Month: June 2010

[Image: The subterranean Flower Factory of Naples by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].

I thought I’d kick off a series of posts looking at my time spent so far going through the “Underground Space Center Library” archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture with a look at a summer 2007 issue of Rassegna magazine, its topic nothing other than underground architecture or architetture sotteranee. While the issue is not actually part of the “Underground Space Center Library” archives, it makes a convenient starting part for a few new posts.

The city of Naples, as many readers will know, is built atop a series of caverns. These continue throughout the coastal region, extending down the coast for quite some time to form grottoes, harbors, and coves; they have been depicted throughout art history and used for everything from smuggling illicit goods (see Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, for instance) to sheltering the populace from bombing raids during World War II.

[Images: Joseph Wright of Derby, Cavern, near Naples (1774) and A Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, Sunset (1780-81)].

As the BBC reported a few years back, these caves “have been dug out over thousands of years and used for everything from aqueducts to air raid shelters.” Though “more than 900 have been discovered so far,” they add, “that is believed to be only a third of what actually lies below.” Approximately 2,700 caves, then: there is a whole other world beneath greater Naples.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was sent by LIFE magazine to document the wartime reuse of the city’s most prominent geological features; from children playing on gravel hillsides to teetering stacks of agricultural machinery waiting quietly in the darkness for the day they could be reactivated, every conceivable activity of everyday life was hosted underground.

[Images: All photos by Margaret Bourke-White, courtesy of LIFE magazine].

But what sorts of sustained, economically pragmatic uses for these spaces might we develop today?

In 1988, an exhibition called Sottonapoli—Beneath Naples—explored possible architectural transformations of the caves.

Amongst those projects was a proposal for an automated “Flower Factory” by Marco Zanuso.

[Image: Underneath Naples; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].

As Francesco Trabucco, one of Zanuso’s collaborators on the project, wrote in Rassegna‘s underground issue, the project was for—and the parenthetical comments here are Trabucco’s own—”a large phytotron (a neologism referring to an accelerator of natural growth).” He continues:

The operating principle of the phytotron involves creating and monitoring the optimum microenvironment for plant growth: temperature, air humidity, lighting, photoperiodism and nutrition. At the same time, all negative factors tied to the natural environment are eliminated, i.e. climatic variation, the unpredictability of precipitation, variability in the length of the solar day, and—naturally—air and water pollution, and infestation by plants and animals. In the conditions created inside a phytotron, a plant grows at a pace that can be accelerated, with the complete absence of pollutants that are now widely present in plants grown ‘naturally,’ such as weed killers, insecticides, pesticides, acid rain, smog deposits and chemical fertilizers.

It’s basically an underground greenhouse, of course, but a fully automated one forming its own subterranean microclimate. Think of it as a buried version of VW’s legendary CarTowers in Wolfsburg, Germany, crossed with the indoor skyscraper farms so popular on architecture blogs back in 2007. The botanical results are not tomatoes, corn, wheat, or cucumbers, however, but prize flowers.

It’s a kind of pharaonic Keukenhof, or a cultivated series of entombed precision-microclimates powered by a surrogate sun.

[Image: The subterranean Flower Factory of Naples by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].

Indeed, “A circular system of solar mirrors is designed to be installed on the ground level,” Trabucco explains, “thereby concentrating enormous amounts of thermal energy to a steam ball set on an upper level. The latter produces superheated steam to power the electric turbines.”

Nearby that is “a sterile laboratory, set up at the system entrance, in which plant cloning and micropropagation are conducted.” Successful shoots are then “placed in growth chambers until they are large enough to transplant to trays, which have holes that are sized and spaced according to the morphology of the individual plants.”

These aeroponic trays of engineered flowers are then placed, via automated relay, into a series of “maturation tunnels”—in many ways quite similar to the mushroom tunnel of Mittagong—”that are 1.8 meters wide and about 100 meters long. Tunnel height varies to cater to plant morphology; the number of overlaid tunnels or growth levels depends on the height of the gallery.”

From there, these flowers grown in such unique architectural circumstances would be harvested, pruned, crated, and shipped all over the world—and probably no one would know their actual origin.

