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 [Image: An old asylum and its floorplan, courtesy of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, otherwise unrelated to the present post].
We recently looked at the phenomenon of trap rooms, but that same idea came to mind again while reading about an interestingly architectural anxiety.
Amongst the many illnesses pushed to the limit by schizophrenic judge Daniel Paul Schreber—a figure who should be familiar to all readers of Deleuze & Guattari—was a kind of architectural paranoia. That is, Judge Schreber suffered an "anxious concern," as Victoria Nelson explains in her book The Secret Life of Puppets, "about the physical layout of the clinics in which he was housed (whose floor plans he includes in the Memoirs) and his occasional conviction that he was in a room that 'does not tally with any one of the rooms known to me' in the asylum."
He was inside the building, sure—but he was inside something else, an architectural circumstance he could neither abstractly understand nor spatially fathom. Perhaps, we might say, it was a trap room: a space neither here nor there, off the plan entirely, part of the very structure it will remain forever outside of.
 [Image: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
Thomas Hillier, of Emperor's Castle fame, has sent in a newly documented but chronologically older project of his called " The Migration of Mel and Judith."
" The Migration of Mel and Judith," Hillier writes, "was the pre-cursor to The Emperor’s Castle and my first real exploration into using narrative as the vehicle for generating and scrutinizing my architectural ideas. It was also where I began using craft-based techniques and 2/3-dimensional assemblage to illustrate the design process."
The Migration, though, is not only an entire storyline packaged inside a beautifully realized, miniature architectural world—it's also told inside a lampshade.
  [Images: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
Mel and Judith, Hillier explains, are "a recently retired couple from Croydon who have decided to give up on their life in London’s third City and travel Europe," looking for a place to touch down for a while (and for better weather).
  [Images: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
Soon enough, though, they get homesick—and the architectural transformation of their caravan-home begins: To combat thier longing they slowly adapt and customise their caravan-house to feel a little more like home. Walls of the caravan become aroma filled bricks of white bread, especially made by Mel & Judith themselves. Other adaptations include the pebbledash façade reminiscent of their Croydon abode. A green lawn-carpet that is much cooler underfoot than the hot Marbella sand and when it gets too hot there's always the sprinkler system and snow-chimney. The couple's mobile slice of English domesticity becomes all but entombed beneath the ornament of personal nostalgia.
     [Images: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
This, too, steeped in English nostalgia, becomes too staid for them, and the couple decides to leave Europe altogether, alighting for the more exotic climes of Luxor, Egypt.
 [Image: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
There, they settle "on a small, uninhabited island situated on the River Nile, where in their weird and wonderful ‘Do-It-Yourself’ English manor Mel brews beer in his bathtub-brewery whilst Judith bakes rose-bread in the bread-garden." Their island comes alive during the holiday season creating an English retreat in the middle of Luxor, a retreat that lures in English tourists with the opportunity to be surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of home. The smell of roses and freshly baked bread drift through the air whilst the temptation to drink beer (which is illegal in Luxor) is impossible to resist. Maps of riverine estuaries have thus been sewn into the lampshade alongside windfarms, fishing boats, photo-collages, and even a portrait of Princess Diana.
              [Images: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
If you pull back, though, and look at the whole project within its physical and visual frame, the self-enclosed curling world of the lampshade adds a wonderfully anti-perspectival, frilly concavity to the couple's journey. These latter scenes become both explosive and disorienting.
Like the spaceships in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, the walls of their representational frame simply turn and turn, bringing us over and over again back through the same space, as if unwilling to let go of what's come before. Here, that space is asprawl with tidal flats and marshlands, fishing spots and coves. The couple, living now in Luxor, welcome visitors, dry their clothes aboard the boat deck, catch some afternoon sunlight, and grow old together, retired into this deliberately over-nostalgic world of their own making, constantly cycling back in memory through their shared past.
They have built a frame to fit themselves within, as if to give their lives narrative completion.
   [Images: From "The Migration of Mel and Judith" by Thomas Hillier].
Check out The Emperor's Castle, meanwhile, if you haven't seen it already, and then click through to Hillier's website.
There are still a few hours—lasting till 8pm EST today—to participate in this week's Glass House Conversation on the political future of cities.
