Month: January 2007

I’m pleased to announce that the Summer 2006 issue of the Urban Design Review has been released; it’s also the first issue for which I served as Senior Editor. There will be many more to come.

The issue includes some fantastic work. You’ll find an amusing – and much-needed – analysis of New York Times Magazine real estate ads, written by Brand Avenue‘s own Chris Timmerman; Charles Jencks’s Iconic Building is reviewed by Michiel van Raaij, the latter being one of today’s most uncannily sharp-eyed critics of iconic architecture (van Raaij’s blog is worth a long visit); David Haskell gives us an essayistic look at urban event places, reviewing architectural attempts “to make the city a perpetual festival”; and, among many other texts – including short interviews with both Charles Jencks and Mike Davis – you’ll find an interview with Jinhee Park and John Hong of SINGLE speed DESIGN. SsD is now justifiably famous for their work on the ingenious – and beautifully inspiring – Big Dig House, a single-family home built from old Boston highway parts. The Big Dig House was reviewed three days ago in USA Today.
From SsD‘s own description of the project:

As a prototype for future Big Dig architecture, the structural system for this house is almost wholly comprised of steel and concrete from Boston’s Big Dig, utilizing over 600,000 lbs of recycled materials. Although similar to a pre-fab system, the project demonstrates that subtle, complex spatial arrangements can still be designed and customized from pieces of the I-93 offramps: Varying exterior and interior planes create an ascending relationship from ground to roof as large upper-level plantings blur interior and exterior relationships.

Houses built from highways.
The Urban Design Review is now all set to expand, through events and publications both, and it is always looking for more interested readers and writers; a forthcoming issue, in fact, is already in the works. It’s not BLDGBLOG in paper form, however, but something much better: a sustained look at the built environment, on a global level, using reviews of texts and exhibitions, open dialogues between practitioners in the field, and essays by theorists, students, professors, artists, and so on.
UDR is published by David Haskell’s Forum for Urban Design. (David is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Topic Magazine).
So check it out.

It’s too small to see clearly, but you’re looking at an ad for Komatsu in which the entire top of a mountain has been sheared clean off.
The tagline? “Call the experts for any challenge.”

And there they are, driving away in yellow earth-moving equipment – mobile crushers, vibratory rollers, and minimal swing radius excavators – if you look carefully at the left side of the advertisement.
In a press release on their site, Komatsu writes how “[n]ew ways to develop hard terrain – sandstone, lava rock and basalt – had to be learned once the easily developed land was taken. As a result,” they write, “contractors are facing great challenges.”
Including, it seems, the obliteration of whole mountain peaks…
Not ones to be intimidated by geology, however, Komatsu arrives with their “advanced land development practices” – “the absolute top” of the industry, they say – and their “world-class machines,” whose “powerful dozing and ripping force” puts the surface of the earth back in its place: as something we will build more suburbs on.
In any case, I’m tempted to propose the plot of some new, geotechnically futuristic version of Paradise Lost – perhaps the world’s first book about the geological invasion of Heaven (in which “devilish enginery” has been assembled inside a “hollow cube,” whilst an army of demons “turn[s] wide the celestial soil” to unleash “sulphurous and nitrous foam” upon a heavenly landscape “soon obscured with smoke”) – but a version that’s been written specifically for Hindus.
In other words, rather than Milton’s legion of demons, who rip minerals from the earth and hurl clouds of rock at the gathered phalanx of angels surrounding God, you’d read instead about a rogue group of anti-mountain engineers – tens of thousands of them, wearing hardhats and carrying bagged lunches – who have begun dismantling Mount Meru one hunk of granite at a time.
They drill, blast, doze, and mobile-crush their way upward, in an endless fleet of bright yellow trucks, reducing the Himalayan vaults of their own gods to mere gravel.

(Thanks, Ben! And thanks, Alex!)

[Image: Mr. Housing Bubble; via Archis].

