Spanish cities are "buckling under bills for empty swimming pools, shuttered sports facilities and unpopular vacation complexes," according to Miller-McCune. Their economies are "saddled with thousands of publicly funded construction projects made in the starrier moments of a mid-2000s property boom. While in the United States, the real estate crash has hit private homeowners hardest, in Spain it was the city governments that gorged themselves, committing to massive projects on the assumption that taxes, like home prices, would always rise."
These public over-commitments include the long-empty and seemingly perpetually unfinished Castellon Airport, where "the only proof that [it] is an airport at all, or will be anytime soon, are dozens of bright blue road signs that claim so along the nearby highway." But is this "15-year effort to build an airport without planes," as the magazine describes it, "a case of epically bad public administration that helps us understand the crisis Europe is facing? Or was it a crime—a case of corruption—that puts Europe’s crisis in a far harsher light?"
Of course, these infrastructural examples should be seen alongside Peter Eisenman's City of Culture of Galicia, which was "born in the Spain of excess and is opening during an economic collapse, as a sort of monument to [the] construction bubble." Eisenman's highly over-budget project is "a cemetery for money," as one critic memorably describes it.
[Image: Lava Floe, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)].
Richard will be showing new work from his Infra series, taken on a series of trips to the Congo, visiting tribal reconciliation gatherings, deserted battlefields, UN-administered aid camps, active war zones, and remote mountain villages in the extraordinary rolling landscape.
[Images: (top to bottom) Flower of the Mountain, House Of Cards V, and Come Out (1966) II, all by Richard Mosse, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011)].
From the gallery description:
For centuries, the Congo has compelled and defied the Western imagination. Richard Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued military surveillance technology, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.
However, infrared film "also found civilian uses among cartographers, agronomists, hydrologists, and archaeologists," the gallery adds, "to reveal subtle changes in the landscape"—and it was in this capacity that Richard first picked up on the conceptual power of the technique.
He began visiting the Congo, using infrared film to document the line between the living and the dead in the war-torn landscape, as living vegetation when exposed on this film appears in blood-like shades of burgundy, pink, and violet, and artificial materials—from army uniforms to discarded weapons—fall flat, appearing nearly black & white like blurs and specters in the terrain.
[Images: (top) Nowhere To Run, South Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010); (bottom) Taking Tiger Mountain, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011), by Richard Mosse].
However, does the surreal transformation of the landscape here make the reality they depict seem that much more dreamlike and politically unreachable—as if we've stumbled upon some strange and very alien race of warriors living amidst military hardware and forests the color of chewing gum, like strandees in a spectacular videogame, where pure white clouds hover above an earth the color of merlot?
Or is that part of a deliberate strategy, a comment on the seemingly impossible task of representing African conflict? Put another way, what specific interpretive role does the filmstock itself play in this scenario?
[Image: Blue Mask, Lake Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010) by Richard Mosse].
In any case, stop by the Jack Shainman Gallery tonight to talk to the artist and see the work at full scale.
An overlooked urban land-use typology is the telephone pole farm, used for honing the climbing skills of telephone-repair personnel, as seen here in a photograph from Los Angeles by Alissa Walker. Along these lines, it might be interesting to explore a training facility for tree-trimming crews—a test-forest populated by genetically-modified trees grown for the complexity of their branches.
[Image: "L.A. Ice" by Victor Hadjikyriacou, produced for Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of last year's Landscape Futures Super-Workshop].
The city of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, will attempt to keep itself cool over the summer by way of a kind of artificial glacier.
According to the Guardian, this "geoengineering trial" will try to "'store' freezing winter temperatures in a giant block of ice that will help to cool and water the city as it slowly melts during the summer." Project directors "hope the process will reduce energy demand from air conditioners and regulate drinking water and irrigation supplies." The cool air will presumably be pumped through the city via a continuous and monumental network of ducts.
So how will it work?
The project aims to artificially create "naleds"—ultra-thick slabs of ice that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through cracks in the surface to seep outwards during the day and then add an extra layer of ice during the night. Unlike regular ice formation on lakes—which only gets to a metre in thickness before it insulates the water below—naleds continue expanding for as long as there is enough water pressure to penetrate the surface. Many are more than seven metres thick, which means they melt much later than regular ice.
Fascinatingly, naleds have already been used as foundations for infrastructural projects elsewhere; in North Korea, for instance, the Guardian reports, the military has utilized naleds "to build river crossings for tanks during the winter and Russia has used them as drilling platforms."
