Altering Antarctica

[Image: Courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory].

There are a wide variety of overlooked and forgotten ways in which humans participate with, and alter, the biological systems around them. A few seeds, trapped in the soles of our shoes, can cross oceans with us in airplanes, bringing gardens, and weeds, and parasite species, to the other side of the earth; trace amounts of infectious diseases can cling to our clothes and decimate livestock several nations away; snakes, rats, spiders, mosquitoes – all can easily ride the ships and planes of globalization.
Our economy is crowded with invasive stowaways intent on surviving elsewhere – even if survival means irretrievably altering the new host environment.
In other words, travel itself can be something of a biological activity: we do the migratory work of other species for them. We take them with us. Importations of even the smallest microbe can sufficiently alter an ecological niche, opening it up to further changes – then compounding over time into whole new landscapes. What would happen naturally is accelerated: a thousand years in a decade.
It shouldn't surprise us, then, to learn that strange things are afoot in Antarctica.

(To read more, you'll have to visit WorldChanging – for whom this post was originally written).

4 Week's Notice

Dear readers,

In exactly four weeks I start school again. Yes, after nearly ten years in professional practice, I'm heading back to school for a Master's degree, specifically the Master's in Urban Planning at City College's Urban Design Program, headed by Michael Sorkin and located in the great city of New York.

What brings this on, you ask? Well, going back to school for a Master's degree (I have a five-year Bachelor's degree from Kansas State) has always been on my mind, though in varying degrees since starting my first job. I've seen it as a way to pursue something more defined than undergrad, more personal, and reflecting some experience with practice and "how the world works." Now with marriage and the prospects that that brings, this might be the last chance I have to pursue this goal. But more importantly, the Urban Design Program's focus on sustainable and pedestrian-oriented planning is something I feel strongly about and feel is timely and important, for reasons that don't require too much explanation here.

Regardless, here's a quote that might help illustrate what I'm thinking, taken from Michael Hough's City Form and Natural Process, written in 1984 but still apt (if not even more) today:

As environment and energy issues assume a higher profile in the future, it will become increasingly necessary to broaden the horizons of urban design to meet new goals. Urban land as a whole will be required to assume environmental, productive, and social roles, as fundamental components of the urban design process...Many of the problems generated by the city and imposed on the larger natural environment will have to be resolved within it.

I'm mentioning this here to alert readers that August might be a slow month in these parts. I'll need to make multiple trips to New York to find an apartment, help my wife find a job, register for classes, and all that other good stuff that goes along with going back to school and uprooting one's life. I plan on keeping this page, my weekly page, and the archi-tourist going, though the frequency of posts on this page will be determined by my schedule and workload. Each one of these pages are a great outlet for me, my interests, and my wanderings about the world and the internet, and I don't plan on any of that lapsing anytime soon.

Sincerely,

John

Old in New

Stumbling about ARCOweb, I came across this project by the current Pritzker laureate, Paulo Mendes de Rocha (with Metro Arquitetos) for a rather brazen addition to the Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.



It's in Portuguese, so I'll let the images speak for themselves.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Mountain Retreat in Kerhonkson, New York by Resolution: 4 Architecture.

The updated book feature is Tadao Ando: Complete Works, edited by Philip Jodidio.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Coroflot
"A career and community site for creative professionals [that] hosts individual creative portfolios [for free!] and a database of job and project openings."

East Coast Architecture Review
"Providing Commentary, Discourse & Insight into Architecture & Allied Design from the Southeastern United States." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Architektur Blog
New German architecture blog, in German. (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Today's archidose #15

Ibirapuera2 by digdoi
Auditorium of the Ibirapuera Park by Oscar Niemeyer, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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A Sketch for London

For an exhibit during last month's London Architecture Biennale 2006, curator Matteo Cainer invited "architectural studios from outside the UK (...) to sketch a visionary project for London." Graphic speculation about another London yet to come, Cainer hoped, would "further consolidate architecture’s role in imagining a future for the city":

Architects have been invited to take an outsider’s view, and as such submit a sketch for an imaginative project in the city of London. They are free to choose a site and focus, whether addressing issues of planning, landscape, infrastructure or building. The central challenge remains what it has been for centuries: to make architecture a vessel for new and controversial ideas. Gathering together architects with sketches, and critics with words, will entice visitors into a theatre of architectural imagination where a wide range of daring projects, conceived by some of the most inventive and newly emerging architects, come together in a panorama of architecture’s current potential and promise. This will in turn create a platform for discussion and a critical examination of today’s approach to architecture.

