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 [Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
An interesting new project by Space Caviar asks, "Does your home have an airplane mode?"
Exploring what it could mean to design future homes so that they offer an optional state of complete electromagnetic privacy, they have put together a "domestic prototype" in which the signal-blocking capabilities of new architectural materials are heavily emphasized, becoming a structural component of the house itself.
 [Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
In other words, why just rely on aftermarket home alterations such as WiFi-blocking paint, when you can actually factor the transmission of signals through architectural space into the design of your home in the first place?
 [Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
Space Caviar call this "a new definition of privacy in the age of sentient appliances and signal-based communication," in the process turning the home into "a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy."
As the space of the home becomes saturated by “smart” devices capable of monitoring their surroundings, the role of the domestic envelope as a shield from an external gaze becomes less relevant: it is the home itself that is observing us. The RAM House responds to this near-future scenario by proposing a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy. Within the space’s core, Wi-Fi, cellphone and other radio signals are filtered by various movable shields of radar-absorbent material (RAM) and faraday meshing, preventing signals from entering and—more importantly—escaping. Just as a curtain can be drawn to visually expose the domestic interior of a traditional home, panels can be slid open to allow radio waves to enter and exit, when so desired.
The result is the so-called " RAM House," named for those "movable shields of radar-absorbent material," and it will be on display at the Atelier Clerici in Milan from April 14-19.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
The London-based ScanLab Projects, featured here many times before, have completed a new commission, this time from the British Postal Museum & Archive, to document the so-called " Mail Rail," a network of underground tunnels that opened back in 1927.
As Subterranea Britannica explains, the tunnels were initially conceived as a system of pneumatic package-delivery tubes, an "atmospheric railway," as it was rather fantastically described at the time, "by which a stationary steam engine would drive a large fan which could suck air out of an air tight tube and draw the vehicle towards it or blow air to push them away."
That "vehicle" would have been a semi-autonomous wheeled cart bearing parcels for residents of Greater London.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
Alas, but unsurprisingly, this vision of an air-powered subterranean communication system for a vast metropolis of many millions of residents was replaced by a rail-based one, with narrow, packed-heavy cars running a system of tracks beneath the London streets. Thus the Mail Rail system was born.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
While the story of the system itself is fascinating, it has also been told elsewhere.
The aforementioned Subterranea Britannica is a perfect place to start, but urban explorers have also gained entrance for narrative purposes of their own, including the long write-up over at Placehacking.
That link includes the incredible detail that, "on Halloween night 2010, ravers took over a massive derelict Post Office building in the city and threw an illegal party of epic proportions. When pictures from the party emerged, we were astonished to find that a few of them looked to be of a tiny rail system somehow accessed from the building."
Surely, this should be the setting for a new novel: some huge and illegal party in an abandoned building at an otherwise undisclosed location in the city results in people breaking into or discovering an otherwise forgotten, literally underground network, alcohol-blurred photographs of which are later recognized as having unique urban importance.
Something is down there, the hungover viewers of these photographs quickly realize, something vague and hazily glimpsed in the unlit background of some selfies snapped at a rave.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
This would all be part of the general mysticism of infrastructure that I hinted at in an earlier post, the idea that the peripheral networks through which the city actually functions lie in wait, secretly connecting things from below or wrapping, Ouroborus-like, around us on the edges of things.
These systems are the Matrix, we might say in modern mythological terms, or the room where Zeus moves statues of us all around on chessboards: an invisible realm of tacit control and influence that we've come to know unimaginatively as nothing but infrastructure. But infrastructure is now the backstage pass, the esoteric world behind the curtain.
In any case, with this handful of party pictures in hand, a group of London explorers tried to infiltrate the system. After hours of exploration, we finally found what we thought might be a freshly bricked up wall into the mythical Mail Rail the partygoers had inadvertently found... We went back to the car and discussed the possibility of chiselling the brick out. We decided that, given how soon it was after the party, the place was too hot to do that just now and we walked away, vowing to try again in a couple of months. It took some time—but, eventually, it worked.
They found the tunnels.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
The complete write-up over at Placehacking is worth the read for the rest of that particular story.
But ScanLab now enter the frame as documentarians of a different sort, with a laser-assisted glimpse of this underground space down to millimetric details.
Their 3D point clouds afford a whole new form of representation, a kind of volumetric photography that cuts through streets and walls to reveal the full spatial nature of the places on display.
The incredible teaser video, pieced together from 223 different laser scanning sessions, reveals this with dramatic effect, featuring a virtual camera that smoothly passes beneath the street like a swimmer through the waves of the ocean.
As the British Postal Museum & Archive explains, the goal of getting ScanLab Projects down into their tunnels was "to form a digital model from which any number of future interactive, visual, animated and immersive experiences can be created."
