Month: October 2006

Scientists from the University of South Florida have come up with a way to reduce the effects of gravity – albeit on a very small scale. It’s a kind of mini-anti-earth, on demand.
Their technique uses microgravity to grow cancer research cells:

Tiny beads of gelatine – around 200 micrometres in size – are mixed together with collagen and fine particles of magnetite (the magnetic iron oxide used to coat recording tape). This mix is then sealed in a gas-permeable bag and dosed with the cells to be cultured. The bag sits on a platform and is sandwiched between two graphite plates, beneath a powerful permanent electromagnet. The magnet is used to exert an upwards force on the magnetite particles that exactly counters the downward force of gravity. The tissue cells, gelatin and collagen can then grow suspended in “zero-g.”

So here’s my vote for finding new applications in the world of landscape architecture: entire zero-g gardens grown in gas-permeable bags. Sent drifting across the Pacific.
Leading to the question: if a medieval theologian had proposed that the Garden of Eden was actually a zero-g garden floating across the Dead Sea in a gas-permeable bag… would he or she have been excommunicated?

(Via).

[Image: The North American and Pelican Nebulas; from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day].

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve read in months: in order to combat light pollution, city officials in Reykjavik, Iceland, “will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark.” The clincher: “While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.”

(Via WorldChanging and Z+).

Perhaps alcohol is the future of urban infrastructure: “Russian customs officers say they have discovered a mile long pipeline that was pumping vodka to Latvia.” This illegal but brilliant act of international infrastructure is referred to as “running hooch across the border.”

Next up: a million-dollar condo tower in New York City where, for $199/month, you can subscribe, via faucet, to the Vodka Of The Month Club…

(Via).

Another quick (and self-indulgent) note: an article of mine, about the photography of David Maisel, has been published in the new issue of Contemporary Magazine (Issue #86).

Called “Human Ash Reactions,” the article looks at chemical similarities between the landscapes and objects Maisel photographs, and the developmental process of photography itself.
If you’re unfamiliar with Maisel’s work, be sure to check out this interview with him, published last Spring on Archinect. The images are gorgeous, haunting, and ironically otherworldly. His own website – a former Yahoo! Pick of the Day – is well worth the visit.
And if you do read the article in Contemporary, let me know what you think.

At the risk of turning BLDGBLOG into some sad and unofficial subsidiary of New Scientist, let me point out in any case that “[h]uge loops of gas – similar to those found on the Sun – have been found soaring above the galactic plane near the centre of the Milky Way.”

“The tube-like structures may be responsible for the formation of giant star clusters near the galaxy’s centre and also might be behind the region’s mysteriously powerful magnetic field.”
To quote the article at length:

“I was struck by the loops when I saw them,” says study leader Yasuo Fukui of Nagoya University in Japan. “But it took a few years for me to understand that they represent magnetic loops.” The team believes they formed the way glowing arches, called prominences, do on the Sun – from the stretching and bending of magnetic field lines.

The rest of the story is weirdly fascinating; we read how the “detailed structure and cause of the galaxy’s magnetic field lines are not well understood,” although Fukui’s team has produced a computer model “that can produce gas loops similar to the ones observed.” If we’re to believe the model’s version of the story, then, “small vertical hills in the initially horizontal field lines cause gas to start flowing down into the valleys between them. With less gas at the tops of the hills, the magnetic field there becomes free to expand upwards even more, leading to giant loops.”
The energy involved is extraordinary: for instance, the “observed speed of the gas as it gushes down the sides of the loops… carries roughly the same amount of kinetic energy as is produced in a supernova explosion.”
This immensely powerful magnetized landscape of interstellar gas undergoes turbulence, pooling, waves, and condensation – eventually hitting a point at which stars can form, spooling themselves together gravitationally from loose strands of an ethereal topography. Structured wisps of polarized light soon shine.

There’s a poem – though I can’t seem to find it anywhere now – by John Burnside, which beautifully describes a sort of Christianized cosmology in which the remains of angels have been found hovering in space, titanic, made of color and transparency – and a part of me likes to think that the “glowing arches” and otherwise unexplained astral loops that New Scientist introduces us to are really part of some huge and ongoing theological archaeology of the sky. Mythic remnants: forgotten gods become astro-tectonic structures in space.
One night, a man with a home telescope discovers the chemical ruins of a church the size and shape of whole galaxies, domes of helium and osmium drifting across the outer tangents of the Milky Way – a mobile landscape that survives even universal catastrophe.

