Month: September 2009

[Image: The Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello; modular additions can be seen bolted on from below. Read the project PDF].

Combining Rails to Trails, William Gibson’s Virtual Light, and the same repurposed-preservation strategies behind New York’s High Line, Bay Area architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello have called for stabilizing the disused – and soon to be entirely dismantled – portion of the Bay Bridge. They would then turn it into a pedestrianized urban park and outdoor sports attraction.

[Image: The Bay Bridge and its replacement; on the right is the piece that Rael San Fratello would like to see stabilized. Image via Wikipedia].

And if it works for the Bay Bridge, they suggest, it could work for other disused bridges elsewhere.

“This proposal seeks to repurpose abandoned and closed bridges as sites of potential for parks, cultural centers and housing,” the architects write in the project’s accompanying PDF. In the process, they hope “to demonstrate the potential for re-purposing historic American bridge infrastructure as possible sites for sustainable urban housing and linear parks.”

The immense load capacity of rail bridges allows for the support of program beyond that of parks, suggesting the urbanization of bridges. While the current economic climate suggests a surplus of housing, the economic reality also suggests a push towards urbanization and often the “affordable” housing constructed in suburban environments, which encroaches on the rural, is not what is needed. Instead, by using abandoned bridges in urban areas, we are creating opportunities for sustainable low-cost housing within the urban realm—creating the potential for creative speculation among housing developers by expounding upon the nascent potential of a layered housing-park-bridge typology.

While, on one level, this simply side-steps the immense financial implications associated with structurally maintaining these bridges, and, on another level, it bears an unfortunate resemblance to Boris Johnson’s recent – if not necessarily well-received – call for an inhabitable bridge across the Thames, it does also kick-start a conversation about what we might be able to do with the massive pieces of civic infrastructure that dot the U.S. and are currently scheduled for replacement and demolition.

[Images: (top) Tennis court, bicycle path, and observation module; (middle) Outdoor auditorium; (bottom) swimming pool on the Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello].

And, I have to admit, it would simply be cool:

Imagine housing, recreational and cultural facilities connected to a continuous, lushly planted, green strip, floating above the water—an aerial garden, as the city’s newest park through which you could walk and wander and enjoy the most spectacular views of the bay.

Of course, critics like James Howard Kunstler might suggest that reusing rail infrastructure – or, in this case, highway infrastructure – as anything other than a rejuvenated national rail service is “decadence at its purest,” it is surely just as decadent to watch as functional pieces of infrastructure rot on all sides, as you sit there with your arms crossed, waiting for the nation’s taxpayers to agree with your views on reuse.

[Images: Other habitable bridge: (top) Florence’s Ponte Vecchio; (second) a painting by Peter Jackson of “Old London Bridge“; (third and bottom) Constant’s New Babylon].

In any case, as someone who literally never enjoyed driving across the Bay Bridge for seismic-safety reasons, I have to point out that this proposal still comes with its own set of earthquake-related issues. I was interested, however, to read in the Economist just this week that “there are few safe places to ride out an earthquake. Surprisingly, though, a recently constructed bridge is often one of them.”

Engineers have become good at designing bridges that are earthquake-resistant enough to preserve the lives of those caught crossing when a quake strikes. The problem is that the bridge is often unusable afterwards.

Nonetheless, if you had put millions of dollars’ worth of landscape and housing onto a bridge that was then left abandoned and “unusable” after an earthquake, it would be a very foolhardy investment, indeed.

[Image: Final render of the Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello].

But what of bridges in non-seismic zones? In Sydney, for instance, due to the peninsular nature of walks along Cremorne Point and through Kirribilli, there are places where the Sydney Harbor Bridge appears not to be crossing over water at all, but standing over the rooftops of the city, anchored into the neighborhood. It looks more like a new kind of inland megastructure, strung above the streets and restaurants, like something designed by Perdido Street Station-era China Miéville, than a harbor bridge. An industrial cathedral of exposed ribs and steel tension lines, arcing up into the skyline.

So what if you hung houses from it? What amazing typologies of bolt-on architectural prosthetics could we create, if bridges were aerial foundations and they carried not cars or locomotives but schools and piazzas?

