Month: October 2009

On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes

[Image: A ruined dock at the Philadelphia Lazaretto; photo by David Barnes].

David Barnes is associate professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on medicine and public health. His most recent research project involves the Philadelphia Lazaretto, a 19th-century quarantine station located on an island in the Delaware River.

As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Barnes about the origins and history of the now-abandoned Lazaretto, including ongoing attempts to preserve the site today. In the process, our conversation covers the legal nature of Colonial-era quarantine, the cultural impact of epidemic disease, and the psychological effects of involuntary medical isolation,

[Image: The Philadelphia Lazaretto, via Wikipedia].

• • •

BLDGBLOG: How did you first get into the study of quarantine, and specifically of the Philadelphia Lazaretto?

David Barnes: The history of quarantine was actually not my idea of a burning historiographical problem. In fact, I was working on two completely different projects when I first saw the Lazaretto—but the sight of it just really stuck in my mind. I decided to read everything that had been written about the history of this place—but I soon found that essentially nothing had been written, in a city where it seems like half the buildings in Center City have two or three books written about their history. This is the oldest surviving quarantine facility in the Western hemisphere, and the seventh oldest in the world—and almost nothing has been written about its history.

BLDGBLOG: Why do you think it’s been so overlooked?

Barnes: I don’t really know. I don’t have a good answer for that, even though I’ve asked myself that question many times. It’s possible that it’s just an accident, and the right person at the right time simply hasn’t come along. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that the history of quarantine is a large, robust subfield of the history of medicine. Generally, historians have written about specific diseases or specific outbreaks; in many of those works, quarantine figures only fairly marginally.

[Image: Philadelphia’s abandoned Lazaretto as it now stands, photographed by David Barnes].

Edible Geography: Can you describe the Philadelphia Lazaretto, and tell us something of what you have found out about it?

Barnes: Sure. The first law relating to quarantine in Pennsylvania was signed by William Penn in 1700, in response to an epidemic of yellow fever in 1699 in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded by William Penn and his gang in 1682, of course—so yellow fever wasn’t far behind. But quarantine itself was not a systematic policy until later in the eighteenth century.

Sometime around 1743, the Pennsylvania colonial government bought an island at the mouth of the Schuylkill River, where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware near Fort Mifflin (which was also built around the same time). It was called by various names: Fishers Island and Province Island, and then later it became known as State Island. It’s just northeast of where the airport is today.

I should say that I’ve developed a little bit of a pedantic pet peeve about the word quarantine, because people use quarantine to refer to what I call isolation. Whenever there is the threat of swine flu or whatever other contagious disease, there are always various policies or proposals to isolate patients or isolate the households of patients or infected people—in other words, impose some form of voluntary or mandatory house arrest or hospitalization somewhere. To me, that’s not quarantine, that’s isolation. Quarantine, in the strict sense, refers to trying to prevent a disease from entering a community from the outside: basically, the interception and detention of vessels, vehicles, cargo, people, or whatever, for a period of time. That’s what quarantine is to me.

Anyway, in the 1740s, Fishers Island/Province Island was bought by the colonial government of Pennsylvania, and structures were built for the accommodation of vessels, passengers, cargo, and patients. Those structures are occasionally referred to as the Lazaretto, though it’s usually referred to as the Marine Hospital. Occasionally you’ll see it referred to as the Pest House, or just Province Island.

Quarantine was enforced on a sporadic basis at that location for the rest of the eighteenth century. As the city grew, the inhabited part of the city got closer and closer to the island. What was a pretty remote location in 1740 was not that far away at all from the city by the 1790s, and it was not at all hard for people in the city to have contact with people at the marine hospital. So you have friends and relatives trying to make contact with people undergoing quarantine; you have merchants trying to pick up their cargo from ships undergoing quarantine; you have people passing messages back and forth… It was just not very hard for Philadelphians to get there and to have contact with people under quarantine, even though it was against the law.

Then comes 1793. There was a devastating epidemic of yellow fever that year, the likes of which had not been seen before. The best estimate is that ten percent of the city’s population died in two months. A huge percentage of the population fled. Basically, anyone who had anywhere to go, left, including many of the doctors. It was a calamity.

By then, the United States was an independent nation, and its capital was Philadelphia. The Federal Government was sitting here, the Supreme Court, the President—they were all there in Philadelphia. They mostly hightailed it out of town, too, and the national government was brought to a standstill.

The scenes of devastation that are written about in letters and surviving testimony are absolutely heart-wrenching. It was terrifying, it was gruesome—but it was also heroic, poignant, and inspiring, because some people didn’t leave. Some people selflessly volunteered to tend to the sick, and to help keep the city going in the midst of an emergency. Dr. Benjamin Rush—a titan of American medicine—stayed, and he cared for patients from before sunrise to long after sundown. Of course, he also bled them profusely and gave them huge doses of what was, essentially, mercury—he was a controversial figure because of his treatment methods.

Others, including a community of free blacks in Philadelphia, led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, organized groups to take patients to Bush Hill, the emergency hospital that was set up in the city, and to provide clothing, food, and care for the sick people and their families. It was believed by many that black people were immune to yellow fever; the idea was that, because blacks were native to tropical climates, they were immune to tropical diseases. But, of course, that was not the case, and many blacks did die in that epidemic.

So there are stories of heroism, and stories of tremendous suffering. The reason I’m going on at length about 1793 is that I have come to believe that this experience was nationally formative. I think there was sort of a 9/11 effect, for lack of a better term, that took place after a catastrophe like that. There were many other yellow fever epidemics, in many other port cities, but 1793 in Philadelphia was, in a sense, like Ground Zero. It was something that nobody believed could happen; it was in the capital; it was just unimaginable.

The yellow fever went away with the first frost, as cooler temperatures arrived—but what is perhaps most terrifying of all was that it came back. It didn’t come back in 1794 or in 1795, but it came back especially severely in 1797, 1798, and 1799. A deep trauma, I think, was inflicted by those recurring epidemics. Clearly, quarantine at the Marine Hospital was not protecting the city against disease.

[Image: A painting of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, “probably by Frank Taylor, noted Philadelphia illustrator, ca. 1900,” Barnes notes].

BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting that the Marine Hospital was not a bio-secure facility in any modern sense; it was simply geographically isolated enough to function as a site of quarantine. Its medical usefulness was undone by urban sprawl.

Barnes: Exactly. The reason the hospital was there in the first place was because it was on the river. Ships could anchor there conveniently. Most importantly, though, it was far away from the city. It’s not as though the air on Province Island was especially healthful or clean—it was just the distance from downtown Philadelphia.

However, by the 1790s, it was clearly not working. Many people believed it was simply too easy for those undergoing quarantine to have contact with people from the city. There are countless stories of violations of the quarantine laws—people leaving ships or people coming on board the ships.

The Board of Health of Philadelphia was established in response to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. It started meeting in 1794, and it quickly determined that the city needed a better quarantine facility—one that was farther away and that had much more rigorous enforcement.

[Image: An aerial view of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, ca. 1929].

BLDGBLOG: Did that come with any constitutional issues, as to whether or not the Board of Health was violating the rights of the people it held in quarantine? How much of that sort of discourse was there at the time?

Barnes: There wasn’t much discourse about infringement of liberties, at least in the way we would see it today. However, the Board of Health was always politically controversial. There were controversies about the division of powers between the state and the city authorities, and there were always arguments about the extent of the Board of Health’s power.

Complaints by individual people who were enduring the unpleasant experience of quarantine usually did not take the form of complaints about their rights being violated. Rather, it was that they had other things to do. It’s boring; they need to be somewhere else; it’s interfering with their business; it’s interfering with their lives and it’s taking too long. Those sorts of more mundane, less philosophical complaints predominate.

On the other hand, there are constant complaints about the way that this authority was used—that the Board of Health was overdoing it, or overreaching, or interfering excessively with commerce. In fact, “interfering excessively with commerce” is the number one complaint I’ve found.

In any case, in 1799 the Board of Health chose and bought a new location on Tinicum Island, which is the site of the Lazaretto that I’m studying—the one that is still intact today. That site was roughly twelve to fourteen miles from the city proper. It was much more remote, and nobody lived nearby. The new Lazaretto they built there was a state-of-the-art facility—there was nothing like it anywhere else in North America and possibly even the world. They opened it in 1801, and it operated continuously until 1895.

Edible Geography: What does “state-of-the-art” mean for a Lazaretto at that time? What design rubric or template were they using?

Barnes: That’s a really good question. One of the main things was its size. It’s a ten-acre site, and the main building is huge. Today, it still looks like a very large, very stately building. It’s even, I would say, beautiful.

In terms of outbuildings, there was a separate two-story house for the Lazaretto physician, and another separate two-story home for the Quarantine Master. There were bargemen’s quarters and a watch-house right on the edge of the river. There was a United States Customs Facility right next door with a large warehouse for the storage of cargo undergoing quarantine. There were also smaller outbuildings like a kitchen and a barn, or carriage house.

