Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear.

From the fashionable worlds of Christian Dior and Playtex to the military-industrial complex working overtime on efforts to create a protective suit for U.S. exploration of the moon, and from early computerized analyses of urban management to an “android” history of the French court, all by way of long chapters on the experimental high-flyers and military theorists who collaborated to push human beings further and further above the weather—and eventually off the planet itself—de Monchaux’s book shows the often shocking juxtapositions that give such rich texture and detail to the invention of the spacesuit: pressurized clothing for human survival in space.

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

Bridging the line between clothing and architecture, the spacesuit is a portable environment: a continuation of habitable space, safe for human beings, capable of radical detachment from the Earth. That a “soft” and pliable suit designed by Playtex—manufacturer of women’s underwear—would beat the “hard,” armor-like suit design of military contractors is the surprising core story of de Monchaux’s research.

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

In the following Q&A, BLDGBLOG speaks with de Monchaux about his book; about his newly announced architectural design track at UC-Berkeley, called Studio One; about the risks and rewards of parametric design on an urban scale; and about his ongoing experiments with architectural representation, including analyses of food production and delivery and a technical interrogation of the complex digital tools we use to map empty spaces in our cities. We video-chatted on Skype.

• • •

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the origins of the book: did you start off researching the history of systems engineering, only to stumble upon this emblematic object—the Apollo spacesuit—or were you hoping to write a design history of the spacesuit, only to discover that it was connected to these hugely diverse topics, such as postwar urban management and complexity theory?

Nicholas de Monchaux: The project itself really has two origin stories. One is when I first began to research spacesuits, as a graduate student: I expected there to be a single historical narrative. I expected that someone had already written extensively about the Apollo spacesuit, because it’s such an iconic object of the 20th century. But there was very little writing to be found.

Then, in 2003, I was invited to give a lecture at the Santa Fe Institute, which was a slightly intimidating thing to do—I was on the same bill as James Crick, Stewart Brand, and all these other heavyweights! I was looking for a way to discuss the essential lessons of complexity and emergence—which, even in 2003, were pretty unfamiliar words in the context of design—and I hit upon this research on the spacesuit as the one thing I’d done that could encapsulate the potential lessons of those ideas, both for scientists and for designers.

The book really was a melding of these two things. One is very much a situation where the chapters alternate between a focus on the object itself and its astonishing history—being made by Playtex, who was an underdog in the whole suit-design process, and that suit’s hand-crafted nature, etc.—and the other is an equally layered but very outward-looking narrative, from the vacuum of outer space to early ideas of computing, simulation, the body, cybernetic theories of urbanism, etc. etc.

Just as the structure of the spacesuit allowed many different approaches to be hybridized, from girdle-making to military-industrial engineering, so too did the structure of the book allow these complex internal and external narratives to be bound together into a single volume.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: At its most basic, your book tells the story of how humans have costumed themselves for extreme exploration. From the Mongolfiers’ balloon to Wiley Post and the high-altitude jump suit, you reveal some fascinating design precedents for the Apollo spacesuit—suggesting that it’s almost more of a technical outgrowth from the history of baroque costume design. Could you speak a little bit more about this background?

de Monchaux: One of the things I find most fascinating about the idea of the spacesuit is that space is actually a very complex and subtle idea. On the one hand, there is space as an environment outside of the earthly realm, which is inherently hostile to human occupation—and it was actually John Milton who first coined the term space in that context.

On the other hand, you have the space of the architect—and the space of outer space is actually the opposite of the space of the architect, because it is a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on technological mediation.

Whether it’s the early French balloonists bringing capsules of breathable air with them or it’s the Mongolfier brothers trying to burn sheep dung to keep their vital airs alive in the early days of ballooning, up to the present day, space is actually defined as an environment to which we cannot be suited—that is to say, fit. Just like a business suit suits you to have a business meeting with a banker, a spacesuit suits you to enter this environment that is otherwise inhospitable to human occupation.

From that—the idea of suiting—you also get to the idea of fashion. Of course, this notion of the suited astronaut is an iconic and heroic figure, but there is actually some irony in that.

For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program.

But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing.

The spacesuit, in the end, is an object that crystallizes a lot of ideas about who we are and what the nature of the human body may be—but, then, crucially, it’s also an object in which many centuries of ideas about the relationship of our bodies to technology are reflected.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: The spacesuit’s history implies a sort of David Bowie-like situation where astronauts are really cosmic cross-dressers—genderless and post-terrestrial, with no obligation to stay on Earth. But there are at least three different ways, I’d say, of preparing humans for inhospitable circumstances, whether that’s the moon, Antarctica, or Mars: one, you can turn humans into cyborgs, as you just explained; two, you can build them a spacesuit, which makes our ability to visit other planets a kind of unexpected outgrowth of the fashion industry; or, three, you can actually alter the atmosphere of the target destination itself, terraforming it, making it more Earth-like. It’s neither fashion nor architecture, but more like planetary-scale weather engineering.

de Monchaux: Well, I’d say that those are actually still two approaches. The cyborg approach and the climate-modification approach are not only one idea, conceptually, but they are also one and the same historically. The same individuals and organizations who were presuming to engineer the internal climate of the body and create the figure of the cyborg were the same institutions who, in the same context of the 1960s, were proposing major efforts in climate-modification.

Embedded in both of those ideas is the notion that we can reduce a complex, emergent system—whether it’s the body or the planet or something closer to the scale of the city—to a series of cybernetically inflected inputs, outputs, and controls. As Edward Teller remarked in the context of his own climate-engineering proposals, “to give the earth a thermostat.”

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about other uses of spacesuit technology. For instance, biosafety suits allow humans to clean up after virological outbreaks or to enter Level 4 bioresearch labs without become infected—it’s clothing as quarantine, we might say. But there is also a different kind of space exploration, which is terrestrial exploration into the earth itself, through caving. The complex rebreathing apparatuses and wetsuits used in cave diving, in particular, are perhaps earthbound cousins of the Apollo spacesuit that you describe so well in the book.

de Monchaux: Absolutely. It’s the same notion. In the devices, mechanisms, and portable environments that we make for ourselves, and that we bring with us into these extreme situations, we see both the inconvenient truths and the convenient untruths of the relationships between technology and the body.

In the 1960s, which was a very anxious time in terms of the safety of the body, you have the image of the space traveler—but it was also an era of films like Fantastic Voyage where the human body itself was deemed to be this fantastic environment that we could enter using technologically mediated tools. And, in films like The Andromeda Strain, there’s that fabulous scene where the wall becomes the suit of the medical worker in quarantine. The architecture literally becomes a piece of clothing that you can wear.

In a sense, though, the diving suit is a fundamentally different technical project from a spacesuit. For instance, a diving suit has to protect against external compressive forces, whereas, in the spacesuit, it’s the internal expansion of a breathable atmosphere that the suit needs to hold in.

