Category: BLDGBLOG

[Image: The headquarters of Poland’s Radio Muzyka Fakty Sp.z oo. As if stunned by their own work, the architects add: “This is a completed facility! This is NOT a drawing or a scene out of Star Wars.” More on that project here].

You can’t get much simpler than “monolithic.com,” the website for the Monolithic Dome Institute. “Today, Monolithic is a family of companies sharing a mutual goal: to improve the lives of people worldwide through the introduction and construction of Monolithic Domes.”
And aren’t domes the #1 suggested gift for 13th wedding anniversaries…?

[Image: That same Polish radio station].

The Monolithic Dome Institute operates a number of subsidiary companies, all with wonderfully abstract names: Monolithic Construction Management, Monolithic Equipment (what kind of equipment, you ask…?), Monolithic Airforms, and Dome Living Rentals.

[Image: Anatomy of a dome: “The Monolithic Dome is a super-insulated, steel reinforced concrete structure used for homes, schools, gymnasiums, bulk storage facilities, churches, offices, and many other uses”].

The company is surprisingly earnest in its attempt to design affordable, safe, and easily constructed shelters that are apparently lightning-proof, earthquake-safe, and even “disaster-resistant.” They even run something called the Domes for the World Foundation.

[Image: Domes built in “emerging countries“].

The company even seems to claim an architectural genealogy that stretches back to Hagia Sophia and Rome’s Pantheon.
They’ve done sports facilities, so-called podular gyms, fertilizer storage units –

– and even churches –

– including this one in Birmingham, Alabama.

[Image: Faith Chapel Christian Church, Birmingham, Alabama].

Then there are the houses.

[Images: A home near Aguilar, Colorado; images supplied by Michael Wenzl].

[Image: Another monolithic dome home in Colorado].

Interested? Plan yours today.
How much would a BLDGBLOG pod village cost, for instance? Could it look like this?:

[Image: The Willard family dome – check out Orion’s belt!].

[Images: The sheer, extraordinary beauty of these maps is hardly even the start of one of the biggest time-traps I’ve ever found on the internet: the National Geologic Map Database of the United States Geological Survey. You can click through regions, or go state by state, and some of the most giddily unbelievable, breathtaking images I’ve ever seen can be zoomed-in on to a detail that nearly pixelizes it’s so close. Preliminary bedrock topography! Interpretive geologic cross sections of Death Valley! The possible mythic overtones make the brain reel. Mapping time-dependent changes in soil-slip-debris-flow probability! What!? The vocabulary alone is worth the visit. Distribution of hydrogeologic units – just look at this map! And this one! Map fetish! It’s the weird and wonderful world of abstract terrestrial science. Look at this one! And this one! In fact, just click on Kentucky and you’ll go nuts].

[For other unforgettable maps, don’t forget these].

[Images: Geoacoustic topographical maps of the seafloor outside Sydney, Australia, taken by the GeoSwath].

Geoacoustics basically means using sound to map a distant landscape. This includes the seafloor: you bounce soundwaves off the bottom, and the time it takes for the echoes to come back reveals landscape depth and other topographical details – sometimes even shipwrecks and alien cities – what –
(You can read a bit more about geoacoustics through a series of PDFs at the Woods Hole Marine Seismology and Geoacoustics Group homepage).
Bats, for instance, can be said to navigate geoacoustically.
In any case, these images are geoacoustic landscape maps of the ocean floor outside Sydney, Australia –

– including an undersea plane wreck, also mapped with geoacoustics. It is unclear whether the plane is also near Sydney, however; either way, there are five or six other wreck maps to look at, and the detail is great. If you look, for instance, at the third image in this post you’ll see a shipwreck! It’s that little oblong geometric object in the bottom-center of the image – which you also see in the monochromatic version, above.
Anyway, to satisfy your inner Steve Zissou, take a look at the Woods Hole Deep Ocean Exploration Unit; and check out these films of echo-scattering on submerged topography. (For another cool film – a simulation of last year’s Asian tsunami – see BLDGBLOG’s earth.mov).
Finally, two more geoacoustic maps:

[Image: A geoacoustic map of the bottom of Lake Vattern, Sweden].

[Image: Geoacoustic map of a faultine off Indonesia].