First, some landscape links:
“Mount St. Helens is drumming out a warning beat,” New Scientist reports. “Regular, repetitive earthquakes around the volcano are being triggered by the movements of a rock plug, reverberating in the neck of the volcano.” Incredibly, the plug is moving upward “at the rate of about 3 to 5 metres per day,” pushed from behind by “magma pressure” – which “could signal the build-up to some kind of eruption.”
On the other side of the world, meanwhile, Mt. Everest’s frozen peak is apparently sucking ozone out of the stratosphere; the ozone then cascades down the sides of the mountain in “katabatic winds,” or walls of cold air propelled downward by gravity. At its worst, these winds are “equivalent to mildly polluted city air and could pose respiratory problems” for climbers.
Sticking with New Scientist, we then learn that there are possible links between oxygen in the atmosphere and the pace of animal evolution – discovering, in yet another article, that too little oxygen can actually lead to Alzheimer’s disease.
In other words, it seems like non-senile humans are only possible on this planet within a very narrow range of oxygen saturation. So don’t forget to breathe.

[Image: Photo by Manfred Cage, via New Scientist].

Then there’s the ongoing possibility that we are already surrounded by thriving alien lifeforms – only we don’t know how to spot them.
“What if life elsewhere is different,” for instance, “based on an exotic alien anatomy and biochemistry?” Our planet could thus be teeming with organisms so alien that they don’t even appear to be alive.
This is a familiar topic on BLDGBLOG; see Unrecognized for what they are, or (the identically illustrated) Alien Planet.

[Image: Moon dust].

In other landscape news, scientists have developed artificial moon dust – a material otherwise referred to as a lunar simulant. The scientists simply “don’t have enough real moondust to go around,” we read, so manufacturing a replica was the only way to go; they’ve now “also begun work on more demanding simulants representing various locations on the Moon.”
Word has it, there is someone on the moon right now, building a small replica of the Earth… within which a small replica of the moon is under construction.
For some reason, though, the lunar simulant story reminds me of Lateral Architecture‘s “garden of soils” project – in which intact, three-dimensional samples of soil from throughout Québec were collected and publicly displayed in rectilinear containers, forming what look like colored chimneys of red and brown earth.
It’s the surface of the Earth, transformed into a readymade art object.

[Image: From Soil Horizon, 2005, by Mason White and Lola Shepherd of Lateral Architecture. This project is also featured in this book].

Meanwhile, don’t forget the “storm the size of a planet” now whirling its way across Saturn’s south pole, complete with “a well-defined wall of towering clouds ringing a dark eye.”
I continue to believe that the landscape architect of the future will somehow learn how to cultivate weather: microclimates and permanent storms hovering over desert gardens… A storm the size of a planet would simply be icing on the cake.

[Image: Polar auroras on Saturn, via Space.com; this is not the “storm the size of a planet,” on the other hand – I just like the picture].

Yet controlling the weather isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. They’re already doing it in Beijing, for instance; and, here in California, the use of “hail cannons” appears to be on the rise.
The Ventura County Star describes how a “thunderous boom from a 20-foot cannon echoes over John Diepersloot’s apricot and peach orchards… breaking up hail stones before they can form.” Specifically, hail cannons, “which switch on when storms are approaching, are the latest high-tech device aimed at protecting crops from the volatile weather that hits California’s agricultural heartland, where a single hail storm or freeze can destroy a crop – and a local economy – overnight.”

[Image: A 19th-century hail cannon; see also that site’s look at Using Energy to Forcefully Alter the Weather].

Moving on to some urban and/or architectural links now:
It seems that “surveillance cameras in the city of Groningen have been adapted to listen out for voices raised in anger. Microphones attached to the cameras feed the sound signals to software that can detect voices that are aggressive in tone.”
Though this is supposed to “prevent fights breaking out,” it will probably: 1) do nothing of the sort; 2) have an unexpected deadening effect on conversations throughout the city: whereas two friends might once have passionately debated the literary merits of Jonathan Franzen, now they will just shrug defeatedly, break eye contact, and order more beer; or 3) 15-year old boys making loud farting noises will take over the streets at midnight.
Not to be deterred by such cynicism, the forces of surveillance have also developed a “device the size of a laptop that can see through walls.” This “will leave criminal suspects no place to hide from police or security forces.”

[Image: The Prism 200, courtesy of Cambridge Consultants].