Other than that simple difference, though, the technologies end up being quite similar. For instance, the hard suits proposed by Litton Industries for use on the moon were never used, because, though they were conceptually very clear, they were logistically more cumbersome than the soft, mutable suits by Playtex. However, they ended up being adapted into a series of deep-sea diving suits—in fact, becoming the first jointed diving suits engineered in the 1960s.

Further, the same industrial division of Playtex that produced the Apollo spacesuit produces many of the suits used today by the EPA for major threat-level spills and contamination events, because the fundamental lessons about how to suit the body for these hostile environments are very similar.

As we’re discovering, we don’t have to go a quarter-million miles to the surface of the moon to discover environments that are inhospitable to the human body.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: On a more speculative level, your research implies, in a sense, that architects could simply design portable environments, in the form of elaborate, pressurized clothing and so on, instead of stationary structures called buildings. Put another way, is it no longer an avant-garde question to ask if clothing is the future of architecture?

de Monchaux: There are at least two levels at which that is very much true. An interesting history has yet to be written about the architectural influence of the Space Race. We’re used to understanding groups like Archigram and Coop Himmelb(l)au as being very influenced by inflatable environments and space habitats in the 1960s—and they truly were, and that’s a fascinating history. Even in the Soviet context, you see a kind of heroic architecture that springs directly out of the Space Race, such as the use of gigantic trusses and frames.

But if you look at American architectural magazines from the same era, you don’t see any of that at all. What you actually see is a kind of utopian vision of the systems-management that was at the core of NASA’s own technical approach, as if it could offer its own revolutionary hopes for architecture. In other words, there was something about the European perspective that seized on the actual, physical architectures of the American and Soviet space programs. For the American architectural psyche, the complex systems of the space race implied that any complex situation—cities, in particular—could be subject to principles of management.

This is interesting, especially as we see a return to the intimate as a zone for design in today’s architectural scene. We have many of the same anxieties and hopes now as were the case in the 1960s, when things like Michael Webb’s “Cushicle” first made their appearance. You only have to look at the work of someone like Hussein Chalayan, in fashion design, to see a vision of clothing itself embedded with sensors and actuators and HVAC and infrastructure, that recalls the complexity and function of a building more than anything like traditional clothing. And I would contrast this with the current architectural fascination for extending parametric systems to every scale.

As for the architecture of fabric more broadly, I think, as was the case in the Apollo program, fabric has a discourse of softness, protection, and layering that is very appropriate to our current architectural moment, despite the hard logic of systems that underlies much of what passes for fashion in architecture these days.

It’s also important to note that, in a world that is moving so fast, and in such uneasy and unsettling directions with issues such as climate change, peak oil, and the resilience of cities, that something like a clothing-based solution is probably more credible than parametrically designing whole future cities from scratch. Of course, as was pointed out by Walter Benjamin, fashion and the city have an intimate and particular relationship that I think is of clear relevance to this discussion.

I love the word fashion, by the way, because, on the one hand, it speaks to a kind of utter fabulousness that none of us, as designers, could live without; but, at the same time, fashion means to make something out of something else, often with a connotation that this is something it wasn’t originally intended for.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: The application of cybernetic and systems-based approaches to the management and administration of cities is also explored by another recent book—The Fires by Joe Flood. Flood’s book specifically looks at the limitations of cybernetic management as applied to firefighting in New York City. The failures of this era of city management seem increasingly of interest today, in fact, when places like New York now have “Chief Digital Officers” and so-called Smart Cities are all the rage. Your book seems, really, to be a prehistory for all this.

de Monchaux: When I presented the original lecture that turned into the Spacesuit book, I made a link between the spacesuit and the urban and environmental scale, mostly through what I would call a system of analogy; the body and the city have been talked about as models for each other at least since Vitruvius. Yet as I delved into the history of NASA, I discovered that what I had thought of initially as an analogy was, in fact, a dense web of historical and material connections.

In the book, I write about a figure named Harold Finger, who was, first, the director of research into nuclear propulsion for something called NACA, a predecessor of NASA. Finger did things like put the only nuclear reactor ever in an airplane—in a B-36 Peacemaker nuclear bomber. The windows to the cockpit needed to be 9-inch thick plexiglass to protect the pilots from radiation. You couldn’t make this stuff up! By 1962, the same figure—Finger—is designing long-range, nuclear-propelled, interplanetary spacecraft. He actually designed the spacecraft that Kubrick lifted and used as a model for the “Discovery” in 2001, with the nuclear reactor at one end, a long spur, and then a habitation module at the other end. And then he becomes NASA’s administrative director.

In 1968, though, he makes a shift to become the director of research for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And this was not some unusual, crazy thing, where the director of research from NASA moves to HUD. This was very much the tenor of the time.

When Hubert Humphrey made his famous speech—where he said that the same techniques that got us to the moon would also solve the problems of American cities—he wasn’t operating by analogy. He was actually talking very explicitly about a direct transfer of techniques and ideas. You had this historical moment where there was a perceived crisis in the American city; you had the heroic victory of Apollo; and, of course, you then had the radical defunding of the space program. After all, the space program was only ever designed to produce a single TV image of an American man on the moon. In 1968, once they’d succeeded in doing that, you had all of the original engineers losing their jobs.

For instance, at Berkeley, where I teach, and also at MIT, there was a summer school in 1968 explicitly organized to train engineers who had been let go from NASA for new jobs in urban administration—for NASA engineers to become city managers. You can’t underestimate the extent to which this attempt to transfer the techniques of systems management from the national space program to cities was very self-conscious.

Also in 1968, for example, Jay Forrester wrote a book called Urban Dynamics, a very comprehensive cybernetic analysis of urban problems. Forrester was the guy who invented magnetic core memory—RAM—as well as early systems of computer networking for something called the semi-automatic ground environment, or SAGE, a nuclear defense system for the Air Force. And General Bernard Schriever, commander of the Air Force’s Western Development Division from 1954, developed systems engineering with Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldrige of what would become TRW; Neil Sheehan just wrote a marvelous biography of this moment in Schriever’s career. By 1968, Schriever was running a firm called Urban Systems Associates, or U.S.A. Simon Ramo also published his own book on applying systems engineering to urban problems in the same year, called Cure for Chaos.

Yet much like the attempts of the military-industrial complex to design, in the context of the space race, for the human body, most attempts to cybernetically optimize urban systems were spectacular failures, from which very few lessons seem to have been learned.

For instance, in our current architectural moment, our popular discourses of parametric urbanism and digital urban design seem to have been cut from the very same cloth. I was at the Parametric Urbanism conference at USC eighteen months ago and, just for my own amusement, I juxtaposed a series of quotations that came out of USC in a previous era, from a book written by a guy named Glen Swanson, who gave a symposium on the “Cybernetic Approach to Urban Analysis” in 1964.

If you lay, side by side, quotations from USC’s discourse on parametric urbanism now and USC’s discourse on cybernetic urbanism thirty years ago, for better or for worse, you can read them as a complete narrative. It’s impossible to distinguish which is which. Both are born out of a fundamental faith in technology and a fundamental notion that, if you feed enough variables into a problem-solving system—now we call it parametric, then we would have called it cybernetic—that an appropriate and robust solution will emerge. I’m not, myself, so sure that’s the case; in fact, I’m pretty certain that it’s not.

