Month: June 2008

I’ll be in London next month, hosting an event at the Pop Up Storefront, so I was asked to put together a quick list of architectural events in the city; that list is now up.

[Image: The London Architecture Diary; view larger].

It’s by no means exhaustive, focusing almost entirely on the London Festival of Architecture which opens there later this month – and it refers only to events in June – but hopefully at least one lecture, place, event or exhibition on the list will be of interest. And I’ll have more information about the Pop Up Storefront event within about two weeks…

As Spain heats up – “the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880,” the New York Times reports – we are seeing the “Africanization” of its climate.
The Sahara, you could say, is spreading north.

[Image: Monica Gumm for The International Herald Tribune].

Previously lush hills are now barren of plantlife; soil is turning to dust; streams have dried up and farms are dying.
But golf courses and casinos are still being built, and hotels, so far, have kept their pools full.
“Grass on golf courses or surrounding villas is sometimes labeled a ‘crop,'” we read in the New York Times, “making owners eligible for water that would not be allocated to keep leisure space green. Foreign investors plant a few trees and call their vacation homes ‘farms’ so they are eligible for irrigation water.”
It’s the hydrology of leisure.
“No one knows if it goes to a swimming pool,” the head of a local water board says.
On a purely bureaucratic level, this is genius: reclassifying your backyard as an agricultural zone so that you can get water rations from the government.
But will this really be the last gasp of southern European civilization, as the dunes roll in, leaving unfinished resorts surrounded by dead olive tree orchards, burying half-drunk British tourists alive beneath surprise evening dust storms? Is well-watered leisure really the only option available to us here – or will a new kind of strategic xeriscaping save us from endemic thirst?
More practically, all of this brings to mind an ongoing interest of mine in a future landscape design project: mapping zones of desertification in southern Europe.
You go around for the summer with a landscape architecture class, a box full of GPS devices, and some graph paper, producing a new cartography of aridity. France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal. Whoever finds the northernmost point of desert – some strange and growing patch of dust outside Berlin – wins something.
But the minute any territory anywhere in Europe is officially named part of the Sahara Desert will be a very surreal moment, indeed.
After all, the Sahara “was once lush and populated” – and so was Europe, future caravans camped out around drained swimming pools will someday say.

There are tornadoes of light erupting from the sun.

A “tennis dome/emergency center” outside Kobe, Japan, gets a quick review in the new issue of Architectural Record.

[Image: Shuhei Endo’s “tennis dome/emergency center” (left), photographed by Kenichi Amano, next to the New Orleans Superdome, post-Katrina].

Designed by Shuhei Endo, the building is both a sports complex and a regional disaster preparedness center – it can become a field hospital, refugee camp, and even perhaps a prison in times of national emergency.

In the event of an earthquake or typhoon, supply trucks can drive directly into the 174,000-square-foot building, thanks to movable glass panels at four locations around the perimeter. But on normal days, athletes enter primarily through a domed foyer on the building’s east side.

We’ve already seen the (as it happens, disastrous) transformation of sports infrastructure into emergency housing during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; but will we all find ourselves someday huddling under floodlights on repurposed football fields after the Big One hits?
I’m reminded of that famous scene from J.G. Ballard’s excellent novel Empire of the Sun, wherein the European prisoners of war are led into Shanghai’s former Olympic Stadium:

This concrete arena had been built on the orders of Madame Chiang Kaishek, in the hope that China might be host to the 1940 Olympic Games. Captured by the Japanese after their invasion in 1937, the stadium became the military headquarters for the war zone south of Shanghai.

The prisoners – former doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and their families – are forced to camp out on the “wet grass” of the overgrown soccer pitch, “waving away the mosquitoes that had followed them into the stadium.” The whole structure has been gutted, meanwhile, stuffed full with spoils of war – cars, tables, and Turkish rugs taken from the rich homes of the International District.

