One of many books I've been referring to quite often these days, both in personal conversations and during desk-crits with my students, is Michael Welland's Sand, newly released in paperback.
I'll be mentioning many things from his book throughout the coming days and later; for now, I simply want to call attention to a comment Welland makes about Vincent Van Gogh's habit of painting en plein air—that is, outside, with fresh paint, in the windswept meadows and fields near the Mediterranean, where dust storms were an expected part of an afternoon.
This regional meteorology often resulted in sand grains being blown onto Van Gogh's still-wet canvases—and thus becoming a permanent part of art history.
Indeed, in some cases, Welland writes, citing Van Gogh's own letters, the sand could get so dense and accumulate so thickly that he would have to scrape preliminary images from the unfinished canvas and start again. That intrusive terrestrial presence—pieces of the very thing his paintings were meant to represent—was thus removed.
More interestingly, though, passing meteorological events of the 19th century left behind what we might call aerial fossils: traces of violent wind patterns and minor climatologies that have been frozen into place on the surface of plein air paintings.
The result is a kind of storm archive—an unintentional core sample of 19th-century weather—housed in museums around the world. Squint long enough, perhaps, and beneath those swirling mists and pixelations you will see traces of the Sahara, of building dust, of pollen, of the wheat-sprouting soil of the region, all recorded for good measure through time.
Like some unexpected variation on Jurassic Park—in which it is not the DNA of dinosaurs extracted from ancient amber that we use to reconstitute a missing being—perhaps an army of art historians and scientists, equipped with microscopes and tweezers, could pull from the surface of every painting by Vincent Van Gogh a catalog of lost weather systems, mapping the moving sands of his era.
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
In a fantastic issue of AD, edited by Sean Lally and themed around the idea of "Energies," a long list of projects appeared that are of direct relevance to the Glacier/Island/Stormstudio thread developing this week. I want to mention just two of those projects here.
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
For their "Reykjavik Botanical Garden," Rice University architecture students Andrew Corrigan and John Carr proposed tapping that city's geothermal energy to create "microclimates for varied plant growth."
"Heat is taken directly from the ground," they write, "and piped up across the landscape into a system of [pipes and] towers."
Zones of heat radiate out from the pipes, creating a new climate layer with variable conditions based on their number and proximity to each other. These exterior plantings are mostly native to Iceland, but the amplified environment allows a wider range of growth than would normally be possible, informing the role and opportunity of this particular botanical garden. Visitors experience growth never before possible in Iceland, and travel through new climates throughout the site.
Amidst "hydroponic growing trays and research laboratories," and sprouting in the climatic shadow of complicated "air-intake systems," a new landscape grows, absorbing its heat from below.
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
The climate of the city is altered, in other words, literally from the ground up; using the functional equivalent of terrestrially powered ovens, otherwise botanically impossible species can healthily take root.
This domestication of geothermal energy, and the use of it for purposes other than electricity-generation, raises the fascinating possibility that heat itself, if carefully and specifically redirected, can utterly transform urban space.
[Image: Produced for the "Vatnsmyri Urban Planning Competition" by Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of WEATHERS].
A variant on this forms the basic idea behind Sean Lally's own project, produced with Andrew Corrigan and Paul Kweton, for the Vatnsmyri Urban Planning Competition (a competition previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here).
Their design also proposes using geothermal heat in Reykjavik "to affect the local climatic conditions on land, including air temperature and soil temperature for vegetative growth." But their goal is to generate a "climatic 'wash'"—that is, an amorphous zone of heat that lies just slightly outside of direct regulation. This slow leaking of heat into the city could then effect a linked series of hot zones—or variable microclimates, as the architects write—that would punctuate the city with thermal oases.
Like a winterized inversion of the air-conditioned cold fronts we feel rolling out from the open doors of buildings all summer long, this would be pure heat—and its attendant humidity—roiling upward from the Earth itself. The result would be to generate a new architecture not of walls and buildings but of temperature thresholds and bodily sensation.
Indeed, as David Gissen suggests in his excellent book Subnature, this project could very well imply "a new form of urban planning," one in which sculpted zones of thermal energy take precedence over architecturally designated public spaces.
Of course, whether this simply means that under-designed urban dead zones—like the otherwise sorely needed pedestrian parks now scattered up and down Broadway—will be left as is, provided they are heated from below by a subway grate, remains, for the time being, undetermined.
This is all just part of a much larger question: how we "renegotiate the relationship between architecture and weather," as Jürgen Mayer H. and Neeraj Bhatia, editors of the recent book -arium: Weather + Architecture, describe it. The Glacier/Island/Storm studio will continue to explore these and other abstract questions of climate and architectural design throughout the spring.
[Image: Glacier-protection services in the Swiss Alps; photo by Olivier Maire/Epa/Corbis, via the Guardian].
