If you had told me that a new science fiction novel just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass move through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal, I would, naively, never have assumed that such a thing might also be possible here on earth. The speculative climatology of alien worlds.
[Image: Photo by AP Photo/Brynjar Gaudi].
But, perhaps, if airplane engines are built to fly through air—i.e. not through glass, dust, rocks, or geology—today’s airplanes should be temporarily retrofitted with tunneling equipment under each wing, jury-rigged Herrenknecht machines to drill a new infrastructure of hovering tunnels through the glass-thundering skies of northern Europe.
One of many things that we’ll be looking at tonight in the Blackout seminar that I’ve been teaching over at Pratt in Brooklyn is organically generated electricity—things like virus batteries, biogeobatteries, sediment batteries, and more.
[Image: From Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige (2006)].
By way of getting there, though, we’ll be taking a very brief look at Christopher Nolan’s under-rated film The Prestige—specifically the scene in which we see a hillside covered in giant incandescent light bulbs, none of which appear to be plugged into anything but soil and all of which are powered wirelessly by a generator located over 12 miles away.
The geological form of the mountain plateau becomes a shining grid framing our two featured characters.
[Image: From Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige (2006)].
Although The Prestige does not suggest that this is what’s happening in this scene, what if the soil itself was powering these light bulbs? What if soil could be turned into a landscape-scale, distributed electrical device?
Awesomely, as Nature reported just two months ago, there is growing evidence to back up “a suggestion within the geophysics and microbiology communities that bacteria can grow tiny ‘wires’ and hook up to form a biogeobattery—a giant natural battery that generates electrical currents.”
Scientists have known that bacteria can create electricity when mixed with mud and seawater, and have even built microbial fuel cells around the little buggers. Now they have begun figuring out just how bacteria create electrical networks that serve as long-distance communication, at least on the microbial scale—the distances ranged up to 2 centimeters. Yet those few centimeters equal roughly 20,000 times the body size of individual bacteria.
Imagining soil itself—the ground all around us—as a giant electrical transmission network is astonishing. And, again, while there is no mention of anything like biogeobatteries and their ilk in The Prestige, the very idea that perhaps someday we could plug light bulbs directly into the soil—an organic battery coextensive with the living surface of the earth—amazes me.
And biogeobatteries are not even the only option here; there are also virus batteries.
MIT reported back in 2006 that a team of researchers had “harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small ‘nanowire’ structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries. By manipulating a few genes inside these viruses, the team was able to coax the organisms to grow and self-assemble into a functional electronic device.” The resulting virus batteries are tiny, but they could vary in scale “from the size of a grain of rice up to the size of existing hearing aid batteries.”
The future design possibilities are bewildering. Could deposits of virus-impregnated soil be used as electricity-storage devices in rural, off-the-grid areas?
After all, bacteria might already be “wiring up the soil,” Nature suggested three years ago. Indeed, “bacteria can sprout webs of electrical wiring that transform the soil into a geological battery,” meaning that “the earth beneath our feet might act as a gigantic circuit built by microbes to power their metabolic systems.” And you can build a soil battery yourself:
The researchers filled plastic columns with wet sand infiltrated with a nutrient compound (lactate), and allowed S. oneidensis to grow in this “fake soil.” Only the top of the column was in contact with air. Electrodes inserted at various heights up the columns revealed that, after about ten days, electrical charge was coursing up the column… threaded by a web of filaments between the bacterial cells.
I’m reminded here of the work of Philip Beesley, which often uses self-fertilizing yeast-packs, gels, and seeds to create living geotextiles. In fact, a Beesley Battery doesn’t seem at all very off: a living mat woven through the soil, generating and storing electricity based on pre-existing bacterial activity in the ground.
You infect the soil with a genetically-modified virus patented by MIT and electrical currents start to flow…
[Image: From Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006)].
Perhaps someday, then, we could simply show up somewhere, in the middle of the night, surrounded by pine forests and hills, and just crouch down, push a light bulb two or three inches into the earth—
In a 2003 paper for the Naval War College Review, author Richard J. Norton defined the term feral cities. “Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles,” Norton begins, as if narrating the start of a film pitch. “Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.”
