Architectural Conjecture | Urban Speculation | Landscape Futures
[Image: View larger].
When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki.
[Image: A “detail theft” by ScanLAB Projects].
ScanLAB Projects, a reliably interesting and enthusiastic design-research duo formed by Bartlett graduates Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, explores, in their words, “the potential of large scale terrestrial laser scanning as a tool for design, visualization and fabrication. We use a range of state-of-the-art 3D scanning technologies to capture buildings, objects and spaces.”
As it happens, they mean this quite literally, as they aim to “capture” and then illicitly reproduce, using multi-axis milling machines, architectural details scanned around London. These are what they call “detail thefts… arguably cloning the original architect’s intellectual property.”
[Image: A “detail theft” by ScanLAB Projects].
You can read an earlier write-up of their many projects—from “stealth objects” to scanner-jamming architectural ornament installed on an urban scale—here on BLDGBLOG (as well as in the forthcoming Landscape Futures book).
What I find so consistently interesting in their work, though, is that, over the past few years, they’ve been expanding the representational range of the laser scanner, using it to document highly ephemeral, even ethereal, spatial events.
Whether scanning mist and humidity or traveling north to the Arctic to shoot lasers at pressure ridges and melting ice floes, their work is almost a kind of documentary holography: not a film, not a photograph, not a 3D model, but also not simply a point-cloud, their work operates almost narratively as they capture objects or places in the process of becoming something else, blurred by passing fog or pulled apart by unseen ocean currents. You could write a screenplay for scanners.
[Images: From the “Arctic Climatic Tour 2011” of ScanLAB Projects].
For a more recent project, one that indicates a growing environmental or ecological emphasis in their work, the duo found themselves in the presence of heavy forestry equipment, a haunting and behemoth machine busy uprooting, de-branching, and stacking trees, converting a living forest to mere timber. The satiny black background makes it all that much more dreamlike, as if occurring in secret at 2am.
[Image: Forestry Commission Tree Harvester by ScanLAB Projects; view larger].
Cast in black and white and seeming to gleam in the laser light, the machine is both dinosaur-like and ghostly, implying the total gutting of the forest around it as the orderly bar code of the trees is disrupted by this artificial clearing.
[Image: Scans of a Forestry Commission tree harvester in action, by ScanLAB Projects; view image one, two, three, and four larger!].
In all cases, the images are much more evocative when viewed at a larger size (see captions for direct links), which you can also find on the ScanLAB Projects website.
Finally, if all this interests you, consider signing up for a 10-day workshop with ScanLAB Projects up in Ottawa, Canada, from 5-13 July 2013, focusing on “post-industrial landscapes.” Here’s the course description:
Set within the context of a post-industrial era, we find ourselves venturing through the Canadian wilderness of Gatineau Park, walking in the footsteps of industrial alchemist Thomas “Carbide” Willson. Within this natural blossom lie the ruins of his former empire, the decaying heart of industrialization and manufacturing in a factory that never fully materialized.
The course will explore 3D devices that can scan the unnatural post-industrial landscape in an attempt to fuse the accidental qualities of discovery—such as Willson’s trial and error of calcium carbide—with the mathematical precision of laser-scanned environments. Students will form their own architectural “carbide,” a fusion of scans and digital modeling to generate a landscape that materialies from Willson’s place of decay into a new architectural ground.
More information, including registration, is available here.
[Image: A Galveston house on stilts, courtesy of the Galveston County Museum, Galveston, Texas, via Science Friday].
Following the catastrophic hurricane of 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, was vertically raised up to 17 feet from its original ground level using “hand-cranked janks and mules,” NPR’s Science Friday explained last week.
In order to “protect itself from future storms,” Dwayne Jones of the Galveston Historical Foundation told the radio program, the city set about constructing a defensive seawall. “And the city began to be raised behind it,” he adds, “so everything was lifted up… Houses, out-houses, sidewalks, fences—everything was raised.”
[Image: “One hundred men worked to raise the church, one-half inch at a time, for 35 days. Once the correct height was reached, a new concrete foundation was poured.” Image courtesy of the Galveston County Museum, Galveston, Texas, via Science Friday].
