The Architecture of Polar Ice Floes

[Image: Trapped in ice].

Back in January 2008, a ship called Tara unlocked from the polar ice near Greenland; it had been frozen in the Arctic floes for a year and four months, repeating the journey of the Fram, a Norwegian ship that once drifted across the polar seas, frozen solid in the ice fields, back in 1896.

In both cases, the ships temporarily became buildings, works of architecture wed flush with the landscape surrounding them.

[Images: Photos via Jules Verne Adventures].

As reported two winters ago in the Times:

Visitors to the North Pole in the past 15 months might have happened upon a peculiar sight: a ship, high and dry on the ice pack, her masts upright against the flaming aurora borealis, her bow pointing over the ice sheet, as if sailing on a sea of snow. They might have thought it a polar mirage.

It was, however, the Tara, a mobile building of the Arctic.

In a description so strange I have trouble visualizing it, we read about a "pressure ridge" that moved toward the boat at "super-slow" speeds, threatening everyone on board with destruction:

There was another scare that winter with a “pressure ridge” caused by colliding plates of ice advancing towards the boat. “It was like a frozen wave, moving in super-slow motion—about a centimeter a second,” said [a crew member]. “At one stage we attacked it with picks and chainsaws, but there was no way we could stop it.” It leant over the boat, then suddenly it stopped by itself and “we were released from the pinch,” said [the crew member].

When landscapes attack.

[Image: Map of the Arctic ice routes that brought ships across the sea, courtesy of New Scientist].

But what interests me here is the idea that you could build one thing—a ship—that only becomes what it's really meant to be—a building—when the circumstances it's surrounded by undergo a phase change (here, water turning into ice).

The ship's hull was specifically designed for this, we read in New Scientist; it was "broad, smooth and round so that, rather than being crushed like an egg, the boat would pop up like an olive stone squeezed between finger and thumb, and sit on top of the pack ice. It also featured a lifting centerboard instead of a fixed keel, and removable propellers and rudders. These precautions worked: Tara suffered just a small dent at the stern, and another stretching a metre or so along the hull."

What might the atmospheric equivalent of this be? Perhaps a planetary probe dropped into the skies of Titan or Enceladus, awaiting some strange aerial phase change to occur on all sides?

And, speaking of other planets, could you ever encounter such extraordinary air pressure—on a gas giant, say—such that solid objects simply become trapped in place, unable to fall any further? The atmosphere beneath them is denser than the metal they are made from.

Like machine-fossils buried transparently in air—or like Arctic ships locked in ice—NASA probes would gradually decay, compressed by nothing but air, under deformational pressures lasting tens of millions of years. Aerial tectonics. Slow weather. Sky glacier.

(Enceladus link via @pruned).

Piggy-back Big-Box

An interesting hybrid assemblage of big box behemoths in Baltimore, shows a trend away from the sprawling power centers to a more . Via the Baltimore Sun, the development will place a Walmart atop a Lowes store in a piggy-back move: "The new location will be unusual for Walmart because it will be built on top of the Lowe's store - much of which will be below ground - and will be 93,000 square feet, about half the size of Walmart super centers... Walmart has been working to burnish its image - most recently with its environmentally friendly initiatives. The planned Baltimore store is emblematic of those efforts. It will be the first to open in this area since executives launched a campaign to retool stores with new graphics and merchandise as well as eco-friendly construction and operating practices. The new store will have a vegetated "green roof" covering more than an acre."




:: images via Baltimore Sun

There are still some questions about such items as traffic and overall form - or maybe the impacts of local businesses - but in the comparison to the normal sprawling model of big-box stores, this seems to take a step in the right directon.

Educational Agriculture

[Image: Edible Schoolyard by WORKac].

Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich will be hosting Foodprint NYC later today at Studio-X in Manhattan (the event is free and located at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here is a map).

Things kick off at 1pm, as you can see on the Foodprint Project website.

[Images: Edible Schoolyard by WORKac].

The above images, meanwhile, come from the Edible Schoolyard by WORKac. Amale Andraos, co-principal with Dan Wood in WORKac, will be speaking on a panel at 4:30pm today about her firm's work with nutritional landscapes, educational agriculture, and the future of urban food production.

Edible Schoolyard, specifically, presents "a series of interlinked sustainable systems that produce energy and heat, collect rainwater, process compost and sort waste with an off-grid infrastructure."

