Fire Lookout Towers

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Constituting their own architectural typology, and falling perhaps somewhere between Lew Welch and Tom Kundig (someone hire Kundig to design the next Serpentine, please!), are the fire lookout towers of the Pacific Northwest.

Search the photo archives – assembled and maintained by Rex Kamstra, complete with lookout tower trivia – from Oregon and Washington to the hills of South Dakota (or just check out the site’s newsfeed) to explore these often extraordinarily remote structures in all their minimalist – and historically fascinating – glory.

And did you know that you can actually adopt a fire lookout?

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

While you’re at it, don’t miss the U.S. Forest Service’s own catalog of these overlooked minor building types: fire lookout towers in Sequoia National Forest, for instance, and Umatilla.

The fact that there are any lookout towers still standing at all is, it seems, slightly amazing. “In their heyday during the 1930s,” the Forest Service explains, “there were over 8,000 fire lookouts that dotted mountain tops across the United States with over 600 in California. Today there are only a few hundred in operation. Once considered a proud symbol of our nation’s conservation heritage, fire lookouts are a fading legacy. There are 10 lookouts left on the Sequoia National Forest.”

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

A definitive history of these timber structures and lonely cabins has not yet been written (attention Princeton Architectural Press!), although they constitute not only a distinctive family of structures, they also have a regional, ecosystemic importance that only the best pieces of civic infrastructure attain.

They also figure into the national mythology in a way that few other forms of architecture do; from Jack Kerouac disappearing off into the mountains for a summer of fire-spotting, to the poems of Gary Snyder, these awesomely elevated perspectives on the natural world – as well as sites of enforced introspection – deserve their NorCalMod moment. That is, they deserve their architectural rediscovery.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Instead of a definitive reference work, there are simply books (albeit still fascinating) like How to Rent a Fire Lookout in the Pacific Northwest: A Guide to Renting Fire Lookouts, Guard Stations, Ranger Cabins, Warming Shelters and Bunkhouses in the National Forests of Oregon and Washington; Adirondack Fire Towers: Their History and Lore; Lookouts: Firewatchers of the Cascades and Olympics; and the so-called “fire lookout research” of David E. Lorenz (now out of print). So people are clearly still interested in these structures. For instance, check out this photo-log of a hike up to the spectacular mountain views of the Mule Peak Lookout.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Even better, take a long read through the Skagit River Journal‘s look at the fire lookout towers of the Cascades. This latter link includes some amazing material, including references to interviews with former fire watchers and their colleagues:

They told many unusual stories of the watchers, who were prepared to be alone on a mountain ridge in a tower measuring less than 200 square feet. Towers were sometimes built on nearby ridges so that two watchers could combine their observations of a section of forest, which enabled them to triangulate and more accurately call in resources to fight fires. A broad spectrum of watchers developed, from college students to housewives to hermits and those who loved to be surrounded by wilderness and mountains. The authors discovered one watcher who was so frightened during a lightning storm that he ran all the way down the mountain.

There is also the story of Maxine Meyers, a former forest lookout.

More architecturally, the Skagit River Journal also gets into the ways and means of these towers’ construction: “Before mountain roads were built of a size to accomodate trucks, the materials were largely packed in on backs or on mules, and then another team had to slog through the brush, stringing telephone wire before the use of two-way radios.” Thus were distant structures assembled in the woods.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Plus, where, now, are the people who actually lived in these structures – stationed there for whole seasons at a time to eat canned peaches and watch the stars, looking out for signs of distant fires? Are they still alive, and, like Maxine Meyers, could you interview them? It’s an architectural form that comes with its own anthropology: narratives of use and inhabitation.

Further, who designed these structures – based on what plan, and from what material inspiration? What would a fire lookout tower, built today, look like? Perhaps like the awesome “Prairie Ladder” by Anderson Anderson?

And how do these towers frame the landscape, and to what extent could you put them into the visual tradition of things like panoramas?

These towers, after all, aren’t just towers; they have a kind of optical functionality, built specifically for the purpose of viewing the landscape in a certain, specific, highly regulated way. They spatially frame this act of disciplined surveillance. In a sense, they are like the British watchtowers so beautifully photographed by Donovan Wylie.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

But, more to the point, where do fire lookout towers – as a minor design typology – fit into architectural history?

Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City

[Image: From Procedural Modeling of Cities by Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller].

Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol.

In 2001 Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller spoke at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California, to present a mathematical city. Their presentation contained an algorithmic approach for modeling city-like topologies. The results were remarkably realistic, and were one among a host of city-like generative systems to appear at the start of the decade.

Another, Jared Tarbell’s Substrate (pictured) remains a fantastic example of how a mathematical approach to generating apparently urban patterns can also be artful.

[Image: From Jared Tarbell’s Substrate].

But it was looking at the work of Parish and Müller that inspired game designer Chris Delay to develop his most recent project: the cryptic (and as-yet-unexplained) Subversion, of which little is known, other than it relies on large, procedurally generated cities for the backbone of its game world.

Having already been burned by the problems of creating content “by hand,” Delay set out to let algorithms do the work of building buildings in his new game. Not only that, but he was determined to create an artistically interesting experience without artists.

[Images: From Chris Delay’s Subversion].

Of course, videogames have long been the home of procedurally generated landscapes where numbers and mathematical equations played the role of the visual designer. Early paranoid classic The Sentinel made use of these techniques to create an astonishingly atmospheric 10,000 levels in simple vector graphics, from just a few kilobytes of data. Other games have used similar techniques as a shortcut to creating solar systems and vast fractal landscapes.

But when it came to cities, well, it took a long time for anyone to take up the challenge.

[Image: From The Sentinel by Geoff Crammond].

Rather than opt for procedural techniques, game designers usually elect to build their cities by hand, often with startling results. The re-imagined contemporary New York that features in last year’s Grand Theft Auto 4 required a small army of well-paid artists and designers to hand-craft the entire world. Their accomplishment is unmatched, but the cost to the company behind the project is in the tens—and perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars. To build up a living city from blank polygons is one of the most expensive possible projects in game design.

Delay, whose project is being undertaken with a tiny budget and by just a handful of staff based in Cambridge, UK, does not have the luxury of vast content teams. His vector-drawn city is far less realistic than Rockstar‘s textured, heaving metropolis, but there’s nevertheless a beauty to it. It’s a kind of mathematical map of the essential urban environment: there are roads, sidewalks, and a no-man’s land of corporate moats around great skyscrapers…

Identify the key equation that define urban patterns, and you, too, can summon a city into existence.

Delay has begun to show off how his cities emerge from the ground up in a series of videos, and he spoke to me about the process.

“I started out with road layouts, and then began to modify the parameters,” he explained. “Sometimes you’ll get lovely radial, spiral patterns, or you can tell it to create a really rigid Manhattan-style grid.” One set of numbers delivers the block logic of American cities, another is rather more like the spirals of Medieval European sprawls. The two merge to create something even more believable. “Every subsequent layer builds on the previous layer,” Delay points out, “so the very next layer looks for the spaces between layers, and makes judgments about ‘is this likely to be a skyscraper, or to be a house?’ Then you zoom in, and carry on. You do another procedural generation process for each layer of detail, filling in that world.”

[Image: From Chris Delay’s Subversion].

A few weeks after speaking with Delay I attended Thrilling Wonder Stories—a seminar at the Architectural Association in London, curated by Liam Young and BLDGBLOG—where I watched conceptual designer Viktor Antonov explain how he had created a science-fictionalized Paris (for a now-cancelled videogame called The Crossing).

Antonov approached the problem by altering just a few parameters in the standard architectural model. For instance, Antonov had noticed a few fundamental details about how the mid-nineteenth century neo-classical core of Paris had been constructed: big street-level floors, smaller attic spaces, complex chimney stacks. By increasing the emphasis on the lower floors, and stretching them out—and by emphasizing the height and complexity of the chimneys—Antonov was able to create a thematically consistent science fiction Paris.

Simply by altering a few basic architectural parameters, he said, you were able to fictionalize the city, whilst at the same time retaining its fundamental identity. His designs were still recognizably—even mathematically—Parisian, in other words, but they were also otherworldly.

[Image: By Viktor Antonov].

This idea instantly connected back to Delay’s project: what parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor.

And perhaps this is not such an outlandish thing to aim for—especially when you consider the speed at which procedural city projects have been appearing across the tech landscape. Could one of these cities potentially be refitted to allow for this type of radical tweak?

Projects like Shamus Young’s impressive PixelCity, or Marco Corbetta‘s Structure seem ripe for such strange fictions. Corbetta’s system is particularly impressive in its verisimilitude: he aims to create a basic engine for rapidly generating the kinds of cities that games like Grand Theft Auto 4 require, and consequently doing so for much cheaper.

Could Corbetta’s engine come with a Paris or a Barcelona preload, which could then be put through Photoshop-style filters for alternate reality logic in its architecture? A stronger skyline, weirder street furniture.

[Image: From Marco Corbetta’s Structure].

More exciting, at least for the thrill-seeking gamer in me, is the fact that Corbetta is aiming one notch higher than any of his peers: he’s aiming to make these cities procedurally destructible. His site contains a demonstration video of neatly arrange office interiors and a domestic library being blown to pieces with a machine-gun. What good is an imaginary city if you can’t go inside the buildings? What good is a virtual downtown if you can’t go crazy with a bazooka? Corbetta’s work preempts these questions.

Further, it conjures visions of massive demolition exercises in parallel worlds—entering an Antonov-algorithm for neo-Rome, where gladiatorial escapades see us going through the walls of the coliseum and into the randomly generated plazas beyond.

That, perhaps, is the greatest promise of procedural cities: that soon they’ll be real enough that their destruction will seem like tragedy.

[Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol appeared on BLDGBLOG in May, and he has written a previous guest post, Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds].

Romecore

[Image: A Greenland ice-core at the Hayden Planetarium; for further reading, visit the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory. Photo by Planet Taylor, used under a Creative Commons license].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

The Crypta Balbi is a relatively recent, low-profile addition to Rome’s museum compendium. It’s billed variously—and confusingly—as a museum of archaeology, a museum of ancient Rome, and a museum of the Dark Ages. All of these descriptions are, in fact, cumulatively accurate, because the site is actually a city-block-sized core sample of Rome, threaded through with staircases, tunnels, and elevated walkways for visitors.

Crypta Balbi is located in an irregular pentagonal plot in the Campus Martius, an area that, unlike many regions in the ancient city, remained largely inhabited through the Middle Ages. In fact, according to Filippo Coarelli’s authoritative Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide, the Campus Martius was originally supposed to be kept free of buildings altogether and “reserved for military and athletic exercises.” However, historian Suetonius describes the city’s gradual encroachment, explaining that: “During his reign Augustus often encouraged the leading men of Rome to adorn the city with new monuments or to restore and embellish old ones.”

[Image: A satellite view of the city-block core sample, via Google Maps].

As a successful military general and favored member of Augustus‘s entourage, L. Cornelius Balbus the Younger stepped up to the plate, building a theater and attached crypta—a rectangular porticoed walkway where the theater’s scenery could be stored and around which the public might stroll, protected from the elements. Apparently, the Balbi Theater’s grand opening in 13 BC took place during one of the Tiber’s regular floods—meaning that it was, briefly, only accessible by boat. Nonetheless, the Theater and Crypta thrived, and they are depicted intact on a chunk of the Severan Forma Urbis, an amazing 60′-x-43′ incised marble map of the city created for public display in 203 AD.

