Month: December 2007

[Image: Ladder leading down to a U.S.-Mexico border tunnel; photo by Monica Almeida for The New York Times].

It’s a bit late to be posting this – the deadline is tomorrow – but there’s a great call for papers going around right now for something called “Under the West.”

Hosted down at the Huntington Library, “Under the West” will be “a scholarly workshop examining the history of the subterranean American West… Topics or themes might include archeology, mining, hydrology, geology, seismology, the history of cemeteries or burials, etc.” The actual conference takes place May 17, 2008.

To apply for the symposium, please submit a letter, C.V., detailed abstract of the subterranean research being pursued, and names of two references by DECEMBER 10th to:

Bill Deverell, Director
Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Huntington Library
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108 USA

This obviously cuts things a bit close – but if you’re on steroids and you think you can hack out an application in the next 24 hours, I say go for it. Tell them you read about it on BLDGBLOG.

For some possible inspiration, meanwhile, check out a recent article in The New York Times: “Smugglers Build an Underground World,” where we read about border tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border.

One tunnel, in particular, used for smuggling marijuana, leads from the inside of an otherwise unexceptional shipping container parked somewhere in the California desert into a storefront on the other side, in Mexico:

The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets. The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office building in sight of the steel-plated border fence.
Three or four feet wide and six feet high, the passageway is illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two pumps. The neatly squared walls, carved through solid rock, bear the signs of engineering skill and professional drilling tools.

It’s the subterranean DIY architecture of armed black-market libertarianism.

[Images: A tunnel inside this U.S. shipping container (top) goes down, under the U.S.-Mexico border, and comes up inside this Mexican storefront (bottom). Photos by Monica Almeida for The New York Times].

If we no longer live in an era of architectural postmodernism, then, and especially not in the age of deconstruction, with all of that movement’s chest-beating male hysteria, perhaps one might say that we’ve entered the weird and porous world of narco-spatiality: the earth itself made hollow and perfect for smuggling.

Illegal topologies worm their way through the soils of Westphalian sovereignty, as nation-states stand, insecure, over unregistered excavations in the desert, territories sewn one to the other like points on Klein bottles: a new form of economic and political adjacency with no true government in sight.

From the article:

Most of the tunnels are of the “gopher” variety, dug quickly and probably by small-time smugglers who may be engaged in moving either people or limited amounts of drugs across the border. But more than a dozen have been fairly elaborate affairs like this one, with lighting, drainage, ventilation, pulleys for moving loads and other features that point to big spending by drug cartels. Engineers have clearly been consulted in the construction of these detailed corridors.

All of which brings us back to the conference at the Huntington. That title – “Under the West” – perhaps even takes on metaphoric status here; in other words, beneath traditional concepts of territory, sovereignty, governance, law, and even constitutionality – that is, under the West – we find this literal border world of inverted self-connectedness, an unpoliceable terrain of infinite porosity, underground.

It’s criminal space, excess space, space that exists outside the Law’s capacity to grasp. Space that bulges. As a San Diego-based Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent explains to the New York Times, trying to control this world is “like squeezing a balloon.”

Of course, one could also say that it is criminal space only insofar as we have made it illegal. Until that point – until the tripwires of Law get snagged and legislation clicks into gear and superior courts all grind into motion – it’s just a bunch of holes in the desert.

What form of government is appropriate for this terrain? You close down one tunnel and another appears two miles away, days later. How does one wrap sovereignty around a surface that constantly moves? When your state is mobile, can the State be a relevant institution?

In any case, for more on border tunnels see Bryan Finoki’s ongoing catalog of this Kafka-like space: Orwellian Wormholes and On Border Tunnel Infill, among many, many others.

(With thanks to Alan Loomis for information about “Under the West”).