Perhaps in a few hundred years we’ll be producing geoacoustic maps of a submerged New Orleans, or a London done under by tides and estuarial flooding. The undersea canyons of New York, former archipelago.
It’d be interesting, meanwhile, if you could take geoacoustic data and release it as an MP3: you could then listen to the suboceanic landscape’s raw sonic topography, compressed aquatic echoes, complete with deepsea ridges and audio-thermal vents. Non-visual mapping of unreachable landscapes. An MP3 of the surface of Mars. The rings of Saturn.

[Image: Keith Robinson/B+C Alexander/New Scientist].

The polar seas are filled with sound: unearthly vibrations that moan almost constantly through near-frozen waters.
“‘It’s like a string orchestra all practising different tunes at the same time but then suddenly playing together,’ says Vera Schlindwein, a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.”
If you’re hoping to stick your head underwater, however, and listen directly to the arctic seas: think again. “The sounds are not usually audible, but can be heard when recordings of seismic signals… are speeded up.”
And they sound like this.

[Image: Photographer unknown; from Shifting Baselines].

So what are the instruments behind this frozen music?
Icebergs, of course.
“A spectacular 16-hour ‘song’ in July 2000 helped pinpoint the cause,” which was “traced to a 400-metre-high iceberg.” As the iceberg scraped along the seafloor, “seawater running through crevasses in the ice would have continued to flow rapidly, causing the tunnel walls [to] vibrate.” It was a kind of frozen saxophone, pounding into underwater geological formations.
This is the iceberg as cello string (or perhaps kettle drum). The internal crystalline pressures of a half-submerged, mobile landscape soundtracking the arctic seas. Tectonics of ice in surround-sound.

[Image: Gustave Doré, “Over London By Rail” (1872)].

But what if you took note of this and went elsewhere, to London for instance, armed with contact microphones and an iPod? You could listen through headphones to the foundational moaning of old buildings, plugged directly in, the whole city an instrument of arches and railway viaducts, Tube tunnels and old churches, gravitational pressures. The unsettling groan of wet masonry.
Like the creaking timbers of an old ship – or like an iceberg: a landscape under strain, singing all but inaudible music. Except you’ve got your contact mics, and your headphones on, and the reverbed shudder of a Georgian terrace house lulls you to sleep in a cafe. Arctic music, London-based.
Or perhaps all the bedrock beneath Manhattan, hooked up to contact mics and recorded for three weeks: that recording sped-up to no less than ten minutes then played at high volume through loudspeakers.
This is what your city sounds like, you say: the loose wobble of brickwork and glass. 70 floors of an iron tower humming in the darkness as snow falls.
This is the city, settling in its marshes; this is London, instrument.

(Via Archinect‘s mapper of the poles, Bryan Finoki).

[Image: “A woman crossing a stretch of India’s improved national highway system in a village in the northern state of Rajasthan.” Tyler Hicks/New York Times].

More Asian highway news: “The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at $6.25 billion, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent’s railway network the century before.”
As the New York Times opines: “The effort echoes the United States’ construction of its national highway system in the 1920’s and 1950’s. The arteries paved across America fueled commerce and development, fed a nation’s auto obsession and created suburbs. They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete inner cities.”
India’s automotive modernization, however, allows the New York Times this quick throwaway line: “Goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus the state – mile by mile, India is struggling to modernize its national highway system, and in the process, itself.”
A part of me wonders if the article’s author only wanted to cover the story in order to write that sentence…

[Image: “Migrant workers carrying cement at night to fill a section of a bridge under construction west of Aurangabad, in the state of Bihar.” Tyler Hicks/New York Times].

“At its heart,” the author continues, “the redone highway is about grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that has always taken the long view.”
Always?
In any case, as the monolithic abstract surfaces of desert highways begin to coil and stretch themselves over the often rugged Indian topography, the mountains and swamps, passing through collapsing cities on shores, perhaps we will see a new kind of Indian Futurism arise, taking over from the outdated and Italianate F.T. Marinetti and Antonio Sant’Elia, an art of speed and travel and roadside architectural abstraction; or perhaps the fresh start of a counter-Bollywood, a traveling, digital, hyper-realist cinema that maps the outer edges of this newly autobahn’d Indian subcontinent with hand-held cameras and cheap cars, filmmakers traveling together at 90mph. DIY psychovideography, roadborne.
What, then, would happen when all this links up with the Asian Highway Project? When our possible future routes stretch from Finland to Tokyo, via Tehran and Outer Mongolia? What then? What future arts and structures will we make then?
A BLDGBLOG Guide to the Asian Highway Project. Interested funders, be in touch.

