Month: May 2007

[Image: Looking through the porous facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture].

We’re into day three of Postopolis! now.
If you want to learn more about what exactly it is that’s going on here, Dan Hill, over at City of Sound, has been doing a bang up job keeping track of all the speakers, offering his summaries of – and commentary on – their talks. Given time over the next few days, I’ll try to do my own quick version of this; there’s been some fantastic stuff so far – and I think we’ve sorted out most of the technical issues, so there’s less to worry about, and, hopefully, more time to blog.
In any case, the schedule today looks like…:

1:30pm: DJ /rupture
2:50pm: Gianluigi Ricuperati
3:30pm: Monica Hernandez
4:10pm: Jeff Byles
4:50pm: Wes Janz
5:30pm: Lebbeus Woods
6:10pm: Robert Neuwirth
6:50pm: Jake Barton
7:30pm: Joel Sanders

[Image: Dan Hill, live-blogging Postopolis!].

So come on down. And don’t miss the slowly growing Postopolis! Flickr pool for some images of the event.
More soon.

(Photos by Nicola Twilley).

[Image: Dan Hill and Bryan Finoki sit inside the Storefront for Art and Architecture].

Well, day one of Postopolis! is now history – and it was a blast. We had some phenomenal presentations, from Robert Krulwich, Tobias Frere-Jones, and Stanley Greenberg; we heard from Michael Kubo, of Actar, about architectural book publishing; we managed our way through a pecha kucha featuring this blog, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia; we drank beer; and I thought the whole thing was great.

[Image: Bryan Finoki, Jill Fehrenbacher, and Joseph Grima at the Storefront for Art and Architecture; unlike Jill and Joseph, Bryan is actually watching a baseball game…].

There are some problems with audio, on the other hand, which means that a great deal of the evening’s visitors didn’t actually hear anything… but we’ll work on that. (If you did come out and heard nothing, I apologize!)
Meanwhile, City of Sound has just posted some great action shots from the day, including a live-blogged summary of Robert Krulwich‘s presentation; and I’ve got a small Flickr set forming, and there is a Postopolis! Flickr group taking shape, as well.
Today, meanwhile, Wednesday, May 30, you’ll be hearing from:

1:30pm: Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch
2:10pm: Matthew Clark
4:00pm: Panel on sustainable design with Susan Szenasy, Allan Chochinov, Graham Hill, and Jill Fehrenbacher (moderated by Jill)
5:30pm: Scott Marble
6:10pm: Paul Seletsky
6:50pm: Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano
7:30pm: Michael Sorkin & Mitchell Joachim

So please come out! And say hello. Be advised, meanwhile, that Michael Sorkin might not be able to attend; we’ll only know when the time comes round.

[Images: (top) Jill Fehrenbacher and Bryan Finoki watch either Geoff Manaugh or Dan Hill give a presentation; (bottom) Bryan Finoki, Joseph Grima, Geoff Manaugh, and Dan Hill set up for the day, inside the Storefront for Art and Architecture].

And I’ll keep updating everyone as the week goes on – but, for those not in NYC or who frankly don’t care about Postopolis!, I’ll hopefully have at least one or two new posts in the forthcoming days.

(Photos by Nicola Twilley).

[Image: The Postopolis! crew: (l-r) Joseph Grima, Jill Fehrenbacher, Geoff Manaugh, Bryan Finoki, Dan Hill, and Gaia Cambiaggi (photo by Nicola Twilley)].

The doors of Postopolis! burst open tomorrow.

First up, at 3:00pm: Robert Krulwich
3:40pm: Tobias Frere-Jones
5:00pm: Stanley Greenberg
5:45pm: Michael Kubo, North American editor for Actar, discusses books, blogs, and the future of architectural publishing with Kevin Lippert, founder of Princeton Architectural Press
6:45pm: Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, introduces BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and City of Sound, who will talk about their blogs and then lead a pecha kucha

So if you’re in NYC, please stop by…! And there’s a lot more news coming soon.

Among many other interestings things to read in Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles – who will be speaking at Postopolis! on Thursday afternoon – is the fact that part of Manhattan is actually constructed from British war ruins.

[Image: Winston Churchill visits the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, 1942; courtesy of the Library of Congress].

Toward the end of the book, Byles describes how “[m]ore than 16 million people saw their homes wrecked by bomb destruction during World War II, with more than 4.5 million housing units completely toasted.”

