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Design writer Alissa Walker recently took a tour of L.A.'s original subway system, one whose tunnels are no longer in operation, though they remain down there—
 [Image: L.A.'s original subway, now walled-off beneath downtown; photo by Alissa Walker].
—bricked off and all but forgotten beneath buildings downtown.
 [Image:Photo by Alissa Walker].
Cue horror movie soundtrack here, with hapless apartment dwellers in a newly renovated downtown loft complex finding strange things coming up from the facility's voluminous basement floors; the power flickers on and off; pets disappear; strange sounds skitter and thump down the corridors at night, leaving muddy trails; then somehow, someone, as in the following photograph—
 [Image: A walled-up sign announces, "TRAINS"; photo by Alissa Walker].
—knocks a hole in the wall, perhaps accidentally losing their grip on a piece of furniture as they move their new table or couch into the building, revealing the eery, abandoned subway tunnels below. And, soon, they go down to find the answers to what's gone wrong in their otherwise perfectly photogenic multimillion dollar building, only to open the door to something altogether much worse.
 [Image: Photo by Alissa Walker].
In any case, absent of these clichéd public-transit-is-a-source-of-horror motifs, Alissa's write-up of the tunnel visit is worth reading in full—and, even better, they will be leading another such visit again some time soon. You'll see sights like this.
Sign-up on the Design East of La Brea website for this and other such events, and don't miss any future announcements.
 I finally became a paying member of Subterranea Britannica this week, a website and historical organization whose interests (and influence) cast a long shadow over this blog's early years.
Joining is £28 a year for overseas members and seems well worth it so far, having received my first issue of their internal newsletter, Subterranea, just last night. From Irish souterrains—described as "the 'underground castles' of early medieval Ireland, used as strongholds and escape tunnels," or, in the words of Current Archaeology, "secret tunnels dug to outwit marauding Norsemen"—to World War I tunnels in La Boisselle, France, and from plans for future deep-level "supersewers" beneath both Milwaukee and London to, amongst many other fascinating things, a project I can't wait to learn more about called the London Power Tunnels, a mafia boss who was captured in an " underground hideout" built twelve miles outside Naples ("access from within the house was via a sliding door on rails in one of the bedrooms," Subterranea explains), the fact that Northern Ireland had "secret contingency plans" for surviving a nuclear war and they involved stockpiling "more than 100,000 pieces of plastic cutlery," to the enormous "stacks of gold bars worth £156 billion stored in an old canteen deep below the streets" of London in a former WWII air-raid shelter now used by the Bank of England, there is a mind-boggling amount of interesting things to read.
Even better, membership comes with otherwise unobtainable invitations to events and underground site tours throughout the UK. Consider joining, if this sort of stuff piques your interest.
 [Images: From ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities during the Cold War at Columbia's Harriman Institute; right three photographs by Richard Pare].
Speaking of Van Alen Books: earlier this week, they hosted a panel on the topic of "Secret Soviet Cities During the Cold War." These were closed cities or ZATO, "sites of highly secretive military and scientific research and production in the Soviet Empire. Nameless and not shown on maps, these remote urban environments followed a unique architectural program inspired by ideal cities and the ideology of the Party."
The ZATO, we read courtesy of an interesting post on the Russian History Blog, was a "Closed Administrative-Territorial Formation ( Zakrytoe administrativno-territorial’noe obrazovanie, ZATO)": [T]he cities themselves were never shown on official maps produced by the Soviet regime. Implicated in the Cold War posture of producing weapons for the Soviet military-industrial complex, these cities were some of the most deeply secret and omitted places in Soviet geography. Those who worked in these places had special passes to live and leave, and were themselves occluded from public view. Most of the scientists and engineers who worked in the ZATOs were not allowed to reveal their place or purpose of employment. In any case, there are two main reasons to post this:
 [Image: Photo by I. Yakovlev/Itar-Tass, courtesy of Nature].
1) Just last week, Nature looked at Soviet-era experiments in these closed cities, where "nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated" as part of a larger medical effort "to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer."
