Tour: Asbury Park

I've shared with you the highlights of Asbury Park, the convention center and the casino, but there is still more to see!

Despite a lot of new building and restoration, much still lies vacant down along the water but has a certain picturesque charm.

Other than the Atlantic, the big draw to Asbury Park is the nearby Ocean Grove Auditorium and village -a religious retreat. This is a quaint area near downtown which contains a number of restored Victorian houses.

Right across the street from the Convention Center along the boardwalk is the iconic Howard Johnsons, now home to another cafe. I love quirky mid century modern buildings like this. No small town is complete without a proper post office, a white marble beaux-arts beauty at that.

Terra cotta decoration is found off the boardwalk as well.The Romanesque styled Methodist church in town is covered in gorgeous, colorful tiles.Immacutely kept, the church must be much loved by its' congregants.Just a detail of the tiles.Even this house was covered in terra cotta! The town has seen a rebirth and many of the houses have been restored.Most are charming Victorians such as this with wide front porches; quintessential American homes.There are many variations though, this classically - inspired bungalow was all original. Talk about unique!I loved this white elephant of a Mediterranean, how I would love to restore it!Downtown holds no end of great restaurants and antique shops. This building in particular appealed to me.Even smaller cities have some early skyscrapers, like this Richardsonian Romanesque stone beauty, now condos above a restaurant.But it is primarily known for the strip along the boardwalk where many musicians have famously gotten their start such as Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi , at the Stone Pony club.I even made a few friends down on the boardwalk! I hope you enjoyed this tour of New Jersey's great small town, Asbury Park.

Kilometro Rosso

Here's an unedited, silent film I made of the Kilometro Rosso (Parco Scientifico Tecnologico) for Brembo, designed by Jean Nouvel. It's located alongside the A4 highway near Bergamo. Previously I featured the project on my weekly page and daily blog.

The Auditory Configuration of Hell

[Image: The howling of Hell, illustrated by Gustave Doré for Dante's Inferno].

Nearly seven years ago, we took a brief art historical look at the "landscape architecture of Hell," quoting critic Adrian Searle's description of the medieval abyss:

Terraced, pinnacled, travelling forever downward, the ledges, cities and basements of hell are furnished with sloughs, gorges and deserts; there are cities, rivers of boiling blood, lagoons of scalding pitch, burning deserts, thorny forests, ditches of shit and frozen subterranean lakes. Every kind of sin, and sinner, is catered for. Here, descending circle by circle, like tourists to Bedlam, came Dante and Virgil. Following them, at least through Dante's poem, came Botticelli.

In a recent issue of The Wire, writer and composer David Toop, in a short article about the various cultural uses of bass, comes to this topic from a different angle, asking what the netherworld of the damned might sound like.

He calls this, citing the Aeneid and Paradise Lost both, the "auditory configuration of Hell": "The auditory configuration of Hell is an opposition of low homogeneous moan and confused Babel, of deep tones and threnodic shrieks, as if combining the outer extremes of human perception is the most authentic expression of damnation." There is acoustic "distress," Toop writes, somewhere "between roaring water and the tumult of the wandering helpless unburied," where dogs howl and angels whirling to their doom are deafened by "the bellowing of the Earth itself."

Toop refers to the recent work of Hillel Schwartz, who has pointed out, in Toop's words, that "Hell was largely silent until Virgil"—a place of total silence—not the pandemonium of noise it seems in popular imagination to have since become.

So let's hear it for a much longer paper cataloging the shifting sounds of Hell—an interesting thesis topic for an comparative literature department somewhere, at the very least.

Morse Road

[Image: Curiosity's tire treads, courtesy of NASA and the nation's taxpayers].

It turns out that Bradbury Landing is also a kind of literary site, an interplanetary Newspaper Rock: the tracks left behind by the Curiosity rover are actually a form of Morse code.

The tire treads—wheeled hieroglyphs—spell out JPL, for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here on earth.

[Image: Curiosity reveals its Morse code, courtesy of NASA].

From a JPL press release: "Careful inspection of the tracks reveals a unique, repeating pattern, which the rover can use as a visual reference to drive more accurately in barren terrain. The pattern is Morse code for JPL, the abbreviation for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the rover was designed and built, and the mission is managed."

