Year: 2007

Planet Bleach

Back in August, New Scientist reported that the landscape of Mars might be sterile due to the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The planet is bleaching itself, in other words, on a near-continual basis.

[Image: Via New Scientist].

Specifically, we read, “large amounts of hydrogen peroxide could be produced on Mars as a result of wind-blown dust grains rubbing together.” Because of these interactions – and the resultant electrochemical effects – hydrogen peroxide, “a harsh chemical used as a disinfectant on Earth may rain down on the surface” of the planet. “This process is similar to the way snow forms from water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, ” we read. “However, the hydrogen peroxide falling on Mars would be in the form of microscopic grains.”
I find this image – the chemical snow of alien planets – quite striking.
Meanwhile, similar electrochemical conditions have been found in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where “photochemistry triggered by the region’s harsh sunlight plays an important role in creating these electric fields” – electric fields, generated in the region’s dusty soil, that produce trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide.

To eavesdrop on breaking glaciers from within

The New York Times reports on “a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland.”

[Image: Jeff Shea/New York Times].

“Despite its remote location,” the Times explains, “the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines” – except that, until recently, the island was “bound to the coast by glacial ice.”
In other words, climate change – melting ice and rising sea levels – has turned a peninsula into an island.

[Image: Map of Greenland, courtesy of the New York Times].

“With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits,” we read, “Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.” I’m tempted to say that that last sentence should be reversed, however: that the maps are becoming obsolete as soon as new geography is created.
For instance, there are the nunataks – or lonely mountains, in Inuit – which stick out from beneath the matrix of glacial ice. These features are now “being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.”

[Image: The mountains of eastern Greenland: a future archipelago. Via Wikipedia].

From the New York Times:

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon – of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it – is a real common phenomenon now.” In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.

That image, of course, is both horrific and exhilarating – literally sublime: the discovery of terra nova, right here on a planet that once seemed topographically claimed. Surely our era is due for a new Jules Verne?
Meanwhile, as Arctic temperatures continue to rise, and as the Greenlandic ice cap continues to liquefy, we’ll see more and more spectacular – if catastrophic – shifts in global geography. (Whole new continents!)
And this won’t be limited to the Arctic: “Over the long term,” we read, “much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.”

[Image: Greenland’s thawing landscape; photo by Jeff Shea/New York Times].

In any case, I was fascinated to learn that “summertime ‘glacial earthquakes’ have been detected within the ice sheet” of Greenland. I can hardly imagine such a strange and haunting sound – like bells shattering – of pure ice heaving beneath your feet, as mile after mile of blue caves and tunnels shift their chambers to realign.
Is it possible, then, to drill contact microphones into the surface of Greenland and listen to this terrestrial baritone, the earth a reverberatory, to eavesdrop on breaking glaciers from within?

(With the use of the word “reverberatory” indebted to John Coulthart. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Nova Arctica and When landscapes sing: or, London Instrument).

Architecture as a form of deliberate paranoia

I once knew someone who owned a drum machine on which he had been, he claimed, programming extraordinary amounts of really great music. Being naive to the thieving ways of the world, however, this friend – or aquaintance, really, from Canada – in fact the best friend of the fiancé of my girlfriend’s sister – came home one day to find that his drum machine had been stolen.

[Image: From Keith Kin Yan’s Overshadowed, a site – and photographer – previously discussed here].

This act of musical thievery propelled him into a state of unremitting paranoia so intense, and so interesting, that I still think about it, nearly fifteen years later.
What happened was that every time he went out to hear music – mostly at raves in New York City – he claimed that, at some point in the night, he had heard one of his own songs. Flagrantly stolen from his own stolen drum machine, then inscribed to vinyl – only to be spun, live, to the dancing masses – his music popped up at least once every few hours.
Wide-eyed, emotional, convincing: there he was, in front of us, the people who hung out with him, explaining that this song was his.
Of course, I mention all this because I wonder what the architectural equivalent would be.
Perhaps a man, or woman, who spends all of his or her time sketching strange buildings – detailing elevators that lead to elevators and hotel rooms that interconnect to secret swimming pools in which hundreds of people sit, talking – finds that his (or her) sketchbook has been stolen.
Fifteen years later, then, this person is on vacation with friends – but the hotel they’ve chosen looks awfully familiar.
Too familiar.
It’s his building.
“I designed this goddamn thing!” he screams, rattling door handles and staring through rotating glass doors at the swimming pool. He’s sweating, veins visible, pulsing on his forehead. Everyone takes a step back. Is my cell phone charged? one thinks. Should I call 911?
“This is my hotel!” the man screams, kicking over an ice bucket.
He gets so loud his friends start to panic, eventually punching him in the face, hoping it will knock him out; it doesn’t work.
The police arrive.
Our architectural sketcher is immediately arrested. He is strapped face-down to a table and injected with horse tranquilizers.
But the thing is: he’s right. He really did design that hotel. It really did come out of his sketchbook. That swimming pool really was his idea.
Even worse: so was the building across the street – a building he’s about to see when the police release him from custody.
And those buildings downtown? He designed them, too.
He designed this whole city, see: he sketched the whole thing in his now lost book.
Except he’s the only one who knows it. Not a single one of his friends believes him. In fact, people make fun of him, call him “Charles Manson” and point out the window at different buildings as if to antagonize him. “Did you design that, too?” Everyone giggles.
Soon, old friends are writing blog entries about him.
To escape the madness, the man moves to a new city, packing his bags and buying a dog – only to realize that everything about even that new city was all his idea.

