Month: February 2006

Brooklyn-based painter Angelina Gualdoni was in the midst of some photographic studies of what she calls “‘terrain vague’ areas around Chicagoland,” when she became interested in “a mall that had been abandoned for the better part of twenty years.” She started to produce a few paintings of it. Each painting required “several days of pouring and staining,” after which she “employed taping to establish crisp architectural lines,” using “thicker, more viscous oil paint to build up figures, whether it’s weeds, dirt, or trash.”

Of course, it turns out this is the infamous Dixie Square Mall of Blues Brothers fame, “in which police cars were driven through the stores and walkways.” Now, after two decades of slow structural collapse, “multiple rapes and at least one murder have occurred there.”
“The place itself is strange, scary, sad, and amazing all at once,” Gualdoni writes. “Inside the mall there’s moss growing over much of the cement and laminate ground, trees (sometimes) growing inside the atrium, gangs that claim it with tags (though I’ve never encountered anyone else in there) and some wild dogs who call it home (I have been chased out by them). The place is entirely water-logged and creaky, damp and fetid. And used as a dumping ground, as well, for trash and toys, from both individuals and institutions.”
As Gualdoni is careful to point out: “it is illegal to enter, and is trespassing. Aside from the police, the dogs, and possible vagrants, there are also just genuinely concerned people at the day care center nearby who will drive through looking for you, if they see you enter the mall, concerned that you may be suicidal or crazy.” Or perhaps undead.
Of course, Gualdoni has other, equally eye-catching architectural work –

– on view at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery, and it’s certainly worth taking a look. And if Urban Exploration is your thing, don’t miss BLDGBLOG’s own tour through the self-intersecting topological knotwork of tunnels and abandoned bunkers coiling underneath Greater London.

(Thanks to the DC madman, Lonnie Bruner, for putting Angelina and I in touch).

[Images: Continuing today’s astronomy theme, these are optical labyrinths of the sky, mapped, from what may be one of the most beautiful books ever published: the Atlas Coelestis (1742) by Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr].

“In a journey that has stretched from the coastline of Namibia to the steamy jungles of Ghana, across crocodile infested lakes and the deserts of Northern Kenya, the cliff-side dwellings of the Dogon in Mali and onto the mysterious archaeological sites of the Egyptian Sahara,” a new lecture, hosted by London’s Royal Society, “explores Africa’s ancient astronomical history.”

The lecture is given by South African astronomer Thebe Medupe, whose constant grin is only one reason to check out his talk. This bloke is psyched.

Medupe introduces us to “celestial beliefs from different parts of the African continent and how some of these ancient African perceptions link with current scientific knowledge.” Part of his expertise is in the “theoretical understanding of stellar oscillations in the atmospheres of stars.” He has worked with the so-called Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), hoping “to turn South Africa into a serious scientific power capable of hosting astronomy’s greatest prize, a vastly expensive project known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).” He’s even got a Wikipedia entry.
In any case, Cosmic Africa is the name of a 72-minute film, produced by and starring Medupe. (Reviewed here by Variety).

South Africa’s official tourism page hypes the film: “Africans told stories about the sky, and saw giraffes, lions and zebras among the stars as naturally as people elsewhere saw bears and horses… To sample the richness of African traditions and achievements, Medupe and the filmmakers travelled around South Africa and to Mali, Egypt and Namibia, learning from local people and sharing modern perspectives.”

So now that I’ve given the film all this free advertising, why is it even interesting?
7000-year old ruined observatories and desert megaliths – a so-called “Stonehenge of the Sahara” – have been casting shadows on themselves, marking the solstices, keeping time on abandoned calendars, entangling landscape design with astronomy. The “apparent patterns” in the sky Medupe talks about become architectural diagrams, inverted: the negative space between stars becomes walls, the stars themselves windows, pillars or standing stones. Human movement following a specific astral route, copying migrations of astrochemical fires burning in the vacuum above.
Medupe talks about incidental jottings found in ancient astronomical books, Arabic vs. local languages, a competing marginalia of myth and science, the two fusing to predict next year’s eclipse. “I think this is very exciting,” he says, and then grins, looking down at his notes.
Orion’s belt is actually Three Zebras; Aldebaran is a hunter afraid to return to his wives – who are the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, with a neighborhood in London named after them. Geography meets geography.

But it’s the constellations that fascinate me, the fact that no one today invents their own, or even talks about the stars – assuming they can see them – because the skies have already been named, claimed, put in textbooks.
I once read that the Maya had “dark constellations,” areas in the Milky Way with no light, absent geometries of the void; these were actually foxes and llamas. Similar star lore has inspired at least one self-styled historian to propose Polynesian roots for Andean astronomy, ancient mariners canoeing across the seas, those stars memorized or carved as diagrams into boats and oars.
Should there be a kind of import tax on constellations?
But what about 200 years from now, after bird flu and global flooding, after the UK is a new Siberia – or a neo-tropical lagoon – will kids wander north across the Franco-English ice bridge, looking up to locate another London, made of stars – formerly the Pleiades – a walled city of light installed there in the skies of a coming ice age? Or perhaps the Tottenham Court Road, a celestial Thames, Buckingham Palace and Wembley, new mansions of constellated locations in the night? Celestial doubles of our contemporary landscape.
Times Square, rising every autumn; you harvest rhubarb by it. Alexanderplatz. Lake Shore Drive. Mt. Fuji. The Super Mario Cluster. Myths of twins: dragon-slayers.
Perhaps we should renovate the sky.

