Month: January 2007

In New York, the BBC tells us, “Chana and Simon Taub, both 57, have endured two years of divorce negotiations, but neither is prepared to give up their Brooklyn home. Now a white partition wall has been built through the heart of the house to keep the pair apart.”
Incredibly, a New York City judge actually “ordered that the partition wall be built.”

[Image: “A white drywall partition, in background at left, separates Simon Taub from Chana Taub in their Brooklyn home.” Via MSNBC].

I’m reminded of a few things, architecturally, including the Berlin Wall, the Israeli Wall, and House VI by Peter Eisenman. House VI, for instance, came complete with “a linear notch in the bedroom floor that prevented the [homeowners] from sleeping in the same bed.” Eisenman’s design, then, was a triumph of “antagonistic space planning” that put architecture itself front and center in the story of a marriage.
In any case, the Taubs’ new marital wall “divides the ground floor of the house, and keeps husband and wife penned into separate sections on different floors. One door linking the rival sections of the house is barricaded shut to prevent any accidental contact between the pair.”
Perhaps there’s even a business model to be found in this story somewhere: you graduate from Princeton into a stagnant economy, unable to find work at any architecture firms…
So you start your own company, called Partition, and you specialize in home renovations for broken families: you add security walls and panic rooms; you seal entire wings off and install surveillance cameras above certain doorways; you add spy holes and thin layers of lead to block cellphone communication. You redirect the plumbing.
Finding great success in this line of work, you decide to produce a new series of reality TV shows in which perfectly healthy, loving families move into such structures, in a fake suburb erected somewhere in Glendale. You and the rest of the world then watch as each family descends into a state of catatonic rage and emotional abandonment, the spouses sexually blackmailing one another.
Peter Eisenman soon offers you a job…

[Image: A Mighty City Constructed On A Series Of Variably-Sized Hilly Islands Linked By Bridges by Leah Beeferman].

Brooklyn-based artist Leah Beeferman, whose map of the Gowanus Canal appeared here in 2005 and who collaborated with BLDGBLOG on the Helicopter Archipelago, has a new project out, this time published in the full-color pages of this month’s Blueprint.
Called A Mighty City Constructed On A Series Of Variably-Sized Hilly Islands Linked By Bridges, the project is a kind of cartographic guide, or urban emblem, for a utopian city. It supplies working definitions of key terrain (a Bridge, a Hill, a Tunnel, an Island) and describes specifically numbered structures.
“A bridge,” for instance, according to Leah’s definition, “is a structure built to connect two previously distinct areas or coasts. In most cases, it creates a route of passage that would otherwise be impossible or difficult. Bridges are often named after what they cross.”

[Image: Excerpt from A Mighty City by Leah Beeferman].

All of Leah’s projects being worth paying close attention to, we then see that one of those bridges has actually been constructed “from a collection of the longest and tallest buildings in the world” – their spans and fragments stitched together to form a brand new structure.
There is also a bridge “made out of a building,” and a bridge “made from a collection of small hills.”
Further afield – and into the atmosphere – we find a strange hovering enginery above the skyline: “Flying machines for higher-up views of the city,” we read, “provide an excellent view of the islands.”
There are even “propeller-powered balconies, for long-term viewing of the surrounding landscape – from the comfort of home!”
Leah’s Mighty City is apparently just one installment in Blueprint‘s ongoing look at imaginary cities or paper utopias, as it were; keep your eyes peeled for the rest – but don’t forget to visit Leah Beeferman’s website for more cool projects, including her amazing Step-by-Step Process of Building a Landscape of Freshly Fallen Hills into an Industrious Winged City.

Lawrence Weschler’s Convergence of Convergences Contest over at McSweeney’s revisits the above photo of a clear-cut forest in Sweden – where the void left behind by logging has visually reproduced the very thing that void destroyed. The return of the repressed, indeed…

(Image of Swedish forest originally submitted to McSweeney’s by Walter Murch).

[Image: A brief homage to Pruned, via the Department of Biophysics at the Otto-von-Guericke University, in Magdeburg].

Back in August, New Scientist reported that the landscape of Mars might be sterile due to the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The planet is bleaching itself, in other words, on a near-continual basis.

[Image: Via New Scientist].

Specifically, we read, “large amounts of hydrogen peroxide could be produced on Mars as a result of wind-blown dust grains rubbing together.” Because of these interactions – and the resultant electrochemical effects – hydrogen peroxide, “a harsh chemical used as a disinfectant on Earth may rain down on the surface” of the planet. “This process is similar to the way snow forms from water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, ” we read. “However, the hydrogen peroxide falling on Mars would be in the form of microscopic grains.”
I find this image – the chemical snow of alien planets – quite striking.
Meanwhile, similar electrochemical conditions have been found in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where “photochemistry triggered by the region’s harsh sunlight plays an important role in creating these electric fields” – electric fields, generated in the region’s dusty soil, that produce trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide.

