Year: 2007

[Image: Screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].

One of the funnier works of atmospheric installation art I’ve yet seen is the so-called Geostationary Banana Over Texas.
The project is described as “an art intervention placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky.”

[Image: Another screen-grab from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage].

The banana, we read, “will float between the high atmosphere and Earth’s low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings.” It will be 300m long, framed with bamboo, and filled with helium.
I’m 100% behind the idea.

[Images: More screen-grabs from the Geostationary Banana Over Texas homepage; the last image is particularly brilliant].

After all, the project’s organizers remind us, “a banana appearing in the Texas sky might seem like a ‘message’.”
Indeed.

(With a huge thanks to Michael Pace for the link! See also MetaFilter or Neatorama for more ).

[Image: Courtesy of NASA/ESA/MASSEY, via the BBC].

“Astronomers have mapped the cosmic ‘scaffold’ of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled,” the BBC reports. Producing the map “involved nearly 1,000 hours of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.” But it was time well-spent: the map now “confirms that galaxy clusters are located within clumps of this invisible material. These clumps are connected via bridges of dark matter called filaments. The clumps and filaments form a loose network – like a web.”
We are thus surrounded by structures of the invisible.
In an interesting analogy, we read that “the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street lights.” But now they have the actual physical layout of the streets – or something like that.
Having said all this, let me admit to an outsider’s sense that either 1) the astronomers are wrong: there is no dark matter; dark matter is just a calculational artifact of the current model used to represent universal space (and, thus, this map actually shows something else); or 2) they’re right about all of it – except the use of the word matter, which is referentially misleading; it is not matter at all.

(Earlier: See Filaments of space-time, where you can read about “huge arc-bubbles of light colliding with themselves in glowing, superskeletal networks, filling space like translucent caulk”).

[Image: Science Building, London, England, 2003, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

In two beautifully realized and conceptually fascinating projects, Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman creates “architectural utopias, fictional ruins from fictional worlds.”

[Image: Archives, Leeds, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s Landmarks of Industrial Britain, for instance, is “a photographic series of fictional public buildings derived from small scale architectural maquettes.”
As the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia explains, the series “envisages a worker’s state in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.”
Zimmerman himself writes that his work preys upon “the apparent willingness of the viewer to accept a fabricated past.” In the process, the lost industrial utopia he’s created – a false history convincingly rendered through the use of immense landscapes and architectural monumentalism – comes to look like a world designed entirely by Etienne-Louis Boullée.

[Image: Museum, Birmingham, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s earlier series, Lost Hamilton Landmarks (referring to Hamilton, Ontario), apparently kicked off the artist’s ongoing interest in “Greek and Roman [architectural] prototypes.” This “neo-classical architectural language,” Zimmerman writes, attains much of its aesthetic power by “appealing to state authority and to instinctual desires for permanence and stability, security, sense of place, or even to the desire for the guidance of a parent.”

[Image: Mount Hamilton Sanatorium, 1995, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

Zimmerman thus uses the authoritative language of neo-classical architecture to help convince his audience that these buildings once actually existed – and that they now stand ruined somewhere, cavernous, sublime, and empty.

[Images: Mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetary, 1996, and Mount Hamilton Hospital, 1996, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

After all, these are not real buildings.

[Image: Public Baths, Manchester, England, 2000, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Quoting the justifiably enthusiastic reviewer Meredith Dault at some length:

[Carl Zimmerman] makes photographs of imagined architectural spaces. He builds models, photographs them, and then digitally manipulates the photographs, creating vast, impossible spaces. Sepia-toned and laid out flat on tables in the gallery space, the photographs read, at first glance, like historical documents – they feel very much like 19th century architectural engravings – until you realize they can’t be because they’re all dated in the present. A closer look reveals that the buildings are set in huge, almost surreal, bleak landscapes – their titles want you to believe, however, that these buildings are plunked down in ordinary cities like Manchester and Leeds.

Zimmerman’s show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia appears to be over – but if it is still up, I would strongly recommend stopping by. Zimmerman’s models were on display alongside the photographs, and the exhibition sounds like it was well worth seeing.
What seems particularly interesting, to me, is that Zimmerman achieves a sense of near-total ruin, but he does so not through the depiction of structural collapse – he simply shows us grandiosity and silence.

[Image: War Memorial, Leeds, England, 2004, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

If you’re feeling well-heeled, meanwhile, consider buying yourself some full-size prints of these images; you can do so at the frankly named buynewart. You can also see more deeply colored versions of Zimmerman’s work by visiting Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery.

(Thanks, John Devlin! See also BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at the work of Oliver Boberg and Thomas Demand).

[Image: Her Majesty’s Theatre, London; via Wikipedia].