In other words, it was a museological project: the digital preservation of an urban underworld that few people— Placehacking's write-up aside—have actually seen.
For example, the Museum writes, the resulting laser-generated 3D point clouds might "enable a full 3D walkthrough of hidden parts of the network or an app that enables layers to be peeled away to see the original industrial detail beneath."
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
Unpeeling the urban onion has never been so gorgeous as we leap through walls, peer upward through semi-transparent streets, and see signs hanging in mid-air from both sides simultaneously.
 [Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].
Tunnels become weird ropey knots like smoke rings looped beneath the city as the facades of houses take on the appearance of old ghosts, remnants of another era gazing down at the flickering of other dimensions previously lost in the darkness below.
(Thanks again to the British Postal Museum & Archive for permission to post the images).
 [Image: A view of the Global Containers Terminal in Bayonne; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
I just spent the bulk of the day out on a tour of the Global Containers Terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey, courtesy of the New York Infrastructure Observatory.
That's a new branch of the institution previously known as the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, who hosted the MacroCity event out in San Francisco last May. They're now leading occasional tours around NYC infrastructure (a link at the bottom of this post lets you join their mailing list).
 [Image: A crane so large my iPhone basically couldn't take a picture of it; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
There were a little more than two dozen of us, a mix of grad students, writers, and people whose work in some way connected them to logistics, software, or product development—which, unsurprisingly, meant that everyone had only a few degrees of separation from the otherworldly automation on display there on the peninsula, this open-air theater of mobile cranes and mounted gantries whirring away in the precise loading and unloading of international container ships.
The clothes we were wearing, the cameras we were using to photograph the place, even the pens and paper many of us were using to take notes, all had probably entered the United States through this very terminal, a kind of return of the repressed as we brought those orphaned goods back to their place of disembarkation.
 [Images: The bottom half of the same crane; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
Along the way, we got to watch a room full of human controllers load, unload, and stack containers, with the interesting caveat that they—that is, humans—are only required when a crane comes within ten feet of an actual container. Beyond ten feet, automation sorts it out.
When the man I happened to be watching reached the critical point where his container effectively went on auto-pilot, not only did his monitor literally go blank, making it clear that he had seen enough and that the machines had now taken over, but he referred to this strong-armed virtual helper as "Auto Schwarzenegger."
"Auto Schwarzenegger's got it now," he muttered, and the box then disappeared from the screen, making its invisible way to its proper location.
 [Image: Waiting for the invisible hand of Auto Schwarzenegger; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
Awesomely—in fact, almost unbelievably—when we entered the room, with this 90% automated landscape buzzing around us outside on hundreds of acres of mobile cargo in the wintry weather, they were listening to "Space Oddity" by David Bowie.
"Ground control to Major Tom..." the radio sang, as they toggled joysticks and waited for their monitors to light up with another container.
 [Image: Out in the acreage; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
The infinitely rearrangeable labyrinth of boxes outside was by no means easy to drive through, and we actually found ourselves temporarily walled in on the way out, just barely slipping between two containers that blocked off that part of the yard.
This was "Damage Land," our guide from the port called it, referring to the place where all damaged containers came to be stored (and eventually sold).
 [Image: One of thousands of stacked walls in the infinite labyrinth of the Global Containers Terminal; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
One of the most consistently interesting aspects of the visit was learning what was and was not automated, including where human beings were required to stand during some of the processes.
For example, at one of several loading/unloading stops, the human driver of each truck was required to get out of the vehicle and stand on a pressure-sensitive pad in the ground. If nothing corresponding to the driver's weight was felt by sensors on the pad, the otherwise fully automated machines toiling above would not snap into action.
This idea—that a human being standing on a pressure-sensitive pad could activate a sequence of semi-autonomous machines and processes in the landscape around them—surely has all sorts of weird implications for everything from future art or museum installations to something far darker, including the fully automated prison yards of tomorrow.
 [Image: One of several semi-automated gate stations around the terminal; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
This precise control of human circulation was also built into the landscape—or perhaps coded into the landscape—through the use of optical character recognition software (OCR) and radio-frequency ID chips. Tag-reading stations were located at various points throughout the yard, sending drivers either merrily on their exactly scripted way to a particular loading/unloading dock or sometimes actually barring that driver from entry. Indeed, bad behavior was punished, it was explained, by blocking a driver from the facility altogether for a certain amount of time, locking them out in a kind of reverse-quarantine.
Again, the implications here for other types of landscapes were both fascinating and somewhat ominous; but, more interestingly, as the trucks all dutifully lined-up to pass through the so-called "OCR building" on the far edge of the property, I was struck by how much it felt like watching a ceremonial gate at the outer edge of some partially sentient Forbidden City built specifically for machines.
