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[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

For their project Log Chop Bench (2011), the Canadian design firm The Practice of Everyday Design used “a logger’s brute strength and surgical precision to carve out seats on a reclaimed log.”

[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

Seats made from “fine, hand-sewn upholstery by a motorcycle saddle maker” were then added to the spaces chopped into the log, creating a surreally massive piece of high-end furniture.

Here is the log’s chopper—a lumberjill—in action, as well as the sketch it was all based on.

[Images: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

Resulting in this:

[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

I would love to see a movie theater or lecture hall furnished with two or three dozen of these, with higher backs for long-term seating but each individual perch unique.

Other projects are viewable at the Practice of Everyday Design‘s website.

This has been a long summer of hotel rooms, from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and an incredible range of interesting stories has passed by that I didn’t have a chance to post. So I thought I’d briefly reach back into the past three weeks or so and salvage a couple things I wish I’d had a chance to cover when they first popped up. In other words, you’ve probably already seen these—but they’re worth the attention, nonetheless.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

1) The video documenting Markus Kayser‘s solar-powered 3D printer—capable of producing complete glass objects from loose desert sand—has been viewed more than half a million times on Vimeo, presumably because the design implications of his experiment are so compelling.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

As Kayser explains, the “process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering).”

These 3D printers use laser technology to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, resins and metals—the objects being the exact physical counterparts of the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer. By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.

Watch the video yourself, if you haven’t yet seen it:

As you can see, the objects produced are quite rudimentary, but it’s hard not to imagine something like this scaled up—an urban-sized glass factory in the desert, out of which strange future objects are released—or even mobilized, wandering the dunes, sintering Great Wall-sized pieces of desert architecture directly into the landscape, perhaps even dune-sailing across the hills of another planet, printing forward operating bases into that alien terrain.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

If you haven’t yet seen the following video, meanwhile, it makes an interesting partner with Kayser’s project. Here, we watch as a parabolic mirror concentrates sunlight to a point so hot it melts rock:

Perhaps solar-powered bedrock-sintering is the next logical step for Kayser’s technology: 3D-printing whole mountain landscapes from artificially produced magmatic lumps, like something from a fever-dream by Vicente Guallart.

2) A couple years ago, we looked at an artist’s book called 15 Lombard Street by Janice Kerbel. Kerbel’s book is “a rigorously researched masterplan of how to rob a particular bank in the City of London”:

By observing the daily routine in and around the bank, Kerbel reveals the most detailed security measures such as: the exact route and time of money transportation; the location of CCTV cameras in and around the bank along with precise floor plans that mark the building’s blind spots. Kerbel’s meticulous plans include every possible detail required to commit the perfect crime.

A similar idea was taken up recently by architect Armin Blasbichler. For an architecture seminar at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Blasbichler’s students “had been assigned to pick up a bank in the city, study it, identify its Achilles’ heel and plan a bank robbery,” as We Make Money Not Art explains.

[Image: From Armin Blasbichler’s bank robbery course; via We Make Money Not Art].

Although Blasbichler’s interview with WMMNA is worth reading, my own interest in his course is less in the idea that, as Blasbichler suggests, bank robberies are a way to foreground “the continuing marginalization of the role of the architect.” What interests me more is the idea that bank robbers have a very specific, albeit highly illegal, understanding of architectural space—indeed, we might even say that bank robbers understand the city better than architects do, and, in the event of a successful heist, better even than the police meant to patrol it.

[Image: From Armin Blasbichler’s bank robbery course; via We Make Money Not Art].

Of course, I am using the phrase bank robbery to refer to a specific type of heist, a uniquely ambitious form of breaking-and-entering: tunneling into a vault, dodging security cameras, picking locks, exploding whole walls or doorways, not merely handing a note to the teller and walking out with sacks of money.

But in this sense, the bank robbery becomes a very specific kind of spatial operation, one that cuts through architecture along unprecedented obliques and diagonals. It is counter-space: an illicit misuse of plan and section. In the process, the bank robbery produces and exploits perforations in the built environment; it operates by way of gaps, sudden accelerations and pauses unplanned for by the bank’s own protective administrators. In one sense, the bank robbery proceeds by asking a simple question: how do we move through this building as if the building is not really there?

