Month: March 2008

With the BLDGBLOG Book still on my plate here, it might be another slow week on the blog – maybe not – but I do want to announce something else before it’s too late: and that’s that I will be giving an hour-long lecture next week in Baltimore, hosted by the American Institute of Architects.

Specifically, it’s this year’s Michael F. Trostel Lecture, sponsored by Preservation Maryland.
I’ll be speaking about everything from the historical preservation of American highway infrastructure north of Baltimore to the curatorial problems associated with underwater archaeological sites in the Mediterranean Sea.
There will be stabilized ruins, abandoned prisons, a post-human Detroit, the architectural reuse of war debris, gene banks, epoxy-sealed Utah arches, and the slow fossilization of cities over eons of geological time. There will be liquid silicone, plaster casts of famous statuary, and old Hollywood film sets preserved by the desert sand.
You have to pay to get in, unfortunately – it’s $15 – but I think it’s free for students, and there might be some kind of discount if you are a member of the AIA. It’s on Wednesday, March 19, at 6pm. It’s in this building, which is located here.
So please come out! Keep me on my toes. Look at weird images. Laugh at bad jokes.
Somewhat incredibly, meanwhile, the lecture series only includes myself, Gregg Pasquarelli, Teddy Cruz, and Daniel Libeskind.

Finally, the AIA-Baltimore webpage says, incorrectly, that I am the founder and editor of Archinect – but that is Paul Petrunia, who founded Archinect nearly 11 years ago, in the fall of 1997. I am just one editor among more than a dozen there – and I’m not a very active one, at that! Apologies to Paul for the confusion.
Hope to see some of you next week in Baltimore! Seriously – it should be fun.

[Image: From the Back-of-the-Envelope Design Contest, sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education].

For the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Back-of-the-Envelope Design Contest, for which they “asked readers to sketch their own visions for the George W. Bush Library,” Scott Carlson wrote:

Now that the George W. Bush era is almost over, the world needs a place to archive the legacy of the 43rd president. That place will be Southern Methodist University, in a building designed by Robert A.M. Stern. The building will probably cost $500 million.

We thought that Chronicle readers would have their own ideas about how that building should be designed, and we invited people to send in designs on the backs of envelopes. About 120 people sent in sketches that were good, bad, serious, humorous, abstract, or really angry. Their designs took the form of toilets, bunkers, crosses, and W’s, some crudely drawn and some very elegant.

I’ve posted a few of the designs here – but, if you want to see more, stop by the Chronicle of Higher Education, where you can vote on the best design.

[Images: From the Back-of-the-Envelope Design Contest, sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education].

(Thanks, Alex Haw!)

“The next time a moth alights on your window sill,” New Scientist warns, “watch what you say. Sure, it may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy – one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement.”

[Image: A Steam Insect by sculptor Christopher Conte; photo by Amanda Dutton/Synesthesia Photo].

What fascinates me about that statement, much more than simply pointing out how advanced surveillance technology has become, is the fact that such thoughts would have been dismissed as absolute schizophrenia as little as two decades ago.
Pointing out the window at insects as you whisper: They’re listening…

[Image: A Battery Powered Microbotic Insect by sculptor Christopher Conte].

Which leads me to wonder if, all along, “human history” has really just been the production, in physical form, of someone else’s mental state – our world is their dream, then, and it is their ideas within which we live. Inventors, industrialists, entrepreneurs, emperors, kings, architects, artists.
In any case, I’m also curious if these sorts of paranoias are ever directed at landscapes and the built environment. In Stasi-era East Germany, for instance, was there ever a kind of architectural paranoia, when you realized that your neighbor’s house was not, in fact, a house… but a listening post for the government.
In fact, I’m reminded of an old post on BLDGBLOG in which we saw photographs by Robin Collyer documenting houses that aren’t houses at all: they’re disguised electrical substations built to look like detached single-family bungalows.

[Image: 555 Spadina by Robin Collyer; this is not a house but an electrical substation].

Will there ever be articles in New Scientist saying: “The next time you use a doorknob, it may not be a doorknob at all…”
Or: “The next time you stay in a hotel room, it may not be a hotel room at all, but a top secret government research lab…”
Is there an architectural paranoia? And, if so, what would the treatment be – walking tours of all the unmarked buildings downtown? Nights spent alone with your psychoanalyst in empty suburban houses?
How does one treat an architectural affliction?

[Image: 96-98 Olive Ave., North York by Robin Collyer – another disguised electrical substations].

And what about landscape? You drive past a “cornfield” – but you know it’s not a cornfield. “This is not a cornfield,” you whisper. “I think it’s listening to us.” The stalks look funny, and they don’t sway with the wind. You and your friends go camping in the forests of northern California, but you sit there outside your tent all night, eyeing the redwoods. “These aren’t trees,” you insist every few minutes. “I don’t think these are trees.”
So can landscapes and the built environment sustain paranoid projections? If we can imagine, as per the New Scientist article cited above, that a moth at the window is really a government surveillance device, then surely we can imagine that whole buildings and fields not be what they seem?

