BLDGBLOG Goes to Paris...

I'll be out of range for a while, only back and posting after the 9th or 10th of July. BLDGBLOG, in other words, is off to Paris... Till then, here's an updated Table of Contents of the site; if you're either new to BLDGBLOG or have simply forgotten this site's previous half-lives: now's your chance to click around. So I'll be back. And the Parisian visit is relatively tightly scheduled (it's work-based), but if you have any tips, let me know!


Wherever you go, bring your own subway entrance!
Should we use cloned meat to pave interstate highways? Or build whole cathedrals out of organ transplants?
The hidden valve chambers and underground hydro-works of New York City, photographed by Stanley Greenberg! More Manhattan tunnels, blasted straight through schisty bedrock!
Slum warfare, William Gibson, Ridley Scott, geopolitical "holes" and ecological footprints – it's an interview with Mike Davis! And here's part two!
A flying micronation made entirely of solar-powered helicopters!
Hurling Taj Mahals into the sky!
The lost city of Z! Albinos, lost maps, dead Brits and miles and miles of unexplored jungle!
Where will Niagara Falls be in a million years? And will London be more than a mile beneath the surface of the earth, buried in muck?
Living amidst highway flyovers – or, in this case, directly on them!
Why is today's architectural criticism so boring?
A group of 38 Ukrainian Jews escaped the Holocaust by living inside a cave system for several years!


Huge cubes of carbonic glass have taken over the world's landscape!
Architectural conjecture meets Parisian sci-fi noir!
Houses that aren't houses at all – they're disguised electrical substations!
Supercomputers, rivaling God, housed in deconsecrated chapels!
Offshoring labor, literally – using a permanently anchored tax haven off the coast of Los Angeles! Or this ship, moored for so long it becomes architecture!
A Shopper's Guide to Urban Catastrophe! And we didn't forget you, vegans!
Bored? Why not read this travel guide to an island that doesn't exist?
A Mexican library made from reused airplane hulls!
The gleaming, inhuman garages of Branislav Kropilak!
Flying hotel rooms! In silver shiny blimps!
Robo-Qibla™ meets the Gyro-Mosque® – in deep space!


Can we melt down London and use it as ink to print new cities?
Blueprints for rebuilding America's National Parks – arch by bolt by nail!
Tour the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model!
The icebergs of war!
The planet, re-mapped according to airplane passengers and tractor imports!
Deliberately manufacturing storms in your garden!
The abandoned Ballardian world of WWII bunker archaeology!
Mind-blowing tectonic maps of ancient North America as the continent slowly takes its present form!
Tatlin's Tower!
A musical machine made entirely from windows!
It's "a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence"!


London, mapped by the emotions of its inhabitants!
Cinematic urbanism!
Are the skyscrapers of Shanghai generating dangerous weather?
Spend the night in an eclipse camp!
Unbelievable photographs of the perfect vortex!
Labyrinthine plaster casts of ants' nests!
Films of those ants leaving phero-chemical trails!
A huge, inflatable sphere that turns earthquakes into music! More tectonic surround-sound!
What strange and secret cities exist beneath Tokyo?
Origami!
A fossil reef stretches from Portugal to Moscow – some say further – but what if the whole thing was eroded by weather over millions of years... to become a huge wind instrument embedded in the rocks of Europe?


Dismantling Gothic cathedrals arch by arch, on the beaches of equatorial archipelagos!
The world's largest diamond mine!
Rollerskating alone at night through subterranean knots!
A seed vault to avert planetary apocalypse!
Listening to the arched foundations of London instrument!
A man exactly reproduces his old apartment using colorful nylon sheets!
Weird geometries in the Kansas farmscape!
Slow landscapes of silt and the J.G. Ballard who loves them!
The lost gods of Europe hurl spheres at each other in space!
Valves, drains, and tunnels in the self-connected topology of underground London!
Entire cities snowing diamonds from Baroque domes!