Further, “[w]ith London and Coventy knee-deep in rubble by the fall of 1940, a phalanx of 13,500 troops from the Royal Engineers got busy ripping down war-ravaged structures.”

But what to do with all that rubble…? Byles:

Around that same time, New York’s FDR Drive was being constructed, which ran along the east side of Manhattan. “Much of the landfill on which it is constructed consists of the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Second World War by the Luftwaffe’s blitz on London and Bristol,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote. “Convoys of ships returning from Great Britain carried the broken masonry in their holds as ballast.”

When you’re driving around on the FDR, in other words – or, for that matter, when you’re simply looking out over the east side of Manhattan – you and your gaze are passing over fragments of British cathedrals and London housing stock, flagstones quarried from Yorkshire, the shattered doorframes and lintels – and eaves, and vaults, and partition walls, and bedroom floors – of whole towns, pieces of Slough and Swindon perhaps, embedded now in asphalt, constituting what would otherwise have passed for bedrock.

Down in the foundations of the city are other cities.

(Elsewhere: We learn that the British coast has become geologically French, further complicated our future sense of geological belonging – raising the interesting possibility that one can exist in a state of geological alienation… Psychoanalysts will have a field day. [via]).

I’m still reeling from the announcement of Postopolis! – but the good news keeps on coming.

To make a long story still rather long…
Back in January, Alan Rapp, the art, design, and photography editor for Chronicle Books, attended a BLDGBLOG event hosted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation here in Los Angeles.
Alan and I met, kept in touch, had a pizza, talked about David Cronenberg; and then, last month, we organized an event together in San Francisco.
Somewhere in there the idea of a BLDGBLOG book came up – which I soon turned into a formal proposal… and now it’s official: Chronicle Books will be publishing a BLDGBLOG book in Spring 2009 – and my head is spinning!
BLDGBLOG: The Book! The BLDGBLOG Book!
I just can’t even believe how many possibilities there are with this thing. It’s a little crazy.
In a nutshell, though, it’ll be divided up into three major sections – Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures – covering everything I’ve already covered here and more…
From plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered Manhattan bedrooms, via offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, fossil cities, statue disease, inflatable cathedrals, diamond mines, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, the architecture of the near-death experience, Scottish archaeology, wreck-diving, green roofs, W.G. Sebald, flooded Londons of the climate-changed future, William Burroughs, Andrew Maynard, LOT-EK, Rupert Thomson, The Aeneid, shipbreaking yards, Die Hard, Pruned, Franz Kafka, Rem Koolhaas, tunnels and sewers and bunkers and tombs, micronations, underground desert topologies, Mars, Earth, lunar urbanism, sound mirrors, James Bond, the War on Terror, earthquakes, Angkor Wat, robot-buildings and the Taj Mahal, Archigram, the Atlas Mountains, refugee camps, Walter Murch, suburbia, the Maunsell Towers… and about nine hundred thousand other topics, provided I can fit them all in.
There will be interviews, essays, quotations, photos, original artwork – and hopefully even a graphic novel, strung throughout the book. And it will be well-designed and affordable! And it will put all existing architecture books to shame. Every single one of them. Except maybe a few…
And, importantly, even if there’s someone out there who’s read every single post on this site – I know I haven’t – they’ll still find loads of new material.

