The Great Man-Made River

In the process of writing the previous post, I learned about Libya's Great Man-Made River, "an enormous, long-term undertaking to supply the country's needs by drawing water from aquifers beneath the Sahara and conveying it along a network of huge underground pipes."

[Images: The concrete skeleton of Libya's future river, the "8th wonder of the world," being trucked into place; photographed by Jaap Berk].

Not only does Libya bear the distinction of holding the world record for hottest recorded temperature (136º F), but most of the country's terrain is "agriculturally useless desert" that receives little or no rainfall. The Great Man-Made River may not even successfully irrigate Libya's governmentally-specified agricultural zones, but due to the region's complete "absence of permanent rivers or streams" – and because the country's "approximately twenty perennial lakes are brackish or salty" – the River's expected 50-100 year lifespan is at least a start.
Indeed, Libya's "limited water is considered of sufficient importance to warrant the existence of the Secretariat of Dams and Water Resources, and damaging a source of water can be penalized by a heavy fine or imprisonment." George Orwell would perhaps call this watercrime.


However, I have to say that the prospect of spelunking through the Great Man-Made River's subterranean galleries in 125 years, once those tunnels have dried-up, makes the brain reel. Imagine Shelleys of the 22nd century wandering through those ruins, notebooks in hand, taking photographs, footsteps echoing rhythmically beneath the dunes as they walk for a thousand kilometers toward the sea...


Yet some are skeptical of the project's real purpose. Precisely because the Great Man-Made River consists of "a stupendous network of underground tunnels and caverns built with the help of Western firms to run the length and width of the country," some consultants and engineers "have revealed their suspicion that such facilities were not meant to move water, but rather to conceal the movement and location of military-related activities." The fact that water is flowing through some of the pipes, in other words, is just an elaborate ruse...
In any case, the Great Man-Made River Authority – "entrusted with the implementation and operation of the world's largest pre-stressed concrete pipe project" – is already seeing some results.
The network will criss-cross most of the country –


– and Phase III is under construction even as this post goes online.
Meanwhile, for more information on deep desert hydrology see UNESCO's International Hydrological Programme or even Wikipedia.
Of course, you could also turn to J.G. Ballard, whose twenty year-old novel The Day of Creation is: 1) not very good, and 2) about a man who is "seized by the vision of a third Nile whose warm tributaries covered the entire Sahara." That river will thus "make the Sahara bloom." The book was modestly reviewed by Samuel Delany, if you want to know more.
On the other hand, I would actually recommend Dune – assuming you like science fiction.

[Image: A new river is born, excavated from the surface of the desert: soon the pipes will be installed and the currents will start to flow...].

Desert Planet

[Image: A satellite view of "two huge sand dune seas in the Fezzan region of southwestern Libya." These are "sprawling seas of multi-storey sand dunes known as 'ergs'. The Erg Ubari (also called Awbari) is the reddish sand sea towards the top of the image. A dark outcrop of Nubian sandstone separates the Erg Ubari sand from the Erg Murzuq (also called Murzuk) further south." See earlier for more satellite imagery].

Half Dose #22: Mother's

For advertising agency Mother, Clive Wilkinson renovated "Derwent Valley's Tea Building in Shoreditch, a burgeoning arts community on the fringes of the City of London."



Since Mother's inception in 1996, their employees have worked around a communal table. As the company grew, so did the table, until now the concrete table in their new digs accommodates 200 and resembles an interior racetrack, a la Fiat's rooftop track in Turin, Italy.



To connect the different floors, stairs interrupt the table, blurring the line between table and floor. At some points one is the extension of the other, making for quite the impression on potential clients.



Links:

:: Mother, London
:: Clive Wilkinson
:: Interior Design
:: Frame Magazine

Mineral TV and the Archipelago of Abandoned Shopping Malls

"A mediaeval cathedral was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV programme that was supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday life, as well as for their eternal salvation." So says Umberto Eco, speaking at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, 2003.

[Image: Cathedral at Bourges, by Arnaud Frich].

