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 [Image: Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid at the Center for Land Use Interpretation].
A new exhibition at the Center for Land Use Interpretation opened last week, called Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Marking and Measuring.
Through maps, surveying devices, and other artifacts from the process of land marking and measurement, the exhibition "depicts and describes the 37 Initial Points of the Public Land Survey System, the rectilinear grid that covers more than two thirds of the landscape of the USA. These surveying points, located in places such as swamps, under manhole covers, in roads, and on top of mountains, are the physical locations that tie this grid to the ground. Looking at them in a contemporary context explores the process and importance of the endeavor of surveying, and reveals a latent cadastral history of the nation as it expanded westward."
 [Image: A view of the exhibition at CLUI].
An earlier program at CLUI looked at U.S./Mexico border-survey markers, which documented 276 "obelisks" placed at the very limit of the nation, monumentalizing and literalizing a particular vision of state territory.
Initial Points—foregrounding the tools and training that allow state delineation or what we might call "ground control"—is on display until April 15, 2012.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued last week with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). Spoilers ahead!
Bresson's film tells the story of Fontaine—a French prisoner held by Nazis in a prison in occupied Lyon—and it operates through the " close scrutiny of salient details," in Roger Ebert's words. Fontaine himself becomes an avid student of the prison interior, always looking askance for points of weakness. This has the effect of explicitly foregrounding the space of confinement in which Fontaine is held, including, as we'll see, the objects in the cell with him, deemphasizing characterization in favor of an intense focus on architectural setting. Ebert continues: In this way, we watch Fontaine examine his cell. We know it as well as he does. We see how he stands on a shelf to look out a high, barred window. We see how the food plates enter and leave, and how the guards can see him through a peep hole. We see the routine as prisoners are marched to morning wash-up. Amongst these daily routines, we also watch Fontaine slip a note into a fellow prisoner's pocket. What does the note say? "The exit route from the building and how to dismantle your door," Fontaine whispers.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
As usual, I want to focus only on specific spatial details, in keeping with the premise of Breaking Out and Breaking In, so I'll just make two quick points.
1) Breaking out, in A Man Escaped, occurs through the strategic dismantling and reassembly of all designed objects that aren't architecture. Blankets are cut down to strips then rewoven into rope, finally wrapped and strengthened with wire from the bedframe. The hinges of a small cupboard door are bent and refashioned into grappling hooks. A mere spoon—then another—is sharpened to a chisel with which to cut through the soft wood of the cell door.
It's as if the tools of escape are, in fact, already hidden all around us, disguised as the overlooked equipment of everyday life—the mundane bits of furniture, clothing, and internal ornament that, provided we teach ourselves how to reassemble them, will lead to an unparalleled state of post-architectural liberation. Put another way, the limits of architecture are exposed by everything normally stored inside it.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
2) The other obvious detail is the film's overriding non-visual dimension—that is to say, the sound design of solitary confinement.
From the coded coughs of fellow inmates to the banister-tapping approach of a particular guard, and from the reciprocated wall-knocks passed prisoner to prisoner to the soundscape of the final escape itself—with the other-worldly grinding gears of a patrol bicycle and the marching feet on gravel that betray a guard who the escapees might not otherwise have seen—the prison is more an acoustic environment than a visual one. Even the timing of Fontaine and his last-minute assistant, as they scamper across the prison rooftop, is coincident with the passing of a nearby train, using the sonic effects of urban infrastructure as camouflage for their actions.
They thus navigate from ring to ring, passing steadily outward, carrying reconstructed ropes made from bedding and forcibly recurved grappling hooks, arming the building's contents against the building itself, disguised by the sounds of a city into which they successfully disappear.
(Earlier: A Prison Camp is for Escaping. Up next: watch Cool Hand Luke on Monday, February 6; for the complete Breaking Out and Breaking In schedule, click here).
 [Image: Making Planning Popular on display at the RCA in London].
