Month: March 2007

[Image: The Mix House, exterior view].

This awesome new project by Joel Sanders Architect, Karen Van Lengen/KVL, and Ben Rubin/Ear Studio takes a step beyond “the modernist notion of visual transparency” (i.e. large windows and glass houses) by adding “aural transparency” – acoustic openness.

[Image: Mix House, exterior].

It’s called the Mix House:

Situated on a generic suburban plot, the dwelling is composed of two sound-gathering volumes outfitted with three audiovisual windows. The curved profile of each of these sonic windows is composed of two elements: a louvered glass window wall that regulates the sound of the air-borne ambient environment, and a parabolic dish that electronically targets domestic sounds and transmits them to an interior audio system controlled from the kitchen island. From this sound command center of the house, occupants are free to design original domestic soundscapes by mixing media sponsored sounds with the ambient noises of the neighborhood.

These “sonic windows” – or parabolic ornaments – amplify the audio setting of the house, thus making location, I’d think, several orders of magnitude more important than with many others works of architecture.
In fact, should a house like this really be constructed in the suburbs? Instead of deep in the woods somewhere, or even on top of a glacier…? Crystalline pressures of melting ice three thousand feet below you suddenly break, sending cascades of sound shivering upward through the home’s foundations. Some days it’s impossible to get out of bed, hypnotized by unearthly noises…

[Image: Mix House, interior].

In any case, the “den/bedroom wing is oriented vertically to capture audio-visual views of the sky,” we read, and “the front window wall doubles as a sliding glass door that allows the occupant to hear the sounds of the streetscape.”
Further: “Located above the bed, the skylight captures sky-borne sounds, as well as signals transmitted through TV and Internet connections.”
It’s architecture as the cure for – or cause of? – schizophrenia.

[Image: Mix House, exterior section and plan].

The artistic possibilities here are extraordinary.
One wonders, for instance, if several of these houses could be constructed in the same neighborhood, on the same street – with each one then hooked up to public broadcasting equipment and loudspeakers. Pirate radio. Cul-de-sac FM.
The houses thus play sounds for each other, like instruments, orchestrally contributing to the neighborhood’s sonic environment – becoming part of one another’s “audio-visual views.”
Each house – already an outside-in acoustic snapshot of the environment in real-time – turns sound around to offer a corresponding inside-out anthem for the streets and passers by: the clinking forks and knives of a private dining room get broadcast onto the street. A kind of architecturally outside-inside-out soundtrack for the local world.

[Image: Mix House, amplifying window technical detail].

Drunk homeowners mix burps with airplane roars, standing at an audio booth in the kitchen.
Someone plays layered tape-loops of the sounds of their house from yesterday – which gets picked up by the neighbor and rebroadcast, with reverb, over the noise of a distant lawnmower. Enemy teenagers declare audio warfare, their microphones left open all night long. Paranoid husbands spy on all possible rivals.
Then, in 2017, a particularly well-constructed house, full of weird audio equipment, becomes the only instrument used to soundtrack Steven Spielberg’s final film…

(Thanks to Rob Kerchner and Joel Sanders for sending me the images! Meanwhile, the Mix House will be on display as part of Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, from April 14-July 1, 2007).

[Image: On the roof of the wind tunnel, lit from below… Photograph courtesy of Benny Chan/Fotoworks].

As some of you will no doubt know, BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications have co-organized an awesome event coming up on Tuesday, May 8, from 8-10pm, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It will be part of this year’s Silver Lake Film Festival.
The speakers? Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner, and Ben Procter, discussing artistic connections between film, architecture, science fiction, and the city.
The venue? A converted wind tunnel, formerly owned and operated by Douglas Aircraft, recently rehabbed by Daly Genik Architects.

[Image: Courtesy of Benny Chan/Fotoworks].