This makes me wonder if everyone on Earth could take everything they know and carve it into a cliffside somewhere – or a mountain – sculpting all that rock into a cathedral; and, then, if they could take that hulking monolith of information and minerals and break it off, launch it into orbit, send it drifting through space... It'd be a kind of moving table of contents for the human species. A knowledge-object.
Would that have a better chance than NASA's so-called Golden Record, that got sent out with Voyager, of explaining the Earth and human history to distant civilizations?

[Image: NASA's Golden Record, "intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials." The record is really "a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth," including the sound of "surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals," and a signed letter from then-president Jimmy Carter. A Menudo video was reportedly removed at the last minute].

Or, instead of demolishing old buildings, perhaps we should detach them from the Earth's surface and send them into space as lessons for alien species. Like that Michael Crichton novel. You could learn about the Earth by studying its architecture – because the planet flings buildings everywhere. Constantly.
Archipelagoes of abandoned shopping malls pulled slowly toward distant planets. There goes the Mall of America...
A new film directed by Jerry Bruckheimer.

CrapPier

I'm coming a bit late to this issue, but just today I saw images of the draft master plan for Navy Pier. According to Hello Beautiful! - who has a large chunk of its latest show (worth a listen) devoted to this plan - the city of Chicago,

asked a Canadian company specializing in theme and water parks to propose a new design to bring Navy Pier into the future. Their suggestions include a floating hotel, an indoor water park, and a monorail stretching the length of the pier.

Here's Forrec's imagery:


Said monorail bisecting the existing mall/winter garden space.


Forrec's proposal to bring Navy Pier into the future seems to resemble an old-fashioned postcard, planes and all.


The inside water park to keep tourists off the streets of Chicago.

For further amusement, read Blair Kamin's biting critique of the plan.

Butt Crack Binding

This weekend as I traded in some books at a used bookstore in my neighborhood* I saw the distinctive binding of Diller + Scofidio's Flesh. If you're not familiar with the book, the front cover is a right butt cheek (Diller's?) and the back cover is a left butt cheek (Scofidio's?), making the binding, yep, the butt crack.


Cover sans crack binding

Seeing this crack peering at me at the very back of the store, it reminded me of a time when I worked in a bookstore in college. Although I worked there less than a year, I was entrusted with some money every month to stock the store with architecture books, something apparently still going strong. At the time I dug (and still do) D+S, so it was an easy choice to order Flesh: Architectural Probes (its full title). Well, the owner saw the binding and stubbornly refused to put it on the shelf, instead keeping it out of sight behind the counter and making it rather difficult to sell.

A few weeks later or so it was sold by my astute friend Eric who had been working at the store longer than me, perhaps gleaning more tricks of the trade than I. He told me that one day a girl came into the store and was buying an architecture book or two, so - remembering about the dirty book behind the counter - with shifty eyes he quietly said to her, "hey...ya wanna buy a raunchy architecture book?" Actually, whatever he said exactly I don't remember, but I do know she walked out with the book.

As I glanced at the butt crack sitting in a dark corner of the store (perhaps unintentionally) this weekend, I couldn't help but think of this story.

*Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the new (to me) bookstore, though it's located on the south side of the 1900 block of west Irving Park and has a decent selection of books (I walked away with the 3rd edition of Mechanism of Meaning by Arakawa + Gins) in a small storefront space.

Mayne Street

Every once in a while a building comes along that fulfills your faith that architecture can be a noble profession...

So gushes Blair Kamin in a review where he heaps praise upon Thom Mayne's soon-to-be-opened design for the Campus Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati.



These photos from a tour of the center show the all-too-familiar dynamism of Mayne's architecture.



What appeals to Kamin (and me) is the urban qualities of the architecture, not a stand-alone building but an assemblage of the Rec Center as well as the Tangeman University Center by Gwathmey Siegel and the Steger Student Life Center by Moore Ruble Yudell. Common geometries (curves) and common materials (zinc and other metals) tie the buildings together, though it's the car-free Main Street that links them together spatially.



(via Archinect)

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Magritte's in Tokyo, Japan by Atelier Tekuto.

