[Image: An abandoned golf course leaves traces in the landscape in northern Los Angeles].
Golf runs in my family, although I don't seem to have inherited that gene; I was nonetheless interested to read about an air-conditioning network embedded in the ground itself at this year's Masters Tournament, dehumidifying the course from below.
In an article called the "Weather Underground," published in the May 2011 issue of Golf Digest, author David Owen describes something called the SubAir system. SubAir was invented in the 1990s by Marsh Benson, Owen explains, a senior grounds manager at August National. The first model consisted of "a stove-size machine," as Owen describes it, that was "attached to the existing network of drainage pipes beneath the putting surface [where it] was acting like a giant Shop-Vac, hoovering moisture from below."
A project director at SubAir explains to Owen that "the concept is to supply fresh air into the root zone and help provide a more optimal growing environment for the greens." Indeed, as SubAir's website explains:
The SubAir aeration and moisture removal system promotes healthier and stronger playing surfaces through moisture content management, subsurface aeration, and root zone temperature control. As a result, SubAir provides optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions. SubAir is integrated underground with no impact on the golf course design options.
Further, "Since the SubAir system can be installed on a progressive basis, adding pieces incrementally makes putting together the SubAir puzzle easy and affordable." This latter turn of phrase explains the company's tagline: SubAir: Adding Pieces to the Puzzle.
Indeed, I have to assume, considering the system's incremental expandability, that we will someday see a suburb somewhere—presumably on a golf course—where the SubAir system has been preemptively installed on every private lot, like any other utility, providing an electrically intensive drainage and lawn-management system for the entire neighborhood. Wired with terrestrial HVAC.
[Image: The system goes from suck to blow; images courtesy of SubAir].
At least two things immediately come to mind:
1) The "refrigerated beach" in Dubai that "will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface." This self-parodically indulgent mechanism built on the scale of a landscape will ensure, as the Times explains, that "hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days."
The management of terrain from below by subterranean machine-strata embedded in the earth itself is surely an extravagance whose accepted price of operation does not include its long-term environmental cost; but the vertiginous implications of being managed from below by unseen machinery even compels Owen, writing in Golf Digest, to joke that the world of golf is actually "a Matrix-like simulation created by green-jacketed aliens." We could call it an encounter with the geological uncanny: an artificial stratigraphy that makes the earth itself into a manufactured object.
On the other hand, this verticalization of grounds-management strategies is no different, I would argue, from the massively horizontal sprawl of flood-control measures in the Netherlands, as but one example, with its Herculean gates, dikes, levees, and depolderized sacrifice zones, a protective network of unseen machines that makes that nation terrestrially possible.
Neither the Dutch water defense line nor SubAir is entirely sound, environmentally speaking; but my larger point is that if we would find ourselves outraged by one (SubAir) for its apparent extravagance, then we should not overlook the invisible systems on which our everyday landscapes already rely—the pumps that keep New York's subways from flooding, the dams, canals, and levees that make New Orleans and Sacramento inhabitable, the aqueducts that feed Phoenix and Los Angeles, the South-North Water Transfer project, the Great Man-Made River of Libya—when we look for something to critique.
SubAir, in this context, is but one minor symptom of a larger, civilization-wide dependence on what we might call terrestrial life-support systems: machines actively and constantly re-formatting the surface of the planet for often fleeting human needs and desires.
[Image: A path originally meant to follow a now-abandoned golf course in northern Los Angeles].
2) Having said all that, I'm curious if SubAir could actually play a much more ambitious ecological role somewhere, whether that's in forestry, gardening, brownfield remediation, wetlands management, or even in a partial automation of urban parks.
After all, if SubAir's "aeration and moisture removal system promotes healthier and stronger [land surfaces] through moisture content management, subsurface aeration, and root zone temperature control," and if, "as a result, SubAir provides optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions," then why not see what this might do for, say, indoor farms, recovering forests, or experimental gardens of a more botanically radical kind?
Imagine, for a minute, a SubAir system powered entirely by renewable energy, aerating, pressurizing, and vacuuming the soil from below in some highly engineered series of fields or enclosed growth chambers, producing the "optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions" out of which specialty foods, medicines, or biofuels will emerge; what would the moral objection to such a system be, and how would this not simply be but one more device of environmental-conditioning grafted onto an already highly complex bundle of other such networks?
