for himself, surrounded by gigantic pieces of urban infrastructure whose purpose now seems oddly counter-human; he is "alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines... an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness."
I'm left wondering: who is the J.G. Ballard of contemporary China? Nadav Kander's photographs—many more of which can be seen at the Prix Pictet site—are an enticing glimpse of what a Ballardian sensibility might create there.
I was reminded, via an old post on Pruned, of an amazing series of photographs by Jules Spinatsch called Snow Management; Snow Management was deservedly short-listed in 2008 for the Prix Prictet.
With those images, Spinatsch documents the infrastructure of snow control—and outright terrain manufacture—at an Alpine resort, including the labyrinths of retaining fences and the individual pieces of equipment that make snow creation and large-scale, though ephemeral, landscape-sculpting possible.
In a way, these scenes are like a big-budget variation on Sergio López-Piñeiro's idea, discovered via Mammoth, of a snow park or whitesward. López-Piñeiro's own photographic documentation of urban plowing practices—that is, the deliberate reshaping of snow piles into an ephemeral, new, seasonal topography—is an attempt, he writes, "to show how standard plowing techniques can become creative tools for generating winter landscapes." López-Piñeiro continues:
The white parks that I envision could be easily constructed: plowing master plans would carefully locate the snow mounds, and the resulting designs would artistically exploit the spatial conditions defined by these usually overlooked piles of snow.
In winter, an artfully shaped snow landscape could become a “whitesward”—underscoring the now obscured potential for plowing to positively transform public space. Such a white landscape could be considered a “snow observation ground” to encourage people to appreciate the snow and its accumulation, and to dispel the negative impressions and experiences that our combative approach has produced.
Ski resorts, with their huge array of technical devices and machinic subfamilies all geared toward—indeed, specifically invented for—the purpose of creating new landscapes below the thermal boundary at which their engineered shapes will liquify, become extraordinary experiments in terrain-generation on a massive scale. They are a kind of igneous hydrology: the controlled freezing of matter into artificial forms.
More images from Jules Spinatsch's spectacular series are available on his website, and the Snow Management series itself can also be downloaded as a 3.2MB PDF.
Tomorrow at noon here in New York City, a musical event that I would love to attend kicks off: 8 solid hours of sound, providing a live accompaniment for Andy Warhol's Empire—a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building.
Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, and, most exciting at least for me, Jan Jelinek—who, bizarrely, I once introduced myself to at WMF in Berlin—will be providing the music.
The Museum of Modern Art describes Empire as follows:
Empire consists of a single stationary shot of the Empire State Building filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m., July 25–26, 1964. The eight-hour, five-minute film, which is typically shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened Empire's running time by projecting the film at a speed of sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of twenty-four frames per second, thus making the progression to darkness almost imperceptible. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time. According to Warhol, the point of this film—perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work—is to "see time go by."
In fact, after a long day spent touring the involuted subterranea of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave back in 2001, Nicola Twilley and I drove home listening to Vladislav Delay's Entain, our car creaking over the hollow roof of an earth below us, its caverns hidden beneath overgrown bedrock, sinkholes perhaps waiting on either side of the highway, heading northwest over collapse-prone mineral logics toward Chicago.
Volume magazine is hosting a conference this coming May about what they call "the Architecture of Peace." Part of this will be assembling "an inventory of inspiring projects for (post-)conflict territories"—and they're hoping that you will get involved.
Are you an architect, designer, urbanist or community leader? Have you developed a project that aids to channel social relationships in a more peaceful way? Then get in touch with Volume. Send a short description to info@archis.org with the subject "AoP projects call," and we will endeavour to include it in our conference material, providing a unique overview of projects of this kind.
From post-military landscape remediation projects to transborder community exchange programs, from conflict gardens to films, from anti-gang territorial initiatives to bunker recycling services, from museums of slave history to a cartography of divided cities, I would imagine there is a huge range of ideas and examples out there to explore.
For his master's thesis, produced last year under the direction of Timo Arnall, Matt Jones, Jack Schulze, Lennart Andersson, and Mikael Wiberg, designer Matt Cottam directed this short video about a technique for growing electrical circuitry inside the trunks of living trees. Just inject the right trace metals, Cottam's mad scientist narrator explains, do some more techno-magic, and simply let the wood grow...
If only it were true. But the day will come, my t-shirt will read, when all the trees around us are computers.
