Month: April 2008

The Guardian reports this morning that Donna Vassar, “part of the Vassar education dynasty, has launched plans to build a $300m (£150m) private getaway for stressed-out presidents and prime ministers who want to ‘reconnect with their unique purpose in life’.”
And it might look like this.

[Image: Design by Chetwoods Architects, via the Architects’ Journal].

Referred to as the Universitas Leadership Sanctuary – or Destination Universitas – Vassar’s desert complex, if built, will be “part monastery and part conference centre,” and it will take the shape “of a four-storey globe on the shores of Lake Las Vegas, a privately-owned lake in the south Nevada desert.”
The site will then be nothing less than the place “where the most powerful men and women on the planet can get away from it all with a combination of reading, contemplation and even a spot of gardening.”

The main globe building will be on four levels. The ground floor will house a library and the first floor a debating chamber, while on the second floor will be technology to help make the building energy efficient. At the top, under a dome of glass, will be the spiritual heart of the development – the contemplation space where leaders will be encouraged to sit in silence.

And sit in silence, I’m sure they will.
The design is by Chetwoods Architects – though they are apparently working with artist and architect Doug Patterson, whose earlier House Mustique supplied Vassar with a spot of inspiration.
More at the Guardian.

[Image: The Super-Metropolis of 1975, via Paleo-Future; view larger!].

Yesterday, Paleo-Future pointed out a map from 1961, produced by the Chicago Tribune, in which the future urban landscape of the U.S. has been speculatively mapped – as it was projected to exist in the bright and futuristic year of 1975.

Ahead of its time in predicting the urban condition within which most of us now live, the map and its accompanying short article suggest that the “‘regional cities’ of tomorrow will be nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops and service places. Some will be strip or rim cities; some will be star-shaped or finger-shaped; others will be in concentric arcs or parallels; still others will be ‘satellite towns’ around a nucleus core.”

Unfortunately, it gets the future of U.S. transportation all wrong:

They will be saved from traffic self-suffocation by high-speed transportation – perhaps monorails that provide luxurious nonstop service between the inner centers of the supercities, as well as links between the super-metropolises themselves.

Having ridden Amtrak somewhat extensively up and down the east coast, I would respectfully suggest that a different infrastructural future has come to pass.

Meanwhile, if you look at a bigger version of the map, you’ll see cities like the Chicago Crescent, the Michigan-Ohio Fingers, and Los Angeles Rim City – but it’s the sprawling urban complexes at the core of the country that seem so strangely interesting to me, like the Chattanooga Strip and the Central Missouri Metro, all linked together by arteries of high-speed rail.

What might a futuristic super-city in the hills and valleys of Tennessee really look like? What might a Mississippi mega-city really be?

(Via Paleo-Future, on a tip from James Petty).

Last autumn, an article in New Scientist asked: “What routes did our ancestors take as they moved into lands unknown and traversed uncharted seas? When did they move and spread?”
The magazine thus included a two-page map – attempting to answer these larger cultural and evolutionary questions via cartography.

[Image: A map of possible human migration routes out of Africa and the Middle East; via New Scientist].

“Until quite recently,” the article tells us, “H. sapiens was thought to have evolved just 100,000 years ago. Over the past two decades, however, a consensus has grown that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa at least 160,000, and possibly 200,000, years ago.”
But how did humans spread?

Skeletal remains from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago are the oldest known traces of modern humans outside Africa… However, all evidence of human habitation beyond Africa disappears around 90,000 years ago, only to emerge again much later.

What happened later is the subject of the article – which goes on to encompass “signature” mutations, southern routes and northern routes out of Africa, “the gene associated with language,” the colonization of Australia, bone-bearing caves on the coast of Sri Lanka, and so on.
Little details stand out. For instance: “The earliest evidence of settlement by modern humans in south Asia, comprises stone tools and human remains discovered in the Fa Hien and Batadomba Lena caves in Sri Lanka, dating from up to 35,000 years ago.”
However – and I find this absolutely fascinating: “Although none of these artefacts is more than 35,000 years old, that may simply reflect the fact that sea levels are about 100 metres higher today than they were 50,000 years ago. Any artefacts or bones left by the first coastal migrants are now buried beneath the sea.” (emphasis added)
But it’s the map, I think, that tells the story so clearly. My only major problem with it is that it shows the world as it looks today, with sea levels where they stand in the present.
However, as we only just read, global sea levels were at least 100 meters (or 328 feet) lower back then, because so much water had been frozen into continent-spanning glaciers. Accordingly, the continents would have had very different outlines. Sri Lanka was not an island, for instance, but a peninsula connected to India, and many, many hundreds of smaller islands throughout Indonesia were actually connected into one large landmass.

