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  [Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries].
In 1886, Los Angeles moved the Fort Moore High School. "A contractor who claimed he could accomplish the task hoisted the building onto scaffolding and, using rollers, horses, and human labor, slowly moved the schoolhouse toward its new location," KCET explains. "After work was underway, the contractor decided that the task was impossible after all. The building remained where his crew left it"—unfortunately, not marooned on the stilts seen here, like some steampunk Walking City, but on its new ground-level site blocks away. Once lowered back to earth, it was "repurposed as a schoolhouse for younger students while a new, grander high school was built atop Fort Moore Hill."
It's as if, in a dreamtime state before any of us can remember, buildings once moved around Los Angeles, nomadic titans settling down only with the end of prehistory. Perhaps they will wake up and walk again, criss-crossing valleys, crawling over hills, rearranging roadways around themselves.
Eventually, most of Fort Moore Hill itself was physically removed from the city. "In 1949, construction crews transported away most of the hill by the truckload," we read, turning it into one of the " lost hills of downtown Los Angeles." If only the hill had disappeared, however, leaving all the buildings built upon it stranded on wooden scaffolds in the sunlight, a tablecloth trick in architectural form.
A short video has been released documenting the brick swarm project mentioned here last month, in which Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler deploy semi-autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure of foam bricks. However, it's as if the architects underestimate the interest of their own work, fast-forwarding through the bulk of the assembly process as if no one would want to watch such a thing (or perhaps their robots were less graceful than originally hoped). Either way, check out the results, embedded above.
(Thanks to phenrydelphia for the tip!)
 [Image: Downtown Reno on a Saturday night with people queuing up to climb the BaseCamp wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].
As part of an overall strategy to rebrand itself not as a city of gambling and slot machines—not another Las Vegas—but as more of a gateway to outdoor sports and adventure tourism—a kind of second Boulder or new Moab—Reno, Nevada, now houses the world's largest climbing wall, called BaseCamp, attached to the side of an old hotel.
 [Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].
BaseCamp is "a 164-foot climbing wall, 40 feet taller than the previous world’s highest in the Netherlands," according to DPM Climbing. "The bouldering area will also be world-class with 2900 square feet of overhanging bouldering surface."
You can see a few pictures of those artificial boulders over at DPM.
 [Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Fascinatingly, though, the same company who designed and manufactured this installation—a firm called Entre Prises—also makes artificial caves.
One such cave, in particular, created for and donated to the British Caving Association, is currently being used "to promote caving at shows and events around the country. It is now housed in its own convenient trailer and is available for use by Member Clubs and organizations."
 [Image: The British Caving Association's artificial cave, designed by Entre Prises; photo by David Cooke].
These replicant geological forms are modular, easily assembled, and come in indoor and outdoor varieties. Indoor artificial caves, we read, "are usually made from polyester resin and glass fibre as spraying concrete indoors is often not very practicable. Indoor caves provide the experience of caving without some of the discomforts of natural or outdoor caves: the air temperature can be relatively easily controlled, in most cases specialist clothing is not required [and] the passage walls are not very thick so more cave passage can be designed to go into a small area."
Further, maintaining the exclamation point from the original text: "The modular nature of the Speleo System makes it possible to create any cave type and can be modified in minutes by simply unbolting and rotating a section! This means you can have hundreds of possible caving challenges and configurations for the price of one."
It would be interesting to live in a city, at least for a few weeks, ruled by an insane urban zoning board who require all new buildings—both residential and commercial—to include elaborate artificial caves. Not elevator shafts or emergency fire exits or public playgrounds: huge fake caves torquing around and coiling through the metropolis. Caves that can be joined across property lines; caves that snake underneath and around buildings; caves that arch across corporate business lobbies in fern-like sprays of connected chambers. Plug-in caves that tour the city in the back of delivery trucks, waiting to be bolted onto existing networks elsewhere. From Instant City to Instant Cave. Elevator-car caves that arrive on your floor when you need them. Caves on hovercrafts and helicopters, detached from the very earth they attempt to represent.
This brings to mind the work of Carsten Höller, implying a project someday in which the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern could be transformed into the world's largest artificial cave system, or perhaps even a future speleo-superpark in a place like Dubai, where literally acres of tunnels sprawl across the landscape, inside and outside, aboveground and below ground, in unpredictably claustrophobic rearrangeable prefab whorls.
