[Image: The skyway-to-nowhere while it still spanned the street; photo via the Star-Tribune].
Continuing our irregular look at oddities in real estate, you might be interested to know that you can now buy a skyway.
The 280,000-pound steel structure was originally designed by architect Ed Baker, a man apparently also known as "the father of the skyways," according to Greg.org, and as a "skyway visionary," as suggested by his 2006 obituary in The Journal.
The structure itself is still intact, although it no longer spans a street or sidewalk; rather, it sits empty in a nearby lot, devoid of both purpose and context, like an architectural prosthetic discarded, half-forgotten, by the city.
But it's no ordinary skyway.
[Image: The skyway sitting in its dusty lot; photo via the Star-Tribune].
“It is a piece of Minneapolis history,” architect Ben Awes of CityDeskStudio told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “To demolish it would be a significant waste of resources, the waste of an object that is both extremely practical and has tremendous creative potential.”
The back-story is complex:
The saga of the grounded skyway, which once ferried shoppers in climate-controlled comfort over S. 5th Street between the J.C. Penney and Powers stores in downtown Minneapolis, began more than a decade ago when the Powers store was demolished, leaving the abandoned skyway perilously projecting over 5th Street.
When work began on the 5th Street LRT line in 2002, the University of Minnesota bought the skyway to nowhere for $1. Plans to repurpose the elegant network of zigzagging steel tubes and trusses never materialized, and in 2006, CityDeskStudio bought it for $5,000 at a blind auction and wheeled it to a weed-strewn field near the U’s Twin Cities campus.
And it has sat there ever since.
When CityDeskStudio bought it, they initially envisioned transforming the structure, in one, architecturally coherent piece, into a modern lakeside cabin somewhere in the wilds of Minnesota. Until the economy got in the way.
[Image: The skyway as lakeside retreat; rendering by CityDeskStudio].
Technically speaking, the thing is not even for sale: in fact, CityDeskStudio will pay you to take it away from the site. But the moving costs, insurance, and whatever other associated site-preparation fees you might face before planting it in the woods somewhere could be quite considerable.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
A group of friends, their faces rigorously hidden from public view, find a huge borehole leading down into some tunnels beneath the city.
Not content to just lie there, straining to see more than 260 feet into the deep and merely wondering what might be down there, they do what any enterprising team of explorers would do.
They don mountaineering gear and descend into the pit.
[Images: Photos by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
It's like scaling Mt. Everest in reverse—"descending black ropes," in their words—swinging ever closer to the entrance to the tunnels, their headlamps and cameras at the ready.
Plus, some weird new myths have been circulating around town: that there's a monolithic machine down there, something massive and temporarily abandoned beneath the city. It is "the toughest of all the machines. A dormant juggernaut that lies underground."
They want to find it, to see if the rumors are true—and, who knows, to discover if the machine might still be operational. Imagine what you could do with a discarded tunneling machine seemingly forgotten in the deepest basement of the metropolis. Imagine if you could bring it back to life.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
Thus begins the next phase of their subterranean quest to find the so-called "Worm Maiden," this conquering machine-animal lying dormant in its lair somewhere under the streets.
"Hitting our helmets and our backpacks on almost everything we found on the way," they inched forward on foot.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
They soon drop their ropes and progress through a series of excavated tunnels and industrial caves, as if puzzling some new route into a pharaoh's tomb—an Egyptology of urban infrastructure with its own secret chambers and traps.
And, incredibly, they actually do it: they actually find the machine, realizing that the rumors were both true and strangely inaccurate.
That is, the machine is even larger and more extraordinary than they'd been led to believe. It is a sprawling and tentacular presence that blocks the tunnel with the dark bulk of its old valves and pipework, like some ancient engine that wanted to hide itself in a cocoon of its own making.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
"Walking through the sleeping beauty, through her corridors amongst rust and spiderwebs," we read, "she looked much bigger than we could have imagined. She didn’t seem to have an end. Eventually we reached a point where we couldn’t go any further, it was full of pipes and unknown mechanisms but the end was intuited."
The machine was so complex, in other words, that they couldn't find the other end of it, having to negotiate their way through all its internal doors and control panels.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
It could be the ultimate joyride—Grand Theft TBM—driving a stolen machine literally through the foundations of the city, carving your own maze through bedrock.