Interestingly, the main gate to the Lazaretto site still survives—it’s a gorgeous, ornate, wrought-iron gate that’s a little bit overgrown with vines now. That was where all transactions with the outside world took place. You had to get written permission from the Board of Health before approaching the gate of the Lazaretto. In other words, all relatives and friends visiting those who were undergoing quarantine, or visiting those who lived and worked at the Lazaretto, had to get permission simply to approach the gate.

Then there was another hospital that was sometimes called the Dutch hospital, or the smallpox hospital. It was a fairly decent-sized, two-story building, built in 1804-5 on the northwestern corner of the property. It does not survive today.

Basically, it was a very expansive facility. It had the ability to house a large number of patients and to provide for the daily needs of the crew and passengers undergoing quarantine. I certainly don’t think it operated any differently, medically-speaking, from other hospitals or quarantine hospitals of the time. It was fairly well-staffed with full-time employees, at least during the quarantine season. The quarantine season varied. For most of the nineteenth century, the season was, by law, June 1st to October 1st—but the Board of Health could declare an early start or a late finish to quarantine. In really bad years, where there were lots of epidemics, or reports of epidemics, in various geographic regions, the quarantine season could last all year.

I think it’s really the size and extent—the staffing and capacity—of the Lazaretto that made it state-of-the-art at the time.

[Image: Photo by David Barnes].

BLDGBLOG: How exactly would one preserve the Lazaretto today—would you be preserving only the buildings themselves, or could you somehow preserve, even recreate, the experience of quarantine? Further, at what stage of its life would the Lazaretto be most usefully preserved—as it was built in 1801, or as it was closed down in 1895?

Barnes: All excellent questions. I’ll take your last one first.

The site did change over time, but it didn’t change all that much. The grounds certainly changed—gardens and ornamental hedges were planted. The most detailed surviving description of the site that I’ve been able to find is from a newspaper article in 1879. It’s a very, very detailed description of the buildings and grounds. We also have a gorgeous watercolor, but it’s undated; the best guess of the archivists and curators who have studied it is that it’s from the middle of the nineteenth century. That doesn’t tell us much, but you can make some educated guesses based on the way the people are dressed in it. We also do have some photographs from the 1880s and onwards.

Interestingly, the site and the buildings later went through several incarnations. It became the summer home of the Philadelphia Athletic Club—so it was a summer resort retreat for the wealthy elite of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Athletics baseball team, which are today the Oakland A’s, played at the Lazaretto. They played on the northern half of the grounds. There are even some depictions of it laid out as a baseball field. Then, beginning around 1920, it was the first seaplane base in North America—an aviation training school for seaplane pilots. That’s what it was for most of the twentieth century.

As far as preservation goes, I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent thinking about this. My own fantasy is of a great historic site and museum. The site has unparalleled historical significance. Various people have called it Philadelphia’s Ellis Island—but, in some ways, I think it’s more significant than Ellis Island. Ellis Island has tremendous historical significance because of the volume of human cargo that passed through there. The sheer number of people who passed through Ellis Island is huge, as is the number of Americans today who can trace their ancestry back through the inspection station there. But Philadelphia’s Lazaretto is a century older—as well as completely different. It was the quintessential nineteenth century institution. To me, it’s a no-brainer that this would be a destination.

Having said that, it costs money to preserve and save historic sites. It costs a lot of money to restore the buildings and the grounds, and to maintain them. And museums, with a few exceptions, are not doing all that well; they don’t generally tend to pay their own way. It’s not a no-brainer financially, by any means.

The latest proposal I’ve heard is that the outbuildings could be dedicated to historical interpretation, and the main building itself would be dedicated to commercial office space. It’s all still up in the air.

[Images: Out-buildings on the grounds of the Philadelphia Lazaretto, photographed by David Barnes].

Edible Geography: Your work suggests that quarantine is quite an overlooked dimension of everyday life in the early United States—as well as something of a forgotten chapter in the immigrant arrival experience. Why is that?

Barnes: Well, it was an unpleasant fact of life—that’s really the best way that I can put it. In one of the papers I’m writing about this, I call it “a most unloved institution.” Really, nobody liked quarantine at all. Merchants, of course, hated it—their cargo spoiled, time is money in business, and this was a huge delay, a waste of time, and an obstacle to commerce.

Everybody on board a ship couldn’t wait to get to their destination. Whether they were immigrants, as many of them were, or they were engaged in commerce—or simply visiting—everyone was desperate to arrive. They’re so close to getting there—but then they’re detained. They can write letters—but they can’t get off the ship unless they’re very sick and have to be taken to the hospital. Many refer to complete and utter boredom, and to impatience—sometimes to fear of getting sick. After all, you’re trapped on board a filthy ship with filthy people who have been confined together for weeks at a time. They are, in a sense, imprisoned on this vessel. All they can do is write letters and complain.

The paradox for me, historically, has been: how did quarantine survive so long, even into the twentieth century, when everybody hated it so much? Crews and captains hated it, passengers hated it, and doctors denounced it. Many doctors, throughout most of the nineteenth century, said quarantine was completely worthless, and that we should be devoting our attention to cleaning up our cities instead, because it was sanitation that would prevent epidemics. Other doctors didn’t go quite so far, but they did complain that quarantine was enforced arbitrarily and needlessly aggressively.

As to the experience of quarantine itself, I have only scattered bits of testimony. One of the letters I’ve found was from a Philadelphia-based merchant in 1804; I think his name was John Reynolds. I’ve found several letters that he wrote to his mother and sister in Philadelphia from the Lazaretto, where he was undergoing quarantine.

In each letter he says, “I hope to be liberated from here in a few more days.” And in the next letter, written five days later: “I cannot wait to escape from this place of my captivity.” He’s impatient. He’s not complaining that his rights have been violated; he’s just desperate to get out of there.

In one letter to his sister, he says, “It has been so long since I’ve been on shore. It has been so long since I have been home. I am dying to see some of those Pennsylvania beauties. You must introduce me to some as soon as I arrive.” This was in a letter to his sister.

It gets lonely where you’re trapped in this sort of sardine can!

Edible Geography: On average, how long were people held there?

Barnes: There is no general rule. The length of time varied from a day to two weeks, or even more. On occasion, vessels were detained for 30 days.

What’s interesting about the enforcement of quarantine is that there were three objects of detention: the vessel, the cargo, and the people on board. They were often treated very differently. I have lots of examples of vessels detained, and their cargo allowed to go on, but the people were kept on board. I have many other examples of the people being allowed to go, but the cargo being considered very dangerous and having to be cleansed and purified, usually by means of fumigation or with some kind of disinfectant spray.

Really, though, I think at the heart of quarantine is the idea of the cleansing power of time. The passage of time alone will make certain things better. If there is something dangerous in the vessel or in the cargo, it will declare itself within a period of time—or it will simply burn itself out. It can’t last indefinitely. Further, everybody knew from experience that things were fine after the first frost, so you would never detain any vessel, cargo, or people longer than the first frost.

[Image: Painting of the Lazaretto attributed to T. Barnea (undated); 
courtesy of the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia].

BLDGBLOG: There’s an interesting point to be made here vis-à-vis long-haul travel to extremely distant destinations. If a place took long enough to get to, in an era of wind-powered ships, quarantine wasn’t often necessary; any disease on board would already have burned itself out, as you say, by the time of arrival. But when steam-powered ships came along, and, then airplanes, people could arrive before a disease cycle came to its natural end—so quarantine stations became necessary. In other words, an entire class of architectural structures comes into existence because of the lengths of certain journeys or the types of transportation involved.

Barnes: That’s fascinating. Time is crucial in quarantine—and there is always a negotiation about how long is long enough. There was a tug of war, for instance, between the Lazaretto physician, who was the leading authority on the site, and the Board of Health, whose dictates that physician was required to obey. But you also had to factor in news reports of epidemics on various Caribbean islands, and you had to factor in the testimony of the captain and crew about what the health status of their port of origin—whether there were any illnesses there, what broke out during the journey, and if anyone had died. But is the captain reliable, or is he known to be a liar? And you also had to inspect the passengers and the crew physically. All of these were factors in the quarantine decision.

Time will always be a critical element of that calculus.

• • •

This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen, and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford.

Many more interviews are forthcoming.

The Emperor’s Castle

[Image: Image 1, “Eternal Punishment,” from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story’s architectural landscape. Hillier’s project was called The Emperor’s Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige.

The Emperor’s Castle originates from a mythical and ancient tale hidden within a woodblock landscape scene created by Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker, Ando Hiroshige. This tale charts the story of two star-crossed lovers, the weaving Princess and the Cowherd, who have been separated by the Princess’s father, the Emperor. These characters have been replaced by architectonic metaphors creating an urban theatre within the grounds of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo.