At the heart of the project is the Kitchen Classroom, where up to thirty students can prepare and enjoy meals together. The kitchen’s butterfly-shaped roof channels rain water for reclamation. Connected to one side is the Mobile Greenhouse, extending the growing season by covering 1600sf of soil in the colder months and sliding away in the spring, over the Kitchen Classroom. On the other side is the Systems Wall: a series of spaces that include a cistern, space for composting and waste-sorting, solar batteries, dishwashing facilities, a tool shed and a chicken coop.

The project, created in collaboration with Alice Water's Chez Panisse Foundation and P.S. 216, continues the suite of ideas WORKac first explored in their design for Public Farm 1, less a functioning farm, or even a prototype for one, than an intensely spatial art installation ornamented by edible plants.

[Image: Public Farm 1 by WORKac; photos by Raymond Adams].

Joining Amale Andraos on the panel today will be Marcelo Coelho (of "Cornucopia" fame, a 3D food-printer designed with Amit Zoran), Natalie Jeremijenko (of, among many, many other things, the Cross Species Cookbook), and Beverly Tepper (Professor of Food Science at Rutgers and director of the Sensory Evaluation Laboratory). As Edible Geography describes it, "the result will be a speculative and wide-ranging conversation about food security, sensory design, and [the panelists'] hopes and fears for the future of food in New York City."

That is only the final of four panels; read more about today's event over on the Foodprint Project website.

Oscars Greenroom

Are you looking forward to this year's Oscars, anxious to know who will win? Precious, Meryl Streep, Sandra Bullock? Well, one person who is winning is Architectural Digest. Each year they do the greenroom for the presenters to relax in and this year they are outdoing themselves with a room by Roger Thomas. He was inspired by Hollywood movies from the 1930s (an era I love) but there are a lot of items that hit current trends as well, such as the Chinese screen backdrop.

The floors will have a polished black base with speckled paint to look like the backlot of a movie studio, or as Thomas says “a contemporary version of those that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would glide across in the 1930s.”

I can't wait to see the finished product in the magazine. Also of note, the design drawing is by noted illustrator Jeffrey Schneider and is really a piece of art!

Artificial Glaciers 101

[Image: From Wired Science's photo gallery, "Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space"].

In light of this week's ongoing conversation, I thought I'd take a quick look at how to build a glacier.

The "art of glacier growing," as New Scientist calls it, is "also known as glacial grafting." It has been "practiced for centuries in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Karakorum ranges," and it was never about science fiction: "It was developed as a way to improve water supplies to villages in valleys where glacial meltwater tended to run out before the end of the growing season."

The artificial glacier, then, is simply a traditional landscape-architectural technique that manipulates and amplifies pre-existing natural processes. It is vernacular hydrology writ large.

[Image: From Wired Science's photo gallery, "Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space"].

So how do you build an artificial glacier?

First, you need a site, and that site should be mountainous; altitudes higher than 4,500 meters are thermally preferable. From New Scientist:

Once the site is selected, ice is brought to rocky areas where there are small boulders about 25 centimeters across. The rocks protect the ice from sunlight, and often have ice trapped in the gaps between them. This seems to be critical to a successful "planting."

Also critical is the glacier's "gender." Yes, glaciers "have a gender": "A 'male' glacier is one that is covered in stones and soil and moves slowly or not at all. A 'female' one is whiter, and grows more quickly, yielding more water."

After [glacier-growing mountain villagers] have added female to the male ice (traditionally by importing 12 man-loads or about 300 kilograms of the stuff), they cover the area with charcoal, sawdust, wheat husk, nutshells or pieces of cloth to insulate it. Gourds of water placed among the ice and rocks are also critical to a glacier’s chances of forming, according to [artificial-glacier expert, Ingvar Tveiten]. As the glacier grows and squeezes the gourds, they burst, spreading water on the surrounding ice, which then freezes.

Awesomely, the glacier then exhibits complex internal ventilation:

Any snowmelt trapped in the budding glacier also freezes, adding more ice. Pockets of cold air moving between the rocks and ice keep the glacier cool. When the mass of rock and ice is heavy enough, it begins to creep downhill, forming a self-sustaining glacier within four years or so.

Of course, "what’s produced is hardly a glacier in the proper sense," we're reminded, "but growing and flowing areas of ice many tens of meters long have been reported at the sites of earlier grafts."