But a way forward was eventually found, and the Kubrickian monolith of this now-stationary drill head was revealed up ahead like some Mayan sculpture in the darkness. Abandoned for now and just lying there: a machine-ruin rusting away in the underground world it had made for itself. The conqueror worm.
[Image: Photo by & courtesy of Trackrunners, used with permission].
"It was much better than I had imagined," we read. The text is like an archaeological report made possible by climbing gear and GoPros. "A twelve meter diameter of pure love just in front of us, was bestial. I couldn’t stop staring at HER. I could see the strain on her, the hard work she had done. The dirt in every part of the face. Pure beauty. All the space around her was filled by a foot of dirty water. A mixture of sand, dirt, water and oil. This mantle of fluids that covered everything was perfect, the vapors fogged my camera lens but the effect was delightfully dramatic. Go and use a filter to look like this. I can see the new Instagram filter now... TBM vapors effect!"
But that's literally only half the journey. They've mountaineered into the planet, like reverse-Alpinists of the inferno—and they go so far as to discover an artificial lake beneath the city, a brackish reservoir that "shone under the light of our torches"—but now they have to get back out, which is not nearly as easy as it had seemed.
There are dozens of other photographs over at Trackrunners, and a much longer version of how everything happened that day; go check it out (and don't miss their other stories, such as the disused stations beneath Barcelona).
[Image: Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, via KCET].
Nathan Masters remains one of the more interesting chroniclers of life and landscape in Southern California, as evidenced by his "L.A. as Subject" blog for KCET. I could (and should) just link to all his posts, to be honest—lost hills! buried rivers! conflicting grids!—but last week's installment, albeit short, was particularly interesting.
"For a few days in late November 1937," Masters writes, "it was the Southland's greatest attraction—a landslide in slow motion, 1.5 million tons of an Elysian Park hillside creeping toward the Los Angeles River bed."
Sensational news reports, printed in papers and broadcast on radio nationwide, described it as a "moving mountain," and tourists came from afar to witness the geologic curiosity. One Oklahoma City police officer took a leave of absence to watch the slide. Two boys hopped freight trains from New York to see it. Some 10,000 sightseers came by the hour. Spectators pressed against police barricades along Riverside Drive, and enterprising vendors worked the throng like a baseball game, hawking peanuts, popcorn, and soda. Some even sold field glasses.
Even local astronomers showed up, telescopes in tow, in order to study the mobile mass, this blob of geology suddenly making a move into town.
After a catastrophic lurching of the slow-motion mountain, the terrain appeared to come to a standstill. "The next day, an estimated crowd of 500,000 converged on the site, munching on popcorn and hoping the mountain would move again."
This pent-up dramaturgy of the landscape—the possibility that its newfound agency would continue—crawling, oozing, rolling, forcing its way into public consciousness—remains strong today, even if subsumed into other contexts.
In other words, I'd suggest that many Angelenos are still, in a sense, "munching on popcorn and hoping the [landscape] would move again," and that this is the dark fascination of seismic instability, of what it means to live in an earthquake zone: that the land itself is active, motivated from within by a kind of a slow-motion sentience, a mineral energy that is as much an invigorating spectacle as it is an existential threat.
You've undoubtedly already seen these, but the "wooden textiles" by designer Elisa Strozyk are a beautiful and surprisingly simple rethinking of the idea of a textile—and they have some interesting implications for terrain modeling and even gaming.
Strozyk writes that she wanted to find "a new tactile experience" for wood, which she achieved by producing wooden tiles that "are then attached to a textile base. Depending on the geometry and size of the tiles each design shows a different behavior regarding flexibility and mobility."
These "different behaviors" can be seen in the following images, where the shape and size of the tiling system dictates the types of ridges and forms that result; while this is obviously interesting from a material standpoint, thinking of these as landscape-modeling exercises lends them a fascinating terrestrial applicability in representing different topographies.
In other words, you start with what appears to be a carpet, but very soon thereafter, with just a few adjustments, you have a mountain range, a moor, a midocean ridge, a series of rolling hillsides. It's tectonics at work, from a flat plane to a folded landscape, like a storm pulsing through the world from below.
As Strozyk points out, "there are various possible applications, for example as floorings, curtains, drapes, plaids, upholstery or parts of furniture."
Her site thus shows these atop beds, on floors, and spread across other objects.
But I can't help but wonder what you could do with this in very different contexts: in a student landscape design project, for example, or even as an Arduino-actuated, live-action game board, something tweaked, ridged, and uplifted to form the polygonal backdrop of a new strategy game.
