Year: 2010

[Image: “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!”].

1) New York Times: “From the city that has banned cars from broad swaths of Broadway and put picnic tables in Times Square, here comes another great reshaping of New York’s streetscape. The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street.”

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building. The result would be a street effectively split in two.

2) American Society of Landscape Architects: “Certainly, it’s very difficult to preserve an evolving landscape. We live in a transitional world and have to adapt to our own constants. Sometimes it’s very difficult to imagine that something will remain exactly the same. We had to define heritage categories that are intrinsically evolving. We’re trying at UNESCO to change our approach a little bit to create a vision of how heritage can be seen in a transitional world.”

3) Archaeology: “The stone city of Nan Madol, in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), consists of 92 man-made islands built on a coral reef at the edge of a mangrove swamp. The buildings of this mysterious 1,000-year-old site, which was the ceremonial and political seat of an ancient dynasty, are made of stacks of cut stone “logs,” each weighing up to 50 tons. Today, issues of ownership and sovereignty hold up plans to rehabilitate Nan Madol and make it eligible for a UNESCO World Heritage designation.”

4) BusinessWeek: U.S. Smart Bombs Rely on Metals Dominated by China

[Image: A giant battery grows in Texas; image courtesy of Popular Science].

5) Popular Science: “An aging transmission line built in 1948 is the only link between the U.S. power grid and the little city of Presidio in West Texas. So Presidio has invested in a single huge battery that can power the entire town and serve as emergency backup for the frequent outages caused by the line going down.”

6) Daily Telegraph: “Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed the remains of a 6th century BC temple-style building complete with detailed assembly instructions which they have likened to an Ikea do-it-yourself furniture pack.”

7) BBC: “The Nottingham Caves Survey… will use a 3D laser scanner to produce a three dimensional record of more than 450 sandstone caves around Nottingham from which a virtual representation can be made.”

The area which now makes up Nottingham city centre was once known as Tiggua Cobaucc, which means “place of caves.” The caves date back to the medieval period and possibly earlier. Over the years they have been used as dungeons, beer cellars, cess-pits, tanneries and air-raid shelters.

8a) “The Falmouth Convention is a three-day conference in an unconventional form… Conceived as an international meeting of artists, curators and writers to explore the significance of time and place in relation to contemporary art and exhibition making, it has been planned to respond to the situation in Cornwall and other such dispersed, rural areas.”

8b) “Described in the eighteenth century as the ‘richest square mile in the old world,’ the Gwennap Mining District will be the setting for a field trip led by the Falmouth-based arts organisation Urbanomic, ‘a journey into an historical process that assembled the powers of geology, mechanics, hydraulics, mineralogy and metallurgy, salvation and combustion, steam and capital into a mighty, infernal machine that traumatised the Cornish landscape and kick-started the industrial revolution.’”

Visiting lesser-known sites where these components interacted and evolved during the height of the mining trade in Cornwall, the field trip will discover what lies beneath the tourist emblem of the abandoned engine-house. With the guidance of rogue scientists, agrosophists and geophilosophers, it will uncover “the complexities of subterranean poetics and aesthetics, and confront the industrial behemoth that made the earth scream.”

[Image: Engine house of an abandoned mine in Cornwall, photographed by Thenenan T. Kig, of tangential relationship to the Hydroplutonic Kernow tour].

9) Popular Science: “While three-dimensional printing has come a long way, engineers still struggle with fabricating objects smaller than a quarter,” but “researchers have hit upon a technique that could produce any number of microscopic medical or mechanical devices through folding, rather than layered printing.”

10) National Geographic Channel: “Take an inside look at what may be the toughest disciplinary tool in the U.S. prison system: solitary confinement.”

Extra Credit: “The European Union has declared travelling a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayers’ dollars for those too poor to afford their own trips.”

(Some links via Archaeology, Reza Negarestani, and more).

[Image: Strato Lab; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy].

The Strato Lab project was a manned, high-altitude balloon project from the 1950s that ascended with its crew above 80,000 feet several times. The pilots performed scientific observations there, including taking observations of Venus through an on-board telescope.

The specific experiments interest me less, however, than the architectural possibilities of inhabited balloons in the stratosphere. The Strato Lab was a kind of sky-throne, regal and airborne over the continents below.

[Image: Strato Lab as sky-throne; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy].

Historian Gregory P. Kennedy has the story over on his website; he includes technical details about how the Strato Lab worked, as well as some thoughts about its position in design history.

