Month: May 2009

Earthquakes on Street View

[Image: A 5.0 earthquake his Los Angeles less than an hour ago – and the epicenter can be seen on Google Street View].

A 5.0 4.7 earthquake hit Los Angeles less than an hour ago – and, aside from the fact that it was remarkably close to my old neighborhood and I hope no one was injured, it seems to be the first earthquake I know of where you can see the epicenter on Google Street View.

[Image: The semi-suburban origins of a seismic event].

The U.S. Geological Service gives us a Google Maps option for viewing tonight’s earthquake reports, but what’s extraordinary is that you can zoom all the way down to the urban surface to see that this earthquake actually had an address: it was epicentered at 3706 W. 106th Street.
Perhaps you could even send it postcards.
Imagine, though, owning the building centered directly over the earthquake that destroys your whole city… And imagine the weird derived value such a property might hold in the future for disaster enthusiasts.
You go to purchase a small house at 3706 W. 106th Street in Los Angeles – only to find that you’ve been outbid, by several orders of magnitude, approaching $50 million, by an earthquake enthusiast in Japan. He or she has gone around the world purchasing epicenters, strange plots of land in the middle of nowhere that have no apparent use or distinction other than that they figure into the unfolding seismic history of our planet’s surface.
It’s an otherwise unknown subculture that has remained camouflaged within the international property market.

The Enemy by Design

[Image: The Berlin Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer].

Jim Rossignol’s recent guest post about the architecture of “evil lairs” reminded me of a brilliant vignette from Deyan Sudjic’s 2005 book The Edifice Complex.
In a chapter called “The Long March to the Leader’s Desk” – a virtuoso example of architectural writing, and easily the best chapter in the book – Sudjic describes how Emil Hácha, Prime Minister of what was then Czechoslovakia, came to visit Adolf Hitler in his Albert Speer-designed Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
The Chancellery – Hitler’s “evil lair,” if you will – proved so psychologically overpowering that Hácha, “a short man in his late sixties with thinning and receding hair,” according to Sudjic, suffered a heart attack and very nearly died after walking through it.

[Image: Hitler’s office in the Chancellery].

Quoting Sudjic at length:

Hácha was white faced, anxious, and dizzy as he made his way across the entrance lobby, completed just eight weeks earlier. He was exactly the kind of visitor the Chancellery was designed for. If ever architecture had been intended for use as a weapon of war, it was here. The grandeur of the Chancellery was an essential part of Hitler’s campaign to browbeat Hácha into surrender. Beyond the courtyard, itself a kind of summation of the Nazi state, was an elaborate sequence of spaces inside the Chancellery, carefully orchestrated to deliver official visitors to Hitler’s presence in a suitably intimidated frame of mind. After a quarter-mile walk, visitors were left in no doubt of the power of the new Germany.

Indeed, Sudjic suggests that Hácha experienced the building “like a spelunker, moving from one giant underground cavern to another, never sure exactly where he would find himself, or what he would have to confront next, as an intimidating and bewildering sequence of spaces unfolded in front of him.”

Past the chancellery guards and out of the way of the floodlights, [Hácha was led] across the porch and into a windowless hall beyond, its wall inlaid with the pagan imagery of mosaic eagles grasping burning torches garlanded with oak leaves, its floors slippery with marble. There was no furniture, nor even a trace of carpet to soften the severity of the hall. (…) Under the hovering glass and the massive marble walls, the bronze doors at the far end of the hall shimmered and beckoned and threatened. Visitors were propelled down its length as if being whirled through a wind tunnel. As Hácha walked, he was aware of his heart accelerating in rapid fluctuating beats.

At this point, Hitler’s Chancellery begins to sound like the boss level of a particularly unnerving video game:

The hall that they walked through was thirty feet high. On the left a parade of windows looked out over Voss Strasse, and on the right were five giant doorways, each seventeen feet high. They stopped at the central pair of double doors, guarded by two more SS men in steel helmets. On a bronze scroll above the door case were the initials AH.

Even here, at the very door to Hitler’s study, Speer’s spatial theatrics weren’t finished.
Passing through those gigantic doors, Hácha found himself standing at one end of a 4000-square-foot room, surrounded by “blood-red marble walls.” At the other end, in front of a fireplace, was “a sofa as big as a lifeboat, occupied by Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring” – and nearby was Hitler, seated at his desk.
Incredibly, “To walk from the door to the desk took a nerve-wracking full minute.”
By that point, though, Czechoslovakia’s fate was sealed: Hácha’s will collapsed as soon as Göring began to describe the Nazis’ military capabilities, and he suffered a heart attack.
Not before signing his country over to Hitler, of course – “a humiliation that he had ample time to reflect on,” Sudjic writes, “during his endless walk back through the marble and mosaic halls of the Chancellery.”

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds

[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol].

