Year: 2010

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s “Seed Cathedral” at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo; photo by Reuters/China Daily, via The Big Picture].

I have to admit that, however over-exposed this building might be, it is one of the coolest architectural constructions I’ve seen in a long time—and while I say that in the most superficial way imaginable, i.e. I just think it looks really, really cool, this structure, the so-called “Seed Cathedral” by Thomas Heatherwick, under construction in Shanghai for this summer’s 2010 World Expo, has an amazing ulterior motive: at the end of every one of the 60,000 transparent acrylic rods that you see fuzzing outward into the sunlight are the seeds of plants.

[Image: The seeds revealed; photo by Aly Song for Reuters, via The Big Picture].

The result looks very much like an expansion of Heatherwick’s earlier work Sitooterie II, but the final design also incorporates seeds from the Kew Millennium Seed Bank project.

From the New York Times last autumn: “Heatherwick and his team worked with Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank partnership to showcase Britain’s commitment to conservation. They encased thousands of seeds in the ends of the transparent rods, creating a larger-than-life catalog of the plant species that contribute to national and global conservation programs, in a veritable cathedral of seeds.”

[Images: Thomas Heatherwick’s “Seed Cathedral” prepares to open in Shanghai; photos by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images; STR/AFP/Getty Images; and AP; all via The Big Picture].

Seed vaults have long been of interest here, of course, but this non-doomsday-inspired celebration of terrestrial botany is, for me, surprisingly much more thrilling than some top secret polar room predicated on an end-of-the-world agricultural scenario. Perhaps every town should have its own seed cathedral, blur-buildings of acrylic rods to showcase their local flora.

[Image: Inside the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, courtesy of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Access Restricted program].

If you’re in New York, three more tours in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Access Restricted series await you. The general idea behind Access Restricted is amazing; it is “a free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Manhattan to the general public. Once inside these unique interiors, the audience is treated to a site-specific lecture and discussion addressing a range of topics revolving around issues of architectural history and preservation, social justice, and urban development.”

The mind boggles at the range of spaces that could be visited for such a thing, from historical urban waterworks to the city’s food infrastructure, from top secret bank vaults to famous murder sites and the apartments of long-dead poets; this year, the LMCC is focusing on the heady couplet of “Law & Representation”:

Even though Manhattan possesses one of the richest legal infrastructures in the country, the general public hardly ever interacts with these buildings and their use except for a few, very specified situations. In order to showcase this legal fabric, Access Restricted: Law & Representation hosts a series of talks by practicing lawyers and scholars in the palaces and parlors where law is practiced or discussed.

Check out the LMCC’s site, linked above, for the complete schedule, and definitely consider supporting such a unique program.

For those of you who have signed up for the BLDGBLOG/Atlas Obscura “expedition to the geoglyphs of nowhere” trip tomorrow afternoon, March 20, part of the first annual international Obscura Day, I wanted to touch base briefly about what will actually occur out there.

First of all, I’m excited—I think this will be a lot of fun, and I look forward to meeting lots of you and exploring the abandoned geometry of a city that was never fully built in the first place (and about which you can read a bit more here). Even CNN is excited, writing that nearly “200 people have committed to a trip to California City, California, a planned city in the middle of the Mojave Desert that was never finished. It is now home to about 15,000 people, many of whom live within a surrounding network of crumbling roads, the vestiges of the abandoned city plan.”

Second, it looks like at least 182 people have signed up for this, which I assume translates into roughly 75 cars making the journey—that’s a substantial caravan. That being the case, our initial meet-up in the parking lot of the California City Rite Aid—as the current plan now stands—will actually be quite hard, if not impossible, to manage.