Strato Lab had two inward opening hatches mounted in flat frames. Having two hatches made normal entry and exit easier and facilitated rapid exit in case of an emergency. Simple air pressure sealed the hatches. Within the cabin, a pressure equivalent to 17,000 feet was maintained. When the balloon ascended beyond that altitude, the pressure difference between the inside and outside atmospheres forced the hatches against their frames. A silicone O-ring around the outer diameter of each hatch created a pressure-tight seal. During descent, the hatches opened automatically.

The lab was also backed up by a “64-foot diameter nylon cargo parachute,” and, if that should fail in addition to the balloon, the crew members themselves had their own emergency chutes.

“Strato Lab retained the configuration and certain design elements of balloon gondolas of the 1930s,” Kennedy writes. “Thus, it bridged the gap between pressurized gondola designs of the 1930s and modern spacecraft.”

[Image: Strato Lab; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy].

All of this takes on a further, slightly different air of possibility when seen in the context of recent questions about the future of air travel in light of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano; if the Katla volcano—ten times the size of Eyjafjallajokull and less than six miles away from it—were to erupt next, for instance, the European airline industry as it currently exists could be put out of business for weeks or months at a time. The New York Times took this as a cue to ask what might be next: high-speed rail, dirigibles, airships…? And that, of course, is if a future supervolcano doesn’t simply cause extinction.

But perhaps high-altitude—and “super-high-altitude“—balloons could be both destination and route: airborne rooms enthroned atop wind systems accessible to civilians for the first time, future platforms for housing at the forecourt of the sky. You build a pressurized village of linked pods, spanning acres—the architectural legacy of Ant Farm—on some land in Nebraska; the final step clips oversized polyethylene balloons to roof-hooks, and then there you go: hauling your project to its rightful site, skybound, where an emerging race of balloonists will evolve massive lungs 95,000 feet above the Great Plains.

As the spring semester comes to an end, and as this past Friday afternoon brought with it a guest lecture from historian James Fleming, I thought I’d offer a quick look back at some texts—mostly books—that were of particular use during the Glacier/Island/Storm studio up at Columbia.

[Image: A hike through the South Downs, photo by the author].

I should add, though, that the following books were not assigned reading—they simply came up as frequent points of conversational reference during individual desk-crits. These were also all in addition to technical readings, done on a per-project basis, such as industry reports on maritime pharmacology, the engineering and construction of offshore structures, the ferroelectric potential of ice, surveys of atmospheric fog- and dew-harvesting techniques in southern England, and the full text of the U.N. Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques.

In turn, those were in addition to several documentary films, such as Owning the Weather, Drifting Station Alpha, and The Reef Builders; which were also on top of a field trip to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a visit from marine biologist Thomas Goreau, a daylong symposium looking at Glacier/Island/Storm outside of its more explicit architectural contexts with the authors of Mammoth, Quiet Babylon, and Edible Geography, and a long list of individual student interviews with experts in the field. These took place during overseas trips to destinations as far as Bali, Morocco, the Blue Hole of Belize, the South Downs, and the Swiss Alps. It’s been an awesome semester, at least from my perspective, and I’m sorry to see it go.

In any case, the following list includes texts that came up across more than one project, at multiple times during the semester for various reasons. As such, they were particularly useful in helping to generate design ideas. In no particular order:

[Images: Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control by James Fleming and Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland by Shin Egashira and David Greene].

1) “The Climate Engineers” by James Fleming. Fleming’s article is an excellent survey of the history—and possible political future—of weather-control efforts and climate-modification technology, mostly in a military context. “Assume, for just a moment,” Fleming writes, “that climate control were technically possible. Who would be given the authority to manage it? Who would have the wisdom to dispense drought, severe winters, or the effects of storms to some so that the rest of the planet could prosper? At what cost, economically, aesthetically, and in our moral relationship to nature, would we manipulate the climate?” His forthcoming book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control sounds fantastic, and it extends that research.

2) Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland by Shin Egashira and David Greene. I bought this book—a pamphlet, really—back in 1998, and I’ve held onto it ever since, even taking it with me on this (still ongoing) year-plus global trip. Exploring the island of Portland—from which much of London’s architectural rock was once quarried, turning the island’s profile into a negative graph of London’s expansion—from the perspective of investigative landscape design, Egashira’s and Greene’s students covered the terrain in architectural devices, machines, and mechanisms that could record wind speed, coastal barometry, island seismology, water levels, and much more (as well as simply demonstrate carpentry skills).

