The Unified Lunar Control Network is "a set of points on the lunar surface whose three dimensional selenodetic coordinates (latitude, longitude, and radial position) have been determined by careful measurement. Typically the points consist of very small craters." This network forms a series of cardinal points that can then be used to orient, fix, and control our topographic understanding of the moon—in a sense, lunar variants on terrestrial coordinate systems such as the trig stations of New Zealand, "a network of control marks that serve as physical reference points."
As it happens, there is quite a long history of temporary "lunar control networks," most of which have simply faded into cartographic obsolescence. For instance, you can read this brief "Chronology of Lunar Control Networks." It includes such phrases as the Apollo Zone Triangulation, the Manchester Selenodetic Control System, the Kazan Series, and the Clementine Control Network—a taxonomic graveyard of discarded geographies, these lost trigonometries of the moon.
(Thanks to Jon Rennie for pointing out trig stations to me a few weeks ago).
A few hours ago, we looked at the exoatmospheric potential of 3D printers in space, but what about road-printers here on our own home planet, printing brick & cobblestone streets through rural villages?
As it happens, a new street-printing device—unfurling a geological substrate known as Tiger Stone, as orderly and as easy "as laying laminate flooring"—can neatly place brick roads where there weren't roads before.
Here's a video of the "printer" in action:
After you've watched this footage, of course, it becomes immediately clear that it is inaccurate to refer to this technology as a literal or genuine act of "printing," but it's nonetheless provocative to imagine a world where roads can be created, as if from an inkjet printer, directly from the vehicles that travel on them.
In China Miéville's book Iron Council, readers follow the path of a vehicle called the "Perpetual Train." It operates by laying its own tracks as it moves forward, hauling in the road it travels upon only to unfurl it again seconds later, tank-like, pushing deeper into landscapes that would once have been impenetrable. It is a route that drives itself, moving, as Miéville writes, on "downlaid and uptaken rails," whereby "the roadbed is extended, the tracks laid through, taken up again," always cycling, again and again forward, on "rails, newly renewed," their own context, "meandering."
The road-printing vehicle featured in the video above clearly presents no such utopia, but it does offer at least a domesticated variant on Miéville's mobile perpetuity, bringing roads to distant towns in a single afternoon. What is the geographical status of the road that, itself, can travel?
According to ElectroIQ, "by implanting the gold nanoparticles into Bacopa caroliniana plants, Dr. Yen-Hsun Su [of the Research Center for Applied Science in Taiwan] was able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under high wavelength of ultraviolet, the gold nanoparticles can produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission of the surrounding chlorophyll."
This has the exquisitely surreal effect of being able "to make roadside trees luminescent at night"—with the important caveat "that the technologies and bioluminescence efficiency need to be improved for the trees to replace street lights in the future." In other words, we're not quite there—but a deciduous splendor might illuminate streets near you, soon.
[Image: Gold nanoparticles, courtesy of Georgia Tech].
Last spring, I should point out, I had the pleasure of teaching a research seminar at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, looking at blackouts: that is, landscapes—both urban and otherwise—encountered in a state of unexpected darkness.
We looked at a huge variety of technologies for non-electrical illumination—sources of light for situations in which electricity has failed—from tools as basic as pocket lighters to openly whimsical investigations into bioluminescent fish, plants, algae, and bacteria, scaled up to intimations of an entire bioluminescent metropolis.
But the idea that trees impregnated with gold might someday line city streets, turning night into day, is like a vision of Gustav Klimt unexpectedly crossed with Con Edison: a botanical alchemy through which base wood becomes light at the speed of photosynthesis.
A seemingly website-less company called Made in Space "wants to launch 3-D printers into orbit and use them to make parts for spacecraft and space stations, which would be assembled in zero gravity." They would do this using "thin layers of 'feedstock,' which can be metal, plastic or a variety of other materials." Even better, when parts break down, they'd simply be recycled back into future printed components: "Rather than shuttling a replacement part from Earth to a space station, 3-D printers aboard the station could simply crank out whatever's needed. And the broken part could be recycled into feedstock."
Of course, this is not entirely different from earlier visions of using radically exported 3-D printers to construct bases in situ on the moon's dusty surface (using "lunar concrete")—albeit, here, there is even less gravity to work with and a much more urgent need to plan for the availability of future construction material.