The specific architectural technique of the ice bridge can be explored in this helpful PDF from the Alaska Division of Forestry. Quoting at great length, here are the skills you need to bridge remote rivers with artificially augmented ice packs, should such a scenario ever befall you or your loved ones. These are "guidelines for ice-bridge construction":
The ideal site has the following characteristics: deep, narrow, slow flow in a single straight channel with gradual approaches to the ice; no tributary streams, creeks or lakes immediately upstream; and it is located near an existing road network. The site should also be free of warm springs and sand bars and not subject to major snow drifting. Being downstream of riffles/rapids may be conducive to supercooling and frazil ice formation that might accelerate ic e formation and growth at the bridge site. (...) Once natural ice cover has progressed across the channel thick enough to bear the weight of personnel and light equipment, existing snow cover is removed to accelerate ice growth at the bottom of the ice sheet. Variation exists in whether snow is removed or just compacted. Snow removal is recommended on upstream and downstream sides of the road for a distance of 23-30 meters (75-100 feet) as well as on the road itself. Subsequent to ice growth in response to snow removal, surface flooding is recommended to build up ice thickness on the road surface. (...) Lateral barriers of snow, logs or boards are used to contain floodwater on the road surface. Water should be applied by layering, allowing full freezing of previous water applications before the next. Conflicting recommendations exist as to whether brush or logs should be incorporated into the ice. One study did document the increase in ice strength after incorporating geo-grid material during the ice buildup process. A regular regime of ice drilling and monitoring of ice thickness is recommended.
If you want something a little more hi-tech, on the other hand, the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center has slowly been amassing insight into the construction of ice roads and ice bridges.
[Image: "A water truck passes over the ice road spreading a thin layer of water to thicken the ice so it can support heavy equipment transport"; photo courtesy of the U.S. Army].
"Building an ice bridge/road takes a lot of time, hard work and favorable weather conditions," the Army reports. "The water must be frozen down to the riverbed, which requires breaking the ice down to the bottom and allowing it to freeze from the bottom up. The Engineers had to pump thousands of gallons of water onto the bridge/road to get the ice thick enough to support heavy equipment, while at the same time smoothing it out so vehicles could drive across it easily." The engineers involved in this particular story "established an ice bridge/road that was 28 inches thick in the beginning of January. With work scheduled to continue through the end of February, the engineers will add another 2.5 inches of ice every day."
And, as it happens, these experimental ice bridges grown by military personnel in the Arctic, like something out of Norse mythology, are a regular occurrence every winter.
[Image: "Soldiers from the 6th Engineer Battalion, Fort Richardson, Alaska, clear water lines during construction of an ice bridge at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greely, Alaska, Jan. 12, 2011." Photo by Sgt. Trish McMurphy, U.S. Army Alaska Public Affairs Office].
The engineers built field-expedient water tanks, berms of snow and crushed ice, to keep the water in designated areas for freezing. They move about 70,000 gallons of water per day using a gas-powered water pump and water lines. Once the bridge is capable of holding the weight, they will use 5,000 gallon water trucks to help speed up the process by delivering water faster than the pump.
The frames and techniques used for building with frozen water, then, are very similar to those used when dealing with concrete; in either case, it is the architecture of hardened liquids.
All told, the resulting ice bridge "will [be] slightly longer than a mile. It will be 24 inches thick and 75 feet wide. The bridge will grow and expand naturally with the weather changes, requiring some personnel to stay longer to maintain it." There are custodians of artificial ice forms and instant cities built from snow at the top of the world.
In any case, the massive ice block used to cool Ulan Bator—I almost forgot what this post is about—will presumably undergo the initial stages of sculpting and augmentation quite soon, as the true cold of winter sets in; we'll have to wait till next summer to see if it's successful.
[Image: Liam Young flying self-illuminated drone quadcopters in Holland for a celebratory nighttime crowd].
Architect Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today is apparently speaking in only a few hours at the CCA in San Francisco. Be sure to check it out, if you're anywhere nearby; Liam will be discussing everything from his specimens of unnatural history to future machine-species and the mythological potential of urban infrastructure. The show starts at 7pm, and is free and open to the public.
China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live."
"Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people," the Broad Group claims.