[Image: A map of southeast Asia during the Ice Age; note how much dry land there could have been. This certainly isn’t the greatest map in the world; it’s just all I could find – and it comes from a site claiming that this somehow proves Atlantis was real…].

Looking at a more accurate Ice Age geography, in other words, would make it substantially easier to comprehend how humans spread, for the most part on foot, to places as far away as central Australia. In fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that, until you look at the world as it was back then, with lower sea levels, you will only mis-theorize these migration routes, devising ever more elaborate forms of seafaring and stellar navigation when it might simply have been the case that they walked.
In any case, ancient human migrations just blow me away. What was it like, standing there on the sandy coasts of Iran or Saudi Arabia, 55,000 years ago? Walking around in the growing darkness as evening sets in, looking up at the stars, building fires – perhaps even dreaming of future towers on the very site where Dubai now rises.

[Note: If anyone knows where to find good maps of Ice Age coastlines, let me know!]

In J.G. Ballard’s otherwise unexceptional 1996 novel Cocaine Nights, we read about a Mediterranean resort called the Estella de Mar.

[Image: The Resort from the Ocean by buck82; note, however, that this particular resort is in Cuba].

The Estrella de Mar is situated along a moribund stretch of the Gibraltar coast, where “a sluggish sea lapped at the chocolate sand of the deserted beaches.”

The coastal strip was a nondescript plain of market gardens, tractor depots and villa projects. I passed a half-completed Aquapark, its excavated lakes like lunar craters, and a disused nightclub on an artificial hill, the domed roof resembling a small observatory.

A nearby town is described as being “without centre or suburbs.” In fact, it “seemed to be little more than a dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools.” The few humans who can still be seen in this oddly depopulated environment are out lying across old reclining chairs, barely talking to one another; but this is what happens, Ballard jokes, “when continuous sunlight is shone on the British.”

[Image: Photo by David Monniaux, via Wikipedia].

Into this world of automated tennis machines and monogrammed hotel ice buckets comes an English travel writer whose brother may or may not have committed a crime a few days earlier. We follow this outsider from the minute he arrives. He drives his rental car past “white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses.”
He soon parks, gets out, and goes for an afternoon hike, unsure of the culture he’s now surveilling:

I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds – British, Dutch and German – were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations.

[Image: Architecture in the Costa del Sol as photographed by Q-BEE].

Ballard continues:

Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.

More to the point, however, and in a quotation which I’m having trouble locating, the novel briefly raises the question of whether it might be more appropriate to send not a travel writer but a psychologist to cover a new resort hotel – perhaps even a neuroscientist.
After all, this visitor would ask, taking notes for a kind of psycho-spatial analysis, what motivated the construction of such a place? Why would such a landscape – seemingly devoid of humans, animated only by pre-programmed swimming pool pumps – be constructed at all?
This globetrotting neuro-tourist then relays the research to Malcolm Gladwell or Jonah Lehrer, signing a contract for a brand new book. It becomes a bestseller. The Mind on Holiday, it might be called. Landscapes of Pleasurable Forgetting. The neuroscience of built space.
But it’s a serious question: could we learn more about, say, Dubai or Las Vegas – or Cancun – if we sent psychologists instead of travel writers?
Might there not be neurological reasons for the construction of certain buildings, or whole cities?
They check into vast air-conditioned lobbies, with no recognizable humans in sight. As dusk settles, they walk alone amidst well-fountained paths, surrounded by ferns, listening to Muzak on hidden speakers – and they produce uncannily accurate diagnoses of the psychological states of the architects and developers behind these non-places.
Then they turn their eyes on the other tourists…
So is this what travel literature right now is sorely missing: that we should be performing – and publishing – neuro-tourism?

(For a different kind of neuro-tourism, see io9).

I’ve organized an event down in Los Angeles, coming up on Tuesday, April 15, for Dwell magazine. This is not a BLDGBLOG event, in other words, and I will only be moderating – but I would strongly encourage anyone in the L.A. area to come out.
It should be a fantastic evening, and I’m extremely proud of the line-up.

