Category: BLDGBLOG

Some of my favorite architectural images of all time come from a series of photos taken by Fred R. Conrad for the New York Times, showing the remains of an 18th-century ship that was uncovered in the muddy depths of the World Trade Center site, a kind of wooden fossil, splayed out and preserved like a rib cage, embedded in the foundations of New York City.

[Images: Photos by Fred R. Conrad, courtesy of The New York Times].

Although it’s almost embarrassing to admit how much I think of this—hoping, I suppose, that some vast wooden fleet will someday be discovered beneath Manhattan, lying there in wait, disguised as basements, anchored quietly inside skyscrapers, masts mistaken for telephone poles, perhaps even slowly rocking with the tidal rise of groundwater and subterranean streams—it came to mind almost immediately while re-reading a short book by art historian Indra Kagis McEwen called Socrates’ Ancestor.

Really more of an etymological analysis of spatial concepts inherited from ancient Greece, from the idea of khôra to the myth of Icarus, McEwen’s book has at least two interesting moments, the first of which relates directly to ships.

[Image: Greek triremes at war, via Pacific Standard].

“At one important point in its history,” she writes, “Athens literally became a fleet of ships.”

When Themistocles evacuated Athens in 481 B.C. in the face of the Persian threat, the entire city put out to sea, taking with it its archaion agalma [or cult statue] of Athena Polias. And when, according to Plutarch, a certain person said to Themistocles “that a man without a city had no business to advise men who still had cities of their own” Themistocles answered,

It is true thou wretch, that we have left behind us our houses and our city walls, not deeming it meet for the sake of such lifeless things to be in subjection; but we still have a city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes.

That is, the city took to the waves, physically and literally abandoning solid ground—leaving the earth behind, we might say—to go mobile, en masse, cutting through the water like Armada from The Scar, novelist China Miéville‘s “flotilla of dwellings. A city built on old boat bones.” In The Scar, Miéville envisions “many hundreds of ships lashed together, spread over almost a square mile of sea, and the city built on them… Tangled in ropes and moving wooden walkways, hundreds of vessels facing all directions rode the swells.”

Incredibly, in the very origins of Western urbanism, this offworld—or at least offshore—scenario actually played itself out, with the evacuation and subsequent becoming-maritime of the entire city of Athens, Greece.

The whole city just picked up, left dry ground, and sailed off for the horizon.

Briefly, McEwen’s book has at least one other detail worth mentioning here: a comparison between ancient shipbuilding techniques and weaving—or, as she says, “the way ancient shipwrights assembled their craft is clearly analogous to the techniques of weaving. To edge-join planks with mortise-and-tenon joints is, essentially, to interlace pieces of wood.”

In the shipyard, planks laid in one direction were fastened to other planks by tenons that penetrated, or interlaced, the planks at right angles in order to bind them together. Similarly, on a loom, the warp threads (analogous to planks) extended in one direction are bound together by weft threads (analogous to tenons and pegs) traveling orthogonally, which interpenetrate the warp threads at right angles to make the cloth.

The word histos, she points out, which can mean “anything set upright, is at once the mast of a ship and a Greek loom… Histos or histion is the web woven on the loom, and histia also are sails.”

[Image: “The first builders wove their walls.” From Socrates’ Ancestor by Indra Kagis McEwen].

This was translated into an architectural technique, she suggests. Citing the historical conjecture of Vitruvius, who wanted to discover where and how architecture truly began, McEwen adds that “the first builders wove their walls… In Vitruvius’ anthropology, community is consolidated when people began to build: ‘And first, with upright forked props and twigs put between, they wove their walls.’ Vitruvius’ first structure is that of an upright Greek loom.”

That is, they “wove their walls” with wood—making some of the Western world’s earliest architectural structures, as McEwen summarizes, both the product of and identical with “an upright Greek loom.”

They were textiles—as were ancient Greek ships. Like floating pieces of oversized clothing woven together from fallen forests.

The ship, the building, the city: they are “a linked series of looms.”

I feel compelled to mention here that some of the most advanced techniques in architectural fabrication today involve, as it happens, a return to looms, or the 3D-weaving of architectural parts and spaces using, in some cases, technologies—such as carbon fiber weaving—borrowed from the automobile industry (as seen in the eye-popping video embedded above).

In any case, it is quite a heady thing to consider all this at once: vast looms at the southern tip of Manhattan, weaving in real-time an interlocking lacework of carbon fiber ship-buildings that depart immediately for the rising seas of the north Atlantic.

The city reveals its inner logic is not that of a grid but of a fleet—not landlocked buildings but patient ships—as silent streets peer out at the sea with longing.

