Month: July 2010

[Image: From The Thing, directed by John Carpenter].

As glaciers and mountain snow packs recede, their disappearance sometimes reveals archaeological evidence of earlier human settlements, with tools and other implements dropping out of the melting ice. As LiveScience reported back in April, “patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic” are disappearing, revealing “a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools” in their wake.

The forensic investigation of these unexpected windows into human history has been dubbed “ice patch archaeology.”

One of the field’s originary archaeologists drew an analogy last week for how these artifacts probably got there:

Maybe you missed a shot and your weapon disappeared into the snowbank. It’s like finding your keys when you drop them in snow. You’re not going to find them until spring. Well, the spring hasn’t come until these things started melting for the first time, in some instances, in many, many thousands of years.

The idea that historical surprises are in store for us, waiting to be revealed—as if by glacial metabolism—in an era of global climate change is a compelling one (and seemingly an inexhaustible plot device for burgeoning writers). In fact, the image that opens this post was taken from John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, in which a spaceship—along with its infectious, shapeshifting passenger—is discovered buried in Antarctic ice that’s at least 100,000 years old. It’s a kind of moving archaeological site, carved from ancient ice and drifting along with the pulse of the glacier.

[Image: Antarctica’s Blood Falls“, via Atlas Obscura].

But we needn’t turn to scifi to find extraordinary examples of “ice patch archaeology.”

Earlier this year, for instance, Atlas Obscura noted a site in Antarctica called “Blood Falls.” It is a “five-story, blood-red waterfall [that] pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys.”

Roughly two million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a world with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

The scientific value of these previously inaccessible reservoirs of planetary history should only become more obvious in the years to come.

Climate change, together with melting glaciers, becomes an inadvertent archaeology of the human—and profoundly inhuman—past.

But, of course, we’ve seen other stories like this, in which caches of human history unexpectedly reappear as the climate heats up. Last year, for instance, we looked at melting glaciers as chemical archives: “As the world’s glaciers melt, they’ve begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years.”

Thirty years is nothing compared to the hundreds—often thousands—of years involved in ice patch archaeology, but the untimely release of dangerous chemicals we once thought long-forgotten is chilling proof that very few things are ever gone for good.

(Via Archaeology).

[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].

One of the most extraordinary—and timely—subcollections in the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture can be found resting on a few metal shelves in the basement, where you will discover stacks of old, oil exploration-themed board games.

Cartel: The International Oil Game.
La Conquête du Pétrole.
King Oil: Combine Luck and Strategy to Control the Oil Fields.
Oil: The Slickest Game in Town.
Total Depth: An Oil Man’s Game.

There’s even the confident one-word title of Gusher, with no description or subtitle needed—or, if none of those strikes your fancy, you can always play a few rounds of Gas Crisis. Its goals include an exhortation to “Master the Minicar” and “Shun the Sheikhs,” showing that smaller cars (and better gas mileage) have been seen as tools of foreign policy since at least the 1970s, when many of these games were first released.

But the one game that seems particularly delirious, a kind of sad joke now, or unfortunate coincidence, is Offshore Oil Strike, “Designed and Manufactured by Printbox (Scotland) Limited in collaboration with The British Petroleum Company Limited.” Offshore Oil Strike, brought to you by BP.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

With this “exciting board game for all the family,” released in 1970, BP delivered all “the thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your own…”

Bring in your own “Offshore Petro-Dollars,” that is.

[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The game’s internal monetary supply comes in denominations of $200,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, $2,000,000, $10,000,000, and $20,000,000—which is good because you need to earn a lot of it: “The 1st player to make $120,000,000 cash is regarded as the winner.”

After all, it’s “a race to find and develop the riches ‘neath the seabed,” where no deepwater is beyond the horizon of possible drilling.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Accumulating this fortune, however, is not without its difficulties. Each player has “Hazard” cards to deal with; here are some of the risks BP thought to include:

—”Accident. Rig shuts down while replacement of key personnel takes place. Miss one turn.”
—”Fire breaks out. Pay $2,500,000 for repairs.”
—”Hit High-Pressure Gas—Rig Damaged. Specialists called in.”
—”Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Repairs cost $2,000,000″
—”Drill pipe breaks. Pay $500,000 for replacement.”
—”Strike High Pressure Gas. Platform Destroyed.”
—”Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Oil Slick Clean-Up costs. Pay $1,000,000.”