[Images: Spreads from Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland by Shin Egashira and David Greene].

3) The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman. I first became aware of this book through an old reference on Pruned, but only managed to read it this past winter. A historical look at the early days of ice-harvesting from the surfaces of frozen ponds across New England—after which great cubes would be preserved in ice houses and in the hulls of ships, insulated with saw dust, and sold to markets as far away as India. The economics, technicalities, and strange cultural inspirations behind the ice-harvesting industry are genuinely fascinating. “Those who could afford it,” Weightman explains, “had a fresh block of ice delivered daily, for which they paid a weekly or monthly subscription”—and thus we have the deterritorialized surfaces of frozen ponds, rearranging themselves around the world by monthly subscription.

4) When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce. This book seemed like something I’d simply file away on my bookshelf for another day, but I stormed through it in less than three nights after letting myself take on the first few pages. Absurdly interesting, and almost impossible to put down, this book about freshwater and its dwindling global presence is so full of interesting material that I could refer to it again and again. Fog nets in South America, dew ponds in Sussex, desert raincatchers, and underground cisterns in China, by way of Iranian qanats, freshwater politics in the U.S. southwest, and polluted irrigation systems in India, cross with disappearing glaciers, the Amazon river, the subsidized economies of hydroelectric projects, and much more, to make a fantastic book. The author, Fred Pearce, also blogs for the Guardian.

5) Sand by Michael Welland. Welland’s book—which I have been meaning to review at great length all Spring and will finally be doing so soon—is equally fantastic. The torsional geometry of sandstorms, dune physics, military geology labs, sand forensics at murder scenes, “sand smuggling,” and large-scale anti-desertification projects in the Sahara meet high-grade silicon mines and granular deposits on Mars in Welland’s informal narrative that goes all the way around (and off) the planet. Welland, too, has a blog, Through the Sandglass, which is well worth checking out.

[Images: The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman, When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, Sand by Michael Welland, and -arium: Weather + Architecture by Neeraj Bhatia and J. Mayer H].

6) -arium: Weather + Architecture by Neeraj Bhatia and J. Mayer H. Published midway through the semester, Bhatia’s and Mayer’s book includes several student projects from a recent weather-design studio in Toronto, as well as the editors’ own original research into climate-modification and its possible urban futures. Bhatia’s short history of thermally regulated interior environments, and what he calls “the crisis of created climates,” is a highlight. Bhatia, of course, is co-author of the blog InfraNet Lab, whose four authors collectively participated in our Glacier/Island/Storm blog week back in February.

7) Subnature by David Gissen. Gissen’s book has already come up several times, to positive review, here on BLDGBLOG and presumably needs little introduction to long-term readers—but it’s a memorably wide-ranging look at all those other presences in the city that urbanists tend to overlook: puddles, dust, dirt, rats, weeds, and car exhaust, to name but a few. Gissen’s history of the tunnel-ventilation infrastructure of Manhattan was of particular relevance this term, as a few students and I looked briefly at the possibility of weather systems generated underneath the metropolis, as air pressure builds, moves, and dissipates throughout sewers, subway tunnels, and cross-island links. What weather-modification possibilities exist below the earth’s surface? Speculative rhetorical questions aside, Gissen’s book is valuable reading for anyone interested in the flipside of the modern city.

[Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower, ventilating the Manhattanite underworld; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].

8) Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets by Mary-Ann Ray. Mary-Ann Ray’s old Pamphlet Architecture installment is still one of my favorites. As much an archaeological handbook as it is an architectural guide, Ray’s pamphlet takes us into the ruins of underground spaces around Italy, including helical stairways, spherical ice-storage facilities “with as little surface area as possible,” and vaulted secret passageways for midgets.

[Images: Subnature by David Gissen, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets by Mary-Ann Ray, and Augmented Landscapes by Smout Allen].

9) Augmented Landscapes by Smout Allen. Smout Allen’s work bridges landscapes, watersheds, continents, and villages, connecting architectural design to the mobile terrains of receding coastlines, wind-blown fens, and drainage canals. “In this Pamphlet,” the authors write, “we discuss five design cases.

In each the physicality of the site and the processes of environmental transformation are exploited—the intrinsic features of the landscape, the force of nature, geography, climate, geology, and land use are all scrutinized. The resulting architectural interventions respond to their dynamic and fluxing territories. The ephemeral character of the environment is reflected in the solidity of the artifacts that inhabit it as they take on a local specificity and lend to their surroundings a sense of nature illuminated.

