Month: January 2008

[Image: Some examples of work by Imaginary Forces].

For those of you in Los Angeles, 1) consider kidnapping me and driving me back there in a van full of architecture books and coffee, because I can’t even believe how much I miss that place, and 2) consider stopping by the Apple Store tonight in Santa Monica to hear Tali Krakowsky, Director of Experience Design at Imaginary Forces, speak about “trends in the fusion of design, technology and architecture.”
It’s the narrative infrastructure of built space:

Transformations in design thinking, inspired by emerging technologies and a fascination with storytelling, are changing the entertainment, educational, corporate and retail environments of the 21st Century. In her session, Krakowsky will break down interactive environments into their components: re-imagining content in motion, re-imagining media delivery systems, and re-imagining smart, interactive spaces, [to] examine several key projects in terms of process and design methodology.

The talk is tonight at 7pm, and it’s located here. Tell Tali I said hey.

EMI has announced that “unsold copies” of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, “will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads.”
More than a million copies of the CD “will be crushed and sent to the country to be recycled,” we read, where they “will be used in street lighting and road surfacing projects.”
This reminds me of a house I visited back in September, in Chicago – about which I wrote a short article for the March 2008 issue of Dwell – wherein the owners had pulverized boxes of old vinyl records, added them to a glass aggregate, and used that to surface the floor of their master bathroom. You could actually see tiny, vaguely recognizable pieces of crushed 45s catching sunlight near the toilet… National Geographic also covered the house.
In any case, does all this imply some strange new infrastructural claim to fame?
“You know that CD they used to pave the King’s Road?” a man asks you, putting his coffee down as if to emphasize the point. He crosses his arms. “I played bass on that.”

(Thanks, Steve!)

[Image: ©Michael Nagle for The New York Times].

Seeing this photo of the Galapagos Islands, with its strange, almost hand-painted color scheme, like something from an old British postcard, made me wonder if perhaps we might yet discover a way to deep-inject colored dyes into active magma chambers, producing technicolor flows of liquid rock in a million years’ time.
Volcanoes will erupt in Chile, forming bright green hillsides, yellow cliffs dotted with blue boulders. A fine pink gravel will wash up and down the steaming beach.
So can we introduce color into underground reservoirs of liquid rock – with the effect that, far after humans have died off, these weird and fantastic displays of dyed geology will arise, poking up beneath eroded soils, revealing themselves in fissures after earthquakes? Colored bulges of bedrock push toward the earth’s surface, seeking the sun.
And isn’t that exactly what will happen anyway, as mineral belts of industrial waste and plastics compress over time into new stratigraphies? We could pattern future hillsides like Scottish tartans. Like shirts from J. Crew. Like Sol Lewitt: give him a whole magma chamber to play with. Like some vast underground ink-jet cartridge ready to print colored landforms onto the surface of the earth.
Can we dye rock itself?
Unsupervised geological interventions are the future of landscape architecture.
What Ted Turner did for film, we will do for geology: the re-colorization of the planet.

(Photo courtesy of The New York Times).

Two Chilean scientists believe that the world’s largest tectonic plate, located beneath the Pacific Ocean, is “tearing apart,” and possibly on the verge of cracking in two, New Scientist reports.

[Image: Courtesy of New Scientist].

The northern half of the plate has been drifting west, into the Mariana subduction zone, nearly seven times faster than the westward drift of the southern half, creating a massive linear cramp of tectonic stress that may eventually snap altogether. Indeed, the scientists suggest that “several archipelagos in the south Pacific – running from Samoa to Easter Island – including the Pitcairn and Cook islands, and French Polynesia,” are evidence that this “future border,” as the scientists call it, has already begun leaking magma, producing tropical island chains.
The seafloor is unzipping, one could say.
So will future archipelagos bloom there, like rocky fruits of the sea – and could we prepare for this? Mapping those islands in advance, even naming them? And might someone yet design a new, sub-oceanic architecture for these and other future spreading zones, awaiting the arrival of new landmasses, slowly explosive islands that don’t exist yet? The virtuality of the tectonic.
And, for now, could we arrange a kind of psychonavigation of this future shear zone, some boatbound summer design studio on a yacht, involving martinis, bikinis, salt-bleached beards, and SPF 100, taking echo-locative readings of the Pacific seafloor, determining edges and boundaries for these islands yet to come?
Perhaps there is a whole new version of the earth that remains both immanent and imminent inside the one we currently live on – with all due implications for tomorrow’s philosophy. Or geophilosophy, as Deleuze would say, sipping pinot grigio on a boat in the mid-Pacific.

I’m back from London now to find the news cycle absolutely abuzz with so many interesting stories that it’ll be hard to keep up – but I’ll start posting the best of the best in a bit.

[Image: A photo from Jacob Carter’s ridiculously gorgeous River Thames Series].

First, though, last week’s lecture was a blast; I talked way too fast, of course, bungling several points in the process, but, in the main, I had a great time and can only hope that everyone who came out on a Wednesday night in London – including my father-in-law! – to hear perhaps a bit too much about geology and not enough about offshore structures, or about the colonial politics of naming alien territories, or about urban iterative architecture, had a good time, as well.
The Bartlett may or may not be uploading a film of the lecture at some point, meanwhile; until then, a few notes from the talk can be seen courtesy of Matt Jones and Mark Simpkins. Also, if you attended BLDGBLOG’s recent lecture at SCI-Arc then you would have heard a lot of this before – but you would have missed out on instancing gates and billboard houses and the Indonesian mud volcano and China Miéville’s “slow sculptures” and what I thought was a really fun Q&A.

[Image: Another one from Jacob Carter’s River Thames Series].