(Vaguely related: Ground Conditions).

[Image: Monumentalizing mismeasurement in Ecuador; photoby Meridith Kohut for the New York Times, courtesy of the New York Times].

At the end of her forthcoming book The Measure of Manhattan, author Marguerite Holloway refers to the impossibility of precisely locating, using today’s GPS technology, the bolt left behind by surveyor John Randel, her book’s subject, back in 1811 as he staked out Manhattan’s future grid.

Being on the road right now, I don’t have my copy of Holloway’s book with me, so I won’t be able to quote her book directly; instead, I will rely on the New York Times for some brief context. Randel spent “10 years staking out and marking the intersections from First Street to 155th Street with 1,549 three-foot-high marble monuments and, when the ground was too rocky, with 98 iron bolts secured by lead. (He had to resurvey 30 miles after vandals or disgruntled property owners removed the markers.)”

Manhattan at that time was thus, however briefly, a kind of game board or field of acupuncture points—a ghost grid, in advance of the city it surveyed—with thousands of monuments and bolts pinning down the spots where streets and intersections would soon appear.

Holloway’s concluding point, however, is that even something as real and tangible as Randel’s iron bolts, anchored by lead into solid bedrock, nonetheless remain extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to map with objective accuracy. The earth slips outside of our satellites and survey systems, even if only by a fraction of a centimeter, always just beyond the promise of perfect measuring.

[Image: The grid arrives before the streets it surveys].

I thought of this recently when two quick stories popped up on my radar:

1) Down in Ecuador, a country named after the Equator that passes through it, a monument dividing the northern and southern hemispheres is, as it happens, in the wrong place:

Those who visit the Middle of the World, a government-owned park that pays tribute to the Equator, are not drawn by the trinket shops or cafes offering roasted guinea pig. They want to stand on a yellow line painted on the ground here that is said to be precisely at Earth’s midpoint—0 degrees latitude, 0 minutes, 0 seconds.

Except that it is not.

The Equator is hundreds of feet to the north.

According to one person there, the ground conditions at the actual Equator are not stable enough to hold a monument nor to welcome the huge crowds that regularly arrive to see it; according to someone else, however, the monument’s original builders “believed they were placing the monument in the correct spot, except that measuring techniques at the time were not as accurate as they are today, so they were off by a few hundred feet.”

This is why a private counter-monument has been built, supposedly on the real Equator, in a place called Inti-ñan: “just a two-minute drive from the Middle of the World, at a small, privately owned site called Inti-ñan, there is a sign on a gate saying that its location is ‘calculated with GPS’ to be exactly at 0 latitude.” However, as we glimpsed with the help of Marguerite Holloway, commercially available GPS is not as precise as most people believe it to be, and it is subject to its own asynchronies and drifts. (For those of you interested in the political implications of inaccurate mapping technologies, amongst other things, be sure to keep a look out for Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics this coming spring).

[Image: From Laura Kurgan’s You Are Here: Information Drift, 1994].

As such, we read, even nominally accurate GPS readings at Inti-ñan actually “varied depending on how devices were calibrated. That, [a local guide] said, was why, on this occasion, a visitor’s GPS held over the line of bricks that Inti-ñan uses to mark its claim to equatorial exactitude showed that it was still several yards to the south of where it ought to be.”

Passing their GPS receivers over the monument like dowsing rods or geodetic ghost detectors, these tourists of the world-system would thus realize, again and again, that they both were and were not standing in the wrong place, both arriving at and never quite reaching their destination.

2) The south pole is also adrift, surrounded by rings of obsolete monuments. Indeed, “in Antarctica, ‘X’ never really marks the spot.”

In a recent piece for the Guardian, Frances Stonor Saunders explains that “the south pole doesn’t stay still.”

It drifts at a rate of about 10 metres a year, and because of the Earth’s axial tilt… it also wobbles. Every New Year’s Day, the pole’s marker is moved to indicate its new position, though in the time it takes to drive the marker into the ice-pack the pole has already shifted slightly.

In fact, Saunders points out, “There are other poles on Antarctica, and they too move around, pursued by scientists with their markers.”

There’s the pole of inaccessibility, for the greatest distance from a coast; the cold pole, for the most frigid place; the pole of variability, for the spot with the greatest range in atmospheric pressure. The most (upwardly) mobile is the south magnetic pole, which has moved over 500 miles north-west since its discovery by members of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition more than a century ago.

All these lines and tropics, equators and poles, passing back and forth over the fallible monuments that mark them, as entire planet-spanning systems of measurement and location miss their marks by inches, feet, kilometers, degrees, momentarily accurate but almost always wrong.