At the very least, I suppose, discovering that an otherwise pristine forest is actually being air-conditioned from below by a geographically extensive, underground air-plumbing network would induce a sense of terrestrial vertigo, as described above; ideally, it would also be working to encourage ecological health and self-repair.
Their strategy is to propose and render a series of speculative architectural detours and additions to the city, "dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling." Each project, they explain, is merely a "hypothetical addition to the built environment," an "absurdly impractical solution"—some of them based on "nonexistent technologies"—to the many problems facing New Orleans today.
Members of this organization begin the narrative process by examining city neighborhoods and commercial districts for compelling structures that appear to have fallen into disuse—“hidden gems” of the built environment. In varying states of repair, these buildings suggest only stories about the past, not the future.
That's where the Hypothetical Development Corporation comes in:
As a public service, H.D.O. invents a hypothetical future for each selected structure. Unlike a traditional, reality-based developer, however, our organization is not bound by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics. In our view, plausibility is a creative dead end. That is to say: We are not trying to fool anybody.
The resulting projects are then printed as posters and displayed in public, at the sites their creators have chosen.
It goes without saying that many people will object to the notion of dreaming up deliberately impossible solutions to very real socio-economic problems; indeed, this argument would go, if you're going to spend so much time coming up with ideas, raising money to print glossy posters, investing in the effort to hang those images up around the city, and then go on to advertise the project online, why not simply create, say, a food bank or a homeless shelter or even a nomadic school? Why not buy a bookmobile and bring mobile libraries to the city's most under-served parish?
These are valid questions, and any speculative project needs to consider the implications of how it uses its time.
However, speaking only for myself, I have never believed that speculative work or writing—fiction, broadly speaking, whether it's architecture fiction or literary fiction—exists in an either/or relationship with social and political activism. We don't need either speculative writing about architecture, for instance, or politically engaged critical writing about real buildings; we need both. Some people are better at the former than they are at the latter; some are better at the latter than they are at the former. It should never be assumed that someone impassioned by the speculative potential of new ideas is somehow against the existence of soup kitchens or grass roots community groups—or that someone working at or relying upon a soup kitchen, shelter, hostel, or church would not be inspired by whimsical utopias and bizarre ideas.
My point is that urban speculation is not some politically dangerous variant on "the opium of the people," cruelly hypnotizing people with intellectual spectacle so that they no longer seek to transform their everyday spatial circumstances; speculation, in fact, is often the very reason they seek out—and physically embark upon—urban change in the first place.
In any case, the fact that these projects deliberately amplify the impossible doesn't bother me. Starting from the miraculous, the marvelous, the utopian, the crazed and working backward from there to fashion a new world is a worthwhile design strategy and it needs to be pursued more often, not less.
Nonetheless, when I first heard about this project, I was afraid that the resulting posters for hypothetical developments might come off not as aspirational signs of the urban fantastic, but more as a kind of taunting—as if a bunch of architects had come along with their posters to show you all the things that your city is not, all the things we wish you could be good enough to be, that we wish you could pull yourself together long enough to become—like a deranged husband taunting his wife with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—but, well, just look at you: you're all weeds, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, and, even worse, you're poor. We architects don't appreciate the ramshackle street you live on or the old five-and-dime where you shop everyday; you're not science fiction enough for our tastes.
In a sense, this is the aggressive undertone of all real estate development ads. The world you live in right now is not up to scratch, those ads say, and this development only proves your current inadequacy.
But there are many ways in which the Hypothetical Development Organization works to avoid—or at least lessen—this fate, in large part through its selection of sites—genuinely abandoned or destroyed lots around the city—but also through the project's tone. It is still whimsical, to be sure; but that's both its strategy and its point.
If an architectural proposal can catalyze local efforts toward remaking the neighborhood—which doesn't mean clearing empty lots so that Walmart can move in or someone can build million-dollar condos—or if that proposal can simply push residents to re-conceive how they physically engage with their surroundings, then it has successfully revealed, at least in part, the transformative potential of spatial ideas and other urban hypotheticals.
Animal Architecture, founded in 2009 by Jonathan LaRocca and Ned Dodington, is currently on the hunt for "exciting projects that engage the lives, minds and behaviors of our alternate, sometimes familiar companion species—insects, birds, mammals, fish and microorganisms—each one with unique ways of world-making."
Animal Architecture thus "invites your critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other—or as we say it here: to illustrate cospecies coshaping."
