Year: 2007

Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan, 1999; view larger].

Lebbeus Woods is one of the first architects I knew by name – not Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe, but Lebbeus Woods – and it was Woods’s own technically baroque sketches and models, of buildings that could very well be machines (and vice versa), that gave me an early glimpse of what architecture could really be about.

Woods’s work is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence proclaiming that the architectural imagination, freed from constraints of finance and buildability, should be uncompromising, always. One should imagine entirely new structures, spaces without walls, radically reconstructing the outermost possibilities of the built environment.

If need be, we should re-think the very planet we stand on.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Havana, radically reconstructed, 1994].

Of course, Woods is usually considered the avant-garde of the avant-garde, someone for whom architecture and science fiction – or urban planning and exhilarating, uncontained speculation – are all but one and the same. His work is experimental architecture in its most powerful, and politically provocative, sense.

Genres cross; fiction becomes reflection; archaeology becomes an unpredictable form of projective technology; and even the Earth itself gains an air of the non-terrestrial.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, DMZ, 1988].

One project by Woods, in particular, captured my imagination – and, to this day, it just floors me. I love this thing. In 1980, Woods proposed a tomb for Albert Einstein – the so-called Einstein Tomb (collected here) – inspired by Boullée’s famous Cenotaph for Newton.

But Woods’s proposal wasn’t some paltry gravestone or intricate mausoleum in hewn granite: it was an asymmetrical space station traveling on the gravitational warp and weft of infinite emptiness, passing through clouds of mutational radiation, riding electromagnetic currents into the void.

The Einstein Tomb struck me as such an ingenious solution to an otherwise unremarkable problem – how to build a tomb for an historically titanic mathematician and physicist – that I’ve known who Lebbeus Woods is ever since.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, the city and the faults it sits on, from the San Francisco Bay Project, 1995].

So when the opportunity came to talk to Lebbeus about one image that he produced nearly a decade ago, I continued with the questions; the result is this interview, which happily coincides with the launch of Lebbeus’s own website – his first – at lebbeuswoods.net. That site contains projects, writings, studio reports, and some external links, and it’s worth bookmarking for later exploration.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Havana, 1994; view larger].

In the following Q&A, then, Woods talks to BLDGBLOG about the geology of Manhattan; the reconstruction of urban warzones; politics, walls, and cooperative building projects in the future-perfect tense; and the networked forces of his most recent installations.


• • •

BLDGBLOG: First, could you explain the origins of the Lower Manhattan image?

Lebbeus Woods: This was one of those occasions when I got a request from a magazine – which is very rare. In 1999, Abitare was making a special issue on New York City, and they invited a number of architects – like Steven Holl, Rafael Viñoly, and, oh god, I don’t recall. Todd Williams and Billie Tsien. Michael Sorkin. Myself. They invited us to make some sort of comment about New York. So I wrote a piece – probably 1000 words, 800 words – and I made the drawing.

I think the main thought I had, in speculating on the future of New York, was that, in the past, a lot of discussions had been about New York being the biggest, the greatest, the best – but that all had to do with the size of the city. You know, the size of the skyscrapers, the size of the culture, the population. So I commented in the article about Le Corbusier’s infamous remark that your skyscrapers are too small. Of course, New York dwellers thought he meant, oh, they’re not tall enough – but what he was referring to was that they were too small in their ground plan. His idea of the Radiant City and the Ideal City – this was in the early 30s – was based on very large footprints of buildings, separated by great distances, and, in between the buildings in his vision, were forests, parks, and so forth. But in New York everything was cramped together because the buildings occupied such a limited ground area. So Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren’t tall enough – we’ve got to go higher! Of course, he wasn’t interested at all in their height – more in their plan relationship. Remember, he’s the guy who said, the plan is the generator.

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan, 1999, in case you missed it; view larger].

So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself. I think that comes across in the drawing. It’s not geologically correct, I’m sure, but the idea is there.

