Year: 2007

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be doing a “Conversation” at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles on the evening of October 10, with National Book Critics Circle Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Lawrence Weschler – of whom I’m a huge and long-time fan (he even spoke at Postopolis! – in fact, it was Weschler who introduced me to Walter Murch).

So we’ll be talking, I assume, about things like cities and writing and architecture, but also about war and music and climate change, by way of science, Athanasius Kircher, contemporary politics, and – of course – Weschler’s brand-new-in-paperback book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. You can check out the online companion to that book over at McSweeney’s.
I can’t wait! So if you happen to be a reader of BLDGBLOG or a fan of Lawrence Weschler, please be sure to come by – it should be a fun conversation, and who know where we’ll end up.
Meanwhile, I can’t recommend Weschler’s earlier book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, highly enough (although, for the most part, it falls outside the purview of this blog); and his Vermeer in Bosnia is a great collection of essays, about everything from independence movements in Eastern Europe and Balkan genocide to furniture design, the light in Los Angeles, and the musicological history of Weschler’s own family.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

Event Details: 7pm on October 10 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA; free and open to the public.

BLDGBLOG’s radio collaboration with DJ /rupture continues…

We’re still (always!) looking for extra room fantasies – but now we’re looking for field recordings, as well… field recordings by phone.
So if you’re anywhere that seems sonically interesting over the next few weeks – a waterfall, a migratory bird preserve, a shuddering freight elevator, the Cornish coast, a screeching Red Line train, the International Space Station, a secret meeting between Bush and Ahmadinejad – feel free to give us a ring: +1 (206) 337-1474.
You’ll be connected to a voicemail account where you can simply hold your phone up high – and proud – and record whatever it is that you’re listening to.
Meanwhile, feel free either to leave a brief explanation of what it is we’re hearing, or even call back and explain what sounds you’ve left for us to sort through.
And then the best of the best will be played live on the radio in New York City – and podcast round the world – via DJ /rupture‘s weekly radio show on the incomparable WFMU, 91.1 FM.

The basic idea, if you’re curious, is to open up the artistic possibilities of field recordings to anyone with a telephone – whether that’s a mobile phone, a public phone, or even a phone attached to the wall in your kitchen.
The results should prove that you can acoustically experience a landscape through the telephone. Tele-scapes. As it is, mobile phones in particular present us with an untapped microphonic resource; these roving recorders encounter different environmental soundscapes everyday – the insides of lobbies and elevators, cars stuck in traffic, windy beaches – yet we’re so busy using them for conversation that we overlook (overhear?) their true sonic possibilities.
The telephonic future of environmental sound art is thus all but limitless – and putting some of that on the radio is just fun.
In any case, we’ll be posting many more calls for sounds soon…

(For a tiny bit more info, click here).

[Image: Beneath the Neon by Matthew O’Brien, with a photo of O’Brien, by Danny Mollohan].

I was intrigued to learn that Las Vegas, instant city of fast food and shrimp buffets, air-conditioning itself in the middle of the desert, actually rests upon a veritable labyrinth of flood-control tunnels, almost all of which have been constructed since 1988. This sub-desert network, literally beneath the neon of Las Vegas, is now expanding rapidly: 413 miles of new tunnels, at an estimated cost of $1.7 billion, are planned over the next 30 years.
In a recent book called Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, author Matthew O’Brien goes down into that complex of storm-sensitive concrete waterways to document both the occasional flash flood – and the people who have taken up residence there.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

In a brief email exchange with BLDGBLOG, O’Brien explained to me that his interest in writing the book “started with a murder.”

A guy named Timmy “T.J.” Weber killed his girlfriend and one of her sons and raped her 14-year-old daughter. He was on the run for a week, then returned to the crime scene and attacked one of the surviving family members. The police descended on the scene – but Weber vanished. When he was caught a few weeks later in a trailer park, he told police he used a storm drain to go underneath the dragnet.
That piqued my interest. I wondered what Weber experienced in the storm drains. What he saw, what he heard, what he smelled. How, apparently without a light source, he’d splashed more than three miles upstream. I also wondered what was beneath Las Vegas. What secrets the storm drains kept.