As it happens, a few years ago I was speaking with a concept artist who had worked on some of the earliest (and eventually unused) design proposals for Avatar; these included, he explained, plans for elaborate 3-D printers that would be used by the military in order to establish a rapid forward-operating base architecture on that alien world.
In a way, though, this is simply the microgravitational realization of BLDGBLOG's earlier proposal for permanently installing 3-D printers inside perpetually incomplete works of architecture so that they can self-expand and internally reorganize over time.
[Image: Mars rover and its gadgets, courtesy of NASA].
This would seem to lead to the question of why 3-D printers, even absolutely tiny ones, aren't already being included on Mars rover missions in order to test the validity of these architectural ideas; why pack only cameras and chemical sensors and their like on these offworld robots when you could add some kind of robust printhead assemblage? If you could put enough printheads on Mars, say, scattered around like totem poles, some of them could even be rented out as design studio equipment for experimental classes at Georgia Tech or the AA. What, then, would be the implications for the future of Mars archaeology, when the impulse toward heritage management will include artificial constructions on other worlds?
Having said all this, of course, architect Mark Hogan pointed out on Twitter this morning that "3d printing sounds so promising but the printed objects often still look like real-world low-res 3d bitmaps"—a sobering point, to be sure, but the idea of lo-fi, dot-matrix-quality space stations orbiting the planet, passing over continents and tropical island chains and glinting with distant starlight at 2 in the morning as insomniacs gaze up at the sky, actually seems even more endearing. And, I'll admit, I have something of a mystical attachment to the possibilities of 3-D printing.
Fast, cheap, and out of control—and coming soon to a sky or offworld near you—these 3-D printers, like tubes of semi-sentient toothpaste, will extrude their low-res geometries, where 8-bit objects meet outsider art, as platforms for the future of human exoplanetary civilization.
[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].
There’s an interesting and provocative article in the most recent issue of Blueprint called “The New Establishment,” by Peter Kelly. In it, Kelly takes issue with the lack of formal criticism in architecture blogging today, writing that “one tends not to find rigorous criticism of significant new buildings” on sites such as Strange Harvest, things magazine, and BLDGBLOG.
Instead, he suggests, a “like-minded” community of writers has arisen, one “that prefers speculative musing and celebrates increasingly niche interests.” He adds, with not a small shade of foreboding, that, “as blogs become a more important part of the establishment, a more realistic and rigorous approach to architectural criticism online is urgently needed.” After all, “As traditional publishing media and institutions become less influential, one wonders where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work.”
These are absolutely valid points. I agree wholeheartedly that a more vigorous critique of the built environment is needed, as it will always be; I’ve said this before, in fact, and I have not changed my mind since then. Infrastructure, the growth of police power in urban space, pedestrianization and mass transit schemes, improved access to cultural institutions, the politics of military landscapes, healthy housing projects, aging and the city—all of these topics need more coverage and broader public discussion. Kelly is right to suggest as much.
[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].
But what I find deeply confusing about Kelly’s article is that, rather than read websites or blogs which do, in fact, offer “criticism of significant new buildings,” as he puts it, Kelly specifically and only focuses on websites that claim to do nothing of the sort (with perhaps one exception: Kieran Long’s Bad British Architecture).
As such, Kelly's article feels a bit like listening to someone who’s just spent two weeks looking around the classical music section only to come out complaining that he couldn’t find any death metal. Well, no shit: you were in the wrong section, and it's your mistake not ours.
In fact, it is illogical to assume that, because this site in particular is more likely to post about topics like weaponized climate modification, Greek mythology, strange infestations, narrative film, haunted house novels, paleontology, and so on, rather than about a new suite of renderings released by Rem Koolhaas, or a new museum in outer Rome, that I am therefore uninterested in seeing buildings and their architects held accountable to rigorous standards of design. As it happens, I am very interested in that; I just don’t tend to write those pieces myself.
To draw an analogy, Kelly seems to be assuming that, because someone plays guitar, they must be willfully obstructing the careers of people who instead play saxophone. Kelly, in this context, plays saxophone; he wants a bigger audience for people who play saxophone; so he writes an article not critiquing other people who play saxophone but deliberately selecting a group of guitar players so that he can make the obvious point that they don’t play sax—and this is what passes for serious architectural criticism? No wonder its audience has evaporated.