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There’s surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it’s okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.

[Image: From World of Warcraft].

Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There’s barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn’t in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dependent on previously pillaged artistic ideas from Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien that evil ambiance is delivered by shorthand. (Of course, World of Warcraft‘s Lich King gets a Stone UFO to fly around in – but it’s still the same old prefab pseudo-Medieval schtick inside). Where the enemy is extra-terrestrial, HR Giger‘s influence is probably going to be felt instead.

[Images: (top) Bran Castle, (bottom) Hunyad Castle, all via Wikipedia].

But, I suspect, these signposts – or the ways in which game designers architecturally represent evil – are becoming too much a part of our everyday imaginative discourse to remain affecting. They’ve begun to lose their danger. The connection with the inhumanity that makes the enemy so thrilling has started to fade via over-familiarity.

Where the evil lair becomes a little more interesting is when its nature is ambiguous – but nevertheless disturbing. Half-Life 2‘s Citadel is an example of this. The brutal gunmetal skyscraper that looms over a nameless Eastern European city, below, appears deeply threatening. But, like everything else in the Half-Life 2 universe, it is unexplained. It does not seem inherently evil. The structure moves and groans; it is a machine of some kind. It is something constructed and mechanical, rather than the clear manifestation or emanation of an evil force. The Citadel is not a fire-rimmed portal to hell, nor a windswept ruin. Nor is it a volcano base. It could even be somehow utilitarian. In fact, it’s reminiscent of the real Moscow’s own television tower.

It is, perhaps, even incidental to the scourge that Half-Life‘s denizens face: alien infrastructure. It is only later, as the plot uncoils the inner architecture of the Citadel, that you come to realise that it is the enemy: the lair of an alien force that must, ultimately, be destroyed.

[Image: From Half-Life 2].

Where the lair is itself the enemy, games are able to excel.

This is the case in both System Shock and System Shock 2, the finest of SF horror games. Both are set aboard spacecraft, but these spacecraft are also the “bodies” of the enemy: SHODAN, a malevolent Artificial Intelligence that controls each vessel.

In a provocative climax of virtuality-within-virtuality, the final act of System Shock 2 is to enter into the cyberspace realm of the AI and defeat SHODAN inside the graphical representation of her own programming. The evil lair is within the mind of the enemy – a motif repeated even more literally in Psychonauts, a game about exploring the physically manifested psyches of various bizarre characters.

[Image: From System Shock 2].

More interesting visually, and far more ambiguous in its delivery of the evil lair, is the underwater city of Rapture, in Bioshock. The designers of this game (some of whom also worked on the System Shock series) poured the early part of the twentieth century into their designs, creating opulent, decaying, Art Deco corridors down which the genetically-enhanced super-human player goes thundering, searching for the enemy.

The ostentation of the city’s innards suggests that the city’s objectivist overseer, Andrew Ryan, must be the enemy we seek. He has, after all, created himself an entire city with a single, over-arching theme: a trademark act of the all-powerful videogame nemesis. Yet, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, although you will inevitably kill Ryan, his architecture tells you nothing about the nature of the enemy you face. Indeed, the true enemy has nothing to do with the stylised nature of this lair at all.

[Image: Channeling Ayn Rand, Andrew Ryan’s city banner announces “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” From Bioshock].

But perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

[Image: From Shadow of the Colossus].

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

[Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol will appear on BLDGBLOG next week].

Infantospatialism, or: adventures in crib design

A new installation at MASS MoCA brings experimental architecture, avant-garde spatiality, and oddly structured dream narratives to kids.

[Image: CRIBS by Matt Bua, as photographed by Kevin Kennefick for MASS MoCA].

CRIBS by Matt Bua is a “Kidpspace exhibition” at this sprawling, industrial-warehouse-turned-modern-art-museum in northwestern Massachusetts.
While CRIBS itself features “an overloaded crib complete with hanging mobiles, recorded ‘lullabies,’ and the bars that keep the infant safe,” the exhibition’s second part, …To CRIBBAGE, is a kind of spatial escape act: the crib has come alive and is climbing out a nearby window: “To escape the chaos of the cluttered future that encroaches on it, the crib must breech the gallery walls, pouring itself down on the museum’s entrance below.”
Child-sized visitors can, in turn, crawl inside it: “This piece of crib can be entered outside the museum to experience the collaborative ‘building game’ Bua calls Architectural Cribbage, a game in which he encourages others to start constructing their own small-scale visionary spaces.”
The dinosaur spine-like spaces created by this apparently sentient crib-structure – it’s Lebbeus Woods meets Lincoln Logs by way of vertebrate biology – would seem rather nightmarish from a child’s perspective, I’d imagine, but there’s also a spatial honesty to that. After all, one of the earliest architectural spaces that a modern human being experiences is a small, enclosed space, locked behind bars – so cribs aren’t necessarily reassuringly womb-like environments.
In fact, I don’t mean to show up 100 years late to the child-rearing game here, but surely there has been some architectural writing about the formative psychological influence that such cribs might have?
At the very least, this sounds like an amazing article for Volume magazine: Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette visit the world’s largest crib designers and manufacturers – in Holland, the States, Canada, Japan – and, amidst on-the-spot New Yorker-style reportage direct from the factory floors (the milling machines, the workers, the design team and their tables full of Macs), they show multiple photographs of different crib spaces. Dimension, color, material choice, layout. It’s the crib as primordial space research.
Pair this, then, with a series of short interviews with development psychologists – and even neurophysicians who have taken research into spatial perception and the infant brain into uncharted realms – and you’re talking National Magazine Award, baby! Damn. I’d read that.
Matt Bua’s CRIBS is on display at MASS MoCA till September 7, 2009.