Players are assigned one of four competing oil company identities, each of which is associated with a specific urban headquarters: Chevron/Rotterdam, Mobil/Dieppe, Amoco/Bergen, and BP/Hull.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

As the CCA wrote in their excellent book and exhibition catalog, Sorry, Out of Gas, “Historians and researchers often see games as a source of information about the customs and concerns of a given era. The way games work, their meanings and goals, are linked to the social context in which they are invented and popularized.”

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

I’ve included several photos of BP’s game here so that you can see the space of play for yourself. But perhaps it’s time now for BP to release a new edition: Beyond Petroleum: Nightmare Well!, with whole new strategies for hazards and risks, with “Junk Shot” cards and “Top Kill” moves to deploy when needed. Perhaps they could even throw in a few special supplements for good measure: Perpetual Blow-Out! or It’ll Take a Clean-Up of $6 Billion to Bring the Gulf Back!

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Anderson Cooper and Joe Barton could play a few rounds on national TV.

#CCA

Just a quick note that I will be speaking in Montreal Wednesday evening, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as part of an informal series of summer research presentations hosted in the historic Shaughnessy House.

[Image: One of the CCA‘s “cold vaults”; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The talk is free and open to the public, so if you are around please feel free to stop in (if you are not, it will be live-streamed). From the event description:

Blogger Geoff Manaugh discusses the strategic opportunities and limitations of blogging as a form of architectural research. Manaugh has been testing out a program called “Bloggers in the Archive,” meant to see if the point-and-shoot pace of a blog and the inertia of an archive can work together to generate public interest in artifacts that are usually stored in vaults. In his seminar, he also discusses blogging in general, based on his experience of writing BLDGBLOG.

The talk is called “On Method,” as the bulk of this informal presentation—and, I hope, the ensuing discussion—will be about the pros and cons of using a blog as a publicly accessible research notebook for the ongoing exploration of certain themes, whether they are architectural, literary, scientific, cinematic, sonic, or otherwise. I believe there will also be a reception of some kind immediately afterward, and things kick off at 6pm. Hope to see some of you there!

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Take a Closer Listen is a project by the talented Dutch graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt in which a variety of people have been asked to describe their favorite sound. The results—which range from quick, five-word responses to entire short narratives about found sounds—were collected into an eponymous booklet, Take a Closer Listen, this past winter.

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Flipping through the pamphlet is like reading a silent soundtrack to a landscape you will never see in full.

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Zuydervelt’s original inspiration for the project is worth quoting in full:

It was a beautiful, sunny day in July, and I was lying in a park in Geneva. My iPod was out of batteries, but I still had my headphones on. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds surrounding me. Having these earphones in somehow gave me the idea that I was more actively listening than I normally would. As if these environmental sounds were playing on my iPod. A world was slowly unfolding to me. I could hear people talking, cycling, walking and roller-skating. A dog barking. A truck passing. Behind me, there was the rhythmic sputter of a sprinkler installation, and kids laughing and fooling around. I could hear a wine bottle being uncorked 3 and a box of crackers being opened. But most enjoyable were the sparrows, flying around nervously, trying to get hold of breadcrumbs. They were flying from tree to tree, from my left ear to my right. A chirp here and there. Sometimes they would burst out in an excited chirping laughter, as if they were watching a ballgame and someone scored. It felt like listening to a great radio play. I just had to do something with this. A project on environmental sound. Maybe a book?

Here, below, are some sample spreads from the book, as well as one or two examples I particularly enjoyed reading.

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Many of the stories are worth reading in full, if for no other reason than to watch how acoustic information is made narratively accessible through verbal description. Here is Romke Kleefstra, for instance, on “the flapping of birds’ wings”:

In winter, over 30,000 geese spend the night at a roost near one of the Frisian lakes, not far from my house. At sunrise I often go there to watch them. Especially their spectacular departure. To fly to a nearby place to spend the day feeding on meadows, the geese will lift off together, in one big movement. Imagine a group of over a thousand percussionists, positioned in a diamond shape, all having a floor tom and two brushes. A split second after the rightmost percussionist starts a five second ruffle, the percussionists left of him do the same, and so forth. Further to the middle of the group, the sound grows louder, fading again when the middle is passed, leaving the leftmost percussionist to make the final beat on his kit. A group of alto sax players is mimicking this movement by simultaneously blowing short puffs. It’s truly incredible.