The New York Times just released its 7th annual Year in Ideas round-up, and there are some interesting inclusions.
Amidst short articles on airborne wind turbines, Islam in outer space, UPS’s ban on left-hand turns – all of which have been explored on BLDGBLOG before – and even so-called “marijuana mansions,” we’re asked to consider “whether full-scale lightning farms might one day become a meaningful source of electricity.”

Practically speaking, the NYTimes explains, building a lightning farm would entail the construction of an entire specialty landscape. You could probably even patent it.
There would be “a tower, an array of grounding wires to shunt off most of the incoming energy and a giant capacitor. Theoretically, if enough energy is delivered to the capacitor, it can be stored, converted to alternating current and transferred to the power grid.”
Unfortunately, the article explains, lightning farms don’t really work.
But no matter: BLDGBLOG would like to propose turning the entirety of Paris into a lightning farm. The Eiffel Tower would loom over a network of grounding wires. Groves of steel poles – orchards of power, virtually harnessing the sky – would stand amidst cobblestones, spiraling up hills, and the outermost streets of the city, connecting cafe to cafe down stairways, leading up to bars and scenic overlooks, glow every fortnight as that great central spike gets thrashed with aerial electricity. You can toast bread with all that power, draining the clouds, awaiting storms with videocameras in hand to film that apocalypse of alternating currents in the sky.

I’m participating in an event tomorrow night called Writers With Drinks, in case you’re in San Francisco and you need to hear some writers speaking into microphones at a bar.

It will be myself, presenting various sundry goods from the back catalog of BLDGBLOG, alongside Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance and On Top of the World; Jack Hirschman, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco and author of The Arcanes (“When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark” – you gotta see that!); Domenic Stansberry, author of the North Beach Mystery Series; eroticist Lisa Palac, author of The Edge of The Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life and former editor of Future Sex magazine (no connection to Justin Timberlake); and comedian Reggie Steele.
The whole thing starts at 7:30pm, ends at 9:30pm, costs $5 to get in, and takes place at The Make Out Room: 3225 22nd Street, between Mission and Valencia, San Francisco. Here’s a map. That’s Saturday, December 8, 2007.
So come out, drink, and scream for more architecture and plate tectonics.

[Images: By Roos Aldershoff].

A bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht has won an architectural interiors prize.

[Image: By Roos Aldershoff].

The project, by Merkz+Girod Architects, places “a two-story structure in black steel on one side, where the books are kept.” This “combination of book complex and church interior [was] deemed particularly successful” by the competition jury.

[Images: By Roos Aldershoff].

Of course, any commercial reuse of a religious structure comes with its fair share of controversy, but this particular renovation seems to do at least two things, each of which inspires something more interesting than outrage.
On the one hand, the project rescues and updates a gorgeous if programmatically obsolete building, thus keeping a certain spatial experience alive (whether or not you would ever have gone there to attend services). On the other hand, it achieves a weirdly ironic overlap in which two cultural spaces, both on the verge of extinction, at least in Western Europe – and I’m referring here to the Christian church and to the bookshop – come together to form a kind of last gasp for either entity.

[Image: By Roos Aldershoff].

It’s as if books, sensing that they are even now moving toward a curious state somewhere between resurrection and purgatory, have decided to retreat, repositioning themselves inside the stone vaults of a church – which happily welcomes these learned visitors – and there the books and the church embrace, like doomed friends all too aware of their age, biding their time together amidst the dust and sunlight until another renovation comes through.

(Originally spotted at Dezeen).

[Image: Photo by Magnus Johansson, via Work in Progress].

These are photographs of a miniature, partially destroyed Manhattan-like metropolis built inside some guy’s apartment in Sweden.

[Image: Photo by Magnus Johansson, via Work in Progress].

Magnus Johansson – who, I believe, took all these photographs – explains over at Work in Progress that the molds for the buildings consist of foamcard and RTV, and that they were then cast with “cheapish construction plaster” – although the artists also produced “some plastic versions using vacuum suction stuff.”
Finally, it’s all held together with “a combination of wood (white) glue, silicone glue from a glue gun and concrete filler,” and then colored and painted in incredible detail.
Johansson refers to the project as “50 large buildings on the floor of three rooms in an apartment.”

