Today's archidose #454

Here are some photos of Bicycle Storage in Amsterdam, Netherlands by VMX Architects, 2001. Photographs are by FADB.







To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Church of Planets Past

[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].

I love this story: the polished rock walls of a Catholic church in northern Italy have been found to contain the skull of a dinosaur. "The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull," paleontologist Andrea Tintori explained to Discovery News. "The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth.”

The skull itself was hewn in two; "indeed," we read, "Tintori found a second section of the same skull in another slab nearby."

[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].

The rock itself—called Broccatello—comes from a fossil-rich quarry in southern Switzerland and dates back to the Jurassic. According to the book Fossil Crinoids, "The Broccatello (from brocade) was given its name by stone masons; this flaming, multicoloured 'marble' has been used in countless Italian and Swiss baroque and rococo churches"—implying, of course, that other fossil finds are waiting to be found in Alpine baroque churches. "In the quarries of Arzo, southern Switzerland," the book continues, "crinoids [the fossilized bodies of ancient marine organisms] account for up to half of the bulk of the Broccatello, which is usually a few metres thick."

In any case, to figure out exactly what kind of dinosaur it is, the rock slab might be removed from the church altogether for 3D imaging in a lab; a new piece of Broccatello rock, mined from southern Switzerland, could be use as its replacement.

The larger idea of discovering something historically new and even terrestrially unexpected in the rocks of a city, or in the walls of the buildings around you—as if the most important fossil site in current geology might someday be the rock walls of a ruined castle and not a cliff face or gorge—brings to mind recent books like Richard Fortey's fantastic Earth: An Intimate History, with its geological introduction to sites like Central Park, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, and the Geologic City Reports (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) by Friends of the Pleistocene. These latter research files present New York City through the lens of its lumpen underpinnings, focusing on bedrock, mineral veins, and salt, not the city's cultural districts or ethnic history.

But, of course, the H.P. Lovecraftian overtones of this story—a monstrous skull in a church wall—are too obvious not to mention: an easy scenario for imagining whole plots and storylines in which the ancient forms of an unknown species are discovered hidden in cathedral masonry, opening previously unimagined horizons of time and radically revising theories of the history of life on earth.

I just absolutely love the idea that a piece of architecture can become a site for paleontological research, framing an unlikely forensic study of the earth's biological past.

Bridges of Paris

Paris may be the city of lights but is also a city of bridges.

One of the best ways to explore the city is to walk along the river. The bridges provide excellent viewpoints to see the monuments of the town.

Some of the bridges themselves have become tourist attractions!

I guess this makes the bridges happy? This statues smile is broader than a mile.

I'm heading to Barcelona later this week with friends for a wedding so travel has been on my mind lately. I've been revisiting my photos from Paris last year; So much beauty that I had to share it with you here today.

Even something as simple as a light post can become a work of art.

Enjoy your Halloween weekend, everyone!

Ebenezer Howard: Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902)

Reviewed by Luke Butcher

Perhaps one of the most influential books in the field of urban planning in the past 150 years, Garden Cities of To-morrow was the second edition title (1902) of Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform (1898). Within its pages Howard put forth designs for a “social city” that attempted to bridge between the individualist (capitalist) system of the time and the ideals of socialism that were gaining political impetus, with Trade Unions, Co-operatives and ideas of communal land protection (central to Howard’s argument).

Dreamt up during a time when countries were beginning to urbanize (15% of the world’s population were urban, a rapidly growing figure), there were squalid living and working environments and the working class were unable to afford a decent home. Howard’s response was just one of numerous utopian visions that spoke of a better future, with the key difference being that he aimed to produce a scheme that was both realistic and achievable.

The model of a “Garden City” set out in the first chapter of the book is ultimately the greatest legacy of the book, rightly or wrongly, with the subsequent formation of the Garden City Association in 1899 (that 42 years later would become the Town and Country Planning Association) leading to the “Garden City Movement.” The construction of two garden cities – at Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1919) – would act as further catalysts for change, that culminated, but was not way limited to, the post-Second World War New Towns Act.