“An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle accelerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world,” New Scientist reports. “The advantage of a circular track [over a linear one] is that the satellite can be gradually accelerated over a period of several hours.” It will just whirl and whirl in the desert for hours, vertiginous yet grounded, till it falls upward, hurled into space…
For some reason, though, I find New Scientist‘s description totally fascinating:

The satellite, encased in an aerodynamic, cone-shaped shell that would protect it from the intense heat of launch, would be attached to a sled designed to respond to the forces from the superconducting magnets. When the sled had been accelerated to its top speed of 10 kilometres per second, laser and pyrotechnic devices would be used to separate the cone from the sled. Then, the cone would skid into a side tunnel, losing some speed due to friction with the tunnel’s walls. The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30° to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. A rocket at the back end of the cone would be used to adjust its trajectory and place it in a proper orbit.

Rather than satellites encased in sleds, however, how about sheds? Ice-fishing sheds. Or whole suburbs, thrown into space.

(Related: Hurling Taj Mahals into the Sky and Mineral TV and the Archipelago of Abandoned Shopping Malls).

[Image: “Louise Kircher raises the staircase in her home in Mesa, Ariz., to reveal the secret room behind it.” Mark Peterman/New York Times].

“On a recent Saturday morning,” The New York Times writes, “Cami Beghou, 13, pushed the right side of the tall, white bookcase that is built into one of the powder-pink walls in her bedroom. The bookcase, holding rows of books, a stuffed dachshund and a volleyball, silently swung outward, revealing a tiny, well-lighted room. Containing a desk, a chair and a laptop computer, it serves as her study area.”
Apparently, the family gets a kick out of fooling people – it’s suburban normality in an age of architectural dissimulation: “When the home inspector came by to examine the house, our builder shut the bookcase, hiding the room. The inspector went up and down the stairs a couple times – he knew that something was unusual – but he couldn’t figure out what was there.”

[Image: “David Lee of Plano, Tex., got a bookcase door to hide the mess of his workroom, but also because he had wanted a secret room, he said, ‘since watching Scooby-Doo way back when.'” Misty Keasler/New York Times].

And therein lies a Kafka novel for the suburban twenty-first century, in which a real estate appraiser from a national bank is sent to a small town in the cloudy hills of central Pennsylvania to find that all the houses he’s meant to review are similarly unusual: the outsides are bigger than the insides – or vice versa – and indoor corridors trace around what should be whole wings the man can never find. He returns to his small room at the Comfort Inn every night, and, in between watching endless Bruce Willis films on the hotel television, he begins sketching out the neighborhood from memory…
Then he realizes something…
In any case, The New York Times adds that these secret rooms in suburbia have become increasingly popular: “The Beghous’ architect, Charles L. Page, who is based in Winnetka, said he had designed seven other houses with hidden rooms since 2001, after designing none in his previous 40 years as a residential architect. ‘Absolutely, there has been an increase,’ said Timothy Corrigan, an architect and designer in Los Angeles, who noted that he has been practicing for 12 years but was not asked to design a secret room until four years ago. Since then, he has created five.”
Unfortunately, there is no mention of whether anyone has commissioned secret rooms accessible only from other secret rooms – M.C. Escher, Architect, perhaps – or complete, non-intersecting houses built in parallel to each other on the same small lot. Otherwise inconceivable geometries in home improvement form. Knotville.

(Via Archinect).

“The peculiar thing about England,” J.G. Ballard tells Simon Sellars of Ballardian.com, in a long, casually humorous, and interesting new interview, “is that we’re so densely populated. When I say there’s nothing to do except go shopping, that’s almost the truth. You know, you can’t climb into your car and drive off into the wilderness. Shopping is all we have.”

[Image: J.G. Ballard, photographed by Paul Murphy; via Ballardian.com].

In a discussion of Ballard’s most recent novel, Kingdom Come – which Ballard himself describes as “a full-frontal attack on England today” – we read how “the gap between rich and poor is widening to such an extent that, particularly in London, it’s begun to shift the whole demographic. The middle class, the people who sustain modern society – the nurses, junior doctors, teachers, civil servants and so on – are being forced out because vast sums of money are pouring into the housing market and distorting it. Gated communities are springing up everywhere, and the moment they can, people are opting for private medicine, private teaching, private hospitals – cutting themselves off from the rest of society, and that’s not a healthy development.”
Landscape urbanism, car crashes, Harvard psychiatric publications, Playboy magazine, human autopsies, and the quiet fascism of British shopping malls: it’s an interview worth the read.

(For more of J.G. Ballard here on BLDGBLOG, see Concrete Island, Bunker Archaeology, and Silt, in particular).