The "outdoor" varieties, meanwhile, are actually able "to be buried within a hillside"; however, they "must be able to withstand the bearing pressure of any overlying material, eg. soil or snow. This is usually addressed by making the caving structures in sprayed concrete that has been specifically engineered to withstand the loads. Alternatively the cave passages can be constructed in polyester resin and glass fibre but then they have to be within a structural 'box' if soil pressure is to be applied."
In any case, here are some of the cave modules offered by Entre Prises, a kind of cave catalog called the Speleo System—though it's worth noting, as well, that "To add interest within passages and chambers, cave paintings and fossils can be added. This allows for user interest to be maintained, creating an educational experience."
 [Image: The Speleo System by Entre Prises].
As it happens, Entre Prises is also in the field of ice architecture. That is, they design and build large, artificially maintained ice-climbing walls.
These " artificial ice climbing structures... support natural ice where the air temperature is below freezing point." However, "permanent indoor structures," given "a temperature controlled environment," can also be created. These are described as "self generating real ice structures that utilize a liquid nitrogen refrigeration system."
 [Images: An artificial ice structure by Entre Prises for the Winter X Games].
Amongst many things, what interests me here is the idea that niche sports enthusiasts—specifically cavers and climbers—have discovered and, perhaps more importantly, financially support a unique type of architecture and the construction techniques required for assembling it that, in an everyday urban context, would appear quite eccentric, if not even avant-garde.
Replicant geological formations in the form of modular, aboveground caves and artificially frozen concrete towers only make architectural and financial sense when coupled with the needs of particular recreational activities. These recreational activities are more like spatial incubators, both inspiring and demanding new, historically unexpected architectural forms.
So we might say that, while architects are busy trying to reimagine traditional building typologies and architectural programs—such as the Library, the Opera House, the Airport, the Private House—these sorts of formally original, though sometimes aesthetically kitsch, designs that we are examining here come not from an architecture firm at all, or from a particular school or department, but from a recreational sports firm pioneering brand new spatial environments.
As such, it would be fascinating to see Entre Prises lead a one-off design studio somewhere, making artificial caves a respectable design typology for students to admit they're interested in, while simultaneously pushing sports designers to see their work in more architectural terms and prodding architects to see niche athletes as something of an overlooked future clientele.
 [Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].
In the novel Foucault's Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People "walk by" this house in Paris, we read, but "they don't know the truth. That the house is a fake. It's a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld..."
 [Image: The door to the underworld; photo by BLDGBLOG].
Two days ago, Nicola Twilley and I went on an early evening expedition over to visit the house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, with its blacked out windows and its unresponsive front door.
This "house" is actually "the world's only Greek Revival subway ventilator." It is also a disguised emergency exit for the New York City subway.
 [Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].
According to a blog called the Willowtown Association, "the ventilator was a private brownstone dating from 1847. The substation was built in 1908 in conjunction with the start of subway service to Brooklyn. As reported in the BKLYN magazine article, the building's 'cavernous interior once housed a battery of electrical devices that converted alternating current to the 600-volt direct current needed to power the IRT.'"
 [Image: A view through the front door of 58 Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].
It is New York's more interesting version of 23/24 Leinster Gardens in London. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote last year, "the exit disguised as a brownstone leads to a grimy-lit set of metal stairs that ascend past utility boxes and ventilation shafts into a windowless room with a door. If you opened the door, you would find yourself on a stoop, which is just part of the façade."
 [Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG].
You'll notice on Google Maps that the 4/5 subway line passes directly beneath the house, which brings to mind an old post here on BLDGBLOG in which we looked at the possibility that repurposed subway cars could be used someday as extra, rentable basement space—that is, "temporary basements in the form of repurposed subway cars," with the effect that "each private residence thus becomes something like a subway station, with direct access, behind a locked door, to the subterranean infrastructure of the city far below." Then, for a substantial fee—as much as $15,000 a month—you can rent a radically redesigned subway car, complete with closets, shelves, and in-floor storage cubes. The whole thing is parked beneath your house and braked in place; it has electricity and climate control, perhaps even WiFi. You can store summer clothes, golf equipment, tool boxes, children's toys, and winter ski gear.