So I think we need to activate Plan B: we will still arrive via that Rite Aid (9482 California City Boulevard) at 1pm tomorrow, and you should still use it as a place to get something to drink or whatever else you might need (and there’s a fast food place next door if you need a bathroom break), but if you do not actually speak to me, or to anyone else, for that matter—perhaps because you are a misanthrope attracted to abandoned cities in the desert—don’t worry: just head out of the city, going northeast along Randsburg Mojave Road, onto 20 Mule Team Parkway. Here’s a link to the most basic map of that road.

At that point, to be honest, you can just do whatever you’re going out there to do: make films, take photographs, record sounds, write blog posts, Tweet things, interview people, do cartwheels, read Ballard and meet your future best friends. Fly remote-control airplanes with small nose-mounted cameras over the failed glyphs of a forgotten real estate dream. Build kites. Assemble simulated Iron Age tumuli in the dirt and gravel and dedicate them all to Anselm Kiefer. Establish a makeshift geothermal drilling operation and cause an earthquake. Call your mother.

This is not a guided tour, and we are not experts. This is a kind of documentarian flash mob, and together we’ll produce the largest archive of contemporary California City photographs that exists anywhere in the world. We can start by filling out this Flickr group—but, again, feel absolutely free to do your own thing and save your own photographs wherever you choose to do so.

Finally, a brief bit of legalese—sorry, but I need to cover this stuff, too:

I understand and acknowledge that my attendance at and participation in Obscura Day is voluntary. I assume full responsibility for any injuries or damages resulting from my attendance at and participation in any related events or activities, including responsibility for using reasonable judgment in all phases of participation and travel to and from any event location. By attending an Obscura Day event, I, the attendee, in full recognition and appreciation of the dangers, hazards and risks inherent in such activities, do hereby waive, release, indemnify, hold harmless and forever discharge JPSF LLC., its officers, agents and employees, from and against any and all claims, demands, liabilities, causes of action, losses, costs and expenses of any nature (including, without limitation, attorneys’ fees) resulting from damages to personal property, personal injury or death, arising out of or relating in any way to my attendance and participation in these activities. 
I acknowledge that I have read and understand this entire Waiver of Liability and Release, and I agree to be legally bound by it. I further acknowledge that I am over the age of 18 (at or above the age of majority in the jurisdiction in which I reside, if different from 18). If not, I understand that my attendance and participation in any event is expressly conditioned on the acknowledgment of this Waiver of Liability and Release by my parent or legal guardian.

So bring sunscreen, fill up your gas tank, wear comfortable shoes, don’t forget some water, and I will see you out there in the middle of nowhere.

This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that Architizer‘s official L.A. launch party is tonight down at the A+D Museum‘s new location on Wilshire Boulevard. Stop by Architizer for more details—but it should be a beautiful evening to be out and about, and things kick off at 6:30pm.

This is a further reminder, as well, that Peter Cook of Archigram and Crab Studio will be throwing open the doors for a new exhibition over at SCI-Arc tomorrow night: London Eight features work by professors and their “proteges” from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Tomorrow night—Friday, March 19—also includes a group discussion, moderated by Peter Cook, with Yousef Al-Mehdari, Pascal Bronner, Johan Hybschmann, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. That’s at 6pm. Hope to see you at both events!

[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].

The last few days have been pretty awesome. We’ve been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Libby Robin from the National Museum of Australia, and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art‘s Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI’s ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters’ near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI’s full-scale virtual reality room.

I have some hilarious and amazing photos of Matthew Coolidge wearing black VR goggles, holding remote controls in each hand, while Bill Gilbert and Lucy Lippard look on, equally engoggled and optically stunned, flying helter-skelter over virtual terrains to chase simulated forest fires up canyon walls, the replicant ground dropping out from beneath them as we ran straight off a cliff, and I hope to post those here soon.

We had amazing conversations, as well: we’re all gearing up for a big conference next year in Reno, hosted by the Center for Art + Environment at the end of September 2011. That will definitely be something to keep your eye on if you’re at all interested in landscapes, the hydrosciences, water rights, mythology and the American West, archaeoastronomy, the contested history (and future) of weather modification, offworld exploration, the anthropology of mining, nature writing in its broadest possible sense, and much more. We’re putting together something really fantastic, to be honest, and you have 18 months to make plans to be there.