With the city’s infrastructure having collapsed long ago—or perhaps having never been built in the first place—there are no works of public sanitation, no sewers, no licensed doctors, no reliable food supply, no electricity. The feral city is a kind of return to medievalism, we might say, back to the future of a dark age for anyone but criminals, gangs, and urban warlords. It is a space of illiterate power—strength unresponsive to rationality or political debate.
From the perspective of a war planner or soldier, the feral city is also spatially impenetrable, a maze resistant to aerial mapping. Indeed, its “buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces, would offer nearly perfect protection from overhead sensors, whether satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles,” Norton writes.
This is something Russell W. Glenn, formerly of the RAND Corporation—an Air Force think tank based in Southern California—calls “combat in Hell.” In his 1996 report of that name, Glenn pointed out that “urban terrain confronts military commanders with a synergism of difficulties rarely found in other environments,” many of which are technological. For instance, the effects of radio communications and global positioning systems can be radically limited by dense concentrations of architecture, turning what might otherwise be an exotic experience of pedestrian urbanism into a claustrophobic labyrinth inhabited by unseen enemy combatants.
Add to this the fact that military ground operations of the near future are more likely to unfold in places like Sadr City, Iraq—not in paragons of city planning like Vancouver—and you have an environment in which soldiers are as likely to die from tetanus, rabies, and wild dog attacks, Norton suggests, as from actual armed combat.
Put another way, as Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”
But feral cities are one thing, cities under siege are something else.
In his new book Cities Under Siege, published just two weeks ago, geographer Stephen Graham explores “the extension of military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into the quotidian spaces and circulations of everyday life,” including “dramatic attempts to translate long-standing military dreams of high-tech omniscience and rationality into the governance of urban civil society.” This is just part of a “deepening crossover between urbanism and militarism,” one that will only become more pronounced, Graham fears, over time.
One particularly fascinating example of this encroachment of “military dreams… into the governance of urban civil society” is actually the subject of a forthcoming book by Joe Flood. The Fires tells the story of “an alluring proposal” offered by the RAND Corporation, back in 1968, “to a city on the brink of economic collapse [New York City]: using RAND’s computer models, which had been successfully implemented in high-level military operations, the city could save millions of dollars by establishing more efficient public services.” But all did not go as planned:
Over the next decade—a time New York City firefighters would refer to as “The War Years”—a series of fires swept through the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Brooklyn, gutting whole neighborhoods, killing more than two thousand people and displacing hundreds of thousands. Conventional wisdom would blame arson, but these fires were the result of something altogether different: the intentional withdrawal of fire protection from the city’s poorest neighborhoods—all based on RAND’s computer modeling systems.
In any case, Graham’s interest is in the city as target, both of military operations and of political demonization. In other words, cities themselves are portrayed “as intrinsically threatening or problematic places,” Graham writes, and thus feared as sites of economic poverty, moral failure, sexual transgression, rampant criminality, and worse (something also addressed in detail by Steve Macek’s book Urban Nightmares). All cities, we are meant to believe, already exist in a state of marginal ferality. I’m reminded here of Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”
In some of the book’s most interesting sections, Graham tracks the growth of urban surveillance and the global “homeland security market.” He points out that major urban events—like G8 conferences, the Olympics, and the World Cup, among many others—offer politically unique opportunities for the installation of advanced tracking, surveillance, and facial-recognition technologies. Deployed in the name of temporary security, however, these technologies are often left in place when the event is over: a kind of permanent crisis, in all but name, takes over the city, with remnant, military-grade surveillance technologies gazing down upon the streets (and embedded in the city’s telecommunications infrastructure). A moment of exception becomes the norm.
Graham outlines a number of dystopian scenarios here, including one in which “swarms of tiny, armed drones, equipped with advanced sensors and communicating with each other, will thus be deployed to loiter permanently above the streets, deserts, and highways” of cities around the world, moving us toward a future where “militarized techniques of tracking and targeting must permanently colonize the city landscape and the spaces of everyday life.”
In the process, any real distinction between a “homeland” and its “colonies” is irreparably blurred. Here, he quotes Michel Foucault: “A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.” If it works in Baghdad, the assumption goes, then let’s try it out in Detroit.
This is just one of many “boomerang effects” from militarized urban experiments overseas, Graham writes.