While it's neither shocking nor even particularly interesting to note that those who can afford it will install air purifiers in their homes and offices, the implication that the Chinese government—who are probably "purposely obscuring the extent of the nation’s air pollution," the Times suggests, and who already eat from their own separate, organic food supply—is in the process of atmospherically seceding from the rest of the nation is extraordinary.
I'm reminded of NBA star Gilbert Arenas, who, as reported here a billion years ago, once "hired a company to reduce the oxygen content in his house" so that he could "train under high-altitude conditions similar to those in Colorado." The creation of a special atmosphere breathed only by Chinese officials could just as easily be achieved by way of architecture, framing all politburo meetings, all official residences, and all fortified state vehicles with plane-like airlocks and breathing masks.
In what could be thought of as the architecturalization of Piney from Sons of Anarchy, a government-run space would always be known for its ornamental breathing apparatus—a prosthetic atmosphere—as if scuba-diving through the murk of everyday life around them.
[Image: An artificial meteorology hovers over China; via China Digital Times].
In a specifically spatial sense—that is, not political or ideological—it would seem that architects like Philippe Rahm are the future of Chinese architecture: designing for the control and manipulation of internal atmospheres, and evaluating the success or failure of a given space through such criteria as air pressure, humidity, and the thermal movement of air.
Or, to bring politics back into the argument, as historian David Gissen wrote several years ago in the Journal of Architectural Education, "Powerful spatial relationships emerge with the heating, cooling, and ventilation of space that connect urban spaces and other social aggregates in a complex social, political, and economic network. Understanding the complexity of these relationships requires reinterpreting the literature on environmental technological systems with literature drawn from urban geography and urban environmental studies."
Here, though, we clearly see the value of also adding literature on the politics of this atmospheric phenomenon—the spatial politics of governmentally regulated and maintained spaces of filtered air—as if, again, we might someday recognize a space of Chinese state sovereignty not through such things as armed security teams or surveillance cameras, but through the quality of the air being breathed there. In fact, the spatial relationship between governmentality and the atmosphere only becomes more extraordinary when we put this in the context of Chinese attempts at weather control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Perhaps the future of state sovereignty, then, is no longer about the terrestrial control of territory—i.e. land—but about, in a very literal sense, who controls the air. The notion of air power takes on a whole new meaning here.
In any case, I was also intrigued to learn this morning that you can follow Beijing's air on Twitter.
Charles Jencks will join Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob of FAT on Monday, October 31st, at the Architectural Association, celebrating Halloween with a discussion of "radical postmodernism" and launching their new, co-edited issue of AD.
That issue "marks the resurgence of a critical architecture that engages in a far-reaching way with issues of taste, space, character and ornament. Bridging high and low cultures," the editors explain, radical postmodernism "immerses itself in the age of information, embracing meaning and communication, embroiling itself in the dirty politics of taste by drawing ideas from beyond the narrow confines of architecture. It is a multi-dimensional, amorphous category, which is heavily influenced by contemporary art, cultural theory, modern literature and everyday life."
The event is free and open to the public, and kicks off at 6pm.
Toxic chemicals leaking from an old wastewater treatment plant in Alabama have unexpectedly led to the discovery of a 1,700-year old "pre-historic village" buried in the ground nearby. Chemicals "have seeped into the ground surrounding the old plant," according to a local news station, so "the soil needs to be removed and taken to a toxic waste facility."
However, a survey of the contaminated site soon revealed that the ground also contained extremely well-preserved artifacts "from a village that once thrived" there. "Lo and behold," the head excavator remarked to the news show: "we found a massive late-middle Woodland period village."
It's not hard to imagine someone another 1,700 years from now accidentally discovering the forgotten city of, say, New York—or Chicago, or Bangkok, swallowed by mud—after a chemical leak at a nearby factory: radioactive liquids drain down through the topsoil, flowing around buried walls and ruins, forming iridescent pools on floors in basements—slow and toxic streams tracing the shapes of old stairways, lighting a path for future excavation and descent. Like giving the earth a radiopharmaceutical, you fire up a ground-scanning machine, trace the pollution underground, and, lo and behold, the dark outlines of buried cities start to glow.
[Images: Dye-tracing cave systems; note that the chemical used is supposedly non-toxic].
In fact, I'm reminded of dye-tracing techniques used for mapping otherwise impenetrable or overly complex cave systems. In James Tabor's wildly uneven 2010 book Blind Descent, for instance, we read about legendary caver Alexander Klimchouk, who set about dye-tracing caves on the Arabika Massif, including Krubera Cave, currently the deepest known cave in the world.
