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 [Image: The New York Federal Reserve Bank; photo by Friends of the Pleistocene].
I have linked to the ongoing series of "Geologic City Reports" released every few weeks by the excellent blog Friends of the Pleistocene—which, having launched back in January, receives my vote for Best New Blog of 2010—but the newest installment, #9, is worth singling out. In it, F.O.P. tour the gold reserve vaults of Manhattan.
The New York Federal Reserve bank "is a place where humans have encased geology within geology. They’ve unfolded and refolded stratifications of limestone, sandstone, iron and gold so they could put the gold on the inside—where it can be hyper-protected because of its high, human-assigned value." Think of it as a kind of metallurgical Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
The authors go on to describe the actual, physical sale of gold bars as "a human-scale chess game playing out in the basement of New York with elemental geology as the pawns."
While you're at it, "Geologic City Reports" 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all worth reading, as well.
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: City of Gold).
 [Image: The crystal growth furnace; courtesy of NASA].
This isn't news, but my days are made fractionally better by the knowledge that there is a " crystal growth furnace" birthing new geological forms in microgravity aboard the International Space Station.
 [Image: Another view of the crystal growth furnace; courtesy of NASA].
"The Zeolite Crystal Growth (ZCG) furnace, which was derived from earlier shuttle models," NASA explains, "can grow zeolites, zeotype titanosilicate materials, ferroelectrics, and silver halides—all materials of commercial interest. The unit consists of a cylinder-shaped furnace, the Improved Zeolite Electronic Control System (IZECS), which includes a touchpad and data display as well as autoclaves. Two precursor growth solutions are placed into each autoclave, which mix during their stay in the furnace."
In the end, though, this research comes down to fossil fuels: "Zeolites form the backbone of the chemical processes industry, and virtually all the world's gasoline is produced or upgraded using zeolites. Industry wants to improve zeolite crystals so that more gasoline can be produced from a barrel of oil, making the industry more efficient and thus reducing America's dependence on foreign oil."
 [Image: Terrestrial and nonterrestrial zeolites compared, courtesy of NASA].
First, "the furnace heats up and crystals start to form, or nucleate," monitored only occasionally by the crew, while a "payload team on the ground" watches these crystals, like something out of a Charles Stross novel, "via download telemetry." Otherwise, "with the exception of loading the autoclaves into the furnace and turning the switch on, the crystal growth experiment operations are unattended by the crew."
Rare and unattended postgeological forms take shape in engines quietly aflame in space, new hearths for future astronauts, like William Blake gone Ballardian in earth orbit, cultivating crystal trays, supervised telemetrically by an audience far below.
 [Image: More comparative space crystallography, courtesy of NASA].
In fact, there was an article seven years ago in New Scientist about cosmonauts running plasma-crystal experiments aboard the International Space Station, studying a type of matter that is atomically parked somewhere between liquid and solid: "Although the consistency of the [plasma] crystals is something like a viscous fluid, their internal structures closely resemble the atomic lattices seen in conventional solids."
But what's particularly interesting is that "one of the cosmonauts was so intrigued" by this strange new material form that "he decided to do extra experiments in his private sleep time"—a statement phrased perhaps deliberately vaguely, as if the writer was unable to resist this exquisite vision of obsessive-compulsive cosmonauts so intent on building crystals in space that they have found a way to do so even while dreaming.
 [Image: From "Microclimates" by PostlerFerguson].
These air-cooling hives made from "3D-printed sand" and designed by PostlerFerguson have been rendered a bit too glossily for my taste, but I love the idea: each unit has "a complex internal structure whose large internal surface area efficiently conditions air passing through it by evaporative cooling. Each cooling tower is made from 3D-printed sand using technology developed by D-Shape."
   [Images: From "Microclimates" by PostlerFerguson].
The designers refer to the work as "not just an installation, but a building language that can be reused again and again to create new public spaces." Roads, piazzas, buildings, halls, rooms, architectural ornament—adding non-electrical air-cooling technology to the built environment on a huge variety of scales and conjuring up images of 3D-printed sandstone ornamental cornices on buildings being used to cool urban streetscapes.
 [Image: From "Microclimates" by PostlerFerguson].
In some ways, purely on the level of material similarities, this might remind readers of the work of Magnus Larsson, featured here last summer, in which it was proposed that landscape-scale architectural forms in the African desert could be "printed" into existence via bacterial-injection machines (read the original proposal for more information).
     [Images: From "Microclimates" by PostlerFerguson].