The result is astonishing; the images here have been presented in order, so you can follow the flow of the tale, with descriptive text supplied by Hillier. I would advise, however, that you also check out the Flickr set I put together for the project, where much larger versions of these images (and more text) are available.

The first two images, Hillier says, are taken from his “research storybook.” They are hand-cut paper collages, and they show us “two acts from a series of five that illustrate and explore the narrative structure of the tale.” The scenes thus supply “a series of clues, which can inform the future architectural proposition.”

[Image: Image 2, “The Last Meeting,” from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

As Hillier writes:

Image 1 (Act 3, Eternal Punishment) illustrates the Emperor’s anger over his daughter’s relationship with a cowherd. He separates the couple, placing them back in their original locations. The Emperor wanted to be sure they would never meet again, so he closed the castle and opened the heavens. Rain fell, causing the castle’s moat to flood, creating an island of the castle surrounded by a deep and swift lake unassailable by any man.
Image 2 (Act 5, The Last Meeting). Seeing the sadness of their friend, the Princess, the birds and animals came together to decide how to stop the torrent of her tears. So the sky became black as all the magpies and crows, with their wings spread wide, formed a bridge across the lake. When the Princess realizes what the birds have done, she stops crying and rushes across the feathery bridge to embrace the Cowherd and renew their pledge of eternal love.

The next three images “are hand-cut exploratory paper collages” illustrating “the architectonic character transition” through which the story’s human figures are transformed into pieces of architecture.

In a way, it’s the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as retold for Late Edo Japan.

[Images: Image 3, “The Emperor’s Origami Lungs”; Image 4, “The Princess’s Knitted Canopy”; and Image 5, “The Cowherd’s Mechanical Cow-cutters”; from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

From Hillier’s project text:

Image 3 (The Emperor’s Origami Lungs). The Emperor’s lungs come alive through differing gestures and surface transformations based on geometrical tessellations adopted from origami crease patterns. The lungs imitate the motion of breathing through expansion and contraction creating a bellowing volume that allows the Emperor to project his emotions both visually and audibly. They rise and fall, creating a bobbing motion, which produces a rippling affect onto the surrounding skin. The severity of these ripples will depend on the anger of the Emperor, and can cause the newly knitted areas of skin to become loose and break, stopping the Princess from ever reaching the cow herder.
Image 4 (The Princess’s Knitted Canopy). The Princess, a flexible, diaphanous knitted membrane, envelopes the spaces below and is fabricated using the surrounding ‘Igusa’: a natural rush material used in the fabrication of tatami mats. Igusa expels a soothing scent as the skin undulates, which is said to calm body and mind. This scent acts as a perfume of remembrance to the cow herder and his time spent running hand in hand through the meadows with the Princess.
Image 5 (The Cowherd’s Mechanical Cow-Cutters). The cowherd has been reinterpreted architecturally as the grass band, which wraps the perimeter of the site, encompassing the Emperor’s lungs and Princess’s knitted skin. Embodying the cowherd are the mechanical cows, which act as wind-up grass-cutting devices that constantly wander the grazing land, cutting the grass and fanning the aroma towards the Princess as a reminder of the cowherd. These cows are waiting and hoping for the moment the Princess knits her skin over the mechanical waves towards them, re-enacting the connection between the two star-crossed lovers.

The mechanical symbology of the resulting landscape—with “the Princess’s knitted membrane knit[ting] itself ever larger… to reach the grass parkland perimeter representing the Cowherd”—is outlined in more detail in the project text (again, as seen in the Flickr set).

[Image: Image 6 from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

The rest of the images—including the full model, above—showcase Hillier’s exquisite craftmanship.

[Images: Images 7, 8, 9, and 10 from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

Image 7, above, shows us “the contoured landscape underneath the knitted canopy, exposing the series of connecting walkways that allow the Emperor’s army to run from one lung to another,” while Image 8 reveals “the Emperor’s origami lungs.” Image 9 reveals how those lungs operate; there, we begin to see “the lung movements” of the Emperor, Hillier writes, as they “generate a bellowing volume of air.” This air is then “forced upwards, sending the woven lung collars into a thrashing frenzy, visually increasing the impact of the Emperor’s anger.” In another context, it might be interesting to explore the use of pneumatic metaphors to explore the nature and function of imperial power; but such an essay will have to wait for another day.

Image 10, meanwhile, zooms in on the Emperor’s “Mechanical Moat,” a machine-hydrology that surrounds and delimits the project landscape.

And then we reach the finale.

[Image: Image 11 from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

The images below are “the final triptych,” Hillier writes. They offer “a section through the urban theatre [that] illustrates the frenetic ‘life’ of the building. This 1.8m x 0.8m piece is the culmination of all the research and design synthesis carried out above.”

[Images: Images 12, 13, 14, and 15 from The Emperor’s Castle by Thomas Hillier].

Hillier’s project is a beautifully realized example of something I’ve long been curious about—for instance, if a book like Ulysses had been “written” not with a typewriter but with a 3D printer, what sort of architectural world might result? The Emperor’s Castle offers at least one possible answer for how literature could be translated directly into urban and architectural space.

Now reverse-engineer this: take a landscape garden somewhere—or an accidental assemblage of parks, buildings, rivers, and homes—and interpret that setting as if it is literature. Do a reverse-Hillier, so to speak: start with the landscape and extract characters and motivated dramatic actions from the objects placed within it.

In any case, again, check out the Flickr set for more text and much larger images; and don’t miss Johan Hybschmann’s “book of space,” also produced this year at the Bartlett.

The Archaeology of Seclusion

[Image: Photo by Vienna-based photographer Wolfgang Thaler].

Journalist Christoph Hinterreiter recently teamed up with photographer Wolfgang Thaler to document a nuclear bunker called D-0 in what is now Bosnia.

As Hinterreiter wrote in an email:

The bunker was the largest structure of its kind, and was for use by the upper echelon of the former Yugoslavia. The premises are still fully furnished and equipped with military apparatus—code books are positioned beside telexes and restrooms are equipped with originally wrapped paper towels. Its construction lasted for 26 years (1953 – 1979) and it cost 4.6 billion USD.

The bunker’s construction required “20,000m3 of excavated material,” Hinterreiter adds, all of which “was secretly transported from the site. A major part was further processed in the nearby JNA quarry and disguised as construction material.”

The photos and text quoted here were originally published in issue #56 of a Croatian magazine called ORIS; they have been reproduced with kind permission of Hinterreiter and Thaler.

[Images: Photos by Wolfgang Thaler].

Reminiscent of the book Waiting for the End of the World by photographer Richard Ross—of which you can see many examples over at GOOD—Hinterreiter and Thaler show us a strangely preserved world of plastic-wrapped couches and vintage telephones, track lighting and glass-framed photographs.

Hinterreiter specifically zooms in on these details for his article in ORIS:

All basic functions are organized in simple metal structures, aligned within a tunnel-like space. In the centre of the horseshoe-shaped footprint lies an elevated block, whose design exceeds purely functional considerations. It is elevated above the rest of the facility and contains interior design components not found elsewhere in the fallout shelter. It was for use by upper echelons of the Yugoslav government. Variously ornamented wall papers, kept in garish colors, cover most walls and arches. Patterns and shades of green vary from room to room and characterize each space. The surface driven spaces provide no clue about the nature of their organization or construction.

It was a kind of subterranean Motel 6 in which guests could wait-out the apocalypse.

[Images: By Wolfgang Thaler].

Such patience would require an extraordinary technical apparatus, however, something that might allow a state of self-imposed quarantine to exist; between the bunker-dwellers and the obliterated surface of the planet above them stood complex networks of ventilation equipment and back-up generators.

[Images: By Wolfgang Thaler].

As Hinterreiter further explains:

Twice a day, air-handling units pump fresh air through a labyrinth of air ducts to maintain 21-23°C temperature at 60-80% humidity. Two transformers are on alternating duty to supply electricity. The water reservoir is filled with potable water from the adjoining Bijela Neretva river. Still modestly filled fuel tanks are ready to supply stand-by emergency generators. Various archaic-appearing mechanical systems would have guaranteed automatic seclusion from the outside world and the engagement of self-sustainable building systems, providing an autarkic survival space for 350 people over a period of months. What was in the event of a nuclear attack supposed to ensure the survival of the political and military elite of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia now fills solitary spaces with fresh air and illuminates Cold War military artifacts for visitors, interested in the fiction-like premises of nuclear bunker D-0.

The motivation for building this structure where it is was fundamentally geographical:

The geographic advantage of Bosnia and Herzegovina, being completely surrounded by other Yugoslavian republics, led to the establishment of strategically important industries in the country’s inaccessible valleys. A network of underground control posts, ammunition factories and power plants lies beneath the country.

But then, of course, all geographies come with strategic implications; filling the valleys of Bosnia and Herzegovina with military installations should thus come as no surprise.

[Images: Wolfgang Thaler].