[Image: “At more than 500 metres, Taipei 101 in Taiwan is the world’s tallest building. But now geologists fear that its size and weight may have transformed a stable area into one susceptible to earthquake activity. (Photograph: Wally Santana/AP)”].

Taipei 101, temporarily the world’s tallest building, is causing earthquakes.
The “sheer size of the Taiwan skyscraper has raised unexpected concerns that may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made megastructures. Taipei 101 is thought to have triggered two recent earthquakes because of the stress that it exerts on the ground beneath it.”
This is 700,000 tons of stress – and it “may have reopened an ancient earthquake fault.”

[Image: Emporis].

This reminds me of the film Ghostbusters. Toward the end of the film it’s revealed that Sigourney Weaver’s residential tower – the metal in its walls, the iron infrastructure, the whole shootin’ match – is actually an antenna for ghosts and fire-breathing hell-oxen, which she finds hiding in her refrigerator.
The entire building, in other words, exerts stress on occult faultlines that run throughout New York City, attracting evil spirits toward it like a vortex of the dead.
Here, however, Taipei 101 acts as a grounded antenna attracting tectonic forces. Tectonic shortwave.
Or, architecture as tectonic warfare pursued by other means: China says sure, mate, we’ll send you our best engineers and architects. Why not? Only three years later the CIA discovers everything China built was specially designed to exert strain on ancient tectonic faults; geotechnical battle tactics in architectural form.
For the price of some construction, and with a little patience, you destroy another country through earthquakes. War averted. No troop deaths.
We learned it from Taipei 101!, they’ll say.
The military manuals of the future – will be entirely architectural.

Andrew Maynard‘s Holl House starts off as a vertical column, then unlocks into a horizontal network of hinged structures –

– in a process described by this diagram:

Sure, there could be loads and loads of stress fracture problems, pinched fingers and drunken accidents – the whole damn thing folding up as you hit the wrong button, collapsing into bed – but put several of these things together and you’ve either got the most exciting micro-city in the world, or an Oscar-winning set for a new science fiction film. Or both.
If I were rich, I’d buy fourteen of them.
But meanwhile, the designer, Andrew Maynard, appears to have no shortage of great ideas. I only today got around to reading a whole profile of his work posted on Archinect last month, and I was practically laughing out loud some of it’s so good.
Check out his prefab entry to the 2004 VicUrban affordable housing competition.
“How can the housing industry make exciting, well designed and cheap housing?” Maynard asks. “Easy, mimic the car industry.”

“The dimensions of the basic module are dictated by the maximum dimensions available to be transported legally on Australian roads without permits.”

The house is then assembled on-site –

– where “work is minimised to the installation of a steel ‘train track’ footing system allowing the prefabricated modules to simply be slid into place. The prefabricated module is based on a rigid galvanised steel frame with plasterboard internal finish and stained farmed pine external skin.”

Soon you could have an entire community: “Alternating between single storey and double storey allows estates to have a visual diversity based on a single modular form. The flat bituminous roof also allows rooves to easily become trafficable outdoor areas for second storey spaces.”

Then there’s Maynard’s Styx Valley Protest Structure, which was designed to assist anti-logging protests in Tasmania’s Styx Valley Forest.
As Maynard writes: “The Styx Valley Forest is a pristine wilderness in south western Tasmania. It is home to the tallest hardwood trees in the world averaging over 80 metres… Many of the trees are over 400 years old… Unfortunately the Styx Valley falls just outside [Tasmania’s] South West National Park and it is now under attack from logging companies.”
How does the Protest Structure work? “Rather than inserting the structure into the canopy of a single tree, the structure is designed to attach itself to three trees,” so that only “a small number of structures can secure the well being of a large area of pristine wilderness.”

I would think, however, that even without this ostensibly protective purpose, such structures would be amazing places to spend time. Somewhere between Swiss Family Robinson and Return of the Jedi, they could serve as little writing labs, up in the trees, or just places where you can clear your mind and breathe.