Designing either with or for nonhuman species can offer, LaRocca and Dodington suggest, "a greater understanding of biotic and ecological relationships [that] can influence design, reshape our cities, and restructure our homes—benefiting the human and non-human animals that interact with and around them." For instance, "what making friends with a duck can teach us about urban design."
Such projects can occur across multiple spatial and temporal scales, whether at the level of landscape infrastructure, through such things as wildlife corridors, national parks, and even zoos (for instance, the forthcoming project by TN Plus, described later on in this post), or through much more intimate interventions, such as Jamie Hutchison's "Bee Station" or the "Animal Estates" project by Fritz Haeg.
On the other hand, of course, there is another, equally fascinating strategy of spatial inhabitation—available to humans and nonhumans alike—and that is is infestation.
From suburban homes taken over by honeybees and wildcats, to the labyrinthine stratigraphies of rats that colonize our cities from below, nonhuman species have their own ways of using—sometimes wildly repurposing—architecture.
Seen in this light, the spatial strategies of the pest-control industry are as much a question of "animal architecture" as the design of underground ant cities or termite mounds.
This final project, below, is, at first glance, a more traditional type of "animal architecture." This is a recent design by Paris-based landscape architects TN Plus for a zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia.
"Our fabricated urban development," the designers write, "will evoke Pangaea, the supercontinent described by German meteorologist and astronomer Alfred Wegener."
[Images: From a design for a zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia, by TN Plus].
Accordingly, the project is a kind of virtual reconstruction of that now-absent supercontinent:
The main idea of the project for the new Saint Petersburg zoo is to reunite in one place pieces of lands which are separated today, but which were once in connection. The project takes symbolic core samples all over the world from various biotopes to assemble them in the Saint Petersburg zoo in the form of an archipelago. Every island of the project must be considered as a sample of a particular zone of a continent.
TN Plus thus hope for the resulting archipelagic complex—which will include its own microclimates and "biozones"—to be "an intriguing, mysterious, attractive, off-kilter strategy at the service of the animals and their well-being, to become the icon of new cultural and scientific life in Saint Petersburg."
[Image: An archipelagic zoological park in St. Petersburg by TN Plus].
What fascinates me here is the prospect that cross-species interaction can take on a particular spatial form—or series of spatial forms—turning landscape architecture into a kind of biological speech act.
In other words, the ideal zoo could be seen as a kind of landscape cryptography: an immersive, trans-species conversation in which the terrestrial forms, plantlife, and climatological special effects are actually signs, intended for a nonhuman audience, simulating—i.e. actively referring to—otherwise locally absent environments.
The "zoo" thus presents a kind of spatial conversation "between man and animal," as the designers describe it.
The question, then, is how we can appropriately evaluate the success of such a project. What can be realistically achieved during the resulting encounters "between man and animal," how can these moments of inter-species communication be most effectively fostered by spatial design, and, again, how do we then measure a particular landscape's tactical success?
[Images: A future zoo in St. Petersburg by TN Plus].
As I wrote here several years ago, also in reference to a zoological park by TN Plus, it would seem that zoos can be thought of as a kind of spatial hieroglyphics: an elaborate system of reenactments and signs through which humans attempt to communicate with other species.
It's as if there is a spatial grammar of zoological communication, and it takes shape, here, as landscape architecture.
Zoos, in this way of thinking, can be at least partially subject to rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are intended to communicate, how has this meaning been produced, and how do we measure the success of its reception? Further, what are the risks of miscommunication?
In any case, there are so many directions to go with this discussion of "animal architecture"—theoretical, practical, speculative, critical, and otherwise—that I can't wait to see what sort of things are submitted to the Animal Architecture project. Register by 15 May 2011 to submit your own essays and designs.
Further information—including the names of the editorial jury, which features Sanford Kwinter, Joyce Hwang, Neeraj Bhatia from InfraNet Lab, myself, and many others—can be found on the Animal Architecture website.
1) A neighborhood in Brooklyn known as "The Hole" is thirty feet below sea level. It is so close to the water table, in fact, that local homes are not connected to the city's sewer system, relying instead on cesspools; the streets—with names like Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire—are often flooded, on the verge of permanently returning to marshland. The Hole is a short documentary by Courtney Sell and Billy Feldman about this neighborhood; cowboys on horseback wander through water-logged streets while abandoned housing developments soak up rain like giant sponges.
