Year: 2006

A project I’ve been meaning to write about ever since it won first place at RIBA’s 2005 President’s Medals awards is Luke Pearson‘s maritime exploration of “the ship as a ‘dry-docked’ architecture.”

“The scheme is a retirement home for elderly fisherman that also houses a working men’s club for members of Newcastle’s fishing community,” Pearson writes. “As a reflection of the separation and torpor of this unique society, the scheme takes the notion of the ship in an architectural context, to create an ersatz environment which interacts with the city around it as if it were a dry docked vessel. The environmental technologies and the ways in which the notional ship has been translated into an architectural system are the focus of this study.”

In other words, you dock the ship for so long it becomes architecture, an extension of the earth’s surface into the sea.
Pearson’s ship/building – perhaps ship.bldg – would include a “heated superstructure” and a “microcosmic ocean upon deck” (both pictured above).
Then there is Pearson’s technique of “Alephographic drawing.” Pearson describes this part of the project as having been “inspired by Borges“; the image, below, “sees everything revealing the technologies and notorieties that exist within the Vessel.”

Now a similar such project needs to be worked out with a train, stopped for so long in the center of a city it becomes architectural, permanently anchored and settled there on tracks, perhaps with moving rooms, parts of a building detach then reattach to other buildings; then further projects with other forms of transport: helicopters, lorries, school buses, hovercraft… The future architecture of stalled vehicles.
Or, to quote Thomas Pynchon, who is here referring to a missile if I remember correctly: “The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.”

(Luke Pearson’s project spotted long, long ago on Archinect; see also Student projects 4, 3, 2, and 1).

Whilst once again finding myself on the same intellectual wavelength as Pruned‘s Alex Trevi, who posted today about the shimmering and explosive self-resurfacing outer loops of the sun, I spent yesterday evening copying down solar-descriptive quotations from an old book by Guy Murchie, called The Music of the Spheres.
Now out of print, as well as scientifically outdated, I can still hardly believe how exciting the 2-volume book – about “the material universe, from atom to quasar, simply explained” – is to read, and how interestingly poetic Murchie’s take on the subject really is. His chapter 6, for instance, is an “Introduction to the Sun,” our local star in which “something much more profound and basic than fire is blazing.”

I get light-headed when I read that the surface of the sun “is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air.” Indeed, some stars, such as E Aurigae I – a star so huge that it could “contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn’s orbit” – “are sometimes described as ‘red-hot vacuums’ because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star.”
Meanwhile, in the sun’s whirling interior, “the highly compressed gassy matter is ten times as dense as steel.” Then, of course, there are “magnetic hurricanes thousands of miles in diameter” – which would be a lot more exciting if those magnetic hurricanes were not “commonly known on Earth as sunspots.”
As the sun unceasingly explodes in arching structures of storm and prominence, “glowing veils of gaseous calcium” escape. In others words, the same mineral responsible for animal bones bursts outward from the sun in astrophysical shells that “look like gnarled trees with blazing rain pouring downward from their branches in beautiful magnetic curves that have been clocked at speeds up to 400 miles a second.”

The universe is loud with intercelestial thunder; there are “vast magnetic influences” at work across all scales of matter; “ionic ‘noise storms’ at radio frequencies” scream ceaselessly through antenna’d headsets of home astronomers; there is even a sunspot cycle that “corresponds to a ‘212-day cycle noted in some studies of human pulse rates’.” Incredibly, some “outlying clusters” of stars at the edge of the Milky Way “overlap each other so densely they are literally buried in light.”
In any case, I think every child in the world would become a scientist if they read Murchie’s 2-volume book – but it’s out of print. Alas. Perhaps, instead, we can all just watch this extraordinary short film, wherein sound art meets video art meets solar astronomy.

[Note: All emphases added. Elsewhere: Pruned‘s Sunscapes (where reader comments tipped us off to the film link, supplied above). Other elsewhere: The Surface of the Sun, a website claiming that the sun is, in fact, solid – furthermore, that it contains something called “solar moss.” Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Podcasting the sun].

“Is it painted?” Park asked. “Most people don’t think about pigments in paint. Most white-paint pigment now is titanium. Red is hematite. Black is often magnetite. There’s chrome yellow, molybdenum orange. Metallic paints are a little more permanent. The pigments come from rocks in the ground. Dave’s electrical system is copper, probably from Bingham Canyon. He couldn’t turn on a light or make ice without it.”

[Image: Bingham Canyon, Utah, photographed by the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

This text is all via John McPhee: “The nails that hold the place together come from the Mesabi Range. His downspouts are covered with zinc that was probably taken out of the ground in Canada. The tungsten in his light bulbs may have been mined in Bishop, California. The chrome on his refrigerator door probably came from Rhodesia or Turkey. His television set almost certainly contains cobalt from the Congo. He uses aluminum from Jamaica, maybe Surinam; silver from Mexico or Peru; tin – it’s still in tin cans – from Bolivia, Malaya, Nigeria. People seldom stop to think that all these things – planes in the air, cars on the road, Sierra Club cups – once, somewhere, were rock. Our whole economy – our way of doing things. Oh, gad! I haven’t even mentioned minerals like manganese and sulphur. You won’t make steel without them. You can’t make paper without sulphur…”
Rearranging planets into TVs. Producing objects from geology.