Consider all of the recent excitement over Earth Primer, for example. "Like a deity in training," Wired effuses, "you can sculpt mountains, summon rain storms, and move tectonic plates with your fingertips. It’s a novel way to learn about our planet, certainly. But it’s also an inspiring design experiment, and a reminder that interactive media is a young and undeveloped world itself."
Something at least as conceptually exciting, yet more tactile and physically immersive, could also be achieved using Strozyk's wooden textiles—even if only as a somewhat expensive luxury item, sure, but the possibilities for developing a textile-based deformable game board, either for personal entertainment or for in-class pedagogy, is a pretty wild thing to think about.
Imagine teaching kids geology using intricately woven, planet-modeling blankets, or producing a landscape-intensive strategy game that can be warped in real-time using semi-solid, geometrically complex textiles.
The result would be far from an aesthetic outlier.
In a virtuoso history of landscape art, from Modern painters such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne to today's digital polygons, Tim Schneider suggested that artists such as Timothy Reynolds have been experimenting with so-called "low-poly" landscapes as a way of deliberately foregrounding the possibilities (and limits) of the digital medium.
"The sharp edges, vivid colors, and obviously geometric modeling put the polygon itself on view," Schneider writes, and this is done on purpose, "despite the fact that more traditionally realistic visual styles are available."
Indeed, low-poly art such as Reynolds's has "highlighted colorful lighting, sharp edges, and the geometric re-interpretation of organic forms as particular draws of the aesthetic. Each of these was [also] explored by more than one icon of early Modern artwork en route to their positions in the canon, and in some cases, their status as present-day household names."
This has never been an easy career path. "While the academies viewed these unrepentant stylizations as naive, childlike, or simply vulgar," Schneider reminds us, "Modern artists recognized the possibilities in this new brand of visual honesty."
In any case, Schneider's 3-part essay can be read in its entirety if you click thesethreelinks, but my own over-riding interest here remains with the potentially half-digital, half-analog nature of Elisa Strozyk's wooden textiles, wondering how they—or objects like them—might potentially be used as platforms for narrative content.
Among other things, the piece looks at various new tools designed specifically to make your home appear inhabited when it is not; these include the so-called FakeTV, which is basically exactly what it sounds like, as well as an album that describes itself as a collection of "hundreds of professionally recorded interior house sounds to give the realistic impression that someone is at home." It's the brave new world of home protection audio.
That kicks off a new monthly column for New Scientist exploring "how technology and design are changing our cities, homes, the built environment—and ourselves."
[Image: Jasper National Park, courtesy of Parks Canada].
There's an interesting article over at Highline Magazine about a lost hiker named George Joachim whose subsequent behavior in the landscape was so spatially unexpected that he eluded discovery for ten days.
He was a "behavioral outlier," we read, and his mathematically unpredictable actions forced a revision of what is, in effect, the search algorithm used by Parks Canada for tracking human beings in the wild.
[Image: Jasper National Park, courtesy of Parks Canada].
From the story:
Parks Canada uses a statistical model to help predict where the lost person might be. The model uses data collected from similar lost person cases to learn the size and location of the search area. Combining the experience of the searchers and research on the lost person, the model then suggests the likelihood the person will be in various locations based on how previous people in their situation have behaved.
Joachim unintentionally misled searchers by listing his destination incorrectly in the climber’s registry, and then behaved so unlike other people previously have in his circumstance that he was repeatedly missed in the search. Parks Canada’s search and rescue community considers his case a valuable learning experience and have since tweaked search protocols to account for other behavioral outliers.
Put another way, this hiker exceeded the agent-based mathematical model used to track him. As a result, his searchers were forced to develop what the author calls the "Joachim profile," a kind of makeshift simulation that, in theory, should have been able to predict where he'd pop up next.
The idea that human movement through the wilderness corresponds—or not, as the case may be—to a mathematical sorting algorithm is fascinating, especially when that model diverges so drastically from what a person really does out there.
In fact, it's worth speculating that it is precisely in this divergence from accepted mathematical models of landscape use where we can find a truer or more "wild" experience of the terrain—as if certain activities can be so truly "wild" that no known algorithm is capable of describing them.
[Image: Jasper National Park, courtesy of Parks Canada].
In any case, it's by no means the world's most gripping story of human survival, but it's a great example of human landscape expectations and the limits of abstract modeling. Click over to Highline to read the whole thing.