Earlier this week, meanwhile, there was some speculation that perhaps the original Labyrinth at Minos had been discovered; we read in the Independent that “a disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels” could very well be the original site where the myth of a minotaur hiding at the heart of an architecturally elaborate underground space was inspired. The history of these quarry-caves is fascinating (with shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark thrown in at the end):

The caves, which are known locally as the Labyrinthos Caves, consist of about two and half miles of interlocking tunnels with widened chambers and dead-end rooms. They have been visited since medieval times by travellers looking for the Labyrinth, but since Knossos was rediscovered at the end of the 19th century they were neglected, and were even used as a Nazi ammunition dump during the Second World War.

I mention this because the urge to build labyrinths—in stone or in tufa or against the detonations of nuclear war—often seems to transcend those labyrinths’ purported use-value. As Hinterreiter himself might say, constructing a labyrinth of any kind “exceeds purely functional considerations,” sliding off into mythology before too long and adding an oddly sinister veneer to any civilization that pursues it.

In other ways, I’m reminded of stories like Seymour Cray and his obsession with tunneling, or William Gass’s unreadable novel The Tunnel, even the Mole Man of Hackney.

Of course, it would be wrong to over-blur these contexts and ignore the clear, functional purpose of a nuclear bunker; but it’s hard not to wonder about the psychological implications of living underground for extended periods of time or, indeed, what strange impulses might compel a society to seek refuge beneath the surface of the earth—Hinterreiter’s “automatic seclusion from the outside world”—in the first place. This is what BLDGBLOG has previously referred to as “psychology at depth.”

[Images: Wolfgang Thaler].

In any case, the ORIS article ends with a quotation from Paul Virilio. He suggests that the now-purposeless and abandoned bunker pictured here “joins a row of defense installations such as the Atlantic Wall along the French coast or the DEW Line in North America, which are not only heritage monuments of contemporary history. They remain to remind ‘us less of yesterday’s adversary than of today’s and tomorrow’s war’.”

Check out Hinterreiter’s website for even more photos and text.

Safari 7

[Image: The Safari 7 Reading Room open now at Studio-X].

Earlier this year, while driving down Highway 5, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, my wife and I passed through huge and endless clouds of butterflies. For a few seconds, the effect was extraordinarily beautiful—even sublime—but, within an instant, our car was covered in tiny corpses: yellow blurs smashing repeatedly against the windshield, leaving a grotesque series of impenetrable smudges. Looking at the other cars around us—not to mention heavy moving trucks and agricultural semis running short-haul routes downstate—it was clear that an all-out slaughter of these migratory butterflies was underway.

What strange irony of the California landscape would lead butterflies to follow a major highway on their seasonal migrations—or what triumph of bad planning would result in that highway being built in perfect alignment with a preexisting animal geography?

Of course, the landscape itself might all but guarantee such an overlap, as California’s central valley offers both Caltrans and Painted Lady butterflies an effective and easy route to from north to south. But what other examples might there be of human transportation infrastructure coexisting with biological routes of passage?

[Images: Gavin Browning of Studio-X shows Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography around the Safari 7 Reading Room].

I’m reminded here of artist Elliot Malkin’s Graffiti for Butterflies project, which—morally or not—sought to create new migration routes for other species using aerosol sprays that only non-human eyes can see.

What paths for animals could we thus build through our cities? Birds following WiFi signals along parallel geographies through the urban canyons our buildings now frame…

Exploring all of these questions, and more, is a cool new exhibition called the Safari 7 Reading Room, which opened last night at New York’s Studio-X. Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, and I got to take a tour of the exhibition before it opened with Studio-X’s Gavin Browning.

[Image: A map of the 7 train’s ecological route; from the Safari 7 Reading Room].

The project, developed by Urban Landscape Lab and MTWTF, with a series of podcasts created by architecture students from Barnard & Columbia Colleges, treats New York City’s 7 train as a kind of safari: what creatures live along the 7 line—and what ecosystem does the train route explore?

Oysters, dogs, humans, worms, snakefish, cormorants and germs are some of the species that populate the length of the MTA 7 train. The “Safari 7 Reading Room” is an exhibition that presents a series of 3D maps, audio listening stations, curated reading materials, and a series of large-scale drawings of animal habitats, behaviors and life cycles in relationship to urban culture and history at selected sites along the MTA No. 7 line.

The podcasts, in particular, we read, are meant as way to “reimagine train cars as eco-urban classrooms, inviting travelers to act as park rangers in their city.” You just download the appropriate sound file, pop in your earphones, and the city becomes an immersive wildlife environment within seconds.

[Image: Let’s go on a city safari… From Safari 7].

The city is treated as an environment full of “decomposers” (the 7 line passes by graveyards), “urban coops” (there are gardens and allotments along the way), “Frankenfish” (aquatic life mutationally altered by chemical runoff), dog parks, weed-choked vacant buildings, and more.

It’s a nature tour of New York, using the city’s existing transportation infrastructure as both route and guide—and it’s a fantastic idea.

Vaguely similar things have been done, for instance, in London, where walking tours of the now-buried rivers beneath the city’s surface reveal what present-day geographies inhabit these lost natural worlds today. Of course, there is also Fritz Haeg’s Animal Estates project, which asks us “to consider the animals that we share our cities with, and creates dwellings for animals that have been unwelcome or displaced by humans. As animal habitats dwindle daily,” Haeg continues, “Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots, skyscrapers, and neighborhoods.”

Further, I remember reading in Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us that many of New York’s subway lines would simply become “rivers” after mere weeks of pumpless-ness (it would only take 36 hours, I believe Weisman wrote, for the entire New York subway system to flood should the pumps truly fail).

This notion that much older ecologies and whole parallel geographies lie waiting beneath our cities, just waiting to self-resurrect and come roaring back to the surface, is something that has long fascinated me. Along these lines, there’s a great quotation from Michael Novacek’s book Terra:

Ecologists often point out that the images of Earth still harboring unspoiled, pristine wild places is a myth. We live in a human-dominated world, they say, and virtually no habitat is untouched by our presence. Yet we are hardly the infallible masters of that universe. Instead, we are rather uneasy regents, a fragile and dysfunctional royal family holding back a revolution.

In fact, I’m now reading Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, and it seems not unrealistic to argue that Novacek’s “revolution” is already underway—only it is being spearheaded by previously unknown diseases.

In any case, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one more project in this context: Invisible-5, an eco-geo-socio-enviro-chemical audio tour of California’s Highway 5, the same route where this post began:

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

So what other human routes could we explore for their ecologies, the landscapes they coexist with or simply cover? London bus lines, the Chicago El, ferry routes through the Baltic, Beijing’s ring-roads, or perhaps even your own daily commute through the city.

The Safari 7 Reading Room is up at Studio-X until December 31, 2009.

Chemical Archive

As the world’s glaciers melt, they’ve begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years.

[Image: Photo via the Alfred Wegener Institute].

According to Discovery, “many persistent pollutants, including PCBs, dioxins and several chlorine-containing pesticides [such as] DDT” have begun to leach out from melting glaciers in places like Switzerland.

The idea of a poisonous atmospheric archive being unintentionally released—on a global scale—makes me wonder what sorts of news reports we might read in several thousand years’ time, when carbon tombs start to leak their quarantined contents back into the atmosphere. The buried skies of an industrial era, put to pharaonic rest beneath the earth’s surface, will make their operatic reappearance in future human history.

Will hissing vents of carbon dioxide gas be found someday, six thousand years from now, when these specially carved geological resting places of the sky crack open?

I was astounded to read, for instance, two years ago in New Scientist, that “burying carbon dioxide under the seabed is likely to remain controversial because of concerns that it will eventually leak out. However, a team of environmental engineers now claims that these worries are unfounded, and that natural reactions will lock away the carbon dioxide within aquifers for millennia.” For millennia. In other words, a catastrophic release of entombed CO2 will re-enter the atmosphere—and it will do so well within what could still be the anthropological era.

Already, we see lead, DDT, PCBs, and more flowing out from melting glaciers, bringing back a chemical presence that we thought we had effectively regulated. What strange myths of haunted returns and cursed ancestors might we be forced to conjure when these other, more deeply buried elemental forces reappear?

(Spotted via @stevesilberman).

Soft Robots

I’m fascinated by the so-called “chemical robots” program run by DARPA. Its purpose is to create “soft robots”: a “new class of soft, flexible, mesoscale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions and perform various tasks.”

[Image: Video originally seen over at IEEE Spectrum].

These soft machines, DARPA suggests, can be materially realized using “gel-solid phase transitions, electro- and magneto-rheological materials, geometric transitions, and reversible chemical and/or particle association and dissociation.” The idea of a robot that travels via “particle disassociation”—that is, a blurry cloud of “mesoscale mobile objects” that temporarily coalesces into a functioning machine before dissolving again—seems particularly astonishing.

Watch the above video for just one example of a “chemical robot.”

