Event 40204628

We just had another earthquake.
The house jolted; the front door chain swung back and forth, tapping the doorframe; and I stood up, looking out the back window, realizing that if all hell breaks loose I'm really thirsty and I don't have any bottled water. The jolting became a dull vibration, and then it ended. I sat back down on the futon.
It was a 5.6 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was 5.7 miles beneath the Earth's surface.
It was Event 40204628.

Earlier: Event 14312160

Ponte City's Transformation

A couple years ago I posted briefly about Ponte City, a 1970s high-rise with a distinct cylindrical shape and hollow core. Located in Johannesburg, South Africa, the building is undergoing a transformation from...



to...



Yes folks, it's New Ponte! While gussying up the concrete core with color and some balconies does little to betray the building's qualities, the exterior rendering below resembles a mediocre development in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, or some other North American city. The design and the marketing make me wonder how much else the South African development borrows from American precedents. From a brief look at New Ponte's web page, it looks like a lot, from the amenities package to the focus on "luxury" living and open floor plans.



Given the fact that Ponte City was a rough and tumble place that happened to have a unique design, the transformation is impossible to dismiss outright, though I'd contend that a development geared at a mix of incomes rather than solely the upper classes might make the transformation less contentious. But given the great swing of (social) change envisioned, architecture is just one piece of the puzzle.

What struck me as perhaps the most important (and unsettling) element in this transformation is the project's "urban renewal." While it's not clear if Johannesburg had the below charter pre-New Ponte, or if it was created with the input of developers to help these and other potential urban-renewal projects, the security element of the charter below appears to be another unfortunate extension of the American influence hypothesized above.

As the web page indicates: "The City of Johannesburg is committed to developing the Inner City as a place where people want to live. The Inner City Regeneration Charter commits the City to the following:

:: Highly Visible ‘bobby-on-the-beat’ system, by increasing resources to the South African Police Services, and the Johannesburg Municipal Police Department over the next three years.
:: Install 216 CCTV cameras in and around the Inner City, connected to a control center manned 24 hours a day by JMPD and SAPS.
:: Zero-tolerance to law-enforcement, including all by-laws.
:: Injecting R99-million into Pikitup in the 2007/8 financial year to build a new system of waste management and street cleaning in the Inner City.
:: Eliminate all Bad Buildings in the Inner City.
:: Eliminate all unlicensed and non-compliant liquor outlets by the end of 2009.
:: Upgrade all the city streets for pedestrians, through new paving, planting street trees, replacing and putting in new lighting, cleaning up litter etc."
[PDF link]

(Thanks to Juliet for the head's up!)

Today's archidose #148

Rooftop louver mock-ups for Art Institute addition, Renzo Piano, originally uploaded by Atelier FLIR.

Mock-up of the rooftop louvers for the Art Institute of Chicago addition by Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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Spies, Light-Writing, and the Surface of the City

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

This morning's post reminded me of a link someone sent in two weeks ago: Energie in Motion, a light-writing project by two guys in Germany.
Hey, little man! What are you doing outside by yourself? You look sad.

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

There's no need to hide!

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

It's just me...
For more images, stop by the Energie in Motion site itself. There's even a short video you can watch of the men at work, writing with light in Munich and Hamburg, turning parking meters into robots and animating street signs with little glowing arms and legs.
It'd be interesting, meanwhile, if you could install some sort of moving light sculpture in the center of the city. The sculpture appears to be totally abstract: casually and randomly, it switches back and forth amongst various positions, spinning little lights around, making arcs, circles, hops, jumps, and flashes, all to no real purpose or design – but then someone accidentally takes a photo of it using too long an exposure...
The resulting images, developed back at home in a basement darkoom, reveal that the sculpture is actually writing things in space.
Like this:

[Image: By and via Energie in Motion].

It just requires an elongated present moment in which to read it.
Turns out it's a new way for spies to communicate – and this random tourist with a camera has now uncovered a sinister plot...
Alfred Hitchcock directs the film version.