The so-called Prism 200 system “uses radar to detect moving objects on the other side of a wall, and displays their position in three-dimensions on a built-in screen. It is sensitive enough to detect a person breathing,” we’re told.
Perhaps implying a future use for architectural design students, the Prism 200’s “through-wall radar” technology “can map an area in plan view, side view or in three dimensions.”
Meanwhile, Metropolis introduces us to “neighborhood intensification,” or “eco-density”:

Recently Portland and Vancouver established zoning and design guidelines to encourage the development of smaller houses, as long as they meet exacting design criteria. A new program in Vancouver that falls under the mayor’s overall policy of “eco-density” encourages the reconfiguration of lots in certain single-family districts. In Portland a new set of ordinances and guidelines seeks to promote “skinny houses,” intended to fit lots less than 36 feet wide.

[Image: An example of “neighborhood intensification,” or building smaller houses on smaller lots. Photo by John Morefield, courtesy of David Sarti, via Metropolis].

Speaking of the phrase “skinny houses,” articles continue to appear debating whether architecture can make you fat. The Guardian, for instance, reports that England’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment recommends that architects try “designing cities and housing that encourage exercise.” The reporter immediately sees “an image of a futuristic metropolis fitted with endless MC Escher stairwells and humiliatingly narrow doorways,” but the real solutions are much more obvious than that. Architects and urban planners can start by “incorporating cycle paths and pedestrian areas into their designs,” for example. “Parks and other green spaces encourage people to exercise, and if a shop is within walking distance, people are more likely to leave the car behind.” Etc.
All of which reminds me of a more or less unspoken theory about contemporary urban space: which is that we don’t need so many countless thousands of roads and parking lots in our cities because everyone drives a car; it’s that everyone drives a car because there are so many countless thousands of roads and parking lots in the way. You can’t get anywhere for all the parking lots surrounding you – and so you have to buy a car just to get out of there.
In any case, Inhabitat introduced us last month to a new high-rise project in Miami, designed by Chad Oppenheim. The building incorporates wind power into its very facade.

[Images: Building by Chad Oppenheim; images via Inhabitat].

As Inhabitat writes, the building works by “integrating green technologies including wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water generation” into its structure. The outer “exoskeleton” is really “a hyper-efficient structure that provides thermal mass for insulation, shade for residents, and architectural elements such as terraces and armatures that support turbines.”
It also looks good at sunset.

[Image: Building by Chad Oppenheim; image via Inhabitat].

However, this building also makes me wonder if the public’s negative reaction to wind farms might be different if we used more attractive windmills. In other words, instead of those free-standing, vertical helicopter blades – as most farms now use – why not try a sleek line of embedded turbines… a kind of Great Wall of Wind Power stretching across the landscape?

In the arches of bridges, turbines.
Finally, BLDGBLOG’s Sitemeter quietly ticked past the 1,000,000 visitors mark this past Friday; thanks to everyone who comes through now and again – hopefully it’s worth it. Expect more news about that soon.

(With some of these links supplied by none other than Alex Trevi).

[Image: Screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].

One of the funnier works of atmospheric installation art I’ve yet seen is the so-called Geostationary Banana Over Texas.
The project is described as “an art intervention placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky.”

[Image: Another screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].

The banana, we read, “will float between the high atmosphere and Earth’s low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings.” It will be 300m long, framed with bamboo, and filled with helium.
I’m 100% behind the idea.

[Images: More screen-grabs from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage; the last image is particularly brilliant].

After all, the project’s organizers remind us, “a banana appearing in the Texas sky might seem like a ‘message’.”
Indeed.

(With a huge thanks to Michael Pace for the link! See also MetaFilter or Neatorama for more ).

[Image: Courtesy of NASA/ESA/MASSEY, via the BBC].