But the very different aesthetic here, and the functional purpose of using hives of 3D-printed sand as a way of generating thermally advantageous microclimates in the city, offers an interesting direction for the surprising popularity today of architectural projects involving stabilized sand.
(Spotted via Dezeen).
 I've been delinquent in mentioning a talk by Eyal Weizman scheduled to take place later this afternoon, over at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. A related exhibition called Decolonizing Architecture—co-curated by Weizman—opens to the public on Tuesday, December 7. Decolonizing Architecture is a project initiated by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman in 2007. Set up as a studio/residency program in Beit Sahour, Bethlehem and recently re-established as the Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency (DAAR), they engage spatial research and theory, taking the conflict over Palestine as their main case study. Decolonizing Architecture seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. Their practice continuously engages a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed. I will be posting again about the exhibition next month; for now, I want to get the word out in the nick of time for those of you who able to attend today's talk.
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil, courtesy of sixteen*(makers)].
Beginning in 2003, architects Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil of sixteen*(makers) began experimenting with a group of "micro-environmental surveying probes" that he was later to install in Kielder Park, Northumbria, UK.
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil, courtesy of sixteen*(makers)].
The probes were "designed to act as dual monitors and responsive artefacts." Which means what, exactly? The probes were designed to measure difference over time rather than the static characteristics of any given instance. Powered by solar energy, the probes gathered and recorded ‘micro environmental data’ over time. The probes were simultaneously and physically responsive to these changes, opening out when warm and sunny, closing down when cold and dark. Thus not only did the probes record environmental change, but they demonstrated how these changes might induce a responsive behaviour specific to a single location. After the probes were installed, they were filmed by "an array of high-resolution digital cameras programmed to record at regular intervals."
   [Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil, courtesy of sixteen*(makers)].
The resulting data—which took note of the climatic and solar situations in which the objects began to change—offers insights, Sheil suggests, into how "passively activated responsive architecture" might operate in other sites, under other environmental conditions.
 [Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil, courtesy of sixteen*(makers)].
As DIY landscape-registration devices constructed from what appear to be off-the-shelf aluminum plates, they also cut an interesting formal profile above the horizon line, like rare birds or machine-flowers perched amidst the tree stumps.
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Phil Ayres, Chris Leung, and Bob Sheil, courtesy of sixteen*(makers)].
 [Image: The Baikonur Cosmodrome; image via Tomorrow's Thoughts Today].
Liam Young and Kate Davies of the Architectural Association's Unknown Fields Division have teamed up to launch an annual "nomadic studio." Next July, 2011, Young and Davies will lead a two-week visit to the irradiated zones of exclusion at Chernobyl, Ukraine, and the derelict Soviet launch-city of Baikonur for an intensive workshop of architectural research and design.
As Liam describes the studio: "Together we will form a traveling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions, and impromptu tutorials... Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators: photographers and filmmakers from the worlds of technology, science and fiction including the Philips Technologies Design Probes research lab and Archis/ Volume magazine."
There is a £650 fee to participate, but this does not cover flights or hotels. More info here.
 [Image: A "Jeffrey Portable Blower," once billed as the "highest efficiency in mine ventilation, insuring [sic] a continuous and abundant supply of fresh air under every operating condition." Image courtesy of Kentucky Coal Heritage].
I had never heard of a "Gorniczy Agregat Gasniczy" apparatus prior to the Pike River Mine disaster still unfolding in New Zealand, where one such device is about to be deployed.
The GAG, as it's known, is "a jet engine inertisation unit developed for use in mines, controlling and suppressing coal seam fires," Wikipedia explains—another way of saying that it is literally a jet engine that you plug into one end of a sealed mine in order to blow high-powered chemical winds (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor) into the tunnels below. These gases then "lower the oxygen levels, suppressing fires and forcing methane out of the mine."
 [Image: A GAG unit being readied in New Zealand, courtesy of the New Zealand Herald News].
There are only three operational GAG units in the world right now, apparently. Each operates by taking a "docking position" on the earth's surface, attached to "intake ventilation headings" that lead, via boreholes, into the porous labyrinth of artificial caves below. The GAG then rapidly pumps a new atmosphere into the existing mineworks, as if generating artificial weather underground. In a paper on " jet engine inertisation techniques," Stewart Bell points out that "a variation of this device was used, mounted on a remotely controlled tank, to extinguish the oil well fires in Kuwait following the Gulf War."
As Jonathan Rennie, the person who originally pointed this machine out to me, added: "I wonder what alternative structures it could be plugged into and what alternative gases could be pumped." Indeed. Weaponized jet-engine army battering rams used to clear enemy houses of hidden combatants. Emergency subway ventilation machines. Alcoholic mist-dissemination units for avant-garde cocktail parties. Underground deodorant guns.