Several posts in our Glacier/Island/Stormblog week are already up and working it:
Nick Sowers, Design to Fail: In which we read about tree-bombing Guam, the unintended reuse of abandoned military artifacts, global climate change as national security threat, and how all architects should plan for the failure of their most grandiose ideas.
InfraNet Lab, LandFab, or Manufacturing Terrain: In which we read about "volcanic heroism," desert islands, "politically anomalous artificial land fabrication," and a brief history of dredging in the Florida Everglades (perhaps vaguely related: Prosthetic Delta).
mammoth, a glacier is a very long event: In which we read about the self-altering internal torque of metamorphic glaciers, salt farms, shell middens, the ecological redesign of an abandoned landfill, accretionary geographies, and much more.
The title of this post, meanwhile, comes from mammoth, as cited above. It was also chosen as way of pointing out that, while this week pretends toward the status of symposium—that is, multiple blogs with different backgrounds all pursuing a shared suite of themes and references at the same time for a limited period—it is, in reality, no more than what already happens in the deep chains of internet conversation everyday. I write a post referring to something on Pruned; Pruned perhaps saw something tweeted by Ballardian or Alexis Madrigal; the link in question might have come from the New York Times or even Metafilter; and the endlessly marbled laminations of successive re-linking never cease to accumulate. That's how things are; that's simply what happens. This is thus just an amplification of processes that already occur.
(There may or may not be Twitter updates throughout the week using the #glacierislandstorm hashtag, as well).
[Image: From Modern Mechanix, thanks to a tip from Nicole Seekely].
For the next five days, if everything goes as planned, BLDGBLOG and eight other architecture, design, and technology blogs will be engaged in a series of linked posts and ongoing conversations about themes relevant to the "Glacier/Island/Storm" studio at Columbia University this Spring.
For my own part, I'll be posting on a wide range of themes directly related to the studio, including summaries of visiting expert lectures and class field trips to local scientific institutions; but I will also be offering my own speculative thoughts on the matter. Also, in addition to each blogger commenting on one another's posts when possible, or simply following up with their own response-posts, I will be maintaining a list of relevant links to keep the whole thing flowing.
So my students and I are off on a field trip for the rest of the day, but I will begin putting up posts this evening. Feel free to join in, leave comments, suggest further readings, and more. Thanks!
A mind-bogglingly awesome new project from MIT called Flyfire hopes to use large, precision-controlled clouds of micro-helicopters, each carrying a color-coordinated LED, to create massive, three-dimensional information displays in space.
Each helicopter is "a smart pixel," we read. "Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario." Emergency streetlights, future TV, avant-garde rural entertainment, and even acts of war.
Watch the video:
Instead of a drive-in cinema, in other words, you could simply be looking out from the windscreen of your car at a massive cloud of color-coordinated, precision-timed, drone micro-helicopters, each the size and function of a pixel. Imagine planetarium shows with this thing!
The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.
Imagine web-browsing through literal clouds of small flying pixels, parting and weaving in the air in front of you like fireflies (or imagine training fireflies to act as a web browser). You're in a university auditorium one day when, instead of delivering her projected slideshow, your professor simply remote-controls a whirring vortex of ten thousand flying micro-dots. Digital 3D cinema is nothing compared to this murmuration of light.
Channeling Tim Maly, we might even someday see a drone-swarm of LED-augmented, artificially intelligent nano-helicopters flying off into the desert skies of the American southwest, on cinematic migration routes blurring overhead. On a lonely car drive through northern Arizona when a film-cloud flies by...
An insane emperor entertains himself watching precision-controlled image-clouds, some of which are distant satellites falling synchronized through space.
[Image: The Cornucopia Digital Fabricator, "a personal, three-dimensional printer for food," by Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran; Coelho will be speaking this Saturday at Foodprint NYC].
1)Foodprint NYC is this Saturday, February 27, at Studio-X in New York City: "Foodprint NYC is the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city. From a cluster analysis of bodega inventories to the cultural impact of the ice-box, and from food deserts to peak phosphorus, panelists will examine the hidden corsetry that gives shape to urban foodscapes, and collaboratively speculate on how to feed New York in the future. The free afternoon program will include designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, food retailers, and others, for a wide-ranging discussion of New York’s food systems, past and present, as well as opportunities to transform our edible landscape through technology, architecture, legislation, and education." It is free and open to the public, and the speaker line-up is amazing. The whole thing goes from 1-5:30pm. Here is a map. Foodprint NYC is organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich.
2) Here is a great design competition: "Currently, over 100,000 people each year follow informal trails through wetlands and over active train tracks to gain access to the surf breaks at Trestles," we read. "These impromptu manmade paths present a safety hazard with passing trains and threaten the fragile ecosystem of Trestles."