Ebenezer Howard

Born the son of a shopkeeper in the City of London, on the 29th of January 1850, Howard, after schooling, took on a number of clerical posts. In 1871, aged 21, he emigrated to the ‘frontier country’ of America to become a farmer. This would prove unsuccessful and he subsequently spent four years living in Chicago, witnessing its’ rebuilding following the great fire. It was during this time he began to contemplate ways to improve cities. He eventually returned to London, in 1876, to a job producing the official verbatim record of Parliament. This would become the primary occupation for the rest of his life and meant he was constantly exposed to the political elite of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Howard began to move in certain social circles, originally through various religious groups, that saw him become involved in late-19th century English social reformism, without ever entering into the socialist mainstream. His political ideologies were more closely aligned to that of the co-operative movement, as opposed to trade union movement.

In addition to these socialist ideologies Howard was heavily influenced by the utopian visions of Edward Bellamy and his publication Looking Backway (1888). According to the ‘great admirer’ of Howard, Frederick J. Osborn, “under the impact of the book the conception of an ideal town came to him as essentially a socialist community.” Howard, in the book itself, highlights three major influences: the proposals for an organized migratory movement of population by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Professor Alfred Marshall; the system of land tenure proposed by Thos. Spence; and the model city of James Buckingham. The ideas put forth in To-morrow were a synthesis of his personal experiences and the works of others.

The Evil of the City

“We are becoming a land of great cities. Villages are stationary or receding; cities are enormously increasing. And if it be true that the great cities tend more and more to become the graves of the physique of our race, can we wonder at it when we see the houses so foul, so squalid, so ill-drained, so vitiated by neglect and dirt?”
Dean Fararr

It is important to understand the context to which Howard’s work was a reaction. London (and other cities) in the 19th century were in the throws of industrialization, and the cities were exerting massive forces on the labour markets of the time. Massive immigration from the countryside to the cities was taking place with London compared to “a tumour, an elephantiasis sucking into a gorged system[s] half the life and blood and the bone of the rural districts” (Lord Rosebery). This situation was unsustainable and political commentators of all parties sought “how best to provide the proper antidote against the greatest danger of modern existence” (St. Jame’s Gazette, 1892) – the importance of the Boer Wall call up and the realization that the health of the English fighting man had greatly deteriorated can not be forgotten either.

The Three Magnets

To Howard the cure was simple – to reintegrate people with the countryside. In trying to understand and represent the attraction of the city he compared each city to a magnet, with individuals represented as needles drawn to the city. He set about comparing the ‘town and country magnets’ but decided that neither were suitable attractors for his utopian vision. Instead he believed that “Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together” – his solution “the two magnets must be made one.”

The Town-Country Magnet

Building on the principles of the Three Magnets, Howard begins to establish a hypothetical scenario for the testing of his proposals for social reform. To do this the reader is asked to imagine a 6,000-acre estate, purchased for £240,000 and vested in trust to four honourable gentlemen. The Garden City itself was to cover 1,000 acres and be home to 30,000 people. Taking a circular form the city would be divided into six equal Wards, by six main Boulevards (named for pioneers of Human thought) that radiated from a central garden. Around the centre garden would be placed the civic institutions (Town Hall, Library, etc) and then a ‘Central Park,’ which in turn is enclosed by a ‘Crystal Palace’ – an arcade of indoor shops and winter garden. A series of concentric ringed tree-lined Avenues provide the major streets for houses, with a ‘Grand Avenue’ 420-feet wide that is both a 3-mile continuous public park and home to schools and churches. At the edge of the city Howard placed the ‘heavy’ industry of factories and warehouses, with direct access to a Municipal railway that aimed to alleviate pressure on the cities street network and connect the Garden City to the rest of the nation. Surrounding the city the remaining 5,000 acres are a designated Agricultural Belt, home to 2,000 people, with cow pastures, farmland and welfare services including an asylum.

Despite being incredibly descriptive in his proposal Howard repeats on a number of occasions that the design and ideas on planning he puts forth should not be taken verbatim, instead any design should be entirely dependent on the context. The principles, which Howard wanted to emphasise, were not morphological – with the exception of an agricultural belt to limit city growth and concentrate social life within the city (Robert Fishman) – but sociological.