As it happens, the specialty subfield of preventing and/or extinguishing underground mine fires comes with a wide range of spatial and material techniques. These include the controlled "injection" of instant gel-foam barriers (operated via "an underground-based mobile gel preparation and injection system"), in order to block airflow through the mines, and the installation of ventilation control devices (VCDs), or rapidly deployed explosive barriers.
Looking into this latter architectural form—if we can treat underground ventilation control devices as a form of spatial design—led me to something called the "TestSafe Explosions Gallery" in Queensland, Australia—a kind of experimental underground explosion lab that operates as "a full-scale pressure test facility for ventilation control devices (VCDs) within Australia."
 [Image: The Lake Lynn Experimental Mine facility; image courtesy of the CDC].
This "full-scale pressure test facility" joins another Aussie site, called the Lake Lynn Experimental Mine (LLEM), "a highly sophisticated underground and surface facility where large-scale explosion trials and mine fire research is conducted."
The workings are located in a massive limestone deposit. Entries are sized to match those of commercial mines, making them authentic, full-scale test galleries. Movable bulkheads permit the setup of single-entry, triple-entry, and longwall face configurations for experiments. The underground test areas are amply instrumented and coupled to a remote control center at the surface. Research conducted at this facility includes large-scale gas and coal dust explosion studies, conveyor belt flammability trials, and evaluations of explosive materials and mine stoppings. In addition, diesel, ground control, and emergency response and rescue research is conducted here. I'm increasingly convinced that these sorts of highly specific sites need to be cataloged within the architectural world—or, at the very least, within the world of landscape research and design. Put another way, in the long line of accepted building typologies—the library, the stadium, the prison, the house, the theater—it's a shame not to see mine-fire research facilities more frequently listed...
In any case, Jonathan Rennie, who first pointed out Gorniczy Agregat Gasniczy devices to me, also forwarded a link to the homepage of Andrzej M. Wala, a mine engineering professor at the University of Kentucky with a research focus on subsurface ventilation techniques—mapping and predicting atmospheric effects in highly confined quarters below ground. As part of this, Wala has pioneered work in simulating the spread of underground fires using VENTGRAPH "mine fire simulation software" (as opposed to VENTSIM "mine ventilation simulation software").
"The essential work program of the project," Wala and his co-authors explain, "was built around the introduction of fire simulation computer software and the consequent modeling of fire scenarios in selected mine with different layouts." At stake here is a comprehensive understanding of the geometry of underground airflow:
The importance of understanding complex ventilation networks such as those with diagonal connections has been discussed. It is important to identify and understand their potential effects on the mine ventilation network as the airflow through the diagonal connections could reverse or stop due to the changes in the adjoining branches within the ventilation network. Mining companies need to identify the existing and potential diagonal connections in their ventilation system and analyze how these connections will affect their ventilation system especially in the case of fires. Training is necessary to equip mine ventilation personnel how to identify and minimize diagonal connections in their ventilation system. Indeed, we read elsewhere, underground facilities are often subject to sudden, potentially disastrous " windblasts," an atmospheric effect generated under certain spatial conditions: "These conditions include the geological configuration and the dimensions of the mining excavation (mine layout)." It's like spatially-induced turbulence inside the earth.
 [Image: The Wieliczka Salt Mine and its surface weather station; image courtesy of NOAA].
So there is weather underground, then. In fact, it is interesting to note in this context that the famed Wieliczka Salt Mine outside Krakow, Poland, has its own weather station monitoring the atmospheric conditions underground. The station operates in tandem with a distributed network of microclimate sensors and a massive dehumidification system: "Although the dehumidification system is not yet operating exactly as desired... 'tuning' of the dehumidification system is planned and is expected to completely solve the mine's moisture problem."
I'm reminded of a passage from the Aeneid that I often cite here on BLDGBLOG, in which Virgil describes the underground storm-storage facilities of King Aeolus, who "rules the contending winds and moaning gales" of the Mediterranean by "imprisoning" them inside artificial caves that he has excavated beneath the "granite of high mountains." A kind of mythic weather-emperor, King Aeolus exhibits a knowledge of underground atmospheric dynamics that the programmers of VENTGRAPH and the operators of the Wieliczka dehumidification system should envy.
 [Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower, ventilating the underworld; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].
Finally, all this talk of subterranean ventilation compels me to mention David Gissen's short history of New York's urban ventilation control structures—specifically, the design of exhaust towers for the Holland Tunnel.