What’s interesting about the book’s focus is that it’s motivated less by the standard tropes of urban exploration – abandonment, space, adventure, or even gonzo photography – than by a kind of anthropological interest in the people who, for a variety of complex reasons, temporarily live beneath the city.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

For instance, O’Brien found that “hundreds of people – veterans, women, children – are living in the storm drains of Las Vegas, addicted to drugs and gambling, dying of diseases and getting washed away during floods.”
I asked him about some of the people he met down there, and he replied that “there have been several memorable experiences.”

Exploring a wet drain under McCarran International Airport one night, I discovered a man named Lawrence sleeping on an elevated bed. The bed, which was about four and a half feet from the floor, was made of couch cushions, a steel frame and a door that provided additional support. Baling wire looped around the head and foot of the bed, angled tightly through the manhole, and wrapped around the rungs. Backpacks hung from the side on hooks.
I squatted and swept the beam of my flashlight under the bed. It was legless. No steel poles, no wooden beams, no milk crates – nothing. A square-shaped wire dangled from the side, serving as a stepladder. Except for his bikes, the whole camp was at least three feet above the stream of urban runoff.
Lawrence told me he designed the bed after reading about mountain climbers at a local library. “This is how they sleep when they stop and rest in the middle of a climb,” he explained.
Also, encountering madmen wandering around in the depths of a drain, without a light source, is something I won’t forget. That happened on a few occasions. Madwomen, too.
I stumbled on a naked man and woman smoking crack in a drain behind a Budget Suites. A man, who lived in a three-foot-in-diameter lateral pipe, washing his clothes in a stream of runoff. Street teens setting up home.
There were several experiences like this, strange but very real, most of which are detailed in the book.

The book, of course, is available through Amazon, and O’Brien’s ongoing reading tour, with appearances scheduled from now through November, is outlined on his blog.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

I will say that the writing can be a little uneven at times – the dialogue, for instance, is often a bit Bill & Ted-like, which is unfortunate because the material is sociologically important enough without needing to remind us that the writer and his friends are Really Cool – but if you come across a copy, be sure to check it out!

(Note: All photos in this post by Danny Mollohan. Figures for the Las Vegas Flood Control District’s expansion – 413 miles of tunnel worth $1.7 billion over the next 30 years – come from Beneath the Neon).

Luke Jerram’s Sky Orchestra project “explores how one can perceive an artistic experience” while sleeping. To do this, Jerram has “develop[ed] music specifically for sleeping people which is delivered out of the sky.”

From the artist’s website:

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at dawn to fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score creating a massive audio landscape.
“Like whales calling in the ocean, the same sounds may be heard in succession passing from one balloon to another across the sky …”
Many hundreds of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. The music is audible, both consciously and subconsciously, to all those in the balloon’s flight paths.

Wired covered the project last summer, writing: “If you’re lulled awake by electronic music at daybreak, look up. The tune may be coming from the seven hot-air balloons in artist Luke Jerram’s Sky Orchestra as it bumps ’80s-synth-style ambient tracks from the heavens.”
The Telegraph jumped in, reporting that “residents of Stratford-upon-Avon awoke yesterday to find a flotilla of hot air balloons drifting over their roofs serenading them with ambient music and readings from Shakespeare.”
Last but not least, way back in 2004, the Guardian claimed that residents of Birmingham had been “helplessly lulled into deeper sleep at dawn yesterday morning, by specially composed music played from a flight of hot air balloons drifting over the dozing city… The flutes and oboes, bird song and whale calls, were based on scientific research to promote deeper and sweeter dreams.”
However, it’d be interesting to see if something like this could be abused for political purposes, whispering subliminal messages into the sleeping, pre-dawn brains of the local electorate…
But it also raises an interesting paranoid-philosophical question: if you experience a particularly good night’s sleep, and you live alone in the countryside somewhere, with neither witnesses nor neighbors, how do you know if the Sky Orchestra has – or has not – come floating through…?
Is this how myths begin?

(Huge thanks to Marilyn Terrell for pointing this out to me! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Is that a geostationary banana in the sky – and what is it trying to say…?)

There’s a great new article in New Scientist about what the surfaces of other planets – with their variable air pressure and chemical humidities – might actually sound like.
Unfortunately, the article is subscriber-only, so I’ll have to summarize a few of its more interesting points.