(Antarctica story spotted via @nicolatwilley).

[Image: Laser-scanning King Tut’s tomb, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

On the 90th anniversary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, an “authorized facsimile of the burial chamber” has been created, complete “with sarcophagus, sarcophagus lid and the missing fragment from the south wall.”

The resulting duplicate, created with the help of high-res cameras and lasers, is “an exact facsimile of the burial chamber,” one that is now “being sent to Cairo by The Ministry of Tourism of Egypt.”

[Image: Laser-scanning King Tut’s tomb, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

This act of architectural replication-at-a-distance has been described in a fascinating booklet—from which these quotations come—just released by the Factum Foundation as an extreme act of conservation, “a new initiative to safeguard this and other [Egyptian] tombs… through the application of new recording technologies and the creation of exact facsimiles of tombs that are either closed to the public for conservation reasons or are in need of closure to preserve them for future generations.”

[Image: Laser-scanning King Tut’s tomb, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

Assembling the back-up tomb took place further south, in Luxor, requiring a step-by-step process. Laser-equipped conservationists first had “to digitize the tombs, archive and transform the data and then re-materialize the information in three dimensions at a scale of 1:1.”

[Image: Routing tomb details into polyurethane, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

And it’s quite a meticulous process.

The booklet both describes and visually documents the time and attention that went into everything from milling minute details into polyurethane sheets to printing full-color replica wall images onto “a thin flexible ink-jet ground backed with an acrylic gesso and then an elastic acrylic support… built in seven layers [that are then] rolled onto a slightly textured silicon mold” that serves as the artificial tomb walls.

Even that skips the thousands of hours devoted purely to laser-scanning.

[Image: One of the scanning set-ups used to “record” the tombs, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

Taken all together, this has proven, the Foundation explains, “that it is possible, through the use of digital technology, to record the surfaces and structure of the tombs in astonishing detail and reproduce it physically in three dimensions without significant loss of information.”

Interestingly, we read that this was “done under a licence to the University of Basel,” which implies the very real possibility that unlicensed duplicate rooms might also someday be produced—that is, pirate interiors ripped or printed from the original data set, like building-scale “physibles,” a kind of infringed architecture of object torrents taking shape as inhabitable rooms.

However, equally interesting is something else the project documentation mentions: that every historical monument—every tomb, artifact, or even outdoor space—comes with “specific recording challenges,” and these challenges include things like humidity, temperature, and dust. This, then, further implies that the resulting “exact replicas” could very well include what we would, in other contexts, refer to as render glitches, or simply representational mistakes built into the final product due to flaws of accuracy in the equipment used to produce it.

As such, given enough time, a huge budget, and lots of interns, we could perhaps expect to see a series of these “exact” copies gradually diverge more and more—a detail here, a detail there—from the original reference space, a chain of inexact repetitions and flawed surrogates that eventually come to define their own architecture, with, we can imagine, no recognizable original in sight.

[Image: Printing the facsimile, courtesy of the Factum Foundation].

This story of King Tut’s duplicate tomb brings to mind—amongst other things, including multiple complete replicas of the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux—a collection of 3D-printed cuneiform texts at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab.

For that project, professors Hod Lipson and David I. Owen “had the idea of implementing 3D scanning and 3D printing technology to create physical replicas of the tablets [using ZCorp powder-based ink-jet printers] that look and feel almost exactly like the originals.”

[Image: 3D-printed replicant cuneiform tablets by Hod Lipson and David Owen at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab].

The idea is that, with the right networks of scanners and printers, as well as curatorial access to museum collections around the world, perhaps we might be able to reproduce, more or less at will, otherwise unique historical objects. We could download ancient stone tools, for instance, print out a quick wall fragment to use in a lecture, or sew together expertly aged carpets and clothes.

Why go to a museum at all, then, when you can simply buy the right printhead?

The nature of how we might encounter historical objects in an era of near-exact 3D recording technologies—that is, that such objects might not be encountered at all, having long ago been replaced by “authorized facsimiles”—returns, in many ways, to an earlier mode of object conservation and inheritance.

In their book Anachronic Renaissance, for instance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood write of what they call a long “chain of effective substitutions” or “effective surrogates for lost originals” that nonetheless reached the value and status of an icon in medieval Europe. “[O]ne might know that [these objects] were fabricated in the present or in the recent past,” Nagel and Wood write, “but at the same time value them and use them as if they were very old things.” They call this seeing in “substitutional terms”:

To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas.

These replicas—for example, painted panels, statuettes, and even architectural models—could thus still hold the aura, if you will, of a timeless past, the weight of true history, not simply that of a souvenir, despite being nothing more than references and echoes of what often turned out to be very different originals.