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious, then, how you’ll incorporate this criticism into your own Studio One program at Berkeley, which will include the use of parametric design tools as well as your own custom modeling software. How will you differentiate Studio One from the overtly technocratic approach that you just described, and what, in the end, is the ultimate goal for the studio?

de Monchaux: I wrote the Spacesuit book very much in the spirit of my own heroes and teachers—people like Alan Colquhoun, Liz Diller, and a whole generation of architects who were also theorists. They intended to figure out the meaning of the moment in which they found themselves, but then also to design for it. That means, of course, that I can’t just sit back and talk about these issues of technology and the city; I actually have to imagine what a constructive practice might be. That’s what I’ve focused on most in the past two to three years, and what has led to Studio One.

But the Studio One project really builds on the work that I’ve published as “Local Code.” I think one interesting point of intersection between them—and, I think, a shared interest with you—is the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. “Local Code” was very much a take on Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates,” which was not actually conceived as a documentary project. Matta-Clark was interested, in the 1970s, in the kind of fissures and overlaps between the official and systematized vision of property assumed by the cadastral map and the actual nature of property on the ground.

One of the things I think is important about technology in the current moment is that it allows us ever more completely to visualize and very precisely map the fissures between a technologically mediated understanding of the world and the world as it actually is—and then to exploit those fissures as designers.

A bit like my stumbling on the links between the space race and the urban history of the late 1960s, when I went into the “Local Code” project, I thought that “Fake Estates” was just a great analogy. Now, though, you can find 5,000 sites in New York instead of 15, and you can even figure out, parametrically, what to do with them and how to turn them into an ecological resource. But then, when I went into the history, it turns out that, by 1975-77, Matta-Clark was deeply excited about the prospects of computing and digital mapping, and he had conceived a whole project using left-over urban space—in his case, I kid you not, for a whole series of what he called “pneumatic network enclosures” that would have provided resources to underprivileged neighborhoods.

So we can look to his practice not just as a kind of analogical inspiration but, more literally, as an interesting alternative model for architecture: that architecture can be informed by technology and, at the same time, avoid what I view as the dead-end of an algorithmically inflected formalism from which many of the, to my mind, less convincing examples of contemporary practice have emerged.

I’m actually speaking to you right now from the Autodesk office in downtown San Francisco. I don’t know if you can see the Ferry Building over my shoulder [N.b. picks up laptop and angles camera outside the window toward the Ferry Building], but they’ve invited us to do a residency here and to complete the parametric design of the 5,000 leftover spaces in New York that we’ve identified. We’ll have that project going on all spring here, hoping to publish it this summer.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: I would love to see the non-urban equivalent of this project. In other words, it would be fascinating to see what scraps of land, in extremely rural areas, also fall into these sorts of federal, municipal, and even just gerrymandered blindspots. Spatial fissures, as you call them, can be just as complex outside the context of, say, downtown San Francisco or Manhattan.

de Monchaux: Of course! The modernist notion that the world needs to be perfect is something that is so fundamental to how architects think about design, yet so potentially problematic in its actual application. Matta-Clark said very directly that “the availability of leftover and unplanned space is one of the primary critiques of progress through modernization.”

[Image: From “Meatropolis” by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: One other aspect of your work that I want to touch on briefly is an essay of yours called “Meatropolis,” on food and the city—in particular, on meat and Manhattan. I’d love to hear more about your research into how urban form can be seen as a graph of shifting consumption practices.

de Monchaux: Many people have looked at the history of the city and meat, of course, but that paper was my attempt to see how and whether there was any further truth behind the formal resonance. In the case of my essay, I showed the butcher diagram of a cow and a map of all the neighborhoods of Manhattan—and they do look fairly similar—but the essay tries to examine whether there’s anything more to that superficial similarity.

And, in my mind, there actually is. In both cases, you have complex tissue reduced to a simplified diagram for the sake of its consumption. But we confuse the butchering diagram with the cow, and the neighborhood diagram with the city, at our peril. That’s a highly consumptive and highly simplistic lens—the lens of neighborhoods, the lens of cuts of meat.

Robert Moses once said that, in order to make the city work, you have to cut through it with a meat axe—but it turns out the city has a whole complex set of tissues and connections that are, in Jane Jacobs’s words, inherently irreducible to diagrams. They are, in her words, as slippery as an eel—to use another food metaphor.

I think that, between those two, you have a really interesting space. One of the other historical connections that turned up in my own work is between the early writing of Jane Jacobs, in the case of Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the early research done in the 1950s and 60s on complexity and emergence under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation not only funded Jacobs’s work to the tune of about $5,000 in 1962, which was a lot of money back then, but also gave her office space with the then-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Warren Weaver. Weaver was a seminal founding figure of complexity science, and was, in fact, the first to coin the phrase “the science of organized complexity”—this notion that our attempts at measurement both freeze and oversimplify something fundamental to natural systems at every scale, from our own body to the city, upward to the ecology of the planet as a whole.

Interestingly, just to bring it full-circle, when I gave my spacesuit lecture at the Santa Fe Institute in 2003, the notion that the city itself should essentially be seen as a complex system was something that people took for granted, but it didn’t have a lot to do with the work that was going on there in complex systems and emergence.

Since that time, however, in the last couple of years, I’ve been engaged with the work of two scientists at the Institute—Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt—who have gone a long way in showing that, not only should cities be viewed through the analogical lens of complex natural systems, but, in fact, some of the mathematics—in particular, to do with scaling laws, the consumption of resources, and the production of innovation by cities—proves itself far more susceptible to analyses that have come out of biology than, say, conventional economics.

And at the same time, current work in more conventional biology—for example, with the internal biome and ecology of our bodies, where bacterial cells outnumber our own cells by 10 to 1—uses economic and statistical techniques developed to understand cities.

So, without falling too far into sensationalism, we’re getting really interesting indications that intuitions by anyone flying in an airplane at night—that cities look like amoebae or giant life forms—might be a lot closer to the truth than we’ve ever had a chance to understand before, both in the sense that they have their own kind of biology and that organisms are turning out to have their own kind of urbane, material economy.

[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

BLDGBLOG: Even the design tools and software packages that we use often have surprising and unexpected connections across disciplines, from urban mapping to missile guidance and from cancer research to special effects. Software archaeology becomes really interesting, in this context—looking at the shared codes and subroutines of otherwise very different software programs. For instance, Auto-Tune, which is now used on basically every pop record, was actually designed as a seismic-analysis tool for Exxon, to find underground oil deposits. My point is that many, seemingly unrelated disciplines can actually have a lively and engaged conversation together simply on the level of shared research tools.

de Monchaux: Yes. For instance, it’s become fashionable—probably rightly so—to talk about the formal and analogical links between the technological systems and media by which we design today and the midcentury systems of the military-industrial complex. But I didn’t fully realize, for instance, how much of the CAD system that I’m sitting in front of right now here at Autodesk, or the GIS technologies that I make use of in the office, come out of very direct historical and material connections.