"In 1984 and 1985," Tabor explains, "[Klimchouk] poured fluorescein dye into several caves, including Krubera, high on the Arabika. Traces of that dye later flowed out of springs on the shore of the Black Sea far below. More traces tinged the water 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, miles offshore," indicating genuinely—in fact, record-breakingly—huge dimensions for the overall system of caves.
[Images: Dye-tracing caves].
But even the most remote, fictional possibility that future spelunking archaeologists might someday map lost cities—London, Moscow, Beijing, Rome—by using dye-tracing packs to illuminate that underground world of collapsed halls and buried rooms is extraordinary. Cartographers in mountaineering gear and helmet-mounted floodlights descend into the New York subway system in 5,161 A.D., following luminescent trails of fluorescein dye, crawling, walking, rappelling into the underworld on the trail of shining rivers as subterranean ruins begin to shine.
[Image: "Meelas Yadee" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].
Nettle's newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel in Dubai. It is sonic architecture fiction.
Less a horror film, however, than its predecessor, Nettle's version seems instead to offer a melancholy audio glimpse of a world in decline: the album's family lost in circumstances far too large—and too alienating, too foreign—to comprehend fully, unraveling alone in the hotel's empty rooms and hallways.
[Image: "Fatima's Kitchen Cupboard" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].
El Resplandor's liner notes feature these photographs by Lamya Gargash, depicting extravagantly furnished rooms in afternoon darkness, empty kitchens, halls, and ruined stairways in the UAE.
As the artist herself explains, many of the houses seen here "are recently vacant, whereas others have been deserted for a long time. There were some houses that still had people living in them when I started my project; the families residing there were preparing to move to newer homes." Many more images from the series can be found here.
[Images: (top) "Blue Purple Chair" (2005-2006) and (bottom) "The Staircase" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].
Jace Clayton and Lindsay Cuff of Nettle will be at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 on Friday afternoon, October 28th, to talk about the album, the entirety of which will be streamed throughout the day.
[Image: "Mona Lisa" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].
Stop by if you're in the area, not only to learn more about the concept behind the album—after all, there's something highly compelling about the idea of a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake (perhaps this could be the first soundtrack optioned by Hollywood for a film it later serves to score)—but also about the technical set-up used by the band during studio production and live sets. Nettle's more sonically aggressive earlier work, Build a Fort, Set that On Fire, is also worth a listen in the meantime.
Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design.
On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of architectural spaces—including real buildings, but also film sets, computer game environments, and spatial simulations—in propelling, staging, catalyzing, or otherwise framing narrative storylines. This requires speaking not only to architects, but to novelists, game developers, screenwriters, film set designers, and even Hollywood directors to discuss their own particular requirements for, and relationships to, the built environment—but also to ask, more specifically, how the spaces they design, describe, feature, or build affect the development of narrative.
This is the cultural dimension of the event—the "wonder stories."
On the other hand, Thrilling Wonder Stories has also looked both to science and science fiction as resources of ideas that might play spatial roles in future design projects—where I use the word spatial, not architectural, very deliberately, so as not to limit this to a discussion of buildings. This means bringing in robot makers and biologists, geologists and geneticists, not to ask them about architecture but simply to learn about their work. The point, in other words, is not to extract architectural ideas from their research—as if fully formed building programs could somehow be pulled from a presentation about synthetic organisms—but simply to add to the overall mix of scientific (and science fictional) ideas available for reference in future design conversations.
This is the "thrilling wonder" side of the series.
To date, Liam Young, the event's co-organizer, and I have hosted comics author Warren Ellis, architect Sir Peter Cook of Archigram, game critic Jim Rossignol, TED Fellow and architectural biologist Rachel Armstrong, novelists Will Self and Jeff VanderMeer, spatial provocateurs Ant Farm, designer Matt Webb of BERG, and more than a dozen other figures from the worlds of film, gaming, architecture, literature, engineering, science, interaction design, and more.
[Image: From "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].
This year, we're trying out an ambitious new format. Not only are we teaming up with Popular Science magazine as our media partner and co-organizer—so watch for content on popsci.com in the lead up to and during the event—but we are leading two simultaneous events: one at the Architectural Association in London, the other across the pond at Studio-X NYC.
