|
|
One of many fascinating details to be found in the Underground Space Center Library archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture is something from a paper, written by a University of Minnesota law student, called "Zoning Ordinances as Obstacles to Earth Sheltered Housing: A Minnesota Perspective."  [Image: Random basement floorplan].There, amongst other key legal points, the student weighs in on what he calls the "definitional problems" that arise when traditional zoning law is applied to underground space—indeed, "whether zoning regulations apply at all to underground structures." Though the paper clearly focuses on the state of Minnesota, it goes as far afield as Texas; in the case of Hancox v. Peek, for instance, "a Texas Court of Appeals held that a fallout shelter which was wholly underground, except for a concrete slab which extended a mere two or three inches above the ground, was not a building—merely an appurtenance, and therefore not within the contemplation of a zoning ordinance requiring a minimum distance between buildings and adjacent property." One can easily imagine byzantine courtroom arguments and legal appeals of the future, citing legal precedents from wartime bunker construction, domestic fallout shelters in Texas, and perhaps even subsurface mine-safety regulations in some strange Kafkaesque scenario involving, say, the late Mole Man of Hackney and his contested underground estate. But, as it happens, my reference to mining safety is deliberate.  [Image: Random basement floorplan].At the time of the paper's writing—the late 1970s—underground facilities, from parking garages to hospitals and private homes, were considered so novel from the perspective of traditional Minnesota zoning law that there was no accepted legal means for how to define or describe them. These are the "definitional problems" mentioned above. "Examples," we read, "are the broad definitions of basement and cellar... defining excavations of greater than 400 cubic yards as 'mining'—thus requiring a special permit, and defining 'detached dwelling' as one 'entirely surrounded by open space'." That's worth repeating: excavations of greater than 400 cubic yards were legally zoned as mines—whether it was a parking garage or your newly renovated basement rec room. In other words, if you lived in Minnesota in the 1960s and 70s, and you had a particularly enormous basement, inside of which you and your siblings might have watched television, you could, legally speaking, have been playing inside a mine. Whether or not this gave you permission to harvest minerals is unclear.  [Image: A continuous mining machine at work; image courtesy of Salt Union Ltd].No lawsuit, to my knowledge, has ever been retroactively filed against Minnesotan parents, accusing them of mine-safety violations—but there is always a first time. Nor has the reverse of this scenario—in which a Minnesotan industrial minerals magnate from St. Cloud successfully rezones his mine or quarry as a domestic basement—been, to my knowledge, attempted. #CCA
In the underground-themed issue of Rassegna, mentioned earlier, author Nicola Sinopoli offers a brief subterranean builders' guide to bringing architecture underground. "There are now no technological limitations that could stop us from colonizing the underground," he declares, providing a short catalog of useful construction materials in the process.
 [Image: The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Sedrun, Switzerland; photo by Brian Fulcher, Walnut, CA, courtesy of Engineering News-Record's 2006 "Year in Construction" recap].
Sinopoli's purpose is to point out "some of the new materials that chemistry and physics have offered this new world of construction." And this goes beyond mere drilling equipment—which Sinopoli does not, in fact, cover—to encompass things like high-density buckled polyethylene membranes that are "impervious to organic bacteria and mildews that may be in the ground," and that serve "as an effective barrier against radon, a radioactive gas sometimes found in the earth."
We see flexible geocomposite mats, fiber-optic lighting technologies, a wide variety of grass turf for roofs, and self-ventilating, anti-humidity wall panels, all of which allow "colonizing the underground," as Sinopoli puts it. Cases, membranes and buckled plates protect the building from the infiltration of water and roots; woven and non-woven geotextiles, geocomposites, geomats and synthetic monofilaments stabilize and drain the land; and ultra high yield reflective films convey natural light inside the new underground spaces He specifically focuses on issues of water and humidity, citing "an exciting array of innovative products in the field of green roofs and facades, where we now have an endless selection of materials for waterproofing and draining, water storage systems, draining sublayers, watering systems, hydrosowing systems and a panoply of plants modified in their deepest nature to adopt to any climate imaginable. The plants are often the fruit of an ingenious union of botany, genetics and new materials research. As if that weren't enough, we have found that natural earth is an excellent insulator from heat and cold."
