Month: January 2006

Two different myths are set to collide in space as NASA’s THOR project targets the surface of Mars with a huge copper sphere.

“The idea behind THOR (Tracing Habitability, Organics, and Resources) is to fly an observer spacecraft to Mars and, hours before it reaches the planet, release an ‘impactor’ ball. It could be up to 230 kilograms in mass and would be aimed at a region about 40° north or south of the equator.”
While thus testing the Martian landscape for signs of water, THOR is nothing less than “a brute force way to gain access to the subsurface of Mars.”
So BLDGBLOG is now taking bets: Mars triumphant or Thor planet-slayer, destroyer of worlds…? Which myth will win?

Russia, we read has “plans to build a permanent base on the Moon within a decade and to start mining the planet for helium 3, a sought-after isotope, by 2020.”

“Russian scientists have come up with the idea of using ‘lunar bulldozers’ to heat the Moon’s surface in order to get at the resource,” adding that “Moscow is keen to institute regular cargo flights of helium 3 back to Earth as soon as possible.”

If you’ll pardon a lengthy quotation:
“‘There are practically no reserves of helium 3 on Earth. On the Moon, there are between one million and 500 million tons, according to estimates.’ Much of those reserves are reported to be in the Sea of Tranquillity. [Nikolai Sevastyanov, of Energia Space Corporation] predicted that nuclear reactors capable of running on helium 3 would soon be developed and said that just one ton of the isotope would generate as much energy as 14 million tons of oil. ‘Ten tons of helium 3 would be enough to meet the yearly energy needs of Russia,’ he added. However, Russia is not the only country interested in the technology. American scientists have expressed interest in helium 3, arguing that one shuttle-load of the isotope would be sufficient to meet US electrical energy needs for a year.”
So: from the Red Sea to the Sea of Tranquillity – what future lunar wars may bring…

[Image: An unrelated example of a helium 3 mining unit from the Lunar Base Design Workshop. “Mining itself is done by robots that scoop up lunar regolith for processing. This base consists of three spheres that roll, with the structure moving from site to site.”]

Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Lunar urbanism 4.

Through her job with the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, BLDGBLOG contributor Nicola Twilley has put together something that should hopefully get more people thinking about urban design, sustainability, quality of life, public transport, pedestrianization… Whatever sounds good.
And though BLDGBLOG is not involved, I thought I’d give it a plug here, and try to drum up some interest.

In a nutshell, the program is called the Ben Franklin Coffeehouse Challenge, and it’s sponsored by Starbucks. The idea is that you get some people together, discuss something you’d like to see happen in your community – more benches, a new park, some fresh paint on the neighborhood bus stop, a film society, a mural or two, a NASCAR track, fewer potholes, some roof gardens, a new running path – meet a few more times to refine the idea, then you organize it into a coherent, workable plan.
That plan is then submitted to the Tercentenary, who review it with a panel of urban designers, community groups, etc. – and if whatever magical buttons need to be pushed are pushed, then Starbucks will give you $3000 and you can get the project off the ground.
That’s right: cash money. It’s all about the Benjamins.
For now, though, it’s only in Greater Philadelphia (with south Jersey up to Princeton, parts of Delaware, and central PA all the way to Penn State included, hint-hint) – but I’m sure you could convince everyone involved that the desire for urban improvement is nationwide. Park benches in Minneapolis, roof gardens in San Francisco, running paths in Tucson.
Better street lighting in Denver. A public performance space in Silverlake.
Well-marked pedestrian crosswalks in Tallahassee.
As the official program graphic itself asks: “How do I plant a lawn on my roof?”
“I want a say in how my town grows.”
So whether you like their coffee or not, I think it’s pretty cool that Starbucks appears to want to fund roof gardens. We need more roof gardens.
If you’ve got some suggestions – like a UFO landing strip in Austin – send a few in to BLDGBLOG; I’d love to see what you’re thinking.