Revenue and Expenditure

Central to Howard’s argument was that the Garden City could operate economically and allow the community to have ownership of the land. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the revenue derived simply from rents could be used to:
- Pay the interest with which the estate was purchased (providing a 4% return for the initial investors
- Provide a sinking fund for the purpose of paying off the principal
- Construct and maintain all the works typically undertaken by municipalities (including a detailed breakdown of associated costs)
- Provide a large surplus for other purposes including old age pensions, medical services and insurance

Administration

In dealing with the administration of the Garden City the first question to be dealt with is the extent to which municipal enterprise is carried out and to what extent it should supersede private enterprise. Howard does not advocate the complete municipalisation of industry or the elimination of private enterprise, instead he proposes a cautious and limited municipality that doesn’t attempt “too much.” The activities are to be closely related to the rate-rent of the tenants and would “grow in proportion as municipal work is done efficiently and honestly.”

With this in mind the structure of the municipality and its administration is proposed with a Board of Management composed of The Central Council and The Departments (Public Control, Engineering, Social and Education).

A Welfare Municipality

The Garden City proposal could be read as being in a state of tension between individual and social ideals. This is particularly evident in the explanation of how to create local choice, in terms of goods and services available to citizens, is made by heavily regulated private enterprise. Instead of “an absurd multiplication of shops” providing the same service – a single shop is allowed with the threat of competition (if the community feels the shop keeper is keeping prices to high, paying insufficient wages to his employees, etc) designed to keep prices low and service high. These local tradesmen are in essence municipal servants in all but title; not being bound in what Howard calls the “red tape of officialism.”

Howard hopes that, as opposed to other socialist (including communist) reform experiments of the day, that his proposal would appeal to not only individuals but to co-operators, manufacturers, philanthropic societies, and others experienced in organisation.

City Growth

Assuming the Garden City model was implemented and found to be successful Howard begins to describe how the City could grow and become part of an integrated network of Garden Cities. The principle of “always preserving a belt of country” around cities should always be maintained, argues Howard, so once a city has reached capacity a new one must be founded outside the agricultural belt (the influence of colonial-models prominent). The off-shoot city would grow organically, a ward at a time. Eventually there a central city (of perhaps 58,000 inhabitants) would be surrounded by a number of smaller off-shoot cities, connected by railroad and canal infrastructure.

Dystopian London

Howard ultimately turns his attention back to London, as an example of the “largest and most unwieldy” of 19th century cities, predicting that Garden Cities had the potential to dramatically change London: reducing population, clearing sums and ultimately turning it into a Garden City.

“The time for the complete reconstruction of London – which will eventually take place on a far more comprehensive scale than that now exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Glasgow, Birmingham or Vienna – has however, not yet come. A simpler problem must first be solved. One small Garden City must be built as a working model…”

These predictions are the most utopian of the book and perhaps would have come to fruition if not for a number of external factors that Howard either couldn’t have foreseen or failed to realise the importance of – notably the rise of the automobile.

Legacy of Howard and the Garden City

When To-morrow was first published the world was very different to the media-rich urban environment we currently inhabit. Despite this Ebenezer Howard is still regarded as one of the most important figures in the international development of urban planning. His simple diagrams of the model city have been taken up and reinterpreted a hundred times over across the globe but Howard’s most cherished ideas of social reform had very little impact – his social reformist message was lost.

“Very quickly, the Garden City came to be understood in a more limited sense, as an urban planning model to reform the spatial arrangement of social and economic life. It is through this understanding that Howard’s legacy has largely been experienced.” (Stephen V. Ward).

He set in motion new ideas about hierarchy of services within the city, the essential components of community, being planned with clear zoning principles. Whilst the ideas about hierarchy and zoning were not original in themselves, it was the holistic approach that Howard adopted that helped lend them legitimacy. The idea of the agricultural belt, the ‘bounded’ city, is directly responsible for policies of ‘Green Belt’ in the UK (and other parts of the world) that has since evolved and changed but essentially remains about constricting and controlling urban growth.

Additionally, the debate about the future of American Cities in the 1950s, with the infamous arguments between Jacobs and Mumford, can be traced back to the Garden City Movement. It will forever be associated with the ideas of suburbia and, increasingly, new urbanism.

If there was one enduring legacy though, beyond the physical make-up of the city, it is the importance Howard gave to creating a sense of community and harbouring relationships between human beings, enhancing them through good planning and design that promoted sociability.



