Month: December 2005

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).

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).

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).

[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.

[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…].

[Image: A “tent city in Pass Christian, Miss.” – Ozier Muhammad/New York Times].

“From a distance, it looks like an Army base camp… But here, a little more than a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico, on a muddy gravel lot that used to be a Little League field, a makeshift village has emerged for some of the many families who, as winter approaches, are still homeless because of Hurricane Katrina.”
As the subtropical ruins of New Orleans continue to mold, buried under mountains of now toxic rubbish (“Contractors have disposed of more than six million pounds of waste… There have been 222,000 refrigerators, washers and dryers gathered, and more than a million containers of hazardous waste have been plucked from land and sea”), the less fortunate members of that obliterated city’s displaced population now live in temporary camps – “canvas cities,” as the New York Times calls them.
Here, the tents “are set up in long, straight rows and distinguished only by alphanumeric addresses painted on their exteriors.” With rough plywood floors, they’re far from luxurious: “The toilets are portable, without running water, and are lined up near a tractor-trailer that serves as a shower house.”
So in a nation faced with rapidly failing civic infrastructure, are these the cities of the future? Instant, poor, and shoddily maintained?
“Boredom is perhaps the biggest problem in the tent cities,” we read. Yet one can clearly add the words: for now.

[Image: “Workers in protective gear inspecting drums for toxic chemicals last week at a reclamation site near Buras, La., near the Mississippi River levee. The detritus included piles of discarded spray cans, top.” Ozier Muhammad/New York Times].

(For more on Katrina, housing, and the architectural response to disaster, see this excellent resource at Archinect).

These photos by Haiko Hebig were taken in “one of Europe’s deepest workplaces (-1,565m),” the Heinrich Robert Colliery “located in the city of Hamm.”
Unfortunately, they show only the surface workings.

[Image: Haiko Hebig, sliding contacts of the west winding machine].

[Image: Haiko Hebig, DSK Bergwerk Ost coal storage building].

[Image: Haiko Hebig, shaft headgear].

More images of the colliery can be found on Hebig’s site. (Though I still want to see what’s 1,565m below the surface…)
Then there’s the closing of the Phoenix Steel Mill, in Dortmund, and the ensuing demolition of its so-called Hoerde Torch, which Hebig also captured on film.

[Image: Haiko Hebig, overlain images of the torch’s final collapse – other photos show the process in more detail].

[Image: Haiko Hebig, inside one of the blast furnaces, Phoenix Steel Mill, Dortmund].

Before they destroy buildings they should build small bunkers with bombproof roofs beneath those structures; for $1000 you can sit inside the subterranean chamber while the building – a waterfall of masonry – collapses onto your head. You emerge, an hour later, unscathed. Ears ringing.
Home for a sound artist, by the architects at BLDGBLOG.

(Originally spotted by Jill Polsby [thanks!])

It’s quite hard to get excited about stories like this: “Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet.” The asteroid is called Apophis, after an ancient Egyptian spirit of “evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.”
Scientists are now “imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it” – because the earth is in danger…! Again.
Only this time, the story has inspired an architectural idea.

[Image: The Roman Coloseum, photographed from space].

The exact trajectory of Apophis is apparently well-calculated (albeit with a few minor blindspots, such as whether or not it will actually come anywhere near the planet).
But surely you could just use a bigger computer – or cancel your lab workers’ vacation time – and soon you’d know, to the exact square-meter – to the very time of day! – where Apophis will land.
At which point we’ll build a huge baseball glove.

[Image: Michael Sorkin, Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles (with a new Dodgers Stadium); from the excellent, Christmas gift-worthy Wiggle].

Massive amounts of fiber-glass padding and reinforced concrete – plus entire subterranean, manmade lakes – will deflect the tectonic pressure of the asteroid’s impact, softening the outward-rippling aftershocks; the glove will even collapse in upon itself, blocking the explosion of dust that would otherwise cloud the atmosphere.
Best of all, we’ll know the exact moment of arrival, so the whole thing will be captured on film. A billion dollars’ worth of ad time has already been sold.
But maybe the calculations are off, you’re thinking. Perhaps we know Apophis will hit in 2029 – but what if it’s outside Springdale, Utah, or somewhere in the Gobi Desert, maybe even in the middle of the sea.
No problem: we’ll just build huge, kilometer-wide baseball gloves all over the planet. Floating through the Pacific. In 2016 an artist will apply for a one-year residency on one of the floating gloves, and her notes and photographs will be published the next year to great critical and commercial acclaim.
Then, in 2029, live on TV: catastrophe averted.
The glove-stadium actually works.