For instance, not only is the GIS software that I used to make “Local Codelike the software that was developed to target defensive nuclear missiles; it, in many ways, is that system. It shares code with it; it shares conceptual and algorithmic approaches with it, including the projection of cartographic information onto screens in an interactive way.

As designers, we stand much more shoulder-to-shoulder with the missile-men and systems engineers of midcentury than we might even feel comfortable with, in terms of the tools that we’re increasingly using to shape the physical world.

An awareness of the true nature of those tools is essential, I think, for us to unlock their actual, potentially liberating possibilities; knowing their origins, you can be much more strategic in your relationship to that history, and use these tools not as they were intended to be used—or even directly as they weren’t intended to be used—but from more oblique perspectives, more uncanny angles of incidence. It’s in this territory, I think, that much more essential and interesting architectural research needs to be done.

• • •

[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].

Thanks again to Nicholas de Monchaux for having this conversation! For more, pick up a copy of his book, about which you can read more at its website, Fashioning Apollo.

Infrastructural Opportunism

[Image: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

Going all the way back to the fall of 1997, my own interest in architecture was more or less reinvigorated—leading, by way of a long chain of future events, to the eventual start of BLDGBLOG—by Mary-Ann Ray’s installment in the great Pamphlet Architecture series, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets.

To this day, the pamphlet format—short books, easily carried around town, packed with spatial ideas and constructive speculations—remains inspiring.

The 30th installment in this canonical series is thankfully a great one, authored by Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab, a design firm and its attendant research blog that I’ve been following for many years.

[Image: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

The premise of the work documented by their book, Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, is to seek out moments in which architecturally dormant landscapes, from the Arctic Circle to the Salton Sea, can be activated by infrastructure and/or spatially reused. Their work is thus “opportunistic,” as the pamphlet’s title implies. It is architecture at the scale of infrastructure, and infrastructure at the scale of hemispheres and ecosystems—the becoming-continental of the architecture brief.

In the process, their proposed interventions are meant to augment processes already active in the terrain in question—processes that remain underutilized or, rather, below the threshold of spatial detection.

As the authors themselves describe it, these projects “double as landscape life support, creating new sites for production and recreation. The ambition is to supplement ecologies at risk rather than overhaul them.”

[Images: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

One of the highlights of the book for me is a section on the so-called “Next North.” Here, they offer “a series of proposals centered on the ecological and social empowerment of Canada’s unique Far North and its attendant networks.”

Throughout the twentieth century, the Canadian North had a sordid and unfortunate history of colonial enterprises, political maneuverings, and non-integrated development proposals that perpetuated sovereign control and economic development. Northern developments are intimately tied to the construction of infrastructure, though these projects are rarely conceived with a long-term, holistic vision. How might future infrastructures participate in cultivating and perpetuating ecosystems and local cultures, rather than threatening them? How might Arctic settlements respond more directly to the exigencies of this transforming climate and geography, and its ever-increasing pressures from the South? What is next for the North?

Three specific projects follow. One outlines the technical possibility of building “Ice Road Truck Stops.” These would use “intersecting meshes,” almost as a kind of cryotechnical rebar, inserted into the frozen surfaces of Arctic lakes to “address road reinforcement, energy capture, and aquatic ecologies.”

The mesh is installed at critical shorelines just below the water’s surface, serving to reinforce ice roads during the winter and invigorate lake ecologies during warmer seasons. As trucks travel over the ice road, a hydrodynamic wave forms below the ice, which the mesh captures and converts to energy through a proposed buoy network.

There is then a series of “Caribou Pivot Stations”—further proof that cross-species design is gathering strength in today’s zeitgeist—helping caribou to forage for food on their seasonal migrations; and a so-called “Liquid Commons,” which is a “malleable educational infrastructure composed of a series of boats that travel between the harbors of eleven adjacent communities.” It is a mobile, nomadic network bringing tax-funded educational opportunities to the residents of this emerging Next North.

[Images: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

Here, I should point out that the book has an air of earnestness—everything is very serious and technical and not to be laughed at—but the projects themselves often belie this attitude. It’s as if the authors are aware of, and even revel in, the speculative nature of their ideas, but seem somehow rhetorically unwilling to give away the game. But the implication that these projects are eminently buildable—shovel-ready projects just waiting for a financial green light to do things like “cultivate” ice in the Bering Strait (duly illustrated with a Photoshopped walrus) or “harvest” water from the Salton Sea—is a large part of what makes the book such an enjoyable read.

After all, does presenting speculative work as if it could happen tomorrow—as if it is anything but speculative—increase its architectural value? Or should such work always hold itself at an arm’s length from realizability, so as to highlight its provocative or polemical tone?

The projects featured in Coupling have an almost tongue-in-cheek buildability to them—such as recreational climbing walls on abandoned oil platforms in the Caspian Sea. This opens a whole slew of important questions about what rhetorical mode—what strategy of self-presentation—is most useful and appropriate for upstart architectural firms. (At the very least, this would make for a fascinating future discussion).

[Image: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

In any case, the book is loaded with diagrams, as you can see from the selections reproduced here, including a volumetric study (above) that runs through various courtyard typologies for a hypothetical mixed-use project in Iceland. For more on that particular work, see this older, heavily-illustrated BLDGBLOG post.

[Images: From Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab].

Essays by David Gissen, Keller Easterling, Charles Waldheim, and Christopher Hight round out the book’s content. It’s a solid pamphlet, both practical and imaginative—made even more provocative by its implied feasibility—and a fantastic choice for the 30th edition of this long-running series.

Stealth Objects and Scanning Mist

The London-based architectural group ScanLAB—founded by Matthew Shaw and William Trossell—has been doing some fascinating work with laser scanners.

Here are three of their recent projects.

1) Scanning Mist. Shaw and Trossell “thought it might be interesting to see if the scanner could detect smoke and mist. It did and here are the remarkable results!

[Images: From Scanning the Mist by ScanLAB].

In a way, I’m reminded of photographs by Alexey Titarenko.

2) Scanning an Artificial Weather System. For this project, ScanLAB wanted to “draw attention to the magical properties of weather events.” They thus installed a network of what they call “pressure vessels linked to an array of humidity tanks” in the middle of England’s Kielder Forest.

[Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].

These “humidity tanks” then, at certain atmospherically appropriate moments, dispersed a fine mist, deploying an artificial cloud or fog bank into the woods.

[Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].

Then, of course, Shaw and Trossell laser-scanned it.

3) Subverting Urban-Scanning Projects through “Stealth Objects.” The architectural potential of this final project blows me away. Basically, Shaw and Trossell have been looking at “the subversion of city scale 3D scanning in London.” As they explain it, “the project uses hypothetical devices which are installed across the city and which edit the way the city is scanned and recorded.”