In an article that is otherwise more medical than it is urban or architectural, we nonetheless read of a mission to the formerly closed city of Ozersk in order to rescue this medical evidence from the urban ruins: "After a long flight, a three-hour drive and a lengthy security clearance, a small group of ageing scientists led the delegation to an abandoned house with a gaping roof and broken windows. Glass slides and laboratory notebooks lay strewn on the floors of some offices. But other, heated rooms held wooden cases stacked with slides and wax blocks in plastic bags." These slides and wax blocks "provide a resource that could not be recreated today," Nature suggests, "for both funding and ethical reasons."
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the idea of medical researchers helicoptering into the ruins of a formerly secret city in order to locate medical samples of fatally irradiated mutant animals is a pretty incredible premise for a future film.
  [Images: (top) photo by Tatjana Paunesku; (bottom) photo by S. Tapio. Courtesy of Nature].
2) More relevant for this blog, you only have five days left to see the exhibition ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities during the Cold War up at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, featuring "ZATO archival materials, camouflage maps of strategic sites, secret diagrams of changing ZATO names/numbers, [and] ZATO passports."
That exhibition documents everything from the "special food and consumer supplements given as rewards for the secrecy and 'otherness' of the sites," to the cities' eerily suburbanized, half-abandoned state today: "Today there are 43 ZATO on the territory of the Russian Federation. Their future is uncertain: some may survive; others may disappear as urban formations within the context of Russian suburbs." Check it out if you get a chance.
More info at the Harriman Institute.
 [Image: Michael Maltzan's Inner City Arts building, Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan].
I'll be speaking tonight, May 17th, at Van Alen Books with architect Michael Maltzan about his book No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, edited by Jessica Varner, previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here. The book includes interviews with Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Charles Waldheim, Qingyun Ma, Catherine Opie, Edward Soja (who quips that "architects should think more like good geographers"), and many more, and will be available for sale this evening, if you can stop by.
Things kick off at 7pm at 30 W. 22nd Street, near the Flatiron Building; here's a map.
 [Image: Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play].
As Maltzan writes in the book, "we have reached a point where past vocabularies of the city and of urbanism are no longer adequate, and at this moment, the very word city no longer applies" to Greater Los Angeles. "Perhaps it is not a city" at all, he suggests, but something altogether different and more formally interesting than that (see a slightly longer discussion of this earlier on BLDGBLOG).
When discussing this resistant, indefinable character of Los Angeles, I'm always reminded of a description from the beautifully written but, sadly, now scientifically out of date 2-part book The Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie. At one point, Murchie describes the surprising lack of density in certain stars, even when those stars, nonetheless, seem structurally coherent to an outside observer.
He explains, for instance, that the surface of the sun "is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air." In fact, other stars—such as E Aurigae I, so huge it could "contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn's orbit"—are often "described as 'red-hot vacuums,'" Murchie writes, "because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star."
You might fly through them for days without even realizing you are inside a star.
 [Image: Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play].
Applying this to the urban condition of Los Angeles—a kind of sidereal city, measured by different stars, able to make you feel as if you will never really arrive—it becomes an oddly apt analogy for that region, with its loose outer edges and unclear points of entry into an often off-kilter system of road grids.
In any case, stop by Van Alen Books tonight at 7pm, where we'll be discussing Los Angeles, density, crime, and, who knows, even my own willful misunderstanding of astrophysics—or, as Van Alen Books puts it, topics such as "real-estate speculation and future urban development, infrastructure, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce, and community, attempting to transform our understanding of how each affects present-day Los Angeles."
 [Image: Wifi-blocking wallpaper from the Grenoble Institute of Technology].
1) A collaboration between the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the Centre Technique du Papier has produced wifi-blocking wallpaper: a printable electromagnetic shield that "only blocks a select set of frequencies used by wireless LANs, and allows cellular phones and other radio waves through."
As The Verge explains, the wallpaper uses "conductive ink containing silver crystals" printed in an otherwise innocuous abstract snowflake pattern. In other words, only if you know exactly what to look for—or in a strange moment of speculative paranoia—would you realize that the paper on the walls around you is actually an electronic device.
