Month: March 2006

If you could partially melt the city of London – then refreeze it: what might that new city look like?
Alternatively, if you could build a huge machine, a landscape printer, and feed molten rivers of the city – a new Thames of liquid windows, old domes of churches running like paint – through its cavernous gates and printheads, what might you actually print with it?
Could you use the molten city of London as an “ink” for future cityscapes – store it in a vat, and print new continuous bridges, endless architecture, from Kent to northern Yorkshire? A diagonal ribbon of liquid London, solidifying across all of France.

[Image: Instead of colors, you’d have a cartridge full of Islington, full of Holborn, King’s Cross, Little Venice…].

(For a related idea, see magmatic architecture).

“Walking along the beach some years ago, I noticed a dark structure emerging from the mist ahead of me,” J.G. Ballard writes in today’s Guardian. “Three storeys high, and larger than a parish church, it was one of the huge blockhouses that formed Hitler’s Atlantic wall, the chain of fortifications that ran from the French coast all the way to Denmark and Norway. This blockhouse, as indifferent to time as the pyramids, was a mass of black concrete once poured by the slave labourers of the Todt Organisation, pockmarked by the shellfire of the attacking allied warships.”

This wall of now abandoned concrete bunkers, Ballard tells us, was but part “of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

[Image: Richard Doody].

Ballard then climbs into one of the ruined blockhouses, and finds it reminds him “of the German forts at Tsingtao, the beach resort in north China that my family visited in the 1930s. Tsingtao had been a German naval base during the first world war, and I was taken on a tourist trip to the forts, a vast complex of tunnels and gun emplacements built into the cliffs. The cathedral-like vaults with their hydraulic platforms resembled Piranesi’s prisons, endless concrete galleries leading to vertical shafts and even further galleries. The Chinese guides took special pleasure in pointing out the bloody handprints of the German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment.”

[Image: Richard Doody].

And so on – we meet Modernism, ornament, Stalin, Hitler, London’s National Gallery, the high-rise architecture of death and class warfare: read more at the Guardian.
Of course, in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald takes us on a walking tour of the English coast, including Britain’s own military landscapes. These abandoned weapons testing ranges, complete with odd concrete structures, Sebald writes, looked like “the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas, which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.”

[Image: Keith Ward].

For Sebald, “wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside these bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the showerheads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways.”
It is interesting to note that both Sebald and Ballard discuss an isle of the dead –

[Image: Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1883].

– specifically, in Ballard’s case, Arnold Böcklin’s famous 1883 painting of that title.
In any case, you can also take a look at the site Atlantik Wall for more images and history; you can follow Subterranea Britannica‘s journey into some weird missile silos –

[Image: Nick Catford].

– built into the landscape of northern France; you can read Paul Virilio’s now somewhat legendary exploration of abandoned WWII landscape architecture, Bunker Archaeology; and you can take a brief look at the observations made here, as part of a larger architectural travelogue that begins in London’s Barbican.
Of course, you can also take a look at an art project, from 1998, by Magdalena Jetelova –

– in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.

Finally, here’s a good interview with J.G. Ballard; and, though irrelevant to bunkers, I recommend Ballard’s Super-Cannes in the highest possible terms. (Though it’s certainly not for everyone who reads BLDGBLOG).

In 1919, Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin proposed a 400m-high Monument to the 3rd International.

Once constructed, it would have stood nearly 100m taller than the Eiffel Tower, giving physical expression to the social and artistic dynamism of the Russian Revolution. Intended as a kind of archi-sculptural testament to the strength of the world’s workers, the Tower was ultimately never built.
Or was it?

[Image: Sara De Bondt].

Recently, a British group called Henry VIII’s Wives has made artistic waves with their proposal to build the Tower in its entirety – although in pieces, distributed throughout the world. Thus the Tower will exist, albeit in an unassembled, ironically incomplete form. An art gallery in Sydney, a wine cellar in Rome, a cupboard in outer Rajasthan – there you will find small, unique and official pieces of Tatlin’s Tower.
Advertisements for this future “unrealized Tower” even began appearing on the walls of the London Underground.

[Image: Sara De Bondt/Lucy Skaer].

Then, tonight, 19 March 2006, at an event in the Bern Kunsthalle, Switzerland, the group formally presented their plan – alongside Tatlin-inspired presentations by unbuilt-monument specialist Takehiko Nagakura, novelist Zoë Strachan and others. BLDGBLOG was also invited to submit a short text, which I’ve reproduced below. (Thanks to Bob Grieve for commissioning it!)