Garden Cities of To-morrow Micro Site

Book Review: CCA on Paper

Books on books are a strange breed, tailor made for people that actually read books but unnecessary at the same time; after all do people who read want to read about something they've read or the act of reading itself? Of course the reasons for books on books vary, such as critical analyses of texts, explorations of the act of reading through books, or documents of books as artifacts. The strangely cover-less book that arrived in my mailbox today, CCA on Paper, falls into the last category. It is "a guide to all of the publications of the Canadian Centre for Architecture since it opened to the public twenty years ago."


[image source | animation by archidose]


The book -- available also as a PDF and online -- chronologically documents CCA's output, companions to their exhibitions but not catalogs of them. As Phyllis Lambert states in an interview with Peter Sealy and Mirko Zardini here, they "do books because they are long-term references," focusing on "the problematic that we're dealing with" rather than just a list of exhibition plates. Therefore the books that CCA publishes -- on their own initially and now with various outside publishers -- have expanded upon the exhibition themes, making them valuable references for scholarly research. I was surprised to see that I only have two CCA books in my library, Carlo Scarpa Architect and Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History. The latter, published with Lars Müller Publishers, is an atypical monograph, an almost scientific presentation of the duo's working process. It's a great book, and seeing it alongside other CCA titles here, I wish I had more than two.

Feral Green Streets (Tamed)

It was bound to happen, but a nice walk for some coffee showed the new 'orderly frames' for the previously unruly green street planters along Burnside Street.  Some updated images displaying what is quickly becoming 'stock' in the local green street planting arsenal -  (c) Jason King | Landscape+Urbanism.

I'm really intrigued by the planters that have captured the existing street trees.

 

My guess is it is a compromise between impacting the tree roots with excavation, versus impacts to the root zone via additional water.  They are all columnar red maples, and the majority of runoff directly on them is from small sidewalk inlets - so seems as if the wet feet may not be so much of an issue.

The neatness of the planting array keeps it from being monochromatic, there is an additional species or two thrown in here or there, particularly in larger areas without trees, and there is a slight differential in height in texture, but they just seem a bit tired at this point.  Maybe the novelty of the green street has worn off - not in function, but that they aren't special anymore, which maybe is OK?.  While still visible, is it preferable to have green infrastructure stick out, or is it acceptable, through ubiquity, for these to involve somewhat into the same invisible infrastructure.  Being common is a good sign, and that's why the 'feral' varieties were interesting:  I kind of liked them in their wild form...

Another interesting shot was the excavation of some of the new planters on the south side of the street (still under construction, I can tell from the wonderful odor of black tar in the air).  The subsurface condition of a stormwater planter is always fascinating, as what you see on the surface is rarely what is doing the heavy lifting for retention and infiltration.

NOW Urbanism

In the spirit of the variety of urbanism - some upcoming events from University of Washington in Seattle as part of the Now Urbanism: City Making in the 21st Century and Beyond - a year long interdisciplinary series of speakers around the concept of the modern city.  Thanks to Thaisa Way from UW for the heads up... I hope to make it to the Nov. 18 event, which should be a great dialogue from a couple of different, but inspiring, thinkers Randy Hester and Chris Reed.

November 17: Environmental Urbanism: Design With Ecological Democracy @ Architecture 147 [Public Lecture]
Randolph T. Hester, Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley

November 18: Environmental Urbanism: Ecological Design For Healthy Cities 

(What does it mean to envision a healthy city - one that nurtures both people and the environment? Environmental Urbanism acknowledges and embraces the relationships between people and their material surroundings. This session will explicitly consider how the human processes of city making involve an ongoing negotiation with various non-human elements-- soils, water, atmosphere, and animals. By considering the intended and unintended effects of urbanization, our goal is to better understand how and to what extent we can intentionally shape future urban landscapes.  Speakers include:

• Chris Reed, STOSS, Boston
• Randolph T. Hester, Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley
• Howard Frumkin, Dean, UW School of Public Health
• Panel Moderated by Peter Steinbrueck, Steinbrueck Urban Strategies

Additional dates of events can be found on their website and include a number of upcoming events of interest in the next year.