 The comments have really hit on some great and very wide-ranging points, including, but by no means limited to, thoughts from Enrique Ramirez, Nicola Twilley, Matthew Battles, Ana María León, and David Gersten. The city as legal actor; the city as myth, described by Italo Calvino; the city as historical environment shaped by the proportions of the human body; the urban slum as a radically privatized development.
Being the host of the discussion this week, I would love to see a flurry of activity there in the last few hours; at 8pm EST tonight, it's all over!
Coincidentally, Foreign Policy's most recent issue proclaims that " The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun." Perhaps skim that article on your way over to the Glass House Conversations, and then feel free to chime in.
While finalizing my slides for tonight's lecture at SCI-Arc, I was reading again about one of my favorite topics: trap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms.
 [Images: A "trap street" on Google Maps, documented by Luistxo eta Marije].
In other words, if a competitor's map includes your "trap street"—a fictitious geographic feature that you've invented outright—then you (and your lawyers) will know that they've simply nicked your data, giving it a quick redesign and trying to pass it off as their own.
But this strategy of willful cartographic deception is not always limited to streets: there can be trap parks, trap ponds, trap buildings.
And trap rooms.
Earlier this week, I was reading about the rise of internal navigation apps for mobile phones, apps that will help you to find your way through otherwise bewildering internal environments. Large shopping malls, for instance, or unfamiliar subway stations.
From the New York Times: A number of start-up companies are charting the interiors of shopping malls, convention centers and airports to keep mobile phone users from getting lost as they walk from the food court to the restroom. Some of their maps might even be able to locate cans of sardines in a sprawling grocery store. Whichever company can upload the most floorplans before everyone else will, presumably, have quite an economic advantage. So how could you protect your proprietary map sets? What if you're the only company in the world with access to maps of a certain convention center or sports stadium or new airport terminal—how could you keep a rival firm from simply jacking your cartography?
 [Image: Photo by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times].
Introduce false information, perhaps: trap halls, trap stairs, trap attics, trap rooms. Nothing sinister—you don't want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn't exist in the event of a real-life fire—but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you're standing in?
It seems to be a mapping error—but it's actually there for copyright protection. It's a trap room.
On one level, I'm reminded of a minor detail from Joe Flood's recent book The Fires, where we read that John O'Hagan, New York City's Fire Commissioner, used to drive around town with blueprints of local buildings stored in the trunk of his car. If there was ever a fire in one of those structures, and his men would have to find their way through smoke-filled, confusing hallways, O'Hagan would have the maps. But is there a kind of Fire Department iPhone app? Could this be downloaded by everyday citizens and used in the event of emergency? What about a Seismic App for earthquake-prone cities like Los Angeles? Going into any building becomes a considerably safer thing to do, as your phone automagically downloads the relevant floorplans. Perhaps buildings known to be fire hazards, or known to be earthquake-unsafe, are somehow red-flagged as a warning before you step inside. (In such a context, the first person to become Mayor on foursquare of every earthquake-unsafe building in Los Angeles wins cult status amongst certain social groups).
But I'm also curious about less practical things, such as what cultural, even psychological, effects the presence of trap rooms might actually have. Games could be launched, the purpose of which is to find and occupy as many trap rooms as possible. New paranoias emerge, that the room featured above your apartment on the new app you just downloaded is not really there at all; it's a trap room. You can't sleep at night, worried that you actually have no neighbors, that you're the last person on earth and every building around you is a dream. There are panic attacks and feelings of unreality, that no map can be trusted, that you've been living in a trap building all along. An Atlas of Trap Rooms is then released, with a foreword by Kevin Slavin.
These and other subtle geographies—trap architectures—awaiting detection all around us.
In her excellent book The First Fossil Hunters, author Adrienne Mayor explains, in fascinating detail, how Classical myths of giants, dragons, titans, heroes, and other ill-formed monstrous beings often stemmed from a misunderstanding of the fossil record. After all, it was not at all infrequent for people of the time to have "striking personal experiences with giant skeletons that weathered out of the ground in Asia Minor," Mayor writes, a place "where strange and immense skeletons emerge from the sand." And, with no particular reason to assemble all those gigantic bones into animal forms with which humans had no direct experience, the bones were, instead, simply fashioned together to form titanic heroes. Gods on earth. Monstrous ancestry.
A mastodon skeleton like this, for instance, seen here in its proper assembly—
 [Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].
—was pieced together, instead, with Herculean proportions, towering over the human figure beside it.
 [Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].