This trackable terrain augmentation is a clever form of so-called visual odometry: "The purpose of the pattern is to create features in the terrain that can be used to visually measure the precise distance between drives," such that the visual appearance of the inscribed code will reveal signs of slippage and, thus, a need to re-chart or correct the rover's navigation. This will be especially useful on "featureless terrain."

[Image: Curiosity's tire treads, courtesy of NASA].

The example NASA uses is a picket fence:

"Imagine standing in front of a picket fence, and then closing your eyes and shifting to the side. When you open your eyes, you wouldn't be able to tell how many pickets you passed. If you had one picket that was a different shape though, you could always use that picket as your reference," said [Matt Heverly, lead rover driver at JPL]. "With Curiosity, it's a similar problem in featureless terrain like sand dunes. The hole pattern in the wheels gives us one 'big picket' to look at."

In other words, somewhere on the surface of Mars, codes from Earth—a new Linear A—will slowly drift apart over the years, becoming an unreadable road in the sand.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip).

More Masters

A further selection of work from the recent submissions by the MA A+U 2012 cohort

Jack Penford Baker

Kihong Kim

Aylin Tara Bahcecioglu

Zoe Mason

Lisa Kinch film here

Anna Lucas

Nicholson Kumwenda

Bookshelf: fall releases

A number of exciting books are being released this fall, just in time for cool reading weather and Christmas shopping (too early?) The first book I'll mention, 'Habitually Chic, Creativity at Work' is written AND photographed by my dear friend Heather Clawson, author of the blog Habitually Chic. Heather has shared a number of projects from the book with me and I think everyone will learn something about how to bring a little more chic into their own workplace. We all read the blog, now read the book! 'Mighty Maharajas, Forts & Palaces of India' by Amita Baig and Joginder Singh is an astonishing look at Indian high style through the ages. A large picture book filled with lush photographs, the thing that surprised me most was how Western many of the more recent palaces are. I was most enamored with the older fortresses found early in the book and their exotic detailing. Read an in depth look on pattern within the book featuring many pictures at one of my favorite blogs StyleCourt.I first read the definitive biography of Sister Parish by Apple Bartlett and Susan Crater a number of years ago and this fall it is being reprinted with forewords by her protege Bunny Williams and, of course, Albert Hadley. This book is a MUST HAVE for any design library of substance or design student. This edition makes it affordable as well!Lastly, the tome 'At Home in Italy, under the summer sun' by Nicoletta del Buono and Massimo Listri is a beautiful and informative look at REAL Italian living today and not a stylized glossy copy. There is something for everyone from Italian farmhouses to stylish villas. You may want to plan your next vacation (or remodel!).
I'm sure everyone can make room on their bookshelf for at least one of these fantastic new design books this fall!

Bradbury Landing

[Image: Bradbury Landing, via the Planetary Society; courtesy of NASA and the nation's taxpayers].

"Bradbury Landing is the first named site on Mars not marked by an object, but by ephemeral burn scars from [Curiosity's] landing thrusters. Project scientist John Grotzinger describes the site as 'four scour marks with wheel tracks that basically begin from nowhere.'"

British Exploratory Land Archive

Speaking of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, I'm thrilled to be an exhibitor this year in the UK pavilion, as part of a collaborative project undertaken with Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen.

[Image: The British Exploratory Land Archive's "capture blanket" in use on Hampstead Heath, London; photo by Mark Smout].

Smout Allen are the authors of Augmented Landscapes, easily one of my favorite installments in the Pamphlet Architecture series, as well as long-time instructors at the Bartlett School of Architecture—in fact, many of their students' projects have been featured here on the blog over the last half-decade—and working with Mark and Laura on a project such as this has been fantastic.

Specifically, as part of the "Venice Takeaway" project curated by Vicky Richardson and Vanessa Norwood, Smout Allen and I have proposed what we call the British Exploratory Land Archive (or BELA).

The British Exploratory Land Archive is, in essence, a British version of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, albeit one defined as much by the use of unique instruments designed specifically for BELA as by its focus on sites of human land-use in the United Kingdom as by.

