An Artful Rearrangement of Darkness

A post yesterday over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun described a new game called “Kieru,” in which monochromatic ninjas lost in a monochromatic landscape alternately blend in with and radically stand out from their architectural surroundings.



As Rock, Paper, Shotgun explains, the design of the game is such that “you’ll be trained to react to colour and shadow—two things that are traditionally irrelevant for most games—in completely new ways.”

This statement combined with the aesthetic of the game itself also brought to mind an undergraduate thesis project that we looked at last week, by Anthony Morey at SCI-Arc, where a rotating, monochromatic exploration of architectural space plays havoc with your sense of volume, shadow, and massing.

[Images: These are just slightly larger versions of some images already seen here, by Anthony Morey at SCI-Arc, produced under the guidance of Dwayne Oyler and Thom Mayne].

Is it a neoclassical temple casting shadows in all directions at once, or some other explosion of architectural representation to suggest new ways of drawing space?

One of many things I like about this project is how it suggests architecture is, in a sense, the art of interrupting shadows, not playing with light but an artful rearrangement of darkness.

Box Kites, Planes, and Super-Ceilings

Here are some interesting houses by Greek architect Takis Zenetos, whose work we first looked at way back in 2009.

[Image: House by Takis Zenetos (1961) from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

I will confess to knowing almost nothing about these projects, but I wanted to post the images anyway; they’re from a book called Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977), which was originally pointed out to me in the comments of that earlier post.

[Image: House by Takis Zenetos (1961) from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

The designs draw heavily on cantilevers and porches, presumably in response to some difficult hillside sites, but incorporating the planes, glass, and open views typical of domestic Modernism.

[Image: House by Takis Zenetos (1961) from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

As such, these could just as well be found in the hills of Los Angeles or even San Francisco.

This next home is a variation on the same basic vocabulary, from the same year (1961), this time apparently in a vineyard or other semi-rural setting.

[Images: Another home by Takis Zenetos (1961) from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

As you can see in that last sketch (bottom right), his houses are almost like Corbusian airplanes—Modernist box kites the size of houses—trying to lift off from the earth.

Then a sketch from 1962 really abstracts all this to a pure assemblage of planes in space, just rooftops and cantilevers hanging over the landscape.

It’s the home as super-ceiling.

[Image: A sketch from 1962 by Takis Zenetos, from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

It basically distills the structure of this next project, another hillside house from 1959.

[Images: House by Takis Zenetos (1959) from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

This one really could be in Los Angeles, for its aggressive cantilever out over the canyon or gorge below.

But now check out this next project, a stunning proposal from 1954 for some kind of amphitheater hewn directly into the landscape, then framed by monolithic blocks of Modernist rock.

[Image: A proposal from 1954 by Takis Zenetos, from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

It’s as much a quarry as it is a building, as much a building as it is just an inspired reorganization of the site’s geology.

It also seems like a set designer’s dream—a craggy, otherworldly gathering place like something from the Greek myths (or a level in a future computer game).

[Image: Alas, I don’t have this in higher res; a proposal from 1954 by Takis Zenetos, from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

Finally, purely for its eye candy, here is a project that is either part of a hotel, a restaurant, or a club, from 1956.

[Image: A proposal from 1956 by Takis Zenetos, from Takis Ch. Zenetos (1926-1977)].

For more Zenetos, check out the earlier post here on BLDGBLOG and follow some of the many links in the comment thread. And, of course, if you read Greek and have some insight into what these projects actually are, by all means, let us all know!

Tree / House

[Image: A tree turned into architecture by the addition of a door. Photo via Tumblr, where it is erroneously described as being on the Portuguese island of Madeira; in fact, it appears to be a tree on the U.S./Canadian border, as per a shot called “Two boys at the doorway of their treehouse, c.1870-80,” from Bridgeman Images, where it is described as a “picture taken on the American/Canadian border.” That photo clearly depicts the same tree, albeit at a different stage in its life].

Mathematical Averages and the Landscape of the American Midwest

[Image: From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

Alas, I did not have a chance to write about this project while it was still on public display last month at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, but Design With Co.—an interesting firm previously featured here for their “Farmland World” proposal—has put together an analytic landscape model called the “Midwestern Culture Sampler.”

[Image: From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

The idea behind the model was to use “a fictional institutional entity called the Institute for Quantities, Scale and Image” in order to illustrate patterns of land use across the United States.

The resulting model, at ten-and-a-half square-feet, thus showed “a full square mile of the average geography and settlement patterns of the United States in their representative proportions.”