[Image: The Flower Factory by Marco Zanuso; photograph by BLDGBLOG of an image from Rassegna].

In any case, the possible underground future of botanical cultivation, using specialty equipment and architectural design to transform caves into ornamental flower farms or large-scale plantations, is something I’ll mention again while exploring the archives of the “Underground Space Center Library” at the CCA.

(For more CCA-related posts, click here).

While writing a brief post for the CCA today about 19th-century “portable buildings” and their unexpected role in facilitating the European colonial project, I stumbled on the “portable camps” of Canadian shelter firm Weatherhaven.

[Images: Multiple projects by Weatherhaven].

Weatherhaven was founded, historian Robert Kronenburg explains in his book Portable Architecture, “in 1981 by the merging of two separate businesses, an expedition organizing team and a Vancouver-based construction company.”

The founders recognized the need for a dedicated approach to the provision of temporary shelter in remote places and developed a strategy to provide a complete service including design, manufacture, packaging, transportation, and erection of buildings, all of which would be created specifically to respond to the logistical problems of remote deployment in harsh environments.

For Weatherhaven, this includes the production of whole “Geological Survey Camps” and “mining villages,” among many other examples, almost all of which are capable of being rapidly deployed and air-delivered by crate.

It is Flatpak City: pop open the box and go.

[Image: Service-installation by Weatherhaven].

“The first stage of the operation,” Kronenburg writes, referring to a specific example of their cities-on-demand, “was to establish a Weatherhaven crew shelter so that a construction team could prepare a temporary landing site for heavier aircraft.” From that initial seed, a whole civilization-by-airfield could be grown—an instant city from the sky. “A single crate was flown in by light aircraft and the building was assembled and in use within four hours.”

The team then prepared the camp layout, and as the rest of the building components and other equipment were flown in, assembled the entire facility… The completed facility included sleeping and leisure accommodation, a 24 hour kitchen, showers, and toilets, a hospital, offices, and an engineering base, and was built in 20 working days.

The buildings themselves are neither architecturally nor materially interesting, Kronenburg adds, but they “are remarkable for their organizational and logistical approach.”

It is just-in-time urbanism: parachuting in whole cities and logistical systems till a new, geographically remote metropolis is up and running in less than three weeks.

[Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].

These temporary mining villages and other extraction towns—somewhere above the Arctic Circle or deep in the desert, “often so remote as to be invisible to most of the world”—unfold in an industrial nanosecond. They stick around for mere years and then disappear, leaving no real archaeological traces, producing no tourist postcards, finding no place on any map, perhaps never even achieving the status of a formal name, yet nonetheless managing to house thousands of workers at a time.

What role should such compounds play in the writing of urban and architectural history?

[Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].

At the very least, these “longer-stay remote shelters,” as Kronenburg calls them, are surely as vital to the global economy—with deep connections to the extraction industries, from diamond mines to tar sands—as the banking district of a recognized urban conglomerate. How ironic it would be to discover someday that an instant village for 2,000 residents, air-delivered by Weatherhaven into the emotionally bleak but mineralogically rich Australian Outback, has a larger economic footprint than the entire business district of a city like Sydney.

In many ways, I’m reminded of an article published last week in which we read that “Cisco Systems is helping build a prototype in South Korea for what one developer describes as an instant ‘city in a box’.”

Delegations of Chinese government officials looking to purchase their own cities of the future are descending on New Songdo City, a soon-to-be-completed metropolis about the size of downtown Boston that serves as a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities.

The idea that a government—or private corporation—can simply “purchase their own cities of the future” is a fascinating and oddly troubling one. “Five hundred cities are needed in China; 300 are needed in India,” an excited developer explains—so why not simply “purchase” them from the cheapest or most reliable supplier?

Cities will be things you have delivered to you, like pizza, and they and their residents will be treated just as disposably.

[Image: The “modular datacenter” of Sun’s Project Blackbox, a stackable, shipping container-based, portable supercomputing and data storage unit].