When you no longer need it, or can't pay your bills, you simply take everything out of it and the subway car is returned to the local depot.
A veritable labyrinth of moving rooms soon takes shape beneath the city. Perhaps Joralemon Street is where this unlikely business model could be first tried out...
In any case, Nicola and I walked over to see the house for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the disguised-entrance-to-the-underworld is undoubtedly one of the coolest building programs imaginable, and would make an amazing premise for an intensive design studio; but also because the surface vent structures through which underground currents of air are controlled have always fascinated me.
These vents appear throughout New York City, as it happens—although Joralemon, I believe, is the only fake house—serving as surface articulations of the larger buried networks to which they are connected.
  [Image: Two views of the tunnel vent on Governors Island; photos by BLDGBLOG].
The Battery Tunnel has a particularly noticeable vent, pictured above, and the Holland Tunnel also vents out near my place of work.
 [Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].
As historian David Gissen writes in his excellent book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, New York's ventilation control structures are "strange buildings" that have "collapsed" the difference between architecture and civil engineering: The Holland Tunnel spanned an enormous 8,500 feet. At each end, engineers designed ten-story ventilation towers that would push air through tunnels above the cars, drawing the vehicle exhaust upward, where it would be blown back through the tops of the towers and over industrial areas of the city. The exhaust towers provided a strange new building type in the city—a looming blank tower that oscillated between a work of engineering and architecture. As further described in this PDF, for instance, Holland Tunnel has a total of four ventilation structures: "The four ventilation buildings (two in New Jersey and two in New York) house a total of 84 fans, of which 42 are blower units, and 42 are exhaust units. They are capable, at full speed, of completely changing the tunnel air every 90 seconds."
 [Image: The Holland Tunnel Land Ventilation Building, courtesy of Wikipedia].
Several years ago a friend of ours remarked that she didn't like staying in hotels near Columbus Circle here in New York because that's the neighborhood, she said, where all the subways vent to—a statement that appears to be nothing more than an urban legend, but that nonetheless sparked off a long-term interest for me in finding where the underground weather systems of New York City are vented to the outside. Imagine an entire city district dedicated to nothing but ventilating the underworld!
 [Image: The house on Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].
This is a topic I will no doubt return to at some point soon—but, for now, if you want to see a disguised entrance to the 4/5 line, walk down Joralemon Street toward the river and keep your eyes peeled soon after the street turns to cobblestones.
(The house on Joralemon Street first discovered via Curbed).
 [Image: An otherwise unrelated image of the unmanned Draganflyer X8 system, courtesy of Draganfly].
A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the "small unmanned aviation system industry"—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.
Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that "has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes," and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.
Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city land archives, how soon will drones become a state tool for regional landscape management?
  [Images: Might semi-autonomous systems such as this someday track residential property lines? Images courtesy of Draganfly].
"Imagine your local planning officer having access to your back garden at a moment's notice!" sUAS writes with alarm. "With the pullback from Iraq and other spots under way, this scenario is much easier to imagine. Perhaps it's already happening."
(Thanks to Ruth Lyons for the Achill Henge link).
 [Image: Assembling the 7-mile rainbow one ring at a time, by Ben Masterton-Smith].
Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben's diploma project, part of which proposed a farcical realization of a 7-mile rainbow reportedly seen on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's birth.
  [Image: Assembling the rainbow; images by Ben Masterton-Smith].
Truckloads of vinyl are delivered to the capital city; teams of "volunteers" pump vast amounts of air into the unfolding structures—the imperial inflatable as architectural type; and, lo, the titanic pink and purple form ascends to its nostalgic place in the public firmament, assembled ring by ring across the sky.
 [Image: The glorious 7-mile rainbow takes form].
While I have cherry-picked only one aspect of Ben's overall North Korean research project, and thus this might seem like a bit of a one-note flute, I have to say that the absurdly over-the-top scale of the proposal actually seems spot-on for an architectural critique of Kim Jong-il's surreal stage-managing of North Korean life.
In many ways, this spatial realization of the state's own ridiculous mythology serves as a sadly necessary—because totally delirious—over-compensation for the otherwise monumentally vacuous cityscapes of North Korean urbanism, as if the grotesque political spectacle of a pink rainbow soaring seven miles over the city might retroactively justify that city's empty stagecraft.