What amazes me about these sorts of critiques of blogging—and they are becoming more and more common and predictable today, now that interest in academic architectural discourse has faded (if there was ever interest in it) in favor of other, more energetic, unapologetically interdisciplinary writing styles—is that these critics are actually complaining about the lack of something they themselves purport to do.
Put another way, writers like Kelly are complaining about the unacknowledged side-effects of their own inadequacy as architecture critics. If they had actually known what they were doing in the first place, then people would never have lost interest in “rigorous criticism of significant new buildings.”
That is, speaking directly to Peter Kelly, if you want to see a more vigorous critique of real buildings, then, by all means, go ahead and show us how it’s done. Make it popular again. Find an audience for that type of writing and cultivate it. Convincingly demonstrate the power of the genre you so openly wish to celebrate.
But for Kelly to complain that BLDGBLOG doesn’t tour Alice Tully Hall, for instance, and offer constructive feedback for the architects is like complaining that Point Break doesn’t have anything to say about the design of the High Line, or that The Hobbit lacks exegetical interludes about the theories of Walter Benjamin—but neither of those things are about that, and they’re not without value because of it. They are, we might say, valued otherwise: performing an altogether different cultural function than the one whose absence Kelly mourns.
In fact, it’s a serious methodological flaw for critics like Kelly to read only the blogs that aren’t about building criticism—he cites BLDGBLOG, Pruned, Tim Maly's Quiet Babylon, and so on—in order to make the point that today's blogosphere is lacking in building criticism. Talk about shooting your own skeet. It’s not only lazy, it’s tautological and it betrays a total lack of commitment to original research.
To use another musical analogy, it’s like listening to smooth jazz for six years and then complaining that not one of those songs had vocals by Dave Mustaine—well, you were listening to the wrong kind of music.
[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].
Pointing out that BLDGBLOG doesn’t offer traditionally recognizable formal criticism of the built environment misses the fact that the modus operandi of this blog is all but precisely not to do that. Indeed, this blog is and always has been very consciously about architecture and landscape in a representationally broad sense: exploring how spatial environments appear in film, literature, mythology, games, dreams, and comics, and to write about the otherwise radically under-reported side-effects of buildings and cities, from freak local weather systems and invasive species to psychiatric disorders and rodents. In fact, I would say that BLDGBLOG has never claimed to be a place “where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work.” I don’t want to do that; that is not my goal as an architecture writer. But that doesn't mean—nor does it in any way imply—that I don't want to see other writers successfully demonstrate how that sort of criticism is done.
Again, to address writers and critics such as Kelly: you all have had so long to prove your point about the value of serious architectural research. You claim absolute, if not unique, critical priority for a style of architecture writing that you yourselves fail to produce in any convincing manner, and you've failed to find any real audience for the very thing you are hoping to promote. Even now, you have blogs, zines, pamphlets, international magazines, Ph.D. funding, radio shows, whole university departments, conferences, and teaching opportunities at your disposal. You can make documentaries for the BBC. Your words and ideas should speak for themselves.
With that in mind, how exactly is your failure to find an audience—indeed, even to find more writers like yourselves willing to write this stuff, surely a damning absence if there ever was one—the fault of a loose group of bloggers who prefer “speculative musing" and "increasingly niche interests”? What exactly are you saying here—that we are Katy Perry to your Shostakovich? Is that a universally negative thing?
To use a wildly overblown historical metaphor, it's a bit like seeing a lost group of battle-shocked British troops suffering from amnesia as they wander down the streets of Philadelphia in the summer of 1778, asking, in all seriousness, why there isn’t more British influence on display. But one of the reasons we came here in the first place was to get away from people like you.
[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].
In any case, having said all that, I want to reiterate that I actually agree with the underlying premise of Peter Kelly’s article: that we need more direct and engaged criticism of the built environment. This is true, and Kelly is right. We need more Christopher Hawthornes and fewer Nicolai Ouroussoffs. We need more Matthew Coolidges and fewer Philip Jodidios. We need the next J.G. Ballard.
