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[Image: A plane lands at Heathrow, London; photo by Simon Dawson, courtesy of Bloomberg].

A short article in The Economist raises the possibility that television signals in London, England, could be turned into a passive, aircraft-detecting radar system.

A system such as this “relies on existing signals, such as television and radio broadcasts, to illuminate aircraft.”

This involves using multiple antennas to listen out for signals from broadcast towers, and for reflections of those signals that have bounced off aircraft, and comparing the two. With enough number-crunching, the position, speed and direction of nearby aircraft can then be determined. Passive radar requires a lot of processing power, but because there is no need for a transmitter, it ends up being cheaper than conventional radar. It also has military benefits, because it enables a radar station to detect objects covertly, without emitting any signals of its own.

“Will soap operas and news bulletins end up helping to direct aircraft in London’s busy skies?” The Economist asks. The idea of the entirety of London becoming a passive aeronautic device, pinging both commercial aircraft and military planes, and tracking the encroachment of unmanned aerial vehicles on urban airspace, all simply by piggybacking on the everyday technology of the television set, is pretty eerie, as if living in a giant radar dish powered by late-night entertainment.

London becomes a weird new kind of camera pointed upward at secretly passing aircraft, your living room taking pictures of the sky.

It also brings to mind the so-called “wifi camera” developed way back in 2008 by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque. The wifi camera “takes ‘pictures’ of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light.”

[Image: The “wifi camera” by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque].

You can thus create images of architectural spaces, almost like a CAT scan, based on wifi signal strength, deducing from the data things like building layout, room density, material thickness, the locations of walls, doors, windows, and more, albeit to quite a low degree of resolution.

[Image: Signal data and its spatial implications from the “wifi camera” by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque].

“With the camera we can take real time ‘photos’ of wifi,” its developers write. “These show how our physical structures are illuminated by this particular electromagnetic phenomenon and we are even able to see the shadows that our bodies cast within such ‘hertzian’ spaces.”

It’s a kind of electromagnetic chiaroscuro that selectively and invisibly “illuminates” the built environment—until the right device or camera comes along, and all that spatial data becomes available to human view. It’s like a sixth sense of wifi, or something out of Simone Ferracina‘s project Theriomorphous Cyborg.

Here, the comparison to the London TV radar system is simply that, in both cases, already existing networks of electromagnetic signals are operationalized, so to speak, becoming inputs for a new form of visualization. You can thus take pictures of the sky, so to speak, using passive, city-wide, televisual radar, and you can scan the interiors of unknown buildings using wifi cameras tuned to routers’ electromagnetic glow.

[Image: From the “wifi camera” by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque].

Apropos of very little, meanwhile, and more or less dispensing with plausibility, it would be interesting to see if the same sort of thing—that is, passive radar, using pre-existing signals—could somehow be used to turn the human nervous system itself into a kind of distributed, passively electric object-detection device on an urban scale. Nervous systems of the city as sensor network: a neuro-operative technology always scanning, sometimes dreaming, interacting with itself on all scales.

An interesting symposium at Columbia University later this month looks at “the ecology of New York City“:

This symposium will explore a range of ecological research happening in and around New York City. The program is focused on three themes—organisms, environment, and history—with speakers from a range of disciplines including community ecology, evolutionary biology, ecophysiology, paleoecology, archaeology, and conservation. The research presented here spans multiple taxa including plants, microbes, birds, and mammals.

The event is free and kicks off—as a lot of academic events unfortunately do—at 9am on a Saturday morning, but if you’re up and at ’em and want to stop by, the program looks pretty compelling. Expect the marginal ecologies of vacant lots, green roofs, urban waterways, regional bird migration, marshlands, and even a look back at “Early Foods and Medicines of 17th Century New Amsterdam: Cross-cultural Plant Population Exchange and Environmental Change in the Lower Hudson Valley,” when the plans growing along the river could perhaps be thought of as a kind of cultivated pharmacy garden. Finally, the symposium wraps up with a speculative look ahead to the ecology of greater New York in the year 2409 AD, with Eric Sanderson of Mannahatta fame leading the conversation.

You must register to attend, after which you’ll find everyone in room 501 of Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia University’s Morningside Campus on Saturday, April 20.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

[Image: The WWI terrain model of Messines, Belgium, in Cannock Chase, England; photo, “taken probably 1918 by Thomas Frederick Scales,” courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand].

Past Horizons reported the other week that “a large concrete terrain model on Cannock Chase, representing a section of the Great War battle of Messines Ridge, is to be excavated” by archaeologists later this year.

The preserved but damaged model “represents the section of the front captured by New Zealand troops,” and, indeed, the model itself was used most extensively by troops from New Zealand who had been stationed in England during the war.

[Image: The concrete model at Cannock Chase, including a viewing hut; photo via The First World War Camps of Cannock Chase].