  [Images: Rainbow diagrams by Ben Masterton-Smith].
In the annals of dictatorial natural history—where, apparently, " even nature is mourning" the death of Kim Jong-il—the tongue-in-cheek architectural manifestation of an otherwise impossible worldly phenomena acts not as celebration but as spatial parody. It is sarcasm, we might say, given architectural form.
 [Image: The rainbow under construction; image by Ben Masterton-Smith].
In any case, a few more images from the project are available on Ben's Flickr page.
 [Image: From the Morpholio app].
A few of my colleagues at Columbia have just released a free portfolio app called Morpholio, with the aim of creating "a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture."
As such, the app aims to be "both a utility and a community"—part social network, part alternative portfolio. "Capable of communicating with multiple devices," the accompanying press release says, Morpholio "organizes image collections in a comprehensible and accessible format that makes sharing and presenting work seamless, and infinitely flexible."
     [Images: From the Morpholio app].
As the app's co-creators explain it, "re-imagining the portfolio" like this in the form of interactive digital media was inspired by asking: "what would happen if you could merge processes of presentation, critique and collaboration into a single elastic platform?"
The app is optimized for iPad—so I haven't been able to test it out—but you can download it for free and give it a spin.
 [Image: The erstwhile basement hibernator, photographed by Brendan Kuty/Patch.com, via Gothamist].
I'm a sucker for tales of the after-market animal reuse of domestic architectural structures—such as wildcats taking over foreclosed California suburbs, bees colonizing the internal walls of a single-family house until honey drips from the electrical outlets, or the strangely elaborate saga of a pack of coyotes living in a burned-out home in Glendale—so I can't resist this story, in which a man from the cable company descends into a basement in Hopatcong, New Jersey, only to find that a black bear had taken up residence there and had apparently been living in the basement for weeks.
According to the police, the bear had even "fashioned a den of his own in the basement, bringing in twigs and leaves, in anticipation of a winter-long stay." The architecturally inclined bear—building a more comfortable bed for himself—was getting ready to hibernate.
(Thanks, Nicky!)
 [Image: The museum inserted underground, by Brandon Mosley].
The town of Picher, Oklahoma, offers a range of spatial conditions that support speculative design projects.
On the most basic level, the town is " at risk of cave-ins" due to the "abandoned mines beneath the city"; this means that "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."
Further, the now-defunct lead mines generated so much waste that the town is now surrounded by massive artificial mountain ranges of carcinogenic material called "chat," as the creation of voids beneath the streets generated surreal landforms on the city's edge. Third, a great deal of the town was destroyed in a tornado in 2008—and that's all in addition to the fact that the town is under voluntary buy-out for the U.S. government, as it is considered too dangerous to live there.
 [Images: Photos of Picher's artificial landforms, courtesy of the USGS].
In any case, Brandon Mosley, a recent graduate from Louisiana Tech University, explored some possible future architectures for the town of Picher.
Mosley specifically proposes a kind of museum of abandoned mines, inserted directly into one of the old entry shafts.
  [Images: A museum of mines in Picher, Oklahoma, by Brandon Mosley].
The local history of the region can thus be physically re-experienced, as well as visually represented, with museum visitors descending into the old mineworks along a spiraling ramp that has been inserted into the earth.
     [Images: Sections through the museum, by Brandon Mosley].
It functions like a giant periscope in reverse, peering down into the planet, as the ramp leads visitors into the darkness of an open cavern where, standing atop a glass floor, they can gaze out into the artificially generated terrestrial void that surrounds them.
 [Image: Inside the "cavern observation room," by Brandon Mosley].
There is even a camera obscura there, for projecting images of Picher's current, semi-ruined state on the walls of the underground space, powerfully placing blame on these subterranean excavations for serving as the engine of the town's ill health and eventual demise. This is the landscape your creation destroyed, the project would seem to say.
As an idea for spatially explaining to visitors a region's economic and environmental history, this is a powerful and intriguing idea; and, as an architectural form—a more interesting version of the so-called groundscraper in Mexico City that's been making the rounds online recently—Mosley's project has much to recommend it. A museum of the earth, drilled into the earth.