Competitively priced with standard wallpapers, it might soon be decking and protecting the walls in a house or office near you.
 [Image: Printed electronics produce 2D loudspeakers; photo by Hendrik Schmidt, via Printed Electronics World].
2) 2D printable loudspeakers have become a reality. Fully functioning speakers can now be "printed with flexography on standard paper" using "several layers of a conductive organic polymer and a piezoactive layer."
Like something out of The Ticket That Exploded, we read that "paper loudspeakers could, for instance, be integrated into common print products. As such, they offer an enormous potential for the advertising segment." In other words, books, newspapers, and magazines could soon literally be yelling at you to buy more products. Less cynically, though, this also raises the fairly fascinating possibility that we could someday release songs inside pamphlets, audiobooks inside the very hardcovers they narrate, field recordings inside road maps, or even add strips of ambient acoustics to rooms through loudspeaker wallpaper.
After all, sound wallpapers are, incredibly, also possible, resulting in large-scale, acoustically active surfaces, from objects to interior walls. The rave of the future will be one person with a roll of paper, pasting up sounds till sunrise.
    [Images: Lasercut survival kits by Steffen Kehrle].
3) However, if wifi-blocking wallpaper and printable 2D loudspeakers aren't your cup of tea, then you can also laser-cut any reasonably stiff 2D surface into an urban survival kit.
Designer Steffen Kehrle's work implies that, with the right laser patterns and a thin sheet of cardstock—even wood veneer—the keys to the city could be yours. Done right, this same approach could offer more than just tactical culinary devices, as seen above, but small-scale urban equipment: pop-out objects for navigating the built environment around you.
 [Image: A map of fictional mega cities, via 2000AD].
A short review in the most recent Wire discusses a new album by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury: a speculative urban soundtrack to Mega City One, a "post-apocalyptic sprawl covering the eastern seaboard of the United States" from Judge Dredd. "Portishead's Geoff Barrow and BBC soundtrack composer Ben Salisbury's instrumental interpretation" of the city, The Wire writes, "evoke[s] the gunmetal grey of life in Mega City One, its multilevel labyrinth of self-contained blocks, zipstrips and boomways reflecting darkly in the album's tarnished metallic textures and gridlike structures."
The retro- Alan Howarthian synthesizers, a " rigorously imagined sound map" of the city, can be streamed in full via Bandcamp.
For those of you in London, meanwhile, Barrow and Salisbury will perform excerpts from the " weirdly addictive"—or is it " hackneyed"?—album at Orbital Comics on 16 May.
 [Image: Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; courtesy of the USGS].
In Charles Fishman's compelling exploration of water on Earth, The Big Thirst, there is a shocking statement that, despite the apparent inexhaustibility of the oceans, "the total water on the surface of Earth (the oceans, the ice caps, the atmospheric water) makes up 0.025 percent of the mass of the planet—25/10,000ths of the stuff of Earth. If the Earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan," he clarifies, "the amount of water on the planet would be in a single, half-liter bottle of Poland Spring in one of the van's thirteen cup holders."
This is rather remarkably communicated by an illustration from the USGS, reproduced above, showing "the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth." That's not a lot of water.
Only vaguely related, meanwhile, there is an additional description in Fishman's book worth repeating here.
 [Image: The Orion nebula, photographed by Hubble].
In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are being produced. How much? Incredibly, Fishman explains, "the cloud is making sixty Earth waters every twenty-four hours"—or, in simpler terms, "there is enough water being formed sufficient to fill all of Earth's oceans every twenty-four minutes." This is occurring, however, in an area "420 times the size of our solar system."
Anyway, Fishman's book is pretty fascinating, in particular his chapter, called "Dolphins in the Desert," on the water reuse and filtration infrastructure installed over the past 10-15 years in Las Vegas.
(Via @USGS).
 [Image: Sunfish Pond].
Something I've long meant to post about—and isn't news at all—is the fact that there is a lost lake in the basement of the Empire State Building. Or a pond, more accurately speaking.
