Air Brain

[Image: Bel-Air by Mathieu Lehanneur].

These air filters, by Mathieu Lehanneur, seem so hilariously inefficient and bizarre to me, but hey – I love the idea. They turn plants into air filtration machines – miniature ecosystems put to work. Somewhere between a terrarium and biotechnology.
The designer himself describes the filter as "a vegetal brain enclosed in an aluminium and Pyrex cranial box." That "brain" then cleans the air in your house for you.

[Image: Bel-Air by Mathieu Lehanneur].

More specifically, Lehanneur's Bel-Air system "is a mini mobile greenhouse" that "continuously inhales" air into an enclosed system of "three natural filters (the plant leaves, its roots, and a humid bath)."
The air is then released again, "purified."

This patented principal has two advantages: Bel-Air is to the American and Asiatic common filter appliances what Dyson is to regular vacuum cleaners. Here, the noxious particles are captured, and transformed inside the system. No more filters to change, and no more clogs.

Lehanneur was at least partially inspired by NASA's old research into space gardens, wherein living plants were to be installed on spaceships in order to filter, clean, and continually recirculate the exhaled breath of astronauts.
As such, this project reminds me of the oxygen garden from Danny Boyle's film Sunshine.

[Images: The Oxygen Garden from Sunshine, courtesy of DNA Films].

There we see a whole room – full of plants, circular fans, UV lights, and timed irrigation tanks (the Earth in miniature, technologically replaced) – built aboard the film's main spacecraft, forming "a natural, unmechanical way of replenishing [the ship's] oxygen supplies."
All houses should be greenhouses. Imagine going to work in a place like that – in an oxygen garden – bringing the tropics to an exurban office park near you. Creeper vines, and Pyrex-shelled ferns, and huge corridors lined with orange trees – groves and orchards spiraling above you up stairways and halls. The sheer terrestrial weirdness of flowering species.
What is it about plantlife that seems so inherently sci-fi?

(For the Bel-Air's complete press release, see Dezeen).

Today's archidose #157

California Academy of Sciences* / de Young Museum**, originally uploaded by fdo h.

The California Academy of Sciences (under construction) by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, as seen from the M.H. de Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron. Both are situated in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Photo is best viewed SUPER LARGE to see the detail of the Academy of Sciences in the distance.

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For the Love of Trees

A number of articles in the past few days about the purposeful and sometimes not-so-purposeful changes we are making to our lovely local flora. The first article, from the Seattle Times - Nov. 27: "Trees giving bizarre clues to climate change" talks about trees as an early warning system to climate change by providing indicators in the form of increased cone production. The article mostly talked with childlike glee about the Wind River Canopy Crane (pictured below) which allows researchers to hoist themselves high into canopies to conduct scientific experiments.



There are specific plants that have been seen to bloom earlier in the spring, due to climate changes. These changes are harder to detect in trees, but scientists are finding new signs. In addition to increased cone production, bud production is a possible sign of impacts climate change may have, causing potential earlier budding due to higher temperatures earlier in the season. Global warming also will potentially increase fires and insect infestations. Research has also shown that older forest sequester huge amounts of carbon, and that removal would cause a imbalance in the carbon impact that would take years to correct. Yeah for old-growth. Also mentioned is a plan for a National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) which would provide much needed additional data for a variety of ecological systems.

This follows nicely with other recent reports about widespread climate change and the adjustment of USDA Hardiness zones, and the Impacts to Local ecosystems. I'm personally looking forward to Portland area getting to USDA hardiness zone 8 or 9, which could bring in some additional plants to a palette that is frankly getting a little stale...

On a more direct note, the first of two in the Oregonian, from Nov. 28, entitled: "Experts aiming to build a better biofuel tree" addresses a favorite plant topic - genetic engineering... North Carolina State University researchers are developing trees with reduced amounts of lignin, which although useful in providing structural stability to trees, is detrimential in turning cellulose into into biofuels. While energy sources from plants are admirable, making the leap from crops to trees is another matter. Also, robbing trees of the very structural fabric of which they depend seems cruel, on the likes of the 'Boneless Chicken Farm' from the Far Side cartoon:



Aside from the functional aspects, it strikes to the heart of our association with trees as a more mythical and special type of plant. From the article:

"The general public is not going to look at trees at this point as a row crop," said Susan McCord, executive director of the Institute of Forest Biotechnology in Raleigh, N.C. "The same is true of foresters. The people who go into that work, they love trees. They view them very differently than a row of corn."

