June 2011 – Page 2

Earth Moves

For more than a month now, a “slow-motion landslide” near the New York/Vermont border has been dismantling a small town, day by day, square foot by square foot. The landslide is “oozing slowly,” New York state geologist Andrew Kozlowski explains to National Public Radio, “no faster than three feet per day. But it’s so big that scientists have been arriving from all over the country to study it.”

[Image: Photo by Brian Mann/North Country Public Radio, courtesy of National Public Radio].

The entire landslide is 82 acres in extent—though there’s not, in fact, enough data to know for certain “how wide this event is”—making it the largest landslide in New York’s recorded history.

However, “gathering good data has been tricky, in part because the terrain is incredibly treacherous, with trees toppling and boulders kicking loose.” It’s the slow-motion landslide as future game environment, or Inception‘s dream-sector physics applied to the surface of the earth: for instance, when the rocks let loose, Kozlowski points out, “you hear a thumping, tumbling sound and you sort of look up and catch a glimpse and you hear them hitting tree trunks as they’re moving downslope. And so you just try to get between a tree and where you think they’re coming.”

As the Albany Times Union adds, for one family, “the first clue that something was wrong came May 6, after [they] returned from a family visit to California.”

While they were gone, a carpenter had added a laundry room near their bedroom, and Jim noticed the bedroom door would no longer shut properly. Then Charity saw a tree outside their bedroom window was tilting at a weird angle and a crack in the ground near a place under the deck where she kept gardening equipment.

The earth was out of joint. (See the Albany Times Union for more photographs, including a house that “has separated from its cement foundation due to a slow landslide.”)

[Film: An otherwise unrelated time-lapse video of the Snake River Landslide in Wyoming, spotted via Pruned].

Here’s NPR‘s summary:

In northern New York and Vermont, the disaster has developed slowly. Weeks of torrential rains have glutted Lake Champlain, flooding hundreds of miles of coastline. Now, in the mountain village of Keene Valley, N.Y., all that water has triggered a massive landslide that is slowly destroying a neighborhood.

In the forthcoming issue of Bracket, on the subject of “soft systems,” Jared Winchester and Viktor Ramos propose a semi-mobile village of “landslide mitigation” structures. “The houses tether themselves to the slopes using soil-nailing technologies,” the architects write, “then rotate, dip and pivot in response to slope movement. As the soil slips, the house slows down the process through its distortion.” Images of their project will be available when Bracket hits the street later this year.

[Image: The “Retreating Village” by Smout Allen, from Augmented Landscapes].

The NPR piece is not without human tragedy, of course, as we learn that whole houses have been condemned, demolished, or otherwise emptied by their owners and left to collapse, uninsured, as the village is abandoned.

But is there, as Winchester and Ramos suggest, or as Smout Allen’s “Retreating Village” project indicates, an architecture appropriate for these dynamic terrestrial conditions?

What sort of building would it be, in any case, like some wheeled arachnid or stilted earthship, that could ride the waves of a sliding planet, stretched, tested, and reconfigured from below by geotechnical shifts? Should such buildings have hulls or foundations—and would architects have more to learn more from seismic engineering or from shipbuilding? Would the structures be vehicles or buildings? Would a pilot’s license be operationally required as a condition of this groundless dwelling?

More simply, what happens to architecture when solid earth becomes more like the ocean?

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Toward the city come hills).

Peripheral Porosity

Last week at the Political Equator 3 conference, which described itself as a “2-day cross-border event” occurring simultaneously in Tijuana and San Diego, something very interesting happened on an inner edge of North American nation-state geography.

[Image: The U.S./Mexico border photographed by Quilian Riano].

For one afternoon only, Mexico formally welcomed international border-crossers, coming south from the United States, into the country at a temporary checkpoint located at the mouth of an underground drain.

“This is the first time ever that Mexico designates a drain as an official port of entry,” Oscar Romo, one of the conference co-organizers, explained to the Washington Post, “and it’s probably not going to happen again.”

[Images: A temporarily official Mexican entry point, photographed by Quilian Riano].

“Travelers clutching passports snapped photos as they walked along the muddy culvert,” the Washington Post continues. “One man switched on a head-mounted light as the group entered a dark 40-yard stretch that took them underground. Mexican officials at folding tables issued visas at the south end of the drain.”

For this brief phase in international relations, then, the U.S./Mexico border formally included a strange, pop-up entry/exit point. A kind of embassy of the porous. Passport stamps from the experience must surely stand as some of the most unique in the world, like some variation on philatelic collecting. In fact, I’m led to wonder if a history of unusual, but officially recognized, border-crossings has ever been written, populated with examples from espionage, political asylum, wartime defection, extraterritorial immigration, enclaves/exclaves, civil dissolution, divided cities, and much more. There should be a narrative tour of this officially-stamped peripheral geography where lines are crossed—a ghostly international world of ambiguous nation-state terrains where sovereignty is both temporary and unclear, though the rituals of the state remain.

[Images: The U.S./Mexico border photographed by Quilian Riano].

Architect and designer Quilian Riano was on hand for the crossing, and these are his photographs reproduced here. By way of email, Riano described the physical terrain where they crossed beneath and through the border, remarking that the hydrological status of the land there “really makes you think about how arbitrary borders are.”

On one side of the border there is an emphasis on surveillance while, on the other side, a series of systematic social, economic, and environmental policy failures have created a hazardous living condition for thousands of Tijuana’s poorest. The failure, however, can be felt on both sides, as the watershed pushes the sediment and trash from the illegal settlements in Tijuana’s Los Laureles Canyon directly across the border into the Tijuana River Estuary State Park. While politicians on both sides demagogue, the lack of communication and collaboration between the two nations leads to social and environmental catastrophe.

The border crossing itself thus aimed “to follow the path of the water, trying to understand the border through its ecological and social impacts,” and opening, in the process, a negotiated pore in the outer edge of sovereign geography through which human beings, like imperial sweat, could flow.

[Images: Photos by Quilian Riano].

This particular border-crossing is, of course, now (officially) closed, and we shouldn’t overlook the still very heavy police presence that this media-friendly moment entailed—as well as the fact that it only moved north to south. This temporary welcome mat faced one way.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel excited that the topology of the nation-state might yet continue to reveal these rough edges not as points of deflection but as ports of entry—that openly carnivalesque gates and fringe geographies through which adjacencies are encouraged, not denied, might spatially instigate a true age of neighbors.

[Images: Pointing past the nation-state; photo by Quilian Riano].

As the Political Equator 3 conference more practically suggests, the “peripheral communities and neighborhoods where new economies are emerging and new social, cultural and environmental configurations are taking place” could thus accelerate their vital role as “catalysts” for an overall calming of geography: a future recession in the tide of hardened borders that uncovers more and more such sites of interpenetration.

The Space of Preparation

Swiss artist Zimoun, previously covered here for his work with the acoustics of woodworms, has been producing a long series of installations involving immersive cardboard structures—both surfaces and spaces—sonically activated by embedded motors. The rain-like plinks and plonks that greet you as you encounter these installations isn’t beautified or specially tuned; in any other context, it would simply appear to be industrial noise.

Watch this recently updated compilation video to hear them at work:

Here are installation shots from three of Zimoun’s recent works—all of which use “prepared” motors, in the artist’s description, like the prepared pianos of composer John Cage, a technique here applied to micromachinery. In a similar vein, it would be interesting to see work produced using “prepared” elevators, “prepared” doorways, or “prepared” architecture at all and any scales. Prepared bridges over rivers, prepared docks on the sea.

1) 200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements (2011)
[Images: From 200 prepared dc-motors (2011)].