In other words, we often read about the ceremonial use of urban space in an art historical or urban planning context, whether that means Renaissance depictions of religious processions or it means the ritualized passage of courtiers through imperial capitals in the far east. However, the processional cities of tomorrow are being built right now, and they're not for humans—they're both run and populated by algorithmic traffic control systems and self-operating machine constellations, in a thoroughly secular kind of ritual space driven by automated protocols more than by democratic legislation.
These—ports and warehouses, not churches and squares—are the processional spaces of tomorrow.
 [Image: Procession of the True Cross (1496) by Gentile Bellini, via Wikimedia].
It's also worth noting that these spaces are trickling into our everyday landscape from the periphery—which is exactly where we are now most likely to find them, simply referred to or even dismissed as mere infrastructure. However, this overly simple word masks the often startlingly unfamiliar forms of spatial and temporal organization on display. This actually seems so much to be the case that infrastructural tourism (such as today's trip to Bayonne) is now emerging as a way for people to demystify and understand this peripheral realm of inhuman sequences and machines.
In any case, as the day progressed we learned a tiny bit about the "Terminal Operating System"—the actual software that keeps the whole place humming—and it was then pointed out, rather astonishingly, that the actual owner of this facility is the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, an almost Thomas Pynchonian level of financial weirdness that added a whole new level of narrative intricacy to the day.
If this piques your interest in the Infrastructure Observatory, consider following them on Twitter: @InfraObserve and @NYInfraObserve. And to join the NY branch's mailing list, try this link, which should also let you read their past newsletters.
 [Image: The Container Guide; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
Finally, the Infrastructure Observatory's first publication is also now out, and we got to see the very first copy. The Container Guide by Tim Hwang and Craig Cannon should be available for purchase soon through their website; check back there for details (and read a bit more about the guide over at Edible Geography).
(Thanks to Spencer Wright for the driving and details, and to the Global Containers Terminal Bayonne for their time and hospitality!)
[Image: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].
A gorgeous project called Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey, made while still a B.A. student at SCI-Arc under the guidance of Dwayne Oyler and Thom Mayne, is well worth a look.
Morey describes the project as a strict exploration of drawing, tracking the effects of architectural "spillovers," freely moving between volume, shadow, ground, and perspective while never fully arriving at a fixed state.
 [Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].
This has the effect of making the elaborate black shading spatially misleading. In other words, it is deliberately unclear if we are looking at rooms, walls, and landscapes, or merely at their secondary effects, at echoes, shadows, and repetitions extruded from an original form made illegible by the shapes that now surround it.
The form casts its own ground, so to speak, existing in a context of its own delays and translations.
 [Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].
It was about "showing volume, but no scale," in Morey's words, using the drawings "to cast doubt on themselves. Allowing for choice in the reading, unraveling."
Morey's monochromatic approach then explodes in a sequence of colorful plans and sections.
   
[Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].
You can see many more images, including 3D prints and some intermediary studies between the drawings seen above, s well as read more about the project over at SUPER // ARCHITECTS.
You can see more of Morey's images on his Instagram feed.
(Spotted via the excellent Data is Nature, by Paul Prudence).
 [Image: Courtesy of Sotheby's].
Back to opportunities in real estate: if you were tempted by the Minneapolis skyway but you're saving your money for something a bit warmer throughout the year, consider snapping up the " Submarine Pits on Boca Chica Key."
 [Image: Courtesy of Sotheby's].
As Sotheby's describes the carved landscape of submarine docking pens, the pits can be found amidst "approximately 122 acres of vacant land just north of Key West."
Here's the site on Google Maps.
  [Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].
They're basically just deep slots blasted through the coral and limestone, barely visible beneath the water line in the form of somewhat ominous black strips where the ground drops away.
  [Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].
The site is zoned as a "Commercial Fishing Special District," perhaps implying some future reuse of the submarine pens as exotic fish farms.
But imagine all the weird opportunities here for submerged foundations, underwater hotel rooms, or other half-aquatic facilities—even something like the Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG—looped in and around these linear, Nazca-like features.
 [Image: The Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG; photo by Luca Santiago Mora via Dezeen].
From Sotheby's:
This parcel was used by the Navy Air Station to house its submarine war ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and has a very colorful and distinct history. Perfect for marine use and development in a great location. Property includes seven finger cut coral canals that are 90 feet wide and over 25 feet deep, plus a deep water basin with dredged entry channel that provides passage to Boca Chica Channel (Oceanside) and Key West Harbor (Bayside).
The asking price?
    [Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].
A mere $21.2 million—but then these drowned geoglyphs in the semitropical sun can be all yours.
(Spotted via Curbed Miami. Previously on BLDGBLOG: Buy a Skyway, Buy a Fort, Buy a Lighthouse, Buy an Underground Kingdom, Buy a Prison, Buy a Tube Station, Buy an Archipelago, Buy a Map, Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Silk Mill, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church).