In a brief section of his recent book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, Gissen describes these structures as "strange buildings" that "collapsed" the difference between architecture and civil engineering:
The Holland Tunnel spanned an enormous 8,500 feet. At each end, engineers designed ten-story ventilation towers that would push air through tunnels above the cars, drawing the vehicle exhaust upward, where it would be blown back through the tops of the towers and over industrial areas of the city. The exhaust towers provided a strange new building type in the city—a looming blank tower that oscillated between a work of engineering and architecture. The very idea here that urban infrastructure—such as trans-river commuter tunnels or an underground subway—might be atmospherically comparable to deep coal mines is fascinating; the possibility that spatial techniques learned in one of these fields might be equally applicable in the other is equally of interest.
It is these moments of marginal, shared spatial expertise that continue to fascinate me, offering, as they do, unexpected perspectives on the built environment—both above and below the ground.
(Meanwhile, check out this image of 16th-century mine ventilation works, in which "revolving wooden wind vanes fitted to the top of mine ventilation shafts... acted as extractor fans sucking stale air from the mine.")
Japan is distinguishing its bid to host the 2022 World Cup with a plan to broadcast the entire thing as a life-size hologram.
 [Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].
"Japanese organizers say each game will be filmed by 200 high definition cameras, which will use 'freeviewpoint' technology to allow fans to see the action unfold from a player's eye view—the kind of images until now only seen in video games," CNN reports.
 [Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].
British football theorist Jonathan Wilson puts an interestingly spatial spin on the idea: "Speaking as a tactics geek," he said to CNN, "the problem watching games on television is it's very hard to see the shape of the teams, so if you're trying to assess the way the game's going, if you're trying to assess the space, how a team's shape's doing and their defense and organization, then this will clearly be beneficial."
Watching a sport becomes a new form of spatial immersion into strategic game geometries.
 [Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].
Of course, there's open disbelief that Japan can actually deliver on this promise—it is proposing something based on technology that does not quite exist yet, on the optimistic assumption that all technical problems will be worked out in 12 years' time.
But the idea of real-time, life-size event-holograms being beamed around the world as a spatial replacement for TV imagery is stunning.
(Thanks to Judson Hornfeck for the tip!)
 [Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].
This wallpaper, designed by Studio Carnovsky, changes images depending on what color light you view it under. As such, it could be an incredibly interesting thing to experiment with in other contexts—including outdoor urban lighting, public signage, and even film animation.
 [Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].
In the latter case, imagine a hallway whose wallpaper is printed with six or seven closely related scenes from an animated clip; each "scene" is printed in a different color. A light programmed to move through the appropriate sequence of color changes is then installed in the same corridor; as it flashes from color to color, changing perhaps every half-second, you see what appears to be a moving image on the walls around you.
It would be a kind of unmoving zoetrope—a stationary cinema in printed form (or a stationary cinema in stationery form?).
   [Images: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].
Even if only used for interior decoration, however, the effect is well worth exploring further.
(Thanks to a tip from Tim Maly).
 [Image: Photo by Vincent Fournier, courtesy of Wired UK].
This morning's post about a robot-city on the slopes of Mount Fuji reminded me of this thing called the CyberMotion Simulator, operated by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany (and featured in this month's issue of Wired UK).
The Simulator, Wired writes, is "a RoboCoaster industrial robotic arm adapted and programmed to simulate an F1 Ferrari F2007." Testers are strapped into a cabin two metres above ground, and use a steering wheel, accelerator and brake to control CyberMotion. The simulator can provide accelerations of 2G and its display shows a 3D view of the circuit at Monza. The arm's six axes allow for the replication of twists and turns on the track and can even turn the subjects upside down. But I'm curious what everyday architectural uses such a robo-arm might have. An office full of moving cubicles held aloft by black robotic arms that lift, turn, and rotate each desk based on who the worker wants to talk to; mobile bedroom furniture for a depressed ex-astronaut; avant-garde set design for a new play in East London; a vertigo-treatment facility designed by Aristide Antonas; surveillance towers for traffic police in outer Tokyo; a hawk-watching platform in Fort Washington State Park.
You show up for your first day of high school somewhere in a Chinese colonial city in central Africa and find that everyone—in room after room, holding hundreds of people—is sitting ten feet off the ground in these weird and wormy chairs, dipping and weaving and reading Shakespeare.
 [Image: From Anti Syn Nation by Jonas Loh].