For those of you near London, you have one more day to see David Knight's Making Planning Popular on display in a group show called GRIST at the Royal College of Art. I'm a huge fan of Knight's work—an ongoing research project on the strange terrains both encouraged and required by local planning ordinances—and he's thus become a regular referent here on the blog.
 [Image: The manifesto from Making Planning Popular].
Specifically, Making Planning Popular "aims to encourage greater popular knowledge of how the built environment is, or could be, produced." Accordingly, "David is showing a manifesto, recent articles and essays, and a series of case studies chosen from his growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices. This work will in time form a popular history of planning"—publishers, take note!—"one in which such practises are brought back to life to explore their relevance to today’s environment, in the belief that putting planning knowledge back into popular culture will lead to a more democratic built environment."
    [Images: Excerpts from David Knight's "growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices," part of Making Planning Popular].
Above are some examples of these case studies; but stop by the RCA before the end of the day on Monday, February 6, to see more. Here's a map.
There was a lot of talk last week about the emergence of " physibles," or downloadable data sets hosted on the Pirate Bay that would allow (potentially copyrighted) objects to be reproduced at home by 3D printers. The idea is that we won't just share music files or movie torrents, but actual physical objects; I could thus print an IKEA table or a Quistgaard peppermill at home, without ever purchasing an original object.
 [Image: A printer known as the Replicator].
Bruce Sterling wrote about just such a scenario in his 2008 novella Kiosk, suggesting that a new "poetry of commerce" would arise in the form of infinitely repeatable, unregulated surrogate objects churned out by desktop factories.
Among many other things about this story, what caught my attention was the specific detail that you could scan any object you happen to have on hand; you could then upload that dataset to a kind of eBay of physibles; and, finally, someone on the other side of the earth—or sitting right next to you—could print out their own "pirate" version. As New Scientist writes, however, we might soon soon see a corporate response in the form of what could be called physible rights management—based on, even repeating, certain aspects of the misguided digital rights management (DRM) policies associated with MP3s. This would mean, for instance, "placing a marker on objects that a 3D scanner could detect and which would stop it operating" (though such marks, the article quickly points out, can simply be covered over with tape or otherwise occluded); in fact, we read, a similar such system is "already used to prevent banknotes from being photocopied." The article then mentions other forms of watermarks and "marking algorithms," detectable only by machines, that could be inscribed onto object surfaces, like invisible hieroglyphs of protection, so as to interfere with those objects' being scanned.
The corporate response to the robot-readable world, mentioned earlier, is thus a kind of robot-blocking world.
In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.
We could call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.
 [Image: Misprinted objects by Zeitguised and Matt Frodsham].
Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality.
One of the more interesting sub-conversations at last fall's Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art revolved around the question of whether or not the future of landscape architecture would be for humans at all—and not for autonomous or semi-autonomous machine systems that will have their own optical, textural, and haptic needs from the design of built space. As highway signage networks are adapted to assist with orienting driverless cars, for instance, we will see continent-spanning pieces of infrastructure designed not for human aesthetic needs but so that they more efficiently correspond to the instrumentation packages of machines.
We touched on this a few weeks ago here on BLDGBLOG with the idea of sentient geotextiles guiding unmanned aerial vehicles, and London-based design firm BERG refers to this as the rise of the robot-readable world. I was thus interested to see that Timo Arnall from BERG has assembled a short video archive asking, "How do robots see the world? How do they extract meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?" Arnall's compilation reveals the framing geometries—a kind of entoptic graphic language native to machines—and directional refocusings deployed by these inhuman users of designed landscapes. Future gardens optimized for autonomous robot navigation.
 [Image: Posters for Grand Illusion, currently out of print from the Criterion Collection].
For the first film in Breaking Out and Breaking In a distributed film fest—where you watch the films at home and return here to discuss them online—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC, we watched Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), recently described as one of the 100 best films of world cinema ( Seven Samurai, if you're curious, was #1).
I will limit myself to discussing Grand Illusion solely from the perspective of this film fest of prison breaks and bank heists (which will be true for all the films discussed in this series). In other words, I'll focus specifically on the topology of escape—on holes, tunnels, walls, and borders. And I should note: there are spoilers ahead.