(Quick PS: BLDGBLOG contributors Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh also helped organize a small, Franklinian beer competition last September in Denver, the results of which – Poor Richard’s Ale – are now available to drink! So go have a pint for Ben Franklin, think about urban design – and perhaps someday you’ll be drinking a BLDGBLOG Architectural Stout… BLDGBLOG Piranesian Ale. Oil Derrick IPA. Offshore Utopia Pale Ale. Manmade Archipelago Doppelbock. London Topological Bitter. BLDGBLOG Geotechnical Weissbier…)

In 1999, New York-based sound artist Stephen Vitiello was awarded a five-month studio residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. For his project World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, he taped contact mics to the studio windows, “picking up the sounds outside of passing planes, helicopters, storm clouds and traffic, the building itself swaying in the wind.”
You can listen to a short NPR piece about the project (and find other sounds here); meanwhile, Vitiello was recently interviewed in Artkrush, if you want a bit more information.
But this reminds me of two other, related projects: 1) I read a review once in The Wire about a guy who taped contact mics to his window to record the sound of snowflakes hitting the glass – a recording which was then released on CD. Unfortunately, I can’t find any information about this at all.
2) Extensive seismic readings were taken by Columbia University during the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th – the Precambrian bedrock of Manhattan was rumbling as the two towers collapsed, and this showed up on Columbia’s seismometers. Sound artist Mark Bain then transformed this information into audio files, so you can actually listen to the wounded, melancholic howl of Manhattan as its two tallest buildings fall to the ground.
Ultimately, Bain produced “a 74-minute recording of the ground vibrations of the World Trade Centre’s collapse and contiguous mayhem,” The Guardian writes. “It certainly does not make easy listening. The piece begins with a low, disconcerting rumble and proceeds through a range of fluctuating sounds. Bain says the vibration of the towers as they were hit by the hijacked passenger planes sounds like ‘tuning forks’.” He then seems quick to add that he “sees nothing morally questionable in making an artwork out of the event.”
“I guess I’m the black sheep,” he says, “the anti-architect.”
If you have RealPlayer, you can download a 2-minute excerpt.
Another vaguely related story, of course, is William Basinski…

(This post was extensively updated on 26 January. For more on urban soundscapes see Orchestra of Bridges, London Instrument, Sound Dunes, and – an old favorite – musicalized weather events).

[Image: Michel Bayard].

Singing Bridges seeks to record, using contact microphones, the sounds of various bridges: stressed cables, rumbling footplates, geotechnical strain.
It’s all about playing “stay-cabled and suspension bridges as musical instruments.”
The artist’s own justification for the project leaves a bit to be desired – claiming it has something to do with global information flow and Indra’s Net – but the musicalization of urban infrastructure is something that totally fascinates me, and it’s popped up on BLDGBLOG before.
If we can go back to Coleridge for a second, and imagine him striding across the retractable bridges of Chicago, iPod in hand, plugging himself into the audial foundations of the city, the trembling of concrete and iron, how every atom vibrates, Aeolian, strummed by the world; or Coleridge wandering London, stepping onto the Thames foreshore, microphones ready, pushing away sand to record the passing of subterranean trains (or whalesong, for that matter); or, yet again, perhaps somewhere in the scoured volcanism of rural Iceland, contact mics taped down on the surface of the earth, Coleridge stands listening to the Atlantic expand, every subtle rumble of tectonic plates spreading; then the bridges of the world, specifically built for how they sound, humming in the wind, can join in – and it’s worth considering that the vibrations of a bridge’s pillars might record themselves in patterns in the subsurface soil, small figures of agitation inscribed into the earth, and that those might fossilize, and in a million years you’ll have a musical score hardened into rock, sandstone evidence of how the earth once sounded, back then, which is now: a planet covered with bridges, vibrating in the wind.

(Singing Bridges spotted at Ruairi Glynn’s excellent Interactive Architecture dot Org).

In a recent post I compared the fissured earth of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to the Grand Canyon.

Whether or not such a comparison holds – and I’ve received several opinionated emails either side – it’s still interesting to speculate about the “peculiar geological circumstances surrounding the Grand Canyon” and whether they might be found elsewhere – even if that’s a few hundred million years from now.
As it happens, I’m reading Richard Fortey’s fantastic new book Earth, and lo! He’s been thinking what I’m thinking:
“If we could wave a tectonic magic wand,” he writes, “and gently elevate southern England, the River Thames would excavate a canyon of its own, another magnificent thing – and, deep enough, there would be the equivalent of the [Grand Canyon’s] Vishnu schist. If we do the same in northern France, the Seine would carve through a sequence of hard and soft layers back to a deep and ancient metamorphic foundation. The same goes for Texas, or the Pirana Basin, or the Arabian Peninsula, or western Africa, or much of Siberia.”
There are Grand Canyons everywhere, in other words, waiting for the right conditions in which to form.