2) While researching blackouts for a seminar I am teaching this winter at Pratt, I stumbled on a strange anecdote from The New York Times, published back in 1986, about a plant physiologist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden who was seeking a way to end the risk of "trees crashing down on power lines" (a major source of power interruptions).
"One of the things we're looking at," the scientist explained, "is something that will directly retard the growth of trees"—that is, chemicals "that interfere with the basic growth hormones." He was trying to develop, he adds, "a mild chemical" that would deliberately slow tree growth, "and instead of spraying we're injecting [it] directly into the tree."
Who knows where that research has now led them, twenty-four years later, but I'd suggest someone might want to mail them a copy of The Death of Grass. ASAP.
[Image: A fig tree grows in Los Angeles; photo by Pieter Severynen].
3) While going back through old bookmarks this morning, I rediscovered Tree of the Week, a series of articles run by the Los Angeles Times. The overall project could be described as a botanical cartography of the city: a catalog of Angeleno trees.
This week's tree is the "highly productive fig"; last week's was the Blackwood Acacia. With regard to the latter tree, Pieter Severynen, the series author, writes: "Given its negative properties it should be clear that a description of this tree, or for that matter any tree of the week, does not imply an endorsement to plant. Instead it is offered as a means to learn more about the existing trees that make up the fascinating urban forest surrounding us in the Southland."
The "fascinating urban forest surrounding us in the Southland" includes the Weltwitschia, the "picturesque Aleppo pine," and, of course, among many others, the apple, a tree genetically sculpted over the millennia through "hundreds of accidental and deliberate cross-hybridizations" around the world, Severynen writes.
Anyone interested in exploring the urban forests of Los Angeles would do well to check out the fruit maps of Fallen Fruit, who have discovered in the seemingly random dispersal of fruit trees around Silver Lake the remnant outlines of long-forgotten orchards; but if your curiosity goes further afield than L.A., the absolutely fantastic book Wildwood, by the late Roger Deakin, has truly unforgettable descriptions of walnut harvesting in Kazakhstan, old-growth Eastern European forests filled with war ruins and shrapnel, and Deakin's own backyard in England. It is often astonishingly beautiful—and it also Deakin's last major work.
Perhaps cities like Montreal and Stockholm—even L.A., watching auroras torque and fold over the black waters of the Pacific—should simply hire small fleets of barium-carrying orbital vehicles to keep the skies interesting all winter long.
[Images: House in Venice, California, by Bureau AA; photos by Larry Underhill].
This small and breezy house in Venice, California, designed by Robert Choeff and Krystyan Keck of the Bureau of Architectural Affairs, was completed in April 2009.
[Image: House in Venice, California; photo courtesy of Bureau AA].
The house's transparent polycarbonate cladding, used to "expose the interactions" of the building elements, makes the house function like "a structural X-ray," we read in a recent issue of Mark Magazine.
Tight quarters, a tight budget and further restrictions—including a height limit and required setbacks—navigated the architects toward their design solution: a 54-square-meter trapezoid perched above the existing structure on steel stilts, topped by a roof deck with views in all directions.
I'm reminded here of Francois Perrin's Guest House for an Anthropologist, itself also very biblio-intensive: both are houses of exposed wood and polycarbonate, with lots of things to read.
[Image: House in Venice, California, by Bureau AA; photo by Larry Underhill].
The interior of the house seems solidly locked in place: "the upper story has no doors," we read, "and its only piece of freestanding furniture is the dining table. Lean work desks and kitchen counters hug the perimeter, and built-in storage spaces double, discreetly, as screens." This includes the bookshelves.
"Where there isn't cabinetry and Sheetrock," Mark Magazine adds, "there's a window."
I would feel compelled to add curtains, I'm afraid, and I would probably be a bit nervous with all those books over my head during an earthquake, but with a few minor adjustments I might put in an order for one, too, please...
[Image: Pole Dance, P.S. 1 competition-winning design by SO-IL].
I have to admit to being less than overwhelmed by the annual P.S. 1 competition—aka the Young Architects Program—as well as by the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London, but this year's P.S. 1 winner, by Brooklyn-based SO-IL, looks pretty amazing.
[Image: Pole Dance, P.S. 1 competition-winning design by SO-IL].
Although it will be nothing but a sea of bungee-anchored soccer nets and wobbly fiber-glass poles—with some colored balls thrown overhead as mobile ornaments—the structure has the feel of being the framework for an emerging game, an obscure sport whose spatial rules are yet to be determined.