Is that architecture or just a soundtrack hovering in space?
Helicopter photographs in the sububs of self-similarity!
The 7 New Wonders of the World!
Southeast London transformed into a maze of rooftop gardens!
A temporary public park – complete with bench and parking meter!
Lunar electricity!
Possibly the longest building on Earth – or at least in Illinois!
BLDGBLOG Presents: the Mars rover film! But bring some Kleenex!
The poet Shelley sets sail for a volcanic archipelago made entirely of glass!
A London superstadium full of ring magnets will capture the Northern Lights!
Beautiful maps!


The churches of Christopher Wren, transformed into a geomagnetic harddrive!
The World Trade Center was actually a gigantic tuning fork!
Jurassic park, Russian conservation style!
James Bond thwarts a San Franciscan attempt at tectonic warfare!
Slum dwellers and modular parasites of the urban world, unite!
An abandoned island off the coast of Japan!
Unearthly landscapes swarming with alien bacteria!
The suburbs: raw mounds and earthworks, before construction arrives!
Extraterrestrial life rained down on India!
The internal volume of Notre-Dame, Paris, carved into the surface of the moon!
Meat!


The landscape architecture of Hell, its subsurface faults and magmatic geology!
Why not live inside your garage?
Is that a suburb growing out of your spine, or are you happy to see me?
3000km of concrete tunnels installed beneath the deserts of Libya!
The robotic, neverending cinema of Los Angeles traffic control!
Plus the real-time participatory surveillance of LA's freeway system!
A house of landslides, filled with geese!
Hypnotic films of motorway orbitals now available on DVD!
Surreal nighttime photography of Japan!
Measuring astronomy – solstice and stars – with a city modeled on Stonehenge!
Unbelievable maps and diagrams of interstellar astral incidence!


Then we hiked alone for a thousand years, and we renamed all the constellations!
The averaged images of suburban ennui!
Food! Cake!
Have you seen this hull before?
New Arctic seaways promise Lovecraftian visions to come!
On the colors of dismantled landscapes, photographed from the air!
Lego spaceships!
The radio sounds of the earth's magnetosphere! The meditative drone of urban security gates!
Famous architecture, blurred!
Photographs of Chernobyl, including an abandoned alphabet!
Morocco double-exposures!


The Earth in 7.5 billion years!
Fossilized cities!
The art of reforesting continents through tree bombs!
The deserts of the world are musical instruments!
Venice resonates with voices!
Huge and amazing maps of California hydrology!
The city as an avatar of itself!
The wonderfully weird, self-observing urban world of CCTV!
Sci-fi instant cities built above working limeworks pits!
The abandoned malls of Chicagoland!
WWII British sound mirrors used to musicalize mountain storms!


All hell is breaking loose in middle America!
San Jellocisco!
Catching near-earth asteroids using a gigantic baseball mit!
If you've got nothing else to do, why not go camping in an abandoned mine?
Inbred, zombified ex-idealists stumble through pressurized undersea utopias, listening to Mozart!
Biking through glass tunnels suspended above metropolitan Toronto!
An inflatable hotel – in deep space!
Folk maps of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal!
Cool bridges!
Houses, churches, places to hang: it's the afterlife of the Quonset hut!
A man jumps from a balloon, free-falls 20 kilometers through the stratosphere, and captures the whole thing on film!


King Kong!
Complicated volcanic pipe networks will extrude cathedrals directly from the earth!
Huge, interconnected white towers in the middle of Beijing!
A book of the Bible, reproduced as a textual landscape!
Should Mars have its own landscape pictorial tradition? Is this it?
Arches National Park, Manhattan branch!
Will the International Space Station soon be turned into a sculpture gallery?
An Indonesian mine and the technicolor stalactites it will form in a million years!
In a wilderness of mirrors we lost our own reflections!
Recording the secret music of bridges!
Amazing tree houses by Andrew Maynard!


[Note: All photographs in this post (so not the first or last image) were graciously supplied by the hugely talented and exhibition-deserving photographer Nicolai Grossman, whose blog, Photon Detector, is well worth a read, and whose Spacetime Set on Flickr is the source for all these photos. Thanks, Nicolai!]