[Images: Blast walls in Iraq].
But what does this emerging city—this city under siege—actually look like? What is its architecture, its urban design, its local codes? What is its infrastructure?
Graham has many evocative answers for this. The city under siege is a place in which “hard, military-style borders, fences and checkpoints around defended enclaves and ‘security zones,’ superimposed on the wider and more open city, are proliferating.”
Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity checkpoints, computerized CCTV, biometric surveillance and military styles of access control protect archipelagos of fortified social, economic, political or military centers from an outside deemed unruly, impoverished and dangerous. In the most extreme examples, these encompass green zones, military prisons, ethnic and sectarian neighborhoods and military bases; they are growing around strategic financial districts, embassies, tourist and consumption spaces, airport and port complexes, sports arenas, gated communities and export processing zones.
Cities Under Siege also extensively covers urban warfare, a topic that intensely interests me. From Graham’s chapter “War Re-Enters the City”:
Indeed, almost unnoticed within “civil” urban social science, a shadow system of military urban research is rapidly being established, funded by Western military research budgets. As Keith Dickson, a US military theorist of urban warfare, puts it, the increasing perception within Western militaries is that “for Western military forces, asymmetric warfare in urban areas will be the greatest challenge of this century… The city will be the strategic high ground—whoever controls it will dictate the course of future events in the world.”
Ralph Peters phrased this perhaps most dramatically when he wrote, back in 1996 for the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, that “the future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the broken cities of our world.” The future of warfare, that is, lies in feral cities.
In this context, Graham catalogs the numerous ways in which “aggressive physical restructuring,” as well as “violent reorganization of the city,” is used, and has been used throughout history, as a means of securing and/or controlling a city’s population. At its most extreme, Graham calls this “place annihilation.” The architectural redesign of cities can thus be used as a military policing tactic as much as it can be discussed as a topic in academic planning debates. There are clearly echoes of Eyal Weizman in this.
On one level, these latter points are obvious: small infrastructural gestures, like public lighting, can transform alleyways from zones of impending crime to walkways safe for pedestrian use—and, in the process, expand political control and urban police presence into that terrain. But, as someone who does not want to be attacked in an alleyway any time soon, I find it very positive indeed when the cityscape around me becomes both safer by design and better policed. Equally obvious, though, when these sorts of interventions are scaled-up—from public lighting, say, to armed checkpoints in a militarized reorganization of the urban fabric—then something very drastic, and very wrong, is occurring in the city. Instead of a city simply with more cops (or fire departments), you begin a dark transition toward a “city under siege.”
I could go on at much greater length about all of this—but suffice it to say that Cities Under Siege covers a huge array of material, from the popularity of SUVs in cities to the blast-wall geographies of Baghdad, from ASBOs in London to drone helicopters in the skies above New York. Raytheon’s e-Borders program opens the book, and Graham closes it all with a discussion of “countergeographies.”
[Images: (left) An archaeologist examines soil cores. (right) Researchers plot lost roads across the grounds of Monticello. Courtesy of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology at IU Bloomington].
It’s hard to resist a caption referring to a “team of researchers” who have used their “electrical resistivity profiler to discover long-buried roads around the historic Virginia home” of 18th century U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. But that’s exactly what you’ll see courtesy of a recent press release from Indiana University.
Specifically, we read, a team of Indiana University archaeologists have “conducted a landscape study to find evidence of two lost roads: a ‘kitchen road’ that serviced the Monticello kitchen, and a formal carriageway that circled along the Ellipse Fence marking the edge of the East Lawn and the formal landscape in front of Monticello.”
A combination of soil cores and direct electrical data helped that team outline this otherwise lost geography at the heart of U.S. presidential history and across the original lawns of American Palladianism. Jefferson, as you might know, was an architect, one heavily influenced by the texts and buildings of Andrea Palladio. American architecture, from day one, was, in a sense, a facsimile: created, with far-reaching variations and personal stylistic quirks, based on reproduced manuscripts from Europe.
In any case, stepping back: beneath Jefferson’s lawn are lost roads.
I’m reminded here of an amazing story published two years ago in the New York Times about “ancient roads,” dating from colonial times, in the U.S. state of Vermont.
