Month: May 2007

[Image: A scene from Peter Kidger’s The Berlin Infection, produced as part of Kidger’s work with the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit 15 in London].

This year’s architectural film fest, jointly organized by BLDGBLOG and Materials & Applications, concludes tomorrow night, Tuesday, May 22, in the wind tunnel at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.
Wired liked the first event – so hopefully we can keep the good energy flowing…

[Image: Outside the wind tunnel – a building rehabbed by Daly Genik. More info about it here].

This time round, we’ll be screening something like an hour and forty minutes’ worth of films, beginning at 8pm. No tickets or reservations are required – and the wind tunnel can be found here (950 South Raymond Avenue, in Pasadena). There’s even free valet parking.
And it should be fun: we’ve got some awesome films lined up – with running times coming in anywhere between two minutes and half an hour – and I’m really looking forward to this.
You’ll be seeing, in this or another order:

Vancouverism in Vancouver, Robin Anderson and Julie Bogdanowicz
Glen Festival School, Fernando Iribarren, Ayers Saint Gross (2007)
LaSubterranea, Raimund McClain and Jesse Vogler (2006)
At Rest: The Body in Architecture, Michael and Alan Fleming (2007)
Spiral Bridge, Dennis Dollens (2007)
Vert-ual, Adam and Nathan Freise (2005)
Alternate Ending, David Fenster, Field Office Films (2007)
London After the Rain, Ben Olszyna-Marzys (2007)
The Berlin Infection, Peter Kidger (2006)
Matched Pair, Bradford Watson (2004)
Declarations of Love, Andre Blas (2006)
Wax On/Wax Off, Benjamin Smith and Wilhelm Christensen (2006)

So come on down – and say hello and drink a coffee (there’s no cafe on site, however) and have a cool Tuesday night, hanging out in a wind tunnel, watching movies about architecture… And if you get restless, you can always walk around and explore Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living, which is simultaneously on display in the exact same space.
Hope to see you there!

[Image: An underground “coffin lift or ‘catafalque’,” from London’s West Norwood cemetery catacombs. “The blocked aperture in the ceiling led to the now demolished Episcopal Chapel above. The stairs on the right (now blocked) also led up to the chapel.” Photo by Nick Catford, the wildly great and seemingly omnipresent photographer behind Subterranea Britannica].

London’s West Norwood cemetery opened to the public in 1837; it boasted “two chapels with a series of vaults or catacombs constructed beneath the Episcopal Chapel.”
Fantastically, the catacombs came with “a hydraulic coffin lift or catafalque to transport the coffins from the chapel to the vaults below.”
Although “[b]oth chapels were severely damaged during the war and the Episcopal Chapel was finally demolished in 1955 and replaced by a walled rose garden, the catacombs below were undamaged and remain intact and accessible today.”
A lot more information is available at Subterranea Britannica, but, if you don’t feel like reading text, be sure to check out Nick Catford’s photo gallery. Some of those images are genuinely creepy; some quite beautiful; others just really, really cool.

[Images: Photos by Neil Burns capture the destruction; via the BBC].

The BBC posted a short photo-spread today that looks at the implosion of four cooling towers at the Chapelcross nuclear power station, in Scotland, where the UK used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
“The towers were brought down in 10 seconds, generating an estimated 25,000 tonnes of rubble,” we read.

[Images: Photos by Andrew Turner and John Smith; via the BBC].

I think it’s interesting, though, that the towers seem to crimp and torque in some of these pictures, almost whirling, or folding, down onto themselves like some kind of self-imploding Richard Serra sculpture, made of lead-reinforced concrete. Might demolition somehow reveal other geometries and architectural forms – otherwise unknown material tendencies held at bay by engineering?

[Images: Via The Scotsman].

In loosely related news, meanwhile, I’m excited to announce that Jeff Byles, author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition, will now be speaking at Postopolis! next week – so if you’ve got a soft spot for demolition, and the various arguments surrounding it, please stop by! More speakers to be announced shortly, including an up-to-date schedule.

A friend of mine once told me about the “typical dream of a New Yorker,” as he described it, wherein a homeowner pushes aside some coats and sweaters in the upstairs closet… only to reveal a door, and, behind that, another room, and, beyond that, perhaps even a whole new wing secretly attached to the back of the house…
Always fantasizing about having more space in Manhattan.