So, on Friday, October 28th, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3—sponsored by the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, and Popular Science—kicks off in London with a truly phenomenal line-up. It's an all day blow-out, lasting from noon to 10pm, featuring:
VINCENZO NATALI*
Director of Cube, Splice, and forthcoming feature films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson
BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author, commentator, and futurist
CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor—to lead a live taxidermy workshop
DR. RODERICH GROSS AND THE NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield—to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration
GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Duncan Jones's film Moon
ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television
Better yet, Matt Jones of the ultra-talented design studio BERG will join Liam Young to serve as co-host for the day. Here's a map for how to get there; the event is free but space is limited.
[Image: "Glass Weed" from Super-Natural Garden by Simone Ferracina; Ferracina will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].
That same day—Friday, October 28th—over at Studio-X NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 will kick off at 1pm local time, lasting till 4 or 4:30pm. Speaking that day are:
JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s new album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai
[Image: One of many evolutionary robotic research projects by Hod Lipson, featured in this PDF; Lipson will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].
Then, Saturday, October 29th, everything comes to a close with an epic second day—from 2-7pm—at Studio-X NYC, featuring:
MORRIS BENJAMINSON
Bioengineer of in-vitro edible muscle protein and CEO of Zymotech Enterprises
ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics
The events in New York will be moderated by myself, Studio-X NYC co-director Nicola Twilley, and PopSci senior associate editor Ryan Bradley. In both locations, events are free and open to the public; however, if you plan on attending the Studio-X NYC event, please register as limited space will be available. Here's a map.
[Image: The "plastic" extruded by New England's Colletes inaequalis bees; photo by Debbie Chachra].
Finally, if you can't make it in person, consider following Thrilling Wonder Stories on Twitter—and keep your eye out at the end of summer 2012, for the Thrilling Wonder Stories book, published by the Architectural Association.
The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that "can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras," Wired UK explains. "Its operator sees the image in 3D on a screen."
It apparently comes with knobby treads or without.
The sphere is currently "undergoing trials" with the Swedish Defense Forces for use "in airports and other locations in need of surveillance," but the system also has potential applications in urban mapping, remote terrain exploration, and even post-disaster search and rescue. While the GroundBot can only reach speeds a bit more than 6mph—which means it won't be breaking any speed records, and it certainly won't be hard to outrun—the idea that failed criminals of the future might be seen sprinting away from swarms of autonomous black spheres the size of car tires is quite extraordinary.
[Images: The GroundBot system by Rotundus on patrol].
The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera," designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air.
The camera "captures an image at the highest point of flight—when it is hardly moving." It "takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." You can see it at work in this video:
Pfeil explains in detail:
Our camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. Our camera contains an accelerometer which we use to measure launch acceleration. Integration lets us predict rise time to the highest point, where we trigger the exposure. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in our spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.
It's easy enough to imagine such a thing being mass-produced and taken up by the Lomo crowd; but it seems equally likely that such a technology could be put to use aiding military operations in urbanized terrain, with otherwise disoriented squad leaders tossing "robust" optical grenades up above dividing walls and blocked streets to see what lies beyond.
Either way, a throwable camera strong enough to withstand bad weather and strong bounces—and able to store hundreds of images—sounds like an amazing way to start documenting the urban landscape. In fact, the very idea that a "photograph" would thus correspond to a spherical sampling of all the objects and events in a given area adds an intriguing spatial dimension to the act of creating images. It's a kind of reverse-firework: rather than release light into the sky, it steals traces of the light it finds there.
In just a few hours here at Studio-X NYC—an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia's GSAPP—we'll be hosting a live interview with Ilona Gaynor. Gaynor is a London-based concept artist, filmmaker, and multimedia designer, as well as the most recent recipient of the Ridley Scott Associates award, where she currently serves as artist-in-residence.
As Gaynor explains it, her work "largely consists of artificially constructed spaces, systems and atmospheres navigated through fictional scenarios," her intention being "to intensify, fantasize and aestheticize the darker, invisible reaches of political, economical and technological progress. Grounded in rigorous research, consultation and collaboration," she continues, "my aim is to reveal these worlds by exploring the imaginary limits within them both as critique and speculative pleasure."
