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 [Image: Random image of street lights].
Parts of Copenhagen are being turned into an outdoor night-lighting experiment, aiming to determine exactly how—even to what extent—cities should be illuminated at night, not only to use resources most efficiently but to increase urban security.
A mix of context-sensitive and remotely controlled lighting systems will be deployed, and each light will have its own IP address for outside monitoring. "Sensors that track traffic density, air quality, noise, weather conditions and UV radiation will also be fitted throughout the site to see what sort of environment the lights are operating in," New Scientist explains. "All this will help work out which lights are making the biggest difference in terms of lowering costs and emissions."
The visual results will be not unlike an outdoor museum of experiential light art, a kind of an " Urban Light" sculpture blown up to the scale of a neighborhood, and the Danish Outdoor Lighting Lab—or DOLL as it's known—is even meant to be toured as such. While "engineers will have freedom to toy with the different products," we also read that "foreign officials who are curious about the technology can comparison-shop for their hometown."
 [Image: Another random image of a street light].
But these networked and responsive urban lighting systems also come with political implications, including an effect on how the city can be monitored by authorities.
Indeed, "Fitting street lamps with complex sensors—and hooking them up to a larger network that controls the city—will have implications far outside of lighting," the article explains. "If a street lamp senses a sudden rush of people in an area that's usually deserted at night, police could be tipped off to go check the area out." And, by extension, those streets could be dramatically flooded with blazing incandescence, transforming the city's infrastructure into a kind of giant police spotlight.
It's not hard to imagine life in one of these smart-lit neighborhoods of the future where, one evening, a suspect—perhaps you—has been chased by police; whole streets light up strategically, one by one, tracking the suspect—guilty or not—as he or she attempts to flee, small emergency lights even turning on in spots where they had previously been invisible. Other streets and alleys dim to help hide police in the darkness. Infrastructure becomes not just civic but tactical.
Recall Evgeny Morozov's look at the smart city as a kind of urban police state. Writing for The Guardian earlier this summer, Morozov suggested that, "As both cars and roads get 'smart,' they promise nearly perfect, real-time law enforcement. Instead of waiting for drivers to break the law, authorities can simply prevent the crime." They can simply darken entire neighborhoods—or flood them with the brilliance of a thousand LED suns.
 [Image: One more random street light image].
Police-enabled pieces of urban infrastructure are, for Morozov, "emblematic of transformations in many other domains, from smart environments for 'ambient assisted living' where carpets and walls detect that someone has fallen, to various masterplans for the smart city, where municipal services dispatch resources only to those areas that need them." Thanks to sensors and internet connectivity, the most banal everyday objects have acquired tremendous power to regulate behavior. Even public toilets are ripe for sensor-based optimisation: the Safeguard Germ Alarm, a smart soap dispenser developed by Procter & Gamble and used in some public WCs in the Philippines, has sensors monitoring the doors of each stall. Once you leave the stall, the alarm starts ringing—and can only be stopped by a push of the soap-dispensing button.
Perhaps the DOLL experiment reveals that we can now add street lights to that list: smart targeting systems that make decisions in real-time as to which residents and neighborhoods have a right to light and who shall be punished by the induced darkness of an infrastructure that no longer wants to turn on for them.
 [Image: Screengrab from Stuff showing the test-suburb, a kind of seismic Operation Doorstep].
An empty suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, abandoned after the 2011 earthquake, was bombed from below last autumn, as a series of carefully timed underground explosions set off an artificial earthquake. The controlled seismic event was part of a closely studied experiment to test how soil liquefaction could be reduced or even eliminated by better geotechnical design.
As Next City explains, it was a 70-year old former resident of the neighborhood named Martin Howman who kicked off the event, triggering the buried necklace of explosives beneath his own street and the houses of his neighbors.
"As he pressed the buttons," Charles Anderson writes for Next City, "a piece of Howman’s old neighborhood, long since abandoned, jumped and jostled just like it had the day of the 2011 quake. Cameras inside the homes showed floor boards shaking and kitchen benches being thrown from their foundations. Drones hovering above captured images of roof tiles being shaken loose and shock waves thudding through the earth. Signs had been placed throughout the wider area to reassure passersby that the sounds were just science in action. Many gathered at a safe distance to watch the spectacle unfold."
In video footage of the event, small clouds of dust can be seen bucking upward from the roofs of houses to drift away in a light breeze as the soil continues to jolt and shudder.
Stuff reported at the time that Howman's initial response to the near-total abandonment of his neighborhood after the 2011 earthquake was that "he might buy a tractor and some cows and revert the land back to dairy farm"—but, instead, he stuck around just long enough to see the empty streets transformed into a seismic research facility like something out the work of Lebbeus Woods.
Recall, for example, the ideas behind Woods's film treatment, Underground Berlin. There—as we explored here on BLDGBLOG back in 2013—Woods posited a fictional network of government seismic labs secretly operating beneath the surface of Berlin, called the Underground Research Station.
 [Image: From Underground Berlin by Lebbeus Woods].
Inside the Station, Woods's unmade film would have shown, "many scientists and technicians are working on a project for the government to analyze and harness the tremendous, limitless geological forces active in the earth... a world of seismic wind and electromagnetic flux." Their eventual goal is to achieve "a mastery"—that is, to weaponize—the "primordial earth forces" they actively study.
In his book OneFiveFour, Woods pushes these ideas further, describing a city so defined by the seismic energy destabilizing the ground beneath it that almost every building and surface has been covered in "oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change."