  [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
The first attempted escape of the film is through the earth: tunneling from beneath the barracks of a German prison camp with the intention of popping up beyond the outer buildings, in a garden.
Removing the floorboards and hacking through exceptionally soft soil, the prisoners rig an alarm system and fashion a tentacular speaking-tube to make sure they all know if the person on digging duty has passed out in the carbon dioxide-rich microclimate being created by their tunneling activity. In fact, the speaking-tube—like an old-fashioned game of telephone—initially appears to be a breathing apparatus of some sort, as if they are, in fact, snorkeling through the earth.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the digger—an irritatingly effusive French cabaret singer—loses consciousness, his candle goes out, and he must be hauled backward out of the mud by rope.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
There are at least two particularly interesting things about this tunnel.
1) The diggers engage in an illicit earth-moving operation by filling their clothes with the resulting dirt, and then dumping the dirt into the garden. They're thus generating their own little artificial topography out in the prison yard as they scoop out the earth beneath their barracks house. The negative space of the tunnel becomes this new terrain of dirt piles and rows, which are thus symptoms of this literally underground activity.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
2) More interestingly, the tunnel is soon abandoned: all of the prisoners are moved to new camps, the barracks are emptied, the tunnel still covered by floorboards, and a last-ditch attempt to let the incoming prisoners know that there is a half-completed escape tunnel beneath their bedroom fails. A train pulls away, splitting up the prisoners and bringing them to new camps; all the while, a remnant escape route, unfinished and unknown, lies waiting to be rediscovered.
Immediately before their departure, however, there is a brief exchange between two of the film's protagonists. Looking out at the clockwork machinations of the German guards, who march in synchrony across the prison courtyard, the imprisoned Captain de Boeldieu quips: "For me it's simple. A golf course is for golf. A tennis court for tennis. A prison camp is for escaping."
   [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
While this is by no means a remarkable piece of dialogue in and of itself, it suggests that, internal to and implied by the diagram of the camp, there is a goal or proper use, but one that runs against the grain of the space's stated intentions. The camp is a landscape that necessitates its own peculiar misuse; escape is just the sport that actualizes this. Put another way, the design of the camp rigorously implies its own escape routes.
Further to this point, however, and as evidenced by the casual manner with which our sporting gentlemen pack up their rackets and coats and abandon their incomplete tunnel, their behavior is motivated more by following unspoken rules (of war, of the camp, of sporting etiquette) than, in a sense, by trying to win.
In any case, from this point in the film it's onward, out and further, through a series of other camps—shown solely in montage—before the displaced captives arrive at an imposing mountaintop fortress—filmed at the Châteaux du Haut-Koenigsbourg— run by the wounded Von Rauffenstein (who, to my mind, looks remarkably like Darth Vader without a helmet, as seen in Return of the Jedi).
Von Rauffenstein takes his new forced guests on a fortifications tour, walking around the castle's walls. "Nice castle," one of them remarks, as another methodically recites the centuries of original construction. "12th century," he mutters. "13th century."
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
But all along they are looking for blindspots, low points, and ways over the wall.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
The eventual—and final—method of escape is by way of diversion, using small flutes and makeshift drums to distract the castle guards as two prisoners make an improbable break for it down a handmade rope out of a tower. And, after a brief stop by a house in the Alps where a spot of romance pops up, they find their ultimate freedom in a moment that is absurd for all it reveals about the notion of political jurisdiction.
Running in plain view of German soldiers, who have finally caught up to them, our remaining two heroes have nothing to worry about: they have crossed an invisible line in the snow, making a mockery of all their tunnels and secret ropes, as they walk up a hill in neutral Switzerland.
  [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Clearly, outside the specific context of Breaking Out and Breaking In, there is much more to discuss, including the film's actual central theme, which is not escape but class divisions.
Hopefully, though, this will serve as a quick intro to the film's many specifically spatial propositions. If you had a chance to watch Grand Illusion last week, by all means let us all know what you think—and stay tuned in the next day or two for a post about Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped.