The second, somewhat more noble article, "Scientists grow new lease on life for majestic trees" features selective cloning of old-growth redwood trees in California in efforts to restore forests throughout the world. By using techniques that are common to plant propagation for centuries, the trees are virtually identical to the original... creating, in the words of one of William Libby, "...reliability and control you don't have with seedlings." The nonprofit called the Champion Tree Project International is working to clone significant trees around the world - including Methuselah (pictured below), a bristlecone pine thought to be the oldest tree in the world at a ripe 4,700 years.



Both of these articles outline approaches to manipulation of trees to suit our needs, whether they be veiled in a search for alternative fuel sources, or protection and perpetuation of natural treasures. While both sides evoke an understandable ethical dilemma, there is a very sharp distinction between the two. Cloning, which is a widely used technique to reproduce plants, is a far cry from manipulating the innate genetic structure of plants. On one hand, to clone a plant to save and restore it is noble. On the other, it is a slippery slope between protection for good reasons, and creation of some freakish plant zoo of significant trees - especially when it gives us the ability to replace things we should be saving - giving us more creedence to continue to harm the environment because we can replace what is damaged in the process.

On the flip side, genetic engineering to alter the very structure of a plant for our own rampant energy consumption needs, by ridding it of its natural protection against damage and pests, is crossing a line. Is it because of the difference of a 'crop' vs. a tree being that of an annual vs. a perennial - something less sacrificial? Plant modification is significant with cultivated varieties, but there is no strong stance from the landscape industry on the perils/merits of genetic engineering. Do we turn the other cheek when it grows plants that are hardy, bloom longer, with brightly colored blossoms? Or do we stop due to a distaste for the entire idea of genetic modification due mostly to it's unknown consequences?

Or, if a limp, lignin-free tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

Very Urban Agriculture

An interesting story - Going Agro, from BLDGBLOG via Dwell... Overall, it is regarding the meshing of agriculture and building - definitely a blending of landscape and architecture in inventive ways.


(photo from BLDGBLOG - via Knafo Kilmor Architects - see their site for more info)

This concept brings up some interesting future scenarios of the need for multi-functional landscape interventions, which will most likely occupy space on/in buildings, as open space is reduced. While there will always be a need for nature, in the form of terra firma, recent dialogue regarding Peak Oil has offered many compelling arguments related to our need to reform a variety of processes, a significant one being food production.

The City of Portland recently commissioned a report entitled 'Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas' - prepared by the Peak Oil Task Force. While hinting at a possibility of anarchist doom and gloom, it is a relatively straightforward approach to preparing ourselves for the possibility of severe changes in lifestyle due to our current reliance on fossil fuels. The recommendations, which to their credit includes a call to 'Act Big, Act Now', even though estimates range from 10-40 years before impacts will be felt, span Transportation and Land Use, Food and Agriculture, Economic Impacts, and Impacts to Public and Social Services.

There were a couple of interesting points, both in a shift to more local economies and agricultural systems, and the ways in which we develop and inhabit land. As a conceptual strategy to move us towards more thoughtful planning, including more density, better mass transit, public spaces, mixed use centers so people can live near work, and on... pretty much the sustainable urbanist princples in a nutshell. Will Peak Oil cause us to come to our senses?

From an urban agriculture perspective, the interesting aspects include a shift to more old fashioned technologies and the need for a re-education of the masses on ideas such as growing food, canning, preservation. How will these educational strategies shift building, in such a way as the modern and designerly agenda shown above, or more of a return to nature strategy that involves us getting our hands dirty, learning how to grow things, and getting satisfaction out of battling slugs with beer, and picking warm cherry tomatoes from the vine. Hopefully both?

Literary Dose #20

"It is here [Baja California], in the Bay of Loreto, where developers are building a 5,000-unit resort designed by Andreas Duany, who is selling it to the world as 'the first ecologically friendly subdivision.' In a typical New Urbanist appeal, this mega development (PDF link) is customized by an authentic Mexican Village, completing the invasion of Loreto Bay by no only mono culture of upper-middle-class North American land owners who can afford this island of pleasure, but by 'Seaside' and 'Celebration' type of planning, making this the official arrival of New Urbanism in grand scale to the Mexican West Coast. Beyond issues of architectural style, however, it is tragic that these mega developments, as ecologically responsible and manicured as they can be, are indifferent to the social and economic inequalities they will engender, as these 'all inclusive' and gated environments might be eventually surrounded by the shanty towns built by their own service providers. This phenomenon will add to the strange asymmetry at the border and along the political equator's trajectory, as this will become another instance of the kind of neoliberalist urbanites worldwide that continue to be supported by cheap labor (service sector), on one end, and the emergence of expensive real estate (enclaves of wealth), on the other."