[Image: From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

In other words, if 27% forest cover, 11% asphalt, 53% agricultural, or any other possible mathematical combination—including number of sports fields, schools, roads, or even hospitals—was the average American use of a given square-acreage of land, then that is how it would be modeled by Design With Co.

This would result in a perfectly calibrated but, for that very reason, utterly absurd representation of the ideal countryside.

[Image: From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

In fact, the designers’ quest for exact calibration also extended to the architecture itself, which became a cartoonish, postmodern exaggeration of midwestern building styles.

Further, the designers explain, “Within this territory are various landmarks and attractions that are relocated in ways that enhance or challenge their architectural metaphors.”

These include, for example, the “Leaning Tower of Pisa” as rebuilt in Niles, Illinois.

[Image: From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

An accompanying guidebook, which I have not yet seen, called Mis-Guided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, apparently offers a history of their fictional institution, but perhaps also, as its title suggests, includes a series of instructions for how one’s own land use patterns could brought into mathematical alignment with the national average.

Build another baseball diamond!

[Image: A ghost of “Farmland World” slips into the model… From “Midwestern Culture Sampler” by Design With Co.; photo by Matthew Messner].

Their overall intention, according to the designers, was “to reframe the familiar in a way that begins to feel like a hyper-real fairy tale,” a landscape of exaggerated relationships and distorted terrains that, nonetheless, are mathematically accurate reflections of the country.

I believe the model is now traveling to other venues, so keep your eye out for the American average landscape popping up in a gallery near you.

Everything is Architecture

[Image: An “unofficial illustration” of the idea by Huntington Ingalls, via gCaptain].

A Washington state legislator has channeled his inner Hans Hollein, proposing the radical adaptive urban reuse of discarded military equipment: turning old aircraft carriers into a new toll bridge for Seattle.

From gCaptain:

A Washington state lawmaker looking to ease traffic congestion for several Puget Sound-area communities near Seattle has proposed building an eye-catching new toll bridge made from retired Navy aircraft carriers.

It would involve at least two—although possibly many more—aircraft carriers laid “end to end” to cross a local stretch of water known as the Sinclair Inlet.

“This would definitely be a unique way to tackle some of those problems,” the representative stated to the AP, “but at the same time it would serve as a floating memorial to veterans and the sacrifice they have given to our country.”

[Image: “Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape, project, Exterior perspective,” by Hans Hollein (1064); via MoMA].

Just think of the epic possibilities here for pedestrian paths, interstitial business opportunities, weird spaces for physical fitness, peripheral plazas and decks available for private events, and new public park space.

Perhaps even, deep in the labyrinth of the old ships’ underbellies, you could open a restaurant, a bookstore, a cinema. A SCUBA academy. An architecture school.

It would be like a return to the inhabited bridges of an earlier age —

[Images: (top) Old London Bridge; (bottom) Old London Bridge painted by Peter Jackson.

—only gunmetal grey and prickly with artillery, like a surreal hybridization of Constant’s New Babylon and the U.S. Navy.

[Images: Constant’s New Babylon].

Of course, this isn’t exactly a real plan—it’s more of a casual remark by a state politician. No feasible studies, environmental reviews, or financial plans have yet been put in place, for example (although apparently one is in the works), and I personally doubt that such a thing could ever see the light of day.

But here’s to weird architectural visions popping up in unexpected contexts—and to the future civilian reuse of discarded military equipment, even (or especially) in spectacular urban ways such as this.

(Spotted via Todd Lappin. Those images of Old London Bridge and Constant’s New Babylon also appeared in an earlier post on BLDGBLOG called We’d all be living in dams).

Signal-Blocking Architecture and the Faraday Home

[Image: “RAM House” by Space Caviar].

An interesting new project by Space Caviar asks, “Does your home have an airplane mode?”

Exploring what it could mean to design future homes so that they offer an optional state of complete electromagnetic privacy, they have put together a “domestic prototype” in which the signal-blocking capabilities of new architectural materials are heavily emphasized, becoming a structural component of the house itself.

[Image: “RAM House” by Space Caviar].

In other words, why just rely on aftermarket home alterations such as WiFi-blocking paint, when you can actually factor the transmission of signals through architectural space into the design of your home in the first place?

[Image: “RAM House” by Space Caviar].

Space Caviar call this “a new definition of privacy in the age of sentient appliances and signal-based communication,” in the process turning the home into “a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy.”

