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Architectural Dressage

You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single block and walked to an adjacent site by a phalanx of miniature robots. Then walked back into place again.

The 432 individual machines used for the move were “actually omnidirectional modular hydraulic jacks that are capable of lifting around 10 tons each,” New Atlas explains. “Sensors monitor pressure, vibration, and alignment while a centralized AI control unit coordinates the balance and movements into a synchronized crawl.”

It’s easy enough to imagine these technologies being permanently built into the urban fabric someday, allowing buildings to relocate for large construction projects or even to dodge flash floods; or demented emperors requiring all their court’s buildings to be mobile, with urban-scale choreographers designing elaborate birthday fetes of architectural dressage; or even that—given how these robots were allegedly installed, involving an earlier sequence of “remote-controlled robots that can move through narrow corridors and doorways,” all guided by a virtual 3D model of the entire complex—some wild new form of whole-building heist becomes possible. Send in the robots; jack the building up; steal it.

[Animation via Core77.]

Uncontrolled Remains

I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of garbage being stored in giant, artificial landforms—or simply buried underground like false geological deposits—might be inadvertently catalyzing chemical processes we neither understand nor know how to stop. I was thus excited to see a long investigation of this topic in Bloomberg last week, led by journalists Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle.

At the Chiquita Canyon Landfill here in greater Los Angeles, a disquieting smell—not to mention strange medical issues—has been tormenting local neighbors for years. But there is “no simple solution,” we read, “because what’s driving it is something buried beneath the waste: a complex and dangerous chemical reaction whose very nature is in dispute.”

The side-effects of that complex chemical reaction include elevated, sometimes “scorching,” underground temperatures and the production of Dantean landscape scenes above: “In early 2022 a closed section in the landfill’s northwest corner began overheating, eventually reaching temperatures above 200F (93C). That’s nearly 40% hotter than the federal EPA’s standard for landfill operations. As the waste slowly cooked, it belched out toxic gases, elevating nearby levels of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and benzene, which can damage DNA and cause leukemia after enough exposure. Large amounts of leachate (basically, trash juice) built up and bubbled, boiled and even shot into the air like geysers.” The belch as landscape phenomenon.

The article is worth reading in full, and goes into much further depth about all of this. One important point is the potential role played by new types of material waste, including lithium-ion batteries, vape pens, electric toothbrushes, and other electronic goods whose presence might be at least partially to blame for rising subterranean temperatures in landfills across the United States.

But what continues to interest me about this overall problem, and why I’m posting about landfills again, is something more abstract than just waste-management practices or oxygen-content regulations in the disposal industry: we continue to create things we don’t know how to get rid of, objects whose attempted destruction only empowers them and materials whose burial makes them harder to control.

Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis

Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio.

The “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” (2014) was a fictional design project we originally set in the vast limestone province of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.

[Image: A rock-acid drip-irrigation hub for the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis,” a collaboration between BLDGBLOG and WROT Studio; all images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio.]

The Nullarbor Plain is a nearly treeless region, roughly the size of Nebraska. It is also the world’s largest karst landscape, and thus home to hundreds of natural caves.

“There is a great variety of cave types under the Nullarbor,” as Australian Geographic explains, “but the plain’s most interesting features are long, deep systems (such the Old Homestead Cave), which are found only here, in the U.S. state of Florida, and on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, all of which all have similar karst limestone layers.”

The Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis was imagined as a remote, thinly staffed site for applied geological research, where huge artificial caves could be generated below the Earth’s surface using a special acid mix—as safe as vinegar, but, importantly for our project, capable of dissolving limestone on a greatly accelerated timescale.

Subterranean spaces of every conceivable size, from tiny hollows and capillaries to vast megastructures, could thus be acid-etched into even the deepest karst formations, both rapidly and over decadal expanses of time.

The resulting rooms, tunnels, and interconnected cave systems could be used for a wide range of purposes: generating speleo-pharmaceuticals, for example, as well as testing recreational caving equipment, experimenting with underground agricultural systems, or developing new technologies for subterranean navigation, communication, inhabitation, and mapping.

As John writes on his own website—where you can also see larger, more-detailed versions of these images—our “aberrant caverns,” in John’s phrase, would be monitored in real-time by autonomous systems operating 24 hours a day.

The ever-growing caves could thus be left on their own, unsupervised, while the acid-drip system gradually etches down, drop by drop, reaching increasingly remote underground realms that the acid itself creates.