(Note: Friday, February 3, brings The Great Escape).
306090, under the guest editorship of David Hays, is seeking "possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge." Hays asks, "What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future?"
These are architectural nonessentials: unexpected sources of spatial counter-expertise that are "currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized" (like, for instance, the peculiar architectural insights found in bank heists, the tactics of urban escape and evasion, or the tools of forced entry banned by California Penal Code 466-469).
Submissions are due March 30, 2012, and more info is available on the 306090 site.
(Via Alex Trevi).
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC.
 [Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!].
Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in prison escapes and bank heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.
Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Monday, April 30.
The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that work as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.
How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kinds of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?
If burglary and prison breaks each require a kind of counter-manual of the city, then what might such a guide include—from precise time schedules and blindspots to the limits of surveillance—what points of weakness and unexpected parallels should it map, and what typologies of incisions or perforations would it posit to allow new routes through closed spaces?
The escape and the break-in here are both about illicit reinterpretations of space, sometimes violent, sometimes simply used against the grain, operating a building, we might say, in every way the architect—and the guards who police his or her creation—regrettably overlooked.
Conversely, how is space regulated and maintained from the standpoint of the police and the prison guard, or from the point of view of the homeowner who seeks to hide his or her private riches? What obstacles, blockades, misdirections, decoys, safe rooms, and security systems must be implemented to ensure that a given space is properly accessed?
 [Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath].
These are all recurring themes here on BLDGBLOG, where, over the years, we've discussed how to plan the perfect heist and how to perforate a skyscraper, as well as how to worm your way through the interlinked foundations of London; and perhaps we might say that 19th-century architect George Leonidas Leslie, who used his spatial skills to become "the head of the most successful gang of bankrobbers known," is, in a sense, our festival's mascot or patron saint.
Over the next four months, we will be discussing these questions and many more—from how certain sequences in these films were shot to the stage sets constructed to produce them—culminating in a public event at Studio-X NYC in April.
Of course, not all of these films are escapes from prisons as such or heists specifically aimed at banks; instead, we'll explore what it means to break out from an overly managed suburban life in The Truman Show and how an elaborate home invasion goes wrong in Panic Room; we'll watch the perfectly timed dream-physics kicks and corporate secrets of Inception as well as a team of German terrorists robbing the vaults of the Nakatomi Building of its negotiated bearer bonds. And our list is by no means exhaustive, with some films chosen less for their cinematic quality or the depth of their characterization than for their discussability or the originality of their spatial propositions.
So, in order of viewing, this distributed film fest of prison breaks and bank heists includes:
— Breaking Out—
Friday, January 27, 2012
Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)
Monday, January 30, 2012
A Man Escaped (dir. Robert Bresson, 1956)
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963)
Monday, February 6, 2012
Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
Monday, February 13, 2012
Papillon (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
Friday, February 17, 2012
Escape from Alcatraz (dir. Don Siegel, 1979)
Monday, February 20, 2012
Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981)
Friday, February 24, 2012
Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)
Friday, March 2, 2012
The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2008)
—Breaking In—
Monday, March 19, 2012
Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955)
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (dir. John Guillermin, 1960)
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Italian Job (dir. Peter Collinson, 1969) vs. The Italian Job (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003)
Friday, March 30, 2012
Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1975) vs. The Third Memory (dir. Pierre Huyghe, 1999)
Monday, April 2, 2012
Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)
Friday, April 6, 2012
Following (dir. Christopher Nolan, 1998)
Monday, April 9, 2012
Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002)
Friday, April 13, 2012
Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee, 2006)
Monday, April 16, 2012
The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008)
Friday, April 20, 2012
Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) Again, you can watch the films wherever you might be, from the Lower East Side to Rotterdam, from Toronto and Mumbai to Beijing, and then join the relevant comment threads here on BLDGBLOG (posted, I hope, within a day or two of the screening date). Further, look out for some original analyses on Filmmaker Magazine as the festival unfolds.
