Month: July 2008

A few years ago, the Boston Globe looked at what we might call the psychiatric impact of that city’s Big Dig project. The Big Dig was a massively expensive urban engineering project that put Boston’s Central Artery underground, freeing up space on the earth’s surface for parks and businesses.

The project, however, was plagued with cost over-runs, engineering difficulties, and the periodic collapse of public support (even the periodic collapse of the ceiling).

From the Globe:

In the short term, mental health experts say, tempers may flare as the public deals with the logistical inconvenience of detours, lingering uncertainty about the safety of the tunnels, and mounting cynicism about the project. (…) And there may be long-term effects as well – ones that could subtly reshape the city’s identity.

What interests me here is not the obvious fact that bad traffic might cause tempers to flare, but the idea that people might develop historically unique psychiatric conditions because of a work of public infrastructure under construction somewhere in their city.

A new tunnel, say, is being dug between Manhattan and New Jersey, and moods in the city begin to darken. Psychiatrists notice a strange surge in patients; people come in complaining of nightmares of forced reunion, being in the same room again with an annoying relative they thought they’d left behind long ago. Homeowners wake at 3am each night, convinced someone’s trying to break into the basement. The whole island is ill at ease.

And it’s all because of that new tunnel getting closer and closer to completion.

Or, say, a new flood barrier is under construction outside London – a gleaming wall of metal that will rise from the tidal murk. Would it change the dreams of city residents? Would this distant piece of hydro-infrastructure affect how Londoners feel about their city – or about themselves? A new confidence. Dreams of survival. Psychoanalysts report that no one dreams of drowning anymore.

On one level here, the answers are both uninteresting and obvious: of course, these sorts of projects would affect the dreams, thoughts, and nightmares of a city’s residents – after all, those new landmarks would be a part of the world these people live within.

But a less obvious, or less easily tracked, impact might be postulated here – that, say, a new bridge between San Francisco and Oakland might subtly change how San Franciscans think about their peninsular city, and that this only becomes obvious in retrospect, when someone notices that prescription rates have changed or the divorce rate has plummeted: it was the psychiatric implication of a new bridge that did it.

Put another way, if a new highway can have a measurable, and easily detected, impact on a city’s economic health and administrative well-being, then could a new highway – or bridge, or tunnel, or flood wall, or, for that matter, sewage treatment plant – have a detectable impact on the city’s mental health? After all, these sorts of massive public works “may carry a psychological burden,” the Boston Globe wrote back in 2006.

It’s the psychiatric infrastructure of the city.

(Thanks to Josh Glenn, Eric Fredericksen, and the Hermenautic Circle for the Boston Globe link).

[Image: Sketches by Smout Allen].

I’ve uploaded an edited MP3 from BLDGBLOG’s interview with Mark Smout and Laura Allen, recorded two weeks ago in London at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
We discuss everything from active vs. passive landscapes to mudflats, river deltas, and the architectural form of managed retreat on the British coast; from the design implications of climate change to artificially refrigerated Chinese tundra in Tibet; from Smout Allen’s educational work with Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture to their work as documented in the excellent and highly recommended Pamphlet Architecture book Augmented Landscapes.

[Images: Sketches by Smout Allen; these images are also briefly explored in the forthcoming BLDGBLOG Book].

The MP3 comes in at about 37 minutes. If you have any thoughts, let me know! I’d love to discuss this further.
Special thanks go out to Mark Smout and Laura Allen themselves, and to Joseph Grima and the Storefront for Art and Architecture for hosting the event.

[Image: Tom McCarthy and Remainder].

I’ve uploaded an MP3 from BLDGBLOG’s interview with novelist Tom McCarthy, recorded on the 4th of July at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in London. We cover a range of topics, from memory and architecture to trauma and the spatial nature of repetition, via Italo Calvino, Marcel Proust, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Burroughs – plus a bit of James Joyce – during a long talk about McCarthy’s novel Remainder (previously described here).
The file is available for download at this link; if you’ve never used Megaupload before, just enter the letters that you see, wait 30-40 seconds as per the instructions, and then knock yourself out.
Of course, I’d love to discuss this discussion further, so if you have any thoughts, please feel free to chime in.
Thanks again to Tom McCarthy for coming out for the conversation, and to Joseph Grima and the Storefront for Art and Architecture for hosting it.

[Images: Poison ivy, resplendent in high-CO2 environments. Photos by Steve Legato for The New York Times].

One of the oft-repeated myths of the present day is that climate change cannot possibly be bad for the living environment; plants will simply thrive in the increased levels of atmospheric CO2. After all, some people call it pollution while others call it life, right?
Well, it turns out that at least one plant unfortunately does like all that carbon dioxide: poison ivy is not only thriving, it is growing more virulent.
The New York Times today reports that “Researchers at Duke University who studied the weed between 1999 and 2004 in a controlled forest area near Chapel Hill, N.C., where high levels of CO2 are pumped into test plots, found that poison ivy not only grew more vigorously, but also produced a more toxic form of urushiol, the resin that causes its rash.”
First, let me briefly say that I’ve actually been to that forest. I once lived, and went to college, in the area, and I had friends who’d developed fascinating conspiracy theories about all those strange devices pumping something – some kind of invisible gas – into the forest… It was all very X-Files.
Second, the article goes on to interview a local horticulturist who now makes a living killing poison ivy. However, he quietly expresses hope that Americans will someday “discover some use for the plant,” referring to poison ivy as a kind of overlooked decorative resource. “In China and Japan,” he says, “they made lacquer out of their resin plants, so they understand and value it… Whereas we just see it as that darn weed over there.”
Of course, it’s interesting to project a direct relationship here between the amount of lacquered furniture being produced in the United States and the intensity of global climate change – that as the latter goes up, so does the former – but such speculation would miss a more interesting point, which is that climate change will not only alter the atmospheric composition of the planet, it will alter the chemical nature of the life that’s able to thrive on it.