[Images: Going through the archives, maps, and files of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, including one of my favorite headlines of all time: "Emptiness welcomes entrepreneurs"; photos by Mark Smout].

In an essay for the Venice Takeaway book, we describe the inspiration, purpose, and future goals of the—still entirely hypothetical—British Exploratory Land Archive:

BELA is directly inspired by the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). It aims to unite the efforts of several existing bodies—English Heritage, Subterranea Britannica, the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust and even the Department for Transport, among dozens of others—in a project of national landscape taxonomy that will combine catalogues created by distinct organisations into one omnivorous, searchable archive of human-altered landscapes in Britain... From military bases to abandoned factories, from bonded warehouses to national parks, by way of private gardens, council estates, scientific laboratories and large-scale pieces of urban infrastructure, BELA’s listings are intended to serve as something of an ultimate guide to both familiar and esoteric sites of human land use throughout the United Kingdom.

In the end, a fully functioning BELA would offer architects, designers, historians, academics, enthusiasts, and members of the general public a comprehensive list of UK sites that have been used, built, unbuilt, altered, augmented and otherwise transformed by human beings, aiming to reveal what we might call the spatial footprint of human civilization in the British Isles.

Thanks to the generosity of the Venice Takeaway organizers, with funding from the British Council, Mark Smout and I had the pleasure of traveling to Los Angeles back in April 2012 specifically to meet with Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Even better, we were able to take Matt, Ben, and Aurora out on a daylong road-trip through gravel pits, dry lake beds, Cold War radar-testing facilities, airplane crash sites, logistics airfields, rail yards, abandoned military base housing complexes, and much more orbiting the endlessly interesting universe of Greater Los Angeles.

[Images: Exploring Greater Los Angeles with Matthew Coolidge, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang; photos by Mark Smout].

That trip was documented in a series of photographs, in a (very) short film, and in the essay mentioned above, all of which will be available for perusal at the UK pavilion for the duration of this year's Biennale.

I'll also include here a few diagrams depicting one the instruments Smout Allen and I devised as part of our land-investigation tools—making BELA a kind of second-cousin to Venue—with the real objects, including a portable explorer's hut, also on display in Venice.

[Images: Assembly diagrams for the BELA "clinometer," a speculative device "for the measurement of variable slopes on sites such as scrap yards, landfills, slag heaps and other industrial dumping grounds... functioning as an easily readable survey tool and as a unique design object that calls public attention to the process of measuring artificial landscapes"].

Taken together, these are what we call, in the essay, "prototypical future survey instruments and experimental site-identification beacons." They are "both semi-scientific and speculative, portable and permanently anchored."

From telescopes to Geiger counters, from contact microphones to weather satellites, the devices and scales with which we measure and describe the landscapes around us determine, to a large extent, what we are able to see. BELA will thus work to pioneer the design, fabrication and expeditionary deployment of new landscape survey tools—instruments and devices both functional and speculative that will aid in the sensory cataloguing and interpretive analysis of specific locations.

While the British Exploratory Land Archive is, for now, merely a proposition, I think Mark, Laura, and I are all equally keen to see something come of that proposition, perhaps someday even launching BELA as a real, functioning resource through which the various human-altered landscapes of Britain can be catalogued and studied.

For now, those of you able to visit Venice, Italy, before the end of the 2012 Biennale can see our instruments, photos, drawings, and texts as they currently exist, and, in the process, learn more about the possibilities for a British Exploratory Land Archive.

(Thanks to Sandra Youkhana for her invaluable help with the project, and to Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang at the Center for Land Use Interpretation for hosting us back in April).

Opportunity: Waddy Wood in Kalorama

Join the ICAA on a tour, Saturday Sept 15 at 10am, led by author and historian Emily Eig of the residences in Kalorama designed by noted DC architect Waddy Wood. The 2 hour tour will begin with a walk around the neighborhood where specific examples will be discussed and will end at the Woodrow Wilson House where lunch will be served. Details for the tour are on the website. I hope you join in, I'll be there!

As if dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers

One of many things you might be missing at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture—which opens this week and runs till November 25th—is a new acoustic installation by Katarzyna Krakowiak inside the Polish Pavilion.

Her piece, called Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers is, in the words of Michal Libera, the pavilion's curator, a controlled "amplification of the Polish Pavilion as a listening-system."