3) The so-called “internet in a suitcase” is an astonishing example of soft infrastructure. As the New York Times explains the overall idea:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

This suitcase “will rely on a version of ‘mesh network’ technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub.” This means that files “could hop directly between the modified wireless devices—each one acting as a mini cell ‘tower’ and phone—and bypass the official network” altogether.

A similar technology is referred to in the article as an “expeditionary cellular communication service.”

[Image: Internet-in-a-suitcase, via the New York Times].

The Jason Bourne-like, black ops thrill of this is clear: you parachute in behind enemy lines—or you smuggle, by way of some dusty, unpoliced airfield unmarked on official maps—a suitcase-sized portable internet. A kind of electromagnetic nervous system unfolds like living origami from your luggage, creating a “stealth wireless network” through which you and your fellow rebels can remain connected to data from the rest of the world.

The internet-in-a-suitcase thus joins the city-in-a-box in the annals of on-demand infrastructural utopias, spatially influential packages theoretically outside of political control.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think that this is all a bit like Gordon Gecko’s infamous cellphone from the movie Wall Street: an almost absurdly clunky solution that will be replaced sooner than we might expect by something much more sleek, embedded, and ubiquitous, requiring not even the weight of a carry-on bag but operating through something as small as an RFID chip.

It will be the internet-from-nowhere, a connective ghost whose quasi-magical presence has been promised to us not only by the gurus of modern technology and political liberation, but by ancient myths and folktales: a cloud of voices from afar to which we are invisibly connected at every moment, everyday.

[Image: The underground city of Derinkuyu, also mentioned in The BLDGBLOG Book].

I’m heading out of town on yet another summer trip, so I wanted to give any Coloradans out there a quick heads up that I’ll be speaking on the subject of “urban spelunking” at this Friday’s Mixed Taste event at the David Adjaye-designed Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

There will be two short, 20-minute lectures: one by myself, on the subject of the underground, from contemporary London and the Mole Man of Hackney to ancient Cappadocia and Moscow’s Metro-2; the other lecture will be an unrelated talk by Chef Jorel Pierce on the subject of “blood sausage.” As the Museum writes, these are “tag team lectures on unrelated topics.” You can buy tickets here.

While I’m on the subject of Denver, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography will also be speaking at the MCA this weekend; she’ll be part of the Colorado Cocktail Project, a “two-day event where Colorado’s bartenders and distillers compete to create a signature state cocktail, made from Colorado spirits.” You can get tickets for that here.

A recent article of mine for Domus, on the “critical foreign dependencies” list revealed last winter by Wikileaks, is now online, in case you missed it here, complete with some maps and infographics.

[Image: Map by, and courtesy of, Domus, “in homage to Buckminster Fuller’s famous Dymaxion projection, and showing the locations of 259 critical infrastructures”; see it folded up, courtesy of David M.A.].

Check it out if you get a chance—and thanks again to Domus for the opportunity to explore this topic.

[Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].

Photographer Noah Vaughn has been busy documenting the city of Chicago and its midwestern environs, both in his own images and in screenshots taken from films set there.

[Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].

Here is some of Vaughn’s own work, from demolition sites and windowless buildings to humid forest roads behind gas stations. Check out his various websites for more—including the aforementioned Chicago Screenshots.

[Images: All photos by Noah Vaughn].

Thanks go to Alex Trevi for first pointing out Noah Vaughn‘s photos.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

Waiting for the River is a 125-foot-long inhabitable bridge, complete with dormitories, outdoor eating areas, and a bathroom, built by Dutch art group Observatorium back in 2010. The project was constructed in anticipation of the newly cleaned and renaturalized Emscher River, whose waters will soon flow through the surrounding landscape.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

As the artists themselves describe it: “In ten years time the river Emscher—now a sewer canal between dikes—will be a natural river again… Observatorium symbolizes the anticipation of better times and a better environment by building a covered bridge for a river that is not there yet. We invite people to wait 24 hours.”

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

As the Art & Architecture Journal Press puts it, the project, made from reclaimed timbers, “sits over the waste land that will be the site of pastoral landscape in ten years time.”