But until architecture critics can find a way to make formal building criticism interesting, entertaining, emotional, funny, adventurous, sexy, or thrilling, it—and its popular appeal—will languish. If people like Kelly can’t bring it upon themselves to reinvigorate their chosen discipline, then it’s not the fault of Sam Jacob or Alex Trevi if they fail. We’re back to the saxophone/guitar thing: what you need to do, Peter Kelly, is learn to play your saxophone so well that everyone else stops liking guitar; you can’t just complain about successful guitar players. Or, in market-speak: put us guitar players out of business by offering the world better music. If you can do something amazing, then I want to hear it, too.
Consider this an open appeal, then, to all architecture critics unnecessarily scared of blogs: produce the texts you want us to read & study. Find writers working in the genre you’re actually talking about and constructively team up with them to promote good and rigorous criticism. Use multiple media. Cast your net wide. Don't assume that to entertain is to lose critical insight. Remember that sometimes the most "significant new buildings" in public life today are not museums and concert halls, but film sets and game environments.
Indeed, Alex McDowell is a more influential architect than David Chipperfield, which means covering McDowell's work is not just fringe speculation. Grand Theft Auto generates more conversations about crime and the city than the writings of Adolf Loos, which means discussing GTA is not just self-indulgent musing.
After all, there is absolutely no reason in the world why we can’t have blogs that “celebrate increasingly niche interests” alongside blogs that offer “rigorous criticism of significant new buildings”—in fact, there is no reason in the world why a single blog couldn’t simultaneously perform both functions. It would be a dream to read.
Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this—and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger—then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.
And, if they don’t succeed—if they can't pull it off—then they should do better than to pin the blame on others.
[Image: The Holland Tunnel Land Ventilation Building, courtesy of Wikipedia].
As described in this PDF, Holland Tunnel has four ventilation structures:
The four ventilation buildings (two in New Jersey and two in New York) house a total of 84 fans, of which 42 are blower units, and 42 are exhaust units. They are capable, at full speed, of completely changing the tunnel air every 90 seconds.
David Gissen briefly explores the architecture of NYC tunnel vents in his book Subnature, opening a window onto the architecture of subterranean weather generation, where unseen machines suck whole atmospheres from the depths of the city. Perhaps we'll even read someday that New York's ongoing rash of tornadoes includes a few rogue climate systems belched forth from these vent stacks on the autumnal banks of the Hudson (or perhaps not).
[Image: The harp-like cabled insides of a New York bridge footing interior, courtesy of the Library of Congress].
Back in 2004, Cryptome offered a carto-photographic look at the bridges and tunnels of New York City, relying on some gorgeous photos taken from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) of the U.S. Library of Congress.
That link is particularly worth seeing, however, in the context of this recent interview with Stanley Greenberg, published last week on Urban Omnibus. As Greenberg says, "I think the city is a huge organism, only some of it visible, and we inhabit it, change it, get changed by it. But there is so much of it that I don’t know"—so much of it still undiscovered, including infrastructure often invisible for the fact that it stands proudly in plain view.
Manhattan being an island once thoroughly criss-crossed by ponds and streams, almost all of which have been sealed in concrete and turned into sewers, this somewhat hallucinatory theory goes that some of those streams might still be accessible: just smash down through your building's basement floor, uncover the island's lost hydrology of well-braided rivers and streams, and an angling paradise will be accessible at your feet.
But what really caught my eye, and what I'm actually posting about here, is a "gutterspace" reclamation project inaugurated by a man named Jack Gasnick, something I rediscovered today after following a link at the end of that post, which leads to the long-defunct blog Urbablurb by Giles Anthony.
In the early 1970s—unbelievably, given how influential Gordon Matta-Clark has become in the last few years—Gasnick began buying and collecting "gutterspace," or small slivers of land left over from zoning or surveying errors. He said that after a little while he couldn't stop: "It's like collecting stamps; once you've got the fever, you've got the fever."