[Image: A sound-study of the 2012 Polish Pavilion by Andrzej Kłosak for Katarzyna Krakowiak].

In an interesting accompanying essay that foregrounds the acoustic experience of space, Libera goes on to suggest that "we live, work and play in gigantic complexes of sounds—their distribution is what we call architecture."

Architectural micro-deformations of the building’s walls and floor, the renovation of the ventilation system, and reinforcement of the resonant frequencies serve to bring this latent acoustic experience to the fore. The focus is on the secret but audible knowledge inscribed in the niches, apses, bays and vestibules, full of long-acknowledged deficiencies and forgotten paradoxes. None of the sounds in the Pavilion are alien to the building. They are all always already there.

One of the techniques deployed by Krakowiak, for instance, is to reinforce architecturally the Pavilion's own resonant frequencies; this leads to "excessive reverberation" that will make "even regular conversation difficult" inside as visitors are enveloped in echoes, everything out-of-synch and returning again in time-delay. Further:

To enhance the experience of being immersed in sound, the floor and one of the walls are tilted at a slight angle. The introduction of a different material (a wooden floor) and the incline itself will also influence sound propagation. With 50 sound sources, the interior of the Polish Pavilion will take the visitor to the heart of an unknown, unfathom- able realm of sound.

Libera describes in detail how Krakowiak partially dismantled the Pavilion itself, performing a kind of acoustic surgery on the various surfaces and materials used inside, analyzing them for their sonic side-effects and picking and choosing which spaces—"the niche, the vestibule and the walls"—to augment, tune, or dampen.

[Image: Another sound-study of the 2012 Polish Pavilion by Andrzej Kłosak for Katarzyna Krakowiak].

While reading about Krakowiak's work, I was reminded of a short piece by Richard Pinnell in a recent issue of The Wire. There, Pinnell describes the, for him, uncomfortable experience of hearing sound artists Mark and John Bain perform under a railway arch in London, work themed "on the principle of self-destruction." Mark Bain has been mentioned many times here on BLDGBLOG for his ongoing interest in the possibility of architectural demolition using nothing but bass, and this particular performance seems like one of a piece with those earlier explorations.

Pinnell describes how the "American sibling duo" of the Bain brothers used "seismic sensors to translate the feedback of the actual building itself into heavy, really heavy droning bass tones. The wall of subsonic pressure that hit me as I squeezed alongside others into the arch space threatened to turn my ribcage inside out." More to the point, he quips that, "If the shock of how physical the sound was caught me off guard, I was even less prepared for the small chunks of crumbling masonry that began to intermittently fall from the bare brick archway above my head as the Victorian building itself struggled against the assault." We could level whole cities with sound. Building and anti-building with LRAD.

The Bains' "architectural bass tremors" haunted Pinnell's sense of equilibrium so much that, he jokes, now, "whenever I enter a room under a railway arch I keep one eye looking over my shoulder," lest the Bain brothers arrive, acoustic weaponry in hand.

In any case, while Krakowiak's installation is not premised on the idea of demolition—and thus the connection between these two stories is entirely anecdotal—I am nonetheless struck by the idea of a pavilion, perhaps some future version of the Serpentine, that deliberately interferes with, or manipulates through time-delay, the acoustic events taking place inside it, whether those are human conversations or simply monstrous waves of sub-bass rumbling up from a concert in the basements below.

In fact, you could imagine some strange new art form, a kind of acoustic variation on Noh theater, that takes place only inside buildings tuned to echo at precise intervals, with whole new forms of dialogue—an entire literary genre—written with actors playing the roles of multiple characters, speaking lines perfectly timed for an endless return of disorienting synchronizations, ten, even fifteen, minutes later still listening for the delayed lines of an earlier phase of self-conversation.

Or, for that matter, a mis-built suburban house somewhere lost in echoes, driving its owner insane, as everything said inside is destructively echoed and reverbed to the point of utter incomprehension, for whole days at a time. A tragi-comedy starring Tom Hanks, muttering to himself in a roaring airplane engine of noise—things he said yesterday!—sitting at the dinner table, starring at a salt shaker, unable to talk to his date.