“British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber warns that the auction of a wireless spectrum in London could doom music theater in the city’s West End,” Marketplace reports.
It’s an unintended musical side-effect of high-priced aerial real estate, or London’s property boom gone electromagnetic.
“Britain’s telecom regulator is to blame,” Webber says. “The regulator is planning to auction off to the highest bidder the airwaves used by theatres and concert venues. A cell phone company with deep pockets is likely to win. The fees could then soar and the theatres could be priced out.”
In the future, perhaps actors can simply schedule a wireless conference call with their intended audience…

Princeton Architectural Press is still looking for the next installment in its Pamphlet Architecture series – which means they just might be looking for you.

“To promote and foster the development and circulation of architectural ideas,” they write, “Pamphlet Architecture is again offering an opportunity for architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, and landscape architects to publish their designs, manifestos, ideas, theories, ruminations, hopes, and insights for the future of the designed and built world. With far-ranging topics including the alphabet, algorithms, machines, and music, each Pamphlet is unique to the individual or group that authors it.”
They want ideas that possess “rigor and excitement,” with stimulating imagery and enthusiasm for the field.
However, you only have 13 days left in which to make your ideas both coherent and presentable – and you have to register.
And if you’re unfamiliar with the series, and need some examples of small, concentrated doses of architectural speculation, then let me point out this particular pamphlet, of which I am a long-term fan – although I lost my copy a few years ago – and I wrote about Tooling back in July.
If you still think you’re at a loss for ideas, you can always find the outer edges of a potential pamphlet just about anywhere: the San Francisco Sewer System Master Plan Project, for instance; or the gradual but complete depopulation of Venice; the Earth without people; the tomb of Agamemnon; the brick-lined subterranean world behind Niagara; a proposal for the exact and to-scale geotechnical recreation of the Mississippi River’s missing mountains; field results from your architectural experiments with Rogaine; some science-fictional extrapolations on London’s CTRL Project, complete with site visits and interviews; or even some Herculean, hydro-architectural taming of the North Pacific Gyre (you build a swimming pool around it, designed by FAT, then charge admission).
Etc. etc. – so get your brains firing, your fingers typing, and get published by Princeton.
And if any readers of BLDGBLOG win this thing, let me know.

[Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

On the front page of the LA Times today, greeting the new year, is a story about a man with a plan in Iowa: “Surrounded by cornfields that stretch to the horizon,” we read, “in a place where molehills pass for mesas, avid outdoorsman Don Briggs has long dreamed of climbing a mountain. So he decided to build one.”

[Image: Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

He’s not a geotechnical engineer, or some wildly charismatic salesman of earth-moving equipment; he’s just a man with a water hose and access to a few corn silos.
“Briggs spends most winter nights hosing down a quartet of grain silos on a friend’s farm – and relies on the Corn Belt’s frigid temperatures to transform the water into frozen walls of ice that tower nearly 70 feet straight up,” the LA Times writes.
“By the time he’s done, the ice encasing the outside of the silos is 4 feet thick in spots – and ready for the onslaught of ice climbers drawn to this strange marriage of farming and extreme sports.”

[Image: There would sometimes be “a heat wave,” Don Briggs told the LA Times, “when the temperature got up to 40 degrees or warmer, and all the ice would fall off the silos and we’d have to start all over.” Photo by Matthew Putney, for the LA Times].

The transformation of architectural structures into geological objects is something worth pursuing; in a way, it reminds me of a fairly minor pet peeve of mine, which is that people like Colin Farrell, or Lindsay Lohan, come out to Hollywood or move to Manhattan, and they make tens of millions of dollars… and they buy liquor with it. Or crystal meth and expensive dresses. Or whatever it is that River Phoenix did.
But when was the last time you heard about some hot young actor pocketing $20 million to star in a new Tony Scott film – then promptly disappearing into the plains of Iowa where he (or she) contracts out the multi-million dollar construction of a new mountain chain? Complete with manmade glacier?
Rather than buy Escalades, diamonds, and a few bottles of Courvoisier, in other words, why not compulsively build whole transparent cities of plexiglass, uninhabited in the mountains of central Idaho?
If you’re going to get addicted to something, make your addiction interesting.
Rather than donate all his money to Scientology, Tom Cruise funds the excavation of a spectacular series of show-caves, curling under the soil of Wisconsin. He sinks millions and millions of dollars into it, and dances on the couches of primetime news shows to sing the praises of subterranean topography.
Which is nothing compared to Robert Downey Jr., who is now rumored to have addicted himself to producing large-scale earthworks, made of polished obsidian, in eastern Washington state… He takes jobs in Uwe Boll films just to buy more rock…

(Thanks to N for the ice silo link!)