Venice Resonator


“Venice has got a very different sound. It’s very interesting, when you’re there, you always hear some kind of hum, like from far away, but also people talking, and you never know if it’s in the next apartment or if it’s 400 metres away, because the labyrinth of the houses works as an amplifying system somehow.”

— Sound artist Christian Fennesz, interviewed in The Wire

Best… what?

Somehow, BLDGBLOG has just won the title of Best Urban Architecture Blog over at Gridskipper… Leading to open, if excited, puzzlement.


Well, thank you if you voted; but if you’re new to this site and want to see what there is to do here, quickly, a narrative table of contents reappears below. Click through at your leisure – then forward to the BBC…
Meanwhile, don’t forget the world’s other – and quite possibly better – architecture blogs, including Pruned, gravestmor, Inhabitat, Land+Living, Daily Dose, Brand Avenue, Interactive Architecture dot Org (and many, many, many others); then there’s Régine, winner of Best Urban Arts Blog for the increasingly better-than-everything we make money not art. (And don’t forget Archinect).
Anyway, thanks again, be in touch, come back often, and here are the goods:


Where Gothic cathedrals go to die, on the beaches of an equatorial island!
Rollerskating alone at night through underground knots!
The world’s largest diamond mine!
Singing icebergs, as the arched foundations of London groan!
A man’s apartment exactly reproduced using colorful nylon sheets!
Lunar electricity!


The drains, tunnels, and self-connected topologies of underground London!
Entire cities snowing diamonds from Baroque domes!
A temporary public park – complete with bench and parking meter!
The poet Shelley sets sail for a volcanic archipelago made entirely of glass!
Beautiful maps!
A London superstadium full of ring magnets will capture the Northern Lights!


The churches of Christopher Wren, transformed into a geomagnetic harddrive!
Proto-terrestrial landscapes swarming with alien bacteria!
James Bond thwarts a San Franciscan attempt at tectonic warfare!
An abandoned island off the coast of Japan!
The suburbs, raw mounds, and earthworks before construction arrives!
The internal volume of Notre-Dame, Paris, carved into the surface of the moon!


Meat!
The landscape architecture of Hell, its subsurface faults and magmatic geology!
Why not live inside your garage?
The robotic, neverending cinema of Los Angeles traffic control!
The house of landslides, filled with geese!
Measuring astronomy – solstice and stars – with a city modeled on Stonehenge!


The averaged images of suburban ennui!
Cake!
New Arctic seaways promise Lovecraftian visions to come!
Famous architecture, blurred!
Photographs of Chernobyl, including an abandoned alphabet!
The Earth in 7.5 billion years!


Fossilized cities!
The art of reforesting continents through tree bombs!
The deserts of the world are musical instruments!
The wonderfully weird, self-observing urban world of CCTV!
Sci-fi instant cities built above working limeworks pits!
WWII British sound mirrors used to musicalize mountain storms!


All hell is breaking loose in middle America!
San Jellocisco!
Catching near-earth asteroids using a gigantic baseball mit!
An inflatable hotel – in deep space!
Folk maps of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal!
Houses, churches, places to hang: it’s the afterlife of the Quonset hut!


A man jumps from a balloon, free-falls 20 miles through the stratosphere, and captures the whole thing on tape!
King Kong!
Complicated pipe networks are plugged into a volcano to extrude cathedrals directly from the earth!
Huge, interconnected white towers in the middle of Beijing!
An Indonesian mine and the technicolor stalactites it will form in a million years!
Amazing tree houses by Andrew Maynard!


Happy new year. (And thanks again).

Falling back to earth, alone

In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.
He then jumped.


Kittinger free-fell for over twenty kilometers – at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.


He had all but left the earth’s atmosphere; the sky around him was pitch black; he could see the outlines of entire continents; and the haiku-like abstraction of his available reference points – earth, balloon, space – made it impossible to tell if he was really falling.
Luckily, there’s a film.

Earth Observatory


[Image: Algodones Dunefield, California].

While looking for images for the previous post – like this one – I got lost in an amazing website full of unbelievably beautiful landscape images: it’s NASA’s Earth Observatory page.
Here’s a representative sampling.


[Images: Lake Nasser; Colorado River Delta; and the Taklimakan Desert].

There are roughly 1800 other images to choose from, and it appears to be updated daily – good luck.

The mine, the rivers, the caves

There’s a huge new article in The New York Times about gold mining in Papua New Guinea and “the intricate web of political and military ties” that keep it moving.

[Image: “Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, an American company, operates this mine in the easternmost province of Indonesia, on the island of New Guinea.” Courtesy of the New York Times].