King Tut’s facsimile tomb, meanwhile, is an interesting variation on this idea of substitutional thinking, a decoy spatial antiquity that could very well outlive the place it was meant to help preserve.

Read a bit more over at the Factum Foundation, or download the PDF from which I’ve been quoting.

For anyone in or near Los Angeles next weekend, consider stopping by Foodprint L.A., hosted at LACMA.

[Image: A robot strawberry harvester, courtesy of Robotic Harvesting LLC].

There are two things to attend. The first is a ticketed walking tour, which kicks off on Saturday, December 8th, at 1pm; it will be led by indefatigable design writer Alissa Walker: “En route, we’ll check out the roasting equipment at LA’s celebrated Handsome Coffee, explore the inside of West Central Produce’s state-of-the-art banana-ripening facilities, preview a future Ferry Building-style food market, and more.”

Those banana-ripening rooms alone deserve an exclamation point, as Edible Geography‘s write-up of an earlier such trip—albeit to a facility here in New York—makes clear. In Nicola’s highly-recommended exploration of what she calls the “vast, distributed artificial winter that has reshaped our entire food system” and that “remains,” she says, “for the most part, unmapped,” we read that banana-ripening rooms are “a specialized architecture of pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that, contrary to logical expectation, require heavy-duty refrigeration.” As such, they are a kind of spatio-thermal fantasy straight out of the work of architect Philippe Rahm.

[Image: A banana-ripening room photographed by Nicola Twilley, via Cabinet Magazine].

Get your tickets here and hopefully we’ll see you at 1pm on Saturday for what should be a fantastic afternoon.

The second half of Foodprint L.A. is also the main focus, a free day of panel discussions and public Q&As, centered around food and the landscape of greater Los Angeles, from water to waste, synthetic biology to robotically-harvested strawberries:

Until the 1950s, Los Angeles County was the top agricultural county in the United States; now, it has one of the highest childhood obesity rates in the nation. With the Los Angeles Food Policy Council approaching its second birthday, the timing is perfect for a truly cross-disciplinary discussion that explores the past, present, and future of food and the city. Foodprint L.A. panelists will explore the forces that have shaped the Angeleno foodscape—from taco trucks to the world’s largest Frito factory and the eviction of South Central Farm—and speculate on how to feed Los Angeles in the future.

As usual, this installment of Foodprint features four panels: Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios (moderated by Alexis Madrigal); Edible Archaeology (moderated by Sarah Rich); Culinary Cartography (moderated by Nicola Twilley); and Zoning Diet (moderated by myself, of all people).

[Image: Courtesy of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council].

This daylong series of panels is free and open to the public, and it includes everything from paleofuturism and the future of cheese, to variant apples and global appetites. Hope to see you there—and feel free to browse the ever-expanding Foodprint event archive to find out more, or pick up a copy of the newly released Foodprint Papers, Volume 1.

[Image: An otherwise only conceptually related photo by Steve Rowell shows the LAPD’s Edward M. Davis Emergency Vehicle Operations Center & Tactics/Firearms Training Facility in Granada Hills, CA; courtesy of the Center for Land Use Intrepretation].

I was fascinated to read yesterday that a cyberwarfare training city is under construction, to be opened by March 2013, “a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop.”

I envisioned whole empty streets and bank towers—suburban houses and replica transportation depots—sitting there in the rain whilst troops of code-wielding warriors hurl electromagnetic spells from laptops against elevator circuit boards, sump pumps, and garage doors, flooding basements, popping open underground gold vaults, and frying traffic lights, like some gonzo version of The Italian Job wed with the digital wizardry of a new sorcerer class, the “first-line cyber defenders” who will be trained in this place, our 21st-century Hogwarts along the freeway. Then they clean it all and start again tomorrow.

Alas. Although this, in many ways, is even more interesting, the entire “test city” truly is miniature: indeed, the whole thing “fits in a six by eight foot area and was created using miniature buildings and houses, [and] the underlying power control systems, hospital software, and other infrastructures are directly from the real world.”

Nonetheless, this 6-x-8 surrogate urban world will be under near-constant microcosmic attack: “NetWars CyberCity participants, which include cyber warriors from the Department of Defense and other defenders within the U.S. Government, will be tasked with protecting the city’s critical infrastructure and systems as they come under attack. Cyber warriors will be presented with potential real-world attacks; their job is to defend against them. Missions will include fending off attacks on the city’s power company, hospital, water system and transportation services.”

