Month: November 2007

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

I have a thing for abandoned islands, so I was excited to see Shaun O’Boyle‘s photo series of Bannerman’s Island, an old, half-flooded and fire-damaged derelict mansion built on a small island in the Hudson River.

[Images: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

As American Heritage describes it, “this island fortress was once the private arsenal of the world’s largest arms dealer.” And that was Frank “Francis” Bannerman.
Bannerman, we learn, “bought up ninety per cent of all captured guns, ammunition, and other equipment auctioned off after the Spanish-American War. He also bought weapons directly from the Spanish government before it evacuated Cuba. These purchases vastly exceeded the firm’s capacity at its store in Manhattan and filled three huge Brooklyn warehouses with munitions, including thirty million cartridges.” Accordinglty, “Bannerman now needed an arsenal.”
Or, more accurately speaking: he needed a private island.

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

Bannerman soon purchased “six and a half acres of scrub-covered rock called Polopel’s Island, about fifty-five miles north of New York City.” But even that wasn’t enough. He then “bought seven acres more of underwater land in front of the island from the state of New York. He ringed the submerged area with sunken canalboats, barges, and railroad floats to form a breakwater” – a kind of artificial reef.
“The island was under continuous construction for eighteen years.”

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

Quoting at length:

The castle was Bannerman’s vision and his execution. It was creviced and encrusted with battlements, towers, turrets, crenellations, parapets, embrasures, casements, and corbelling. Huge iron baskets suspended from the castle corners held gas-fed lamps that burned in the night like ancient torches. By day Bannerman’s castle gave the river a fairyland aspect. By night it threw a brooding silhouette against the Hudson skyline.

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

More:

Visitors approached the place along a breakwater bristling with cannon and then passed through an opening flanked by two watchtowers. After tying up their boat at a large unloading dock they crossed a moat spanned by a drawbridge and passed under a portcullis crowned by the Bannerman coat of arms carved in stone.

Bannerman died a week after the end of World War I – and the island had sunk into a state of “monumental decay” by the 1960s.
It was then gutted by arsonists.
And then photographer Shaun O’Boyle came into the picture.

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

“I found the island,” Shaun explained to me over email, “while commuting to NYC via the Amtrak train along the east bank of the Hudson River, which passes by the island and is plainly visible. It is located north of Cold Spring, NY, and can be seen when crossing the Beacon Bridge.”
“New York state owns the island now,” O’Boyle added, “and there are renovations going on, but I’m not sure what their plans are for public access. You can take tours of the island, via kayak, or motor boat.”

[Image: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

O’Boyle goes on to describe how he “explored the island using a kayak with friends,” and that he’s “made 3 visits, 2 in the past 2 years. The last visit we climbed the mountain adjacent to the river,” he adds, “and that is where the aerial views are from.”
When I asked him about what appear to be flooded foundation walls, ringing the island like a tropical atoll, Shaun said: “What look like sunken foundations in the Hudson are actually part of the breakwater constructed to form a harbor for unloading the ships of supplies.”
And when I asked him about the actual construction of the building – how the ruined walls handle themselves today, maintaining their shape and structure – O’Boyle wrote that “the construction quality was lacking, and I heard that Bannerman used old musket barrels to reinforce some of the concrete walls.”
Architecture as a kind of thinly described weapon: like almost all archaeology, scrape deep enough and you’ll uncover the residues of warfare.

[Images: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

O’Boyle:

The island is a beautiful place. I have been there in the mid-summer only, and thick vegetation covers everything, making it a challenge to move around anywhere but the paths. It certainly is a different kind of ruin for me to photograph: most of my photography work is of large scale industrial ruins, like Bethlehem Steel, and some of the industries that feed the steel mills – like coal and mining. Although my latest work is a bit different, I have been photographing the coal mining region of Pennsylvania – the towns, buildings and landscapes. It’s a fascinating area. But Bannerman’s is a more romantic ruin, set among the beautiful hills of the Hudson river.

It’s also the perfect setting for a future Patrick McGrath novel.
And the island – or at least Bannerman’s arsenal – has had its effects elsewhere. As O’Boyle explained, Bannerman “published a catalogue of all his products – Bannermans Catalogue – and, in fact, I currently have a 1925 edition on order from a used book store. Word has it that many of the canons you find in front of American Legions and town halls around the country are from Bannermans.”

[Images: Bannerman’s Island, copyright Shaun O’Boyle].