Offloading a few of Sun’s Project Blackbox units, seen above, in order to construct a privately chartered city-in-a-box, based around a remote airfield somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, is something as likely to be seen in a Roger Moore-era James Bond film as it is in the corporate spreadsheets of a firm like Rio Tinto; but I’m left dwelling on the question of where these sorts of settlements belong in architectural history.

Purpose-built instant cities “purchased” wholesale from private suppliers, and erected in as little as one month’s time, are only going to increase in quantity, population, diversity of purpose, and global economic importance in the decades to come; their impact on political science and concepts of sovereign territory and constitutional law is something we can barely even begin to anticipate. But if architects have more to learn from the international warehousing strategies of Bechtel than they do from the Farnsworth House or the software packages of Patrik Schumacher, then what role might firms like Weatherhaven prove to have played in transforming how we understand the built environment?

Put another way, should the COO of Weatherhaven be invited to contribute to Icon‘s next “Manifesto” issue? If so, what might architects and urban planners learn?

(Thanks to my dad for the Cisco “city-in-a-box” link!)

[Image: “Soldiers in the triumphal entry of Henri II into Rouen in 1550,” engraver unknown, from Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph].

In Mary Beard’s recent book The Roman Triumph, we read the interesting story of conquering armies parading architectural models of the forts they’ve destroyed through the streets of their own home city.

These triumphant returning soldiers would sometimes “carry models of forts captured by the victorious army,” she explains. “Enthusiastic accounts of the procession held these models to be so accurate that the places were ‘easily recognizable’ to the participants in the various battles.” It was about “the success of display no less than the display of success,” she quips.

These parades—called triumphs, in the case of imperial Rome, and the subject of Beard’s book, which falls somewhere between classical history and spatial anthropology—both “re-presented and re-enacted the victory.” A military triumph—the victorious parade—thus “brought the margins of the Empire to its center, and in so doing celebrated the new geopolitics that victory had brought about,” Beard adds. Orphaned objects of victory moved through the conquering city, embattled remnants as diverse as “the beaks of wrecked pirate ships” and “exotic trees”—amidst, of course, the architectural models pictured above. Urban simulations, hoisted high above the crowds in an apotheosis of spatial doubling.

One wonders what such a practice might result in today, on the other hand. What expertise in modeling the enemy might be required in our own era’s case, with military operations now running through drug tunnels, feral cities, and mountain caves, amongst many other such complex terrains?

(Read BLDGBLOG’s two-part interview with Mary Beard, published back in 2007, here and here).

[Image: Mammoth bone hut; unknown illustrator].

It’s been two weeks now since I arrived in Montreal to begin my summer residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where I am also kicking off the “Bloggers in the Archive” experiment.

It’s been fantastic so far, and, in almost every way, is just getting started. After the initial introductory tours and orientations—wandering through “cold vaults” in an obligatory down jacket, looking at children’s architectural toys, seeing Gordon Matta-Clark’s tax returns, learning about “sulfur bricks” baked in cake trays, flipping through 19th-century photographs of Istanbul’s city walls, and, as anyone who follows my Twitter feed might have noticed, going through no less than 17 boxes of archival material from the Underground Space Center Library—I’ll now be able to write about the objects, texts, photos, films, and more that I discover (or am shown) here in the voluminous storage rooms of the CCA.

Expect those posts to begin this week and to continue through the end of July.

[Image: Alessandro Poli, Zeno-research of a self-sufficient culture (1979-80). ©Archivio Alessandro Poli. Photo: Antonio Quattrone. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

For now, the first five posts that I’ve written for the CCA are up and ready for reading. You can find any new content that I produce for them in one of two ways: either go to the home page itself and click on the Post-It note at the bottom right, or simply bookmark the tag Geoff@CCA. This is all part of the To CCA, From… series. Unfortunately, there is no way to leave comments on the CCA site, but perhaps use the comment thread here for any reactions, positive or negative, to the posts.

