Month: March 2007

[Image: Tower demolition in Philadelphia, as photographed by werdsnave. Perhaps that room at the very top could be rehabbed and kitted out with a small suburban house… or some version of this thing… making it worth the climb. Elsewhere: A tunneling project by werdsnave on Pruned. Earlier: Chicago’s Inner Flute-Ruins].

[Image: From “Splitting,” by Gordon Matta-Clark].

“A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck,” Reuters reports.

The man then “picked up his half with the forklift truck and drove to his brother’s house where he has since been staying.”

The police seem less than outraged. “The man said he was just taking his due,” one of them stated.

And you thought building a wall was a bad way to get divorced…

(Read more about Gordon Matta-Clark in BLDGBLOG’s Museum of Assassination).

New Scientist reports that “lane markings on roads could one day be changed at the click of a mouse.”
If electronics firm Philips has its way, roadway markings will no longer use paint; instead, “ultrathin plastic strips would be attached to road surfaces,” utilizing “a hard-wearing version of the electronic ink used in emerging flexible displays for e-books” – transforming roads into a kind of literary hieroglyph, or infrastructural e-book.
Paving the way for Da Vinci Code 2: Road to Calvary, in which a strange message is found encoded in the pavement outside Mel Gibson’s Malibu home…
More prosaically, this just means that “lane marking or speed limits [could] be changed at will.” But whose will…? And does that mean that you could program the M25 to be like I-95 for a day, and vice versa? Exploring cultural exchange via roadway markings?
Of course, if these programmable markings do become an everyday reality, it will inevitably mean that every fifteen year-old on the planet will waste hours and hours trying to hack the local roadways, engineering gruesome pile-ups. J.G. Ballard will be arrested, remote control in hand, staring glassy-eyed through a window at the final crashes he has staged.
And, who knows, maybe somebody will figure out how to make these magic roadways show films. The face of Cary Grant, shining upward from a freeway in Montana.
Earth Surface Television™. Brought to you by BLDGBLOG.

This “12th century chapel and priory,” located “between Poitiers and Limoges in the Vienne region of France,” is for sale.

The property “includes cellars, seven bedrooms, eight main reception rooms (!), a small library, bathrooms, kitchen, double garage and further attics capable of conversion. The chapel’s porch is registered as a Historic Monument. It has central heating and a security system. The grounds extend to some 3000 sq m and is planted with a range of trees etc.”

[Image: “Stout members of the sixth column dislodge an enemy machine gun post on the dome of St. Paul’s,” by W. Heath Robinson; via Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery].

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Sitooterie II, a “small outdoor retreat” made from “square, hollow tubes… Each tube points to the exact center of the structure, so a single light source can illuminate them all. They also serve a structural purpose, supporting the whole building like a bed of nails.” Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired – larger version here].

“When he was 6,” we read in the new issue of Wired, British artist-engineer Thomas Heatherwick “would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor”:

He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension – and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato.

31 years later, Heatherwick has become “a modern da Vinci.”
Scattered throughout Heatherwick’s King’s Cross studio, Wired reports, “are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls.” A 2004 profile in the Observer describes this same studio as “an unconventional set-up that includes experts in landscape architecture, architecture, product design, theatre design, civil and structural engineering and metal working.”
Wired goes on to relate how, one “cold winter morning,” Heatherwick showed the visiting reporter a photograph of “a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College.”
The bridge was made of glass:

In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.

The three photographs below, then, each taken by Donald Milne for Wired, show another of Heatherwick’s bridge projects: the deservedly famous “hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats.”
Of course, that’s the bridge that can “curl itself into a ball” – not the canal. Or the Thames. Though I would like to see that.

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge. Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired].