As the The New York Times explained back then, a 2006 state law gave Vermont residents a strong incentive to uncover the buried throughways in, around, and through their often quite rural towns. Indeed, “citizen volunteers are poring over record books with a common, increasingly urgent purpose: finding evidence of every road ever legally created in their towns, including many that are now impassable and all but unobservable.”
These “elusive roads”—many of them “now all but unrecognizable as byways”—are lost routes, connecting equally erased destinations. In almost all particular cases, they have barely even left a trace on the ground; their presence is almost entirely textual.
They are not just lost roads; they are road that have been deterrestrialized.
If these ancient routes can be re-discovered, however, then Vermont state law dictates that they can also be added to official town lands (and thus be eligible for some kind of federal something-or-other). Accordingly:
Some towns, content to abandon the overgrown roads that crisscross their valleys and hills, are forgoing the project. But many more have recruited teams to comb through old documents, make lists of whatever roads they find evidence of, plot them on maps and set out to locate them.
And, in what is surely one of the most interesting geographical subplots in recent newspaper publishing, we read: “Even for history buffs, the challenge is steep: evidence of ancient roads may be scattered through antique record books, incomplete or hard to make sense of.”
Like something out of the poetry of PaulMetcalf, or even William Carlos Williams, the descriptions found in these old documents are narrative, impressionistic, and vague. They “might be, ‘Starting at Abel Turner’s front door and going to so-and-so’s sawmill,’ said Aaron Worthley, a member of the ancient roads committee in Huntington, southeast of Burlington. ‘But the house might have burned down 100 years ago. And even if not, is the front door still where it was in 1815? These are the kinds of questions we’re dealing with.'”
While making sense of cryptic references to lost byways is fascinating in and of itself, these acts of perambulatory interpretation are part of a much larger, fairly mundane attempt to end “fights between towns and landowners whose property abuts or even intersects ancient roads.”
In the most infamous legal battle, the town of Chittenden blocked a couple from adding on to their house, saying the addition would encroach on an ancient road laid out in 1793. Town officials forced a showdown when they arrived on the property with chain saws one day in 2004, intending to cut down trees and bushes on the road until the police intervened.
The article here goes on to refer to one local, a lawyer, who explains that “he loved getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads: parallel stone walls or rows of old-growth trees about 50 feet apart. Old culverts are clues, too, as are cellar holes that suggest people lived there; if so, a road probably passed nearby.”
What would happen, then, if you discovered that an ancient road actually passes through your house? Your living room is a former throughway, and old paths knot and twirl off to every side; one even leads right through the guest bedroom. And then another road pops up, and another—and you realize that you live on the intersecting scars of a lost built environment, some old village that disappeared or was destroyed in an H.P. Lovecraft-like enigmatic disaster.
[Image: An old Roman road in Britain; photo via Historic UK].
I’d also be curious, meanwhile, to see what might happen if such a law was passed in a city like London. In an old but interesting review of the book London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair, we’re told that London “is a city of the forgotten.” It is where anyone “can still disappear without trace.” Indeed, London is a city “built upon lost things”; it “towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits.”
Best of all, entire London streets have disappeared: “Catherine Street, Jewin Street, Golden Place are just three of the vanished thoroughfares named in a litany of sorrowful mysteries,” our reviewer points out. “Other streets have been curtailed. Swallow Street has been swallowed by burgeoning London. Grub Street has been renamed Milton Street.”
So what would happen if someone—who liked “getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads”—were to set about such a task elsewhere, in a city made from unstable geographies flashing in and out of county land registers?
I’m reminded here of China Miéville’s short story “Reports of Certain Events in London,” in which “unstable” streets appear and disappear throughout the city. One night they’re there, the next night they’re not.
Or take Chris Carlsson’s explorations of San Francisco’s ghost streets. “Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence,” Carlsson wrote last autumn. “Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they’re still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.”
[Image: A map of San Francisco, including many “ghost streets,” courtesy of Streetsblog SF].
Carlsson’s post—something every San Franciscan should read—seemingly paved the way for a later exploration of “San Francisco’s unaccepted streets,” throughways too ephemeral for any real act of archaeology.