Let me repeat that: to call these artificial glaciers is a poetic over-statement, as they are much more realistically described as artificially maintained deposits of snow—what I have elsewhere called non-electrical ice reserves. But the thermally self-sustaining nature of these deposits nonetheless makes them susceptible to glaciological analysis.

[Image: From Wired Science's photo gallery, "Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space"].

But there are also other, equally lo-fi techniques of glacier-growing.

Elsewhere, we read that "a good artificial glacier costs $50,000," even though "the materials are simple: dirt, pipes, rocks—and runoff from real glaciers high above." Importantly, then, but quite obviously, a controlled act of artificial glaciation can only be achieved in regions where there is already water available; you can't simply snap your fingers and "build a glacier" in a Tucson parking lot.

In any case, this second technique "is remarkably simple":

Water from an existing stream is diverted using iron pipes to a comparably shady part of the valley and here the water is allowed to flow out onto an inclined mountainside. At regular intervals along the slope of the mountain, small embankments of stone are made which impede the flow of water making shallow pools. At the start of winter, water is allowed to flow into this `masonry contraption' and as the winter temperatures are constantly falling the water freezes forming a thick sheet of ice looking almost like a thin, long glacier.

All this is done before the onset of winter. During the winter, as temperatures fall steadily, the water collected in the small pools freezes. Once this cycle has been repeated over many weeks, a thick sheet of ice forms, resembling a long, thin glacier.

Again: resembling a long, thin glacier. We're not talking about monumental, mountain-crushing tectonic formations (yet)—even if I do feel compelled to wax speculative here and suggest that, if these structures do indeed begin "to creep downhill, forming a self-sustaining glacier within four years or so," then it is not at all unrealistic to assume that, given the right thermal circumstances and the necessary amount of snowfall, you could kick-start glaciation on a macro-scale. This might only mean on the scale of one valley—and not, say, the entire northern hemisphere—but it is an amazing idea that architects could set massive, self-sustaining, tectonically complex structures of ice into motion.

After all, glaciers are very long events, as mammoth memorably put it.

[Image: From Wired Science's photo gallery, "Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space"].

To reiterate the simplicity of this latter design process, I want to quote artificial-glacier expert Chawang Norphel, from an interview he did with the IPS:

Glacier melt at different altitudes is diverted to the shaded side of the hill, facing the north, where the winter sun is blocked by a ridge or a mountain slope. At the start of winter (November), the diverted water is made to flow onto the sloping hill face through appropriately designed distribution channels or outlets.

At regular intervals stone embankments are built, which impede the flow of water, making shallow pools. In the distributing chambers, 1.5-inch diameter G pipes are installed after every five feet for proper distribution of water.

Water flows in small quantities and at low velocity through the G pipes, and freezes instantly. The process of ice formation continues for three to four winter months and a huge reserve of ice accumulates on the mountain slope, aptly termed “artificial glacier.”

I emphasize this for two reasons: 1) It's extraordinarily easy to dismiss the idea of building "artificial glaciers" simply on the basis of the phrase alone. That is, the very phrase "artificial glaciers" sounds pseudo-scientific, impossibly complex, and disastrously fossil-fuel dependent. However, it's actually a remarkably straight-forward design process, involving thermal site-specificity and vernacular building materials. 2) The idea of "artificial glaciers" also reeks of space-operatic self-indulgence, but the fundamental purpose of these structures is to create a reliable freshwater reservoir (or ice reserve) for rural communities.

We're not talking about nuclear-powered snow-blowers built and operated by Darth Vader, in other words; we're talking about rural Himalayan villagers who have learned to reorganize their region's existing snowpack so as to make it thermally self-sustaining.

Or, as Norphel himself phrases it, "Apart from solving the irrigation problem, the artificial glaciers help in the recharging of ground water and rejuvenation of springs. They enable farmers to harvest two crops in a year, help in developing pastures for cattle rearing and reducing water sharing disputes among the farmers."

[Image: From Wired Science's photo gallery, "Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space"].

Having said that, the design possibilities become truly amazing when you scale this up, from a vernacular aid project to the level of carefully-maintained industrial infrastructure, and when you consider a wide range of alternative reasons for stockpiling ice (and, of course, things go bonkers if you let yourself consider genuinely and deliberately sci-fi-inflected ideas, such as maintaining artificial glaciers at the lunar south pole or using artificial glaciation as a Martian terraforming technique).

In any and all cases here, this makes artificial glaciers a fascinating topic for an architectural design studio—at least in my opinion—and the resulting conversations (and even open disagreements) about this topic have been very much worth the time already.

