[Image: A swiftlet nesting house in Thailand; photo by Alexander S. Heitkamp, courtesy of Wikipedia].
"This drab, windowless concrete facade does not conceal an electricity substation, data servers, or a high security detention center," Nicola Twilley writes over at GOOD. It is, instead, a living birds' nest factory, an emerging building type that has "spread across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Cambodia, towering above traditional one-story structures and transforming the urban landscape." Their purpose? To foster the production of swiftlet nests, used in Chinese bird's nest soup.
Nicola explains that these nest farms are, in effect, surrogate geological formations: "the buildings are intended to mimic caves," she writes, where the swiftlets would normally live, "with a carefully spaced matrix of wooden rafters replacing the ledges and crannies of a cave ceiling, and detailed attention paid to internal temperature, humidity, and even sound."
They are, in effect, part of what could be called a saliva industry, as the nests are made from swiftlet saliva. A spitshop, say, instead of a sweatshop. Mechanize this one step further, and full-scale 3D saliva-printing might not be far off...
Artist Dan Grayber has a new show on display in Oakland, at Johansson Projects. It features an ingenious collection of spring-loaded devices that play on ideas of architecture, tension, mechanics, and space.
They are more like booby traps—their only spatial purpose to support themselves in states of high tension—or re-tuned Vitruvian readymades sealed in glass.
Grayber's Cavity Mechanism #6 w/ Glass Dome, for instance, "is a pair of spring loaded mechanisms that wedge themselves into the inside of a cavity (the glass dome in this case), suspending themselves. Cable running between pair maintains tension on both mechanisms. If cable were to fail, both mechanisms would fall."
As the gallery describes his work, "Dan Grayber isolates machinery from its usual role of fulfilling human needs through placing it in an eternal mode of self-perpetuation. His safety-orange powder coated objects endlessly assure their survival through completing the simple and essential task of holding oneself up. These sculptures, which create problems as they solve them, exude a sovereign elegance, the dignity of not having to justify themselves to an outside source."
This notion of a "sovereignty" of the object is a compelling one: the aloof, isolated, self-supporting nature of these pieces is done away with utterly the instant they are pulled from their glass domes.
Forced out of what could be called the tautology of the dome—a precise space of limitations in which each mechanism can perform itself endlessly—these arachnid-like devices become functionally useless.
They become not sovereign at all, but parasites robbed of their original, enabling context.
An example of Grayber's experiments with this latter spatial condition is Column Mechanism #1.
Removed from the glass vitrine and installed directly on a concrete wall, it "consists of central tensioning mechanisms and eight 'satellite' contact objects, in pairs. Tension created from central mechanism is run through pulleys on each pair of 'satellite' objects, pulling them together, creating tension that squeezes column and supports central piece."
Similarly, the "centrally located springs" of Drywall Mechanism #2 "use bicycle brake lines to carry tension of springs to the outer mechanisms. Outer mechanisms have points that when tensioned simultaneously gently dig into wall surface."
These latter examples also raise the intriguing possibility of a Dan Grayber installation disguised as everyday construction or architectural testing equipment: devices attached to drywall and concrete, like something straight out of a box from Home Depot. Until you notice the intricate systems of bike cables and tension lines, and the strangely functionless beauty of the forms poised just slightly on the right side of snapping...
The gallery will be hosting an opening reception on February 4, in case you're in Oakland and want to stop by; tell them you read about it on BLDGBLOG.
With just a few more hours left in GOOD's weeklong festival of food-writing, I thought I'd throw one more post out there: two projects by Lik San Chan.
Camara de Lobos, Madeira, Chan explains, "is a fishing village located 10km west of the capital, Funchal. The fishing community is quickly dwindling into poverty as Funchal provides its own facilities for fish vending businesses. Camara de Lobos remains the only place in the world where the Black Scabbard fish industry can be self sustained, yet the fishermen still receive second hand pay for their catch as most of it is sold in Funchal."
Accordingly, the Odorless Fish Market "provides a place where their catch can be sold directly. The programme consists of a fish market, smokery, fish cookery school cum restaurant run by the fishermen community. Its architecture is technically driven to control Smell, Ventilation and Cooling, to provide a building with a greatly reduced smell of fish. The heart of the architecture is a solar chimney system which uses the consistent madeiran sun to, ironically, ventilate/cool the building."
It is a spatially self-deodorizing architecture of thermal air control.
The second of Chan's projects that I want to look at quickly here is the so-called Tempelhof Ministry of Food, from 2010.
"Tempelhof Ministry of Food is a bread and fish production community situated on the old airfield of Tempelhof Airport," Chan writes.
More specifically, "the proposal is a joint venture between Edeka and the Berlin State, seeking to help Berlin's current problems of unemployment and social disparity." Local residents can produce their own food, cultivating "a spirit of co-existence and community, which they bring back to other Berliners."
