Month: January 2010

Crime is a way to use the city

[Image: Published in the New York Tribune, September 11, 1910].

Someday I’d like to write a book about the architectural side of burglary—bank heists, home invasions, jewelry thefts, wall-scaling girl gangs of the Global South, trans-metropolitan tunnels dug vault-to-vault through crypts by men with names like Terry Leather, smoke & mirrors, props and decoys, CCTV control rooms, lock-pickers’ guides, hourly updated routes of gold trucks leaving Manhattan, deterritorialized histories of the getaway car, impersonations and forgeries, spatial camouflage, criminal blueprints and future dream-technologies of the ultimate break-in—all in the name of looking at buildings, and the city itself, as puzzles, spatial systems you try very hard to get into. The well-guarded entrance and its multiple delays. Kafka meets HSBC.

Perhaps an Architectural Guide to the Ultimate Bank Heist—a 108-page pamphlet of speculative break-ins—or Pamphlet Architecture #31, in which incomprehensible robberies are outlined, complete with floorplans and renderings, or even next year’s best-selling stocking stuffer, a quasi-sequel to 15 Lombard Street, the BLDGBLOG Field Guide to Robbery. Illustrated by eBoy.

Until then, I’ll just post images like this one, above, originally published in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1910, in which gangs of silent-airplane enthusiasts raid the metropolis from above. They coast down onto moonlit roofs while unsuspecting homeowners sleep soundly in the comfort of darkness.

Golden Scans

[Image: The Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at the Palomar Observatory].

A new book of photographs curated, cropped, and digitally reprocessed by Michael Benson (previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here) has been reviewed by the New York Times as something you could flip through “for hours and never be bored by the shapes, colors and textures into which cosmic creation can arrange itself.” The book shows us “stars packed like golden sand, gas combed in delicate blue threads, piled into burgundy thunderheads and carved into sinuous rilles and ribbons, and galaxies clotted with star clusters dancing like spiders on the ceiling.”

The above image of the Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, brings to mind the later sky studies and weather paintings of John Constable, in particular Constable’s Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827). As if there are nebulas here on earth with us, moving through the sky (and through art history).

Stars, here, would be chemical weather that emits light.

[Image: John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827); originally spotted at Pruned].

But such landscape comparisons only go so far; here are a few more photographs from the book, which you can buy at Amazon.

[Images: (top) The bewilderingly beautiful Cat’s Paw Nebula, photographed by T.A. Rector at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; (middle) The Witch Head Nebula, photographed by Davide De Martin at the Palomar Observatory; (bottom) The Rosette Nebula, photographed by J.C. Cuillandre (Canada France Hawaii Telescope) and Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia)].

That final image shows us “3000 cubic light years of gas… heated to a temperature of over 10 million degrees Fahrenheit.” To my discredit, I have never thought of volumes of space in terms of “cubic light years” before—it’s an extraordinary unit of measurement. Perhaps someday it could even be applied to data: teraflops be damned, our future harddrives will be filled with cubic light years of information.

Who rules the night

[Image: “Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs” by Linda Bennett].

Sydney-based blogger, architecture student, comic book illustrator, and muscle car enthusiast Linda Bennett has produced a beautifully tongue-in-cheek guide to the “Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs.”

Summoning up her own ninja army from blogs like Super Colossal, City of Sound, ArchDaily, ArchitectureMNP, and Inhabitat, Bennett’s graphic skills—and sense of humor—are on colorful display. The weapons given to designboom would inspire terror in any foe.

Bennett has also been running an occasional series of interviews on her site; check out her conversations with Bjarke Ingels, Gerard Reinmuth, and Andrew Maynard—and here’s hoping she sits down someday to record one with fellow Sydneysider, and “Super Strength” blogging ninja, Marcus Trimble.

And, for that matter, here’s hoping Bennett keeps producing more comic strips!

The Blobwall and the Bomb

[Image: Operation Sailor Hat, before detonation, via Wikipedia].

It’s a house, it’s a ziggurat, it’s… 500 tons of TNT stacked in a dome on the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe. A later test-detonation of these architecturally arranged fissile materials left a huge, still-extent crater that “currently contains unique sub-species of shrimp” that have “evolved to survive the hypersaline conditions” in the artificially excavated hole.

Bringing to mind Greg Lynn’s Blobwall—amorphous and multicolored plastic “bricks” whose puzzle-like stacking produced (unfortunately quite garish) enclosures—or even Gramazio & Kohler’s robot-built wall in New York City, Pike Loop, the dome implies a kind of militarized vernacular through which new, functional architectures can be constructed.

20th-century prefab modularity by way of well-placed bricks of TNT.

[Image: Greg Lynn’s Blobwall, on display at SCI-Arc].

But perhaps someday we’ll see autonomous instruments of robotic war crawling behind enemy lines, building fantastically elaborate, Dr. Seussian architectures on the shores of foreign continents. Artificially intelligent 3D printers, producing bomb-domes—explosive ziggurats—vast and terrible buildings awaiting their detonative spark from the sky.