#glacierislandstorm

Cartographic Rectification

A recent post at the Fresh Kills Park Blog showed the beauty and function of the process of map rectification in GIS, where a map and image can be combined by matching ground control points in the mapping system to points in the image. As it may be well known, I'm constantly fascinated by historic maps as a tool for understanding and creating modern moves in cities, and recently I expressed a desire to do this with a series of Portland maps.


:: image via Fresh Kills Park Blog

These maps aren't 100% accurate, as they rely on consistent base points to align common map features, and often lack in accuracy - but do provide a great overview of layers of history. An indication of the product is shown on the FKP site - a rectified map of the landfill site (above): "A 1907 map of the Fresh Kills area helped us understand a little more clearly the extent of filling in creeks and wetlands, and also the sense of private ownership that this land did, in fact, enjoy prior to the start of landfill operations–the entire site was entirely carved up into privately owned parcels."

In this case, it isn't a particularly unattainable venture, thanks to the New York Public Library beta version of their map rectifying tool (aka Warper) online: "...that allows users to digitally align or “rectify” historical maps from the NYPL collection with today’s maps and aerial photos. You can browse previously rectified maps or sign-up for an account to align your own and add it to the browse-able archive"

Check out a short video of the tool:


These processes bring to mind of course the wonderful Mannahatta Project by Eric Sanderson, which used rectified historical maps to provide a . I just finished devouring the book, so look for a post soon.

Drift Station Bravo

The other day I took my students up to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory for an afternoon of tours through the awe-inspiring Core Lab and for a visit with the Borehole Group; we stopped in at the Lamont-Doherty seismic research station along the way, where we watched our technician-guide create artificial earthquakes with a wooden mallet so that we could watch his digital equipment go to work. It was a great day.

[Images: Inside the Core Lab at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory].

While we were in the Core Lab, however (photographs of which you see above), our guide mentioned that many of the older core samples—where a coring device is dropped all the way to the seabed in order to take a large cylindrical sample of geological material back to the surface for archiving and analysis—were taken not from ships but from icebergs.

These mobile islands of ice would be temporarily repurposed, turned into science labs at sea. Researchers would simply ride them till they melted, often quite far south into the waters of the North Atlantic.

I had forgotten about this. Oddly, I have been meaning to post about an old ice island called Drift Station Bravo, used for exactly these sorts of purposes, since the earliest days of BLDGBLOG (in fact, I mentioned Drift Station Bravo in a very old interview with Ballardian).

In light of the Glacier/Island/Storm studio, then, and after our inspiring tour of Lamont-Doherty, I thought I'd briefly recount this awesome story.

[Image: Drift Station Bravo postage cancellation mark, via Polar Philately].

As explained by the Polar Philately page, Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher, commander of an Air Force weather squadron stationed in the Arctic, discovered "a large tabular iceberg... that had broken off the Arctic ice shelf... [and] gone adrift."

This island of solid ice was soon "codenamed T-1, taken from its original radar designation as a target." Future "ice islands" were codenamed T-2 and T-3.

On March 19, 1952, the U.S. Air Force led by Colonel Fletcher and some scientists landed on this ice island [T-3] in a C-47 aircraft, setting up a weather observation station. Fletcher established a research station that was manned at this big ice sheet for roughly the next 25 years, despite a grim quote given by the head of the Alaska Air Command at the time, a General Old, who was quoted in a Life magazine article of the time as saying "I don't see how any man can live on this thing."

These details seem worth repeating: Fletcher's weather station was operated on a repurposed but naturally occuring ice island for 25 years.

Fletcher's Ice Island, and the research station that was located on it, rotated in circles in the Arctic Ocean, floating aimlessly along in the Arctic currents in a clockwise direction. The station was inhabited mainly by scientists along with a few military crewmen and was resupplied during its existence primarily by military planes operating from Barrow, Alaska.

Even better, the island—later renamed "Drift Station Bravo"—was inhabited long enough that it actually got its own postal network.

[Image: Letters postmarked from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

Again, from the Polar Philately website:

During the period of active habitation, T-3 covers [basically postage stamps] were serviced, each stamped with a variety of hand-stamped cachets and markings, dated, and often marked with a manuscript notation of the geographic position of the drifting station on that particular day of ops. The T-3/Bravo covers were often cancelled at Barrow or at a USAF base in Alaska, and then placed in the mailstream.