(Perhaps coming soon: Sketchbook, starring Christian Bale).

Copenacre Quarry

[Images: Two shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley’s Secret Underground Cities site].

Last night I came across a review of the album Copenacre, by C4I, in an old back issue of The Wire.
Apparently inspired by Nick McCamley’s legendary book Secret Underground Cities, the musicians behind Copenacre tried “to evoke the dead air and constant low level hum of Copenacre Quarry‘s now abandoned navy testing and storage facility” in England.
In other words, it’s the soundtrack for an underground city.

[Images: Two more shots of Copenacre Quarry, via Nick McCamley’s Secret Underground Cities site].

“It’s not easy to understand the sonic appeal of these places,” The Wire continues, “until you’ve actually visited one.” On the CD, we read, strange sounds “flash through tunnels and massive steel doors clang and lock to disconcerting effect.”
Here are two examples: MP3 1. MP3 2.
Both of those excerpts, however, remind me of the early work of Lustmord, the nom de musique of LA-based sound designer Brian Williams. Lustmord’s discography became somewhat notorious in the early 1990s for, among other things, having been partially recorded inside abandoned mines, in the crypts of churches, and inside caves and cellars. The resulting, planet-shaking resonance and sub-bass could often put listeners’ headphones out of commission.
On an almost ridiculously great CD called The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, Williams achieves a similar effect – but he gets rid of the caves and architecture. Instead, we plunge headfirst into nearly an hour and twenty minutes of machinic astronomy; we rumble and drone inside with what sounds like a WWII airplane buzzing through deep space, recording the slow magnetic death of stars.
Gigantic radar systems bounce and reflect off nothing.
Needless to say, it’s not for everyone.

(See also BLDGBLOG’s look at Subterranean bunker-cities).

Yesterday in L.A.

Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who came out yesterday – and an apology to those who showed up but couldn’t get in. I really had no idea the crowd would be as big as it was, and it seems a good 50 or 60 people were left standing outside on the sidewalk! But for those of you who did get in, and who sat through two hours of tightly-packed darkness, I hope you saw some cool things, had a good time, and enjoyed the presentations.
So I just wanted to say thanks; I had a great time, and I’m already looking forward to the next event. Thank you especially to Matthew Coolidge, Steve Rowell, and Sarah Simons of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, both for lending their space and for helping set-up for the event; to Mary-Ann Ray; to Robert Sumrell; to Christine Wertheim; and to Margaret Wertheim; and last, but not least, to my wife, for helping me put everything together.
More soon.

Urban Design Review

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

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

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

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

On the geotechnical invasion of paradise

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

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

(Thanks, Ben! And thanks, Alex!)

Divided Kingdom

[Image: Circle Line Pinhole 32, from Rob Gardiner’s inspired photographic project, Walking the Circle Line, London].

Rupert Thomson’s recent novel Divided Kingdom is set in a world where the whole of Britain has been broken up into four sectors, the population itself forcibly “rearranged” according to emotional temperment.

Well-disciplined over-achievers are sent to one quarter; despair-wracked introspectionists another; pick-up truck driving nutters prone to violence take a third (I came I saw I lost my temper, its postcards read); and some other group I’m overlooking at the moment gets the last bit.

Walls and fences begin to appear; soon people complain of “border sickness” as they are further hemmed in by a series of Internal Security Acts. “Throughout the divided kingdom,” we read, “the walls of concrete blocks had been reinforced with watch-towers, axial crosses and even, in some areas, with mine-fields, which rendered contact between the citizens of different countries a physical impossibility.”

London itself is “divided so as to create four new capitals,” and each major bridge over the Thames is “fortified, along with watch-towers at either end and a steel dragnet underneath.” However, “in stretches where the river itself had become the border all the bridges had been destroyed. The roads that had once led to them stopped at the water’s edge, and stopped abruptly. They seemed to stare into space, no longer knowing what they were doing there or why they had come.”

[Image: From Under Blackfriars Bridge, London, by Rob Gardiner].