Of course, it takes more than simply activating a vegetation layer in Photoshop to create a realistic urban food infrastructure, but the technical realization of the images—as well as the historic context of the Berlin Airlift, when Tempelhof effectively became an emergency food-distribution center—make it interesting enough for a quick look.
Indeed, as much as I like the narrative background for the Tempelhof project, it's simply too hard to tell if there is more to the proposal's otherwise impressive imagery to suggest a financially realistic and socially sustainable intervention into Berlin's existing systems of urban food production.
Put another way, it's one thing to create, analyze, or even editorially promote architectural projects as narrative ideas—that is, as scenario plans for future landscapes—but it's another thing to look at whether or not such proposals do, in fact, operate successfully as solutions to the problems they highlight.
In any case, the spatial and atmospheric implications of food are foregrounded by both projects, though it is the deliberately complicated, Rube Goldberg-like sectional ventilation chambers seen in the Odorless Fish Market that seem most worthy of further exploration.
Greenpeace has released these images of a train carrying nuclear waste through Valognes, France. Shot with infrared film, the photos show a demonic red glow coming from inside the bellies of the railcars.
"The train is hauling a so-called CASTOR convoy," National Geographic explains, "named after the type of container carried: Cask for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive material. These trademarked casks have been used since 1995 to transport nuclear waste from German power plants to France for reprocessing, then back to Germany for storage."
Produced by Smudge Studio/Friends of the Pleistocene, the film shows us a flatbed truck carrying transuranic nuclear waste along a desert highway. As Smudge write, "Our brief passing of this truck was a momentary point of contact with this waste, bound for deep time." Filmed in sepia-toned Super-8, the 35-second film has a timeless and dramatic surreality, verging on postapocalyptic.
I should add, briefly, that the name of the train seen in the first three images—a CASTOR convoy—lends all of this a nicely symbolic overtone. In Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were twin brothers; Castor was mortal, Pollux immortal, and it should come as no surprise to learn that Castor is eventually killed.
However, in one version of the story, "Castor's spirit went to Hades [Hell], the place of the dead, because he was a human. Pollux, who was a god, was so devastated at being separated from his brother that he offered to share his immortality with Castor or to give it up so that he could join his brother in Hades." I mention this otherwise superficial overlap because Smudge's notion that nuclear waste is on its way to being entombed in "deep time," far below ground, takes on explicitly Hadean resonance when put into the context of something called a CASTOR train.
I first heard of the Taiwanese spatial subculture of betel nut shacks last autumn when a former student of mine at USC, Yu-Quan Chen, showed me a project he once proposed, inspired by these anomalous yet everyday spaces.
I was thus interested to see that Polish-born, New York-based photographer Magda Biernat will be exhibiting a group of images she's made called Betel Nut Beauties, a few examples of which are seen here.
The Clic Gallery describes Biernat's project as "a photoseries documenting the compelling phenomenon of roadside betel nut stands across Taiwan."
A fixture on the streets of urban and suburban Taiwan, these brightly lit, often ramshackle huts sell a mild stimulant made from the nut of the areca palm and wrapped in betel leaves... Staffed almost exclusively by young women, the stands cater to longhaul truck drivers and, like taxi dancers or cigarette girls in casinos, the betel nut girls are encouraged to dress in skimpy clothes to lure in male customers. Snapped while waiting for their next sale, Biernat's compassionate photographs capture the isolation and tedium of these sellers who themselves are on display, a daily existence bounded by walls of glass.
Biernat describes these buildings as "luminescent structures" where sex, economics, and food overlap—thus making the title of this post ("spaces of food...") referentially problematic, as if the women themselves are objects of both bodily and aesthetic consumption. "The colorful shops," Biernat writes, "with their scantily clad employees make for a startling contrast against Taiwan's often drab urban landscape."
"These are glass and neon jewels," Biernat adds, "beckoning the customer with the high of not only the betel nut, but of the interaction with the betel nut girls."
To make a long story short, Nicola and I had the pleasure, back in 2009, of visiting an abandoned railway tunnel in the hills southwest of Sydney, Australia, a site that has since been turned into a commercial mushroom farm. Featuring no less than a linear kilometer of underground mycological cultivation—racks upon racks upon racks, fruiting with mushrooms in the semi-darkness—it extended as far as the eye could see.
So, to see what we saw, you really should check out Nicola's post.
Continuing today's short series of posts, offered up as part of GOOD's ongoing food-blogging week, I thought I'd point your attention to an interesting architectural experiment in the U.S. southwest.
[Image: Gene Giacomelli and his lunar greenhouse; photo by Norma Jean Gargasz courtesy of UANews].
Researchers at the University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agriculture Center have devised a "lunar greenhouse" that "could be the key to growing fresh and healthy food to sustain future lunar or Martian colonies," Space reported back in October.