Architecture has participated with astronomy for so many thousands of years, far longer than its current role as a calculated by-product of cost-benefit charts and insurance liability.
Alignments, symbols, star gardens.
I remember an article in The Guardian, by Kathleen Jamie, who decided to experience astronomy via neolithic architecture left eroding on the Orkney Islands, built to frame the winter solstice: “You are admitted into a solemn place which is not a heart at all, or even a womb, but a cranium. You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, as in a recording studio, or a strongroom. A moment ago, you were in the middle of a field, with the wind and curlews calling. That world has been taken away, and the world you have entered is not like a cave, but a place of artifice, of skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel the self-assurance.”
In any case, be sure to stop by Medupe’s lecture; and then consider renaming your constellations. Maybe post the best ones, in a comment, below.
An Astral I-95. Gemini becomes Bush-Blair. The entire bus route of the 19, from Finsbury Park to Battersea, somehow mapped across a supercluster.
London Eye’s wheel of light turning there in space.

Also re-discovered in an old issue of Wired I stumbled upon last night (see earlier) was a very short article about Aldo Costa and his backyard perpetual motion machine.

It’s old news, but I like the image. And I like perpetual motion.

While much has been made of the so-called “home plate” formation – pictured above – recently discovered on Mars, there are equally intriguing, and beautiful, geological formations right here on Earth beside us.

Australia’s “Great Sandy Scars,” for instance, look like a huge rooster, or a mythical gryphon, bleached into the surface of the planet.
“In a small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia,” the actual explanation reads, “large sand dunes – the only sand in this desert of scrub and rock – appear as lines stretching from left to right. The light-colored fan shapes are scars from wildfires.”
Or this desert view of Iran – the geology of evil, perhaps.

It’s the Dasht-e Kevir, or “valley of desert,” the largest desert in Iran, “a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating.”
It looks like god came through with an abrader, geology on hyperdrive, polishing the planet down to stumps and fractal whorls.

(USGS global satellite image database discovered via Pruned. See also BLDGBLOG’s earlier satellite explorations of alluvial terrains, Libya, and the earth, observed).

[Image: From Pruned: Paolo Soleri, 1969].

Be sure to stop by Pruned for some amazing new posts and images, including Asteromo, “an outside-inside ellipsoidal earth,” designed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri, of course, was also the man behind Arcosanti, that monument to dust-covered magazines, old toilets, bureaucratic inactivity and failed utopias in the otherwise beautiful Arizona desert.
In any case, Pruned compares Asteromo to other plans “using actual asteroids” as spacebound earth-surrogates, rescuing humans from a poisoned biosphere.

[Image: As Pruned quotes: “Man, standing head toward the axis of rotation, will be enveloped in a solid ecology” – surely a haiku if there ever was one. Or perhaps this is haiku as rediscovered by Aleister Crowley, a Tarot card for the Space Age. (Illustration by Roy G. Scarfo)].

An earlier idea, for instance, by “futurologists Dandridge Cole and Donald Cox,” would have created a nomadic pseudo-earth by “fusing and sculpting” domestic space inside a captured asteroid. This would be done using “heat from solar mirrors.” The result would be a “gigantic geodesic interior chamber,” created “in much the same way as a glassblower shapes a small solid lump of molten glass into a large empty bottle.”
Yes – someone apparently thought that would work. (See here for loads more information about outerterrestrial bio-escape utopias).

[Image: Vent-Based Alpha; illustration by Kenn Brown & Chris Wren/Wired].

Then, however, I was cleaning house last night when I found an old copy of Wired – I must be living in Arcosanti – which I promptly wasted more than an hour and a half reading in its entirety. But therein I re-discovered Phil Nuytten’s plans for Vent-Based Alpha, an undersea hot-vent microtopia powered by geothermal energy.
From the article: “‘Essentially, it’s like taking a cruise ship with several hundred people and parking it at the bottom of the ocean,’ Nuytten says. ‘After three or four generations, inhabitants would ask, Are there really people who live on the surface?'”
Which is fair enough – the place will have gardens, for instance, and everyone will get exercise somehow, etc. – but, even aside from the obvious questions of population growth and a need for more space, I can’t help but picture those people a bit further down the line, once several generations have been bred in the darkness, devolving into a state of permanent dementia, confused brains hardened from lack of sunlight and vitamins, stumbling through the pressurized halls of their own undersea prison, wearing stained clothing and listening to Mozart, talking to reflections, teeth yellow, repeating things, forgetful, screwing their own children, half-insane.
Vent-Based Chainsaw Massacre. Screenplay by BLDGBLOG.