As a preliminary step, different blends of rock-acid mix would first be tested on large pillars aboveground, to choose or highlight specific spatial effects.

Controlled showers of rock-acid would result in totem-like sculptures, like industrial-scale menhirs—Stone Age ritual artifacts by way of 21st-century geochemistry.

Once the desired effects have been achieved, fields of bladders, nozzles, and injection arrays can be programmed and choreographed to enlarge an artificial cave mouth.

The irrigation system can then be continued underground. Necklaces of acid-drip arrays can easily be extended underground in order to expand the cave itself, but also to lengthen certain tunnels or to experiment with architecturally stable cave formations.

As John explains, the images seen here depict an “injection array using a pressurized system to move large quantities of solution to underlying areas of the cave network. These injection sites are outwardly the tell for a hidden world below. Much like oil derricks extracting resources from the earth, their density and scale across the landscape give you a glimpse into areas afforded the most resources for injection.”

Our initial siting of this in the Nullarbor Plain was motivated entirely by geology, but other large limestone provinces—from Kentucky or northern Arizona to southern France, and from California’s Lucerne Valley to Egypt—would also be good hosts.

While we looked into standard mining acids, currently used for stripping tailings piles of valuable minerals, it quickly became apparent that specific kinds of acetic acid—again, no more toxic than vinegar—offered a more viable approach for creating a maximally spacious site with minimally polluting environmental implications. (Of course, should someone without such qualms want to explore this set-up with no concern for its ecological impact, then much stronger acids capable of dissolving much stronger rocks could also be explored.)

In 2022, I was excited to see that John returned to this project, generating a new series of images using AI image-generation software trained on our earlier project documentation. Given their provenance, the resulting images are unsurprisingly cinematic—equal parts cyberpunk dereliction and underworldly luminescence.

Over the years, John has become a wizard at producing Modernist geological imagery, publishing images on his Instagram account—rock sculpted as smooth as paper and as diaphanous as a veil or curtain.

Check out his own website for more images of the Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis and other recent projects. And, if you like this, don’t miss “Architecture-by-Bee and Other Animal Printheads,” an earlier project of ours that I’m proud to say was published in Paul Dobraszczyk’s excellent recent book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us.

(All images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio. This post contains a Bookshop.org affiliate link, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.)

The Reaction Area

“Enigmatic chemical reactions” have broken out underground inside two Los Angeles-area landfills, according to the L.A. Times. These “highly unusual reactions at Los Angeles County’s two largest landfills have raised serious questions about the region’s long-standing approach to waste disposal and its aging dumps.”

If landfills are the extreme endpoint of a cultural practice of burial—we bury to memorialize, to forget, to protect, to hide, store, and retrieve—then the idea that what we’ve made subterranean might take on a life or chemical activity of its own has a strange irony. Landfills seem to fully embody the idea that we don’t understand the extent of we’ve placed into the ground, nor what it does once we leave it there. Perhaps we also bury to reinvigorate and transform.

I’m reminded of a story from the British nuclear facility at Sellafield, whose new owners realized they had incomplete documentation of the site and thus had no idea where radioactive waste had been buried there. They actually put an ad in the local newspaper saying, “We need your help. Did you work at Sellafield in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s? Were you by chance in the job of disposing of radioactive material? If so, the owners of Britain’s nuclear waste dump would very much like to hear from you: they want you to tell them what you dumped—and where you put it.”

It feels oddly on-brand with modern living that we might not fully understand long-term landfill chemistry, that random solvents, dyes, acids, fuels, and detergents sloshing around together in huge, sealed landscapes for decades might break out in unexplained reactions, like inadvertent batteries—that we isolated our waste, thinking it would make us safe, but it is only gaining in chemical power.

As of November 2023, the “reaction area” in one of the L.A. dumps “had grown by 30 to 35 acres, according to the agency [CalRecycle]. Already, the heat has melted or deformed the landfill’s gas collection system, which consists mostly of polyvinyl chloride well casings. The damage has hindered the facility’s efforts to collect toxic pollutants.” This seems to imply it will get worse, and nearby residents have begun reporting chemical smells.

“The bad news,” L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger told the paper, “is we’ve never seen anything like this, and if we don’t understand what triggered it, it could happen at other landfills that are dormant. So it’s important for us to get a handle on it.” The earth, riddled with dormant landfills, attaining enigmatic chemical vigor in the darkness.