The result was The World in One City – A Sketch for London, an exhibit beautifully designed by Cainer's own Design Research Studio at Fletcher Priest Architects.


[Images: ©Chris Gascoigne].

After emailing Cainer expressing interest in the exhibit itself and in the architectural projects it featured, he responded with a PDF from which these images were taken. Here we see interior shots, offering a glimpse of the show's dominant theme: coordinate points of latitude and longitude, geographic sites of architectural speculation.


[Images: ©Chris Gascoigne].

"The show tries to move beyond the current scene, dominated by cyberspace and video simulation," Cainer explains, "and beyond the familiar client restraints and the fashion parade of magazines." Instead, the exhibit's purpose is to focus on "the ‘sketch’ as the fulcrum of architectural imagination. Concepts and subsequent sketches are often underestimated: sketching is not only practical but also essential; it is the quickest, most accessible way for generating ideas."
A website for the show is in the works, as well as a publication.
Finally, let me just add that the idea for this exhibition is totally fantastic, and that every city in the world, frankly, should perform this kind of imaginative self-reflection at least once every few years. By openly speculating about conjectural urban futures – whether those include pedestrian malls, blimp-aquariums, or even insanely ambitious green roof projects – residents of cities everywhere can be reminded that their own urban environment is an ongoing project, and that everyday life itself can be upgraded, reprogrammed, better designed. After all, the architectural future is just a few words and sketches away.

(Note: All photographs in this post are by Chris Gascoigne – whose website is chock full of more architectural photography).

The architecture of spam

[Image: From Spam Architecture, ©Alex Dragulescu].

Alex Dragulescu has some extremely interesting projects up on his website right now. For the most part, they're "experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets."
However, this one – called Spam Architecture – totally blows me away: "The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures."


[Image: From Spam Architecture, ©Alex Dragulescu].

Applying this to large-scale architectural design would be endlessly and hypnotically fascinating – not to mention quite profitable if you turned it into a kind of immersive, 3-dimensional version of Tetris. You turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into architectural structures; your Ph.D. thesis, exported as an inhabitable object; every bank statement you've ever received, transformed into a small Cubist city.
Your whole DVD collection, informationally re-presented as a series of large angular buildings.
Of course, you could also reverse the process, and input CAD diagrams of a Frank Gehry building – thus generating an inbox-clogging river of spam email. The Great Wall of China, emailed around the world in an afternoon. The collected works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
In any case, Dragulescu currently works at the Experimental Game Lab at UC-San Diego – the same institution at which Sheldon Brown developed his Scalable City project.

(Thanks to Brent Kissel for the tip about Dragulescu – and you can read more here – and to Brian Romer for Scalable City).

Seal Silo

The Marine Mammal Center (MMC) in Sausalito, California, treats elephant seals injured by "shark bites, gunshot wounds, and untenable toxins in their liquid habitat," Architecture magazine explains. "Half of all injured pinnipeds and cetaceans found in the United States – typically 700 over recent years, mostly reported by vigilant fishermen – are treated here."
More relevant to the present website, however, the MMC is now receiving a much-needed, multi-million dollar architectural upgrade – and the new design fascinatingly incorporates a derelict "pair of Nike missile silos."


[Image: Architecture Magazine].

"A dozen anti-aircraft missiles were first secured here in two 3,000-square-foot underground berths," Architecture tells us. "Soon, one of those deep concrete wells will contain all of the hospital facility’s water processing equipment, keeping it away from the sun’s damaging rays and freeing the territory above ground for recovery functions... The other silo will contain long-term freezer storage of animal tissue specimens for study."
Let's hope neither of them accidentally go off.
Of course, reusing missile silos for architectural purposes is nothing new – and, in skimming the original article, I actually thought the silos would be turned into functioning aquariums – but the project still works as a brilliant engagement with existing site conditions.
You can see one or two more images of the design at the website of Gyroscope, Inc., the project architects –