It's hardly surprising to read that drones can be repurposed as burglars' tools; at this point, take any activity, add a drone, and you, too, can have a news story (or Kickstarter) dedicated to the result.
"Why not send an inexpensive drone, snoop in your windows, see if you have any pets, see if you have any expensive electronics, maybe find out if you have any jewelry hanging around," a security expert wonders aloud to Hawaii's KITV, describing what he sees as the future of burglary. Burglars "can do all that with a drone without ever stepping a foot on your property line."
"So what's a homeowner to do?" the TV station asks.
They suggest following the drone back to its owner, who, due both to battery life and signal range, will be nearby; or even installing "new expensive high-tech drone detection systems that claim to detect the sounds of a drone's propellers." This is absurd—suggesting that some sort of drone alarm will go off at 3am, driving you out of bed—but it's such a perfectly surreal vision of the suburbs of tomorrow.
Fortifying our homes against drone incursion will be the next bull market in security: whole subdivisions designed to thwart drone flights, marketed to potential homeowners specifically for that very reason.
You go home for the weekend to visit your parents where, rather than being enlisted to mow the lawn or clean the gutters, you're sent you out on drone duty, installing perimeter defenses or some sort of jamming blanket, an electromagnetically-active geotextile disguised beneath the mulch. Complex nets and spiderweb-like antennas go on sale at Home Depot, perfect for snaring drone rotors and leading to an explosion in suburban bird deaths.
This news comes simultaneously with a story in Forbes, where we read that drone manufacturer DJI is implementing a GPS block on its products: they will no longer be able to fly within 15.5 miles of the White House.
The company is issuing "a mandatory firmware update to all Phantom drones that will restrict flight within a 15.5 mile radius centered around downtown Washington D.C. Pilots looking to operate their Phantom drone will not be able to take off or fly within the no-fly-zone."
Based off a drone’s GPS coordinates, the technology to geo-fence drones from entering a particular airspace, especially around major airports, has been around in Phantoms since early last year. The new update will add more airports to its no-fly-zone database as the 709 no-fly-zones already in the Phantom’s flight controller software will expand to more than 10,000, with additional restrictions added to prevent flight across national borders.
This is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that firmware updates and geography now work together to disable entire classes of products within a given zone or GPS range. Put another way, drones today—but what tomorrow?
Geofencing or "locationized" firearms have already been discussed as a possible future form of gun control, for example, and it would not be at all surprising to see "locationized" smartphones or geofenced cameras becoming a thing in the next few years.
All a government (or criminal syndicate) would have to do is release a (malicious) firmware update, temporarily shutting down certain types of electronics within range of, say, a presidential inauguration (or a bank heist).
More to the point of this post, however, GPS-based geofencing will also become part of the electromagnetic armature of future residential developments, a new, invisible layer of security for those who are willing to pay for it.
Think, for example, of the extraordinary geographic dazzle effects used by government buildings to camouflage their real-world locations: as Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote for The Washington Post back in 2012, "most people don't realize when they're nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade's, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals."
If half the point of living in the suburbs is to obtain a certain level of privacy, personal safety, and peace of mind, then it is hardly science fiction to suggest that the electromagnetic fortification of suburbia is on the immediate horizon.
You won't just turn on a burglar alarm with your handy smartphone app; you'll also switch on signal-jamming networks hidden in the trees or a location-scrambling geofence camouflaged as a garden gnome at the edge of your well-mown lawn. Drones, dazzled by invisible waves of unpredictable geographic information, will perform U-turns or sudden dives, even racing off to a pre-ordained security cage where they can be pulled from the air and disabled.
The truly high-end residential developments of tomorrow will be electromagnetically fortified, impervious to drones, and, unless you've been invited there, impossible for your cars and cellphones even to find.
Here's another project from the RIBA President's Medals, this one by Alexis Quinteros Salazar, a student at the University of Chile in Santiago.
Called "Mining Cenotaph," it imagines an "occupation" of the tailings piles that have become a toxic urban landmark and a spatial reminder of the region's economic exploitation.
A museum would be carved into the tailings; in Salazar's words, this would be a "building that captures the history and symbolism behind mining, enhancing and revitalizing a memory that is currently disaggregated and ignored and has a very high touristic potential."
In an architectural context such as this, the use of the word "cenotaph" is a pretty clear reference to Étienne-Louis Boullée's classic speculative project, the "Cenotaph for Newton." Over multiple generations, that has become something of a prime mover in the history of experimental architectural design.