We’ve got Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Frances Anderton, host of KCRW’s Design and Architecture radio show (DnA) and Los Angeles Editor of Dwell; and Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and easily one of the most interesting critics working in the field today.
The theme of the evening is “architecture and the media.”
How, for instance, does one discuss architecture over the radio – or in the newspaper, or in a gallery space? How are architectural ideas communicating through these various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way?
How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms?
For instance, as the New York Times reported last year, Govan hopes to engage on a curatorial project “to collect houses”:

His idea – one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum – is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators.

Govan himself explains:

“It started with an effort to rethink the museum, looking at the resources that are both locally powerful and internationally relevant,” he said. “It’s clear that the most important architecture in Los Angeles is largely its domestic architecture. I’ve talked certainly to a number of people who have interesting architecture, and I’m beginning to talk to other people about raising funds to preserve these works.”

This would have the interesting effect of distributing the museum, so to speak, throughout the city; it would also be architectural history exhibiting itself in itself, collapsing the distinction between the exhibition space and what that space displays.
Now put this into the context of architecture as a radio conversation and architecture as a subject for newspaper editorials, and you’ve got three very different approaches to how the public can engage with or come to understand the built environment.
The event will be in my former hometown of Culver City, at the Museum of Design Art and Architecture – which is located here.
Doors open at 7:30pm, and the event itself begins at 8, lasting roughly one hour – followed by drinks and mingling.
Check out this website for more information about tickets and so on.

Also, this will only be the first of many such events: Dwell Conversations should be a really fun new series of talks, taking place in three cities over the next several months.

[Image: The self-weaving complexity of I-95 and I-695, north of Baltimore].

For a variety of reasons, it seems worthwhile to do a kind of combined recap of my recent talks for the AIA in Baltimore and at the University of Pennsylvania. If you were present at either one of those events, then this should hopefully serve as a nice trip down memory lane; if you weren’t there, this should give at least some idea of the topics covered, themes discussed, images seen, and so on. Of course, if this sounds even remotely interesting, I’d be more than happy to give a similar talk at a venue near you… I’ve been having a blast doing these things.
In any case, I was in Baltimore two weeks ago on a joint invitation from the AIA and Preservation Maryland, to discuss architectural preservation, broadly conceived, with at least some relation to Baltimore proper.
So I began my lecture with a story from the science journals back in fall 2005. It turns out, we learned, that a specific highway junction north of Baltimore – where I-95 and I-695 meet – is topologically unique, exhibiting something called “non-trivial braiding.” However, because of that structure’s inefficiency as a traffic conveyor, the merging on- and off-ramps were going to be rebuilt, reconnected, and otherwise altered beyond mathematical recognition.
Its topology, in other words, would be ruined.

[Image: A diagram of the “non-trivial braiding” that awaits you on the eastern seaboard; via New Scientist].

A little bit of roadwork, and that mathematical object would be gone.
“I don’t want to encourage more cars onto the roads,” New Scientist wrote, “but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late.”
So the question becomes: at what point do we preserve something not for its historical value but for its topological interest? If a bridge, or a highway overpass, becomes functionally obsolete, is it still subject to the rules of architectural preservation – whether or not it’s mathematically unique or culturally intriguing? Surely infrastructure is just infrastructure – i.e. when it breaks you replace it? You don’t preserve infrastructure.
Or do you?

[Images: Google Maps of the famed intersection].

Meanwhile, at what point does the exchange value of culture and history trump the use value of function and design?
And should mathematicians have any say?

[Image: Knot diagrams by Robert Scharein. Could we treat these as infrastructural blueprints and redesign the U.S. highway system to form a catalog of complex knots? You could then study experiential mathematics from behind the wheel of your car…].

Perhaps there’s a middle ground here. Perhaps we can, in fact, preserve something like a highway traffic exchange without forcing people to use its outdated twists and turns.
This brings us to the idea of the stabilized ruin.
If we could remove the intersection, for instance, from everyday use and simply build around it, we could then stabilize it as a ruin – turning it into a kind of abstract sculptural form, like something by Barbara Hepworth – and, at the very least, create an interesting site for mathematically inclined tourists.