The envelope, in other words, was stamped with the latitude and longitude of the iceberg at the moment of that letter's departure.

[Image: A postal marking from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

Over on InfraNet Lab, we read that ice "has been a strategic building material in the Arctic for the construction of roads, airstrips, housing, and, in the last few decades, as temporary drilling platforms to explore for oil."

Ice islands are formed by spraying ice into cold air (below 20 degrees F), and layering the ice until it reaches a thickened state. These islands are either grounded at the bottom of the sea floor or are floating structures in deeper waters. Fabricated in just two months, these islands provide enough stability to support exploratory drilling tools including the rig and attendant equipment.

One of many amazing things about Drift Station Bravo, however, is that it was an administratively claimed piece of naturally existing, mobile territory. It wasn't created in any genuine architectural sense, simply redirected, named, and given its own postal identity.

Given this act of territorial appropriation, and bearing in mind the island's fundamental state of mobility, what are the implications for its maritime jurisdiction, as Enrique Ramirez explores over on a456?

[Image: A letter from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

This becomes a question of immediate geopolitical concern when we consider the fact that Drift Station Bravo and its ilk were actually created in a Sputnik-like reaction to the Soviet's own very active ice island program. The Soviets "already operated six drifting ice camps of this kind," we read in a documentary transcript, downloadable as a 27kb PDF, but, "owing to the particular strategic importance and sensitivity of the Arctic Basin, little information from these early Soviet stations had reached the West."

That same transcript goes on to explain exactly how the U.S managed to architecturally colonize these nomadic ice worlds. Like a vision straight out of Archigram, military civilization on the ice established itself as follows:

...a ski-equipped C-47 landed on the ice and deployed the first team of workers. It included an Air Force Major as camp commander and several soldiers with technical skills who had volunteered for 6 months duty on the ice, plus four of the typical tough and versatile Alaskan construction workers.

Modular buildings, called Jamesway huts, camp supplies, fuels, two small World War II Studebaker tractors, called Weasel, and a small bulldozer, were dropped by parachutes.

I could quote the entire PDF, in fact, as it is easily one of the most fascinating things I've read, but a particularly eye-popping detail comes when we read that these researchers deliberately generated earthquakes in the iceberg they lived on: "we generated tiny earthquakes in the ice. The propagation of the compressional waves generated in this way are used to study the elastic properties of the ice."

The story expands rapidly from here. In an article originally published in the September-October 1966 issue of Air University Review, we read that competitive Soviet drift stations apparently discovered a "second magnetic north pole... located near 80° N and 178° W, with magnetic medians extending across the Arctic Ocean," and that sulfuric gas fumes from a badly timed undersea volcanic eruption killed at least one unlucky crew member.

The whole thing amazes me, in fact. I don't know why I've been sitting on this story for so long, but it's nice, finally, to put something up about Drift Station Bravo. How many other icebergs actually had their own postal codes?

(I owe a huge thanks to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory staff for taking my students around their facilities—we had a great time. Thanks!)

A Minor Architectural History of Ice Islands

[Image: "Drawing shows ice island, frozen by liquid air, proposed by German scientist as a floating harbor and landing field"; via InfraNet Lab].

InfraNet Lab's new post on artificial ice islands—and the architectural use of ice as a building material for things like roads, drilling platforms, remote airstrips, and more—is absolutely fascinating and a must-read. Don't miss it.

More on ice islands coming soon!

#glacier #island #storm

By way of a quick update, several fantastic new posts have joined this week's ongoing series of linked conversations, part of the Glacier/Island/Storm studio at Columbia's GSAPP.

[Image: Map showing a straight baseline separating internal waters from zones of maritime jurisdiction; via a456].

Here is a complete list so far, featuring the most recent posts and going backward in temporal order from there [note: this list has been updated as of February 26]. By all means, feel free to jump in with comments on any of them:

—Nick Sowers of UC-Berkeley/Archinect School Blog Project on "Super/Typhoon/Wall"

—Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes of mammoth on "saharan miami," "translation, machines, and embassies," and "islands draw the clouds, and glaciers are wind-catchers"

— Mason White, Maya Przybylski, Neeraj Bhatia, and Lola Sheppard of InfraNet Lab on "Particulate Swarms"

—David Gissen of HTC Experiments on "A contribution, a mini-review, a plug"

—Enrique Ramirez of a456 on "Baselines Straight and Normal"

—InfraNet Lab on "Islands of Speculation/Speculation on Islands: Spray Ice" (nice comments on this one)


[Video: #climatedata by by Michael Schieben; via Serial Consign].

—Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign on "Glacier/Island/Storm: Three Tangents" (interesting comments developing here)

—mammoth on "Thilafushi" and "The North American Storm Control Authority" (enthusiastic comments thread on the latter link)

—Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon on "Islands in the Net" (interesting comments also developing here)

—Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography on "The Ice Program" (great comments here, too!)

—mammoth on "A Glacier is a Very Long Event" (another interesting comment thread)

—InfraNet Lab on "LandFab, or Manufacturing Terrain"

—Nick Sowers on "Design to Fail"

Finally, I was excited to see that Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera have jumped into the conversation, adding their own thoughts over at dpr-barcelona; and Alexander Trevi of Pruned has also supplied a Glacier/Island/Storm-themed guide to his own archives in this hashtag switchboard. And that's in addition to some ongoing posts here on BLDGBLOG.

It's been a great week for new content, I think, and all of the above are worth reading in full.

Ornamental Forensics

[Image: Photo by Andy Marshall of Foto Facade from his awesome Flickr set Beverley Minster Hoodmould Carvings].

Continuing, briefly, with the ideas presented in the previous post, I wanted to add two more things:

1) Could ancient astronomical events also have been recorded in architectural ornament (not just in paintings or poetry)? In other words, somewhere beneath the overgrown vines of some Indiana Jones-like complex in the Cambodian rain forest—or carved into the solid rock of a minor cathedral near Dijon—is a bas-relief depicting a star gone nova six hundred years ago. This astral disaster left no other record than that. Previously unknown celestial events could thus be pieced together through stone carvings found as far apart as a village church in Russia and a temple on the Deccan Plateau—or even stars in stained glass windows. So is there an architectural equivalent to the appearance of Halley's Comet's in the Bayeux Tapestry? A previously unknown meteor shower historically recorded in a chapel's stone vault?

2) What about epidemiological history as recorded in architectural ornament? Of course, there are already dozens of examples of medical historians determining, through close readings and reinterpretations of literary document, that such and such a king or character must have been suffering from syphilis or a brain tumor or lead-induced dementia. But I'm specifically interested here in how medical symptoms might have taken on ornamental form. Perhaps, in the writhing Gothic forms of church facades—in those old carved faces depicting humans hybridized with angels and demons, plants and animals, minerals and gods—we might yet discover the symptomological clues of some horrifying medieval plague or outbreak. You travel to a remote mountain village in Macedonia to study vernacular church-building traditions only to find a shunned building on the edge of town whose ornamentation borders on the grotesque—and you soon realize that you've discovered not just an architectural masterpiece but evidence of a forgotten disease, similar to Ebola, that had otherwise gone unrecorded. At the very least, this would make for an awesome potboiler or short novel, that I would absolutely love to write (attention, publishers!).

My point, though, is to ask if there are any real-world examples of architectural ornament in which something like an unknown astronomical event, or a disease forgotten by the modern world (weird bodies on a stone frieze in northern India). If so, how might these strange carving be subject to the same type of analysis as explored in the previous post?

I sense a new historical field here—called ornamental forensics—just waiting to happen.

A Chicago Beauty

As promised yesterday, today we are having a house tour of Mark Coy's previous apartment on Lakeshore drive. Located in a grand old building, the apartment has great bones but needed a LOT of work when he first moved in. Lets see the results!

The living room contains the same aesthetic as his new apartment, but in a traditional environment. Recognize the French armchair? The grass blinds are used here again to great affect.