And so I was thinking today that you could go around Manhattan with a microphone, asking people who have had that dream to describe it, recording all this, live, for the radio – or you ask people who have never had that dream simply to ad lib about what it might be like to discover another room, and you ask them to think about what kind of room they would most like to discover, tucked away inside a closet somewhere in their apartment.
What additions to space do the people of New York secretly long for?
Of course, you’d probably need to record about 5000 people to get a dozen or so good stories – but then you’d edit it all down and listen to the unbelievable variations: people who find secret attics, or secret basements, secret closets inside closets, or even secret children’s bedrooms, secret bathrooms, hidden roof gardens, even a brand new 4-car garage plus screened-in porch out back. One guy finds a sauna, and a cheese cave, and then a bicycle-repair shop…
What does it all mean?
And if you once dreamed about finding a secret UPS loading dock attached to your back door… would Freud approve?
So you get all these stories together and you make a radio piece out of it. A month or two later, it’s broadcast during rush hour, on a Friday night, as you want to give people something to think about over the weekend.
But soon commuters are pulling over to the side of the road and staring, shocked, at the radio – because you’ve given no introduction, and no one out there has any idea what this is.
Some guy found a boathouse attached to his apartment in Manhattan…?, one driver thinks.
And the stories keep coming.
There’s a skyscraper with a whole hidden floor…? someone thinks, momentarily amazed – before driving into the car in front of her.
A woman on the Upper East Side found what?
Or: All along he had a basketball court behind the bedroom wall?
The NJ turnpike gets backed up for miles and the Brooklyn Bridge is at a stand-still.
It’s mass hysteria.
Where are all these secret rooms…? People want to know. And why don’t I have one…? Manhattanites are knocking on walls, taking measurements. drafting letters to the rent control board.
But then the credits roll, and the radio station cuts to commercial, and everyone realizes that those were all just stories. Dreams.
There are no secret rooms – they think.
So they pull back onto the highways – and you go down in radio history.
Within two weeks you’ve signed a six-figure deal with Henry Holt to turn it into a book, and Paul Auster volunteers to write the forward.
You call it: The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan.
It gets accidentally shelved with Erotica.
People cry as they read it.
A sequel is planned, interviewing residents of London and Beijing.

(With thanks to Robert Krulwich, who puts up with emails from me full of ideas like this…).

New Scientist reports that certain architectural hallucinations associated with near-death experiences – such as bright lights at the end of long hallways and tunnels – might actually be the product of a sleep disorder.

[Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].

Neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson, New Scientist tells us, thinks that near-death experiences (or NDEs) “may be little more than dream-like states brought on by stress and a predisposition to a common kind of sleep disorder. If he’s right, as many as 40 per cent of us could be primed to see the light.”
But what I think deserves more exploration is the tunnel – the architectural space within which NDEs seem to occur.
For instance, is there a particular type of structure that people see when it comes to almost dying? If so, are those structures simply optical phenomena – or are there cultural and historical influences at work?
If you’re an architect, are your NDEs particularly detailed?
And what if you see a bright tunnel, inverted, ending in a space of pure darkness…?
The article doesn’t really address these issues.

[Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].

“Written accounts of NDEs go back more than two thousand years,” we learn instead, and they “have been reported all over the world. Most include a ‘point of no return’ that if crossed will lead to death, and a person who turns you away from it.”
But what about the archtecture? Does everyone see the same hallway – or do some people see large rooms, or skylights, or even underground car parks, or caves, or maybe some huge mechanical garage door that slowly creeps open…?
Is there an architecture of death?
Can it be measured and taught to others?

[Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].

If death does have a structure – or, at least, if near-death experiences do spatialize in certain pre-existing ways – if death has a spatial format, you could say – then clearly death could also be architecturally reconstructed, based on eyewitness accounts, here on earth, in the present moment, with us.
We could visit it, in groups, and emotionally prepare…
So what would happen if an architect teamed up with an anthropologist (who studies cultural narrations of the near-death experience) and with a neurophysiologist (who understands the underlying cortical mechanisms), to design themed environments specifically meant for triggering NDEs?
It’d be a kind of post-Buddhist thanatological fun ride, complete with people passing out – then waking up, blinking and vibrant, determined to change their lives, giving hugs to others and starting things over again.
Hallways of Rebirth, they might be called – and the first person to make it to the end of that hall without passing out wins $10,000.

[Image: From the series Tunnel Vision, by Jill Fehrenbacher].