The construction of the model is itself pretty fascinating, as it was accomplished with the forced help of German POWs:

The Messines model had been constructed at Brocton in 1918 by men from the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, using German labour from the nearby prisoner of war camp. The use of trench maps and aerial photographs ensured the model, constructed in concrete, had a high degree of accuracy; trenches, strong points, railways, roads and buildings all being represented. The model was used to train soldiers in topography and to show how an impeccably planned battle could be won with minimal casualties. One feature, believed to be a “viewing platform” around three sides of the model still exists.

The “full excavation” to occur later this year—hopefully more photographs of the model will emerge online—will include the “recording and reburial” of the simulated landscape.

[Image: A viewing hut for studying the model landscape; photo via The First World War Camps of Cannock Chase].

An interpretive center—complete with an interactive 3D digital model of the nearby 3D concrete model of the actual 3D battlefield in Belgium—will also be constructed, to guide visitors through the site and to “explain how these models were used to prepare troops for battle.”

Near the model, however, lie the rest of the training camps at Cannock Chase, the subject of at least one historical website about these wartime facilities, where we read about the preserved earthworks used to train soldiers for trench warfare:

Front line trenches were typically constructed in a pattern which in plan resembled battlements (also known as the Greek Key pattern) with the intention that attackers were fired upon from three sides. Conversely communication trenches connecting the front line with reserve trenches were built in a zig-zag pattern. This ensured that if the front line trenches fell the enemy would not have a clear line of sight down the length of the “communication” trench and could therefore not enfilade (fire straight at) approaching reinforcements.

They were topographic baffles, we might say.

[Image: The scale of the model becomes more clear in this photo, also via Past Horizons].

Briefly, I’m reminded of an aside by natural historian Tim Flannery in his long but extraordinarily interesting book The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, where he comments on the Maori origins of European trench warfare tactics.

The Maori—pre-European but remarkably recent inhabitants of the islands of New Zealand—had been brutalized, in Flannery’s telling, by their own environmental mismanagement of their adopted island home, all but exterminating the indigenous wild bird population and reducing themselves, through egregiously unsustainable hunting practices, to an almost stereotypically Hobbesian state of nature.

They had thus long been at war amongst themselves, fighting over the archipelago’s steadily dwindling sources of protein—which is when the British came along, unknowingly stumbling into the midst of what Flannery describes as a chaotic and very nearly continuous state of ecologically-necessitated human conflict.

The British, Flannery explains, thus learned firsthand that the Maori had already gone to ground, so to speak, digging themselves into defensive trenches and other complex earthworks as their battles became both more extreme and more sophisticated. “Indeed,” Flannery writes, “during the Maori defense of the pa [or fortress] Puapekapeka, the British learned their first lessons in trench warfare and underground bunkers from the Maori. They were to turn these tactics to their advantage in the First World War.”

Of course, as we’ve explored elsewhere on BLDGBLOG, Flannery’s claim is an overstatement—”siege mines” and other forms of militarized earthworks had already long existed in the European war tradition, well before English seafarers reached New Zealand—but it’s an interesting claim, nonetheless, and it resonates strangely with this vision of New Zealand troops studying trench geometries on a large-scale 3D concrete model in the middle of WWI England, preparing to dig themselves into “Greek key” and zig-zag patterns over on the European mainland.

[Image: The Central Park bolt, photographed by The Bowery Boys].

One of many memorable images from Marguerite Holloway’s recommended new book The Measure of Manhattan is the Central Park bolt, a 19th-century survey marker affixed in place by John Randel Jr., original surveyor of Manhattan’s street grid.

The bolt is, in Holloway’s words, “the relic of an invisible intersection, one city leaders had planned to build in 1811 but that had never been constructed.” In fact, she adds, these “planned but never realized intersections” are rare but not, in fact, unique, low in number but peppered around the island like acupuncture points that somehow materialized before the body they were meant to intensify. The city lives alongside and strangely amidst other, historically unrealized versions of itself.

This particular “grid bolt,” as Holloway goes on to describes it, is now “long-forgotten,” but has recently become “part of the National Spatial Reference System database.” This means, as she phrases it, that a “bolt on a rock in a park on an island is connected to the satellites that travel above us in great arcs,” incorporated into the great digital systems of earth-measurement—or geodesy—used today.

[Image: A photo of Benchmark B taken by Tullio Aebischer, courtesy of Discovery News].

I thought of this when reading earlier this winter about a “Roman marker used to measure the Earth” that had been found “near the town of Frattocchie along one of the earliest Roman roads which links the Eternal City to the southern city of Brindisi.”