“Astronomers have mapped the cosmic ‘scaffold’ of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled,” the BBC reports. Producing the map “involved nearly 1,000 hours of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.” But it was time well-spent: the map now “confirms that galaxy clusters are located within clumps of this invisible material. These clumps are connected via bridges of dark matter called filaments. The clumps and filaments form a loose network – like a web.”
We are thus surrounded by structures of the invisible.
In an interesting analogy, we read that “the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street lights.” But now they have the actual physical layout of the streets – or something like that.
Having said all this, let me admit to an outsider’s sense that either 1) the astronomers are wrong: there is no dark matter; dark matter is just a calculational artifact of the current model used to represent universal space (and, thus, this map actually shows something else); or 2) they’re right about all of it – except the use of the word matter, which is referentially misleading; it is not matter at all.

(Earlier: See Filaments of space-time, where you can read about “huge arc-bubbles of light colliding with themselves in glowing, superskeletal networks, filling space like translucent caulk”).

[Image: Science Building, London, England, 2003, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

In two beautifully realized and conceptually fascinating projects, Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman creates “architectural utopias, fictional ruins from fictional worlds.”

[Image: Archives, Leeds, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s Landmarks of Industrial Britain, for instance, is “a photographic series of fictional public buildings derived from small scale architectural maquettes.”
As the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia explains, the series “envisages a worker’s state in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.”
Zimmerman himself writes that his work preys upon “the apparent willingness of the viewer to accept a fabricated past.” In the process, the lost industrial utopia he’s created – a false history convincingly rendered through the use of immense landscapes and architectural monumentalism – comes to look like a world designed entirely by Etienne-Louis Boullée.

[Image: Museum, Birmingham, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s earlier series, Lost Hamilton Landmarks (referring to Hamilton, Ontario), apparently kicked off the artist’s ongoing interest in “Greek and Roman [architectural] prototypes.” This “neo-classical architectural language,” Zimmerman writes, attains much of its aesthetic power by “appealing to state authority and to instinctual desires for permanence and stability, security, sense of place, or even to the desire for the guidance of a parent.”

[Image: Mount Hamilton Sanatorium, 1995, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

Zimmerman thus uses the authoritative language of neo-classical architecture to help convince his audience that these buildings once actually existed – and that they now stand ruined somewhere, cavernous, sublime, and empty.

[Images: Mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetary, 1996, and Mount Hamilton Hospital, 1996, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

After all, these are not real buildings.

[Image: Public Baths, Manchester, England, 2000, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Quoting the justifiably enthusiastic reviewer Meredith Dault at some length:

[Carl Zimmerman] makes photographs of imagined architectural spaces. He builds models, photographs them, and then digitally manipulates the photographs, creating vast, impossible spaces. Sepia-toned and laid out flat on tables in the gallery space, the photographs read, at first glance, like historical documents – they feel very much like 19th century architectural engravings – until you realize they can’t be because they’re all dated in the present. A closer look reveals that the buildings are set in huge, almost surreal, bleak landscapes – their titles want you to believe, however, that these buildings are plunked down in ordinary cities like Manchester and Leeds.

Zimmerman’s show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia appears to be over – but if it is still up, I would strongly recommend stopping by. Zimmerman’s models were on display alongside the photographs, and the exhibition sounds like it was well worth seeing.
What seems particularly interesting, to me, is that Zimmerman achieves a sense of near-total ruin, but he does so not through the depiction of structural collapse – he simply shows us grandiosity and silence.

[Image: War Memorial, Leeds, England, 2004, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

If you’re feeling well-heeled, meanwhile, consider buying yourself some full-size prints of these images; you can do so at the frankly named buynewart. You can also see more deeply colored versions of Zimmerman’s work by visiting Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery.

(Thanks, John Devlin! See also BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at the work of Oliver Boberg and Thomas Demand).

[Image: Her Majesty’s Theatre, London; via Wikipedia].

“British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber warns that the auction of a wireless spectrum in London could doom music theater in the city’s West End,” Marketplace reports.
It’s an unintended musical side-effect of high-priced aerial real estate, or London’s property boom gone electromagnetic.
“Britain’s telecom regulator is to blame,” Webber says. “The regulator is planning to auction off to the highest bidder the airwaves used by theatres and concert venues. A cell phone company with deep pockets is likely to win. The fees could then soar and the theatres could be priced out.”
In the future, perhaps actors can simply schedule a wireless conference call with their intended audience…

Princeton Architectural Press is still looking for the next installment in its Pamphlet Architecture series – which means they just might be looking for you.