Tools include the “stealth drill” which dissolves scan data in the surrounding area, creating voids and new openings in the scanned urban landscape, and “boundary miscommunication devices” which offset, relocate and invent spatial data such as paths, boundaries, tunnels and walls.

The spatial and counter-spatial possibilities of this are extraordinary. Imagine whole new classes of architectural ornament (ornament as digital camouflage that scans in precise and strange ways), entirely new kinds of building facades (augmented reality meets LiDAR), and, of course, the creation of a kind of shadow-architecture, invisible to the naked eye, that only pops up on laser scanners at various points around the city.

[Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].

ScanLAB refers to this as “the deployment of flash architecture”—flash streets, flash statues, flash doors, instancing gates—like something from a short story by China Miéville. The narrative and/or cinematic possibilities of these “stealth objects” are seemingly limitless, let alone their architectural or ornamental use.

Imagine stealth statuary dotting the streetscape, for instance, or other anomalous spatial entities that become an accepted part of the urban fabric. They exist only as representational effects on the technologies through which we view the landscape—but they eventually become landmarks, nonetheless.

For now, Shaw and Trossell explain that they are experimenting with “speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains. These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them.”

[Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].

Here is one such “stealth object,” pictured below, designed to be “undetected” by laser-scanning equipment.

Of course, it is not hard to imagine the military being interested in this research, creating stealth body armor, stealth ground vehicles, even stealth forward-operating bases, all of which would be geometrically invisible to radar and/or scanning equipment.

In fact, one could easily imagine a kind of weapon with no moving parts, consisting entirely of radar- and LiDAR-jamming geometries; you would thus simply plant this thing, like some sort of medieval totem pole, in the streets of Mogadishu—or ring hundreds of them in a necklace around Washington D.C.—thus precluding enemy attempts to visualize your movements.

[Images: A hypothetical “stealth object,” resistant to laser-scanning, by ScanLAB].

Briefly, ScanLAB’s “stealth object” reminds me of an idea bandied about by the U.S. Department of Energy, suggesting that future nuclear-waste entombment sites should be liberally peppered with misleading “radar reflectors” buried in the surface of the earth.

The D.O.E.’s “trihedral” objects would produce “distinctive anomalous magnetic and radar-reflective signatures” for anyone using ground-scanning equipment above. In other words, they would create deliberate false clues, leading potential future excavators to think that they were digging in the wrong place. They would “subvert” the scanning process.

In any case, read more at ScanLAB’s website.

Earthquake Sounds, Tsunami Rocks, Future Trenches

[Image: Photo by Ko Sasaki, courtesy of the New York Times].

1) “This webpage contains earthquake ‘sounds’ created from seismic recordings around the world generated by the 2011/03/11 Mw9.0 Tohoku, Japan earthquake. They provide a unique way for us to listen to the vibration of the Earth that is otherwise inaudible to us, and to decipher the complicated earthquake physics and triggering processes.”

2) “The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: ‘Do not build your homes below this point!’ Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone… Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation.”

3) “Europe may be starting to dive under Africa, creating a new subduction zone and potentially increasing the earthquake risk in the western Mediterranean Sea… For millions of years the African plate, which contains part of the Mediterranean seabed, has been moving northward toward the Eurasian Plate at a rate of about an inch every 2.5 years (a centimeter a year). Now studies of recent earthquakes in the region indicate that a new subduction zone may be forming where the plates are colliding along the coasts of Algeria and northern Sicily… [M]ost established subduction zones are marked by giant undersea trenches. A similar trench should eventually form in the Mediterranean—but certainly not overnight.”

Architectural Ecology

It’s not difficult to imagine finding unexpected affinities between a specific animal species and certain types of architectural ornament, whether it’s pigeons nesting on the tops of ruined columns in Rome, bats colonizing the attic windows of single-family Victorian homes, or bees, moths, wasps, and other bugs breeding in the cracks of terracotta egg-and-dart.

[Image: A bird in Rome].

However, it would be interesting to see if any of the following scenarios might be true:

1) Ornamental details from a particular phase of, say, the Baroque—or the Gothic, or Dravidian temple design—are found to attract a specific species of bird, whose size, nesting needs, etc., correspond exactly to the proportional details of this decorative style. Because of the foods those birds eat, however, and, thus, what seeds they later spread around their flight paths, their guano results in a very specific kind of forest growing around each building (or its ruins). The buildings catalyze their own ecological context, in other words, ringed by forests they indirectly helped create.

2) A particular type of early modern warehouse or other such industrial structure is found to house a specific species of bird, perhaps because only its frame can fit through gaps in the brickwork, precluding colonization by other species. Thus, while all other bird species in the local ecosystem have gone extinct—due to habitat loss, food-web collapse, or whatever—these birds, regally ensconced inside their protective warehouses, manage to survive. They are thus saved by 19th-century architecture—perhaps even by one architecture office’s work. A species that only lives inside buildings by Anthony George Lyster.

3) When the type of stone used to build a region’s churches erodes, weathering away to nothing, its remnant minerals fertilize a specific type of weed or small flowering plant, one that would otherwise eventually have died off. Thus, whenever you see a particular flower, you can deduce from its presence that a church built during this particular phase of architectural history once stood there. The flowers are archaeological indicators, we might say: botanical traces of architectural history.

[Image: Del Castello dell’Acqua Giulia by Piranesi].

In all three cases, these buildings’ unanticipated side-effects would ripple outward to influence the evolutionary development of other, future species, whose ecological origins are thus at least partially predicated on the existence of a specific phase of, for example, Baroque architecture or 19th-century warehouse design. So when those architects were designing their buildings, they were also indirectly designing future species.

Fiction and the city

[Images: From “Dream Isle” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Thomas Hillier, Maxwell Mutanda, Rachel Guo, and Ed Liu, from Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions].

I’ve just received a copy of the forthcoming book Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions by CJ Lim and Ed Liu, and I thought I’d include a few glimpses of it here.

[Image: From “Carousel” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda, from Short Stories].

The book is ostensibly a collection of spatial short stories in which “unexpected environments and places transform into active protagonists.” The stories are “laced with a healthy dose of myth and locational specificity,” as the authors write in the book’s preface.

They continue:

The short stories of this book’s title are set in different time periods of London, intentionally locating themselves in the liminal territory between fiction and architecture to provoke an engagement between readers and their two-dimensional counterparts occupying the depicted city. The stories are neither illustrated texts nor captioned images; the collages represent a network of spatial relationships, and the text, which splices genre such as science fiction, magical realism and the fairy tale, a thread that links some of the nodes of that network together.

In the two following images, for instance, produced by the authors in collaboration with Maxwell Mutanda and Tomasz Marchewka, we see a fictive bridge connecting what are described as the warring tribes of north and south London. There are 214 bridges over the Thames, this story goes, but every year a new connective filament appears: a 215th bridge.

This bridge, “in contrast to its predecessors, is a transitory connection joining the two halves of the metropolis only between the summer months of June and September, during which a common amnesty is held.”