There are a couple of other interesting features which I’ll just mention. One is that the only bridge I show is the Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t show the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, for instance. That’s just gone. And I don’t show the Manhattan Bridge or the Williamsburg Bridge, which are the other two bridges on the East River. On the Hudson side, it was interesting, because I looked carefully at the drawings – which I based on an aerial photograph of Manhattan, obviously – and the World Trade Center… something’s going on there. Of course, this was in 1999, and I’m not a prophet and I don’t think that I have any particular telepathic or clairvoyant abilities [laughs], but obviously the World Trade Center has been somehow diminished, and there are things floating in the Hudson next to it. I’m not sure exactly what I had in mind – it was already several years ago – except that some kind of transformation was going to happen there.

BLDGBLOG: That’s actually one of the things I like so much about your work: you re-imagine cities and buildings and whole landscapes as if they have undergone some sort of potentially catastrophic transformation – be it a war or an earthquake, etc. – but you don’t respond to those transformations by designing, say, new prefab refugee shelters or more durable tents. You respond with what I’ll call science fiction: a completely new order of things – a new way of organizing and thinking about space. You posit something radically different than what was there before. It’s exciting.

Woods: Well, I think that, for instance, in Sarajevo, I was trying to speculate on how the war could be turned around, into something that people could build the new Sarajevo on. It wasn’t about cleaning up the mess or fixing up the damage; it was more about a transformation in the society and the politics and the economics through architecture. I mean, it was a scenario – and, I suppose, that was the kind of movie aspect to it. It was a “what if?”

I think there’s not enough of that thinking today in relation to cities that have been faced with sudden and dramatic – even violent – transformations, either because of natural or human causes. But we need to be able to speculate, to create these scenarios, and to be useful in a discussion about the next move. No one expects these ideas to be easily implemented. It’s not like a practical plan that you should run out and do. But, certainly, the new scenario gives you a chance to investigate a direction. Of course, being an architect, I’m very interested in the specifics of that direction – you know, not just a verbal description but: this is what it might look like.

So that was the approach in Sarajevo – as well as in this drawing of Lower Manhattan, as I called it.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods. Future structures of the Korean demilitarized zone (1988) juxtaposed with two views of the architectonic tip of some vast flooded machine-building, from Icebergs (1991)].

BLDGBLOG: Part of that comes from recognizing architecture as its own kind of genre. In other words, architecture has the ability, rivaling literature, to imagine and propose new, alternative routes out of the present moment. So architecture isn’t just buildings, it’s a system of entirely re-imagining the world through new plans and scenarios.

Woods: Well, let me just back up and say that architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, by definition. But, as a multi-disciplinary field, our ideas have to be comprehensive; we can’t just say: “I’ve got a new type of column that I think will be great for the future of architecture.”

BLDGBLOG: [laughs]

Woods: Maybe it will be great – but it’s not enough. I think architects – at least those inclined to understand the multi-disciplinarity and the comprehensive nature of their field – have to visualize something that embraces all these political, economic, and social changes. As well as the technological. As well as the spatial.

But we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right?

So if there’s a dearth of that kind of thinking at the moment, it’s because architects have retreated – and I’m sure a coming generation is going to say: hey, this retreat is not good. We’ve got to imagine more broadly. We have to have a more comprehensive vision of what the future is.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, The Wall Game].

BLDGBLOG: In your own work – and I’m thinking here of the Korean DMZ project or the Israeli wall-game – this “more comprehensive vision” of the future also involves rethinking political structures. Engaging in society not just spatially, but politically. Many of the buildings that you’ve proposed are more than just buildings, in other words; they’re actually new forms of political organization.

Woods: Yeah. I mean, obviously, the making of buildings is a huge investment of resources of various kinds. Financial, as well as material, and intellectual, and emotional resources of a whole group of people get involved in a particular building project. And any time you get a group, you’re talking about politics. To me politics means one thing: How do you change your situation? What is the mechanism by which you change your life? That’s politics. That’s the political question. It’s about negotiation, or it’s about revolution, or it’s about terrorism, or it’s about careful step-by-step planning – all of this is political in nature. It’s about how people, when they get together, agree to change their situation.