Don’t miss the rest of O’Boyle’s website, Modern Ruins, including his exquisite visual tour of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary – where my wife once worked as a tour guide – as well as this freaky crypt.
Of course, you can also support the artist by purchasing a print.
Finally, you can read more about Bannerman’s Island here and here – and, while you’re at it, why not read a bit about Boldt Castle, another ruined, island-bound mansion, this one standing amidst vegetation further north in the Thousand Islands. I used to visit that place as a kid; we’d go up to see my grandpa, a boatbuilder, who lived on one of the nearby islands, and then we’d toot on over to Boldt Castle.

The post-apocalyptic seed vault – or “international doomsday vault” – now under construction on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen can be counted upon perhaps not to save global agriculture but to pop up now and again on the internet for years to come; it’s been on BLDGBLOG twice already – and I have a feeling we’re only going to hear more about this thing.
And for good reason: it’s fascinating.
But now we actually have a photograph of the vault’s interior.

[Image: Mari Tefre for Getty Images, via the Guardian].

So what’s the vault? As the Guardian says:

Engineers last week finished work on one of the world’s most ambitious conservation projects: a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside in the archipelago of Svalbard, a few hundred miles from the North Pole.
Over the next few weeks, the huge cavern – backed by the Norwegian government and the Gates Foundation – will be filled with more than a million types of seed and will be officially opened in February next year.
“This will be the last refuge for the world’s crops,” said Cary Fowler, of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is building the vault. “There are seed banks in various countries round the globe, but several have been destroyed or badly damaged in recent years. We need a place that is politically and environmentally safe if we are going to feed the planet as it gets hotter.”

And the inside of the vault may look cold now, but “engineers are scheduled over the next few weeks to use refrigerating equipment to cool the vault to around minus 18 degrees. Then it will be ready for its seeds, say scientists.”
Perhaps those engineers can combine all this with the ice wall and build a whole new architecture of frozen vaults in the earth’s surface, domed labyrinths beneath the snow.
In 225 years a group of climate change survivors, sunburnt and half-mad with starvation, will flee the intolerably tropical temperatures that now extend as far north as Oslo and literally stumble upon the place, slipping into a crevasse and knocking up against the rusting door of a long-forgotten vault.
It takes only a few hours to hack open the door – and then they’ll cautiously walk inside…

I’ll be down in Los Angeles next week to give a lecture at SCI-Arc on the night of Thursday, November 15. The talk is sponsored by Ed Keller’s new MediaSCAPES program, with the support of onMatter, and it should be a lot of fun.

MediaSCAPES, for those curious, describes itself as follows:

Founded and directed by Ed Keller, MediaSCAPES… blends an intensive design studio culture with theory, research and practice. A cutting edge faculty team – with critics, lecturers, workshop leaders and guests drawn from academia and professional practice worldwide – provides students with training and a vital global network in both academic and professional contexts.

It does this in a “‘thinktank R&D’ environment,” concentrating on “technology, software, media, film and game spaces, to produce new content and ideas.” The program thus prepares students for “positions in design, research and theory work across the fields of architecture, new media, landscape design, and digital cinema.”
I’ll be giving a talk called Future Conjecture Speculation and, as far as I’m aware, it’s free and open to the public; it starts at 7pm on November 15; it’s located here; and, against all better judgement, I’ll try to mention the secret burial place of Christ at least once… and I’ll almost certainly discuss the militarization of geology, some urban knot theory, a few solidified carbon dioxide cities, and an inflatable architectural cosmos or two. Maybe even the museum of assassination.
And if you’re interested in applying for admission to the MediaSCAPES program, click here

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More info about the talk should be coming up soon! I’m excited.

Being inclined to spend time remembering things, I just made this map of my old flat in London. I lived there five years ago. How unbelievably bizarre it is to scroll around on that thing and remember street names, restaurants, transport routes to work…
In any case, the map also reminded me that my next door neighbor was a man named Aidan Andrew Dun. He was a poet; we spoke maybe two times, never in depth; and he was friends with Iain Sinclair.
Dun is the author of a long poem called Vale Royal, a kind of mytho-poetic walking tour, psychogeographically inspired by William Blake, exploring the region around King’s Cross.
I think it’s from Dun – but I don’t actually know; I just associate this with him – maybe I made it up? – that I heard a legend claiming that St. Pancras Old Church, stranded on its small hill behind the train stations next to the old London Hospital for Tropical Diseases, is actually the secret burial place of Christ.
The church, obviously, was built much later, as a means of marking the site – at the same time keeping silent its little secret.
And thus somewhere in the London soil, we’re meant to believe, is the body of Jesus Christ…
Imagine if it is there, though.
Imagine that it’s down there, talismanic, demagnetizing harddrives and affecting the moods of certain bus routes. You’re always happy whilst riding the 73 – and now you know why. Imagine that your Tube train just rattled past the body, lodged somewhere like a holy stone in London’s muddy undersurface, and a cold draft blew through the cabin. Imagine migratory birds flying east over the domes of churches three days before Christmas, then pulled north or south by some unseen point in the ground, that lost navigational burial that webs the earth with purpose.
Who knows.