This unaccepted geographical unconscious of the city was recently mapped by Nicholas de Monchaux in an awesomely ambitious project called Local Code. It’s hard to exaggerate how interesting this project is; the following embedded video barely does it justice:
Here we are, then, surrounded by lost roads, forgotten throughways, and unaccepted streets. We turn on ground-penetrating radar and we find lost highways. What new cartographies could possibly account for these layers? With avenues leading nowhere and medieval freeways whose stratigraphic routes remain unpaved?
Finally—though by no means answering these questions—roughly two years ago, historian Kitty Hauser published a book called Bloody Old Britain. That book told the story of pilot, and accidental archaeologist, O.G.S. Crawford. Crawford pioneered the use of aerial photography in both discovering and analyzing ancient sites. Learning to read the landscape from the air, on the look-out for German ditches and bunkers, Crawford “would later apply this kind of skill honed in war, the trained interpretation of visual evidence, to the peacetime work of archaeology,” Hauser writes.
In the process, he realized almost instantly that you could detect, from high above, the traces of ancient landscape features that would otherwise have gone unseen. For instance, “at certain times of day, when the sun is low in the sky, the outlines of ancient fields become visible over Salisbury Plain, as shadows throw their ridges and dimples into sharp relief; these are known as ‘shadow sites.’” Much of this comes down to the specific species of plant growing over these landscapes:
Field archaeologists know that vegetation grows differently on soil that has been disturbed, even if that disturbance happened centuries ago. They know that crops grow more luxuriantly over silted-up ditches, and more stunted where there are buried remains. The site of a Roman villa might go unnoticed until a field of wheat grows and ripens, to reveal most strangely the outlines of buried masonry, only to disappear again at harvest. Slight contours or indentations on the land marking out the site of a lost settlement might be invisible to the eye until a low sun throws them into sharp but momentary relief.
Further:
Barley is a more sensitive ‘developer,’ for example, than oats, wheat, or grass, but only in certain soils. Dry spells can bring about remarkably sharp crop sites, like the outline of the medieval tithe barn, complete with buttresses, that appeared in the grass at Dorchester in June of 1938.
Hauser continues, pushing the awe factor:
One of the most remarkable things about aerial archaeology is that very few human processes will completely remove a site from view for ever. It might be decades—centuries even—before the right combination of crop growth, rain, sun, and aerial observer results in a site manifesting itself and being photographed. But unless deep excavations or quarrying are carried out, removing all traces of the site, the possibility remains that one day, under new conditions, it will reveal itself.
And, thus, “Photographs of unimpressive-looking mounds and lumps, the sort of thing one might not notice as one went past in a car or a train, turn out to be burial mounds, still for all we know containing crouching skeletons or buried treasure. You just needed to know where to look.” And Crawford knew where to look: there were ancient archaeological features everywhere, from buried roads to wooden menhirs rotting back into the soil. Britain was very old, Crawford himself could see; it was Bloody Old Britain.
[Image: O.G.S. Crawford and his archaeological airplane; via Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain].
What, then, if we could combine all this? Dead streets buried beneath the sprawling lawn of a U.S. president—himself now erased from the historical memory of U.S. Conservatives—crossed with lost streets from San Francisco, wed with linear archaeological sites known only from the air of 1910s England, meeting ancient roads through the hills of rural Vermont, informing short story sci-fi by China Miéville: how does our understanding of the built environment accordingly change?
What ancient routes exist all around us—like the dead streets of California City?
When I first mentioned the story of Vermont’s ancient roads two years ago on BLDGBLOG, commenters pointed out things like the Icknield Way, a.k.a. the “oldest road in Britain,” as well as lost railway lines in North Dakota:
I’ve done a lot of ‘landscape hermeneutics’ with former rail lines. I’m working on photographing every town in North Dakota, and most of these towns were built on a rail line. Many of those lines are now long-gone, so there’s often a ridge running through the town where the railroad used to be. Some of the tiniest spots (like Petrel) that still manage to get on the map can only be identified by a swath of cleared land where a railroad siding and depot might have been.
Or, from Ian Milliss, perhaps the best commenter in BLDGBLOG history (punctuation added):
For the last two years I’ve been on a National Trust committee working on heritage listing for Coxs Road, the first road across the Blue Mountains west of Sydney that opened up Australia to European settlement. Its bicentenary is in 2015.