This is just one of several extraordinary photographs taken in Guangxi Province, China. Scroll through the rest and see huge terraces that look as if carved from the earth with a fretsaw; agriculture everywhere imposes its own geometry.

(Discovered via gravestmor).

[Image: More super-prostheses, and the monsters who love them, by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo (image #6)].

[Image: An architectural “super-prosthesis” by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo].

Quite a while back I got an email from Wes Janz, who runs something called onesmallproject, a fascinating look at standards of housing and urbanism – including the absence of the former – around the world. What does home look like elsewhere? How do people find shelter? Are we perhaps approaching a planetary urbanism? Etc.

Arguably, this would all begin a series of questions that could lead back to Heidegger; for instance: is architecture an appropriate response for those who dwell in a state of homelessness – Heidegger’s state of “harassed unrest”? Is dwelling always an architectural activity? What of “those buildings that are not dwelling places” – or those dwelling places that are not buildings? And so on.
In any case, here are some statistics from the project’s facts pages to consider:

• by 2030, 1 person in 4 will be a slum dweller
• every day, 200,000 people move to cities worldwide (which is 73 million people urbanizing every year)
• half the population of Istanbul lives in slums
• Caracas has 5 police forces, wearing 5 different uniforms
• 10-30% of U.S. waste comes from architectural demolition and construction

Where it gets interesting, however, is in offering solutions, proposing something, offering ideas. Everyone knows how to complain; imaginative responses are welcome for their sheer infrequency.

The images I’m showing, for instance, are by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo, a member of onesmallproject, taken from Parejo’s own website.

Parejo’s work explores a kind of do-it-yourself tactical urbanism, using modular frame structures and prefabricated building units in a way that “exploits gaps in administrative structures, governmental bodies’ supervisory energies, official procedures, and where the law falls short.” In the process, Parejo transforms vacant lots and peripheral spaces into what he calls “subversive urban occupations.”
This has included working with scaffolding: constructing nest-like “urban reserves” in the spaces defined by construction scaffolds, enlarging houses parasitically.
The architectural prosthesis, in fact, is something Parejo frequently explores by constructing temporary, unofficial extensions to existing buildings – including this capsule on stilts, “installed orthopaedically… as a spatial and functional prosthesis,” in a place called the Finland Pavilion.

There is a lot more information – including dozens of projects – at both Parejo’s site and at onesmallproject. Of course, as a side note, even as I write this a new exhibition continues apace at the NLA, called Prefabulous London.

There, you can gaze all you like at plans and photos of affordable, high-density urban construction techniques using prefabricated structures, including a few parasite-like microbuildings. If you’re not sure you want to go, or live elsewhere – attempting to dwell while located otherwise – you can always download the exhibition’s catalog here (1.8MB PDF); or click through some other coverage of the show at Inhabitat (who link to an interesting article in Building Design) or the London-based City of Sound.

A few comments at the end of a recent post reminded me of something from David Toop’s Ocean of Sound, an excellent and highly recommended survey of “sonic history,” focusing on ambient music, post-Debussy.

Roughly midway through Toop’s book we find this review by composer Paul Schütze: “Recently listening to Thomas Köner’s Permafrost,” Schütze writes, “I found that by the end of the disc my sense of aural perspective was so altered that the music seemed to continue in the sounds around me. Tube trains passing beneath the building, distant boilers, the air conditioning, and the elevator engines had been pulled into the concert. This effect lasted for about forty minutes during which I could not get anything to return to its ‘normal position’ in the ‘mix’ of my flat.”
What would have been yet more fascinating, however, is if Schütze had been wrong. What if the disc, in other words, had still been playing – and he didn’t live anywhere near the Tube, nor did his building have elevators…? What if those subtle and distant architectural sounds had actually been part of the CD?
This would be music as the illusion of architecture.
You could move into a house without a basement – so you purchase this CD, or download these tracks, and you uncannily achieve the sonic effect of having more floors below you. Or perhaps you want an attic, or even a next-door neighbor: you would buy soundtracks for architecture, architecture through nothing but sound.
For instance, think of the Francisco López album, Buildings. Buildings is “a work composed entirely of sound fragments López procured while wandering around big buildings in NYC,” recording the “sounds of elevators, air conditioning systems, cables, pipes, air ducts, boilers, clocks, thermostats, video cameras, and so on.” (You can actually listen to a brief excerpt).
So instead of an addition, or a home renovation – you would commission a piece of music; and for as long as that music is playing, your house has several thousand more square-feet… and a Tube line nearby… and distant boilers…

(With thanks to Dan Hill at City of Sound for pointing me toward Buildings).