I like this tiny model of the Maunsell Towers, part of Jonas Loh's Anti Syn Nation project—"a speculative micro nation," he writes, supported by the "natural genetic engineering" of sea slugs. But I think someone should make a chess set entirely from Maunsell-tower like oil platforms and other modular microutopias at sea—or perhaps just a student thesis project presented using custom-milled chess pieces, with elaborate spatial rules governing the resulting game.
 [Image: The yellow chipboards of the Fanuc global headquarters; courtesy of Fanuc].
On the flight back to Los Angeles yesterday I read about the corporate campus of Fanuc, "a secretive maker of robots and industrial automation gear," according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
"Some 60 percent of the world's precision machine tools use Fanuc's controls," the article explains, "which give lathes, grinders, and milling machines the agility to turn metal into just about any manufactured product." As if suggesting a future art installation by Jeff Koons—sponsored by Boeing—we read about a man who uses "a milling machine with Fanuc controls to sculpt 747 parts." (The company's robot A-Z shows off their other goods).
 [Image: Assembly robots by Fanuc].
But it's the description of the firm's actual facilities that caught my eye. " Fanuc's headquarters, a sprawling complex in a forest on the slopes of Mount Fuji, looks like something out of a sci-fi flick":
Workers in yellow jumpsuits with badges on their shoulders trot among yellow buildings as yellow cars hum along pine-lined roads. Fanuc lore holds that the founder, Seiuemon Inaba, believed yellow "promotes clear thinking."Inside the compound's windowless factories, an army of (yes, yellow) robots works 24/7. "On a factory floor as big as a football field you might see four people. It's basically just robots reproducing themselves." Thing is, if you want to see more—to see this strange origin-site for contemporary intelligent machines—you can't. "Outsiders are rarely allowed inside the facility, and workers not engaged in research are barred from labs," Businessweek adds. "'I can't even get in,' quips a board member who asks that his name not be used."
In a way, I'm reminded of South Korea's plans for its own " Robot Land," an "industrial city built specifically for the robotics industry," that will have "all sorts of facilities for the research, development, and production of robots, as well as things like exhibition halls and even a stadium for robot-on-robot competitions."
Here, though, alone amidst other versions of themselves in the pines of Mt. Fuji, "the world's most reliable robots" take shape in secret, shelled in yellow, reproducing themselves, forming a robot city of their own.
Earlier this month, Macleans looked at the idea of "aerial reforestation," or the large-scale dropping of tree seedlings using decommissioned military aircraft. Of course, we looked at this same plan many, many years ago—and it turns out the same guy is behind this latest round of journalistic interest.
 [Image: Courtesy of Getty Images/Macleans].
Moshe Alamaro, still affiliated with MIT, had previously been pushing his plan for "using a small fertilizing plane to drop saplings in plastic pods one at a time from a hopper," Macleans explains. The biodegradable canisters would then have "hit the ground at 200 m.p.h.," MIT explained back in 1997, "and imbed themselves in the soil. Then the canisters decompose and the young trees take root. A large aircraft could drop as many as 100,000 saplings in a single flight: Alamaro's system could plant as many as a million trees in one day."
But, Macleans points out, "it wasn’t very fruitful—most pods hit debris during pilot tests and failed to actually take root."
The idea has thus now been "upgraded," using different technical means "to create new forests on empty landscapes." The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. He says the process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft,” he says, adding that thousands are in hangars across the globe. Although the original pitch failed, Alamaro says the growing carbon market is creating new interest, and he hopes to find funding for a large-scale pilot project soon. Once Alamaro gets planes in the air, the last step, says [Dennis Bendickson, professor of forestry], will be to simply “get people out of the way.” In this context, it's difficult to resist pointing out Iceland's own soil-bombing campaign: "Iceland is big and sparsely populated," the BBC reported in 2005. "There are few roads. So, Icelanders decided to 'bomb their own country'," dropping special mixtures of fertiliser and seeds "from a WWII DC 3 Dakota"—carpet-bombing subarctic desert in an attempt to make that emptiness flower.
I feel compelled here to point out a brief scene from the film Hellboy 2, in which we see a "forest god" killed in the streets of Brooklyn (roughly 2:36 in this clip); his green and bubbling blood blooms instantly into a carpet of soft roots and lichen, splashing onto the roofs of cars, sending seedpods from wildflowers and pollinating plants down in drifts along the New York sidewalks. Should a substance that fertile be developed in real life, Alamaro's—and Iceland's—plans could be realized in the blink of an eye.