The unbuilt status of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International – or Tatlin’s Tower – is both befuddling and possibly contentious. In other words, are we sure that Tatlin’s Tower has not actually been built? Can this state of unconstruction be proven?
Perhaps Tatlin’s Tower exists after all – but we’ve been looking in all the wrong places.
There is, in fact, no logical reason to assume that Tatlin’s Tower, once built, would even be architectural. Indeed, there is no logical reason to assume that Tatlin’s Tower, in its full realization, its exact structural form, is something that can even be seen.
But if Tatlin’s Tower does exist – and, as you’ll hear, it probably does – we may find that it’s been built not just once or even twice; we may find that the Tower exists in a constant state of construction, a never-ending condition of being-built. Tatlin’s Tower is constructed – and destructed – from scratch, everyday, every instant – and the Tower will go on being built, ritualistically, every moment for eternity.
If that’s really the case, however, where are we supposed to find it? It is hard, after all, to misplace a 400m high Communist Tower; if it now stands, where exactly is it standing?
For starters, perhaps stand is the wrong word. It is important to realize that the Tower is a vertical grid of spatial relationships, a physical rhythm of structure in space. Once we establish that, we see that the proportion of gap to girder forms a mathematical ratio that can be applied anywhere – at the very least, it can be perceived anywhere.
It is then that the Tower’s helical super-symmetry becomes evident on every scale, in every location.
The Tower already exists.
As but one example, in the time spent between visiting a pub once, then visiting it again – and then again, two weeks later – there is the structure of Tatlin’s Tower, measured precisely, to the second, in the chasm between drinks. You have lived the rhythm of the structure, its buttresses and cantilevered gantries. One day, two days, one hour: the ratios and rhythms match exactly to the Tower’s form.
The Tower, in other words, does not have to be architectural.
I even discovered while writing this text that the space between myself and the computer screen, if you include the short distance to the floor, forms an oblong triangle; and it dawned on me: this is a section of Tatlin’s Tower, right here, surrounding me, inscribed into the space I inhabit. Tatlin’s entire 400m-high Babel can be reverse-derived from the data.
In this context it is quite extraordinary to reveal that Dr. Simon X, a musicologist from Leeds University, has found indisputable evidence that Tatlin’s Tower was translated into a series of Indian ragas. Whilst vacationing in Tamil Nadu in 1974 – and suffering from a stomach bug due to questionable local hygiene – Dr. X found that the nightly concerts he and his wife had been attending were actually musicalized versions of the mathematics found inside Tatlin’s Tower. He didn’t know if the musicians had planned this.
X’s recordings have become something of a myth in the field of Tatlin’s Tower-spotting, but his musical logic remains impeccable, even obvious: you can very clearly hear the outline of Tatlin’s symmetrical structuring in the recurrence of certain south Indian octaves.
Indeed, X’s recent papers suggest, if one were to transcribe Tatlin’s Tower directly as a musical score, the folk songs of Tamil Nadu would be as accurate a result as any.
But it gets yet more interesting, when one considers contemporary cinematic choreography. Tatlin’s closest friend from university went on to marry a woman whose sister taught dance, first in Moscow, then in Paris, then in New York in exile. The school she started in New York to support herself during the war included, at one point, a young Beatriz X – who would later befriend world famous film editor Walter Murch.
It is rumored now that Murch – editor of such features as Apocalypse Now – would edit raw film stock into the proportions suggested by a poster of Tatlin’s Tower pinned up on his studio wall. Intriguingly, then, the movements of characters through the cinematic space of Apocalypse Now – or the more recent Iraq War film, Jarhead – actually carefully circumscribe the upward coiling vertical movement of Tatlin’s monumental iron tower.
This can be glimpsed most clearly in a scene from The Conversation, which Murch also edited, in which Gene Hackman, taller than the other actors he appears with, seems to mimic the precise angle of tilt at which Tatlin’s Tower was meant to repose.
And so forth.
The importance, here, is in the realization that if the Tower was designed to be of the people, a monument to international popular sovereignty, then it is also in the people, and amongst them, literally: it is medically present in the space between cells, resonating in cobwebs of bone marrow, as much as it is traced again and again within the four dimensions of urban space by the passage of workday pedestrians.
The sliver of empty asphalt between your car and the lorry overtaking you, multiplied by the time it takes to get anywhere, inevitably adds up to frame the gantries in Tatlin’s Tower.
The Tower is everywhere. It is something we enact, performed here in the present, indeed in the hesitations between every letter that I type. It is negatively present in the foundations of buildings, in natural crevasses carved by streams through the ice of Antarctic deserts. Even American astronaut Neil Armstrong, some have claimed, found evidence of Tatlin’s Tower impressed into the surface of the moon, an almost exact reproduction eroding there in faint stratigraphies of colorless rock.
The ultimate “Communist monument,” then, if there is such a thing, is the one that we’re living inside of, the proportional numerologies that frame and contain us. The brilliance of Tatlin’s Tower was that it was already built from the moment he first designed it – or perhaps I should say: transcribed it.
Tatlin knew this; now so do we.