As I wrote some years back, architecture is a political act, by nature. It has to do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living. And architecture is a prime instrument of making that change – because it has to do with building the environment they live in, and the relationships that exist in that environment.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Siteline Vienna, 1998].

BLDGBLOG: There’s also the incredibly interesting possibility that a building project, once complete, will actually change the society that built it. It’s the idea that a building – a work of architecture – could directly catalyze a transformation, so that the society that finishes building something is not the same society that set out to build it in the first place. The building changes them.

Woods: I love that. I love the way you put it, and I totally agree with it. I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events. That’s what you’re saying: That by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator; it becomes an initiator.

That, of course, is what I’ve always promoted – but it’s the most difficult thing for people to do. Architects say: well, it’s my client, they won’t let me do this. Or: I have to do what my client wants. That’s why I don’t have any clients! [laughter] It’s true.

Because at least I can put the ideas out there and somehow it might seep through, or filter through, to another level.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, Nine Reconstructed Boxes].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, it seems like a lot of the work you’ve been doing for the past few years – in Vienna, especially – has been a kind of architecture without walls. It’s almost pure space. In other words, instead of walls and floors and recognizable structures, you’ve been producing networks and forces and tangles and clusters – an abstract space of energy and directions. Is that an accurate way of looking at your recent work – and, if so, is this a purely aesthetic exploration, or is this architecture without walls meant to symbolize or communicate a larger political message?

Woods: Well, look – if you go back through my projects over the years, probably the least present aspect is the idea of property lines. There are certainly boundaries – spatial boundaries – because, without them, you can’t create space. But the idea of fencing off, or of compartmentalizing – or the capitalist ideal of private property – has been absent from my work over the last few years.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods. A drawing of tectonic faults and other subsurface tensions, from his San Francisco Bay Project, 1995].

I think in my more recent work, certainly, there are still boundaries. There are still edges. But they are much more porous, and the property lines… [laughs] are even less, should we say, defined or desired.

So the more recent work – like in Vienna, as you mentioned – is harder for people to grasp. Back in the early 90s I was confronting particular situations, and I was doing it in a kind of scenario way. I made realistic-looking drawings of places – of situations – but now I’ve moved into a purely architectonic mode. I think people probably scratch their heads a little bit and say: well, what is this? But I’m glad you grasp it – and I hope my comments clarify at least my aspirations.

Probably the political implication of that is something about being open – encouraging what I call the lateral movement and not the vertical movement of politics. It’s the definition of a space through a set of approximations or a set of vibrations or a set of energy fluctuations – and that has everything to do with living in the present.

All of those lines are in flux. They’re in movement, as we ourselves develop and change.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, System Wien, 2005].


• • •

BLDGBLOG owes a huge thanks to Lebbeus Woods, not only for having this conversation but for proving over and over again that architecture can and should always be a form of radical reconstruction, unafraid to take on buildings, cities, worlds – whole planets.

For more images, meanwhile, including much larger versions of all the ones that appear here, don’t miss BLDGBLOG’s Lebbeus Woods Flickr set. Also consider stopping by Subtopia for an enthusiastic recap of Lebbeus’s appearance at Postopolis! last Spring; and by City of Sound for Dan Hill’s synopsis of the same event.

Robo-Chernobyl and the Alcubierre Drive

In light of an interview I’m about to post with architect Lebbeus Woods, I thought I’d point out two quick bits of recent news.

1) The heavily irradiated failed nuclear complex at Chernobyl will soon be “encased in steel.”
This “arched structure,” New Scientist calls it, “will be 150 metres long and 105 metres tall – big enough to allow the existing sarcophagus and the wrecked reactor to be dismantled and permanently entombed.”
That “existing sarcophagus” is actually a giant shell of concrete that “was hastily built over the wreckage” back in 1986. It has already begun “leaking radioactivity” and needs to be replaced.

[Image: Via the BBC].

The BBC helpfully points out that this “giant arch-shaped structure” will be slipped over top of the existing buildings via purpose-built railways – thus creating Robo-Chernobyl™, the world’s first scientifically viable comic book super-villain-creation lab.