Under the guidance of Gene Giacomelli, "The team built a prototype lunar greenhouse in the CEAC Extreme Climate Lab that is meant to represent the last 18 feet (5.5 meters) of one of several tubular structures that would form part of a proposed lunar base. The tubes would be buried beneath the moon's surface to protect the plants and astronauts from deadly solar flares, micrometeorites and cosmic rays. As such, the buried greenhouse would differ from conventional greenhouses that let in and capture sunlight as heat. Instead, these underground lunar greenhouses would shield the plants from harmful radiation."
The 18-foot, membrane-sheathed system collapses into a 4-foot wide disk for easy packing on an interplanetary mission. When extended, it is fitted with water-cooled lamps and seed packets prepped to sprout without soil. They hydroponic system needs little oversight, relying on automated systems and control algorithms to analyze data gathered by embedded sensors that optimize the controlled ecosystem. The whole system takes just ten minutes to set up and produces vegetables within a month.
Giacomelli himself explains that lunar rovers—or "robotic bulldozers"—would first bury the greenhouses, installing them in advance of human arrival. Then, "When the spacecraft sets down, the idea is that [the buried greenhouse] expands outwards, opens by itself, like a robot would. The seeds are already in place. We start it up, turn on the lights, turn on the water, and the plants can begin to grow, even in advance of when the astronauts arrive."
Interestingly, Antarctica supplied a kind of natural test-environment for this architectural experiment: "the extreme conditions of the South Pole helped his team fine-tune their lunar greenhouse, and also allowed them to figure out how to remotely control conditions like temperature, humidity and light. He said similar technologies could also be used someday in cities—in a greenhouse in the middle floor of a skyscraper, for example. He added that, at least right now, the technology, and lighting, especially, are too expensive for daily commercial use."
[Image: A glimpse inside the "oxygen garden" from Danny Boyle's film Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].
A long time ago, meanwhile, we looked at the idea of an "oxygen garden," pictured above, with its vision of locally networked plants, aeration devices, cylindrical growth chambers, and hydroponic vats for long-term space missions. But an oxygen garden is only one particular kind of non-terrestrial agriculture under cultivation right now.
As Popular Mechanics explain in their January 2011 issue, "Teams of scientists around the world—and above it, aboard the International Space Station—are trying to design farms for the diverse environments future explorers could encounter across the solar system." From "robotic farmers with articulate hands" operating inside inflatable greenhouses on the moon to microgravitational peas and radishes grown by the fantastically named Roscosmos, by way of greenhouses "that can endure Mars's low-pressure, high-carbon-dioxide environment" designed by the Italian Space Agency to the Arthur C. Clarke Mars Greenhouse (not mentioned by Popular Mechanics), these living experiments demonstrate how to use architecture as a way to frame unearthly environments here on earth—so that we can then bring earthly environments with us to other planets. It's the referential topology of interplanetary simulation.
In fact, repeating myself from the earlier oxygen garden post, I remain fascinated by and slightly in awe of the idea of what I call surrogate earths, whereby the earth enters into a chain of substitutions—a standardized economy of counterfeits and stand-ins, experimental surrogates and scientific stunt-doubles, all of which refer to, re-enact, and simulate a superceded original. These portable versions of the planet, from its climate and its soil to its viruses and bacteria, pop up everywhere from plans for hydroponic gardens, terrariums, and floating greenhouses to complex manned missions to the moon. And, if only for the purpose of growing vegetables, it is nonetheless extraordinary that we can use a finely tuned technological apparatus–including specialty fertilizers, nanofabrics, and UV lights–to reproduce terrestrial conditions elsewhere, in miniature.
[Image: Like something out of the work of Vicente Guallart, a farm in Washington State; image via Wikipedia].
As a participant in GOOD's extremely wide-ranging food-blogging week, I wanted to look at a few things over the course of two or three posts today, starting with a quick look at the very idea of agriculture, as explored by natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Future Eaters.
There, amongst many other things, Flannery explains what it means to be a quote-unquote "hunter-gatherer" vs. a sedentary agricultural society. He writes, for instance, that "the problem of defining just what constitutes agriculture is an acute one when examining the prehistory of New Guinea."
Traditionally, the major crops of the region have been root crops such as taro, or suckering species such as bananas. In order to propagate these plants one simply needs to grub them up, cut off the tuber or sucker and stick the leafy top back into the ground. This simple act has probably been a part of the human behavioral repertoire for 100,000 years or more. Clearly it does not qualify a person as an agriculturalist. But what is to be said of the person who returns to the newly established plant occasionally and clears competing species (weeds) away from it? And what if they plant 10 taro tops together; does that qualify as a garden? Would it do so if they fenced the patch? Clearly the definition of agriculturalist merges insensibly into the definition of hunter-gatherer and it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
This mobile cultivation of the landscape actually helped to generate, as Flannery goes on to explain, a substantial part of our contemporary, highly globalized fruit diet. Indeed, he writes, "Given the extremely long history of agriculture in New Guinea, it is not surprising that a number of plant foods appear to have originated there. Among these are certain varieties of taro, sago, some kinds of yams, bananas (particularly the cooking or plantain varieties), sugar cane and various nuts. Some of these crops were adopted by people as far afield as Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands many hundreds of years before European colonization of the Pacific. New Guinean agriculture has thus made an important, if largely forgotten, contribution to the food crops of the world."
