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 The London-based architectural group ScanLAB—founded by Matthew Shaw and William Trossell—has been doing some fascinating work with laser scanners.
Here are three of their recent projects.
1) Scanning Mist. Shaw and Trossell "thought it might be interesting to see if the scanner could detect smoke and mist. It did and here are the remarkable results!"
 [Images: From Scanning the Mist by ScanLAB].
In a way, I'm reminded of photographs by Alexey Titarenko.
2) Scanning an Artificial Weather System. For this project, ScanLAB wanted to "draw attention to the magical properties of weather events." They thus installed a network of what they call "pressure vessels linked to an array of humidity tanks" in the middle of England's Kielder Forest.
 [Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].
These "humidity tanks" then, at certain atmospherically appropriate moments, dispersed a fine mist, deploying an artificial cloud or fog bank into the woods.
 [Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].
Then, of course, Shaw and Trossell laser-scanned it.
3) Subverting Urban-Scanning Projects through "Stealth Objects." The architectural potential of this final project blows me away. Basically, Shaw and Trossell have been looking at "the subversion of city scale 3D scanning in London." As they explain it, "the project uses hypothetical devices which are installed across the city and which edit the way the city is scanned and recorded." Tools include the "stealth drill" which dissolves scan data in the surrounding area, creating voids and new openings in the scanned urban landscape, and "boundary miscommunication devices" which offset, relocate and invent spatial data such as paths, boundaries, tunnels and walls. The spatial and counter-spatial possibilities of this are extraordinary. Imagine whole new classes of architectural ornament (ornament as digital camouflage that scans in precise and strange ways), entirely new kinds of building facades (augmented reality meets LiDAR), and, of course, the creation of a kind of shadow-architecture, invisible to the naked eye, that only pops up on laser scanners at various points around the city.
  [Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].
ScanLAB refers to this as "the deployment of flash architecture"—flash streets, flash statues, flash doors, instancing gates—like something from a short story by China Miéville. The narrative and/or cinematic possibilities of these "stealth objects" are seemingly limitless, let alone their architectural or ornamental use.
Imagine stealth statuary dotting the streetscape, for instance, or other anomalous spatial entities that become an accepted part of the urban fabric. They exist only as representational effects on the technologies through which we view the landscape—but they eventually become landmarks, nonetheless.
For now, Shaw and Trossell explain that they are experimenting with "speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains. These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them."
 [Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].
Here is one such " stealth object," pictured below, designed to be "undetected" by laser-scanning equipment.
Of course, it is not hard to imagine the military being interested in this research, creating stealth body armor, stealth ground vehicles, even stealth forward-operating bases, all of which would be geometrically invisible to radar and/or scanning equipment.
In fact, one could easily imagine a kind of weapon with no moving parts, consisting entirely of radar- and LiDAR-jamming geometries; you would thus simply plant this thing, like some sort of medieval totem pole, in the streets of Mogadishu—or ring hundreds of them in a necklace around Washington D.C.—thus precluding enemy attempts to visualize your movements.
  [Images: A hypothetical "stealth object," resistant to laser-scanning, by ScanLAB].
Briefly, ScanLAB's "stealth object" reminds me of an idea bandied about by the U.S. Department of Energy, suggesting that future nuclear-waste entombment sites should be liberally peppered with misleading "radar reflectors" buried in the surface of the earth.
The D.O.E.'s "trihedral" objects would produce "distinctive anomalous magnetic and radar-reflective signatures" for anyone using ground-scanning equipment above. In other words, they would create deliberate false clues, leading potential future excavators to think that they were digging in the wrong place. They would "subvert" the scanning process.
In any case, read more at ScanLAB's website.
 [Image: Photo by Ko Sasaki, courtesy of the New York Times].
1) "This webpage contains earthquake 'sounds' created from seismic recordings around the world generated by the 2011/03/11 Mw9.0 Tohoku, Japan earthquake. They provide a unique way for us to listen to the vibration of the Earth that is otherwise inaudible to us, and to decipher the complicated earthquake physics and triggering processes."