In fact, I’m reminded of this unexpectedly inspiring – structurally speaking – proposal by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which sought to string the suspension cables of a new pedestrian bridge from inside the nearby buildings of a rebuilt Leamouth Peninsula (click through to their image gallery for more).

[Image: A proposal for London’s Leamouth Peninsula by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill].

Returning to Rael San Fratello‘s Bay Line, though, there are obviously still huge issues associated with the unusually catastrophic nature of structural failure when it comes to inhabitable bridges, as well as the financially prohibitive needs of regular maintenance, but treating suspension bridges simply as another type of district in the city is an undeniably interesting urban idea.

(Via Streetsblog SF and Ronald Rael. Meanwhile, Rael’s recently published book Earth Architecture is an excellent and thoughtful survey of earthen structures across the world and throughout building history; Rael’s old school blog, megablog, is also worth a read for its eye-popping and often literally world-altering architectural ambitions).

[Image: From “Imprints on the Andes” by Studio Orta].

While writing a post earlier this week about an exhibition in Paris, called Uninhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments, I stumbled upon this project by Lucy and Jorge Orta, aka Studio Orta.

Performed fourteen years ago, “Imprints on the Andes” used “PAE light cannons,” which “enable[d] gigantic mobile images to be projected up to 1km in distance.” The artists thus projected massive hieroglyphic shapes onto the ruins of Macchu Picchu and on the mountainsides beyond.

In fact, the cannons are strong enough to be seen in broad daylight.

[Image: From “Imprints on the Andes” by Studio Orta].

The effect is quite amazing, especially if one were to encounter these things without foreknowledge of what they were or that they’d be there.

You hike over a remote rise in the mountainous deserts of Utah – and there, ahead, moving ever so slightly, is a strange shape, like an enemy ship from Space Invaders, a shining path of alien signs hovering on the geologies all around you.

[Images: From “Imprints on the Andes” by Studio Orta].

Unfortunately, the effect is not quite as exciting when used on buildings.

[Image: Preflooded Wetlands by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

Unexpectedly apropos of the previous post, Liam Young of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, together with Darryl Chen, has created a series of quite beautiful images called “Postcards from a Green Future” – one of which, seen above, uses the Maunsell Sea Forts as a gantried foundation for suburban anti-flood design in an idyllic southeast England.

The entire suite of images is almost farcically green – it’s sustainability redone as Grand Guignol. These speculative scenes of “a green future” show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it’s an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London’s most distant scattered cityscape.

[Image: Waste and Biogas and Permacultural Hinterland by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

But the images also betray an interest in the murky borders between the synthetic and the geological, the organic and the mass-produced. What if those verdant fields of green out there are actually cloned and genetically-modified? What if that well-trimmed nature is simply an exhibition on display?

[Image: Primordial Garden Sanctuary and Incarceration Tower by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

You can read about the entire project in new four-part series of blog posts over at Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today – just go to the righthand column (“Slow Thoughts”) and keep scrolling down…

Opening today in Paris is a new exhibition called Uninhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments. Featured artists include Catherine Rannou, Connie Mendoza, and Studio Orta, among many others.

[Image: From Numerical Desert by Connie Mendoza].

Rannou’s work has ranged from speculative building projects for spatially challenging sites in the city (seen below) to her work Colonisation 2041, featured in the exhibition. This latter project is “an installation reflecting the active and actual occupation that the development of scientific stations in Antarctica represents; energy dependence, waste management, roads and tunnels, planes, tractors, helicopters, and building materials all point to a form of ‘urbanisation’ that is clearly in progress.”

[Image: Parentheses, an “habiter dans les interstices de la ville,” by Catherine Rannou].

Meanwhile, Connie Mendoza produces diagrammatic artworks, analyses of the optical landscapes of mirages, and fascinating quasi-documentary photo-projects, including the stunning Moon Landscapes and Numerical Desert. Numerical Desert, which will be on display in Paris, explores the Atacama Large Millimeter Array through black-and-white photos; it comes with “drawings based on the data of the astronomical observation of stars and galaxies in coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere.” She’s also got a blog.