Books Received

[Image: The “renovation of an old barn into a library and studio” by MOS architects].

BLDGBLOG’s home office here is awash in books. Accordingly, I’ve started a new and more or less regular series of posts called “Books Received.” These will be short descriptions of, and links to, interesting – but not necessarily new – books that have crossed my desk.
Note that these lists will include books I have not read in full – but they will never include books that don’t deserve the attention.
Note, as well, that if you have a book you’d like to see on BLDGBLOG, get in touch – send us a copy, and, if it fits the site, we’ll mention your title in a future Books Received.
Note, finally, that even this list is barely the tip of the iceberg; if you’ve sent me a book recently, please wait till the next list before wondering if I’ll be covering your work. Thanks!

1) The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole by Stuart D. Klipper et al. (Chronicle Books) — Horizontally oriented – that is, you read it like a centerfold – The Antarctic is a genuinely beautiful collection of panoramic photographs taken of, on, and approaching the ice-locked continent. From clouds to empty stretches of black sea water to glacial abstractions – to penguins – Stuart Klipper’s work is a superb document of this frozen landscape. It’s 0º in widescreen. Includes a notable essay by William L. Fox.

2) Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin (Penguin) — The UK paperback edition has a wonderfully textured feel, as if the cover was printed on watercolor paper; that the paper itself, sourced from Forest Stewardship trees, has a distinct materiality to it, fits this book perfectly. The late Roger Deakin travels through the forests of Eurasia and Australia, from the willows of Cambridgeshire, past ruined churches in the Bieszczady Woods, to the towering walnut groves of Kazakhstan. The book had me hooked from page one, where Deakin writes that “the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon.” Deakin was an amazing writer. At one point he describes “the iceberg depths of the wood’s root-world,” just one mind-bending moment in a book so full of interesting sub-stories that I could post about it all month. Don’t miss the Deer Removal Act of 1851, the surreal Jaguar Lount Wood (a landscape sponsored by the automotive firm), the chainsaw-resistant oaks of the Bialowieza Forest – their trunks sparkling with shrapnel from WWII – and the unforgettable closing chapters about harvesting apples and walnuts in the giant forests of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

3) The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin) — Robert Macfarlane was close friends with Roger Deakin, and Deakin’s presence is often cited throughout The Wild Places. Macfarlane’s frustratingly good book focuses on the natural landscapes of Britain, describing the author’s quest for sites of true wildness in today’s UK. Macfarlane is also a fantastic writer; this is another book that could easily be unspun into a whole month’s worth of blog posts. As but one example, Macfarlane finds himself exploring holloways, those deeply incised, sunken roads produced over decades by the passage of people, carts, and horses. Each holloway is “a route that centuries of use has eroded down into the bedrock,” Macfarlane explains, “so that it is recessed beneath the level of the surrounding landscape.” He continues, writing that “the holloways have come to constitute a sunken labyrinth of wildness in the heart of arable England. Most have thrown up their own defences, becoming so overgrown by nettles and briars that they are unwalkable, and have gone unexplored for decades.”

4) Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey (Knopf) — Richard Fortey is one of my favorite authors; his Earth: An Intimate History should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the planetary sciences. Here, Fortey takes us behind the scenes at the institution from which he has only recently retired: London’s Natural History Museum. His descriptions of the museum itself are worth quoting at length. “There seemed to be no end to it,” he writes, referring to the building’s sprawling rooms and corridors:

Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.

Further:

Even to find one’s ways to the towers is an exercise in map reading. The visitor has to go through one door after another apparently leading nowhere. Then there are thin flights of steep stairs that go upwards from floor to floor; I am reminded of a medieval keep, where one floor was for feasting and the next one for brewing up boiling oil. I discovered part of one tower that could only be accessed by a ladder stretched over a roof. Nowadays, the towers do not have permanent staff housed there – something to do with them lacking fire escapes and not complying with some detail of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. Instead there are empty rooms, or ones holding stacks of neglected stuff. A hermit could hide here, undiscovered.