Her most recent short film, Everything Ends In Chaos, embedded at the start of this post, presents "a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and films that reveal the intricate trajectories of an artificially designed and reverse engineered Black Swan event." A Black Swan, in Gaynor's telling of it, based on the economic work of NassimNicholas Taleb, is the idea that humans "are collectively and individually blind to uncertainty, and therefore often unaware of the impact that singular events can have on [their] lives: economically, historically and scientifically, until after their occurrence." Her film is thus an attempt to "reverse-engineer" such an event, piecing together chaos from order; the film's backstory, which is unfortunately quite hard to detect from the imagery alone, involves an elaborate kidnapping plot, stolen jewels force-fed to doves (which then escape from their cage and fly away), and an actuarial committee in charge of insuring against this event.
In another work, nature—that is, non-human lifeforms, especially plants—has become so expensive and, thus, so out of reach for everyday workers—in Gaynor's future, for example, a single Ficus tree costs £450,000—that indulging in any interaction with the natural world becomes an experience of "unapologetic decadence." That film, 120 Seconds of Future, is embedded below:
Gaynor kicks things off at 7pm tonight—Wednesday, 12 October—to be followed by an open Q&A. We'll be at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610. Here's a map.
Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP, if possible, to studioxnyc at gmail dot com—but I hope to see some of you there!
[Image: The Blue Angels create their own cloud systems over the San Francisco Bay; view larger].
My week in San Francisco, now at an end, coincided with Fleet Week—and, thus, the arrival of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's "Flight Demonstration Squad." While the often overwhelming noise of the Blue Angels—rattling whole buildings at a time and setting off car alarms—is extremely polarizing, both acoustically and politically, I continued to have incredibly interesting, albeit very brief, conversations about them, extending beyond mere love or hate.
1)Performance Physics
After a friend of mine drove into town for a meeting, he described to me how the individual planes—high-speed military jets flying often disconcertingly low over the city in geometrically complex configurations—would disappear behind one of San Francisco's many hills... only to pop out behind a different hill altogether, visibly out of synch with the Doppler'd roar of its passage (which seemed to echo hilltop to hilltop across the Bay).
But then another identical jet—or was it the same?—would appear behind a different hill, or it would come circling up from another direction entirely, and it began to feel, my friend explained, as if he had inadvertently driven into the middle of a kind of quantum event, with the same—or was it?—airplane appearing and disappearing, over and over again, reappearing and swooping back from different angles, all the while mis-timed with its own acoustic side-effects.
It was, we might say, not performance art but performance physics: an immersive, urban-scale demonstration of quantum dislocation, one object—or multiple?—and multiple objects—or just one?—constantly out of self-synch in a single setting. It was not the military-industry complex but airborne physics: the skies of San Francisco temporarily modeling an inter-dimensional event.
2)Sky Forensics
During the two-day "blogging workshop" that I led this past weekend at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the participants—artist Alex Shepard—noted that the passage of the Blue Angels had been setting off car alarms all over the city. But, he added, the locations of the car alarms always—of course—coincided with the physical passage of the airplanes, following around right behind them; so, he suggested, you could actually reconstruct the aerial trajectories of the planes through entirely indirect means, using nothing but AAA data and SFPD noise complaints.
These street-level data, collated with enough ambition and accuracy, could thus be seen as a kind of fossil record for the Blue Angels' weekend performance: a distributed motion-capture device parked throughout the peninsular city. The planes, in other words, left more traces than just artificial clouds: they mapped their own passage through car alarms.
In twenty years' time, then, forensic historians could reconstruct the skies of Fleet Week 2011 using nothing but data from parked cars.
3)Literary Climatology
Because we met up for a blogging workshop, the students at the SFAI and I began to talk about other media for literary self-expression—beyond paper and digital screens—and we briefly got onto the subject of skywriting. A Geico ad had been spotted earlier in the day, one of them pointed out, drifting from the back of a skywriting plane, as if in competition with the more abstract cloud shapes produced by the Blue Angels (who, seemingly seduced by San Francisco, took to drawing hearts in the sky).
That led us to the subject of J.G. Ballard's short story, "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," in which a small Pacific island—if I remember the story correctly—serves as the setting of a peculiar cultural contest: the advanced cultivation of artificial clouds, using kites and small by-planes.
From there, we got onto the premise of Roberto Bolaño's novella Distant Star. There, Bolaño tells the story of Carlos Wieder, a poet who—to quote the Daily Telegraph, as I am ironically on board an airplane right now, flying over central Wyoming, and thus do not have access to my copy of the book—"wears the uniform of the Chilean air force and pilots an old Messerschmitt—with which he writes stirring poetic phrases in the sky. The generals and their wives think these aerial stunts are wonderfully entertaining, but Wieder's professed ambition is to inaugurate a new, populist poetry of "barbarism", which abandons old literatures and flies into the glorious future."