In response, a coalition of concerned groups organized by the volunteer non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity, are launching “Safe Trestles,” an open-to-all, two-stage design competition to create a safe pathway to serve surfers, the local coastal community and day visitors to San Onofre State Beach. This coalition is looking for cohesive designs that eliminate the danger of crossing active train tracks, help to restore wetlands that have been damaged by the present path, preserve and improve vistas, and offer education about the history of the site and the beach marsh environment.
Registration deadline: March 17, 2010; submission deadline: April 17, 2010
3)workAC's 49 Cities exhibition travels to San Francisco next month, where it opens at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR. "A survey of utopian urbanism, 49 Cities provides a remarkable insight into the contemporary metropolis and our efforts over time to make cities more controllable, monumental, organic, taller, denser, sparser or greener." A newly expanded reprint of the accompanying 49 Cities book, published by Storefront for Art and Architecture, will be for available for purchase. Amale Andraos, principal architect (with Dan Wood) of workAC will be speaking at Foodprint NYC.
6)Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on April 25, 2010. The exhibition explores "how modern and contemporary artists—from Childe Hassam and Edward Hopper to Willem De Kooning, Gerhard Richter and Catherine Opie—have drawn upon coastal landscapes as a source of inspiration, metaphor and mystery in their work. Through selections from the Museum’s rich collections and important local holdings, Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea will juxtapose coastal landscapes from around the world and from a range of different artistic traditions."
7)Pruned supplies his newest list of quick links—and they're all worth reading: Prunings LIII. In particular, don't miss the $100 million, seven-story aquarium being planned for Times Square: a Canadian developer hopes to "install tanks featuring sharks, rays, penguins, otters, and other animals in the bottom floors of the 40-story building, known as 11 Times Square, hoping to attract some of the 35 million people who pass through Manhattan's major crossroads every year."
8) The new issue of Vague Terrain has been released; its theme is Architecture/Action. "Where is the boundary that separates space from computation?" the issue asks. "What is this territory that lies between interaction design, gaming, physical computing, and architecture?"
9) Speaking of computation, Unconventional Computing & Architecture will be held this Friday, February 26, at the Building Centre in London. "This one-day conference explores new materials for architectural practice in the 21st century. International architects and scientists will explore the decision-making properties of matter and how this may be applied to create increasingly life-like buildings."
10)Built for the Bush is now on display in the Australian city of Albury, showcasing "green architecture for rural Australia." The exhibition "explores some of the energy efficient features of Australia's 19th century country homes and the reappearance of many of these traditional practices in contemporary green architecture."
And one to grow on: Alberto Pérez-Gómez will be speaking tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 23, in the Great Hall of New York City's Cooper Union. His talk—"The Splendor of Architectural Shadows in a Nihilistic Age"—is free and begins at 6:30pm.
I was excited to see that Matthew Coolidge, of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), will be speaking at Pratt tomorrow night, Monday, February 22nd, in Brooklyn. His subject is "Anthropogeomorphology Today." The talk starts at 6pm, is free and open to the public, and starts at 6pm. Just head over to Higgins Hall at the Pratt Institute: 60 St. James Place, near the corner of Lafayette. Here is a map.
CLUI's exhibitions are always worth checking out in detail, as are their field trips through the American landscape. Meanwhile, for an infrastructural tour of Los Angeles, guided by Coolidge, check out an old article I wrote for Dwell.
Two years ago, Colleen Morgan of Middle Savagery pointed out these amazing tactile maps of the Inuit, "3D wood carvings of the East Greenland coastline, with the details of inlets and islands in sculptural relief. These could be employed by [travelers] at night in conjunction with the stars, feeling your way along the coastline, navigating at an intimate scale."
She compares these to Braille maps for the blind—which I would further compare to the embossing printer used by a blind architect in San Francisco to produce tactile building plans. "He began drawing with Wikki Stix," the L.A. Times reported last month, "strands of wax-covered yarn that adhere to paper with just a little pressure. His most useful tool became a large-format embossing printer, which turns blueprints into raised line drawings that he can read with his fingertips."
As if using the Inuit maps pictured above, he simply runs his fingers along the creased lines of rooms and hallways, and buildings take shape in their every variation around him.
Briefly diverging here, I was fascinated to read elsewhere in that same article about the subtle architectural design cues that can be deployed for the blind or visually impaired. For instance, the architect once "collaborated on a room-numbering system to help blind students navigate the building. The facility will use different textured flooring in a few key areas so students can tell where they are by the tap of a cane." Further, "blind students who descend a staircase that deposits them in the middle of a vast lobby will be able to find their way because the ceiling will be enhanced, at [the architect's] suggestion, to create an acoustic corridor to the door." Designing "acoustic corridors" across the city sounds like a superb design challenge (as well as something that could be of much wider use in the event of prolonged urban blackouts).