Agency of the Subsurface

[Image: The Heathen Gate at Carnuntum, outside Vienna; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Last summer, a geophysicist at the University of Vienna named Immo Trinks proposed the creation of an EU-funded “International Subsurface Exploration Agency.” Modeled after NASA or the ESA, this new institute would spend its time, in his words, “looking downward instead of up.”

The group’s main goal would be archaeological: to map, and thus help preserve, sites of human settlement before they are lost to development, natural decay, climate change, and war.

Archaeologist Stefano Campana, at the University of Siena, has launched a comparable project called Sotto Siena, or “Under Siena”—abbreviated as SOS—intended to survey all accessible land in the city of Siena.

[Image: A few of Siena’s innumerable arches; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

That project’s goal is primarily to catalog the region’s millennia of human habitation and cultural artifacts, but, like Immo Trinks and his proposed ISEA, is also serving to document modern-day infrastructure, such as pipes, utilities, sewers, and more. (When I met Campana in Siena last year, I was interested to learn that a man who had walked over to say hello, who was introduced to me as an enthusiastic supporter of Campana’s work, was actually Siena’s chief of police—it’s not just archaeologists who want to know what’s going on beneath the streets.)

I had the pleasure of tagging along with both Trinks and Campana last year as part of my Graham Foundation grant, “Invisible Cities,” and a brief write-up of that experience is now online over at WIRED.

The article begins in Siena, where I joined Campana and two technicians from the Livorno-based firm GeoStudi Astier for a multi-hour scan of parks, piazzas, and streets, using a ground-penetrating radar rig attached to a 4WD utility vehicle.

[Images: The GPR rig we rode in that day, owned and operated by GeoStudi Astier; photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

We stayed out well past midnight, at one point scanning a piazza in front of the world’s oldest bank, an experience that brought back positive memories from my days reporting A Burglar’s Guide to the City (alas, we didn’t discover a secret route into or out of the vault, but just some fountain drains).

In Vienna, meanwhile, Trinks drove me out to see an abandoned Roman frontier-city and military base called Carnuntum, near the banks of the Danube, where he walked me through apparently empty fields and meadows while narrating all the buildings and streets we were allegedly passing through—an invisible architecture mapped to extraordinary detail by a combination of ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry.

“We want to map it all—that’s the message,” Trinks explained to me. “You’re not just mapping a Roman villa. You’re not mapping an individual building. You are mapping an entire city. You are mapping an entire landscape—and beyond.”

An estimated 99% of Carnuntum remains unexcavated, which means that our knowledge of its urban layout is almost entirely mediated by electromagnetic technology. This, of course, presents all sorts of questions—about data, machine error, interpretation, and more—that were explained to me on a third leg of that trip, when I traveled to Croatia to meet Lawrence B. Conyers.

[Image: A gorge leading away behind the archaeological site I visited on the island of Brač, Croatia; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Conyers is an American ground-penetrating radar expert who, when we met, was spending a couple of weeks out on the island of Brač, near the city of Split. He had traveled there to scan a hilltop site, looking for the radar signatures of architectural remains, in support of a project sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Conyers supplies a voice of caution in the WIRED piece, advising against over-relying on expensive machines for large-scale data collection if the people hoarding that data don’t necessarily know how to filter or interpret it.

[Image: Lawrence Conyers supervises two grad students using his ground-penetrating radar gear; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

The goal of an International Subsurface Exploration Agency could rise or fall, in other words, not just on questions of funding or public support, but on the limits of software analysis and human interpretation: are we sure that what we see on the screens of our machines is actually there, underground?

When we spoke in Siena, Campana used the metaphor of a medical biopsy, insisting that archaeologists and geophysicists will always need to excavate, not just for the recovery of historical artifacts and materials, but for verifying their own hypotheses, literally testing the ground for things they think they’ve seen there.

Archaeologist Eileen Ernenwein, co-editor of the journal Archaeological Prospection, also emphasized this to me when I interviewed her for WIRED, adding a personal anecdote that has stuck with me. During her graduate thesis research, Ernenwein explained, she found magnetic evidence of severely eroded house walls at an indigenous site in New Mexico, but, after excavating to study them, realized that the structure was only visible in the electromagnetic data. It was no less physically real for only being visible magnetically—yet excavation alone would have almost certainly have missed the site altogether. She called it “the invisible house.”