So what would these machines be used for? As DARPA explains: “During military operations it can be important to gain covert access to denied or hostile space. Unmanned platforms such as mechanical robots are of limited effectiveness if the only available points of entry are small openings.”

This is what I imagine Eyal Weizman‘s alter-ego might invent if he went into the robotics business in collaboration with eXistenZ-era David Cronenberg.

I’m specifically reminded of Weizman’s amazing paper, “Lethal Theory” (it is well worth reading the PDF), in which he writes of “microtactical actions” used by the Israeli military as a means of exploring a new domination of the city. The Israeli Defense Force, Weizman writes, has begun strategically retraining itself, in a bid to explore a “ghostlike military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean.” Soldiers, we read, can now become “so ‘saturated’ within [a city’s] fabric that very few would have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment.”

Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.

This is referred to as “infestation.”

So what if you replaced the living human soldiers with swarms of “soft robots,” capable of squeezing themselves, roach-like, through even the smallest opening? As Weizman terrifyingly suggests later in the paper: “You will never even understand that which kills you.”

Or perhaps we could find a more civilian use, we might say, for these soft machines, and send tens of thousands of them—a storm of flexible swarm-organisms shifting their shapes and flocking—outfitted out with GPS and radar, into the earth, traveling downward via faultlines, where they can map the spheroidal puzzle of our planet.

(Thanks to Alex Trevi for the tip!)

Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford

[Image: Thermal scanners at the Seoul international airport; photo by Jung Yeon-Je for Reuters, via Time].

Alison Bashford is Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, as well as Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her work has examined the politics, culture, and spaces of quarantine at a variety scales, from immigration law and geopolitics to the design of nineteenth-century hospitals. She is the author of Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, and co-editor of both Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies and Medicine At The Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present.

[Image: Map of Lawlor Island Quarantine Station, showing 1st and 2nd Class accommodation].

As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Bashford about the ways in which quarantine can both define and blur borders, the use of vaccination scars as health passports, and quarantine’s role in enforcing social hierarchy and racial prejudice.

• • •

Edible Geography: To start with, how did you become interested in quarantine?

Alison Bashford: I got to quarantine through my early work on the concepts of purity and pollution. My first book, Purity and Pollution, was about how ideas about clean and dirty spaces and clean and dirty bodies, and the separation between them, came into being in the nineteenth century in the context of hospitals, and the discovery of germs, and so forth. After that first book, I started studying infectious disease management on a larger scale. I fairly quickly moved into looking at maps of early quarantine stations and the division of pure and polluted spaces there, as well as the various diseases that were managed that way.

My work is not always focused on Australia, but I quickly realized there was quite a particular Australian history to be sorted through here. Many diseases that have been endemic and epidemic in other parts of the world, such as cholera, never even arrived in Australia. In Australia, the quarantining of the entire continent came to be important in terms of keeping diseases out, but it was also symbolically incredibly important as part of the project of producing White Australia. I gradually realized what a rich history there was in terms of thinking about the racializing of the new nation in 1901 as, essentially, a public health project.

After that, I became very interested in island spaces as well—places where people with various diseases were quarantined in a much more permanent way. Amusingly, I live right next to the quarantine station in Manly. I’d written about quarantine for a long time—long before I lived there—and it’s just been terrific, living on the place that I was writing about for so many years.

[Images: (top) The North Head Quarantine Station, Manly, Australia; photo by Nicola Twilley. (bottom) Spa treatment at Q-Station hotel retreat, Manly, Australia].

Edible Geography: It’s interesting what they’ve done to the quarantine station at Manly, in terms of turning it into a luxury hotel. The afterlife of quarantine stations is a fascinating topic in and of itself.

Bashford: Yes, absolutely. The developer gave me a good tour around it just before it opened. It was extraordinary listening to him talk about the concept of putting a day spa on the site of the old hospital buildings, which is where the most infected were kept.

[Image: As Egypt and Sudan gained their independence from Britain, the border between the two countries was determined by drawing a straight line from the sea through Wadi Halfa, a quarantine station on the Nile (which is now an underwater archaeological site due to flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan Dam)].

BLDGBLOG: A great deal of your work examines the political nature of quarantine and the relationship between quarantine and the border. I was particularly struck by the fact that, in some cases, the biological border has preceded the national border, as in the case of the line between Egypt and Sudan.

Bashford: A lot of historians have written about borders, but I think what’s sometimes overlooked is that this temporary line, marked by quarantine practices that maintain a disease on one side of the border and not the other, is often the earliest sign of what later becomes a national, territorial border.

This is also the case with regional borders. The boundary between the nineteenth-century Orient (as the Near East used to be called) and Europe was the place where cholera was controlled. Various quarantine practices were set up every year in and around the Mecca pilgrimage, because there was constant European anxiety that this mass movement—in a place that is just adjacent to Europe—would introduce cholera into Europe itself. So that boundary, which was not an actual territorial border but, rather, an important part of how Europe defined itself in relation to its most adjacent neighbor, the Orient, was made meaningful through very specific, very grounded, practices of inspecting people, putting them in quarantine camps, and monitoring or restricting their movement.

[Images: Routes to Mecca, and pilgrims on the Hajj (second image via Gizmowatch)].

Edible Geography: You’ve also examined the way these kind of disease borders can define cities as well.

Bashford: Yes—in Imperial Hygiene, I really explored this idea of boundaries at different scales. I structured that whole book spatially. I started with a chapter about smallpox, vaccination, and the border of the body and skin, and I looked at the way that a vaccine introduces disease into the body, in order to create immunity.

Then I moved outwards to the scale of the city. I took Sydney as a place that had certain diseased zones that were quite disordered, and analysed the way in which the establishment of the quarantine station on North Head—in Manly—was an attempt to create clean and dirty spaces within an urban environment.

Then I moved outwards again to think about the entire Australian continent—and outwards again to consider international hygiene and quarantine measures, and the way that the entire globe, due to immigration restriction acts over the twentieth century, became criss-crossed by all kinds of lines of quarantine.

Edible Geography: In that context, I was particularly interested in your paper tracing the origins of the World Health Organization—and public health as a globally regulated phenomenon—back to the International Sanitary Conferences, which were themselves convened to implement quarantine.

Bashford: The question of how to manage infectious disease is foundational for the League of Nations Health Organization, and then the World Health Organization. In fact, even the large philanthropic organizations, like the Rockefeller’s International Health Board, were attempts to prevent infectious disease, both by quarantine and also by hygiene education. In nineteenth-century Europe, the International Sanitary Conventions and Conferences were, in the first instance, about cholera, and the concern about the annual pilgrimage.

What’s intrigued me for many years are the way immigration restriction lines dovetail as quarantine lines. In spatial terms, I’m fascinated by the way this division of pure and polluted spaces can be architectural at a very small and local level, but can also come to structure the globe as a whole.

Edible Geography: Can you give an example of an encounter with one of these quarantine lines today?

Bashford: Airports are places where the demarcations of quarantine lines are very clear, and biological or biomedical terms like “Sterile Zone” still cling to the various clean and polluted zones. “Sterile Zone” doesn’t actually mean sterile zone—it indicates a zone into which only authorized people can go.

Airports still make the link between quarantine and the regulation of movement very clear. Historically, quarantine laws were the main way in which people’s movement over national borders was regulated. Almost all of the immigration acts that proliferated around the globe in the nineteenth century (which we still live with, every time we hand over our passport) were about quarantine regulations. Every immigration restriction act across the world, even now, always has a “loathsome disease” clause in it.

[Image: An Italian Health Passport, via the Disinfected Mail Study Circle].

Edible Geography: Can you talk a little more about the relationship between health passports, or pratique, and quarantine?

Bashford: What’s interesting is that all of these identity documents—passports, visas, health vaccine certificates, and so forth—only become attached to an individual relatively late in time. Through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and into the twentieth century, in some cases—these documents would refer to the vessel on which you arrived into a zone, rather than to you as an individual.

For a ship arriving in Sydney Harbor, for example, there would be a certificate of freedom from disease that pertained to the entire ship, and that would be determined by the route on which the ship had come. If the ship had come to Sydney from London via what was then Ceylon, and if there was known to be an epidemic of cholera or smallpox in Ceylon, then that entire ship would be understood to be diseased and it would be put in quarantine for a certain period of time. I’m very interested in the way that, in the maritime world, the passengers and ship became one body, which could then be categorised as infected or clean, irrespective of the health or otherwise of the individuals on board.

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do more work on is the actual bodily inspection of people to determine whether they’ve got a vaccine scar, from the smallpox vaccine. It’s something that I know was practiced, particularly during an epidemic. Historically, before you had a passport or even a piece of paper that authorized your movement from one zone into another, people were not infrequently checked for a vaccination scar. You could only move from what was understood to be an infected zone into a healthy zone if you had a vaccination scar. It became a kind of bodily passport.