I seem to be under the influence of H.G. Wells this week, but something about the previous post reminded me of Wells’s old novel The Sleeper Awakes.
In that book we follow the shocked but exhilirated travails of a man who wakes up in London 200 years in the future – only to find that he’s become some sort of Messiah…
So the plot is not exactly interesting, but the book’s descriptions of architecture are extraordinary.

[Image: Cover illustration by Kate Gibb for The Sleeper Awakes].

London, we read, has become a place of “vast and vague architectural forms.”
The book’s central character – the Sleeper, named Graham – looks around himself, spatially overwhelmed. He becomes aware of “balconies, galleries, great archways giving remoter perspectives, and everywhere people, a vast arena of people, densely packed and cheering.” Looking at the city, he says, is “like peering into a gigantic glass hive.”

His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast windows and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. Athwart these ran inscriptions horizontally and obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering. Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness were fastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular openings on the opposite side of the space…

He begins to walk, touring the “great structural lines of the interior,” following “a narrow but very long passage between high walls, along which ran an extraordinary number of tubes and big cables.” From there, he passes over “strange, frail-looking bridges” through an “endless series of chambers and passages.”

[Image: An unrelated vision of London’s sci-fi future from Maurice Elvey’s 1928 film, High Treason, mentioned in Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036].

Meanwhile, outside, the Thames has been drained, replaced with “a canal of sea water” fed by “vast aqueducts” that are “spanned by bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree.”
And the entire place runs on wind power:

He saw that he had come out upon the roof of the vast city structure which had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets and open spaces of Victorian London. The place upon which he stood was level, with huge serpentine cables lying athwart it in every direction. The circular wheels of a number of windmills loomed indistinct and gigantic through the darkness and snowfall, and roared with varying loudness as the fitful wind rose and fell. Some way off an intermittent white light smote up and made an evanescent spectre in the night; and here and there, low down, some vaguely outlined wind-driven mechanism flickered with livid sparks.

Graham walks further into the strangeness, coming upon “a space of huge windmills, one so vast that only the lower edge of its vanes came rushing into sight and rushed up again and was lost in the night and snow.”
Standing beside a companion now, he tries to absorb all the things he’s seeing:

All about them huge metallic structures, iron girders, inhumanly vast as it seemed to him, interlaced, and the edges of wind-wheels, scarcely moving in the lull, passed in great shining curves more and more steeply up into a luminous haze. Wherever the snow-spangled light struck down, beams and girders, and incessant bands running with a halting, indomitable resolution, passed upward and downward into the black. And with all that mighty activity, with an omnipresent sense of motive and design, this snowclad desolation of mechanism seemed void of all human presence save themselves, seemed as trackless and deserted and unfrequented by men as some inaccessible Alpine snowfield.

Soon the man can’t take it anymore – and I love this line:

Then for a time his mind circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could he escape into this vast, crowded world?

In any case, going back through Wells’s descriptions here I’m led to wonder aloud: Would architecture schools maintain higher student morale – and produce more interesting work – if they assigned reading material like this, instead of, say, A Thousand Plateaus?
Or does such a comparison collapse under further analysis? Surely such things could, and should, be assigned at the same time? They’re not mutually exclusive and may even benefit from one another’s company?

[Images: The VitraHaus, a proposed collection showroom by Herzog & de Meuron; bottom photograph by Dezeen].

This project made the rounds several months ago – and commenters the blog world over found it worthy of ridicule – but I’ve been reading St. Peter’s and so I have to wonder what would happen if you stacked cathedrals this way. A church made of bridges, all of which cross one another and lead back into themselves through cantilevered wings and side-chapels. Strategic elevators and light-wells punch voids through adjacent spaces, stretching into halls that lead outward as arches over rooms three floors below. There are vertical courtyards and consecrated spaces that defy gravity through self-buttressing, and even the smallest walls are part of the structure, bearing loads, part of the building’s strength and not mere decoration. What appear to be multiple buildings are really one – and other such obvious allegories. Etc. etc.