Eventually, Rome’s earthquakes, fires, barbarian raids, and radical population shrinkage (from a million people in 367 AD to just 400,000 less than century later) combined with architectural re-use and the passage of time to take their toll. There isn’t much of the original Crypta left to see—a reconstructed stucco arch, and the massive travertine and tufa walls that now serve as foundations for modern houses in Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Via dei Delfini.

[Image: A fragment of the Forma Urbis, showing the Balbi Theater. For more on the Forma Urbis, visit the seemingly great but non-Mac-friendly Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae project].

However, layered above the Crypta’s original floor plan are traces of this city block’s shifting usage—a condensed narrative of Rome’s destruction, accretion, and evolution. It is this series of transformations and reuses of both the Crypta and the urban space it occupies, rather than the fragmentary ancient ruins, that the museum aims to make visible. Like a series of stills from an impossible time-lapse film, the visitor who descends to the basement or climbs to the third floor can see this awkward cuboid chunk of city ruined, reshaped, reused, and reoriented over two thousand years of urban history.

Equally amazing are the expansive historical detours prompted by even trace elements in the urban core sample. For example, as early as the time of Hadrian, a “monumental” public latrine was inserted into a section of the Crypta. From the quantity of copper coins that fell, and weren’t worth recovering, archaeologists have extrapolated the amount of coinage in circulation in Western Europe during the latrine’s life-span. (Astonishingly, it was only in the 19th century that small change was to be this common again in Western Europe).

[Image: Museum display panel diagramming five distinct road levels wandering across the Crypta’s ruins (apologies for the quick snapshot)].

Two centuries later and a few feet higher, two graves bear witness to a city in ruins between the 5th and 7th centuries, as the prohibition against burial within city walls lapsed, and the dead were buried singly in abandoned buildings or beside roads. Ironically, in a museum that preserves the urban structures of each era equally, during the medieval period the Crypta actually housed one of the city’s largest lime-kilns, where the marble inscriptions, statues, and building blocks of classical Rome were brought to be crushed and melted down into lime (a key ingredient in the cement needed to build the city’s new Christian architecture).

In the 1940s, the convent that had occupied the site for the past four hundred years was demolished for a planned new Mussolini-era construction, which thankfully never materialized. Finally, in the 1980s, the Soprintendenza archeologica di Roma authorized the excavation of the abandoned city block; and, in 2002, the northwest corner was opened to the public, even as work continues on the rest of the site.

[Image: An interior view of the Crypta Balbi].

Aside from the execution, which is excellent, the very idea of a museum built into an urban core sample—a stratigraphic investigation of the shifting use of space over time—is incredibly exciting to me. Imagine a similar hollowing-out of urban space in Istanbul, Cairo, or Paris—residents as disoriented as tourists as they clamber through the hidden foundations and forms woven underneath and around their own city.

In New York, this might even be an idea whose time has come: as The New Yorker pointed out in December 2008, the expiration of a residential construction tax-abatement law encouraged builders to dig foundation trenches early, so as to secure better financing, but the subsequent recession has put many of these projects on hold, semi-permanently.

“What will become of the pits?” asks Nick Paumgarten, speculating that they could turn into “half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England” or even “urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby.” These are both attractive ideas, but with a little expenditure on zip-lines, elevated walkways, and interpretative signage, visitors could circulate around several millennia of Manhattan’s history, from the collision of the North African and American continental plates to the tangled evolution of New York’s water mains, via retreating glaciers and the housing bubble.

Meanwhile, back in Rome and less than a mile away from the Crypta, engineers have teamed up with the Soprintendenza to sink several new urban cores, this time in the guise of excavating the elevator and escalator shafts for a new subway line.

Angelo Bottini, director of the Soprintendenza, can hardly hide his excitement, telling the Wall Street Journal that, under usual circumstances, “We never get to dig in the center of Rome.” Sadly, it seems as though most of the finds will be documented and then destroyed, due to a shortage of museum space and the already astronomical construction costs (an estimated $375 million for one mile of track in the city center).

But how amazing would it be if the new subway station walkways and escalator shafts could themselves become Crypta Balbi-like museums of buried stratigraphy? Rome would be riddled with urban cores, awestruck tourists ascending and descending through sampled spatial histories across the city. Meanwhile the Sistine Chapel lies miraculously empty…

[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include The Tree Museum, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, and Park Stories].

The Tree Museum

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

Every tree is a living archive, its rings a record of rainfall, temperature, atmosphere, fire, volcanic eruption, and even solar activity. These arboreal archives together reach back in time over centuries, sometimes millennia. We can even map human history through them—and onto them—tracing famines, plagues, and the passing of our own lives.

[Image: A scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Muir Woods, outside San Francisco, where Novak points to the concentric rings of the redwood trunk and says, “Here I was born… and here I died”].

For artist Katie Holten, trees were thus the natural starting point for an oral history of a city street in the Bronx. To mark the 100th anniversary of the Grand Concourse, a four-mile-long boulevard that connects Manhattan to the parks of the Northern Bronx, Holten has created the Tree Museum: 100 specially-chosen trees between 138th Street and Mosholu Parkway, each of which has a story to tell if you dial the number at its base.

The museum opens today, June 21, with a parade and street fair: for those of us not in New York, a podcast and brochure will be available for download, and you also can view each of the tree locations on Google Maps.

[Image: Trees in the museum each have their own sidewalk marker, which gives their name and extension number].

Only a handful of the one hundred “story-trees” date from the Concourse’s construction, when an avenue of Norwegian maples was planted to shade carriages and pedestrians strolling along the broad boulevard. In an email conversation, Holten explained to BLDGBLOG that most of these original trees were moved to Pelham Bay Park when the B/D subway line was built in the early ’30s. Twelve of the surviving maples are joined in the Tree Museum by representatives of fifty-nine other tree species, from an Amur Corktree in Joyce Kilmer park to a Kentucky Coffeetree just south of Tremont Avenue.

In fact, each tree is carefully identified by its species name, in Spanish, English, and Latin, to draw museum visitors’ attention to their variety. Holten told me that, early on in her community outreach, she realized how important naming the trees would be when a teacher in a local school confessed, incredibly, that it was only after he heard about the Tree Museum idea that “he noticed the next time he was walking that there were different kinds of trees. Before that he’d thought they were just ‘trees’.”

[Image: A section of the Tree Museum map; a much larger version can be seen here].

The trees were chosen for their variety, Holten says, but also for “location, age, and connection to a particular person or story.” Holten acted as matchmaker, pairing trees with former and current Bronx residents, as well as scientists, authors, and activists who have worked in the area. Among the 100 participants are well-known former Bronxites DJ Jazzy Jay and Daniel Libeskind, students at the Bronx Writing Academy, and Jonathan Pywell, Bronx Senior Forester, who helped Holten identify all the trees (not an easy task in mid-winter). Each has used their tree as the starting point for a personal anecdote, snippet of neighborhood history, song, or even a digital sound recording.

Taken together, the tree stories are part shared history, part personal memory, part science lesson—they form what Holten describes as “the whole ecosystem of the street.”

[Image: A computer-generated image of Klaus Lackner’s prototype “synthetic tree,” which would remove carbon dioxide directly from the air; image courtesy of Columbia University].

In her email, Holten went into some detail describing the range of stories you can hear as you dial each tree’s extension, from the sound of a Puerto Rican tree frog (No.73, a Gingko) to a local preservationist describing how he fought to turn an abandoned lot into the park that now surrounds No. 100, a Cottonwood. From her email:

Klaus Lackner (professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University and director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy) tells the story of the carbon cycle and his attempt to create a “fake plastic tree,” or air extractor, that would suck the CO2 out of the air and convert it into something we can put in a safe place. Eric Sanderson (a landscape ecologist based at the Bronx Zoo, and author of Mannahatta) needed a really old, native tree to talk about projecting the landscape backwards. I gave him No. 9, a beautiful American Elm outside Cardinal Hayes High School.

At the northern end of the Concourse, at 206th St, there’s a huge chunk of rock between two buildings; it’s like the side of a cliff. I had to give the tree there, No. 95, to Sid Horenstein, a geologist who recently retired from the American Museum of Natural History. He’s able to use the rock outcrop to explain the story of what the Concourse lies above—it was built on a ridge and that’s one of the main reasons the street was constructed here, because it was elevated and offered spectacular views of the countryside all around.

And Tree No. 45, a Little Leaf Linden, has a story told by Patricia Foody, a 95-year-old Bronxite. She remembers her dad bringing her for a walk to the Concourse to visit his brother’s tree in just this location—it was one of the original maples, and many of them had plaques for soldiers who had died in World War I.

Some of the stories come from people who work with the trees directly: Jennifer Greenfeld, director of Street Tree Planting for the Parks and Recreation department, uses No. 66, a Chinese Elm, to provide an overview of street trees throughout New York City and the policy battles they sometimes cause. Barbara Barnes, a landscape architect also with the Parks department, puts her tree in the context of the historic street tree canopy project she’s working on, to replant Joyce Kilmer and Franz Sigel parks as they were originally laid out.

[Image: Eric Sanderson pointing at a map of the Bronx; photo by Katie Holten].

For other participants, the trees function as more of a backdrop for personal history and community activism. Sabrina Cardenales is the real-life model for the character Mercedes in Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which documents extreme urban poverty in New York: both Sabrina and Adrian introduce themselves and read a passage from the book as part of the Tree Museum. Meanwhile, Majora Carter, an environmental justice activist and MacArthur fellow from the south Bronx, uses tree No. 6, a honey locust, to tell people: “You don’t have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one, and trees are an important part of making that happen.”

The variety of voices and stories Holten describes accumulate into a sense that plenty of people really do care about these trees, this street, and the Bronx in general. They also act as a series of nudges to look at the urban landscape in a new light. The result is that the Tree Museum, at least in theory, will recreate some of the optimism of the Grand Concourse’s roots in the City Beautiful movement, while not glossing over the struggles and setbacks faced by the “Champs-Élysées of the Bronx” ever since.

[Image: The Bronx Grand Concourse, looking north from 161st Street; photo by Katie Holten].

As part of the Concourse’s centenary celebrations, the Bronx Museum and New York’s Design Trust For Public Space are running a competition called Intersections: Grand Concourse Beyond 100, to gather new proposals for regenerating the street. Although the call for entries period is now closed, Katie Holten has set up a community forum for the Tree Museum, and clearly hopes the project will prompt action, as well as reflection.

Holten explains her most basic hope, which is that the Museum will encourage people to start using and enjoying their shared public space again:

One hundred years ago the Concourse was built for people to stroll along, under the shade of the trees, but in 2009 it takes quite an effort to get people out for a walk—hopefully we’ll get them strolling! There are a number of individuals who I met because they are interested in trees, or in “green” issues, and we’ve tried to use the momentum of the Tree Museum to help them make differences. For example, Fernando Tirado (tree No. 88) is district manager for Bronx Community Board #7 and he’s been prompted to establish a “Greening the Concourse” project. He’s organizing summer internships for youth in the area: giving them a job and training, and at the same time actually greening the street.

Perhaps more importantly, Holten’s Tree Museum (which she describes as “practically invisible—it’s part of the urban fabric”) demonstrates an intriguing way to re-imagine the landscape: finding ways to make the hidden layers and connections of a street’s story visible (or audible) might ultimately be as, if not more, important than installing a new swing set in the park.

[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include Watershed Down, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, and Park Stories].

London Yields, Harvested

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

As Geoff mentioned last month, London’s Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground.

[Image: From London Yields: Urban Agriculture].