The idea of blogging in the sky through the medium of artificial weather—chemically produced, aerodynamic clouds draping the city in a haze of literary climatology—thus presented at least one more alternative way of looking at the highly polarizing urban presence of the Blue Angels.
[Image: The weird artificial geology of "soil equivalent" landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].
On the way over to the west coast last week, I read Universal Foam: Exploring the Science of Nature's Most Mysterious Substance by Sidney Perkowitz. Amongst references to "applied foam science," "computational foam" studies, and even a "power-producing sonoluminescent foam" that might someday be used to generate electricity for the national grid, there were two ideas for future infrastructure that seem worth repeating here.
1)Foam Roads
While discussing the buffering quality foam can offer as protection against explosions, Perkowitz points out the logical next step in the neutralization of land mines: he writes, roughly 11 years ago, that "a quick-hardening rigid polyurethane foam is being tested at Sandia"—already manufacturers of a successful "decontamination foam"—"for use in nullifying mines on land or in water by buffering soldiers and equipment against their explosive force, or to lay down a safe ribbon for vehicles to travel."
This "safe ribbon" is, of course, a road—a road made entirely of foam, laid down over active land mines so as to protect vehicles against detonation from below. A whole new class of transportation infrastructure arises: unexplodable foam roads fanning out across military landscapes; instant roads-in-a-can, like shaving cream, that you spray over dangerous terrain; even foam bridges spanning rivers and caves.
Whether or not we'll see roads-in-a-can coming soon to a Home Depot or city works department near you, however, I'd be shocked not to see foam-road weapons in a computer game shortly—foamed infrastructure brought to you in a flash as new roads and bridges bubble out and harden over otherwise inaccessible terrain. Post-geologic weaponized foam activities.
2)Foam Geotechnics
Later in the book, Perkowitz refers to "the possibility that foam could extinguish the twenty-year old Percy Coal Mine fire in Pennsylvania," as well as to "the use of an acidic foam to destroy asbestos installed in buildings by simply spraying it on." In both cases, you would fill a closed space with foam, which would thus go to work extinguishing underground fires or chemically dissolving asbestos.
However, this segues directly into a brief exploration of the geotechnical implications of quick-hardening foam. Chemist Paul Kittle, Perkowitz explains, "worked out a way to cover garbage landfills with foam" back in the 1980s. Quoting at length:
A significant portion of a landfill is occupied by plain dirt, which according to EPA guidelines must be piled six inches deep every night to cover that day's trash. Kittle came up with an environmentally benign shaving cream-like foam that would adhere even to steep slopes and would not blow away. The foam stopped rats and bugs, and prevented odors from rising. But unlike dirt, it dissipated after thirty-six hours, no longer taking up room when it was no longer needed under newer trash. For this reason, says Kittle, using his foam could save up to 15 percent of landfill space.
Geotechnical foams are now used in places like the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles, using equipment manufactured by Rusmar Foam; Rusmar offers foams of various durations, from 12 hours to 180 days, and with scents such as Vanilla and Wintergreen. Best of all, their product is called "Soil Equivalent Foam"—it is an earth-surrogate, a replicant geology.
But this leaves Perkowitz with what he calls "an image to relish": Perkowitz closes that section of his book imagining "the huge track vehicle Kittle designed, patiently spreading liquid foam to cover acres of garbage made partly of indestructible foamed plastic peanuts, coffee cups, and McDonald's clamshells." Inside a plastic earth, in other words, we simply find more plastics, in an artificial geology sealed with geotechnical foam. Literally what on earth might future geologists think?
A very large boulder is on its way to Los Angeles, we read in the New York Times this morning: a 340-ton rock on a journey moving "through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns."
The rock is going there for an installation by artist Michael Heizer, called "Levitated Mass," and it was "dynamited out of a hillside" 60 miles from Los Angeles.
[Image: The rock in question; photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].
"The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid," Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times.
In fact, the rock's specific route never relied on one path through that "bewildering thicket," but has been constantly updated and changed; as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Heizer's rock will be displayed, points out, "the State of California is always reviewing the state of its bridges and roads. So a route plan that would have worked a couple of days ago doesn’t work today."