In a subscriber-only article published back in 2001 by the London Review of Books, author Neal Ascherson describes “the Akwizgran Discrepancy.”
There “may or may not have been,” he writes, “something called the ‘Akwizgran Discrepancy’.” It’s now just “a forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore.”

Before we get there, though – and before I sidetrack myself pointing out that “diplomatic folklore” would be an amazingly interesting literary sub-genre – Ascherson’s paper is about the fluid nature of “international space.” He focuses particularly on the changing natures of both terrain and sovereignty – and how the definition of one always affects the definition of the other.
Ascherson’s geography is, for the most part, European; he discusses nation-states from the early 20th century through to the end of the Cold War. During that time, we read, there were a number of “less durable spaces” – for instance, the “parallel but unlicensed institutions” of Solidarity-era Poland. He points out that, “in the early 20th century, there were a number of spaces which were not absolutely unpopulated but whose allocation to empires or nation-states was undecided.”
From an imperial standpoint, these unofficially recognized lands and institutions – mostly rural and almost always located near borders – represented “a dangerous breach in space.” They were “intercellular spaces,” we’re told, and they functioned more like “gaps, crevices, interstices, [and] oversights” within much larger systems of sovereign power.
In fact, these “unlicensed” spaces “appear whenever some new international system attempts to demarcate everything sharply, menacingly and in a hurry.”
At one point, then, Ascherson refers to the Akwizgran Discrepancy. Quoting at length:

…when the new Kingdom of Belgium emerged in 1831 – much to the annoyance of the Congress Powers who had imposed the Vienna settlement on Europe after 1815 – there had been a demarcation error at the point where the borders of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands met. Somewhere between Aachen and Verviers, there existed a tiny triangular space, big enough to contain a house, a patch of field and a few fruit trees, which belonged to nobody. (…) I have never been able to find the Discrepancy, which probably never existed. But the thought of it is dear to people.

There is something seemingly timeless in such a fantasy. In the face of sovereignty you propose a space of no sovereignty, a Permanent Autonomous Zone which is not in itself a state, it is simply a space unclaimed by other states.
In this particular Discrepancy, though, that space is “big enough to contain a house” – a detail which is surely dear to libertarian homesteaders everywhere. How exciting it would be to realize one day that your little house, on its plot of land in Manhattan, is actually outside the control of all existing nation-states. You owe taxes to no one. In fact, they owe back-taxes to you.
You live inside a Discrepancy.
It’s like something out of Thomas Pynchon.
Your house is an Embassy for Utopia, so to speak, an anti-state from nowhere under no one’s jurisdiction. Your patron saint is Captain Nemo, who is cousins with Homer’s Nobody.
So is the Akwizgran Discrepancy real – or just something made up in Ascherson’s article? (Try Googling it).
I suppose I’d say that that’s beside the point – that the real point is that the Akwizgran Discrepancy, in many ways, is the only place that is real; it is the exception to sovereignty upon which claims to sovereignty are based. It is the remainder, the outside, the infinitely necessary unclaimed surplus upon which the legitimacy of nation-states has always been premised: discrepancies are the space that is yet to be conquered. Yet to be absorbed. They exemplify the lack of control that governments claim to protect you against, even as they give you a kind of strange attractor for political fantasies: they are an escape-valve to self-rule.
Discrepancies are autonomous spaces of liberation to some – mere Lebensraum to others.

[Image: BLDGBLOG speaks with Geoff Shearcroft (right) from The Agents of Change; photo by John Ng].

John Ng has sent in some photos that he took last week during the event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in London. You can see now that we were all sitting inside a kind of miniature putting green – actually part of an architectural model by the Bjarke Ingels Group – which made me think that perhaps all architectural interviews should take place on miniature putting greens: you rent a miniature golf course for the day and host a second Postopolis! there, open to all.

[Images: Interviewing Smout Allen (top) and Alex Haw (bottom); photos by John Ng].

Thanks again to the speakers, meanwhile, and to John for sending in the photographs. We’ll hopefully have all – or at least some – of the recordings online soon, as well. And if you were there and have more photos to share, please feel free to send them in!

[Image: The Super Sucker in action].

A vacuum has been developed that can suck invasive seaweed off of coral reefs. The machine is called the Super Sucker:

To create the Super Sucker, biologists modified a system designed for gold dredging. Seaweed from reefs is sucked up and dumped onto mesh sorting tables on a barge. Native organisms inadvertently vacuumed are removed and returned to the reef and the seaweed is eventually used by farmers as fertiliser.

Now we just need a job board where you can apply for the position of Reef Sucker: you fly around the world vacuuming weeds off reefs. You drink a lot of coffee and get up at 5am, and you dream of moray eels.
So will they develop a special, dry land version of this thing for cleaning the ornaments of Gothic cathedrals? A huge vacuum chamber beneath the streets of Rome that you can tap into with hoses in order to suck all the dust from the city.
Or perhaps a special type of handheld saw, or modified sander, will be made to go along with the Sucker – the Sander and the Sucker – so you can sculpt coral reefs through precise cuts and abrasions. The Great Barrier Reef becomes rather Bauhaus in appearance. And the reefs of south Florida – well, those now look like something from the Amsterdam School. South Pacific atolls are carved into rings of underwater statuary.
So much for the natural.
The world is more interesting when it’s all been Sucked & Sawed™.