– where, for instance, we find the above diagram. "Because the center operates around the clock," Architecture explains, "illumination for night had to be directed in a manner sensitive to the fact that animals in the bay use light for migration. A portion of the pools will always be shaded by overhead awnings – many of which will be lined with photovoltaic panels, thanks to a generous donor – giving the animals a choice of where to hang out, and cutting down on cooling costs."
On the other hand, at least one question remains: seeing as how the missile silos will not be turned into functioning aquariums, is there an aquarium avant-garde anywhere else – and, if so, what does it look like? My provisional vote is for a series of truly gargantuan blimps dragging huge, transparent, cable-tethered aquariums full of coral reefs, fish, and blue whales through the skies of Baghdad.
The insurgency might end right then and there: dazzled, confused, feeling touched by the miraculous, the only thing the militias will know how to do is just put down their guns – and stare.

Today's archidose #14

Sundial Bridge by informedmindstravel
Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA by Santiago Calatrava.

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Algae Doesn't Appreciate a Great Sponge

Get an inside look at Steven Holl's Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT in this cool short film by redbucketfilms.



(Thanks for the head's up, Josh!)

Urban Autobiographies

In April 2006, a city-wide writing program began in Philadelphia. Called the Autobiography Project, the program's basic idea was to invite residents of the city to tell ther own life stories – or simply individual stories taken from their lives – using 300 words or less. The Project even sponsored community writing workshops for those Philadelphians unsure of their literary abilities – and some workshops were so successful that similar such groups may become regular fixtures at the institutions involved.
More than 340 memoirs were submitted over a six-week period. A panel of local writers and cultural figures then chose 20 particularly memorable autobiographies, and these were printed as full-size posters, complete with a photograph of each author, and installed within bus shelters throughout the city. The posters were taken down on July 23rd.
You can read more about the project at WorldChanging, where this post was originally published.

Stacking Architecture

The seemingly impossible (or unpossible, as Ralph Wiggum would say) just might happen. Commercial Property News confirms a rumor I've heard, that Blue Cross Blue Shield will expand its headquarters in Chicago's East Loop by adding 24 stories on top of its current 30 floors. That's right, on top of its current building.



Completed in 1997, the building by now defunct Lohan Associates (apparently attributed to James Goettsch via inclusion on his firm's web page and not Lohan Anderson's) was actually designed to be expanded vertically, an intelligent but far-fetched approach. Considerations include leaving some space in the core empty in anticipation of a new bank of elevators for the addition, space that can be used for the tower crane during construction; and creating a large plaza to the north that can be used for staging during that time. Regardless of these and other measures, now that that time has almost come, it should be interesting to see just how smooth the process is and if they can pull it off.

And speaking of stacking, Freitag's new shop in Zurich that recently opened is comprised of 17 used shipping containers stacked into four columns of varying heights. Architects spillman.echsle found an appropriate design for a company that makes and sells "recycled freewaybags."



More photos can be seen at Freitag's Flickr sets.

(via WM$NA)

National sovereignty and the detention market

[Image: A partially inflatable immigrant-detention center, photographed by The New York Times – though their article is now pay-per-view].

Between statelessness and Westphalian sovereignty you apparently get inflatable architecture, instant cities on the carceral edge between two systems of power: "As the Bush administration gets tougher on illegal immigration and increases its spending on enforcement," the New York Times reported last week, "some of the biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that have been building and running private prisons around the country."
This is referred to as the "detention market," and it is "projected to increase by $200 million to $250 million over the next 12 to 18 months" – an astonishing increase of 400%. (Invest now).
These "beds within the border region" are managed with Wal-Mart-like efficiency. Indeed, making beds "available quickly is considered an advantage in the industry since the government’s need for prison space is often immediate and unpredictable. Decisions about where to detain an immigrant are based on what is nearby and available. Immigration officials consider the logistics and cost of transportation to the detention center and out of the country."
All of which defines a new political space wherein real-time logistics, transport infrastructure, the rise of the market-state, private investment, and post-Archigramian inflatable architecture strangely merge.
Two quotations seem appropriate here, both taken from Philip Bobbitt's recent – and extraordinarily dense – look at historical mutations within the concept and practice of constitutional sovereignty.
As the nation-state is superceded by the market-state, Bobbitt explains, we are witnessing a clash of tactical responsibilities: "What is appropriate for the market-state – with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment – seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation." Of course, this is exactly what we see today in the U.S. immigration debate: an argument for the economic necessity of immigrant labor, including financial opportunity for all, vs. an argument for national border security and the protection of legal citizens.
"There is a grotesque disparity," Bobbitt writes, "between the rapid movement of international capital and the ponderous and territorially circumscribed responses of the nation-state, as clumsy as a bear chained to a stake, trying to chase a shifting beam of light."
The almost Dr. Seussian world of inflatable immigrant-detention camps, as explored by The New York Times, is perhaps evidence of this sovereign clumsiness.