As the space of the home becomes saturated by “smart” devices capable of monitoring their surroundings, the role of the domestic envelope as a shield from an external gaze becomes less relevant: it is the home itself that is observing us. The RAM House responds to this near-future scenario by proposing a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy. Within the space’s core, Wi-Fi, cellphone and other radio signals are filtered by various movable shields of radar-absorbent material (RAM) and faraday meshing, preventing signals from entering and—more importantly—escaping. Just as a curtain can be drawn to visually expose the domestic interior of a traditional home, panels can be slid open to allow radio waves to enter and exit, when so desired.

The result is the so-called “RAM House,” named for those “movable shields of radar-absorbent material,” and it will be on display at the Atelier Clerici in Milan from April 14-19.

Urban CAT Scan

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

The London-based ScanLab Projects, featured here many times before, have completed a new commission, this time from the British Postal Museum & Archive, to document the so-called “Mail Rail,” a network of underground tunnels that opened back in 1927.

As Subterranea Britannica explains, the tunnels were initially conceived as a system of pneumatic package-delivery tubes, an “atmospheric railway,” as it was rather fantastically described at the time, “by which a stationary steam engine would drive a large fan which could suck air out of an air tight tube and draw the vehicle towards it or blow air to push them away.”

That “vehicle” would have been a semi-autonomous wheeled cart bearing parcels for residents of Greater London.

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

Alas, but unsurprisingly, this vision of an air-powered subterranean communication system for a vast metropolis of many millions of residents was replaced by a rail-based one, with narrow, packed-heavy cars running a system of tracks beneath the London streets.

Thus the Mail Rail system was born.

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

While the story of the system itself is fascinating, it has also been told elsewhere.

The aforementioned Subterranea Britannica is a perfect place to start, but urban explorers have also gained entrance for narrative purposes of their own, including the long write-up over at Placehacking.

That link includes the incredible detail that, “on Halloween night 2010, ravers took over a massive derelict Post Office building in the city and threw an illegal party of epic proportions. When pictures from the party emerged, we were astonished to find that a few of them looked to be of a tiny rail system somehow accessed from the building.”

Surely, this should be the setting for a new novel: some huge and illegal party in an abandoned building at an otherwise undisclosed location in the city results in people breaking into or discovering an otherwise forgotten, literally underground network, alcohol-blurred photographs of which are later recognized as having unique urban importance.

Something is down there, the hungover viewers of these photographs quickly realize, something vague and hazily glimpsed in the unlit background of some selfies snapped at a rave.

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

This would all be part of the general mysticism of infrastructure that I hinted at in an earlier post, the idea that the peripheral networks through which the city actually functions lie in wait, secretly connecting things from below or wrapping, Ouroborus-like, around us on the edges of things.

These systems are the Matrix, we might say in modern mythological terms, or the room where Zeus moves statues of us all around on chessboards: an invisible realm of tacit control and influence that we’ve come to know unimaginatively as nothing but infrastructure. But infrastructure is now the backstage pass, the esoteric world behind the curtain.

In any case, with this handful of party pictures in hand, a group of London explorers tried to infiltrate the system.

After hours of exploration, we finally found what we thought might be a freshly bricked up wall into the mythical Mail Rail the partygoers had inadvertently found… We went back to the car and discussed the possibility of chiselling the brick out. We decided that, given how soon it was after the party, the place was too hot to do that just now and we walked away, vowing to try again in a couple of months.

It took some time—but, eventually, it worked.

They found the tunnels.

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

The complete write-up over at Placehacking is worth the read for the rest of that particular story.

But ScanLab now enter the frame as documentarians of a different sort, with a laser-assisted glimpse of this underground space down to millimetric details.

Their 3D point clouds afford a whole new form of representation, a kind of volumetric photography that cuts through streets and walls to reveal the full spatial nature of the places on display.

The incredible teaser video, pieced together from 223 different laser scanning sessions, reveals this with dramatic effect, featuring a virtual camera that smoothly passes beneath the street like a swimmer through the waves of the ocean.



As the British Postal Museum & Archive explains, the goal of getting ScanLab Projects down into their tunnels was “to form a digital model from which any number of future interactive, visual, animated and immersive experiences can be created.”

In other words, it was a museological project: the digital preservation of an urban underworld that few people—Placehacking‘s write-up aside—have actually seen.

For example, the Museum writes, the resulting laser-generated 3D point clouds might “enable a full 3D walkthrough of hidden parts of the network or an app that enables layers to be peeled away to see the original industrial detail beneath.”

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

Unpeeling the urban onion has never been so gorgeous as we leap through walls, peer upward through semi-transparent streets, and see signs hanging in mid-air from both sides simultaneously.

[Image: By ScanLab Projects, with permission from the British Postal Museum & Archive].