[Note: Not every claim made in this text should be considered factual].

[Images: Landscape design through interventionist Aristotelianism (action-at-a-distance): Utah’s test bombing ranges. You need airborne explosives that inflict damage in the exact patterns of the royal gardens at Versailles. The Air Force Corps of Landscape Engineers. Launch missiles at the moon and Angkor Wat appears inscribed into the lunar surface. You bomb Kew Gardens – and it turns into Longwood Gardens. Bombing landscapes with new landscapes. (These photos via Pruned – via Polar Inertia. See also: Tree Bombs and Digging with Bombs)].

[Image: “The world’s first inflatable folly is displayed at the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, England.” Hint: it’s not the woman sitting front-left. BBC].

In 1784, utopian designer and speculative architect Etienne-Louis Boullée designed a Cenotaph for Newton, or tomb for Isaac Newton. It was ridiculously huge, its dome pierced by small holes to shine as new constellations, illuminating visitors from above with artificial stars.

[Image: Etienne-Louis Boullée; more here (including a cool triangular version)].

Not to be outwitted by their fanciful neighbors across the Channel, however, Britain now has “the world’s first inflatable folly,” on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Modeled after Boullée’s Cenotaph and named for a song by Joy Division, In a Lonely Place gives us a “7 meter inflated black sphere punctured by a half-timbered structure. Inside, a stair leads up to a viewing platform, from where the surrounding void is broken by small pinpricks of light, made by transparent panels cut into the sphere.”

These, too, are constellations – of a different kind: they’re maps to the stars of Hollywood, terrestrial residences of artificial stars, a Californian pantheon to guide us through the night.

Designed by FAT, the folly is up till 2 May 2006, so check it out! And you can see photographs of the folly under construction here.
Meanwhile, one of the first things this made me think of for some reason is a tool that may not even exist, but what I want to call a surgical balloon: you open up someone’s body (in a surgical context), insert the balloon, expand it, and this lifts away the surrounding tissue so that a safe operation can take place. I have no idea if this really exists, but it sounds quite useful.
So what I’m thinking is: could architects design small buildings, in the form of surgical tools, that are temporarily erected inside people’s bodies? A hip replacement that looks remarkably like the Barcelona Pavilion, for instance – or a medical device that references Boullée. Small versions of Boullée’s cenotaph begin appearing everywhere, in surgical theaters, worldwide. Inflated inside people’s bodies. Hissing.
The Boullée Balloon. It might happen.

[All unlabeled images in this post come courtesy of Sam Jacob/FAT].

The Arbonian Sea is back in the news – and it’s got Hollywood written all over it:
“Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed – and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter.” [extreme close-up; words inaudible]
“And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.”
[title screen]

[Image: Anthony Philpotts].

However, ocean is a blatant exaggeration; it’s a sea, really – the Arbonian Sea. It will simply pry off the Horn of Africa, and form a kind of parallel Red Sea in the space left behind. It’s not destined to be a new Indian Ocean, or a new Atlantic. Even a Mediterranean, for that matter.

[Image: Dereje Ayalew/Addis Ababa University].

Yet every time geologists return to study the area, “new crevices are discovered. Fumes as hot as 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) shoot up from some of them; the sound of bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur rise from others. The larger crevices are dozens of meters deep and several hundred meters long. Traces of recent volcanic eruptions are also visible.”
This is all screaming for a BLDGBLOG field-trip. (Funders be in touch!)

[Image: Asfawossen Asrat].