The speakers covered a lot of terrain—so, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the broader ideas, responses, and questions about urban agriculture that stood out from the day’s presentations.

1. Becoming public policy
The event was introduced and moderated by David Barrie, a sustainable development consultant, who framed the day as a collective opportunity to brainstorm ways in which urban agriculture could be moved from mere “sustainable accessory” to become a standard practice of both everyday life and city design. Interestingly, Mark Brearley, Head of Design at Design for London (DfL) and the day’s first speaker, provided confirmation of Barrie’s diagnosis, confessing that food production was a recent add-on to many of their open space projects. Why? “Because people were asking us about it,” he said.

Brearley’s presentation was an overview of DfL’s hundreds of urban regeneration and infrastructure improvement projects; these are, in themselves, interesting but, in aggregate, somewhat exhausting. However, as an office of the London Development Agency, working on behalf of the Mayor of London, Brearley was able to provide a fascinating insight into some of the current institutional priorities that need to be satisfied before urban agriculture can become a standard part of London public policy. For example, DfL’s main interest in food production today is in terms of its “public engagement potential” and their primary stumbling block is how to measure the scaleability of local initiatives. Any London-based urban agriculture projects hoping for a mayoral blessing, take note!

2. Food is a design tool
The second speaker was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Hungry City traces how food has shaped both the city and its productive hinterland throughout history, from the Sumerian city of Ur to today’s London via the markets and gates of ancient Rome. Steel provides a wide-ranging historical look of food production, importation, regulation, and culture, before putting forward her own intriguing and potentially revolutionary proposition: what would happen if we consciously used food as a design tool to create a “sitopic” city? Steel’s coinage here, sitopia—from “sitos” (food) and “topos” (place)—is derived from her realization that “food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary… capable of transforming not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, [and] cities.” And because “food is necessary,” a sitopian city (unlike its utopian cousin) would remain tied to reality and of universal relevance.

The quotations above come from Steel’s book, however, rather than her lecture; twenty-five minutes was enough time to provide fascinating examples of food’s role in shaping cities and urban life, but, sadly, not enough to explain (let alone explore) further thoughts about food’s use as an urban planning tool. More to come soon, I hope, on this topic…

[Image: Ebenezer Howard’s original scheme for the Garden Cities of To-morrow shows a landscape reimagined in terms of food production and supply. As Carolyn Steel explains in her own book Hungry City, Howard’s plans relied on land reform that was never carried out, and the garden cities of today (Letchworth, Welwyn, etc.) are, as a result, little more than green dormitory suburbs].

3. Partnerships as infrastructure
Anna Terzi, who runs London Food Link’s small grants scheme for Sustain, was the day’s third speaker; she described one of their current projects, demonstrating how key insights from both Mark Brearley’s and Carolyn Steel’s talks might look in action.

Sustain (a nonprofit alliance for better food and farming) is currently poised to create borough-wide institutional change by partnering with Camden Council and Camden Primary Care Trust (part of the National Health Service). This alliance—with its intriguing implication that the National Health Service might be the one institution with the most to gain by promoting urban agriculture—speaks to the impact of creating new interest groups for locally grown food. By partnering with institutions responsible for dealing with established urban challenges—issues such as public health, economic growth, community engagement, waste, and environmental sustainability—groups like Sustain have the potential to take urban agriculture from decorative hobby to investment-worthy infrastructure.

The Camden partnership’s report (still in draft stage) aims to outline a relatively coherent and holistic food program for the borough—a plan that promises to use food to reshape at least this part of the city, in terms of promoting social enterprise, meeting infrastructure needs, and reducing health inequalities.

[Image: A lemon grown in Dulwich; photograph by Jonathan Gales (2008), ©Bohn & Viljoen Architects].

4. Mapping and visualization tools
The last two presentations of the day agreed that successfully producing food in the city requires a detailed resource inventory combined with effective promotion efforts. Mikey Tomkins, a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, described systematically mapping the rooftops, grass patches, vertical faces, and vacant lots of Elephant & Castle—whereupon he discovered that 30% of the area’s food needs could be met through the cultivation of found space alone.

Architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen, creators of the uninspiringly named CPUL (Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes), emphasized the need to think about spare inventory in terms of population and three dimensionality (their Urban Agriculture Curtain filled a display window one floor above us). Their research techniques included the accumulation of census data and questionnaires combined with GPS mapping and site visits in order to analyze a landscape’s food production capacity.

Both Tomkins and Bohn & Viljoen also showed several projects intended to help people read the city in terms of food, using tools as diverse as “edible maps” of London and visual analyses of urban agriculture in Havana, to installations and public events, such as the Continuous Picnic. This was a day-long event, part of the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, that included an “Inverted Market” (bring your own locally grown fruit and vegetables to be admired, judged, and then prepared), as well lessons in “Community Composting”; a giant public picnic then spread throughout Russell Square and Montague Place, with connecting corridors between.

Meanwhile, for his Edible Maps series, an example of which appears below, Tomkins targets a new type of urban resident: the “food-flâneur,” who, map in hand, “could start to picture… the grassed areas around housing, the corners of parks, or the many flat rooftops of this quarter of Croydon spring into life with psychogeographic food.”

Another example of urban agriculture as an opportunity for community activation was Croydon Roof Divercity, Tomkins’s collaboration with AOC (previously discussed, along with other AOC projects, on BLDGBLOG here).

[Image: From Mikey Tomkins’s series of Edible Maps, this guide represents the area around Surrey Street car park, site of Croydon Roof Divercity, in terms of inventory and potential yield].

5. Easy, cheap, and somewhat under control
Both Anna Terzi and Bohn & Viljoen recognized the difficulty of maintaining urban agriculture projects, once the initial novelty has worn off. Bohn & Viljoen are currently working on a twelve-step program to prevent relapse, while Sustain are offering ongoing practical and financial support to new food growing spaces in London through their Capital Growth initiative.

Throughout the morning, David Barrie repeatedly registered his concern that urban agriculture needed to be economically viable, not just an upscale $64 Tomato lifestyle choice. Several of the presenters added a layer of nuance to Barrie’s formulation, noting that cheap food has simply had its costs externalized and hidden (Carolyn Steel) and that organizations like the New Economics Foundation are developing the much-needed tools to measure urban-agriculture-created value, such as increased community engagement and environmental sustainability, which is currently perceived as intangible and qualitative (Katrin Bohn). Mikey Tomkins argued against an economics-based one-size-fits-all approach to urban agriculture, explaining that the scale of a food growing project determines its possible benefits. Thus differentiated, food gardening generates educational and quality of life outcomes and should be measured accordingly, while market gardening creates recycling benefits, and urban agriculture can be evaluated in terms of yield.

Finally, the elephant in the room was the degree of coordination and regulation needed to transform London into a food-producing landscape. In an environment where, as Carolyn Steel said, the supermarkets where Londoners buy more than 80% of their groceries refused to participate in consultations with the Mayor’s London Food Strategy, it seems unlikely that sustainable food production and distribution will become the norm without legislative intervention.

In her book, Steel quotes Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman who wrote: “You who control the transportation of food supplies are in charge, so to speak, of the city’s lifeline, of its very throat.” At the moment, Steel tells us, roughly 30 agrifood conglomerates—unelected, and with no responsibility other than to their shareholders—have almost unfettered control over London’s food supply. Until that changes, urban agriculture can’t help but remain “at the artwork stage”—an inspiring, attractive, and completely optional extra.

[Other guest posts by Nicola Twilley include Watershed Down, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion].

A Parking Lot to Last 16,000 Years

Perhaps proof that J.G. Ballard didn’t really die, he simply took an engineering job at MIT, scientists at that venerable Massachusetts institution have designed a new concrete that will last 16,000 years.

Called ultra-high-density concrete, or UHD, the material has so far proven rather strikingly resistant to deformation on the nano-scale – to what is commonly referred to as “creep.”

This has the (under other circumstances, quite alarming) effect that “a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today’s concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete.” (Emphasis added).

So how long until we start building multistory car parks with this stuff? 16,000 years from now, architecture bloggers camped out for the summer in rented apartments in Houston – the new Rome – get to visit the still-standing remains of abandoned airfields, dead colosseums, and triumphal arches that once held highway flyovers?

16,000 years’ worth of parking lots. 16,000 years’ worth of building foundations. Perhaps this simply means that we’re one step closer to mastering urban fossilization.

(Thanks, Mike R.!)

Saddam’s Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse

[Image: Ruined swimming pool at Uday’s Palace, Jebel Makhoul, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

Photographer Richard Mosse first appeared on BLDGBLOG last year with his unforgettable visual tour through the air disaster simulations of the international transportation industry.

He and I have since kept in touch—so, when Mosse returned from a trip to Iraq this spring, he emailed again with an unexpectedly intense new body of work. These extraordinary images—published here for the first time—show the imperial palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary housing for the U.S military.

Vast, self-indulgent halls of columned marble and extravagant chandeliers, surrounded by pools, walls, moats, and, beyond that, empty desert, suddenly look more like college dormitories. Weight sets, flags, partition walls, sofas, basketball hoops, and even posters of bikini’d women have been imported to fill Saddam’s spatial residuum. The effect is oddly decorative, as if someone has simply moved in for a long weekend, unpacking an assortment of mundane possessions.

The effect is like an ironic form of camouflage, making the perilously foreign seem all the more familiar and habitable—a kind of military twist on postmodern interior design.

Of course, then you notice, in the corner of the image, a stray pair of combat boots or an abandoned barbecue or a machine gun leaned up against a marble wall partially shattered by recent bomb damage—amidst the dust of collapsed ceilings and ruined tiles—and this architecture, and the people who now go to sleep there every night, suddenly takes on a whole new, tragic narrative.

Fascinated by the dozens and dozens of incredible photos Mosse emailed—only a fraction of which appear here—I asked him to describe the experience of being a photographer in Iraq.
The ensuing dialogue appears below.


• • •

BLDGBLOG: What was the basic story behind your visit to Iraq? Was it self-funded or sponsored by a gallery?

Richard Mosse: The trip was backed by a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts, which I received after graduating from Yale last summer with an MFA in photography. The Fellowship provides enough to fund two full years of traveling to make new photographs, and I applied to shoot in a range of places, including Iraq. My proposal was to make work around the idea of the accidental monument. I’m interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of being written and rewritten—and the way that we write history is often plain to see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our landscape, and in what stays and what goes.

[Image: Saddam’s heads, taken from the roof of the Republican Guard Palace, now located at Al-Salam Palace, Forward Operating Base Prosperity, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

I suppose it’s an idea that captured me while traveling through Kosovo in 2004. I saw a building by the side of the road there that lay mined and shattered in a field of flowers. It was almost entirely collapsed—except for a church cupola which lay at a pendulous angle, though otherwise perfectly intact on a pile of rubble. It was a marvelously pictorial vision of the Kosovo Albanian desire to rewrite the history books. In other words, what I saw before me was not an act of mere vandalism, but a decisive act by the Kosovo Albanian community to disavow the fact of Serb Orthodox church heritage in the region. The removal of religious architecture is a terrible crime, and it constitutes an act of ethnic cleansing (remember Kristallnacht); yet I couldn’t help but interpret this as an attempt to create a brave new Kosovo Albanian world.

I began to see architecture as something that can reveal the ways in which we alter the past in order to construct a new future, as a site in which past, present, and future come together to be reformed. And it’s not the only one: language—our words and the way we use them—are another fine barometer of these things.