For the project, Daly Genik led the “transformation of an industrial wind tunnel and support buildings” into a 24-hour arts education facility, complete with studios, classrooms, galleries, and offices – yet it’s the outside of the building that I find the most interesting (the wind tunnel itself, sadly, is just sort of a gigantic room with a huge ceiling).
“The wind tunnel’s complex of concrete buildings had few windows,” the architects explain. This meant there were a bunch of “large, uneven, dark spaces” inside that needed brightening:

To open up the building, we cut windows and skylights in the thick street-front concrete walls and the roof, bringing light into classrooms and studios while making the program visible to the street. A certain amount of light escapes as a beacon allowing the skylights and signage to make the building glow.

These “strategic cuts,” in other words, now function both as light wells – or “sculptural skylights” – bringing sunlight in, and as lanterns, illuminated from below.

[Image: Courtesy of Nic Lehoux].

Further, because the architects “wanted the skylight installation to demonstrate an integration of design disciplines: structure, architectural form, and graphic design,” they worked “in collaboration with graphic designer Bruce Mau, ARUP structural engineers and Foiltec technicians.”
More technically, the skylights are “an assembly of translucent ETFE films stretched on a structural frame.” These “films,” however, are information-bearing; that is, the “surface can be printed with a pattern.”
However, this “printing” process is rather complex.

[Image: Courtesy of Nic Lehoux].

“In order to print the foil,” for instance, that foil must first be “irradiated with a high frequency energy source, then printed with cut rubber rollers.” Beyond even that, then, Bruce Mau – hired to design the print – was specifically asked to optimize the pattern “so that correct amounts of light would be transmitted” down to the classrooms below.
The interior space of the building thus appears to be stippled with indirect sunlight.

[Image: Courtesy of Nic Lehoux].

Finally, what appear to be solid light-boxes on the roof of the building are actually “huge pillows.”
A “compressor is needed to keep the pillows inflated… [and] to adjust the amount of natural light and heat entering the building… A timer, a seasonal clock, or light and thermal sensors can control the reinflation process.”
This system is part of the reason why the building was granted LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.
In any case, come out on May 8 to step inside the building and see the wind tunnel itself – and to hear about science fiction, film, urban space, and architecture. More information on that event appears here.

(Thanks to Meara Daly for sending me the images! The Wind Tunnel was also covered, nearly three years ago, on Land+Living – who point us onward to this article in Metropolis).

[Image: The Macdonald-Harrington Building at McGill, home of both the Urban Planning and Urban Design programs].

Just a quick congratulations to my brother, Kevin, who’s been accepted into the McGill School of Urban Planning. Congrats, Kevin!
Be nice to him.

[Image: Ben Procter].

A few weeks ago I announced that BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications had teamed up to curate an architectural film fest as part of this year’s Silver Lake Film Festival here in LA.
Well, I have some exciting news to announce: on Tuesday, May 8th, from 8-10pm, inside a converted wind tunnel in Pasadena, we’ll be hosting an evening full of talks and presentations about film, science fiction, space, landscape, and architecture.

[Image: James Clyne].

I have said many times before on this blog that contemporary architecture could learn quite a lot from the spatial and material imaginations on display in both film and science fiction – so perhaps this event will be a good opportunity to explore what that really means.

[Image: Ryan Church].

Though the connections between film and architecture run too deep – and are either too widely known or too conceptually entangled – to discuss in full here, I still think it’s worth pointing out, briefly, a few examples of cinematic thinking in architecture. Or architectural thinking in cinema, as it were.
One of the greatest essays on Piranesi ever written, for instance, was produced by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein – whose father, interestingly, was an architect.
While studying Piranesi’s notoriously vertiginous etchings of imaginary prisons, Eisenstein felt moved to write an essay about the basic cinematic acts of montage and cutting. If Piranesi’s prisons are anything, Eisenstein suggests, they are spaces edited together from unrelated episodes; they are cinematic.
He calls them “architectural frenzies.”
Inspired by this realization, Eisenstein goes on to say that even film should be reconsidered, on a structural level, as “a sequence of collisions,” a “succession of broken links,” thousands and thousands of different frames and spaces that then unite into a coherent whole. The individual stills of a film sequence – like the individual rooms of a building – thus fuse into an “ecstatic construction.”