   [Images: "N House" by Roote is a clever response to a hillside plot in Fukuoka, Japan, accommodating a 4-meter (13-foot) change in elevation from one side of the house to the other; images courtesy of Roote via designboom].
 [Image: From "Destination Docklands" by Emma Colthurst; via Lobby].
This is such a clever architectural model: a project by Emma Colthurst from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London is presented as a narrative gyroscope, an urban universe of wheels within wheels, of shifting ground planes and emerging landscapes amidst a carousel of new horizons.
 [Image: From "Destination Docklands" by Emma Colthurst].
Called " Destination Docklands," it is intended as a kind of horological device, telling the story of the site through time.
This includes the "submerged industrial landscape" that re-arises with a turning of the gears to the towering cranes of as-yet unrealized construction projects set to transform the Docklands for generations.
 [Image: From "Destination Docklands" by Emma Colthurst].
As Colthurst herself explains over at Lobby:
"Destination Docklands" seeks to reconnect the remnant memory of the submerged industrial landscape. A Gimbal—a mechanism, typically consisting of rings pivoted at right angles, for keeping an instrument such as a compass or chronometer horizontal in a moving vessel or aircraft—holds the Dock’s spatiality in fragmented balance. Previously a device used for ship navigation, the Gimbal realigns glimpses of the area’s connected history, and its axes pivot perpendicularly, bringing their own relationship and meaning to the Dock. The Gimbal becomes a capsule for the connected "players" of this industrial world.
"As the rings turn," she adds, "the spatial relationships between the industrial worlds are juxtaposed against each other. As these tangible connections teeter on the edge of the Dock’s hemisphere, their world is refocused in moments of realisation, before falling away."
 [Image: From "Destination Docklands" by Emma Colthurst].
The result is a gyroscopic scenography of different contexts rolling into view, momentarily aligning, and then sinking once again into the urban murk of potential rearrangements yet to come.
Read more about the project over at the recently launched Lobby.
 [Image: "Dome-shaped Architectural Staircase Model," courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].
If you liked those two staircase posts from earlier today, a reader has pointed out that the Cooper Hewitt has a whole slew of " Models & Prototypes" on display that seem worth checking out.
More specifically, it's "a gallery devoted to exhibiting three-dimensional representations of ideas that demonstrate the design process; test concepts and resolve problems; enhance presentations; and display complex technical skills."
Take a look at the " Dome-shaped Architectural Staircase Model" from the mid-19th-century, for example, seen above, or this gorgeous " staircase model from France".
 [Image: A "staircase model from France," courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].
Freestanding and divorced from their ultimate architectural context, they become more like vertebrae or genetic helices spiraling in midair.
 [Image: "Staircase Model, France," courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].
See more over at the Cooper Hewitt.
(Thanks to John O'Shea for the tip!)
 [Image: A blueprint of tunnels rumored to connect the Playboy Mansion with nearby celebrity homes, via Playboy].
This is hilarious and amazing: there may (or may not) have been secret underground tunnels connecting the Playboy Mansion to the homes of nearby celebrities, including Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson. It's like the becoming-priapic of the Mole Man of Hackney.
According to some blueprints literally unearthed from the Playboy Mansion basement after overhearing a rumor about some "tunnels," it seems that, at the very least, underground routes were designed all the way to the point of construction diagrams, to connect the homes from below.
Those construction documents imply, according to the post over at Playboy, that "tunnels were built to the homes of 'Mr. J. Nicholson,' 'Mr. W. Beatty,' 'Mr. K. Douglas' and 'Mr. J. Caan.' We’ll go ahead and assume they’re talking about Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas and James Caan—all of whom lived near the Playboy Mansion during the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are no dates on the architectural schematics, but the dates on the Polaroids were from 1977."
The Polaroids referred to show excavations and construction material, and can be seen at the original article.
Of course, no one seems to know if the tunnels were, in fact, ever constructed—or even if the Playboy story itself isn't just a rumor-stirring bit of architectural fiction—but a staff member apparently "heard they were closed up sometime in 1989."
The idea that the libidos of Hollywood stars are all secretly linked by a maze of underground tunnels is awesomely perfect: equal parts psychoanalytic metaphor and potential plot for a new David Lynch film. Has-been celebrities clad head to toe in fur wander through a maze of multicolored halls beneath Los Angeles, experiencing bizarre moments of time travel that serve no narrative function other than to let them spy on earlier versions of themselves, making love in a wood-paneled mansion where wall-sized fireplaces roar with logs that never burn. Everyone is played by Bill Pullman.
(Thanks to Josh Glenn for the tip!)
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[Image: The "Vanessa School" (1973) by Fitch and Co., a retail design firm run by 
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