Month: April 2009

[Image: From a February 2006 patent application by SolarEn, proposing that terrestrial weather systems might be controlled by mirrors in space].

It was reported yesterday that a California solar energy firm – SolarEn – hopes soon to construct “orbiting solar farms” that will harvest electricity in space.
Each “farm” would be “a set of solar panels in outer space that would beam enough clean energy back to Earth to power half a million homes and could one day potentially help save the planet,” according to the Guardian.
SolarEn’s specific plans are to put “an array of solar panels around 22,000 miles above the earth’s equator using existing rocket technology, and then convert the power generated into radio-frequency transmissions. The radio waves would be beamed back down to antennae in Fresno, California and then converted into electricity and fed into the regular power grid.”
The images you see here, however, are from a patent application SolarEn filed back in February 2006, with quite a different purpose in mind.

[Images: From SolarEn‘s February 2006 patent application].

Using a complicated geometry of spaceborne mirrors – seen in the diagrams below – in tandem with meteorological tracking technology, this device would give SolarEn the ability to control the weather.
Or, as the patent application itself explains, it would be a “Space-based power system and method of altering weather using space-born energy”:

Power system elements are launched into orbit, and the free-floating power system elements are maintained in proper relative alignment, e.g., position, orientation, and shape, using a control system. Energy from the space-based power system is applied to a weather element, such as a hurricane, and alters the weather element to weaken or dissipate the weather element. The weather element can be altered by changing a temperature of a section of a weather element, such as the eye of a hurricane, changing airflows, or changing a path of the weather element.

Weather control has become a topic of near-constant interest for me. As I suggested the other night in my talk at the SVA – and as I also explore in The BLDGBLOG Book – weather control could very well be the future of urban design; in other words, cities might very realistically attempt to engineer specialty microclimates – similar to Beijing‘s Olympic efforts at weather control last summer – as a new means of attracting new residents and future development.
What’s fascinating about SolarEn’s proposal is that it seems entirely possibly that, for instance, Dubai, attempting to recapture the international imagination, might put into orbit a private, geostationary solar farm with which that city could not only power its delirious experiments in beach refrigeration and large-scale air-conditioning, but actually create a new climate for the city.

[Image: A geometry of mirrors in space, from SolarEn‘s February 2006 patent application].

That, of course, or it’s just Real Genius all over again: after all, why use this technology only for stopping hurricanes when you could melt an opposing army’s tanks or even assassinate someone through a brief application of solar overload? We’ll just militarize Apollo, bringing astronomical power down upon our enemies, causing storms of fire in distant cities, evaporating reservoirs, and turning glaciers into roaring torrents of weaponized floodwaters.

[Image: From SolarEn‘s February 2006 patent application].

In an endlessly fascinating article published two years ago in The Wilson Quarterly, historian James R. Fleming describes – among many other things – how a “weather race with the Russians” was fought on the level of climatological R&D between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.
For instance, “In the 1940s,” Fleming writes, “General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, declared, ‘The nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will dominate the globe.'”
Indeed, the U.S. military ultimately hoped that it might learn how to “alter the global climate for strategic purposes,” something which not only involved “using weather as a weapon of warfare,” but “using controlled precipitation as a delivery system for biological and radiological agents.” You could snow anthrax, say, onto the streets of belligerent cities unaware of the infections drifting down from above.
But perhaps all they need is a strange new constellation of mirrors – a remote-controlled blur of light that moves against the stars it’s surrounded by – to hurl typhoons against China or destroy a whole civilization’s agricultural base from above.
Toward the end of his article, Fleming asks:

Assume, for just a moment, that climate control were technically possible. Who would be given the authority to manage it? Who would have the wisdom to dispense drought, severe winters, or the effects of storms to some so that the rest of the planet could prosper? At what cost, economically, aesthetically, and in our moral relationship to nature, would we manipulate the climate?

Of course, having said all that, I don’t mean to imply that SolarEn’s weather control system is some kind of paranoiac Doomsday Device; but anyone who learns to stop – or, more to the point, conjure up – hurricanes from space will nonetheless be sitting on an unimaginably powerful technology.

(Via Alexis Madrigal – who signed a contract for his first book yesterday. Congrats, Alexis!)

[Image: An absurdly beautiful photo of laser-cut steel by Elijah Porter, a student at the Yale School of Architecture].

