Month: October 2006

[Image: Courtesy of Statoil].

I was flipping through a copy of Archive the other night when I came across a spread of recent print ads by Norwegian oil giant, Statoil. The ads featured cities and skyscrapers and the Roman Colosseum all Photoshop’d perfectly onto offshore oil derricks; they looked like instant and futuristic offshore micro-utopias – or perhaps even some weird, mechano-robotic version of Arnold Böcklin‘s Isle of the Dead.

[Image: Arnold Böcklin].

In any case, I wanted to post the ads here – but all I could find online were Statoil’s own press images. Those, however, induced a kind of minor panic attack, as the offshore structures they document easily rival, and possibly surpass, the most far-fetched architectural speculations of Constant Nieuwenhuys.

[Images: Constant vs. Statoil].

So here are some photos – and anyone who runs across online versions of the Statoil ads, let me know.

[Images: Courtesy of Statoil].

These next two shots were actually taken inside the legs of one of the derricks; as such, the photographer is standing below sealevel.

[Images: Courtesy of Statoil].

But then I got to thinking how, toward the beginning of The Aeneid, we read that Aeneas and his crew have been tossed about by a string of storms and bad navigation, moving island to island against their will:

For years
They wandered as their destiny drove them on
From one sea to the next…

They are accidental exiles, always docking on the wrong shore.

[Image: Courtesy of Statoil].

Unsurprisingly, Aeneas is soon fed up with trying “[t]o learn what coast the wind had brought him to,” so he confronts a random islander – not realizing that it’s actually his mother (his mom happens to be Venus, and she likes to wear disguises). He demands:

Tell us under what heaven we’ve come at last,
On what shore of the world are we cast up,
Wanderers that we are, strange to this country,
Driven here by wind and heavy sea.

Etc. etc. – it’s the endless drama of origin and detour.
My point is simply: how might the Aeneid have been different if the Mediterranean Sea they’d explored had actually been full of oil derricks, a manmade geography of machine-islands, industrialized stilt-kingdoms each more fantastic than the rest – and so they’d set sail beneath the anchored legs of support understructures and maintenance gantries, roping up their ships for the night in the shadow of artificial hills and disguised islands? An Aeneid for the machine age.

[Images: Courtesy of Statoil].

More practical questions include the reuse of these structures: what unintended future functions might these aging derricks be repurposed for? Once their fields run dry, will they be left standing till inevitable collapse? Or will a maritime preservation movement swoop in to save them?
Further, will corporate tax havens of tomorrow be built at sea, in private archipelagos of platform-cities, an experimental terrain for new concepts of financial sovereignty?

[Note: Just to be absolutely clear here, all images of oil derricks used in this post come courtesy of Statoil].

[Image: The old tower blocks of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, transformed by demolition into totem pole-like wind instruments, flute-ruins, a musically-active wasteland whistling to itself behind security fences. Photographer unknown; spotted at Archinect. It seems worth briefly pointing out, however, that Cabrini-Green could instead have been architecturally salvaged and later reused—and, given a different economic model, the towers could also have been refurbished. Indeed, through that latter link we learn that the combined weight of London’s existing tower blocks is an astonishing forty million tons—meaning that high-rise building materials constitute a near-geological presence in many cities, and they should not simply go to waste…].

Wired reveals what “a permanent presence in the ocean” might look like, if that “presence” consisted entirely of manmade submersibles.

[Image: From Wired].

This underwater robotic metropolis is otherwise known as the NEPTUNE Project. Specifically, Wired writes, the project “would string 10 semiautomated geobiological labs across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off Washington, 8,000 feet underwater. Each would have cameras, lights, robots, and sensors, all connected to the surface via optical cable to transmit data on everything from the biomass of microbes to the effects of ocean temperature on weather.”
According to the project’s own website, the “goal is for NEPTUNE to appear as a seamless extension of the global Internet, connecting users anywhere on shore to the sensors on the seafloor.”

[Image: A future seafloor exploratorium. Image provided courtesy of the NEPTUNE Project and produced by CEV].

As Space.com reported back in 2003, “the network itself will cover a region roughly 310 miles by 620 miles (500 kilometers by 1,000 kilometers) in size. More than two dozen experimental sites will form nodes along the sub-sea cable system. Nodes will be situated about 62 miles (100 kilometers) apart” – making the whole thing only slightly smaller than Great Britain.
On the other hand, the NEPTUNE Project should be thought of as a terrestrial analog for other, more far-flung, research stations: according to John Delaney, for instance, a similar set-up could be used to explore the oceans of Europa (about which more can be found here).
Given some oxygen tanks, it could also be the perfect location for a new public lecture series on architectural design…

(Not quite related: Open Ocean Aquaculture).