The idea that "colonizing the underground" will be made possible at least partially through the use of genetically modified plants is pretty fascinating. This extends engineered biologies—future crops and oxygen gardens, perhaps even crypto-forestry—into the earth's subsurface. Speleonauts living inside an architecture of growth chambers three miles underground, shining UV lights at specialty plantlife bred specifically to produce a breathable atmosphere, researching new anthropological directions in the deep.
It's not much of an exaggeration here to say that gardening will be as important to the future of underground living as tunneling equipment.
  [Images: Photos by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].
Sinopoli suggests that building underground is, for all intents and purposes, a solved problem: "If anything," he quips, "we should explore what effects living and working in underground or almost underground spaces might have on behavior and quality of life. Sociologists will give their answers to this." This is what I have earlier called psychology at depth, or the unanticipated psychiatric implications of living underground.
 [Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].
I should note, however, that Sinopoli's article is less about moving into scifi mega-cities inside the earth than it is about making things like underground shopping malls and even suburban basements more safe for everyday use. Nonetheless, over-ambitiously applying these same techniques in the outright construction of artificial caverns on a continental scale is, for me, simply too interesting to pass up.
Indeed, I'm reminded of Jeff Long's scifi-horror novel The Descent, in which armed military units lead an invasion of the underworld, heading downward into the earth, Jules Verne-like, but with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV klieg lights, and truckloads of instant concrete. They "approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago," Long writes, "as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics." The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved, "tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots—three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves." It takes days at a time to get anywhere in Long's underworld; there are outbreaks of "tropical cave disease," we read, and claustrophobia.
 [Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].
In any case, at this point, Sinopoli suggests, questions of architectural style can re-enter the picture. Indeed, "there are questions about the consequences of underground building on architecture and its language. That's a discussion still waiting to be had."
We can assemble a subterranean builders' guide, in other words, and solve the problem of constructibility; but when it comes to architectural form, if we hope someday to move beyond mere underground shopping malls—for instance, Montreal's overwhelmingly anti-climactic " underground city"—then there is still an awful lot of work to do.
#CCA
 [Image: My own "crypto-forest of Utrecht," via Google Maps].While we're on the subject of PrimatePoetics!, I'm intrigued by their " Crypto- Forests of Utrecht" series, which kicked off back in October 2009. It's an ongoing exploration of botanical landscapes in and around Utrecht, Netherlands, that have sprung back from aggressive anthropological intervention. Weed patches in which the earliest emergent traces of a thicket can be found; clusters of trees growing semi-feral on the edges of railroad yards; forgotten courtyards sprouting with random saplings unplanted by any hand: these are all crypto-forests. Each example of this type of landscape, PrimatePoetics! explains, is "almost entirely hidden from view and very few people know about it." Each is "a forest grown in the shadow of neglect, private ownership and municipal refusal." Each is a landscape that has been "left to fallow" but then spurts back in spikes of weedy regrowth, becoming "unnoteworthy from all angles, but pretty large when you are inside it." All of them together would make an amazing travel guide or landscape pamphlet—a short tour through minor quasi-forests around the city of Utrecht (or elsewhere). I'm tempted to launch a global "crypto-forestry" group on Flickr for documenting exactly this sort of thing—in fact, I've gone ahead and done so. Feel free to contribute, if you're in the mood, burgeoning scholars of urban weeds. Photographic documents of minor landscapes on the rebound; urban forests in their earliest, stunted stage; insurgent fringes of suburbia coming back to vitality; derelict groves extending underground roots. The return of the botanical repressed.