After following a series of links leading off from Steve Duncan's ongoing exploration of New York's "lost streams, kills, rivers, brooks, ponds, lakes, burns, brakes, and springs," I found the fascinating story of Sunfish Pond, a "lovely little body of water" at the corner of what is now 31st Street and Fourth Avenue. "The pond was fed both by springs and by a brook which also carried its overflow down to the East River at Kip's Bay." Interestingly, although the pond proper would miss the foundations of the Empire State Building, its feeder streams still pose a flood risk to the building, rising up through the concrete during heavy storms. To a certain extent, this reminds me of a line from the recent book Alphaville: "Heat lightning cackles above the Brooklyn skyline and her message is clear: 'You may have it paved over, but it's still a swamp.'" That is, the city can't escape its hydrology.
But perhaps this makes the Empire State Building as good a place as any for us to test out the possibility of fishing in the basements of Manhattan: break in, air-hammer some holes through the concrete, bust out fishing rods, and spend the night hauling inexplicable marine life out of the deep and gurgling darkness below.
There's a lot going on again this week at Studio-X NYC. Two quick things to put on your radar, in case you're near New York:
 [Image: NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild measures solar radiation, via NASA].
1) Tonight at 6:30pm, we've got NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild coming in to discuss her work, from extreme environments here on Earth, where scientists test for the limits of life, to the irradiated landscapes of Mars. We'll look at the nature of biology, the possibilities for synthetic life, unexpected alternatives to DNA, and other mind-bending experiments that ask, in Rothschild's words, " Where do we come from? Where are we going? and Are we alone?" Architect Ed Keller will be co-moderating this live interview.
2) Tomorrow, beginning at 6pm, we've got a massive line-up, including, I'm thrilled to say, an interview with Michael Gerrard, Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School, discussing " drowning nations and climate change law. The list of whole countries at risk from sea-level rise is both extraordinary and growing, from the Marshall Islands to the Maldives, posing a series of unanswered questions about migration, citizenship, geopolitical power, and even the very definition of a state. As a 2010 article on ClimateWire asks, citing Gerrard's work, "If a Country Sinks Beneath the Sea, Is It Still a Country?"
 [Image: Male, capital of the Maldives, via Wikipedia].
Gerrard was instrumental in organizing a conference last year called " Threatened Island Nations: Legal Implications of Rising Seas and a Changing Climate," inspired by the "unique legal questions posed by rising oceans." Central to our conversation tomorrow night will be what that last link calls "the sovereignty of submerged nations": Would the countries continue to have legal recognition like the Order of Malta, which ceded its island territory long ago but continues to be treated like a sovereign for some purposes? Would they retain their seats in the United Nations and other international bodies? Here, it's interesting to note recent suggestions that the " entire nation of Kiribati" might—or might not—move en masse to Fiji, to escape rising sea levels.
We will be interviewing Michael Gerrard only from 6-6:45pm, so don't be late.
Immediately following that live interview, we will kick off a roundtable discussion on the future of sovereignty, governance, citizenship, and the nation-state, looking at a range of unique geographic and spatial scenarios, from the Arctic to the Internet. Joining us—many via Skype—will be: Benjamin Bratton, director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at UC-San Diego; architect Ed Keller; Tom Cohen, co-editor with Claire Colebrook of the Critical Climate Change series from Open Humanities Press; science fiction novelist Peter Watts; architect and urbanist Adrian Lahoud, editor of Post-Traumatic Urbanism; and Dylan Trigg, author of, among other things, The Aesthetics of Decay.
Studio-X NYC is at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, 16th floor; here is a map. These events are free and open to the public, and no RSVP is required.
 [Image: Image via Karst Worlds].
An ice cave in Austria was recently used as a test landscape for experimental spacesuits and instrumentation systems—including 3D cameras—that might someday be used by humans on Mars.
The Dachstein ice cave was chosen, Stuff explains, "because ice caves would be a natural refuge for any microbes on Mars seeking steady temperatures and protection from damaging cosmic rays."