Or here is Chris Herbert on “echoes in a tube station,” the London Underground turned into a vast musical instrument made of compressed human voices:

A few years ago, I wandered into a tube station on the deeply buried Central Line in London. Along the platform and out of my line of sight, three or four girls were singing close RnB harmonies. By the time this arrived at my ear, it had been bounced along several hundred metres of tunnel, an unfathomable series of natural comb filters that rendered it an unintelligible but gorgeous wooze, speckled with the faint percussive clank and rumble of a fully operational mass transit system.
Although I sometimes record environmental sounds, you can never really be prepared for those one-off events that take you by surprise. In a way, I’m glad all I was able to do was stand and listen when I chanced upon the most beautiful improvised arrangement. I think every piece of music I have ever made has tried but fallen short of recalling this moment.

The assumed ephemeral nature of these found sounds becomes readily apparent after reading Zuydervelt’s edited collection; but is the intangible, nostalgic, beyond-grasp nature of sound inherent to the sonic experience, or simply an artifact of the rhetorical tone most often used in today’s writing about the acoustic environment?

In other words, are sounds really the disappearing remnants of a world that we are always trying—and failing—to reassemble? Is there really always a connection between sound and memory or sound and nostalgia—not sound and physical experience, say, or even sound as a subset of astronomy?

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

For instance, as a rhetorical counterexample—one that does not rely on memory at all in order to communicate the acoustic and experiential value of a given sound—here is Nate Wooley on “the drone of an electrical generator”:

There’s a giant generator that heats and cools the large library building for the main campus of New York University. The sound of its drone is very deep, rich and colorful. The overtones seem to dance above a base set of fundamentals the same way as in an Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece. It changes slowly and organically, almost imperceptibly, from one place to the other. No one just walking by would ever even notice its almost human quality, but if you stand and listen for five minutes, the building seems to breathe and sing.

And I was particularly struck by this one—here is Felicity Ford on “the clunk of a cooling paint can”:

I love the sound of paint tins in an outside building responding to shifts in temperature. When they get warm, the air inside the tins expands, and then when they cool down again, the air contracts, pulling the metal lids down with a subtle, percussive clunk. I love how it sounds a little bit like a steel drum—sort of musical and metallic. And I love how the sound always comes as a surprise.

The crisp, animate nature of both of those—the electrical generator and the paint cans alike—is astonishing.

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Of course, certain sounds do seem maddeningly unrepeatable and lost to time—for instance, the utter weirdness of things like the Bloop, Julia, and the eery Slowdown, even, for that matter, #pdxboom—but I have to wonder if the gossamer-like ghostly nature of sound, its always-slipping-away-into-nothing-ness, is not simply the result of writers emotionally acting out their own inability to conjure a sound in its precise and every detail. The language used becomes a performance of personal yearning, not a description of the sound at all.

But descriptions are descriptions, not technical reproductions of noise itself. I’m reminded of those ads from seven or eight years ago—perhaps produced by Meineke?—in which customers were shown unsuccessfully acting out the strange noises their car engines had begun to make, implying that fixing an automobile is at least as much about re-tuning industrial machinery to fit within an appropriate acoustic range as it is about remedying potentially fatal mechanical flaws. It also makes me wonder if a car has ever been recalled because it sounded bad. (See also my recent Q&A with sonic historian Sabine von Fischer for the Canadian Centre for Architecture about some of these ideas: Noise versus noise).

In any case, Take a Closer Listen is a fascinating project, and I would love to see it opened up to the entire commenting public, perhaps as a dedicated website, a global archive of acoustic descriptions from anyone who wants to log-in.

1) Have you been reading The Launch Box? “The purpose of this blog is to document activities in and around the 2nd Avenue Subway Tunnel Boring Machine Launch Box construction site between 91st and 95th streets in Manhattan.”

[Image: “This odd looking structure is part of the steel form that is being used to cast a concrete lining for the 72nd Street work shaft. This shaft, and the other one that’s just like it [at 69th Street], will be used during the construction of the 72nd Street station”; photo by The Launch Box].

As such, it features a pretty fascinating weekly catalog of the shifting surface structures found on-site—from plywood shacks to piles of tarps—as well as the actual subterranean work sites, including temporary elevators, off-duty digging equipment, and even rat infestations (“a Maginot Line of rat traps has been deployed along the east fence line of the work site”), associated with this massive urban engineering project. Start here, perhaps—but also don’t miss what The Launch Box calls “the official New York City rat map.”

