Month: June 2011

[Image: The underground city of Derinkuyu, also mentioned in The BLDGBLOG Book].

I’m heading out of town on yet another summer trip, so I wanted to give any Coloradans out there a quick heads up that I’ll be speaking on the subject of “urban spelunking” at this Friday’s Mixed Taste event at the David Adjaye-designed Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

There will be two short, 20-minute lectures: one by myself, on the subject of the underground, from contemporary London and the Mole Man of Hackney to ancient Cappadocia and Moscow’s Metro-2; the other lecture will be an unrelated talk by Chef Jorel Pierce on the subject of “blood sausage.” As the Museum writes, these are “tag team lectures on unrelated topics.” You can buy tickets here.

While I’m on the subject of Denver, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography will also be speaking at the MCA this weekend; she’ll be part of the Colorado Cocktail Project, a “two-day event where Colorado’s bartenders and distillers compete to create a signature state cocktail, made from Colorado spirits.” You can get tickets for that here.

A recent article of mine for Domus, on the “critical foreign dependencies” list revealed last winter by Wikileaks, is now online, in case you missed it here, complete with some maps and infographics.

[Image: Map by, and courtesy of, Domus, “in homage to Buckminster Fuller’s famous Dymaxion projection, and showing the locations of 259 critical infrastructures”; see it folded up, courtesy of David M.A.].

Check it out if you get a chance—and thanks again to Domus for the opportunity to explore this topic.

[Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].

Photographer Noah Vaughn has been busy documenting the city of Chicago and its midwestern environs, both in his own images and in screenshots taken from films set there.

[Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].

Here is some of Vaughn’s own work, from demolition sites and windowless buildings to humid forest roads behind gas stations. Check out his various websites for more—including the aforementioned Chicago Screenshots.

[Images: All photos by Noah Vaughn].

Thanks go to Alex Trevi for first pointing out Noah Vaughn‘s photos.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

Waiting for the River is a 125-foot-long inhabitable bridge, complete with dormitories, outdoor eating areas, and a bathroom, built by Dutch art group Observatorium back in 2010. The project was constructed in anticipation of the newly cleaned and renaturalized Emscher River, whose waters will soon flow through the surrounding landscape.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

As the artists themselves describe it: “In ten years time the river Emscher—now a sewer canal between dikes—will be a natural river again… Observatorium symbolizes the anticipation of better times and a better environment by building a covered bridge for a river that is not there yet. We invite people to wait 24 hours.”

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

As the Art & Architecture Journal Press puts it, the project, made from reclaimed timbers, “sits over the waste land that will be the site of pastoral landscape in ten years time.”

You could thus book a small bed in the dormitory and fall asleep, in anticipation of a future landscape to come.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

It’s a kind of temporally inverted High Line: a popular sight-seeing infrastructure constructed in advance of the very thing it’s meant to help the public see.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

It is the preparation of the landscape that becomes the spectacle, an otherwise unremarkable spread of fields and small thickets suddenly taking on a sign of impending—but still strangely unpredictable—transformation. Something is meant to happen here, some kind of terrestrial event; the structure exists because of this predicted shift in the earth.

But where exactly the braided meanderings of this future river will go—one that has yet to flow through, and thus format, the landscape—seems too difficult to anticipate. So this piece of architecture simply waits there, straddling what it presumes to be the currents of a future riverbed, its anticipatory landscape tourists fast asleep inside.

[Image: “Waiting for the River” by Observatorium].

The Observatorium’s Andre Dekker will actually be speaking later today—Saturday, 18 June, at 4:30pm—at the Los Angeles Design Festival; hopefully he’ll present a bit more about this project.

While we’re on the subject of Domus #948, that issue also includes a short profile of Luc Sante‘s home book collection, including titles by Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and the Situationists. The article itself is by Gianluigi Ricuperati, a young writer who spoke long ago in the medieval days of Postopolis! New York and whose novel Il mio impero è nell’aria has recently been published in Italy.

[Image: Luc Sante in his home writing room; note the copy of Learning From Las Vegas. Photo by Yoo Jean Han, courtesy of Domus].

Back in 2007, meanwhile, in an interview with The Believer, Luc Sante suggested that New York “was a wild, one-in-a-million conjunction of circumstances, a sort of black pearl of world history, when New York City was at one and the same time both the apex of Western culture and the armpit of the Western world.”

In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.

In Sante’s book Kill All Your Darlings, he continues to riff on the city. There was, for instance, in Sante’s terms, a fantasy New York, a canyon’d utopia taking shape in the gleam of postwar growth; but there was another, more everyday—a more used—New York.

“The New York I lived in, on the other hand, was rapidly regressing,” he writes. “It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more; ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile.”

“At that time,” Sante suggests, “much of Manhattan felt depopulated even in daylight.”

[Image: Otherwise unrelated to this post, photographer Marlis Momber explores an era in NYC when “entire blocks east of Avenue A consisted of little more than rubble-strewn lots”; photo by Michelle V. Agins for The New York Times].

A nonhuman dimension was thus free to move into the metropolis. It became a city “where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates.”

On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square.

“The tenements,” Sante adds, “were aspects of the natural landscape, like caves or rock ledges, across which all of us—inhabitants, landlords, dope dealers, beat cops, tourists—flitted for a few seasons, like the pigeons and the cockroaches and the rats, barely registering as individuals in the ceaseless churning of generations.”

This semi-feral city was less a topic of anthropology, we might say, than it was of natural history: an interzone of species, as well as human culture.