Apparently this sound (which I can only hear through headphones) is causing quite a stir in the northern districts of Auckland. The sound is so maddening, it seems, that it’s inspired some residents “to take drastic action” – which, in one case, means purposefully deafening oneself with the roar of chainsaws.
In fact, “for those who can hear it, the sound is the bane of their lives.”

The sound also reveals where unexplained acoustic phenomena, dishonesty, and urban real estate intersect: “Some have been reticent to give away more details of their predicament for fear that reports of persistent humming could adversely affect the resale price of their homes.”
One of the researchers trying to locate the sound’s origins “rules out geological factors. ‘It’s more likely to be things like pipes under the ground – you know, gas pipes, sewerage pipes, factories in the distance.'” CIA installations, perhaps.
“This is not the first incidence of humming in New Zealand,” we’re told. Oh, no. “In 2005, New Zealand author Rachel McAlpine wrote a book called The Humming… largely inspired by the author’s own experiences in the seaside town of Puponga on the northwest tip of New Zealand’s south island which was itself at the centre of a humming mystery some years back.” That man was later arrested.
In McAlpine’s novel we read how “life is becoming increasingly frustrating for [a character named] Ivan because he is plagued by an underground humming that he tries to disguise with an increasingly bizarre array of devices.”
If it were my story to re-tell, however, Ivan would soon become so unbelievably good at manufacturing sonic camouflage that he turns into the terror of post-Blair Great Britain. (He moves to Britain). Completely silent, exploding noiseless weaponry over the city of Birmingham, Ivan’s Joseph Conrad-inspired, acoustically avant-garde ransom demands are met not with payment stashed inside a pre-arranged safety deposit box – but by a visit from a certain, rather well-known, secret agent of the crown… Unfortunately, James Bond is almost immediately captured – having been dumbfounded by a house full of mirrored rooms, someone else’s mobile phone, and a weird echo, coming as if from behind him, that induces a state of cognitive paralysis. Bond is then subjected to a series of unbearable noise-tortures, leading some in the audience to laugh and others to accuse the film of being an unacknowledged remake of The Ipcress File. But, once the enemy is brought back on screen, transformed by his life of sonic dissimulation, he addresses Bond through a grotesque series of hand-held voice-cancellation machines – and we see that something altogether more terrifying has been planned…
Of course, it has long been known that if you “listen carefully… you can hear the Earth singing quietly to itself.”

They live underground. They are everywhere but seem to come from nowhere. They barely exist, but never leave. If sounds have shadows, they are the shadows of a sound. Researchers call them the background free oscillations of the Earth.

These “background free oscillations,” however, while more or less totally unrelated to the New Zealand drone, discussed above, are also unexplained. This endless terrestrial resonance could be “buildings shuddering in the wind,” for instance – or it could be “the constant throb of fluctuating atmospheric pressure all over the Earth.” It could even be the combined effect of all the oceans’ waves crashing on all the earth’s shores simultaneously. It could even – though let me pull the blinds closed as I write this – it could even be the rumble of invisible stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier out at sea…

(Thanks, Marcus! Earlier: Sound Dunes, Dolby Earth, and so on).

Though it’s kind of insane to post this here, I was excited nonetheless to see that BLDGBLOG is featured in the new Blackberry Pearl ad campaign…

It pops up in the context of author Douglas Coupland‘s everyday telephonic activities; at 12:45pm, according to the little Flash animation, Coupland “settles a lunchtime architectural argument” by going to BLDGBLOG.

The logo’s so bigtime they got shy and hid the other half…
That’s right.
So I’m retiring on the royalties to Brazil, where I’ll re-reverse the flow of the Amazon River and report back in a few years’ time.

(Thanks, Douglas!)

[Image: By Nicolai Grossman, of Photon Detector fame].

Like some weird cross between the Bible, William Blake, and a botanical Finding Nemo, the British landscape is alive with plants that escaped from gardens: “About one-quarter of plants sold to ornamental gardeners since the 1800s have escaped, and 30 per cent of these are firmly established in the English countryside.” It seems these inadvertant landscapes-at-a-remove could actually have been financially predicted; historical researchers “found that the odds of escape increased with how widely available and inexpensive a given plant was at the time.” Leading me to wonder if a similar approach, today, could be used to plot prices of wildflowers, garden herbs, and domestic tree species against the projected future landscape of Ohio, say, or Brecon, Wales: price-maps as a subset of future landscape geography.
Speaking of future landscapes, New Scientist‘s look at an earth without humans was republished and discussed everywhere last week – but, in case you missed it, here’s a link. From the article: “Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.”