Tunnels become weird ropey knots like smoke rings looped beneath the city as the facades of houses take on the appearance of old ghosts, remnants of another era gazing down at the flickering of other dimensions previously lost in the darkness below.

(Thanks again to the British Postal Museum & Archive for permission to post the images).

Infrastructure as Processional Space

[Image: A view of the Global Containers Terminal in Bayonne; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

I just spent the bulk of the day out on a tour of the Global Containers Terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey, courtesy of the New York Infrastructure Observatory.

That’s a new branch of the institution previously known as the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, who hosted the MacroCity event out in San Francisco last May. They’re now leading occasional tours around NYC infrastructure (a link at the bottom of this post lets you join their mailing list).

[Image: A crane so large my iPhone basically couldn’t take a picture of it; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

There were a little more than two dozen of us, a mix of grad students, writers, and people whose work in some way connected them to logistics, software, or product development—which, unsurprisingly, meant that everyone had only a few degrees of separation from the otherworldly automation on display there on the peninsula, this open-air theater of mobile cranes and mounted gantries whirring away in the precise loading and unloading of international container ships.

The clothes we were wearing, the cameras we were using to photograph the place, even the pens and paper many of us were using to take notes, all had probably entered the United States through this very terminal, a kind of return of the repressed as we brought those orphaned goods back to their place of disembarkation.

[Images: The bottom half of the same crane; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

Along the way, we got to watch a room full of human controllers load, unload, and stack containers, with the interesting caveat that they—that is, humans—are only required when a crane comes within ten feet of an actual container. Beyond ten feet, automation sorts it out.

When the man I happened to be watching reached the critical point where his container effectively went on auto-pilot, not only did his monitor literally go blank, making it clear that he had seen enough and that the machines had now taken over, but he referred to this strong-armed virtual helper as “Auto Schwarzenegger.”

“Auto Schwarzenegger’s got it now,” he muttered, and the box then disappeared from the screen, making its invisible way to its proper location.

[Image: Waiting for the invisible hand of Auto Schwarzenegger; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

Awesomely—in fact, almost unbelievably—when we entered the room, with this 90% automated landscape buzzing around us outside on hundreds of acres of mobile cargo in the wintry weather, they were listening to “Space Oddity” by David Bowie.

“Ground control to Major Tom…” the radio sang, as they toggled joysticks and waited for their monitors to light up with another container.

[Image: Out in the acreage; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

The infinitely rearrangeable labyrinth of boxes outside was by no means easy to drive through, and we actually found ourselves temporarily walled in on the way out, just barely slipping between two containers that blocked off that part of the yard.

This was “Damage Land,” our guide from the port called it, referring to the place where all damaged containers came to be stored (and eventually sold).

[Image: One of thousands of stacked walls in the infinite labyrinth of the Global Containers Terminal; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

One of the most consistently interesting aspects of the visit was learning what was and was not automated, including where human beings were required to stand during some of the processes.

For example, at one of several loading/unloading stops, the human driver of each truck was required to get out of the vehicle and stand on a pressure-sensitive pad in the ground. If nothing corresponding to the driver’s weight was felt by sensors on the pad, the otherwise fully automated machines toiling above would not snap into action.

This idea—that a human being standing on a pressure-sensitive pad could activate a sequence of semi-autonomous machines and processes in the landscape around them—surely has all sorts of weird implications for everything from future art or museum installations to something far darker, including the fully automated prison yards of tomorrow.

[Image: One of several semi-automated gate stations around the terminal; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

This precise control of human circulation was also built into the landscape—or perhaps coded into the landscape—through the use of optical character recognition software (OCR) and radio-frequency ID chips. Tag-reading stations were located at various points throughout the yard, sending drivers either merrily on their exactly scripted way to a particular loading/unloading dock or sometimes actually barring that driver from entry. Indeed, bad behavior was punished, it was explained, by blocking a driver from the facility altogether for a certain amount of time, locking them out in a kind of reverse-quarantine.

Again, the implications here for other types of landscapes were both fascinating and somewhat ominous; but, more interestingly, as the trucks all dutifully lined-up to pass through the so-called “OCR building” on the far edge of the property, I was struck by how much it felt like watching a ceremonial gate at the outer edge of some partially sentient Forbidden City built specifically for machines.

In other words, we often read about the ceremonial use of urban space in an art historical or urban planning context, whether that means Renaissance depictions of religious processions or it means the ritualized passage of courtiers through imperial capitals in the far east. However, the processional cities of tomorrow are being built right now, and they’re not for humans—they’re both run and populated by algorithmic traffic control systems and self-operating machine constellations, in a thoroughly secular kind of ritual space driven by automated protocols more than by democratic legislation.

