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I’m excited to announce that I’ll be lecturing at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, in only two days’ time, kicking off their Spring 2009 lecture series.

[Image: View larger].

I’ve clearly got some very large shoes to fill with this series, however, as I’ve been lined up with everyone from Beatriz Colomina to Cynthia Davidson. Stan Allen, Juan Herreros, Richard Ingersoll, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Michael Weinstock, Peter Trummer – it looks like a fantastic series.
For my own part, I think I’ve got a great talk planned – called “Cities Gone Wild” – expanding from the lecture I gave back in November, sponsored by the Complex Terrain Laboratory, at University College, London.
This talk begins at 5pm on Wednesday, January 7; it’s free and open to the public; and it will take place in Anderson Hall.
I don’t know how many readers BLDGBLOG has in Houston – or, for that matter, at Rice – but I’d love to see some of you there. And please introduce yourselves, too, as I love meeting new people.
Also, at the end of my talk I hope to address the more general subject of blogging, if for no other reason than I can guarantee that there are students enrolled at Rice right now – and people living in Houston – who have something interesting to say and simply need a new platform from which to say it. I’d be happy to talk about establishing a blog and so on, as that’s not a topic I’ve much addressed throughout all of these talks.
Finally, I’ll be doing thesis reviews at the architecture department all day on Thursday and Friday, so if you happen to be enrolled in the courses I’ll be visiting, then cool. I look forward to meeting you!
And come out to the talk – it should be fun.

Instead of putting people under house arrest – where they’d stay at home all day, unable to leave their own property for weeks or months at a time – you instead send them out to some perfect suburb in the middle of, say, Nebraska or Utah, a remote development where each house is fully furnished and tastefully maintained, but each also has only one inhabitant: a minor criminal of some sort, dwelling on the immorality of shoplifting or tax fraud and serving-out a short period of house arrest. They can even get their mail redirected there, and watch Netflix.
But out on the far periphery are watchtowers, and the streets are lined with cameras.

“There are architecture photographers [who] refuse to photograph anything from November up to February,” Michiel van Raaij writes on his blog Eikongraphia. “In their view the long shadows and dimmed light intensity of the winter season compromises their work. The effect is that – in the architecture media – not only the sun always shines, but that it is also never winter.”
There are several interesting observations here, but I’m particularly struck by the thought that the spherical trigonometry of the earth’s surface – and its angular effect on shadows – has an impact on how we might popularly view and represent architectural space.
By extension, then, if raised only on images of buildings in which there are no visible shadows – and in which surfaces thus appear to be all but shaved of ornament – are architects actually designing for a particular season of light? That is, buildings that are meant to look good, and photograph well, only in summer?
How amazing it would be to find that architectural styles begin to change – moving away from the Clement Greenberg-like flatness of international modernism toward a new era of ornamentally active deep surfaces – if something as simple as when photographs are taken were to change.
All the works of Frank Gehry, photographed in the anemic, angular light of midwinter. I sense a book idea here, if any enterprising photographers might be reading this…

In between discovering this thing the other day and sitting down to post about it this morning – it was cancelled.
What was it?
A fortifications tour through the United States and Europe, planned for 2009. And it sounded awesome.

As you can read in the trip’s accompanying PDF (3.2MB), Cornell professor Arthur Ovaska, architects Austin + Mergold, and their students would “travel along the east coast of the US and traverse Europe north to south in pursuit of a transformation in space and history of a particular type. The typology is fortifications. It is neither building nor landscape, but a hybrid, shaped in response to thousands of years of war.”

We will study the architectural responses to conflict; their continuing evolution and adaptation to new technology, tactics and politics; as well as their impact on the national, urban and individual scale in the built environment and landscape… While architects no longer design for war, we have to reconcile with its aftermath through re-appropriation of killing fields for parks, the re-engagement of city centers choked by defensive rings, and the transformation of space formerly traversed by metal and fire into places of peaceful public interaction.

Although I don’t at all agree with the statement that “architects no longer design for war” – this might be true for, say, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, but it is in no way true for military spatialists employed on prototype base housing, prefab field shelters, or even secure urban embassy design – I nonetheless think the very idea of this trip is pretty amazing.