The updated book feature is Living Big in Small Apartments, by James Grayson Trulove.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

B******s to Architecture
"Irreverent opinion on (mainly UK) architecture and architects" (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Hello Beautiful! Blog
Aka "Teatro Lifson", a new blog for the weekly arts show on Chicago Public Radio.

dialog
"Blogging directly from New York City about architecture and other interesting things." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Mars v. Thor

Two different myths are set to collide in space as NASA's THOR project targets the surface of Mars with a huge copper sphere.


"The idea behind THOR (Tracing Habitability, Organics, and Resources) is to fly an observer spacecraft to Mars and, hours before it reaches the planet, release an 'impactor' ball. It could be up to 230 kilograms in mass and would be aimed at a region about 40° north or south of the equator."
While thus testing the Martian landscape for signs of water, THOR is nothing less than "a brute force way to gain access to the subsurface of Mars."
So BLDGBLOG is now taking bets: Mars triumphant or Thor planet-slayer, destroyer of worlds...? Which myth will win?

Lunar urbanism 5

Russia, we read has "plans to build a permanent base on the Moon within a decade and to start mining the planet for helium 3, a sought-after isotope, by 2020."


"Russian scientists have come up with the idea of using 'lunar bulldozers' to heat the Moon's surface in order to get at the resource," adding that "Moscow is keen to institute regular cargo flights of helium 3 back to Earth as soon as possible."


If you'll pardon a lengthy quotation:
"'There are practically no reserves of helium 3 on Earth. On the Moon, there are between one million and 500 million tons, according to estimates.' Much of those reserves are reported to be in the Sea of Tranquillity. [Nikolai Sevastyanov, of Energia Space Corporation] predicted that nuclear reactors capable of running on helium 3 would soon be developed and said that just one ton of the isotope would generate as much energy as 14 million tons of oil. 'Ten tons of helium 3 would be enough to meet the yearly energy needs of Russia,' he added. However, Russia is not the only country interested in the technology. American scientists have expressed interest in helium 3, arguing that one shuttle-load of the isotope would be sufficient to meet US electrical energy needs for a year."
So: from the Red Sea to the Sea of Tranquillity – what future lunar wars may bring...


[Image: An unrelated example of a helium 3 mining unit from the Lunar Base Design Workshop. "Mining itself is done by robots that scoop up lunar regolith for processing. This base consists of three spheres that roll, with the structure moving from site to site."]

Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Lunar urbanism 4.

Ten Fours

Rob decided to pass along some annoyance, though I rather like this sorta thing. So here goes:

Four jobs I've had:

1. Caddy
2. Vegetable preparer (I washed lettuce in a basin full of cold, cold H20)
3. Dishwasher
4. Bookstore clerk

Four films I can watch repeatedly:

1. Groundhog Day (no joke)
2. Being John Malkovich
3. School of Rock (formerly Dazed & Confused)
4. Taxi Driver

Four places I've lived:

1. Northbrook
2. Manhattan (The Little Apple)
3. Castiglion Fiorentino
4. Chicago (4 places in the city, coincidentially...wait. 5 actually)

Four television programs I like to watch:

1. The Simpsons
2. Lost
3. This Old House
4. Poirot Mysteries (on dvd)

Four places I've been to on vacation:

1. Italy
2. Japan
3. Wales
4. New York City

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Grilled Cheese
2. Pancakes
3. Pesto
4. A good cheeseburger

Four websites I visit daily:

1. Bloglines (most of my "browsing" these days)
2. Archinect
3. The Archi-Tourist (Another plug for my latest undertaking)
4. Yahoo! Mail (yea, I know, kinda boring)

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. In a piazza somewhere in Italy
2. Under a canopy of stars (or somewhere where I can at least see stars)
3. At a bookstore
4. On the couch

Four bloggers I am annoying:

1. Eric (it's about time for an update on your page)
2. Neal
3. Frank (that should be easy, seeing you've already done it)
4. Marcus

They Make $$

An interesting building and installation over at the always-reliable we-make-money-not-art:


A ball gown made of steel
A small apartment building in The Hague by Archipelontwerpers reminiscent of Frank Gehry's "Fred and Ginger" building in Prague.