Further, since I’ll more or less be writing this thing over the next six months, I’d love it – love it! – if BLDGBLOG readers wanted to make suggestions, or send me links, or leave comments, or tell me what to avoid…
In fact, half the joy of writing BLDGBLOG has always been the comments, so I hope I can even figure out a way to include the best of them in the book somehow, either chasing down anonymous readers for permission or… something, I don’t know, but the whole point is to be open to everyone’s input and ideas.
A BLDGBLOG book Flickr pool, perhaps…
Or a design contest…
A questionnaire… What’s your favorite bus stop in the world and why?
Who knows – but this should be an absolute blast – and I’ll make sure that the book is actually worth picking up. You won’t just get a bunch of crap you’ve already read, reprinted word-for-word from the blog, served back to you for $30 (or $20, or $25…).
But, man, I don’t even know how many blogs make the leap into book-form! So I’m also nervous. But excited. And a little delirious with possibilities. Hoping that I do it right.
So look out for BLDGBLOG: The Book, or The BLDGBLOG Book, or whatever it will eventually be be called, coming soon to a Borders near you. Spring 2009. Chronicle Books. In a deal that never would have happened had it not been for Alan Rapp.
And, of course, without so many hundreds – and hundreds – of people out there, who went out of their way to help BLDGBLOG find an audience – or who just did or wrote or built or made or said something cool, thus supplying me with material – I might never have started blogging at all.
So I don’t want to jump into some kind of Academy Award acceptance speech here, but I really do have to say thanks to dozens and dozens and dozens of people, including, but in no way limited to – hold your breath: my wife, for editing almost literally every single post I’ve written on this thing and making everything, universally, on all levels, better; Javier Arbona, Bryan Finoki, John Jourden, and Paul Petrunia, in particular, of Archinect for the early break, as well as the entire Archinect crew for putting up with me there; Alex Trevi at Pruned; Marcus Trimble of gravestmor; Simon Sellars at Ballardian; Sarah Rich and Jill Fehrenbacher; Jonathan Bell of things magazine; David Maisel; Cory Doctorow, Jason Kottke, William Drenttel, Jim Coudal, Bruce Sterling, Steve Silberman, Robert Krulwich, Lawrence Weschler, Douglas Coupland, Warren Ellis; The Kircher Society; all the people I’ve interviewed; all the people who have participated in BLDGBLOG events; all the commenters out there, both regular and one-time only, including people who have disappeared (or who no longer leave comments – I miss you!); all the people who have sent me tips; Christopher Stack; Dan Polsby; friends of mine who were part of BLDGBLOG at the very, very beginning, before it even had a logo, including Jim Webb, Cathy Braasch Dean, Neena Verma, and Juliette Spertus; David Haskell of the Forum for Urban Design; William Fox; Ruairi Glynn, Abe Burmeister, Dan Hill, Régine Debatty, Chris Timmerman, Chad Smith, Dave Connell, John Hill, Jaime Morrison, Andrew Blum; Scott Webel; Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, and Steve Rowell of the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Materials & Applications; Leah Beeferman; John Coulthart; Theo Paijmans; my del.icio.us network for linking to so many interesting things; Joerg Colberg; Siologen, Dsankt, and Michael Cook; Theresa Duncan; Curbed LA and SF; Jörg Koch; Steven Ceuppens; Yahoo!, Time Magazine, MSNBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Architectural Review, Mark Magazine, Artkrush, Planetizen; Thomas Y. Levin and Annette Fierro, for letting me sit-in on their classes, free, way back in 2004, leading directly to the birth of this blog; my family (including in-laws!); Blogger; and about ninety-nine million other people, things, places, friends, writers, editors, architects, and on and on and on.
BLDGBLOG would have folded up and disappeared long ago were it not for the encouragement of people who it would take me literally the next two days to thank completely.
So thanks – again – especially to Alan Rapp and to Chronicle Books.
Meanwhile, expect to hear more about all this as I set about actually writing it… And I’ll hopefully see some of you in New York City next week for Postopolis!

(Note: I’ll add more links and such in a little bit – including the names of people who I’ll realize, with horror, that I forgot to mention).

[Image: Future climate map of Europe; the cities have been relocated based on what present locations their future climate will most resemble… or something like that].

Last week, the Guardian took a look at what London might look like in 2071. The city, they suggest, will be defined by “heat, dust, and water piped in from Scotland.”
To illustrate the point, that article includes a somewhat cryptic climate map, produced by scientists at the University of Bremen. The map relocates Europe’s capital cities to the present region that most closely resembles their impending future circumstances.
In other words, London, in 2071, will be more like a city on the coast of Portugal today; Paris will feel how central Spain now feels; Berlin, unbelievably, will be like north Africa (one of the coldest summers I’ve ever experienced was in Berlin) – and so on.
These regions are those cities’ “climate analogues.”
In any case, one of the scientists behind the map says that it’s also meant to “help architects and officials who plan buildings, streets and services to adapt to the likely impacts of global warming. ‘If you look at the map you see that Paris moves to the south of Spain. It’s scary that just a few degrees rise will make such a difference. Paris is currently designed to deal with a very different climate, which means designs in future will have to be very different.'”
For exameple: “Houses and buildings in northern Europe typically have windows to the west to make the most of meagre winter sun… ‘But in warmer countries you will never find windows to the west because the sun just pours in all afternoon during the summer.'”
What isn’t mentioned, however, is that architecture will have to change gradually, decade by decade, even year by year; after all, it’d be inappropriate to get rid of all west-facing windows today – and it might still be premature, come 2030 – but, by 2071, perhaps all west-facing windows will be entirely phased out… Or skylights, or rain catchment systems, or winter insulation, or whatever.
But you’ll be able to track changes in the European climate based on what styles of architecture still exist, and where.
Read more at the Guardian.