The program will begin by travelling down the East Coast of the US (an area that has been fortified against the “invasion by sea from the east and by land from the west”) to look at urban and rural examples of Fortress America and their effects on our built situation today. We will then continue on to Britain and study results of nearly 2000 years of military history expressed in buildings and landscape. Then, traveling along the French-German border (a continuous battlefield for over a thousand years), we will visit mediaeval castles, baroque garden-fortresses and WWII bunkers, in addition to post-bellum architecture such as Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. Next we will make our way into Switzerland and northern Italy to see some of the incredible natural defenses from the time of Napoleon and Garibaldi (area also featured in numerous James Bond movies and written about by Ernest Hemingway) as well as examples of modern architecture built in short spans of peacetime. Travelling down the fabulous Adriatic coast through several Croatian cities (including Dubrovnik – the ultimate walled city) we will observe traces of the Roman, Venetian, and Italian conquests as well as the recent civil war in the former Yugoslavia. After that we will stop in Greece to visit the famous last stand of the 300 Spartans and study the unique landscape of Thermopylae pass. And finally, finishing our Great March across Europe, we will arrive on the island of Malta: a fortified naval refuge of the Maltese order for the last 500 years that is now contending with its legacy of isolationism.

Here’s the actual itinerary:

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You’d engage in design studios along the way – this sounds so unbelievably cool to me, imagine filling whole sketchbooks and blogs with images of well-fortified hill towns, walled cities, bunkers, and urban cores – and, lest you fear for their absence, we’re reminded that “coffee & refreshments will be served.”

You would even have studied “operational walls”:

This technology seminar will focus on the evolution of the fortified wall and earthwork construction dating back several thousand years and its influence on current architecture & landscape production. The primary topics in this seminar will include utilizing the vernacular landscape as a source for construction materials; examining construction methodologies and phasing for the production of an earthwork and wall assembly; analyzing the relationship between form and functional operation; exploring the danger/safety nature of the double-sided programmed wall; and dissecting the logic of wall details. Coursework will require a series of analytical sketches, photographic documentation exercises and a final measured project.

I have to assume that the trip was cancelled because of lack of enrollment, or some other trickle-down effect of the financial crisis (after all, enrollment, airfare, accommodation, and so on was all estimated at a rather eye-popping $20,000 – perhaps I’m wrong, but I feel like BLDGBLOG could organize a cheaper version of this trip quite easily).

[Image: The pack and the bunker: equipment for landscapes].

How exciting would that be, though? You get Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, Javier Arbona, Edwin Gardner, the Complex Terrain Laboratory, and a dozen others; you all buy a copy of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology; and then you head over to Europe for five or six weeks of cheap hotel rooms, high-speed trains, rural bus routes, and some overgrown fortifications. You visit bunkers and tunnels and dungeons and barrows. You sketch things, make short films, and one of you draws a comic book. You read Beowulf and shave Javier’s leg hair while he’s sleeping…
Etc. etc.
Then you visit Spartan battlefields in Greece and update the rest of the world via Twitter. At the end, you all split a book deal.
Perhaps a serious plan for 2010…
Read more about the actual trip in the original PDF.

The new year begins with a look at sovereign geography as applied to movement through the atmosphere: a Ugandan baby girl was born aboard an airplane en route from Amsterdam to the United States – and so was given Canadian citizenship, because the plane was flying over eastern Canada at the time.

[Image: Three photos by greentheory./Sarah Palmer].

Of course, one wonders what citizenship this baby would have been given if the parents had been flying over the middle of the ocean, for instance, or across the tangled borders of an enclave or exclave. A complicated mathematics of trajectory, speed, and height is unleashed by terrestrial scholars below in order to find the exact location of the plane at the moment of childbirth.
Like something out of Borges, imperial trigonometricians are called in for consultation. Their calculations take days and arguments break out.
Perhaps the child goes on to be famous – a political leader, a poet, a revolutionary, the next pope – and his or her exact aerial origin becomes increasingly important to determine. Weather data and wind speed, the weight of fellow passengers, tiny aerodynamic imperfections in the wings, and even gravitational anomalies in the earth’s crust are brought to bear: how fast was the airplane traveling?
Like the origins of the Sunni/Shia split in Islam, rival factions form: their battle lines are drawn, like wisps of cloud in a springtime sky.
Perhaps, in a virtuoso application of air rights laws delivered to a stunned General Assembly of the UN, a property entrepreneur actually purchases the exact section of sky where he believes the baby was born. Rethinking the deal later, he buys the entire historic flight path. Soon, he owns vast corridors of air.
I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg, who once wrote of a “Subliminal Billionaire” who “owns vast Spheres of Air” – only, here, those carefully surveyed envelopes of atmospheric real estate are more like UNESCO Heritage Sites, international sky parks hovering somewhere over a border near you.