You can read more about Smout Allen’s work courtesy of an article in the April 2010 issue of Blueprint Magazine.

[Images: Four Moleskine spreads from Augmented Landscapes by Smout Allen].

10) Mont Blanc: A Treatise on its Geodesic and Geological Constitution by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Last but not least, Viollet-le-Duc’s amazing hybrid architectural/geological analysis of the tectonic structure of Mont Blanc and its glaciers offered us several beautiful insights into the structural properties of ice flows and how they might be of interest in the context of architectural design.

[Images: From Mont Blanc by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc].

Quoting at great length from a paper by architectural historians Martin Bressani and Robert Jan van Pelt:

Viollet-le-Duc’s work on Mont Blanc introduces a new edge to geological discourse in architecture as compared to the painterly outlook of [John] Ruskin. Now, observations of tectonic forms not only served to see nature intensely but also, and mainly, to identify a structural logic to its complex morphology. A basic principle thus organizes Viollet-le-Duc’s analysis of the great massif: The apparent chaos of its outline is only an illusion, as “laws have ordered these forms and determined the great crystalline system.” Viollet-le-Duc’s book is essentially a description of the process of formation of Mont Blanc, using a set of fascinating drawings and diagrams as if he had been present at the time of its genesis. The book’s opening chapter confidently illustrates the initial upheaval that generated the massif: An expanded mass of soft granite (protogine) below the earth’s thick surface erupted through the crystalline crust above, producing a domical rock formation sprouting out of a buttonhole-shape slit. As it slowly cooled and crystallized, this gigantic mass of granite progressively shrank and retreated. According to Viollet-le-Duc, the subtraction process followed a very precise rhombohedral prismatic pattern consistent throughout the whole. Mont Blanc thus acts as one huge crystal formation—every edge, every peak and aiguille follows a geodesic structure. The pattern creates a network of cells, a type of formation that Viollet-le-Duc found also at the micro level in glacial formation. This hexagonal configuration, based upon the equilateral triangle, proved the most fundamental and consistent principle of organization within Viollet-le-Duc’s late writings and architecture.

Within both glaciers and large-scale rock formations, in other words, we can find formal analogies for human architectural constructions—a geometry and order to both rock and ice. Coming round nearly full circle, then, geologist Michael Welland, whose book Sand is mentioned above, wrote a blog post exploring Viollet-le-Duc’s Alpine investigations, also mentioning a kind of geological novella that Viollet-le-Duc wrote shortly before his death.

• • •
Again, that’s by no means all of the material that we looked at this term, but it does give a fairly good list of the textual, historical, scientific, and architectural influences that came up repeatedly during the course.

In his recent book The Lost Books of the Odyssey—an “ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive”—author Zachary Mason, an Artificial Intelligence researcher, fictionalizes King Agamemnon’s attempts to build a fortress underground.

[Image: The walls of Troy slowly revealed].

Agamemnon’s choice of site, however, makes this task rather difficult: it is to be constructed in the sandy plains facing the walls of Troy.

Agamemnon wanted a fortress on the wide plain before the walls of Troy but there was nothing to build with but a few trees and an unlimited quantity of sand. Therefore (at Odysseus’s suggestion) the Greeks dug the negative image of a palace in the white plain, a convoluted warren where cascades of fine grains trickled endlessly down the walls and into the tenuous corridors irregularly shored up with masonry.

Mason describes “frequent cave-ins and sand-slides that suddenly obliterated rooms, courtiers, armories, armorers, elegists and exits.” It was, Agamemnon says to himself, both forward-operating base and future tomb.

Following the wisdom of the court geomancers it was considered impious to exhume any of the collapsed rooms and tunnels, a sin on par with looting a tomb, so when more space was needed the miners struck out into virgin ground. Thus the new underground palace evolved dendritically, sending off new shoots in all directions, sometimes opposed by unforeseen aquifers or plumes of hard rock, working around these obstacles with ant-like tenacity.

The passages multiply and deepen until the fortress “resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth. Now and then a district was separated by a landslide and till the miners could reconnect them to the king’s rule they lived with their own laws and minted their own coins,” forming separate subterranean administrations, split by the logic of collapsing sand and its unpredictable granularity.

[Images: Extraordinary photographs of sand by Larry Deemer].