Heroes, titans, giants: eventually, in a time before human history, Mayor explains, a mythic war between the oversized dwellers of the Earth and the Gods themselves took place, called the Gigantomachy. Explosive battles left incomprehensible body parts scattered all over the land masses, where they were gradually buried by sand or stratigraphically entombed inside rocky cliffs.
Then humans came along, unversed in today's anatomical principles, and assembled these giant bones into a lost and mutant history for themselves. And there you have Hercules, for instance, a mutant being accidentally assembled from the remnant skeletons of other creatures.
 While I'm announcing things, I also want to give a heads up to anyone in the Los Angeles area that I'll be lecturing on Wednesday evening, October 13th, over at SCI-Arc, speaking on the subject of " Quadraturin and Other Architectural Expansionary Tales." I'll be delving into the long-running subtheme on this site of the role of architectural ideas in poetry, myth, comics, and fiction, from the ancient to extreme futurity.
From " trap streets" in London and the fiction of China Miéville to the folklore of The First Fossil Hunters and myths of Alexander's Gates—to, of course, Quadraturin—by way of Franz Kafka, Mike Mignola, Rupert Thomson, 3D-printing bees, haunted skyscrapers, neutrino storms, the Cyclonopedia, and much more, the talk will be a quick rundown of both the narrative implications of architecture and the architectural implications of specific storylines.
It's free and open to the public, and there's an insane amount of parking, so hopefully I will see some of you there. Here's a map. Things kick off at 7pm.
For the next five days, I'll be hosting and moderating an online discussion as part of the Glass House Conversations, sponsored by the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.
 Every week this autumn, the Glass House Conversations have presented one question, posed by a new host each week, for general discussion online; previous queries have come from designers, writers, architects, critics, and educators, including 2x4, Steven Heller, John Maeda, Alice Twemlow, Alice Rawsthorn, Alissa Walker, and many more.
Click through to read the specific question I'm asking, and feel free to chime in; hopefully we can generate a good exchange over there throughout the week (note that the commenting function closes Friday evening).
 [Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].
Edible Geography has a fun interview up this morning with glacial scientist Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. The interview is remarkable not only for its descriptions of the technicality of drilling, shipping, preserving, and studying ancient ice cores removed from landscapes as far afield as Greenland and Tibet, but also for Mayewski's confession that unneeded ice cores are sometimes melted down and drunk by the scientists.
 [Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].
"But, you know," he clarifies, "it’s not as if we have a lot of ice lying around and we drink the water on a regular basis. We are pretty careful to restrict it to pieces that we know we don’t need for any measurements, and that come from places where they could be repeated if need be. We have to be sure that they’re not valuable to anybody. And we only use them for special events—we don’t drink it very often."
  [Images: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].
These special events include wedding receptions, where shavings of ancient ice, dropped into water, bubble and pop like champagne, Mayewski explains: Probably the most exciting thing about it is when you have real ice—that’s where the snow has been gradually compacted and eventually formed into ice, and the density has increased. When that happens, if the ice is old, it will often trap air bubbles in it. Those air bubbles can contain carbon dioxide from ten thousand years ago or even a hundred thousand years ago. And when you put an ice cube of that ice in a glass of water, it pops. It has natural effervescence as those gas bubbles escape. You get a little a puff of air into your nostrils if you have your nose over the glass. It’s not as though it necessarily smells like anything—but when you think about the fact that the last time that anything smelled that air was a hundred thousand years ago, that’s pretty interesting. Atmospheres trapped for a half-a-million years suddenly freed, as wedding guests inhale these vaporous paleoarchives.
 [Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].
The whole interview, though long, is a quick and good-spirited read.
 I'm thrilled to be kicking off this fall's Design and Existential Risk lecture series, hosted by Ed Keller and the Parsons School of Design in New York. Things kick off tomorrow, Saturday, October 9th, at 6pm EST, with a simulcast lecture featuring myself here in Los Angeles and legendary writer Bruce Sterling in New York.
As you can see from the flyer, above, the whole series will address the strategic use of science fiction-inflected scenario planning and the rise of "extreme existential risks" at this particular point in human history. As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, we are challenged by unprecedented planetary scale events—resource wars, climate change, emerging diseases—which increase in frequency and pose unprecedented problems for mapping and design. What can the role be for design when the reality that faces us is more extraordinary than the worlds we have imagined in science fiction? Each lecture in the series will thus "explore the ways design thinking engages sustainability and indeed our very survival across near term (5 years), mid term (20 years), through very, very long term (tens of thousands of years and longer) time frames."