- Teddy Cruz, "Border Tours: Strategies of Surveillance, Tactics of Encroachment," from Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State (2008), edited by Michael Sorkin.

The IceCube and the Earth's Core

Will an astronomical machine buried in the ice of Antarctica someday reveal what the Earth's core really looks like?

[Image: The IceCube's surface workings, Antarctica; via New Scientist].

Last week, New Scientist reported that a neutrino detector called IceCube, once constructed, might just do exactly that.
Because the Earth rotates, we read, distant neutrino sources – such as black holes – will be blocked at certain predictable moments by the Earth's core; piecing together all these temporary blindspots, we can then infer the shape of the core itself.
It's an absence that generates absences elsewhere.

[Image: A schematic diagram of the IceCube].

The "machine" itself, meanwhile, is actually quite extraordinary: incredibly, it will "fill a cubic kilometre of ice" – and yet it's really a buried network of connected glass balls.
According to The Daily Galaxy, building the IceCube is less an act of construction than a kind of archaeology in reverse; the process will consist of entombing "glass-globed sensors the size of basketballs on 1-mile-long strings, 60 sensors per string, in 80 deep holes beneath the polar surface."
This will then allow scientists to develop, that same writer says, a "library of the universe" – something that would make even Borges proud.
So I'm left thinking of at least two things:

1) In John Carpenter's 1983 remake of The Thing, a team of Norwegian researchers finds something buried in the ice of Antarctica; it turns out to be a spaceship... which, according to a later group of American scientists, must have been there for more than 100,000 years.
It's frozen solid, and older than writing.
But what if, down there in the ice someday, we find something not unlike the IceCube – only we didn't put it there, some vast and buried machine with no identifiable purpose, origin, or design?
Or perhaps next year some lone helicopter pilot will go flying around, scanning the ice with radar, only to discover that what appears to be a geological formation is actually a machine, some ancient, hulking technology indistinguishable from bedrock... Or a machine made entirely from ice, still detecting the remnants of galaxies.
Perhaps even telescopes dream.

[Image: A glimpse of the Transantarctic Range].

2) I was joking with a friend the other day that Americans are always stumbling upon the face of Christ in unexpected places, and then ending up on CNN. They find Christ on a pancake, or on a piece of burned toast, or on an Eggo waffle (these sightings often involve breakfast foods), or even in the bark of a tree – and the people who discover these faces never once seem to think that what they're suggesting is sacreligious: God has sent unto you his only son... disguised as a croissant.
But what if, after all the numbers are crunched and the maps are made, we find that the core of the Earth looks like the face of Jesus? What then? Nevadan entrepreneurs will suggest that we rescue it, digging it up with diamond drills, polishing it and storing it in a church somewhere.
Imagine the core of the planet on display behind stained glass inside a cathedral near Paris, or down in an old consecrated basement in central Rome. Under armed guard. Why is there not more holy geology?
Someone breaks in, using C4, a pair of infrared goggles, and a lot of rope, and they try to steal the center of the planet...

For more on the IceCube and Antarctic science in general give this article in The Economist a quick read – then check out NOVA's round-up of weird detectors.
Then, if you're looking for a good book on Antarctica itself, consider picking up a copy of Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent by William L. Fox (a book previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here).

Modes of Representation

Back to Integrating Habitats... and the need for graphic representation techniques that are up to the challenges of representing time-based processes in viable ways. There are two polar opposites on the continuum - one is traditional graphic representation techniques, involving the ubiquitous rendered site plan, sketches, and such. The other is the deconstructed graphic that is both illegible and frustrating - or as i just heard - i am paraphrasing: inaccessible because it is essentially visual masturbation that only speaks to a select few in the intellectual realms. (this statement was specifically directed towards Alan Berger, but could nonetheless apply a fair number of folks when it comes down to it).

Representation is also tied closely with writing, which i'm interested in exploring further. I have slogged through some dense reading (and subsequent dense graphics) and am constantly amazed at the intellectual rigor of most writers on the subject of Landscape Urbanism. A part of me also yearns for a complex yet simplified style such a J.B. Jackson. Is the complexity necessary to convey the depth of concepts? Or is it a variant form - verbal masturbation - to elevate the writer to a higher plane of credibility?