Punctured walls and ceilings bring light into the interior—
—while the roof is a recreational space for visitors.
Of course, there are a lot of unanswered questions here—including the control of aerosol pollution from the tailings pile itself and that pile's own long-term structural stability—but the poetic gesture of a public museum grafted into a pile of waste material is worth commending.
The detail I might like this most is where the structure becomes a kind of inversion of Boullée's dome, which was pierced to make its huge interior space appear illuminated from above by constellations. Here, instead, it is the perforations in the the rooftop that would glow upward from below, as if in resonance with the night skies high above.
Salazar's project brings to mind a few other proposals seen here over the years, including the extraordinary "Memorial to a Buried Village" by Bo Li and Ge Men, as well as Brandon Mosley's "Mine Plug" (which actually took its name retroactively from that BLDGBLOG post).
An underground bike park is opening up next month in a former limestone mine 100 feet beneath Louisville, Kentucky.
At 320,000-square feet, the facility is massive. Outside Magazine explains, "the park will have more than five miles of interconnected trails that range from flowing singletrack to dirt jumps to technical lines with three-foot drops. And that’s just the first of three phases to roll out this winter."
That's from an interview that Outside just posted with the park's designer, Joe Prisel, discussing things like the challenges of the dirt they've had to use during the construction process and the machines they used to sculpt it.
It's not the most architecturally-relevant interview, if I'm being honest, so there's not much to quote here from it, but the very idea of a BMX super-track 10 stories underground in a limestone mine sounds like a project straight out of an architecture student's summer sketchbook, and it's cool to see something like this become real.
I was clicking around on the RIBA President's Medals website over the weekend and found a few projects that seemed worth posting here.
The one seen here is a beautifully illustrated proposal for an "alternative supermarket" in Brooklyn, New York, that would be located in the city's old Navy Yard.
Note that, in all cases, larger images are available at the project website.
Its designer—Yannis Halkiopoulos, a student from the University of Westminster—pitches it as a food-themed exploration of adaptive reuse, a mix of stabilized ruins, gut renovations, and wholly new structures.
He was inspired, he suggests, by the architecture of barns, market structures, and the possibility of an entire urban district becoming a "reinvented artefact" within the larger economy of the city.
The results would be a kind of post-industrial urban food campus on the waterfront in Brooklyn.
The project is a response to current plans which are to demolish the row of abandoned houses to build a suburban supermarket. Once home to high ranking naval officers the eleven structures have been left to decay since 1960. The response is an alternative food market which aims to incorporate the row of houses and re-kindle the consumer with the origin of the food produced and promote regional traditions, gastronomic pleasure and the slow pace of life which finds its roots in the Slow Food Movement NY.
It includes a slaughterhouse, a "slow fish market," preservation facilities, a "raised tunnel network" linking the many buildings, and more.
Most of these use exposed timber framing to imply a kind of unfinished or incompletely renovated condition, but these skeletal grids also work to extend the building interiors out along walking paths and brise-soleils, partially outdoor spaces where food and drink could be consumed.
These next few images are absurdly tiny here but can be seen at a larger size over at the President's Medals; they depict the stabilized facades of the homes on Admirals Row, including how they might change over time.
Part of this would include the installation of a "raised tunnel network," effectively just a series of covered walkways and pedestrian viaducts between buildings, offering a visual tour through unrenovated sections of the site but also knitting the overall market together as a whole.
In any case, I really just think the images are awesome and wanted to post them; sure, the project uses a throwback, sepia-toned, posterization of what is basically just a shopping center to communicates its central point, but the visual style is actually an excellent fit for the proposal and it also seems perfectly pitched to catch the eye of historically minded developers.
In a sense, it's actually too bad this didn't cross their desks; personally, I wouldn't mind hopping on the subway for a quick trip to the Navy Yard, to wander around the revitalized ruins, now filled with food stalls and fish mongers, walking through gardens or stumbling brewery to brewery on a Saturday night, hanging out with friends amidst a labyrinth of stabilized industrial buildings, eating fish tacos in the shadow of covered bridges and tunnels passing overhead.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
[Image: The skyway-to-nowhere while it still spanned the street; photo via the Star-Tribune].
[Image: The skyway sitting in its dusty lot; photo via the Star-Tribune].
[Image: The skyway as lakeside retreat; rendering by CityDeskStudio].
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