As the architects themselves explain in their initial proposal, "On discovery of its elasticity, visitors engage with the structure, to envision games, test its limits or just watch it gently dance."
[Image: Humans creating a future archaeological site on the moon].
In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports.
After all, "California law allows listing historical resources beyond the state's borders—even if it's more than 238,000 miles away."
Some of the 5,000 pounds of stuff Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin abandoned at Tranquility Base was purposeful: a seismic detector to record moonquakes and meteorite impacts; a laser-reflection device to make precise distance measurements between Earth and the moon; a U.S. flag and commemorative plaque. Some was unavoidable: Apollo 11's lunar module descent stage wasn't designed to be carted back home, for instance.
"They were told to jettison things that weren't important," anthropologist Beth O'Leary, "a leader in the emerging field of space heritage and archaeology," tells the newspaper. "They were essentially told, 'Here's eight minutes, create an archaeology site.'""
If the Apollo site does become, incredibly, a California state landmark, this decision will open a legal path for the location to be recognized as an official UNESCO World Heritage Site. This, in turn, will help protect it from vandalism during "unmanned trips to the moon by private groups, and even someday by tourists." While the implied vision of Indiana Jones, Astronaut, is an exciting one, the idea that the State of California could someday have historical jurisdiction—or something like it—over a fragment of the moon's surface seems genuinely astonishing to me. Perhaps we could even have it declared part of Los Angeles County—the first offworld municipal exclave.
Texas and New Mexico also have plans to "place the items on historic registries" later this year, we read.
Somehow this morning I ended up reading about an artificial island and devotional chapel constructed in Montenegro's Bay of Kotor.
"In 1452," we read at montenegro.com, "two sailors from Perast happened by a small rock jutting out of the bay after a long day at sea and discovered a picture of the Virgin Mary perched upon the stone." Thus began a process of dumping more stones into the bay in order to expand this lonely, seemingly blessed rock—as well as loading the hulls of old fishing boats with stones in order to sink them beneath the waves, adding to the island's growing landmass.
Eventually, in 1630, a small chapel was constructed atop this strange half-geological, half-shipbuilt assemblage.
Throwing stones into the bay and, in the process, incrementally expanding the island's surface area, has apparently become a local religious tradition: "The custom of throwing rocks into the sea is alive even nowadays. Every year on the sunset of July 22, an event called fašinada, when local residents take their boats and throw rocks into the sea, widening the surface of the island, takes place."
The idea that devotional rock-throwing has become an art of creating new terrain, generation after generation, rock after rock, pebble after pebble, is stunning to me. Perhaps in a thousand years, a whole archipelago of churches will exist there, standing atop a waterlogged maze of old pleasure boats and fishing ships, the mainland hills and valleys nearby denuded of loose stones altogether. Inadvertently, then, this is as much a museum of local geology—a catalog of rocks—as it is a churchyard.
Here, the slow creation of new inhabitable terrain simply takes place in the guise of an annual religious festival—pilgrims assembling islands with every arm's throw.
I'm thrilled to announce that Edible Geography has teamed up with Sarah Rich to host a public event here in New York City next month; it will take place at Studio-X and will also be broadcast on Columbia University's iTunes U channel.
Nicola's own description of the day's themes says it best:
The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: “Zoning Diet,” about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; “Culinary Cartography,” a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviors; “Edible Archaeology,” about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and “Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios,” an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.
Each panel, she adds, will feature "a range of voices, including designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, architects, anthropologists, health professionals, and food producers and retailers." The line-up so far looks amazing, and a public announcement of all confirmed speakers should be up soon.
So if you're interested in how food shapes cities, from urban culture to built geography, mark your calendar—and I hope to see some of you there.
Foodprint NYC will take place on Saturday, February 27, from 1-5:30 p.m., at Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York City. Here's a map.
On the advice of a friend here in New York, my wife and I went over to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on New Year's Eve to watch the school's underground steam infrastructure be transformed, temporarily, into a thunderous musical instrument. Somewhere between subterranean calliope and mutant wave organ, steam-powered explosions of sound threatened to deafen everyone as it turned 2010.
I've finally gotten around to uploading some footage I shot that night; you can watch (a very badly edited) clip, above.
[Image: Pratt's underground steam HQ, stitched together and cropped by iPhone].
According to the Municipal Art Society, Pratt's steam-powered plant "is the oldest privately-owned, continuously operating, power plant of its kind in the country"—and, once a year, it gets turned into a gigantic musical instrument. One of the whistles used has even been repurposed from an old steamship, the S.S. Normandie.