A Suburban Future?

Much of my time over the Thanksgiving break was spent helping my parents pack their belongings to move out of the home in which they raised me and my sister. Located about 20 miles north of Chicago, the house is in what could be called an old suburb, with a gridded street pattern, small lots, and walking distance to shops, library, and a train station to Chicago.

Regardless of this condition, the McMansion phenomenon is still to be found in the area, though more likely on the large blocks of adjacent streets with larger lots than this street and its smaller lots, where new houses -- between the size of the old ranches or colonials and the trendy McMansions -- crowd their lots and leave very little yard space. Well, looking out the back of my parent's house I noticed one possible scenario for achieving large houses on small lots:



Buy the next-door neighbor's lot, tear down the house, and plant grass! Yes, that open space directly behind my parent's yard used to be a house, a split-level 70s-era number, from what I recall. The orange-brick house on the right is a recent addition to the block (built after tearing down a one-story house about the size of my parent's house) that did this duty.

While the newfound airspace and light seems refreshing (though late, considering the move) it also strikes me as a cautious scenario for transforming "old" suburbs into "new" suburbs. Where critics of suburbia offer future scenarios that call for adding density to suburbs old and new, in effect filling in further the existing voids, this gesture, if writ large, would make the transformation of the suburbs into a more sustainable use of land close to impossible. Not only would it push houses even further out across the landscape, it would make the place affordable to only those that can afford two houses and pay property taxes on a relatively unused lot.

I can see my parent's suburb -- Northbrook, the home of Ferris Bueller and other John Hughes teen flicks -- as being desirable for the qualities I mentioned earlier, though the hypothetical application of this two-lot apparatus to the area would be similar to what's happening in Manhattan: the desirability of the place drives the price beyond the reach of the lower and middle classes (minus irregular, crowded situations). This isn't to say Northbrook is as desirable as Manhattan, but I do think that these and other old suburbs will become more desirable as people see the inferior nature of the new suburbs and attempt a scenario that tries to meld the two (walkability and other qualities of the old with the giant size of the new houses and lots) before other alternatives are tried and the tide turns.

Reading List: The World Without Us

I recently finished 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman. While not exactly what i imagined when i started reading, it definitely was captivating enough in terms of a compelling future vision of life. The nutshell is that life is for some unforeseen reason, mysteriously vanished from the earth. Or i should say, human life, that is.

:: book cover image via The World Without Us

Everything else is left to frolic and adapt to the environment that is left in our wake. Certain areas and species heal and adapt, others degenerate due to lack of human intervention, and others - well, they either degrade over millenia (plastics, nuclear materials), or await the unfortunate small mammal that stumbles upon them (underground vaults for volatile gases, nuclear waste). While painting a picture around some of the less touched spaces in the world (ancient Polish forests, for instance) and providing some real visions of deterioration (New York City devolving into nature) - what was lacking was a real picture of what this means.

My question, why write the book? Is it a plausible future to envision? Perhaps, but is it motivated by a need to teach us something. Maybe, but the conclusion, which took me totally by surprise, was a plug for population control. While a large proponent of this concept from way back college reading of the family Ehrlich, I failed to see the connection to the idea of us all being gone.

:: Photo of a flooded City of Jafaa via Naked in Nuhaka

So my summary conclusion is that for all of us to disappear would be bad - due to the instability that would create via our technologies. The other conclusion is that we must reduce the amount of people that are here, or, some portion of us (a lot) should disappear, but enough should remain to man the controls. With impending Peak Oil, global warming, and other looming catastrophes, will this rationale be the one that finally leads us to an awakening to slow down our inevitable decline... or will be laugh at the vision of new york and the world degenerating, ala 'The Day After Tommorrow'. Guess we'll find out.

Algae Power

[Image: Algae balloon communities in Iceland by the Philadelphia-based 202 Collaborative].

A few years ago I audited a course about Archigram at the University of Pennsylvania, just something to do on a Wednesday morning before I went to work – but one of the things that indirectly came out of that experience was BLDGBLOG. It's interesting to note, then, that one of the other people in that class now writes Brand Avenue; another's work was featured here on BLDGBLOG last year; and, this morning, another course attendee emailed to point out a proposal that he's helped assemble and conceptualize, about hydrogen-powered urban design in Iceland.

[Image: Algae balloons and the houses they serve, by the 202 Collaborative].