In any case, many things have drawn me to this material, but the long-term electromagnetic traces of our built environment get very little discussion in architectural circles, and I would love this sort of legacy to be more prominently considered. What’s more, our cultural obsession with ruins will likely soon begin to absorb new sorts of images—such as radar blurs and magnetic signatures of invisible buildings—signaling an art historical shift in our representation of the architectural past.

For now, check out the WIRED article, if you get a chance.

(Thanks again to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for supporting this research. Related: Through This Building Shines The Cosmos.)

Lost Animals

I don’t normally link to my short stories here, but I’m proud of a new one called “Lost Animals” that went up earlier this week. It’s about a man hired by private clients to clear houses of ghosts, not using supernatural equipment but a baseball bat.

He’s been storming into abandoned homes, haunted offices, auto-repair yards, and even millionaires’ yachts all over the country, using aggression to overcome his own fears and maintain the upper hand.

The times ghosts truly scare me aren’t from the shock of a dead face staring up from the bottom of a basement staircase; I’m usually too drunk or high for that, too hyped up on aggression. I’ll simply charge at the thing, running after it into a root cellar or climbing a wooden ladder into an unlit barn attic to chase it away. The sights that genuinely unsettle me, that keep me awake at night, are the weird, demented loops I sometimes catch them in, the bleakness of a ghost’s new existence, the never-ending isolation of the afterlife, empty versions of ourselves stuck in routines that have lost all meaning.

After nearly two decades of this—scaring dead people out of their comfort zones—he experiences a slow change of attitude that affects his ability to do the job.

It’s only loosely architectural, but I thought I’d link it here anyway, as the story explores a wide range of spatial situations amenable to hauntings. Check it out, if you’re in the mood for an autumnal read at the height of summer.

[Photo in top image courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.]

Every Room A Battlefield

[Image: Looking out over the center of “Razish,” a simulated city at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

I had an opportunity to revisit the Fort Irwin National Training Center this weekend as part of a series of field trips I’ve put together for the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera program. One of their major topics of discussion this spring is models and simulations.

[Image: Downtown Razish, part of the fictional nation of “Atropia”; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Fort Irwin is a U.S. Army base the size of Rhode Island, roughly three hours outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. Already huge, Fort Irwin fits into a much larger jigsaw puzzle of other military lands, including Edwards Air Force Base and the Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, forming a truly vast, almost state-level presence in the mountains and desert.

Its scale and isolation make it an ideal setting for immersive training exercises, which are staged in a series of 14 simulated towns and cities.

[Image: A multistory reconfigurable plywood interior used for building-clearance operations at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

My last trip to Fort Irwin was back in September 2012, long enough for significant changes to occur, both architecturally, in terms of the training center itself, and geopolitically, in terms of current events.

[Image: Views of “Razish” at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

When I was there in 2012, our visitor group witnessed a staged combat scenario set in a small Afghan village; today’s geopolitical context has changed, resulting in a kind of theatrical shift in what—and who—is being simulated. In another post, I have referred to this as imperial dramaturgy: how we stage and engage with representations of our purported adversaries. Indeed, dramaturgy, stagecraft, and set design all offer a useful lens through which to understand politics—and, of course, also cast Fort Irwin in a different light, where members of the public are permitted to watch carefully orchestrated events whose purpose seems equally split between operatic braggadocio (“look what we can do!”) and practical fundraising (“here’s where your taxes go!”).

The city we visited on Friday is called “Razish,” the provincial capital of a fictional nation known as “Atropia.” With more than 750 individual buildings, some of which are five stories tall, and multiple tunnel complexes, Razish is not only much larger than the village market I saw back in 2012, but the signs are also now written in Cyrillic. Russian-speaking actors hired from a local jobs agency played live-action roles for us, including a gruff mayor and his monosyllabic chief of police; there were also upward of three dozen civilian residents whose job would soon become simply screaming out of sight for psychological effect as the simulated military operation began.

The aesthetic effect was that of a geopolitical uncanny valley: Razish was not Iraq or Iran, it looked nothing particularly like Russia, and it did not have Chinese characteristics, so to speak. It felt like a looking-glass version of a Central Asian breakaway republic, a windswept landscape of cinder blocks, cargo containers, and outdoor markets, with attack helicopters buzzing by in the distance. An ersatz mosque stood atop one hill, with strategic views of the surrounding terrain.