    [Images: (top and bottom) Photos by Katja Zanella-Kux; middle photos via Karst Worlds].
Many images available at the Dachstein Mars Simulation Liveblog—including this series of 25 images courtesy of the Austrian Space Forum—document the testing process, which ranged from the beautifully surreal, as a fully space-suited man rolls strange devices down slopes of ice inside the planet, to the nearly postmodern, as crowds of normally dressed tourist onlookers are revealed at the edges of the show cave, watching this odd performance unfold.
And all this is in addition to the " obstacle course" developed for wearers of the spacesuit—reverse-engineering terrain from a particular type of clothing, or landscape design as an outgrowth from fashion—in the parking lot and nearby paved spaces of a research center in Austria. "The course included four snow-mountain passages, almost 40 meters of rock climbing and more than 60 meters of slushy snow terrain amongst others"—including "drawing bright 'rocks' to make the simulation happen" accurately.
Walking amidst painted representations of geology, wearing a suit designed for the atmosphere of another planet, and temporarily moving below the surface of the earth to throw pieces of specialty equipment down ice slopes, attached to ropes, the team was able to, by means of props and in William L. Fox's words, " perform Mars on Earth."
(Spotted via Karst Worlds).
 [Image: Poster design by Atley Kasky of Outpost].
Although I hope to post again about the specific topics to be discussed at this event, I didn't want to lose any more time in announcing the Breaking Out and Breaking In final public event to be hosted at Columbia University's Studio-X NYC on Monday, April 30, featuring a unique and exciting panel of discussants drawn from the worlds of film, design, history, architecture, and the FBI.
Stop by to hear Special Agent Brenda Cotton, Bank Robbery Coordinator for the FBI's Bank Robbery/Kidnapping/Extortion Squad; Thomas McShane, Retired FBI Special Agent from the Bureau's Art Crime Team and co-author of Stolen Masterpiece Tracker; Scott Macaulay, editor-in-chief of Filmmaker Magazine, co-sponsors of the Breaking Out and Breaking In film festival; Matt Jones, designer and principal at BERG; and Jimmy Stamp, writer and editor at the Yale University School of Architecture and co-organizer of last year's symposium on the architecture of the getaway, the hideout, and the coverup.
The event is free, open to the public, and kicks off on April 30 at 7pm sharp. We'll be at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, on the 16th floor; here's a map. Stop by for a panel discussion and open Q&A about the spatial scenarios of real and cinematic crimes, from armored car heists to panic rooms, from Boston art thefts to Los Angeles bank tunnels, and from the internal layouts of financial institutions to the unanticipated criminal side-effects of urban design, exploring the built environment from the perspective of the crimes that can be planned and foiled there.
 [Image: Temporary islands emerge from the sea, via].
In the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Sicily, an island comes and goes. Called, alternately and among other names, depending on whose territorial interests are at stake, Graham Bank, Île Julia, the island of Ferdinandea, or, more extravagantly, a complex known as the Campi Flegrei del Mar di Sicilia (the Phlegraean Fields of the Sicily Sea), this geographic phenomenon is fueled by a range of submerged volcanoes. One peak, in particular, has been known to break the waves, forming a small, ephemeral island off the coast of Italy.
And, when it does, several nation-states are quick to claim it, including, in 1831, when the island appeared above water, "the navies of France, Britain, Spain, and Italy." Unfortunately for them, it eroded away and disappeared beneath the waves in 1832.
It then promised to reappear, following new eruptions, in 2002 (but played coy, remaining 6 meters below the surface).
The island, though, always promises to show up again someday, potentially restarting old arguments of jurisdiction and sovereignty—is it French? Spanish? Italian? Maltese? perhaps a micronation?—so some groups are already well-prepared for its re-arrival. As Ted Nield explains in his book Supercontinent, "the two surviving relatives of Ferdinand II commissioned a plaque to be affixed to the then still submerged volcanic reef, claiming it for Italy should it ever rise again." This is the impending geography of states-in-waiting, instant islands that, however temporarily, redraw the world's maps.