You could thus book a small bed in the dormitory and fall asleep, in anticipation of a future landscape to come.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

It’s a kind of temporally inverted High Line: a popular sight-seeing infrastructure constructed in advance of the very thing it’s meant to help the public see.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

It is the preparation of the landscape that becomes the spectacle, an otherwise unremarkable spread of fields and small thickets suddenly taking on a sign of impending—but still strangely unpredictable—transformation. Something is meant to happen here, some kind of terrestrial event; the structure exists because of this predicted shift in the earth.

But where exactly the braided meanderings of this future river will go—one that has yet to flow through, and thus format, the landscape—seems too difficult to anticipate. So this piece of architecture simply waits there, straddling what it presumes to be the currents of a future riverbed, its anticipatory landscape tourists fast asleep inside.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

The Observatorium’s Andre Dekker will actually be speaking later today—Saturday, 18 June, at 4:30pm—at the Los Angeles Design Festival; hopefully he’ll present a bit more about this project.

While we’re on the subject of Domus #948, that issue also includes a short profile of Luc Sante‘s home book collection, including titles by Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and the Situationists. The article itself is by Gianluigi Ricuperati, a young writer who spoke long ago in the medieval days of Postopolis! New York and whose novel Il mio impero è nell’aria has recently been published in Italy.

[Image: Luc Sante in his home writing room; note the copy of Learning From Las Vegas. Photo by Yoo Jean Han, courtesy of Domus].

Back in 2007, meanwhile, in an interview with The Believer, Luc Sante suggested that New York “was a wild, one-in-a-million conjunction of circumstances, a sort of black pearl of world history, when New York City was at one and the same time both the apex of Western culture and the armpit of the Western world.”

In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.

In Sante’s book Kill All Your Darlings, he continues to riff on the city. There was, for instance, in Sante’s terms, a fantasy New York, a canyon’d utopia taking shape in the gleam of postwar growth; but there was another, more everyday—a more used—New York.

“The New York I lived in, on the other hand, was rapidly regressing,” he writes. “It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more; ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile.”

“At that time,” Sante suggests, “much of Manhattan felt depopulated even in daylight.”

[Image: Otherwise unrelated to this post, photographer Marlis Momber explores an era in NYC when “entire blocks east of Avenue A consisted of little more than rubble-strewn lots”; photo by Michelle V. Agins for The New York Times].

A nonhuman dimension was thus free to move into the metropolis. It became a city “where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates.”

On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square.

“The tenements,” Sante adds, “were aspects of the natural landscape, like caves or rock ledges, across which all of us—inhabitants, landlords, dope dealers, beat cops, tourists—flitted for a few seasons, like the pigeons and the cockroaches and the rats, barely registering as individuals in the ceaseless churning of generations.”

This semi-feral city was less a topic of anthropology, we might say, than it was of natural history: an interzone of species, as well as human culture.

First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city “of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris,” and it would “contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.”

[Image: The original Hallstatt, Austria; photo courtesy of Der Spiegel].

Now, though, we learn that a Chinese firm has been “secretly” copying an entire UNESCO-listed village in Austria, called Hallstatt. Residents of the original town are “scandalized,” Der Spiegel reports, by these “plans to replicate the village—including its famous lake—in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.”

After all, in addition to the uncanny experience of seeing your buildings, streets, sidewalks, and even trees repeated on the other side of the world, “creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jörg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO. ‘The legal situation still needs to be examined,’ he said. Building new structures based on photographs is legal, he explained, but owners must give their permission for them to be measured.”

Indeed, Der Spiegel adds that “‘spying’ by Chinese architects would not have been conspicuous in Hallstatt, where there are up to 800,000 visitors each year who ‘photograph everything and everyone,'” according to the town’s mayor. This constant, everyday documentation—an archive of the quotidian, rivaling Ulysses—could thus be put to alternative use, not as a seed for nostalgia or as a collection of personal souvenirs, but as a means for generating construction diagrams.

Take a look at some photos of other Chinese duplication spaces, including the photo-friendly Thames Town, modeled after an English village (“when Thames Town was completed in 2006 not everyone was happy about it,” we read. “One English woman complained that her fish and chips restaurant had been copied in exact detail”).

(Link discovered via Peggy Nelson).