Dark places
A badass looking installation for the Dark Places exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art by Servo, like something out of a sci-fi movie.

competitions:

Glancing around CAF's Exhibitions page, I found a link to the web page competition: public process for public architecture, which is currently on display in the Cityspace Gallery. Curated by Edward Keegan, "the exhibition will introduce the general public to the competition process for selecting the architect or the design of a building," specifically American buildings. The case studies include:

:: The White House (1792)
:: Tribune Tower (1922)
:: Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980)
:: Harold Washington Library (1988)
:: World Trade Center (2002-present)
:: Freedom Museum (2005-present)

The extremely thorough and graphic-heavy site* should keep you busy for a while, especially with the local Freedom Museum (housed in the 1922 Tribune competition building), set to open this spring.

*Inexplicably, the exhibition is hosted on the web site of Cynthia Plaster Caster, an artist who "began making plaster casts of rock stars' erect penises in 1968...[and] in 2000 she began casting breasts as well."

Wrigley Update

The Chicago Tribune posts graphics and images (registration req'd) for the Wrigley Field bleachers renovation, part of a larger plan that also includes a parking garage, restaurants and retail.



For the passer-by, the most notable change will be the walkway will cantilever over the sidewalk.



Granted this ain't exciting architecture, but it's been a heated debate...



...because of these neighbors and their right to peer into Wrigley Field during games, charging admission and receiving $$ that might otherwise go to the Cubs (and its parent, the Chicago Tribune). Notice the construction at the bottom of the image.

2006 Coffeehouse Challenge

Through her job with the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, BLDGBLOG contributor Nicola Twilley has put together something that should hopefully get more people thinking about urban design, sustainability, quality of life, public transport, pedestrianization... Whatever sounds good.
And though BLDGBLOG is not involved, I thought I'd give it a plug here, and try to drum up some interest.


In a nutshell, the program is called the Ben Franklin Coffeehouse Challenge, and it's sponsored by Starbucks. The idea is that you get some people together, discuss something you'd like to see happen in your community – more benches, a new park, some fresh paint on the neighborhood bus stop, a film society, a mural or two, a NASCAR track, fewer potholes, some roof gardens, a new running path – meet a few more times to refine the idea, then you organize it into a coherent, workable plan.
That plan is then submitted to the Tercentenary, who review it with a panel of urban designers, community groups, etc. – and if whatever magical buttons need to be pushed are pushed, then Starbucks will give you $3000 and you can get the project off the ground.
That's right: cash money. It's all about the Benjamins.
For now, though, it's only in Greater Philadelphia (with south Jersey up to Princeton, parts of Delaware, and central PA all the way to Penn State included, hint-hint) – but I'm sure you could convince everyone involved that the desire for urban improvement is nationwide. Park benches in Minneapolis, roof gardens in San Francisco, running paths in Tucson.
Better street lighting in Denver. A public performance space in Silverlake.
Well-marked pedestrian crosswalks in Tallahassee.
As the official program graphic itself asks: "How do I plant a lawn on my roof?"
"I want a say in how my town grows."
So whether you like their coffee or not, I think it's pretty cool that Starbucks appears to want to fund roof gardens. We need more roof gardens.
If you've got some suggestions – like a UFO landing strip in Austin – send a few in to BLDGBLOG; I'd love to see what you're thinking.


(Quick PS: BLDGBLOG contributors Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh also helped organize a small, Franklinian beer competition last September in Denver, the results of which – Poor Richard's Ale – are now available to drink! So go have a pint for Ben Franklin, think about urban design – and perhaps someday you'll be drinking a BLDGBLOG Architectural Stout... BLDGBLOG Piranesian Ale. Oil Derrick IPA. Offshore Utopia Pale Ale. Manmade Archipelago Doppelbock. London Topological Bitter. BLDGBLOG Geotechnical Weissbier...)

