Mars Bungalow and the Prison of Simulation

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

Following a few links from the perennially great things magazine, I discovered this new attempt at a future Martian architecture.

Meant to house “visitors,” we read, at the Martian north pole, “ANY Design Studios has designed a robot on legs built of Martian ice.” It comes complete with padded walls and a nice little bed.

Note, however, that the walls (on the right) have been painted to look like the Pacific northwest: even on Mars, we will live within simulations.

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

“What would it be like to spend nearly two Earth years at the Martian north pole,” we’re asked, “a place where darkness falls for nine months of the year, carbon dioxide snow flutters down in winter and temperatures drop to a chilly minus 150 centigrade?” I, for one, think it would be wonderful.

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

The architecture itself is “a self assembling six module robotic design on tracked landing legs.” It’s thus a cluster of smaller buildings that, together, “would allow for ten people to live indefinitely at the pole.”

The architects behind the project go on to explain that they “have also been exploring the possibility of reproducing programmable Earth environments in a room we have called the ‘Multi Environment Chamber’. Settlers on Mars may well be able to make themselves a cup of tea and settle into a chair with the sun gently warming their skin, cool breezes, and the sound of songbirds of an English orchard on a warm July afternoon” – assuming that such an experience wasn’t precisely what you were trying to get away from in the first place.

These “programmable Earth environments,” though, should undoubtedly include a setting in which you are sitting in a room in southern California, which has been kitted out to look like a Martian base – inside of which a man sits, reminiscing about a room in southern California that he once decorated to look like a Martian bungalow… Which would be referred to as the interplanetary architecture of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Phrased otherwise, of course, all of this would simply be an inversion of what William L. Fox describes in his recent book, Driving to Mars. There, Fox writes about “the idea of practicing Mars on Earth” – which means simply that, even as I write this, there are teams of astronauts on a remote base in northern Canada, acting as if they are already surrounded by Martian topography.

It’s a form of psychological training: act as if you have already arrived.

So you simply turn that around and find, here, that anyone living inside this “self assembling six module robotic design on tracked landing legs” will really be “practicing Earth on Mars.”

Act as if you never left.

But why not practice, say, Jupiter, instead? Why not be even more ambitious and use each planet in this solar system as a base from which to simulate the rest?

Or you could just abandon simulation altogether, of course, and experience Mars as Mars.

It’s interesting, though, in this context, to look at the naming practices used by NASA through which they claim – or at least label – Martian territory. Landscapes on Earth toponymically reappear on the Martian plains; there is Bonneville Crater and Victoria Crater, for instance; there is Cape Verde and a cute little rock called “Puffin.”

Mars is an alien landscape, then, in everything but name.

Even more fascinating, at least for me, is the small range of Martian hills now “dedicated to the final crew of Space Shuttle Columbia.” Accordingly, these hills now appear on maps as the Columbia Hills Complex. An entire landscape named after dead American astronauts? Surely there’s a J.G. Ballard story about something exactly like this?

Then again, according to one reviewer: “A story by J.G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don’t think.” Uh oh.

(Note: For more on Martian architecture don’t miss the unbelievably weird proposal behind Mars Power!, discussed earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Sleep Labs of the Soviet Empire

[Image: A “garden suburb” outside Moscow. Via Cabinet Magazine].

In the new issue of Cabinet, we read how, following the implementation of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan – and in the wake of food rationing and extended work hours – “the shock-troops of Communism were edging perilously close to physical and mental exhaustion: what they needed was rest.”
Soviet authorities thus “announced a competition to design a garden suburb outside Moscow, where workers could be sent to recuperate from the strains of factory labor.”
Without getting into specifics – for that, be sure to pick up a copy of the magazine, issue #24 – one detail about the garden suburb that I particularly love, and that the article’s author specifically highlights, was a sort of colosseum of slumber. A dream academy.
Designed by Konstantin Melnikov, the building was a purpose-built structure referred to as the “Sonata of Sleep.”

[Image: Konstantin Melnikov’s “Sonata of Sleep.” Via Cabinet Magazine].

