Month: September 2008

[Image: New flats, part of the AHMM master plan in Barking, England, specifically cited by the BBC as being so small that they’re mere slums in the making; via Building Design].

“Are the gleaming new apartment buildings of the past decade the inner-city slums of tomorrow?” the BBC asks this morning in an interesting, if insufficiently argued, opinion piece about the state of private housing in England.
New, privately developed apartment complexes there – the exact same apartment complexes of visual interest to architecture magazines such as the one for which I work – might, in the end, simply be too small and too cramped to become anything other than the slums of tomorrow.
Affordable now, ghettoized later.
The problem, the essay argues, is that there are no real minimum space standards for private housing developments in England. Tiny flats suitable only for single men and women, or for weekend getaways, are filling up valuable land in city centers – which is great for the duration of a real estate boom, but which might have sociologically frightening future implications.
“Alone in the UK,” the BBC points out, “Scotland does have legislation on minimum sizes for homes in the commercial sector. Northern Ireland has rules on social housing – while in England and Wales many local authorities also have size regulations for affordable housing. But none of this covers private sector developments.”
One point, by no means minor, that goes totally unexplored comes from the BBC‘s own table of apartment space data. There we see that the average apartment size in Italy is actually smaller than the average apartment size in England.
So why all the scare talk about future slums and ghettos? Is there a legitimate concern here that smaller living spaces might become crime-infested labyrinths when the economy dries up – or is this simply fear of other forms of social organization?
Nuclear families living in several comfortable rooms = good.
Single men and women living alone in small apartments = moral hazard.
In any case, I thought suburbs were the next slums?
In fact, it’d be interesting to do a kind of comparative slum futurology: to see what building types different countries and cultures fear will become the “next slum.” What does it say about you, politically? On the left, perhaps, you think it’s the suburbs, waiting to be taken over by wildcats and gangs; on the right, you think it’s affordable housing.
But who’s got the data on their side?

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking on a panel at the upcoming Art + Environment Conference hosted by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from October 2-4.
Other speakers include Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, artist and architect Vito Acconci, photographer Michael Light, artists Fritz Haeg and Katie Holten, Bill Gilbert from Land Arts of the American West, and cultural organizer Cheryl Haines, among many others.
The entire thing is being moderated by William L. Fox, a prolific writer, poet, and friend who often documents his own travels through extreme natural environments, describing those landscapes’ effects upon human cognition.
Here is a PDF with all the information you’ll need to register for the conference; for more info about the speakers themselves, and their conference schedules, check out the conference website.

[Image: Panel description; view larger].

My own panel, “Placing Space,” will be on Saturday, October 4, at 9:30am. Hopefully I’ll see a few of you there!
I hope to come back not only with several new posts, but possibly with some interviews. Stop by if you get a chance.

Perhaps in the spirit of the Wonders of the World, the nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, has been declared a national historic site.
“National Historic Landmarks,” the Department of Energy explains, “can be nationally significant districts, sites, buildings, structures, and/or objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.”
In a late-August news release (PDF) we read:

U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer today announced the designation of DOE’s B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark and unveiled DOE’s plan for a new public access program to enable American citizens to visit B Reactor during the 2009 tourist season. The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II (WWII).

As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, however, Hanford is but “one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.” Another site is the so-called Chicago Pile.
The atomic infrastructure of mid-century American warfare is thus slowly being converted into a distributed landscape of historic monuments.
Perhaps it’s dark tourism with a physics bent – the national memory of nuclear fission, a geography of Cold War nostalgia. They are places where the atom opened up – a series of small entryways into matter.

Google has filed a patent for what the New York Times describes as “mobile data center platforms out at sea.”

[Image: A view of the R/P FLIP ship, which has absolutely nothing to do with Google’s offshore server plan; it just looks cool and seems appropriate. Image altered by Alexander Trevi].

This means “stacking containers filled with servers, storage systems and networking gear on barges or other platforms.” These would be “‘crane-removable’ data center modules on ships.” From the actual patent application:

In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in this era of alternative energy sources, “Google has theorized about powering these ocean data centers with energy gained just from water splashing against the side of the barges.”

[Image: From Google’s patent application for servers at sea; via the New York Times].

I have to assume, then, that we’re moving ever closer to true deep-water city-states – only they won’t be libertarian ocean-going homesteads, after all, they’ll be distributed networks of supercomputing villages afloat on, and drawing power from, the tides.
Two weeks ago, meanwhile, the NYTimes also looked at the privatization of civic infrastructure – but perhaps Google’s literally offshore experiment in information technology implies a coming world of privatized services at sea.
A fleet of tankers shows up in a nearby port one day… and suddenly your city has telephone services. It’s Archigram‘s instant city all over again, but on the level of specific – and highly billable – urban amenities.
The services show up. The network takes over.
Your city will never be the same.

[Image: The Instant City at work; diagrams by Peter Cook/Archigram. An original interview with Peter Cook appears in the forthcoming BLDGBLOG Book].

I’m further reminded of the five-week-long power outage that struck Auckland, New Zealand, just slightly more than ten years ago. Peter Gutmann describes some of the possible ship-borne solutions to that city’s loss of electricity:

Apparently the idea of moving ships from the naval base on the other side of the harbour across to the Auckland waterfront to act as floating generators was considered, but there are problems with feeding the power from the ships to the city. There’s also the problem that there’s nothing around which can generate even a fraction of the power required. Another idea which was considered is using one of the Cook Straight ferries (which could in theory provide around 10MW) as a floating generator (the term “ferry” is a considerable understatement). Currently a couple of waterfront businesses are being run with power from ships acting as floating generators, and when both repaired cables failed their testing, Mercury finally brought in a diesel-electric trans-Tasman freighter, the Union Rotorua, to act as a 12MW floating generator, and is considering bringing in another ship or installing generators on barges.

In any case, the seafaring future of civic infrastructure is something we’ll have to keep our eyes on. Entire new untold types of urban experience could be yours the minute that strange shape on the horizon comes in to dock.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

Wildcats are taking over the foreclosed homes of Southern California. According to the neighbor of an abandoned house near Lake Elsinore, “this is the first she has heard of a wild animal taking over a foreclosure.”

[Image: Karen Brown/The Press-Enterprise].

So is the wild coming back for good – or has the ongoing U.S. real estate bubble simply produced temporarily ideal conditions for the return of bobcats and other large feline predators?
After all, what sort of burgeoning ecosystem does the world of foreclosed homes represent? Mold, lichen, and vines; bears, deer, and wildcats.
Repurposed McMansions, emptied of their human inhabitants, are filled in later by a troupe of mountain lions.
I sense a children’s film here.
But is this really the way the wild will reclaim our world? Starting with foreclosed homes and moving inward, to the centers of cities, from there. Soon ivy crawls across the well-polished tables of New York boardrooms, as the suburbs fall prey to nests of field mice.