• Informal Urbanism: Slum Cities and Global Health (January 13, 2011)
• Transcultural Urbanism: Immigrant Cities (February 11, 2011)
• Generosity of Cities: Arts, Humanities, and the City (March 10, 2011)
• Next Eco-Cities (April 7, 2011) 
• Towards Just Cities (May 5, 2011) 
• The University and the City (May 26, 2011)

More on Ecological Urbanism

A recent post regarding Ellen Dunham-Jones talk in Vancouver highlighted the stance of new urbanism not just on landscape urbanism but on ecological urbanism.  Some notes via one of the attendees from - highlights a major disconnect between understanding and rhetoric - particularly that ecological urbanism is focused on some idea of 'city in nature' suburbia - or in others words, more 'sprawl in a pretty green dress'.  From the  Planning Picture blog, Tim Barton gives a synopsis of the talk:

"According to Dunham-Jones, while new urbanists like to plan through good design, ecological urbanists don’t. They prefer to set something in motion and see what happens. Kind of more ecology in the city, but it also seems to be more lower density suburbia where, although surrounded by hills and other natural landscapes, most people would still have to drive everywhere."

To which most would answer: Huh? and those under 35 would say: WTF?  How does one interpret ecological urbanism in this way, other than as a knee-jerk reaction that isn't addressing the actual theories of ecological urbanism, but equating it with a new methodology for ecologically-oriented sprawl?  I'll chalk it up to a lack of understanding of the nuances of EU, such as LU theories (much as those opponents of NU don't have a full understanding of the specifics in making arguments against).  I don't see, as other do, these as direct attacks on the concept of new urbanism, but as a reaction to neo-traditional urban form as an ends, not a means.  The sprawling suburbs is not the goal of any of these methodologies.  To say so is total bullshit.

:: image via Light Rail Now

Much as Michael Mehaffy previously discussed in relation to landscape urbanism, New Urbanist Dunham-Jones has a stake in the argument - mostly in holding on to the conceptual turf they have gained as a strong and organized collective movement.  I get what they are both saying... which holds true to the essence of NU ideology - plan every detail so nothing is left to chance, based on sound principles from good precedents.  Flux, therefore, is the enemyof deterministic design - but this same flux is the essence of the historical precedence that the new urbanists draw from in reinforcing their .  The principles didn't just happen and then go away, but accreted over time and experimentation, and reworking, and change of cities over millenia.  It's how this is heavy-handedly applied that seems the conceptual break.

:: Poundbury - image via Wikipedia

While laudable as a theoretical proposition - it's impossible to do this for anything of a significant scale, much something with the complexity of cities.  While planners set wide ranging, relativistic and somewhat spatial frameworks, designers (particularly architects and engineers, but the nature of their scope) are pre-disposed to want to control every aspect of every system, component, assembly, and material, along with the final end form.  Landscape architects perhaps fall in the middle, as we have the control-specific aspects of architects with the necessity for letting things evolve due to the nature of our primary materials, plants.

For someone with a goal of 'Retrofitting Suburbia' (a very important goal as well, but one with, at least in this context, a very New Urbanist aura to it) Dunham-Jones of all people, through the research on the book case studies, should be able to glean from ecological urbanism that it isn't at all about dispersed suburbia but is about a rejection of hyper-determinism, for lack of a better term.  Suburbia will not be retrofitted en masse, both due to economics and the slowness of change.  It will happen through strategic insertions and manipulations that will have ripple effects of new housing and commercial uses.  Thus it is a variation of the 'set it in motion' ideology, but in a much more strategic sense that looks at catalysts versus entire elements of reformulation (ala urban renewal).

The concept isn't just 'new' versus 'ecological' or 'landscape' in terms of urbanism.  It's putting down our egos and admitting that we don't have all the answers from day one (or two, or 100).  It is evolving from a deterministic stance to planning (a neo-utopian approach to designing every aspect of cities) to one that allows for a more process oriented approach (designing the frameworks for cities to evolve and adjusting them periodically).  It's not a question of density, as the same general approach using characteristics gleaned from LU/NU/EU can produce both neo-agrarian, elitist, rural sprawl or hyper-urban, vibrant, city densities in equal measure.  

An urban scale intervention of deterministic new urbanism is bound to fail, just due to the massive number of variables at play.  While these may be controlled in a development, there is a point where we reach the capacity of the designer to account for the complexity of a truly diverse city and any will quickly be overcome  with the task.  On the flip side, just setting things is motion and 'seeing what happens' is bound to fail as well if just left to it's own devices.  A good indication of this result is suburban sprawl (particularly in areas with softer planning regulations) or mishmash urban redevelopment.  Letting the market decide (with minimal direction or governmental intervention) what is best has led to vast dispersion of cities and significant environmental degredation.  It has also led to many great examples of density, safe and walkable communities, mixed use and income cities, and a range of inventive cases of urban ecological restoration.  But, in sum, the former is well out-pacing the much more desirable latter.