Accordingly, Gasnick "bought a slice in Corona just behind Louis Armstrong's house," Urbablurb continues, "a piece near Jamaica Bay where he once filled a pail with sea-horses, and yet another adjacent to the Fresh Kills landfill where he claims an abandoned sea Captain's house still stood." Gasnick then cultivated small patches of parkland and wilderness within those areas—a micro-wilding of the metropolis, one site at a time: "On the weekends, he would sometimes drive out to the tiny parcels and help the milkweed and laurel grow, tend to the turtles, and sit down for a picnic. 'This jump of mine from flower pot to apple tree bears witness to the fact that it doesn't cost much for an apartment-living guy to get a share of the good environment,' he wrote in 1974. To be exact, it cost between $50 and $250. But the taxes he had to pay were enough of a hassle that he gave away (or otherwise lost track of) all the pieces by 1977."
He "lost track" of them! The mind reels at the possibility that there is still a distributed Jack Gasnick estate somewhere, peppering the streets and gutters of New York City.
As Anthony suggests, this all has an uncanny parallel in Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates project. From Cabinet magazine:
In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark discovered that the City of New York periodically auctioned off “gutterspace”—unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion. He purchased fifteen of these lots, fourteen in Queens and one in Staten Island. Over the next years, he collected the maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation attached to the slivers; photographed, spoke, and wrote about them; and considered using them as sites for his unique brand of “anarchitectural” intervention into urban space.
So who is Jack Gasnick, that minor New Yorker who once "bought strange-shaped lots in every borough," as the New York Times reported back in 1994, when Gasnick was still alive and 74 years old, and who once claimed to fish in the basements of Manhattan? Who knows.
(The BLDGBLOG/Edible Geography presentation tonight at USC is at 6pm in Harris Hall; it's free and open to the public. We'll be talking about buried rivers, artificial glaciers, and quarantine, among other shared topics of interest).
New Yorkers, don't miss a live conversation taking place tomorrow night—Tuesday, November 9, the 21st anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—on the subject of "Cities." Moderated by Mark Wigley, the discussion features Robert Krulwich, science correspondent for NPR and co-host of Radiolab; Lewis Lapham, founder and editor of Lapham’s Quarterly; architect JeffreyInaba, director of C-LAB at Columbia's GSAPP; and Andrew Dolkart, director of the Historic Preservation Program, also at the GSAPP.
The Fall 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, of course, takes "The City" as its central theme, with literary and historical excerpts describing urban settlements such as Antioch, Dongguan, New York City, Atlantis, Thebes, Oaxaca, Constantinople, Bangkok, Moscow, Los Angeles, Vienna, Hiroshima, Mecca, Rome, Saigon, and many more; and this comes simultaneously with Radiolab's most recent episode, also about Cities (and the title of this post is edited from a quotation by Philip K. Dick, which appears in Lapham's Quarterly).
The event takes place down at 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, beginning with a reception at 6:30pm. Register for the event here.
If you're able to attend in person, let me know how it goes!
[Image: Honey drips from the electrical sockets of a home in California; courtesy of KSBW].
A single-family home in California has been "invaded" by bees—so much so that honey is now leaking from the electrical outlets, coming "from a giant beehive behind the walls."
When the owner reached into one of the house's vents to investigate this growing apian problem, he pulled out "honeycomb after honeycomb after honeycomb," according to news channel KSBW.
[Image: A close-up of the honeycombs now tormenting a family in California; courtesy of KSBW].
The vents are droning; honey is flooding the interior of the house; and the owners are exactly one month past the cancellation of their builders' warranty, meaning that the problem is not only quite expensive, it is entirely up to them to solve.
The same owner is now justifiably worried that the house will become infested with honey-hungry ants.
It is infestation after infestation after infestation, we might say—though I suppose ants are a better fate than being infested with bears.
Ages ago, though, we saw that foreclosed homes have become an alternative ecological niche for mountain lions, and even now that unused—and undrained—suburban swimming pools are breeding grounds for West Nile-infectedmosquitoes; the possibility that still-inhabited architecture could become the target of these and other strange infestations puts a uniquely worrying spin on the subject.
Could temporary jets of seawater be used as functioning radio antennas? Apparently so: as PopSci reports, "communications are vital" for vessels at sea, but deck space for "all the large antennas necessary for long-range (and often encrypted) communications" can be hard to come by. "So U.S. Navy R&D; lab SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) engineered a clever scheme to turn the ocean’s most abundant resource into communications equipment, making antennas out of geysers of seawater."