[Images: From “Discontinuous Cities” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda and Tomasz Marchewka, from Short Stories].

In other stories, Alice in Wonderland collides with the Playboy Mansion, which arrives for one night, and one night only, in the parks of London, where “underground chambers, replicating the hole through which Alice follows the white rabbit, had been scattered through the garden, capped with circular lenses and mirrors,” optically augmenting this hedonistic underworld.

A “roving telescopic contraption” roams the streets; a leather suitcase pops open and “the habitable spaces within extend and unfold each morning to provide a stage for grooming, relaxation and formal dining”; a landscape illuminated by falling stars is discovered to be watered from below by “networks of metal piping” that “mirrored the arrangement of flowers above.”

Elsewhere, a baker works himself to exhaustion “every day without fail,” perfuming the city with fresh bread from within his “synaesthetic pleasure dome,” its “glorious landscape of smells shifting from fermenting acidity to caramelizing sweetness, a riot of auburn and amber reflecting the fires of the bakery and street lamps outside, a symphony of hissing steam and the pummeling of dough.”

The two images, below, show “nebulous clouds of steam,” like an artificial weather front—its “topiaries of water vapour will become indistinguishable from clouds,” we read—being produced in the baker’s garden.

[Images: From “The Baker’s Garden” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Safia Qureshi, from Short Stories].

There are dragons and summer solstices and mechanical animals roving the streets; butchers’ towers, police on horseback, and a fictional interview with the director of something called the New Battersea Centre for Dogs, who explains how she managed to transform vast circular gasometers into greyhound racing parks.

As novelist China Miéville explained to BLDGBLOG in an interview published here last month, London is a city peculiarly well-suited for these sorts of literary and spatial phantasmagoria: “For various reasons, some cities refract, through aesthetics and through art, with a particular kind of flamboyancy. For whatever reason, London is one of them. I don’t mean to detract from all the other cities in the world that have their own sort of Gnosticism, but it is definitely the case that London has worked particularly well for this.”

[Images: From “The Nocturnal Tower” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Barry Cho, from Short Stories].

In Short Stories—where myths are told through photographs of pop-out paper figures and propped-open books—London becomes a city architects will always have the freedom to re-dream, and architecture itself becomes a way to undo the spatial straightjackets we find ourselves within.

But does all this mean that the architect is thus politically neutered, reduced to the role of court jester, telling stories of impossible urban boroughs while the real city takes shape, a graph of nothing but the financial needs of absentee developers, hypnotized by fairy tales of a metropolis that can never be built?

[Images: From “The Celestial River” by CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects with Maxwell Mutanda and Sarah Custance, from Short Stories].

Not at all: architects telling stories with and through complex spatial representations—rather than merely supplying construction documents—brings them into contact with all the arts and sciences that have always and already used the built environment as a framework for larger, abstract ideas. Architectural mythology doesn’t cede anyone’s right—or political ability—to change the city, any more than cinema, games, music, poetry, or narrative fiction might do, despite fundamentalist claims that these operate as nothing but middle-class distractions; in all cases, these and other speculative entertainments are often precisely the reason why new visions of human community, spatial justice, and cathartic well-being arise in the first place.

Of course, spatial tales will inspire some people simply to daydream, but that hardly sabotages architecture’s undeniable power to push others to pursue, with great fervor and enthusiasm, the means of seeing such strange and hallucinatory sights someday come true.

Science fiction is no substitute for science itself, but it is a valuable, if not conceptually indispensable, tool for generating, discussing, and communicating often radical ideas.

And the same is true for architecture’s relationship with architectural fiction: thankfully, the latter will not replace the former—but, again, that’s not its point.

The point of “combining place and fiction,” as Short Stories describes it, is not so that we can sit around infantilizing one another with fairy tales, treating the world as empty spectacle, but to reveal, through projects of great imaginative power, that another world is possible, and architects have a unique ability to chaperone this future earth into existence.

Canal Street Cross-Section

[Image: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].

Alan Wolfson’s Canal Street Cross-Section, a miniature depiction of the New York street and subway station, will be on display this summer as part of the forthcoming group exhibition, Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, starting 7 June.

[Images: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].

Wolfson explains that he “wanted to build a piece that resembled a core sample of a city street. As though you took a street, dug it up, and lifted it straight off the earth.”

The resulting urban core sample has the look of a toy oven or vending machine—as if, in the latter case, we could someday just a few quarters into a streetside machine and walk away holding complete miniature rooms, intact down to their ads and posters, extruded from some kind of self-replicating master-model.

[Image: From Canal Street Cross-Section by Alan Wolfson].

“The problem,” as he explains it, “was to make all that architecture work together and make sense visually. I was able to do that by having windows on the sides of the piece to accommodate the cross views. I gave the subway platform a sense of depth by using a carefully placed mirror at the far end. As with almost all of my projects, the sight lines were critical.” The piece, we might say, required a kind of Piranesian optical correction so that all its cross-angles and counterviews could be spatially comprehensible.

You can see many, many more photographs of Canal Street Cross-Section over on Wolfson’s website, as well as dozens of other, often quite incredible “miniature urban sculptures,” as the artist describes them.

(Spotted via Thomas Pollman and Joe Alterio; earlier on BLDGBLOG: Romecore).

Time, Photography, and Spatial Devices

[Image: From the “Bird Automata Research Test Track” by Nat Chard].

Fabricate is underway over in London, wrapping up in only a few hours (read a bit more about it here).

One of the conference’s many speakers is Nat Chard, from the University of Manitoba, who recently got in touch with some fantastic project images, showing mechanisms and devices of various functions and scales.

[Images: From the “Bird Automata Research Test Track” by Nat Chard].

The first project seen here is the “Bird Automata Research Test Track.” It’s a spatial condensation and narrative reenactment of early attempts to photograph the anatomical movements associated with bird flight.

The set-up is a reference to the work of early artist-scientists such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who sought to develop a technical means for analyzing physiological activity as a series of discrete, individual moments—or bodily freeze frames, if you will—using chronophotography.

[Image: A chronophotograph by Étienne-Jules Marey].

As Jussi Parikka describes this in his recent book Insect Media, for late 19th-century and early 20th-century scientists, animal life represented “a microcosmos of new movements, actions, and perceptions”—it was seen as “something akin to a foreign planet of perceptions waiting to be excavated and reproduced.”

Whole new branches of technology were therefore developed in order to record and study how these unfamiliar anatomies interacted with the surrounding environment.

[Image: The spatial apparatus behind bird chronophotography].

Chard’s bird track is thus an exploration of “representational stop animation… witnessed by researchers from two camera positions.” But the birds are not natural, living creatures; they are automata, machines: “A researcher tracks one of the birds in elevation, the other camera is sited at the end of the track watching the approaching birds. There is a stair cantilevered off the start of the track to allow access to set up the automata for a flight.”

[Images: From the “Bird Automata Research Test Track” by Nat Chard].