But architecture is something I felt I could research and portray using the dumb eye of my camera.

[Image: JDAM bomb damage within Saddam’s Palace interior, Jebel Makhoul, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: Beyond the most obvious reasons—for instance, there’s a war going on—why did you go to Iraq? Was there something in particular that you were hoping to see? 

Mosse: I had heard plenty about Saddam’s palaces. They were the focus of the International Atomic Energy Association’s tedious investigations in the years preceding the invasion, and the news was always full of delegations being turned away from this or that palace. Why were we so keen to get inside Saddam’s palaces? Because he built so many—81 in total. Surely, we thought, he must be hiding something in those palace complexes. Surely he must be building subterranean particle accelerators. And, in the end, our curiosity got the better of us.

[Image: U.S.-built partition and air-conditioning units within Al-Salam Palace, Forward Operating Base Prosperity, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

In fact, Saddam was building palaces in every city as an expression of his authority. Palace architecture in Iraq served as a constant reminder of Saddam’s immanence. A palace in your city simply fed the sense that Saddam was not just nearby—he was everywhere. Saddam was omnipresent.

I once heard a Westerner tell me that, prior to the invasion, Iraqis driving near one of Saddam’s palaces would actually avert their eyes—they would refuse to look toward the palace. It was almost as if they were prisoners in a great outdoor version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Curiously, the sentry towers along the perimeter walls of Al-Salam Palace in Baghdad face only outward; they’re screened from looking inward at the palace itself. People say it’s so the guards could not witness Saddam’s eldest son Uday’s relations with underage girls, but I rather like to think that it created a sense of the unseen authoritarian staring blankly outwards. It was like those ominous black turrets that the British army constructed over the hills of Belfast, packed with listening devices and telescopic cameras.

[Image: Outdoor gym, Al-Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

But the idea of Iraqis averting their eyes from Saddam’s palace architecture also reminds me of something from W.G. Sebald’s book On the Natural History of Destruction.

BLDGBLOG: That’s an incredible book – I still can’t forget his descriptions of tornadoes of fire whirling through bombed cities and melting asphalt.

Mosse: Sebald recounts how the German population, after the end of WWII, would ride the trains, staring into their laps or at the ceiling—anywhere but out the window at the terrible wreckage of their cities. It was as if they were somehow disavowing the war by willing it away, by refusing to perceive it.

It’s interesting, then, that, in both instances—in both Iraq and in post-war Germany—it’s the tourist, or the outsider, who observes this blindness. I suppose that’s why I like to make photographs in foreign places: only the tourist notices the really dumb things that everyone else takes for granted.

[Image: U.S. military telephone kiosks built within Birthday Palace interior, Tikrit, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: The way these structures have been colonized is often amusing and sometimes shocking—the telephones, desks, and instant dormitories that turn an imperial palace into what looks like a suburban office or hospital waiting room. Can you describe some of the spatial details of these soldiers’ lives that most struck you? 

Mosse: It was extraordinary how some of the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers. Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed chipboard cubicles. Obama’s face beamed out of televisions overlooking the freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.

Many of the palaces have already been handed back to the Iraqis—but where Americans troops do remain, they live in very cramped conditions, pissing into a hole in the ground and waiting days just to shower. Life is hard on the front line, and it seems more than a little surreal to be ticking off the days in a dictator’s pleasure dome.

[Images: American dormitories built within Saddam’s Birthday Palace, Tikrit, Iraq (2009); photos by Richard Mosse].

The most interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam’s palaces in the first place. If you’re trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they’d done away with. Instead, they made the mistake of repeating history.

This is why I’ve titled this body of work Breach. “Breach” is a military maneuver in which the walls of a fortification (or palace) are broken through. But breach also carries the sense of replacement—as in, stepping into the breach. The U.S. stepped into the breach that it had created, replacing the very thing that it sought to destroy.

There are other kinds of breach—such as a breach of faith, a breach of confidence, or the breach of a whale rising above water for air. All of these senses were important to me while working on these photographs.

[Image: Provisional office wall partitions within Al-Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: In several of these photos, the soldiers are literally lifting tiles up from the floor as if the buildings had been left unfinished, or they’re peering through cracks in the palace walls. From what you could see, were Saddam’s palaces badly constructed or were they just heavily damaged during the war?

Mosse: Tiles simply fell from Al-Faw Palace because the cement used there had been poorly salinated. If that can happen to tiles, think what’s happening when the entire palace has been built on similarly salinated foundations! It’s just a matter of time before Al-Faw collapses in on itself.

You can already see arches cracking and walls beginning to sag.

[Image: Fallen tiles and chandeliers, Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

But I’m reluctant to include images of U.S. soldiers pointing out problems with Saddam’s architecture, because it’s fairly evident that those could be a form of propaganda—and it’s easy to forget that many of these palaces were built during times of terrible sanctions imposed by the West. It might not seem very clear why Saddam was busy building palaces in a time of sanctions, but remember how the WPA was set-up during the Great Depression? I don’t want to risk being called an apologist for Saddam, but there are many ways to read a story.

[Image: “Thank you for your service” banner, Al-Faw Palace interior, Camp Victory, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

That said, the palace is a fabulous monument to rushed construction, poor materials, and gaudy pomp. Saddam had apparently insisted that the palace be finished within two years, so many shortcuts were taken during construction. For example, the stairway banisters were made of crystallized gypsum—rather than carved marble—and where pieces didn’t quite fit together, they were just sanded down rather than replaced. Marble that was used in the palace (such as in the great spacious bathrooms) was imported from Italy, in spite of the trade embargo. And the plaster cast frescoes in the ceilings were imported from Morocco.

[Image: Stairway, Al-Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

Al-Faw Palace later became the U.S, Army’s Command HQ, located at the heart of Camp Victory, near Baghdad International Airport. The palace is now teeming with generals, including General Odierno, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. It’s a great, tiered wedding-cake structure, built around an inner hall with possibly the biggest and ugliest chandelier ever made. In fact, the chandelier is not made of crystal, but from a lattice of glass and plastic.

[Image: Chandelier, Al-Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

The palace itself is then surrounded by a lake, which seems a bit like a moat—and it would be tempting to take a swim there, but the moat has been turned into a standing pool for Camp Victory’s sewage. In the summer, the place must be rather unpleasant: rank in all senses of the word, both military and sanitary. These artificial lakes surrounding the palace are also populated by the infamous “Saddam Bass.” It’s said that Saddam would feed the bodies of his political opponents to these monsters. In fact, they’re not bass at all, but a breed of asp fish. U.S. troops stationed at Camp Victory love to fish on these lakes, and a 105-pound specimen was recently caught.

[Image: Tigris Salmon caught at Camp Victory Base, measuring 5 feet 10.5 inches and weighing 105 lbs. Image courtesy of the U.S. Army].

BLDGBLOG: How was your own presence received by those soldiers? Did you present yourself as a photojournalist or as an art photographer?

Mosse: The difference between art and journalism is, for me, of paramount importance—but twenty minutes in Iraq, and the dialectic recedes. I got a vague sense that Americans working there feel a little forgotten—unappreciated by people at home—so they’re very grateful for a camera, any camera, coming through. Even a big 8″x10″ bellows camera with an Irishman in a cape. There were a lot of rather obvious photographs that I chose not to make, and occasionally someone got offended by this.

[Image: A game of basketball, Birthday Palace, Tikrit, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: What was the soldiers’ opinion of these buildings? Did they ever just wander around and explore them, for instance, or was that a safety violation?

Mosse: I got the feeling that soldiers who occupied one of Saddam’s palaces were pretty interested in its original function. They seemed a lot more together, and happier with their job, compared with the troops I met on the massive, sprawling, purpose-built military bases in the Iraqi desert. Constant reminders of hierarchy and protocol were everywhere on the bigger bases—but on the more cramped and less comfortable palace bases, soldiers of different ranks seemed much closer and more capable of shooting the shit with each other, to borrow an American turn of phrase.

Though a far tougher environment, there seemed to be real job satisfaction—a sense that they were taking part in a piece of history.

[Image: Detail of U.S. soldier’s living quarters, Birthday Palace interior, Tikrit, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: Architect Jeffrey Inaba once joked, in an interview with BLDGBLOG, that Saddam’s palaces look a bit like McMansions in the suburbs of New Jersey. He quipped that “the architecture of state power and the architecture of first world residences don’t seem that far apart. Saddam’s palaces, while they’re really supposed to be about state power, look not so different from houses in New Jersey.” They’re not intimidating, in other words; they’re just tacky. They’re kitsch. Now that you’ve actually been inside these palaces, though, what do you think of that comparison? 

Mosse: Well, I’ve never been inside a New Jersey McMansion, so I can’t pass judgment. However, “McMansion” is a term borrowed by us in Ireland, where I’m from. Ireland was hard-hit by English penal laws, from the 17th century onward. One of those laws was the Window Tax. This cruel levy was imposed as a kind of luxury tax, to take money from anyone who had it; the result was that Irish vernacular architecture became windowless. The Irish made good mileage on the half-door, for instance, a kind of door that can be closed halfway down to keep the cattle out but still let the light in.

Aside from this innovation, and from subtleties in the method of thatching, Irish architecture never fully recovered—to the point that, even today, almost everyone in my country chooses their house from a book called Plan-a-Home, which you can buy for 15 euros. And if you have extra cash to throw in, you can flick to the back of the book and choose one of the more spectacular McMansions. Those are truly Saddam-esque.

[Image: Birthday Palace, Tikrit, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, the “Green Zone,” as well as many of these palaces, are notoriously insular, cut-off behind security walls from the rest of Iraq. Did you actually feel like you were in Iraq at all—or in some strange architectural world, of walls and dormitories, surrounded by homesick Americans? 

Mosse: Not all of Saddam’s palaces are as isolated from reality as those situated in the green zone (or international zone, as it’s now called). One I visited near Tikrit—Saddam’s Birthday Palace—was even right at the heart of the city. Saddam was said to visit the palace each year on his birthday.

Wherever you go on the base, you’re eminently shootable—a fantastic sniper target—and can hear the coming and going of Iraqis in the surrounding neighborhoods. It’s a remarkable experience to go up to the roof with the pigeons at dusk and watch the changing light. You get a palpable impression of the great tragedy of the Iraq war, and you can see for yourself the fencing between neighborhoods, the rubbish strewn everywhere, the emptiness of the place, and you can hear the packs of dogs baying about. But you can also hear occasional shots fired in the distance, and you get the distinct feeling that you’re being watched.

I spent a very slow month in Iraq trying to reach as many of these palaces as possible. I only managed to visit six out of eighty-one palaces. It is impossibly slow going over there, working within the war machine. These palaces are currently being handed back to the Iraqis, and many of them will be repurposed, sold to private developers or demolished. If I could get the interest of a publisher, for instance, I would return to Iraq to complete the project before Saddam’s heritage, and the traces of U.S. occupation, are entirely removed.


• • •

Thanks again to Richard Mosse for the incredible opportunity to talk to him about this trip, and for allowing BLDGBLOG to publish these images for the first time.

Be sure to see the rest of Mosse’s work on his website. Hopefully the entirety of Breach will be coming soon to a book or gallery near you.

Zone for Cloud

[Image: Detail of a zoning map for New York City].

Earlier this month, mammoth – just two months old, but already one of the more interesting architecture blogs out there – cited climatological research that certain land use patterns can dramatically affect the formation of clouds above.