Quick list 1

[Image: A "bizarre double vortex whirls in the atmosphere above Venus's south pole." Courtesy New Scientist SPACE].

There are roughly one million things I want to post about here – but, due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm way too busy to put up anything new. So, in lieu of a real post, yet saving you from another day of staring at Obliteration A.D., here's a grab-bag of BLDGBLOGian things for your intellectual self-pleasure.
First, don't miss Inhabitat's newly-launched weekly look at Green Building 101. This week's installment: rethinking location in an era when daily commuting has reduced Americans' reported number of close friends. For the dark side of eco-urbanism, however, check out this near-catastrophic look at how gangs and serial killers from Los Angeles with no experience of "nature" have turned the nearby National Forest into a kind of murder-plagued wasteland full of corpses. (Thanks, Neddal!) Elsewhere, if you're near Long Island City, stop by Opolis, a "giant-scale miniature city in 13 blocks by 15 artists" (including Leah Beeferman), open through August. Discover the landscape acoustics of Mars. This device "records smells to play back later," so perhaps we can make the streets of Paris... smell like Barcelona. Or like oatmeal, for that matter. And if you, too, are addicted to the World Cup, racing to the TV every mid-afternoon to watch ESPN, then here's an ingenious look at football, John Cage, choreography diagrams, and the labyrinth of steps taken by Argentinian strikers. Meanwhile, The Economist reimagines the Eiffel Tower as a minaret –


– in their recent look at Islam in the cities of Europe; will we someday see a new continent called Eurabia? Finally, read architect Eyal Weizman's take on what could be called the military topologics of urban warfare: according to Weizman, for instance, recent incursions by Israeli soldiers have "used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as 'infestation,' sought to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. Rather than submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries and logic, movement became constitutive of space. The three-dimensional progression through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban balk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax." (More to be found in this 4.3MB PDF – thanks, Bryan!).
I'll put up one more post tonight or tomorrow before BLDGBLOG heads off... to Paris. More soon. I hope.

PS: It is apparently safe to dump chemical weapons into landfills.

Obliteration A.D.

[Image: A film-still taken from this look at the Earth's complete destruction – the whole planet, shattered – after it's been hit by a 100km-wide asteroid. Boiling tidal waves of impact magma! Hot stuff – via New Scientist. Note: the film is in Japanese].

Earth Surface Machine

Implant Matrix, we read, is "an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future." It is a responsive latticework that, installed beneath soil, would act as a kind of a terrestrial prosthesis, a local replacement for the earth's surface. An earth surface machine.


The Implant can also be used, however, as a way to treat "an architectural building skin as a responsive textile," facilitating "active exchanges with building occupants." In the process, the machine would exhibit "mechanical empathy."


Which means what, exactly?
"Mechanical empathy" is described by the project's designers – Philip Beesley Architect of Toronto – as a kind of architectural eroticism. So if you're lonely... reach out and touch your house: "The components of this system are mechanisms that react to human occupants as erotic prey. The elements respond with subtle grasping and sucking motions. Arrays of ‘whisker’ capacitance sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to achieve sensitive reflexive functions. The interactive elements operate in chained, rolling swells, producing a billowing motion. This motion creates a diffuse peristaltic pumping that pulls air and organic matter through the occupied space."


The assembly, in other words, with its micro-mechanical nerve endings, seems to mimic orgasm... Perhaps giving new meaning to earthquakes. (Read more in this PDF).
Two more, decidely cinematic, views of the Implant Matrix:


Of course, there is a bewildering array of other such projects by Philip Beesley Architect featured on their website, including Cybele, a kind of rubberized terrain-machine on stilts –


– which, seen from above in this next image, offers its own miniature landscape, another earth surface machine.


Then there's the hypnotically delicate Orpheus Filter, with its shivering infrastructure of virus-like bladders arranged in hanging constellations and blurred carousels (below).