The basic trouble, the article says, is that we haven’t sent microphones to many of the places we know so well visually.
The Mars rovers, for instance, those wheeled landscape photographers whose work is destined to appear in tomorrow’s art history textbooks, “are oblivious to the soundscape of Mars.” After all, with no sensors to hear with, “they can’t hear the buzz of grit whirling around in dust devils, the rumbles of Martian thunder, or even the noise of their own wheels crunching across the dusty plains.”
We could be listening to literally extraterrestrial soundscapes on our iPods, riding through Manhattanite subway tunnels:

Imagine listening to babbling brooks of methane on Titan, or hearing deep thunder booming through Venus’s dense, noxious atmosphere. Or what about the creaking and groaning of ice on Jupiter’s satellite Europa, which could reveal whether the moon’s frigid exterior hides a warm ocean, hospitable to life?

But acoustics play second fiddle in most scientific investigations of other planets.
Our heavens are silent.
New Scientist points out that microphones “are usually smaller, lighter, cheaper and less power-hungry” than are cameras – imagine live-streaming the winds of Venus on your car radio, driving past Spudnuts! – but this very simplicity “may have had the adverse effect of underselling them as instruments able to deliver subtle and rich scientific information.”
Our sonic understanding of other planets is thus rather lacking – leaving us, more or less, to guess.
Call it speculative acoustic planetology.

[Image: The canyonlands of Mars; courtesy of NASA].

So it may not immediately be obvious that things will literally sound different on other planets; but atmospheric chemistry and air pressure – or the complete lack thereof – are two major factors in the transmission of sound waves.
For instance, because “Mars’s atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth’s – the average distance between molecules is about 120 times greater – sound waves attenuate very quickly.” This has the following horror movie-like effect:

While a typical scream on Earth might still be audible a kilometre away, it would only travel about 16 metres on Mars.

This “low sound speed” would also “lower the pitch of your voice” – and give burgeoning screenwriters something to consider.

[Image: A stunning view of Venus, which looks more solar than planetary; courtesy of NASA].

On Venus, meanwhile, “sulphuric acid rains down through a CO2 atmosphere with a crushing surface pressure 90 times greater than Earth’s.” A Soviet lander actually brought microphones there in 1982 – picking up “deep rumbles that might have been thunder” – but we have no real idea of what Venus actually sounds like.
We can speculate, however, using some kind of computer program, that “only low-frequency sounds carry well in the crushing CO2 atmosphere,” nearly cutting treble altogether.
It’s a planet perfect for hip-hop.

[Image: The Earth’s moon].

The article goes on to explain how the crust of the Earth’s moon is almost constantly groaning with “stresses and stains… due to the tidal forces of the Earth’s gravity,” and that there are a surprising number of “quakes triggered as heat from the sun swell[s] the moon’s crust.”
But what do these moonquakes sound like?
Titan, meanwhile, one of Saturn’s moons, actually has been heard before: a microphone attached to the Huygens probe, in 2005, “recorded the whistle and whoosh” of the probe’s own distant arrival.
It’s worth pointing out, in a brief but fascinating side-note, that drops of methane “about a centimetre wide” rain down onto the surface of Titan seven times slower than rain falls here on Earth. Imagine thunderstorms in bullet-time…
In any case, Titan’s atmosphere is actually “a factory for complex hydrocarbons.” The sky thus has “all this photochemistry going on,” one scientist is quoted as saying, with the result that Titan’s surface is dotted with “dark hydrocarbon lakes” – and these lakes will probably be bubbling, we read, and each bubble will probably “pulsate like a vibrating bell” when it bursts.
The acoustic effect of this would be like “having a chorus of little bubbles each ‘plinking’ at its own pitch,” and it would all sound rather “robotic.”

[Image: The cracked icy surface of Europa].

Finally, Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons and a celestial body long suspected of hosting life, is covered with a shell of ice. That ice, however, is constantly compressed by Jovian gravity, causing huge fissures and breakages – with, I’d think, spectacular, micro-continental bursts of atonality and noise.
But who knows?
First, we have to get a microphone there to find out.
Personally, I’d love to hear music that’s been deliberately tuned for alien atmospheres – slow, shuddering drones, or crystalline symphonies of accelerated acoustics. Even more, I’d love to read an acoustic analysis of different landscapes here on Earth: how far a scream propagates in the gardens of Versailles, for instance, or in the new Orange County Great Park. Or whether your voice sounds deeper in the deserts of Utah. Or whether you can unexpectedly overhear people talking far away, on some humid curve in the Parisian Seine.
It’s the science of acoustic planetology.