Again, BLDGBLOG would buy fourteen of them if it could.
Somewhere between furniture and inhabitable architecture, there are some really great ideas on Maynard’s site; check out the Design Pod, the 2nd Sproule House, the Conceptual Library for Japan and the Cog House for starters.
Here are some images of the 2nd Sproule House – but check out the site for more:

(For some other cool and prefabulous structures, see BLDGBLOG’s own Garage conversions, and Inhabitat’s frequently updated prefab database).

The Quonset hut was a portable, easy to construct architectural unit that allowed for the rapid deployment of forward bases in war zones. A hut could be flown in by helicopter and just as easily removed.
Whole cities could be built in a day.
The Quonset contributed, in many subtle and overlooked ways, to the global, mid-20th century spread of U.S military power. By enabling a new kind of nomadic military utopia – or, modular instant cities maintained on inhospitable terrains – the Quonset hut literally sheltered America’s overseas Army presence.

“During the housing crunch of the late 1940s,” however, as a press release from the National Endowment for the Humanities explains, “thousands of people across the nation converted these surplus military huts into unconventional homes, churches, and restaurants. Today, the Quonset has largely vanished from most of the American landscape – and most people’s memory.”
A new book and exhibition hope to correct that fading memory.
As these photos from that book show, the Quonset has many cool uses – and could even experience something of a renaissance in today’s pro-prehab architectural climate.

I, personally, would love a little BLDGBLOG village out in the desert somewhere, made entirely of Quonset huts: I could write books, use solar power, watch the stars…

(Via Archinect‘s omnipresent Bryan Finoki).

There’s a secret prison city in Florida: “It looks like your normal neighborhood, but you won’t find this place on any map. The county property appraiser doesn’t even have a record of it. In this secret community, some streets have names, others do not. When we plugged in one street name, mapquest said it doesn’t exist.”
The town is called Starke. According to the Florida Department of Corrections it consists entirely of “staff housing” for a nearby prison. Starke’s “lawns are personally cut by the prisoners.”
The whole place exists behind high-security barricades, and the news team which wrote the above-linked story was refused entry.

For some reason, however, when I first heard of Starke, I immediately thought of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s 18th century plans for the royal saltworks at Chaux, in Arc-et-Senans, France. Chaux may not have been a prison, but it was a quasi-utopian (read: radial) community of workers, each of whom had their own assigned home and workspace. The whole thing was overseen by what was in effect a plantation master. With all the workers living on-site, the community formed a kind of early industrial “factory town,” a total-living experience – that, for some reason, seems oddly like Starke. Maybe not.
It is Chaux whose images you see here.

[Image: Ledoux’s saltwork utopia, from Gallica].

(Via Archinect‘s own live-in avant-garde, Bryan Finoki).

“Made from prefabricated concrete panels, they were churned out fast and cheap in a handful of blankly functional, almost indistinguishable designs, usually five to 11 storeys high, arranged in long, relentless blocks.”

[Image: Germany Online].

They’re Germany’s Plattenbauten, or towering and monotonous slab houses, and they’re increasingly standing empty.
“What to do with a tower block that no one wants to live in?” an article in The Guardian asks. “The solution: pull it down, slice it up, turn it into pleasant family homes.”
As Der Spiegel explains: “Eastern Germany’s population is shrinking and leaving hundreds of thousands of empty buildings behind. With plans afoot to demolish 350,000 apartments worth of hideous, communist-era buildings made from pre-fab concrete, a Berlin architectural firm is recycling the material into immensely livable single-family homes.”
That firm, Conclus, is literally re-using the intact walls, floorplates, and ceilings of these Plattenbauten, putting old modules into new designs, like puzzle pieces. “The only thing we have to do is take the wallpaper off them,” says Conclus founder Hervé Biele.

[Images: From Conclus].

Meanwhile it’d be interesting to see if you could take apart the Empire State Building, floor by floor. You could then purchase the 54th floor, and the 54th floor only, and have it transported to you, on a piece of land outside London or in the Scottish Highlands – where you could live in it, floorplan-intact.
Or you could buy an office on the 63rd floor of Taipei 101 – and have it removed, shipped to you in Arizona. The global real estate market becomes a weird spectacle of moving rooms, intact, decontextualized, shipped elsewhere.

(Via Archinect‘s unflappable Bryan Finoki).