These—ports and warehouses, not churches and squares—are the processional spaces of tomorrow.

[Image: Procession of the True Cross (1496) by Gentile Bellini, via Wikimedia].

It’s also worth noting that these spaces are trickling into our everyday landscape from the periphery—which is exactly where we are now most likely to find them, simply referred to or even dismissed as mere infrastructure. However, this overly simple word masks the often startlingly unfamiliar forms of spatial and temporal organization on display. This actually seems so much to be the case that infrastructural tourism (such as today’s trip to Bayonne) is now emerging as a way for people to demystify and understand this peripheral realm of inhuman sequences and machines.

In any case, as the day progressed we learned a tiny bit about the “Terminal Operating System”—the actual software that keeps the whole place humming—and it was then pointed out, rather astonishingly, that the actual owner of this facility is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, an almost Thomas Pynchonian level of financial weirdness that added a whole new level of narrative intricacy to the day.

If this piques your interest in the Infrastructure Observatory, consider following them on Twitter: @InfraObserve and @NYInfraObserve. And to join the NY branch’s mailing list, try this link, which should also let you read their past newsletters.

[Image: The Container Guide; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

Finally, the Infrastructure Observatory’s first publication is also now out, and we got to see the very first copy. The Container Guide by Tim Hwang and Craig Cannon should be available for purchase soon through their website; check back there for details (and read a bit more about the guide over at Edible Geography).

(Thanks to Spencer Wright for the driving and details, and to the Global Containers Terminal Bayonne for their time and hospitality!)

Shadowcaster

[Image: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].

A gorgeous project called Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey, made while still a B.A. student at SCI-Arc under the guidance of Dwayne Oyler and Thom Mayne, is well worth a look.

Morey describes the project as a strict exploration of drawing, tracking the effects of architectural “spillovers,” freely moving between volume, shadow, ground, and perspective while never fully arriving at a fixed state.

[Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].

This has the effect of making the elaborate black shading spatially misleading. In other words, it is deliberately unclear if we are looking at rooms, walls, and landscapes, or merely at their secondary effects, at echoes, shadows, and repetitions extruded from an original form made illegible by the shapes that now surround it.

The form casts its own ground, so to speak, existing in a context of its own delays and translations.

[Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].

It was about “showing volume, but no scale,” in Morey’s words, using the drawings “to cast doubt on themselves. Allowing for choice in the reading, unraveling.”

Morey’s monochromatic approach then explodes in a sequence of colorful plans and sections.

[Images: From Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey].

You can see many more images, including 3D prints and some intermediary studies between the drawings seen above, s well as read more about the project over at SUPER // ARCHITECTS.

You can see more of Morey’s images on his Instagram feed.

(Spotted via the excellent Data is Nature, by Paul Prudence).

Buy A Complex Of Submarine Pits

[Image: Courtesy of Sotheby’s].

Back to opportunities in real estate: if you were tempted by the Minneapolis skyway but you’re saving your money for something a bit warmer throughout the year, consider snapping up the “Submarine Pits on Boca Chica Key.”

[Image: Courtesy of Sotheby’s].

As Sotheby’s describes the carved landscape of submarine docking pens, the pits can be found amidst “approximately 122 acres of vacant land just north of Key West.”

Here’s the site on Google Maps.

[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby’s].

They’re basically just deep slots blasted through the coral and limestone, barely visible beneath the water line in the form of somewhat ominous black strips where the ground drops away.

[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby’s].

The site is zoned as a “Commercial Fishing Special District,” perhaps implying some future reuse of the submarine pens as exotic fish farms.

But imagine all the weird opportunities here for submerged foundations, underwater hotel rooms, or other half-aquatic facilities—even something like the Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG—looped in and around these linear, Nazca-like features.

[Image: The Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG; photo by Luca Santiago Mora via Dezeen].

From Sotheby’s:

This parcel was used by the Navy Air Station to house its submarine war ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and has a very colorful and distinct history. Perfect for marine use and development in a great location. Property includes seven finger cut coral canals that are 90 feet wide and over 25 feet deep, plus a deep water basin with dredged entry channel that provides passage to Boca Chica Channel (Oceanside) and Key West Harbor (Bayside).

The asking price?

[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby’s].

A mere $21.2 million—but then these drowned geoglyphs in the semitropical sun can be all yours.

(Spotted via Curbed Miami. Previously on BLDGBLOG: Buy a Skyway, Buy a Fort, Buy a Lighthouse, Buy an Underground Kingdom, Buy a Prison, Buy a Tube Station, Buy an Archipelago, Buy a Map, Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Silk Mill, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church).