The whole region, called the Afar Triangle, is “sinking rapidly. Large areas are already more than 100 meters (328 feet) below sea level. For now, the highlands surrounding the Denakil Depression prevent the Red Sea from flooding these areas, but erosion and tectonic plate movement are continually reducing the height of this natural barrier.”
So if the next James Bond is worth its snuff it will feature a crazed geotechnic engineer bulldozing new flood paths through those highlands, ready to flood the valley… Where Britain has some kind of outpost… A space program… A germ warfare lab…
Or maybe it’s Bond doing the bulldozing…

[Image: Tim Wright/University of Oxford].

In any case, the Denakil – or Danakil – Depression sounds like paradise to me. Not only does it have the hottest average temperature on earth – it “tops 34°C every day of the year and soars to 55°C in the summer” – but it is chock full of “geological treats.” For instance, New Scientist tells us, a “splendid shield volcano more than 50 kilometres wide called Erte Ale occupies much of the depression. The volcano is one of the few in the world with an active lava lake. Nearby, volcanic smoke holes have created crystal pools, lava cones called hornitos and colourful structures formed from sulphur, halite and other minerals. Elsewhere the floor is littered with marine reefs, silt plains and ancient shorelines.”
Add all to that the nearby Arbonian Sea, and it seems a good time to be terrestrial, indeed.

(Thanks, Alex!)

[Image: Caver Chris Nicola looks at markings left in Priest’s Grotto; National Geographic Adventure/Peter Lane Taylor].

“In the spring of 1944,” we read, “a group of 38 Ukrainian Jews emerged weak and jaundiced from a cave they’d used for nearly a year to escape the horrors of the Holocaust.”
Caver Chris Nicola rediscovered this story 13 years ago, after exploring Ukraine’s Gypsum Giant cave systems. “While there, during an expedition into the tenth longest cave in the world, his team came across two partially intact stone walls and other signs of habitation.” Learning about the Jewish families who had used these caves for survival, “Nicola grew determined to learn how people with no prior caving experience or specialized equipment were able to live in such a hostile environment for so long.”
So Nicola returned with a photographer, Peter Lane Taylor, and he learned more of the story.
The Holocaust refugees’ “first stop was Verteba, a well-known tourist cave where the families spent their first six months. There, the Jews struggled to find enough water and suffered from the toxic buildup of smoke from their cooking fire. Then on May 5, 1943, after narrowly avoiding capture at the hands of the Gestapo, the families relocated to a previously unexplored cave located beneath land owned by a local parish priest. It was called Popowa Yama, or Priest’s Grotto, and it would be the Jews’ refuge from the Holocaust for the next 344 days.”
They lived without sun for more than a year.
“At the surface, Priest’s Grotto is little more than a weedy hole in the ground amid the endless wheat fields stretching across western Ukraine. A short distance away, a low stand of hardwoods withers in the heat and is the only sign of cover for miles around.” Here, “there’s nothing to indicate that one of the longest horizontal labyrinths in the world lies just underfoot.”
The story is almost unbelievable. For instance, “one of the survivors, only four years old at the time, said she remembers playing with a bright, shining crystal in the cave. One of the largest crystals in the world is close to their campsite inside Priest’s Grotto, and chunks of it will sometimes fall to the ground. When we saw the crystal, we realized that that was where she used to play.”
Or: “They had few candles, so light was limited to three short periods each day. After enough time spent wandering in the dark, they memorized the feel of the cave floor on their bare feet. It was like directions in braille.”
The inside of the earth, lined with language.

[Thanks to Neddal for the tip!]

The Los Angeles freeway system is one of the most carefully filmed locations on the planet. The total number of cameras permanently dedicated to watching it can only be estimated; and the fate of those uneventful films is almost ritualistic: temporary storage, then erasure.
But occasionally there’s some action – and the true magic of the system begins.

LA’s unacknowledged cinema – its highway network – was the focus of a recent article, by Tad Friend, in The New Yorker. During the OJ chase of 1994, Friend writes, “from the cameras above, the customary vantage for tracking the city’s televised pursuits, you could see that this most sprawling and motorized of our great metropolitan areas is a huge web that is easily apprehended from the air – some forty police and TV helicopters keep busy doing just that – and that it is not the roadways but their surveillance that never ends.” (My emphasis). Or, as Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz: “thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.”
In other words, whether operated by FOX, CNN, or the LAPD, traffic helicopters give Los Angeles an urban coherence that few drivers and pedestrians may ever understand – till they see it on TV.