There is even a “tourist settlement called the Border Experience” constructed near one of the crossings – apparently learning from Venturi, complete “with theme hotels, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops.”

In one sector, all the motorways “had been converted into venues for music festivals or sporting events, and others had been fortified, then turned into borders, their tall grey lights illuminating dogs and guards instead of traffic, but for the most part they had simply been allowed to decay, their signs leaning at strange angles, their service stations inhabited by mice and birds, their bridges choked with weeds and brambles or, as in this case, collapsing altogether. In time, motorways would become so overgrown that they would only be visible from the air, half-hidden monuments to an earlier civilization, like pyramids buried in a jungle.”

[Image: Circle Line Pinhole 16, from Rob Gardiner’s Walking the Circle Line, London].

While still a young boy, the narrator develops “border games” with a mate; they “prowl among the cement-mixers and scaffolding poles” next to “a section of the motorway that was in the process of being dug up,” and they use cardboard tubes to spy on guards stationed several acres away.

In any case, parts of Divided Kingdom read like descriptions of Dubai – or what Mike Davis refers to as Dubai’s “monstrous caricature of futurism,” as that city strives “to conquer the architectural record-books.”

There is something called the Underground Ocean, for instance. Thomson’s narrator and his entourage are led down into a basement warehouse, where they stand beside a lifeguard on a boardwalk in the dark:

The lifeguard’s voice floated dreamily above us. Any second now, he said, the scene would be illuminated, but first he wanted us to try and picture what it was that we were about to see. I peered out into the dark, my eyes gradually adjusting. A pale strip curved away to my right – the beach, I thought – and at the edge furthest from me I could just make out a shimmer, the faintest of oscillations. Could that be where the water met the sand? Beyond that, the blackness resisted me, no matter how carefully I looked.
“Lights,” the lifeguard said.
I wasn’t the only delegate to let out a gasp. My first impression was that night had turned to day – but instantly, as if hours had passed in a split-second. At the same time, the space in which I had been standing had expanded to such a degree that I no longer appeared to be indoors. I felt unstead,y, slightly sick. Eyes narrowed against the glare, I saw a perfect blue sky arching overhead. Before me stretched an ocean, just as blue. It was calm the way lakes are sometimes calm, not a single crease or wrinkle. Creamy puffs of cloud hung suspended in the distance. Despite the existence of a horizon, I couldn’t seem to establish a sense of perspective. After a while my eyes simply refused to engage with the view, and I had to look away.
“Now for the waves,” the lifeguard said.

It is interesting to note that, at the end of the book, in the Acknowledgements, Thomson cites S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas as having been a literary resource.

[Image: Circle Line Pinhole 52, from Rob Gardiner’s Walking the Circle Line, London].

While it seems rather obvious that the book is not meant to present the next likely development in national governance or urban planning, many readers – i.e. Amazon reviewers – seem upset by the premise, and repeatedly point out that this “could never happen.” But surely that’s not the point? As with all of Thomson’s novels the writing is exquisite, at times dreamlike yet descriptively precise; the book is also one of the few examples I can think of where I actually wished the book had been substantially longer (it’s 336 pages).

If you do read it, let me know what you think.

[Image: Circle Line Pinhole 64, from Rob Gardiner’s Walking the Circle Line, London].

(Thanks to Steve & Valerie Twilley for the book! Meanwhile, for more of Rob Gardiner’s photographs, see Gardiner’s blog; I’m a particular fan of his London work).

The First Million

I’m immensely pleased to announce BLDGBLOG’s first event, on January 13th in Los Angeles, to be hosted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

The event is meant as a way to mark BLDGBLOG’s recent move to Los Angeles; to kick-start the new year in a conversationally exciting way; to celebrate being one of Yahoo’s top 25 web picks of 2006; and to meet a few of the one million readers who have now clicked through to read BLDGBLOG (some much-needed statistical caveats about that statement appear below) – and, thus, an event seemed like a good idea. It also just sounds fun.

So this Saturday, January 13th, from 3pm-5pm, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, Los Angeles, I’ll be introducing five speakers: Matthew Coolidge, Mary-Ann Ray, Robert Sumrell, Christine Wertheim, and Margaret Wertheim, who will speak for 15-20 minutes each.

Matthew Coolidge is Director of CLUI; as such, he’s one of the larger influences on BLDGBLOG, up there with J.G. Ballard, John McPhee, and Piranesi – so it’s immensely exciting for me to have him as a participant, and equally exciting that he and the CLUI staff are willing to host this event in their space. If you’re curious about CLUI’s work, consider purchasing their new book: Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or just stop by the Center at some point and say hello.