In other words, pastures, forests, suburbs, cities, farms, and so on, all affect the skies in very particular spatial ways. Deforestation, for instance, has “substantially altered cloud patterns” in the Amazon; specifically, we read that “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’,” generating a new marbling of the local atmosphere.

The same thing can be found to happen above cities, of course. Instead of “being zoned ‘R-3 Residential Low Density’,” mammoth continued, “a block might be zoned ‘Cumulus H-2’.” Or Mammatus H-3. In this tongue-in-cheek vision of sky-centric urban development, all new buildings would have to be cleared with a Meteorological Bureau to ensure that they produce the right types of cloud. Atmospheric retrofitting comes to mean attaching bizarre cantilevers, ramps, and platforms to the roofs and walls of existing houses till the clouds above look just right.

Sky vandals are people who deliberately misengineer the weather through the use of inappropriate roof ornamentation.

Over generations, you and your friends and the descendants of your friends sculpt vast, urban-scale volumes of air, guiding seasonal rain events toward certain building types – where, as mammoth‘s own earlier paper about fog farming suggests, “fog nets” might capture a new water source for the city.

(Incidentally, there is a short vignette in The BLDGBLOG Book about bespoke, privatized, and extremely local weather control).

This Gaming Life: An Interview with Jim Rossignol

[Image: Jim Rossignol’s This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities].

Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, and the author of This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, published by the University of Michigan Press. Rossignol’s book is “a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures,” according to The New Yorker‘s John Seabrook; Chris Baker of Wired magazine says that “we need more writers like Jim Rossignol,” writers who can intelligently explore “the deeper significance of games.”
My own familiarity with Rossignol’s work came through blogging: we first crossed paths online a few years ago; I read his book; we managed to meet up at the Barbican last winter; and we soon decided to have a much longer conversation about our mutual interests and books.
The following interview is an edited transcript of that discussion, focusing on Rossignol’s book, but also covering my own interests in gaming and architecture, Rossignol’s travels to Seoul and Reykjavik for games research, the plug-in avant-gardism of Archigram and others, the psychological effect of historic preservation in the UK, and the rewards of speculative thinking in the design of both physical and virtual worlds.
I’ve often wondered, for instance, how the process of playing a game might compare to the experience of using a building, and if these must necessarily be different ways of engaging with another person’s created space. Further, if the same software packages and other digital effects can be used to design a building and a new videogame, might this imply that there are deeper structural similarities between games and architecture—or is this merely a sharing of aesthetics and tools?
Such a conversation could go in any number of directions, of course; this interview merely helps kick things off.
Rossignol and I spoke by phone.

• • •

BLDGBLOG: First, what was the origin of your book?
 
Jim Rossignol: This Gaming Life came out of an essay I wrote about the Korean gaming scene, which is fairly unusual for gaming cultures around the world. There was a series of circumstances in Korea that led to something quite strange in the way Koreans approach gaming—via massive social gaming through internet cafes, but particularly their E-Sports, which focus on professional players playing games like Starcraft. I went out and looked at that for PC GAMER magazine—which, at the time, was doing very progressive games journalism. So I wrote a piece on that and it was very popular, and people became interested in the cultural angle of gaming. The University of Michigan, which does a collection of technology writing each year, put that into their 2007 anthology. Afterwards, UMICH came back to me and asked if there was any similar material that I had written, and we eventually decided it would be a good idea to sit down and put together a longer work—and that’s what became This Gaming Life.
 
I actually found it very difficult initially to come up with a cogent theme for the book! It developed quite a lot along the way, particularly in its focus on three cities. The structure of the book is broken up between London, Seoul, and Reykjavik, the London part being the most autobiographical. It’s me explaining my particular angle on gaming; moving into Seoul to talk about gaming cultures worldwide, particularly the differences between the west and Korea. Then the third section is Reykjavik, which I suppose is more personal once again, because it’s expressing some ideas and angles on a particular game—EVE Online, which was developed in Reykjavik by a company called CCP. I think there are some very interesting lessons and ideas in that game model. EVE, being a massively multi-player game, is never a static, fixed thing, as games have been in the past, and I think it points to the way games are going to work more as social systems, involving both the gamers and the developers. It creates a sort of symbiotic process where the developers are developing for and reacting to the way that gamers are using and doing the game. That stuff fascinates me.
 
[Image: A scene from EVE Online, taken from Robin Burkinshaw‘s massive EVE Online Flickr set].

BLDGBLOG: Your section about Seoul almost seems to imply that there’s less of a cultural difference between the gaming cultures of London and Seoul, and more of a recreational drug difference. What I mean is that everybody goes out drinking in London—it’s a social culture built very much around alcohol—but, when you go out in Korea, it sounds more like an all-night caffeine binge. That creates a very different urban and social reality.
 
Rossignol: I may be wrong in my impression of Seoul, of course! But wandering round the city myself, I didn’t tend to stumble across many bars—whereas it’s impossible not to stumble across a bar in any British town. There’s a lot of social eating, as well, in Seoul. It’s hard to really gauge how dominant gaming is there, and how much this is a factor of caffeine consumption; but, on the surface, the gaming is very obvious. It’s well-promoted and it takes place in public.
 
I was thinking the other night, though, about what prohibition would do to England. The disabling aspect of alcohol certainly changes motor tasks—but gaming does appear in bar culture here. There’s darts and pool, and so on. And there are slot machines, which are sort of prototypical video games. Gaming itself is so ubiquitous in British culture that you perhaps don’t even notice all the aspects of it and where they appear.
 
BLDGBLOG: In that sense, you suggest, gaming pops up everywhere. There’s a lot of stigmatism around the idea that you might sit at home alone playing a computer game—or blogging—or that you might go out to an internet café and play a game with your friends, as if there’s something socially wrong with you; but if you go down to the pub for a game of pool, that’s the height of sociability. That’s the right kind of gaming. So only specific types of games are stigmatized, and only specific types of play have been rewarded.
 
Rossignol: I wonder whether there will be a massive generational shift over the next 40 years, so that electronic gaming will just be everywhere. People will be so familiar with it. Kids who are growing up now are so used to the idea of a digital interface that they will expect to find one everywhere. When I was in Vegas a few years ago, I sat at a bar and there was a little betting machine panel in the bar top—a touch-screen betting system. But I was thinking: I would have happily sat at that bar longer if it had been a touch-screen Tetris.
 
BLDGBLOG: I can easily see games being embedded in different social environments—even instead of hold music, when you call the bank, you get a short text game.
 
Rossignol: Or a sound-based game. There are apparently a number of games which are based just on sound response, for blind people—sound-structure games. There’s no reason you couldn’t play a pure audio game while you’re just holding on the phone, by responding to sound cues.
 
BLDGBLOG: Something else you mention in the book, and that has been getting more and more attention in popular media, is the idea that games aren’t just a frivolous way to waste time; they’re almost a form of job training. You can learn to be a better brain surgeon and so on. Do you think games are a kind of pedagogical device like that, or even an emerging neurological frontier?
 
Rossignol: The U.S. military did, I think, say gamers were ideal helicopter pilots, due to the spatial awareness and coordination required. But games have other roles: like that Tactical Iraqi thing—that was actually a role-playing game: you go into a village, and you have a bunch of text trees, and you explore how you should approach the situation, and how you should talk to the locals. I thought that was interesting because the immediate thought is always the helicopter fighter-pilot angle—the classic “games make you have better reactions” angle—but games as social teaching devices I think is quite interesting. Perhaps crucial, from a military angle.
 
One of the things about games journalism, though, is that it’s dominated by business, and by products and product marketing, so a lot of the writing is preview/review cycle stuff. The other end of the scale is very academic material that tends to be theory-based. But there’s not a lot of practical study of the fundamentals of gaming, which I find very interesting.
It’s also one of those areas where I almost don’t want to make too much comment, because I feel like all I really want to say is, “For God’s sake, scientists! Spend some time with the subject and really use your methodology to see how people react to games. Do that kind of deep research that’s been done on so many other subjects.” It increasingly comes up. Just the other week there was an article called “Your Brain on Games,” where researchers had used an MRI scanner to look at someone’s brain while they were gaming, and talked about the effects and so on—but that still seems like a trivial treatment of the subject.
 
I think the University of Rochester in NY is doing some research on this, and I hope they continue to. One of the things they’re looking at is, as you were saying, the effect on the brain long-term. Which is a completely new frontier for neuroscience research. What they have shown is that visual processing is increased—so that gamers are much better at figuring out what’s happening in a particularly busy visual field—and it’s a very quick change, as well. People only have to play games for a few hours to see a distinct difference. What I think is interesting about that is that we don’t yet have any real handle on what’s going to happen to an entire generation of people who have spent years and years increasing their visual processing. Will we have this sort of super-visual human whose abilities to pick things out and understand things on a visual basis are going to be massively accelerated beyond what we’ve had in the past? I can’t even really see what sort of ramifications that would have—other than that we might be short-sighted as well, from being sat looking at the screen for so long. [laughs]
 
I read in a recent story about texting—I think it was in New Scientist—that texting actually improves your general literacy. That was the headline. I think the actual content of the article was that people who were more literate were better at texting, and better at reducing words down to a shorter form. There are graphical forms finding their way into text—obviously, the smileys and emoticons—and people have started doing other ones, like an o with a slash—a little man waving hello—and stuff like that. That kind of pictorial thing—this truncation that you’re getting from text-speak—is rapid visual processing.
 
BLDGBLOG: That reminds me of something else about your book—it has no images. However, I think that actually helps to demonstrate what your book is talking about—which is that you can have a literate, intelligent, and articulate approach to gaming, and it doesn’t require pyrotechnic visuals for people to be interested.
 
Rossignol: Yeah, we quickly dismissed the idea of using pictures at all. I wanted to make it pure text, which I’m quite pleased with. Even if we’d had color plates, I think that would have distracted from the themes I was talking about. I think a lot of the material isn’t easily illustratable—you can’t really illustrate interactions or game development, or indeed a lot of the cultural or theoretical stuff I was going to talk about. Having a picture of Mario would have been redundant.
 
Something I wanted to ask you about was how being speculative seems to be rewarded in architecture writing—which is almost the opposite condition that we have with games. Critics and writers are heavily dissuaded from being speculative when talking about games, and I think this is because there’s a tendency for gamers to be backseat designers. There’s a strong tendency for people to dismiss journalists who write speculatively about games or who talk about games’ futures or the possibilities of game design the way that you do with architecture. I wonder if that’s different with architecture because there are so few backseat architects, so to speak.
 
[Image: From Pixel City by Shamus Young].

BLDGBLOG: That’s interesting. I’d say that one of the ways that blogging is doing this—leading to more speculation in today’s architecture writing—is that blogging has tapped into a massive class of unprofessional writers who, nonetheless, have strong opinions about the built environment. After all, they’re surrounded by it at all times. It’s not just Harvard graduates now who have the microphone, so to speak; even some kid in the suburbs—playing videogames—can offer an opinion about architecture, and it almost definitely will not involve references to Mies van der Rohe. It will be about shopping malls, or the suburbs themselves, or the ruined cities you see in movies like Terminator Salvation. It will be about the architecture of videogame worlds.
 
In any case, I think as people start to realize that they can have an opinion about architecture, in the same way that they can have an opinion about the food they order in a restaurant, or an opinion about a book they’ve just read, then they will also realize that they can ask questions about the buildings they see all around them. You know: why am I surrounded by buildings that look like this? Or: why on earth is there a road in the middle of that children’s park downtown? Or why can’t the world look like this—or this, or this? Very soon, you start speculating about how the world could really be.
 
