Alluvial terrains


A composite of riverine meanders, ancient hydrological scars in the earth of California, Owens Valley, like glimpses of old Chinese landscape scrolls –


– taken from the satellites of TerraServer. Fossilized wakes and side-streams, eroding banks of fractal continents. Silt on silt. Everything ending in self-similarity.


Click-on to enlarge! Please!
Meanwhile, see Pruned‘s uploaded set of geological investigations from the lower Mississippi alluvial basin.

Sky Tunnels of Toronto


As the above text describes – and as you can read here – architect Chris Hardwicke has recently proposed a network of elevated bike trails – glass tunnels soaring above Toronto, in a “dynamic air circulation loop” – that would allow city residents to travel by bicycle at speeds of up to 40kph.
It would look like this:


Two thoughts: 1) the Tour de France of the future will be a Tour de Sky Tunnels of Toronto; and 2) why not build a moving version, nomadic, hinged, flexible, a kind of glass octopus of dynamic sky-routes, accessible only by pedestrians, going nowhere except into itself, knot-like, a mobile marathon route torquing above the city at night, reflective, looping over Roncesvalles, utopian junctions in space?

(Spotted at Archinect).

An electromagnetic Grand Canyon, moving through space


[Image: It’s the “N44 superbubble complex,” and it spans 325 lightyears. But are we drifting dangerously close to another such superbubble? And what would such a cosmic ring sound like? (Thanks, Bryan!) Meanwhile, is the Milky Way – and everything near it – being pulled toward something, a region of “superdensity,” a “Zone of Avoidance,” the “most massive known structure in the observable universe”? Finally, is this –


– the fate of the sun, bursting over a ruined earth of half-molten continents and liquified alluvial cities 7.5 billion years from now?].

Demolition Sculptures, or: Sandblasting Manhattan

I just saw this at Tropolism, and was amazed: turning abandoned buildings – into sculptures.


Would you still be able to use those rooms?, I wonder. To work in them and go to sleep in them and take stairways up the legs between levels? All the while living inside this Empire Strikes Back/robotect sculpture?
The head, for instance, could be rented out as a two-bedroom flat…
“As each vacated building is subsequently recycled and transformed into a sculpture,” the architects write, “abandonment and demolition is no longer viewed as a negative process but becomes a celebration for cultural creation, urban revitalization, and identity building.”


What other sculptures of I-beams and rebarred floor plates exist within skyscrapers, from London to Chicago, LA to Beijing? A selective pruning of a high-rise’s insides, and a new skyline takes shape, pierced by breezes.
Which leads me to wonder if you could sandblast all the buildings of Manhattan into rounded landscape sculptures, rock, brick, glass, and steel ground down to geometric smoothness. Aerodynamic.
Like a rock-tumbler, turning backyard gravel into perfect spheres, eggs, and ovals, could you polish the city down to a gleaming rock park of half-abraded office towers, adjoined buildings sanded one into the another like the lips of wooden bowls – just throw the whole island into a rock-tumbler?
Sandblast new sculptures out of every brownstone.
Or could you declare war on a city not with bombs and missiles but with high-powered industrial abraders and sandblasting machines? Turn Manhattan into a smooth series of sandstone arches and contours, all of New York a hulking Utah-like world of “balanced rocks, fins and pinnacles… highlighted by a striking environment of contrasting colors, landforms and textures”?


It’s Arches National Park: Manhattan Branch. All that bedrock, geology and form released – by the geotechnical avant-garde. City sculptors. Sandblasting the torqued ruins of Manhattan; then moving back to re-colonize those polished canyons.

Seeds of the Apocalypse


“Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. The room is a ‘doomsday vault‘ designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. It is being built to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies.”
And I’m on my way…
“The $3 million vault” – which seems a remarkably cheap price to “safeguard the world’s food supply” – “will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but ‘the mountains are patrolled by polar bears’, says [Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project].”
“This will be the world’s most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,” says Fowler.
Rumors are the vault was designed by Jerry Bruckheimer – and it’s not seeds they’re keeping in there… but Noah’s Ark. Wait –

(A somewhat related, and very interesting, story: global seed-hunters, as reported in The Guardian).

Stranger TV and the World of Cinemapolis


[Image: Banksy (Marble Arch, London, 2004); via Enjoy Surveillance].

“Residents of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive ‘Asbo TV‘ – television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets. As part of the £12m scheme funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister,” the Times reports, “residents of Shoreditch in the East End will also be able to compare characters they see behaving suspiciously with an on-screen ‘rogues’ gallery’ of local recipients of anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos).”
This is part of a “New Deal for Communities to regenerate poor districts” – by watching those districts on TV. It’s the future of televised entertainment.
So will advertisers buy every wall in view of a camera…?

(For more, see BLDGBLOG’s earlier piece on CCTV and urban psychovideography; as well as a quick post on wmmna).

Landscapes undone

Two love affairs continue simultaneously here: 1) photos of mines, and 2) photos by David Maisel.


[Images: David Maisel, from his series The Mining Project; these are Bingham Canyon, Utah, and the so-called Clifton Tanks, Arizona].

Maisel writes of a “fascination with the undoing of the landscape,” a kind of geo-industrial unpuzzling of the terrestrial surface and its impermanent forms. He also has two books available, if you’re interested; and there’s an audio interview to check out, as well.
For more eye-explodingly beautiful examples of his work, see BLDGBLOG’s earlier posts. But your eyes might explode. (Or click here).

The Lake Project


More aerial photographs by David Maisel, this time of California’s Owens Lake. But I’m totally addicted. I can’t even believe how beautiful his images are.


As Maisel himself explains: “Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats.” (For any film buffs out there, this is the same hydro-political event that inspired Roman Polanski’s Chinatown).


“For decades,” Maisel continues, “fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. The lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, and other materials.”


At this point, the “concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that I find compelling.”

(Read more at The Lake Project; and you can search Maisel’s work – then give him a grant or something – on his website; see also BLDGBLOG’s Terminal Lake and Silt).

Terminal Lake


In 2003, photographer David Maisel “began to make aerial photographs around the perimeter of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as part of a project that will ultimately cover much of the Great Basin. The Great Salt Lake is considered a ‘terminal’ lake, in that it has no naturally occurring outlets. Around its edges are industries of varying types, including evaporation ponds that cover some 40,000 acres along the eastern and southern shores of the lake.”


Accordingly, all photographs in this post are by Maisel – but his work is so ridiculously great, and so retina-scarringly colorful, that I have to urge you in the strongest possible terms to go check it out. (Just look at these! And these! And these! I’m going crazy here! They’re so beautiful you might have a heart attack).


(And don’t forget BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at the literary hydrologies of silt and other drainscapes).

Greater Los Angeles Traffic Galaxies


[Image: David Maisel, from his series Oblivion; the site includes Maisel’s brief text on the project].

The Grass Collective has recently uploaded a short, amazingly hypnotic aerial video of nighttime Los Angeles traffic – and I was embarrassingly excited to find that you can actually order a whole DVD (!) of the stuff.
There’s only a minute or two available on the site, but I can imagine quite a juicy first date starting off with nothing but an LA traffic DVD, a bearskin rug, maybe fill your bedroom with some car exhaust… Hot.


[Images: David Maisel – who is not actually connected to the Grass Collective video, I just like his stuff – from the Oblivion series].

(Traffic video spotted in Dwell Magazine. See also BLDGBLOG’s Knot Driver, including an earlier piece on the geometry of Los Angeles traffic control; for more of David Maisel’s photography do not miss Terminal Lake).