Within those surveilled streets – what Friend calls LA’s “public stage, its Colosseum” – there have been as many as 5,596 car chases in one year (2004). Yet this should surprise no one: LA’s “ten million occupants are all ceaselessly trying to go very different places by very elaborate routes that gum up everyone else’s very elaborate routes. So the two people who stole a big rig filled with mixed melons last July and then led police on a four-hour meander around the 5, the 605, the 215, and the 15 freeways were, by local standards, behaving logically. And as for the trucker a few years back who fled deputies after a traffic collision, drove his eighteen-wheeler through the fence surrounding Long Beach Airport, overturned it on the main runway, set the cab on fire, and then ran away without any clothes on – well, fair enough, really.”
As a transportation technique, or genre of driving, the chase is an entirely sensible use of the LA highway system. In some ways that’s what it’s built for. “This is as much city planning,” Friend writes, “as it is producing – a vision of a metropolis knit together by speed and spectacle.”

[Image: David Maisel, from the Oblivion series].

What’s even more interesting is that the LAPD have begun to change their tactics of pursuit, including radio communication strategies, so as not to bring undue televisual attention upon the chases, the chasers, or the chased themselves – who often see these high-speed extravaganzas as a kind of initial public offering, or debut role, a break-out performance watched by captivated millions.
There is even a burgeoning visual style or cinematography associated with this tele-vehicular art form: “The frame of the pursuit – a cropped shot of an anonymous vehicle moving at ominous speed through a featureless landscape – has not been updated since the genre began.”

[Image: OJ Simpson’s infamous white Bronco; in a parallel universe, ruled by Philip K. Dick, this image would be used as the next American flag].

Meanwhile, whole subsidiary industries have arisen on the fringes of the car chase scene. Wired, for instance, writes about James Tatoian, who is “developing a system that uses microwave energy to interfere with microchips inside cars. Once the chip is overloaded with excessive current, the car ceases to function, and will gradually decelerate on its own.”
Then, in the slightly Orwellian field of “pursuit management” – a growth industry, I’m sure – StarChase LLC has developed a GPS dart system that consists of “a tracking projectile with a miniaturized GPS receiver, radio transmitter, power supply and a launcher which can be hand-held or mounted on a police car.” Shoot this thing at a fleeing car – and you can track it via satellite. (More here).
Yet another way to manage pursuits? As Tad Friend writes: “Within fifteen years or so, when all new cars will be equipped with OnStar-type security systems, the LAPD hopes to be able to override disobedient drivers using the quintessential weapon of the video age: a remote control.”
There’s even a “Pursuit Intervention Technique, or PIT,” which basically sets a fleeing car spinning – because a police car has just rammed into it.

[Image: A different kind of intervention technique].

In any case, what interests me here is not police pursuit technology in and of itself, but the fact that it has slowly become a regular feature of American urban life. Even more, the car chase, though illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous, is also one of the most logical responses to the American landscape: if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” (Tad Friend) in one city alone, you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put it to use.
Add that to uncountable thousands of cameras installed there on lightposts, or carried by helicopters throughout the sky – the endless cinema of the everyday, an anthropologist’s dream – and anyone driving in LA right now is literally only moments away from celebrity. Go a little further, a little faster – and fifteen minutes after you read this post, I might be watching you on TV.
Be sure to wave.

[Note: Perhaps this is needless to say, but if you go whizzing off into la la land and drive your car through a house – it ain’t the fault of BLDGBLOG. Buckle up. And you can find more of this here].

[Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman].

This is an amazing idea. A tourist brochure – for a fake destination – is printed on glossy paper, then distributed in the New York subway system. Confused would-be tourists leaf through the brochure, “intrigued to learn that this island city’s leading industries are winemaking and bookbinding, and that it features a Vegetation Museum, the world’s largest flea market, ‘Pools of Certitude,’ and a natural feature known as the Subterranean Honey Baths.”
46% of its citizens are secular humanists.
Yawning commuters look in vain for flights or cruises, any way to get there at all…
Designed by Amanda Spielman, the brochure is “an aesthetic cross between McSweeney’s and Edward Tufte,” writes Metropolis. See for yourself by downloading the complete PDF.

[Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman].

Perhaps a small series of BLDGBLOG tourist PDFs coming soon: a rough guide to the neotropical manmade archipelago of… whatever I decide to call it.

(Thanks, Scott! See also Brand Avenue‘s brief look at the island utopia).