[Note: This post was originally written for Blend – so it reads a bit like an article – though it was not actually published].

The company known as Muzak claims to provide “audio architecture” for its clients.
Audio architecture may sound wonderful; the phrase may conjure up images of cathedrals made from noise – whole buildings connected by bridges of music – but, in the world of Muzak, it means something less exciting. Audio architecture, Muzak writes, is “the integration of music, voice and sound to create experiences designed specifically for your business.”
In other words, audio architecture is about making you feel comfortable – so that someone else can sell you things.
The “power” of audio architecture, Muzak‘s website continues, “lies in its subtlety.” These subtle sounds, played incessantly in the background, can “bypass the resistance of the mind and target the receptiveness of the heart.” It is thus almost literally subliminal. “When people are made to feel good in, say, a store, they feel good about that store. They like it,” Muzak claims. “Audio architecture builds a bridge to loyalty. And loyalty is what keeps brands alive.”
If there is a connection between background sounds and customer loyalty, perhaps sound could also inspire a kind of urban loyalty, where the sound of a certain city plays its own subtle role in making that place more inhabitable.
Like Muzak, the city’s sound makes residents “feel good” – which “builds a bridge to [urban] loyalty.”

Of course, this would not be the first time someone has suggested that cities have a certain sound, unique to them, or that cities should learn to cultivate their unique sonic qualities.
More than thirty years ago, the World Soundscape Project called for the “tuning” of the world. Cities would be treated as vast musical instruments: certain sounds would be eliminated altogether; others would be promoted or even subtly redesigned. The World Soundscape Project was about sonic improvement, making the world sound better, one city – one building – at a time.
Where the Project went wrong, however, and where it began to act a bit like Muzak, was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city, for instance, and a nostalgic calm would be infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles.
But where would such sensory cleansing leave those of us who enjoy the sounds of factories…?
In any case, we could still have fun with the World Soundscape Project, designing alternative sonic futures for the cities of the world, by turning, ironically, to the techniques of Muzak itself: Muzak imitates. Rock, jazz, blues, Mozart – even Muzak: anything at all can be absorbed, and replaced, and reproduced, by Muzak.
There could be a Muzak version of the street sounds of Amsterdam – played on a continuous loop in the supermarkets of London. The sounds of yesterday could be replayed today, transformed into Muzak – and Muzak versions of your old phone conversations could be broadcast over the radio… where laughter is replaced with synthesizer trills.
University lectures and Books on Tape could be replaced with Muzak, pushing us toward a post-verbal society.
Or we forget Muzak altogether and we simply swap urban soundtracks, cities imitating cities to sound entirely unlike themselves.
In the elevators of the Empire State Building, you hear the elevators of the Eiffel Tower. The sounds of the Paris Metro are replaced with the sounds of the Beijing subway, complete with squeals from overworked brakes and the metallic thud of sliding doors.
If you don’t like Rome, you can make it sound like Dubai.

In his 1964 novel Nova Express, William Burroughs described a series of elaborate, even hallucinatory, assemblages of tape recorders and microphones that could be carried from city to city.
Borderless, these roving sound installations, with their capacity for instant playback, would blur the line between your own thought processes and the sounds of the city around you. Like Muzak, Burroughs’s legion of rogue microphonists could thus “bypass the resistance of the mind,” installing a soundtrack where there once had been thought.
A few years ago I read about a sound artist who had been reproducing the exact placement of microphones used to record the live performances of orchestras around the world, only he did so in unexpected places: in the middle of rain forests, or on top of sand dunes, or in towns on the English coast and inside empty warehouses.
Whether or not the story’s even true, recording the everyday noises of, say, Oslo as if Oslo is an ongoing symphony – and then re-playing that symphony through hidden speakers in San Francisco – perhaps even transforming it into Muzak – should certainly be the next artistic step.
It would be a question of acoustic urban design – of true audio architecture.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Cover Bands of Space and Amplifier House: Original Domestic Soundscapes. See also AUDC’s The Stimulus Progression).