Numerous pieces of it survive intact, and it does, indeed, sometimes disappear under houses. I’ve also been working on an overlay of it for Google Earth and even some virtual sections done using SketchUp… Its entire construction is detailed in the diaries and reports of its builders so that it can still be tracked through farmland where there is no visible trace of it.
It also relates to Australian indigenous mapping via ancestor stories and songlines, to produce virtual highways that can easily be followed but have very little obvious physical evidence of their existence.
Geography is a dream. Like an absorbed twin, we are surrounded by forgotten roads. That there are lost routes even at the spatial core of the U.S. presidency is just one of many surprising acts of poetry that this world seems always capable of.
(Monticello story spotted via Jessica Saraceni’s great newsfeed over at Archaeology Magazine. Of interest, meanwhile, earlier on BLDGBLOG: Ancient Roads, from which part of this post actually comes, Ancient Lights, and Z).
A project I’ve been meaning to write about ever since seeing it in Vague Terrain #16 is “Pulse Room” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
[Image: From “Pulse Room” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
“Pulse Room,” originally produced back in 2006, was an “interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs,” the brightness of which was controlled by an interface and sensor that could detect “the heart rate of participants.”
When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.
The room thus becomes a counterpunctual archive of heart rates in space, throbbing like a chandelier in front of you.
[Image: From “Pulse Room” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
Lozano-Hemmer later expanded this idea in scale quite significantly for his “Pulse Park” project, in which New York’s Madison Square Park was temporarily illuminated by a moving, heart-rate-controlled “matrix of light beams.”
But I would like to see something like “Pulse Subway,” say, where long tunnels flicker off around underground curves as heartbeat-like rhythms of light beat below ground, scaling the whole thing up yet further to form a piece of urban infrastructure (or is that simply a nightclub?); or even “Pulse Cinema,” in which the film itself fades in and flickers out according to the pulmonary ups and downs of the audience. Scenes of high-stress are seamlessly projected, but boring moments make the whole theater drain down toward black. One particularly caffeinated individual keeps the whole place bright as day.
[Image: From “Pulse Room” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
It’s less the lighting effects that interest me here, though, than the idea of an archive of heart rates, a place where old rhythms could be stored. You could thus try out someone’s pulse—Usain Bolt’s record-shattering runs, or someone who’s survived a car accident—turning the facility (call it the CardiArchive) into a kind of Brainstorm for heart rates. Adventures in tachycardia. Heart-rate sharing.
Upload new pulses into the light-cloud and experience someone else’s panic as your own.
[Image: Photo by Kevin Sellers, courtesy of the Juneau Empire].
This weekend, April 16-17, over at The Lab (2948 16th Street) in San Francisco, sponsored by Swissnex San Francisco, an event called Activating the Medium will explore the sonic properties of ice—that is, “the physical, geographic, metaphoric, and mythological attributes of ice as manifested through sound.”
Specifically, you will hear “the sound of frozen lakes and ice caves,” as well as “various hydrophone recordings” taken in frozen circumstances around the world, and “a composition for real and imagined ice” will be played. As something like the main event of the evening, Cheryl E. Leonard’s work Antarctica will also be performed, samples from which can be heard on her blog Music from the Ice.
That being the case, I thought I’d post a by now very widely disseminated audio clip, recorded by Andreas Bick, of alien sounds racing through strained ice sheets on a lake in Berlin. The noises are incredible:
And this video, below, that Bick later linked to, offers a bit for anyone curious to hear more from these amazing phenomena that sound like laser warfare being conducted inside a glacier.
In any case, the event kicks off at 8:30pm both nights; tickets range from $8-$15. Enjoy!
[Image: A pyramid at Giza, the earth archaeo-surgically opened at its base; courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum; for what it’s worth, this photo just knocks me out].
The shots above and immediately below, in which we see the pyramids at Giza, exude a stage-set quality: the diffuse and hand-colored light, the foreshortened perspective, and the cut-away glimpse into a world of subterranean vaults lending an air of surreality to the whole collection.
[Image: Giza, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum; for what it’s worth, this photo just knocks me out].