Just in time for the summer solstice, I thought I'd post this hand-drawn, shamanic map of the " Barasana cosmos."  [Image: The Barasana Cosmos, via PrimatePoetics!]."Constellations are here mapped as identities from Barasana mythology," we read. "The Pleiades, or Star Woman, is shown here as the 'star thing that holds the summer.'" As a brief aside, the Pleiades are known in Japan as Subaru—which explains that carmaker's astrally inflected logo. So, if you're driving a Subaru, there's a kind of futurist ethno-astronomical star chart emblazoned on the front grill of your car. In any case, the image seen above comes from a recent series of short posts, looking at hand-drawn cartographies from peripheral cultures around the world, posted on the excellent blog PrimatePoetics! (whose exhilarating manifesto reminds us that "we still have at least 30,000 years to go before our existence in history will be of equal duration to our existence in prehistory," and whose blog thus hopes to document "the transmutation of the ape into a conversationalist"). That blog's ongoing interest in ethnocartography extends from this " Yage Map" and a handful of " Amazonian Maps" (including the Barasana map, above) to the " Ojibwa Migration Map," the " Arawete Village Map," the " Aboriginal Water Map," the " First Contact Eskimo Driftwood Map," a " Valcamonica Topographic Rock Carving," and many, many more examples that should not be missed.
 [Image: The subterranean Flower Factory of Naples by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].I thought I'd kick off a series of posts looking at my time spent so far going through the "Underground Space Center Library" archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture with a look at a summer 2007 issue of Rassegna magazine, its topic nothing other than underground architecture or architetture sotteranee. While the issue is not actually part of the "Underground Space Center Library" archives, it makes a convenient starting part for a few new posts. The city of Naples, as many readers will know, is built atop a series of caverns. These continue throughout the coastal region, extending down the coast for quite some time to form grottoes, harbors, and coves; they have been depicted throughout art history and used for everything from smuggling illicit goods (see Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, for instance) to sheltering the populace from bombing raids during World War II.   [Images: Joseph Wright of Derby, Cavern, near Naples (1774) and A Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, Sunset (1780-81)].As the BBC reported a few years back, these caves "have been dug out over thousands of years and used for everything from aqueducts to air raid shelters." Though "more than 900 have been discovered so far," they add, "that is believed to be only a third of what actually lies below." Approximately 2,700 caves, then: there is a whole other world beneath greater Naples. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was sent by LIFE magazine to document the wartime reuse of the city's most prominent geological features; from children playing on gravel hillsides to teetering stacks of agricultural machinery waiting quietly in the darkness for the day they could be reactivated, every conceivable activity of everyday life was hosted underground.     [Images: All photos by Margaret Bourke-White, courtesy of LIFE magazine].But what sorts of sustained, economically pragmatic uses for these spaces might we develop today? In 1988, an exhibition called Sottonapoli— Beneath Naples—explored possible architectural transformations of the caves. Amongst those projects was a proposal for an automated "Flower Factory" by Marco Zanuso.  [Image: Underneath Naples; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].As Francesco Trabucco, one of Zanuso's collaborators on the project, wrote in Rassegna's underground issue, the project was for—and the parenthetical comments here are Trabucco's own—"a large phytotron (a neologism referring to an accelerator of natural growth)." He continues: The operating principle of the phytotron involves creating and monitoring the optimum microenvironment for plant growth: temperature, air humidity, lighting, photoperiodism and nutrition. At the same time, all negative factors tied to the natural environment are eliminated, i.e. climatic variation, the unpredictability of precipitation, variability in the length of the solar day, and—naturally—air and water pollution, and infestation by plants and animals. In the conditions created inside a phytotron, a plant grows at a pace that can be accelerated, with the complete absence of pollutants that are now widely present in plants grown 'naturally,' such as weed killers, insecticides, pesticides, acid rain, smog deposits and chemical fertilizers. It's basically an underground greenhouse, of course, but a fully automated one forming its own subterranean microclimate. Think of it as a buried version of VW's legendary CarTowers in Wolfsburg, Germany, crossed with the indoor skyscraper farms so popular on architecture blogs back in 2007. The botanical results are not tomatoes, corn, wheat, or cucumbers, however, but prize flowers. It's a kind of pharaonic Keukenhof, or a cultivated series of entombed precision-microclimates powered by a surrogate sun.  [Image: The subterranean Flower Factory of Naples by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].Indeed, "A circular system of solar mirrors is designed to be installed on the ground level," Trabucco explains, "thereby concentrating enormous amounts of thermal energy to a steam ball set on an upper level. The latter produces superheated steam to power the electric turbines." Nearby that is "a sterile laboratory, set up at the system entrance, in which plant cloning and micropropagation are conducted." Successful shoots are then "placed in growth chambers until they are large enough to transplant to trays, which have holes that are sized and spaced according to the morphology of the individual plants." These aeroponic trays of engineered flowers are then placed, via automated relay, into a series of "maturation tunnels"—in many ways quite similar to the mushroom tunnel of Mittagong—"that are 1.8 meters wide and about 100 meters long. Tunnel height varies to cater to plant morphology; the number of overlaid tunnels or growth levels depends on the height of the gallery." From there, these flowers grown in such unique architectural circumstances would be harvested, pruned, crated, and shipped all over the world—and probably no one would know their actual origin.  [Image: The Flower Factory by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].In any case, the possible underground future of botanical cultivation, using specialty equipment and architectural design to transform caves into ornamental flower farms or large-scale plantations, is something I'll mention again while exploring the archives of the "Underground Space Center Library" at the CCA. (For more CCA-related posts, click here).
Edible Geography has posted a must-read interview with Julio Cou Cámara, one of Mexico City's famed sewer divers.  [Image: Diver Carlos Barrios is lowered into the sewers of Mexico City; Julio Cou Cámara can be seen on the right. Photo by Mary Jordan, courtesy of the Washington Post]."Good afternoon," the transcript of Cámara's recent live presentation begins, "my name is Julio and I’m a diver in the sewage here in Mexico City. What I do is a bit weird. Most people, when I tell them that I’m a diver, they think, 'Oh wow, that’s beautiful—the ocean and the beach.' But no, we are divers of the sewage." I’m part of a team, and we work for the government in DF, in the Sistema de Aguas. We’re a water emergency team, so we participate in everything that has to do with flooding and repairing drainage systems. Under the city, under the streets where you walk, that’s where we dive. The whole interview is well worth reading in full: Julio the Sewer Diver. (Edible Geography's transcript of food historian Rachel Laudan is also fantastic).
 I think easily the most sobering thing I've read in a long time is that the BP Gulf oil spill might now be unstoppable. It's never the best editorial practice in a situation like this to laminate comments on top of comments on top of comments, but the internet is a-riot tonight with a chain of frankly terrifying speculation that boils down to one anonymous note posted on The Oil Drum earlier this week (which you can read in full through that link). In a nutshell, "the well bore structure is compromised 'down hole'," we read, leading to "one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking." This means that no surface capping will ever, at this point, work; the well is leaking in too many places, and the seabed itself is now beginning to show signs of collapse. Indeed, the comment immediately following suggests that "a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making," and that "fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway"—meaning that no fewer than 2 billion barrels of oil could leak into the Gulf before the reservoir has fully depleted itself. That's two billion. Again: this is all rumors, anonymous comments, and geological speculation, but it's also the most chilling scenario I've read yet for what is already an ecological disaster. The consequences of an unstoppable, multi-billion-barrel oil spill in the Gulf are truly unimaginable. Read the Oil Drum comment and feel free to join one of the numerous threads discussing it. (Spotted via @stevesilberman).