That project, originally intended for a design competition, imagines carefully engineered algae ponds and balloons of hydrogen gas fueling the Icelandic city of the future.
It's Icelandic New Energy (INE).

[Image: An Icelandic hydrogen economy, outlined by the 202 Collaborative; view larger].

As the designers note:

It has long been known that algae produce small amounts of hydrogen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. In 1999, researchers in Berkeley observed that algae alternate between hydrogen production and normal photosynthesis depending on the chemical environment. Depriving algae of oxygen and sulfur, the researchers greatly increased the hydrogen production and triggered the algae to produce hydrogen for an extended period of time. Another research group also discovered that algae will sustain simultaneous production of hydrogen and oxygen from water by illuminating the algae and depriving it of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Researchers estimate that a small pond (1.5 acre or 10 meter diameter) will produce enough hydrogen on a weekly basis to fuel 12 cars.

Of course, a part of me wonders if this whole thing would be easier to solve if we just got rid of those 12 cars – but I understand that that wasn't the point of this design exercise.

[Image: 202 Collaborative].

However, referring to things beyond the scope of this project, a part of me does find it a bit depressing that we'll go to all these lengths – we'll totally redesign the industrial base of society – only to jump back into our Escalades and drive out to buy organic cotton Christmas mittens at the local Baby Gap.
It seems like an awfully long distance to go to get nowhere, in other words. After all of this, we'll do the exact same things, outshopping one another on greengoods.com and parking our solar-powered sustainable sports cars somewhere in that sprawling tangle of garages and freeways that we never disassembled out back.
Everything will be recycled, yet everything will be the same.
We'll watch internet sitcoms and judge each other's social value by the hemp dresses that our girlfriends wear.
In any case, that's a pet peeve of mine that deals with things well outside of the project featured here.

[Image: A broader view of the plan by the 202 Collaborative; view much larger].

These renderings are gorgeous, meanwhile, and they lead me to wonder what Archigram would be doing today, if they had grown up designing in a world powered by alternative fuels. What strange new worlds of hydrogen balloons and algae ponds extending off past the urban horizon might we then see?
Crops harvested from the roofs of brick tenements in north Philly. Steel frameworks of solar concentration arrays visible in the cracks between buildings as we step over bio-boulevards and water filtration systems on our way to work.
Vast harddrives made entirely from milled crystal move glass elevators floor by floor through the environment ministry, carrying cloned medicinal plant samples up to their examination chambers...
All narratives of the future are fair game when you're talking about architectural design.
Anywho, although their site is still under construction, be sure to stop by the homepage of the 202 Collaborative.

(Thanks, Patrick!)

Today's archidose #156

Spertus, originally uploaded by archidose.

The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, Illinois by Krueck + Sexton Architects. The building opens officially on November 30.

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Study in Mass

[Image: Boutique Monaco by Mass Studies; view larger].

I've mentioned architect Minsuk Cho, of Mass Studies, on BLDGBLOG before: he designed the so-called "ring dome" for the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Z-A event last month in New York City, and he collaborated with Jeffrey Inaba's SCI-FI studio to propose an "urban district above the water" in Seoul.
I'd say that Mass Studies is hard to beat for sheer spatial interest and originality; witness their Torque House, Pixel House, or Cheongam Media Headquarters, for instance – let alone the famously freaky Seoul Commune 2026.

[Images: Three rendered views of the building's lobby and ground level exterior].

Or take a look at the Boutique Monaco, pictured here.
The Monaco is "a high-density, massive building for residential/office/commercial/cultural activities to be located in the heart of the Seoul metropolitan life, the area around Gangnam station."

[Images: Day and night renders of the project's exterior, complete with punctuated vertical bays of greenery and residential terracing; view both the top and bottom images larger].

As Mass Studies explains:

Unlike the existing high-rises where one is segregated from the outside world as soon as he [or she] leaves the ground floor, Boutique Monaco will be a building where at each level will be a vertical open space accessible from different spots in the floor. The exterior, designed in an orthogonal pattern in the interest of efficiency in space allocation, is intended to strike a balanced harmony with the surrounding box-type high-rises.

Further: "In the plan for Boutique Monaco, around 172 units are created in 49 different types and sizes and interconnected as if in an enormous puzzle. At the same time, different types of internal/external, private/public areas are to be installed."
You can see some of the building's floorplans here.

[Image: A kind of rooftop park and bioscape, complete with what appears to be a helipad].

The project can be seen in renderings, drawings, and diagrams on the Mass Studies website – but also now in photographs.
The building is under construction even as this post is being written, and it should be open for inhabitation by late summer 2008.