[Images: Photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

Idle speculation amongst some of my fellow visitors suggested that the Army was leaning into this portrayal of a Russian opponent as a deliberate feint or ruse, hiding the fact that the Army might be preparing for urban combat in Central Asia, sure, but likely with a different Asian nation-state in mind.

But rather than try to interpret what we saw in terms of its imperial messaging, I’ll stick with a brief description of the architectural experience. The building interiors were dense, modular labyrinths of rooms framed by plywood, their walls porous at various scales with doors, chutes, and openings. In some cases, trapdoors led up—or down—through the buildings along a different axis of approach, such that an unexpected ambush could be staged in nearly any spatial circumstance. Many walls were stenciled with warnings that they were load-bearing and not to be removed; others had “demo,” for demolish, spray-painted across them.

It seems highly likely that, upon future return, entirely different interiors would greet us, a continuously revised maze of threats and imminent violence.

[Images: Interiors at Fort Irwin; photos by Geoff Manaugh.]

We were able to speak with active-duty soldiers throughout the day, including over lunch, and I asked one of them about building-clearance operations and how it might differ from the simulated outdoor raid we had just seen performed. “Every room is a battlefield,” the soldier replied, noting that combat now often takes place inside architecture, not just on the muddy plains of vast continental interiors. This would be the “four-floor war” described elsewhere.

[Image: The back streets of Razish; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

The Fort Irwin National Training Center offers public tours once a month, every spring and summer; interested visitors can sign up online.

World Store

There was an article last year in the New York Times about a California start-up called Inversion that wants to “speed delivery of important items by storing them in orbit.”

Their goal is to build “earth-orbiting capsules”—“hundreds or thousands of containers”—that could “deliver goods anywhere in the world from outer space.”

The company’s founders imagine the capsules could store artificial organs that are delivered to an operating room within a few hours or serve as mobile field hospitals floating in orbit that would be dispatched to remote areas of the planet.

Purely in terms of this logistical vision, I’m reminded of a DARPA proposal called the “Upward Falling Payloads” program. For that, critical goods, including weapons and war-fighting materiel—but, why not, perhaps also emergency organs for frontline surgery—could be stored underwater, in the middle of the ocean, using “deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they ‘fall upward.’”

Whether or not either one of these plans is technically feasible is less interesting to me than the underlying idea of caching valuable objects in remote locations for later recovery. The world would become a series of hiding spots for artifacts and tools of potential future importance, the Earth reengineered for its archival utility.

Perhaps the Anthropocene is really just a world denuded of its ecological functions, all life other than human vacuously replaced by landscape-scale storage facilities housing just-in-time detritus—the psychosis of a species surrounded only by things it can store and retrieve at will.

Cleared For Approach

[Image: “Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst.]

When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst, a composition and theme he continually revisited and changed over the course of his career—I mistook the tiny white squiggles in the lower right for a procession of human congregants or religious pilgrims, people approaching a huge, alien landform out of some strange act of homage or scientific curiosity. Alas, it’s just Max Ernst’s signature.

Whatever you’re approaching in 2023, may it be unfamiliar, potentially threatening, and new.

Through This Building Shines the Cosmos

[Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG of public domain images from NASA and the Library of Congress.]

An opportunity to explore the use of muons as a tool for architectural and archaeological imaging came up this summer while I was in Europe for my Graham Foundation project, “Invisible Cities.”

Muons are cosmic particles, similar to neutrinos, that pass through us constantly—but also through solid rock and concrete, through cathedrals, pyramids, dams, and roads. In the 1960s, physicist Luis W. Alvarez of UC Berkeley launched a whole new form of architectural imaging when he realized that, if you can capture muons as they leave various structures—in Alvarez’s case, the Pyramid of Khafre outside Cairo—then you can create an image of what they’ve just passed through.

This is now known as muography—muon photography. Muography, as I describe it in a new story published in this weekend’s Financial Times Magazine—my first cover story!—is “one part comic-book superpower, one part cosmic photography.”

Fast-forward to 2022, and muons are on the cusp of being adopted as a new tool for infrastructural inspection, allowing engineers to peer inside the supports of bridges and freeways, inside the concrete of hydroelectric dams and high-rise apartment blocks, even inside the thick, dense masonry of Renaissance cathedrals and ancient temples, looking for signs of corrosion, decay, and impending collapse.