(The NYT article was also covered by Bryan Finoki over at Subtopia; meanwhile, a rather old BLDGBLOG post explores the idea of "criminal aliens needing beds").

Today's archidose #13

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse, Hampshire, IL by Karla's
The Muirhead Farmhouse by FLLW, now a bed and breakfast.

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Chang-Lin Tien Center

About 180 degrees from the Tate Modern Extension posted earlier today is UC Berkeley's Chang-Lin Tien Center, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Yep, them.



While it may not resemble other projects by the New York-based architects -- the Neurosciences Institute, the Folk Art Museum, the Cranbrook Natatorium -- it clearly exhibits their thoughtfulness and sensitivity to site, client, and program. And compared with the Herzog & de Meuron design for the Tate, this project is much more clear on what's happening inside.

(via Javlog)

This Just In

From World Architecture News:

Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron have today revealed plans for their £215 million iconic extension to the former power station on the south bank of the River Thames. The new 7,000 m² extension will be built on land to the south of the Tate Modern reclaimed from EDF energy networks. A new entrance and piazza to the 4 million visitor/year venue will allow north-south pedestrian passage through the complex. Ten new galleries will be provided in the 10 stories above ground and a performing space will be created within the former oil tanks, once used to feed the power station located below ground. The Mayor of London today pledged £7 million pounds towards the project through the London Development Agency. Completion is scheduled for 2012.

Kinda makes Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins look sensitive.

More at Google News.

Update: The image below and more, with commentary by Hugh Pearman, at Gabion.



Update 07.26: The Tate's official site on the addition is Transforming Tate Modern, "an opportunity for you to see how the project is developing and how Tate is responding to local people's views."



On Tate's page is the view above, which better illustrates the extension's siting and its view from across the Thames, less imposing than other renderings.

Today's archidose #12

duomo di milano by twoeightnine
A detail of Milan's Cathedral.

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Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Halmstad Library in Halmstad, Sweden by Schmidt Hammer Lassen.

The updated book feature is Peter Walker and Partners: Nasher Sculpture Center Garden, edited by Jane Amidon.

Some new (to me) architectural blogs, all added to the sidebar under blogs::architecture:

Kollectif
"Kollectif emerges from an intention to rally the different design professions...to facilitate communication between parties and, ultimately, to create and nourish a sense of curiosity towards each other. (en francais)

The Design Rag
"Illuminating commentary and illustrated visions of issues in architecture and urbanism."

Passion of the Architect
"the crazy world of architecture....the drama, the stories, the reality."

Printable Airplanes and the Future of Fiction

[Image: "The Polecat UAV is pictured flying at 15,000 feet by a chaseplane. Polecat's airframe was 'laser printed' rather than machined." New Scientist Tech].

The same week we found out that jets of the future will be made with plastic, we also read that the U.S. military has been working toward printable airplanes – unmanned drones made by "rapid prototyping." As New Scientist Tech reports: "In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part – a wing strut, say – is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes."
Of course, 3D printing is nothing new; several months ago, for instance, just about everyone in the universe learned that 3D buildings and cityscapes can be printed using images from Google Earth.


Even more strangely, you can also print fully-functioning body parts using "droplets of 'bioink'," which are "clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter." In other words, if you "alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed 'biopaper', with the bioink droplets," and if you "build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance," then, through bio-printing, these will become the "successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins."