[Image: Ryan Church].

Less abstractly, Jonathan Glancey claims, in an old article for The Guardian, that “cinema remains the best place to experience the architectural imagination at full flight.”
Through film, Glancey writes, an audience can get “highly wrought glimpses into future cities; for popular audiences, such films offer thrilling guides as to how our world might look.” He continues:

What is fascinating, and very much an area for further research, is the close relationship between radical architectural design and the cinema. Much of the best of modern architecture, combining digital and three-dimensional design processes, is cinematic in scope and feeling.

He then concludes, and I strongly echo this sentiment:

If only the members of Archigram or Superstudio had been able to buy, in the 1960s, the kind of cheap digital technology available on high streets today. They may not have been able to get their dream cities constructed, but they could have visualised them in mini-movies – much more enticing than so many drawings, lectures and models.

After reading something like this, though, I find it very hard not to get excited by things like Unit 15 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, a design studio that “uses film, video, animation and motion graphics to generate, develop, refine and represent architectural proposals.”
It’s also interesting, though, in this context, to point out the work of M. Christine Boyer, and her excellent book The City of Collective Memory.
There, Boyer writes about Edward Gordon Craig, an early 20th-century stage set designer (and son of an architect), whose “architectonic scenery” foregrounded architectural backdrops, turning them into the only action an audience was meant to watch.
For instance, Craig “proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors,” Boyer writes. “The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination.”
The architecture does all the acting for you; the architecture is the film – or the play, as the case may be. The architecture is the storyline.
The space itself is the plot.

[Image: Ben Procter].

So what does all this have to do with cinema and architecture – or even with science fiction and the city?
Well, by talking not to architects but instead to the people who actually design the sets, backdrops, cityscapes, environments, buildings, rooms, etc., in which cinematic action takes place – from X-Men 3 to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – you should be able to get at least some sense for what architecture can mean, on a narrative level, to those outside the architectural field.
In other words, what do those people who tell stories through and with space actually want from architecture?
How do they use space?
Rather than set out to discover, yet again, what architects think about cinema – or about science fiction, or about stage set design – why not turn the question around? Why not see what architects can learn from spaces, buildings, and cities produced by other fields?

[Image: A sketch by Mark Goerner; here’s a larger version].

Or, to ask another question that won’t necessarily be answered by this event: if Architectural Record bills itself as a magazine about architecture, then why doesn’t it ever cover, say, the apartment complex from Minority Report, or the office lobbies featured in The Matrix? That’s architecture, too.
In any case, Materials & Applications and BLDGBLOG have therefore gathered together four of the most exciting concept artists working in film today to discuss some of these questions, and to talk about their own artistic backgrounds – how they got into film, what they studied to get there, and what imaginative role architecture plays in their creations.
They will each give a short, 15-20 minute talk, with images, and the whole thing will be followed by a Q&A. And, just to mention this again, because I love saying it, this will take place in a converted wind tunnel, formerly used for testing the aerodynamism of experimental vehicles.
But I’ll be posting about the wind tunnel in a few days (complete with some really cool pictures).

[Image: Ben Procter].

The resumes of these four guys, then, put together, cover so much cinematic ground that it’s almost easier to name what they haven’t worked on; nonetheless, here are the speakers – with an abbreviated list of their film production credits.
In alphabetical order, you’ll see Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner, and Ben Procter.

[Images: Ryan Church].

Ryan Church has worked on The War of the Worlds, Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith – with stills from each film available on his site.
Some of the landscapes and structures that Ryan has produced are just extraordinary; there’s this titan arch vs. these linked arches; there’s this weird interior full of glowing discs; there’s this thing; there’s the Death Star under construction – etc. etc. etc.
Awesome work can be found all over this page, in fact, including some truly amazing sketches.