The architectural nature of sand grains is something discussed by Michael Welland in his own book Sand. There, Welland introduces us to the complex internal structures of sand dunes:

The weight and pressure distribution within a pile of any granular material is determined by the way in which the individual grains contact each other and distribute the stress. Quite commonly, grain shapes and sizes mean that there are microscopic chains and networks of grains that are oriented and in contact with each other in such a way that they carry most of the pressure from the weight of the material above them. These chains seem to behave like the soaring arches of Gothic cathedrals, which serve to transmit the weight of the roof, perhaps a great dome, outward to the walls, which bear the load. In a sand pile, particularly one that is confined in a container of some sort, these chains perform the same function—they carry the stress outward to the container, rather than directly downward to the base of the pile.

The idea that dunes have internal Gothic cathedrals, arranged chain-like throughout their sandy massing, is an incredible thing to consider. The amorphous mounds of the deep desert are, in fact, both structurally intricate and gravitationally complex.

Agamemnon’s fortress is thus a mathematical model of collapse—an inhabitable diagram of the forces traveling through it—bulwarked and avalanching against itself into new formations and plans. It is an architecture of dynamic materials.

[Image: A still from Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

An article I meant to link to the other week takes a look at the architectural design of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film Inception. Being a longtime fan of Nolan’s work, going back to his debut feature, Following (which I first saw at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1999 and which, oddly enough, starred emerging architect Alex Haw, now of Cloud fame), I have to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing this movie.

Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times describes it as “Hollywood’s first existential heist movie,” offering us a preview of some of the film’s sets and spaces in the process.

[Images: A rotating hall and fight scene from Inception, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

He specifically highlights the contributions of “special effects guru Chris Corbould (the man who built the Batmobile and has worked on a dozen James Bond films),” who helped to “put a premium on an old-school approach to movie magic” in the physical production of Inception:

Corbould’s teams, for instance, built giant rotating hallways and a massive tilting nightclub set to film the startling Inception scenes when dream-sector physics take a sharp turn into chaos. One of the film’s stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, spent long, bruising weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like a giant hamster wheel.

The idea of athletically training inside “giant rotating hallways” on a film set is pretty awesome; it comes with the implication that certain combat scenes are less demonstrations of a specific fighting style than the architectural revelation of a whole new type of geometry, an unprecedented way of filling, and thus dominating, space. On the other hand, of course, Boucher is quick to point out that it wasn’t all analogue set construction and advanced balance-training:

Inception does have major computer effects: Several vivid sequences show a dream metropolis in churning calamity, a city skyline seems to fold in on itself as a dream begins to lose its shape and, unlike many Hollywood versions of dream surrealism, the scene has the look of a massive mechanical failure, not a morphing, liquid calamity. Nolan’s dreams have the sharp edges of Escher, not the syrup drips of Dalí. Architecture is a major influence on the culture of the film too with dreams that are more like blueprints than poems. That speaks to Nolan’s longtime interest in architecture. A key scene in Inception was filmed at the architecture school at University College London, where Nolan was an English major and also met his future wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas.

You can see one of those “massive mechanical failures” in the image, below, where we watch Paris rear up and crease back over on itself like some fine-tuned, mathematically exact introduction to a new, urban-scale baroque.

[Image: From Inception by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

Dream-sector physics meets The Fold.

In any case, check out the trailer when you get a chance—while I try to work some media magic to score an interview for BLDGBLOG with Nolan and Corbould.

(It’s interesting to note, meanwhile, in the context of this post’s opening image, that Nolan grew up in Chicago—which, in tandem with that image, makes me wonder if some very, very minor part of Nolan’s architectural and stylistic interest in Japonisme—i.e. Batman as ninja in a wood-paneled dojo—wasn’t at least partially inspired by the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings scattered in and around the Chicago area; in fact, the set featured in that opening image could very well have been inspired by Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo).

[Image: Photo by Arni Saeberg/Bloomberg].

One of many things interesting to me about the ongoing volcanic eruption in Iceland is the fact that it has generated a new weather system made of glass: its own “maelstrom of microscopic volcanic glass shards” that liquify and go molten inside passing airplane engines, causing failure.

If you had told me that a new science fiction novel just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass move through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal, I would, naively, never have assumed that such a thing might also be possible here on earth. The speculative climatology of alien worlds.

[Image: Photo by AP Photo/Brynjar Gaudi].

But, perhaps, if airplane engines are built to fly through air—i.e. not through glass, dust, rocks, or geology—today’s airplanes should be temporarily retrofitted with tunneling equipment under each wing, jury-rigged Herrenknecht machines to drill a new infrastructure of hovering tunnels through the glass-thundering skies of northern Europe.