Another view looking back at the living room. Notice the beautiful black fireplace with unusual overmantel on the left. You see the entry through the arched opening on the left and the dining room through the cased opening on the right. I love that Mark chose a cohesive color scheme to tie all the spaces together. The apartment has a great flow to it and the color unites the rooms.The dining room has beautiful moldings, a window bench and original sconces. I love the white painted trimwork throughout the apartment and dark stained floors! Another seagrass carpet is used here and recognize the fabric on the pillows on the window seat? Tying the rooms together through fabrics and color brings a modern flow to a traditional compartmentalized apartment.I was crazy for this gorgeous chandelier and guess what....it's from the HOME DEPOT! Yes, such style for only $495 plus the added black shades which were used again on the sconces. The high and low real world decorating is used here to full affect: using what he had to work with (sconces), adding a 'low' touch from home depot (the candelier) and hanging it above a Milo Baughman dining table (the 'high' statement piece).The master bedroom continues the same color palette but in a much more soft and subtle environment. It looks like it could be a room at a spa hotel, doesn't it? So relaxing. The bathroom is probably my favorite room in the entire apartment. I instantly recognized the Ann Sacks Bellarita Travertine flooring in a herringbone pattern: I've used it in projects before and hope to use it someday in my own house! I'm all on board with white subway tiles, befitting the apartment's age and the glam sink and ebonized doors make me so happy. No seagrass blinds in here but the wallpaper (continued onto the ceiling I might add) tie in that aspect from the rest of the apartment.
The 2nd bedroom, used as a den, uses the same color palette in a darker tone: A perfect room to curl up with a good book and cup of tea. I love the blocky lamp in the background and again the seagrass shades.

The one room that does not follow rest of the apartment's color scheme is the kitchen. The wood floors were ebonized in here as well and it looks like an original built-in to the right was painted the same white as the trimwork. I love this cheerful paint, who wouldn't smile having their morning tea (or coffee!) in here? I always tend to prefer black over stainless appliances (yes I know i'm in the minority) - I think they tend to blend better into a room and not become the 'star' attraction. They also tie in nicely with the black granite countertops.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of Mark's beautiful old apartment, I know I could happily move in tomorrow! Hopefully he'll share photos of his new space once it's completed!

The Star Archive

[Image: Perseids Meteor Shower, August 11, 1999; photo by Wally Pacholka, courtesy of NASA].

In an earlier post, I looked at the possibility that the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh might include a very physical archive of 19th-century meteorological events, with sand, dust, pollen, and other airborne particulates from the days Van Gogh painted en plein air now trapped for all art history inside the vibrant swirls of his canvases.

Adam, from Design Under Sky, then left a comment saying that this unintentional archive of sand already exists, with or without such speculation: "Sand was used as an ink blotting material and remnants are often still found in manuscripts today." Every library is thus also a museum of sand.

But I completely failed to mention an article that has fascinated me for more than a year now; I believe I originally found it via Andrew Ray of Some landscapes.

In a feature for COSMOS Magazine called "Sky detectives," we read that "forensic astronomers... are seeking clues to historical events embedded in artworks and literature."

[Image: Halley's Comet—upper right—passes through the Bayeux Tapestry].

In other words, similar to the idea of geomythology—in which ancient tales of floods or vengeful fire gods can be re-interpreted in light of newly found evidence for catastrophic tsunamis or volcanic eruptions—"forensic astronomers" look for more celestial clues. Things like Halley's Comet burning through the night sky of the Bayeux Tapestry will catch their eye, or supernovas as depicted in Native American rock art.

These details, hidden in plain sight, can be used to indirectly piece together long-gone astronomical events.

The following very long quotation gives at least some idea of how extraordinary the results can be; it's like something out of Minority Report:

Donald Olson, a physics professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, U.S., has used similar techniques to help art historians pin down details of famous paintings. In 2000, for example, he found the location at which Vincent van Gogh created one of his last paintings, The White House at Night.

Knowing that van Gogh painted it in mid-June, and the direction in which the house faced, Olson was able to determine that a bright star in the painting was mostly likely the planet Venus, which would have been prominent at the time.

Two years later, Olson used a similar process with another van Gogh painting, Moonrise. That painting depicts the full moon rising behind an overhanging cliff in southern France. Historians knew the work was made sometime in 1889, and haystacks in the foreground indicate that the time of year is somewhere around harvest season.

Olson's team hunted down the location and, with a bit of astronomical detective work, determined that there was only one date on which the Moon rose in the right place: 13 July 1889. Since van Gogh once said he never worked from memory and always painted what he saw, this was probably the date on which he started painting Moonrise.

Here, I'll reveal a secret fantasy of mine: at one point during the film Jaws, there is a night scene during which a meteor suddenly lights up the sky overhead. The characters are out at sea when zoooooom: a flash goes by, from one end of the screen to the other.

Every time I see that scene I wonder what the flash was, and, more importantly, where it went: if something later crashed down into the sands of North Africa, or hit a cliff in Arizona, or splashed into the ocean waters much further out at sea. Or simply burnt up into dust and fiery particles.

[Image: Rock art possibly depicting a supernova. Photo by John Barentine, Apache Point Observatory, courtesy of SPACE.com].