[Images: Three environments by Ryan Church; larger versions available here, here, and here].

Check out Ryan’s bio for more.
Moving onward, alphabetically, we find James Clyne, who has worked on A.I. (check out this Caspar David Friedrich-esque landscape, in particular), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (!), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Minority Report (including this cityscape and these freeways), Mission to Mars, The War of the Worlds, and X-Men 3, among others.

[Images: James Clyne].

There’s then Mark Goerner, who’s worked on Constantine, Minority Report, The Terminal, and X-Men 2 (including Magneto’s plastic prison), among others. Check out this crashed ship-city, piercing the lunar surface, in both sketch and final versions.

[Image: Reef City by Mark Goerner].

Of course, Mark has also designed a space station.
Ben Procter, finally, has worked on a bewildering number of films, including the forthcoming, feature-length version of The Transformers. His work also appears in Blade 2, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Superman Returns, and The Terminal, among others.

[Image: Ben Procter].

Ben has produced environments for games such as Need for Speed: Underground, and he’s even helped spatially conceptualize a few music videos for Mariah Carey, Ginuwine, and Busta Rhymes.

[Image: Ben Procter].

His resume has more information (available as a PDF).
So come out if you can on May 8, 2007, from 8-10pm, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Hear about film, architecture, and science fiction; learn how these artists were educated and how they found the careers that they did; ask questions about artistic influences, strategies, and intentions; find out what it’s like to work on a Steven Spielberg film; and see some more of their work, from film stills to sketchbooks to video clips.
The former wind tunnel, meanwhile, is absolutely enormous, so there’s no need to worry about reservations or whether you’ll be able to get in. And bring some extra cash, in case you want to purchase one of their instructional books or DVDs; they’re cool guys and deserve the support. And I’ll repost about all this once the event draws closer, complete with address, etc. etc., so don’t worry if you read this post and don’t know how to get there. The event is nearly two months away. Don’t panic.

[Image: A sketch by Mark Goerner; here’s a much larger version].

Expect more soon…

[Image: For a few heady weeks I actually thought I was going to be teaching at this thing… but no more. Alas. Still, though, how can you resist applying for a two-week architectural design studio in Sydney, Australia, themed around the spatial rehabilitation of a semi-derelict, post-industrial island, complete with “early convict settlement structures” and heavily incised sandstone foundations? More information, including how to apply, available here; larger, though low-res, version of the flyer available here. Have fun!].

[Image: BLDGBLOG’s second event! The flyer uses photos by Nicolai Morrisson].

I’m excited, honored, flattered, stoked, etc., even slightly stunned, to announce that BLDGBLOG and Chronicle Books have teamed up to host an afternoon of talks about landscape and architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, from 2:30-5:00pm on Saturday, April 7th.
The line-up, as you’ll see from the flyer, above, includes John Bela & Matthew Passmore, of Rebar; Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State; Lisa Iwamoto, of both IwamotoScott Architecture and UC-Berkeley; myself, against all better judgement and in contrast to last time; and Walter Murch, three-time Oscar winner and co-author, with Michael Ondaatje, of the excellent and highly recommended book, The Conversations.
Each speaker will have 15-20 minutes in which to do their thing; you’ll have two different Q&A periods in which to ask questions, and there’ll be a 10-minute break between the third and fourth speaker. Everything will be timed to within a millisecond…
I’ll be re-posting about all this in ten days or so, however, complete with more information about each speaker, including some examples of Lisa’s work at IwamotoScott and a full-length interview with Walter Murch; so, for now, just mark your calendars! And if you’re anywhere near San Francisco, I hope to see you there. Be sure to introduce yourself; I like people.
Finally, if you want a larger version of the flyer, go here. Of course, if you like what you see, photographically, don’t miss the other work of Nicolai Morrisson (formerly known as Nicolai Grossman).

[Image: Art ©Peter Garfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York; from the New York Times].