As a way to slip behind the Staff Only doors at a major world museum, the book is unsurpassed.

5) Victory Gardens 2007+ by Amy Franceschini (Gallery 16 Editions) — For the most part, a photo-documentation of the “victory gardens” of Amy Franceschini, scattered amongst the various microclimates of San Francisco, this hardcover guide to urban gardening will make almost anyone want to go out and plant rows of buttercrunch lettuce. Locavores, guerilla gardeners, and revolutionary horticulturalists take note.

6) Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (Harper) — Of course, all these trees and gardens require sunlight – and the chemically transformative inner workings of photosynthesis are the subject of Oliver Morton’s newest book, Eating the Sun. Morton, a Features Editor at Nature, is also the author of the excellent Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World.

7) Atacama Lab by Chris Taylor et al. (Incubo) and Land Arts of the American West by Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert (University of Texas Press) — Two awesome books of landscape design, history, art, and theory, both involving the formidable talents of Chris Taylor. According to Taylor’s own introduction, Atacama Lab – which is bilingually printed in both Spanish and English, contrary to Amazon’s indications – documents “the interpretive frame and working methods of Land Arts of the American West in Chile to broaden our understanding of earthworks and open a dialog between arid lands along the north-south axis of the Americas. The book includes a wide variety of student landscape projects, as well as an essay by the ubiquitous William L. Fox. If you’re wondering what exactly Land Arts of the American West is, you’re in luck: this massive, textbook-like, quasi-monographic guide to the eponymous research institute is an explosive catalog of the terrestrial work of Bill Gilbert, the group’s founder, here in collaboration with Taylor. They write:

Land Arts of the American West is a field program designed to explore the large array of human responses to a specific landscape over an extended period of time… Moving between the land and studio, our inquiry extends from the geologic forces that shape the ground itself to the cultural actions that define place. Within this context, land art includes everything from pictographs and petroglyphs to the construction of roads, dwellings, and monuments as well as traces of those actions.

It’s immersive landscape theory, armed with duffel bags and tents. Sign me up.

8) Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds by Martin Beech (Springer) — Hampered only an appalling choice of paper and by its factory-preset graphic design, Martin Beech’s Terraforming is otherwise a refreshingly quantitative approach to how whole planets can be made habitable for human beings. “The ultimate aim of terraforming,” Beech writes, “is to alter a hostile planetary environment into one that is Earth-like, and eventually walk upon the surface of the new and vibrant world that you or I could walk freely about and explore.” Usually the realm of science fiction and/or moral speculation – indeed, even this book opens with a fictional scenario set in the year 2100 – the controversial idea of terraforming here takes on a numeric, chemical, and even topographic specificity.

9) Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age (Harvard University Press) — Having been oddly obsessed with Xenophon’s Persian Expedition ever since learning that it was one of the inspirations for Sol Yurick’s novel The Warriors – check out BLDGBLOG’s interview with Yurick for more – I was excited to find Robin Waterfield’s micro-history of “Xenophon’s retreat.” The basic question: what do you do when you’re a highly trained mercenary fighting on the losing side in an unparalleled example of fratricidal desert warfare, and you now have to fight your way back home, on foot, temporarily living in caves, engaging in numerous minor skirmishes, followed by spies, passing from what would now be the suburbs of Baghdad to the western shores of Turkey? That’s exactly what Xenophon did – and he went on to a distinguished career as a writer and historian. In other words, it’s an absolutely incredible story. Waterfield’s descriptions of the physical reality of phalanx-based warfare are also awesomely intense.

10) After the City, This (Is How We Live) by Tom Marble (LA Forum) — At some point, architect Tom Marble had the ingenious idea of writing a book about the mysterious subcultures of real estate development and zoning in greater Los Angeles – but to write it as a screenplay. The results are both charming and readable. At times perhaps a bit too didactic to be put on screen by Steven Spielberg, as an experiment in mixing genres this is altogether brilliant, full of voice-over narratives and cuts from scene to scene and even color photographs. But to write this as a screenplay… I’m jealous.

EXT. REUNION — NIGHT
Nat walks up to the front door of a large Colonial house in Pasadena. He is about to knock when the door swings open, revealing a crowd of about twenty people.

Or:

EXT. SOFT ROCK CAFE — DAY
Nat and Jack sit at a restaurant table overlooking a koi pond. Consumer Jazz rises out of rock-shaped speakers. Nat can’t help notice beautiful twenty-something mothers swarm the bridges and banks of the pond, chatting with one another or chasing their kids.

As Nat bites into his sandwich, Jack smiles.

This is what I imagine might happen if Brand Avenue were to move to Hollywood and get a film deal. Again, genius.