But I’d also say that one of the reasons this is the case—why I can speculate freely about a Rem Koolhaas building, or about the future of London in an era of rising sea levels—is that there’s almost no risk that someone is going to take my ideas and realize them in built form. No one’s going to build an alternative version of London, with 80-foot seawalls, because they read about it on BLDGBLOG! But if I outline an amazing idea for a new videogame, then there’s every chance in the world that someone might take that idea and run with it.
 
I think I even saw something like this on Warren Ellis’s blog, where he says that, if you email him, don’t mention any new ideas for future stories or comics—because, at least in my interpretation of that, if he then puts that idea into a comic strip five years later, he’s probably going to be sued. It’s unlikely, on the other hand, that Zaha Hadid will read on my blog about some great new room she should design someday—and then actually go and add that exact thing to a new museum of hers in Potsdam.

In other words, there’s quite a large barrier to entry to becoming an architect. The idea that I would actually build the next Olympic Stadium is absurd, whereas—and I don’t mean to make it sound easier than it is—I think I could presumably become a games designer much faster than I could design the next Los Angeles airport. You’re less of a competitor as an architecture critic than you would be as a video game critic.
 
Rossignol: At the last game developers conference in San Francisco, one of my colleagues said to me that perhaps what was most interesting were all the ideas that were walking around inside the heads of the developers—the ideas that they wouldn’t talk about, or stuff they kept secret because it was too good and too commercially important for their companies. It did make me wonder whether the fact that games are so commercial stunts their futurology—after all, if game developers were given free rein to be pure creatives, I think there would be a massive exchange of ideas. This kind of accelerated avalanche of development could come out of there being no limits on sharing ideas. It makes it very difficult for game designers to get the ideas they need to make games better—because they’re going to be protected, or hidden, or otherwise held back by commercial concern.
 
BLDGBLOG: In a way, though, this brings us back to EVE Online—to the idea that there is a feedback loop between the players and developers. You do seem to be able to influence the future structure of a game, and it’s precisely through playing it in a certain way or demonstrating a certain behavior. That sort of thing doesn’t happen very often in architecture—it’s way too expensive to redesign buildings every two years based on how people have actually been using the space.

Or—actually, here’s a random example. When I lived in London seven or eight years ago, I worked at Norman Foster’s office in Battersea. I’m not an architect; I was just an admin person. One day, though, my task was to go through this huge cupboard full of old VHS tapes, many of which were unlabeled. I actually had to put them into the VCR, watch them for a few minutes, take notes, and figure out what they were—then label them and stick them back in the cupboard, in an organized way, based on chronology.
 
At one point, I found a bunch of tapes that were nothing but surveillance footage taken inside Wembley Stadium. It was unlabeled, black and white footage of people milling about outside the bathrooms, near the ticket gate, and so on—and my initial thought was actually that some sort of crime must have taken place. There had been a stabbing, or a riot—and, I thought, maybe even someone here at Foster & Partners had been involved. That’s why we had the tapes. Then again, that’s how it always is with surveillance tapes: you’re always waiting for something to happen on them. All CCTV footage of road traffic, for instance, looks like CCTV footage taken right before an accident.
 
In any case, nothing happened: there was no crime. What those tapes were actually used for was a kind of spatial research project: the office had pulled a bunch of surveillance tapes from the stadium so that they could watch how people actually used the space: where they congregated, what needed to be better designed, how things really, on a social level, worked. They could then figure out how to design the next Wembley Stadium.
 
My point is that that was an example of user-research coming to influence the spatial future of a building project—but it’s very rare, I think. Most people just design buildings based on whether or not it fits into their own stylistic development, regardless of whether anyone else will like what results. They just put up a new building—and you have to adapt to it, not the other way around.
 
Having said all that, I’m wondering if you could talk about how, in the specific case of EVE Online, the players’ interaction with the game affects how that game might be developed in the future.
 
[Images: Scenes from EVE Online, taken from Robin Burkinshaw‘s EVE Online Flickr set].

Rossignol: The thing about EVE, which is distinct from other online games, is that it’s a single galaxy—a single space. Most games aren’t like that. Even massively multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, are broken up into “shards”—so that, if you’re playing Warcraft, you’ll be on a shard with maybe two or three thousand other people. In EVE, everyone is in the same galaxy together. It’s never been switched off or restarted, although there’s a brief downtime everyday, so there’s been this continuous etching-in of detail since the game was first launched.
 
To create the actual structure of the galaxy, they used some crystal-forming algorithms—the maths that explain how crystals grow—and then a bunch of random generation to architect the solar systems (which creates some weird anomalies in places). It’s the system that they’ve laid down on top of that, and the detail that’s gone in subsequently, that often reflects how the players started using the world itself.
 
The two best examples of this occurred quite early on. One was this phenomenon called “can mining.” It may even have been in the beta version, but certainly in the early weeks of the game, when players realized that the asteroid belts could be mined for resources, and that that was the best way of making money. That’s no longer true, but it was true when it started. The logistical problem of getting minerals back to the space station hadn’t really been considered. There was no model for it, although there were these industrial hauler ships that could take large amounts.
 
What players realized early on is that they could eject a cargo container from their ship, a container which had vastly more cargo space than a mining ship, and they developed this process where they would mine into their own cargo hold and then move the minerals over to a canister; the industrial ships would hurry back and forth over to the can to take minerals back to the space station, where they could then be used to build stuff. I don’t think that CCP initially thought that their economic system would definitely work from the ground up like that, or that they would have people wanting to put together the most basic resources in the game; but once players discovered this cargo canister loophole, mining became very important to them. Subsequently there’s a huge section of the game, and the updates that followed, just based around mining. That perhaps goes counter to the designers’ expectations, because designers come in looking at gamers wanting to shoot things, wanting to blow things up, wanting to do combat and exciting stuff like that.
 
Another, bigger, example is the alliance system. Quite early on in the game, CCP introduced the alliance management systems. They expected players to band together in alliances to fight each other, but they didn’t quite know how it was going to work. They wanted players to be able to capture space, and very early on, pretty much from day one, players banded together in these sort of feudal tribes to do that. Initially it was done purely by the players saying, “Right, anyone in this corporation or in this small group of corporations which are all friendly with each other can use this space. Anyone else that comes in, we’ll just blow them up.” CCP waited to see what tools players would need to make this work before they implemented them.
 
But this created a kind of “piled up” evolution of game structures. The Something Awful GoonSwarm war against Band of Brothers—those are the two main alliances within the game as it is now—demonstrated how CCP had laid down layer after layer of game functionality in a sort of house of cards manner. They pulled down one part of that and the system collapsed drastically. Vital defensive systems were based on the alliance tools—not in any logical way, just in a kind of design legacy way—so when a Goon Swarm defector shut down the Band Of Brothers alliance, many of their entrenched defensive systems shut down, too. It handed the keys to the fortress over to the enemy—and it was a loophole created by the evolving design of this single galaxy.
 
That kind of ongoing development is pretty much unique to EVE. It’s come about because CCP’s philosophy is essentially that the game needs to be purely about human interaction. There is non-player interaction in the game, and there are non-player ships that populate various areas—and you can go blow them up, and you can do missions against them and so on. But the crucial step for CCP has been the idea that what fuels the game is interactions by players with each other, and that interaction is either through combat or through trade.
 
The economics of it are really interesting. I’ve had people say, “I can just stay in my space station and trade, or just play on the stock market, and not really interact with any other players”—but, of course, when it’s a purely player-based in economy, when players are mining to get the minerals that produce the materials that are sold in the market, any economic interaction is still interaction with other people. That in itself is unique within EVE. There are elements of it within lots of other games—Second Life, for example—but I think EVE’s game-like structure is what makes it so interesting.
 
Although it might not always be to its advantage: I’ve recently written an article about whether this dependence on interaction could actually be the downfall of EVE, because there is always the danger that the game will run into an evolutionary dead end—that the way the players behave within the systems that these people have created simply won’t continue functioning. A lot of people are speculating now, after this recent Band of Brothers/GoonSwarm conflict, that the big game—the alliance game—will be over, because everyone will be essentially allied with each other, and there won’t be enough war to make it worth playing. This would bring the whole game grinding to a halt, because once there isn’t any war and there aren’t any losses, then there’s no reason for a massive economy to turn out spaceships to get destroyed.
 
BLDGBLOG: It’s funny, though: listening to that as an outsider, or as a non-player, it sounds a lot like the end of the Cold War, when people like Francis Fukuyama were predicting that we were now at the “end of history.” If there was no more USSR vs. the USA—if there was no more good vs. evil—then everything would come to a halt and we could all go shopping. That would be the end of history. But, as we’ve seen, all it takes is these much smaller minor conflicts, and maybe one or two ambitious groups, like an Al-Qaeda—or, for that matter, an internal economic collapse—to step on stage and kick-start the engines of history again. If part of EVE is watching for these emergent, unexpected, angular behaviors, then there’s no telling what might happen next.
 
Rossignol: Absolutely.
 
BLDGBLOG: To go back to can mining briefly: your description made me wonder whether you might ever be playing a game that requires a certain behavior to win, but that behavior has absolutely no interest for you. It’s boring. But what if that game is Chinese, say, and the winning behavior for that game is something highly valued in Chinese culture—even though it leaves you basically wondering when the shooting begins. It’s incomprehensible that someone would actually want to do this. So it’s a kind of anthropological exchange through the embedded goals of gaming.
 
Rossignol: There is an element of that. Korean MMOs are seen as what’s called “grind-heavy,” in that they tend just to be about killing 50 floating eyeballs—and then you go off and kill 200 more, and then you move on to bats, or evil horses or something. It’s deeply repetitious, and there’s very little story. Some Korean MMOs—I think RF Online and ArchLord are probably the best examples—have stumped Western audiences, who have said, “Why are they so grind-heavy? Why are they so repetitious?”
 
I think there’s just a different philosophy for Korean developers. They want to create those games because they know that the players will spend time doing that. The high-end castle sieges and stuff have been invested in very heavily, long-term, by Korean players—it comes out of what Lineage did: huge castle sieges where you’d get hundreds of people, all fighting. I wonder whether that’s born out of their different gaming culture, where all 40 people who were fighting online in the castle siege would probably have been together in the same internet café. Whereas, in the West, it’s a much more solitary, single-player experience—like what you find in World of Warcraft, where it’s much more about the solo player’s experience.
 
[Image: A scene from Love by Eskil Steenberg].

BLDGBLOG: So if the sorts of user-generated structures you were describing are unique, at least for now, to EVE Online, do you think it’s something other people might start incorporating into their own games?
 
Rossignol: It’s a tough one. I think one of the main problems—and one of the reasons I’ve written so much about EVE—is that a lot of game designers who are making these games haven’t played EVE and they don’t understand the systems. It’s that traffic of ideas thing again: I think most people just don’t get it. They don’t understand why it works. It’s much easier to copy, say, World of Warcraft, which has quite a prescribed level structure—sort of “go and kill X number of monsters for X reward in money or experience points to continue to the next level up.” Game designers understand that a lot better.
 
EVE has been such an esoteric project anyway. The EVE computer cluster is one of the world’s supercomputers, and they’ve had to build this up over time to cope with the sheer number of people who are logging into a single world. The single galaxy model is such a big deal for them. I don’t think anything other than Second Life does the same thing. Any big commercial launch that tried to do the same thing would need to aim higher for more people to try to make more money, and, right now, that’s just not happening. I think where it’s most likely to come from is, in fact, going to be someone independent, starting very small like CCP did, and then slowly building it up over time.
 