Overall, the architecture captured in these images is a mixture of deeply shaded, geometric minimalism—
[Images: Brutalism at Giza, circa 2,500 B.C.; courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum].
—wed with moments of ornamental grandeur, as hieroglyphic bas-reliefs, revealed by passing angles of sunlight, offer whole worlds of spatial detail. Stone inscriptions become less like something you might read, in other words, and more of a spatial experience in their own right.
I’m reminded here of one of my favorite stories of all time, which is that of physicist Luis Alvarez. In the September/October 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine, author Samir Patel explained how Alvarez used a device called a muon detector “to scan the inside of an ancient structure,” which, in this case, was Khafre’s pyramid at Giza.
“Working with Egyptian scientists in the late 1960s,” Patel explains, Alvarez “gained access to the Belzoni chamber, a humid vault deep under the pyramid.” There, “Alvarez’s team set up a muon detector called a spark chamber, which included 30 tons of iron sheeting, in the underground room.” This image—of foreign physicists building iron rooms beneath the pyramids in a search for secret chambers based on cosmic particles raining down from above—is one of the coolest things I have ever read in my life.
[Image: An illustrated depiction of the physicists’ sub-pyramidal adventures; view larger].
As it happens, Alvarez’s work was not without local controversy:
Suspicion of the research team ran high—here was a group of Americans with high-tech electronics beneath one of Egypt’s most cherished monuments. “We had flashing lights behind panels—it looked like a sci-fi thing from Star Trek,” says Lauren Yazolino, the engineer who designed the detector’s electronics.
Alvarez’s humid iron room beneath the pyramid—like a collaborative project by LebbeusWoods and Mike Mignola—took one full year to perform its work. At that point, when the team finally took a long look through its gathered data, Yazolino “spotted an anomaly, a region of the pyramid that stopped fewer muons than expected, suggesting a void.”
There were still undiscovered rooms inside the structure.
[Image: Tombs at Abu Simbel, Egypt, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum].
In any case, you can find these and many more on the Brooklyn Museum’s website; just go to the Lantern Slide Collection (including this write-up of the Lantern Slide Collection’s history) or to this Flickr set. The specific images seen here come from subsidiary collections: Giza, Thebes, Karnak, Philae, Abu Simbel, Edfu, Denderah, and so on.
This final image, below, featuring a doorway embedded in the hills—perhaps leading down into iron rooms, and further into spark chambers, and beyond even those into unmapped humid vaults—is particularly fantastic.
In our urban landscapes we now have the most manipulated kind of city forest ever seen. In the past twenty years landscapers have grown inordinately fond of using male trees. In dioecious species (separate-sexed) there are separate male trees and separate female ones. Female trees and shrubs do not produce any pollen, ever, but they do produce messy seeds, fruits, old flowers, and seedpods. Landscapers and city arborists consider this female byproduct to be “litter”, and they don’t like to see it lying on our sidewalks.
In other words, urban landscapers over-utilize pollen-intensive plantlife—which, in turn, wildly amplifies seasonal allergies. What if you didn’t need more boxes of Claritin, then—you need a more informed city parks department?
I was thus thrilled when Alex pointed out that Ogren had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times, revisiting these very ideas. “As certain trees burst into bloom in spring,” Ogren writes, “their pollen wafts through the air in a wanton attempt to reach receptive blossoms.”
Millions of people with allergies pay the price, in sneezing, wheezing, coughing, drowsiness and itchy, watery eyes. They needn’t suffer so much. Cities could reduce the misery by planting street trees that produce very little pollen or none at all.
Approaching public health from the perspective of landscape design—streetscape botany—together with the unexpected history of our growth in urban allergies, is absolutely fascinating. “Street trees weren’t always as allergenic as they are today,” for instance, Ogren writes.
Back in the 1950s, the most popular species planted in the United States was the native American elm, which sheds little pollen. Millions of these tall, stately trees lined the streets of towns and cities from coast to coast. Sadly, in the 1960s and ’70s, Dutch elm disease killed most of the elms, and many of them were replaced with species that are highly allergenic.
Whether you suffer from allergies or not, the op-ed is worth reading in its entirety.