So here’s a huge thanks to Iain Borden for hosting the lecture, and to Alex Haw, both for setting it up and for introducing me. Expect more from Alex here on BLDGBLOG, by the way, hopefully soon.
Now: back to regular posting…

(Note: The title of this post is a line from London Orbital by Iain Sinclair).

A British novelist has been awarded legal damages in excess of £100,000 because she writes thrillers, not literary masterpieces. What’s at fault?
She’s been inhaling fumes from a nearby shoe factory.

The author “claimed to have become so intoxicated” by the fumes that “she was reduced to writing thrillers.” Indeed, the fumes grew so intense “that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier.”
That book went on to sell 10,000 copies.
So there are several unspoken arguments being put forward by her claim. Such as:

1) Literary judgement. Why is one “reduced” to writing crime thrillers? Perhaps Henning Mankell is more interesting than, say, Zadie Smith. This writer thinks so, at least. I.e. me. Perhaps the traumatized British author under discussion here should actually owe money to the shoe factory – a small percentage of her royalties, for instance – or at least an acknowledgment in the book.
2) Environmental causality. Perhaps BLDGBLOG is caused by the fact that I do not inhale fumes from a nearby shoe factory. Perhaps I find it difficult to concentrate on anything but architecture because of my city’s aroma… I’d thought it’d been all the coffee.
3) Paranoia. Perhaps you, right now, are inhaling something that prevents you from writing your own Ulysses. Perhaps you are being held back by untraceable smells. Perhaps your life is being quietly reshaped by something you can neither see nor properly talk about, some vast and mysterious influencing machine that manipulates you from the outside. Perhaps that machine is a giant shoe factory.
4) Theft, unauthorized use of services, and/or copyright infringement. Perhaps this woman has been using the shoe factory’s fumes without permission. Perhaps, Delphi-like, they have been wafting through the neighborhood for someone else’s use, mesmerizing home scribblers into a state approaching hypergraphia. Perhaps there was another writer in the flat next door furiously pounding out thrillers and loving every minute of it. Perhaps this woman had no right to use the fumes in the first place – like taping a film whilst sitting at the cinema. Put the pen down, love. These fumes aren’t for you. It’s a form of neurochemical shoplifting.
5) Scapegoating. Perhaps you can’t finish the novel you started writing last summer because of London. You don’t live in London – in fact, you’ve never been there – but it’s distracting you. It’s forcing you to write emails to friends, instead. You haven’t touched your novel in ages. You should sue London… Or perhaps all those buildings you see everyday are preventing you from being a good architecture critic. It’s not your eye for detail – it’s the buildings you’re forced to write about. Perhaps the streets you take to work each day are not inspiring you to travel abroad and be interesting and do something fun with your life. Perhaps your coworker’s cubicle makes you terrible at data entry. Perhaps nothing is your fault at all. Perhaps the color of Manhattan taxi cabs prevents you from writing good music. You’re now homeless. You prepare to sue.
6) Aromatherapeutic innovation and/or the future of global perfume. In 2010, Burberry will release a new scent. It will smell like the fumes of British shoe factories. Within days of buying your first bottle you begin to convulse – and write thrillers…

So is your neighborhood causing you to write – or not write – highbrow novels? Can you prove it? Or do you only cook spaghetti because of the sad little street you live on – when, really, you’re a gourmet chef…?
What is your city doing to you?

(Thanks, Steve T!)

[Image: Photo by Eran Brokovich for National Geographic News].

For the next 8 or 9 days I will be in and out of range, possibly unable to post. I’m flying to London tonight and I will be back the following weekend.
However, I will be giving a lecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture on Wednesday, January 23, at 6:30pm – so if you’re in London, and you’ve got an overwhelming need to hear about artificial reefs and tectonic warfare and urban soundscapes and climate change and sovereign trapdoors and dungeon instancing and the future of surveillance and offshore utopias – in other words, all the things that normally appear here on BLDGBLOG – then please feel free to come out, bring your friends, and roar for urban speculation. The more the merrier.
It’s my first international lecture, and I’m excited!

I believe, as well, that I’ll be introduced by Alex Haw, who helped set up the lecture in the first place, so it’ll be worth coming out just to hear him speak.
And then I’ll be back posting next week. If you’ve never been to BLDGBLOG before, by the way, as good a place as any to start reading might be here and here.
Hope to see some of you there!

(Meanwhile, don’t miss the White House Redux competition!)

[Image: Maison elastique by Etienne Meneau].

Don’t miss the maison elastique, or elastic house, a modular system of somewhat theatrical scaffolding, by Etienne Meneau – “made for those who like instability.”

[Images: More views of Elastic Houses by Etienne Meneau].

One or two of those might be fun to bounce around in here in California during an earthquake… Deformable grids absorbing tectonic shock. Popping back into place. Waiting for the next one.
There are some interesting videos on Etienne’s site.

[Image: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – you must view larger!].

Another project that’s been knocking me out these past few weeks is “Wish You Were Here! Postcards from our Awesome Future,” by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings. A brief description:

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, “what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?” Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed, and perhaps mildly exaggerated by Steve and Packard to create a series of 6 posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Program.

These posters are actually now on display at bus kiosks down along Market Street in San Francisco. A little bit of urban speculation on your way to work.

[Image: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – view larger!].

I love these things! Every city should do this. And they should hire Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings, because their illustrations are ace.
Seriously, every city should do this: Produce visions of your city in the future, then pin them up at bus shelters. That’s how SCI-Arc and The Bartlett should start exhibiting student work.

[Images: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – view larger: top, middle, bottom].

Be sure to check out the whole Flickr set, which includes documentation of the posters in situ.

(With huge thanks to both Ross Perlin and Steve Lambert for pointing these out!)