2) Meanwhile, we also read that it might yet be possible to construct “a protective bubble” around future spaceships so that they can “zip across the galaxy.” Each ship would have space-time “bunched up in front of it and stretched out behind it.”
These “new and improved bunchings and stretching of space-time” involve the generation of a “warp bubble,” a “mathematical configuration” of space that will wildly amplify the surrounding radiation – but will allow, in the process, faster-than-light galaxial travel.
Called an Alcubierre drive, named after the physicist who first proposed it, the effect would really be a kind of mathematically augmented architecture that alters the local structure of the universe.

And now onto the interview with Lebbeus Woods…

Hog Island

Around a year ago, Andrew Evans – of Reinterred City fame – sent me this image of a place called Hog Island, Philadelphia.

Hog Island was a shipbuilding yard – in fact, we read, it was “the largest shipyard in the world” during WWI.

The yard covered 846 acres and comprised 250 buildings. It had 80 miles of railroad track; 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring; a hospital; YMCA, hotel, cafeteria, trade school, 12 service restaurants and 5 mess halls. Twenty locomotives, 465 freight cars and 165 motor trucks hauled material within the yard. Hog Island’s telephone traffic was equivalent to that of a city of 140,000 inhabitants.

And though Hog Island is now barely known outside of war historical circles, it was a true industrial behemoth:

There never before had been conceived or executed a plan for the fabrication of ships on such an enormous scale. Every steel fabricating plant in America, 88 of them in all, from Montreal to Kansas City, funneled steel plate into Hog Island and machinery and gear from hundreds of manufacturing plants all over the country poured into the mammoth assembly plant.

It was “a sizable piece of land – about a thousand acres – between Philadelphia and Chester, south of what was known then as League island,” but it was also something of a manmade artifact, an artificial terrain.
Partially constructed from dredged fill in a “glorified bog,” the industrialized earthworks were then turned – as you can see in the image, above – into a kind of machine-island, built to order.
And while this has nothing to do with architecture, I was fascinated to learn, as a former resident of Philadelphia who never knew this, that Philadelphia’s hoagie sandwiches are actually named after the lunches once eaten by workers on Hog Island.
In any case, this island of ship-assembly machines is now lost to the muck, bogs, and marshes – and entombed beneath the concrete runways of Philadelphia International Airport.
Perhaps this could even kick off a new series of architectural guidebooks, written to explore that little-known terrestrial subcategory: manmade islands lost beneath airports…

(Thanks, Andrew!)

Air Unit

Last week, Toronto’s Lateral Architects premiered a brand new “deployable condo unit… that is light as air.”

[Image: The Air Unit by Lateral Architects].

Lateral’s “exciting new freehold residential unit” not only attaches to the sides of existing buildings – indeed, it is “a portable unit that can fit into any community and be attached to any building” – but it also floats on water.
Fill it will helium, meanwhile, and perhaps it will even float on air…
BLDGBLOG would like at least three units, please.
I’ll attach them to the side of the Golden Gate Bridge and telecommute.

Lights among the ruins

The New York Times reports today on what it calls the “Pompeii of World War II,” an abandoned village in Italy now “overtaken by vines and lime trees.”
That village is San Pietro, an “11th-century cobblestone mountain village nestled among wild figs and cactus,” as well as the scene of months of horrific fighting between Allied and German troops.

[Image: The reconstructed abbey atop Monte Cassino, as photographed by Stephanie Kuykendal for The New York Times].