But you can also see many, many more interactive machine-sculptures – like the William Burroughsian Orgone Reef, the amazing Hiving Quilt, or even the Reflexive Membrane, which looks like some sort of artificially intelligent alien surgical device – over at Philip Beesley Architect's online gallery. Then you should hire them to design something for you.

(Abstractly related: Strandbeestmovie. With huge thanks to Eric Bury for the tip! And... I just saw that Tropolism also featured the Implant Matrix, so check out their coverage for a bit more).

Monolith

[Image: What is it? To find out, you'll have to visit gravestmor].

The Buzz

Penny Boston – a professor at New Mexico Tech who once spent two weeks "in a self-contained 24-foot-diameter capsule in the Utah desert to simulate working conditions on Mars" – has also discovered a cave tunnel that buzzes.

[Image: The Cueva de Villa Luz, Mexico, with its buzzing tunnel; see also this PDF for more information, or this site for more images].

"Drops of sulfuric acid from the ceiling sting my neck and back as I crawl," Boston explains in an old issue of Wired. "I can hear something far down the narrow tunnel," she writes, "a buzzing like a million tiny voices. My team members and I don't know what it is. We've tried to find out, but each time something forces us to turn back: a spike in carbon monoxide, a breathing-mask failure, a choking blast of ammonia. Now I'm trying again. But the passage is narrowing."

The buzzing tunnel there in front of her is the Cueva de Villa Luz system, in Mexico. These deep, chemically exotic subterranean environments, Boston believes, are excellent examples of the landscapes that might host life beyond Earth – on Mars, for example.

In fact, Boston continues, "since first suggesting that the underworld was a good Mars analog in 1992, my team has studied caves filled with microorganisms that eat bedrock and produce unique minerals, and we've found beautiful crystal formations that are products of ancient subterranean life. I've dived into hot acid waters, rappelled into deep pristine caves where no humans have gone before. In these worlds under the water, we are the aliens, barely able to cope, while the natives happily flourish." These "natives" are called extremophiles: micro-organisms capable of surviving almost literally infernal conditions.

They're not cute little animals, however; these organisms are often described as a kind of sticky cave-snot – thick sheets of living mucus.

Boston: "The debate about whether there actually is life anywhere else in our solar system has raged for the past century. We just don't know – but someday we'll go find out. We'll face many of the same dangers and challenges we do while exploring the subsurface of our own planet." In the meantime, she adds, "the caves of the solar system await us." Such as the caves of Mars.

And yet, fascinatingly, Boston and her research team "still don't know" why that tunnel, deep in Mexico, was buzzing...

[Note: At least one other landscape in Mexico has U.S. scientists convinced they've found biological analogs for alien life; you can read about the marshes of Cuatro Ciénegas here on BLDGBLOG. Meanwhile, Penny Boston has some interesting ideas for how to terraform Mars – how to prepare it for supporting life – and this includes cultivating huge ponds of duckweed].

Gettin' Hitched

Posts will resume around the 4th of July.

Update 07.03: Thanks for all the wonderful comments!

The wedding went off better than I ever could have expected. The photo below is by our friend Frank, who also has a great shot of the tree Karen and I are getting married under, in the courtyard of the Smart Museum on the University of Chicago campus.



And here's a cool shot of Karen and her Dad walking down the aisle, by another friend, Don.

Evolving Skyline

Found this image over at Chicagoist, showing Chicago with buildings now under construction or proposed inserted into the city's skyline. Many more images and views are in the Chicago Model Thread at SkyscraperCity.



Makes me think that this view won't ever really happen, because even if the proposed buildings are built, there'll probably be more towers under construction with their tower cranes dotting the skyline. Especially in times of progress, the city is never complete, it's always evolving.

Handrail Memorial

A new plan for the WTC Memorial has been unveiled, according to The New York Times. This plan is the first of probably many rounds of value engineering, in this case spurred by a cost estimate of approximately $1 billion for the memorial. This design comes in at about half that, though Tropolism points out the twisted arithmetic.