2) "The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: 'Do not build your homes below this point!' Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone... Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation."
3) "Europe may be starting to dive under Africa, creating a new subduction zone and potentially increasing the earthquake risk in the western Mediterranean Sea... For millions of years the African plate, which contains part of the Mediterranean seabed, has been moving northward toward the Eurasian Plate at a rate of about an inch every 2.5 years (a centimeter a year). Now studies of recent earthquakes in the region indicate that a new subduction zone may be forming where the plates are colliding along the coasts of Algeria and northern Sicily... [M]ost established subduction zones are marked by giant undersea trenches. A similar trench should eventually form in the Mediterranean—but certainly not overnight."
It's not difficult to imagine finding unexpected affinities between a specific animal species and certain types of architectural ornament, whether it's pigeons nesting on the tops of ruined columns in Rome, bats colonizing the attic windows of single-family Victorian homes, or bees, moths, wasps, and other bugs breeding in the cracks of terracotta egg-and-dart.
 [Image: A bird in Rome].
However, it would be interesting to see if any of the following scenarios might be true:
1) Ornamental details from a particular phase of, say, the Baroque—or the Gothic, or Dravidian temple design—are found to attract a specific species of bird, whose size, nesting needs, etc., correspond exactly to the proportional details of this decorative style. Because of the foods those birds eat, however, and, thus, what seeds they later spread around their flight paths, their guano results in a very specific kind of forest growing around each building (or its ruins). The buildings catalyze their own ecological context, in other words, ringed by forests they indirectly helped create.
2) A particular type of early modern warehouse or other such industrial structure is found to house a specific species of bird, perhaps because only its frame can fit through gaps in the brickwork, precluding colonization by other species. Thus, while all other bird species in the local ecosystem have gone extinct—due to habitat loss, food-web collapse, or whatever—these birds, regally ensconced inside their protective warehouses, manage to survive. They are thus saved by 19th-century architecture—perhaps even by one architecture office's work. A species that only lives inside buildings by Anthony George Lyster.
3) When the type of stone used to build a region's churches erodes, weathering away to nothing, its remnant minerals fertilize a specific type of weed or small flowering plant, one that would otherwise eventually have died off. Thus, whenever you see a particular flower, you can deduce from its presence that a church built during this particular phase of architectural history once stood there. The flowers are archaeological indicators, we might say: botanical traces of architectural history.
 [Image: Del Castello dell'Acqua Giulia by Piranesi].
In all three cases, these buildings' unanticipated side-effects would ripple outward to influence the evolutionary development of other, future species, whose ecological origins are thus at least partially predicated on the existence of a specific phase of, for example, Baroque architecture or 19th-century warehouse design. So when those architects were designing their buildings, they were also indirectly designing future species.
   [Images: From "Dream Isle" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Thomas Hillier, Maxwell Mutanda, Rachel Guo, and Ed Liu, from Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions].
I've just received a copy of the forthcoming book Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions by CJ Lim and Ed Liu, and I thought I'd include a few glimpses of it here.
 [Image: From "Carousel" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda, from Short Stories].
The book is ostensibly a collection of spatial short stories in which "unexpected environments and places transform into active protagonists." The stories are "laced with a healthy dose of myth and locational specificity," as the authors write in the book's preface.
They continue: The short stories of this book's title are set in different time periods of London, intentionally locating themselves in the liminal territory between fiction and architecture to provoke an engagement between readers and their two-dimensional counterparts occupying the depicted city. The stories are neither illustrated texts nor captioned images; the collages represent a network of spatial relationships, and the text, which splices genre such as science fiction, magical realism and the fairy tale, a thread that links some of the nodes of that network together. In the two following images, for instance, produced by the authors in collaboration with Maxwell Mutanda and Tomasz Marchewka, we see a fictive bridge connecting what are described as the warring tribes of north and south London. There are 214 bridges over the Thames, this story goes, but every year a new connective filament appears: a 215th bridge.