“War, however tragic, is often a source of architectural invention,” writes Farès el-Dahdah.
“Beirut’s recent civil warfare produced many such inventions,” he suggests. “Black drapes, eight stories high and hung across urban interstices shielded pedestrians from the deadly trajectory of a sniper’s view so as to veil one fighting camp from another. Shipping containers were filled with sand and arranged as divisive labyrinths along frontlines… Entering a building became an oblique experience as one was forced to slither sideways behind oil barrels filled with concrete. War is inevitably linked with architectural experience…”

[Image: From Wonder Beirut, 1997-2004, by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige].

According to architect Rodolphe el-Khoury in an article for Alphabet City #6, “In Beirut’s centre-city, where the busiest and densest structures once stood, now lies an empty field… a tabula rasa at the very heart of the city. This cleared ground has no discernible physical differentiation: all traces of streets and building masses are now erased. Also obliterated are the property lines, zoning envelopes and other invisible but no less ‘real’ demarcations which customarily determine or reflect urban morphologies.”

The larger, urban-geographic effects of war are well-described in this article by Katja Simons: “In the years of war, Beirut was divided along ideological and religious lines. A new mental map of the city emerged. The city was renamed East and West Beirut and was divided by the Green Line of demarcation… Self-sufficient sub-centers developed in different parts of the city, preventing civic interaction throughout Beirut. People fled the city and moved to safer places at the periphery. Shop owners and businesses followed, moving to the coastal areas north of the city where new suburban commercial centers mushroomed.”
A new geography of investment soon followed; and, beyond the bombs, Beirut’s infrastructure was transformed.
These internal erasures also affected the city’s natural coastline. The port of Beirut, for instance, served as a dumping ground for rubbish, as disposal of waste by other means was too dangerous. A moving coastline of garbage slowly infilled the sea.

[Image: By Gustafson Porter].

“The shoreline of Beirut has continuously evolved throughout history,” a landscape proposal by Gustafson Porter explains. In that proposal, Beirut’s “lost city coastline has become the inspiration for the creation of a series of new urban spaces.”

[Images: By Gustafson Porter].

“Within the historic context of the evolving shoreline, Gustafson Porter has suggested a new line… revealing elements of the changing historical coastline and acting as a connective spine. On the ground it is marked by a continuous line of white limestone that is accompanied by a wide pedestrian promenade lined by an avenue of distinctive palms (Roystonia regia).” (Download their PDF for more).

[Image: By Gustafson Porter].

What’s interesting here is the idea of building a new coastline, internal to the city. Framing that as a walk, an urban unit, and then leading people along this imagined shore. A new outside, inside.
All the old Devonian coastlines of Manhattan recreated for a day by a series of guided walks. You can download an MP3; it tells you how deep the water was at the corner of Front and John. Where reefs once grew. Marking those with white limestone: here was the sea…
BLDGBLOG Presents: The Paleo-Coastal Walkway, a new guide to the lost seas of Manhattan.

[Image: Bernard Khoury, Checkpoints, 1994].

In any case, Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury seems to view war as architecture pursued by other means. (Or perhaps vice versa).
Khoury, for instance, directly confronts the architecture of military control in a series of sci-fi urban checkpoints: “Our proposal plans for high-tech retractable and inhabitable structures that include monitoring systems. While at rest, the checkpoints are dissimulated below the tarmac, they are brought back above the surface when their operators are on duty. The checkpoints establish new roadmaps, they create another battlefield through which the whole territory is linked. The public transits through the selected points in the city, moves into the matrix to be referenced, crosschecked.”

[Image: Bernard Khoury, B018, 1998].

Khoury’s most famous work, however, is the Beiruti nightclub, B018, which melds an urban, post-war bunker aesthetic with the world of hydraulic disco: “The project is built below ground. Its façade is pressed into the ground to avoid the over exposure of a mass that could act as a rhetorical monument. The building is embedded in a circular concrete disc slightly above tarmac level. At rest, it is almost invisible. It comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated roof structure constructed in heavy metal retracts hydraulically. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below.”
Checkpoints, bunkers, new walkways, moving coastlines, oblique forms of entry – architectural responses to urban warfare could take up a whole website of their own. It’s a theme I’ll return to.
For a bit more reading, meanwhile, check out this paper on war and anxiety, from the excellent Cabinet Magazine.