The spatial implications of chronophotography—which visually shatters the passage of time into a series of discrete moments extracted from an event-sequence of otherwise unfixed length and duration—leads to a reference, in a text on Chard’s website, to the fact that criminologists, physicists, and even paranormal investigators all also began to use “the emerging potential of photography to further their research.” In the process, those researchers “developed new sorts of architecture particular to the demands and opportunities of the medium and the way they were using [them]. There are many research institutions that display the emergence of a new architecture with very little typological precedent.”

I might refer to this instead not as architecture, though, but as spatial equipment for the measurable demarcation of fixed events. Or, if it is architecture, it is architecture as a piece of gear—a device, an instrument—that lets you measure the very thing it simultaneously helps set into motion.

[Image: From the “Bird Automata Research Test Track” by Nat Chard].

In any case, these ideas also animate Chard’s other, ongoing work: designing “variable picture plane drawing instruments” that graphically record spatial events.

[Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

They are optical devices that seem to flicker in and out of phase with themselves—little stage-sets that whir, self-camouflage, and take photos of their own future repositions and alterations.

Here, where we see that the equipment is actually photographing itself, I’m reminded of Edward Gordon Craig, a stage-set designer (and the son of an architect), whose “architectonic scenery,” as M. Christine Boyer describes it in The City of Collective Memory, turned the architectural backdrops themselves into the only action an audience was meant to watch, even proposing the elimination of actors altogether.

Craig “proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors,” Boyer writes. “The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination.”

The fascinating thing here is the idea of “a performance without any actors”—it would be pure space, pure architecture, pure equipment, pure device.

You’d simply sit in the dark and watch mechanized stage sets endlessly self-transforming.

[Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

Chard sent along parts of a still in-process essay that will soon be published in an issue of AD, edited by architect Bob Sheil, of sixteen*(makers), whose “probe field” project was featured on BLDGBLOG back in December.

[Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

Chard’s essay throws a variety of ideas into the mix, including the mystical (and unfortunately nonexistent) technology of “thoughtography,” i.e. the direct translation of thoughts into photographic images; the myth of the “genius sketch,” an image produced by someone (or, as his work intriguingly suggests, something) uniquely qualified and technically skilled enough to pull off instantaneously perfect acts of visual representation; and the geometric difficulties of representing 3D urban space on 2D surfaces, specifically looking at back at the history of drawing and surveying equipment, with references to the trigonometry of modern aerial bombers and Renaissance artillerymen, both of whom relied upon precise spatial calculations in order to map the targets that they would then set about trying to destroy.

At the heart of all these examples is the trick—the magic, one might say—of spatial representation: how to distill, translate, carry across, or otherwise re-enliven something from one field or context into another.

Chard’s devices are spatial equipment that document the very places they also frame and help define.

[Image: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

Chard’s machines are surprisingly playful—indeed, almost toylike—inhabited by small human figures and seemingly ready for mass-assembly (which would be amazing: imagine a generation of children raised not on Lincoln Logs but on Chard Devices, rewiring kids’ brains through the toys they play with).

[Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

The issue of AD edited by Bob Sheil, featuring Chard’s essay, should be out at some point in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. In the meantime, I’ve posted some images of Chard’s work to give you a sense of the project’s ongoing directions and research possibilities.

[Images: From a series of spatial drawing instruments by Nat Chard].

Until then, check out Nat Chard’s website for a bit more info, or check out his book Drawing Indeterminate Architecture, Indeterminate Drawings of Architecture (though I should note that I have not yet seen a copy myself).

Water Towers of Ireland

[Image: From Water Towers of Ireland; photograph by James Young].

An exhibition up—possibly for just one more day—over at University College, Dublin, features photos by James Young. For the last 10 months, Young has been assembling a typological study of water towers in Ireland. Young describes it as “part inventory, part photographic essay and part history.”

Of course, Young’s work has presumably been greeted with very many comparisons to the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher.

[Images: From Water Towers of Ireland; photographs by James Young].

Many of the structures are militaristic and even explicitly fortress-like. They are prisons for water.

[Image: From Water Towers of Ireland by James Young].

Others could be mistaken for ornamental menhirs, functionless and inexplicable totems standing patiently in the fog and rain.

[Image: From Water Towers of Ireland by James Young].

I just wanted to post a few of my favorite images here, but then urge you to look through the many other examples over at the Water Towers of Ireland website.

[Images: From Water Towers of Ireland; photos by James Young].

You’ll see, among other things, that many of the more forensic portraits, as seen above, have been twinned with casual, souvenir-like Polaroid shots—such as this one, in Castlemoyle, the very first tower posted on Young’s site.

[Image: From Water Towers of Ireland; photo by James Young].

Perhaps this last one heralds the aborted start of a new branch in architectural history, that of mycological brutalism.

Ground Conditioning

[Image: An abandoned golf course leaves traces in the landscape in northern Los Angeles].

Golf runs in my family, although I don’t seem to have inherited that gene; I was nonetheless interested to read about an air-conditioning network embedded in the ground itself at this year’s Masters Tournament, dehumidifying the course from below.

In an article called the “Weather Underground,” published in the May 2011 issue of Golf Digest, author David Owen describes something called the SubAir system. SubAir was invented in the 1990s by Marsh Benson, Owen explains, a senior grounds manager at August National. The first model consisted of “a stove-size machine,” as Owen describes it, that was “attached to the existing network of drainage pipes beneath the putting surface [where it] was acting like a giant Shop-Vac, hoovering moisture from below.”

A project director at SubAir explains to Owen that “the concept is to supply fresh air into the root zone and help provide a more optimal growing environment for the greens.” Indeed, as SubAir’s website explains:

The SubAir aeration and moisture removal system promotes healthier and stronger playing surfaces through moisture content management, subsurface aeration, and root zone temperature control. As a result, SubAir provides optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions. SubAir is integrated underground with no impact on the golf course design options.

Further, “Since the SubAir system can be installed on a progressive basis, adding pieces incrementally makes putting together the SubAir puzzle easy and affordable.” This latter turn of phrase explains the company’s tagline: SubAir: Adding Pieces to the Puzzle.

Indeed, I have to assume, considering the system’s incremental expandability, that we will someday see a suburb somewhere—presumably on a golf course—where the SubAir system has been preemptively installed on every private lot, like any other utility, providing an electrically intensive drainage and lawn-management system for the entire neighborhood. Wired with terrestrial HVAC.

[Image: The system goes from suck to blow; images courtesy of SubAir].

At least two things immediately come to mind:

1) The “refrigerated beach” in Dubai that “will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.” This self-parodically indulgent mechanism built on the scale of a landscape will ensure, as the Times explains, that “hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.”

The management of terrain from below by subterranean machine-strata embedded in the earth itself is surely an extravagance whose accepted price of operation does not include its long-term environmental cost; but the vertiginous implications of being managed from below by unseen machinery even compels Owen, writing in Golf Digest, to joke that the world of golf is actually “a Matrix-like simulation created by green-jacketed aliens.” We could call it an encounter with the geological uncanny: an artificial stratigraphy that makes the earth itself into a manufactured object.