Which means, in the end, that this is really just an enlarged board game with an eye-catching press release—but there is still something compelling about the notion of an anointed patch of circuits and wifi routers, accepted as an adequate stand-in—an electromagnetic stunt double—for something like all of New York City, let alone the United States. A voodoo doll made of light, animated from within by packet switches, under constant surveillance in an invisible war.

(Via @pd_smith).

There are at least two events tonight, Tuesday, November 27th, that are worth stopping by if you’re in New York.

[Image: “Salvage Architecture” by production designer Paul Lasaine from Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb’s Drawing Building archive].

While I will be busy co-hosting a book release party for Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb—who just published a collection of images from their Drawing Building online archive of “works that convey architectural alternatives, by-products, expansions, or critiques of our inhabited environments”—at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, at 7pm, I also wanted to post a quick note that there is an interesting sonic event happening nearby, at 291 Church Street, for a new project by Marc Weidenbaum‘s Disquiet Junto exploring the sonic universe of retail sounds.

Weidenbaum is a highly prolific, Bay Area-based collaborative producer of always surprising music, sound, and noise projects, including a soundtrack for the city of Lisbon and Instagr/am/bient, which produced “25 sonic postcards” inspired by musicians’ images on Instragram.

Tonight’s event—part of an exhibition curated by Rob Walker called As Real As It Gets—will be “an exercise in sonic branding,” as the participating musicians “will gather to perform speculative sound works that employ as source material documentary audio from retail establishments.” Each “will present imagined soundscapes inspired by Émile Zola’s characterization of the department store, in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise, as ‘a machine working at high pressure.'” (Read an interview with Weidenbaum about the project at the Free Music Archive or Rob Walker’s essay on the project, “Listening to Retail“).

Retail soundscapes will buzz, hum, and sing starting at 6:30pm at 291 Church Street, and, a half-hour later, up the street at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, we’ll be kicking things off with Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb. Stop by both if you can.

The structure pictured below is a “microscopic pyramid,” New Scientist explains, “a cage for a living cell, constructed to better observe cells in their natural 3D environment, as opposed to the usual flat plane of a Petri dish.”

[Image: A pyramidal “cell trapping device,” via New Scientist].

It was constructed “by depositing nitrides over silicon pits. When most of the material is peeled away, a small amount of material remains in the corners to create a pyramid.”

This is called corner lithography, a technique used for creating the “cell trapping device” seen above.

The Giza-like, seemingly alien geometry of the pyramidal cage compared to the wild and barely containable spheroid burr of the cell itself is remarkable. The literally monstrous vitality of the cell caught inside the imposed order of the pyramid offers us an image of two fundamentally opposed methods of material organization in conflict with one another, a collision of orders as if the Gothic met the Doric or the Baroque met the Romanesque.

Interestingly, though, at least according to New Scientist, “Because the pyramids have holes in the sides and are close together, the cells can interact for the most part as they naturally do.” In other words, these apparently oppositional modes—the fuzzy and the straight—incredibly, even miraculously, don’t interfere with one another at all.

[Image: Via New Scientist].

Functionally speaking, it’s as if, from the cell’s perspective, the pyramid isn’t even there.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

While we’re on the subject of stepwells, I thought I’d post some photos taken of another well, this one in the town of Bundi, Rajasthan.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

While we were in India—or, more specifically, while we were traveling in Rajasthan—Nicola Twilley and I put stepwells very high on our list of things to go out of our way to see, having assembled a long list of architectural sites and sights to visit, from castles and towers to temples and, of course, these wells.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Being on something of an India binge the last week or two, I’ll try to get more of these photos up. These are extraordinary buildings, in purpose, structure, and ornamentation. Framing the everyday act of water-collection in such otherworldly architectural circumstances is a work of extravagant genius, yet seemingly one of a piece with the grandeur given to waterworks elsewhere.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

From the old brick sewers of London—beautifully sculpted hallways for water, all smooth knots and vortices below the city—to the strangely kitsch Greek columns of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works, and even the sprawling labyrinth of fountains and spigots that distribute water throughout Rome, hydrological infrastructure inspires and deserves these otherwise functionally unnecessary acts of monumental design.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

So the Raniji ki Baori is roughly 150 feet deep. A central stairway takes visitors down to the well itself, passing beneath an archway home to bats.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

However, when you get down to the bottom of the staircase and you peer into the deep pit where fresh water was once collected, the dilapidated state of the facilities become instantly and sadly visible. The steps are covered in guano, dust, and litter. Pieces of broken pipe (or collapsed scaffolding) extend from the walls.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

These photos—like those of Chand Baori—were taken during a trip to India earlier this year.

[Images: Inside the stepwell; bottom photo (by Nicola Twilley) gives a sense of scale].

These, too, are available in slightly larger sizes if you open them in a new window.