Year: 2006

[Image: Ripping up British railroad tracks in Angola under Chinese supervision; New York Times].

An excellent – if gigantic – article about international development, foreign aid, construction contracts, and “China’s African adventure” was published last weekend in the New York Times.
There, we find China reconsidered as a kind of economic event with infrastructural effects in distant landscapes. In Africa, for instance, “China has already begun, in myriad ways, to serve the interests of [developing nations], while the United States, preoccupied with terrorism, has seen its dominant status slip. Angola, once a cold-war pawn, can now serve as a kind of test case in the latest struggle to shape Africa’s destiny. Call it Chinese-style globalization.”
The article is quick to point out that China already has “a long history as a development partner; Africa is dotted with gigantic sports complexes and People’s Halls built by Chinese engineers at the behest of dictators.” It will now be dotted with Chinese-built roads, railways, and conference centers.
Quoting at length:

Four or five miles along the asphalt road that runs east from Kaala, a small town in central Angola, a Chinese construction company has carved an unexpected right turn, a broad dirt path that runs over a rise through scrubby forest. The path, which has no marking, winds past a basketball court – recreation for the work force – and then empties out into a vast plaza of meticulously smoothed earth. Dump trucks ferry loads of dirt back and forth. At the far end of the plaza, obscured by tree trunks that have been uprooted and laid carefully on their sides, are train tracks. The whole scene, invisible from the road, conjures the stupendous designs of the evil genius in a Bond film.
The weed-covered tracks are the remnants of a railway built by British engineers a century ago to transport precious minerals from the heart of the continent to the port of Lobito, more than a thousand miles away. The Angolan government is paying a consortium of Chinese companies $1.9 billion to completely reconstruct the tracks, the bridges, the stations, the equipment, all shattered by a quarter-century of warfare and neglect.

Like something out of a J.G. Ballard novel – or perhaps a Chinese rewriting of Heart of Darkness – we read how, throughout Angola, old urban plans are still visible “but the cities themselves had crumbled away.” However, with Chinese help, a “new city, Luanda Sul, has begun to sprout above the vast, teeming slums of Luanda [Angola’s capital]. On a hilltop south of the city, Sonangol has built a giant aluminum-and-glass conference center, a state-of-the-art facility for international conferences as yet unplanned, to be serviced by an international airport as yet unfinished. Portuguese and Brazilian construction companies are building their headquarters along perfectly smooth boulevards. Members of the new corporate class are spending $80,000 and up to buy one of the rose or pale green houses overlooking the sea. It’s a new world for a new, legitimate kind of wealth.”
It seems totally legitimate to wonder, then, what future literatures might emerge in such a setting. Will Chinese middle managers with a taste for spy novels write, under pseudonyms, the first great Graham Greenian thrillers of the 21st century? Mineral rights, emerging diseases, oil fields, ethnic tension, and weekend flights back home to Beijing… What future plots will take shape during the final years of “China’s African adventure”? Will a Chinese Archigram publish its own delirious manifestos for instant development, modular villages built with oil money on the shores of manmade lakes?
In any case, the New York Times continues: “The Chinese are a mysterious presence in Angola. Everyone seems to know about them and their assorted projects, but few people have actually seen them, and scarcely anyone can claim to have talked to them. The Chinese rarely venture beyond the encampments in which they live and work.”
Meanwhile, if your curiosity about China has been piqued, don’t miss another gigantic article from the New York Times about that nation’s industrially over-exploited Yellow River.

[Image: The city of Zhengzhou, on the banks of the Yellow River; New York Times].

“The Yellow River, curving through regions only intermittently touched by the country’s boom, offers a tour of the pressures and contradictions bearing down on China, and of the government’s efforts to address them,” we read.

Most astonishing, cities beside the river like Yinchuan, Luoyang and Zhengzhou – places few Americans have ever heard of – are racing to become China’s next new regional urban center with almost hallucinatory building booms. Yinchuan, a modest, ancient capital, is building an entire city district for a vast government complex and is adding 20 million square feet of construction every year through 2011. Luoyang, once the capital of the Zhou dynasty, has built a cluster of futuristic sports stadiums that look like a grounded armada of metallic, alien spaceships.

Finally, one more recent article from the New York Times… This one re-introduces us to Rem Koolhaas‘s topologically self-connected headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing.

That building, we read, will be “one of the largest ever constructed,” and it will loom “like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.” It’s due for completion by the end of 2007.
Read a bit more about the project at BusinessWeek – or in Koolhaas’s own, and ultimately somewhat content-less, Content.

[Image: Manuel Roig-Franzia/Washington Post].

Panama’s Hotel Campestre now caters to an unusually specific clientele: endangered frogs.
There, frogs “get the full spa treatment. Daily cleansing rinses. Exotic lunches. Even 24-hour room service.” In fact, it is “the frogs’ own Hotel California,” we read, “a place where they could check in but could never check out.”
Mixing metaphors, the hotel is nothing less than “a Noah’s Ark for frogs,” its residents arriving in the specimen boxes of concerned volunteers and scientists. There are “glass frogs with skin so translucent that their organs are always on full display.” There are “frogs that look like rocks and eat freshwater crabs, aggressive tree frogs and shy, nocturnal toads.” There are even frogs with “a taste for the good life.” This means that the males of the species “happily hop on the backs of the much larger females, who carry them around for as long as 80 days searching for just the right spot to breed.”
I’ve tried this method, and the results are spectacular.
Perhaps coming soon: Honeymoon at the Frog Hotel, a new film by Pixar…

(Thanks, Nicky!)