The implication here, that you can attach pieces of musical instruments, and even old ship parts, to your city's existing infrastructure and thus generate massive waves of sound is pretty astonishing; this might be a very site-specific thing, to be sure, and something only Pratt has permission to do to its own steam tunnels, but the mind reels at the possibility that this could be repeated throughout New York. For instance, on any point of the existing steam network as documented last month by Urban Omnibus:
Every winter, a typically unseen machine becomes visible in the streets of Manhattan: Con Edison’s District Steam System. Seen from the street as steam leaking from manholes, or more safely vented through orange and white stacks, leaking steam hints at an underground energy distribution system that is the largest of its kind in the United States and offers a chance for the public to become more aware of and more involved in how the city works.
As Urban Omnibus adds, "the steam system is largely ignored by the public until things go wrong"—or, of course, until that system is turned into a city-scale musical instrument through a maze of well-placed reeds, valves, and resonators.
The city is a saxophone, your grandfather explains, pointing down through sidewalk steam-grates as haunting whistles begin to sound. We have always lived inside an instrument, he adds, even if not all of us have known.
[Image: The black pyramid at Tama-Re, the Egypt of the West].
After watching a documentary about Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—a few months ago, I got to looking into the supermax prison where Kaczynski is now being held in the mountains of Colorado. And there are a lot of bizarre people up there, including Andrew Fastow, former Chief Financial Officer of Enron, and Charles Harrelson, the (now deceased) hitman father of actor Woody Harrelson.
One of the inmates who particularly stood out, however, was Dwight York. York is "an author, black supremacist leader, musician, and convicted child molester," Wikipedia tells us, and he built a colorful, Ancient Egyptian-themed instant city on several hundred acres of forest land in the U.S. state of Georgia.
[Image: Tama-Re photographed from above, via Wikimapia].
The Urban Dictionary's description of Tama-Re is amazing; it reads like every race-based fear of the white U.S. middle class summed up in one surreal location.
When York and his Nuwaubians moved there and began erecting pyramids and obelisks there was much curiosity about the group. However trouble started when the citizens became aware of the fact that York was an ex-Black Panther and a convicted felon and statutory rapist who was preaching the gospel that whites were mutants and were inferior to blacks. There is also a foam rubber alien on display in the compound that causes problems with public relations. Officials have had problems with the Nuwaubians failing to comply with zoning and building permits that coincide with what they have created. The Nuwaubians feel that this is a racist attack.
It's hard to top a "foam rubber alien," but the fear-factor nonetheless gets ratcheted up a notch:
Many children from upper middle class cities have left college to live in poverty at the cult's compound, Tama Re. This has caused a lot of turmoil in the lives of many families who can't accept the fact that their sons and daughters have left them to follow an alien messiah. Throughout the grounds speakers everywhere emit the humming sound of Egyptian chants 24 hours a day. Inside one of the pyramids you can buy books and clothes as well as a Dr. York doll. The people who live on the land dwell in a trailer park full of double-wides. York claims his people are Moors who traveled by foot from Africa to what is currently Georgia before the continental drift. The only problem with this "indisputable" fact is that the moors were Muslims who existed way after the birth of Christ which was only approximately 2000 years ago.
Ergo, there was no way in plate tectonics that they could have walked all the way to Georgia.
In June 2005, after the compound's governmental seizure, financial forfeiture, and ensuing sale for $1.1 million, outright demolition began. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time, the local sheriff was on the scene, "speaking with relish as he watched crews tear through the series of obelisks, statues, arches and buildings. Many of the dozens of structures were weathered and in disrepair. He said very few of the Egyptian structures or objects were worth salvaging. 'It feels good to tear down the SOB myself,' he said. 'By the middle of next week, there will be nothing but a couple of pyramids.'"
How, though, could these sorts of messianic compounds be addressed by and incorporated into architectural discourse? How do tacky black pyramids full of Luxor references complexify or contradict something like Venturi & Scott-Brown's ideas of pop cultural ornament discussed just this past weekend at Yale?
Put another way, when will religious compounds meet their Tom Vanderbilt—that is, a journalist willing to travel around the world writing an architectural history of these fringe religious environments and stylistically eccentric cult enclaves?
These are sites built such that their every spatial detail is not justified by some historically rigorous academic architectural code, but because they function, psychologically, as a piece-by-piece tuning of the built environment. Add enough ornamental references together, these spaces say, and some weird new Messiah might yet someday return. It is functional ornament.