As the article describes it, the Freeport-McMoRan mine is like a dizzying combination of the novels of J.G. Ballard, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and a Werner Herzog film: “Freeport has built what amounts to an entirely new society and economy, all of its own making. Where nary a road existed, Freeport, with the help of the San Francisco-based construction company Bechtel, built virtually every stitch of infrastructure over impossible terrain in engineering feats that it boasts are unparalleled on the planet.”
The result is “a 21st-century version of the old company town, built on a scale unique even by the standards of modern mega-mining.”
It’s a geotechnician’s utopia – populated by construction engineers, former CIA operatives, and Indonesian military attachés.

In the process, Freeport has literally created a new landscape, a down-river hydrological earthworks sculpture made entirely of poisonous mine tailings.
By “Freeport’s own estimates,” we read, the mine “will generate an estimated six billion tons of waste before it is through – more than twice as much earth as was excavated for the Panama Canal. Much of that waste has already been dumped in the mountains surrounding the mine or down a system of rivers that descends steeply onto the island’s low-lying wetlands.”
Incredibly, “the waste rock in the highlands, 900 feet deep in places, now covers about three square miles.” It is “accumulating at a rate of some 700,000 tons a day.”
At that rate, a whole new continental plate could be created.

[Image: A view of the mine, by Kutztown University geologist Kurt Friehauf].

Another danger, however – though I find this fascinating – is that “the waste rock atop the mountain will trickle out acids into the honeycomb of caverns and caves beneath the mine in a wet climate that gets up to 12 feet of rain a year.”
Before my morals kick in, I’m left stunned by a vision of technicolor stalactites growing drip by drip in the darkness, stretching toward pools of iridescent pollution slowly solidifying into rock. What, in a million years, will these caves look like? Will anyone be around to spelunk them?
Could you deliberately use metallic pollution to color rocks, then use those rocks as a building material?
Bank lobbies floored with examples of a new geology. Using caves as a kind of rock-farm; harvesting for color.
In any case, the article is totally fascinating, whether it moves you to campaign against pollution or invest in gold mine companies; and there are two prequels to it, as well: here and here.

(See also BLDGBLOG’s Monitor Mine, Bingham Pit, Utah, and the World’s largest diamond mine, as well as some cool limeworks photographs).

Church of Earth, Magmatic


BLDGBLOG here proposes an ecumenical cathedral for the holiday season, made entirely of magmatic architecture.
The cathedral would consist of nothing but igneous rock, extruded directly from the earth and diverted through a complicated system of pipework and trenches. These would act as a plumbing system, shaping eruptive flows, giving the lava architectural form as it cools.
The lava would therefore be frozen in place on-site, taking the final form of the building; it would steam for a bit, perhaps, maybe hiss if it’s raining – but then it’s architecture.
A kind of lava-fountain; a domestication of the earth’s magmatic dynamism.


The red eddies of liquid glass from an ongoing eruption – Hawaii, or Iceland – would be shaped immediately into the buttressed vaults, nave, tracery, and cloisters of this, the world’s largest cathedral, larger than most towns and continually growing. A crystalline crypt, glassine, geothermal.
New wings and side-chapels appear with every eruption.


[Image: The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, from a Boston College Gothic architecture page].

The resulting volcanic glass could even be shaped into thin sheets of polished obsidian, fed through a filigree of pipework till you’ve got stained rosate windows, readymade. Perhaps you could color the flows using a salt of various metals.
Churches were always geological, monuments to stratigraphy –


[Image: The cathedral at Amiens, from Boston College’s High Gothic architecture page].

– this just more so.
The earth, printing itself upward into arches and barrel vaults; new Gothic mountains, shaped by the creative process they celebrate.


[Images: Arnaud Friche, Senlis Cathedral, Gothic Vault, Senlis, Oise, France; The Great Organ, Saint-Eustache, Paris; and the Crypt of the Plaimpied Church, Cher, France (many more beautiful photos at this site; spotted via things magazine)].

Alternatively, of course, you would not need a volcano. You’d simply build an earth-melting platform anywhere in the world, and it would melt its way down through the earth’s crust.


As a boat passing through water creates a wake, the platform’s passage through the earth would create cathedrals, lava curling up in buttresses and freezing into place.
Frozen wakes of igneous rock in the form of sacred architecture.
Or a volcanic pasta machine: extruding churches from terrestrial dough.


[Image: Viollet-le-Duc’s ideal Gothic cathedral, prior to the era of magmatic architecture – which hereby begins].

(And for a bit more on volcanic landscapes, see Mount St. Helens of Glass).

Student projects 3: Harmonic form

Continuing with our Royal Institute of British Architects’ President’s Medals showcase showdown, this is Benjamin Koren‘s Harmonic Proportion in Amorphic Form: A Music Pavilion in Hyde Park, London – because I’m a sucker for abstract geometric doodles.
Amorphic music, in knots of symmetric density.