This has the effect of doubling the distance covered: "Door to door," Nagourney writes, "the distance is 60 miles, though the actual drive is going to be closer to 120 miles, as engineers plot a route that can accommodate the huge size of what is known as the Prime Mover, and one that steers clear of low bridges and wires. Any route must have stopover spots to park the rock as it waits for night."
The museum's $10 million boulder-displacement project has, of course, faced some public criticism—but Govan has a response for that: "we are putting more people to work here in L.A. than Obama," he quips. This includes "teams of workers... deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges."
I remember once reading once about the construction of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which required an elaborate ballet of shutting down whole streets and intersections in the middle of the night, when traffic would already be low, to truck massive girders and beams in past the mansard roofs and streetside cafes of a sleeping city. The building was first a distributed network of large, chaperoned objects, taking shape load by load, before it briefly served as a gleaming sign of the architectural future.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, thieves have dismantled and stolen an entire steel bridge near Pittsburgh. "Pennsylvania State Police are looking for a steel bridge worth an estimated $100,000 that was dismantled and taken from a rural area in Lawrence County," we read. "Police said they believe a torch was used to cut apart the bridge, which measured 50 feet by 20 feet, near Covert's Crossing in North Beaver Township."
If you see the bridge—or its parts—moving slowly down a remote Appalachian road somewhere, I'm sure the police would appreciate a heads up.
For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S."
[Image: Inside the Picher, Oklahoma, supergrid, by Clint Langevin and Amy Norris].
The specific site for their project is the Tar Creek Lead and Zinc Mine in Picher, Oklahoma, which long-term BLDGBLOG readers might remember as the town at risk from cave-ins. As the Washington Post reported in 2007, "Trucks traveling along the highway are diverted around Picher for fear that the hollowed-out mines under the town would cause the streets to collapse under the weight of big rigs." The unlucky town was then gutted by a tornado in 2008.
Langevin's and Norris's work highlights the area's surreal, almost Cappadocian landscape: "Dozens of waste rock piles, some up to 13-storeys high," they write, "and contaminated ground and surface water are the legacy of mining operations in the area, which produced a significant portion of the lead used in the World Wars."
The architects specifically propose "a structure that raises the solar energy infrastructure off the ground [and] creates the opportunity to host other activities on the site, as well as to remediate the polluted ground and waterways. The concrete structure, pre-fabricated using waste rock material from the site, is assembled in a modular fashion from a kit of parts that accommodates a variety of programs."
[Image: The "kit of parts"].
"Importantly," the architects add, "the hollow structure also acts as a conduit to carry water, energy, waste—all the infrastructure for human habitation—to all inhabited areas of the site."
The result is a three-tiered plan: the topmost layer is devoted to solar energy development and production: testing the latest solar technology and producing a surplus of energy for the site and its surroundings. This layer is also the starting point for water management on the site. Rainwater is collected as needed and transported through the structure to one of several treatment plants around the radial plan. The middle layer is the place of dwelling and exploration of the site. As the need for space grows, beams are added to create this inhabited layer: the beams act as a pedestrian and cycling circulation system, but also the infrastructure for dwelling and automated transit. Finally, the ground layer becomes a laboratory for bioremediation of the ground and water systems. Passive treatment of both the waste water from the site and of the acid mine drainage is coupled with a connected system of boardwalks to allow inhabitants and visitors to experience both the industrial inheritance of the site and the renewed hope for its future.
It's a bit of a Swiss Army knife—in the sense that it tries to solve everything and have a solution for every possible challenge—with the effect that the architects seem to under-emphasize the titanic supergrid that clearly defines the overall proposal. It's as if the proposal is so large—more landform building than architectural undertaking—that even the architects lose sight of it, focusing instead on individual systems in their description.
[Images: A wanderer above the sea of white cubes gazes at the Picher supergrid].
But inside this continuous and monumental space frame, whole communities could live—the "infrastructure for dwelling" and "pedestrian and cycling circulation system"—surrounded by a toxic geography for which the grid itself serves as both sublime filter and possible remedy.
[Images: More views inside the supergrid; second image is simply a detail from the first (view larger)].
The model for the project is pretty great, and I would love to see it in person: a cavernous grid envelopes the site's artificial topography, wrapping tailings piles and hills of waste rock, whilst treading lightly on ground too thin to hold the weight of architecture.
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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