(Story originally spotted at Kottke).

[Image: A green Trafalgar, via the BBC].

There’s a new landscape installation in London. “More than 2,000 sq m of turf has been laid as part of Visit London‘s campaign to promote green spaces and villages in the city,” the BBC reports today.

The grass will cover the square for two days during which visitors will be able to soak up the sunshine in specially laid-out deckchairs or enjoy a picnic.
The turf, which has been sourced from the Vale of York, will then be moved to Bishops Park in Hammersmith and Fulham.

Certainly not the most exciting idea in the world; but I love the underlying concepts: 1) Take a distant landscape (something “sourced from the Vale of York,” for instance) and install it in the center of London. This gives rise to all sorts of possibilities – like recreating the Brecon Beacons throughout the streets of Westminster (you do it in the dead of night and don’t tell anyone what you’re doing). Or: 2) You swap landscapes, installing Trafalgar Square somewhere in the Vale of York to promote urban spaces and cities in the local farmland.
Then again: 3) You simply install lawns everywhere: inside movie theaters and churches and airplanes and hot air balloons… Airborne landscapes and gardens! Flying yards. You then form a company, incorporated in Maryland, called, yes, the Flying Yards and you perform distant landscapes in the sky for stunned crowds.
4) You transform London into what it will look like after it’s been taken over by wild grasses and tree roots and weeds – perhaps even fencing off whole parts of Camden for several years as a complicated work of land art: the city gone feral. Someone at Goldsmiths writes a PhD about you…
But more soon on such future visions of a new London to come.

During an event the other night, I had a brief olfactory encounter with a waterless urinal.
While I know that waterless urinals are environmentally fantastic – they save literally tens of thousands of gallons of water a year – I also think that they can smell extraordinarily bad.
The instant you put one to use, in other words, you’re made instantly aware of all the people who have been there before.
In fact, the experience made me wonder if you could prevent burglary by making houses smell like that: no one, not even a burglar, would come near.

If you could make your house smell like urine, in other words, all your possessions would be permanently safe…
So I was thinking, specifically, that you should attach some kind of scent-emission device to your home burglar alarm – or above the windows and beside the front doorway – before you go away for the weekend. You then just have to choose what scent will be emitted; you type in your PIN; and you go.
Because then, if someone actually does break into your house… an invisible puff of scented air – a defense cloud™ – goes misting out into the hallway, settling down onto your erstwhile burglar – who thus finds himself greeted with an alarmingly strong scent of urine. The scent gets worse by the minute, and seems to be coming from all sides.
What is this place…? the burglar thinks. Do they manufacture waterless urinals here? He recoils in horror.
But should the determined home invader persist in his folly, the scent-alarm simply kicks it up a notch, through different aromas, making everything that much worse – moldy potatoes, rotten chicken parts, gangrenous limbs and human corpses – till only someone without a nose, or a true sociopath, could even contemplate sticking around.
In which case your scent-alarm phones the police.
Only a few unfortunate customers have reported product malfunction.
A scented car alarm is now in development.

[Image: The final night of the architecture and film festival. From left-right, top-bottom: the wind tunnel entrance; the set-up; the intro, by Jenna Didier of M&A; and a scene from At Rest: The Body in Architecture by Michael and Alan Fleming. Photos by Nicola Twilley].

Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the final night of the film fest; it was a bit intimate – but it was still fun, and we made it through two cases of beer, so… you can’t beat that.
Anyway, I owe a huge thanks to Leslie Marcus of the Art Center College of Design for her patience, interest, and organizational help; Oliver Hess and Jenna Didier of Materials & Applications, for inviting me to help put all this together in the first place; Architecture Tours LA and Michael Maltzan Architects, our sponsors for last night’s show; and to all the filmmakers who took part – and the people who came out to see their work.
And hopefully we’ll see you again next year!