This bridge, "in contrast to its predecessors, is a transitory connection joining the two halves of the metropolis only between the summer months of June and September, during which a common amnesty is held."
  [Images: From "Discontinuous Cities" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda and Tomasz Marchewka, from Short Stories].
In other stories, Alice in Wonderland collides with the Playboy Mansion, which arrives for one night, and one night only, in the parks of London, where "underground chambers, replicating the hole through which Alice follows the white rabbit, had been scattered through the garden, capped with circular lenses and mirrors," optically augmenting this hedonistic underworld.
A "roving telescopic contraption" roams the streets; a leather suitcase pops open and "the habitable spaces within extend and unfold each morning to provide a stage for grooming, relaxation and formal dining"; a landscape illuminated by falling stars is discovered to be watered from below by "networks of metal piping" that "mirrored the arrangement of flowers above."
Elsewhere, a baker works himself to exhaustion "every day without fail," perfuming the city with fresh bread from within his "synaesthetic pleasure dome," its "glorious landscape of smells shifting from fermenting acidity to caramelizing sweetness, a riot of auburn and amber reflecting the fires of the bakery and street lamps outside, a symphony of hissing steam and the pummeling of dough."
The two images, below, show "nebulous clouds of steam," like an artificial weather front—its "topiaries of water vapour will become indistinguishable from clouds," we read—being produced in the baker's garden.
 [Images: From "The Baker's Garden" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Safia Qureshi, from Short Stories].
There are dragons and summer solstices and mechanical animals roving the streets; butchers' towers, police on horseback, and a fictional interview with the director of something called the New Battersea Centre for Dogs, who explains how she managed to transform vast circular gasometers into greyhound racing parks.
As novelist China Miéville explained to BLDGBLOG in an interview published here last month, London is a city peculiarly well-suited for these sorts of literary and spatial phantasmagoria: "For various reasons, some cities refract, through aesthetics and through art, with a particular kind of flamboyancy. For whatever reason, London is one of them. I don’t mean to detract from all the other cities in the world that have their own sort of Gnosticism, but it is definitely the case that London has worked particularly well for this."
 [Images: From "The Nocturnal Tower" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Barry Cho, from Short Stories].
In Short Stories—where myths are told through photographs of pop-out paper figures and propped-open books—London becomes a city architects will always have the freedom to re-dream, and architecture itself becomes a way to undo the spatial straightjackets we find ourselves within.
But does all this mean that the architect is thus politically neutered, reduced to the role of court jester, telling stories of impossible urban boroughs while the real city takes shape, a graph of nothing but the financial needs of absentee developers, hypnotized by fairy tales of a metropolis that can never be built?
 [Images: From "The Celestial River" by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda and Sarah Custance, from Short Stories].
Not at all: architects telling stories with and through complex spatial representations—rather than merely supplying construction documents—brings them into contact with all the arts and sciences that have always and already used the built environment as a framework for larger, abstract ideas. Architectural mythology doesn't cede anyone's right—or political ability—to change the city, any more than cinema, games, music, poetry, or narrative fiction might do, despite fundamentalist claims that these operate as nothing but middle-class distractions; in all cases, these and other speculative entertainments are often precisely the reason why new visions of human community, spatial justice, and cathartic well-being arise in the first place.
Of course, spatial tales will inspire some people simply to daydream, but that hardly sabotages architecture's undeniable power to push others to pursue, with great fervor and enthusiasm, the means of seeing such strange and hallucinatory sights someday come true.
Science fiction is no substitute for science itself, but it is a valuable, if not conceptually indispensable, tool for generating, discussing, and communicating often radical ideas.
And the same is true for architecture's relationship with architectural fiction: thankfully, the latter will not replace the former—but, again, that's not its point.