The New York Times reports on “a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland.”

[Image: Jeff Shea/New York Times].

“Despite its remote location,” the Times explains, “the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines” – except that, until recently, the island was “bound to the coast by glacial ice.”
In other words, climate change – melting ice and rising sea levels – has turned a peninsula into an island.

[Image: Map of Greenland, courtesy of the New York Times].

“With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits,” we read, “Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.” I’m tempted to say that that last sentence should be reversed, however: that the maps are becoming obsolete as soon as new geography is created.
For instance, there are the nunataks – or lonely mountains, in Inuit – which stick out from beneath the matrix of glacial ice. These features are now “being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.”

[Image: The mountains of eastern Greenland: a future archipelago. Via Wikipedia].

From the New York Times:

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon – of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it – is a real common phenomenon now.” In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.

That image, of course, is both horrific and exhilarating – literally sublime: the discovery of terra nova, right here on a planet that once seemed topographically claimed. Surely our era is due for a new Jules Verne?
Meanwhile, as Arctic temperatures continue to rise, and as the Greenlandic ice cap continues to liquefy, we’ll see more and more spectacular – if catastrophic – shifts in global geography. (Whole new continents!)
And this won’t be limited to the Arctic: “Over the long term,” we read, “much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.”

[Image: Greenland’s thawing landscape; photo by Jeff Shea/New York Times].

In any case, I was fascinated to learn that “summertime ‘glacial earthquakes’ have been detected within the ice sheet” of Greenland. I can hardly imagine such a strange and haunting sound – like bells shattering – of pure ice heaving beneath your feet, as mile after mile of blue caves and tunnels shift their chambers to realign.
Is it possible, then, to drill contact microphones into the surface of Greenland and listen to this terrestrial baritone, the earth a reverberatory, to eavesdrop on breaking glaciers from within?

(With the use of the word “reverberatory” indebted to John Coulthart. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Nova Arctica and When landscapes sing: or, London Instrument).

[Images: Two shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley’s Secret Underground Cities site].

Last night I came across a review of the album Copenacre, by C4I, in an old back issue of The Wire.
Apparently inspired by Nick McCamley’s legendary book Secret Underground Cities, the musicians behind Copenacre tried “to evoke the dead air and constant low level hum of Copenacre Quarry‘s now abandoned navy testing and storage facility” in England.
In other words, it’s the soundtrack for an underground city.

[Images: Two more shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley’s Secret Underground Cities site].

“It’s not easy to understand the sonic appeal of these places,” The Wire continues, “until you’ve actually visited one.” On the CD, we read, strange sounds “flash through tunnels and massive steel doors clang and lock to disconcerting effect.”
Here are two examples: MP3 1. MP3 2.
Both of those excerpts, however, remind me of the early work of Lustmord, the nom de musique of LA-based sound designer Brian Williams. Lustmord’s discography became somewhat notorious in the early 1990s for, among other things, having been partially recorded inside abandoned mines, in the crypts of churches, and inside caves and cellars. The resulting, planet-shaking resonance and sub-bass could often put listeners’ headphones out of commission.
On an almost ridiculously great CD called The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, Williams achieves a similar effect – but he gets rid of the caves and architecture. Instead, we plunge headfirst into nearly an hour and twenty minutes of machinic astronomy; we rumble and drone inside with what sounds like a WWII airplane buzzing through deep space, recording the slow magnetic death of stars.
Gigantic radar systems bounce and reflect off nothing.
Needless to say, it’s not for everyone.

(See also BLDGBLOG’s look at Subterranean bunker-cities).

Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who came out yesterday – and an apology to those who showed up but couldn’t get in. I really had no idea the crowd would be as big as it was, and it seems a good 50 or 60 people were left standing outside on the sidewalk! But for those of you who did get in, and who sat through two hours of tightly-packed darkness, I hope you saw some cool things, had a good time, and enjoyed the presentations.
So I just wanted to say thanks; I had a great time, and I’m already looking forward to the next event. Thank you especially to Matthew Coolidge, Steve Rowell, and Sarah Simons of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, both for lending their space and for helping set-up for the event; to Mary-Ann Ray; to Robert Sumrell; to Christine Wertheim; and to Margaret Wertheim; and last, but not least, to my wife, for helping me put everything together.
More soon.

If you’re in LA and you’re reading this before 3pm, Saturday, January 13th, consider stopping by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, in Culver City, to catch BLDGBLOG’s first public event.
More information on the proceedings available here.
Thanks!