The other fascinating thing about quarantine is that it dreams of being non-porous, but in fact, quarantine lines are always leaky. Quarantine, like today’s passports and visas, is much more about letting some people through and keeping other people out, than enforcing a total border.

BLDGBLOG: I’m also interested in the phenomenon of proto-states testing the limits of their power through bio-political practices—that is, experimenting with how they can control and regulate individual people, and doing so in the arena of medicine. Medical power becomes a kind of stepping stone toward national sovereignty.

Bashford: Certainly, the display of a line around a country—and hence territorial sovereignty—can be put into practice very clearly through quarantine practices. That’s where we started our conversation. Immigration restrictions and quarantine practices go hand-in-hand as the two intertwined practices that determine a border as a border for modern kinds of territory. This takes place at an imaginary level.

But there is a flip side to all of this: the apparent imperative to maintain hygiene and keep out disease sets up the territorial boundaries of a nation, but it also gives that nation an almost humanitarian license to step over its own border and into the territory of another state. Patrick Zylberman and Alexandra Minna Stern wrote about this in my book, Medicine at the Border.

Alexandra Minna Stern, in particular, writing about U.S. quarantine and yellow fever, discussed the way that quarantine at Ellis Island was about inspecting migrants and excluding some people, and thus setting up a sovereignty for the United States. She then went on to show us how the very concern about yellow fever was also a way in which the United States government could offer assistance to, intervene in, and set up hygienic measures in all of the nations adjacent to the south, as a kind of a first way in. Unsurprisingly, this was followed pretty quickly, either by territorial acquisition of those places or by transnational agreements and other extensions of influence. After the Spanish-American War, in a whole lot of places like Cuba, and eventually Panama, Puerto Rico, and even Guam, the first U.S. inroads were around quarantine and infectious disease measures.

So while quarantine and infectious diseases function to set up territorial borders and national sovereignties, for powerful nations and nations with pretty good internal health structures the management of infectious disease in a place over the border is quite a common way to extend sovereignty into that territory.

[Image: Tuberculosis seen via x-ray].

Edible Geography: So quarantine contributes to both a spatial out-sourcing or in-sourcing of the border?

Bashford: Exactly. One article that I wrote about quarantine and tuberculosis is called “Where is the border?” It came out of work I was doing with colleagues in the UK about the difference between the Australian history of quarantine and the British tradition.

In Australia, quarantine took place from the physical borders of the nation outwards—the border was pushed way back to the point of origin of any intending migrant. Most people came to Australia from England, and your certificates of health had to be secured before you even got on the ship. This is completely different to the British tradition, because the UK was not, until after World War II, a country of immigration. In fact, the UK had very, very weak, and sometimes completely absent, quarantine laws.

My UK colleagues told me that, today, if you have tuberculosis and you arrive at Heathrow airport, you’re not asked to get back on the plane or to get back on the ship as you would be in Australia. Instead, your name and address are taken and you’re asked to see a doctor in your local area. You’re entirely brought within the borders of the country, and then quarantined or monitored.

These island nations have very different histories of where the border is located. Recent British governments have tried to bring in what they call the Australian model—a system where people get their health checks done at the point of departure. It seems to be much more problematic in the UK than it is for nations that have a long history of rigid quarantine rules.

[Image: The leper colony at Molokai].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, what examples come to mind in terms of places of quarantine that are particularly striking for spatial reasons?

Bashford: Molokai, Hawaii—that’s one of the original leper colonies dating back to 1865. It’s currently managed by the National Park Service, but there’s a community of people with Hansen’s Disease still living there. It’s a fascinating place. It’s an island within a very remote archipelago, and it’s also on a peninsula. It juts out sensationally underneath the world’s tallest sea cliff. The cliff separated the lepers from everybody else, even on the island, and the island itself was clearly chosen to be separate from the other islands in Hawaii. Natural geographies are being put to use here as a way to create a place of quarantine and isolation.

In addition, nineteenth-century maps of quarantine stations are fascinating for the way that they demarcate zones even within spaces of quarantine. Usually they are divided by race and class—in the nineteenth century, there is typically a specific building within the quarantine station for Chinese passengers, for example. To me, these intricate divisions of space within quarantine stations capture social divisions instantly, and almost too obviously.

• • •

This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes, and The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen.

Many more interviews are forthcoming.

The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen

Thomas Mullen is the author of The Last Town on Earth, a novel set in a voluntarily quarantined village in the remote forests of the Pacific Northwest during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

From the book’s description:

The year is 1918. America is fighting a war on foreign soil that has divided the nation. Meanwhile, rumors of the spread of the deadliest epidemic ever are causing panic on the home front. The uninfected town of Commonwealth, Washington, votes to quarantine itself, and two young friends are asked to guard the town entrance and keep strangers out.
One day, a starving, cold—and seemingly ill—soldier comes out of the woods begging for sanctuary, and the two guards are confronted with an agonizing moral dilemma.

The Last Town on Earth was named the Best Debut Novel of 2006 by U.S.A. Today – who describe it as “an absorbing depiction of a utopian town that attempts to keep the 1918 flu epidemic at bay” – and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Excellence in Historical Fiction.

As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Mullen about his novel, about the historical research that informed it, and about the moral implications of mass quarantine.

• • •

Edible Geography: What sort of research went into writing the novel?

Thomas Mullen: The impetus for the book was an article that I read many years ago about an AIDS virologist who had studied the 1918 flu earlier in his career. It also mentioned, parenthetically, that there had been healthy towns in the Rocky Mountain states and in the Pacific Northwest that were so terrified by stories about how contagious the flu was, and how fatal it was, that they decided their best recourse for staying healthy was to block off all the roads leading into town and to post armed guards to prevent anyone from coming in. That just blew me away—it was amazing to read that this had happened—and I thought it would be a very dramatic first scene.

I was hooked by the moral dilemma of quarantine: what happens if, one day, you and your buddy are standing guard over your town and you’re presented with a lost traveler? He’s freezing, and he’s starving, and he’s begging for your aid. He needs food and shelter, or he might die. What do you do? Do you bring this person in? Do you try to be charitable, even if you know he might be carrying this awful virus that you don’t really understand? Again, it was 1918 and their understanding of the virus was certainly worse than ours is today. Or do you tell you the person: “Hey, I’m sorry, but I need to think of my friends and family and my town. I don’t know what you might be carrying, and you’re just going to have to die in the woods.”

That’s what made me want to write the book. I sat down and I read a few books about the 1918 flu—although I couldn’t find many. It had become this overshadowed chapter in history. That’s starting to change now; with the new concern about avian flu and H1N1, there’s been much more discussion of the 1918 epidemic. But, back when I started my research, it was hard to find much information.

I tried to find out about these towns that had done this—these sort of reverse-quarantines. That’s just a phrase that I invented; I don’t know if there’s a real phrase for it. Normally, quarantine is when something or someone is ill and they’re quarantined off so that they don’t spread their germs to the rest of us. But in this situation, the town that closes itself off is healthy. I called that reverse-quarantine.

I couldn’t really find anything out about these towns. In fact, when I was about three-quarters done with the rough draft, a historian named John Barry wrote what is now the definitive history of the 1918 flu, called The Great Influenza. I got that book and I read it—and it’s about 600 pages long, but he only gives about half a page to this phenomenon of Western towns that had closed themselves off. He says that it worked for some and it didn’t work for others—and that’s it.

[Image: Historical quarantine marker].

Edible Geography: Was reverse-quarantine a common phenomenon and just under-reported, or was it actually fairly rare?

Mullen: It doesn’t sound like it was very common. After all, if it only got about half-a-page in a 600-page book… It’s just something I could not find reference to very often.

They were probably small towns that were already fairly isolated, and therefore might not have left such a good paper trail for historians to write about. It must have been fairly unusual in the first place, because the flu spread very, very quickly, so usually it was too late. By the time you were thinking that maybe you should close the borders, people were already getting sick in your town—so you missed the opportunity.

Meanwhile, because our nation was at war, there was censorship of the press. Newspapers didn’t want to report bad news. People didn’t often know what was happening until it was too late. Instead, newspapers would have a little pick-me-up story about how some soldiers in a nearby army base had a bad case of the flu… but they’re feeling much better now. Meanwhile, people are looking out their windows and seeing hearses! If there had been a free press, and if the government had not been distracted by a war and had shared information about it sooner, it’s possible that more towns would have tried quarantine. But for most people, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late.

I think the reason why the towns that did this were in the Rocky Mountains and in the Pacific Northwest was that they were inland and fairly isolated. The flu had started, most epidemiologists believe at this point, in army bases, and then it had traveled along the rail lines, from army base to army base; and from port to port—meaning cities like Philadelphia and Boston and New Orleans and San Francisco—and it gradually trickled inland. Some of the mountain states were the last to get infected – and they were the ones where, finally, the story was out. They were the ones who knew what was happening, so some of them were able to make this decision.