Back in 1997, then, I found myself in Rotterdam where I went to the Netherlands Architecture Institute several days in a row to use their architecture library; the NAi’s exhibit at the time was about Daniel Libeskind. While this proves that I’m possibly the world’s lamest backpacker, it also resulted in my stumbling across a copy of Mary-Ann Ray’s Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets, a book I highly recommend to just about anyone – and a book that may or may not even be responsible for my current interest in architecture.

So when I saw last week that Mary-Ann still lives in LA, and that her firm had actually worked on the facade of the Museum of Jurassic Technology – located right next door to the Center for Land Use Interpretation – I immediately gave her a call; and now she’s a speaker at the event.

[Image: Mary-Ann Ray, from Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets].

Robert Sumrell, meanwhile, is co-director of AUDC. AUDC’s work explores the fields of diffuse urbanism and network geography, whether that means analyzing Muzak as a form of spatial augmentation or photo-documenting the town of Quartzsite, Arizona.

Interestingly, Sumrell also works as a production designer for elaborate fashion shoots and other high-gloss, celebrity spectacles. If you’re a fan of Usher, for instance, don’t miss Sumrell’s Portfolio 2; if you like topless women surrounded by veils of smoke, see his Portfolio 1. I like Portfolio 1.

[Image: From Robert Sumrell’s Portfolio 4].

Then we come to Christine and Margaret Wertheim, co-directors of the Institute for Figuring, here in Los Angeles.

“The Institute’s interests,” they explain, “are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.”

Margaret will be presenting a hand-crocheted hyperbolic reef, “a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft.” The reef is part craft object, part mathematical model in colored wool.

[Image: An example of “mega coral,” crocheted by Christine Wertheim].

Margaret is also an ace interviewer; don’t miss her conversation with Nicholas Gessler, for instance, collector of analogue computers. While you’re at it, don’t miss her “history of space from Dante to the internet”.

Meanwhile, Christine’s interests lie more in the realm of logic and its spatial representations. Christine has curated an upcoming show at the Museum of Jurassic Technology around the work of Shea Zellweger, an “outsider logician” and former hotel switchboard operator who developed a three-dimensional, internally rigorous representational system for logical processes.

Christine will thus be speaking on what could be called an illustrated spatial history of logic.

[Image: Part of Shea Zellweger’s logical alphabet; image courtesy of Shea Zellweger, via the Institute for Figuring].

Finally, the statistical caveats I mentioned above.

While it is true that my Sitemeter is now above one million – recording visitors to the site – it is also true that if you come to BLDGBLOG four times a week for a year, then you will be counted as 208 different people… So the accounting is a bit off.

Also, it is inarguably the case that at least 350,000 of those 1,000,000 visitors only visited one of the five following posts, which, thanks to Fark, Digg, MetaFilter, Boing Boing, etc., are overwhelmingly the most popular posts here: World’s largest diamond mine, Scientological Circles, “The city as an avatar of itself”, Transformer Houses, and Gazprom City.

Possible runners-up for that list – though those five really do take the cake – include, and I apologize for this blatantly self-indulgent yet strangely irresistible nostalgia trip: the interview with Simon Sellars, the interview with Simon Norfolk, the Aeneid-inspired look at offshore oil derricks, Chinese death vans, how to buy your own concrete utopia, Architectural Criticism, Where cathedrals go to die, the story of Joe Kittinger, London Topological, and L.A.’s high-tech world of traffic control. Actually, this one had a lot of readers, and the mud mosques were also quite popular…

But now I’ve wasted twenty minutes, assembling those links.

So I’ll link to others, instead. BLDGBLOG would still only be read by myself, my wife, and possibly two or three others if it hadn’t been for the early and/or ongoing enthusiasm of other websites who link in – including, but by no means limited to: Pruned, gravestmor, Archinect, things magazine, Inhabitat, Gridskipper, Boing Boing, Design Observer, Coudal, Artkrush, we make money not art, Subtopia, Ballardian, The Dirt, Apartment Therapy, Curbed LA and Curbed SF, City of Sound, Future Feeder, Archidose, Brand Avenue, Tropolism, hippoblog, Land+Living, Abstract Dynamics, Worldchanging, Warren Ellis, The Nonist, The Kircher Society, Conscientious, Centripetal Notion, and whoever it is that occasionally puts links to BLDGBLOG up on MetaFilter.

In any case, my final point is just to be honest and say that a million visitors is more like “a million visitors” – i.e. not quite a million visitors – and that, on top of that, many of those people only came through to see five or six particular posts in the first place. And that’s not even to mention the fact that many websites have more than a million visitors per month, and so the whole thing is not exactly awe-inspiring.

But who cares. If you’re in LA this weekend, consider dropping by; it’ll be a fun and casual event, not an academic conference, and you can tell me in person whether cone beats sphere.

(There’s also a full-size version of the event poster available).

Quick list 7

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

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

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

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

[Image: Moon dust].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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