The question, then, is what can be done to further this process? Could we “gently elevate southern England,” as Fortey says, perhaps learning from the project to lift Venice?
Could we prop-up Texas on some oil derricks, for instance, moving those platforms further and deeper underneath the continental plate every year till the whole thing is an artificial Himalaya – then let the Rio Grande carve away?
For that matter, could you perform an exact, laser-measured study of the internal volume of the Grand Canyon – then carve another one, in western China, or right in the heart of Greater London?
Open a chain of hotels nearby, and you’d make all your money back through tourism. And geologists would love you. The world’s first university-sponsored Grand Canyon. Harvard will buy it.
Fortey himself compares the Grand Canyon to an act of carpentry: “The strata appear unwaveringly horizontal, like an infinity of stacked plywood worked with a giant fretsaw.”
So what are our geotechnical options here?
How could we realize a world full of new Grand Canyons?

(Earlier: sandblasting Manhattan into a new Arches National Park).

[Image: Olivo Barbieri, via his beautifully surreal tilt-shift lens; see earlier for more images & information].

There are about two dozen more of these images, taken during a trip through Morocco, September-October 2002, studies of light and proximity, architecture, routes and detours, space.

What I noticed in Marrakech almost immediately is that inside the networked markets that reflect one another through rows of glass lamps, bronze trinkets, polished rocks and small pieces of jewelry, laid out in tilted cases or stacked inside stalls, you find a collapse of expected proximities: everything’s too close.

Toward the end of our trip, for instance, because of a gut parasite I’d picked up, I developed this insane fever that torqued the whole visual field into a funnel; then, while trying to figure out how I got that sick, we walked past a fruit stall – this was in Fes – immediately to the side of which, unprotected, out in the open, was a man taking a ball peen hammer to the skull of a dead cow, and chips of bone were flying everywhere, even landing on the fruit. People were buying the fruit, and serving it in restaurants.
Everything was too close, in other words; hygiene and distance became unexpected synonyms.

What’s interesting, though, is when you get out of the cities and into the desert, and a kind of hydro-topographical narrative begins: while there’s water in the coastal plains, collecting in small valleys or oases, and supporting urbanization, as you pass away on looping roads into the hills the entire continental shield seems to dry out. The rocks are abstract and red; Mars conspiracists could probably argue NASA’s rovers are actually tootling around in the iron-rich void of central Morocco.
In any case, the continent is shattering; large rocks get smaller, weathered by thousands of years of wind and sandstorms – what Richard Fortey calls “the blast of erosion,” in his awesomely great Earth – and you can actually watch as the terrain chips away at itself, getting closer and closer to the consistency of sand: sand which you then see on the horizon, in great dunes of the outer Sahara.
Meanwhile, you’ve passed over massive fissures in the earth, the planet breaking open, and so the twisting claustrophobia of the urban market has been replaced by its apparent opposite: geological time, ripped open right in front of you in stratigraphic abysses that can rival the Grand Canyon.
The continent is abrading to sand, there is no one in sight, the heat is amazing, and you’ve barely even set foot in the interior.
But you realize that the complexity of the local architecture, especially in the markets and casbahs – which any labyrinth aficionado would fall in love with right away (I fell in love right away) – is not only a kind of terrestrial tactic, i.e. keeping small pieces of the planet (sand) out of the inner rooms, it’s also a philosophical response to the utterly gigantic north African landscapes collapsing all over themselves, ground down to sandy fissures in the distance: you want to control space, and limit the perimeter. Keep the walls close.

Whole rooms, entire buildings, seem to overlap with everything else – till it’s like walking through double-exposures.

(All images: Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG; please link/credit if using elsewhere!)

“It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real,” Metropolis writes.

“They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography – a complete overview, like military surveillance.”

Barbieri “achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens – a method, he says, that ‘allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.'”
It’s geology disguised as sculpted chocolate; a Claymation paradise. Herculean examples of American civic infrastructure look like nothing more than cardboard, flimsy and ridiculous. (Amazingly, the second image, below, is a photograph of Hoover Dam).

“For Barbieri,” Metropolis says, “it is ‘the city as an avatar of itself.'” So if he did take photos of city models someday… would they look real?

I’m left wondering what this techique would achieve in the field of human portraiture. The blurred heads of Francis Bacon meet some kind of plasticized mannequinization of the subject… Pickman’s Model.
The results could be horrific.

(See also BLDGBLOG’s look at the work of Oliver Boberg; and click here for another photo by Barbieri. Meanwhile, thanks to Brent Kissel for the initiating email! Thanks, as well, to Dan who I think might have mentioned Barbieri once…).

[Image: Irrigated geometries of the American West, courtesy of TerraServer].