Ultimately, though, because I’m a novelist—I write fiction, and I can make things up—I decided, okay, maybe it’s better that I don’t know exactly what happened in these towns. Maybe that frees me up a bit. I did as much research as I could into how the epidemic worked, how the disease itself worked, and what the political environment was like at that time in America—what these characters were doing and what they were thinking about. But, as for what had actually befallen towns that tried this, I was sort of unconstrained by historical fact—which, I think, was a good thing.

BLDGBLOG: That raises the question of your own interest, as a novelist, in the idea of quarantine. What are the narrative possibilities of quarantine that drew you to it, as a plot device?

Mullen: As a novelist, you need there to be some stress, because that creates the tension between the characters. It leads them to act – sometimes in inappropriate or regrettable ways.

One of the things that I was really interested in doing with this book was studying the way in which people act differently from the way they would like to think they act, under stress. We have this idea of ourselves as good people, and we have moral guidelines that we like to believe we follow, but when we feel threatened and we feel that our family is in danger, we tend to bend some of those rules. Whether that means shooting a stranger who’s trying to come into your town, or whether that means shutting out your neighbor because you think they might have a cold – things like that.

I was interested in looking at the stresses that these people would be under. First of all, externally, they feel they’re safe in their little town—but the world around them is dangerous, with everyone being ill. Also, in those political times, there were things happening that the utopians in my little mill town didn’t agree with; they’re very anti-war and anti-capitalist. They feel at odds with the world, and they’re closing themselves off from a world that they disagree with in many ways. But when the disease does get into the town, they’re at odds with each other: some are sick, some are healthy. New stresses are introduced; they start running out of food and out of things that they need to maintain their quarantine.

[Images: The town of Jerome, Arizona, during the 1918 flu outbreak; note the face masks. Courtesy of the Jerome Historical Society, via the Sharlot Hall Museum].

Edible Geography: Much of your book is focused on the moral dilemmas associated with implementing and enforcing quarantine. What drew you to that?

Mullen: That was something that I didn’t seek out to do, but, as I was writing the story, it came naturally. You have these utopian idealists and political activists who are anti-war and pro-union, and they’re early suffragists. Some of them support the quarantine because they want to stay healthy; they want to protect their families. But some of them, because their political beliefs are so strong, realize that, hey, I have these beliefs because I want to make the world a better place. I don’t want to just make my town a better place. And what are the moral implications of turning our back on a world that is suffering? Isn’t it our obligation to do something that would improve the world? Some people feel that the best way to make a better world is to focus on yourself, and on your own community, and to hope the world will emulate it. Others—more activist—think they need to get out there. I’m interested in that conflict.

And, of course, that line is itself blurred—because they all support the quarantine initially. Even those who opposed it refused to leave. So, theoretically, everyone in the town in chapter one is cool with the idea. But, as time goes on, some people are thinking, god, I’m bored, I want to get out of here; or we learn that they’ve been secretly sneaking out to visit women or buy booze. So even the people who had initially agreed with it came to feel that it had been imposed on them. They change their minds—but it’s too late.

BLDGBLOG: In a way, you illustrate the fundamental impossibility of a total quarantine: there’s always something getting in or getting out, usually due to human weakness or error.

Mullen: I can’t remember if that’s something that I always intended—that I was going to have these people sneaking out—or if that was something that came up halfway. But it just seemed right to me. The whole dilemma of utopian politics, in general, is: can we really make the world a perfect place? I think there is enough human frailty and vice out there that something will always sabotage it.

Medically speaking, I know that quarantine can work, but, with something on the scale of a whole town, I can’t help but wonder: would it really work? It didn’t in the book because it was this slapdash affair; you’ve got randomly chosen people standing guard. But I think if it were to happen now, with a city or a state, you’d have National Guard or police or army officers standing guard, and I don’t think they would bend quite the way my characters would bend. But then you have the other problem—where it becomes a police state—and people aren’t allowed to come and go. It might work to keep the disease out, and people might thank them for that, but they might also feel like their rights were being violated. It gets really complicated.

[Image: A sick ward for those infected with the 1918 Spanish flu].

Edible Geography: Why do you think there has been such a historical silence about the epidemic?

Mullen: My partly cynical answer is that we Americans just don’t know our history very well!

I did a panel once with two other writers who both had novels set during World War I, and they were both British. They talked about how World War I is a big deal in the UK: how everybody knows about it; you see plaques everywhere listing the dead; and there were some towns where, in one night, the entire population of young men died, because they had this idea that men in the same town could enlist together and fight in the same regiment. This meant that you got to enlist with your friends, and you got to fight with your friends, which was great for morale—but what it also meant it that you died with your friends. There were literally towns where all the young men died on the same day, in one of those major battles.

It was a profound experience for so much of Europe, where they fought the war for years on their home soil. For America, on the other hand, we were only involved militarily for about year. We declared war earlier on, but it took a while just to get an army together, because we didn’t even have a standing army. And, of course, it wasn’t fought on our own soil. So the flu took place during the war, and the war itself is just not very well-taught or well-understood here.

But, also, in terms of why do people know about the war and not the flu, can it be that history textbooks can only handle one big subject at once? They’re writing about the war and they just didn’t think they needed to mention the flu? A disease doesn’t have the geopolitical themes that you get to play with when you’re teaching about a war or a politician or a movement; it was this horrible thing that just happened.

Also, I wonder how much of it was simply the fact that the people who lived through it just wanted to build a wall around those memories; they didn’t have our mindset, where we need to come to terms with our past and expose our scars in order to find closure. I think the survivors, to some degree, probably felt that it’s over – and it was horrible – but the last thing to do was to talk about it.

At this point, it’s enough generations away that there’s very little memory of it left – people only remember being told about it. Another horrible thing about the flu was that it killed so many adults and it left so many orphans. A lot of the survivors were very young children, who really don’t remember it for themselves.

But it was interesting to me that so many of the great literary lions in the early 20th century were people who lived through this when they were teenagers or young adults—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck—and none of them wrote about it. It now seems like of course you would write about this.

• • •

This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes, and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford.

Many more interviews are forthcoming.

The Plague

What does a town under quarantine—walled off against the world, shutting its doors against commerce—feel like? What if those doors have been forcibly shut, against the citizens’ will? What is it like to be medically captive in a city? At the very least, how does one pass the time?

Nearly two years ago, while living and working in San Francisco, I would often spend my lunch breaks down at Stacey’s, an amazing bookstore that sadly went out of business this past spring. One of the books that I gravitated toward—and eventually purchased—was The Plague by Albert Camus.

Camus’s novel—about a quarantined city in North Africa called Oran, where the bubonic plague has erupted, originating in rats that have come crawling out into the streets to die en masse—seems to illustrate quite well the proposition that fiction is an extraordinarily effective medium through which to describe architectural and urban experiences. One of Camus’s characters, for instance, surveys the quarantined city laid out before him: “At that moment he had a preternaturally vivid awareness of the town stretched out below, a victim world secluded and apart, and of the groans of agony stifled in its darkness.”

Quarantine, Camus suggests, can have the effect of heightening the sensorial impact of certain urban details: “For in the heat and stillness, and for the troubled hearts of our townsfolk, anything, even the least sound, had a heightened significance. The varying aspects of the sky, the very smells rising from the soil that mark each change of season, were taken notice of for the first time.” The city has become amplified, so to speak, by its isolation. We even read that a “new paper has been launched: the Plague Chronicle,” as if all of these newly noticed details, and the alterations in daily routine that revealed them, were too numerous—and far too extraordinary—not to catalog.

But the city looms, stripped of vitality, anemic, its purpose gone; it is urbanism as depicted by Giorgio de Chirico.

The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.

I won’t review the book here; it is worth reading, even if it’s emotionally imperfect, so to speak (and often a bit boring), but its literary merits are not what I’m concerned with. I’m concerned with its descriptions of space.

I thought, then, especially in light of the quarantine studio that kicks off in NYC this autumn, I would simply excerpt some of Camus’s more memorable thoughts on quarantine.

For instance, he writes, describing this strange state of medical siege-urbanism:

At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under that blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events, this feeling of being locked in like criminals prompted them sometimes to foolhardy acts.

Oran, Camus continues, its city gates closed against foreign visitors, its citizens often sitting there, listless in the desert heat, “assumed a novel appearance.”

You saw more pedestrians, and in the slack hours numbers of people, reduced to idleness because shops and a good many offices were closed, crowded the streets and cafés. For the present they were not unemployed; merely on holiday. So it was that on fine days, toward three in the afternoon, Oran brought to mind a city where public rejoicings are in progress, shops are shut, and traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.

What is there to do in quarantine? Not much, it seems:

So now he drifted aimlessly from café to café. In the mornings he would sit on the terrace of one of them and read a newspaper in the hope of finding some indication that the epidemic was on the wane. He would gaze at the faces of the passers-by, often turning away disgustedly from their look of unrelieved gloom, and after reading for the nth time the shopsigns on the other side of the street, the advertisements of popular drinks that were no longer procurable, would rise and walk again at random in the yellow streets. Thus he killed time till nightfall, moving about the town and stopping now and again at a café or restaurant.