Bedsteads and wardrobes, refrigerators and air-conditioning units were stacked above one another, rising in a slope toward the sky. The immense presidential box, where Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo might once have saluted the world’s athletes, was now crammed with roulette wheels, cocktail bars and a jumble of gilded plaster nymphs holding gaudy lamps above their heads.

Are similarly surreal scenes of material juxtaposition lying in wait for structures such as Shuhei Endo’s “single, cavernous space that holds nine tennis courts,” as earthquake-rattled survivors file in to take up residence amidst the dust and fallen walls of the city?
And are sports infrastructure twinned with military-run refugee camps really the end-game of 21st century disaster urbanism?

[Image: Stacked washing machines, from the J.G. Ballard-inspired series Future Ruins by Michelle Lord].

Of course, I’m also reminded of a scene toward the end of 28 Weeks Later, when the American military helicopter lands on the grass football pitch of Norman Foster’s new Wembley Stadium: the grass, untended now for 28 weeks, is waist-high, like a wild English meadow, the stalks blowing in slow, flattening spirals from the crosswinds of the aircraft’s blades.
How ironic to think that sports stadiums – justifiably bemoaned by certain urban planners for their financial short-sightedness – might someday prove to be the most valuable buildings in the city.

Is the U.S. “operating ‘floating prisons‘ to house those arrested in its war on terror”? The Guardian reports this morning that “the U.S. may have used as many as 17 ships as ‘floating prisons’ since 2001.” Of course, the “floating prison” in this specific case is simply a warship – but actual, purpose-built floating prisons do exist, for instance, in Amsterdam. There, an illegal-immigrant detention center “sits on two concrete platforms, each in turn moored to large steel pilings,” moving up and down with the tides, like a building only temporarily docked on the edge of the city. Bryan Finoki calls this the “ongoing narrative of sea-bound detention,” drawing parallels between this and the practice of extraordinary rendition, wherein detainees are shipped through the skies of the world inside unmarked airplanes. So are airborne prisons far off? Clusters of hot air balloons in the mid-Pacific, “moored” to the Trade Winds, in a strange, post-sovereign airspace outside the reach of international law.

[Image: A Mars polar panorama, taken by the Phoenix lander. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].

Two unrelated bits of news this week strangely merged for me, to surreal effect.
First, we learned that two monkeys were able to move a robotic arm “merely by thinking.” The arm, which included “working shoulder and elbow joints and a clawlike ‘hand’,” was controllable after “probes the width of a human hair were inserted into the neuronal pathways of the monkeys’ motor cortex.”
This field of research is referred to as “mind-controlled robotic prosthetics” – but the mind in control here is not human.
Second, the New York Times reported that “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has successfully lifted its robotic arm” up there on the surface of another planet.
“Testing the arm will take a few days,” we read, “and the first scoops of Martian soil are to be dug up next week.”
And while I know that these stories are not connected, putting them together is like something from a Thomas Pynchon novel: monkeys locked in a room somewhere, controlling the arms of machines on other planets.

[Image: A mountainous horizon; photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].

As if we might discover, at the end of the day, that NASA wasn’t a human organization at all – it was a bunch of rhesus monkeys locked in a lab somewhere, enthroned amidst wires and brain-caps, like some new sign of the Tarot, lost in private visions of machines on alien worlds. An experiment gone awry.
Their “dreams” at night are actually video feeds from probes moving through outer darkness.

“An army of inflatable, spherical robots might one day roll around on the Martian surface,” New Scientist reports. These “rolling spherical rovers” could prove key in mapping other planets – and they might even be put to work spelunking deep caves here on earth. Or, say, exploring large architectural structures: unmanned drones bouncing down the steps of Angkor Wat.

In what sounds like a fairy tale written by Freud, a woman in Japan was arrested last week for living inside another man’s flat – without his knowledge or consent. The Woman Inside. The man noticed food had gone missing from his refrigerator, and so he set up a home surveillance network… which revealed the woman coming and going from a small “cubby hole” in the floor of his closet. She had apparently been living there for nearly a year. BBC. (Thanks, Alex!)