The Inhabitable Wind Turbine

[Image: From Power from the Wind by Palmer Cosslett Putnam].

“In May 1931,” author Palmer Cosslett Putnam wrote in his 1949 book Power from the Wind, and “after two years of wind measurement, a wind-turbine 100 feet in diameter was put in operation on a bluff near Yalta, overlooking the Black Sea, driving a 100-kilowatt, 220-volt induction generator, tied in by a 6300-volt line to the 20,000-kilowatt, peat-burning steam-station at Sevastopol, 20 miles distant.”
As if anticipating BLDGBLOG’s recent look at infrastructural domesticity, Putnam points out that “a streamlined house” containing generators was held aloft behind the turbine – but this “house” also offered a temporary place of rest to the maintenance workers who checked up on the turbine’s workings. Accessible via a long flight of stairs, this airborne space added a small touch of domestic comfort to an otherwise industrial piece of machinery in the sky.

[Sent in by Alexis Madrigal, who also had this image scanned from Putnam’s book].

Backyard Aquaculture

[Image: From a project for fish-farming the Thames by Benedetta Gargiulo, part of a recent design studio at the Architectural Association taught by Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos; via Pruned].

A passing comment on the previous post has me thinking that a fantastic, Pruned-inspired summer architectural studio could be organized around the idea of turning backyard swimming pools not into mausoleum-like, subterranean granny flats, but experimental fish farms and hatcheries, alternative-energy algae-breeding ponds and other avant-garde aquacultural installations. Architecture as artificial ecosystem.
Could you reimagine the food production infrastructure of a city through the aquacultural transformation of its backyard swimming pools?

Down Under

[Image: The subterranean granny flat of the future, via the Sydney Morning Herald].

According to an article published last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, turning backyard swimming pools into subterranean “granny flats” is a spatially innovative, if unexpected, way to assuage Sydney’s growing housing shortage. Indeed, much of Sydney’s projected population growth could simply be “housed within some of [New South Wales’s] 360,000 swimming pools.” These “redeveloped pools” could then be used as detached bedrooms for grandparents, teens, guests, bunker enthusiasts, underground-obsessed schizophrenics, and so on.
The regions 360,000 swimming pools would first be emptied of their water and then transformed, through architectural intervention, into a comfortable domestic space, “complete with a small bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, garden alcove and rooftop windows.”
But where would everyone then swim? In the ocean pools of Sydney, of course.

(Thanks to Simon Sellars for the tip!)

Space Beer

Last week, Sapporo announced that they would soon be serving space beer, “the world’s first beer made with barley descending from plants grown inside the International Space Station.”

The barley used in the new beer is a third-generation offshoot of the original plant stored for five months in a Russian laboratory in the station. The company has made only 100 liters of the new brew, named Sapporo Space Barley, which is not for sale. Sapporo says the beer is safe because it has tested microbes in it and did tests with lab animals and Sapporo employees, too. It also says that the space beer tastes just like regular beer.

For obvious reasons, this brings to mind China’s space seed project, in which “space breeding” puts astronomy to work in the service of contemporary agriculture.

Plant seeds have been blasted into orbit in the hope that “space breeding” holds the key to improving crop yields and disease resistance. Wheat and barley strains developed by the Department of Agriculture and Food in Western Australia (WA) have just landed back on Earth following a 15-day orbital cruise on board China’s Shijian-8 satellite. “Space-breeding refers to the technique of sending seeds into space in a recoverable spacecraft or a high-altitude balloon,” said Agriculture WA barley breeder Chengdao Li. “In the high-vacuum, micro-gravity and strong-radiation space environment, seeds may undergo mutation.”

While this certainly offers landscape architects an unearthly way to boost their horticultural repertoire, it also shows that specialty foods cultivated through genetic interaction with the universe might yet find a comfortable place in the human food chain.
Sipping space beer, ingesting astronomical influence, welcoming literally non-terrestrial nutrition into the planetary web of caloric intake, we’ll find that Sapporo’s newest beer brings a suitably alien tenor to the local amnesia of alcoholic intoxication.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Turning endangered landscapes into beer).

San Francisco As It Should Be

If you happen to be near Los Angeles this weekend, I’ll be giving a 40-45 minute talk this Saturday at the A+D Museum as part of a day-long event organized by Gensler – designers of the tallest building in China, which began construction last week in Shanghai.

