[Image: A nearly empty banana truck; photo by the author].
I had the pleasure two weeks ago of tagging along on a field trip led by Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, for a seminar she's teaching this fall at Columbia's GSAPP. Called "The Artificial Cryosphere," the class is an extended look at spaces and technologies of artificial refrigeration, from morgues to ice cream plants, from sperm banks to indoor hockey rinks, from spacecraft testing rooms to the transportation needs of organ-donation networks.
The field trip itself started off early at a banana-ripening and fruit distribution warehouse in Queens, extending from there to one of the largest refrigerated food warehouses in the country and ending with a series of visits to semi-automated modified-atmosphere packing lines and other meat-processing facilities, complete with fat-covered chainsaws attached to the ceiling and mandatory hairnets.
Nicola has written up the first part of that trip, describing in detail her class's journey through the architecture of banana ripening. "Nearly two million bananas pass through these ripening rooms," we read on Edible Geography, "on their journey to New York consumers each week—a vital link in the largely invisible, highly specialized architecture of artificial refrigeration that has enabled the banana to become and remain America’s favourite fruit." Much of this is about dissimulation, artificially inducing the fruit-ripening process using "pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador." It is architecture pretending toward a condition of ideal nature.
Further, we learned how boxes of bananas are first designed—with holes in their cardboard boxes—and then stacked—in orderly aisles, leading to wall-sized fans that suck air through the room—so as to maximize ventilation, and that it is more or less an entirely nocturnal operation, with the warehouse only opening at 10pm. In particular, though, it's hard to forget walking into the ethylene-dosing chambers with their massive 20'-doors, like something out of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, promising some strange and vaguely sinister vegetative presence on the other side.
[Image: The Lovecraftian doors of the banana crypt; photo by the author].
In any case, Edible Geography has a much longer write-up, and it's well worth checking out in full.
[Image: The defused Koblenz bomb is lifted to safety].
1) The German city of Koblenz was partially evacuated over the weekend so that two still active WWII-era bombs—including one weighing 1.8 tons—could be defused. The bombs "were discovered when water levels fell because of a prolonged dry spell," the BBC reports. As it happens, "600 tons of old munitions from two world wars [are] discovered every year" in Germany, with this perhaps being one of the few examples of discovery-by-drought.
2) Elsewhere, drought in parts of Europe has become so extreme that Switzerland's ski resorts have no snow. "The autumn has been the driest on record in the country."
3) Over in Texas, meanwhile, a record-setting drought has lent an archaeological air to the region's weather. "The historic drought that has devastated crops and forced millions of Texans in small towns and large cities to abide by mandatory water restrictions," the New York Times explains, "has had at least one benefit: As lake levels have dropped around the state, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades and even centuries are being revealed." Human skulls, tombstones, the bodies of suicide victims, and even "a piece of debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia" have been found in "roughly 200 previously unreported archaeological sites resulting from lowered lake levels." The chairman of a local historical commission quips that “everybody hates the drought, but I needed the drought." "I knew it was there," he adds, referring to a cemetery for freed slaves that has been revealed by the receding waters. The image is remarkable: a whole state of archaeologists, landowners, and historians waiting patiently on the shores of shrinking lakes for some forgotten landscape or artifact to be revealed.
4) Politics by geography: "There are no guard towers, or Checkpoint Charlies, or even walls. But scores of American cities, counties and metropolitan areas are being divided again—splitting apart families, neighbors and, most important, voters with similar interests and needs—as states engage in the once-a-decade process of drawing the lines of new Congressional districts." However, "when urban and metropolitan areas are broken up and combined with rural areas, mayors say, fewer voices are left to vigorously push an urban or metropolitan agenda in Washington." And so cities are underserved by the political process. This latter point is perhaps reminiscent of an earlier discussion here on BLDGBLOG: Minor landscapes and the geography of American political campaigns.