While removing this degree of hyper-determinism from the process takes some leap of faith, it isn't an all-or-nothing scenario (i.e. a leap off a cliff) but rather a less scary need for confidence in our ability to set positive frameworks, evaluate, and adjust accordingly in mid-flight (i.e. base jumping).  Cities aren't buildings, and thus shouldn't be approached with the same formula of absolute determinism.  While no architect in their right mind would leave basic foundational structures to chance, there has been more willingness to embrace change, evolution of materials, adaptability of floor plans, varied uses, which can react to changing economic and usage characteristics - saving a building from not just having to be torn down when times change.  This is also a necessity as the innate durability of buildings and infrastructure will extend long past the era where societal change makes them irrelevant - making adaptability even more important as we don't want to be left with useless dinosaurs from another age.

:: Fresh Kills - images via Metropolis

Ecological urbanism to me isn't prescriptive of any type of city, or a blank plea for more open space.  Rather, it addresses the city as an organism and collection of organisms and processes acting in concert, interrelated and interdependent.  Much as the ecologist looks at the structure of an ecosystem and determines approaches to adjusting and modifying systems, the urbanist can take the cues from the ecologist in holistic systems thinking towards cities.  For instance, and massively simplified, the field of community ecology, via Wikipedia, looks at "...distribution, abundance, demography, and interactions between coexisting populations."  Is that not a viable approach to a theory of urbanism?  Is it less valid that the Charter of the New Urbanism?  Can it provide necessary structure while allowing for fluidity and change?  Are there viable elements, such as ecotones, that provide a foundation for macro-scale interventions.

To sum up, the post did mention that Dunham-Jones "...did acknowledge that new urbanists can learn something from the less planned, more spontaneous places that seem to be so popular." which is echoed in Duany's recent call to learn from landscape urbanist theories and approaches.  Unfortuantely, the examples mentioned are boiled these down to fun, but small scale interventions like Parking Day, Building a Better Block, determining temporary use for spaces like in Pop-Up cities, or through more socially oriented community activities like the very cool 'Pie Day'.  

:: image via Pop-Up City

These are, however, considered adjuncts to real city building, with a connotation that these are 'fun additions of spontaneity', but not valid overall approaches urbanism.  While it would be great to learn how to capture these, there are also rules to doing so, because cities must be 'planned through good design' and  that means leaving things to chance is not allowed..   Hyper-determinism is a thing of the past, and whatever the approach, there must be more flexibility in process and product when dealing with the complexity of cities.  I believe that everyone is looking for the same result - health people, healthy cities, healthy planet.  LU and EU, in overlapping and independent ways, are methods of investigating how we can utilize a different set of precedents and methods, and a radically different approach to the process - to get to what I believe is our shared goal.  

The Access Maze

[Image: A fenced-off, back alley security stair in Toronto, via Google Street View; view larger].

A link on Twitter from Andrew Lovett-Barron led me to this otherwise innocuous fenced-in back alley staircase in Toronto, pictured here via Google Street View (view larger).

There's something oddly compelling about this minor architecture of out-of-place private access—as if implying that buildings could begin blocks and blocks away from where they actually rest in urban space, splayed out into the neighborhoods around them like chain-linked octopi, reaching out with stairways, doors, and catwalks across the roofs and back streets of the city. A Home Depot vernacular stretched to Berlin Wall-like proportions.

You don't like your address, you simply hurl a chain-linked access stair up over and out to whatever street you prefer—and you enter there, turning a key and stepping into a steel maze of steps and ladders, cantilevered walkways and pillared decks. Fifteen minutes later, passing over and beneath ribbons of other parallel geographies, looping down alleys and nesting briefly on thin platforms in the canopies of trees, walking alone in this isolated cocoon like a private enclave in the city, you're home.

Max Ernst lived here

Paris is a city of history. Plaques on nearly every house list famous occupants and you obtain quite the lesson just walking down the street. I wonder if anyone but tourists pay any attention to these signs.