(Thanks, Joel D.! Vaguely related: Automotive Ossuary).

White Light

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

I stumbled on an old project from the summer of 2004 today, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio, called White Noise/White Light.
The project was on display in Athens during the 2004 Olympics:

Comprised of a 50' x 50' grid of fiber optics and speakers, "White Noise/White Light" is an interactive sound and light field that responds to the movement of people as they walk through it... As pedestrians enter into the fiber optic field their presence and movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LEDs and white noise from speakers below.

And though I wasn't in Athens to see the thing in person, it certainly did photograph well.

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

Juxtaposed with the Parthenon in the background, the effect, in fact, looks quite mesmerizing.
Electrical practicalities and issues of light pollution aside, it'd be nice to install something like this for a few nights along the rim of the entire Grand Canyon... Then fly over it in a glider, at 3am, taking photographs.

UPDATE: How strange: I came home from work today to find two copies of Architect magazine waiting for me in the doorway – and lo! On p. 49 of their September 2007 issue there's nothing else but "White Noise/White Light" by Höweler + Yoon... Architect says: "The experience and publicity that Höweler + Yoon gained from the Olympics project have led to new commissions and further explorations in up-to-the-nanosecond lighting technologies." Interesting overlap.

(Earlier: Archidose blogged it).

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Courtyard House in Los Angeles by Ripple Design.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

designverb
"Designverb covers elements in design that excite, inspire, captivate, and rattle our goofy creative minds through curious and refreshing finds in art, design, technology, food, culture, experiences, lifestyles, entertainment, and all the other mind-provoking ideas that come with it!" (added to sidebar under blogs::design+technology)

AndrewBlum.net
A collection of articles on architecture, urbanism, design, art, technology and travel from a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines. (added to sidebar under architectural links::criticism)

Photography of the Unexpected and the Neglected Architecture
A work by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre.

Half Dose #38: Secret Sauna

The following text and images are courtesy vision division, a young Swedish architecture firm with a penchant for the clever.

"If you want to build something in Sweden, you have to neglect your architectural aspirations and desires, and build something comprehensible and conventional to please the Swedish building regulations with their obsessed traditional values."



"So at a first glance this sauna may appear to be an anonymous wooden cabin, with no architectural features or ambition. The front façade is windowless; a water proof drape covers the façade on the other side. The sauna has a pointed traditional roof as well, to accomplish this intriguing scam."



"The front façade is actually a door, and when it is opened, the cabin changes its appearance completely."



"Now you have a magnificent view over the archipelago, and the door/wall creates an intimate space with the guest hut next to the sauna."



"The wall prevents the neighbors from peaking in as well."

What Came Before After

Part of the Urban Design program at City College last year was a class on the anthropology of space and place. Taught by Setha Low -- whose books I reviewed here and here -- the class was equal parts theory and practice; readings about the subject followed by research and field observations for a public space in the city. The team of which I was a part looked at Jacob Javits Plaza in Lower Manhattan's Civic Center area. Designed by Martha Schwartz, the plaza is known as being the site of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, a curved wall of cor-ten steel that bisected the space and was removed only eight years after its supposedly permanent installation.

I'd written critically about the plaza design in the past, though this class gave me the opportunity to look at the success (or lack thereof) of the design from the point of view of use, in relation to design. This weekend I decided to reformat the final paper for the web and post it on my web site. So I give you Jacob Javits Plaza: Reconsidering Intentions. It's a fairly long paper, but one I'm particularly proud of. If you make it through it all, hopefully you'll find it worth your while.



An abstract of the paper might read:

This paper attempts to determine the success of Jacob Javits Plaza through the framework of the current design's historical relationship to what came before, via a historical analysis, a three-part mapping analysis of the space (seating population, movement, and use), and using internet “discussions” about perceptions of the space and the plaza design. These analyses follow histories of the Federal buildings that created the plaza; the selection, installation, and removal of Serra’s sculpture; the “in-between” period when temporary planters and furniture occupied the space; and the selection, installation, and reaction to Schwartz’s plaza redesign.