[Image: Photos by Magnus Johansson, via Work in Progress].

So what is it?
As Johansson goes on to explain, the whole thing was “funded by Swedish company Popcore,” to a creative design by Mats Sahlström, and it was “built by Warhammer 40K players and students of Nordiska Scenografiskolan (Nordic Set Design school) in Skellefteå, Sweden.”
They built it for a music video by Strata.
In some ways, though, I’m most blown away by the apocalyptic wallpaper.

[Image: Photos by Magnus Johansson, via Work in Progress].

But surely these guys should all be given honorary B.Arch. degrees for their model-building skills alone?

(Found via doilum. Meanwhile, if you think I need to re-caption these images with more accurate information, please let me know and I will update the post right away. Visually related: BLDGBLOG’s interview with Lebbeus Woods).

“Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry,” New Scientist reports.

One server alone, we read, has the “same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not.”
Note, meanwhile, that I have not independently verified these numbers; I am simply repeating someone else’s claims.
As Money explained last summer, these “server farms” and “data centers” can each use up to “a small city’s worth of electricity” – and most of that electricity goes toward “cranking up the air conditioning to make sure the computers don’t literally melt themselves into slag.”
Returning to New Scientist, we read that, “with more than 1 million computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.”
And here I am, writing BLDGBLOG, doing my part to cut down on the world’s use of internet servers…

So what to do? Do we make our server farms hydroelectric? It’s already happening. Do we make them wind-powered? Already happening. Do we go solar? That’s happening, too.
As Business 2.0 wrote back in October: “Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.”
And so we read:

That’s why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for “affordable Internet services online”) has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation.

However, couldn’t we also just store less information, save two or three – or four – hundred fewer emails, stop being mouse potatoes and go outside for a walk, leaving our servers turned off in the darkness?
Sure – or we could build our server farms in Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power is easy enough to find.

In any case, I can’t help but wonder if the ecological effects of this archival instinct to preserve the past at any cost – whether we store something inside air conditioned warehouses full of books that no one wants, or in the well-lit galleries of potentially unnecessary new museums, or even out on server farms somewhere in the rainy hills of Oregon – are really worth it.
And I can’t help but suggest that they’re not – even if that means I’ll no longer have a place to save BLDGBLOG.
But we are making the earth unearthly, through the knock-on effects of global climate change, in order that we might hold onto the human past for another generation – reading old books, preserving films, saving emails.

[Image: The Mare Nostrum supercomputer, Spain; this is not a server room].

So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects?
Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it’ll have lots of really great archives…?
Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don’t represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project’s future ecological demise?

(Read more about “green” server farms over on Worldchanging. See also the previous post).

[Image: The unforgettable final glimpse of a U.S. government warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark].

A warehouse is being constructed to house books no one’s reading.

“The warehouse is extraordinary,” the Guardian writes, “because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants.” Those “fringes” are outside London.

“When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.”

The building’s temperature will be regulated. It will be sealed against moisture. It will hold copies of books that no one actually cares about.

Indeed, this is where unwanted books “will go to serve their life sentences in a secure environment,” the Guardian explains, “thanks to the grace of the provisions of the 1911 Copyright Act [UK] and later government legislation.”

In other words, a relatively random piece of 100-year old legislation – dealing with copyright law, of all things – has begun to exhibit architectural effects.

These architectural effects include the production of huge warehouses in the damp commuter belts of outer London. These aren’t libraries, of course; they’re stockpiles. Text bunkers.

From the Guardian:

“We need this warehouse,” says Steve Morris, the British Library’s head of finance, “not just because it is cheaper than existing rented warehouses we use in London, but also because we are statutorily obliged to house more and more material.”