The point of "combining place and fiction," as Short Stories describes it, is not so that we can sit around infantilizing one another with fairy tales, treating the world as empty spectacle, but to reveal, through projects of great imaginative power, that another world is possible, and architects have a unique ability to chaperone this future earth into existence.
 [Image: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].
Alan Wolfson's Canal Street Cross-Section, a miniature depiction of the New York street and subway station, will be on display this summer as part of the forthcoming group exhibition, Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, starting 7 June.
   [Images: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].
Wolfson explains that he "wanted to build a piece that resembled a core sample of a city street. As though you took a street, dug it up, and lifted it straight off the earth."
The resulting urban core sample has the look of a toy oven or vending machine—as if, in the latter case, we could someday just a few quarters into a streetside machine and walk away holding complete miniature rooms, intact down to their ads and posters, extruded from some kind of self-replicating master-model.
 [Image: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].
"The problem," as he explains it, "was to make all that architecture work together and make sense visually. I was able to do that by having windows on the sides of the piece to accommodate the cross views. I gave the subway platform a sense of depth by using a carefully placed mirror at the far end. As with almost all of my projects, the sight lines were critical." The piece, we might say, required a kind of Piranesian optical correction so that all its cross-angles and counterviews could be spatially comprehensible.
You can see many, many more photographs of Canal Street Cross-Section over on Wolfson's website, as well as dozens of other, often quite incredible " miniature urban sculptures," as the artist describes them.
(Spotted via Thomas Pollman and Joe Alterio; earlier on BLDGBLOG: Romecore).
 [Image: From the "Bird Automata Research Test Track" by Nat Chard].
Fabricate is underway over in London, wrapping up in only a few hours (read a bit more about it here).
One of the conference's many speakers is Nat Chard, from the University of Manitoba, who recently got in touch with some fantastic project images, showing mechanisms and devices of various functions and scales.
  [Images: From the "Bird Automata Research Test Track" by Nat Chard].
The first project seen here is the "Bird Automata Research Test Track." It's a spatial condensation and narrative reenactment of early attempts to photograph the anatomical movements associated with bird flight.
The set-up is a reference to the work of early artist-scientists such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who sought to develop a technical means for analyzing physiological activity as a series of discrete, individual moments—or bodily freeze frames, if you will—using chronophotography.
 [Image: A chronophotograph by Étienne-Jules Marey].
As Jussi Parikka describes this in his recent book Insect Media, for late 19th-century and early 20th-century scientists, animal life represented "a microcosmos of new movements, actions, and perceptions"—it was seen as "something akin to a foreign planet of perceptions waiting to be excavated and reproduced."
Whole new branches of technology were therefore developed in order to record and study how these unfamiliar anatomies interacted with the surrounding environment.
  [Image: The spatial apparatus behind bird chronophotography].
Chard's bird track is thus an exploration of "representational stop animation... witnessed by researchers from two camera positions." But the birds are not natural, living creatures; they are automata, machines: "A researcher tracks one of the birds in elevation, the other camera is sited at the end of the track watching the approaching birds. There is a stair cantilevered off the start of the track to allow access to set up the automata for a flight."
 [Images: From the "Bird Automata Research Test Track" by Nat Chard].
The spatial implications of chronophotography—which visually shatters the passage of time into a series of discrete moments extracted from an event-sequence of otherwise unfixed length and duration—leads to a reference, in a text on Chard's website, to the fact that criminologists, physicists, and even paranormal investigators all also began to use "the emerging potential of photography to further their research." In the process, those researchers "developed new sorts of architecture particular to the demands and opportunities of the medium and the way they were using [them]. There are many research institutions that display the emergence of a new architecture with very little typological precedent."
I might refer to this instead not as architecture, though, but as spatial equipment for the measurable demarcation of fixed events. Or, if it is architecture, it is architecture as a piece of gear—a device, an instrument—that lets you measure the very thing it simultaneously helps set into motion.
 [Image: From the "Bird Automata Research Test Track" by Nat Chard].