11) Subterranean Twin Cities by Greg Brick (University of Minnesota Press) — I associate the underworlds of Minneapolis–St. Paul almost entirely with “Rinker’s Revenge,” an ailment peculiar to urban explorers mentioned by Michael Cook in his interview with BLDGBLOG. Rinker’s Revenge also makes an appearance in Greg Brick’s book-length journey through the city’s substructures, passing waterfalls, tunnels, wine cellars, and drains. “Let’s take an imaginary journey downward through the geological layers of Minnesota by way of a sewer,” Brick begins – before donning waterproof boots and making the descent himself.

12) McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny (Vintage) — A different kind of underworld comes to us in this book that I found absolutely impossible to put down. Wildly undersold by reviews on Amazon, I can’t recommend this book enough. A look at the global counter-economies of sex trafficking, drugs, illegitimate construction, counterfeit goods, and light weaponry, the otherwise somewhat embarrassingly titled McMafia shows us a planet riddled with labyrinthine networks of unregistered transactions, untraceable people, and even illegal building sites. Author Misha Glenny also has a wonderfully sober take on the U.S. War on Drugs, suggesting that is the War on Drugs itself that has allowed the hyper-explosive growth of narcotic black markets – which, in turn, fund wars, rape, violence, and kidnapping across dozens of other economic sectors, worldwide. Toward the end of the book, Glenny even implies that, if the U.S. were to change its approach to drugs, the knock-on effects would be instantly catastrophic for organized crime everywhere. Ignore the title; this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read all year.

13) The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches from the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking by William Langewiesche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — Continuing this Final Four of crime, war, and violence, William Langewiesche’s The Atomic Bazaar could be described as a very long Atlantic article about the growing threat of nuclear trafficking. In the U.S. paperback copy, pages 6-10 are a seering, microsecond-by-microsecond description of what actually happens when a nuclear bomb explodes in a city; if nothing else, go to your local bookstore and read those pages. The rest of the book, however, present a fascinating look at the nightmarish world of post-Soviet nuclear arms storage facilities (and what Langewiesche suggests are the strategically self-defeating U.S. efforts to fund their protection), and an over-long (but fascinating) introduction to the life of A.Q. Khan, the Dutch-trained metallurgist who went on to give Pakistan its first nuclear bomb (and subsequently to market those nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and beyond).

14) Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano (Picador) — The perfect accompaniment to Misha Glenn’s McMafia, Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano – the writing of which resulted in the author having to disappear into police protection – is an often horrific look at the counter-state of organized private crime in and around Naples, Italy. Stomach-turning descriptions of torture – including a spiked baseball bat and decapitation by metal grinder – punctuate what is otherwise a remarkably thoughtful guide to the administrative reality of urban gangsterism. This is what happens to cities when a) there is no state and b) there are lots of machine guns. I hope to post about this book – now also a film – in more detail later, so I will leave my description at that. Suffice it to say, though, it’s worth the read.

15) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham (Verso) — Stephen Graham’s Cities Under Siege has not even been released yet, so I don’t know if it’s good – but I can’t wait to read it. “Drawing on a wealth of original research,” the publishers write, “Stephen Graham shows how Western and Israeli militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a real or imagined conflict zone inhabited by lurking, shadow enemies, and urban inhabitants as targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned, controlled and targeted.” Release date in July 2009.

* * *

All Books Received: August 2015, September 2013, December 2012, June 2012, December 2010 (“Climate Futures List”), May 2010, May 2009, and March 2009.

Landscape Deflation Exercises

[Image: A stunning and very nearly unbelievable glimpse of land subsidence in California’s agricultural heartland; image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Service. “Signs show approximate land levels over the years,” we read at the New York Times. “Groundwater pumping has caused some areas to sink 50 feet.” Now do this as a landscape design exercise: selective deflation of the earth’s surface. Create domes and valleys, sunken gardens that dimple the earth from below.].

Simulant Youth

[Image: Youth storm a building; photo by Todd Krainin for the New York Times. The rest of Krainin’s slideshow should not be missed].

The Boy Scouts of America apparently have a youth anti-terrorism training program here in California, partially dedicated to simulated border patrol exercises.
“The Explorers program,” as it’s called, “a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence – an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.”
This training, we read courtesy of The New York Times, “can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out ‘active shooters,’ like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses.” The kids, toting compressed air guns styled to look like heavy weaponry, even once “raided” a simulated marijuana-growing operation. “I like shooting them,” a 16-year old Scout named Cathy Noriega said, referring to said guns. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”
These and other replicant crime scenes spill out across private backyards temporarily donated for the purpose of youth-officer training. This deliberately militarized new spatial order of well-run simulations – including “building[s] rigged with tripwire, alarms and ‘poison’ gas” – seems to fall somewhere between immersive game, after-school program, sports training, and indoctrination exercise.
The slideshow is worth a view.