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Tar Creek Supergrid).
 [Image: Pitching a tent].
New Yorkers, be sure to stop by Studio-X NYC on Saturday, December 10th, at 6:30pm, to catch architect Sam Jacob, from Fashion Architecture Taste and Strange Harvest, for a free drawing workshop. Called An Evening of Psychometric Drawing Experiments, Architectural Non Sequiturs, and Free Association, this latest edition of Studio-X's Night School series "will explore the potential of drawing to generate and represent the spatially impossible, using techniques derived from police artists, psychiatrists, and parlor games." No drawing skills are required, but please bring your own pens, pencils, and sketchbooks, if you have specific needs or preferences (only minimal drawing instruments will be provided).
In an interview with Jacob, published in The BLDGBLOG Book, I asked him about the role of supposedly non-architectural ideas, from literature and myth to NASA and the earth sciences, in helping to inspire new forms of architectural design and spatial thinking. He replied: I think, if you say that these things that aren’t quite architecture actually are architecture, then you start to think: Well, how come architects aren’t involved in designing them? How come they don’t call up an architect when they need to build a massive gas pipeline all the way from Wales to central England? There are so many architectural moments that could happen within a project like that. Well, it’s partly because architects, on the whole, don’t want to get involved in that kind of stuff—but it’s also because it’s not perceived as something that you would need an architect for. I suppose you could say: if all of that stuff is architectural, then, as an architect, you should get involved in it, and you should argue why it’s relevant for an architect to be involved. That would mean, from a business point of view, expanding your possible client base so that you could work for all kinds of strange organizations. I suppose that’s not unusual, either—the Eameses were working for the U.S. military and Basil Spence worked in the second World War designing decoy oil refineries so that the Germans would bomb these bits of cardboard rather than the real things.
But I’m also interested in expanding the idea of architecture in terms of thinking about what the term means in a more general way. For instance, working with someone from an advertising background, or working with an artist, or a writer—that gives you an ability to look beyond the confines of what is normally considered architectural. With those sorts of projects you’re not building a building, you’re kind of making a scenario—which, if you think about it in the right way, at the right time of night, after the right amount of wine, is architecture. These are often temporary projects which hijack a moment that already exists, and turn it into a moment where something else could happen. Because, fortunately, architecture is not just about building stuff. You can have a pretty good career as someone involved in architecture, even as an architect, without ever building anything. If, as an architect, you sit there waiting for stuff to happen—it’s inevitable that you’re going to reproduce the status quo. I think that, in whatever way, architects can make stuff happen, whether it’s to do with ideas or to do with buildings.
Once you start to recognize these things as significant moments in the life of a city, or in someone’s experience of the city, then they offer up architectural scenarios. You can check out the rest of the interview in The BLDGBLOG Book, of course, but you can also come by Studio-X NYC on Saturday night to talk to Sam Jacob in person. If you can, please confirm your attendance on Facebook—either way, we hope to see you there!
 [Image: Untitled, Diana Balmori (2010), via Architect's Newspaper].
On Thursday, December 8, at 6:30pm, landscape architect Diana Balmori will join architect Joel Sanders for a lively conversation hosted by the Museum of the City of New York, addressing what they call Urban by Nature: Healing the Landscape/Architecture Divide in NYC. From the event description: Nowhere is the divide between nature and culture, country and city, seemingly more stark than in New York City, where concrete, glass, and steel long ago tamped down the native flora and fauna of Manhattan. How can architecture and landscape architecture, themselves the product of the nature/culture divide, help mend this physical and philosophical rift? Balmori and Sanders recently co-edited the book Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. There, in his introductory essay, Sanders writes that it is "imperative" today for "design professionals—architects and landscape architects—to join forces to create integrated designs to address ecological issues." However, he mourns, "longstanding disciplinary divisions frustrate this crucial endeavor." In part, Sanders looks back to the very idea of wilderness—that is, a pristine world separate from human activity—as a limit to discovering these "integrated" practices. In his words, "the idea of wilderness is so engrained in the American conscience—through literature, philosophy, and even notions of gender and sexuality—that it has effectively shaped the design approaches and even codes of professional conduct that in many ways still define the relationship between architecture and landscape practice."