The story of Ferdinandea, as recounted by that well-known primary historical source Wikipedia and seemingly ripe for inclusion in the excellent Borderlines blog by Frank Jacobs, is absolutely fascinating: it's appeared on an ornamental coin, it was visited by Sir Walter Scott, it inspired a short story by James Fenimore Cooper, it was depth-charged by the U.S. military who mistook it for a Libyan submarine, and it remains the subject of active geographic speculation by professors of international relations. It is, in a sense, Europe's Okinotori—and one can perhaps imagine some Borgesian wing of the Italian government hired to sit there in a boat, in open waters, for a whole generation, armed with the wizardry of surveying gear and a plumb bob dangling down into the sea, testing for seismic irregularities, as if casting a spell to coax this future extension of the Italian motherland up into the salty air.
More than 10 million square kilometers of landscape on the surface of Mars, a region nearly the size of Europe, is made of glass—specifically volcanic glass, "a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallize."
 [Image: An otherwise randomly grabbed image of Mars from the fantastic HiRISE site].
In a paper called " Widespread weathered glass on the surface of Mars," authors Briony Horgan and James F. Bell III, from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, go on to suggest that "the ubiquitous dusty mantle covering much of the northern plains [of Mars] may obscure more extensive glass deposits" yet to be mapped.
Although it's worth emphasizing that this glass is present mostly in the form of "Eolian" grains—that is, small pieces of windblown sand accumulating in dune fields—it is, nonetheless, a sublime scene to consider, with endless glass ridges and hills rolling off beneath stars and red dust storms, slippery to the touch, as hard as bedrock, cold, perhaps glistening and prismatic inside with distorted reflections of constellations, like blisters of light on a television screen coextensive with the surface of the planet. You could slide from one hill to the next, for hours—for days—alone on a frozen ocean of self-reflecting landforms, dizzy with the images locked within.
(What would a glass farm look like, agriculture carved into crystalline ridges, cultivating strange geologies? Meanwhile, ages ago, in a different lifetime on BLDGBLOG: Mount St. Helens of Glass).
 [Image: Flow].
A floating tidemill on the UK's River Tyne has been filled with "electro-acoustic musical machinery," powered by the river itself. The building, a collaboration between Owl Project and Ed Carter, called Flow, is "a floating building on the River Tyne that generates its own power using a tidal water wheel."
The acoustic machines inside, powered by CNC-milled wooden gears and timber pistons, "respond directly to the ever-changing state of the river. The sounds created by each instrument can also be manipulated by visitors to the millhouse."
 [Images: Flow].
Specifically, the floating auditorium includes "three inter-connected sonic instruments which mix traditional craft and digital innovation. They draw water from the River Tyne, passing it through a series filters, lasers and sensors, which bubble, beep, hiss, creak and groan." For at least one instrument, the resulting sounds are determined by the salt-content of the water: "A wooden mechanism then dips a series of electrodes into the jars and creates a series of sounds. The pitch of the sounds will be modified depending on the salinity levels of the water."
The installation is thus also a kind of lo-fi river research station, supplying data about the water it floats within (in the designers' words, it uses "a range of traditional and new technologies to monitor key environmental details, including water temperature, speed, salinity, and pollution").
 [Images: Flow].
Finally, "Owl Project has designed a series of Log interfaces to alter the sounds the instruments make," literal pieces of wood with knobs and levers that produce acoustic special effects.
 [Images: Flow].
It seems obvious to describe this as a kind of mobile version of the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia—or the San Francisco Wave Organ—with the addition of fine woodworking skills and some quasi-scientific instrumentation. Putting this into the context of a project like " Amphibious Architecture," featured here a few years ago, it's easy to imagine an acoustic early-warning system for pollution, floods, and even the appearance of rare marine wildlife. A city's waterfront—a whole bay—ornamented by singing buoys.
You can follow the project on Twitter, and there is theoretically a live-stream of sounds here. If any readers out there happen to hear it in person, let me know!
(Spotted via The Wire).