In any case, will Alamaro finally succeed? Will we see whole new woodsy landscapes grow in the wake of sustained rural bombing campaigns— druidic warfare— cryptoforests spreading out from craters and abandoned fields far below? Will we launch seed grenades from sapling artillery, plant improvised explosive devices packed dense with forest nutrients?
(Story found via @treestrategist).
Here is an updated schedule for tomorrow's big event at the Architectural Association, Thrilling Wonder Stories II. We've had a few changes to the line-up (and, thus, to the schedule itself), requiring us to move some people around and repopulate each theme.
 [Image: Thrilling Wonder Stories II at the Architectural Association; view larger].
See below for the current and correct proceedings:
12:00 Bookshop, coffee, music and gaming
12:30 Introductions by Brett Steele and Liam Young
12:40—14:00 COUNTERFEIT ARCHAEOLOGIES
Geoff Manaugh + Nicola Twilley
[Founders of Future Plural, authors of BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography]
Dunne and Raby
[Design provocateurs]
14:00–15:20 CAUTIONARY TALES
Jeff VanderMeer
[Author of City of Saints and Madmen and Finch]
Will Self
[Author of The Book of Dave, Psychogeography and Walking Through Hollywood]
Paul Duffield
[Artist and Author of Freakangels and Signal comics]
15:20–15:40 Break/Overspill
15:40–17:00 NEAR FUTURES
BERG London
[Technologists, futurists and RFID magicians]
Alex Rutterford
[Motion graphics filmmaker, director and designer for Ridley Scott Associates and Warp Records]
Gavin Rothery
[Concept artist for the film Moon]
Ubisoft
[Transmedia and game designers]
17:00–18:20 APOCALYPTIC VISIONS
Antony Johnston
[Author of Wasteland and Daredevil comics]
Splash Damage
[Designers of the Ark, the war-stricken floating refugee city from the game Brink]
Rachel Armstrong
[Biotechnology and scifi squishiness]
18:20–18:40 Break/Overspill
18:40-20:00 ALTERNATIVE PRESENTS
Ant Farm
[Architectural supergroup and countercultural heroes]
Joep Van Lieshout
[Founder of Atelier Van Lieshout and the speculative free state of AVL Ville]
Feel free to stop by any time between noon and 8pm to see how it's all moving along; it will also be livecast, courtesy of the AA. Here is a map.
Hope to see you tomorrow!
 [Image: From Prototype, courtesy of Activision].
[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol].
The parallels and disparities between videogames and movies are endlessly debated, but there's one certainty: they both return, routinely, to the architecture of New York City. The most frequently filmed city in the world is also the most frequently modeled.
The canyons of New York are as useful for game designers as they are for film directors. If the decision is arbitrary, then New York represents a kind of go-to alpha city: the logical choice if you need a city at all. For film directors it's a grand and familiar backdrop, and the same bold geometry is relatively straightforward for game technologies to render. The grid-like topology, an added bonus, is easy for gamers to understand and navigate, too.
Models of the city exist, at many different levels of fidelity, for many different gaming scenarios. From the crude polygonal outlines of early iterations of Microsoft Flight Sim, to the normal-mapped biomorphic horrors of last year's ultraviolent brawler, Prototype, Manhattan's skyline and the districts beyond are etched into virtuality, over and over. These models exist on countless DVDs and hard-discs across the world, in ten of thousands of memory-states within the architecture of game consoles and PCs that are modeling the city right now, in real time. It might be impossible to say how many different (or identical) instances of New York are stored, digitally, within the city itself. It seems likely that a model of New York sits just an arm-length away from every Xbox-inhabited TV stand in the greater metropolitan area.
 [Image: From True Crime: New York City, courtesy of Activision].
There have been dozens of instances of New York remade for the escape-hatch sub-realities of gaming in studios around the world. In just the past decade we could name Alone In The Dark, True Crime, The Hulk, World In Conflict, Forza 2, Project Gotham, 50 Cent, Max Payne 1 & 2, Gran Turismo 3, and Def Jam Vendetta. This number spills into scores more across the previous decades, and it's a figure which becomes hazier still when mods, expansions, analogues, and cancelled or lost projects are counted in the mix.
 [Image: From Max Payne, courtesy of Rockstar Games].
This reliance on New York isn't simply about providing a visually interesting backdrop, of course, because it has also provided some of the strongest connections to character. When the noir ultraviolence of Max Payne was moved to Sao Paulo for Max Payne 3, there was uproar. If you took Max out of the tenements of New York, was he really Max at all? What was the New York cop without his delirious nightmare of New York's criminal innards? Similarly, when it was announced that Crysis 2 would be moving from its technologically impressive jungle-island home to the exploding streets of Manhattan, no one really thought to comment. Of course it would be set in New York. Indeed, if they really wanted to see/destroy it all, where else would the aliens want to go next?