One day while sightseeing we came upon this very grand house with lovely wooden gates and a plaque bearing the name of the artist Max Ernst.

It was in this house in Paris that he lived the remainder of his life after returning to France and where he passed away in 1976.

I love these courtyard type houses which are found all throughout the city. Gates and walls provide an outdoor room to seperate their occupants from the city, sort of like a foyer in an apartment.

There are many ways to live comfortably in the midst of a city through good planning and this just is one of them!

Stitch Up

[Image: Oceangoing ships clipped and stitched from Google Maps by artist Jenny Odell, via things and SpaceInvading].

Buy an Archipelago

Another story I meant to link here long ago is this real estate listing for an entire Scottish archipelago.

For £250,000—approximately $398,000—you can be the owner of "a wonderful and remote island group... a small archipelego centred around two main islands 25 miles north east of Lerwick, Shetland and extending to about 600 acres in all." It comes complete with a "private airstrip" and seasonal wild flowers.

Perhaps you want to establish a writers' residence. Perhaps you're fed up. Perhaps you want to declare a private city-state. Or perhaps you simply want to reinvigorate the struggling private island market.

Whatever the case may be, "a charter flight can also be arranged from Tinwall just to the north of Lerwick."

[Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Buy a Map, Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, and Buy a Silk Mill].

Buy a Map

[Image: Photo by Barney Peterson, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle].

Something I meant to post three few weeks ago, before October became the Great Lost Month of constant busyness and over-commitment, is the story of a 70-ton relief map of California, unseen by the public for half a century, that has been re-discovered in San Francisco, sitting in "an undisclosed location on the city's waterfront."

[Image: Photo by Barney Peterson, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle].

In its time, the map was considered far too marvelous for simply cutting up and storing—but that's exactly what's happened to it.

It was as long as two football fields and showed California in all its splendor, from Oregon to Mexico, with snow-capped mountains, national parks, redwood forests, a glorious coastline, orchards and miniature cities basking in the sun. It was made of plaster, wire, paint, and bits of rock and sand. In the summer of 1924, Scientific American magazine said it was the largest map in the world.

However, we read, "The problem with the map is simple: it is huge and would cost a lot of money to move, restore and display it. The last estimate was in the range of $500,000. And that was 30 years ago. It is a classic white elephant, too valuable to scrap, but too expensive to keep."

And, today, it's not going anywhere: "The Port of San Francisco has no plans to be anything but stewards of its storage, and no one else has come forward in half a century to rescue the map." If you have half-a-million dollars or so, and heavy moving equipment at your disposal, then perhaps it could soon be yours.

(Thanks to Steve Silberman for the link. In the archives: San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model; Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, and Buy a Silk Mill].

Softcore

Just a quick reminder that you have till December 10 to submit to Bracket 2, published by Actar, Archinect, and InfraNet Lab:

Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks... Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design. Bracket 2 invites designers, architects, theorists, ecologists, scientists, and landscape architects to position and leverage the role of soft systems and recuperate the development of the soft project.

Check out InfraNet Lab and the Bracket website for more info. Keep your eye out, as well, for InfraNet Lab's forthcoming Pamphlet Architecture installment, Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

The Museum of Speculative Archaeological Devices

Perhaps a short list of speculative mechanisms for future archaeological research would be interesting to produce.

[Image: A toy antique oscilloscope by Andrew Smith, courtesy of Gadget Master and otherwise unrelated to this post].

Ground-scanners, Transparent-Earth (PDF) eyeglasses, metal detectors, 4D earth-modeling environments used to visualize abandoned settlements, and giant magnets that pull buried cities from the earth.

Autonomous LIDAR drones over the jungles of South America. Fast, cheap, and out of control portable muon arrays. Driverless ground-penetrating radar trucks roving through the British landscape.

Or we could install upside-down periscopes on the sidewalks of NYC so pedestrians can peer into subterranean infrastructure, exploring subways, cellars, and buried streams. Franchise this to London, Istanbul, and Jerusalem, scanning back and forth through ruined foundations.

Holograph-bombs—ArchaeoGrenades™—that spark into life when you throw them, World of Warcraft-style, out into the landscape, and the blue-flickering ancient walls of missing buildings come to life like an old TV channel, hazy and distorted above the ground. Mechanisms of ancient light unfold to reveal lost architecture in the earth.