The theme for the day is Design Process Innovation, and my own talk is called “San Francisco As It Should Be” – applying many of the ideas that have been found here on BLDGBLOG over the past few years to the (ironically complacent) city where I now live. From tectonic self-engineering to whole-city sound design, via guerrilla gardening, subterranean mobile libraries, and vertical film clouds, among many other ideas and projects, from Fritz Haeg to Sarah Ross to Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings, I’ll be taking a look at a range of ways to alter the face and experience of the city.
The event lasts from 10am-5:30pm, and I’ll be one of the final keynote addresses – from 3-4pm, I believe. It’s not free, unfortunately, but student discounts are available.
The other participants include some really fantastic people, including Scott Robertson of Design Studio Press; the awesome Tali Krakowsky from Imaginary Forces – from whom you’ll soon hear more when I post BLDGBLOG’s long (and very long-delayed) interview with the principals of that firm; Frances Anderton, a colleague of mine at Dwell and host of KCRW’s weekly radio show DnA; Sam Lubell of The Architect’s Newspaper; and many, many, many more.
So if you’re in town and need something to think about, consider stopping by. Here’s a map – and you can read a bit more about it here, with tickets available for purchase here.
If you do make it out, come up and introduce yourself as I’d love to say hello.

Infrastructural Domesticity

Because “it takes too long to come down to ground level each day to make it worthwhile,” a crane operator on the Burj Dubai – the world’s tallest building – is rumored to have “been up there for over a year,” the Daily Telegraph reports.

His name is Babu Sassi, and he is “a fearless young man from Kerala” who has become “the cult hero of Dubai’s army of construction workers.” He also lives several thousand feet above the ground.

[Image: The Burj Dubai, via Wikipedia].

Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – 1) the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space — a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct — is amazing; 2) further, the idea that crane operators are subject to these sorts of urban rumors and speculations brings me back to the idea that there might be a burgeoning comparative literature of mega-construction sites taking shape today, with this particular case representing a strong subgenre: mythic construction worker stories, John Henry-esque figures who single-handedly assemble whole floors of Dubai skyscrapers at midnight, with a cigarette in one hand and a hammer in the other (or so the myths go), as a kind of oral history of the global construction trade; and, finally, 3) there should be some kind of TV show – or a book, or a magazine interview series – similar to Dirty Jobs in which you go around visiting people who live in absurd places – like construction cranes atop the Burj Dubai, or extremely distant lighthouses, or remote drawbridge operation rooms on the south Chinese coast, or the janitorial supply chambers of inner London high-rises – in order to capture what could be called the new infrastructural domesticity: people who go to sleep at night, and brush their teeth, and shave, and change clothes, and shower, inside jungle radar towers for the French foreign legion, or up above the train tracks of Grand Central Station because their shift starts at 3am and they have to stay close to the job.

How do they decorate these spaces, or personalize them, or make them into recognizable homes? It’s like a willful misreading of Heidegger as applied to the question of building, dwelling inside, and thinking about modern infrastructure.

I’m reminded of a line from Paul Beaty’s new novel, Slumberland. Early in the book he writes, and my jaw dropped: “Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.”

[Image: The Burj Dubai, via Wikipedia].

In fact, consider this an official book proposal – to Penguin, say: a quick, 210-page look at strange inhabitations, like that guy who lived inside a bridge in Chicago, only not some mindless catalog of quirky stories – like, ahem, that guy who lived inside a bridge in Chicago – but profiles of people with amazingly strange jobs who have to sleep in places no one else would even imagine calling home. Down beneath the streets of Moscow in a subway switching HQ in a little bunkbed. Out on the Distant Early Warning Line of the U.S. Arctic military – where it’s just you, a toothbrush, and the Lord of the Rings on DVD. You dream about forests.

Or perhaps there is a suite of individual employee bedrooms in some South Pacific FedEx re-routing warehouse, where long-haul pilots are required by labor law to sleep for ten hours between flights; they come through twice a year, leaving Robert Ludlum paperbacks behind for themselves to read later.

The micro-tactics of dwelling inside strange but temporary homes.

In any case, while I’m working on that, the rest of the Daily Telegraph article is worth a quick read.

(Spotted on Archinect).