Tomorrow will involve some technical intricacies—such as getting a video feed of myself and architect Ed Keller recorded live here in Los Angeles broadcast into the auditorium in New York City where Bruce Sterling will be interviewed by Carla Leitao and introduced by Elizabeth Ellsworth. But it should work. If all hell breaks loose, though, and the video feeds fizzle, you can still attend Bruce Sterling's talk in person at Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Avenue, and videos from both Bruce's and my talks will be released online later this fall.
Other speakers in the series include Benjamin Bratton, Jeffrey Inaba, Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio, Keller Easterling, David Gersten, and many more.
Check out the program's website for more info.
 [Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
For his final thesis project this year at the Cooper Union in New York City, student Andrejs Rauchut diagrammed and modeled "a constellation of architectural set pieces" meant for "a day-long performance of The Comedy of Errors" by William Shakespeare. Rauchut's project presentation included an absolutely massive, wood-bound book: it started off as a flat chest or cabinet, before opening up as its own display table.
   [Images: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
The diagrams therein are extraordinary: they map character movement not only through the ancient city of Ephesus, where Shakespeare's play is set, but through the "constellation" of set pieces that Rauchut himself later designed.
 [Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union; view larger!].
As Rauchut describes it, The Comedy of Errors "follows a single day in the life of the port city of Ephesus through the eyes of its commuting citizens, from the high perch of the duke to the city’s prostitutes." This has interesting spatial implications: The shrewdest and most elaborate part of the play is its circuitous, knotted plot. The city starts to fold in on itself when a merchant named Antipholus arrives in Ephesus unaware that his long-lost twin brother now lives in Ephesus. The local citizenry misidentify the brothers as each Antipholus is shuffled in and out of scene. A complex strand of chaos breaks out throughout the city that climaxes with one of the brothers attempting to publicly murder his wife out of shear frustration. While the play investigates how the circulation patterns in a city can be hijacked to create chaos, it also demonstrates how, through the art of gathering, peace can be obtained via discussion and the exchange of information. We see this in the last act when all the characters gather and finally make sense of the day’s events. Urban design becomes public dramaturgy.
 [Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
The bulk of Rauchut's work went into producing a series of timelines and graphic depictions of character movement in Shakespeare's play.
 [Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
In the massive image seen above, for instance, "Each box represents the time and space of an act and the crossing of a box by a line signals a character’s entrance onto the stage. One can see that it is in the final act, when nearly all the lines collectively intersect the last rectangle, and all the characters are on stage, that they can finally straighten out the events of their collective day. Up to this point, as the timeline demonstrates, the characters have been weaving in and out of contact with one another, multiplying the fragmented misinformation that spreads throughout the city."
    [Images: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
He then went on to experiment with overlaying these character paths onto Staten Island, part of the New York City archipelago, as if trying to draw an analogy between the seafaring, splintered island geography of the ancient Mediterranean—with its attendant heroes and unacknowledged gods—and the contemporary commuter landscape of greater New York.
This transposition of Shakespeare's characters' movements onto Staten Island, Rauchut explains, became "the backbone for the design of a series of architectural set pieces inserted into the suburban fabric of Staten Island. At each of the points where characters interact, an architectural set is built."
    [Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].
Ultimately, the project aimed for the indirect choreographing of a public, urban event—it was to be a "guerilla instigator of public space," as Rauchut describes it: The final design is a constellation of architectural set pieces that would be used for a day-long performance of The Comedy of Errors. Actors would travel along their scripted routes through the city dressed in plain-clothes crossing paths and delivering lines. The audience would consist of interested citizens, gathering, following, growing, leaving, and occasionally returning as they continue through their daily routines. "After the play is over," he concludes, "the architecture would remain and would be used by the locals of Staten Island"—the remnants of a play incorporated into everyday urbanism.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of that sort of participatory street theater, but the spatial ideas underlying Rauchut's project—that is, the precipitation of architectural forms from the public passing of an unannounced literary event—is certainly thought-provoking and could have some pretty awesome effects applied elsewhere, with different texts. Books become clouds, raining events and built forms onto the city.
(Thanks to Hayley Eber for inviting me to see Andrejs Rauchut's project at midterm last spring! Of possible earlier interest: Bloomsday).
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