For the Financial Times, I went to Berlin to meet an engineer leading Germany’s federal effort to test and certify muon-inspection technology, with the goal of turning an obscure physics experiment into a commercial tool. The lab I visited there was incredible, an industrial space lit by skylights in the city’s southwest suburbs, filled with massive concrete monoliths, each marked with Agnes Martin-like grids. These dense concrete slabs—modern obelisks—are used to test non-destructive imaging technologies. In the piece, I compare the lab to a Brutalist sculpture garden.

While German authorities (in this case, working with a physicist at the University of Glasgow) work to set standards and protocols for muography in the global marketplace, the most charismatic proof-of-concept for muons’ future use might come from Florence, Italy.

That’s where a muon detector will likely be installed later this year, imaging the walls of Brunelleschi’s famous dome. The cathedral there is a constantly settling, dynamic system—far from static—and the overwhelming weight of Brunelleschi’s dome has produced large cracks in the church walls below. Those cracks have been growing wider for centuries, leading to enough concern that the entire church is now enreefed with measuring devices—“giving it a solid claim as the world’s most carefully monitored structure,” as the New York Times wrote as long ago as 1987.

[Image: Looking up into Brunelleschi’s Dome, Florence; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Because Brunelleschi left behind no drawings or even textual descriptions of how his dome had been assembled, today’s engineers remain in the dark about how to reinforce it. With walls up to two meters thick, the masonry is too dense for traditional imaging methods, such as radar and ultrasound. But muons can easily pass through the entire cathedral; they are generated freely by natural reactions between cosmic rays and the Earth’s upper atmosphere; and they can be detected with a device that requires almost no electricity to run.

In any case, I’ve been obsessed with muons for more than a decade, so this was an absolute thrill to report. The Financial Times has a rigorous paywall, however, so it will be hard to read the piece without a subscription, but if you see a copy of the magazine kicking around at your local newsstand, grab a copy and dive into the cosmic future of large-scale architectural imaging.

[Thanks again to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for funding this research. A great, but not widely known, book on Brunelleschi’s dome, with superb illustrations, is Brunelleschi’s Cupola by Giovanni Fanelli and Michele Fanelli.]

Numbers Pool

[Image: “Solomon’s Pools & ancient aqueducts…,” via Library of Congress.]

There’s a beautiful description over at New Scientist of a hypothetical new form of computing device, a “liquid crystal computer” in which calculations would move “like ripples through the liquid.”

According to researchers Žiga Kos and Jörn Dunkel, calculations would be performed by—and registered as—crystal orientations in the liquid, induced or controlled by electromagnetism: “Electric fields could… be used to manipulate the molecules to perform basic calculations, similar to how simple circuits called logic gates work in an ordinary computer. Calculations on the proposed computer would appear as ripples spreading through the liquid.”

Liquid-supercomputer facilities of the near-future might thus resemble not server farms but aquatic centers, sealed interiors lined with reflecting pools kept in different electromagnetic regimes. Although the air inside is utterly still, you watch as small ripples bounce and roll across the surface of each pool, depths triggered by equations. Thinking machines masked as hydrologic infrastructure. Cisterns and aqueducts. Computational hydrology.

There’s a line by William S. Burroughs that I probably quote too often, but I’m nevertheless reminded of again here. Burroughs once described “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal,” but perhaps this new vision is more akin to an oceanic consciousness thinking in slow tides and currents, liquid crystal waves of calculation breaking through the deep.

[Image: “The ancient swimming pool at Bath,” via Library of Congress.]

Briefly, given the prevalence of cauldron imagery in Western myth, there is something almost folkloristic about the idea of liquid technologies such as this—pools that can model the future or offer visions of other worlds.

In fact, it tangentially brings to mind another wild proposal: constructing the “Ultimately Large Telescope” [PDF], a vast spinning cauldron on the moon, reflecting astral light from a facility constructed inside the darkness of a lunar crater.

This hypothetical telescope, Universe Today explains, “would rely on liquids rather than coated glass (making it much cheaper to transport to the Moon). One type of liquid would be arranged in a spinning vat while a second metallic liquid (like mercury, which is reflective) would be positioned on top. The vat would spin continuously to keep the surface of the liquid in the correct parabolic shape to work as a mirror.” A witches’ cauldron on the moon, peering into space.