Today's archidose #147

Ordrupgaard Museum Extension - Copenhagen (Denmark), originally uploaded by dod:.

Ordrupgaard Museum Extension in Copenhagen, Denmark by Zaha Hadid.

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The Road

Flying into Vegas last night to speak at a conference hosted somewhere inside the Venetian Hotel by the Urban Land Institute, I read Cormac McCarthy's recent novel, The Road. It's a book I'd long wanted to read but kept putting off for some reason, and I'm glad I finally read it.

[Image: By Trevor Manternach, found during a Flickr search].

If you don't know the book, the basic gist is that the United States – and, we infer, everything else in the world – has been annihilated in what sounds like nuclear war. But all of that is just background for the real meat of the book.
The Road follows a father and son as they walk south, starving, toward an unidentified coast. They cross mountains and prairies and forests; everything is burned, turned to ash, or obliterated. The father is coughing up blood and the skies are permanently grey.
Briefly, I'd be interested to hear, out of sheer curiosity, where other people think the book is "set" – because it sounds, at times, like the hills of New York state or even western Massachusetts; at other times it sounds like Missouri, Tennessee, parts of Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast; at other times like the Sierra Nevadas, hiking down toward the rocky shorelines just north of, say, Santa Barbara. Sometimes it sounds like Oregon.
In any case, the only glimpse we get of the war itself is this – and all spelling and punctuation in these quotations is McCarthy's own:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.

After this, the landscape outside is described as "scabbed" and "cauterized," heavily covered in ash.
McCarthy memorably writes: "They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn."
The wife soon gone – indeed, she's only ever present through flashbacks – the father and son stumble south pushing their food supplies, a few toys, and some "stinking robes and blankets" in an old grocery cart. They come across Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like houses, as some bands of bearded survivors have taken to cannibalism.
Interestingly, every house seems vaguely terrifying to the young boy in a way that the dead forests and dried riverbeds simply do not. Empty houses on hills with their doors left open.
So their journey down the road continues:

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. (...) Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

And then they approach what appears to have been a place actually struck by those distant concussions of sound and light, the perhaps atomic bombs of an unexplained war:

Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I dont think you should see this.

It's a good book. It's not perfect; a friend of mine quipped that it ends with "a failure of nerve," and yet the nostalgic tone of the book's final paragraph suited me just fine.
Which just leaves us, readers of things like this, preparing in whatever small ways we can to survive some undefined possible apocalypse of our own time here, the future politicized, the reservoirs drying, the religions hording arms and the oceans full of plastic. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

A Sense of Scale

On the left is a (modified) aerial of Kramer Junction (Google Earth link) solar electric generating station in Southern California; on the right is an aerial of Central Park (GE link, again) in Manhattan.



According to Nova's "Saved by the Sun," Kramer Junction powers approximately 150,000 homes, or the equivalent of just under two Central Parks at Manhattan's population density of 66,940 people per square mile. Or to put it another way, turning Central Park into a solar electric generating station, like Kramer Junction (assuming, magically, the same solar conditions as the Mojave Desert), would power approximately 8-10% of Manhattan's households. While I don't think this comparison deflates the solar potential, it helps illustrate the enormous areas required, with current technologies, to achieve a more suitable way of creating energy than burning fossil fuels. Of course, this comparison also ignores demand (what I see as a -- if not the -- key to the current energy "crisis"), in which case the 150,000 might actually increase in Manhattan's denser and more compact living conditions.

Today's archidose #146

wave, originally uploaded by base_gee.

Block 16 in Almere, Netherlands by René van Zuuk Architekten.

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N.A.W.A.P.A.

With drought on my mind, it was interesting to come across two new articles in The New York Times today, both about the United States of waterlessness.

The less interesting of the two tells us that "[w]ater levels in the Great Lakes are falling; Lake Ontario, for example, is about seven inches below where it was a year ago" – and, "for every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads... or risk running aground."

[Image: The Great Lakes are draining; photo by James Rajotte for The New York Times].