This seemingly casual, on-the-go human interaction with the biosphere—simply replanting root stocks now and again, and returning every once in a while to harvest, replant, clear away, and prune—helped to bring into existence what are now highly refined, industrially useful plant species. Bananas, in particular, are an excellent example of a food that has become so thoroughly enmeshed in international economic systems of consumption and export that they bear little formal or nutritional resemblance to their genetic forebears.
[Image: Landscape as if subject to the spatial kerning and leading of an agricultural typography; via Wikipedia].
But what specifically interests me here is how the long-term re-formatting of the planet's landscape, whereby the surface of the earth has slowly been made habitable almost solely for humans and the species they cultivate, began with something as small-scale—a field operation as micro-tactical and discrete—as pushing roots into the ground and then coming back a few days later to see how it's all developed. Repeat this action for a hundred-thousand years, scaling it up each time, both mechanically and quantitatively, and what was once a lo-fi interaction with the forest has become an industrialized agriculture for an exponentially humanized earth.
Nic Clear, from Unit 15 of the Bartlett School of Architecture, recently got in touch with some links to his students' newest work, all of which explores architecture through the lens of both narrative and abstract film. Clear, as you might recall, instructed both Keiichi Matsuda and Richard Hardy, and there's some really fantastic work coming out of his studio.
It is part of what Tavares calls "a collection of images of what Brixton could be like if it were to develop as a disregarded area inhabited by London's new robot workforce." To accommodate the rapidly growing machine-population, "unplanned cheap quick additions have been made to the skyline."
Together with the image "Brixton High Street," this mechanized borough presents a compelling visual backdrop for future narrative explorations—spatial, technical, economic, and sociopolitical—in a kind of robotization of favela chic.
Here is the setting in action, seen in Tavares's short film, Robots of Brixton:
[Image: Camp Century under construction; photograph via Frank J. Leskovitz].
Camp Century—aka "Project Iceworm"—was a "city under ice," according to the U.S. Army, a "nuclear-powered research center built by the Army Corps of Engineers under the icy surface of Greenland," as Frank J. Leskovitz more specifically explains.
A fully-functioning "underground city," Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor—an "Alco PM-2A"—that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War.
[Images: Camp Century under construction; photographs via Frank J. Leskovitz].
According to Leskovitz, the Camp's construction crews "utilized a 'cut-and-cover' trenching technique" during the base's infraglacial construction:
Long ice trenches were created by Swiss made “Peter Plows,” which were giant rotary snow milling machines. The machine's two operators could move up to 1200 cubic yards of snow per hour. The longest of the twenty-one trenches was known as “Main Street.” It was over 1100 feet long and 26 feet wide and 28 feet high. The trenches were covered with arched corrugated steel roofs which were then buried with snow.
Prefab facilities were then added, with "wood work buildings and living quarters... erected in the resulting snow tunnels."
[Images: Camp Century under construction; photographs via Frank J. Leskovitz].
Leskowitz continues:
Each seventy-six foot long electrically heated barrack contained a common area and five 156 square foot rooms. Several feet of airspace was maintained around each building to minimize melting. To further reduce heat build-up, fourteen inch diameter "air wells" were dug forty feet down into the tunnel floors to introduce cooler air. Nearly constant trimming of the tunnel walls and roofs was found to be necessary to combat snow deformation.
Somewhat incredibly, though, Camp Century went from scientific outpost to research-site for the U.S. Army's attempt to install battle-ready nuclear missiles underneath the Greenland ice sheet—the so-called "Project Iceworm" mentioned earlier. The following four short videos, produced by the U.S. military, explore the site's strange technical circumstances as well as its complicated defensive history.
Indeed, "During this period of the Cold War," Leskovitz explains, "the US Army was working on plans to base newly designed 'Iceman' ICBM missiles in a massive network of tunnels dug into the Greenland icecap. The Iceworm plans were eventually deemed impractical and abandoned," and, "due to unanticipated movement of the glacial ice," the entire subterranean complex was eventually left in ruins.
The idea that the moving terrain of a glacial ice sheet could be considered a stable-enough launching point for nuclear missiles is astonishing, and the idea that the U.S. Army once ran a top secret, and rather Metallica-sounding, "city under ice" just shy of the North Pole only adds to the story's disarming surreality.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
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