[Image: A related graphic, from the Times Online].

Further: “If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. (…) The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.”

The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly.

Of course, ten years ago New Scientist offered a very similar look at what would happen if London was abandoned to the marshes and earthworms. “Within the first year,” we read, “dandelions and other weeds begin growing in the gutters and emerge from the cracks caused by frost and flooding in concrete, paving slabs and walls.” Fair enough. “Within five years,” however, “roads, pavements parking places and the great squares of the city are carpeted with weeds and a rich turf of clover.” Then, an “understorey of grasses and shrubs gradually spreads over the city. As the soil layer builds up, deeper-rooting plants take hold. Trees start to grow and their roots smash through what’s left of the pavement and tarmac,” until the whole of London looks more like Angkor Wat, or the lost city of Z, than it does Notting Hill. Etc. etc.
The article’s parting shot: “In a flood plain like London’s, inundation of foundations and natural soil movements would leave very few buildings standing after 1000 years. By that time, both the oak and the floodplain forests would be mature and the rubble of Canary Wharf would have sunk into the marsh.” (See Silt for more on a flooded London).
Speaking of ruined cities, meanwhile, Pruned introduces us to a new boring machine – that is, a new machine that bores tunnels. Quoting from both Pruned and the project brief, the machine’s designer, we learn, hopes:

[to] deploy a robot to cities devastated by an earthquake, whereupon this “burrowing robot negotiates through the unstable rubble and solid earth, creating an interred, inhabitable structure from recycled debris. The raw system left behind by the robot provides a basic framework for shelter, infrastructure, and structural stability in an upheaved landscape. The resultant system is a landscape of interconnected spaces ready for human colonization.”

The machine would look like this:

[Image: From The Reinterred City].

There are many more images available at the project’s Flickr page.
Whilst pondering that mechanism, don’t forget that the Pamphlet Architecture 29 submission process is still open. So get published. And whilst you’re pondering that, don’t miss this year’s Next Generation competititon, sponsored by Metropolis:

The 2007 Next Generation® prize will finance the development of a bright idea that focuses on ENERGY, its uses, reduction, consumption, efficiencies, and alternatives. (…) On your own or in teams we invite you to submit work on urban plans, buildings, interiors, products, landscapes or communications design. The winner will receive $10,000 to realize his or her idea, and will be featured in Metropolis magazine.

One place you could start: is thorium the clean energy source of the future…?
Returning to William Blake – who once declared that “Energy is Eternal Delight” – the November 2006 issue of Wired features a fantastic article about Darren Aronofsky’s new film, The Fountain. In the article, author Steve Silberman describes how Aronofsky, determined to represent galactic space without the use of computerized special effects, came upon the work of Peter Parks, “a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London”:

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence.

Having then constructed their own kind of universal microcosm, using “yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge,” these DIY home f/x producers filled the end of Aronofsky’s film with “galactic clouds and pillars of dark matter that look like nothing else in science fiction.”

[Image: From The Fountain].

Such an approach gives The Fountain‘s grand finale “a handwrought quality that evokes the luminous etchings of William Blake.”
Turning our eyes away from space, toward the center of our own planet, we read that the “first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine. The bacteria exist without the benefit of photosynthesis by harvesting the energy of natural radioactivity to create food for themselves.” They apparently “live in ancient water trapped in a crack in basalt rock, 3 to 4 kilometres down.”
Speaking of energy and the center of the earth, it’s never too late to revisit Manhattan’s (only?) geothermally powered townhouse:

[Image: From the Wall Street Journal].

According to the Wall Street Journal, the building’s “unusual geothermal energy system provides heating, cooling and hot water. Pipes extend about 1,400 feet into the earth, where the temperature is always about 52 degrees… The pipes transfer energy to the house, where two-layer-thick concrete exterior walls, filled with thermal materials, trap the energy and distribute it.”
Finally, part of Turkey’s new Marmaray Rail Tube Tunnel, set to open in 2010, will cut beneath the Bosporus strait.

[Image: A visualization of project specifics; from New Scientist].

The Marmaray rail link “will not only be the deepest underwater tunnel ever constructed,” it “will also pass within 16 kilometres of one of the most active geological faults in the world.” Indeed, “the abutting plates move about 2 to 3 centimetres relative to each other every year.” However, using “flexible joints made from thick rubber rings reinforced by steel plates,” the central section, passing under the waters between Europe and Asia, will hopefully survive any major quakes. Or hopefully not, if you like disaster/rescue films.
Much more information available at, yes, New Scientist. (Thanks, Bryan!)