Elijah Porter, a student at the Yale School of Architecture, has a great Flickr set up called Material Formation in Design. It features several awesome examples of how strategic cutting can transform a solid surface into a porous structure.
In the specific case of the image featured above, you’re looking at what might be called subtractive origami, wherein diamond-shaped cuts have introduced foldability and mesh into a solid sheet of steel.
How interesting to think that, with just the right geometry of cuts and slices, you could activate the otherwise overlooked – or even unknown – baroque possibilities of a given material. You could even hold annual slice-design competitions, where students and mathematicians from around the world get together to display their secrets of cutting; one at a time, they program precise geometries into a laser-cutting machine, and whoever thereby achieves the most complex form, or the largest volume of folded space, wins.
Huge, 8′ x 8′ sheets of steel are turned into spheres and waveforms, in a kind of arabesque of wounding through which metal becomes lace.
One year, a student from Amsterdam blows everyone away by introducing just one, incredibly complex cut… and the whole sheet rolls up to the size of a one-inch ball.
Or you obtain a truck-mounted laser and a grant from the Graham Foundation, and you proceed to cut a new, gridded faultwork into the bedrock of the continent – perforation on the scale of whole landscapes – so that the geography you’re standing on simply folds up and disappears.
Check out the rest of Porter’s Flickr set here.

I was on pins and needles all morning knowing that my doorbell would ring, that there would be a bicycle courier standing there waiting for me – and that he or she would then hand me my very first copy of The BLDGBLOG Book.
And it arrived! It’s real, it’s in my hands – and it looks fantastic.

[Image: The BLDGBLOG Book, published by Chronicle Books, designed by MacFadden & Thorpe, and illustrated by Brendan Callahan. Visible here are images by Joe Alterio, Alex Dragulescu, Sir Peter Cook/Archigram, Lateral Architecture, Michael Cook, Stanley Greenberg, Alexis Tjian, myself, Joel Sanders, Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson, NOAA et al., Lebbeus Woods, NASA et al., Ron Blakey, the USGS, David Maisel, and Brendan Callahan].

So amazing to see this thing in real life!
From a series of Microsoft Word documents, to an ever-changing suite of PDFs, to a year and a half of long, long nights editing more than 125,000 words’ worth of content, it’s now bound, inked, and sitting here looking around at the world it tried to describe.
And there’s so much to say about it, I don’t even really know where to begin.
It’s got five major chapters and a huge bibliography; it’s got interviews, full-color photo spreads (by Simon Norfolk! David Maisel! Edward Burtynsky! Ilkka Halso! Bas Princen! and more!), as well as original illustrations by my colleague at Dwell, Brendan Callahan; it’s got maps and plans and architectural sections; it’s got renderings; it’s got 19th-century British ruin paintings, W.G. Sebald, and J.G. Ballard; it’s got FAT, geology, and rogue tunneling machines; it’s got urban farming, icebergs, archaeology, and Archigram; it’s got a saddle-stitched paperback binding that can open up flat, as well as multi-colored paper and an awesome use of a changing page grid; it’s got two original comic strips by BLDGBLOG (my first!), drawn by Joe Alterio and printed on the inside covers; it’s got runaway climate change, undersea cathedrals, artificial reefs, lost cities, oceangoing utopias, and the Chinese Olympics; it’s got injected landforms, spray-foam monuments to the nuclear power industry, Gustave Doré’s black and white visions of the underworld, and the architecture of Gothic horror; it’s got blimps, retractable villages on the British coast, the San Andreas Fault, underground warfare in the mountains of Afghanistan, and a short interview with Alex Trevi (among so many other interviews! dozens! from Sir Peter Cook, Sam Jacob, and DJ /rupture to Lebbeus Woods and Mary Beard); it’s got exploding stars, simulated mountain ranges on Venus, Mars habitats, and a quantum tomb for Albert Einstein; it’s got Minsuk Cho, China Miéville, Christopher Wren, Frederick the Great, and Paradise Lost.
Man, I’m so excited and so genuinely pleased to see this thing in person after such an incredibly long time putting it together.
Check out some spreads here – and feel free to order the living crap out of this thing on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk, or simply go straight to the source and pick up a copy through Chronicle Books themselves. Also, how incredibly interesting is it for me to see, on Amazon.com, which books customers “also bought,” from Eyal Weizman to 306090 and Neal Stephenson. It’s good company to be in!
So expect more information about the book over the next two months, including voluminous and genuine thank yous for all the people who helped put it together – from my editor, Alan Rapp, and my designers, MacFadden & Thorpe, to everyone who contributed the book’s eye-popping range of 300+ images – as the actual publication date approaches.
But, for now, I just couldn’t let today go without mentioning how happy I am to see this thing. Hello, book.