[Image: Photo by The Launch Box].

2) Pruned has redesigned—complete with its own personal artificial sun.

3) Check out this book about Improvised Architecture in Amsterdam Industrial Squats and Collectives. “This web-book presents a visual-conceptual-experiential documentation of four occupied industrial sites in central Amsterdam, researched and recorded between 1990 and 1997 and between 2006 and 2008.”

[Image: A projection for day 360 of the oil spill, courtesy of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology].

4) “There are more than 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico, according to AP,” we read in the Guardian, “of which 600 belonged to BP.”

The oldest of the abandoned wells dates back to the late 1940s and the AP investigation highlights concerns about the way in which some of the wells have been plugged, especially the 3,500 neglected wells which are catalogued by the government as “temporarily abandoned.” The rules for shutting off temporarily closed wells is not as strict as for completely abandoned wells.

Further:

AP quoted state officials as estimating that tens of thousands are badly sealed, either because they pre-date strict regulation or because the operating companies violated rules. Texas alone has plugged more than 21,000 abandoned wells to control pollution, according to the state comptroller’s office. In state-controlled waters off the coast of California, many abandoned wells have had to be resealed. But in deeper federal waters, AP points out, there is very little investigation into the state of abandoned wells.

If you’d like to see where all of BP’s oil might end up, check out this frightening simulation of one full year of ocean currents bringing the spill out into the Atlantic Ocean; the above image is the projected Day 360, courtesy of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

On a side note, this all reminds me of an architectural detail from H.P. Lovecraft’s scifi/horror story “The Shadow Out Of Time.” The story’s narrator discovers a massive abandoned city full of “never-opened trap-doors,” we read, “sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.” He keeps returning to these doors, over and over again, as if obsessed by what they might be holding back—”those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung,” “sealed trap-doors,” he says again, as if stuttering, constructed “for strategic use in fighting the elder things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places”—only here, in the Gulf of Mexico, it is a shapeless presence older than human history, an “elder thing” made of black liquid petroleum, leaking slowly into the subtropical waters of the planet. So will our “sealed trap-doors” hold over time? Generations from now, will ruptured fittings and broken “metal bands” release untold amounts of shapeless toxicity into the sea?

[Image: “A tapping machine used in tests to evaluate the ability of floor coverings to reduce the transmission of impact sound from one floor to another in multi-family dwellings,” courtesy of the National Research Council Canada].

5) Over at the CCA, I have posted a Q&A with sonic historian Sabine von Fischer, who is visiting Montréal for the summer from the ETH in Zürich. Here’s an excerpt:

Sabine von Fischer: The tapping machine, as it was first published in 1930 and as it was standardized in the 1960s, has five steel rods that hammer against the floor. The speed has changed a bit over time—and its speed is now standardized—but it just tramples on the floor. It’s a very basic machine.

The principle of the machine can be found in older apparatuses, such as those used in grinding food items, but this particular application was to simulate the sound of footsteps, furniture, and machines on the floors of multistorey buildings. In this form—with five hammers, which are electrically operated—it was first published in 1930, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Everyone who has been working on building acoustics claims that, since 1923 or 1926, they’ve been doing similar tests on structure-borne sound, but almost all of those earlier tests were done with women in high-heeled shoes. High-heeled shoes make a very distinct sound… [T]he National Bureau of Standards, in the period between the wars, had ladies in high-heeled shoes walking around inside buildings.

Read the interview in full.

6) Are you going to Foodprint Toronto? It’s July 31, it’s free $5, and it’s got an amazing line-up. I hope to see you there!

7) No description needed: Pyongyang Traffic Girls From The Sky.

8) GOOD reports on the UK’s Empty Shops Network: “For Dan Thompson, helping to get empty shops back into action has become a full-time job. The founder of the Empty Shops Network, Thompson says that the United Kingdom has seen a surge in pop-up shops, galleries, and community spaces that tap into a wider national mood: “There’s a DIY movement going on with more and more people setting up their own events… you get knitting groups setting up in pubs and cafes, [gardening] groups, people are really engaging with their local community. It’s a huge shift in the national culture.”

9) Doomsday economics. As the New York Times reports, “market forecaster and social theorist” Robert Prechter “is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions—perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.” Believing that a series of “repetitive patterns, or ‘fractals,’ in the stock market” will destabilize the global economic system, Prechter warns that “investors will be devastated in a crash much worse than the declines of 2008 and early 2009 or the worst years of the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873.”