Using arcing vaultworks of oceanwater, like domesticated waves, to beam and receive encrypted telecommunications not only reduces the metal-load of ships—thus also reducing the radar profile of military vessels—it also offers a way to construct "a quick, temporary antenna that could just as easily be dismantled."
What they [SPAWAR] came up with is little more than an electromagnetic ring and a water pump. The ring, called a current probe, creates a magnetic field through which the pump shoots a steam of seawater (the salt is a key ingredient, as the tech relies on the magnetic induction properties of sodium chloride). By controlling the height and width of the [stream], the operator can manipulate the frequency at which the antenna transmits and receives. An 80-foot-high stream can transmit and receive anywhere from 2 to 400 mHz, though much smaller streams can be used for varying other frequencies, ranging from HF through VHF to UHF.
Turning seawater into a temporary broadcast architecture is absolutely fascinating to me and has some extraordinary design implications for the future. Pirate radio stations made entirely from spiraling pinwheels of saltwater; cell-phone masts disguised as everyday displays spurting seasonally in public parks, from Moscow to Manhattan; TV towers replaced with BusbyBerkeley-like aquatic extravaganzas, camouflaging the electromagnetic infrastructure of the city as a gigantic water garden.
[Image: A mountainous display of women closely choreographed with water by Busby Berkeley, via Alexander Trevi's Pruned].
Given some salt, for instance, the Trevi Fountain could begin retransmitting mobile phone calls throughout the heat-rippling summer landscape of greater Rome. Ultra-refined specialty saltwaters offer dependable signal clarity in audio HD. La Machine de Marly becomes a buried industrial art project, beaming death metal salt hydrologies to garden visitors: a continuous fountain of thundering music on FM, headbanging to seawater hifi. Espionage conspiracies involving elaborate, deep-cover radio links hidden inside public fountains.
I remember reading earlier this year how one of the editors of Gizmodo had accidentally discovered coastal sea caves can act as cell phone signal amplifiers—"I pulled up my camera to take a couple of shots," Gizmodo's Joel Johnson wrote, "when I felt it chirp in my hand. Text message received! I could hear a few other phones around me making noise as well. I don't recall how many bars I had—one or two at the most—but sure enough, the shape of the cave was concentrating the signals from across the water of Santa Barbara enough to restore basic service." But this story takes that to a whole new level of design intervention.
So how could this be further explored in the contexts of tidal river waters—Thames Radio!—rogue waves, and even tsunamis? The artistic, architectural, musical, and infrastructural misuse of this technology is something I very much look forward to hearing in the future.
The project "explores the relationship between written prose and illustrated scenarios," Waterman explains, as it zooms into specific spatial episodes in the lives of five characters.
There are thus five specific buttons a viewer can push, each of which corresponds to one of these characters: "When one of the five character buttons is pressed a version of that character's scenario is chosen from a database of possible outcomes." It is a choose-your-own-adventure cube of light, a projection whose contents are partially decided by viewer interest.
Waterman achieves the installation's disorientingly holographic visual effect, as you can see in these photographs, using a white cube inside of another half-cubic projection area in the lower corner of a room; the smaller cube supports a sort of projection inside the projection, amplifying the resulting image's apparent 3D.
That smaller cube is a burning stove in one character's life, an ambulance in another, an ominous train tunnel in another, and so on.
A larger version of this, perhaps installed atop a billboard cantilevered next to the roadway, would be interesting to see, offering pseudo-holographic variations on future signage. Or flip it upside-down and you've got surfaces for virtual ornament on the corners of existing buildings.
The materials used, Waterman says, include MAX/MSP/JITTER, Arduino, a five-button circuit, projector, computer, foam board, 15 thirty-second animations, inkjet prints, and fluorescent light.
Check out a short film of the installation over on Vimeo.
Recent architecture grad Joshua Rathbun has released an album under the name Crash Cadet, called Lists Are Good. While the album is worth giving a spin—though it's not normally the kind of music I listen to—the specific track "Desk Crit" is the most architecturally-influenced of the bunch. Check it out on Soundcloud, then consider purchasing the album from the Crash Cadet site. This is perhaps what Benoît Pioulard would sound like if he had gone to the GSD.
[Image: "The Dormant Workshop" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect; view larger].
While studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, recent graduate Tom Noonan produced a series of variably-sized hand-drawings to illustrate a fictional reforestation of the Thames estuary.
[Image: "Log Harvest 2041" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect; view larger].
Stewarding, but also openly capitalizing on, this return of woodsy nature is the John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, an imaginary trade organization (of which we will read more, below).
[Image: "Reforestation of the Thames Estuary" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect; view larger].
The urban scenario thus outlined—imagining a "future timber and plantation industry" stretching "throughout London, and beyond"—is like something out of Roger Deakin's extraordinary book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (previously described here) or even After London by Richard Jeffreys.
In that latter book, Jeffreys describes a thoroughly post-human London, as the ruined city is reconquered by forests, mudflats, aquatic grasses, and wild animals: "From an elevation, therefore," Jeffreys writes, "there was nothing visible but endless forest and marsh. On the level ground and plains the view was limited to a short distance, because of the thickets and the saplings which had now become young trees... By degrees the trees of the vale seemed as it were to invade and march up the hills, and, as we see in our time, in many places the downs are hidden altogether with a stunted kind of forest."
Noonan, in a clearly more domesticated sense—and it would have been interesting to see a more ambitious reforestation of all of southeast England in these images—has illustrated an economically useful version of Jeffreys's eco-prophetic tale.
[Image: "Lecture Preparations" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect].
From Noonan's own project description:
The reforestation of the Thames Estuary sees the transformation of a city and its environment, in a future where timber is to become the City’s main building resource. Forests and plantations established around the Thames Estuary provide the source for the world’s only truly renewable building material. The river Thames once again becomes a working river, transporting timber throughout the city.
It is within these economic circumstances that the John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science can establish itself, Noonan suggests:
The John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Scienc eat Deptford is the hub of this new industry. It is a centre for the development and promotion of the use of timber in the construction of London’s future architecture. Its primary aim is to reintroduce wood as a prominent material in construction. Through research, exploration and experimentation the Institute attempts to raise the visibility of wood for architects, engineers, the rest of the construction industry and public alike. Alongside programmes of education and learning, the landscape of the Institute houses the infrastructure required for the timber industry.
They are similar to an organization like a cross between TRADA and the Wooodland Trust, say.
[Image: "Urban Nature" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect].
And the Institute requires, of course, its own architectural HQ.
Noonan provides that, as well. He describes the Institute as "a landscape connecting Deptford with the river," not quite a building at all. It is an "architecture that does not conform to the urban timeframe. Rather, its form and occupation is dependent on the cycles of nature."
The architecture is created slowly—its first years devoid of great activity, as plantations mature. The undercroft of the landscape is used for education and administration. The landscape above becomes an extension of the river bank, returning the privatised spaces of the Thames to the public realm. Gaps and cuts into the landscape offer glimpses into the monumental storage halls and workshops below, which eagerly anticipate the first log harvest. 2041 sees the arrival of the first harvest. The landscape and river burst in a flurry of theatrical activity, reminiscent of centuries before. As the plantations grow and spread, new architectures, infrastructures and environments arise throughout London and the banks of the Thames, and beyond.
The drawings are extraordinary, and worth exploring in more detail, and—while Noonan's vision of London transformed into a working forest plantation would have benefitted from some additional documentation, such as maps—it is a delirious one.
[Image: "Thames Revival" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect].
Considering the ongoing overdose of urban agriculture imagery passing through the architecture world these days, it is refreshing simply to see someone hit a slightly different note: to explore urban forestry in an aesthetically powerful way and to envision a world in which the future structural promise of cultivated plantlife comes to shape the city.
[Note: A large print from Noonan's series will be on display at the Building Centre in London, at least through the end of November].
[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].
I love this story: the polished rock walls of a Catholic church in northern Italy have been found to contain the skull of a dinosaur. "The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull," paleontologist Andrea Tintori explained to Discovery News. "The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth.”
The skull itself was hewn in two; "indeed," we read, "Tintori found a second section of the same skull in another slab nearby."
[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].