Notions Update

Last April I posted about an ongoing project Initiated by A. Laurie Palmer with support from Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago called Notions of Expenditure, a "request for speculative proposals to re-design exercise equipment to generate and store energy; and/or to retrofit gyms to function as local power sources linked to the grid."



At the time there were only two projects uploaded, but now there's close to twenty, worthy of an updated post here. Also, the comments to my earlier post have recently attracted people undertaking similar endeavors who have questions I unfortunately can't answer. So look those over, and if you can help them out, please do.

New York City of Sound

In 1999, New York-based sound artist Stephen Vitiello was awarded a five-month studio residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. For his project World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, he taped contact mics to the studio windows, "picking up the sounds outside of passing planes, helicopters, storm clouds and traffic, the building itself swaying in the wind."
You can listen to a short NPR piece about the project (and find other sounds here); meanwhile, Vitiello was recently interviewed in Artkrush, if you want a bit more information.
But this reminds me of two other, related projects: 1) I read a review once in The Wire about a guy who taped contact mics to his window to record the sound of snowflakes hitting the glass – a recording which was then released on CD. Unfortunately, I can't find any information about this at all.
2) Extensive seismic readings were taken by Columbia University during the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th – the Precambrian bedrock of Manhattan was rumbling as the two towers collapsed, and this showed up on Columbia's seismometers. Sound artist Mark Bain then transformed this information into audio files, so you can actually listen to the wounded, melancholic howl of Manhattan as its two tallest buildings fall to the ground.
Ultimately, Bain produced "a 74-minute recording of the ground vibrations of the World Trade Centre's collapse and contiguous mayhem," The Guardian writes. "It certainly does not make easy listening. The piece begins with a low, disconcerting rumble and proceeds through a range of fluctuating sounds. Bain says the vibration of the towers as they were hit by the hijacked passenger planes sounds like 'tuning forks'." He then seems quick to add that he "sees nothing morally questionable in making an artwork out of the event."
"I guess I'm the black sheep," he says, "the anti-architect."
If you have RealPlayer, you can download a 2-minute excerpt.
Another vaguely related story, of course, is William Basinski...

(This post was extensively updated on 26 January. For more on urban soundscapes see Orchestra of Bridges, London Instrument, Sound Dunes, and – an old favorite – musicalized weather events).

Orchestra of Bridges

[Image: Michel Bayard].

Singing Bridges seeks to record, using contact microphones, the sounds of various bridges: stressed cables, rumbling footplates, geotechnical strain.
It's all about playing "stay-cabled and suspension bridges as musical instruments."
The artist's own justification for the project leaves a bit to be desired – claiming it has something to do with global information flow and Indra's Net – but the musicalization of urban infrastructure is something that totally fascinates me, and it's popped up on BLDGBLOG before.
If we can go back to Coleridge for a second, and imagine him striding across the retractable bridges of Chicago, iPod in hand, plugging himself into the audial foundations of the city, the trembling of concrete and iron, how every atom vibrates, Aeolian, strummed by the world; or Coleridge wandering London, stepping onto the Thames foreshore, microphones ready, pushing away sand to record the passing of subterranean trains (or whalesong, for that matter); or, yet again, perhaps somewhere in the scoured volcanism of rural Iceland, contact mics taped down on the surface of the earth, Coleridge stands listening to the Atlantic expand, every subtle rumble of tectonic plates spreading; then the bridges of the world, specifically built for how they sound, humming in the wind, can join in – and it's worth considering that the vibrations of a bridge's pillars might record themselves in patterns in the subsurface soil, small figures of agitation inscribed into the earth, and that those might fossilize, and in a million years you'll have a musical score hardened into rock, sandstone evidence of how the earth once sounded, back then, which is now: a planet covered with bridges, vibrating in the wind.

(Singing Bridges spotted at Ruairi Glynn's excellent Interactive Architecture dot Org).

Half Dose #21: S(ch)austall

My friend Brandon brought this small building to my attention, and now I'm passing it along to you, dear readers.