The Dow, which now stands at 9,686.48, is likely to fall well below 1,000 over perhaps five or six years as a grand market cycle comes to an end, he said. That unraveling, combined with a depression and deflation, will make anyone holding cash “extremely grateful for their prudence.”

Indeed, Schechter compares the current state of the global stock market to the South Sea Bubble.

10) Explore the market in weather derivatives, as well as the supposed need for “weather risk professionals.”

Extra Credit: “Disneyland, with its far-flung colonies in Florida, Japan and France as well as affiliated city-states such as EPCOT, is a key symbol of contemporary American culture… The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks follows the layout of the parks themselves—from berm to Main Street, and from hub to ‘lands’: Frontierland and Adventureland, playing on the relationship between humankind, myth, and nature; Fantasyland, with its imagery from the movies; and Tomorrowland, with its once optimistic visions of the future becoming sinister, playful and ironic.” Think of it as an architectural variation on Susan Willis’s Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World.

(Some links via Tim Maly, Nicola Twilley, Steve Silberman, @oceanplastics, and other sources I might have forgotten. Don’t miss Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12).

[Image: From Auto-Defense by Stéphane Malka].

In the second of two projects by architect Stéphane Malka that I want to look at here, the Arche de la Défense in Paris has been transformed into a honeycomb of subsidiary spaces: encrusted with modules that have been attached to the inside of the existing building’s vast interior.

[Image: From Auto-Defense by Stéphane Malka].

As writer and curator Maryse Quinton describes it, “this study imagines the hijacking of a building that is symbolic for its monumentality and its location: the Arche de la Défense.”

A pocket of active resistance installs itself within the building in the form of a modular complex offering an alternative and militant lifestyle. The project bears with it a permanent insurrection and unites all malcontents, whether refugees, stateless persons, dissidents, outcasts or utopians. Referring to the notion of concretion, its construction principle allows for expansion tailored to the effervescence of this spontaneous community. It bases itself on the existing fabric using walkways grafted on to the lifts and a system of scaffolding leaning against the rear facade. A guerrilla architecture project that aims to hijack the great arch of fraternity.

In a detail that seems slightly tongue-in-cheek to me, Malka estimates that each module would cost only 3,000 Euros—as if you, too, could simply purchase your own plot of permanent insurrection, without need for a long-term mortgage or loan. Which leads me to wonder if there might someday be an insurrection bubble, with derivatives traded exclusively by Goldman Sachs.

[Images: From Auto-Defense by Stéphane Malka].

In any case, I really like this overhead view (below): the precarious spatial state of these revolutionary modules becomes readily apparent from above, as if this inspired reclaiming of urban space is really just one or two steps away from total collapse.

[Image: From Auto-Defense by Stéphane Malka].

These units, of course, could also very easily be adapted to other buildings or sites, just as symbolic for their monumentality and location, as Quinton writes; in Malka’s hands, the images would be equally breathtaking.

From U.S. Federal Buildings to overseas military bases; from the Kremlin to the Great Wall of China; from Parliament Square to historic battlefields; even as a structural cousin to Raimund Abraham’s Church on the Berlin Wall—a project I hope to write about soon—where else could Malka’s modular counter-utopias be anchored and what political scenarios might result?

Malka writes that architecture now “means reclaiming territory in the marginalized areas of our cities, with projects that bear insurrection and civic mobilization,” thus “creating new potentials for collective use.”

This methodology seeks to promote public participation as an act of resistance against urban restrictions. It is a colonization of neglected public spaces by the participation of a non-specialized labor collective that elaborates on prefabricated and hijacked construction systems.

As this and Malka’s Galerie Bunker project indicate, parasite spaces—and the incredible idea of “hijacked construction systems”—are one surprisingly fast way to begin rebuilding the modern city.

[Image: From Auto-Defense by Stéphane Malka].

For more, see Malka’s website.

(Earlier: Malka’s “museum for neglected spaces.” Related: projects by Santiago Cirugeda Parejo).

[Image: Proposal for a “bunker gallery” in Paris by architect Stéphane Malka].

In the first of two proposals by Stéphane Malka that I want to post about here, we see what Malka calls “an alternative art gallery” installed like vertical parasites beneath the tracks of the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris.