But what if someday you find a meteorite and you somehow piece together evidence for when it fell to earth—and you find that it was during the summer that Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws. You find out exactly where they filmed Jaws, and you keep digging deeper, and then, finally, there it is: some fantastic piece of irrefutable evidence that proves you have just discovered the very object that once flew through the sky in a film seen by countless millions of people around the world. Jaws, after all, is the seventh-highest grossing film of all time.

It's archaeo-astronomy via Hollywood film history.

In any case, as you will see in the "Sky detectives" article, our forensic astronomers begin reading nothing less than The Odyssey, looking for astronomical clues ("...the poem describes Odysseus steering his boat by the positions of the constellations Boötes and the Pleiades [which] establishes the date as early spring...").

But as they start putting Homer's descriptions of the constellations, and the precise order and time of year in which Odysseus saw those constellations, into their weird software that maps the movement of the earth and our nearby planets through 49,000 years of history... my hair began standing on end.

All these astronomical clues—in ancient poetry, famous paintings, and the overlooked skies of film history—simply waiting to be deciphered.

Food Shape City

[Image: Courtesy of Flickr-user humain, via Urban Omnibus].

Varick Shute of Urban Omnibus has posted a great interview with Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and Sarah Rich about their collaboration on the Foodprint Project—and, specifically, the Foodprint NYC event coming up this weekend at Studio-X.

The interview discusses urban food-distribution networks, the cultural and nutritional effects of food-vendor carts, the geographic distance from "farm to table," food-contamination scares, what Sarah describes as "the ways in which food and eating behaviors influence the physical shape of the city," Nicola's interest in "cupcake shops as indicators of gentrification," and much more. Be sure to check it out in full—and consider coming to the event on Saturday.

MAP 002: Quarantine

[Image: MAP 002: Quarantine by David Garcia].

Architect David Garcia's MAP project—the Manual of Architectural Possibilities—has been mentioned here before, which makes me all the more excited to announce that the next issue of MAP will not only be themed around quarantine but it will be on display as an offical part of the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition opening next month at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

This installment, which features Garcia's speculative designs for projects like a "Zoo of Infectious Species," a "Domestic Isolation Unit," and an "Instantly Quarantinable Farm," will also once again include an introductory text by Sir Peter Cook.

[Image: MAP 002: Quarantine by David Garcia].

Garcia will in town for Storefront's Landscapes of Quarantine opening party, on Tuesday, March 9, so be sure to come by, buy a copy of MAP 002: Quarantine for yourself, and meet the man in person.

a work in progress

One of the best parts of blogging is making new friends with common interests. I have been corresponding with Mark Coy, a party planner at the Palmer House in Chicago, and he was kind enough to share some pictures of the transformation of his new living room in a Mies van der Rohe high rise. At the top you see the 'after' shot.The huge windows let in tons of daylight and expansive views (as I can testify to in my own apartment) but the natural grass shades really offer great texture and help moderate the harsh daylight; this is especially important with the hot summer sun! The placement of the couch in front of the windows might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but helps the room feel cozy and also blocks the unattractive window mechanical unit. The room remains open and airy with 'leggy' furniture and an bent glass coffee table. The seagrass carpet compliments the room nicely, much better than the wall to wall carpeting that was here previously!Look for the tour of his magnificent old apartment in a classic beaux arts building on Lakeshore drive here tomorrow, you won't be disappointed!

Floating Manhattan

Via Ptak Science Books, a proposal to float Manhattan into the adjacent Hudson River and seemingly into the Atlantic. "Robert Grosvenor had a delectable and memorable idea for a project in 1975: testing the sea-worthiness of Manhattan island. Grosvenor (b. 1937) was a well-known kinetic sculptor in Manhattan by the time of his detaching-Manhattan idea... "


:: image via Ptak

The project is somewhat satirical, and shown in some of the graphic play to reinforce the specifics of the proposal. More from Ptak: "I do though like the simplicity of the presentation of the project, right down to the "Step 2" of preparation, which was the umbilical snipping of the bedrock of Manhattan and the attachment of the "flotation collar", which, I guess, would allow it to be moved around so long as flotation devices were attached. "


:: image via Ptak

The project comes from what sounds like a fascinating book Unbuilt America, by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone -shows plans of buildings and monuments, that were planned but never built, throughout the first two centuries of the history of the United States. Thanks to @SpaceSyntaxGirl for the heads up on this one!