“To promote and foster the development and circulation of architectural ideas,” they write, “Pamphlet Architecture is again offering an opportunity for architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, and landscape architects to publish their designs, manifestos, ideas, theories, ruminations, hopes, and insights for the future of the designed and built world. With far-ranging topics including the alphabet, algorithms, machines, and music, each Pamphlet is unique to the individual or group that authors it.”
They want ideas that possess “rigor and excitement,” with stimulating imagery and enthusiasm for the field.
However, you only have 13 days left in which to make your ideas both coherent and presentable – and you have to register.
And if you’re unfamiliar with the series, and need some examples of small, concentrated doses of architectural speculation, then let me point out this particular pamphlet, of which I am a long-term fan – although I lost my copy a few years ago – and I wrote about Tooling back in July.
If you still think you’re at a loss for ideas, you can always find the outer edges of a potential pamphlet just about anywhere: the San Francisco Sewer System Master Plan Project, for instance; or the gradual but complete depopulation of Venice; the Earth without people; the tomb of Agamemnon; the brick-lined subterranean world behind Niagara; a proposal for the exact and to-scale geotechnical recreation of the Mississippi River’s missing mountains; field results from your architectural experiments with Rogaine; some science-fictional extrapolations on London’s CTRL Project, complete with site visits and interviews; or even some Herculean, hydro-architectural taming of the North Pacific Gyre (you build a swimming pool around it, designed by FAT, then charge admission).
Etc. etc. – so get your brains firing, your fingers typing, and get published by Princeton.
And if any readers of BLDGBLOG win this thing, let me know.

[Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

On the front page of the LA Times today, greeting the new year, is a story about a man with a plan in Iowa: “Surrounded by cornfields that stretch to the horizon,” we read, “in a place where molehills pass for mesas, avid outdoorsman Don Briggs has long dreamed of climbing a mountain. So he decided to build one.”

[Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

He’s not a geotechnical engineer, or some wildly charismatic salesman of earth-moving equipment; he’s just a man with a water hose and access to a few corn silos.
“Briggs spends most winter nights hosing down a quartet of grain silos on a friend’s farm – and relies on the Corn Belt’s frigid temperatures to transform the water into frozen walls of ice that tower nearly 70 feet straight up,” the LA Times writes.
“By the time he’s done, the ice encasing the outside of the silos is 4 feet thick in spots – and ready for the onslaught of ice climbers drawn to this strange marriage of farming and extreme sports.”

[Image: There would sometimes be “a heat wave,” Don Briggs told the LA Times, “when the temperature got up to 40 degrees or warmer, and all the ice would fall off the silos and we’d have to start all over.” Photo by Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

The transformation of architectural structures into geological objects is something worth pursuing; in a way, it reminds me of a fairly minor pet peeve of mine, which is that people like Colin Farrell, or Lindsay Lohan, come out to Hollywood or move to Manhattan, and they make tens of millions of dollars… and they buy liquor with it. Or crystal meth and expensive dresses. Or whatever it is that River Phoenix did.
But when was the last time you heard about some hot young actor pocketing $20 million to star in a new Tony Scott film – then promptly disappearing into the plains of Iowa where he (or she) contracts out the multi-million dollar construction of a new mountain chain? Complete with manmade glacier?
Rather than buy Escalades, diamonds, and a few bottles of Courvoisier, in other words, why not compulsively build whole transparent cities of plexiglass, uninhabited in the mountains of central Idaho?
If you’re going to get addicted to something, make your addiction interesting.
Rather than donate all his money to Scientology, Tom Cruise funds the excavation of a spectacular series of show-caves, curling under the soil of Wisconsin. He sinks millions and millions of dollars into it, and dances on the couches of primetime news shows to sing the praises of subterranean topography.
Which is nothing compared to Robert Downey Jr., who is now rumored to have addicted himself to producing large-scale earthworks, made of polished obsidian, in eastern Washington state… He takes jobs in Uwe Boll films just to buy more rock…

(Thanks to N for the ice silo link!)