[Image: The ashes of the David Koresh compound in Waco, Texas].
Of course, I'm fascinated by the idea that Tehran, for instance, has been analyzed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who trained as a traffic engineer—for its ability to handle the crush of cars and pedestrians that will show up to greet the returning Messiah. And, spatially speaking, I would love to read more about the now-destroyed Texas farmhouse inside of which David Koresh once preached his Branch Davidian gospel. But what about the central headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo, where LSD-fueled physicists meditated in the dark, crowned with well-lit helmets of electrodes, or the mirrored room inside of which Heaven's Gate cultists once strangled themselves out of fear of Hale-Bopp?
Somewhere between Spaced Out, Survival City, and the excellent (though over-exposed) Gomorrah, a seriously amazing book about the architectural design of religious compounds is waiting to be written.
Princeton Architectural Press should contract Sam Jacob and Charles Holland to write this, immediately: gonzo architectural criticism in an era of the postmodern religious baroque.
[Image: Fresh Kills landscape masterplan by Field Operations, via Mammoth; "With 2,200 acres filled with 150 million tons of trash to contend with," Metropolis writes, "the challenge is making Fresh Kills public and safe, which means covering the garbage mounds with some four feet of fresh soil. The park would grow itself with cost-effective soil farms that aren’t eyesores." Read more at the Freshkills Park Blog].
Mammoth has posted a great list of the best architecture of the decade. It runs the gamut from groundwater replenishing infrastructure and Chinese high-speed rail to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the iPhone, by way of the Large Hadron Collider, Rome's Pontine marshes, and a library in Medellín (among others).
The purpose of the list, they write, is "to share a handful of the reasons that we’re genuinely excited about the future of architecture, and to hopefully engender a bit of that excitement in a reader or two." It's an inspired (and refreshingly non-building-centric) list of innovations (like microfinance) that have affected the built environment—and yet another reason why Mammoth is one of the best architecture blogs being written anywhere in the world today.
As a list, it also fares very favorably against the mind-numbing self-congratulation of other critics' decade-in-retrospect lists, in which the last ten years appeared to exist only to validate the publishing decisions of people who, long ago, forgot how to engage with anything more than a shaving mirror.
Keiichi Matsuda, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, produced this fantastic short video in the final year of his M.Arch. It was, he writes, "part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality."
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
The bewildering groundlessness of surfaces within surfaces is beautifully captured by this video, and its portrayal of drop-down menus and the future hand gestures needed to access them is also pretty great. Augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow.
Now how do we use all that home-jamming ad space for something other than Coke and Tesco? What other subscription-content feeds can be plugged into this vertiginous interface?
Take a look—and you can find more thoughts, and another video, on Matsuda's own blog.
I was excited finally to pick up a copy of Icon's February issue today; it is, in its entirety, an exploration of how fiction can be used to explore architectural ideas and the future of the built environment.
Contributors range from China Miéville, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow to Ned Beauman, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Oron Catts, and Will Self, with microfiction contributions from Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon fame and Simon Sellars of Ballardian. I was also very happy to see that "Landscapes of Quarantine" participant Scott Geiger appears with a short review, and there is much else besides.
China Miéville's story, "The Rope is the World," takes place amidst "the space elevators, the skyhooks, the geostationary tethered-dock haulage columns" of a planet bound to its lower atmosphere by giant pieces of astral infrastructure. However, these elevators, in Miéville's telling, are doomed to become fantastic aerial ruins, turning the Earth into "an irregularly spoked wheel" studded with abandoned elevator shafts, each "longer than Russia." Derelict chain-cities hang flaccid in the skies. What might Caspar David Friedrich have painted in such a world?
Bruce Sterling, meanwhile, presents us with a world in which nothing seems to exist but broadband access—and that world is far from exhilarating. The story's accompanying photograph shows us a Windows-powered laptop sitting alone on a plaster-flecked apartment floor, plugged into the wall of a room that otherwise has nothing in it; this solipsistic interior, void of anything like human presence or culture, reminded me of an old Peter Lamborn Wilson interview in which Wilson launches into an amazing rant against the rise of home internet use (even if I don't agree with his conclusions):
Yes. You're slumped in front of a screen, in the same physical situation as a TV watcher, you've just added a typewriter. And you're "interactive." What does that mean? It does not mean community. It's catatonic schizophrenia. So blah blah blah; communicate communicate; data data data. It doesn't mean anything more than catatonics babbling and drooling in a mental institution. Why can't we stop?