First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city “of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris,” and it would “contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.”

[Image: The original Hallstatt, Austria; photo courtesy of Der Spiegel].

Now, though, we learn that a Chinese firm has been “secretly” copying an entire UNESCO-listed village in Austria, called Hallstatt. Residents of the original town are “scandalized,” Der Spiegel reports, by these “plans to replicate the village—including its famous lake—in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.”

After all, in addition to the uncanny experience of seeing your buildings, streets, sidewalks, and even trees repeated on the other side of the world, “creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jörg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO. ‘The legal situation still needs to be examined,’ he said. Building new structures based on photographs is legal, he explained, but owners must give their permission for them to be measured.”

Indeed, Der Spiegel adds that “‘spying’ by Chinese architects would not have been conspicuous in Hallstatt, where there are up to 800,000 visitors each year who ‘photograph everything and everyone,'” according to the town’s mayor. This constant, everyday documentation—an archive of the quotidian, rivaling Ulysses—could thus be put to alternative use, not as a seed for nostalgia or as a collection of personal souvenirs, but as a means for generating construction diagrams.

Take a look at some photos of other Chinese duplication spaces, including the photo-friendly Thames Town, modeled after an English village (“when Thames Town was completed in 2006 not everyone was happy about it,” we read. “One English woman complained that her fish and chips restaurant had been copied in exact detail”).

(Link discovered via Peggy Nelson).

In 1919, artist Marcel Duchamp purchased a 50cc glass ampoule filled with Paris air as a souvenir for a friend; the sealed glass object was later exhibited as a readymade art piece called 50 cc of Paris Air.

[Image: Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art].

For his 2008 “olfactory reconstruction of Philip Johnson’s Glass House,” architect and preservation theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos sought to create a perfume that would accurately reproduce the smell of the Glass House, complete with period leathers, the barest hint of then-trendy aftershaves, and the pervasive scent of cigar smoke from an era of heavy nicotine use.

This experimentally reproduced internal atmosphere could then be exhibited—that is, dispersed—or even bottled and sold as a kind of diaphanous historical artifact.

Elsewhere, historian David Gissen has proposed that an “indoor air archive” be developed. While writing his dissertation, Gissen writes, he “lamented the fact that we had no archive of indoor air, as we do for all other manner of indoor elements of the built environment—furniture, designed objects, fashion.”

The specific content of the air of the interiors of the past is lost to us—its bio-physical make-up is gone; we really can’t study it with a full range of analytical methods. But I wondered… what if we archived our current indoor urban atmosphere for the historian of the future? (…) What if we made urban core samples of the air inside buildings and then stored them like we do with core samples from the North Pole or Antarctica?

All of these projects came to mind when reading last night about an ongoing murder trial in the U.S. state of Florida, where a 25-year old woman, named Casey Anthony, has been accused of killing her daughter.

Substantial weight has been placed on a bizarre, and by no means uncontroversial, piece of evidence: a “can of air” from the interior of Anthony’s car, where the dead girl’s corpse had allegedly been stored.

[Image: Empty tin can photographed by Sun Ladder, courtesy of Wikipedia].

To create this atmospheric artifact, forensic investigators used a syringe to extract air from a sealed can in which fabric samples from Anthony’s car were held. That air was then tested against a database of controlled decomposition smells taken from the so-called Body Farm at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (otherwise known as the “Outdoor Research Facility,” where human bodies are left to decay in a series of carefully monitored spatial conditions, taking landscape architecture to new, gonzo heights).

There, off-gassing chemicals from these decomposing human corpses are themselves captured and stored inside “hoods” that have been mounted over the deteriorating remains; the resulting gaseous records are later archived in a nationally important database for forensic research and investigation.

In a nutshell, then, as Popular Science explains, the technique used in the Casey Anthony trial “involves trapping air—in this case, air from Casey Anthony’s car—in a can for later extraction in a laboratory, where it is put through tests for the telltale signs of human [de]composition.”

I’ve often thought that Marcel Duchamp barely missed inventing the bottled water industry with his 50 cc of Paris Air project—suggesting, in the process, that the bottled water industry is, in fact, the world’s largest and most wasteful network of readymade art objects—but who knew that Duchamp would also loosely anticipate the emerging field of internal atmospheric forensics, deployed as evidence in a U.S. murder case?

If the “can of air” from Casey Anthony’s trial holds up in court, prepare to see controlled atmospheric sampling coming soon to a crime scene near you—and perhaps people like Jorge Otero-Pailos and David Gissen called upon as expert witnesses.

(Read more at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

[Image: E13 000625 by Alberto Tadiello; photo by Martino Margheri, courtesy of T293, Napoli].

Inspired by experimental Japanese sound weapons prototyped during World War II, Alberto Tadiello’s E13 000625 (2010) mounts a bass cannon onto the wall of an art gallery, where it greets visitors with an alarming, vibratory blurt.

Régine Debatty calls it “the sound that hits you in the stomach.”

[Image: E13 000625 by Alberto Tadiello; photo by Martino Margheri, courtesy of T293, Napoli].

The resulting object is quite stunning, both insect-like and strangely neurological—the black ganglia of a previously unknown acoustic lifeform—as if an organ had been separated from its body and pinned to the wall for scientific review.

Aside from this straight-forward interest in the piece, however, perhaps there are design suggestions here for a possible future of acoustic ornament: sonically active devices for nontraditional architectural space.

(Via Everyday Listening and we make money not art).