Nearby, atop Monte Cassino, was “one of the holiest sites in Christendom,” a monastery “founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century, a shrine of Western civilization” – indeed, “a center of art and culture dating back nearly to the Roman Empire” – which the Allies bombed into rubble, suspecting (or not suspecting, but caught up nonetheless in the machinations of bad intelligence and unquestioned orders) that German troops had taken refuge there.
“After the battle ended,” we read, the entire chain of small mountain valleys in which San Pietro once stood “would be left uninhabitable for years, demolished by Allied bombs, beset by malaria.”
So this may be a bit rambling, and otherwise unrelated, but while working on The BLDGBLOG Book tonight (due out Spring 2009! from Chronicle Books! buy loads!), I was re-reading W.G. Sebald’s extraordinary On the Natural History of Destruction.
At one point in the book Sebald describes the literally shell-locked life of people who had managed to stay on in the destroyed cities of northern Germany during WWII. He describes “the unappetizing meals they concocted from dirty, wrinkled vegetables and dubious scraps of meat, the cold and hunger that reigned in those underground caverns, the evil fumes, the water that always stood on the cellar floors, the coughing children and their battered and sodden shoes.”
Battling grotesquely bloated rats and enormous green flies, these “cave dwellers,” as Sebald calls them, lived with the “multiplication of species that are usually suppressed in every possible way,” amidst the gravel and shattered windowframes of their now “ravaged city.”
Based on an eyewitness account written by an Allied Air Commander, Sebald then refers to “the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst the monstrous destruction, [which] makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war.”
For some reason the next line just haunts me:

No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in.

Which leads me to ask myself whether it’s simply a factor of my age – I’m not exactly getting younger here – though I do drink a lot of orange juice – or if it’s something more closely related to the weirdly militarized political climate in which we now live, but I’ve started to react to things like this with a kind of concentrated studiousness, as if reading – absurdly – for advice on how to survive my own generation’s coming, perhaps even more calamitous, future.
What “monstrous destruction” of world war and oil shortages and global terror and climate change might we, too, have to face someday?
In twenty years’ time will I be out holding up some pathetic light among the ruins of a destroyed city, wondering where my wife is, dying of thirst, deaf in one ear, covered in radiation burns?
Or is that just a peculiarly American form of pessimist survivalism? Or do I just read too much Sebald?

Sound Pressure

Wired just published a conversation between neurologist Oliver Sacks and journalist Steve Silberman – the latter of whom is also now my neighbor – hello, Steve! – about music, memory, the neurological benefits and pressures of sound, blindness, and the (possible) dangers of urban noise pollution.

[Image: Luigi Russolo and his noise machines… something otherwise irrelevant to this post].

An excerpt:

Wired: When you were growing up, hearing music often required going to see it performed. But iPods make music ubiquitous, like mental air-conditioning. What have we gained or lost by that?

Sacks: At first it would seem to be a wonderful gain. Darwin might have had to go to London to see a concert. But I can’t help wondering if the incidence of earworms and musical hallucinations is higher now, with background music in every public place. You can’t go to a restaurant without music, and they get offended if you ask them to turn it off. They feel it’s part of their creativity – they’re doing it for you.

The brain is very sensitive to music; you don’t have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it. I think we may be exposed to too much loud and repetitive music. One patient of mine has epileptic seizures induced by music and has to wear earplugs in New York City. It’s a dangerous place for him.

Read the rest at Wired.
For some reason, though, this reminds me of an anecdote I read five or six years ago about French minimalist/proto-ambient composer Erik Satie – about whom you can read more in David Toop’s excellent book Ocean of Sound.
So Satie, the anecdote goes, once tried to compose – and have performed, live, in a Paris restaurant – literal background music. It was music meant to flavor a room the way perfume might scent the boudoir: something you don’t quite notice but is there nonetheless. Or, in a slightly more famous analogy, it was music meant to be experienced like furniture: it may be there in the room with you – but you didn’t have to pay attention to it.
It was just part of the design.
In any case, social conventions of the time being what they were, whenever Satie’s musicians, installed there in the restaurant, started to play, all the diners would stop talking, put their utensils down, and politely listen.
But that wasn’t the point.
Satie thus had to walk around the restaurant almost continuously for the next half-hour, passing from patron to patron, demanding that they stop listening to his music…

Urban Noise Generation

The Observer this week takes a look at the sounds of cities.
“For some,” we read, “living in a city is a loud, unpleasant babble of intrusive noise. For others it is a soundscape of calming tones that lift the spirits and brighten the day. Now a £1m, three-year research project is building a database of noises that people say improve their environment. It will translate those findings into design principles to help architects create sweeter-sounding cities.”
Wonderfully, the leader of the study “is looking for members of the public to take part in mass ‘sound walks’ through cities or in laboratory listening tests, where the team will use MRI scanners to measure participants’ brain activity as they are played a variety of urban noises.”
They will thus develop an artificial soundtrack for the urban future.