[Image: Piece of Nature Preserved (1973) by Haus-Rucker-Co; photo by Hagen Stier, courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum].
A forthcoming exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt explores the world of the architectural model, from Frei Otto and Rem Koolhaas to Peter Eisenman.
The above piece, by Haus-Rucker-Co, called Piece of Nature Preserved (1973) seems worthy of highlighting. "The small hut is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the longing for a simple, back-to-the-roots way of life," the museum suggests. "Nature unharmed by destructive environmental forces can only be created in a glass capsule, as a model in the shape of a preserving jar."
The exhibition opens the evening of May 24.
 [Image: Via English Russia].
In a story seemingly invented for future landscape architecture thesis projects, we find the city of Berezniki, Russia. "In the West," the New York Times explains, "mines are usually located far from populous areas, to reduce the risks of sinkholes to homes and other buildings. But Berezniki, a city of 154,000 that began as a labor camp, was built directly over the mine—a legacy of the Soviet policy of placing camps within marching distance of work areas."
With collapsing salt pillars and widespread erosion in the derelict mines below the city, Berezniki is thus "afflicted by sinkholes, yawning chasms hundreds of feet deep that can open at a moment's notice."
 [Image: Via English Russia].
Incredibly, like a geologically-themed remake of The Truman Show, the city has responded with "24-hour video surveillance." On a screen in the command center late last year, one such hole appeared as a small dark spot in a snowy field in the predawn hours, immediately threatening to suck in a building, a road and a gas station. "I looked and said, 'Wow, a hole is forming,'" recalled Olga V. Chekhova, an emergency services worker who monitors the video... While scientists have so far successfully predicted each sinkhole, the chasms can open with astonishing speed. On Dec. 4, as Ms. Chekhova watched the dark spot on her screen expand, witnesses began calling an emergency number for reporting sinkholes. They had heard a loud swooshing noise. The town has decided to "fight the holes with science," putting in place "a panoply of high-technology monitors. These include the video surveillance system, seismic sensors, regular surveys and satellite monitoring of the changes in altitude of roofs, sidewalks and streets."
While the design possibilities of a town off-kilter with itself are clear, the Times article seems to undersell the incompetence of the city officials, mine engineers, and policy-makers who oversaw the creation of the underground facilities in the first place and who made the idiotic decision to locate a city overtop land that would subsequently be excavated. Having said that, the photo gallery accompanying the original article—unlike the more sensationalist images I've chosen here—focuses on the people who actually live there, families who watch as cracks appear in their ceilings and walls, looking around at furniture they can't afford to move and the neighborhoods that seem on the verge of, in the article's words, "being sucked into the earth."
"In my view, we need to move the entire town," one of the residents says, with what seems like obvious melancholy. He's not reaching for a sketchbook or planning robotic future cities on stilts. "Every house has cracks."
 [Image: The ghost town of Animas Forks, Colorado, via Wikipedia].
Fred Chambers, an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, is studying what he calls " ghost town climatology," or the declining temperature of a region as it is abandoned by human activity. He describes it as "a reverse urban heat island effect."
There's not much info available right now on his website, but the idea of weather patterns being generated by ghost towns— abandoned villages in the mountains creating artificial winters that haunt those in the city down below—is a captivating one. As if, to exaggerate the study's implications, you could hike up into the hills one day and locate the source of all that snow, stumbling, half-blind and frostbitten, into a dead valley of churches and town halls, fighting against a wind those empty buildings help to generate.
 [Image: Gentlemen quarriers of a golden age, via].
Following on from earlier looks at the city as mining district, including a quarry on the Lower East Side, I was interested to read that parts of Manhattan were once productive marble quarries. A street and surrounding small neighborhood called Kingsbridge, in particular, was "an early quarrying district on Manhattan island."
In a 1997 article for the Mineralogical Record, Lawrence H. Conklin relates his discovery, like something out of Jules Verne, of a 19th-century print called "Marble Quarry, Kingsbridge, N.Y. (1819)," thus piquing his interest in these and other excavations around Manhattan's northern end. "The acquisition of the drawing spurred me to explore the printed record," Conklin writes, "to find out what could be learned about marble and mineral specimen production at Kingsbridge, and especially about the quarry and the house depicted in the sketch."