To “retract” the bridge, Wired explains, “an 11-kW hydraulic pump drives a master cylinder 16 inches in diameter, which in turn drives a series of 6-inch slave cylinders. These power 14 vertical shafts beneath the bridge’s hinged handrails. As the shafts rise, the railings fold in, causing the 39-foot span to curl. Because all the cylinders are driven at a constant rate regardless of the load on each bridge segment, the structure moves smoothly, taking two minutes to open or close. The pumps and related equipment are housed in the basement of an adjoining building, so the bridge is almost silent as it operates.”
Bear in mind, however, that the “canal” this bridge crosses is really only nine or ten feet wide, as well as the maritime equivalent of a cul-de-sac – so the bridge is more of an artistic curiosity than a real piece of city infrastructure. Nonetheless, it’s awesome.
In an older interview with PingMag, Heatherwick explained, referring to his work in general, that “[b]ehind all this, it always remains important that something is achievable! You can have a perfect wonderful plan, but if it never happens it doesn’t really matter to anybody anyway.”
So, speaking of achievement – and as everyone in the universe already knows – Heatherwick has also designed B of the Bang, the tallest sculpture in Britain – beautifully photographed, while under construction, here.

[Image: A Zoroastrian “tower of silence,” on top of which corpses would be left, arranged in rings, exposed to sun, weather, and vultures].

You wake up in a New York hotel room, your vision cloudy. You have hazy memories of guests arriving, all grins and champagne glasses, coming in the night before to snort coke as you watched the Weather Channel – only you don’t remember inviting anyone over, and you can’t seem to figure out who they were.

Nevermind, you think: you like champagne. Sometimes a bit too much.

It’s only after rising with a headache like iron clamps strapped to your temples, squinting at the morning light, that you remember the syringe, and the struggle, and the fact that someone must have drugged you. But why you?

That’s when you see that: 1) you are still dressed; 2) your suitcase is gone; and 3) there is a small note taped to your bedside table, next to a free copy of International Salesman. The note says:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is being performed in an elevator somewhere in Manhattan. You have ten hours to find it.

This is terrible news.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that Materials & Applications and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to curate an architectural film fest, as part of this year’s Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles. In fact, we’re putting together a ton of interesting stuff; I’ll be making more announcements here on BLDGBLOG soon.
But part of our little sub-festival will be an entire evening full of short architectural films – so we thought we’d put out a general call to anyone with a film of their own that they might want to see screened for the adoring, semi-famous, and well-tanned crowds of southern California.
The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment – or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn’t just backdrop.
Even more specifically, we’d love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces, such as the short films generated annually by the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit 15. (International submissions are encouraged).
Need more ideas? Then check out cinematic urbanism; stop by the glass avenues of Paris 2054; or watch one of these two films. If that’s not enough, consider reading this article by Jonathan Glancey, in which he claims that:

What is fascinating, and very much an area for further research, is the close relationship between radical architectural design and the cinema. Much of the best of modern architecture, combining digital and three-dimensional design processes, is cinematic in scope and feeling.

Of course – though Glancey doesn’t explicitly state this – many of the most exhilirating films to watch are architecural in both structure and reference, whether this means Die Hard or Stalker or even David Fincher’s Panic Room – or Aliens, Tativille, and The City of Lost Children, for that matter.

[Image: From Christian Volckman’s architecturally awesome Renaissance].

Less abstractly, perhaps you’ve just recorded a video interview with an architect or urban planner – and it’s actually interesting – or you’ve just driven around Manhattan fifty times, filming each circuit, speeding the whole thing up till it’s less than three minutes… Or whatever: we just want films about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment. There’s a whole lot of leeway there.
Your film has to be at least a minute long – though it can consist of multiple, smaller films, edited together – and no longer than ten minutes. It also has to be good.
Finally, to be included, your film has to be submitted either to BLDGBLOG or to Materials & Applications before Friday, April 6th, 2007. Include your name; your affiliation, if you have one; the title of your film; its running length; and a short description of the actual film. We’ll then go through all the submissions and choose the ones that will be featured at the festival (specific date, time, and location to be announced shortly).
Pending further developments, eligible formats for submission include Region 1 DVDs (email me for my address, or just ship it to Materials & Applications) or files sent via services like YouSendIt and MegaUpload.
So get cracking! Who knows who will see your film. This time next year, you could be directing X-Men 4 and flipping the bird at all the kids you went to architecture school with…

[Image: The abyss, courtesy of National Geographic News].

“After rumbling for weeks,” we read, “part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth on Friday.”
The gigantic sinkhole into which those homes plummeted is referred to as “the Guatemala City abyss.”

(Via gravestmor. But don’t miss The town at risk from cave-ins, earlier on BLDGBLOG).