[Image: An aerial view of the bombing of Dresden during World War II; photo via Wikipedia].

Toward the end of an article by H.G. Wells, discussed in the previous post here, Wells writes: “I can bear to see no more ruins” – and you’re with him. You think exactly.
You read that Wells is “sad and weary with a succession of ruins” as he tours the Alpine battlefields of the Austro-Italian war, that “insane escapade” at high altitude, just one part of a larger “history of colossal stupidities” wherein war is a folly, a blunder, a disaster, and you think, of course, how could anyone bear to see yet more scenes of destruction.
But then you read the rest of the sentence.
“I can bear to see no more ruins,” Wells writes, “unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin…”
War always leads to yet more of itself later.
Here are Part One and Part Two of the Wells article, originally published in 1916 in The New York Times.

In New Scientist this week we read that an underwater neutrino detector being constructed at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is, “to physicists’ surprise,” also picking up signs of aquatic life:

Spanning 10,000 square metres of the Mediterranean seabed, the Antares telescope is designed to tell us about the cosmos by picking up signs of elusive particles called neutrinos, which fly thousands of light years through space. To physicists’ surprise, however, the underwater particle detector is also providing a unique glimpse of marine life.

From astrophysics to marine biology in a heartbeart.

[Image: Courtesy of New Scientist].

The huge underwater mechanism – called Antares – will not only give us more “information about where [neutrinos have] originated, such as the outskirts of black holes,” it will also register “waves of light” given off by “free-swimming bioluminescent bacteria” under intense benthic pressure at the bottom of the sea. Further, while peering into the outer dark, feeding currents of data into drone harddrives that think in slow algebras, unpeeling galaxial structure and calculating the future evolution of simulated stars, this machine amidst the shoals will also help solve “the mysteries of undersea storms.”
Living clouds of light swim past, colliding with particles as old as the universe – and the drowned antenna whirs on, detecting all of it.

Of course, all of this made me think of “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft.
In “From Beyond,” we encounter a narrator whose friend has 1) gone insane, 2) developed “baggy skin” with “hands tremulous and twitching,” and 3) built a machine, complete with moving crowns of glass bulbs and “a powerful chemical battery,” that will allow humans to “see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.”

The man explains to our friendly narrator – who, for reasons of his own, has decided to visit this guy, overlooking his “repellent unkemptness” and “wild disorder of dress” – that:

Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.

The machine awakens “dormant organs,” he says, so that we can see the horrors that surround us at every instant of existence, these ill-conceived but animate shapes that criss-cross endlessly through space.

Soon, the narrator shouts, there are “huge animate things brushing past me.” These are “disgusting” and “indescribable shapes” like “jellyfish monstrosities” that “flabbily quive[r] in harmony with the vibrations from the machine.”
The living shapes are even “semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids.”
Etc. etc. He ends up shooting the machine and his friend dies of apoplexy.
You can read the rest of the story here.

So what happens when scientists fully assemble this vast and sprawling neutrino detector at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, within sight of ruined arches onshore and Piranesian streetscapes, only to find themselves detecting, in a chaos of vibration and flashing light, previously unknown and hostile forms of maritime life?
And what happens if that otherwise undiscovered life detects the machine?
Can BLDGBLOG retain the film rights?

There was an interesting article in The New York Times this week about “161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands” that were purchased this summer by the Nature Conservancy.
The cost was $110 million – and the sellers had owned the land since the end of the Civil War.

[Image: The “View from Noonmark Mountain” by Robbie’s Photo Art, found via Flickr; this photo is simply for illustrative purposes: as far as I’m aware, it does not show the property discussed below].

These 161,000 acres, “considered the last remaining large privately owned parcels in Adirondack Park,” we read, “are an ecological marvel”:

containing 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, more than 80 mountains and a vast unbroken wilderness that only loggers and a few hunters have ever seen. The property also contains unmatched natural features like the blue ledges of the Hudson River Gorge, OK Slip Falls and Boreas Pond, with its stunning views of the Adirondack high peaks, which naturalists have dreamed of protecting for decades.

While the article is actually about what the Nature Conservancy might be forced to do next, in order to live up to its own purchasing agreement, what I find extraordinary is the idea that these 161,000 acres of “unbroken wilderness,” a long day’s drive from New York City, have only been seen by “loggers and a few hunters” since the end of the Civil War.
So what else is out there…? And do we know?