Finally, stop by Studio-X NYC on the evening of Monday, April 30, for a free public discussion featuring a stellar group of panelists soon to be announced.
I hope many of you will participate in this experiment in film curation!
(New Yorkers, note that Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped happens to be screening this week at Film Forum, so it might be a good idea to catch it before it leaves the theater).
 [Image: The expansion of Manhattan island, via Urban Omnibus].
For those of you in New York, consider stopping by Studio-X NYC for a short visual history of geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, engineered earthforms, and other monuments of the dredge cycle as Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth join Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon to present the work of the Dredge Research Collective (with Brett Milligan of Free Association Design, who, sadly, is unable to attend).
In the words of the event organizers: The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.
For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge. The evening’s conversation, which is free and open to the public and will be followed by a lively Q&A, will also serve as a prelude to a limited-ticket Festival of Dredge tour in the summer of 2012, for which interview attendees will be given reservation priority.
Things kick off at 6:30pm on Tuesday, January 24, at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here's a map. Hope to see you there!
 [Image: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai, via Archinect].
Archinect is currently featuring a project called "White Elephant (Privately Soft)" by Jimenez Lai.
Lai describes it as "a building inside a building," falling "somewhere between super-furniture and a small house." It's a flippable object, able to be tilted and set on any side. It tumbles, in the architect's words, its cowhide-padded interior offering a place to sit in any orientation.
   [Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].
I'm basically just posting this here as eye-candy, but there is something awesomely compelling about the notion of super-furniture: hypertrophied spatial objects that are more like portable rooms, perfectly inhabiting the otherwise inexact and under-explored midspace between architecture and a bed or couch, between a house and the ergonomic equipment that fills out.
In fact, the sight of this thing looming all alone in an empty room makes it seem more powerful than it really is, I'd suggest, as it appears, in many ways, to invalidate the walls around it. In other words, why use the walls at all—why even furnish your own apartment—when you can just drop two or three of these white elephants inside it, perhaps lit from within, completing the space with their bulk? Your "bedroom" becomes spatially and materially coextensive with the bed itself.
  [Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].
It's a thus a kind of instant room you throw into your house, like spatial jacks, an inhabitable in-between, or burrow space, that both divides the place it sits within and defines an interior of its own.
  [Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].
There are more photographs on Archinect showing the spatial object being flipped, as the following, truncated sequence demonstrates—
   [Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].
—and Lai's diagrams reveal the variety of facets the project requires.
 [Images: "White Elephant" diagrammed, by Jimenez Lai].
But it would also be interesting, given more time, to see many more spatial variations on the same basic idea, but also to explore the effect of different materials, finishes, and colors. Imagine building out a family of these objects the way you might build a BMW or specify a Mini Cooper. You select the geometry, the interior, the upholstery—maybe even small, medium, or large—and soon enough your very own piece of super-furniture arrives, ready for assembly.
  [Images: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai].
See more at Archinect.
 [Image: New York Harbor, mapped in 1966, courtesy of NOAA].
Going through old links this morning, I found a story originally published in New York Magazine back in 2009 about the waters of New York City—a maritime metropolis that, many forget, is also an archipelago.
"What, exactly, is down there?" the magazine asked, looking out at the urban waters. "For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms." There are also the now submerged ruins of "Coney Island’s great early theme parks," discarded in the waters after the fun ran out.
 [Image: New York Harbor, mapped in 1957, courtesy of NOAA].