(Note: The obituary of the man who invented air rights – please, oh please, someone commission me to write a longer article about this man! – was originally spotted last summer via Marcus Trimble’s Super Colossal).

[Images: From a short film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 at the Bartlett].

A few days ago, Ballardian posted a long, well-timed, and very interesting interview with Nic Clear, from London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. I’ve long been a fan of Clear’s work with his students; I wrote a short article about him for Dwell last spring (see image, below), and Clear organized last month’s Science Fiction and Architecture panel in London.

[Image: A short article about Nic Clear from the March 2008 issue of Dwell].

Huge sections of the interview, in which they discuss the value of extra-architectural ideas in helping to shape the “near future” of spatial design, are worth quoting in full; but I’ll stick to a few specific moments here, and you can then go read the rest.
What I like about Clear, though, is that he’s 100% comfortable with – and seemingly relentless about pursuing – architecture not as a system of codified ornament or as a closed universe of citational conformity open only to grad students, but as a resource for ideas of every kind, whether or not they apply to your own local building codes or will ever lead to an act of construction.
Want to write a novel? A screenplay? An essay about landscape and climate change? Want to direct a music video? Start a blog? Architecture offers fuel – and amazing visuals – for all of these things.
The field becomes almost infinitely more exciting when you realize that architectural projects, by definition, entail the reimagination of how humans might inhabit the earth – how they organize themselves spatially and give shape to their everyday lives. Architecture is, within mere instants of discussing any idea or project, real or imagined, something with anthropological, economic, legal, libidinal, seismic, and even planetary implications.
In fact, if architecture can be viewed as the material alteration of the earth’s surface, then it is not a stretch to say that architecture has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet.
Little wonder, then, if we do decide to go in this direction, that there appears to be a growing cross-over of interests between architecture and science fiction – as in, for instance, the work produced by Nic Clear’s Unit 15.

[Images: From a short film by Dan Farmer, a tour through a landscape of abandoned hospital equipment, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 at the Bartlett].

In any case, it shouldn’t be surprising that Ballardian would then focus specifically on the architectural value of J.G. Ballard.
When asked whether Ballard is a growing influence on today’s practitioners, Clear answers:

I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture – maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian.’ Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Asked to define “Ballardian space,” if such a thing exists, Clear says: “If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city – especially London – then you are pretty close [to Ballardian space].”
Finally – because you can simply read the interview itself in full – Clear sums it all up: “We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings – that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.”

[Image: Sludge makes itself at home in Harrimann, Tennessee; photo by J. Miles Carey/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated Press/New York Times].

Earlier this week the retaining wall of a massive sludge dam gave way 40 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee, resulting in a coal ash spill that now lies “thick and largely untouched over hundreds of acres of land and waterways.”
Houses and business have been buried whole or swept off their foundations by the potentially toxic material; amidst its unnaturally concentrated ingredients are selenium, arsenic, and lead, all of which produce “neurological problems” and cancer.
“The breach occurred,” the New York Times explains, as if describing a painting by from a little-known Appalachian Series by Caspar David Friedrich, “when an earthen dike, the only thing separating millions of cubic yards of ash from the river, gave way, releasing a glossy sea of muck, four to six feet thick, dotted with icebergs of ash across the landscape. Where the Clinch River joined the Tennessee, a clear demarcation was visible between the soiled waters of the former and the clear brown broth of the latter.”
An updated aerial survey now suggests that more than 5 million cubic yards of this possibly neurologically-active waste has been released – “enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep” – forming a new self-organized landscape of industrial byproducts, a future stratigraphic surprise for our next millennium’s archaeologists.
Or perhaps this is the metallization of the world long ago dreamed of by the Italian futurists. Adventures in metallized deterrestrialization.