Winner of a 2005 AR Award for Emerging Architecture, this showroom by Stuttgart-based FNP Architekten is a renovation of a pigsty, the humorous relationship between these two uses apparent in the project's parenthetical naming (saustall=pigsty; schaustall=showroom).



To deal with the crumbling 18th-century structure, the architects created a "house within a house", a wood container that fit within the old stone walls but without touching them.



A new roof protects old and new from the elements. The awards jury mentions that the existing windows now look fashionably random, even though they are derived from the building's original function, a decidedly humorous take on the renovation. In the end, the project is more dignified than humorous, the architects able to extend the life of an old building through simple yet clever means.

Links:

:: FNP Architekten
:: AR Award (PDF link)
:: DBZ-online

London Canyonlands

In a recent post I compared the fissured earth of Morocco's Atlas Mountains to the Grand Canyon.


Whether or not such a comparison holds – and I've received several opinionated emails either side – it's still interesting to speculate about the "peculiar geological circumstances surrounding the Grand Canyon" and whether they might be found elsewhere – even if that's a few hundred million years from now.
As it happens, I'm reading Richard Fortey's fantastic new book Earth, and lo! He's been thinking what I'm thinking:
"If we could wave a tectonic magic wand," he writes, "and gently elevate southern England, the River Thames would excavate a canyon of its own, another magnificent thing – and, deep enough, there would be the equivalent of the [Grand Canyon's] Vishnu schist. If we do the same in northern France, the Seine would carve through a sequence of hard and soft layers back to a deep and ancient metamorphic foundation. The same goes for Texas, or the Pirana Basin, or the Arabian Peninsula, or western Africa, or much of Siberia."
There are Grand Canyons everywhere, in other words, waiting for the right conditions in which to form.


The question, then, is what can be done to further this process? Could we "gently elevate southern England," as Fortey says, perhaps learning from the project to lift Venice?
Could we prop-up Texas on some oil derricks, for instance, moving those platforms further and deeper underneath the continental plate every year till the whole thing is an artificial Himalaya – then let the Rio Grande carve away?
For that matter, could you perform an exact, laser-measured study of the internal volume of the Grand Canyon – then carve another one, in western China, or right in the heart of Greater London?
Open a chain of hotels nearby, and you'd make all your money back through tourism. And geologists would love you. The world's first university-sponsored Grand Canyon. Harvard will buy it.
Fortey himself compares the Grand Canyon to an act of carpentry: "The strata appear unwaveringly horizontal, like an infinity of stacked plywood worked with a giant fretsaw."
So what are our geotechnical options here?
How could we realize a world full of new Grand Canyons?

(Earlier: sandblasting Manhattan into a new Arches National Park).

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Fujy House near Madrid, Spain by Fujy Sustainable Architects.

The updated book feature is Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture, edited by William S. Saunders.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Progressive Reactionary
"How is architecture affected by the political climate? More importantly, how can architecture affect the political climate itself?" (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

butter paper
"Australian and new zealand architecture and design resources." (added to sidebar under online journals)

ArchitectureINK
"Architecture Ink is brought to you by creative designers and observant citizens from around the world." (added to sidebar under online journals)

Tilt-Shifting Shanghai

[Image: Olivo Barbieri, via his beautifully surreal tilt-shift lens; see earlier for more images & information].

Morocco Double-Exposures

There are about two dozen more of these images, taken during a trip through Morocco, September-October 2002, studies of light and proximity, architecture, routes and detours, space.


What I noticed in Marrakech almost immediately is that inside the networked markets that reflect one another through rows of glass lamps, bronze trinkets, polished rocks and small pieces of jewelry, laid out in tilted cases or stacked inside stalls, you find a collapse of expected proximities: everything's too close.


Toward the end of our trip, for instance, because of a gut parasite I'd picked up, I developed this insane fever that torqued the whole visual field into a funnel; then, while trying to figure out how I got that sick, we walked past a fruit stall – this was in Fes – immediately to the side of which, unprotected, out in the open, was a man taking a ball peen hammer to the skull of a dead cow, and chips of bone were flying everywhere, even landing on the fruit. People were buying the fruit, and serving it in restaurants.
Everything was too close, in other words; hygiene and distance became unexpected synonyms.