We thus learn that “low use material” is being relocated “from rented warehouses in London to a cheaper facility where the material will be kept in conditions that ensure it is kept as pristine as possible” – and that this move, along with all the “mind-bending logistical problems” inherent in such a task, are simply par for the course in our era’s ongoing format wars.

In other words, should we be saving books, CDs, PDFs, MP3s…?

And do we know that anyone will ever use them?

I’m tempted to say that we need an injection of Buddhism – or, at least, the doctrine of non-attachment – into the field of library science. But I’m not a Buddhist, so I’m not going to say that. (Interesting, though, that religious beliefs could affect both the shape and the very existence of libraries).

In any case, last month Anthony Grafton took a long look at the future of the library, gazing upon the history of textual accumulation from the Library at Alexandria to Google’s new book-scanning project.

From The New Yorker:

When ships docked in Alexandria, any scrolls found on them were confiscated and taken to the library. The staff made copies for the owners and stored the originals in heaps, until they could be catalogued. At the collection’s height, it contained more than half a million scrolls, a welter of information that forced librarians to develop new organizational methods. For the first time, works were shelved alphabetically.

Of course, then the Library at Alexandria burned down.

Enter the printing press:

The rise of printing in fifteenth-century Europe transformed the work of librarians and readers. Into a world already literate and curious, the printers brought, within half a century, some twenty-eight thousand titles, and millions of individual books – many times more than the libraries of the West had previously held. Reports of new worlds, new theologies, and new ideas about the universe travelled faster and more cheaply than ever before.

And, of course, huge new structures took shape, specifically built to house this growing surplus. This surplus was really the archive, and this archive keeps civilization going, with all of its awareness of the past.

Or so we’re told.

[Image: The British Museum Reading Room: top photo via Wikimedia (view huge), bottom photo by Vlad Jesul].

Fast-forward, then, to the present and you’ll find even more gigantic air conditioned warehouses under almost continual construction on the sides of Western motorways – and you get some sense of how the quest for unrestricted information retrieval has taken on architectural form.

No matter if no one actually visits these places; they’re our era’s equivalent of pharaonic tombs. They’re time capsules.

Quoting once again from the article by Grafton: “Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.”

Perhaps it will take some future moment of cultural archaeology to break into these places, spelunking back into the literate past, to find well-tempered rooms still humming at 50ºF, humidity-free, where the past is refrigerated and Shakespeare’s name can still be recognized on the spines of books.

Until then, these warehouses – again, not libraries – will continue to take shape as abstract windowless volumes outside cities on the freeway.

Finally, I’m reminded of a few lines from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, in which the book’s narrator and his well-read “master,” William of Baskerville, break into a labyrinthine library after dark – a library full of mirrors, unmarked halls, and trick doorways. (While lost in the library, the narrator beautifully remarks: “I proceeded as if in the grip of a fever, nor did I know where I wanted to go.”)

The architects of the library were, in fact, quite clever, mixing climate control with acoustic design:

“The library must, of course, have a ventilation system,” William said. “Otherwise the atmosphere would be stifling, especially in the summer. Moreover, those slits provide the right amount of humidity, so the parchments will not dry out. But the cleverness of the architects did not stop there. Placing the slits at certain angles, they made sure that on windy nights the gusts penetrating from these openings would encounter other gusts, and swirl inside the sequence of rooms, producing the sounds we have heard. Which, along with the mirrors and the herbs, increase the fear of the foolhardy who come in here, as we have, without knowing the place well. And we ourselves for a moment thought ghosts were breathing on our faces.”

“In any case,” the book goes on, “we need two things: to know how to get into the library at night, and a lamp.”

After all, the narrator then says, “I felt inclined to disobedience and decided to return to the library alone. I myself didn’t know what I was looking for. I wanted to explore an unknown place on my own; I was fascinated by the idea of being able to orient myself there without my master’s help.”

And so he goes, lamp in hand, heading into that unlit space full of books no one’s reading, in a surround-sound of breezes, looking for something he knows he’ll never find.