Month: June 2006

“A novel, glass-like form of carbon dioxide has been created in the laboratory by Italian scientists,” New Scientist reports. “Under extreme pressures the researchers found that CO2 forms a crystalline solid, dubbed ‘amorphous carbonia’ (a-CO2).” This new material “could shed light on the way CO2 behaves under pressure inside planets.” Instead of bedrock, for example, on these alien planets, you’d have miles and miles of transparent carbon dioxide glass spiraling downward beneath your feet, forming fissures and caves; a San Andreas fault of windowed canyons, shattering over millions of years. Glass continents.
As Jules Verne once wrote: “Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses.” In this case, those abysses may well reflect you.

After being compressed under artificial, near-planetary pressures – or “400,000 to 500,000 atmospheres” – “CO2 molecules react to these conditions by forming an irregular crystalline, or amorphous, structure with oxygen molecules. The resulting material is transparent, tough, and has an atomic structure resembling that of ordinary window glass.”
Although amorphous carbonia “cannot [yet] exist outside of a pressure chamber,” some scientists have already imagined using the material for “new, less environmentally harmful ways to dispose of CO2.”
This could mean, for example, creating huge transparent cubes of carbon dioxide glass; these would then store excess CO2, locking it into perfect Euclidean forms, instead of letting more gas escape into the atmosphere where it would trap solar heat. The more cars and factories are put into operation anywhere in the world, pumping out yet more carbon dioxide, the larger these cubes will get, growing, reflective, looming on the edge of the city. Peripheral, abstract geometries of the purest architectural avant-garde.
Create enough and you could build whole cities with them.
Or, airlifted into the desert and buried there, future caves of glass will soon form, eroding from the surface down, abraded by sand-heavy winds. Years later, you’ll take walking tours of the Glass Caverns of Utah, staying in towns such as New Carbonia – even Carbonia an der Oder, or Carbonia-on-Thames – where everything is made from weird glass blocks, and windows look out upon a faceted abyss of crystalline landscapes, cubed mazes of self-generating reflections where future backpackers of the world will re-discover existentialism, writing abstract poetry in old notebooks before being driven mad.
A confrontation with your double that never ends.
Meanwhile, the skies have cleared of all excess carbon dioxide, and these cubes around the world continue to grow…

(With a nod, of course, to J.G. Ballard; of similar concern: BLDGBLOG’s A Natural History of Mirrors).

[Image: What is it? Who knows. Though, as Mervyn Peake describes the buildings of Gormenghast: “Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their color.” Cantilevered structures self-supported over the void. Via Archinect].

“In 2003,” Cabinet Magazine tells us, “Berlin-based sound artist Christina Kubisch began an ongoing project called ‘Electrical Walks.'”
For this project, Kubisch has employed “specially built headphones that receive electromagnetic signals from the environment,” transforming those signals “into sound.” In the process, “Kubisch maps a given territory, noting ‘hot spots’ (ATM machines, security systems, electronic cash registers, subway systems, etc.) where the signals are particularly strong or interesting.” In other words, she performs a kind of audial psychogeography, zones of the city turned into MP3s, “very beautiful, very dense sounds… like a movie, an audio movie.”
The images, below, represent the sound files those sounds produced, digital noise-maps of urban space.

Whether you’re listening to the mellow, down-tempo techno of this light advertisement from Japan, or the sci-fi drone of a Taiwanese subway (which Cabinet covertly, and somewhat fascistically, editorializes as a region of China) – or even the minimal, repetitive heartbeat of this security gate in Oxford, England, the mournful buzz of a Bratislava tram, which Kubisch describes as “almost like a choir,” or the empty Ballardian hum of a control tower at Heathrow airport – these are the electromagnetic sounds of modern urbanism.
“What I would really like to do,” Kubisch says, “is to make a map of several cities and continents. In a large city, for example, where are the electromagnetic fields? Where are the security gates? You could just mark them with little dots. They even have the same sound systems all over the world. It’s the globalization of sound. This is something that I think would be very interesting: to see a network of little dots showing where things are and where they are spreading. Every time I do an ‘Electrical Walk,’ it adds to this general map of sound that I’m collecting. It’s artistic work, but it’s a kind of social research, too.”
There are thirty tracks in all. Knock yourself out.

(Related and elsewhere: we make money not art discusses Kubisch’s project as well as “sound performances produced by people scanning their Oyster cards as they access London tube stations.”)

A project I’ve been meaning to write about ever since it won first place at RIBA’s 2005 President’s Medals awards is Luke Pearson‘s maritime exploration of “the ship as a ‘dry-docked’ architecture.”

“The scheme is a retirement home for elderly fisherman that also houses a working men’s club for members of Newcastle’s fishing community,” Pearson writes. “As a reflection of the separation and torpor of this unique society, the scheme takes the notion of the ship in an architectural context, to create an ersatz environment which interacts with the city around it as if it were a dry docked vessel. The environmental technologies and the ways in which the notional ship has been translated into an architectural system are the focus of this study.”

In other words, you dock the ship for so long it becomes architecture, an extension of the earth’s surface into the sea.
Pearson’s ship/building – perhaps ship.bldg – would include a “heated superstructure” and a “microcosmic ocean upon deck” (both pictured above).
Then there is Pearson’s technique of “Alephographic drawing.” Pearson describes this part of the project as having been “inspired by Borges“; the image, below, “sees everything revealing the technologies and notorieties that exist within the Vessel.”