While writing a brief post for the CCA today about 19th-century "portable buildings" and their unexpected role in facilitating the European colonial project, I stumbled on the "portable camps" of Canadian shelter firm Weatherhaven.  [Images: Multiple projects by Weatherhaven].Weatherhaven was founded, historian Robert Kronenburg explains in his book Portable Architecture, "in 1981 by the merging of two separate businesses, an expedition organizing team and a Vancouver-based construction company." The founders recognized the need for a dedicated approach to the provision of temporary shelter in remote places and developed a strategy to provide a complete service including design, manufacture, packaging, transportation, and erection of buildings, all of which would be created specifically to respond to the logistical problems of remote deployment in harsh environments. For Weatherhaven, this includes the production of whole "Geological Survey Camps" and "mining villages," among many other examples, almost all of which are capable of being rapidly deployed and air-delivered by crate. It is Flatpak City: pop open the box and go.  [Image: Service-installation by Weatherhaven]."The first stage of the operation," Kronenburg writes, referring to a specific example of their cities-on-demand, "was to establish a Weatherhaven crew shelter so that a construction team could prepare a temporary landing site for heavier aircraft." From that initial seed, a whole civilization-by-airfield could be grown—an instant city from the sky. "A single crate was flown in by light aircraft and the building was assembled and in use within four hours." The team then prepared the camp layout, and as the rest of the building components and other equipment were flown in, assembled the entire facility... The completed facility included sleeping and leisure accommodation, a 24 hour kitchen, showers, and toilets, a hospital, offices, and an engineering base, and was built in 20 working days. The buildings themselves are neither architecturally nor materially interesting, Kronenburg adds, but they "are remarkable for their organizational and logistical approach." It is just-in-time urbanism: parachuting in whole cities and logistical systems till a new, geographically remote metropolis is up and running in less than three weeks.  [Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].These temporary mining villages and other extraction towns—somewhere above the Arctic Circle or deep in the desert, "often so remote as to be invisible to most of the world"—unfold in an industrial nanosecond. They stick around for mere years and then disappear, leaving no real archaeological traces, producing no tourist postcards, finding no place on any map, perhaps never even achieving the status of a formal name, yet nonetheless managing to house thousands of workers at a time. What role should such compounds play in the writing of urban and architectural history?  [Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].At the very least, these "longer-stay remote shelters," as Kronenburg calls them, are surely as vital to the global economy—with deep connections to the extraction industries, from diamond mines to tar sands—as the banking district of a recognized urban conglomerate. How ironic it would be to discover someday that an instant village for 2,000 residents, air-delivered by Weatherhaven into the emotionally bleak but mineralogically rich Australian Outback, has a larger economic footprint than the entire business district of a city like Sydney. In many ways, I'm reminded of an article published last week in which we read that "Cisco Systems is helping build a prototype in South Korea for what one developer describes as an instant 'city in a box'." Delegations of Chinese government officials looking to purchase their own cities of the future are descending on New Songdo City, a soon-to-be-completed metropolis about the size of downtown Boston that serves as a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities. The idea that a government—or private corporation—can simply "purchase their own cities of the future" is a fascinating and oddly troubling one. "Five hundred cities are needed in China; 300 are needed in India," an excited developer explains—so why not simply "purchase" them from the cheapest or most reliable supplier? Cities will be things you have delivered to you, like pizza, and they and their residents will be treated just as disposably.   [Image: The "modular datacenter" of Sun's Project Blackbox, a stackable, shipping container-based, portable supercomputing and data storage unit].Offloading a few of Sun's Project Blackbox units, seen above, in order to construct a privately chartered city-in-a-box, based around a remote airfield somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, is something as likely to be seen in a Roger Moore-era James Bond film as it is in the corporate spreadsheets of a firm like Rio Tinto; but I'm left dwelling on the question of where these sorts of settlements belong in architectural history. Purpose-built instant cities "purchased" wholesale from private suppliers, and erected in as little as one month's time, are only going to increase in quantity, population, diversity of purpose, and global economic importance in the decades to come; their impact on political science and concepts of sovereign territory and constitutional law is something we can barely even begin to anticipate. But if architects have more to learn from the international warehousing strategies of Bechtel than they do from the Farnsworth House or the software packages of Patrik Schumacher, then what role might firms like Weatherhaven prove to have played in transforming how we understand the built environment? Put another way, should the COO of Weatherhaven be invited to contribute to Icon's next " Manifesto" issue? If so, what might architects and urban planners learn? (Thanks to my dad for the Cisco "city-in-a-box" link!)
 [Image: Mexico's "Cavern of Crystal Giants" photographed by Carsten Peters, courtesy of National Geographic].I've got another post up over at the CCA, looking at Paul Scheerbart's recently republished 1912 short story " The Light Club of Batavia," in which an abandoned mine is transformed into a glass-filled environment for the hosting of underground "light parties." Check it out if you get a chance: Hurray for crystal!
