Month: June 2009

What do you do when you’re trying to shut down a high-profile prison for unofficially accused international terrorists? Ship the prisoners off to a nation of disappearing islands.
The U.S. might shortly begin sending Chinese Muslim prisoners from its facility at Guantanamo Bay – itself an extra-judicial territory, or semi-sovereign administrative enclave, that both is and is not part of the United States – to a terrestrially complicated new situation in the Pacific island nation of Palau.
Palau, of course, is disappearing.
From one black hole to another, then.

(Via @pruned).

Just a quick note that I’m off to Turin tomorrow to participate in a conference called I Realize: The Art of Disruption, if any readers out there are in that city of long shadows and automobiles.

[Image: The massive Mole Antonelliana, Turin (1875); view larger].

The point of the conference is to look at “breaking radically with the past, moving the horizon and embracing ambitious challenges.”
Even better, it takes place inside a “Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park” (here’s a map) – and the other speakers include the one and only Bruce Sterling, legendary designer Peter Saville, architect Andrea Branzi, Nicolas Nova, Jennifer Higgie, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Nicola Perullo (director of Slow Food Italia), and many, many others.
If you’re around, be sure to introduce yourself (although my Italian, unfortunately, è inesistente).

[Image: A Roman Triumph following the sack of Jerusalem].

Amongst the many books I’m reading here in Rome this month – including Tobias Jones’s surprisingly good Dark Heart of Italy, the incredible Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (J.G. Ballard wrote that he “found Paxton’s post-mortem deeply unsettling, with its strong hint that the corpse [of fascism] might sit up at any moment and seize us by the throat” – Exhibit A here might be Andrew Brons‘s election this week to the European Parliament), and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog – I’m making my way through two books by Mary Beard.
Beard, of course, was the subject of a long, two-part interview with BLDGBLOG back in 2007.
What I want to mention here comes from her book The Roman Triumph; it’s only a brief quotation, but I like it.
At one point Beard refers to the “theaters and porticoes” built in ancient Rome using wealth taken during Pompey‘s “eastern campaigns” in Armenia and elsewhere. However, she writes:

The term “theaters and porticoes” hardly does justice to this vast building complex, which stretched from the present day Piazza Campo del Fiori to the Largo Argentina, covering an area of some 45,000 square meters. A daring – and, for Rome, unprecedented – combination of temple, pleasure park, theater, and museum, it wrote Pompey’s name permanently into the Roman cityscape. Even now, though no trace remains visible on the ground, its buried foundations (and particularly the distinct curve of the theater) determine the street plan and housing patterns of the city above; it remains a ghostly template which accounts for the surprising twists and turns of today’s back-streets, alleyways, and mansions.

The not entirely surprising realization that the present-day street grid of Rome is actually an articulation of other, previously buried cities – cities not lost to history, then, but accessible in outline through the indirect archaeology of contemporary urban planning – reminds me of something that came up back at Postopolis! LA.

[Image: Fallen Fruit‘s map of the lost orchards of Silver Lake].

During their presentation, the ingenious duo Fallen Fruit mentioned that, when they were mapping fruit trees in today’s Los Angeles, they stumbled upon the borders of much older, abandoned fruit orchards.
In other words, what appeared simply to be a random fig tree growing in someone’s front yard was, when seen on a map together with other such trees, actually the remnant presence of a now-forgotten farm.
Those trees, to use Beard’s term, are the “ghostly template” from an earlier phase of land use.
There is a different grid inside the grid, you might say – where each tree becomes something like a legal document, marking the outer boundaries of a lost landholding.
Of course, both of these examples together bring to mind the lost airports of Los Angeles, those geographies of aerial experience that now sit buried and all but forgotten beneath millions of tons of pavement throughout the greater L.A. region.
Other such examples are easy to come by – but their interest, for me, never dissipates. Whether it’s the lost rivers of London still giving shape to the street plan above (or lost streams of Manhattan turning into underground fishing ponds), there are remnant geographies and ghostly templates everywhere.
In fact, as I recently wrote in an introduction to photographer Shaun O’Boyle’s forthcoming book Modern Ruins: Architectural Monuments of the Mid-Atlantic – definitely check it out upon publication in 2010 – this even includes our own bodies: forgotten anatomies still make themselves known through the structure and layout of our nerves and bones.
But Rome, Los Angeles, London – these urban examples simply give our ghostly ancestors architectural shape.

Reader Louis Schultz has pointed out the work of Lithuanian-born artist Aleksandra Kasuba, who used curved surfaces of fabric stretched and attached between space frames in order to create inhabitable rooms and corridors.

[Images: The Live-in-Environment (1971) by Aleksandra Kasuba; the project “was built on a parlor floor of a brownstone house in New York City,” we read. “The intent was to abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature”].

These ephemeral installations were intended, spatially, as a way to “abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature.” I love that latter caveat: to retain the experiential impact of unexpected natural vistas without simply copying, or simulating, the spatial details and material palette of the natural world.
Instead, a somewhat stark world of undecorated surfaces curves around us – call it biomorphic minimalism – thus eliding the differences between architecture and large-scale tailoring.
In any case, her Live-in-Environment, from 1971, seen in the images above, is a great example of this – but don’t miss the Roof Deck Study from 1974; the Barbarella-meets-IBM world of torqued geometry from her Office Renovation Study (1975); the aerial tunnels of Art-in-Science I (1977), which look like some megafaunic form of undersea life, stretched through the canopies of a North American thicket (“With the assistance of three students during an eight week stay,” Kasuba writes, “we explored the topology of 78 fabric structures, hardened 32 with resins, and erected 4 weather structures”); and the simplicity of Blue Shade (1978).
Better yet, Kasuba supplies a section called How It Was Done – where you can learn how to create finishes, arches, and doors, for instance – and this includes Kasuba’s extraordinary, lo-fi guide to shells, tube structures, and minimal surfaces.
It’s what The North Face might have become had their tent division been bought by Kenneth Snelson.