Early Man Site

One of the more unique road signs you’ll see between L.A. and Las Vegas is one that announces the nearby presence of an “Early Man Site.”

[Image: The excavation pit at Calico; photo by D. Griffin].

“One of the most controversial archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere,” we read, courtesy of the Calico Early Man Site website, “is located in the Mojave Desert of California, near the town of Barstow. The site, in low hills east of the Calico Mountains, displays evidence for the presence of tool-making humans in the Americas some 200,000 years ago, far earlier than any Western Hemisphere site that has been accepted by the majority of the archaeological community.”
Though no human remains have ever been found there, and the stone tools themselves are suspiciously rock–like, “It is hoped that [the region] may someday reveal early human remains, becoming America’s Olduvai Gorge.”
“The history of this site dates back to 1942,” the Bureau of Land Management explains, “when amateur archaeologists discovered what they believed to be primitive stone tools in this area. Fragments were embedded in the sediments of the shoreline of an ancient Pleistocene Era lake, called Lake Manix.”
Incredibly, famed anthropologist Louis Leakey once worked at the site – though his wife, Mary, was apparently so unconvinced by its early dating that she tried to prevent Louis’s excavations at Calico from being published.

[Image: A Calico Cutter – but is it a rock or a shaped tool?].

The phrase “Early Man Site,” in and of itself, also interests me, in all of its politically incorrect self-assuredness. There appears to be only one other “official” Early Man Site in the world, and that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Indonesia. Aside from these two places, the phrase is simply used as a descriptive term for definable areas of prehistoric anthropological settlement.
But the seeming incongruity – the quasi-Ballardian nature – of seeing an Early Man Site so close to the American highway system (between L.A. and Vegas, no less) would not sound real if you had invented it.
Looking into this strange coincidence of American roadworks and ancient humanity further, I soon discovered that Caltrans – the California Department of Transportation – actually maintains a series of ongoing archaeological projects, including an official Archaeology Branch. They study landscape phenomena such as “the ruins of linear structures” (i.e. “road ruins”).
There is even a Caltrans guide for how to identify a prehistoric site.

San Francisco As It Used To Be

[Image: The astonishingly far inland dune-sea at 16th Avenue and Strawberry Hill in San Francisco, approximately 109 years ago, before being engridded and buried by homes (via); this seems to give an interestingly San Franciscan spin to the old, May ’68 idea that, beneath our streets and paving stones, we will find the beach (or the desert, as the case may be)].

The Hills Have Eyes

[Image: An installation of work by photographer JR on the walls of a Rio favela].

“Undercover photographer” JR – who makes “photo galleries out of our streets” by exhibiting his work in public, as posters – has taken his exhibition strategy a step further. “What is at stake here,” he writes, referring to this change in tactic, “is the assessment of the possibilities of intervention in different environments.”
Amongst these environments are the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – however, here, these “possibilities of intervention” clearly include more opportunities for his work to gain greater exposure.

[Image: Work by JR in Rio].

I have a variety of reactions to this.
My first thought upon seeing these photos was actually that it was quite an interesting visual transformation of the favela. The realization that the Cubist surfaces of a mountain subcity might be transformed, through fragmentary glimpses of representational art – these shard-like pieces of larger works that only add up from certain angles, as if in parallax – seems to be a discovery worth taking further.
However, at least two problems open up here: are you visually transforming the ghetto so that those who live in the city below no longer have to look up and see themselves surrounded by blight? They will see, instead, a hot new contemporary artist on display?
Or could you visually augment the favela in a way that positively impacts both the self-image of, and the quality of life for, the people living there while not erasing the presence of that ghetto from the visual awareness of the central city dwellers? Perhaps there could even be something that looks, I might say, just as bad from the outside, but that nonetheless benefits the people living within.
So the question is: who is this art really for?
Because there’s actually a third player involved in all of this: the international art market, where these sorts of guerrilla exhibition strategies now increase one’s chances of canonization (and coverage on blogs).
Less critically, though, I’m also curious here about the use of representational art.
So often we’ve seen the walls of favelas repainted with primary colors and such like, in an attempt to beautify or, to be more sinister about it, visually correct an otherwise offensive built environment. However, using the faceted hillsides of a favela as a kind of gemlike canvas for representational art actually seems to open up more interesting possibilities.
Could you paint, or glue a poster of, all 200,000+ frames from a new film onto the surfaces of distant buildings? And treat the city as a kind of cinematic installation, a cubist filmography in which walking around is a form of experiential editing? You could live inside a fight scene, or in the closing credits.
Or perhaps you could hike to the top of Buena Vista Park here in San Francisco and look out toward the high-rises of downtown – and see a photograph, installed anamorphically across the rooftops of different buildings, only correctly visible from this precise location (but what if that photo… is a Coke ad?).
Perhaps the future of Cubism is not in some painter’s studio somewhere but in the ten million unexplored, minor surfaces of the city.
I’m reminded here of the (admittedly abstract) work of Felice Varini – and wondering what he might do, given a hillside with ten thousand surfaces all visible from multiple angles.
Finally, though, there are the eyes: in these images, you are being looked at in return. But who is meant to identify with this? Are these the eyes of the favela dwellers looking out upon a city they cannot access, as if to shame those more privileged residents? Or, as the poor wander home at night up steep streets, are these the eyes of the world looking down at them in judgmental scrutiny?
Again, though, there is a third class of people involved here. Perhaps these eyes aren’t looking at the favela at all, and they aren’t looking down at the city below.
They are looking out at the international art market, hoping for coverage in magazines and blogs, looking for their real, intended audience: the people who will see these photographs, at home, around the world. The city is merely their blank wall and host.