 [Image: "Soldiers in the triumphal entry of Henri II into Rouen in 1550," engraver unknown, from Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph].In Mary Beard's recent book The Roman Triumph, we read the interesting story of conquering armies parading architectural models of the forts they've destroyed through the streets of their own home city. These triumphant returning soldiers would sometimes "carry models of forts captured by the victorious army," she explains. "Enthusiastic accounts of the procession held these models to be so accurate that the places were 'easily recognizable' to the participants in the various battles." It was about "the success of display no less than the display of success," she quips. These parades—called triumphs, in the case of imperial Rome, and the subject of Beard's book, which falls somewhere between classical history and spatial anthropology—both "re-presented and re-enacted the victory." A military triumph—the victorious parade—thus "brought the margins of the Empire to its center, and in so doing celebrated the new geopolitics that victory had brought about," Beard adds. Orphaned objects of victory moved through the conquering city, embattled remnants as diverse as "the beaks of wrecked pirate ships" and "exotic trees"—amidst, of course, the architectural models pictured above. Urban simulations, hoisted high above the crowds in an apotheosis of spatial doubling. One wonders what such a practice might result in today, on the other hand. What expertise in modeling the enemy might be required in our own era's case, with military operations now running through drug tunnels, feral cities, and mountain caves, amongst many other such complex terrains? (Read BLDGBLOG's two-part interview with Mary Beard, published back in 2007, here and here).
 [Image: Mammoth bone hut; unknown illustrator].It's been two weeks now since I arrived in Montreal to begin my summer residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where I am also kicking off the " Bloggers in the Archive" experiment. It's been fantastic so far, and, in almost every way, is just getting started. After the initial introductory tours and orientations—wandering through "cold vaults" in an obligatory down jacket, looking at children's architectural toys, seeing Gordon Matta-Clark's tax returns, learning about "sulfur bricks" baked in cake trays, flipping through 19th-century photographs of Istanbul's city walls, and, as anyone who follows my Twitter feed might have noticed, going through no less than 17 boxes of archival material from the Underground Space Center Library—I'll now be able to write about the objects, texts, photos, films, and more that I discover (or am shown) here in the voluminous storage rooms of the CCA. Expect those posts to begin this week and to continue through the end of July.  [Image: Alessandro Poli, Zeno-research of a self-sufficient culture (1979-80). ©Archivio Alessandro Poli. Photo: Antonio Quattrone. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].For now, the first five posts that I've written for the CCA are up and ready for reading. You can find any new content that I produce for them in one of two ways: either go to the home page itself and click on the Post-It note at the bottom right, or simply bookmark the tag Geoff@CCA. This is all part of the To CCA, From... series. Unfortunately, there is no way to leave comments on the CCA site, but perhaps use the comment thread here for any reactions, positive or negative, to the posts.  [Image: Unknown engraver, Series of views showing the development of the modern bastion system from its medieval origins, Matthias Dögen (1647), courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].Over the past week, then, I've looked at urban fortifications and the defensive future of feral cities; through the CCA's extensive periodicals collection, focusing on a brief comment about the relationship between furniture design and weight-lifting equipment; I've taken a behind-the-scenes tour of the CCA's current exhibition Other Space Odysseys, looking specifically at a fictional encounter between an Apollo astronaut and an Italian farmer; I've reviewed the sonic abnormalities of a concert here in Montréal last weekend as part of the MUTEK festival; and, in the most recent post, I've taken a look at the paleolithic history of architecture and the prehistoric design possibilities for an Archigram of mammoth bones. Actual archival research—live-blogging the archive, so to speak—will begin promptly. Thanks again to the CCA for hosting me!
 [Image: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
Shin Egashira, an architect and instructor at the AA in London—and co-author of the amazing pamphlet I mentioned back in April, the Alternative Guide to Portland—has a number of projects that I'd like to write about here, but I'll limit myself to one: Slow Box After Image, produced in 2000 in Japan.