Even better, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and Mark Smout of Smout Allen were also on hand, winning stuffed animals together in the Circus Circus casino (Mark quipped that the casinos were simply “giant, ugly buildings with jewelry stuck on them, like earrings”), and so the three of us are now down in San Francisco, where we’ll be picking up Sarah Rich tomorrow to drive down to LA—and I can hardly imagine a better group of people to hit the Californian road with. The roads outside Reno were eight-foot canyons of plowed snow till we hit the Bay Bridge and drove past Alcatraz blinking in the darkness.

[Image: Photo by George Steinmetz/CORBIS for National Geographic; via @stevesilberman].

In any case, if you’re near San Francisco tonight, Tuesday, March 16, I’ll be giving a talk at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) starting at 6pm. It costs $5, unfortunately, but it should be fun, and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and colleagues again; as all of those friends and colleagues know, I wasn’t a huge fan of San Francisco when I lived here, but it’s good to be back in this rolling city of fog lines, abandoned bunkers that look like hills, tectonic trembling, lost ships, ghost streets, buried dunes, vinicultural microclimates, chemical weapons, a suicide bridge, and its artificially shrunken bay. I’ll be talking about quarantine, The BLDGBLOG Book (which I’m thrilled to say has just gone into a second printing), the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio and its accompanying blog-week experiment, blackouts, and more.

Pruned posted an image the other day by artist Nicolas Moulin (more of whose work can be seen over at Vulgare). Looking into Moulin’s work further, however, I came across another series he produced a little more than a decade ago called Vider Paris. Here, we see Paris transformed into an abandoned maze of lifeless streets. Every building is sealed shut behind a seamless, Berlin Wall-like concrete monolith.

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

Vider Paris “is a series of computer-altered images of the streets of Paris,” we read in a PDF portfolio of Moulin’s work. “All traces of life are removed from the images: vegetal, urban furnishings, pedestrians, cars, etc.” Further, “all the buildings are sealed with sheets of concrete up to the second floor.”

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

The effect is oddly exhilarating; whether because these images have the appearance of being stills pulled from a much longer video, or simply because of their haunting, Ballardian overtones, Moulin’s vision of an empty Paris seems tailor-made for Hollywood art directors or even for someone sketching out ideas at Thunder Game Works.

A dream of apocalypse, twelve centuries from now, when you wander into the concretized canyons of a Paris with almost no signs of life, its skies grey, the barest trace of weeds growing up through cracks in rain-filled gutters. There are sounds of distant animals rustling, the city’s rhomboid geometries now animated by unpredictable acoustic effects. You see smoke somewhere, but it could be miles away. Looking for clean water, and a place to sleep before the sun goes down, you walk onward into the city core.

(This is now the second post I’ve written from an airplane… flying somewhere over SW Nebraska).

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine opens tonight, March 9, at 7pm in New York City].

With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City].

Ready or not, then, and half-covered in paint, our jeans ruined, in need of new shoes, dehydrated, our exhibition participants recently returned from Uganda and the eastern Congo with photographs and a film, mounting illuminated comic book manuscripts on the wall, exploring nuclear-waste repositories as symbolic geological centers of a future world, diagramming parallel split cities with quarantine spaces merely an arm’s length away, and opening the facade panels of the gallery to allow bubbles and bulges and Tyvek screens to confuse the outside line with the street, and more, we will be there tonight, unloading dozens of cases of beer donated by Brooklyn Brewery, to celebrate this long project coming together at last in an exhibition space for everyone to see.

Stop by at 7pm tonight, March 9, if you’re around and say hello—or drop in on Storefront for Art and Architecture during its regular opening hours any time before April 17. Orange will after-image through your brain for days to come…