In any case, these ideas also animate Chard's other, ongoing work: designing "variable picture plane drawing instruments" that graphically record spatial events.
 [Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
They are optical devices that seem to flicker in and out of phase with themselves—little stage-sets that whir, self-camouflage, and take photos of their own future repositions and alterations.
Here, where we see that the equipment is actually photographing itself, I'm reminded of Edward Gordon Craig, a stage-set designer (and the son of an architect), whose "architectonic scenery," as M. Christine Boyer describes it in The City of Collective Memory, turned the architectural backdrops themselves into the only action an audience was meant to watch, even proposing the elimination of actors altogether.
Craig "proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors," Boyer writes. "The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination."
The fascinating thing here is the idea of "a performance without any actors"—it would be pure space, pure architecture, pure equipment, pure device.
You'd simply sit in the dark and watch mechanized stage sets endlessly self-transforming.
  [Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
Chard sent along parts of a still in-process essay that will soon be published in an issue of AD, edited by architect Bob Sheil, of sixteen*(makers), whose " probe field" project was featured on BLDGBLOG back in December.
 [Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
Chard's essay throws a variety of ideas into the mix, including the mystical (and unfortunately nonexistent) technology of "thoughtography," i.e. the direct translation of thoughts into photographic images; the myth of the "genius sketch," an image produced by someone (or, as his work intriguingly suggests, some thing) uniquely qualified and technically skilled enough to pull off instantaneously perfect acts of visual representation; and the geometric difficulties of representing 3D urban space on 2D surfaces, specifically looking at back at the history of drawing and surveying equipment, with references to the trigonometry of modern aerial bombers and Renaissance artillerymen, both of whom relied upon precise spatial calculations in order to map the targets that they would then set about trying to destroy.
At the heart of all these examples is the trick—the magic, one might say—of spatial representation: how to distill, translate, carry across, or otherwise re-enliven something from one field or context into another.
Chard's devices are spatial equipment that document the very places they also frame and help define.
 [Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
Chard's machines are surprisingly playful—indeed, almost toylike—inhabited by small human figures and seemingly ready for mass-assembly (which would be amazing: imagine a generation of children raised not on Lincoln Logs but on Chard Devices, rewiring kids' brains through the toys they play with).
   [Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
The issue of AD edited by Bob Sheil, featuring Chard's essay, should be out at some point in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. In the meantime, I've posted some images of Chard's work to give you a sense of the project's ongoing directions and research possibilities.
  [Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].
Until then, check out Nat Chard's website for a bit more info, or check out his book Drawing Indeterminate Architecture, Indeterminate Drawings of Architecture (though I should note that I have not yet seen a copy myself).
 [Image: From Water Towers of Ireland; photograph by James Young].
An exhibition up—possibly for just one more day—over at University College, Dublin, features photos by James Young. For the last 10 months, Young has been assembling a typological study of water towers in Ireland. Young describes it as "part inventory, part photographic essay and part history."
Of course, Young's work has presumably been greeted with very many comparisons to the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher.
   [Images: From Water Towers of Ireland; photographs by James Young].
Many of the structures are militaristic and even explicitly fortress-like. They are prisons for water.
 [Image: From Water Towers of Ireland by James Young].
Others could be mistaken for ornamental menhirs, functionless and inexplicable totems standing patiently in the fog and rain.
 [Image: From Water Towers of Ireland by James Young].
I just wanted to post a few of my favorite images here, but then urge you to look through the many other examples over at the Water Towers of Ireland website.
  [Images: From Water Towers of Ireland; photos by James Young].
You'll see, among other things, that many of the more forensic portraits, as seen above, have been twinned with casual, souvenir-like Polaroid shots—such as this one, in Castlemoyle, the very first tower posted on Young's site.
 [Image: From Water Towers of Ireland; photo by James Young].
Perhaps this last one heralds the aborted start of a new branch in architectural history, that of mycological brutalism.
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