What's causing this? "Most environmental researchers," we read, "say that low precipitation, mild winters and high evaporation, due largely to a lack of heavy ice covers to shield cold lake waters from the warmer air above, are depleting the lakes."

I'm reminded of something Alex Trevi sent me several weeks ago, in which writer and comedian Garrison Keillor speculates as to what might happen if the state of Minnesota sold all the water in Lake Superior.

Keillor describes a fantastical project called Excelsior, in which the Governor of Minnesota "will stand on a platform in Duluth and pull a golden lanyard, opening the gates of the Superior Diversion Canal, a concrete waterway the size of the Suez. Water from Lake Superior will flood into the canal at a rate of 50 billion gal. per hour and go south."

It will flow into the St. Croix River, to the Mississippi, south to an aqueduct at Keokuk, Iowa, and from there west to the Colorado River and into the Grand Canyon and many other southwestern canyons, filling them up to the rims – enough water to supply the parched Southwest from Los Angeles to Santa Fe for more than 50 years.

The drained landscape left behind will be renamed the Superior Canyon – and the Superior Canyon, Keillor says, will put the Grand Canyon to shame. "It's bigger, for one thing," he writes, "plus it has islands and sites of famous shipwrecks. You'll have a monorail tour of the sites with crumpled hulls of ships. Very respectful."

By 2006, Keillor speculated (he was writing from the Hootie & the Blowfish-filled year of 1995):

Lake Superior will be gone, and its islands will be wooded buttes rising above the fertile coulees of the basin. A river will run through it, the Riviera River, and great glittering casinos like the Corn Palace, the Voyageur, the Big Kawishiwi, the Tamarack Sands, the Clair de Loon, the Sileaux, the Garage Mahal, the Glacial Sands, the Temple of Denture, the Golden Mukooda will lie across the basin like diamonds in a dish. Family-style casinos, with theme parks and sensational water rides on the rivers cascading over the north rim, plus high-rise hotels and time-share condominiums. Currently there are no building restrictions in Lake Superior; developers will be free to create high-rises in the shape of grain elevators, casinos shaped like casserole dishes, accordions, automatic washers. Celebrities will flock to the canyon. You'll see guys on the Letterman show who, when Dave asks, "Where you going next month, pal?" will say, "I'll be in Minnesota, Dave, playing four weeks at the Pokegama." Tourism will jump 1,000%. Guys on the red-eye from L.A. to New York will look out and see a blaze of light off the left wing and ask the flight attendant, "What's that?" And she'll say, "Minnesota, of course."

All of which actually reminds of Lebbeus Woods, and his vision of a drained Manhattan.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan; view larger].

But perhaps such a willfully fictive reference overlooks the reality of the drought(s) now creeping up on the United States.

In a massive new article published this weekend in The New York Times, we're given a long and rather alarming look at the lack of water in the American west, focusing on the decline of the Colorado River.

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River – which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains – has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government.

And it will happen; this "unfathomable" situation will someday occur. The American West will run out of water.

[Image: Simon Norfolk, a photographer previously interviewed by BLDGBLOG, taken for The New York Times].

Or will it?

At one point in his genuinely brilliant book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner describes something called N.A.W.A.P.A.: the North American Water and Power Alliance. N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the gonzo hydrological fantasy project of a particular group of U.S. water engineers. N.A.W.A.P.A., Reisner tells us, would "solve at one stroke all the West's problems with water" – but it would also take "a $6-trillion economy" to pay for it, and "it might require taking Canada by force."

He quips that British Columbia "is to water what Russia is to land," and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam. Canadians, we read, "have viewed all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice" – but what exactly is "all of this"?

Reisner:

Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia – dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles – reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature's second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent's hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long.

And that's barely half the project!

The project would ultimately make "the Mojave Desert green," we read, diverting Canada's fresh water south to the faucets of greater Los Angeles – thus destroying almost every salmon fishery between Anchorage and Vancouver, and even "rais[ing] the level of all five [Great Lakes]," in the process.