Some of the “surprisingly agreeable” sounds discovered thus far include “car tyres on wet, bumpy asphalt, the distant roar of a motorway flyover, the rumble of an overground train and the thud of heavy bass heard on the street outside a nightclub.”
We even read that the sounds of “skateboarders practising in underground car parks” are considered “kind to the ear.”
As part of his auditory interest in urban design, then, the leader of the study wants “to see more water features and sound-generating sculptures next to busy roads,” and he wants to use buildings and trees “to scatter, deaden or reflect sound.”
The entirety of city space could thus be instrumentalized – literally made more musical.
However, I’m curious how this study will deal with different moral and/or cultural expectations for urban noise. The sounds of neighbors having sex, for instance, and those who voyeuristically listen-in: should you play copulatory noises through hidden speakers in the downtown park? Thus calming a certain segment of the population?
What about the Muslim call to prayer?
And could your city someday start a season-long program, inviting sonic grandmasters to come in once a month and play new sounds for the whole metropolis, resoundtracking highways and civic infrastructure, giving the sewers a tune, adding audio to everything?
Or is that just called a radio DJ?

(Thanks, Nicolai! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Audio Architecture and New York City in Sound).

Inhaling 9/11

[Image: The South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11; photographer unknown].

On the flight over to Chicago last week I read an intense and frightening article in Discover about the wide range of post-9/11 illnesses that have begun to develop in New York City.
As most people no doubt know, tens upons tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of people literally inhaled the World Trade Center towers in the collapse and aftermath of 9/11.
It was the malign aerosolization of late modernist architecture, producing “the most dangerous atmospheric conditions ever to occur on American soil.”
The “sky was glittering with glass” that day:

A toxic cloud composed of industrial waste and human remains crept out from the aching, smoldering pit at Ground Zero and wound its way into the adjoining streets. Its vapors circled around and up buildings, pumped in and out of nostrils, mouths, and lungs, and stung the eyes of every woman, child, man, bird, and beast within a wide range. It spread itself on building walls and inside boiler rooms and left its trail on parked cars, handrails, and public benches. That day, New York City was blinded by a perpetually sickening haze. It poisoned the minds of politicians who acted with hubris and paranoia. It obscured the vision of responders and residents, many of whom acted with heroism and reckless bravado, never thinking that their actions might be endangering themselves, their families, their cities, and their very future. The cloud billowed southward, over the river, enveloping everything in the dust and debris of blown-apart lives.

Breathing this “toxic cloud” has led to people coughing up “brown and pinkish-bloody” clots of tissue; it has led to organ failure; and the article even introduces us to a man who, five years later, “started bleeding everywhere – out of my ears, mouth, penis, and anus, and none of the doctors could figure out why.”
Indeed, the “number of seriously ill New Yorkers could climb to 300,000 in the near future,” and these serious illnesses run the gamut from “internal chemical burns” and “chronic respiratory and gastrointestinal conditions,” many of which will be fatal, to “rare blood cancers” and asthma attacks.

[Image: “Within a few hours’ time, a person exposed to the fumes could ingest toxins that would otherwise take a year to accumulate in a typical environment”; photographer unknown].

None of which seems surprising when you read about what actually went up in the air that day:

The Twin Towers contained tens of thousands of computer terminals, each housing about four pounds of lead, and an untold number of fluorescent bulbs that contained mercury. Released metal particles from the smoldering pit of the World Trade Center were so fine that they could easily slip past a paper face mask and reach deep into lung tissue, where they are poorly soluble in lung fluid. Metals and glass can remain trapped there for long periods of time and make their way into the heart.

It’s also important to note, for my voting American readers, that the leadership of Rudy Giuliani does not fare very well in this article.

[Image: After the towers’ collapse; photographer unknown].