In any case, like Middle Savagery, I am fascinated by the other applications these sorts of handheld, tactile maps might have—where else they might be useful and what other spaces they might be able to represent. Could there be a tactile map of a novel's plotline, or or the New York City subway system, or of the Appalachian Trail? What about of your own apartment, or the house you grew up in? Could there be tactile cinema? Could you make a tactile map of a song?
Like a culinary version of Sourcemap, Rebar has teamed up with landscape architect David Fletcher and some students from the increasingly interesting California College of the Arts in San Francisco to explore the ingredients of your local taco—from pinto beans to the aluminum foil it all comes wrapped in.
Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring [in our studio's investigation of the city]. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle for what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed.
This is a participatory undertaking; meet at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco at 7pm on Thursday, February 25, to find out how you, too, can map a taco. Here's a map.
The Studio for Urban Projects, meanwhile, has a pretty fascinating list of previous endeavors, including Foodshed, Strange Weather, and the awesome Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park. Large parts of what are now west San Francisco were once covered by nomadic sand dunes, a kind of peninsular erg; that granular presence is now only temporarily locked in place beneath the foundations of houses. Every grain you see blowing down a San Franciscan street is this lost geography attempting to reassert itself.
Beneath your feet, San Francisco, something ancient is patiently waiting.
[Image: "There are two basic types of taco trucks," we read; "the first and most common is the transient truck which is a truck that stops at approximately 20 different locations at 20-minute intervals during an 8-hour shift, typically beginning at 6am and ending at 2pm. The second type is the semi-permanent truck, which is a truck that has found a location that has a density of clientele to sustain it for an extended period of the day, creating a nearly fixed presence in a particular community." From Polar Inertia].
And I can't let this post end without calling attention to the excellent—in fact, extraordinary—Polar Inertia, specifically its photo-essay published more than four years ago tracing the taco-truck geography of greater Los Angeles. These dispersed infrastructures might now be quite trendy, but the functional networks things like taco trucks actually form on the streets of our cities are still worth mapping in full.
(On an unrelated note, my older brother apparently wanted to name me "Taco"—not Geoff—but my parents, luckily, got to decide).
1)Constructed Territory: "A juried exhibition of work integrating the use of maps, cartography, or environmental and topographical explorations." Submissions due: May 14, 2010.
2)made up: "This call welcomes designers, filmmakers, architects, scholars, researchers, and artists to submit proposals for design-driven research projects to be conducted in Summer 2010 in the Graduate Media Design Program studio [at the Art Center College of Design in sunny Pasadena]. We are looking for projects that are motivated by research questions and that use design/making as a mode of inquiry. We are particularly interested in projects that address the theme 'made up' which explores the role of fiction in design." Submissions due: March 23, 2010.
3)Mine the Gap: "An international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap?" Submissions due: "anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010."
4)All That Glitters Is Good: "How do you prepare your architectural drawings? What mediums do you allow yourself in your quest to explain three dimensional intent and ideas on a two dimensional surface? Answer truthfully, when was the last time you did anything beyond hitting print?
All That Glitters Is Good asks you to submit your most accomplished architectural representation that uses glitter. This includes new drawings made with glitter, old drawings pepped up with a little sparkle, as well as anything else that you can imagine so long as it satisfies two criteria:
1. It’s a drawing of architecture. 2. It uses glitter."
Submissions due: March 15, 2010.
5) You just missed: GOOD magazine, Studio-X, and PRE Office teamed up to judge Spontaneous Architecture—the results of which can be seen at that latter link. For some background to that call-for-ideas, read Studio-X's Gavin Browning debate with Cameron Sinclair about the efficacy of design competitions inspired by natural disasters over at Building Design. While you're there, refresh your memory about Building Design's stance on climate change.
In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). Bill & Ted meet Cerne Abbas Man.
The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all.
On Google Street View, distant structures like McMansions can be made out here and there amidst the ghost-grid, mirages of suburbia in the middle of nowhere. Meaningless STOP signs stand guard over dead intersections.
And it's a weird geography: two of the most prominent nearby landmarks include a prison and an automobile test-driving facility run by Honda. There is also a visually spectacular boron mine to the southeast—it's the largest open-pit mine in California, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation—and an Air Force base.
To make things more surreal, in an attempt to boost its economic fortunes, California City hired actor Erik Estrada, of CHiPs fame, to act as the town's media spokesperson.
The history of the town itself is of a failed Californian utopia—in fact, incredibly, if completed, it was intended to rival Los Angeles. From the city's Wikipedia entry:
California City had its origins in 1958 when real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres (320 km2) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of master-planning California's next great city. He designed his model city, which he hoped would one day rival Los Angeles in size, around a Central Park with a 26-acre (11 ha) artificial lake. Growth did not happen anywhere close to what he expected. To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, scarring vast stretches of the Mojave desert, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed area of the city. A single look at satellite photos shows the extent of the scarred desert and how it stakes its claim to being California's 3rd largest geographic city, 34th largest in the US. California City was incorporated in 1965.