[Image: CCTV by (or perhaps via?) Charbel Akhras; check out Akhras’s blog for more].

You go home to visit your parents in a gated community built 15 years ago in the midst of what used to be virgin pine forest. As a teenager you ran there at night, before the other houses were constructed, when the only visible lights were the stars above and your parents’ house, self-reflecting in the waters of an artificial lake.

Amidst hills and rocks – most of which have been tastefully arranged – there are now cul-de-sacs and a members-only health club, 18 holes of golf and a 4-star restaurant that specializes in Gulf shrimp.

But, standing above all of it now, interspersed throughout the development on tall steel poles painted green to blend in with the well-trimmed forests around them, are surveillance cameras.

They watch parking lots, intersections, driveways, and golf paths; they look down along diagonals at the lobby of the clubhouse restaurant, at the tables inside, and at the various corridors leading to the indoor pool and weight room.

Alarmed by their sheer quantity and concerned that a wave of petty crime has perhaps broken out, you are instead reassured that these cameras are not here because of crime – not at all – but because a new private development outside Dubai wants to study how Americans live.

These camera feeds are reality TV for them; whole parties get together on Tuesday nights to watch an American suburb: BMWs parking in flower-lined driveways, teenagers mowing lawns, groups of two or three women jogging together in the morning as the sun comes up.

This is a research project by overseas developers, your dad explains, cresting a hill in his car beneath an especially well-populated mast of cameras, as formerly rural hills roll away for miles in the distance, and everyone in the neighborhood receives $1,500 a year for participating.

Before his talk last week at Postopolis! LA, Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, joked that someday he should bring a laser pointer up there to the roof deck and give a new lecture, pointing out specific offices visible around us in the nighttime sky.
That afterhours galaxy of Xerox machines and elevator shafts, paper-covered desks and meeting halls, would all be explained, room by room, from the artificially grassed crown of the Standard Hotel.
And though both of us laughed, I think it’s an amazing idea.

[Image: The view from Postopolis! LA; photo by Dan Hill].

Standing up there in the darkness, looking at bank towers and real estate investment firms, individual offices lit from within (and even whole hallways, stretching horizontally into the sky before disappearing into themselves through a trick of perspective), the 16th, 17th, and much-higher stories of the city all visible to us like an architectural section, you could narrate a kind of local micro-history of nighttime spaces in LA.
It wouldn’t be giving a lecture so much as becoming a planetarium.
“In that building over there,” Coolidge might say, pointing his laser at a window four blocks distant, “the man who invented Technicolor once worked; and in that office over there” – pointing yet further, to One Wilshire, visible from the pool side of the building – “the internet traffic through which you’re able to write this post passes everyday.”
And so on.
The woman who first dreamt up and mapped the flight paths of intercontinental passenger airplanes over LAX once ran a property law services firm in that office, just barely visible with a laser pointer down there.

[Images: The artificial astronomy of downtown Los Angeles, as seen during Postopolis! LA; photographed by Dan Hill].

Or perhaps it could be a new form of immersive storytelling: local novelists stop by every third Friday of the summer months and, in the darkness, using laser pointers, they invent family dramas, murder mysteries, political thrillers, and end-of-the-world catastrophes, all the while pointing to specific rooms and halls within which the action takes place – even the specific computer monitor, visible in someone’s unblinded window, where plot-defining government secrets are thought to be stored…
Alternative fictions of the city.
In a way, I’m reminded of the brilliant Access Restricted program, curated by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (the final edition of which is April 28). Access Restricted is a “free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Lower Manhattan to the general public” – meaning that certain offices, lobbies, meeting rooms, and even whole buildings directly relevant to the lecture taking place inside them are temporarily opened up for public visitation.
But imagine a rooftop version to this, a kind of Rooftops Restricted: you take a roof somewhere in midtown Manhattan and you give it to Paul Auster for the night, with a microphone in one hand and a laser pointer in the other, with 10 or 15 people camped out in sweaters all around him.
Next week, it’s Jonathan Lethem; the week after that, Joseph O’Neill.
You generate a new ad hoc literature for the city, a narrative planetarium that radiates stories outward from the rooftops into the city.