To refer to it as “Roman,” however, is a bit misleading, as it was actually laid in the mid-1800s by Father Angelo Secchi—not in the days of ancient Rome—as part of an attempt to establish a comprehensively measured geographic baseline; this baseline could be used to support much larger calculations that would ultimately verify (or not) the mathematically projected shape of the Earth. It thus acted as a verification point for abstract speculation.

A geographer named Tullio Aebischer explained how it worked to Discovery News back in January:

“We found it after a long archival research and a georadar survey. The discovery will allow us to precisely verify the ancient measurements with modern GPS technologies,” Aebischer said.

“The measurements along the Appian Way were part of surveys which began in the middle of the 18th century and spread all over Italy, in Europe, especially in France and Lapland, and in South America. The aim was to measure the shape of the Earth,” Aebischer said.

Today, the marker is referred to as Benchmark B—with Benchmark A located back in Rome proper, near the tomb of Cecilia Metellaan architectural feature familiar to any fans of Piranesi. More specifically, it is “hidden under a manhole in the middle of the road at the Cecilia Metella mausoleum”—as such, surely a worthy target for urban explorers intent on bringing to light the forgotten objects and spaces of geographic history.

Buried benchmarks, competing meridians, rejected state lines, shifting global poles, mistaken horizons: one can easily imagine a kind of amateur archaeology dedicated to exploring nothing but obsolete regimes of territorial management, whole planet-spanning systems of measurement whose function depends on these almost impossibly mundane, mud-covered artifacts.

If Borges, say, is their poet laureate, then we might say that these—lost bolts, grids, and baselines—are the sites and relics of other Earths that nearly were, derelict props from a Borgesian folklore now geodetically coextensive with the planet.

In any case, both of the examples referred to here are all but forgotten 19th-century objects—a plaque and a bolt—that nonetheless now participate in much larger-scale projects of measurement, one planetary, the other civic: two physical monuments to older ways of modeling, measuring, and definitively interpreting something as unassuming as the ground.

Spatially speaking, the game Parallax looks pretty amazing, especially now that, in the words of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the developers—two students at Queen’s University, calling themselves Toasty Games—have “decided to turn off all the gravity.”

The resulting “gravitational surface test,” seen in the first video embedded above, lets you twist, meander, level-hop, and corkscrew around inside the game’s “overlapping spatial dimensions,” passing through portals on windowed ribbons of black and white space.

The game has not been released yet, but, if it looks like something you might want to play someday, consider voting for Parallax over on Steam Greenlight.

[Image: The Auburn Dam site, via Google Maps].

While re-reading John McPhee’s excellent book Assembling California last month for the San Andreas Fault National Park studio, I was struck once again by a short description of a Californian landscape partially redesigned in preparation for a reservoir that never arrived.

McPhee is referring to the Auburn Dam, in the city of Auburn, northeast of Sacramento (and near a small town called, of all things, Cool, California). The $1 billion Auburn Dam would have been “the largest concrete arched dam in the world,” according to Geoengineer.org, but construction was abandoned over fears that seismic activity might cause the dam to collapse, inundating Sacramento.

Construction was begun, however, and its cessation produced some rather unassuming ruins—basically large piles of exposed gravel and rock now eroding in springtime floods.

Nonetheless, these mounds were not cheap, including “$327 million concrete abutments [that] stand in stark contrast to the rest of the oak-filled canyon,” as the Auburn-Cool Trail site (or ACT) explains. “The washout of the 250-foot coffer dam in 1986 left huge scars that continue to erode, with large broken pipes sticking out in a precarious manner. Hasty roadbuilding for the project has contributed to landslides that have caused sedimentation and increased turbidity in the river downstream and in Folsom Lake. The cost of seasonal repairs on the service roads alone has run into the millions of dollars, and many roads remain cracked and unsafe.”

[Image: A bypass tunnel built in anticipation of the never-completed Auburn Dam; photo by D.P. Zeccos of Geoengineer.org].

Amazingly, though, and this is where we come to John McPhee, regional infrastructure was constructed with an eye on what the landscape would look like in the future, given the presence of the Auburn Dam, leading to surreal sights like the Foresthill Bridge.

The bridge, which you can still drive on today, is a towering structure remarkably out of proportion with the landscape, its unnecessary height all but incomprehensible until you imagine the cold waters of the American River rising up behind the Auburn Dam, forming a recreational lake and reservoir, the lights of the bridge reflected at night in the waters below. “Not particularly long,” McPhee quips, “the bridge was built so high in order to clear the lake that wasn’t there.”

[Image: The Foresthill Bridge, via Wikipedia].

Weirdest of all, McPhee writes, there were boat docks built high up on the surrounding hillsides, waiting for their lake.