In Sterling's fictional world, these empty interiors freed of all personal possessions, with not even a place to sit, pulsate with instant access to Gmail; you can check your Twitter feed even if you can't cook a decent meal.
But when the story's protagonist obtains a mail-order 3D printer ("This sleek and sturdy overnight parcel contains everything one might need for do-it-yourself, open-source digital home fabrication," Sterling writes), he or she gains an ability to produce objects—which then seems to be greeted with hipster disillusionment, rather than with ecstasy.
Indeed, the story ends on a low note; its final line: "I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it."
I have to admit to having already read that final sentence courtesy of Matt Jones's Twitter feed a few weeks ago, and I had imagined, between then and now, a totally different story. I had pictured Sterling's story, called "The Hypersurface of the Decade," set in a world where personalized 3D printers create everything from our furniture to our food; today we might print our boarding passes at home before getting on an airplane, but tomorrow we will print our hamburgers, TVs, and even bedspreads.
Maybe we'll print dogs and subway passes and prescription medications. Maybe we will even print our children.
Maybe it's just a question of having the right new infrastructure of pipes—no, not those pipes. Maybe we need to forget ink cartridges; we'll just subscribe to personal flows of speciality ingredients, chemical mixtures that come to us through a radically retooled infrastructure of pipes embedded in the walls of our cities. As unsurprising to someone in 50 years as piped water is to residents of New York today, anyone will simply print a pill of Prozac when they really need it or even print themselves a birthday cake.
Forget killer apps; all you need is the right printhead. Plug it into a nozzle on the wall and voilà.
In any case, I had pictured a story set in some strange Dr. Seuss world of instantly-printed objects. Forget furniture and clothing and utensils. Forget the Apple Tablet; instead you'd carry portable printheads, emitting on-demand, dissolvable realities of the present moment. Trapped in a room, you'd simply print a hammer and attack the wall. Of course, in many ways that is exactly what Sterling has described in his story, but it takes till the last three or four paragraphs to get a glimpse of this malleable world.
But, speaking only for myself, I'd love to spend more time inside this strange fever-dream in which instantly realizable objects appear left and right. I would hold something not unlike a gateway in my hand—some fabulous new printhead—spraying forms into the world of human beings.
Pick up a copy of Icon's Fiction Issue before it disappears.
[Image: Australia's Cadia gold mine, photographed by Jacky Ghossein for Getty Images, spotted at the Big Picture].
L.A. Times | "Ozone from Asia is wafting across the Pacific on springtime winds and boosting the amount of the smog-producing gas found in the skies above the Western United States," the L.A. Times reports.
Economist | "Much of [California's central valley] was an inland sea in its geological past," we read in the Economist, "and its alluvial soils and Mediterranean climate make parts of it, particularly the San Joaquin valley in the south, about the most fertile agricultural region in the world. But this status is at risk because water, the vital ingredient to make the soil productive, is increasingly scarce."
Popular Science | Undersea Cables Could Be Used as an Early Tsunami Detection System: "Monstrous tsunami waves, like the one that killed over 200,000 people in the Indian Ocean in 2004, create an electric field as they form. This field could possibly be sensed by a network of underwater sensors."
ABC | "U.S. military veterans are sorting through a massive government archaeological collection that has been neglected for decades, with the hope of archiving the stone tools, arrows and American Indian beads that were found beneath major public works projects."
Scientific American | Simulating the growth of the Tokyo subway system using slime mold: "A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum polycephalum [slime mold] in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting the food sources that looked rather like the existing rail system."
[Image: A "shipworm invasion" is threatening "thousands of Viking vessels and other historic shipwrecks" in the Baltic Sea, National Geographic reports; photo by Paul Kay, Oxford Scientific Photolibrary].
Scientific American | "Wind energy could generate 20 percent of the electricity needed by households and businesses in the eastern half of the United States by 2024, but it would require up to $90 billion in investment," according to Scientific American.
BBC | "A new US assessment of Venezuela's oil reserves could give the country double the supplies of Saudi Arabia," we read at the BBC.
Brookings Institution | The Suburbanization of Poverty: "Suburbs saw by far the greatest growth in their poor population and by 2008 had become home to the largest share of the nation’s poor."