It’s harder than it sounds.

(All photos from Jill Fehrenbacher’s Tunnel Vision series).

According to the BBC, Indian officials have concluded that a “deep-cleansing mud pack may be the only way to return a yellowing Taj Mahal to the cultural landmark’s former white marble glory.”
By “caking the building in clay,” we read, those same officials can actually “draw out surface impurities” – but how do they know whether or not they’ve purchased the right mud mask…?

[Earlier on BLDGBLOG: the oddly popular Hurling Taj Mahals into the Sky].

A poster for Postopolis! will be coming out soon (without a red border), including the list of speakers as it now stands – and I’m unbelievably excited about this thing. I really can’t wait.
So: scattered over the course of five days, from May 29 to June 2, from 1pm-8pm everyday, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, you’ll be hearing from, among many others yet to be announced:
Lebbeus Woods, Laura Kurgan, Michael Sorkin & Mitchell Joachim, Stanley Greenberg, Joel Sanders, Susan Szenasy, DJ /rupture, Andrew Blum, Jake Barton, William Drenttel, Tom Vanderbilt, Michael Bierut, Lawrence Weschler, Robert Krulwich, Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch, Randi Greenberg, Allan Chochinov, Julia Solis, Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano, Scott Marble, Paul Seletsky, Robert Neuwirth, Wes Janz, James Sanders, Eric Rodenbeck, Kevin Slavin, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Quilian Riano, Miss Representation, Enrique Gualberto Ramirez, George Agnew, Chad Smith, Abe Burmeister, John Hill… and a lot more to come (including unannounced guests who just happen to be in New York that week).
So it should be a blast.
Stay tuned for specific times and so on, coming soon – and if you’re anywhere near NY, please consider stopping by: it’s not an academic conference, and the more people the merrier…
Finally, the other three blogs involved in planning all this are City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia – with the indispensible help of Joseph Grima, from the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

So it looks like Wired liked our science fiction and film panel, held last week.

[Image: Courtesy of Mark Goerner – here’s a large version].

The four panelists, Wired writes, showed “art that’s rarely seen outside the film studio: pictures of otherworldy and futuristic cities that special effects crews and CGI geeks use as blueprints to build the backdrops for outer-space fights, alien worlds and castles fit for dragons.”
Read more – and see a lot more images – at Wired.
Meanwhile, some more background on the event can be found here, on BLDGBLOG – or you can even check out ARCHITECT Magazine‘s coverage of the event (although, if you read that article, note that the date for our second screening has been moved from May 9 to May 22).
Finally, if you were there, thanks again for coming out!

While researching another post I hope to write soon, about Franz Kafka and a small room in San Francisco, I stumbled upon something else that seemed worth putting up on the blog; it’s from Kafka’s Diaries: 1910-1923.
In an early entry, from 1911, Kafka describes the “unhappiness of the bachelor,” an unhappiness that, for him, seems less dependent on loneliness or personal abandonment – or even on some catastrophic sense of being overlooked by the world, always – than on space: a bachelor never has enough of it.

A bachelor is alone, after all, which means that “so much the smaller a space is considered sufficient for him.”
One could perhaps say that, for Kafka, a bachelor is never spatially respected…
In any case, looking for space – or for the proper space, the one that feels right and “has a few panes of glass between itself and the night” – our bachelor finds that he “moves incessantly, but with predictable regularity, from one apartment to another.”
This goes on – and on – for the rest of his isolated existence until “he, this bachelor, still in the midst of life, apparently of his own free will resigns himself to an ever smaller space, and when he dies the coffin is exactly right for him.”

[Image: Ruins of the City Walls (1625-1627) by Bartholomeus Breenbergh].

In The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert Bevan describes, in almost numbing detail, how specific buildings – indeed, whole cities – have been targeted, damaged, or otherwise destroyed by war.
He writes of the “violent destruction of buildings for other than pragmatic reasons,” claiming that “there has always been [a] war against architecture.” This war is fought through the deliberate “eradication” of an enemy’s built environment – that is, “the active and often systematic destruction of particular building types or architectural traditions.”
Some of Bevan’s examples, however, sound less like warfare than a kind of highly complex – and extremely violent – architectural ritual, played out over centuries between rival governments and religions. This is the “repeated demolition or adaptation of each other’s buildings,” and retaliation can sometimes take generations.
For instance, Bevan writes about the site of the cathedral, in Córdoba, Spain, which “started out as a Roman temple” before being destroyed by Christian Visigoths:

A subsequent church on the site was replaced by a mosque following the Arab conquest of the early eighth century. Some seventy years later this was itself demolished to create the first stage of a massive new mosque. The Christian recaptured Córdoba in 1236 and consecrated the building as a cathedral. (…) It is said that the mosque’s lamps were melted down to make new bells for the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 800 km to the north. This probably seemed only fair, since the lamps had themselves been made from Santiago’s original bells: when the Moors had conquered the city in 997 they had dragged the bells to Córdoba and melted them down into lamps.