On the other hand, this verticalization of grounds-management strategies is no different, I would argue, from the massively horizontal sprawl of flood-control measures in the Netherlands, as but one example, with its Herculean gates, dikes, levees, and depolderized sacrifice zones, a protective network of unseen machines that makes that nation terrestrially possible.

Neither the Dutch water defense line nor SubAir is entirely sound, environmentally speaking; but my larger point is that if we would find ourselves outraged by one (SubAir) for its apparent extravagance, then we should not overlook the invisible systems on which our everyday landscapes already rely—the pumps that keep New York’s subways from flooding, the dams, canals, and levees that make New Orleans and Sacramento inhabitable, the aqueducts that feed Phoenix and Los Angeles, the South-North Water Transfer project, the Great Man-Made River of Libya—when we look for something to critique.

SubAir, in this context, is but one minor symptom of a larger, civilization-wide dependence on what we might call terrestrial life-support systems: machines actively and constantly re-formatting the surface of the planet for often fleeting human needs and desires.

[Image: A path originally meant to follow a now-abandoned golf course in northern Los Angeles].

2) Having said all that, I’m curious if SubAir could actually play a much more ambitious ecological role somewhere, whether that’s in forestry, gardening, brownfield remediation, wetlands management, or even in a partial automation of urban parks.

After all, if SubAir’s “aeration and moisture removal system promotes healthier and stronger [land surfaces] through moisture content management, subsurface aeration, and root zone temperature control,” and if, “as a result, SubAir provides optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions,” then why not see what this might do for, say, indoor farms, recovering forests, or experimental gardens of a more botanically radical kind?

Imagine, for a minute, a SubAir system powered entirely by renewable energy, aerating, pressurizing, and vacuuming the soil from below in some highly engineered series of fields or enclosed growth chambers, producing the “optimum aerobic subsurface growing conditions” out of which specialty foods, medicines, or biofuels will emerge; what would the moral objection to such a system be, and how would this not simply be but one more device of environmental-conditioning grafted onto an already highly complex bundle of other such networks?

At the very least, I suppose, discovering that an otherwise pristine forest is actually being air-conditioned from below by a geographically extensive, underground air-plumbing network would induce a sense of terrestrial vertigo, as described above; ideally, it would also be working to encourage ecological health and self-repair.

(Thanks to Nick Sowers for pointing me to the Golf Digest article!)

Urban Hypotheticals

[Image: The “Grow House” by Carey Clouse, with the Hypothetical Development Organization].

Tonight in New Orleans, the Hypothetical Development Organization, spearheaded by G.K. Darby, Ellen Susan, and Rob Walker, will celebrate a public launch at the Du Mois Gallery on Freret Street.

Their strategy is to propose and render a series of speculative architectural detours and additions to the city, “dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling.” Each project, they explain, is merely a “hypothetical addition to the built environment,” an “absurdly impractical solution”—some of them based on “nonexistent technologies”—to the many problems facing New Orleans today.

[Image: The “Snooze Tower” by John Becker, with the Hypothetical Development Organization].

As the organizers describe it:

Members of this organization begin the narrative process by examining city neighborhoods and commercial districts for compelling structures that appear to have fallen into disuse—“hidden gems” of the built environment. In varying states of repair, these buildings suggest only stories about the past, not the future.

That’s where the Hypothetical Development Corporation comes in:

As a public service, H.D.O. invents a hypothetical future for each selected structure. Unlike a traditional, reality-based developer, however, our organization is not bound by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics. In our view, plausibility is a creative dead end. That is to say: We are not trying to fool anybody.

The resulting projects are then printed as posters and displayed in public, at the sites their creators have chosen.

[Image: The “Theater of Escape” by Michael Doyle, with the Hypothetical Development Organization].

It goes without saying that many people will object to the notion of dreaming up deliberately impossible solutions to very real socio-economic problems; indeed, this argument would go, if you’re going to spend so much time coming up with ideas, raising money to print glossy posters, investing in the effort to hang those images up around the city, and then go on to advertise the project online, why not simply create, say, a food bank or a homeless shelter or even a nomadic school? Why not buy a bookmobile and bring mobile libraries to the city’s most under-served parish?

These are valid questions, and any speculative project needs to consider the implications of how it uses its time.

[Image: The “Mobile Cornucopia” by Candy Chang, with the Hypothetical Development Organization].

However, speaking only for myself, I have never believed that speculative work or writing—fiction, broadly speaking, whether it’s architecture fiction or literary fiction—exists in an either/or relationship with social and political activism. We don’t need either speculative writing about architecture, for instance, or politically engaged critical writing about real buildings; we need both. Some people are better at the former than they are at the latter; some are better at the latter than they are at the former. It should never be assumed that someone impassioned by the speculative potential of new ideas is somehow against the existence of soup kitchens or grass roots community groups—or that someone working at or relying upon a soup kitchen, shelter, hostel, or church would not be inspired by whimsical utopias and bizarre ideas.

My point is that urban speculation is not some politically dangerous variant on “the opium of the people,” cruelly hypnotizing people with intellectual spectacle so that they no longer seek to transform their everyday spatial circumstances; speculation, in fact, is often the very reason they seek out—and physically embark upon—urban change in the first place.

In any case, the fact that these projects deliberately amplify the impossible doesn’t bother me. Starting from the miraculous, the marvelous, the utopian, the crazed and working backward from there to fashion a new world is a worthwhile design strategy and it needs to be pursued more often, not less.

Nonetheless, when I first heard about this project, I was afraid that the resulting posters for hypothetical developments might come off not as aspirational signs of the urban fantastic, but more as a kind of taunting—as if a bunch of architects had come along with their posters to show you all the things that your city is not, all the things we wish you could be good enough to be, that we wish you could pull yourself together long enough to become—like a deranged husband taunting his wife with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—but, well, just look at you: you’re all weeds, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, and, even worse, you’re poor. We architects don’t appreciate the ramshackle street you live on or the old five-and-dime where you shop everyday; you’re not science fiction enough for our tastes.

In a sense, this is the aggressive undertone of all real estate development ads. The world you live in right now is not up to scratch, those ads say, and this development only proves your current inadequacy.

But there are many ways in which the Hypothetical Development Organization works to avoid—or at least lessen—this fate, in large part through its selection of sites—genuinely abandoned or destroyed lots around the city—but also through the project’s tone. It is still whimsical, to be sure; but that’s both its strategy and its point.

If an architectural proposal can catalyze local efforts toward remaking the neighborhood—which doesn’t mean clearing empty lots so that Walmart can move in or someone can build million-dollar condos—or if that proposal can simply push residents to re-conceive how they physically engage with their surroundings, then it has successfully revealed, at least in part, the transformative potential of spatial ideas and other urban hypotheticals.

In any case, if you’re in New Orleans tonight, stop by the Du Mois Gallery to learn more; if you’re unable to go, check out the Hypothetical Development Organization‘s website.