Specifically, we’re told, “the building consisted of two large dormitories either side of a central block,” and the dormitories each “had sloping floors.”
This would “obviate the need for pillows.”
Even more amazing – or is it absurd? – we read:

At either end of the long buildings were to be situated control booths, where technicians would command instruments to regulate the temperature, humidity, and air pressure, as well as to waft salubrious scents and “rarefied condensed air” through the halls. Nor would sound be left unorganized. Specialists working “according to scientific facts” would transmit from the control centre a range of sounds gauged to intensify the process of slumber. The rustle of leaves, the cooing of nightingales, or the soft murmur of waves would instantly relax the most overwrought veteran of the metropolis. Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin gently to rock until consciousness was lost.

While all this certainly sounds ambitious enough, apparently “Melnikov’s original impulse had been much more far-reaching.”
His original dream had been to create an Institute for Changing the Form of Man.
The whole article is awesome, frankly, encompassing the resurrection of the dead, a house designed by Melnikov in which residents felt as if they “were floating in thick golden air,” and further thoughts about how Melnikov “recombined industrial iconography into a series of spatial adventures,” most notably with a building that was “a delirium of gigantic stairways and roller bearings.”

[Image: Konstantin Melnikov’s “Leningrad Pravda” tower, as modelled by R. Notrott].

While I’m on the subject, though, don’t miss this page full of Melnikov’s other architectural projects, including the tower, pictured above, where “each floor should turn around the central core,” and this outrageous parking garage, to be constructed as a bridge in Paris, over the Seine. Note the bronze, Oscar-like statues holding up either end of the structure.

(Thanks to Leah Beeferman for emailing me the first two images, hot off the press from Cabinet).

Interchange Tiles

[Image: Four tiles by Jim Termeer].

“This is a set of 25 ceramic tiles,” artist Jim Termeer explains. “The patterns are based on satellite imagery of major highway interchanges that have been built worldwide.”
So you can decorate your bathroom with the freeways of Barcelona.

[Image: The Barcelona tile, by Jim Termeer].

(Discovered via Mason White, thanks to a tip from Theresa Duncan. If you like these images, meanwhile, be sure to stop by BLDGBLOG’s Return of the Knot Driver and, of course, The Knot Driver

).

Structures of the death market

Another cool project from Domus, this time a “vertical cemetary” whose “commitment to quality is eternal.”

[Image: Via Domus].

Though it looks like something out of Perdido Street Station, it’s really a skyscraping extension to the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica, “a vertical cemetery established in Santos in Brazil in 1983.”
This futuristic, insectile extension “will create another 25,000 niches, set inside a 108-metre-high tower block that will complete the complex.”
It will be circled by birds, looming alien on the horizon.

[Image: Via Domus].

Quoting the article at great length:

The vertical cemetery is particularly widespread in Brazil and is also beginning to be used in other places: the Panteón Memorial Towers complex, which consists of 13 towers in a vaguely deconstructivist style, has recently been presented at Bogotá in Colombia and sparked debate concerning changes in funeral rituals related to the social changes that have taken place over the last 30 years. In the South Korean pavilion at the last Venice Architecture Biennale, the project The Last House by architect Chanjoong Kim (founder of System Lab) addressed the same notion, bringing it into line with more contemporary architectural styles and approaches and drawing on a zoomorphic language that echoed systems of vascular circulation. Architecture appears swift to take the opportunity to address a new area where death creates a market, on the borderline between consumerism and entertainment.

Personally, I think it will soon be covered in plastic bags, snagged from the air, and within ten years it will host a bungee-jumping platform.
Then, fifteen years after the tower is completed, a Brazilian George A. Romero will make a terrifying new version of Night of the Living Dead, in which all the corpses come back to life… falling to the ground in packs, then crawling away into the darkness.

[Image: Via Domus].

More images are available at Domus, and a few more thoughts on such projects can be found at we make money not art.

(Elsewhere: “The Hanging Cemetary of Babylon“).

Europe’s Geological Attics

[Image: Carlo Mollino’s “architectural solution for extremely high altitudes.” Via Domus].

Last year, Domus introduced us to an “architectural solution for extremely high altitudes.”
But it’s not another weird, home oxygen system; it’s a derelict ski lift relay station, designed by Carlo Mollino – who apparently once said: “Everything is permissible as long as it is fantastic.”