One of the biggest changes to the design is technically one of the smallest. Confused? Take a look at these images:


L-R: Before and After

The only apparent change is that the floating handrail has become a solid cap for the parapet wall overlooking the waterfalls and voids below. But if we take a closer look, we see the function of this cap:



Yes, now the names of the dead that were previously etched into the walls below grade, adjacent to the waterfalls, are inscribed into this continuous railing atop the parapet wall. To me this does a few (not good) things: 1. It diminishes the role of the subterranean spaces to a visitor's center, galleries, and places for respite; 2. It diminishes the meaning of presenting the names of the dead via a "two birds with one stone" gesture; and 3. It makes the names an oversight for many visitors who will go to the edge to lean over and look at the waterfalls below (note how they didn't even change the woman in the rendering to reflect the functional change of this piece; she's not looking at the names, but the water below).

Driven mainly by construction exec. Frank Sciame, the full report on the redesign is available in PDF form on LMDC's web page.

A Critic and a Chemist

Who knew?



Just kidding. Actually, it's B.Kamins Chemist, as in Ben Kamins. Looks like Blair Kamin doesn't lead a double life as a skin-care guru after all.

Chinese Death Vans

Mobile execution chambers are now on the road in China. As a replacement for the firing squad, this is nomadic power, bringing the state – and lethal injections – to your doorstep.


"Makers of death vans," USA Today reports, "say they save money for poor localities that would otherwise have to pay to construct execution facilities in prisons or court buildings. The vans ensure that prisoners sentenced to death can be executed locally, closer to communities where they broke the law." It's the infrastructure of punishment detached from the limitations of geography.
On the other hand, "China's critics contend that the transition from firing squads to injections in death vans facilitates an illegal trade in prisoners' organs. Injections leave the whole body intact and require participation of doctors. Organs can 'be extracted in a speedier and more effective way than if the prisoner is shot,' says Mark Allison, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. 'We have gathered strong evidence suggesting the involvement of (Chinese) police, courts and hospitals in the organ trade.'"
To guarantee that each execution is "carried out legally," they are all "recorded on video and audio that is played live to local law enforcement authorities" – state-induced death as a form of avant-garde cinema.
As USA Today continues, punishment by death is not uncommon: "Sixty-eight different crimes – more than half non-violent offenses such as tax evasion and drug smuggling – are punishable by death in China. That means the death vans are likely to keep rolling."
Perhaps leading to someone's future Ph.D.: Urban Design and the Death Sentence. Or a TV show: Pimp My Death Van.

Your Concrete Utopia

Johnston Atoll, which consists of "four small man-made islands enclosed in an egg-shaped reef approximately 21 miles in circumference," located 718 miles from Hawaii, is for sale.
The current owner, however – the wonderfully named U.S. Office of Property Disposal – wonders if potential buyers might be "unaware that all buildings had been removed" from the island, and that "there were no functioning utilities or water supply, the runway was iffy, the golf course disintegrated, the seawall containing the nuclear waste dump was insufficient, and that nearest services of any kind are over 700 miles away."


If you purchase the island despite all that, your land deed "will contain use restrictions because the atoll was used by the Defense Department for storage of chemical munitions and as a missile test site in the 1950's and 60's. The island can be used as a residence or vacation getaway" – but "the airstrip and the golf course are closed."
Today, the Center for Land Use Interpretation tells us, Johnston Atoll is nothing but "a scab of concrete, slowly being covered in bird droppings."


Meanwhile, the atoll's history as a U.S. nuclear test-site is fascinating: "In 1962," CLUI continues, "Johnston was used for a series of nuclear tests as part of Operation Dominic, which included the only U.S. test of an operational ballistic missile with a live warhead. For this test a Polaris missile was launched from a submarine, and traveled 1200 miles through space and the atmosphere, until detonating 11,000 feet above the ocean near Johnston. Also that year, the newly constructed rocket launch pad at Johnston was used for a number of extremely high altitude nuclear tests. On June 20, during 'Starfish,' the Thor rocket engine cut out a minute after launch, and the missile was intentionally destroyed, at 30,000 feet. Large pieces of the rocket, including some plutonium–contaminated wreckage, rained down on the atoll."
And so forth.
If you buy the island, of course, let me know...