2) Montréal's St. Pierre River "was pushed underground long ago," we read in the Montréal Gazette; before it was funneled through storm drains and sewers, however, the river "would occasionally flood the surrounding farmlands." This tendency to flood never went away: it just went into people's basements. As one local homeowner explains, "The land is low, apparently very low. Before I bought the building, the inspector I hired told me the pit of standing water in one corner of the basement was no cause for concern. 'Oh that,' he said. 'That's quite normal here. The water table is very high.' Yes, it is."
The notion that a city could be so misaligned with its own water table that puddles—in basements and roadways alike—are actually the return of an underground river quietly streaming through your cellar, and your neighbor's cellar, and their neighbor's cellar, and a thousand other cellars all invisible to maps, or the self-reassertion of an ancestral marsh surfacing like a dream in the streets is fascinating, bringing to mind the possibly apocryphal tale of old men fishing in the basements of Manhattan, casting their lines down into still existing rivers and streams that were simply paved over and forgotten, or the tempting prospect of resurrecting London rivers based on obscure royal decrees.
This short film is actually an advertisement for Japanese mobile phone company Docomo, but it's nonetheless hard to resist: a linear musical instrument designed by Drill Inc. is played by the descent of a wooden ball as it slowly rolls down track, sending xylophonic plinks and plonks out into the forest.
[Images: A linear wooden forest instrument playing Bach, by Drill Inc. for Docomo].
At the height of the Cold War, the sprawling, decentralized suburban landscape of the United States was seen by many military planners as a form of spatial self-defense. As historian David Krugler explains in This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War, "urban dispersal" was viewed as a defensive military tactic, one that would greatly increase the nation's chance of survival in the event of nuclear attack.
Specially formatted residential landscapes such as "cluster cities" were thus proposed, "each with a maximum population of 50,000." These smaller satellite cities would not only reshape the civilian landscape of the United States, they would make its citizens, its industrial base, and its infrastructure much harder to target.
"This might seem the stuff of Cold War science fiction," Krugler writes, "but after World War II, many urban and civil defense planners believed cluster cities, also called dispersal, should be the future of the American metropolis."
These planners, like the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, imagined atomic firestorms engulfing American cities and advocated preventive measures such as dispersal. Just one or two atomic bombs could level a concentrated metropolitan area, but cluster cities would suffer far less devastation: enemy bombers could strike some, but not all, key targets, allowing the unharmed cities to aid in recovery.
Krugler points out that this suburban dispersal was not always advised in the name of military strategy: "Many urban planners believed dispersal could spur slum clearance, diminish industrial pollution, and produce parks. Not only would dispersal shield America's cities, it would save them from problems of their own making."
However, the idea that urban dispersal might be useful only as a protective tactic against the horrors of aerial bombardment overlooks other threats, including earthquakes and tsunamis.
Earlier this week, Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan was advised "to decentralize Japan" out of fear of "Tokyo annihilation danger." Indeed, we read, the recent 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and partial nuclear meltdown at Fukushima together suggest that "the nation must reduce the role of its capital city to avert an even greater catastrophe."
Takayoshi Igarashi, a professor at Hosei University, explains: "I told the prime minister that nationwide dispersal is the first thing we need to do as we rebuild. We have no idea when the big one’s going to hit Tokyo, but when it does, it’s going to annihilate the entire country because everything is here." His conclusion: "The lesson we need to take away from this disaster is that we have to restructure Japan as an entire nation"—a seismic decentralization that relies as much on horizontal geography as on vertical building code. This could thus be "the nation’s biggest investment in urban planning in decades."
The idea that urban design might find a reinvigorated sense of national purpose in response to a threat in the ground itself is fascinating, of course, perhaps especially for someone who also lives in an earthquake zone. But the prospect of large-scale urban dispersal remaking the urban landscape of Japan—that Tokyo itself might actually be broken up into smaller subcities, and that future urban planning permission might be adjusted to enforce nationwide sprawl as a form of tectonic self-defense, from megacity to exurban lace—presents an explicit spatialization of Japanese earthquake policy that will be very interesting to track over the years to come.
A recent paper published in the Physical Review has some astonishing suggestions for the geographic future of financial markets. Its authors, Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, discuss the spatial implications of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such fantastic quantity, that the speed of light itself presents limits to the efficiency of global computerized trading networks.
These limits are described as "light propagation delays."
[Image: Global map of "optimal intermediate locations between trading centers," based on the earth's geometry and the speed of light, by Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer].