(Thanks to Adrian Giddings for the tip!)

The Wave Motors of California

Still embedded somewhere in the shores of California, buried by more than a century of sand, are lost hydroelectric machines.

[Image: The Pacific Wave Motor, via the San Francisco Western Neighborhoods Project].

Deep in the prehistory of green energy technologies now being researched by Alexis Madrigal for his forthcoming book, there is a whole series of devices intended to generate power from the sea.
Precursors of today’s interest in tide power, these were “wave motors” and mechanized basins that turned the coast into a series of timed catchment reservoirs. The landscape itself became a machine.
One of the earliest patents filed for such technology was by Oakland resident Henry Newhouse in 1877. The purpose of his machine was “[t]o utilize the tide for a water-power,” his patent text read, as quoted by the San Francisco-based Western Neighborhoods Project, “and preserve a continuous power by means of the arrangement of a reservoir to catch the water at high-tide, and a discharge-basin to let the water out at low tide and shut it out while the tide is rising.”
Like something designed by Smout Allen, tunnels would be drilled through littoral rockfaces, even as natural bays were both expanded and reinforced. The coastline is soon a linked sequence of valves through which the tides can flow, generating electricity as they pass through a maze of elevated waterwheels and pumps.
A great example of this type of wave motor comes to us from “the Armstrong brothers”; it was built on the coast of Santa Cruz in 1898. Quoting the Western Neighborhoods Project‘s description of that project:

The Armstrongs’ wave motor, an oscillating water column, was built inside the cliff. They had dug a thirty-five by six foot hole into the side of the cliff that ran to a level below low tide. From there another tunnel connected it with the ocean. Inside of the thirty-five-foot well was a pump, and attached to that a 600-pound float. When the waves crashed on the shore, they forced water through the tunnel and up the well, lifting the float, opening the valve and filling the pump. As the water receded, the well water would fall, dropping the pump and the float. The valve would close and the piston, under the weight of the float, forced the water through a pipe to a tank on the hill.

Certain to puzzle future archaeologists, “The only part of the wave motor that remains today is the thirty-five-foot deep well in the cliff.”
In other words, what now appear to be eroded cliffs and chipped coastal plateaus are actually derelict machine parts from the 19th century.

[Images: The Santa Cruz Wave Motor, originally from Scientific American; via John Haskey].

Take Adolph Sutro’s “Aquarium” project, eventually subsumed into his larger quest to create the Sutro Baths: Sutro’s “tide machine was built inside the rocky bluff at Sutro Cove that was then being referred to as ‘Parallel Point’.”

From a natural shelf 17 feet above mean tide level, a catch-basin was built to catch water from three directions. A canal, 8 feet high and 153 feet long with a downwards slope of 3 feet in a hundred carried the ocean water from the catch-basin to the settling basin on the beach. The settling basin, built of cement and of rock taken from boring the canal, was 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 10 feet deep. It held 250,000 gallons.

One might say that these “wave motors” were a kind of prosthetic stratigraphy upon the surface of the earth; left to their own devices, perhaps in a million years they’d even fossilize.
In other examples of this phenomenon, however, the machines weren’t embedded into the geology of the landscape; they were instead constructed, Constant-like, offshore on wooden piers.

[Image: Constant’s New Babylon… reimagined as an offshore wave power farm].

“Most notable” of these designs, we read, “was the Starr Wave Motor of Redondo Beach which began construction in 1907. It was a large project that hoped to supply power for six counties. In the end, the enormous machine collapsed in 1909 because of the flimsy construction of the pier on which it was attached.”
As the Western Neighborhoods Project continues, this was actually just one of many of “the wave motors of southern California.”
Included amongst that sub-class were the Wright Wave Motor of Manhattan Beach (built in 1897), the Reynolds Wave Motor of Huntington Beach (built in 1906) and the Edwards Wave Motor of Imperial Beach (built in 1909). “The Wright Wave Motor is the only one of these Victorian era wave motors still in existence,” we read; however, incredibly, it is now “buried in the sand at the foot of the present pier in Manhattan Beach.”
How fascinating to think that beneath the sand are strange devices long since forgotten by the general public; a retiree out for a stroll one day with a metal detector receives incredibly strong signals from a certain stretch of forlorn coastline – only to begin excavating, slowly and over the course of many months, a monumental hydroelectric machine for which no documentation can be found.
The site is soon renamed Machine Bay – and excavations continue for more than a decade.