5) "Imagine a lush forest: silent but for the chirping of birds flying through a dense canopy overhead, and damp, aromatic earth underfoot. Now picture a mountain of incinerated trash, 12 million tons of what was once a toxic heap of rotting fish and vegetables, old clothes, broken furniture, diapers and all manner of discarded items." This describes a new project by architect Tadao Ando called the Sea Forest. The Sea Forest "will transform 88 hectares of reclaimed land, a 30-meter deep mound of alternating layers of landfill, into a dense forest of nearly half a million trees" in Tokyo Bay. Ando adds that it is also an experiment in climate-engineering, or weather control as the future of urban design: "not only will [the forest] become a refreshing retreat for stressed out city workers, it will also create a cool ocean breeze to sweep through the capital and cool its sweaty denizens in summer."
[Images: Spreads from Project Japan, courtesy of Taschen].
6) The new book Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist is an incredible document, in both physical and intellectual terms. The design, by Irma Boom, is gorgeous, and the contents—consisting of long, illustrated interviews with such figures as Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange's Tange Lab, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, and many others, scattered amongst historical imagery and present-day site photos—offer a fascinating oral history of the Metabolist movement. As Koolhaas sums it up, Metabolism offered "a manifesto for the total transformation of the country" based on three specific principles. Still quoting Koolhaas:
a) The archipelago has run out of space: mostly mountainous, the surfaces fit for settlement are subdivided in microscopic, centuries old patchworks of ownership b) Earthquakes and tsunamis make all construction precarious; urban concentrations such as Tokyo and Osaka are susceptible to potentially devastating wipeouts [ed. note: cf. today's calls for a "back-up Tokyo"] c) Modern technology and design offer possibilities for transcending Japan's structural weakness, but only if they are mobilized systematically, almost militaristically, searching for solutions in every direction: on the land, on the sea, in the air...
Architecture thus becomes the literal geopolitical extension of the state, constructing new territory—such as floating forests and artificial islands—over which to govern. It's a kind of proactive gerrymandering, we might say: not redesigning the district map, but constructing new districts. In any case, I recommend the book.
7) Cities in the jungle:
a) "Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders." b) "The inventor of the concept of cities with special laws designed to spur the lagging economies of failing states talks about the latest attempts by the Free Cities Institute to found a charter city in Central America." c) "The newest—and nicest—road in Myanmar is, paradoxically, one of the emptiest as well: Only a handful of cars travel along the desolate four-lane highway to nowhere, or so it seems. But in fact, it leads to Naypyitaw, a new city in one of the world's poorest countries, carved out of the jungle and built from scratch by an aging, autocratic leader who then moved the nation's seat of government there, lock, stock and barrel."
[Images: Photos by Soe Than Win/AFP/Getty Images, courtesy of NPR].
8) Quantum geology: "A pair of diamond crystals has been linked by quantum entanglement." This is, as Nature describes it, "a weirdly connected quantum state... [in which] both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating." It's extraordinary to think about the possibility of much larger-scale quantum entanglement, for instance planet-scale mineral deposits vibrating in tune with one another, like the so-called "diamond planet" discovered earlier this year.
9) Galactic GPS: Autonomous spacecraft could someday navigate the universe based on directional information taken from pulsars. "Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that are observable as variable celestial sources of electromagnetic radiation. Their periodic signals have timing stabilities comparable to atomic clocks and provide characteristic temporal signatures that can be used as natural navigation beacons, quite similar to the use of GPS satellites for navigation on Earth."
10) I meant to link this months ago: an office complex in Santa Monica uses trained falcons to ward off other birds. It's called "falconry-based bird abatement." In a weird sort of bird-building cyborg assembly, the falcons are kept "tethered to 10-pound blocks" on the edge of an artificial lake in order "to keep them from flying off and landing in harm's way in the congested area around 26th Street and Olympic Boulevard." The falcons are even "equipped with tiny transmitters" in case "they get disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings of Santa Monica. But they always respond to [the trainer's] call when it's time to take up their positions around the courtyard pond." It gets weirder: "They spend their nights in large perch boxes in the Water Garden's subterranean parking garage." Perhaps all buildings should come with living bird-ornaments...
11) ...or robots. By now, you've no doubt read that "robotic prison wardens" are set "to patrol [a] South Korean prison." According to the BBC, "the machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behavior." What could possibly go wrong?
12) Or we could combine animals and robots in the name of urban safety: "Insect Cyborgs May Become First Responders." According to ScienceDaily, tiny "cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment" could be mounted directly on the backs of insects, and "we could then send these 'bugged' bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go."