This level of ennui—”You could see them at street corners, in cafes or friends’ houses, listless, indifferent, and looking so bored that, because of them, the whole town seemed like a railway waiting-room”—unsurprisingly soon breeds violence (and, with it, glimpses of a new constitutional order):

It was incidents of this sort that compelled the authorities to declare martial law and enforce the regulations deriving from it. Two looters were shot, but we may doubt if this made much impression on the others; with so many deaths taking place every day, these two executions went unheeded—a mere drop in the ocean. Actually scenes of this kind continued to take place fairly often, without the authorities’ making even a show of intervening. The only regulation that seemed to have some effect on the populace was the establishment of a curfew hour. From eleven onwards, plunged in complete darkness, Oran seemed a huge necropolis.

For all of these descriptions, however, the question remains: what is the effect of quarantine on a city’s populace? Can public policy reach down into the emotions of a resident and predict how he or she might react? And how is urbanism itself transformed by states of temporary—but enforced—isolation?

For that, a much larger conversation about quarantine and the city must ensue.

Dormitorium

[Image: From Dormitorium].

Today is your last day to see Dormitorium, an exhibition of interior sets from films by the Brothers Quay, on display now at Parsons in New York City. Dormitorium, we read, “explores the macabre fantasy world of twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay through the highly detailed miniature sets of their influential stop-motion animations.”

The dean of academic programs at Parsons adds:

This exhibition gives our students an opportunity to see how the Quay brothers create intricate fantasy worlds, from set design to finished film through their compelling engagement with literature, their command of sound and lighting design, their uncanny use of focus, color and texture, as well as their mastery of digital editing processes.

The show is open till 6pm today, and you can find more info here.

[Image: From Dormitorium. Photo by Morbid Anatomy; see more photos here].

Tangentially, I am reminded of an article from the most recent issue of Mark Magazine about the models and dioramas of Ronan-Jim Sevellec. Sevellec explains the making of his miniature boxed scenarios to Mark:

The first phase of my work consists of setting together a certain number of elements. That may be furniture or scenery items, but it’s mostly insignificant and mostly at random. This is my way of setting traps to catch images of latent inner dreams. A really accurate picture of what my efforts will finally result in remains unclear to me. It does reveal itself, but only progressively, until the day I realize that nothing more is to be added. At that moment, I make up my mind and seal the front with a glass panel.

While I could perhaps do without the “latent inner dreams” to which Sevellec refers, his basic idea of timing – that there is an intuitive moment at which a created miniature world has reached a state of completion – is a compelling one.

You hit a certain point at which you can seal off a microcosm and move on.

[Image: From Dormitorium].

Finally, how much do I love the use of the word “dormitorium” in the Quay Brothers’ exhibition title? What would normally refer simply to university housing becomes an extraordinary codeword for a laboratory of sleep.

(Thanks to Ed Keller for the tip!)

Phantom City

[Image: Museum of the Phantom City by Cheng+Snyder for the Van Alen Institute].

A fantastic new iPhone app by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder has come to market in New York City this autumn. Sponsored by the Van Alen Institute, Museum of the Phantom City is “a public art project that allows individuals to browse visionary designs for the City of New York on their iPhones.”

Users can view images and descriptions of speculative projects ranging from Buckminster Fuller’s dome over midtown Manhattan, to Antonio Gaudi’s unbuilt cathedral, to Archigram’s pop-futurist “Walking City,” all while standing on the projects’ intended sites.

In other words, you go around the city, iPhone in hand – a kind of architectural dowsing rod held in front of you – discovering the traces of buildings that never were (perhaps even fragments of a city yet to come).

Proposals by Buckminster Fuller are suddenly as real as the Empire State Building – after all, they’re both pictured right there on your iPhone…

[Images: Screen shots from Phantom City by Cheng+Snyder].

As the New York Times wrote this morning:

A mile-high dome shades Midtown Manhattan, an airport floats off Battery Park, Harlem is enveloped in a hulking megastructure literally lifting residents out of poverty, and the tallest building in the world, continuously under construction, sprouts from ground zero, growing without end.

“It’s the city that never was but could have been,” said Irene Cheng, an architectural historian. “Sort of an alternate future.”

Without mining the architectural avant-garde and its history of impossible projects, and before you even get to things like science fiction films and comic books, and as you hold yourself back from exploring the spatial reserves of ancient myth and urban legend – weird tunnels beneath midtown, World War II bunkers, secret apartments of the rich and famous – you can simply tap the ongoing economic recession for architectural content.

It would be easy enough, in fact, to put together a tour of building projects that never made it past the recession – New York’s so-called “Lost Skyline” – or, for that matter, of the buildings that never made it past the Depression.

You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you’re being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur, leaving messages for you (complete with call-back number).

Electromagnetic voice phenomena in architectural form.

[Image: Screen shot from Phantom City, featuring Superstudio’s Continuous Monument].

On one level, of course, it’s worth asking whether or not it’s a problem that all of these new and exciting visions for 21st-century urban life are only accessible to people rich enough to afford iPhones – but, on another level, why not use the tools that exist, no matter how expensive they might be, in order to try out new models for historical and spatial exploration?

Caving, for instance, requires caving equipment – and not everyone can afford to stock up. But that’s no reason to stop exploring the underworld.

At a conference in Turin earlier this summer, I was on a panel with Bruce Sterling and Nicolas Nova, where Nova asked this exact question. Having just shown us all a series of slides in which new ways of interacting with, and learning about, the city had been suggested, he pointed out that most of these things required an iPhone. But do we really want to build and promote the city of tomorrow, if it’s effectively inaccessible to a particular class of consumers?

Yet, one could argue, this is exactly what we’ve done with cars; the spatial needs of the automobile industry have shaped our cities far more than the cultural and economic – and possibly even neurological – needs of those cities’ inhabitants.

So will iPhones do to urban information what cars have done to the streetscape?

[Image: The iPhone at work, detecting the Phantom City].

In any case, back in 2008, in a post that now seems remarkably dated, I suggested that Google Maps should come with a “sci-fi layer” – that is, a layer that would document where in your city certain events had taken place or certain structures had stood in a work of fiction. For instance, the building that Robert Neville’s dog runs into in I Am Legend or the trainyard from Escape From New York, the apartments from Make Room! Make Room!, the high-rise penthouse from The Day After Tomorrow…

Those are Manhattan-centric examples, of course, and drawn only from science fiction, but this could easily be expanded to include landscapes and structures elsewhere, from the deserts of the Empty Quarter to central Paris, and it could include other genres, from the poems of John Ashbery to Howl to The Great Gatsby.

You could even have a “mythology layer” – roaming around Scandinavia, tracking Thor or digging for the roots of Yggdrasil – or a “theology layer”: you go to Israel and your iPhone short-circuits from the laminations of charged geography around it. Pillars of salt, sacred basements, dead walls and abandoned forts.

In fact, I’m further reminded of a project produced this past summer by Sally Hsu, one of my students at Urban Islands down in Sydney. Hsu came up with something she called the Research Institute of Phantomology, a fake historical research society whose specially-invented machines could detect missing buildings: structures that had been demolished and lost to history. You could use these throughout the Sydney Harbor – or specifically on Cockatoo Island, where our studio was set – in order to trace the architectural remains of history.

One of those devices, according to Hsu, was the Architectural Ghost Chaser: it would lead historians directly to the ruins of old buildings in the earth.

[Image: Patent diagrams for an “Architectural Ghost Chaser” by Sally Hsu; Urban Islands 2009].

A tongue-in-cheek proposal, of course – Hsu even made patent diagrams to illustrate it, as well as a fake cover for New Scientist featuring the remarkable device – it nonetheless kicked-off an interesting conversation about demolished buildings, urban archaeology, and the strategies through which we could detect the ruins of the past if physical excavation is not an option. After all, we’ve already got things like ground-penetrating radar – through which we can map and explore an ancient Roman city beneath Wroxeter, England, without digging a single hole – and we’ve even got muon detectors. But imagine discovering new archaeological sites through an iPhone app!

So why not build a tricked-out PKE Meter attuned to architectural space? At the exact intersection of Sally Hsu’s Institute of Phantomology and the iPhone?

In other words, why not create something like the Museum of the Phantom City?

Cheng+Snyder‘s free download opens up a new kind of historical spectating: architectural tourism of the unbuilt. Perhaps someday we’ll be done with monographs, traveling exhibitions, and even senior thesis reviews; we’ll simply upload all our projects into the Phantom City and let the world decide their worth. Crowds of tourists mill about on 13th Street, looking around at the imaginary buttresses of a superstructure you’ve spent three years digitally assembling.

Download the app via the iTunes store and see for yourself.