[Image: Two stitched panoramas of the Adirondacks: (top) Valley View Ledge” / (bottom) “View from Catamount Mountain, both by retropc, found via Flickr].

Absurd questions, of course: it’s New York state, not Borneo or even Utah – or Bosnia, for that matter – and so it seems relatively unlikely that some weird and amazing lost city or heretofore unknown species of hominid will be found out in the darkness by Nature Conservancy volunteers.
And yet I can’t help but think of vague, sci fi-like scenarios of undiscovered archaeological sites – civilizations no one even dreamed existed, thriving here on the North American landmass before ice ages came and scraped the place clean – or monstrous fossils lodged in lumps of exposed bedrock, weird marks in the sides of distant hills corresponding to no known period of the earth’s biological history… Crashed spaceships. The world’s largest cave system. Medicinal flowers.
And so on.
Anyway, there’s something about large, privately held plots of wilderness that absolutely fascinates me – and not because I advocate turning the public lands of the United States over to private interests, but because of what I might call the literary, even psychological, possibilities of owning wilderness.
In fact, I’m reminded of yet another New York Times article, this one about the large-scale private purchasing of former timber lands out west.
There is, we read, “a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests.” There are thus “private ponds” – and private rivers and mountains and gullies. In fact, there are “vast national forests, grasslands and wilderness areas that in Montana alone add up to nearly 46,000 square miles, about the size of New York State” – however, “in many places, the new owners are throwing up no trespassing signs and fences, blocking what generations of residents across the West have taken for granted – open and beckoning access into the woods to fish, hunt and camp.”
Then, surrounded by a few hundred acres of remote and unpopulated – and unpoliced – land, you start to do things… Gradually planning a bid for political sovereignty. Building things deep in the woods. Walking around alone at midnight, thinking about calculus, surrounded by 2000 acres of your own land.
This, in turn, reminded me of an old Clive Barker story called “Down, Satan!”
I may not have remembered the story correctly, having last read it in high school, but its premise is that a fabulously wealthy businessman decides to build Hell on Earth – literally to construct Hell – in order to summon forth the devil (or some such idea). He thus sets about designing and building a terrifying new complex full of torture machines and acid baths and vast graveyards somewhere on private land in Nevada.
At the end of the story, the police raid the place and the guy realizes that he has, in fact, summoned the devil to Earth – and it’s him…

[Image: “Serene View” in the Adirondacks, by |ash|, found via Flickr].

In any case, we learn that these sorts of transactions, involving formerly public lands, are growing much more common – but also more complex and more ambitious. “Over the last 10 years,” we’re told, “at least 40 million acres of private forest land have changed hands nationwide.” 40 million acres! That’s very nearly the size of the United Kingdom.
Of course, the motivation behind all these purchases is not preservation – or even constructing Hell: it all comes down to logging. Even environmental advocates are now picking up their chainsaws.

In ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, environmentalists and representatives of the timber industry are reaching across the table, drafting plans that would get loggers back into the national forests in exchange for agreements that would set aside certain areas for protection.
Both groups are feeling under siege: timber executives because of the decline in logging, and environmentalists because of the explosion of growth on the margins of the public lands.
(…)
Many environmentalists say they have come to realize that cutting down trees, if done responsibly, is not the worst thing that can happen to a forest, when the alternative is selling the land to people who want to build houses.

But surely “selling the land to people who want to build houses” is not the only alternative.
Surely someone with loads of money could finally do something interesting, for instance, putting aside the cocaine addiction and the personal fleets of Range Rovers and the Malibu mansions and buying land, buying lots of land, buying as many tens of thousands of acres as they can afford – and not developing it, not re-selling it, not clear-cutting it, not even necessarily preserving it, just doing something out there in their own private wilderness, whether it’s opening a system of public trails – or maybe you can subscribe to the land the way you subscribe to a magazine, and so you get access to new trails every few months – or building radio astronomical research stations, or a summer camp for landscape journalists, or the BLDGBLOG Academy, or a human clone farm, or whatever. Build a private cave. Who cares.
But, surely, with literally tens of millions of acres of land at stake here, and with more and more – and more – people becoming billionaires, let alone millionaires, someone with a little imagination will come along finally and do something interesting out there, away from the airports, alone in the darkness of North America, surrounded by maple trees, coming up with plans, changing history, supplying novelists with fodder for plots for decades to come.
Otherwise we’ll just build more houses.