[Earlier: Quick list 4 and so on].

Austria’s relatively new dasparkhotel is an inn “constructed from repurposed, incredibly robust drain pipes.”

Each pipe’s Zen-like “external simplicity,” we’re told, “surrounds an unexpectedly comfortable interior – full headroom, double bed, storage, light, power, woolly blanket and light cotton sleeping bag. All other hotelery devices (toilets, showers, minibar, cafe, etc) are supplied by the surrounding public space.” Which means you piss in the bushes…?
In any case, dasparkhotel uses “simultaneously functional and comfortable concrete sleep-pipes” – or architecturally repurposed drains – to “offer the chance to experience a place in a totally new way.”

According to Wallpaper, the hotel is “a big hit among passing canoeists.”

(Via Archinect).

[Image: “An aurora borealis and the lights of Finland, Russia, Estonia and Latvia are featured in this digital still picture taken by the Expedition 11 crew aboard the International Space Station.” In addition to cities, you can see the moon, the Beehive Cluster, and the planet Saturn, the latter shining just above the green magnetized wisps of the northern lights. Via Space.com].

As many of you will no doubt know, I interviewed photographer David Maisel back in March for Archinect. As it happens, Maisel has a new show of photographs opening up this weekend at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles (6150 Wilshire Boulevard), and he’ll be at the gallery tomorrow night, October 21st, from 6-8pm.
The show consists of shots from Maisel’s series Oblivion: reverse-printed aerial views of Los Angeles. As Maisel explains in the Archinect interview, Oblivion “was realized in a post-9/11 time period, so seeing the urban world from the air simply was not the same as it might have been a few years earlier.” Further:

Getting permission to fly over the city was fraught with difficulty; the possibility of an airplane somehow turning the urban fabric into the site of an Armageddon-esque conflagration was implicit. At the same time, the meaning of “looking” within an urban environment has changed; it’s now more akin to an act of surveillance. Who gets to look? Who controls the gaze? Who controls the information seen? Who is or is not permitted to photograph the railroad tracks, the subway station, the public building? Is it unlawful to do so without permission? And who, or what entity, is given the power to grant such permission? By what authority is that bestowed?

Elsewhere, on his own website, Maisel adds: “Certain spatial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls and gated developments, highway entrance and exit ramps, lays unfurled over the landscape like a sheet over a recalcitrant cadaver. Surely the earth is dead beneath the sheer weight and breadth of this built form?”

Finally, Oblivion is simultaneously being released in book-form by the Nazraeli Press. There, in an essay accompanying Maisel’s photographs, author William L. Fox (the same William L. Fox discussed here) suggests that the tonal inversion so apparent in the Oblivion series works to disrupt the”circuitry of the city”:

The skyscrapers of downtown are now axonometric figures in a virtual reality, as if displayed in a Computer Aided Design program, and the course of the Los Angeles River is indistinguishable from those of the freeways. The oblique view… lays out a city as elaborate as that of a Persian carpet, yet it is as white as if it had been incinerated. What presumably is a blown-out, overexposed sky above the hills in the background is instead a black void that glowers over the city. It’s how an X-ray looks, how we imagine the military sees the monochromatic world when surveilling it at night. It’s as if we are seeing what the artist refers to as a “shadowland,” a place previously unobserved that coexists with its sunstruck version.

So come out if you can, meet David (and possibly meet William Fox?), and potentially even meet me, though I’ll just be there as a spectator. It should be a good night. Bring your friends, your Romans, your countrymen – as well as a few bucks so you can buy a signed copy of the book.

Sun has announced their Project Blackbox: a modular, prefab, stackable, shipping container-based, portable supercomputing and data storage warehouse – ideal for pirate utopias.
“After today,” they say, “you’ll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter – built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.” Project Blackbox is “a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future.”
Somewhat incredibly, “[t]he Project Blackbox prototype is a computing powerhouse capable of hosting a configuration that would place it among the top 200 fastest supercomputers globally.”

Outdoing Archigram – who once dreamed of air-lifting whole prefab command/control systems into the wild, where, at the push of a button, computerized instant cities and other “plug-inscapes” could take form – Sun continues:

Project Blackbox packages compute, storage, and network infrastructure capabilities into scalable, modular units outfitted with state-of-the-art cooling, monitoring, and power distribution systems. Customers will be able to order a variety of standard and custom configurations of systems, storage, networking, and software. Housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container for maximum flexibility, Project Blackbox will be easily transported using common shipping methods. Simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking will enable customers to quickly deploy Project Blackbox upon delivery.

I’ve ordered eleven.

(Via Boing Boing).