Note, however, that this is not a guided tour; it is simply an organized simultaneity of people all going out to investigate these streets en masse. Armed with cameras, microphones, sketchbooks, GPS devices, quickly scrawled notes for future blog posts, and more, we'll be exploring the site at our own pace, perhaps even miles apart at various times. This is not a guided tour with an expert on the area.
As such, all questions of transportation (including tires suitable for travel over unsealed dirt roads); adequate food, fuel, and water; personal safety (including protection from sprained ankles and snakes); and navigation are up to individual participants.
We will meet at 1pm on Saturday, March 20, 2010, in the parking lot of Rite Aid in California City: 9482 California City Boulevard, California City, CA 93505. There will be a very brief group introduction there—and you can run inside to buy Cokes or whatever—before we set off to document the uninhabited streets outside town. Let's photograph, film, blog, Lomo, Twitter, and audio-record the crap out of this place! I've started a Flickr group, which will be opened up soon. If you arrive late, simply head out Randsburg Mojave Road, onto 20 Mule Team Parkway, and look for the cars; our eventual cluster of destinations is approximately 15 minutes’ drive northeast of town.
And, in the unlikely event of torrential rains, I will post travel updates here on BLDGBLOG.
Meanwhile, the incomparable Atlas Obscura has a whole slew of amazing trips planned for March 20, all over the world, all part of their first annual "Obscura Day." Definitely check out that list for sites closer to you, if you're not in southern California.
(California City was originally pointed out to me by David Donald, and it was written up by The Vigorous North last year. The "cannabis city" and solar farm links come courtesy of Alexis Madrigal. All images in this post via Google Maps and Google Street View).
During the New York City blackout of 1965, roughly "one thousand overseas passengers were affected," the New York Times reported at the time, and "many of them were put up in nearby hotels or motels."
A slightly different scenario unfolded at the city's airports, however:
At Kennedy, American Airplanes rolled out all its planes, which are equipped with independent power systems, and loaded eight hundred stranded passengers. They were fed a meal and shown motion pictures until the lights came back.
These self-powered moving rooms—airplanes become hotels become cinemas become emergency shelters, in a jet-setting transformational sequence like something out of the early visions of Archigram—revealed an unexpected flexibility to the infrastructure of global transport.
Next time, perhaps, when the lights go out in your own home city, that jumbo jet parked nearby on an airport runway will be the best place for you to go: an aboveground disaster shelter, independent from the grid whose loss it temporarily saves you from.
(You can watch a short video about the blackout, courtesy of James Burke; here is part one).
The opening scene of The Forever War by Dexter Filkins presents us with the sight of U.S. soldiers preparing for their invasion of Falluja. Filkins is there to witness the attack; amidst the growl of tanks and Humvees, and "by the light of airstrikes and rockets," he writes, there is suddenly something sonically unexpected.
[Image: "An Advanced Individual Training Soldier in the Psychological Operations Specialist Course attaches a loud speaker on top of a High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle, or HUMVEE, at Forward Operating Base Freedom, Camp MacKall, N.C." Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School].
"And then, as if from the depths," Filkins writes, "came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire."
I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.
It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately: "Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield.
While by no means advocating the use of sonic warfare as a tool in U.S. military adventures or police operations, I nonetheless instantly thought of this scene—of armed soldiers holding aloft rock-blaring boom boxes, like some John Milius-directed remake of Say Anything—when I read, in a very different context, that bark beetles can be driven out of the pine forests they currently infest if you play digitally-altered sounds of their own chewing back at them through loud speakers. The high-volume sound of themselves drives them away.
A research assistant suggested using sounds to aggravate the beetles, much as police sometimes blare music in hostage situations. The researchers tried Queen and Guns N' Roses and played snippets of radio talker Rush Limbaugh backward. None produced the desired results.
Then, the beetles were exposed to digitally altered recordings of their own calls, the sounds they make to attract or repel other beetles. The response was immediate. The beetles stopped mating or burrowing. Some fled, helter-skelter. Some violently attacked each other.
Most important, they stopped chewing away at the pine tree, suggesting that the scientists may have discovered a sort of sonic bullet that could help slow the beetles' destructive march.
Again, I do not mean to imply that infestation metaphors are the most appropriate to use when discussing Operation Phantom Fury, or that military action in that city was analogous to clearing a forest of bark beetles; but the audio possibilities here, and the specifics of the set-up, seem amazing.
[Image: A ponderosa pine forest; within those trunks might be beetles].
More about the actual experiment, run at Northern Arizona University's Forestry Lab:
They collected tree trunks infested with bark beetles... Working in the lab, [research assistant Reagan McGuire] piped in the music through tiny speakers, the sort you might find in a singing greeting card. He watched the reaction of the beetles using a microscope. The rock music didn't seem to annoy the bugs, nor did Rush in reverse.