 [Image: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
The project, Egashira explains on his website, "required the construction of an over-sized camera vehicle ( Slow Box) and an archive space ( After Image). Slow Box can fit a person inside its wooden structure. It travels across villages with a help of an agricultural tractor."
It needed up to 30 minutes of exposure time per image, and each exposure produced only one part of the eventual, tiled print—a print that measured no less than 1.5 square-meters. The results—which you can see toward the end of this post—are amazing.
But check out the structure first, its hinged operation seen here in model form.
  [Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
The whole contraption, Egashira explains in his book Before Object, After Image: Koshirakura Landscape, 1996-2006, "can flip from a horizontal position (when it is in transit or being used as a darkroom) to a vertical fixed position, which allows one to sit inside and see the inverted image." Climbing down into the belly of the camera for the first time as it creaked and shook around me, I felt like an early pioneer about to descend into the depths of the ocean in some kind of prototype submarine. Last waves and smiles to those outside before closing up the hatch and sinking into my own world of muffled sounds and stifling darkness. Here are some action shots.
    [Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
"7 villages showed their interest to collaborate," the architect adds, "namely, Takakura, Takizawa, Kurokura, Kettou, Seitayama, Funasaka and Koshirakura. The journey was organized as 3-4 days in each village, taking photographs as a form of communication, just us being a group of visitors asking permissions for taking pictures, except the camera that is big and slow enough to be taken seriously."
Egashira quips that, "Over time we all began to build up a close relationship with the thing as we hauled it daily from one village to the next, in a procession akin to a medieval pilgrimage caravan bearing a precious effigy. How strange it must have seemed to the elderly villagers we visited as an increasingly disheveled troupe of people from all over the world turned up in a slow-moving convoy of car, van and tiny buzzing moped, with the tractor bearing the camera at the centre, raised up high and sheathed in canvases lashed with ropes for protection."
Some of the resulting images can be seen below.
    [Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
"The pictures were eventually displayed in an old hall with tall windows hugh up on a remote hillside," we read. "Twenty or so large sheets of glass with images showing the people of this quiet corner of Japan, the sepia colour and hazy focus conjuring up anthropological images that could have been taken a hundred years before."
The installation shots, below, are from the school gym in Kurokawa Village, where the prints were displayed in August 2000.
  [Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].
Egashira and his students also built a Suitcase Camera in 2003, which is basically what it sounds: an unfolding suitcase-camera on wheels that they hauled, once again, village to village, photographing residents in situ.
The mobile camera device/portable architecture hybrid is a pretty intriguing mix, though, and I would love to see further permutations of the concept. Perhaps something combining the Strandbeest of Theo Jansen with Gigapan, by way of Shin Egashira, to unleash autonomous, roving, bamboo-framed camera-machines that wander town to town through mists and mountains.
At one point in Owen Davies's recent book Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, we read a short history of pirate treasure, lost gold, forgotten cities, and other "magical" artifacts of early colonial North America and the Caribbean, including what drove people to look for—and believe in—such things.  "America may not have been dotted with the ruined monasteries, castles, stone circles, dolmens, and hill forts that attracted treasure legends across Europe," Davies writes, "but this did not prevent settlers from creating a new geography of treasure—one based on buried pirate booty supposedly secreted by the notorious William Kidd and Jean Lafitte, lost Spanish gold mines, and ancient Indian treasure." The West may have had its gold rush in the mid-nineteenth century but, long before, the countryside of the northeastern Atlantic seaboard was dotted with the exploration of those seeking hidden riches. In 1729 Benjamin Franklin co-wrote a newspaper essay highlighting the "problem," bemoaning the great number of labouring people who were bringing their families to the brink of ruin in search of "imaginary treasure." The physical signs of their activity were apparent around and about Philadelphia. "You can hardly walk half a mile out of Town on any side, without discovering several Pits dug with that Design," Franklin moaned. He took a particular swipe at the role of