(With images from CLUI – and with huge thanks to Mark, who recently tipped me on the island's existence. For more info, there is also this Wikipedia article. And if you're in the market for other strange real estate, consider purchasing this subterranean bunker-city).

[Note: Apparently, Johnston Atoll was never for sale. The advertisement claiming otherwise was accidentally put onlin e and then picked up by search engines. Alas...]

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Seewurfel in Zurich, Switzerland by Camenzid Evolution.

The updated book feature is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Lift, the London International Festival of Theatre
"a progressive international theatre festival engaging audiences and participants with the work of international and UK artists and which raises consciousness of contemporary issues relevant to our daily lives. Lift is a biennial festival supported with a series of year-round trailblazing events," its latest and current one being The Lift New Parliament, "a portable and transportable structure with a programme of events and activities curated by an international team of artists and producers who will be engaging with local communities on the issues that matter to us all in the 21st century."

Portland Art and Portland Architecture
Two great resources on everybody's favorite progressive West Coast city.

Blair Kamin visits Minneapolis and writes about three new buildings by Jean Nouvel, Cesar Pelli, and Michael Graves.

Five Wonders

It was quite a shock to see Mini Cooper partnered with Arcosanti in an insert advertisement in this month's Dwell Magazine.



Part of Mini's "Let's visit five wonders of the modern world" campaign (the other four being The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; Santiago Calatrava bridge in Redding, California; The Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe in Plano, Illinois; and Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania), the back of the ad asserts that the Mini uses the same design principles as Soleri and Arcosanti, specifically conservation of space and fuel. While it may be true that the Mini is designed with these considerations in mind, it's a far cry from the way those concepts work and inform Arcosanti (see an article I wrote for TENbyTEN for background on the place). Same words, different principles.

What I find hard to believe is that Paolo Soleri would endorse such a thing as an automobile, even though he located his pedestrian-only laboratory of Arcosanti in an area only reachable by car, a fact not lost on Mini who mention that "those desert highways along the way are a veritable motoring paradise."

So Mini appears to be twisting the main concepts of Arcosanti towards its end. It makes me wonder how the other four relate to Mini Cooper...

Sand/Rake Diptych

[Images: Sand raked into earthworks, then photographed from above with a kite – a process all but perfected by Lenny, a photographer based on the island of Guernsey, whose art and idea these are. Both photos taken from his Flickr set. The first photo, above, I find almost unbelievably gorgeous].

(Discovered via Xenmate, whose blog will also tell you about starling murmurations).

Lightning Map

Geology.com presents us with a very interesting map of global lightning strikes – high-resolution version available here. Central Africa is clearly the lightning hotspot of the world, and by a fairly stunning magnitude, I might add. (Black indicates the most active regions).


I wonder what you'd do, on the other hand, if your own brain showed up on this map... A moving black spot, crashing harddrives, frying satellites, starting fires in the deserts of sub-Saharan Africa. Or the canyons of Manhattan, funneling frictive clouds of geomagnetic energy down avenues, lighting up this map with darkness.
For that matter, if, instead, spinning out in the middle of the Pacific you find a weird eye of unexpected hydro-electrical activity, dooming ships, hiding islands, setting up the storyline for King Kong 2...
In any case, yet more information about lightning, etc., can be found at the Center for Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity Research.

Tighten Up!

Some Friday fun for ya with Bateman365's animated video for Yo La Tengo's cover of "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell & the Drells. It's a cut from Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics.



Everybody's favorite Hoboken, New Jersey-based band also has a cut from their upcoming album posted on their web page. That album goes by the bit less self-deprecating title of I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. Enjoy.