Linda Bennett of Archi-Ninja has posted an interview with Sydneysider architect and fellow blogger Marcus Trimble.
[Image: Proposal for a new UTS Tower by Super Colossal].
By way of some historical context, Marcus was writing one of the few architecture blogs out there, during an earlier phase in the field (say, 2004-2005), when Archinect, City of Sound, Archidose, Strange Harvest, we make money not art, Life Without Buildings, things magazine, and not a lot of others (though some deserving sites have been left out of that truncated and subjective list) were the only blogs offering consistent architectural coverage. Inhabitat didn’t exist till mid-2005; same with Pruned; Subtopia had yet to be launched; and the bigger sites today, like Dezeen, which sidestep architectural journalism altogether to focus simply on image reproduction and/or social networking, were still years away.
But there was Marcus, writing his first blog gravestmor—which lasted from May 18th, 2004, to July 12, 2007—a site that morphed into a blog for his own architectural practice, Super Colossal. That firm has since gone on to win first place in the Gold Coast Performing Arts Centre design competition (proposing a sort of inhabitable bridge -slash- artificial harbor island), as well as the high-profile Australian Peacekeeping Memorial (and their overlooked design for a new UTS Tower, which can be seen in the image above). Of course, those are in addition to several finished projects, including a private house, apartment, bathroom renovation, and the internet-famous cardboard cubby house.
But it’s Marcus’s roving and very widespread field of interests that made gravestmor so appealing, and that Super Colossal extends today—whether it’s his ongoing explorations of comic bookarchitecture, steampunk spaces, the racial politics of Sydney beaches, how to park cars on the moon, urban space as depicted in the work of J.G. Ballard, his suggestion that China might really be a USB external harddrive for the French, and much more. This was actually the first post I ever remember seeing over there—and I was pretty much hooked from then on.
In any case, the interview over at Archi-Ninja is a bit on the short side, and I would love to hear more from Marcus about his active organizational role down there in Sydney, promoting that city’s architects and their work both to one another and to the rest of the world. But it’s still worth a read, covering space elevators, the films of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann, the future of the architect, running in the city, and more.
In a long new post, Edible Geography takes a look at the planned cities of chocolate barons, suburban sites where the capitalist ideal of a company town overlapped with philanthropic inclinations toward utopia. Quoting at length:
The towns that chocolate built are a curious blend of idealistic vision and pragmatic company town—the convergence of paternalistic benevolence and capitalist expedience. The Cadbury and Rowntree brothers were devout Quakers, whose humanitarian beliefs undoubtedly impelled them to improve the living conditions of their workers. Hershey’s benevolence seems not to have been motivated by religious belief, despite the fact that he was raised by a strict Mennonite mother. However, he was undoubtedly a grand philanthropist, anonymously giving away his entire personal fortune (an estimated value of $60 million in 1918) at the age of sixty-one to endow a school for poor and orphan boys.
Nonetheless, as Tim Richardson is quick to point out [in his recent book Sweets], “philanthropy was always accompanied by efficiency in these developments.” Hershey chose his rural location, for example, less from a desire to ensure his factory workers had access to healthy, rural air, than for strategic gain—deep in dairy-farming land to ensure a cheap supply of milk, but close enough to major cities (Philadelphia and New York) to allow cost-efficient distribution.
The design, planning, economic administration, and cultural history of these chocolate cities would be a fascinating subject for a longer book (or Ph.D.).
Until then, see a related—and similarly titled—story over at Lapham’s Quarterly, then check out the Edible Geography post in full.
I’m a big fan of these speculative subway maps in which underground transportation systems have been projected for landscapes in which their actual construction would be absurd.
Indeed, in many cases, constructing a subway in these sites—Acadia National Park, for instance, seen above, or Martha’s Vineyard—would not only be technically ridiculous, or simply surreal, it would be a disaster.
Hopefully more maps are forthcoming—and it would be great to see more sites outside of New England. A subway for Rocky Mountain National Park, say, or the Galapagos. How about the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John so famously experienced his revelation? Or mechanized travel beneath the Antarctic base at McMurdo. Marrakech. The Florida Keys.
Keep your eye on the Transit Authority Figures’ poster page to see what might come next.
[Image: Photo by Arni Saeberg/Bloomberg].
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