The entire city has become a seismic instrument where "tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes... Indeed, each object—chair, table, cloth, examining apparatus, structure—is an instrument; each material thing connects the inhabitants with events in the world around him and within himself.”
In a video posted on Stuff, the ground rhythmically ripples and pops from below, as if a living creature has stirred beneath the cracked foundations of this empty neighborhood, "primordial earth forces" intent on resisting the architecture so flimsily built upon their shoulders.
(Thanks to mike.m.d. for the heads up!)
 [Image: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
For his final thesis project at the endangered Cooper Union, Danny Wills explored how survey instruments, cartographic tools, and architecture might work together at different scales to transform tracts of land in the geographic center of the United States.
   [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
Called "Cultivating the Map," his project is set in the gridded fields, sand hills, playas, and deep aquifers of the nation's midland, where agricultural activity has left a variety of influential marks on the region's landscapes and ecosystems.
     [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
Its final presentation is light on text and heavy on models, maps, and diagrams, yet Wills still manages to communicate the complex spatial effects of very basic physical tools, how things as basic as survey grids and irrigation equipment can bring whole new regimes of territorial management into existence.
It's as if agriculture is actually a huge mathematical empire in the middle of the country—a rigorously artificial world of furrows, grids, and seasons—dedicated to reorganizing the surface of the planet by way of relatively simple handheld tools and then rigorously perfecting the other-worldly results.
  [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
Wills produced quite a lot of material for the project, including a cluster of table-sized landscapes that show these tools and instruments as they might be seen in the field.
 [Image: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
In many ways, parts of the project bring to mind the work of Smout Allen, who also conceive of architecture as just one intermediary spatial product on a scale that goes from the most intricate of handheld mechanisms to super-sized blocks of pure infrastructure.
Imagine Augmented Landscapes transported to the Great Plains and animated by a subtext of hydrological surveying and experimental agriculture. Deep and invisible bodies of water exert slow-motion influence on the fields far above, and "architecture" is really just the medium through which these spatial effects can be cultivated, realized, and distributed.
This, it seems, is the underlying premise of Wills's project, that architecture is like a valve through which new landscapes pass.
            [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
In any case, I've included a whole bunch of images here, broadly organized by tool or, perhaps more accurately, by cartographic idea, where the system of projection suggested by Wills's devices have had some sort of spatial effect on the landscape in which they're situated.
However, I've also been a little loose here, organizing these a bit by visual association, so it's entirely possible that my ordering of the images has thrown off the actual narrative of the project—in which case, it's probably best just to check out Wills's own website if you're interested in seeing more.
    [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
The project includes land ordinance survey tools and irrigation mechanisms, a "Mississippi River levee tool" and the building-sized "grain elevator tool."
    [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
In Danny's own words, the project "finds itself in the territory of the map, proposing that the map is also a generative tool. Using the drawing as fertile ground, this thesis attempts a predictive organization of territory through the design of four new tools for the management of natural resources in the Great Plains, a region threatened with the cumulative adverse effects of industrial farming. Each tool proposes new ways of drawing the land and acts as an instrument that reveals the landscape’s new potential."
These "new potentials" are often presented as if in a little catalog of ideas, with sites named, located, and described, followed by a diagrammatic depiction of what Wills suggests might spatially occur there.
  [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
The ambitious project earned Wills both the Henry Adams AIA Medal & Certificate of Merit, and the school's Yarnell Thesis Prize in Architecture.
        [Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
I'll wrap up here with a selection of images of the landscapes, tools, and instruments, but click over to Danny's site for a few more. Here are also some descriptions, where all text is italics is courtesy of Wills:
Tool 1: Meanders, Fog Fences, Air Wells
Tool 1 attaches itself to the groundwater streams, both proposing tools to redirect and slow down the flow, as well as tools to collect atmospheric water through technological systems like air wells and fog fences, forming new bodies and streams of water. The new air wells collect atmospheric water through a system of cooling and heating a substrate core inside of a ventilated exterior shell. The air wells also become spaces to observe the re-directing flow of water, as overflow quantities are appropriately managed.
Tool 2: Aquifer Irrigation Ponds
Tool 2 uses the center pivot irrigation rigs to reconstruct the ground, making bowls in the landscape that act as dew ponds. At the same time, the wells become tools and markers to survey the levels of the aquifer below, signifying changes in the depth through elevational changes above. New forms of settlement begin to appear around each ring as a balance is reached between extraction and recharge of the aquifer.
Tool 3: Sand Dunes, Grazing Fields
Tool 3 uses gas wells as new geo-positioning points, redrawing boundaries and introducing controlled grazing and fallowing zones into the region. Walls are also built as markers of the drilling wells below, creating a dune topography to retain more ground water. Each repurposed oil rig becomes an architectural element that both provides protection and feed for grazing animals as well as a core sample viewing station. The abandoned rigs suspend cross sections of the earth to educate visitors of the geological history of the ground they stand on.
Tool 4: Water Recycling Station
Tool 4 converts the grain elevator into a water recycling station, filling the silos with different densities of sand and stone to filter collected types of water- rain, ground run-off, grey, brackish, etc. Large pavilion like structures are built between houses, collecting water and providing shade underneath. Some housing is converted into family-run markets; the new social space under the pavilions provide for market space. The repurposed grain elevator becomes the storage center for the region’s new water bank. Economic control is brought back to the local scale.
[Images: "Cultivating the Map" by Danny Wills].
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