It is thus in traders' direct financial interest, they suggest, to install themselves at specific points on the Earth's surface—a kind of light-speed financial acupuncture—to take advantage both of the planet's geometry and of the networks along which trades are ordered and filled. They conclude that "the construction of relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes across the Earth’s surface" is thus economically justified, if not required.
Amazingly, their analysis—seen in the map, above—suggests that many of these financially strategic points are actually out in the middle of nowhere: hundreds of miles offshore in the Indian Ocean, for instance, on the shores of Antarctica, and scattered throughout the South Pacific (though, of course, most of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Bos-Wash corridor also make the cut).
These nodes exist in what the authors refer to as "the past light cones" of distant trading centers—thus the paper's multiple references to relativity. Astonishingly, this thus seems to elide financial trading networks with the laws of physics, implying the eventual emergence of what we might call quantum financial products. Quantum derivatives! (This also seems to push us ever closer to the artificially intelligent financial instruments described in Charles Stross's novel Accelerando). Erwin Schrödinger meets the Dow.
It's financial science fiction: when the dollar value of a given product depends on its position in a planet's light-cone.
[Image: Diagrammatic explanation of a "light cone," courtesy of Wikipedia].
These points scattered along the earth's surface are described as "optimal intermediate locations between trading centers," each site "maximiz[ing] profit potential in a locally auditable manner."
Wissner-Gross and Freer then suggest that trading centers themselves could be moved to these nodal points: "we show that if such intermediate coordination nodes are themselves promoted to trading centers that can utilize local information, a novel econophysical effect arises wherein the propagation of security pricing information through a chain of such nodes is effectively slowed or stopped." An econophysical effect.
In the end, then, they more or less explicitly argue for the economic viability of building artificial islands and inhabitable seasteads—i.e. the "construction of relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes"—out in the middle of the ocean somewhere as a way to profit from speed-of-light trades. Imagine, for a moment, the New York Stock Exchange moving out into the mid-Atlantic, somewhere near the Azores, onto a series of New Babylon-like platforms, run not by human traders but by Watson-esque artificially intelligent supercomputers housed in waterproof tombs, all calculating money at the speed of light.
"In summary," the authors write, "we have demonstrated that light propagation delays present new opportunities for statistical arbitrage at the planetary scale, and have calculated a representative map of locations from which to coordinate such relativistic statistical arbitrage among the world’s major securities exchanges. We furthermore have shown that for chains of trading centers along geodesics, the propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by such arbitrage."
Historically, technologies for transportation and communication have resulted in the consolidation of financial markets. For example, in the nineteenth century, more than 200 stock exchanges were formed in the United States, but most were eliminated as the telegraph spread. The growth of electronic markets has led to further consolidation in recent years. Although there are advantages to centralization for many types of transactions, we have described a type of arbitrage that is just beginning to become relevant, and for which the trend is, surprisingly, in the direction of decentralization. In fact, our calculations suggest that this type of arbitrage may already be technologically feasible for the most distant pairs of exchanges, and may soon be feasible at the fastest relevant time scales for closer pairs.
Our results are both scientifically relevant because they identify an econophysical mechanism by which the propagation of tradable information can be slowed or stopped, and technologically significant, because they motivate the construction of relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes across the Earth’s surface.
Here's some eye-candy for a Tuesday evening: Arc en Ciel, a new building in Bordeaux, France—part residential, part office—by Bernard Buhler Architects, spotted via Architizer.
With a building as eye-catching as this one, it's quite difficult to imagine a rationale behind adding graphics to the exterior glass windows—like children's drawings, or some vague gesture toward "street art"—which looks both kitschy and unnecessary.
Successfully, to my mind—based entirely on a scan of some photographs on the internet—the colored exterior glass works not only to vivify the building's urban site but to bring a constantly changing series of hues, like a colored bar code, onto the interior walkways. I would love to see this place lit from within at night, a sight the available photographs don't offer.
Anyway, the building looks cool; that's about all I have to say. I will add, however, that I'm struck by how extraordinarily better the actual, constructed building is, compared to its rendering, seen below.
All the more evidence that rejecting (or embracing) a building's outward formal characteristics on the basis of renderings is not necessarily a good idea.
[Image: The "Trevisco pit," Cornwall, from which the kaolinite used in space shuttle tiles comes from; photo by Hugh Symonds].