There’s one developer operating at the moment who just programs things on his own—this guy called Eskil Steenberg. He’s sort of a graphical programming savant who used to be a tools programmer, and he’s now building his own tools to make his own world. He takes some similar ideas from EVE—it’s not quite the same, but his concept is basically city-building. It has a similar ethos, in that he wants players to build a lot of the content. They’ll be creating the architecture, creating the game world by being able to interact physically with the terrain. So he’s going to procedurally generate the landscapes, and then the players will have to build cities into them and then go out on quests to find stuff in the world, and bring that back to furnish the cities that they’ve built. It has a similar reliance on player productivity to make the game function.
 
I think that realizing that players want to work and want to invest in these things, and that they will put a lot of effort in over time, is probably the lesson that EVE has given to other game designers.
 
Have you seen LittleBigPlanet on the Playstation 3? The idea behind that is essentially that players can build their own levels. There are very simple tools—it allows you to cut-and-paste a world, and to import assets such as photos and so on. They’re relying on player creativity there to create game content.
 
[Image: Plug-In City by Archigram; meanwhile, check out The BLDGBLOG Book for an interesting, and previously unpublished, interview with Archigram’s Sir Peter Cook].

BLDGBLOG: One of the things I was doing while reading your book was trying to read the word “building” wherever you wrote “game.” In other words, every time you referred to user-generated content for a game, I was trying to imagine: could you do the same thing for a building? Could a building also have a built-in quest or goal? Could you have player-generated rooms and levels?
 
What’s interesting, though, is that once you start asking those questions you’ve basically just rediscovered the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 70s—where you had people like Archigram proposing plug-in architecture. You know, you’d show up in London with your own room and you would just plug it into an existing anchorage point on a building core near the Thames—it’d be a kind of user-generated utopia of temporary levels and rooms. That was the Archigramian vision of the city: I could bring my building, level, or room anywhere in the world and just plug it in to everyone else’s before eventually moving on. But what if I wanted to add a floor to the Empire State Building?
 
Anyway, what would user-generated content be in architecture? The most immediate thing that comes to mind is when you do things like geo-tagging, or immersive gaming, like cellphone gaming, where you chase someone through the Louvre based on cellphone signals—things like that. It seems, though, that user-generated content for architecture only exists through the digital world: you can have a temporary Google Maps mash-up that allows you to see who else is in Trafalgar Square with you—but that’s about as deep as it gets. Compare that, for instance, to showing up in London with your own Trafalgar Square. What might be called a gamer’s approach to architecture still has unrealized structural possibilities that might even allow that sort of thing to happen.
 
Rossignol: I think that’s born of the extent that architecture is often about preservation in urban environments. Isn’t that sort of the great frustration of architecture—that you can only ever put down small layers and make small changes? There can’t be a blank canvas—unless you’re building in the middle of the desert, on billions of dollars of oil money.
 
BLDGBLOG: That’s definitely part of the imaginative allure of cities like Dubai, Shanghai, and Beijing, even after the bust. There was, and perhaps still is, a real jealousy amongst architects, in the sense that China gets to do this but “we” don’t. You know, why is all this happening in Dubai and not Berlin?
 
Rossignol: That’s always been an interesting aspect to living in the UK, particularly where I live—Bath—which has an incredibly strict architectural theme. It’s all sandstone. Even modern buildings—they’re building a huge new shopping complex in the center of town—are built with sandstone in the Georgian style. Preservation lends a weird sort of museum air to a lot of the UK. Even where I live, outside of Bath, there are no new buildings—it’s all stone cottages and so on. But it can be quite complex: I love the fact that Bath is like that, and it’s very beautiful—but I’m also such a neophile. I like to see new buildings. I find the obsession towards heritage, and sustaining this mummified England, quite terrifying.
 
I can’t think whether it was an essay or a short story by the writer Will Self, but Self wrote about England as controlled by the National Trust. The National Trust is our core heritage organization that looks after stately homes and parks and so on. Self reimagines the UK as this fascist state where brown-shirted Heritage Police—the National Trust uniform is a brown shirt—are controlling the UK and not allowing any kind of change. I think that’s a splendid satirical image, and very telling about what it’s like to live here.
 
It’s also one reason why I love modern videogames: they are really heavy on architectural fantasies. They’re probably the best place to feel out a lot of that stuff. Sim City is obviously an amazing example of that.
 
BLDGBLOG: Yeah—there’s a funny gap between what people actually enjoy and what they feel is theoretically appropriate for their output as a designer. I’m referring to architects when I say that. I think that many students today, in order to be rigorous to the legacy of Le Corbusier, or to be rigorous to algorithmic design philosophies as laid down through a rereading of Gilles Deleuze in the mid-1990s, feel like they have to produce a certain kind of design—but then they go home and play a videogame, or watch a movie, or even read a fantasy novel or whatever, and they see these vast tree-cities, or old castles on cliffs, or Japanese pagodas the size of whole planets, or derelict mining spaceships, and they actually like that kind of architecture. But it’s exactly what they do not design in the studio. Of course, part of that is the fact that the physical realization of those sorts of ideas very quickly crosses over into kitsch, into the realm of the theme park: that’s Euro Disney or Busch Gardens. Or, for that matter, it’s Dubai.
 
But I do wonder about this. At the same time that it’d be ridiculous if San Francisco was rebuilt as a mock European village, I also wonder why I think that. Is there not a way to adapt fantasy architectures to the real-world without taking on the air of a kind of Walt Disney postmodernism?
 
There seems to be a very real sense that you have to design certain things, in a certain style, in order to demonstrate your seriousness as an architect—to the point that it might actually be that you’re out of touch with what you, yourself, desire and what you would actually want to build. I often wonder: do architects really enjoy these sprawling, biomorphic, 21st-century algorithmic buildings that look like huge webs of kudzu—or would they rather, just for kicks, design Dracula’s castle? It’s a question that doesn’t seem to be asked very often in architecture school.

dracula[Image: A geological rethinking of Dracula’s castle, by a designer named Audit; from a recent Environment of the Week thread on ConceptArt.org].
 
Rossignol: I’d love to see figures for trained architects going into the videogame industry. I wonder how many of them actually are building castles and cities and so on.
 
BLDGBLOG: I’d love to see that number, too.
 
However, I’d like to reverse what I just said. Instead of asking: “Why aren’t architecture students designing the real world to look like a videogame?” It might be interesting if videogames started to use what are precisely not fantasy environments. For instance, at what point might architects stop putting out $100 coffee-table books that are only bought by libraries, and instead commission someone to design a game environment that features all of their buildings? It’d be a new kind of monograph. You buy the new Grand Theft Auto—but all the buildings are designed by Richard Rogers. It seems like you’ve got incredibly imaginative and very passionate people playing those games, so why not present your buildings to that audience? It seems like a missed opportunity.
 
Rossignol: I don’t know if you’ve seen Mirror’s Edge? That’s the one game recently that really made me think: wow, that’s a studio that’s paying attention and trying to use a specific architectural theme. The game is this perfect, controlled utopia, with whole cities full of pure white concrete skyscrapers. You also have these beautiful monochrome interiors, where everything is green or everything is orange. It’s a unique visual theme.
 
I’m hoping that kind of experimentation might push designers to create something that is more wholesale environment design, rather than lifting stuff either from the real world—or just trying to do Aliens again.

[Image: The architecture of Mirror’s Edge by Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), from an article by Charlotte West published last month in Varoom. “What distances Mirror’s Edge from the murky visuals often associated with gaming is its sharper, more intricate imagery,” West suggests].

• • •

Thanks again to Jim Rossignol for taking part in the conversation!
For more, check out Rossignol’s This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; his ongoing reviews at Rock, Paper, Shotgun are also always worth a look.
Thanks, as well, to Nicola Twilley for transcribing this interview.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds

[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol].

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There’s surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it’s okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.

[Image: From World of Warcraft].

Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There’s barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn’t in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dependent on previously pillaged artistic ideas from Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien that evil ambiance is delivered by shorthand. (Of course, World of Warcraft‘s Lich King gets a Stone UFO to fly around in – but it’s still the same old prefab pseudo-Medieval schtick inside). Where the enemy is extra-terrestrial, HR Giger‘s influence is probably going to be felt instead.

[Images: (top) Bran Castle, (bottom) Hunyad Castle, all via Wikipedia].

But, I suspect, these signposts – or the ways in which game designers architecturally represent evil – are becoming too much a part of our everyday imaginative discourse to remain affecting. They’ve begun to lose their danger. The connection with the inhumanity that makes the enemy so thrilling has started to fade via over-familiarity.

Where the evil lair becomes a little more interesting is when its nature is ambiguous – but nevertheless disturbing. Half-Life 2‘s Citadel is an example of this. The brutal gunmetal skyscraper that looms over a nameless Eastern European city, below, appears deeply threatening. But, like everything else in the Half-Life 2 universe, it is unexplained. It does not seem inherently evil. The structure moves and groans; it is a machine of some kind. It is something constructed and mechanical, rather than the clear manifestation or emanation of an evil force. The Citadel is not a fire-rimmed portal to hell, nor a windswept ruin. Nor is it a volcano base. It could even be somehow utilitarian. In fact, it’s reminiscent of the real Moscow’s own television tower.

It is, perhaps, even incidental to the scourge that Half-Life‘s denizens face: alien infrastructure. It is only later, as the plot uncoils the inner architecture of the Citadel, that you come to realise that it is the enemy: the lair of an alien force that must, ultimately, be destroyed.

[Image: From Half-Life 2].

Where the lair is itself the enemy, games are able to excel.

This is the case in both System Shock and System Shock 2, the finest of SF horror games. Both are set aboard spacecraft, but these spacecraft are also the “bodies” of the enemy: SHODAN, a malevolent Artificial Intelligence that controls each vessel.

In a provocative climax of virtuality-within-virtuality, the final act of System Shock 2 is to enter into the cyberspace realm of the AI and defeat SHODAN inside the graphical representation of her own programming. The evil lair is within the mind of the enemy – a motif repeated even more literally in Psychonauts, a game about exploring the physically manifested psyches of various bizarre characters.

[Image: From System Shock 2].

More interesting visually, and far more ambiguous in its delivery of the evil lair, is the underwater city of Rapture, in Bioshock. The designers of this game (some of whom also worked on the System Shock series) poured the early part of the twentieth century into their designs, creating opulent, decaying, Art Deco corridors down which the genetically-enhanced super-human player goes thundering, searching for the enemy.

The ostentation of the city’s innards suggests that the city’s objectivist overseer, Andrew Ryan, must be the enemy we seek. He has, after all, created himself an entire city with a single, over-arching theme: a trademark act of the all-powerful videogame nemesis. Yet, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, although you will inevitably kill Ryan, his architecture tells you nothing about the nature of the enemy you face. Indeed, the true enemy has nothing to do with the stylised nature of this lair at all.

[Image: Channeling Ayn Rand, Andrew Ryan’s city banner announces “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” From Bioshock].

But perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

[Image: From Shadow of the Colossus].

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

[Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol will appear on BLDGBLOG next week].

Books Received

[Image: The “renovation of an old barn into a library and studio” by MOS architects].

BLDGBLOG’s home office here is awash in books. Accordingly, I’ve started a new and more or less regular series of posts called “Books Received.” These will be short descriptions of, and links to, interesting – but not necessarily new – books that have crossed my desk.
Note that these lists will include books I have not read in full – but they will never include books that don’t deserve the attention.
Note, as well, that if you have a book you’d like to see on BLDGBLOG, get in touch – send us a copy, and, if it fits the site, we’ll mention your title in a future Books Received.
Note, finally, that even this list is barely the tip of the iceberg; if you’ve sent me a book recently, please wait till the next list before wondering if I’ll be covering your work. Thanks!