[Image: Screen shots from artist Pam Skelton‘s recent project Conspiracy Dwellings, about the apartments and rooms used by the Stasi to spy on East Germany].

This makes me think of Judge Schreber, the famously schizoid target of one of Sigmund Freud’s later analyses, who, upon being institutionalized, made sure to diagram the spatial layout of the hospital for fear that the rooms and layouts might change or betray him. His legendarily bizarre autobiography thus includes hospital floorplans. Was the architecture itself part of some vast conspiracy? his illness seemed to ask.
One need only turn to someone as obvious as Franz Kafka to see that architecture has a capacity to frustrate and enrage that few other art forms ever manage.
Finally, then, in a recent issue of Abitare I came across a project by artist Pam Skelton called Conspiracy Dwellings:

Conspiracy Dwellings is a visual arts project that explores the legacy of state surveillance. Presented are a network of almost 500 secret apartments and institutions in Erfurt from which the former East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) operated from 1980 to 1989. Initiated by British artist Pam Skelton and German scholar Joachim Heinrich, the project displayed audio/video installations in locations around the city of Erfurt based on the network of conspiracy dwellings that were used for spying and denunciation, and [it] uses the original locations of the conspiracy dwellings to reveal the surveillance practices of that time. Set up to maintain secrecy in an environment of fear, observation and control, the “home” proved to be an effective tool for spying on friends, colleagues and family.

Skelton presented her work at a recent conference, along with presentations by Alex Haw and others.
In any case, this all takes us back to the ever-watchful robot insects of the future, with which this post started – and so we could perhaps rephrase that opening statement from New Scientist like this: “The next time you walk into a building, watch what you say. Sure, it may look like an innocent piece of architecture, but it could actually be a spy – one of a new generation of cyborg buildings with implants wired into its walls to allow remote control of the built environment.” Or some other such formulation.
But the fundamental question remains: how is architecture reimagined, or refigured, when it becomes the target of paranoia?

[Image: Photo by Matt York for the Associated Press (via)].

“A torrent of water was released into the Colorado River from the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona on Tuesday, in a disputed effort to improve the environment for fish in the Grand Canyon,” the New York Times reports.
The sheer volume of water released is extraordinary:

The water poured out of the dam as if pumped through a gigantic fire hose, at the rate of 41,500 cubic feet per second – enough to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes. This release, which engineers call “high flow,” was meant to scour the river bottom and deposit silt and sediment to rebuild and extend sandbars and create new, calm backwater areas where the fish can spawn.

The BBC adds that “the Colorado river rose quickly after the flood was released.”

[Images: The water guns are opened. Photos by Matt York for the Associated Press (via)].

1) It would actually be quite fun to do that – to fill the Empire State Building with water in 20 minutes. It would be a performance art piece called Modernism after the Flood.
2) These timed releases are also a means of “calibrating” the river to the West’s urban hydroelectric needs: the waters will now “rise and fall for six months in a pattern that the United States Geological Survey is calibrating to match the demand for hydroelectric power in cities like Las Vegas.” The waters will “rise and fall,” that is, not because of lunar tides or upstream rainfall, but because U.S. cities need more hydroelectric power.
So while it may be obvious to this point out, the implication is that the whole river is a machine now – and what appears to be a “river” is really a kind of liquid chart, graph, or diagram from which we can read the electrical needs of contemporary U.S. urbanism.
The river, then, is a sign – it is information-bearing. It is textual, graphic, communicative. The controlled river, with its unnatural floods and valved reservoirs, indicates.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: N.A.W.A.P.A.)

“Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep,” Reuters tells us. “Meet California’s most alternative new energy.”

[Image: Photo via Reuters].

You’ve no doubt seen this elsewhere by now in our internet-flattened world, but this geometrized pool of cow manure will “provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day.”

To tap the renewable gas from cow manure, the Vintage Dairy farm first flushes manure into a large, octagonal pit, where it becomes about 99 percent water. It is then pumped into a covered lagoon, first passing through a screen that filters out large solids that eventually become the cows’ bedding.

The covered lagoon, or “digester,” is the size of nearly five football fields and about 33 feet deep. It is lined with plastic to protect the ground water and the cover, made of high density polyethylene, is held down at the edges by concrete.

Vast octagonal lagoons of cow crap festering in the California heat.
As one of the companies involved, BioEnergy Solutions, explains it: “We capture the methane released as livestock waste decomposes, then ‘scrub’ it to create clean, renewable natural gas that is delivered to power plants. The process can reduce methane emissions by up to 70%, or an estimated 1,500 tons per year, on a 5,000-cow dairy farm.”

[Image: Photo courtesy of American Images, Marshfield, WI, via CNET News].

Of course, news like this has been coming out for years now – for instance, in this story about Californian farmer Albert Straus and his “poop-filled lagoon”:

In addition to the energy savings, Straus’ new methane digester [the “lagoon”] will eliminate tons of naturally occurring greenhouse gases and strip 80 to 99 percent of organic pollutants from the wastewater generated from his family’s 63-year-old dairy farm. Heat from the generator warms thousands of gallons of water that may be used to clean farm facilities and to heat the manure lagoon. And wastewater left over after the methane is extracted, greatly deodorized, is used for fertilizing the farm’s fields.