[Image: Antarctic Village by Studio Orta].

Studio Orta’s work touches on political questions associated with empty landscapes – including the question of whether or not one could ever be a citizen of Antarctica. Their Antarctic Village, for instance, pictured above, falls somewhere between an experiment in extreme camping and a stab at temporary utopian space unaffiliated with national governments.

Antarctic Village is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people.

For more information about the exhibition, check out the website.

(Thanks to William Fox for the tip!)

[Image: The offshore metropolis of Oil Rocks, Azerbaijan, via Wikipedia].

There are a number of massive artificial peninsulas extending offshore from the Azerbaijani city of Baku. The most famous of these is known as Oil Rocks, and it is an offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea.

It even appears on a postage stamp.

[Image: The Oil Rocks postage stamp, via Wikipedia].

As Wikipedia informs us:

The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some workers’ dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex’s 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure.

These “new additions… grafted onto the existing structure” are at least partially responsible for the epic nature of the place, as it seems to push ever further outward into the tides and weather.

Funded with private money, and created entirely for the purpose of extracting oil from the Caspian’s shallow seabed, these and other peninsular extensions of Baku are functional urbanism at its most giddy: uni-purpose structures like something dreamt up by Guy Maunsell, by way of the obligatory reference to Constant’s New Babylon.

This metropolis of platforms would not be out of place in a design studio themed around micronations, the future of private urbanism, or even failed utopias.

[Image: Other artificial peninsular cities of Baku, seen from above. View larger! Via Google Maps].

Oil Rocks, we read elsewhere, “is a full town on the sea: it has 200 km of streets built on piles and landfill… There are tall blocks of flats, a bakery, a cinema, a garden, [and] a school.” There are also helipads, helping to shorten the journey from the city’s outer architectural limits back to shore.

According to Statoil, meanwhile, Oil Rocks “looks from the air like a cobweb scattered with large drops of water.” Over-extending the metaphor a bit, they point out that a “closer inspection shows that the ‘web’ is made up of gangways across the sea, the ‘spider’ at its heart is the field centre and the ‘water drops’ are the many production installations.” Structurally speaking, “Sand and stone were shipped out to create dry land, and steel pillars attached to the seabed as the foundation for huge living quarters.”

Of course, it would interesting to see if something similar could be created if only we could connect all the unused ships of the global, recession-hit shipping industry together with gangways and thus institute our own Armada – but, until then, this is still absurdly interesting.

[Images: Photos of offshore oil structures in the Caspian by Stanley Greene; spotted via Artificial Owl].

In a recent issue of John Knechtel’s Alphabet City, called Fuel, there is a proposal by architect Maya Przybylski called “Occupying the Caspian Sea: A One Hundred Year Plan.” Przybylski specifically addresses the derelict – or soon to be derelict – extraction platforms of the Caspian. She approaches the sea as if seeing it “through the filter of oil operations: concession systems, contract blocks, pipelines, tanker ports and routes, national boundaries, bathymetric and climatic conditions, and the oil fields themselves.”

Przybylski focuses, among many things, on the fact that the architectural remains of the extraction industry are being gradually recolonized by the region’s wildlife. She writes, for instance, that “many birds have claimed abandoned oil rigs as resting points along their routes,” and that “the offshore oil installations have become an important alternative sanctuary,” both for birds and for fish. Indeed, “birds have begun to fly from rig to rig during their migration, avoiding contact with the shore altogether.” In many ways, and for obvious reasons, I’m reminded of the EcoRigs project (about which I’ve written a short paper for a forthcoming issue of New Geographies), which seeks to turn abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico into new endoskeletons for specially curated ecosystems at sea.

While Przybylski does not, in fact, mention Oil Rocks, this stilted metropolis-at-sea is quite easy to think of it when she writes that, “When the oil companies begin to wind down their operations, the key to the proposed renewal of the sea will be the reexploitation of the relics they leave behind.” If Oil Rocks is one of these relics, then, in all of its sprawling, labyrinthine wonder, what could we do with it?

Whether subject to historic preservation or transformed into a Dubai-style resort, what might Oil Rocks yet become?