McGuire and [Northern Arizona University forest entomologist Richard Hofstetter] decided to try something different. They recorded the sounds of the beetles and played them back, manipulating them to test the response.
Suddenly, every little thing they did seemed to provoke the beetles.
"We could use a particular aggression call that would make the beetles move away from the sound as if they were avoiding another beetle," Hofstetter said.
When they made the beetle sounds louder and stronger than a typical male mating call, he said, the female beetle rejected the male and moved toward the electronic sound.
These audio simulations, in other words, had demonstrable physical effects on another species; their own warped sonic portrait drove them crazy.
So could you reprogram your Marsona 1288A ("create a personalized sound environment") with the digitally-altered ambient sounds of termites and thus clear your house of insectile pests? The USDA, after all, has published a paper—download the PDF—explaining how a "portable, low-frequency acoustic system was used to detect termite infestations in urban trees." Indeed, "termite sounds could be detected easily underneath infested trees, despite the presence of high urban background noise." So why not reverse this—drive them out of the city using weird MP3s specially produced for boom cars?
Perhaps we should petition Clear Channel or Sirius XM to premiere a new, insect-only broadcast hour, killing ants and roaches in every city where it's played (or perhaps just driving them all out, streaming from the floorboards, in a moment of utter horror).
I'm reminded here of the famous example of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, with its "dog whistle—which humans can't hear—buried on the album's second side." Only, in our case, it would be a different kind of beetle-whistle, and one with anti-infestational effects.
Danger Room: "As part of its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon extreme research agency Darpa is launching the Transparent Earth project. They’ll invest $4 million into the creation of real-time, 3-D maps that display 'the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily-relevant spatial scales.'"
InfraNet Lab: "When snow prospects at lower Cypress looked dim, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) unrolled the contingency plan to use snowcats, trucks, helicopters and a team of about 45 people to equitably redistribute snowfall. This led to two basic weather engineering practices: snow transfer and snow-base packing. Trucks and snowcats are moving snow from higher elevations, while helicopters are ferrying in bales of straw to bolster bases, walls and turns. Snow is being moved hastily—none of the ice brick techniques found at Innsbruck here—almost more as a cut-fill soil strategy. VANOC is trucking in about three dozen loads of snow a day from as far away as Manning Park, more than two hours drive east of Vancouver. That is over 300 truckloads and counting."
[Image: Snow-hardening in Olympic Vancouver; photo by Jae C. Hong courtesy of the Associated Press (via InfraNet Lab)].
e360: "A group of solutions is emerging under the rubric of 'rewilding,' and this new movement has made considerable progress over the past decade. A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the 'island' effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators."
New York Times: "Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future."
[Image: Rho Ophiuchus. Photo courtesy Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA].
PhysOrg.com: "According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation... 'We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life.'"
PhysOrg.com: "NASA to Study Seeds in Space to Understand Plant Growth... 'There's only one way to determine exactly why plants grow differently in weaker gravity environments, like on the moon and Mars, than on Earth—and that's by using the microgravity environment in spacecraft orbiting Earth.''
White House: "The Environmental Protection Agency is developing regulations that address the safety, efficacy, and environmental soundness of injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground. The Department of the Interior is assessing, in coordination with the Department of Energy, the country's geologic capacity to store carbon dioxide and promoting geological storage demonstration projects on public lands."
The Sofia Echo: "Possession and use of a metal detector in Bulgaria [now] requires registration with the Culture Ministry and lack of such registration [will be considered] a crime... Efforts to legalize the open use of metal detectors have consistently been rebuffed by state bodies, which have treated it as attempts to legalize tomb-raiding."
[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].
For a recent studio at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, taught by Douglas Burnham of envelope A+D, students Duncan Young and Brett Walters produced what they call "The Atomized Library." It was produced as part of an overall studio exploring the space of the public library in an age of rapidly changing information storage.
[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].
The basic idea was to scatter smaller information spaces throughout the city: buildings, kiosks, cafes, computer labs, public-access WiFi envelopes, media production centers, "teen spaces," public meeting rooms, and more. Importantly, though, the entire point of Young's investigation was to ask what libraries might look like if information was no longer accessed through books.
[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].
"This methodology," Young and Walters write, "increases the density of the urban fabric, and allows for a new reading of how we use and access information." His units would be particularly well-suited, he suggests, for "unbuilt and under-used" urban sites.
[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].
Think of it as a network of partially prefab, rapidly deployable, plug-in, book-less micro-libraries, with potential for global distribution. EasyLibrary, perhaps.
In fact, it raises an interesting question: when it comes to public libraries, whether we're referring to New York City or Ciudade del Este, what is the architectural equivalent of One Laptop Per Child? Is the future of the community library a modular shed, or has an entire building type been made obsolete by handheld devices?
Larger versions of these images are available on Flickr.