After all, N.A.W.A.P.A. also means that the Great Lakes would be connected to the center of the North American continent by something called the Canadian–Great Lakes Waterway.

But N.A.W.A.P.A. is an old plan; it's been gathering dust since the 1980s. No one now is seriously considering building it. It's literally history.

But who knows – perhaps 2008 is the year N.A.W.A.P.A. makes a comeback. Or, perhaps, in January 2010, after another dry winter, Los Angeles voters will start to get thirsty. Perhaps some well-positioned Senators, in 2011, might even start making phonecalls north. Perhaps, in 2012, some recent graduates from water management programs at state-funded universities in Illinois or Utah might catch the itch of moral rebellion; they might then start redrawing their personal maps of the continent, going to bed at night with visions of massive dams in their heads, writing position papers for peer-reviewed hydrological engineering magazines.

Perhaps, in 2017, ten years from now, BLDGBLOG – if it's still around – will even be reporting from the rims of these gigantic structures, thrown up overnight in the remote and untrafficked darkness of riverine western Canada. Long, perfectly calibrated concrete sluices and pumps will bring water thousands of miles south through redwood forests to the open basins of California's reservoirs, and photographs of their incomprehensibly expensive and exactly poured geometry will elicit whistles of embarrassed awe from readers on the streets of Weehawken.

[Image: A fish-cleaning station in Las Vegas Bay, now abandoned by the West's sinking waters; taken by Simon Norfolk for The New York Times].

Or perhaps it won't be N.A.W.A.P.A. after all, but some titanic new project identical in all but name.

Will California wait for the coming drought to destroy it – or will the state take drastic measures?

Las Vegas and the Future of Urban Real Estate

Just a quick note that I'll be speaking in Las Vegas on Wednesday afternoon, October 24, as part of the Urban Land Institute's 2007 annual meeting.
I'll be on a panel with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times; Neil Takemoto of CoolTown Studios; and Ted Bardacke of Global Green.
So if you're in Las Vegas – though you have to register for the conference – be sure to stop by.
Wildly, it's also the day to catch Queen Noor of Jordan; she has a B.A. in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton – and, who knows, maybe she's a dedicated reader of BLDGBLOG (I'm not holding my breath).

Graphic Anatomy of Atelier Bow-Wow

Even without being the fan of Japanese super-duo Atelier Bow-Wow that I am, I still would have been blown away after perusing the drawings in their latest book, Graphic Anatomy, at a bookstore a couple weeks ago. The thorough mix of working drawing, perspective drawing, and entourage is a novel combination of well-established drawing conventions. They're beautiful in their own right.



While I resisted purchasing the book (how much longer I can, I'm not sure), it was great to find some super-large-scale images from the book on yusunkwon's Flickr page. Below are some strips from those images. Click the image to be taken to see the overall images, impressive even at a lower resolution. (For those not versed in navigating Flickr, click on the "all sizes" button above the image on the Flickr page to see the full, hi-res image.)

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Termas Géometricas in Villarrica, Chile by Germán del Sol.

The updated book feature is Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair, by Lisa D. Schrenk.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

The Other City
An international exhibition in two venues (the Hungarian Cultural Center and the Romanian Cultural Insitute, both in New York) that "explores the ideologies behind the postwar initiatives of public housing projects, the conditions these buildings have provided for their inhabitants, as well as the agenda of those who support or criticize them." Running from Oct. 19 to Dec. 9.

Lebbeus Woods
New blog of the prolific, experimental architect, teacher, and artist. (added to sidebar under blogs::offices)

BMW Welt
This weekend saw the opening of Coop Himmelb(l)au's building for the German car maker. (via ecAr)

Top 100 Architecture Blogs
From out of nowhere comes this list of 100 blogs on architecture and urbanism, with a few new ones (to me) that will be added to this page's sidebar in the near future.

Half Dose #37: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Yesterday saw the opening of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas. Designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, the museum is a part of the Johnson County Community College and is built as an addition to the school's Regnier Center, giving the museum a prominent location on the campus's northeast corner.