German artist Martin Kippenberger once proposed a subway system for the entire world, connecting Los Angeles to Helsinki, Tokyo to Rome, Münster to Dawson City. Greek islands, Canadian towns, Swiss lakes, pharaonic tombs – there would be entrances everywhere.

So Kippenberger actually began building these things – doors in the earth, leading nowhere – including this portable subway entrance.
But then he died.
The project ended.

Here are some construction specs and photo-speculative images to ponder.

So who’s up for re-starting this thing? After all, an entrance was built on the roof of the World Trade Center – but, even though the towers have been destroyed, the entrance is still there, hovering invisibly above Manhattan. It leads to an unexplored subcavern deep inside Mammoth Cave – where you’ll find a door to the Vatican. Which leads to the International Space Station. Which leads to the aerotropolis. Which connects onward to Cape Farewell, via the Cabinet Magazine National Library. Rumor has it, an Australian bone surgeon once uncovered another entrance in a patient’s rib. Eve was an entrance.
Etc.

(Thanks to Brand Avenue for pointing out Kippenberger’s project to me – nearly seven months ago. And thanks to Andrew Blum for reminding me of The New Yorker cover, above, which I’ve been saving in a box of files since August 2002).

[Images: An ingenious ad campaign by Y&R for preserving America’s National Parks: landscapes blueprinted, seeds diagrammed, arches shock-absorbed. Here are Delicate Arch (PDF), Yosemite Falls (PDF), and Giant Sequoia (PDF)].

(Thanks to Eric Jamieson for the tip!)

[Image: “Glowing, silvery blue clouds that have been spreading around the world and brightening mysteriously in recent years will soon be studied in unprecedented detail by a NASA spacecraft.” New Scientist].

Some unrelated items of atmospheric news…
First, the phenomenon of “noctilucent clouds” is under investigation. These are clouds “which glow at night, form in the upper atmosphere, at an altitude of about 80 kilometres, and their glow can be seen just after sunset or just before sunrise. ‘Even though the Sun’s gone down and you’re in darkness, the clouds are so high up, the Sun is still illuminating them.'”
However, could a city deliberately build upward curving traps of air, thermally concentrating moisture in huge, rising chimneys, giving its citizens a kind of Air TV – abstract films of silvery blue clouds coiling across the sky, mercurial and noctilucent? Gone would be Seasonal Affective Disorder; in its place you’d have this fairy tale gossamer light, glowing metallic on the edges of all things. Add to that the microscopic sounds of water crystallizing inside distant clouds – amplified throughout the canyons of the city – and you’d have a kind of climatopia.
Meanwhile, “many of the skyscrapers in Shanghai could become quite dangerous” due to the high winds they’re now producing. This effect is seemingly parodied in Mission Impossible III when Tom Cruise parachutes out of a Shanghai skyscraper – only to find that his chute fails to open due to the torque of neon whirlwinds lashing him about between corporate bank towers. (Yes, I’ve seen Mission Impossible III).
In an inadvertant moment of architectural criticism, “the Shanghai municipal government identified skyscrapers as one of the biggest potential threats to the city.”
Ages ago, in a no doubt now embarrassing BLDGBLOG post, the idea of urban wind-guns was explored, wondering, simultaneously, what impact surburban tract housing might have on the storms that eventually blow through a city. Fences, back porches, forests cut down or left to grow: how do these affect the speed of regional wind systems?

[Image: By krisstr, from the Shanghai Flickr group].

Shanghai city authorities have more or less answered that question, suggesting that “more trees can be planted to block part of the winds,” and that “the walls of the buildings should be fortified while notice signs are put up to signal potentially dangerous areas.” Pockets of atmospheric turbulence within the city. (How do skyscrapers affect the flight-paths of airplanes?)
Finally, air wells, tropospheric rivers, and electromagnetic weather control all meet in this surprisingly long but very interesting article.
There, we discover that “huge filamentary structures” in the sky act as “preferable pathways of water vapor movement in the troposphere (the lower 10-20 km of the atmosphere) with flow rates of about 165 million kilograms of water per second. These ‘atmospheric rivers’ are bands from 200 to 480 miles wide and up to 4,800 miles long, between 1-2 kilometers above the earth. They transport about 70% of the fresh water from the equator to the midlatitudes, are of great importance in determining the location and amount of winter rainfall on coastlines.”

[Image: The aforementioned tropospheric rivers, a kind of fluted cobwebbing of intercontinental air pressure].

The following devices – towers, air wells, etc. – were all designed to help tap into these rivers, turning the sky itself into an aquatic reservoir.

You basically build one of those things at a geo-atmospherically strategic location; you make youself a cup of tea; their height and geometry trigger downdrafts; then the internal chambers cause condensation of vapor from air. Thus, an air well. The end of drought through tropospheric riverways.
Here’s a diagram of one of the machines working:

The article, of course, also discusses electromagnetic weather control, such as the notorius HAARP Project, pictured here –

– but there’s a (very little) bit more on that in an earlier post.

(Thanks to Scott Webel for the air wells article; and to the incomparable things magazine for the link about Shanghai).