[Image: Via Domus].

The ski lift itself was meant to cross upward through the Alpine sky, from mountain top to mountain top, eventually alighting upon the crest of the Matterhorn. As such, it was part of a much larger mountain sports complex – or distributed “micrometropolis,” as the article describes it – for prestigious (and wealthy) winter athletes.
Wonderfully, these structures – located on various peaks and connected by cable cars – were partly inspired by “the Tibetan monasteries of Lhasa as self-sufficient and self-justifying mountain units.”
Mollino himself wrote, referring to this project: “I believe this construction represents an answer to the question of architecture at very high mountain altitudes, and that it is also a new constructional concept. It is literally anchored in the rock, which had to be dynamited in order to create the albeit partial support platforms. All the rest is cantilevered.”

[Image: A sketch by Carlo Mollino. Via Domus].

However, “a secret passageway into the glacier” was also constructed; this was a jagged corridor filled with stairways and machinery that Domus refers to as “the famous rock tunnel.”
More poetically, they add, it’s “a tunnel through the rock of one of Europe’s geological attics.”

[Images: Inside “the famous rock tunnel,” that “passageway into the glacier.” Via Domus].

Though I want so badly to learn that a manmade labyrinth of tunnels and passageways has been blasted through the highest mountains of the Alps – perhaps even possible to ski through – it seems that this “famous rock tunnel” doesn’t go very deep, and that it houses nothing but enginery for the ski lift, bobbing noisily in the wind outside.
But there’s just something so incredibly evocative about an abandoned network of Alpine ski lifts.
You arrive in a small town in Switzerland, say, having traveled there to research tectonic stress in the rocks of southern Europe – how that continent’s ongoing collision with Africa results in magnificent lumps of folded rock, rising miles into the air. Your guidebook mentions a specific geological formation worth the time if you can reach it, because those rocks have neither been seen nor photographed since the early 1950s.
Turns out, the only way up there – and the rocks are way up there: three or four mountains away, in the wind, ice, and weather – is to take a series of abandoned cable cars. No one is even sure how well the machinery works, but, after a few days’ tinkering, using a dozen cans of WD-40, you manage to get the thing back on track.
You pack a lunch, put on some gloves, and you bring a new flashlight – and some granola bars, just in case.
And then you ascend, alone, taking photographs, as you pass from one abandoned outpost to the next, gliding through cantilevered architectural structures, each more fantastic than the one before.
By midday, you have arrived at a spectacular cluster of buildings, now abandoned to the snow for over 60 years – but, of course, at that instant, the cable car jams. Gingerly, you step out.
Looking back, you can’t even see the village where you started; looking ahead, you can’t see the peak you’ve been looking for. The cables just sort of disappear, sagging and forlorn, covered in icicles, like thin wires between distant cliffsides.
Soon, it’s rather late.

[Image: The Alps. Via Domus].

You crawl into one of the empty buildings in an effort to stay warm – because, outside, the wind has picked up – but you notice that, behind the wood panelling in the back, there’s some kind of opening, or even a cave. Or at least there’s something: you can’t quite tell what it is.
Crawling over to investigate, flashlight in hand, you realize it’s not a cave at all, but a manmade tunnel. And it extends downward, at a sharp angle.
Looking closer, you see footprints.
You enter.

Transparent Soil and the Gardens of Tomorrow

[Image: Tomas Saraceno, via Domus].

“A sun is rising behind a large glass surface among the trees,” Daniel Birnbaum writes in Domus, and that sun’s “bright light is reflected in the water. Huge balloons hover in the air, some transparent, others lit from within. Hundreds of people gather on the small green island at night. What kind of strange place is this?”

[Image: Tomas Saraceno, via Domus].

This “strange place” is actually “a small island in a river running through a large European city.” Specifically, if somewhat disappointingly, it’s an art institute called “the new Portikus,” and it’s located in Frankfurt, Germany.
As it happens, the new Portikus is in the midst of a long run of art installations, and so the sun we just saw “rising behind a large glass surface among the trees” is really a project designed by Olafur Eliasson’s Light Lab. The project is “visible at night from across the city,” and is part of what Birnbaum calls “a solar lab.”
After all, he adds, all of the artworks in this series “will all relate to the notion of heliotropism.”