[Image: The Boutique Monaco under construction; view larger].

Meanwhile, I don't mean to uncritically promote the actions of a property developer in Seoul; nor do I wish to suggest that because this building has a few trees growing out of it that it's "green."
But I do have to say that I like 1) the project's use of materials (the wood cladding inside the vegetated nooks is especially brilliant), 2) the punctuated bays themselves, which break up the facade in a really great way and add a spatially and experientially inspired dimension to the project, and 3) the diagonal bracing, however ornamental and non-structural it may be, of the podium. We may be seeing more and more of these sorts of structural weavings – but that's because they're cool.

[Image: Bracing at the base of the Boutique Monaco; view larger].

For other projects by Mass Studies, check out their archives.

Cradle to Cradle Development

The Greenbridge Development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is on the docket for Christmas vacation, is of course, a trip to see the first Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) development in the US, created by William McDonough. The website is vague on how this meetings C2C goals, but does give some indication of the overall project goals, which i'm guessing, is to be the showcase project for MBDC and yet another certification system.


:: Photo via IndyWeek

The following quote was excerpted from the Greenbridge Development site:

"A hallmark of modern construction is the use of innovative building techniques and materials. Greenbridge takes this one step further by building with innovative GREEN TECHNOLOGY. All of the condo's most essential utilities will work in ways rarely seen in conventional housing. Heating, cooling, water, electricity will all be run by Green Technology. When green technology is incorporated into a structure, the average utility costs are decreased by 50% - according to the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, green buildings require less maintenance and repair, and promote better health among occupants. However, green buildings don't just benefit the individual, they benefit our society at large by reducing the environmental impact of a structure."

Additionally, the site listed multiple reasons for C2C development that will be remedied with this project:

@ Buildings consume more than 35% of all energy and more than 65% of all electricity used in the United States. In NC, almost two-thirds of our electricity is produced from burning coal, which pollutes our air and water and fills our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, resulting in global
warming.

@ Each day five billion gallons of potable water is used in buildings solely to flush toilets. A typical North American commercial construction project generates 2.5 pounds of solid waste per square foot of complete floor space.

@ Conventional development transforms forests and fields from natural, biologically-diverse habitats to hardscape that is impervious and devoid of biodiversity "


:: Photo from CoolTownStudios

So how does one develop a cradle-to-cradle development versus a product? Looking at the concept of C2C, that would mean that the entire development meets the goals. Also, aside from roof terrace/ecoroof, it would interesting to see how the landscape is intertwined with the concepts. More to come, post x-mas, i'm sure...

Reading List: Center 14, On Landscape Urbanism

I just received this copy of Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism, and have yet to delve into it in great depth due to the current Integrating Habitats Competition that i've been working on.


:: Link to Center 14 via Amazon

The interesting fact of the book is its scope, ranging from some of the initial pre-landscape urbanism thinkers that have paved the way to current theory (Ian McHarg, Pierce Lewis, Anne Whiston Spirn, to name a few), along with the typical cast of characters (Corner, Waldheim, Allen, etc.) that have become synonymous with the landscape urbanism movement. The goal, aside from comprehensiveness, is to provide a summary textbook format for teaching as well. This is a great companion to the steadily increasing library for landscape urbanism reading.

Seeds

This is set up to be my clearinghouse of musings on Landscape Urbanism, Landscape Architecture, and Planning, Design and related subjects. I'm not really planning on this for public consumption, rather an electronic journal of things that interest me, a chance to write more often, and an outlet for thoughts. But if perchance someone happens to stop by, welcome and feel free to contribute/comment.

My interest in landscape urbanism as a specific topic has been relatively recent, but upon discussion and further investigation, i realized that many ideas that i have been interested in over the years have threads in common with landscape urbanist theory, and really struck me as a vital theoretical outlet. My interests in general are diverse, so my guess is that the content will wander, but a concept like landscape urbanism seems to have enough breadth to accomodate a perpetual generalist.

So onward...

Architecture by Accident

[Image: This post was originally published last winter in Blend, translated into Dutch].