Tit for tat.
Bevan also describes how the Bastille, having been stormed in 1789, was reduced to a heap of stones – but these stones were then “broken up and sold as souvenirs,” in a “commodification process repeated with the fragments of the Berlin Wall 200 years later.”
In any case, Bevan goes on to discuss mosques bulldozed in the Balkans, synagogues burnt to the ground in both Poland and Germany, Armenian monasteries reduced to foundation stones as, even today, they are dismantled and reused to build houses in eastern Turkey, the dynamiting of Loyalist mansions by Irish Republican militias, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and even archaeological sites fatally disturbed during the invasion of Iraq – among many, many other such examples, all found throughout Bevan’s book.
These are all, he says, “crimes against architecture.”

More to the point here, when Bevan points out that “the bulldozed remains of the Aladza mosque” were “dumped” by Serbian troops into a nearby river – the ruins were only “identified by the mosque’s distinctive stone columns” – it occurred to me that fragments like these must be numerous enough that you could use them to reassemble complete buildings elsewhere.
You could construct a whole city from fragments of buildings destroyed by war.

For instance, all the gravel, dirt, and foundation stones from ruined buildings and cities around the world could be dropped into shallow waters off the western coast of Greece – forming the base of an artificial island, as large as Manhattan, on which to build your memorial to cities and spaces killed by war…
You draw up plans with a local architecture school, plotting a whole new island metropolis constructed from nothing but pre-existing pieces of annihilated architecture – fitting arches with arches and floors with floors.
Within a decade you’ve covered the island in a maze of Chicago tenement housing, Russian churches, Indian temples, and Chinese hutongs; there are Aztec walls and pillars standing inside reconstructed Romanian state houses – before most of pre-WWII Europe begins to appear, together with shattered castles, north African villages, and the weathered masonry of pre-Columbian South America, all the buildings merging one into one another, indistinct, with Mayan rocks and Kurdish roofing joined together atop bricks from Köln and Dresden.
Another decade later and the island-city is complete. There are no cars and no electricity – in fact, no one lives there at all. It sits alone in the waters, covered in wild herbs and home to songbirds, casting shadows on itself, eroding a bit in the occasional rainstorm.
Documentaries about it soon appear on CNN and the BBC.
Only 10 people are allowed on the island at any given time; most of them just take photographs or make sketches, or write letters to loved ones, as they wander, awe-struck, through the narrow streets of this barely remembered desolation, stumbling upon extinct building types and lost statuary – towers of churches destroyed by bombs – hardly even able to conceive how all these places could have been destroyed by human conflict.
They then brush the dust of structures off their shoes as they board the boat to go home, silent, looking back at this island, the sun setting a brilliant orange behind its almost pitch-black silhouette.

[Image: Ameyoko by Hisaharu Motoda; via Pink Tentacle].

On Wired today, we read that “Japanese photographer Hisaharu Motada [sic] envisions the radioactive and decomposing cityscapes of post-apocalyptic Tokyo in his Neo-Ruins series of photographs.”

[Image: Ginza Chuo Dori by Hisaharu Motoda; via Pink Tentacle].

From Motoda’s own website:

In his Neo-Ruins series Motoda depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In Neo-Ruins I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.

The resulting images are actually lithographs, heavily textured, like aged prints.

[Images: Kabukicho, Shibuya Center Town, and Electric City by Hisaharu Motoda].

Of course, Motoda’s website hosts a number of other works, including this awesome image of Hashima, or Gunkanjima Island, the wonderfully creepy abandoned former mining island off the coast of Japan.

[Image: Hashima by Hisaharu Motoda].

So who’s up for making lithographs of a post-apocalyptic Cairo…? Or Chicago, or Mumbai? I’ll write the wall-text.

(Also found via Pink Tentacle).