What's interesting, though, is when you get out of the cities and into the desert, and a kind of hydro-topographical narrative begins: while there's water in the coastal plains, collecting in small valleys or oases, and supporting urbanization, as you pass away on looping roads into the hills the entire continental shield seems to dry out. The rocks are abstract and red; Mars conspiracists could probably argue NASA's rovers are actually tootling around in the iron-rich void of central Morocco.
In any case, the continent is shattering; large rocks get smaller, weathered by thousands of years of wind and sandstorms – what Richard Fortey calls "the blast of erosion," in his awesomely great Earth – and you can actually watch as the terrain chips away at itself, getting closer and closer to the consistency of sand: sand which you then see on the horizon, in great dunes of the outer Sahara.
Meanwhile, you've passed over massive fissures in the earth, the planet breaking open, and so the twisting claustrophobia of the urban market has been replaced by its apparent opposite: geological time, ripped open right in front of you in stratigraphic abysses that can rival the Grand Canyon.
The continent is abrading to sand, there is no one in sight, the heat is amazing, and you've barely even set foot in the interior.
But you realize that the complexity of the local architecture, especially in the markets and casbahs – which any labyrinth aficionado would fall in love with right away (I fell in love right away) – is not only a kind of terrestrial tactic, i.e. keeping small pieces of the planet (sand) out of the inner rooms, it's also a philosophical response to the utterly gigantic north African landscapes collapsing all over themselves, ground down to sandy fissures in the distance: you want to control space, and limit the perimeter. Keep the walls close.


Whole rooms, entire buildings, seem to overlap with everything else – till it's like walking through double-exposures.

(All images: Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG; please link/credit if using elsewhere!)

Low-rise

I'm not talking about jeans, I'm talking about buildings. In places like Chicago, tall buildings tend to get all the press. But not all sites are suitable for 30+ story condo and office towers - especially with the city's parking requirements - so the occasional low-rise building rises with a bit of flair or at least some design sense. The best the city has seen lately is definitely Ralph Johnson's Contemporaine in River North. But has that design spawned more quality output? Let's look at some recent and under-construction buildings and see.


630 North Franklin

This eleven-story residential building in River North is by the same developer as the Contemporaine, CMK Companies. Credited to both Brininstool + Lynch and Perkins + Will on the Emporis web site, the design is more flat and restrained than the Contemporaine. Half the residences face the street, while the other half face the back alley. The only corner units face the elevated tracks, a somewhat unfortunate circumstance. Both the units and the building are ultimately pretty typical, only clad in a a full-height window wall with a random window pattern as an attempt to give it distinction. The "band of light" at the parking garage looks like it could give further distinction at night.


156 West Superior

Just down the street from 630 North Franklin is a narrow, nine-story residential building by Seattle's Miller Hull Partnership, developed by Ranquist Development whose tastefully modern houses and small condos dot the Chicago's west side. This design appears to be a departure for Ranquist, as Miller Hull strives to relate to "the Chicago steel and glass I.I.T. School." An exposed steel frame with diagonal cross-bracing is articulated in front of a full-height glass wall on the building's south and north facades. Balconies anchor the southeast and northeast corners and a mix of masonry and metal panel covers the side elevations. While the bracing doesn't stand out, as in the Hancock, its subtle presence gives the facade a layering and depth not found in many multi-family residences these days.


HUB 116

Further south, but still in the River North neighborhood, is HUB 116 (a seemingly techno-savvy name that is actually just a truncation of its address: 116 West Hubbard), an eight-story office building developed by Dumas Associates and designed by Obora-Phillips. The distinctive feature here is obviously the swiss-cheese roof that's cantilevered from leaning columns, apparently extending the roof beyond the street facade. The rendering clearly shows a post-modern articulation of base-middle-top, a tripartite division that architect's can't seem to abandon. Here, unfortunately, the changes are abrupt, without apparent relationship to each other or the building's context.