[Image: Unknown engraver, Series of views showing the development of the modern bastion system from its medieval origins, Matthias Dögen (1647), courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

Over the past week, then, I’ve looked at urban fortifications and the defensive future of feral cities; through the CCA’s extensive periodicals collection, focusing on a brief comment about the relationship between furniture design and weight-lifting equipment; I’ve taken a behind-the-scenes tour of the CCA’s current exhibition Other Space Odysseys, looking specifically at a fictional encounter between an Apollo astronaut and an Italian farmer; I’ve reviewed the sonic abnormalities of a concert here in Montréal last weekend as part of the MUTEK festival; and, in the most recent post, I’ve taken a look at the paleolithic history of architecture and the prehistoric design possibilities for an Archigram of mammoth bones.

Actual archival research—live-blogging the archive, so to speak—will begin promptly. Thanks again to the CCA for hosting me!

[Image: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

Shin Egashira, an architect and instructor at the AA in London—and co-author of the amazing pamphlet I mentioned back in April, the Alternative Guide to Portland—has a number of projects that I’d like to write about here, but I’ll limit myself to one: Slow Box After Image, produced in 2000 in Japan.

[Image: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

The project, Egashira explains on his website, “required the construction of an over-sized camera vehicle (Slow Box) and an archive space (After Image). Slow Box can fit a person inside its wooden structure. It travels across villages with a help of an agricultural tractor.”

It needed up to 30 minutes of exposure time per image, and each exposure produced only one part of the eventual, tiled print—a print that measured no less than 1.5 square-meters. The results—which you can see toward the end of this post—are amazing.

But check out the structure first, its hinged operation seen here in model form.

[Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

The whole contraption, Egashira explains in his book Before Object, After Image: Koshirakura Landscape, 1996-2006, “can flip from a horizontal position (when it is in transit or being used as a darkroom) to a vertical fixed position, which allows one to sit inside and see the inverted image.”

Climbing down into the belly of the camera for the first time as it creaked and shook around me, I felt like an early pioneer about to descend into the depths of the ocean in some kind of prototype submarine. Last waves and smiles to those outside before closing up the hatch and sinking into my own world of muffled sounds and stifling darkness.

Here are some action shots.

[Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

“7 villages showed their interest to collaborate,” the architect adds, “namely, Takakura, Takizawa, Kurokura, Kettou, Seitayama, Funasaka and Koshirakura. The journey was organized as 3-4 days in each village, taking photographs as a form of communication, just us being a group of visitors asking permissions for taking pictures, except the camera that is big and slow enough to be taken seriously.”

Egashira quips that, “Over time we all began to build up a close relationship with the thing as we hauled it daily from one village to the next, in a procession akin to a medieval pilgrimage caravan bearing a precious effigy. How strange it must have seemed to the elderly villagers we visited as an increasingly disheveled troupe of people from all over the world turned up in a slow-moving convoy of car, van and tiny buzzing moped, with the tractor bearing the camera at the centre, raised up high and sheathed in canvases lashed with ropes for protection.”

Some of the resulting images can be seen below.

[Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

“The pictures were eventually displayed in an old hall with tall windows hugh up on a remote hillside,” we read. “Twenty or so large sheets of glass with images showing the people of this quiet corner of Japan, the sepia colour and hazy focus conjuring up anthropological images that could have been taken a hundred years before.”

The installation shots, below, are from the school gym in Kurokawa Village, where the prints were displayed in August 2000.

[Images: Slow Box After Image by Shin Egashira].

Egashira and his students also built a Suitcase Camera in 2003, which is basically what it sounds: an unfolding suitcase-camera on wheels that they hauled, once again, village to village, photographing residents in situ.

The mobile camera device/portable architecture hybrid is a pretty intriguing mix, though, and I would love to see further permutations of the concept. Perhaps something combining the Strandbeest of Theo Jansen with Gigapan, by way of Shin Egashira, to unleash autonomous, roving, bamboo-framed camera-machines that wander town to town through mists and mountains.

[Image: “Crane Rooms and Keg Apartments” by Aristide Antonas].

Architect Aristide Antonas will be speaking tonight, Tuesday, June 8, at the Bauhaus–Universität in Weimar, Germany. Antonas’s Flickr set has long been a favorite of mine, as it thoroughly documents his work, which radically reuses existing structures and pieces of mobile industrial equipment, such as cranes, trucks, and buses. In fact, you might recognize his “Crane Rooms” project from ArchDaily.