 [Image: From Crysis 2, courtesy of Electronic Arts].
Crysis 2's ash-hazed avenues are impeccably damaged, while surly pedestrians in any sandbox city are happy to pick a fight if you don't look where you're going. These models new look increasingly like New York City, and more often behave like it, too. As the complexity of games increases, it seems that we are speeding towards a completionist model of the city—one that whirs and hums and yells like the real thing. As the models made by game studios march toward reality, they march towards Manhattan.
Yet realism is not a goal that games should really be striving for. Leave that to the CAD programs and the satellite maps. Instead games should explore the aspects of Manhattan that make less sense, like its dreams, or the models of the city that represent it not as it is, but as we are able to explore it, thanks to the mutational potentials of digital simulation. Examine those aspects of the city and perhaps the issue becomes less about New York as a fabulous piece of set design, and more about New York as a vital raw material for the business of fantasy.
This is a relationship that has moved on from simply being a straightforward practical connection to something that is embroiled in deeper meaning. New York city has become gaming's ideal and idealized urban environment, and it has done so by becoming refictionalized and reimagined. The finest example of a city yet given to gaming, that of Grand Theft Auto IV, isn't really New York at all, and yet it is more like New York than ever before. It's the essence of New York—a distillation that is only possible thanks to the unique way in which games are able to make the figurative and the abstract resonate with us even more profoundly than the infinite detail of the everyday.
 [Image: From Grand Theft Auto IV, courtesy of Rockstar Games].
It's worth noting that the superficial New Yorkness of other, real cities often counts in their favor when it comes to making movies. At the end of American Psycho, for instance, Toronto's TD Centre convincingly stands in for the fictional Patrick Bateman's office in the real-world Seagram Building—both buildings by Mies van der Rohe, but the latter is in Manhattan. The TD Centre thus becomes an architectural stunt double—or perhaps a sinewy body double helping the real New York look good. Not only that, but Pinewood Toronto Studios recently announced that they will be investing further in their home city to create lived-in, urban areas that look like residences in New York, Chicago and London—real districts of a city that are permanently and deliberately cast as a "living movie set."
 [Image: From Deus Ex, courtesy of Eidos Interactive].
Where games are concerned, New York, and the modeling thereof, is a primary conduit for things that cannot happen, or things that need to happen over and over in a slightly different way each time. Not just a conveniently located backdrop, but a thing that can be toyed with digitally, again and again, first by the game developers and then by the gamers themselves. Occasionally, even, the simulations might accidentally model things that have yet to happen. Conspiratorial cyber-fantasy Deus Ex was awash with its own ideas about the sinister possibilities of our politico-military techno-future, but what was the meaning behind the twin towers missing from its future skyline? A year before the towers were destroyed? The silent bells of paranoia began to ring.
In truth the skyline had been cheaply mirrored to reduce the game's memory footprint, and the Twin Towers portion had simply been left out to make the game run more smoothly. It was nothing more than a technical conceit of the kind games are riddled with, one of the limiting factors of memory or processing that makes the computerized cities so much less than their real counterparts. But it was also a manifestation of something that became inevitable as New York was modeled over and over—as speculation mingled with outright fantasy—the inevitability that games could become a form of architectural prophecy.
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Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, occasional guest writer on BLDGBLOG, and author of the excellent This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is @jimrossignol on Twitter.
In his book Rats, Robert Sullivan—an author whose work we previously reviewed here—offers a glimpse of how the city is seen through the eyes of the pest-control industry.
 [Image: Rats by Robert Sullivan].
Effective rodent control requires a very specific kind of spatial knowledge, Sullivan suggests, one that often eludes architects and city planners.
Sullivan quotes one rat-control professional, for instance, who "foresees a day when he will be hired to analyze a building's weaknesses, vis-à-vis pests and rodents... 'They design buildings to support pigeons and for infiltration by rodents because they don't think about it. Grand Central Station, right? They just renovated it, right? Who knows what they spend on that, right? You know how much they spend on pest control? You know how much they budgeted? Nothing. I did all the extra work there, but they had to pay us out of the emergency budget.'"
Pest control here becomes an explicitly architectural problem, something you can design both for and against. Imagine an entire degree program in infestation-resistant urban design.