[Image: Little Rome Ruins by Bernat Gallemí].

An early burst of thunder woke me up this morning, before a brief wash of rain blew through – but what was extraordinary was that the sound of the thunder didn’t pass all at once: it kept opening and echoing, as if moving outward through the city to trace the shapes of piazzas, streets, river banks, and alleyways.
There was a kind of Dopplered geometry to it – an acoustic version of Rome exactly opposite the city’s angles and walls. Live here long enough, and perhaps you could even tell when a storm has reached the Campo del Fiori – echolocating yourself amidst urban geography – because the thunder has opened out again, getting louder, or more resonant, only then to dampen itself back in a tight squeeze through surrounding alleyways. The sound moves through the city like a spider.
You might say that thunder could be used here as a kind of horizontal space-detection device. It’s urban radar: an acoustic sensing of the city that moves through that city, seeking out cracks and passageways. Only to fill those empty spaces with sound.
A guild of blind mapmakers uses thunderstorms to pursue prehistoric radar cartography.
It occurred to me, though, that every city – or, at least, every city with a different street grid – must react to thunder differently. Urban design becomes a direct sonic engagement with the atmosphere through storms, using the unique form of your city as a precise acoustic frame for the sky.
Could there even be building types that funnel the sound of thunder? Like Athanasius Kircher‘s talking statues, they would be talking buildings: acoustically activated by thunder for the purpose of public spectacle.
You could actually test people with this: put them blindfolded in different locations during foreign thunderstorms and ask them to deduce where they are from the widening concussions of sound around them.
Moscow, Cairo, Rome, Fez. London, Barcelona, New York. All with their own sonic signatures: you pinpoint an aerial detonation and acoustically trace its spatial after-effects.

I’m in Rome now for the month of June, living across from a prison near the banks of the Tiber, listening to seagulls, on a fairly awful and inexplicably expensive wireless internet connection, fearing that I might only be able to post every few days.

In fact, my early morning attempts to find domestic hotspots – putting my computer near the windows, or moving books and papers just a few more feet away – reminds me of stories I’ve read about high-end audio equipment aficionados, people who purchase arcane bits of scientifically dismissible, wildly overpriced stereo attachments in the hopes that they can affect, clarify, or otherwise improve their home-listening experience.
Pieces of piezoelectric crystal, or unsustainably harvested rain forest wood milled into odd shapes – combined with bizarre new alloys imported from metallurgical research labs in southern Germany – all wired up and placed around your home stereo, like a deviant altar. Where consumer goods meet Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law.
But is there an equivalent for wireless internet connections?
You put a small piece of copper near your USB port, hoping for magical cross-interference, or, in a fit of antihistamine-influenced mania, you rewire your whole house, splicing electrically unnecessary strands of tellurium through the switchboards inside the walls.
Or why not take the Ghostbusters route and construct a whole building as an urban antenna, an architectural attractor for that strange wireless haunting that allows you to Google things in foreign cities from a desktop that isn’t yours.
In other words, are there micro-practices of wireless superstition that people engage in so that they can achieve, or believe they achieve, stronger wireless internet signals?
You implant rods inside all of Rome’s statuary, and inside the ruined walls of the city’s periphery, in order to boost your home internet access. A conspiratorial geometry of antennas that no one else recognizes, pulsing with airborne data.
Rome, reconceived as a counter-Vatican of wireless downloads. Catholicism of the megabyte.
It’s what might happen if Telecom Italia opened an urban design wing after reading too much Aleister Crowley.
In any case, while the internet is still functioning here, I also wanted to thank everybody who came out to see Thrilling Wonder Stories last week at the Architectural Association. My own talk was something of a jumble, to be honest – sorry about that, especially for those of you who were meeting me for the first time – but the rest of the day really impressed.
For those of you who missed it, participant Jim Rossignol has a great write-up of the event on his blog; Rossignol’s account of Francois Roche is well worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

Then the most extraordinary storm of science-madness came from Francois Roche (of architects R&Sie) whose thick accent masked incredible phrases: “strategies of sickness,” “protocolising the witch in the forest,” “the necrosis of the building,” “the penis of the wall”… He talked about feeding death and traditional fairy tales into design, and about creating a machine that would build an un-navigable glass maze in the courtyard between buildings, into which people would wander, and then die, unable to escape without GPS. “They die to become part of the building,” he said, grinning, and propping expensive sunglasses on his styled bonce. He talked about a building which would be constructed from vast, moulded versions of bullet holes on wet clay, covered in rotting vegetation collected from the Korean de-militarized zone by a purpose-built “witch” robot, referencing Tarkovsky’s Stalker on the way.

With any luck, the whole of Thrilling Wonder Stories will soon be made into an AA publication by the end of this summer.
So expect more posts soon – and if anyone has tips for obscure archaeological sites in Rome that need to be visited, let me know.