Washington Post | "The gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound are trapping the oil [from the Exxon Valdez] between two layers of rock, with larger rocks on top and finer gravel underneath... creating a nearly oxygen-free environment with low nutrient levels that slowed the ability of the oil to biodegrade."
Financial Times | Stray dogs in Moscow are "evolving greater intelligence and wolf-like characteristics"—as well as an ability to use the subway.
[Image: Sectional model through the preparation bench, Bloodline pavilion by Caroline O'Donnell; Bloodline is supported by the Akademie Schloss Solitude].
Bloodline is the outcome of O'Donnell's 2007 fellowship and residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, a grant-making and residency institution housed in the late-Baroque "Solitude Castle" near Stuttgart in southern Germany.
Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, built Schloss Solitude in 1763 as a private pleasure house—a cross between a party castle, summer retreat, and hunting lodge. Solitude was intended to be more intimate and less formal than his royal palace at Ludwigsburg, like the Trianons were to Versailles.
[Image: Akademie Schloss Solitude, via Wikimedia].
Among the prerequisites for an eighteenth-century aristocrat to achieve relaxation were a natural setting and, perhaps more importantly, minimal interaction with the servant classes. However, since domestic service was still required (aristocratic relaxation did not encompass preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals, for example), palace architects had to resort to an extremely elaborate set of spatial tricks and distortions to make the servers as invisible as possible. The original design for the Petit Trianon even included a mechanism for raising and lowering the dining table through the floor so that it could be set and cleared out of sight.
According to O'Donnell, "The guides at Schloss Solitude could not understand why I wanted to see the service spaces, and tried to convince me that they were not interesting. I kept telling them in bad German that I was an architect and therefore interested in uninteresting spaces, but that seemed to cause more confusion."
[Image: The secret service spaces at Ludwigsburg (left) and Schloss Solitude (right)].
What she found, eventually, were a series of awkward and cramped service cupboards and passages, filling in the spaces around the formal, symmetrical rooms. They are the negative space of pure classical order; the banished evidence of domestic effort and bodily needs.
Interestingly, O'Donnell noticed that at Karl Eugen's main palace, Ludwigsburg Castle, the formal rooms are arranged around the edge, concealing a rabbit warren of service spaces in the interior.
Meanwhile at Solitude, the reverse is true: the cupboards, closets, and service passages are banished to the edge, with the result that seven of the fourteen windows on the perfectly symmetrical south façade actually open onto these deformed, hidden spaces.
[Images: (top) The south-facing façade of Schloss Solitude, in which seven of its windows actually open onto service spaces, rather than public rooms; via. (bottom) The negative spaces into which domestic functions were banished at Schloss Solitude (left); many were used as fire-spaces (right)].
Among the domestic functions concealed in this way was fire maintenance: tiny fire-spaces were used for storing firewood and also enabled servants to stoke open fires while remaining behind the scenes.
O'Donnell explained that when she finally gained access to a fire-space, she noticed "the effects of this small-scale and contorted space on the body," but she was most fascinated "by this idea of the fire-space as a window, through which the stooping servant had a rare window into the lives of his masters"—and, in some ways, a more complete or privileged understanding of the space of the palace as a whole.
[Image: Bloodline, showing the stacked grillholz cuboid exterior concealing the irregular interior].
So, back to the barbecue pavilion: O'Donnell's Bloodline proposal would use 360 bags of grillholz (German barbecue wood sticks) as the cladding—enough for a summer season, or ninety barbecues at four bags per cook-out. As July fades into August, and then into September, the pavilion will gradually be dismantled: the architecture's fiery function will lead it to literally consume itself from the outside in. This is an incredibly poetic literalization of the shelter's function: architecture parlante at its finest.
The pavilion also plays on O'Donnell's initial fascination with Solitude's squished fire-spaces. Bloodline begins the summer as a perfect, platonic cube, but gradually grills itself down to an awkwardly shaped frame that mirrors a section through the original fire-space. In other words, through use, the mini-barbecue palace will reveal its contorted, service-space origins—a slow, season-long process of revelation.
[Image: The pavilion will begin the summer as a platonic cube before being eroded through repeated barbecuing to reveal its hidden fire-space form].
Like Solitude's original fire-spaces, which servants had to bend down and crawl to enter, the Bloodline barbecue pavilion is only designed to fit one person. And, as in the originals, that one person—the servant or barbecuer-in-chief, depending on how you look at these things—has a unique, more omniscient view.