Sullivan points out that a massive, urban-scale architectural intervention, in the form of a quarantine wall fortifying all of New York City against rats, was once tentatively planned: “There was a time in New York, in the 1920s," he writes, "when scientists proposed a great wall along the waterfront to shut out rats completely, to seal out rats and, thus, forever end rat fear. Eventually, though, the idea was deemed implausible and abandoned: rats will always get through.”
But it's the particular subset of urban knowledge that has been actively cultivated within the pest control industry that fascinates me here. Sullivan spends a bit of time with a man named Larry Adams, a municipal rodent control expert. “If you hang around Larry long enough," Sullivan says, "you realize that he sees the city in a way that most people don’t—in layers." And what follows is well worth quoting in full: He sees the parks and the streets and then he sees the subways and the sewers and even the old tunnels underneath the sewers. He sees the city that is on the maps and the city that was on the maps—the city’s past, the city of hidden speakeasies and ancient tunnels, the inklings of old streams and hills. "People don’t realize the subterranean conditions out there," he likes to say. "People don’t realize the levels. People don’t realize that we got things down there from the Revolution. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s just layers of settlers here, that things just get bricked off, covered up and all. They’re not accessible to people, but they are to rats. And they have rats down there that have maybe never seen the surface. If they did, then they’d run people out. Like in the movies. You see, we only see the tail end of it. And we only see the weak rats, the ones that get forced out to look for food.” The book's wealth of rat-catching anecdotes are often unbelievable. "More than anything," Sullivan reflects, "I have learned from exterminators that history is crucial in effective rat analysis." In fact, history is everything when it comes to looking at rats—though it is not the history that you generally read; it is the unwritten history. Rats wind up in the disused vaults, in long underground tunnels that aren’t necessarily going anywhere; they wind up in places that are neglected and overlooked, places with a story that has been forgotten for one reason or another. And to find a rat, a lot of times you have to look at what a place was. One exterminator I know tells the story of a job on the Lower East Side in an old building where rats kept appearing, nesting, multiplying, no matter how many were killed. The exterminator searched and searched. At last, he found an old tunnel covered by floorboards, a passageway that headed toward the East River. The tunnel was full of rats. Later, he discovered that the building had housed a speakeasy during Prohibition. Or this disconcerting image of an infested basement that was never fully demolished—it was simply forgotten, walled off beneath the surface of the city. Here, Sullivan visits an abandoned lot with a rat-catching expert named Isaac, writing that, "just before we drove off, two men walked by and stopped at the fence; they looked into the abandoned lot and spoke with Isaac in Spanish." They told Isaac that they remembered when the lot was the site of an old wooden house that had become abandoned and filled with rats. They remembered the house being demolished and partially buried—the basement was still there, they said. They pointed to the ground, saying that the old home was still beneath it, still rat-infested. What a perfectly haunting line: They pointed to the ground, saying that the old home was still beneath it, still rat-infested. (And if anyone out there has read The Rats by James Herbert, you might remember that the novel begins with a vaguely similar urban image).
 [Image: A "rat king," via Wikimedia].
Speaking later with Mike, another rat-control expert, Sullivan learns how the stratigraphy of the city takes shape in the mind of the exterminator: “I was getting ready to leave—Mike was just too busy. But then Mike was reminded of an aspect of the nature of rats in the city, and as he put down the phone, he said, ‘You know, I heard there are three layers of sewer lines.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘There are the ones from the 1800s, the ones from the 1700s, and the ones they don’t have maps for anymore. Once in a while, they use that old line, when they’re doing construction or something, and you read in the papers that there are hundreds of rats coming up. Well, those rats that are in the third line, they haven’t even seen man before.’”
These stratigraphies of infestation are wonderfully horrifying—but also perfectly and immediately available to the architect and urban planner as practical design challenges. How does one deal with "what was on the maps," as Sullivan phrases it, while at the same time designing a pest-unfriendly metropolis?
Taking as their design target rats and other "unwanted inhabitants" of the city, as Sullivan phrases it, what inspired collaborations could we develop amongst public health inspectors, urban ecologists, pesticide manufacturers, historical cartographers, city archivists, materials scientists (Sullivan writes, for instance, that Larry Adams, mentioned earlier, has actually developed his own special mix of rat-resistant concrete: “With his expertise, Larry has developed his own rat-eradication techniques, such as concrete mixed with broken glass to keep the rats from gnawing through the concrete. ‘Sometimes, they’ll still cut through before the concrete hardens. So sometimes, I use glass and industrial-strength steel wool and put it in with the concrete and make one big goop with it’”), and, of course, architects and planners? How realistic—let alone ethical—a design challenge is the rodent-free metropolis?
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