astrologers, "with whom the Country swarms at this Time," in promoting such fruitless endeavour. This "popular preoccupation with treasure hunting," as Davies describes it, created its own landscape, its "new geography of treasure": a world of ceaseless, intuitive digging, tunneling downward with nothing at all like historical evidence but invigorated by the strong emotional conviction that something must be down there if only we can take it upon ourselves to look. On the one hand, it's fascinating to see that the orphan-like state of a newly liberated proto-United States would result in people so desperate for a sense of history that they might turn their own everyday world into a moonscape of excavations and craters—as if the "popular preoccupation with treasure hunting" was really the perverse acting-out of a society-wide mnemonic condition. History must still be around here somewhere, these excavations seem to say. And so new myths were created, swirling with "Indian treasure," lost gold mines, secret cities in the mountain West, and stolen imperial fortunes locked away in pirate coves on the storm-sheltered sides of Caribbean islands.  [Image: From North By Northwest].I might even suggest that Alfred Hitchcock's film North By Northwest ( mentioned earlier) plays with some of these very themes, from its undisclosed imperial secrets hidden inside a Mesoamerican statue to the act of smuggling them through the Rocky Mountains by way of the massive tetrostatuary of Mt. Rushmore, stone totems of ancestral kings. In any case, this urge for treasure—the need to dig—was not in any way limited to North America in its early Europeanization. During the so-called London treasure hunt riots, Londoners tore up properties all over the city "looking for one of 177 prize medallions which a Sunday newspaper called the Weekly Dispatch had planted around the UK." The paper used its first issue of the New Year to announce it had concealed a fortune in treasure medallions, the most valuable of which were worth £50 apiece. Each issue would carry a series of clues pointing to the prizes' locations. But these locations were incredibly vague, and, many readers thought, the only way to look was simply to start digging holes.  [Image: From Paul Slade, "London's treasure hunt riots"].Quoting journalist Paul Slade at great length: All over London, the story was the same. Crowds gathered outside Pentonville Prison and Islington's Fever Hospital, blocking the roads and attacking any scrap of loose ground. Hundreds of treasure seekers converged on a Bethnal Green museum and began digging there. One Shooters Hill resident said his area was "infested with gangs of roughs." Shepherd's Bush, Clapton and Canning Town were besieged too.
By the time [a 19-year-old Battersea labourer called Frederick Nurse] had his day in court, Luton and Manchester had also been hit. Luton residents seeking the town's single £10 medallion caused what councillors called "a gross disturbance" to the town in the early hours of Sunday, January 10. A week later, the Manchester Evening News found "some most extraordinary scenes" in its own city.
"From an early hour on Saturday night to late on Sunday night, various parts of the Manchester suburbs were the resort of men, women and children, people of all classes, drunk and sober, who had taken up what they thought to be the real clue to the spot where a medallion worth £25 lay hidden beneath the turf," the [Manchester Evening News] reported. “They seized upon vacant pieces of land and stretches of roadway, digging and delving until not a foot of the ground lay smooth.” In Blackley, it added, three hunters had arrived simultaneously at the same spot and “settled the matter by a three-cornered fight." Indeed, Slade adds, "Wherever the Dispatch's promotion touched down, hysterical treasure hunters began tearing up the public highways with knives, shovels, sticks and any other implement that came to hand. If they took it into their head to dig up a private garden or vandalise the local park, they went right ahead and did so. Anyone who protested was bullied into submission... The promotion was less than three weeks old, and already causing chaos." This wasn't even the only such "promotion"—other citywide treasure hunts, albeit resulting in less damage to personal property, were launched at the same time.  [Image: From Paul Slade, "London's treasure hunt riots"].The cartoon from January 1904, included above, mocking the state of mind in which even a passing dream might really be an intuitive discovery of a buried treasure's secret location, seems perfectly pitched here: convince people that there is something out there to be found—hidden gold or lost symbols—and a kind of neurosis for meaning breaks out. Everything is read and over-read, interpreted and over-interpreted. From the public craze for Dan Brown novels to Paul Slade's "hysterical treasure hunters," the urge to find something that you think has been hidden from you becomes all-consuming.
|
|