1) The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole by Stuart D. Klipper et al. (Chronicle Books) — Horizontally oriented – that is, you read it like a centerfold – The Antarctic is a genuinely beautiful collection of panoramic photographs taken of, on, and approaching the ice-locked continent. From clouds to empty stretches of black sea water to glacial abstractions – to penguins – Stuart Klipper’s work is a superb document of this frozen landscape. It’s 0º in widescreen. Includes a notable essay by William L. Fox.

2) Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin (Penguin) — The UK paperback edition has a wonderfully textured feel, as if the cover was printed on watercolor paper; that the paper itself, sourced from Forest Stewardship trees, has a distinct materiality to it, fits this book perfectly. The late Roger Deakin travels through the forests of Eurasia and Australia, from the willows of Cambridgeshire, past ruined churches in the Bieszczady Woods, to the towering walnut groves of Kazakhstan. The book had me hooked from page one, where Deakin writes that “the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon.” Deakin was an amazing writer. At one point he describes “the iceberg depths of the wood’s root-world,” just one mind-bending moment in a book so full of interesting sub-stories that I could post about it all month. Don’t miss the Deer Removal Act of 1851, the surreal Jaguar Lount Wood (a landscape sponsored by the automotive firm), the chainsaw-resistant oaks of the Bialowieza Forest – their trunks sparkling with shrapnel from WWII – and the unforgettable closing chapters about harvesting apples and walnuts in the giant forests of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

3) The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin) — Robert Macfarlane was close friends with Roger Deakin, and Deakin’s presence is often cited throughout The Wild Places. Macfarlane’s frustratingly good book focuses on the natural landscapes of Britain, describing the author’s quest for sites of true wildness in today’s UK. Macfarlane is also a fantastic writer; this is another book that could easily be unspun into a whole month’s worth of blog posts. As but one example, Macfarlane finds himself exploring holloways, those deeply incised, sunken roads produced over decades by the passage of people, carts, and horses. Each holloway is “a route that centuries of use has eroded down into the bedrock,” Macfarlane explains, “so that it is recessed beneath the level of the surrounding landscape.” He continues, writing that “the holloways have come to constitute a sunken labyrinth of wildness in the heart of arable England. Most have thrown up their own defences, becoming so overgrown by nettles and briars that they are unwalkable, and have gone unexplored for decades.”

4) Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey (Knopf) — Richard Fortey is one of my favorite authors; his Earth: An Intimate History should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the planetary sciences. Here, Fortey takes us behind the scenes at the institution from which he has only recently retired: London’s Natural History Museum. His descriptions of the museum itself are worth quoting at length. “There seemed to be no end to it,” he writes, referring to the building’s sprawling rooms and corridors:

Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.

Further:

Even to find one’s ways to the towers is an exercise in map reading. The visitor has to go through one door after another apparently leading nowhere. Then there are thin flights of steep stairs that go upwards from floor to floor; I am reminded of a medieval keep, where one floor was for feasting and the next one for brewing up boiling oil. I discovered part of one tower that could only be accessed by a ladder stretched over a roof. Nowadays, the towers do not have permanent staff housed there – something to do with them lacking fire escapes and not complying with some detail of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. Instead there are empty rooms, or ones holding stacks of neglected stuff. A hermit could hide here, undiscovered.

As a way to slip behind the Staff Only doors at a major world museum, the book is unsurpassed.

5) Victory Gardens 2007+ by Amy Franceschini (Gallery 16 Editions) — For the most part, a photo-documentation of the “victory gardens” of Amy Franceschini, scattered amongst the various microclimates of San Francisco, this hardcover guide to urban gardening will make almost anyone want to go out and plant rows of buttercrunch lettuce. Locavores, guerilla gardeners, and revolutionary horticulturalists take note.

6) Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (Harper) — Of course, all these trees and gardens require sunlight – and the chemically transformative inner workings of photosynthesis are the subject of Oliver Morton’s newest book, Eating the Sun. Morton, a Features Editor at Nature, is also the author of the excellent Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World.

7) Atacama Lab by Chris Taylor et al. (Incubo) and Land Arts of the American West by Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert (University of Texas Press) — Two awesome books of landscape design, history, art, and theory, both involving the formidable talents of Chris Taylor. According to Taylor’s own introduction, Atacama Lab – which is bilingually printed in both Spanish and English, contrary to Amazon’s indications – documents “the interpretive frame and working methods of Land Arts of the American West in Chile to broaden our understanding of earthworks and open a dialog between arid lands along the north-south axis of the Americas. The book includes a wide variety of student landscape projects, as well as an essay by the ubiquitous William L. Fox. If you’re wondering what exactly Land Arts of the American West is, you’re in luck: this massive, textbook-like, quasi-monographic guide to the eponymous research institute is an explosive catalog of the terrestrial work of Bill Gilbert, the group’s founder, here in collaboration with Taylor. They write:

Land Arts of the American West is a field program designed to explore the large array of human responses to a specific landscape over an extended period of time… Moving between the land and studio, our inquiry extends from the geologic forces that shape the ground itself to the cultural actions that define place. Within this context, land art includes everything from pictographs and petroglyphs to the construction of roads, dwellings, and monuments as well as traces of those actions.

It’s immersive landscape theory, armed with duffel bags and tents. Sign me up.

8) Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds by Martin Beech (Springer) — Hampered only an appalling choice of paper and by its factory-preset graphic design, Martin Beech’s Terraforming is otherwise a refreshingly quantitative approach to how whole planets can be made habitable for human beings. “The ultimate aim of terraforming,” Beech writes, “is to alter a hostile planetary environment into one that is Earth-like, and eventually walk upon the surface of the new and vibrant world that you or I could walk freely about and explore.” Usually the realm of science fiction and/or moral speculation – indeed, even this book opens with a fictional scenario set in the year 2100 – the controversial idea of terraforming here takes on a numeric, chemical, and even topographic specificity.

9) Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age (Harvard University Press) — Having been oddly obsessed with Xenophon’s Persian Expedition ever since learning that it was one of the inspirations for Sol Yurick’s novel The Warriors – check out BLDGBLOG’s interview with Yurick for more – I was excited to find Robin Waterfield’s micro-history of “Xenophon’s retreat.” The basic question: what do you do when you’re a highly trained mercenary fighting on the losing side in an unparalleled example of fratricidal desert warfare, and you now have to fight your way back home, on foot, temporarily living in caves, engaging in numerous minor skirmishes, followed by spies, passing from what would now be the suburbs of Baghdad to the western shores of Turkey? That’s exactly what Xenophon did – and he went on to a distinguished career as a writer and historian. In other words, it’s an absolutely incredible story. Waterfield’s descriptions of the physical reality of phalanx-based warfare are also awesomely intense.

10) After the City, This (Is How We Live) by Tom Marble (LA Forum) — At some point, architect Tom Marble had the ingenious idea of writing a book about the mysterious subcultures of real estate development and zoning in greater Los Angeles – but to write it as a screenplay. The results are both charming and readable. At times perhaps a bit too didactic to be put on screen by Steven Spielberg, as an experiment in mixing genres this is altogether brilliant, full of voice-over narratives and cuts from scene to scene and even color photographs. But to write this as a screenplay… I’m jealous.

EXT. REUNION — NIGHT
Nat walks up to the front door of a large Colonial house in Pasadena. He is about to knock when the door swings open, revealing a crowd of about twenty people.

Or:

EXT. SOFT ROCK CAFE — DAY
Nat and Jack sit at a restaurant table overlooking a koi pond. Consumer Jazz rises out of rock-shaped speakers. Nat can’t help notice beautiful twenty-something mothers swarm the bridges and banks of the pond, chatting with one another or chasing their kids.

As Nat bites into his sandwich, Jack smiles.

This is what I imagine might happen if Brand Avenue were to move to Hollywood and get a film deal. Again, genius.

11) Subterranean Twin Cities by Greg Brick (University of Minnesota Press) — I associate the underworlds of Minneapolis–St. Paul almost entirely with “Rinker’s Revenge,” an ailment peculiar to urban explorers mentioned by Michael Cook in his interview with BLDGBLOG. Rinker’s Revenge also makes an appearance in Greg Brick’s book-length journey through the city’s substructures, passing waterfalls, tunnels, wine cellars, and drains. “Let’s take an imaginary journey downward through the geological layers of Minnesota by way of a sewer,” Brick begins – before donning waterproof boots and making the descent himself.

12) McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny (Vintage) — A different kind of underworld comes to us in this book that I found absolutely impossible to put down. Wildly undersold by reviews on Amazon, I can’t recommend this book enough. A look at the global counter-economies of sex trafficking, drugs, illegitimate construction, counterfeit goods, and light weaponry, the otherwise somewhat embarrassingly titled McMafia shows us a planet riddled with labyrinthine networks of unregistered transactions, untraceable people, and even illegal building sites. Author Misha Glenny also has a wonderfully sober take on the U.S. War on Drugs, suggesting that is the War on Drugs itself that has allowed the hyper-explosive growth of narcotic black markets – which, in turn, fund wars, rape, violence, and kidnapping across dozens of other economic sectors, worldwide. Toward the end of the book, Glenny even implies that, if the U.S. were to change its approach to drugs, the knock-on effects would be instantly catastrophic for organized crime everywhere. Ignore the title; this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read all year.

13) The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches from the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking by William Langewiesche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — Continuing this Final Four of crime, war, and violence, William Langewiesche’s The Atomic Bazaar could be described as a very long Atlantic article about the growing threat of nuclear trafficking. In the U.S. paperback copy, pages 6-10 are a seering, microsecond-by-microsecond description of what actually happens when a nuclear bomb explodes in a city; if nothing else, go to your local bookstore and read those pages. The rest of the book, however, present a fascinating look at the nightmarish world of post-Soviet nuclear arms storage facilities (and what Langewiesche suggests are the strategically self-defeating U.S. efforts to fund their protection), and an over-long (but fascinating) introduction to the life of A.Q. Khan, the Dutch-trained metallurgist who went on to give Pakistan its first nuclear bomb (and subsequently to market those nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and beyond).

14) Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano (Picador) — The perfect accompaniment to Misha Glenn’s McMafia, Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano – the writing of which resulted in the author having to disappear into police protection – is an often horrific look at the counter-state of organized private crime in and around Naples, Italy. Stomach-turning descriptions of torture – including a spiked baseball bat and decapitation by metal grinder – punctuate what is otherwise a remarkably thoughtful guide to the administrative reality of urban gangsterism. This is what happens to cities when a) there is no state and b) there are lots of machine guns. I hope to post about this book – now also a film – in more detail later, so I will leave my description at that. Suffice it to say, though, it’s worth the read.

15) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham (Verso) — Stephen Graham’s Cities Under Siege has not even been released yet, so I don’t know if it’s good – but I can’t wait to read it. “Drawing on a wealth of original research,” the publishers write, “Stephen Graham shows how Western and Israeli militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a real or imagined conflict zone inhabited by lurking, shadow enemies, and urban inhabitants as targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned, controlled and targeted.” Release date in July 2009.

* * *

All Books Received: August 2015, September 2013, December 2012, June 2012, December 2010 (“Climate Futures List”), May 2010, May 2009, and March 2009.