The whole town, in effect, was “lifted up and put on blocks,” including huge masonry structures, such as Galveston’s St. Patrick Catholic Church. The church was held off the earth by nearly 700 separately hand-operated jacks. The church was kept level as it was raised only one half-inch a day for 35 days, lifted off the ground as if you were changing its tires.
The description brings to mind the truly extraordinary photographs of North Moore High School being moved across Los Angeles, posted here back in 2011.
[Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries].
Commenting on the seven-year time span of the overall town-lifting operation, Jones describes how the soil there in Galveston is “all sand.” These soft ground conditions meant that the engineers could “put canals through, and they had barges and pumps that took the soil or the fill from Galveston Bay and pumped it underneath the properties. So they would go kind of block by block, lift the properties up in that block, pump underneath it, and keep going across the island.” The city dredged itself.
In any case, the short but interesting radio segment goes on to discuss contemporary structure-moving operations in New Orleans, Chicago, and beyond, with the ultimate implication that perhaps the inhabited coastal periphery of the greater New York City area might also someday see itself on the rise.
(Thanks to Ed Porter for the tip!)
[Image: Tunnel House, Dream Mine, Johnson Creek, Abajo Mountains, San Juan County, Utah (1915); courtesy of the USGS].
I don’t have much to say about this image, other than it depicts the architectural workings of something called the Dream Mine, located in the Abajo Mountains of Utah and photographed back in 1915.
But it’s such a great name—the Dream Mine—perhaps suggesting that, somewhere out there in the American desert, there is a reserve surplus or underground stockpile of unconscious aspiration stored inside the earth, a kind of geological harddrive where the dreams of the whole nation have been frozen like holographs in mineral glass.
[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of an ice-harvesting operation in Minnesota—but perhaps this is what it would look like to mine dreams. Courtesy of Wikipedia].
Using red and blue lasers, subterranean excavators trained in neurology cut slow sequences from flowstone and ship televisual crystals out along the interstate, rare dreams distributed direct from this underground site in Utah. We’ll simply mine our dreams from the earth and ship them out in perfect, white cubes from the dark roots of distant mountains to the rest of the world. It’s logistics.
[Images: More ice-harvesting from Minnesota].
Alas, the actual Dream Mine worked the other way around: that is, it was inspired by a dream experienced by John H. Koyle, a Mormon pioneer.
In August 1894 [Koyle] experienced a dream in which he was visited by a figure from another world. The visitor carried him to a high mountain east of Koyle’s house and into the mountain, showing him the various strata and explaining the meaning of the minerals. The visitor showed Koyle an ancient “Nephite” mine with large rooms of mined-out ore bodies. The rooms contained treasure and artifacts of an extinct civilization. Koyle was instructed that he was to open a mine and extract gold for the welfare of “his” people. Specific instructions were given for the mine development leading to rich ore bodies.
“Koyle’s dreams continued,” the University of Utah explains. “He especially received instruction on how to develop the mine. Plans included air shafts, escape ways and drainage tunnels. Instructions came to build a processing mill and storage bins for grain.” In other words, Koyle claimed to have received technical plans for the mine in his sleep, down to the precise construction of ventilation shafts.
It would be interesting, in this context, to learn that the entire New York City subway system had been built according to plans seen in a dream by some tweed-bound engineer of the 19th-century—rolling in his sleep at night with visions of stairs coiling into the earth and tunnels connected cellar to cellar across the island like a circuit board—and whether knowing that would affect how millions of commuters look at their daily train trips, as if passing through a 3D model of the mind of a stranger.
[Images: From La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker].
Of course, it was all for naught: the gold was never discovered. However, some apparently still hold out for a Tea Party-like moment of mineralogical revealing on some future day in which the global economy has collapsed and the only thing left with value is gold… all the many, many thousand tons of it stored somewhere in the mountains of Utah and dreamt of decades ago by John Koyle, an incalculable stash as yet unreachable by today’s technologies.
Salt Lake City’s City Weekly jokes (under the headline “prophet sharing”) about “the mine’s ancient and fabled promise: wealth beyond imagination, where rivers of precious gold and platinum course beneath the docile farm community. What’s more, nine vaults are said to lie deep within the mine, filled with the treasures left by an ancient race from the Book of Mormon known as the Nephites. As legend goes, the Nephites’ wealth was set aside for God’s chosen people during a time of uncertainty as a blessing to fortify the faithful against the ensuing chaos of the apocalypse.”