[Images: A postcard featuring the Santa Cruz Wave Motor; via John Haskey].

In any case, the very real possibility of generating electrical power from the ocean is something I would absolutely love to see happen – and I would be particularly excited to see California, with its 100 years of research precedence, assume global leadership. As the Western Neighborhoods Project writes, “In California the idea of power from the ocean has been pursued since the 1870s. Experiments have taken place as far south as Imperial Beach near the Mexico border and as far north as Trinidad, in Humboldt County.” And, today, interest in wave-generated electricity only seems to be gaining in strength.
For instance, gubernatorial candidate and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has gone on record, in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, writing that we should “power America with ocean energy.” He even cites the working landscapes of Adolph Sutro; Sutro, San Francisco’s 24th mayor, “recognized the power of San Francisco’s waves,” Newsom writes, “building a wave catch-basin that he hoped to one day turn into a wave-powered ‘overtopping’ system near Cliff House.”
But Newsom also seems to be cultivating a vision in which San Francisco assumes a new position of centrality in the national debate over energy independence – and it would all be based in tides. He writes:

Today in San Francisco, we’re not just talking about ocean power, we are advancing its actual implementation. We have submitted an application to the federal government to develop an underwater wave project off San Francisco’s Ocean Beach that could generate between 30MW and 100MW of power. And we are actively working to develop a tidal power demonstration project in the San Francisco Bay that demonstrates the promise of technologies that capture tides.

I’m all for this, frankly. As Alex Trevi suggests in his post San Francisco As It Will Be (a response to the climage-change-inspired Bay Area design competition Rising Tides), there is an extraordinary amount of machinic innovation to be found in reimagining the region’s hydrology (from Trevi’s “Golden Gate Dam” to his idea for mobile sewers).

[Images: Via the Western Neighborhoods Project].

In fact, the very idea that, somewhere over the hills to the west of us here in San Francisco, there is a sequence of machines plugged into the oceanic itself, is extraordinarily inspiring.
In the process, the dynamic hydroelectric capacity of the sea – if it could replace inland, coal-burning power plants – would revolutionize the geography of power generation in the United States.
Could San Francisco be the next Houston?
Who knows – but a new landscape of electrical substations harvesting gigawatts of coastal electricity from the shores of California, and then delivering it to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, would not only be a more “sustainable” future for power generation, it would be a technologically amazing feat that verges on Romanticism, plugging directly into the elemental.
I could open my own power plant, the BLDGBLOG SeaBattery™, available on the microscale.

[Image: Antonio Sant’Elia‘s hydroelectric-like vision of a Città Nuova; now imagine the Los Angeles River redesigned by Sant’Elia…].

So while the idea of an architect-designed national power grid – for instance, OMA’s plan for a European wind farm – is easy to ridicule as being frivolous, superficial, and distracting, I find it nonetheless quite brilliant to wonder what Antonio Sant’Elia, for instance, might do with a massive Pacific Wave Motor Complex looming somewhere on the coast of Los Angeles or out on some isolated cliffside near Santa Cruz.
After all, if architectural design can make people excited about, and financially interested in, future energy sources, then isn’t the comparatively small extra expense of getting an architect to design pieces of that future landscape worthwhile? One needn’t claim that infrastructure will save the architectural profession – it won’t – while pointing out, unironically, that wave motors are fun to sketch.
I would personally be quite happy to see stylized tide machines take shape in the sea – future archaeological presences there amongst rocks and hills, lost in fog one morning only to reappear at sunset against a backdrop of cresting waves.

[Image: Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova; alternatively, imagine a future Hydroelectric Monastery designed by Peter Zumthor in which monks of water live surrounded by technical equipment, timing their valves with tides, calculating lunar wave algorithms, opening silent gates at night while the rest of the world sleeps].

Until then (if such a day comes), detailed exploration of these derelict motors left corroding in the sand – remnant machinescapes of artificial holes and tide pools, amongst the drowned foundations of forgotten piers – absolutely must continue.
At the very least, I can see an incredible Pamphlet Architecture produced about these lost mechanisms, with sketches and photographs, maps and stratigraphic diagrams in which inexplicable machines appear, several feet below ground.
A Graham Foundation-funded cartography of abandoned coastal machines hidden in the sands of premodern California.
It all seems straightforward enough: we could start that archaeology now – while planning more of such installations for the future.

(Thanks to Alexis Madrigal for the tip!)