The manifestos that I posted about last week are now online at Icon: 50 manifestos for a 50th issue.
So click on over and read manifestos by Rem Koolhaas

(“Europe is doing almost ridiculously well. We fly for next to nothing, we have the highest quality prisons, Europe gave us millions of new friends, Frisian Lakes are maintained in order, sewers that ruined the most beautiful beaches are gone, the Spanish countryside is now a polished backdrop for whizzing high-speed trains”)

and Bruce Mau

(“So long as architects self-marginalise by purposely excluding the business of development and its real burden of complexity and decision making from their education, from their business, architecture will remain a gentleman’s weekend culture, unwilling or unable to take on the heavy lifting and big problems, happy to polish fancy baubles for our urban entertainment”)

and Sam Jacob

and a press release by Joshua Prince-Ramus and an ad for an event by Hans Ulrich Obrist and some crap by BLDGBLOG

(“Everything is relevant to architecture – from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel. There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure – but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and W.G. Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames – as well as in the toy sets of children. The suburbs are architecture; bonded warehouses are architecture; slums are architecture; NASA’s lunar base plans are architecture – as are the space stations in orbit [above] us”)

along with more manifestos by Peter Saville

(“Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever”)

and Bernard Khoury

(“Relevant architecture should not be limited to exceptional programs such as schools, corporate headquarters of international companies, museums, and public libraries”)

and Vito Acconci

(“…if people can’t ‘get’ the buildings we make, then those buildings are meant to appear as a force of nature, and we expect from people only belief”)

and Paola Antonelli

(“I consider design the highest expression of human creativity because it is concise and distilled. I am baffled that the world does not yet understand not only how important, but also how tremendously engrossing and entertaining design is”)

and Steven Holl

(“At the beginning of the 21st century, architecture can be the most effective instrument for reconstructing the relations between our species and the earth”)

and Philippe Rahm

(“Architecture has to generate new nature in this artificial global environment”)

and Jasper Morrison

(“Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise. Its historic and idealistic purpose, to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, seems to have been side-tracked. The virus has already infected the everyday environment. The need for businesses to attract attention provides the perfect carrier for the disease”)

and so on…
So check it out.

About twenty minutes after writing the previous post, I felt my first earthquake out here in L.A. It had a magnitude of 4.6, with an epicenter near Chatsworth; it struck at 12:58am local time; and it’s being referred to as “Event 14312160.”
Check out the official shake map of that experience.
Our apartment trembled for a few seconds – as if a large, but totally silent, truck was rumbling by – before the building, which is on stilts, sort of jolted.
That was it.

[Image: Bolivia’s salt hotel; photographed by Jose Luis Quintana/Reuters].

Ten years ago this month, I took a Polish-language tour of a salt mine outside Kraków – because, at the bottom of the mine, there was a church made from salt.
It was carved from the walls of the mine itself.
That increasingly distant and somewhat surreal experience – I don’t speak a word of Polish, and everyone on the tour was from Austria – came to mind when I read about a new salt hotel in Bolivia.
It’s a hotel made from salt.
According to National Geographic, the hotel is “constructed solely of salt blocks on the white plains of the Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia.” The Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt desert. Until tourists began visiting it, however, “the only inhabitants of the chilly, harsh region were salt miners, who still extract 25,000 tons of salt annually from the 10 billion tons available.”
I know at least this writer is curious if they’ll someday build an exact, to-scale replica of the city of Edinburgh: shining there, in the Andean heat, with white cubic walls, the city will then be shaved down – bit by bit, brick by brick – and drunk with shots of tequila. You can salt your chips with it.
Or perhaps architectural enthusiasts will forego the Snow Show… and buy tickets to Bolivia, instead: the Salt Show.
Mineral pavilions designed by Zaha Hadid. Sodium towers by OMA.

(Via Super Colossal and Boing Boing).

Future Australians perplexed by the design of their cities might have ants to blame: “The movement of ants could help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion, Australian scientists say, and the findings could be used in future town planning systems.”
Indeed, we’re told, “Humans could learn from ants about how to deal with… exiting large venues after concerts or sporting events.” Eat grass, for instance, and dig lots of orderly holes.
Apparently, whilst being studied, “ants moved in an orderly fashion, and never seemed to panic, even when there was danger or congestion.”
In any case: do ants offer interesting analogies and parallels for fields such as robotics? I’m sure they do.
But I have to admit I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to using ant behavior as a model for urban design; something tells me ants act like ants because they’re ants, and that to rebuild our cities and streets so that the built environment responds best to those of us who might act like ants might be artistically fascinating – but perhaps a little foolish.

(Thanks, Steve! Previously on BLDGBLOG: Tracking Ants and Nest-casting. See also inhuman urbanism, animal urbanism, and simian urbanism).