An assemblage of powerfully simple rough precast concrete, the modules are attached to each other and secured to the beams of the viaduct. The alignment of different blocks creates spatial diversity while the unified whole protects the artwork and creates a strong interiority. Nevertheless, lateral openings introduce unexpected light from below as well as elevationally reframing views to the site.

He refers to the project as a “bunker,” or Galerie Bunker. “The gallery responds to the challenge of addressing neglected spaces,” he adds, “generating a singular place, a spontaneous cultural space divergent from the restrained exhibition spaces of Paris.”

[Images: Proposal for a “bunker gallery” in Paris by Stéphane Malka].

As such, this would be perfect for Pruned‘s ongoing “Under Spaces” series.

[Image: Proposal for a “bunker gallery” by Stéphane Malka].

Here are some views of the gallery interiors:

[Images: Proposal for a “bunker gallery,” Stéphane Malka].

See more on Malka’s website, and don’t miss the second post in this series: A Permanent State of Insurrection.

(Of related interest: The Bay Line).

[Image: Photograph by Will Webster].

Photographer Will Webster got in touch the other week with a large batch of photos taken behind the scenes of the “world’s largest tent,” designed by Norman Foster, which opened this week in Astana, Kazakhstan.

[Images: Photos by Will Webster].

From the Guardian:

The Khan Shatyr, a 100,000 sq metre complex designed by Lord Foster, holds a city within a city, with shops and restaurants, cinemas, water park, botanical garden, mini-golf course, and a monorail. The aim of the tent is to provide escape to a people subjected to some of the harshest climes of Central Asia’s vast steppe. Temperatures in Astana, in northern Kazakhstan, regularly dip well below -30C in winter.

The “aim of the tent,” of course, is also to monumentalize the ego of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which the Guardian describes as “Kazakhstan’s increasingly autocratic president.”

[Image: Photograph by Will Webster].

But the building was assembled by everyday workers, amidst the mundane landscapes of this growing, purpose-built capital city, watched by Astana’s own residents.

[Images: Photos by Will Webster].

Webster’s photos—a selection of which you see reproduced here—offer a welcome, unpolished, backstage view of the building as its construction approached an end.

[Image: Photo by Will Webster].

Future fun rides sit patiently wrapped in plastic as men in mountaineering gear fix cabled meshes and high-tension wires high inside the volcanic space.

[Images: All photographs by Will Webster].

All told, the building cuts an unlikely profile in its only semi-urban context. At dusk, through Webster’s lens, it looks less like a structure parachuted in from the future, than the shell of an old expo whose excitement has long since faded.

[Image: Photo by Will Webster].

(PS: The abandoned water towers of Webster’s Soviet Farming Project series would also be great to explore at more length).

[Image: A former torpedo-testing facility, now a £4 million private home; courtesy of Knight Frank].

This £4 million property located in the suburbs southwest of London “must be one of the most unique spaces to have come to the market in recent local history,” estate agents Knight Frank justifiably claim.

[Images: Former torpedo-testing facility in the London suburbs; courtesy of Knight Frank].

After all, it is “a former torpedo testing tank, set within the wonderful Royal Park of Bushy, close to Hampton Court, converted into an amazing house.”

Standing within walled private gardens of 1.3 acres and extending to approximately 10,133 sq ft (940 sq m) this curved property offers not only a great and unique space but the potential to create a very special property indeed… The site was used by the Admiralty during the Second World War and was a circular domed building containing a 46m pool used to test torpedoes as they spun around at the end of a metal arm. After the war, the architects Norman and Dawbarn were commissioned to turn the tank into a modern house. They utilised the 4ft thick “blast proof” curved concrete walls in a very contemporary style using an abundance of glass and aluminium beneath a copper roof to create a very light and open space. There is huge scope to further improve the property and make use of large subterranean areas to provide a fabulous leisure facility.

Being able to say—without lying—that your house has the form it does because, long ago, “torpedoes as they spun around at the end of a metal arm” outlined its foundational geometry would be awesome, indeed.

[Image: The kitchen of a former torpedo-testing facility; courtesy of Knight Frank].

And while £4 million seems a bit steep, if you can still test torpedoes in the basement—while boiling you and your mysterious Eastern European paramour a pot of strozzapreti in the roomy kitchen up above—then it’s probably worth every cent.

(Via City A.M., indirectly on a tip from Mountain. Earlier: Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, Buy a Silk Mill).