Month: November 2014

[Image: “Fantasy House 10” by Charley Harper].

These aren’t the best-quality scans in the world, but I just rediscovered these on my computer and thought I’d post them. These are so-called “fantasy houses” by artist Charley Harper, originally published in, as far as I can tell, the November 1959 issue of Ford Times, exactly 55 years ago.

To use an ungainly compound analogy, these look like what might have happened if Syd Mead had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, or as if we’re glimpsing a kind of prairie modernism timidly trying on the garb of science fiction.

[Image: “Fantasy House 2” by Charley Harper].

Minimalist cubes are suspended on cables from vast geological forms and glass houses pop up unexpectedly in the deepest recesses of American show caves.

[Image: “Fantasy House 3” by Charley Harper].

Elsewhere, extraordinary cantilevers stretch like the prows of exotic ships over postcard-ready landmarks, and the whole series has the feel of a rather wholesome advertising campaign for the National Park service—complete with conspicuously well-placed Ford automobiles reminding you that the future is only one or two rest stops away.

[Image: “Fantasy House 10” by Charley Harper].

I don’t have much further information about these images, to be honest—other than to point out that they fulfilled the role of a kind of pop-speculative domestic architecture from the near-future for an earlier generation of media consumers—but click through to the Charley Harper website to see more of his work, or consider picking up a copy of the Charley Harper coffee table book for the holidays.

[Image: “Fantasy House 7” by Charley Harper].

Harper—who sadly passed away back in 2007—remains more widely known for his stylized animals and landscape scenes, but these uncharacteristic stabs at architectural futurism are worth a passing glance in any survey of 20th-century speculative work.

[Image: Photo by Dmitry Kostyukov, courtesy of The New York Times].

The New York Times has the strange story of an abandoned and overgrown military base near Paris where “scientists blew up more than half a ton of uranium in 2,000 explosions… often outdoors, just 14 miles from the Eiffel Tower.”

The site is now being considered for demolition, the ground beneath it to be excavated as part of a new gypsum mine—however, all that construction work risks stirring up clouds of “toxic uranium dust” from an earlier generation’s detonations.

Today, the old fort is part picturesque ruin, part Tarkovsky film:

These days curtains flap from rows of overgrown buildings; radiation symbols and other graffiti cover the security post, which is filled, weirdly, with women’s shoes. The empty housing of a vast supercomputer sits in gloom; vines spill into laboratories. The ruins recall the post-apocalypse landscape of Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

For all the controversy and narrative suspense, however, there are surprisingly few sites of detectable radioactivity. “In 2011,” we read, for example, “Christophe Nedelec, a local environmentalist, broke into the fort and, using an amateur Geiger counter, found three spots with elevated levels of radiation.” Three spots—considering that no fewer than an astonishing 150 kilograms—or roughly 330 pounds—of uranium are estimated to have blown around the grounds of the fort, that’s a seemingly reassuring find.

Yet the less optimistic view is that the uranium dust has already been and gone, lost and dissipated over decades into the surroundings neighborhoods, that are only “about nine miles from central Paris,” perhaps even blowing back into the city itself on windy days over a timespan of decades—uranium dust swirling down onto the streets and sidewalks, landing on the shoes, coats, and coffee cups of everyday Parisians who would otherwise have no real reason to worry about what appeared to be ordinary soot.

So, in a sense, the site has already depleted itself. This, certainly, resembles the view of the mining company that now wants to tear down the old fort and rip the landscape into a gypsum mine.

In any case, the site—and the people now guerrilla-gardening there—is worth a quick look over at the New York Times.

(The title of this post is borrowed from a pamphlet by Eugene Thacker, which has surreally and hilariously been in the news this past month after popping up on Glenn Beck’s show as an example of the threat of nihilism in U.S. popular culture; there is otherwise no connection between this post and the book—just toxic uranium dust…).