The New York Times Magazine published another issue on the state of Real Estate this past weekend.
Some highlights include the above image, by Peter Garfield, used to illustrate an article about the housing bubble, and whether or not that bubble really exists – including a brief look at Robert Shiller’s “housing futures” market, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
But why not a landscape futures market…?
The N.Y. Times then takes a look at crazy dorm rooms – most notably at DePaul University, in Chicago – where students can expect “loft- and villa-like settings, private bedrooms and baths, professional-style kitchens with granite countertops, weekly housecleaning services, plasma-screen TVs, wireless and high-speed Internet connections in every room, fitness centers, swimming pools, even hot tubs and tanning booths.” All of which differs rather fantastically from my own experience of dorm life, which involved living on the 9th floor of a 10-floor high-rise called “Hinton James,” with a roommate who drank huge amounts of Mountain Dew till nearly one o’clock every morning, had a poster of Top Gun above his bed, and wanted to run for President.

[Image: A dorm room at DePaul, as photographed by Nikolas Koenig for the New York Times].

Returning to the article, we read that “some parents are willing to pay as much as 50 percent more than the cost of a comparable campus dorm room for a private room in an outsourced, off-campus ‘dormitel.'” The dormitel, as an architectural type, is surely now coming to an architectural design syllabus near you…
There’s also a longish history of home renovation and house-flipping shows, as recounted for us by Rob Walker. Walker opines that, whilst these shows may be entertaining and sometimes even quite thorough in their economic analysis of a given home improvement scheme, “much is left out. Buyer’s remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites.”
Meanwhile, Goa seems to be where “India’s investor class” is now moving – helped along by a friendly Indian-American developer named Roy Patrao:

Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa’s enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. “One billion people. Limited land supply. It’s a no-brainer,” he concluded.

Back in the U.S., a man who looks remarkably like a young Dabney Coleman wants you to be rich – and, at least in the case of myself, I heartily agree.
We’re then meant to contemplate whether Richard Meier has designed a Brooklyn condo tower that “will be compared to Modernist masterpieces”? But if you mean compared favorably to said masterpieces, then BLDGBLOG would say: nope. But don’t let that stop you from reading the article.
Finally, at least for the purposes of this round-up, there is a frankly unbelievably interesting article about the Tejon Ranch, located 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

[Image: Tejon Ranch from the air; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].

The ranch survives from the 19th century and is “roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island,” but it may soon be broken into smaller parcels for the construction of a future instant suburb called Centennial – where Huxley-esque corporate land use planners are “engineering a balanced society, mainly through the use of real estate prices.”

[Image: The land of Tejon Ranch, where there may soon be suburbs; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].

It’s a great article, actually, and seems to encapsulate, in its own abbreviated way, a lot of the arguments going on right now about land use in the United States, from Brand Avenue and Joel Kotkin to James Howard Kunstler. You’ve got questions of infill, sprawl, demographic change, resource depletion, the environment, transporation, regionalism vs. localism, and even centuries-long economic shifts from agriculture to domesticity.
“Nevada and Arizona may still build one new city after another,” we read in one pithy formulation. But “Los Angeles will thicken more than it will spread.”
In any case, check it out if you get a chance.

There’s been a lot of interesting news lately about the earth’s surface.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

First, deep beneath Beijing, there is apparently “a reservoir holding as much water as the Arctic Ocean.”
Two scientists have just “analysed more than 600,000 seismic waves generated by earthquakes” – only to find that “the waves weakened below eastern Asia at depths between 600 and 1200 kilometres, corresponding to Earth’s lower mantle.” They thus concluded “that there must be massive amounts of water in porous mantle rock muffling the seismic waves mainly below Beijing, China.”
That water, they estimate, took no less than 200,000,000 years to accumulate there, dragged down, in large part, by the movements of plate tectonics.
But that’s nothing.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