Ludwigsburg and Solitude castles are linked by Solitudeallee, each palace is also aligned on its own axis of symmetry. When O'Donnell looked at these lines in satellite view, it became clear that there was a third axis, emerging from the forest, which was missing a castle.
Ingeniously, O'Donnell's proposed site for Bloodline means that our barbecuing hero, standing in front of the grill-window on the southwest-facing side of the pavilion, is the only person in their party who can see that they are actually inside the missing third castle.
[Image: Plotting the axes and intersections of Ludwigsburg and Solitude: O'Donnell explained that "only the forest is missing a castle"].
In other words, while their friends and family relax in the grounds outside the pavilion, eating sausages they haven't had to prepare, "only the servant (or grill-master) will know the truth," explains O'Donnell, "although they can sneak others in, to share the secret."
[Images: (top) Renderings of Bloodline show the grill-window and entrance; (bottom) Bloodline interior, looking out toward the grill-window's privileged view].
In terms of grilling experience, the barbecue pavilion that becomes a secret, personal castle seems second to none. "After that, the sausages are not my responsibility," O'Donnell told me. "There are however custom spaces built into the pavilion on the west side for a fire-extinguisher and a fire-blanket, as well as a big vent on the east side that aligns with the prevailing wind and uses the stack-effect to ventilate the space naturally."
A couple of thoughts immediately come to mind here: firstly, that this is the perfect Father's Day gift. After all, doesn't every red-blooded male secretly crave his own barbecue castle: a private space of solitude, unspoken power, and burger perfection? Lowe's or Homebase could even stock build-your-own kits, for an extra DIY frisson.
[Image: (left) Inside Bloodline (the server has clearly snuck in a few friends); (right) Stacked grillholz will form the façade and the barbecue fuel. The wood sticks' color even matches the ochre putty exterior of Schloss Solitude].
I'm also reminded, via a link that was (coincidentally?) sent to me separately by Caroline O'Donnell, of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham's theory that cooking is the root cause of human civilization. His basic idea is that the discovery of cooking allowed us to unlock many more calories in food, which gave us more energy for less effort, which in turn resulted in a massive increase in brain size in Homo sapiens (as compared to our primate ancestors).
[Images: Stages of consumption. At the end, all that will remain is the ash bench (bottom right), which O'Donnell plans to leave on site once the summer is over, "as a clue to the missing castle"].
That expanded brain of course led, eventually, to the flowering of the Baroque, in which rococo pleasure palaces were cleverly designed to hide any evidence of cooking facilities. O'Donnell's pavilion gives cooking its due once again, as over the course of the summer Solitude's missing third palace is revealed to be a a functional fire-space, rather than the abstracted perfection of a symmetrical cube. Barbecuing German day-trippers will thus be paying inadvertent homage to the role of fire in human civilization.
[Image: Some of O'Donnell's incredibly complex cut files for fabrication].
Caroline O'Donnell is working with Akademie Schloss Solitude to secure funding for the pavilion: the hope is to install it during the summer of 2011. My thanks are due to her for an incredibly interesting conversation, and also to Nathan Friedman, who has been working on Bloodline with O'Donnell for the past few months.
(Note: This post, written by Nicola Twilley, was originally published on Edible Geography).
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
[Image: Sectional model through the preparation bench, Bloodline pavilion by 
[Image: Akademie Schloss Solitude, via 
[Image: The secret service spaces at Ludwigsburg (left) and Schloss Solitude (right)].
[Images: (top) The south-facing façade of Schloss Solitude, in which seven of its windows actually open onto service spaces, rather than public rooms; 
[Image: Bloodline, showing the stacked grillholz cuboid exterior concealing the irregular interior].
[Image: The pavilion will begin the summer as a platonic cube before being eroded through repeated barbecuing to reveal its hidden fire-space form].
[Image: Plotting the axes and intersections of Ludwigsburg and Solitude: O'Donnell explained that "only the forest is missing a castle"].
[Images: (top) Renderings of Bloodline show the grill-window and entrance; (bottom) Bloodline interior, looking out toward the grill-window's privileged view].
[Image: (left) Inside Bloodline (the server has clearly snuck in a few friends); (right) Stacked grillholz will form the façade and the barbecue fuel. The wood sticks' color even matches the ochre putty exterior of Schloss Solitude].
[Images: Stages of consumption. At the end, all that will remain is the ash bench (bottom right), which O'Donnell plans to leave on site once the summer is over, "as a clue to the missing castle"].
[Image: Some of O'Donnell's incredibly complex cut files for fabrication].