[Images: Three sculptures by Barbara Hepworth – build these big enough and they’d be pieces of urban infrastructure].

For visual reference here I mentioned architect Alberto Campo Baeza‘s 2002 proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum. Might Campo Baeza’s structure be a model for what the I-95/695 intersection would look like if it was detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways?
It’d be a kind of modern-day Stonehenge, made from on-ramps, surrounded by wildflowers, with well-designed signs to explain its fine geometry. Loops of concrete in space.

[Images: Proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum by Alberto Campo Baeza].

Of course, there are other stabilized ruins – and here, trying to keep things regional, I pointed out Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, highlighting photographs taken there by Shaun O’Boyle. We see some examples of O’Boyle’s work here in this post – and O’Boyle, of course, was featured in BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at Bannerman’s Island.
“After 142 years of consecutive use,” the penitentiary’s website explains, “Eastern State Penitentiary was completely abandoned in 1971, and now stands, a lost world of crumbling cell blocks and empty guard towers.” It was one of the only two U.S. sites that Charles Dickens went out of his way to visit, on a trip in 1842; the other was Niagara Falls.

[Images: Four photos of Eastern State Penitentiary, taken by Shaun O’Boyle].

So if stabilization is a viable preservation strategy, then what are its limits? What is too small to worry about – and what is too large even to consider?
Back in the late 1990s, photographer and urban sociologist Camilo José Vergara controversially proposed that a “skyscraper ruins park” be built in downtown Detroit. In his book American Ruins, Vergara suggested that, “as a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis.”
Continuing this line of thought in a later article for Metropolis, Vergara wrote:

We could transform the nearly 100 troubled building into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley… Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals – squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects – would live in the empty behemoths, adding their call, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings.

Of course, fantasies of ruined cities are alive and well, so to speak. One need only look as far as the disastrous film I Am Legend, or turn to Alan Wiseman’s recent bestseller The World Without Us to see that the appeal of dead cities never quite fades.

[Image: A poster for I Am Legend].

Indeed, I’m tempted here to pitch a new breed of entertainment complex to some oil-rich emir or investment group: the idea is that you would build a ruined city on the shores of an artificial island somewhere south of all the luxury developments in Dubai, and you’d invite tourists to explore those haunted canyons of steel and broken glass.
For the low-low price of only $75,000 a day, you can rent the entire park for yourself – and thus be Will Smith for a day, wandering through ruined department stores and sunbathing in weed-filled plazas.
At the very least, imagine the political implications of such a park: touring the ruins of the west by visiting Dubai – where the shattered remnants of Euro-America are nothing but a theme park for global tourists.
With recognizable buildings from London, New York, Chicago, Paris, Rome, and so on, I suppose it’d be a little like the film Resident Evil: Extinction, where we see the lost lights of Las Vegas buried in desert sand.
Only here it’s a simulacrum of the entire western world, and it’s laid out as waste at the feet of Dubai’s glass towers and air-conditioned boulevards.

[Image: A poster for Resident Evil: Extinction].

In any case, with accidentally good timing, we moved on from there into a discussion of architect Albert Speer’s notorious plans for the Nazi super-city of Germania: a vision of what Berlin would become, given the presumed global triumph of Hitler and his skeletal empire. Of course, Speer’s by now well-known architectural theory was that all buildings should be designed so that they will look good in the future as ruins.
He called this ruin value.
I say “good timing” here, because Germania is actually the focus of a well-publicized exhibition in Berlin, going on right now, called Myth Germania. It comes complete with a detailed model of Speer’s urban vision – bits of which can be seen here in old photographs.

[Images: Albert Speer’s Germania].