[Images: Benjamin Koren, Harmonic Proportion in Amorphic Form: A Music Pavilion in Hyde Park, London – note the use (top image) of Bach’s 14th Goldberg Variation!].

(Spotted via Archinect).

Student projects 2: Germ towers

The winners of this year’s President’s Medals, awarded by RIBA, were announced about two weeks ago, but I’ve only just taken a look at the projects. (The entirety of the listed entries can be found here and here – there are 172).

[Images: Two “living studies” by Yew Choong Chan: “Escherichia Coli Colony Study Microscale” and “Cladosporium Fungi Colony Microscale,” part of V.En. (Vertical Energy), Lea Valley, London].

So out of a combination of enthusiasm, awe, and feeling the Christmas spirit, I’ve decided that some of the winners are interesting enough to post about; I’ve chosen, I think, four in particular. Maybe five. (They’re really good).
This is V.En. (Vertical Energy), a project by Yew Choong Chan, sited in the Lea Valley, London. It starts off with some swarming and growth diagrams – of both bacteria and birds – extrudes a series of mechanical towers out of that motion-structure, then projects all of this roughly 50 years into the future.
Nonhuman species as models for architectural form.
The skies are grey; the towers have toppled, forming bird sanctuaries; the whole thing is further proof that architecture students could very well be the future of the entertainment industry… Films, games, novels.

[Image: A very Matrix-like “Tower HT.05” – an inhabitable machine-flower, anchored in the valleys of London].

[Images: Like film stills, or scenes from a graphic novel, these are a “predicted visual representation of the site” in 2035, including tower HT.04 – which has collapsed (middle picture), creating a bird sanctuary. Finally, the bird sanctuary in 2055].

(Spotted via Archinect).

Simian urbanism

[Image: Peter Jackson’s entirely computer-generated Manhattan, created for his remake of King Kong; spotted at this quick and entertaining history of that film, including early Modernist high-rise design, Italian futurism and the radio dreams of an earlier era – reactions to the city, crossing species lines].

How do other species survive in our cities? King Kong, The Birds, Willard, King Rat. The brutalist concrete masses of Modernist architecture, swelling upward into towers on the edges of parks. Distracting birds to their death. Home to roaches and rats.
“As we lure animals into urban environments with promises of food and shelter, we could be exposing them to hazards they are ill-equipped to handle,” we read in New Scientist.
“In British cities,” for instance, “foxes are now commonplace. In southern California, bighorn sheep journey down from the mountains to feed on lush lawns. Further up the Pacific coast, Canada geese nest on balconies and roofs in Vancouver. And in Australia, Melbourne is witnessing the return of rainbow lorikeets, flashy parrots not seen in the city since the 1920s. Even peregrine falcons – majestic birds of prey redolent of lonely sea cliffs and wide-open country – have gone urban. In the heart of New York city, 16 pairs are now raising their young.”


This is “urban natural history,” and it is rapidly crossing over into an architectural concern, as human habitations are being re-designed for other species.
Look at London: “Planners are incorporating [trans-species design] ideas into large-scale housing developments. Take the derelict sites and old docks east of London earmarked for the massive Thames Gateway project. This ‘brownfield’ site supports a band of black redstarts, attractive birds which moved in after the second world war. The wasteland is perfect for them because they feed on weedy plants that grow on land with few nutrients. What they cannot tolerate is the sterile bark-mulched landscaping routinely used on new developments. So eco-planners at Thames Gateway advocate building roofs with sparsely vegetated areas where the black redstarts could forage.”
In any case, the following melancholic description of what happens to many animal species once they make the urban jump applies equally well to humans – who are, after all, an animal species: “Ecological traps arise because animals can make mistakes: they can be seduced by a man-made habitat that looks good but in fact has a hidden downside. Animals trying to breed there will fail over and over again to raise young, yet new pairs will keep moving into the neighbourhood to keep the population up.”
Soon hawks, bears – even rats – will be popping anti-depressants; they’ll join the sad crowds of walled-in urbanites who no longer recall why they moved to the city in the first place…

Just like King Kong.

Student projects 1: The carbon tower of Manhattan

[Images: I don’t know a thing about this project, other than I like it (perhaps minus the green ramp) and that it’s described as a “design school, student union, + dormitories” for the New School in Manhattan; I ran across it at Archinect’s student projects gallery. If you know anything more – including the designer – be in touch! Meanwhile, I truly believe that if an energetic group of architecture students teamed up with some good writers – BLDGBLOG would surely lend a few – the greatest films ever produced could come out of it. Whole cities – entire planets! – designed down to the subsurface bedrock. Floating cathedrals, cities of carbon, canyons carved from lead walls, auroral coloseums. With Oscar-nominated soundtracks. Films, illustrated books, TV pilots. You’d make millions. Put Archigram to shame…].