Last winter The New York Times reported on a surprising growth industry in the United States: the physical relocation of old houses.
This is the somewhat surreal activity of transporting entire, intact buildings from one place to another, often over more than one hundred miles.
A single-family home, for instance, will be "jacked up" – like a car with a flat tire – so that "long steel beams" can be inserted between the house and its foundations. Very slowly, the house is then disconnected from the surface of the earth and loaded onto the back of a lorry.
If you think that sounds easy, however, bear in mind that some houses "have to be broken into two or more pieces" during this process and the roofs must often be removed. Removing the roofs streamlines the structures for highway transport, allowing them "to pass under power lines, bridges and trees" as they make their way to a new location. After all, as one whole house relocation client jokes: "The last thing you want is to show up one morning and find they’ve lopped off a room during the night."

[Image: Photo by Stewart Cairns for The New York Times].

Transporting an intact house along the American interstate highway system can take several days. Worse, it can "cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars." One such relocation job was so complex, the article explains, that it "required the bulldozing of a temporary access road," and that was simply to remove the structure from its original plot of land.
But, even then, the troubles aren’t over.
After a house has been installed on its new foundation, it might need to be re-assembled – and this means "putting the house back together from thousands of pieces" while carefully following page after page of engineering notes, photographs, drawings, and detailed architectural plans so that you don’t put anything back in the wrong place.

[Image: Photo by James Edward Bates for The New York Times].

My first thought when I read this was of all those dinosaur skeletons now standing silently in museums around the world. What if someone, somewhere, got something wrong? What if they used the wrong skull on the wrong spine – or they attached the wrong leg, the wrong jawbone – and so the whole bodily form needs to put together again, perhaps with pieces from other dinosaurs in other museums far away?
Because what if your house gets moved three hundred miles but the bedroom is inadvertently attached to the wrong floor? Or two entire houses get mixed up along the way – what strange new architectural styles might result?
These are more than rhetorical questions.
Just last week, for instance, Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short article for the L.A. Times about a single family house that literally crashed onto the side of a freeway in Los Angeles.

[Image: Photo-illustration by Aaron Goodman for the L.A. Times].

Soon known as the Freeway House, "the single-story structure had been on its way from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita a few weeks ago, riding atop a trailer, when it smashed into an overpass and came to rest on the shoulder of the 101 in the Cahuenga Pass."
It then just sat there.
For 10 days.

[Image: Photo by John Fuentes, found via the L.A. Times].

It was an uncannily accurate, if entirely unintentional, comment on life in today's Los Angeles: a house stranded on the side of a freeway, with no context or human history in sight.
But what, I might ask, would have happened if the Freeway House had not crashed into a bridge but into another tractor trailer, carrying another house, and those two structures had then merged – even if only temporarily, in mid-air, a kind of post-deconstructive act of architecture lasting mere milliseconds in a cloud of debris above the L.A. freeway system – and then a third building, and a fourth...?
Soon architecture schools are teaching their students as much about car crashes as they are about CAD.
In this context, perhaps the crash could be a future strategy for architectural design: load the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, something by Mies, and an entire American suburb onto three dozen lorries, then crash them all together on a remote German autobahn. Photograph the results.
J.G. Ballard would be proud.
In any case, the whole-house relocation industry would have it so much easier if residential structures were built to move in the first place. The internal structure of a building could incorporate wheels, pulleys, gears, and other machine parts, thus allowing the house to be reconfigured, even geographically relocated. A building could simply attach itself to the local railroad tracks and slip away…
You report your house missing – but Interpol soon finds it: its windows have been smashed and it's covered in graffiti, and it's sitting next to a road outside Thessaloniki.
It misses you.

[Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

With these thoughts in mind, then, I got an email from Australian architect Andrew Maynard announcing a new project that he and his office had just finished putting together.
Maynard’s Corb v2.0 is a speculative housing complex that serves to update Le Corbusier’s old idea of the house as “a machine for living in” – and Maynard takes that statement to its logical extreme.
He proposes permanently incorporating a cargo container-stacking machine into a new residential suburb. The machine would thus rearrange all the houses on a near-continual basis.

[Images: Two views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

If a family doesn’t like where their home is located, they simply wait another day: “Yesterday this was a penthouse apartment on the other end of the complex,” Maynard explains. “Today the family has returned to find it on the ground floor.”
You can move up, down, left, right – even turn 180º around and face the other direction. You see sunset instead of sunrise, or a forest instead of a lake.

[Images: Three more views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

As Maynard describes it, this gigantic, crane-like stacking machine would smoothly glide back and forth over lines of “movable housing modules.” Residents could wake up to find themselves elsewhere, perhaps closer to the parking lot; neighbors would always have new neighbors.
This way, “everyone gets a penthouse as often as they get a ground level apartment” – which has the effect of “transforming traditional real estate valuations.”

[Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

Taking this yet further, though, I'd suggest that we need more than isolated clusters of container-homes, each connected to one stacking machine. We need thousands of these things, aligned in continuous routes like train tracks, connecting neighborhoods, cities, countries, and continents. A house in the U.S. soon shows up in Mexico; a house in Utrecht moves to Sri Lanka. Immigration laws are rewritten, with complex architectural sub-rules. Customs officials the world over are required to take summer classes at SCI-Arc. Criminal homeowners shift back and forth across the International Date Line, avoiding taxes – while astronauts look down at great crowds of houses: whole cities migrating in a web across the earth.
Every once in a while, though, kicking off new schools of architectural thought and theory, there is a Great Accident. Architects stop reading Paul Virilio to concentrate on derailing entire cities...

(For more Andrew Maynard on BLDGBLOG see Unhinged and treeborne. For more posts that originally appeared in Blend, meanwhile, don't miss Fossil Rivers, The Weather Emperors, Urban Knot Theory, Abstract Geology, Wreck-diving London, and The Helicopter Archipelago).

Mobile Minimalism

Flavio Galvagni of Lab Zero has a few projects that I think deserve mention here.

[Image: The solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero].

Let me say right away, though, that I know a lot of people are tired of shipping container architecture – in fact, I think most people are tired of shipping container architecture – yet I have a fairly limitless patience for this sort of thing. Actually, I love shipping container architecture.
But the same questions inevitably arise whenever things like this re-appear in the blogosphere: Are shipping containers comfortable? Is reusing them as a form of readymade architecture even structurally realistic? Would anyone really want to raise a family inside one of these things? And does the appeal of such designs actually cross cultures and income levels and ethnicities and, more important, climates? Sure, these might work in Santa Monica – but would they work in Minneapolis-St. Paul?
To which I would have to say that the answer is: no, they probably aren't that comfortable when it comes to raising two and a half kids – and they probably don't equally appeal to, say, bedouins, Russian oil tycoons, Detroit's inner city poor, suburban parents, or even BLDGBLOG readers.
But I don't think those are the right questions to ask.
I don't think the point of cargo container architecture is for us to pretend that it's a universally appropriate design solution for every situation that could possibly exist in the world today – because it isn't. Then again, nothing is universally appropriate in architecture.
What I think is, actually, the point of reusing shipping containers as architecture is: 1) when you can, you should reuse existing materials for somewhat obvious environmental reasons, and 2) the spatial, logical, and combinatorial systems that cargo containers imply are simply awesome. The possibilities excite me. Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they're fun to render, and they're fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cities, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you.
Whole new outer districts of London made from shipping container towers!

[Image: The Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero; view larger].

So arguments about the architectural reuse of shipping containers shouldn't be based on the claim that it's all or nothing; it's not either we replace all existing architecture in the world with cargo containers and then force everyone to live in them or we never construct a single cargo container building anywhere ever again, even for something as simple as a meditation retreat in your own backyard.
Maybe only one cargo container building will ever be built again – or maybe none will – but that doesn't mean we can't still screw around for hours on end with them on our home computers, virtually assembling weird new unfolding structures or houses with legs or helicopter-borne instant cities simply because it's fun and a way to kill time.
In other words, even if these plans serve as nothing but design exercises – studies in volume, combination, and color – then that's fine with me. We can be done with the ongoing arguments and just enjoy looking at cool imagery.
But I digress.
Lab Zero has put together a number of cool projects, including the solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module, pictured above, and the Carapace House, below.

[Image: The Carapace House by Lab Zero; view larger].

The Carapace House – a larger diagram of which can be seen here – is intended for use in "challenging natural environments."
Similar to Lab Zero's own Drop Off Unit, the Carapace House is temporary, mobile, and easy to "drop off" in a variety of locations.

[Image: The Drop Off Unit by Lab Zero; view larger or in more detail].

All of which brings us to the Jellyfish House – not that Jellyfish House – a kind of floating tower perfect for those of us interested in "spatial delocation."
You can drift around the world's oceans in it, reading William Gibson.

[Image: The Jellyfish House by Lab Zero; view bigger].

The Lab Zero website is still apparently under construction, meanwhile, but keep your eye out for more of their work in the future. They were featured in Actar's recent book Self-Sufficient Housing, for instance, and will no doubt be popping up elsewhere soon.
And for more cargo containers on BLDGBLOG see Container Home Kit or even Project Blackbox.