In a fantastic interview published last year by the Wall Street Journal, novelist Cormac McCarthy—quipping off-hand that "anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing"—reflects on what might or might not have caused the world-ending catastrophe that frames his recent book The Road.
The Road, of course, takes place in a relentlessly grey world, populated only by a father and his son. The anemic duo walks slowly south toward an unidentified coast over mountains and plains, through valleys and dead forests; everything is burned, molten, or obliterated. The father is coughing blood. They meet cannibals and the insane, and they stray into abandoned houses less uninhabited than they seem.
The only glimpse we're given of what violently ends the known order of things is this brief scene; I have left McCarthy's original spelling and punctuation intact:
The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening? I dont know. Why are you taking a bath? I'm not.
After this, the landscape outside—everywhere—is described as "scabbed" and "cauterized," heavily covered in ash. McCarthy memorably writes: "They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn."
Later in his interview with the Wall Street Journal, McCarthy jokes that he and his brother once "talked about if there was a small percentage of the human population left [after a disaster], what would they do? They'd probably divide up into little tribes," he and his brother decided, "and when everything's gone, the only thing left to eat is each other. We know that's true historically."
In any case, McCarthy's end-times scenario sounds, to me, remarkably like nuclear war, but in his interview McCarthy entertains, even if only casually, that it could also have been the caldera beneath Yellowstone National Park finally exploding. McCarthy:
A lot of people ask me [what caused The Road's apocalypse]. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.
It was thus amazingly interesting to read that no less than 1,799 earthquakes have occurred beneath Yellowstone since January 17, 2010—a so-called earthquake swarm.
As of yesterday, however, the USGS reports that the current swarm has "slowed considerably." Indeed, we read, while "the current number of earthquakes per day is well above average at Yellowstone... nevertheless, swarms are common... with 100s to 1000s of events, some of which can reach magnitudes greater than 4.0." In other words, it is always and already a landscape prey to internal lurching deformations and displacements, as if fabricated in a fever dream by Lebbeus Woods, torqued and aterrestrially tuned to some strange counter-timescale.
Swarms like this are, structurally speaking, quite common; this is a landscape always on the move—though it doesn't necessarily travel far: "The crust beneath Yellowstone is highly fractured already," a scientist told the New York Times, "so we’re getting stress release in these earthquakes—a displacement of millimeters."
Still, when "the park’s strange and volatile geology," with its thrumming subterranean supervolcano that is "bigger, much bigger, than scientists had previously thought," kicked back into trembling motion, McCarthy's "bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and... just sort of pulsing," a topographical sign of the apocalypse, instantly came to mind.
[Image: Mudslides strike Los Angeles; photo by Gary Friedman for the L.A. Times].
In his short novel Man in the Holocene, author Max Frisch describes the psychological implications of living in the presence of possible Alpine landslides. The idea that the very earth beneath your feet might someday start to avalanche takes on existential overtones.
"Nobody in the village," Frisch writes, for instance, "thinks that the day, or perhaps night, will come when the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time." He then supplies us with the image of a "laborer who has been working all his life on supporting walls and does not believe the whole mountain could ever begin to slide"; for someone such as that, a landslide's accompanying loss of foundation is simply too extraordinary to think about.
Somewhere in the hills, though, Frisch suggests, is a hidden logic: it both explains and demonstrates how thousands of tons of rocks and the spaces between them can unlock, breaking open into discrete geometries to tumble toward the valleys below, perhaps bringing houses—whole cities—down with them.
And it can all start with a minor act: a small crack, perhaps a rainstorm, perhaps just the weight of one man hiking alone. "That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it," Frisch writes.
Indeed, "One must be prepared for everything."
[Images: Beneath the pavement, liquid terrain. All photos by Anne Cusack for the L.A. Times].
A few months ago, meanwhile, I bookmarked a short article in the L.A. Times. Published after massive wildfires had burned through the hills around the city, denuding them of all vegetation and thus destabilizing the rock and soil, the article reported on a number of city residents in the outlying hilltop communities who had begun to eye the slopes around them with alarm. It was as if the earth itself had been weaponized: every hill, scarred by fire now and insecure for void of plantlife, was a mudslide waiting to happen.
To protect against this cascading eventuality, a new municipal landscape architecture thus emerged: mazes of concrete barriers and walls of sandbags showed up to redivide the streets. Circulation through the neighborhood would be entirely redefined, and a massive landscape of waiting would be installed: a space patient for all the material locked inside those hills to arrive.
Officials have said the concrete barriers [they soon installed] will stay in place for three to four years because the hillsides are completely barren in the wake of the Station fire, which charred more than 160,000 acres. It was the worst wildfire in L.A. County's history. Many measures had been put in place, including the clearing of debris basins, the notification of residents in high-risk areas, the distribution of sandbags and the laying of several thousand feet of K-rails.