In other news, there seems to be “a huge hole in the earth’s crust on the sea bed,” described rather dramatically as “a gaping open wound in the Earth’s skin.”
Last month, a group of British marine geologists discovered that part of “the Earth’s crust was missing in an area covering thousands of square kilometres. The big gap is midway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They say the sea isn’t going to be sucked away – although they admit the discovery defies science.”
This also means that the mantle is showing.
As one of the scientists explained: “The oceanic crust is usually 6km to 7km thick but the Earth’s crust seems to be absent in this area of the Atlantic. Instead we have a window into the interior of the Earth, that simply shouldn’t be there, according to the standard ideas of how the Earth works.”
He asks: “Was the crust never there? Was it once there but then torn away on huge geological faults? If so, then how and why?”
To help answer these questions they’ll use “a robotic sea-bed drill to explore the area in more detail,” hoping to “find out what bizarre mechanisms were in place to lead to the mantle being exposed.”
A whole slew of commenters on Metafilter then chimed in, pointing out this absurd plot summary of The Core… A film I will admit to never having seen.
Meanwhile, it turns out there is also a gigantic crater hidden beneath the visible surface of north-central California. “The 5.5km-wide bowl is buried under shale sediments west of Stockton, in San Joaquin County,” the BBC reports, and it “is thought to be between 37 and 49 million years old.”
It has been dubbed the Victoria Island Structure.
“Data from a 3D seismic survey of an ancient sea bed clearly shows a circular structure buried 1,490-1,600m (4,890-4,250ft) below sea level” – but some think this “circular structure” is not a crater at all.
Some think it is a buried spaceship, bearing the name of Jesu…
In any case, the crater may actually have been created during an event known as “the late Eocene bombardment… an episode of multiple impacts” that took place roughly 35 million years ago. This “bombardment” also generated “one of the largest craters in the world – the 45km-wide (28 miles) Chesapeake Bay structure on the eastern shore of North America.”

[Image: The Chesapeake Bay structure, via Wikipedia].

Finally, you can take it with you: the surface of Ireland, I mean.
Thanks to the Auld Sod Export Co., you can import “official Irish dirt” through “a new patented process.” This “process” is not further explained.
The company “allows Immigrants of Irish decent [sic]” – but no one else? – “to keep part of their heritage, the Irish connection to their land, in their new homes. Its uses vary but mainly it serves as a connection to home by giving all of life’s milestones a traditional Irish feel.” They recommend scattering this official Irish dirt “over the casket or grave of a dearly departed loved one.”
Your portion of the Irish earth even comes with a refund policy.
How much stranger, though, will geological surveys someday be! When bits of Ireland are found lining the graveyards of Boston!
The shores of England are already part-French, for instance, as architect Sam Jacob pointed out last Spring. He writes of news that “Lyme Regis beach [is] being restored with French sand and Norwegian rocks. This will certainly puzzle future geologists, perhaps precipitating erroneous revisions to plate tectonic theory.”
So would this make The Auld Sod Export Co. a kind of rogue agent, resurfacing the earth in secret? A deliberate plan to forsake the science of geology?
Might they even be responsible for the deepsea mantle-hole?
And what would happen if someone places far too large an order? Could Ireland itself be ground up – and FedEx’d to a ranch in Texas?
Our investigations will continue.

(Thanks to John Devlin for the Californian crater link).

In David Toop’s excellent book Ocean of Sound – a short history of ambient music – he quotes composer Brian Eno, at great length, on the connections between landscape, sound, time, and the city.

“There’s an experiment I did,” Eno tells us; it was “a good exercise that I would recommend to other people.”

I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater Road I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this – a 3-1/2 minute section, the length of a single – and I tried to learn it? So that’s what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made a fade-up, let it run for 3-1/2 minutes and faded it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried to learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercise to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: “Right, then he puts this bit there and that pattern’s just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brilliant!” Since I’ve done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It’s like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I’m playing that role.