 [Image: A quarry site that now "lies in the bed of the present Harlem River," via].
Digging around in various archives, Conklin goes on to locate references to old quarries along what is now Broadway. The bracketed note in the following quotation is Conklin's: "From 213th to 217th street the road [called at the time the Kingsbridge road and now known as Broadway] passed along the foot of the eastern slope of marble quarries." This places additional marble quarries in Kingsbridge, in the year 1808, on the lands of the Dyckman family and elsewhere. The Dyckmans at one time owned the largest single tract of land in the history of Manhattan and were honored by the naming of present-day Dyckman Street, an important east-west thoroughfare that traverses their former lands. When the quarries were later abandoned, they filled with water, becoming ponds (and, in the winter, small ice-skating rinks); however, in many cases, these already coastal land features were "obliterated" by the navigable straightening of the Harlem River.
 [Image: Nautical chart of the Harlem River, courtesy of NOAA].
But there are other quarries out there that have since been built over, and that remain covered over or filled in by architecture. There might even have been, Conklin speculates, a large-yielding quarry "situated on land that is now occupied by Columbia University's Baker Field." It's fascinating to consider even the possibility that there are buildings on the northern end of Manhattan whose basements are, in fact, former quarries, large artificial caverns hewn directly from bedrock, negative sculptures in which people now do laundry or park cars (or, who knows, wander around at night for hours, flashlight in hand, amazed at these labyrinths that stretch for miles, across state lines, underneath rivers, out beneath the sea).
The story of the quarries is long, as the same veins of rock that criss-cross Manhattan were also exploited further afield, at sites in Connecticut and upriver, and, if you're into that sort of thing, it's worth a quick read.
Finally, though, there is a juxtaposition of two historical photographs in Conklin's post that I feel compelled to reproduce here; it's like Piranesi-on-Hudson—or on 216th Street, as the case may be.
[Image: Manhattan Piranesi, via].
A ruined arch made from quarried Manhattan bedrock later covered in signs and spraypaint, all but buried in the visual mess of the modern city.
(More on the minerals of NYC).
 [Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].
An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage with humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life."
 [Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].
Reaching that point, however, requires an ambitious reformatting of the entire site, seemingly the very limit of landscape architecture: a kind of concrete garden that produces stars.
As the project now stands, construction involves inserting a supergrid of rebar into the quarried pit, securing the limestone walls with concrete foundation work, then pouring seismically-stabilized plinths that will support the so-called International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (or ITER) upon completion.
 [Image: Checking plinths at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as if Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin could be repurposed for building stars. Photo ©ITER Organization].
Superficially—i.e. they're both in France and they both involve limestone—I'm reminded of the Crazannes Quarries project by Bernard Lassus, for which cuts, sections, "artificial rock formations," shaped cliffs, and other designed geologies were introduced into and through the side of a French road. In effect, Lassus milled a new, powder-white landscape from the limestone.
But the ITER project seems to take the ambitions of Crazannes and turn them up to a nearly overwhelming degree: using a (to be clear, all but unrelated) landscape design process to produce moments of stellar combustion on the earth. It's like an undeclared monument to Giordano Bruno—or, for that matter, to Aleister Crowley. A quarry in which we'll build stars.
In any case, nestled there in its semi-subterranean, mine-like site and buzzing inside with radiation-resistant robot elevators, each "about the size of a large bus," the ITER will recreate, again and again, "the process that powers the sun and most other stars. At extremely high temperatures, hydrogen nuclei will fuse to form helium, spitting out more energy than the process consumes, something that has never yet been achieved by a human-made device."
  [Image: A blanket of rebar is installed inside the pit at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].
The photos seen here—reproduced in accordance with ITER's image-use policy—shows the site work in action: quarrying, gridding, pouring, smoothing, and stabilizing, in preparation for the birth of new heavens.
   [Images: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].
More images are available at the ITER website.
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