[Image: Tomas Saraceno, via Domus].

However, artist Tomas Saraceno, also exhibiting at Portikus, is “more interested,” we read, in how people could start “living in the skies.”
Saraceno thus “explores the possibilities of air-borne housing as a conceivable solution to the problems of population growth and rapidly changing climates.”
Elsewhere, in an interview with Stefano Boeri and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Saraceno says: “Up in the sky there will be this cloud, a habitable platform that floats in the air, changing form and merging with other platforms just as clouds do. It will fly through the atmosphere pushed by the winds, both local and global… in a permanent state of transformation, similar to nomadic cities.”
In other words, it’ll be a bit like the Helicopter Archipelago
In the same interview, Saraceno then describes another project called the Flying Garden. The Flying Garden will be an “invasion” of the sky, “made up of plants, humans and animals.”
For instance, “there will be ‘air plants’,” he says, taken “from the genus Tillandsia. Native to South America and Africa, these are true air plants: they derive all their nutrition from the air, imbibing rain and dew and whatever nutrients the air brings to them through their leaf tissues. There are no roots for water and nutrient uptake so they are quite air-sufficient.”
This actually reminds me of an image I’ve had in my head for several years now: which is a forest, growing at its own faunal pace, over years, decades, even centuries, yet all the plants are rooted in transparent soil – clear hillsides like plastic or glass – so you can actually sit there in the sun, reading Charles Darwin, everyday, every week, watching those slow and ancient roots push deeper and deeper into the earth.
Worms crawl, as if through space, forming tunnels – underground landscapes of air. After the sun goes down, you walk out into the middle of the woods with a flashlight and you shine it straight down through the surface of the earth, illuminating tangles of roots and buried streams.

The Museum of Assassination

[Image: The window through which JFK was shot, recently purchased for over $3 million on eBay].

Leaving aside for now whether or not this is the real deal, the window through which JFK was assassinated has been purchased on eBay for more than $3 million.
“The starting price was just $100,000,” the BBC reports, “but bidding was brisk and the item eventually fetched $3,001,501.”
Why was it available for purchase at all? Well, apparently, “the window of the Dallas building was removed shortly after the assassination because people were stealing bits of it.” They presumably then took those bits home as macabre souvenirs – latter-day relics, perhaps carefully enshrined in secret temples to American history, next to devotional photographs of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.

[Image: Three frames from the infamous Zapruder film, an amateur tourist reel that captured the assassination of JFK in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, 1963; via Assassination Research].

No one is entirely sure, however, if this particular window is authentic; for instance, the BBC mentions a few “conspiracy theorists” who say that it cannot possibly be the real window – after all, they claim, “a man from Tennessee bought the building years ago and took the window with him when he left town.” What he did with it next just adds to the mystery.
Perhaps you’ve even looked through it, whilst visiting your parents’ neighbors in Memphis; or perhaps you saw a man with a Southern accent hanging out at a gas station in New Mexico, and he was transporting a large window in the back of his minivan. Looking closely, you saw that it was secured with several padlocks, and the man was carrying a stun-gun…
Perhaps this mysterious dealer in architectural fragments is actually amassing items for his future Museum of Assassination, in which pieces of architecture, historical documents, and associated weaponry will be put on display. A complete, hyper-realistic simulation of Dealey Plaza is being constructed out back.

[Image: A “building cut” by Gordon Matta-Clark, along with two “Bronx Floors”].