After much more detail about both the “plume” itself and about the various environmental failures that occurred up and down the political chain of command, the article ends magnificently: “While the courts try to determine who is responsible for the environmental debacle following 9/11, countless New Yorkers continue to live and work near Lower Manhattan with the assumption that it is safe. The dust is now out of sight, out of mind, and possibly in their lungs, hearts, and bloodstreams.”
So this is what happens when you pulverize and burn modern architecture: plumes of cadmium, thallium, benzene, silver, zinc, osmium, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid, nickel, and lead drift outward into the city, snowing invisibly into local waterways, settling on windowsills and dusting the floors of homes, shops, and offices, salting food on plates at outdoor cafes, entering bloodstreams and sticking to clothes. Fiberglass and fire retardants, arsenic and rubber – asbestos, soot, and paper – all enter the atmosphere and form undetectable weather systems too vaporous and ghostlike to track.
Which leads me to wonder about what sort of post-bombardment aerial conditions existed in cities like Dresden or Hiroshima, after they were destroyed in World War II, when architecture was not made from such things – when there were not home computers and circuitboards to burn and when homes weren’t full of flame retardant fabrics and PVC.
Were different and earlier forms of pulverized architecture somehow safer to breathe?
In fact, if I can be excused a brief moment of contextually inappropriate speculation, would it be possible to impregnate buildings with good things – with good chemicals: with vitamins and medicines and even seeds – so that future 9/11s release beneficial plumes and so that the inhalation of architectural smoke is no longer catastrophic?
Or would that just encourage terrorist attacks, arson, and urban warfare?
In any case, the article in Discover is well worth a half-hour or so of your time – especially if you lived or worked in lower Manhattan or Brooklyn during the weeks after 9/11.

Galaxy Chicago

[Image: Famous buildings in Chicago, via the Chicago Architecture Foundation].

I’m in Chicago, wandering around the city for the first real time since I left six years ago, looking at a hundred thousand new brick-and-limestone private condo developments, crossing and recrossing the Chicago River on foot, staying in various hotels, visiting houses, checking out gigantic roof decks, writing up stories for work, attending dinners, feeling almost overwhelmingly nostalgic, giving a talk about BLDGBLOG, hanging out soon with this guy… but I’ll almost definitely be back in San Francisco before I have time to post again.
In the meantime, hello from Chicago!

A Pavilion in New York

[Image: Glowing pavilion by Minsuk Cho, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC].

New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture today kicks off nearly a month’s worth of events, in celebration of the Storefront’s 25th anniversary. The list of speakers is long and well-curated; they’ll be speaking inside Minsuk Cho’s pavilion, in Petrosino Park, and the nightly events will last until October 16.
So if you’re in New York, you now have something to do every night for the next 26 days. Be sure to stop by.

(The Storefront for Art and Architecture, of course, also hosted Postopolis!)

It came from outer space

This is how the world will end: with a quiet bit of news on the BBC.
I got home from work last night to find out, incredibly, that “[h]undreds of people in Peru have needed treatment after an object from space – said to be a meteorite – plummeted to Earth in a remote area.”

[Image: A spectacular glimpse of the Leonid meteor shower, circa 1999; photo by Wally Pacholka].

The object “left a deep crater” that immediately began “spewing fetid gases,” and everyone who has “visited the scene” has since “been complaining of headaches, vomiting and nausea.”
A local villager, worried for himself and for his neighbors, says: “We don’t know what is going on at the moment, that is what we are worried about.”
It’s a virus from space!
So I half-seriously expected to wake up this morning and read that the entire population of Peru has been wiped out by clouds of alien zombie-dust; that militaries have been mobilized; that families are now scrambling in all possible directions to find a safety that will no longer come; and that the catastrophe continues to spread… In eight days’ time it reaches the streets of San Francisco, where I’ll be live-blogging the outbreak from behind a plywood barricade.
But it turns out that we don’t need to worry after all: the scientists quoted in the original article are right.
It wasn’t an object from space at all but “a fireball,” the appearance of which led people to hike out into the wild and find “a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane rich organic matter.”
This “rich organic matter” made everyone ill – infected by rot and vegetation. It’s a kind of petro-illness.