Photographer Hugh Symonds recently got in touch with a series of images called Terra Amamus, or "dirt we like," in his translation, exploring mining operations in Cornwall.
"The granite moors of Cornwall," Symonds explains, "were formed around 300 million years ago. Geological and climatic evolution have created a soft, white, earthy mineral called kaolinite. The name is thought to be derived from China, Kao-Ling (High-Hill) in Jingdezhen, where pottery has been made for more than 1700 years. Study of the Chinese model in the late 18th century led to the discovery and establishment of a flourishing industry in Cornwall."
You could perhaps think of the resulting mines and quarries as a landscape falling somewhere between an act of industrial replication and 18th-century geological espionage.
As Symonds points out, kaolinite is actually "omni-present throughout our daily lives; in paper, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, paints, kitchens, bathrooms, light bulbs, food additives, cars, roads and buildings. In an extraterrestrial, 'Icarian' twist, it is even present in the tiles made for the Space Shuttle."
Indeed, the photograph that opens this post shows us the so-called Trevisco pit. Its kaolinite is not only "particularly pure," Symonds notes; it is also "the oldest excavation in the Cornish complex."
Even better, it is the "quarry from which the clay used for the Space Shuttle tiles came from." This pit, then, is a negative space—a pockmark, a dent—in the Earth's surface out of which emerged—at least in part—a system of objects and trajectories known as NASA.
Of course, the idea that we could trace the geological origins of an object as complex as the Space Shuttle brings to mind Mammoth's earlier stab at what could be called a provisional geology of the iPhone. As Mammoth wrote, "Until we see that the iPhone is as thoroughly entangled into a network of landscapes as any more obviously geological infrastructure (the highway, both imposing carefully limited slopes across every topography it encounters and grinding/crushing/re-laying igneous material onto those slopes) or industrial product (the car, fueled by condensed and liquefied geology), we will consistently misunderstand it." These and other products—even Space Shuttles—are terrestrial objects. That is, they emerge from infrastructurally networked points of geological extraction.
In John McPhee's unfortunately titled book Encounters with the Archdruid, there is a memorable scene about precisely this idea: a provisional geology out of which our industrial system of objects has arisen.
"Most people don't think about pigments in paint," one of McPhee's interview subjects opines. "Most white-paint pigment now is titanium. Red is hematite. Black is often magnetite. There's chrome yellow, molybdenum orange. Metallic paints are a little more permanent. The pigments come from rocks in the ground. Dave's electrical system is copper, probably from Bingham Canyon. He couldn't turn on a light or make ice without it." And then the real forensic geology begins:
The nails that hold the place together come from the Mesabi Range. His downspouts are covered with zinc that was probably taken out of the ground in Canada. The tungsten in his light bulbs may have been mined in Bishop, California. The chrome on his refrigerator door probably came from Rhodesia or Turkey. His television set almost certainly contains cobalt from the Congo. He uses aluminum from Jamaica, maybe Surinam; silver from Mexico or Peru; tin—it's still in tin cans—from Bolivia, Malaya, Nigeria. People seldom stop to think that all these things—planes in the air, cars on the road, Sierra Club cups—once, somewhere, were rock. Our whole economy—our way of doing things. Oh, gad! I haven't even mentioned minerals like manganese and sulphur. You won't make steel without them. You can't make paper without sulphur...
We have rearranged the planet to form TVs and tin cans, producing objects from refined geology.
What's fascinating here, however, is something I touched upon in my earlier reference to geological espionage. In other words, we take for granted the idea that we can know what minerals go into these everyday products—and, more specifically, that we can thus locate those minerals' earthly origins and, sooner or later, enter into commerce with them, producing our own counter-products, our own rival gizmos and competitive replacements.
I was thus astonished to read that, in fact, specifically in the case of silicon, this is not actually the case.
In geologist Michael Welland's excellent book Sand, often cited here, Welland explains that "electronics-grade silicon has to be at least 99.99999 percent pure—referred to in the trade as the 'seven nines'—and often it's more nines than that. In general, we are talking of one lonely atom of something that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions."
Here, a detective story begins—it's top secret geology!
A small number of companies around the world dominate the [microprocessor chip] technology and the [silicon] market, and while their literature and websites go into considerable and helpful detail on their products, the location and nature of the raw materials seem to be of "strategic value," and thus an industrial secret. I sought the help of the U.S. Geological Survey, which produces comprehensive annual reports on silica and silicon (as well as all other industrial minerals), noting that statistics pertaining to semiconductor-grade silicon were often excluded or "withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data."