In any case, what all this actually made me think of was New York artist Gordon Matta-Clark‘s project “Bronx Floors.”
To produce artworks like these, Matta-Clark “would chainsaw large circles or other shapes in abandoned buildings and exhibit both a photograph of the building after the operation and the parts that had been removed” (emphasis added).
In other words, many of the “objects” that Matta-Clark displayed in New York City art galleries were really decontextualized fragments of existing buildings – including, of course, several Bronx floors. These mobile pieces of real architecture – a fever of walls and floors on the loose in New York City – became instant works of sculpture, somewhere between a readymade object, archaeological remains, and a kind of experiment in found architecture.
So what’s interesting about the JFK window, at least for me, is that it seems to exist – purposefully or not – as a Matta-Clark-like sculpture, a “building cut” if there ever was one.
Perhaps we may even find that Gordon Matta-Clark did not die of cancer at all – in fact, he moved to Tennessee, only to purchase, years later, a certain building in Dallas, Texas…
On the other hand, the auctioning off of JFK’s fatal window also opens up the possibility that we could chainsaw, chisel, or otherwise reclaim – i.e. steal – historically important bits of architecture, removing them from their original contexts and exhibiting them elsewhere. The balcony over which Michael Jackson dangled his baby in Berlin; the terrace from which Juliet addressed Romeo; the windows through which administrators were defenestrated in Prague.
Perhaps we could even re-assemble all these into a complete, if eclectic and quite controversial, new building – add the JFK window as the coup de grâce – and you’ve got a 21st century version of Sir John Soane‘s Museum in London.
But, of course, archaeology is full of such acts of structural burglary. Whole temples and friezes and doorways and rooms have been removed and transported elsewhere. Just ask Lord Elgin – or, for that matter, ask the Getty.
In light of all this, then, are we witnessing some new Lord Elgin of the 21st century, raised on the novels of J.G. Ballard, as he or she begins a new quest to collect pieces of architectural morbidity?
The sale of JFK’s window would thus be the opening salvo in this death-obsessed archaeology of tomorrow.

Churches of remathematization

[Image: “Adams in Saint Flour Cathedral,” a 360°x180° panorama by Seb Przd].

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.

[Images: “Saint Etienne Two Times,” taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].

Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot “Treppe.”
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including “On the side of the cathedral,” “Don’t drink and pray,” and “Notre-Dame de Reims.”
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within…
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.

[Image: “The Ceiling and Columns of the Cathedral” by Seb Przd].

(Discovered via MetaFilter).

Cover the Earth

[Image: REUTERS/China Daily].

A mountain quarry in the county of Fumin, China, has been “artificially painted green by the local forestry bureau” as a way “to simulate planted trees.”
Doing this apparently cost $51,000.
“Workers who began spraying Laoshou mountain last August told villagers they were doing so on orders of the county government but were not told why,” the Associated Press reports.
“Some villagers guessed officials of the surrounding Fumin county, whose office building faces the mountain, were trying to change the area’s feng shui” – others think they were told to do it by Pruned.
That, or they were just responding over-literally to the horrific slogan of chemical giant Sherwin Williams – who exhort their customers to “cover the earth” with paint.

(Via things magazine).

Mars Power!

[Image: Courtesy of NASA/Pat Rawlings/SAIC, via New Scientist].

Proteins harvested from inside the human ear could soon power space stations on Mars.
“Astronauts’ spacesuits may one day be covered in motion-sensitive proteins that could generate power from the astronauts’ movement,” New Scientist reports. “Such ‘power skins’ could also be used to coat future human bases on Mars, where they could produce energy from the Martian wind.”
Surely, though, biomechanical protein coats like these would also be architecturally useful here on earth? On these shacks, for instance?

[Image: Courtesy of NASA/John J. Olson, via New Scientist].

To make this work, then, researchers in Cambridge, MA, have been “focusing on a protein called prestin, which is found in the outer hair cells of the human ear. In the cell membranes of these cells, prestin converts electrical voltage into motion, elongating and contracting the cell. This movement amplifies sound in the ear. However, prestin can also work in reverse, producing electrical charges in response to mechanical stresses, such as tiny vibrations.”
Stunningly, Northwestern University actually “patented the prestin molecule in 2003,” claiming, as they did so, that prestin “may be 10,000 times more efficient at generating power than the best manmade material.” Ironically, of course, prestin is, in a way, manmade?
In any case, if I clean my ears and damage some prestin molecules, do I owe Northwestern University money?
And what happens if you wake up one day to find that someone has patented your hands? Perhaps someday we’ll read about the Laboratory of Patented Anatomy – housed, yes, at Northwestern University.