Now a similar such project needs to be worked out with a train, stopped for so long in the center of a city it becomes architectural, permanently anchored and settled there on tracks, perhaps with moving rooms, parts of a building detach then reattach to other buildings; then further projects with other forms of transport: helicopters, lorries, school buses, hovercraft… The future architecture of stalled vehicles.
Or, to quote Thomas Pynchon, who is here referring to a missile if I remember correctly: “The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.”

(Luke Pearson’s project spotted long, long ago on Archinect; see also Student projects 4, 3, 2, and 1).

Whilst once again finding myself on the same intellectual wavelength as Pruned‘s Alex Trevi, who posted today about the shimmering and explosive self-resurfacing outer loops of the sun, I spent yesterday evening copying down solar-descriptive quotations from an old book by Guy Murchie, called The Music of the Spheres.
Now out of print, as well as scientifically outdated, I can still hardly believe how exciting the 2-volume book – about “the material universe, from atom to quasar, simply explained” – is to read, and how interestingly poetic Murchie’s take on the subject really is. His chapter 6, for instance, is an “Introduction to the Sun,” our local star in which “something much more profound and basic than fire is blazing.”

I get light-headed when I read that the surface of the sun “is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air.” Indeed, some stars, such as E Aurigae I – a star so huge that it could “contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn’s orbit” – “are sometimes described as ‘red-hot vacuums’ because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star.”
Meanwhile, in the sun’s whirling interior, “the highly compressed gassy matter is ten times as dense as steel.” Then, of course, there are “magnetic hurricanes thousands of miles in diameter” – which would be a lot more exciting if those magnetic hurricanes were not “commonly known on Earth as sunspots.”
As the sun unceasingly explodes in arching structures of storm and prominence, “glowing veils of gaseous calcium” escape. In others words, the same mineral responsible for animal bones bursts outward from the sun in astrophysical shells that “look like gnarled trees with blazing rain pouring downward from their branches in beautiful magnetic curves that have been clocked at speeds up to 400 miles a second.”

The universe is loud with intercelestial thunder; there are “vast magnetic influences” at work across all scales of matter; “ionic ‘noise storms’ at radio frequencies” scream ceaselessly through antenna’d headsets of home astronomers; there is even a sunspot cycle that “corresponds to a ‘212-day cycle noted in some studies of human pulse rates’.” Incredibly, some “outlying clusters” of stars at the edge of the Milky Way “overlap each other so densely they are literally buried in light.”
In any case, I think every child in the world would become a scientist if they read Murchie’s 2-volume book – but it’s out of print. Alas. Perhaps, instead, we can all just watch this extraordinary short film, wherein sound art meets video art meets solar astronomy.

[Note: All emphases added. Elsewhere: Pruned‘s Sunscapes (where reader comments tipped us off to the film link, supplied above). Other elsewhere: The Surface of the Sun, a website claiming that the sun is, in fact, solid – furthermore, that it contains something called “solar moss.” Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Podcasting the sun].

“Is it painted?” Park asked. “Most people don’t think about pigments in paint. Most white-paint pigment now is titanium. Red is hematite. Black is often magnetite. There’s chrome yellow, molybdenum orange. Metallic paints are a little more permanent. The pigments come from rocks in the ground. Dave’s electrical system is copper, probably from Bingham Canyon. He couldn’t turn on a light or make ice without it.”

[Image: Bingham Canyon, Utah, photographed by the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

This text is all via John McPhee: “The nails that hold the place together come from the Mesabi Range. His downspouts are covered with zinc that was probably taken out of the ground in Canada. The tungsten in his light bulbs may have been mined in Bishop, California. The chrome on his refrigerator door probably came from Rhodesia or Turkey. His television set almost certainly contains cobalt from the Congo. He uses aluminum from Jamaica, maybe Surinam; silver from Mexico or Peru; tin – it’s still in tin cans – from Bolivia, Malaya, Nigeria. People seldom stop to think that all these things – planes in the air, cars on the road, Sierra Club cups – once, somewhere, were rock. Our whole economy – our way of doing things. Oh, gad! I haven’t even mentioned minerals like manganese and sulphur. You won’t make steel without them. You can’t make paper without sulphur…”
Rearranging planets into TVs. Producing objects from geology.

German artist Martin Kippenberger once proposed a subway system for the entire world, connecting Los Angeles to Helsinki, Tokyo to Rome, Münster to Dawson City. Greek islands, Canadian towns, Swiss lakes, pharaonic tombs – there would be entrances everywhere.

So Kippenberger actually began building these things – doors in the earth, leading nowhere – including this portable subway entrance.
But then he died.
The project ended.

Here are some construction specs and photo-speculative images to ponder.

So who’s up for re-starting this thing? After all, an entrance was built on the roof of the World Trade Center – but, even though the towers have been destroyed, the entrance is still there, hovering invisibly above Manhattan. It leads to an unexplored subcavern deep inside Mammoth Cave – where you’ll find a door to the Vatican. Which leads to the International Space Station. Which leads to the aerotropolis. Which connects onward to Cape Farewell, via the Cabinet Magazine National Library. Rumor has it, an Australian bone surgeon once uncovered another entrance in a patient’s rib. Eve was an entrance.
Etc.

(Thanks to Brand Avenue for pointing out Kippenberger’s project to me – nearly seven months ago. And thanks to Andrew Blum for reminding me of The New Yorker cover, above, which I’ve been saving in a box of files since August 2002).