It's an incredibly interesting article, as it happens, but those silver bars might even inspire a few of you to change your life direction: In 1903, a barge in the Arthur Kill—the oily, mucky arm of the harbor between Staten Island and New Jersey—capsized, spilling its cargo of silver ingots. It carried 7,678 bars; about 6,000 were recovered soon after. The rest are still down there. At today’s prices, they’re worth about $26 million. Every now and then, someone tries to find them. So far, no luck. Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, actually wrote a follow-up piece later in 2009 about a treasure-hunting scientist named Ken Hayes. ("I'm a scientist, not a treasure hunter," says Hayes. "Treasure hunting is just an interesting application of the technology we utilize in the other things.") As of 2009, Hayes was "working on his favorite—and potentially most profitable—project: finding the lost Guggenheim silver, valued at around $26 million." The whole story is pure Hollywood: On the boat’s starboard side, shaded by the wheelhouse, Hayes produces a laminated photocopy of a New York Times article from October 17, 1903, which details the barge accident and recovery. It’s effectively a treasure map in article form, Hayes contends, replete with apparent red herrings that he believes could yield important clues. Since first hearing about the silver in the mid-’80s, Hayes has studied the piece like the Rosetta Stone, identifying words whose meanings have altered and dissecting logic gaps and inconsistencies in police reports. He’s plied local people for old rumors about the incident and tried to separate myth from historical fact. Tales abound of a local Native American man who resided in a nursing home with just one possession: an ingot of Guggenheim silver. Hayes never found him. Here, below, is that 1903 article, if you're curious.
 [Image: From the New York Times, October 17, 1903].
In any case, New York Magazine also mentions a somewhat disconcerting detail in which we learn that the roof of the Lincoln Tunnel is actually being slowly eroded of its soil coverage by new river currents that were generated by the pilings of nearby Battery Park City. It's a case of urban hydrodynamics at work: The Hudson’s main current has, for all of recorded history, clung to lower Manhattan’s edge, skimming along the West Side. Battery Park City, built in the seventies, juts out into that flow, and since then, the current has been cutting a new channel, out toward the center of the river. That current is scraping mud off the top of the Lincoln Tunnel where it never did before; the underwater traffic tubes have lost 25 percent of their soil coverage in some spots. If the tubes ever became exposed, they would be at risk for shifting, cracking, and terrorist threats. Check out these and other sites in New York's aquatic geography in the original piece.
(Originally via Gideon Shapiro and, I believe, kottke.org).
 [Image: The "buried cable intrusion detection sensor," courtesy of G-Max Security].
1) The Israeli-based company G-Max Security makes a "buried cable intrusion detection sensor" that is "totally concealed and operates effectively under any type of surface," from open fields and highways to mountains, snow, and ice. It acts as a "perimeter detection ring" that uses "Passive Magnetic Detection" technology—that is, a buried cable-sensor network—assuring "effective Early Warning of any perimeter intrusion attempt."
This security geotextile is, in effect, an electromagnetic nervous system in the ground.
 [Image: The sensor after burial, courtesy of G-Max Security].
However, the system perhaps also foreshadows the implementation of much more complex, spatially ubiquitous, and locally intelligent geotextiles that could monitor, from below, in real-time, and with remarkable accuracy, everything that passes through the landscapes above them. The most secure landscape in the world could thus someday be an open field—or friendly suburb—peppered with trees and flowers in which all of the surveillance technology is passive, omniscient, experientially invisible, and indistinguishable from the earth.
As a useful replacement for land mines and electrified fences, however, the very idea of a security geotextile brings an alarming potential for weaponization. For instance, what would stop such a system from being given the ability to electrify, stun, immobilize, or even kill a detected intruder? Perhaps this would be the malign or malevolent geotextile I ask about in my essay for Philip Beesley's recent book, Hylozoic Ground.
Either way, it will be interesting—and unfortunately necessary—to track the potentially emergent field of weaponized geotextiles.
2a) The Dutch engineering firm TenCate offers a product called the GeoDetect system. It is "the first sensor enabled geotextile on the market to provide soil reinforcement, structural health monitoring and an early warning system into one package."
It is a computational fabric that structurally strengthens and physically monitors the landscapes it is buried within.
"Our 'intelligent geotextile,'" the company points out, "is the first system designed specifically for geotechnical applications and offers a technical solution for monitoring geo-structures for changes in strain, temperature or the combination of the two." As such, it "incorporates a geocomposite fabric, fiber optics, instrumentation equipment and software to provide a innovative solution for the multi-functional requirements of a geotechnical application" (for example, stabilizing landfills and levees).
You can watch a short video about it here.