This Frankenstein-meets-Hewlett-Packard technology can be used to "print any desired structure." Indeed, there are now "printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster." (What about a photocopier?) Finally, skeptics will benefit from learning that "cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. 'After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner.'" (A bit more on this here).
The Oliver Twist of tomorrow, then, will be a poor boy, printed in obscurity...
So the question naturally arises: what if you were to combine all these? You'd get a vast, self-printing city-organism, whose skies are criss-crossed with machine-birds of prey; when buildings reach the age of senility, forgetting how many floors they contain, they are melted down into rivers of ink and pooled in living reservoirs to be printed once again; molds and fungi and architectural infections bloom, growing atop one another till new parasite structures form, small Gothic rooms in which the homeless live.
All of which reminds me, somewhat disjunctively, of the following rather unoriginal statement: the default condition of all literary genres will soon be science-fiction. You simply will not be able to write about the world without incorporating these weird new technologies.
Science-fiction and social realism will become one and the same thing.
Look at the recent genre-defying work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, David Mitchell, Rupert Thomson, Alex Garland; soon even Ian McEwan will be writing sci-fi. Note, as well, that whilst mainstream American literary novelists appear increasingly incapable of doing anything other than reimagining their own national past – Philip Roth, say, or the forthcoming Thomas Pynchon – as if endlessly recycling historical micro-narratives will result in something new – Anglo-European fiction appears to have accepted, with great success and enthusiasm, the futurist inclinations already so obvious in everyday life.
To be rather broad here – for instance, does Michael Cunningham invalidate my argument? do I even have an argument? – it seems that while British fiction in particular has already accounted for the slippage of contemporary life into sci-fi, even welcoming this phenomenon with a newfound literary ambition, mainstream American fiction is content simply to enroll itself in unnecessary MFA programs, writing 800-page novels about family farms, the period between WWI and II, shopping, or the supposedly "atmospheric" end of the 19th century.
Run-of-the-mill student architectural proposals are already more stimulating than most of today's American novels. Architectural proposals have ideas.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has already discovered the future, and it's no real wonder that the U.S. publishing industry is in the midst of a kind of slow financial crisis. In fact, you only have to look at the ongoing revival of interest in Philip K. Dick – sci-fi novelist and volunteer FBI informant – to see that Americans don't exactly lack a literary taste for the future; it's just that all the wrong novels keep getting published here.
In any case, there are a million exceptions to this argument; feel free to rip it apart. For example, where does The Da Vinci Code fit in all this? Etc. etc.

Today's archidose #11

Originally uploaded by gac.

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Bloch Pics Update

An anonymous tipster has sent us some photos of the Steven Holl-designed addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The Bloch Building was first featured on this page back in March 05 and most recently with some pics in January of this year. The apparent split over the merits of the addition probably won't be remedied by these photos, exhibiting both the good and bad qualities of the design. The addition is scheduled to open June 2007.

















Thanks anonymous!

Half Dose #28: House of Sweden

According to its web page, "a House of Sweden is being erected outside Sweden [for the first time], to be home to the Swedish embassy and representatives of Swedish commerce. The building will form a new Swedish arena in the United States. It is an unusual embassy building, housing a secretariat, 16 apartments and an Event Center."



Designed by Sweden's Gert Wingardh, the building's exterior is a banded composition of various materials, predominantly glass but also wood and stone. In the middle bands, a blond maple is covered in fritted glass below a laminated glass printed with a wood grain. Ironically perhaps, the latter has a stronger impact, though the faux wood grain appears almost comic.



This horizontal banding reflects the variety of uses within the House of Sweden: basement event center, ground floor public areas, 2nd floor Embassy, 3rd and 4th floor apartments, and finally roof terrace. Most likely intentional is the ground floor's transparency, featuring an all-glass storefront will open in selective areas to allow public access.



As can be seen in the image below, the site "commands a spectacular view of such landmarks as Georgetown, Watergate and the Kennedy Center." Having broken ground back in April 2004, the building is approximately two months from completion.



Links:

:: House of Sweden
:: Embassy of Sweden
:: Gert Wingardh

Voyage to Utopia and the City Obscure

These images are spatio-structural urban fantasies taken from Urbicande. Les cités obscures, the source material, is a 12-volume graphic novel by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, in which "references to our world abound, especially in regard to architecture." It is a "parallel universe," we read, full of utopian construction projects and urban expeditions, strange villages and—



—moving machine-labyrinths made from decontextualized walls. Its "coherence is constantly growing with time."

All images, including those below, are copyrighted by and fully credited to this creative team.


(Thematically related: gravestmor introduces us to The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, and Pruned gives us some Brodsky & Utkin. In the process, don't forget BLDGBLOG's own look at cinematic urbanism, or Archidose's reconsideration of the strangely inspiring film, La Jétee).