[Image: An LED cube by Pic Projects, otherwise unrelated to this post].

Or there could be football-field-sized milling machines that re-cut and sculpt muddy landscapes into the cities and towns that once stood above them. A peat-bog miller. Leave it operating for several years and it reconstructs whole Iron Age villages in situ.

Simultaneous milling/scanning devices that bring into being the very structures they claim to study. Ancient fortifications 3D-printed in realtime as you scan unreachable sites beneath your city's streets.

Deep-earth projection equipment that impregnates the earth's crust with holograms of missing cities, outlining three-dimensional sites a mile below ground; dazed miners stumble upon the shining walls of imaginary buildings like a laser show in the rocks around them.

Or a distributed iPhone app for registering and recording previously undiscovered archaeological sites (through gravitational anomalies, perhaps, or minor compass swerves caused by old iron nails, lost swords, and medieval dining tools embedded in the ground). Like SETI, but archaeological and directed back into the earth. As Steven Glaser writes in the PDF linked above, "We can image deep space and the formation of stars, but at present we have great difficulty imaging even tens of meters into the earth. We want to develop the Hubble into, not away from, the earth."

Artificially geomagnetized flocks of migratory birds, like "GPS pigeons," used as distributed earth-anomaly detectors in the name of experimental archaeology.

[Image: "GPS pigeons" by Beatriz da Costa, courtesy of Pruned].

So perhaps there could be two simultaneous goals here: to produce a list of such devices—impossible tools of future excavation—but also to design a museum for housing them.

What might a museum of speculative archaeological devices look like? A Mercer Museum for experimental excavation?

(Thanks to Rob Holmes and Alex Trevi for engaging with some of these ideas over email).

What's in an Icon?

Visiting Santiago Calatrava's website today, I see it's been redesigned. This is the splash page:



Does that little icon (I wouldn't call it a logo) go with the designs of the name over which it's located? To me it looks too traditional, like it would be found on the letterhead of staunch law firm or on a napkin at a fancy restaurant or on a box from a custom suit shop...to me, it says anything but Calatrava. Who knows, maybe they'll change the icon or get rid of it entirely. These days it seems businesses will easily and quickly give up their redesigned images.

Update 10.29: As some astute readers have pointed out to me, the symbol is the Calatrava Cross, dating back to the 12th century. It is also used by Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe.

f451

A video about f451 arquitectura's various projects. I especially like the UPF Temporary Building at the beginning. I wonder if we'll see more video marketing for architects?



Or shall I say, I wonder how much more video marketing we'll see for architects?

Last Call

One of the chapters in my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, to be released by W. W. Norton next year, highlights projects that are under construction or in planning, ones that should be realized in the second decade of the 21st century, an extension of the featured projects completed in the first decade. Like my research for the latter, I'm once again asking you, dear readers for help in finding projects for this "On the Horizon" chapter.



So here are some criteria for inclusion in that chapter:

• It is intended to be built, not hypothetical;
• It is public or has a public presence, meaning no private interiors
• It is permanent, so no temporary installations or restaurant/retail interiors, which have a way of being temporary even when they're intended to be permanent;
• It can be a landscape, not just a building;
• Ideally the project has a rendering or other illustration representing it, one that can be published.

If you know of projects that I should consider please e-mail me with, at the very least, the name of the project and its architect. I have a fairly long list already with what one would expect in this sort of chapter (World Trade Center, Atlantic Yards, Fresh Kills Park, etc.), as well as others not so well known, but the nature of the architectural process means it's much harder to know about projects in these early stages than after they've been under construction for months or years. Hence my last call for help. Thank you.

Grand staircases of Vienna

My Australian friend is at it again, sending me gorgeous photos from his world travels. This set of photos from public buildings in Vienna especially caught my attention. The Viennese know how to create a dramatic staircase!The image at top reminds me of main hall in the Library of Congress while the red carpeted stair above is reminiscent of an Escher drawing to my mind! Seriously though, is that not the most confusing staircase you have ever seen? A lot going on there.The flooring in the stairhall above is what mainly caught my attention here. The checkered marble, again with the red carpeting, is so striking and those brass light fixtures are really beautiful.

I'll end with yet another complicated stair, however this time the limestone tones of the marble create a very calm feeling. Four very grand stairs and yet each one so different in its' own way, proving that there is more than one way to skin a cat!