Meanwhile, complete with photographs, CNET News introduced us to “industrial-sized ‘digesters’ that, through heat and microbes, reduce mountains of waste into gas or electricity that can be reused on the farm or sold on the open market” – and USA Today explained how, “at a time when state and federal energy bills have called for increasing renewable energy sources, there is more focus on developing cow dung as an alternative to coal or natural gas.”
In any case, I’m wondering what effects the cow poo boom will have on civic infrastructure – and even if human sewage might someday be tapped for its decompositional energy potential.
What strange new world of plumbing awaits us on the alternative energy horizon? How might it reshape the urban landscape?

(Thanks, Michael G.!)

The “remote Arctic settlement” of Longyearbyen, apparently the northernmost town in the world, “is buzzing with excitement and expectation” this week, the New York Times writes – because the sun will rise on March 8, the first time it’s done so since October. The town has been in polar darkness for the last five months.

[Image: Photo by Dean C. K. Cox for The International Herald Tribune].

Already, we read, “with the sun climbing closer to the horizon, each day is 20 minutes longer than the day before, and noticeably brighter. On Saturday, direct sunlight, with shadows and warmth, will arrive, starting with an actual sunrise.” Night as a function of the curvature of the earth.
Night as the experience of spherical geometry.
In any case, I’m reminded of at least two things here: 1) The graphic novel series 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, in which a small Alaskan town plunged into darkness by the earth’s curvature is overrun by – yes – vampires, and 2) a short story I’ve always wanted to write about a man who, fed up with the world, goes out to revive his sense of awe and too-long-lost capacity for self-appreciation by camping for a few nights alone in southern Utah. He wants to see sunrise, a kind of zero-moment out of which all emotional calibrations can be reset and centered once again – in illo tempore, as Mircea Eliade might say – and he’s all prepared for it, with a journal and gloves, feeling warm, surrounded by geology, sitting there beneath the stars, glad to have given himself this experience, relieved that amidst all the failure there can still be dawn, still something as simple as that to look forward to – except the sun doesn’t rise.
He’s two days’ drive away from home, there’s no one else in sight, he can’t get a cellphone signal in the midst of these rocky canyonlands in southern Utah, and it’s already noon. And it’s still dark.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

As interesting for its form as for its content, the project pictured here is something called “Willa’s Wonderland,” a one-off urban design comic strip set on the urban fringes of Atlanta by LOOMstudio and Amy Landesberg Architects, in collaboration with artist John Grider and writer Julia Klatt-Singer.
I’ve always thought that comic books – in fact, entire graphic novels – are an underused graphic resource for communicating architectural and urban design ideas, so it’s exciting to see that this project more or less puts that statement to the test.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

In a nutshell, it attempts to relay a series of thoughts about how the Atlanta Beltline could be put to better use, and to do so through the narrative structure of a comic strip.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

It suggests that the Beltline “must include supportive connections to neighborhoods along the way and a pathway filled with wonder.” It is this pathway filled with wonder on which a young girl, Willa, quietly walking.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

The designers write:

As a visionary collaborative model, we have constructed an idealized world in the representational form of a comic book. We were motivated to select a form of communication that would provide a platform for a writer, two artists and a gaggle of architects. We were able to work together by carrying forward our individual strengths to form a new synthetic vision. Though we are also aware of the comic nature of all idealized vision, this did not prevent us from joyful and serious forward progress.

Some of the ideas put forward are a Sound Field, a Mind Garden, a Bike Forum, and the Cinema Paradise.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

Further:

Thinking of our comic book as a model for reality, we know every community needs a vehicle that joins and carries many voices, many visions and many hands. These must be carried forth with human perspective in the context of actual human experience. Large projects are often developed in cities where rational economic and executive force usurps human comfort, practicality and beauty. Bird’s-eye planning rarely addresses human perspective from the street. Every city has need for humane stories, woven into the fabric of daily life and the places that nurture and inspire.

Fundamentally, though, I want to come back to the idea that comic strips are a legitimate narrative vehicle for the communication of architectural ideas. I can’t help but wonder how interesting it would be if, say, Sin City had been produced with Delirious New York-era Rem Koolhaas as its architectural consultant – or if all the action had taken place inside buildings designed by Minsuk Cho or Andrew Maynard or FAT.
Or, not even going that far, if Richard Rogers hired an illustrator – if he hired Geof Darrow – to present all of his projects in one 225-page graphic novel, complete with plot, how much more interesting might studying architecture be?
You see vast airports and multi-million pound London flats and train stations and private homes and art museums, and people come wandering through.
By the end of the book you’ve seen every single project Richard Rogers has designed – and you didn’t need to buy some $300 hardcover retrospective to do so.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

In any case, I’ve uploaded all of the “Willa’s Wonderland” images – in their original, legible size – to a Flickr set; but be sure to check out the project website, where you can read the storyboards and check out more credits for the creative team behind it all.

(Originally spotted at Super Colossal).