13) A former U.S. military base in Iraq has been turned into a surreal new hotel where "guests are greeted by a jumble of concrete blocks, sand bags and barbed wire—the hotel’s front gate." The hotel "relies on hundreds of American military residential trailers, known as CHUs, from the acronym for containerized housing unit. They had once accommodated guards." Now, however, hoteliers have "installed indoor plumbing in some, creating the guest rooms." On the other hand, the New York Times adds, "besides the few upgrades to the trailers, the prison remains unaltered and eerily empty, the wind whistling through the old guard towers." Trailers go for roughly $190 a night.
14) There is a growing incidence of archaeological looting in the U.S. led by meth addicts. According to a recent study, "since meth labs are often found in isolated areas, just like archaeological sites, geographical coincidence may explain the complaints. Meth addicts are known for repetitive behavior and may find digging at sites soothing." This would make an interesting premise for a film: desperate meth heads excavating unmarked burial mounds in the middle of the night, loading up their trucks under the moon.
15) Finally, for now, were the first human architects actually Neanderthals? "Neandertals are stumping for bragging rights as the first builders of mammoth-bone structures, an accomplishment usually attributed to Stone Age people. Humanity’s extinct cousins constructed a large, ring-shaped enclosure out of 116 mammoth bones and tusks at least 44,000 years ago in West Asia," ScienceNews reports. "The bone edifice, which encircles a 40-square-meter area in which mammoths and other animals were butchered, cooked and eaten, served either to keep out cold winds or as a base for a wooden building." Elsewhere: Who was the Archigram of mammoth bones?
[Image: Window by Susanna Battin, courtesy of the artist].
If you're out driving in Los Angeles this coming Friday, December 2, consider using the second lane from the left, heading south on I-15 immediately after the 91 Freeway interchange and before the East Ontario exit: artist Susanna Battin's new work, Window, will be on display on a digital billboard overlooking the highway, and will be best viewed from that lane. There, "Los Angeles freeway commuters [will] briefly witness the billboard transform into a window," Battin explains, in "an attempt to repair the visually severed mountain range" beyond. Battin's elevated digital image also accounts for "thirteen of San Bernardino’s varying smog conditions," so the overlap will hopefully work by blending in with the local weather.
Meanwhile, I'm curious if you could achieve something vaguely similar, but without the digital billboard—something like the optical effects of Felice Varini, but applied at a particular curve in the freeway, using different overlapping space frames partially installed on different rooftops, or various painted outlines distributed across other billboards and facades. They would all lock together for a brief and fleeting instant, from one very specific angle, perhaps even too fast to notice, and thus "repair" the surrounding landscape. I suppose, in some mythical world where insurance liability is not an issue, Felice Varini, Susanna Battin, and Caltrans could team up to make the California highway system itself into a massive and perceptually instantaneous optical installation, visible in full effect only at certain exact velocities and angles.
In any case, if you see the installation, and don't risk crashing your car, consider taking a picture and sending it in; I'd love to see if this works.
The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to animals and vegetation.
"Left over munitions and landmines from the wars in the early 1990s still litter the countryside in Bosnia," Van Ort explains.
According to BHMAC (the Mine Action Committee for Bosnia and Herzegovina), just over 3.5% of the land area of the country is still contaminated by landmines. Many of the deminers in the field believe roughly 10% of the country can still be deemed a landmine area. They also feel that nowhere in the countryside is safe, as they may clear one area but a torrential downpour may unearth landmines upstream or upriver; consequently, these unearthed landmines find their way into vicinities that were deemed safe weeks, months or even years ago.
While visiting the landscapes himself, Van Ort adds, "some people told me not to walk into nature at all."
The photographs seen here juxtapose shots of natural landscapes considered safe—that is, free of landmines—with portraits of the mines once buried there.
"The viewers of these photographs," Van Ort suggests, "should ask themselves: which of these landscapes would they feel comfortable walking into?"
The project closes with a particularly dark observation: "I see the idea of hand-placed landmines protecting the natural setting and allowing the environment to regenerate itself as an ironic twist on our inability to conserve and see into the future."
Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler "will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks" next month—starting 2 December 2011—at the FRAC Center in France. The result, they hope, will be a "3.5 meter wide structure."
According to the architects, this will serve as an experimental test-run for the construction of a hypothetical future megastructure—presumably requiring full-scale, autonomous, GPS-stabilized helicopters. However, I'd think that even a small insectile swarm of robot bricklayers piecing together a new low-rise condominium somewhere—its walls slowly materializing out of a cloud of rotors and drones—would be just as compelling.
I've been going through a lot of old files and papers recently, and I thus found a short piece I clipped from New Scientist five years ago. I absolutely love stories like this, and I swoon a little bit when I read them; it turns out that "plants growing over old sites of human habitation have a different chemistry from their neighbors, and these differences can reveal the location of buried ruins."
The brief article goes on to tell the story of two archaeologists, who, in collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: "Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads."
The idea that your garden could be more like an indicator landscape for lost archaeological sites—that, below the flowers, informing their very chemistry, perhaps even subtly altering their shapes and colors, are the traces of abandoned architecture—is absolutely unbelievable.
[Images: More extraordinary photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt].
So why not develop a new type of flower in some gene lab somewhere, a designed species that reacts spectacularly to the elevated presence of nitrogen-15 from ruined settlements? Ruin Flowers® by Monsanto acting as deserted medieval village detection-landscapes, as thale cress does for mines.
You plant these flowers or trees or vineyards—future archaeological wine—and you wait three seasons for the traces to develop. Now imagine a modified tree that can only grow directly above ruined houses. Imagine an entire forest of these trees, curling and knurled to form floorplans, shaping out streets and alleyways, rooms instead of orchards and halls instead of groves. Now imagine the city beneath that forest becoming visible as the woods slowly spread, articulating whole lost neighborhoods over time.
Genetically-modified plantlife used as non-invasive archaeological research tools would, at the very least, add a strange practicality to summer gardening activities, in the process turning whole surface landscapes into an unexpected new kind of data visualization program.
It's the earth's surface as browser for what waits undetected below.
[Image: A U.S. Predator drone, photographed by Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia].
The Send Equipment for National Defense Act, sponsored by Texas Representative Ted Poe, would "require that 10 percent of certain equipment returned from Iraq—like Humvees, night-vision equipment and unmanned aerial surveillance craft—be made available to state and local agencies for border-security operations."
Poe denies that this would militarize the border, as reported by the New York Times; but John Cook, mayor of the border city of El Paso, strongly disagrees, suggesting that only "a whole lot of ignorance" could inspire the plan. Cook points out that "moving war zone equipment to the border would send the wrong signal to Mexico and potentially damage the robust symbiotic economic relationship between the two countries."
This comes at the same time that Miller-McCune warns that "armed police drones"—or weaponized UAVs—might soon be flying through a sky near you. While Miller-McCune focuses specifically on the sheriff of Montgomery County, Texas, it's worth pointing out that so-called Leptron Avengers—"battery-operated helicopters designed to take high-resolution video and photos and that can be equipped with night-vision cameras or thermal-imaging equipment"—have also been requested by the Texas city of Arlington, perhaps making Texas—alongside such places as Syria, North Korea, and China—the go-to site today for witnessing civilian adaptations of military surveillance technology.
The current version of this equipment, called the ShadowHawk, "won’t carry weapons," we're told, but "the drone’s manufacturer, Vanguard Defense Industries, boasts that it’s strong enough to carry a shotgun or even a grenade launcher." The firm itself adds that the "ShadowHawk can maintain aerial surveillance of an area (i.e. house, vehicle, person, etc.) at 700 feet without being heard or seen unlike full sized aircraft. Imagine the advantage provided to an entry team in the following scenarios: high risk warrant, hostage rescue, domestic violence, etc."
Mechanized urban surveillance is hardly news. Indeed, the currently existing network of CCTV cameras already installed in cities all over the world is equally "unmanned," in an exactly comparable sense; they are fixed-point drones. One could thus make an argument that the ShadowHawk is simply a camera with wings: you have a camera outside CVS or Tesco, ergo you have a camera in the sky above the city. It's easy to see how "mission creep," as Miller-McCune calls it, could occur.