The view above shows the building apparently reaching out beyond the campus, to the community beyond, as a sort of symbolic connection between the two.



According to the architect's web page, the museum "provides amenities for the entire campus. A café is provided in the atrium and a large multi purpose Lecture Hall serves the museum, campus educational needs, and has additional conferencing capabilities. Galleries are provided for both the permanent collections and for temporary and changing exhibitions."



The simple stone and glass exterior illustrates these functions, the more public facilities, such as the café, occupying the transparent ground floor, and the "serene" galleries located overhead in the primarily solid second floor. A pixelated ceiling over the entry makes for a dramatic entry space at night.



The exterior -- particularly the single window on the upper floor framing the distant landscape -- gives a hint at the design choices made within. Views across the galleries and atrium space are framed via openings that also connect with the surroundings, a suitable, though subtle gesture in the Midwestern landscape.



Links:

:: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
:: Johnson County Community College
:: Kyu Sung Woo Architects
:: Detail Magazine coverage

Do the Meier Mash

After seeing these images at Dezeen of Richard Meier's artwork now on display at the Louise T Blouin Foundation in London, I couldn't help but think about how they relate to his buildings. Where what he's known for are geometrically crisp, white and light-filled, his art is geometrically chaotic, black and dingy. The images also made me wonder what the art would look like in some of his spaces. So here's some "mash-ups" I made of the possible interaction of the two.


Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany
Original image by darrell godliman


Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany
Original image by Gabó


High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia
Original image by Wizum


Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, Italy
Original image by DarkFrame

Today's archidose #145

gas natural, originally uploaded by MaLóL.

Gas Natural's New HQ in Barcelona, Spain by EMBT.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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Drained

[Image: Lake Lanier, Atlanta's primary source of drinking water, gets lower and lower; photo by Pouya Dianat for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution].

Via Pruned, we read that Atlanta may have less than four months of water left, that the governor of North Carolina has asked his constituents "to stop using water for any purpose 'not essential to public health and safety,'” and that an ongoing, 18-month drought, complete with "cloudless blue skies and high temperatures," has "shriveled crops and bronzed lawns from North Carolina to Alabama."
So is this the new desert southeast, a grassless landscape of abandoned golf courses, college dorms left empty amidst the remains of dying pine forests, and the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk creeping in toward Raleigh-Durham?
And could Atlanta really run out of water before March 2008?

The event

[Images: Lawrence Weschler and BLDGBLOG at the Park Life Store, San Francisco; photos by Nicola Twilley].

A quick thanks to everyone who came out the other night to see Lawrence Weschler and BLDGBLOG speak at San Francisco's Park Life Store – I had a blast. I had a really great time, actually – and I'd love to do it again.
We were celebrating the paperback reissue of Weschler's book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, and otherwise just talking about the things that interest us – from the world's largest platinum deposit and artificial reefs off the coast of Israel, to the LA-based Institute for Figuring, underground infrastructure, and how to hurl Taj Mahals into the sky.
And a huge thanks to both McSweeney's and the Park Life Store for hosting it!

Literary Dose #17

"Gaudi did for architecture what Lautréamont did for poetry: he put it through the bath of madness."

"He pushed the Baroque as far as it would go, but he did not do so on the basis of accepted doctrines or categorizations."

"As locus of risible consecration, one which makes a mockery of the sacred, the Sagrada Familia causes modern space and the archaic space of nature to corrupt one another."

"The flouting of established spatial codes and the eruption of natural and cosmic fertility generate an extraordinary and dizzying 'infinitization' of meaning."

"Somewhere short of accepted symbolisms, but beyond everyday meanings, a sanctifying power comes into play which is neither that of the state, nor that of the Church, nor that of the artist, nor that of theological divinity, but rather that of a naturalness boldly identified with divine transcendence."

Excerpt by Henri Lefebvre, from The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (1991).

Photos by (from top to bottom): MaLóL, panic-embryo, klaus dolle, T.SC, and Lou Rouge.