Welland thus embarks upon an admittedly short but nonetheless fascinating investigation, hoping to de-cloud the proprietary geography of these mineral transnationals and find where this ultra-pure silicon really comes from. To make a long story short, he quickly narrows the search down to quartzite (which "can be well over 99 percent pure silica") mined specifically from a few river valleys in the Appalachians.
As it happens, though, we needn't go much further than the BBC to read about a town called Spruce Pine, "a modest, charmingly low-key town in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, [that] is at the heart of a global billion-dollar industry... The jewellery shops, highlighting local emeralds, sapphires and amethysts, hint at the riches. The mountains, however, contain something far more precious than gemstones: they are a source of high-purity quartz." And Spruce Pine is but one of many locations from which globally strategic flows of electronics-grade silicon are first mined and purified.
In any case, the geological origin of even Space Shuttle tiles is always fascinating to think about; but when you start adding things like industrial espionage, proprietary corporate landscapes, unmarked quarries in remote mountain valleys, classified mineral reserves, supercomputers, a roving photographer in the right place at the right time, an inquisitive geologist, and so on, you rapidly escalate from a sort of Economist-Lite blog post to the skeleton of an international thriller that would be a dream to read (and write—editors get in touch!).
And, of course, if you like the images seen here, check out the rest of Symond's Terra Amamus series.
Artist Gerry Judah's paintings are massively and aggressively three-dimensional, piling up, away, and out from the canvas to form linked cities, ruins, and debris-encrusted bridges, like reefs.
They are perhaps what a tectonic collaboration between Lebbeus Woods and Jackson Pollock might produce: blasted and collapsing landscapes so covered in white it's as if nuclear winter has set in.
As the short film included below makes clear, Judah embeds entire architectural models in each piece, affixing small constellations of buildings to the canvas before beginning a kind of archaeological onslaught: layering paint on top of paint, raining strata down for days to seal the landscape in place and make it ready for wall-mounting.
And then the paintings go up, sprawling and counter-gravitational, like ruins tattooed on the walls.
For more work—including pieces executed in red and black—see Judah's website (including his bio, which suggests larger architectural and theatrical influences).
The company Airborne Sound has a near-infinite website on which you can listen to royalty-free sound effects for everyday scenarios like dishwashers, traffic noise, office ambiance, overhead helicopters, vacuum cleaners, elevator shafts, construction sites, and more.
The extreme specificity with which many of these sounds are cataloged—"Small metal military tin, empty, closing concisely," for instance, versus "Small metal military tin, empty, closing quickly and smartly," or even the encyclopedic varieties of sounds created by someone eating ice—often outdoes Borges.
"Magazine dropping and picking up from a table in a series in an indifferent manner." "Rain in the city nasal and heavy and constant with some thunder." "Room tone in a New York apartment on the tenth floor with window open and helicopters departing and traffic and AC." "Room tone in a large machine shop with fluorescent buzz and pipe hiss in a loop." "Construction site with junk sliding down a chute"—in case you like the sound of sliding your junk down a chute. "A homeless guy digs in a garbage bin with rain"—which apparently consists of "Alley, Rain, Homeless Guy." There are even hospital sounds: "Room tone in a radiology clinic with nurses and x-rays." "Crowd in New York City at Bellevue hospital lobby passing with voices."
But my original purpose in mentioning this was for the company's domestic sound effects, filed under Household. Why have a housemate when you can simply listen to endless loops of air-conditioning units, refrigerator hum, distant TV voices, pet sounds, keyboard clacking, footsteps over hardwood floors, and more? The specially curated Household Collection has it all (almost), including someone "handling a wallet," "peeling a rubber glove off," and "opening a bedroom door." There's also Household Collection 2.
Perhaps this could even offer a glimpse of some emerging new form of spatio-acoustic therapy: prescription sound effects for people dealing with loss or depression.
Or download the Kitchen Collection, including its own part 2, and make it sound like someone is cooking dinner in the background as you read a novel, home alone on a Saturday night, disappearing into a world of sonically reinforced self-isolation.
You can soundtrack your next dinner party with the sounds of another dinner party. You can work out to the sound of farm animals, cruise the streets of Los Angeles listening to someone clipping their toe nails, fall asleep to the relaxing tones of "flesh moves."
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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