His “Bus Hotel,” for instance, is a double-decker bus transformed into a mobile, 7-bed hotel.

[Images: “Bus Hotel” by Aristide Antonas].

The “Keg Apartment,” designed in collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni, continues what Antonas calls his “stable vehicle” series. There, “existing transportation wagons of different types… form rooms that can still move or can function again as movable. They can be used as holiday rooms or as small office places.”

[Images: “Keg Apartment” by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni].

His “Crane Rooms,” mentioned earlier, deserve a look here—

[Images: “Crane Rooms” by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni].

—about which Antonas writes:

Simple concrete foundations and elementary water pools are proposed to be installed in non hospitable beaches or arid hills nearby the sea. The room units form independent cells, they can be covered by tissues during the day; they provide a quality connection to the Internet. The private or public character of each room is regulated by the chosen high of every unit. The high control system is located inside every room. Platforms go up and down following the will of every provisional inhabitant. A bigger screen, related to the bed, serves as a home cinema structure; a small office, a wardrobe and a shower are placed in the same moving platform. A common underground kitchen serves the needs of all the complex; a reverse osmosis desalination plant provides drinkable water to the invisible kitchen and to the units (the water pipes follow the length of the crane).

He also proposes the construction of a “Crane Room Hotel” in which a network of individual units “moving up and down provide summer shelters with changing views.”

[Images: “Screen Wall House” by Aristide Antonas, including a map of possible sites and locations].

I’m more or less just randomly sampling his Flickr page, but “Screen Wall House” also deserves a quick look. Here, from what I can gather, a roofless island camping structure has the ability to expand indefinitely with the addition of further walls. “The walls that form this house are made out of screens,” Antonas writes. “These thin walls arrive by boat and are maintained by the desert place company, which is something similar to a camping set with particular rules. The screens can be added to existing concrete bases. A power engine provides the electricity that is needed for each unit.” The architecture, then, is dependent on the concrete floor plan laid out in advance by the “desert place company”—but one can easily imagine an alternative wall-structure that brings its modular floor plates along with it, thus allowing these flexi-mazes of temporary screens to encompass unprecedented interior spaces without a need for prior planning.

In any case, Antonas will be presenting his work at the Bauhaus-Universität in only a matter of hours; say hello to him if you happen to be there tonight.

Christoph Gielen‘s aerial studies of suburban land-use patterns can be seen in the new issue of Culturehall, curated by David Andrew Frey around the theme “Future History.”

[Image: “Skye Isle II, Florida” (2009) by Christoph Gielen].

Glyphic, abstract, and typological, Gielen’s chosen land forms span the multidirectional universe of ribbons in the highway structures of Southern California to kaleidoscopic rosaries of Arizona houses.

In his own words, Gielen “specializes in conducting photographic aerial studies of infrastructure in its relation to land use, exploring the intersection of art and environmental politics.”

[Image: “Untitled Arizona III” (2010) by Christoph Gielen].

The results are often stunning, as monumental earth-shields of anthropological sprawl reveal their spatial logic from above. Seemingly drab and ecologically disastrous—even intellectually stultifying—suburbs become complex geographic experiments that perhaps didn’t quite go as planned.

Some of the photos—such as “Sterling Ridge VII, Florida” (2009), below—look genuinely alien, more like conceptual studies for exoplanetary settlements as imagined in the 1950s by NASA.

[Image: “Sterling Ridge VII, Florida” (2009) by Christoph Gielen].

How strange, though, and deeply ironic would it be for a photographic project ostensibly intended to show us how off-kilter our built environment has become—Gielen writes that “he hopes to trigger a reevaluation of our built environment, to ask: What kind of development can be considered sustainable?”—to reveal that the suburbs are, in a sense, intensely original settlement patterns tiled over the landscape in ways our species could never have anticipated? We are living amidst geometry, post-terrestrial screens between ourselves and the planet we walk upon.