All of which is interesting already – but it makes me wonder if a band could then reproduce that tape, live, as a kind of cover song, in concert. Godspeed You! Black Emperor plays the sounds of Bayswater in their closing set, a perfect rendition of Eno’s old tape…
Instead of another Led Zeppelin cover band, you book a Times Square cover band for your daughter’s Bat Mitzvah; they play the traffic, voices, and horns of a typical Times Square day, for hours. Even lifetime Manhattanites can’t tell the difference.
Or an International Space Station cover band, playing for you, live, acoustic versions of the Station’s lonely clicks and whirs.
A St. Louis Arch cover band – the St. Louis Arches® – reproducing the sounds of Eero Saarinen’s structure on stages around the world. “It’s just like being there,” The New Yorker reports. “The effect is uncanny.”
An Elevators of the Empire State Building cover band. Alexanderplatz acoustically reproduced on guitar… by a busker in Alexanderplatz.
The sounds of Death Valley – live, at the Hollywood Bowl.
What the Kremlin would sound like if it had been built in the Piazza Navona – played live, in a small room outside Tokyo.
Or a man who tunes the infrastructure of his building till it sounds exactly like a hotel he once stayed in in Paris. The ducts rattle in just the right way, and the door hinges creak… reminding him of better days. He then hires a band to reproduce those sounds at the office Christmas party.
He is promptly fired.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Soundtracks for Architecture and Silophone resonance: architecture to play by phone. Coming soon: a great interview with Walter Murch, in which I ask him about the Brian Eno quotation, above).

Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, of terraswarm, creators of the infamous 10 Mile Spiral as well as the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, will be unveiling a new project on Monday night in Manhattan.
Called Color Shift, the installation “is an urban-scaled art project made by inputting a continuous stream of alternating colors into the FreshDirect video billboard, the largest in the country.” As such, it’s a kind of creative mis-direction of urban light pollution – a post-Duchampian optical relief in technicolor, throbbing through a dozen spectra across the roofs and walls of New York City.

You can watch a virtual version of Color Shift, installed online – it’s a weird, hypnotic abyss of slow alteration that, at one point, made my eyes feel broken. Very Olafur Eliasson-esque.
Ben and Chris will be speaking Monday night, March 19th, at 6:30pm in Columbia University’s Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall. Tell them BLDGBLOG sent you.

Your TV is helping to alter the metallic structure of the earth.
New Scientist reports that the planetary supply of “minor metals” – such as ruthenium, bismuth, and indium – is being depleted. Depleted how? By going into cellphones and flat-screen TVs, into resistors and harddrives.

[Image: Like a print by M.C. Escher, it’s a landscape featured on TV – a TV made of the landscape it features. It’s the television as simulated micro-geology, an elemental landscape in miniature].

“To meet demand,” the magazine reports, “tech firms must mine the growing mountains of electronic waste to recover the materials.”
Growing mountains?
So what future geographies of electronic waste might our descendents someday explore? There will be the Plateau of Circuitboards and the Cliff of Printers – the Dot-Matrix Range – each showing up on new maps of distant continents.
Outside magazine will run a series of articles about a man camping in central Africa, in the shadow of 200,000 used photocopiers; their scanning beds still intact, the copiers reflect the man’s stunned face in moonlight as he walks by, notebook in hand…
A day later he crests a ridge, crunching through the gravel of broken office machinery – only to look down into a whispering abyss: uncountable ten millions of discarded radios sit, chattering to themselves between stations with the last traces of power still trapped in their rusting batteries, speaking in tongues.
A thousand years later, a Third Testament will be added to The Bible, and this place – known as the Valley of Voices – will figure prominently.
For it seems that our rugged explorer heard something there… something he’ll never forget… and it soon becomes the stuff of legend. An absent broadcast around which future religions take shape.
Endlessly re-intepreting the missing words that only one person ever heard.

(Note: For a more serious – not to mention practical – look both at recycling electronic goods and at the environmental problem posted by these mountains of waste, click around the site of Earthworks Action; for some cool photographs of discarded mobile phones, meanwhile, check out the work of Chris Jordan).