The rock itself—called Broccatello—comes from a fossil-rich quarry in southern Switzerland and dates back to the Jurassic. According to the book Fossil Crinoids, "The Broccatello (from brocade) was given its name by stone masons; this flaming, multicoloured 'marble' has been used in countless Italian and Swiss baroque and rococo churches"—implying, of course, that other fossil finds are waiting to be found in Alpine baroque churches. "In the quarries of Arzo, southern Switzerland," the book continues, "crinoids [the fossilized bodies of ancient marine organisms] account for up to half of the bulk of the Broccatello, which is usually a few metres thick."
In any case, to figure out exactly what kind of dinosaur it is, the rock slab might be removed from the church altogether for 3D imaging in a lab; a new piece of Broccatello rock, mined from southern Switzerland, could be use as its replacement.
The larger idea of discovering something historically new and even terrestrially unexpected in the rocks of a city, or in the walls of the buildings around you—as if the most important fossil site in current geology might someday be the rock walls of a ruined castle and not a cliff face or gorge—brings to mind recent books like Richard Fortey's fantastic Earth: An Intimate History, with its geological introduction to sites like Central Park, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, and the Geologic City Reports (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) by Friends of the Pleistocene. These latter research files present New York City through the lens of its lumpen underpinnings, focusing on bedrock, mineral veins, and salt, not the city's cultural districts or ethnic history.
But, of course, the H.P. Lovecraftian overtones of this story—a monstrous skull in a church wall—are too obvious not to mention: an easy scenario for imagining whole plots and storylines in which the ancient forms of an unknown species are discovered hidden in cathedral masonry, opening previously unimagined horizons of time and radically revising theories of the history of life on earth.
I just absolutely love the idea that a piece of architecture can become a site for paleontological research, framing an unlikely forensic study of the earth's biological past.
There's something oddly compelling about this minor architecture of out-of-place private access—as if implying that buildings could begin blocks and blocks away from where they actually rest in urban space, splayed out into the neighborhoods around them like chain-linked octopi, reaching out with stairways, doors, and catwalks across the roofs and back streets of the city. A Home Depot vernacular stretched to Berlin Wall-like proportions.
You don't like your address, you simply hurl a chain-linked access stair up over and out to whatever street you prefer—and you enter there, turning a key and stepping into a steel maze of steps and ladders, cantilevered walkways and pillared decks. Fifteen minutes later, passing over and beneath ribbons of other parallel geographies, looping down alleys and nesting briefly on thin platforms in the canopies of trees, walking alone in this isolated cocoon like a private enclave in the city, you're home.
For £250,000—approximately $398,000—you can be the owner of "a wonderful and remote island group... a small archipelego centred around two main islands 25 miles north east of Lerwick, Shetland and extending to about 600 acres in all." It comes complete with a "private airstrip" and seasonal wild flowers.
Perhaps you want to establish a writers' residence. Perhaps you're fed up. Perhaps you want to declare a private city-state. Or perhaps you simply want to reinvigorate the struggling private island market.
Whatever the case may be, "a charter flight can also be arranged from Tinwall just to the north of Lerwick."
Something I meant to post three few weeks ago, before October became the Great Lost Month of constant busyness and over-commitment, is the story of a 70-ton relief map of California, unseen by the public for half a century, that has been re-discovered in San Francisco, sitting in "an undisclosed location on the city's waterfront."
In its time, the map was considered far too marvelous for simply cutting up and storing—but that's exactly what's happened to it.
It was as long as two football fields and showed California in all its splendor, from Oregon to Mexico, with snow-capped mountains, national parks, redwood forests, a glorious coastline, orchards and miniature cities basking in the sun. It was made of plaster, wire, paint, and bits of rock and sand. In the summer of 1924, Scientific American magazine said it was the largest map in the world.
However, we read, "The problem with the map is simple: it is huge and would cost a lot of money to move, restore and display it. The last estimate was in the range of $500,000. And that was 30 years ago. It is a classic white elephant, too valuable to scrap, but too expensive to keep."
And, today, it's not going anywhere: "The Port of San Francisco has no plans to be anything but stewards of its storage, and no one else has come forward in half a century to rescue the map." If you have half-a-million dollars or so, and heavy moving equipment at your disposal, then perhaps it could soon be yours.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh in Los Angeles, California. The opinions expressed on BLDGBLOG are my own; they do not reflect the views of my employers, publishers, editors, friends, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated.
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[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of 
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[Image: "Lecture Preparations" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect].
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