[Image: “An orbiting array of reflective balloons focuses sunlight onto the surface of Mars, providing extra heat and solar power for human colonists.” Via New Scientist. The plan being illustrated here would specifically use “300 reflective balloons, each 150 metres across, arranged side-by-side to create a 1.5-kilometre-wide mirror in orbit.” This would thus create “Earth-like conditions” on Mars – and perhaps inspire some strange future version of the Narcissus myth, in which a whole civilization turns its eyes to the nighttime skies… only to be confronted with an unmoving reflection of itself. What new astronomies are we doomed to construct? Of more earthly concerns, could we build small clouds of mirrored balloons, and – when our teenage neighbors aren’t shooting them down – amplify urban solar power intake during the off-season? Manhattan, masted to a thousand clouds of silver balloons, all shining].

(Thanks, Bryan! Related: Pruned’s Let there be light!)

Utopia, pictured above, is a “digital typeface that portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.” In other words, all the letters look like buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, jumbled up in Brazilian proximities.

[Images: BLDGBLOG written in Utopia; the whole font, posterized].

Utopia was designed by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain; because their site uses Flash, however, you can’t directly link to the font. But it’s there.
So if somebody stumbles on a city full of Oscar Niemeyer buildings… will they suspect hidden messages in every glance?

[Image: Chengfu Lu, Haidian District, Beijing (2004) by Sze Tsung Leong].

Apparently Beijing hopes “to ease congestion and other urban growing pains plaguing the city” by going underground.
“City planners have identified 17 key areas of the city for subterranean development, and envision an eventual ‘underground town‘ spanning 90 million square meters by 2020.”
This new subterranean Beijing “would quadruple the amount of underground space now being utilized in the city, which is currently at about 30 million square meters… Underground floor space [has] expanded by three million square meters in Beijing annually, [accounting] for 10 percent of the city’s total floor space completed each year” – much of which has been “devoted to parking and other traffic use.”

(Thanks, Alex P.!)

[Images: Sze Tsung Leong, Seine I (2006), Baogang, Inner Mongolia (2003), and Jersey City (2002) from his Horizons Series, exhibited at the Yossi Milo Gallery earlier this year; discovered via Artkrush. The gallery’s accompanying press release gives some background on Sze Tsung Leong’s photos, but it concentrates entirely on his work from China. For more images, see The Built Environment].

The Dirt introduces us to this business card slash micro-terrain by Tur & Partner, landscape architects. It’s a portable garden: impregnated with seeds, in the photosynthetic presence of sunlight and water, the paper eventually sprouts.
Which reminds me of a birthday card my brother once bought: if you buried the card and watered it, small seeds incorporated into the cardstock’s fibers would germinate. Which, in turn, makes me wonder if you could use this exact same method to smuggle rare plants out of totalitarian regimes intent on crushing botany within their borders… whether or not such regimes actually exist.
Or future trans-botanical geneticists, fleeing persecution, will hide their greatest seeds inside the pages of fake landscape guides, woven into the actual paper; they then bury their libraries in the soil of distant hillsides, and cloned roses and hybrid flowers soon grow.

(Card also featured at anArchitecture, among other places).

Artist Florian Dombois‘s Auditory Seismology project plays you the sound of earthquakes.
Using time-compression to accelerate the vibrational waves of global seismic activity, Dombois makes landscape events audible to human ears. Specifically, he writes, “if one compresses the time axis of a seismogram by about 2000 times and plays it on a speaker (so called ‘audification‘), the seismometric record becomes hearable and can be studied by the ear and [by] acoustic criteria.”

In this map of global tectonics, for instance, you can listen to the weird, rubbery snapping of plate boundaries.
Dombois: “The sound of earthquakes at spreading zones differs much from earthquakes at subduction zones. Whereas earthquakes produced by plates that are drifting against each other appear as sharp and hard beats, an earthquake from a parting mid ocean ridge sounds more like a plop.”

Meanwhile, Dombois also introduces us to the sonic seismicity of southern California, where the aftershocks of 1994’s Northridge quake sound like loose bits of metal banging against the side of a speeding bus. Then we go to Japan, whose plentiful subterranean dislocations come out like snaps of a drum. Finally, of course, we confront distance (the graph, featuring Earth’s surface, mantle, and core, that appears at the top of this post). Clicking on the seismic stations listed round that graph, you get short ambient works that weave together to form endless varieties of terrestrial drones.
Click on more than one at the same time, and you can waste whole minutes of your life tuning faultlines and making dissonant chords of plates; the earth becomes your instrument.
Dombois’s exhibition of Auditory Seismology closes November 18th, at the galerie rachel haferkamp in Cologne.

(Thanks, Alex! Earlier: Fault Whispers, Dolby Earth, resonator.bldg, Sound dunes, and, to some extent, Podcasting the sun).

[Image: Resembling the birth, or perhaps death, of the universe under studio lights – or a black & white alternate ending to The Fountain – this is a sculpture by Michel Blazy from 5 Billion Years Later, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, photographed by booce. The image is best seen in its original size].

Going on right now in a New York City near you is Payphone Warriors: “You and your teammates must dash across the blocks around Washington Square Park in a bid [to] control as many payphones as possible. You simply make a call from a payphone to the game system and enter your team number to capture a phone. For each minute your team controls that phone the team scores one point. Grab more phones for more points.”

And if someone complains that they actually need to use that phone… you know what to do.

(Brought to you by Abe Burmeister of Abstract Dynamics).