[Image: Planet Glove, by BLDGBLOG].

(Inspired by a brief discussion on Archinect; see also BLDGBLOG’s earlier post, The Torino Scale, for more on the architecture of impact).

The Dynamic City Foundation describes Beijing Boom Tower by architect Neville Mars as an “inspiration against sprawl,” through which “an entirely new urban reality is being created.”

The Boom Tower, they say, is an example of “the market responding to all future demands: suburban living in the heart of China’s capital.” Which is interesting, because this is possibly the least suburban thing I’ve ever seen.

Be sure to dress colorfully.
“Can the city withstand 15 more years of uncontrolled expansion?” they ask. “Can architecture even comprehend the scale of the urban problem? Can the mixed-use megastructure combat our segregating society?”
Why the answer to these questions is a city within a city, constructed from what look like huge stacks of white film canisters plastered with corporate logos, is beyond me – but as a set for a science fiction film?
Go for it.

At least it would attract a lot of tourists.
If you want to learn more about the complex, you can actually watch this (often surreal) short film, wherein you will learn that Beijing Boom Tower… includes a driving range.
Or just download this PDF, which contains an interview with project architect Neville Mars, including his thoughts about the desegregated garden-city towers of the future.

(Originally spotted at we make money not art).

Any public parking space can be prime real estate: well-located, easy to access, convenient. You rent the space out for a given time while you park your car – but surely you could engage in other activities while there? You’ve paid your money; the space is yours for two hours; why not have a barbecue, or play a game of chess, have a picnic… even open a short-term public park?

This was the premise behind PARK(ing), by the San Francisco-based group Rebar (also responsible for the Cabinet National Library – a filing cabinet in the middle of the desert).
As Rebar writes, “more than 70% of San Francisco’s downtown outdoor space is dedicated to the private vehicle, while only a fraction of that space is allocated to the public realm. Feeding the meter of a parking space enables one to rent precious downtown real estate, typically on a 1/2 hour to 2 hour basis. What is the range of possible occupancy activities for this short-term lease?”
How about “a metered parking spot for public recreational activity”? In other words, a temporary public park.
Take a look:

Rebar’s caption for that last photograph is: “the need for green open space is apparent.” Indeed.

[Image: Jan Curtis].

The Northern Lights are on the move.
“The Earth’s north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America so fast that it could end up in Siberia within 50 years, scientists have said.”

[Image: Jan Curtis].

“The shift could mean that Alaska will lose its northern lights, or auroras, which might then be more visible in areas of Siberia and Europe” – including, of course, the cities: Northern Lights coiling above cathedrals, bus routes, and sidewalk cafes.

[Image: Jan Curtis; see BLDGBLOG’s Radio Aurora New York for another].

Auroras have already been spotted as far south as Rome, crackling above the Pantheon; following these recent, accelerating movements of the earth’s magnetic field, however, Roman auroras might occur every night.
Hotel rates will skyrocket.

[Image: “The magnetosphere is a kind of elastic fire. It forms where the Earth’s magnetic field meets the hot plasma – the ionised gases – at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere.” It is “occasionally rocked by an explosive convulsion that flings some of its energies at the Earth, switching on spectacular auroras, damaging satellites, and knocking out electric power grids”].

At least one possible architectural project here would be to construct a tower of some sort, or a superstadium full of ring magnets and electromagnetic coils; these would attract, then trap, the planet’s north magnetic pole.
The pole would be permanently anchored; its terrestrial migration – and ultimate reversal – would stop.
The stadium would hum quietly, and all compasses would point toward it.
Massive sheets of auroral light would then torque downward every night at high speed – breaking away at the last minute to fold off toward the suburbs. You could stand on the roof and drink beer with your mates. Forget fireworks.
It’s a Project for a New North Pole.