So how can this divide be overcome? What specific projects could we propose in order to demonstrate the "integrated designs" whose absence Sanders highlights? And if the remedy is not a design project at all but a more subtle, philosophical shift in how we think about—and even believe in the concept of—wilderness, what is the proper arena for definitive action?
Sanders and Balmori will discuss these and other questions in the context of their ongoing collaboration for a new linear park system and proposed streetscape redesign here in New York City, which they will also present in an opening slideshow. As you'll see on Thursday evening, that project envisions a truly massive pedestrian park stretching the length of northern Broadway, and their pitch for it is not to be missed.
I'm also thrilled to say that I will be moderating their discussion, bringing many themes and questions of my own and drawing, for instance, on the recent work of such figures as Emma Marris, Caroline Fraser, Janette Sadik-Khan, Liam Young, landscape anthropologist Clark Erickson, and others. The ensuing Q&A will thus range from future materials (such as robotic geotextiles) and controversial technologies (such as genetic modification) available to landscape architects; the legacies, both toxic and generous, of previous urban planning administrations; the incredible challenge of preemptive landscape design in the context of global climate change; and specific urban sites where ecological redesign is most clearly needed.
You'll find more information, including how to buy tickets, over at the Museum of the City of New York website. I hope to see some of you there!
 [Image: "Sunset Bulbs" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].
The Streets series by photographer Leigh Merrill perfectly captures the often unexpectedly suburban architecture of San Francisco, a city that—away from its famed Victorian houses and its picturesque skyline—can be relentlessly dull. The featureless white skies of that peninsular metropolis and the anemic pastels of its painted stucco facades always seem strangely out of synch with the city's otherwise vibrant human atmosphere.
  [Images: (top) "Convergence" and (bottom) "Christmas" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].
"Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007," the artist writes, "I began looking at the complexity of its urban environment. The Bay Area presents a unique blend of residential living that sits between urban and suburban in a way that never quite reconciles one with the other."
Merrill's photos, on the other hand, are inventions.
    [Images: (top) "White Street," (second from top) "Ocean Circle", (second from bottom) "Jean Street," and (bottom) "Caraway Street," all by Leigh Merrill from Streets].
She continues: In investigating this landscape I photographed thousands of homes throughout the area and then digitally assembled these images together to create new and illogical structures and streets. At first these images look plausible, however, closer inspection reveals their fabrication. The reconstructed homes and neighborhoods appear skewed, revealing their underlying and sometimes unconscious intentions. These constructs highlight the ways in which our built environments pull from a variety of different architectural and landscape styles and reflect cultural ideas of beauty and perfection. In working with the Bay Area as a site for investigation, I explore what our built environments tell us about our own individual desires as well as our collective culture and ideals. Similar to the work of Filip Dujardin, Merrill's images assemble believable structures just up to the limit of surreality. Weird topiaries and stained concretes reappear image to image and impossible vanishing points force odd symmetries on the opposing edges of single compositions.
  [Images: (top) "Bushes" and (bottom) "Pebble Street" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].
San Francisco seems surprisingly well-represented by this technique, I have to say, and Merrill's digital skills are incredible. And, lest her approach somehow seem possible only within the repetitive suburban architecture of outer San Francisco, Merrill has embarked upon a similar project featuring the low-slung buildings and storefronts of north Texas with equally interesting results.
 [Image: "The Dragon" by Leigh Merrill from Into the Sunset].
The idea of the imaginary view brings to mind the distortionary engraving techniques of Piranesi, who similarly fabricated exaggerated, impossible, and critical views of the city—in his case, Rome. Only, in this case, it's as if Piranesi had moved to the Sunset District or the Outer Richmond of San Francisco, that supposedly beautiful city, with a high-res camera and a copy of Creative Suite.
  [Images: (top) "Ocean Place" and (bottom) "Ocean Street" by Leigh Merrill from Streets].
Meanwhile, Merrill's work is available in a new print from Small Batch Editions. Small Batch Editions "is dedicated to bringing together a carefully curated selection of photographs from around the world, and making them available for a wider audience. To this end, we proudly publish limited edition prints, working closely alongside each artist to ensure the highest standards of quality."
Check out their back catalog—and more of Leigh Merrill's work—when you get a chance.
(Thanks to Melissa Stafford of Small Batch Editions for the tip).
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