These spatial precautions were put to heavy use last week when the hills disgorged themselves, liquifying, going mobile, and flowing through, past, and over the neighborhood houses.
"The mudflow twisted garage doors into dented accordions," we read, and it "disintegrated walls of sandbags and knocked over 4,000-pound concrete barriers that lined the road to divert water away from homes. About 25 vehicles were damaged, flowing down the street and smashing against walls, trees and one another." In one case, "a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit."
Another man, woken up in his Snover Canyon house in the middle of the night, looked outside to see "muddy water carrying boulders the size of bowling balls... through the 4-foot-high barricade of sandbags, a plywood wall and a chain-link fence. A sheet of mud nearly a half-foot deep and 16 feet wide cascaded across the backyard."
He ran to the bathroom window. He had expected this. It was the weak point of his defense. There at the corner of the yard, a geyser of water crashed into the remains of the wall and shot into the air. He had to get his family out. He didn’t know what else might be coming down that mountain.
The terrestrial uncertainty of that final sentence is astonishing.
Once the mudslides abated in one district, "nine homes in the foothill area suffered enough damage to be red-tagged, which means they’re partially collapsed and uninhabitable. With crumbling walls, sunken roofs, shattered windows and mud-filled living rooms, the structures are in a precarious position," themselves now more like residual appendages of the debris flow than freestanding architectural units.
However, perhaps the best article ever written about mudslides in Los Angeles was produced nearly 30 years ago by John McPhee. Called "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," it was originally published in The New Yorker but was later collected in McPhee's genuinely excellent and very highly recommended book The Control of Nature.
Among many other things, McPhee devotes several paragraphs to a description of the DIY architectural tweaks that have arisen in response to these landscapes-gone-mobile. "At least one family," he writes, for instance, "has experienced so many debris flows coming through their back yard that they long ago installed overhead doors in the rear end of their built-in garage. To guide the flows, they put deflection walls in their back yard. Now when the boulders come they open both ends of their garage, and the debris goes through to the street."
Not only has this image stuck with me for years now, ever since I first read McPhee's book, but it has also been impossible for me to avoid thinking about when looking at the photographs you see here, particularly those taken on the mud-slicked streets themselves by Irfan Khan. But the very idea that one could deliberately open a causeway for the natural world to flow, with awe-inspiring violence, through one's own personal space—that you could actually build a kind of sacrifice zone within your own house for forces otherwise well beyond spatial control—is, at the very least, an extraordinary metaphor for living with the natural world.
This minor architecture—of repurposed overhead doors, emergency ditching, concrete crib structures, deflection walls, and more—brings the ever-present possibility of geologic collapse into world of design.
After all, how do you build on an earth that keeps disappearing?
[Images: Photos by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].
Returning to Frisch's book, there is a fantastic, if brief, image of sound being put to use to stimulate minor avalanches, perhaps as a way to help avoid the Big One later on. "Men blow three times on a little horn and wave a red flag," Frisch writes, as if describing a fairy tale of precisely administered sonic land-disassembly, "and shortly afterward the bits come rattling down, pebbles and gravel from the Ice Age."
I mention this out of the possibility that perhaps Los Angeles city officials should not be responding to the ever-present threat of landslides on the urban perimeter with hardened architectural defenses but with something more like preemptive techniques: why wait for the hills to come to you, in other words (see this diagram of how debris basins work), when you could simply bring them down on your own time and schedule, in rock-by-rock increments, pulling rivers of solid geology out from their halo'd terraces above the city? Could micro-landslides somehow keep apocalyptic avalanches at bay?
Or, more realistically, does L.A. need to ditch the bulky mazes of concrete switching walls and go for a massive replanting effort, instead? Like Beijing's Great Green Wall against the coming desert, L.A. needs to plant a wall of minor roots against the instability of its mountains.
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: Vincent Van Gogh, "Wheatfields under Thunderclouds" (1890)].
[Image: Vincent Van Gogh, "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890)].
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
[Image: "Reykjavik Botanical Garden" by Andrew Corrigan and John Carr].
[Image: Produced for the "Vatnsmyri Urban Planning Competition" by Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of 
[Image: Glacier-protection services in the Swiss Alps; photo by Olivier Maire/Epa/Corbis, via the 
[Image: From 
[Image: From 
[Image: Via 
[Image: The 
[Images: From 49 Cities by 
[Images: From 
[Image: Unknown image, via 
[Image: Unknown image, via 
[Image: From 
[Image: 
Like a culinary version of 
[Image: "There are two basic types of taco trucks," we read; "the first and most common is the transient truck which is a truck that stops at approximately 20 different locations at 20-minute intervals during an 8-hour shift, typically beginning at 6am and ending at 2pm. The second type is the semi-permanent truck, which is a truck that has found a location that has a density of clientele to sustain it for an extended period of the day, creating a nearly fixed presence in a particular community." From 
[Image: From 