2b) To speculate a bit here, if TenCate's GeoDetect is basically a 2D computer or sensor network, then, given further processing power and mechanically augmented with servomotors, a future version of this system could perhaps not only engage in locally autonomous decision-making—a kind of 2D supercomputer disguised as a landscape—but could also physically rearrange itself to protect against impending disasters (such as levee failure or an avalanche).
We might thus find that sentient artificial landforms built from networks of computational geotextiles and mobilized from within by servomotors could literally redesign landscapes in place, on their own, at will. This would, presumably, be for practical purposes (flood mitigation or landslide control), but could also be purely for aesthetics. Imagine a new park of crawling landforms—slow ripples moving through the grass, forming constantly refreshed hills and valleys, the soil pulsing in waves.
 [Image: A photo by Toshio Shibata].
These speculative geotextiles, otherwise invisible beneath the ground, could use their own algorithms to monitor visitor activity and thus compute the appropriate spatial response to those visitors' location in the park.
Given such a scenario, the entire Dutch coast could someday be, we might say, a robot: a self-intelligent system of interacting mechanical fabrics that rearrange on their own volition, on the scale of hundreds of miles, to keep Atlantic floodwaters at bay. The art of landscape photography is revolutionized. Bewildering art films are set amongst this crawling landscape. Slow hills move and dance in front of the sun.
 [Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of concrete block installation atop a geotextile base, courtesy of the Directorate of Public Works, Ft. Jackson, South Carolina].
3) These technologies could, of course, be networked yet further, off-site, to other unmanned and interactive technologies. We might describe this as a semi-autonomous landscape-to-robot constellation.
In other words, a sensor-embedded stretch of earth—using a radio-transmitting variant of G-Max's buried cables—could communicate directly with unmanned aerial vehicles, steering them in for precise landings. It is a kind of invisible runway. Or long strips of buried sensors on the perimeter of secure sites could guide UAVs flying high above; pilotless machines bank and turn in a constant loop, following the geotextiles below. They are locked in place—they are steered and guided—by transmissions from inside the ground. (The same could be true of unmanned ground vehicles, following otherwise invisible electromagnetic "roads" embedded in the soil.)
 [Images: "An MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft takes off July 17 from Joint Base Balad, Iraq. The Reaper can loiter over battlefields or targets for hours at a time without refueling and carries up to 3,750 pounds of laser-guided munitions, giving ground commanders unprecedented situational awareness and the ability to bring the right amount of force to bear on a target. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Richard Lisum)"].
In effect, this would terrestrialize the so-called robot-readable world: burying the signs and sensors that such machines require and disguising them in apparently natural circumstances. What appears to be a meadow is actually an electromagnetically active runway read and used by UAVs. What you think is a forest is a complex signaling landscape. What appears to be a garden is a computational geotextile interacting with driverless ground vehicles miles away.
4) In any case, all of the above ideas could, perhaps much more interestingly, be used to activate a kind of anti-drone defensive landscape. As the horrific possibility of drone proliferation looms, what spatial and geographic countermeasures could be implemented to mislead, confuse, detour (or détourn), and otherwise deflect pilotless vehicles?
The "perimeter detection ring" examined above, for instance, would instead be used to repel or otherwise blind "intruding" UAVs and UGVs; this could be used for everything from keeping a foreign power's drones out of your sovereign airspace to preventing the IRS from flying drones over your suburb for property tax purposes.
In mythological terms, this would be the geotextile as talisman, or terrestrial ring of protection.
 [Images: Geotextiles, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Highway Administration].
So what possibilities exist for landscape architects to, as it were, resist drones, using signal-jamming geotextiles, electromagnetic dazzle effects, or even bizarre new forms of robot-readable camouflage, in order to make drone warfare all but spatially impossible?
Could anti-drone landscapes be added to existing cities—urban spaces or architectural forms lethally confusing to robots—and what might such additions actually look like (if they would be visible to humans at all)?
(Thanks to Rob Holmes and Brett Milligan for first alerting me to the GeoDetect system).
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