Or compare this, for instance, to plans aflight in the UK, where police "are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the 'routine' monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance." This will take the form of unmanned airships hovering over the English capital, as if simulating the barrage balloons of World War II.
[Image: Barrage balloons above London, courtesy of Wikipedia].
The drones "are programmed to take off and land on their own, stay airborne for up to 15 hours and reach heights of 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground," and they will be launched "in time for the 2012 Olympics." (An Afghanistan-based version of this program is described as follows: "This fall, there’ll be a new supercomputer in Afghanistan. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.")
Briefly, I'm reminded of the opening scene from Christopher Dickey's book Securing the City, in which a helicopter that falls somewhere between aerial war machine and advanced Hollywood film equipment is breathlessly unveiled: "The winter air is cold and the light hard-edged as the unmarked New York City Police Department helicopter meanders through the winds above the five boroughs," we read.
It is a state-of-the-art crime-fighting, terror-busting, order-keeping techno toy, with its enormous lens that can magnify any scene on the streets almost one thousand times, then double that digitally; that can watch a crime in progress from miles away, can look in windows, can sense the body heat of people on rooftops or running along sidewalks, can track beepers slipped under cars, can do so very many things that the man in the helmet watching the screens and moving the images with the joystick in his lap, NYPD Detective David Zschau, is often a little bit at a loss for words. "It really is an amazing tool," he keeps saying.
This technology—whose unlimited vision seems so mind-boggling as to cause aphasia in those who encounter it—should inspire as much moral and political discomfort as an unmanned version of the same helicopter; in other words, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this very kind of spy equipment already exists and has already been deployed. That is, the unnerving implication that we are being watched from above by undetectable robots should not let us forget that being watched from above by human pilots is just as invasive.
In any case, the ShadowHawk, described above, can also be put to use in fire and rescue situations, able to track down "heat sources and cut through the smoke and haze with it’s Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) or SWIR"—short wave infrared—cameras. Indeed, the company points out that "the vast capabilities of the ShadowHawk are ideal for mitigating and handling disasters whether natural or manmade. From locating victims, serving as an airborne communications relay point or conducting damage assessment, the ShadowHawk will significantly expand response capabilities." In light of this, it is foolish to reject, universally and in principle, the very idea of unmanned systems operating in non-military environments; but it's equally foolish to welcome them without a simultaneous demand for strong regulation and oversight.
To be honest, though, it seems only a matter of time before armed police drones are a reality in the United States, and it would thus be great to see a long discussion of the legality—or, at the very least, the societal implications—of such equipment, before we are faced with a scenario none of us adequately understand. For instance, is there a law course somewhere examining the rights and implications of autonomous urban police technologies? Combine this with a look at repurposed military hardware used in patrolling national borders, and the syllabus from such a course would be well worth exploring in detail.
(In addition to the London example, cited above, another rebuke to the moral self-congratulation of the Miller-McCune piece comes from Northern Ireland, where the use of unmanned aerial systems in urban policing might soon take the form of "mini drones" used "to combat crime and the dissident republican threat"—in other words, autonomous police drones are by no means limited to cities in the United States).
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.
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.
[Image: A nearly empty banana truck; photo by the author].
[Image: The Lovecraftian doors of the banana crypt; photo by the author].
[Image: The defused Koblenz bomb is lifted to safety].
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[Images: From 
[Image: From "
[Image: From "
[Images: Botanical photogravures by 
[Images: More extraordinary photogravures by 
[Image: 
[Image: A U.S. Predator drone, photographed by Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via 
[Image: The 
[Image: Barrage balloons above London, courtesy of 
[Images: From an October 2009 presentation by Major General Blair Hansen to the 
[Image: Men of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by 
[Image: Lava Floe, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by 
[Images: (top to bottom) Flower of the Mountain, House Of Cards V, and Come Out (1966) II, all by 
[Images: (top) Nowhere To Run, South Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010); (bottom) Taking Tiger Mountain, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011), by 
[Image: Blue Mask, Lake Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010) by 
[Image: Photo by 
[Image: "L.A. Ice" by Victor Hadjikyriacou, produced for Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of last year's 
[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 
[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 