Although ruined cities appear again and again here on BLDGBLOG – and will continue to do so – there is a stage beyond ruin, something that comes after dereliction and abandonment. As long as we are willing to think along geological timescales, in other words, then we can talk about what I’ve called urban fossil value.
What will our cities look like when they have fossilized?
Who else but New Scientist approached this very topic nearly a decade ago, explaining that, hundreds of millions of years from now, many of our cities will indeed become fossils.
These fossil cities will be “a lot more robust than [fossils] of the dinosaurs,” geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Kim Freedman wrote, and those fossils will consist of “the abandoned foundations, subways, roads, and pipelines of our ever more extensive urban stratum” – becoming “future trace fossils” of a lost form of life.
The already subterranean undersides of our modern cities, from Tube tunnels to secret government bunkers, “will be hard to obliterate. They will be altered, to be sure, and it is fascinating to speculate about what will happen to our very own addition to nature’s store of rocks and minerals, given a hundred million years, a little heat, some pressure (the weight of a kilometer or two of overlying sediment) and the catalytic, corrosive effect of the underground fluids in which all of these structures will be bathed.”
Plastics, for instance, “might behave like some of the long-chain organic molecules in fossil plant twigs and branches, or the collagen in the fossilized skeletons of some marine invertebrates.” A hundred thousand Evian bottles, then, might someday be transformed by compression into a new quartz: vast and subterranean veins of mineralized plastic.
Of course, all of this depends on the future tectonic fates of certain regions. Los Angeles, for instance, “is on an upward trajectory,” the geologists explain, “pushed by pressure from the adjacent San Andreas Fault system,” and so it is “doomed to be eroded away entirely.” But if a city is flooded, buried in sand, or otherwise absorbed downward, then “the stage is set to produce ideal pickling jars for cities. The urban strata of Amsterdam, New Orleans, Cairo and Venice could be buried wholesale – providing, that is, they can get over one more hurdle: the destructive power of the sea.”

[Images: Fossils, via the Fossil Museum].

Rather than talk about ruin value, then, which is so Romantically 18th century, why not strive for fossil value instead? Tens of millions of years in the future, when all of this urban infrastructure has turned to sludge, and radiative terrestrial heat has cooked old bricks into something resembling trace fossils, our cities could still be beautiful.
Can we design for this fate? Can we plan urban fossils ahead of time?
Can we give our constructions urban fossil value?

[Image: Antarctica by Christopher Michel].

I’ve written about the sounds of Antarctica before, but, as it happens, we can now listen directly to “an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape.”
This “live stream” is recorded via hydrophones attached to “an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf.” The observatory is called PALAOA – the PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean – and its purpose is “to record the underwater soundscape in the vicinity of the shelf ice edge over the duration of several years.”
Bizarrely, the Institute reminds us that “this transmission is not meant for entertainment” – it is meant “for scientific research.” Twenty-five people sitting around in a Manhattan apartment, popping open some more wine at 2am, listening to the sounds of Antarctica. Or next year’s Super Bowl half-time show: an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape.
Adrenalin goes through the roof.

(Via del.icio.us/kio).

[Image: Istanbul Birds in Flight by Tim O’Brien].

City birds have begun to sing new songs. “Gone is the familiar dawn chorus, with its rich mix of enchanting melodies and calls,” New Scientist writes. “In its place is a strangely depleted music – abrupt, high-pitched and sometimes ear-piercing.”
It seems that constant background sound in cities is having an alarming effect on bird species.

Some species simply are not able to make themselves heard above the ever-growing racket and are finding themselves squeezed out of the city. Others are beginning to change the way they communicate. In the long term, new species may evolve. If noise levels continue to rise, it seems inevitable that urban bird life will change dramatically.

Birds such as house finches, blackbirds, and – yes – great tits are learning how to adapt.
Researchers found that great tits in the city, for instance, will actually sing “higher-pitched tunes than their forest-dwelling counterpart” – indeed, that city tits even tune in to different noises now because they’re drowned out at other frequencies.

[Image: Bird subcommittee on traffic by Rosanne Haaland].

This, too, could have huge implications.

If singing and hearing diverge enough, urban birds may be less likely to find the vocals of rural birds attractive, or even to recognise them as members of the same species. These changes could serve to eventually split populations into genetically distinct urban and rural species. Alternatively, different populations of the same species might adopt differing strategies to cope with urban noise, leading eventually to a species split occurring in birds living in the same neighbourhood.

Roads and other forms of transport infrastructure – such as airports – are a major part of the problem. In Holland, we read, “the construction of a road near a particular [warbler nest] reduced the number of warbler breeding pairs from around 10 to just two. When the road was closed for repairs for two years, five more pairs moved into the area, although the subsequent return of traffic drove them away again.”
Everyone, and everything, is just looking for some peace and quiet.
I’m reminded of something I’ve written for a future issue of Dwell about the role of urban sound control in massive eco-design schemes – but I’ll leave that unexplored till the (albeit very brief) article comes out.