One gravel boat ramp, he explains, “several hundred yards long, descends a steep slope and ends high and nowhere, a dangling cul-de-sac. The skeletons [a skeleton crew of federal workers stationed at the former dam site] call it ‘the largest and highest unused boat ramp in California.’ Houses that cling to the canyon sides look into the empty pit. They were built around the future lakeshore under the promise of rising water. You can almost see their boat docks projecting into the air. Thirty-three hundred quarter-acre lots were platted in a subdivision called Auburn Lake Trails.”

[Image: The expected waters of a lake that never arrived; via Wikipedia].

While I will confess that, while using the omniscient eye of Google Maps, I can’t find these gravel boat ramps leading down to the rim of a lake that doesn’t exist—looking in vain for a maze of quasi-lakeside home lots perched uselessly in the hills—I assume that it’s either because the ramps have long since revegetated, given the two decades that have passed since the publication of McPhee’s book, or perhaps because there was a certain amount of willful projection on McPhee’s part in the first place.

After all, the idea of a line of homes built far up in the hills somewhere, overlooking an empty space in which a lake should be, is so beautiful, and so perfectly odd, that it would be tempting to conjure it into being, imagining bored kids in a town called Cool riding their bikes down to lost docks in the woods each summer near sunset, climbing over maritime ruins slowly crumbling in the mountains, throwing rocks at rotting lifejackets, building small forts inside the discarded hulls of someone else’s midlife crisis, perhaps still waiting, even hoping, for a flood to come.

[Image: Fallen rockets at the bottom of the sea; photo by Bezos Expeditions, via Discovery News].

News this week that the discarded engines of the Apollo rockets from the moon missions of the 1960s have been found at the bottom of the ocean by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos is perhaps further indication that the robber barons of the 21st-century will be spending at least some of their fortunes on complex, engineering-oriented, and slightly Nemo-like adventures, whether that means mining asteroids, flying civilians into space, building 10,000-year clocks in the mountains of west Texas, traveling down into the deepest trenches on Earth, or, yes, performing gonzo acts of space archaeology 400 miles off the east coast of Florida.

Bezos’s description of the rocket-age ruins now on their way back to dry land—and, eventually, into a museum—puts a fairly Ballardian spin on the discovery: “We’ve seen an underwater wonderland,” he quipped, “an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines,” a garden of fallen offworld technologies appearing to grow coral at the bottom of the sea.

I’m reminded of a line from Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Axis, where Wilson writes that “the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines,” fragmentary gears and circuits drifting through the air like mechanical snow, only, here, it’s the equipment of our own recent history having washed down through the ocean, taking on the ringed appearance of coral.

Maintaining his Ballardian tone, Bezos suggested that the seafloor from which the rockets were pulled was not unlike the surface of the moon: “We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions. The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colourless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion.”

Explaining his interest in restoring the behemoth pieces of equipment being re-absorbed into the planetary ecosystem, Bezos adds that his team “photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.” Now, he says, “We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mph re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface.” Sadly, doing this required interrupting what might someday have been a reef, possibly one of the most interesting points to take away from all of this—that even something as unearthly as rockets, given enough time and isolation, could become overgrown, a kind of Angkor Wat of the sea, indistinguishable from life in the oceans.

Last year, I posted about a summer workshop held in upstate New York run by architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union. Well, it’s back and this summer’s 8-week program is even more ambitious. However, note that the deadline for applications fast approaches (due March 25).

[Images: Photos from Arts Letters & Numbers; applications for the summer 2013 workshop are due March 25].

As Gersten himself describes it, this summer’s workshop will be “structured through six disciplines: construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music/sound,” forming a kind of “disciplinary exquisite corpse.” Participants in each of these fields “will work in parallel and in close proximity, directly interacting though a framework of shared questions and actions.”

During the eight-week intensive workshop, together, we will build a bridge; a bridge that is a stage, a drawing board, a film screen, a story, a place to act—a bridge between many disciplines. This bridge will be co-constructed, as each step in its construction will be developed as a series of shared questions across all of the disciplines. As we excavate the site, we will ask: What is excavation in drawing? in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we pour the foundations we will ask what are foundations in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we raise the structure, we will ask what is structure in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As raise a new horizon, we will ask; what is horizon in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music? Week by week as we move thought the shared questions we will co-construct a work, an emergent space between all of the disciplines.

The grand finale of the eight weeks will be “a live performance built between all of the works,” an interdisciplinary opera of construction, poetry, drawing, light, and words.

[Image: Photo from Arts Letters & Numbers].

As is probably obvious, this is a much more embodied and physically engaged form of architectural exploration, in many ways at the opposite end of the world from sitting inside, designing little triangle-shaped tiles in Rhino all day, and, as such, it offers a great way to experience the humid and heavy vegetation of a New York forest outside the nighttime lights of the city for a few weeks, exploring the rigors of other disciplines (and possibly even driving heavy excavation equipment).

[Image: Photo from Arts Letters & Numbers].

Application information and a short film about the summer program are available on the project website.