Month: December 2011

[Images: A “living neon sign” made of bioluminescent bacteria; via UC San Diego].

Scientists at UC San Diego have made a bioluminescent bacterial billboard. They call it a “living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.” Making it all work “involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison.”

These are referred to as biopixels.

Two summers ago, we looked at the idea of a “bioluminescent metropolis,” where light-emitting organisms could be used to supplement—or even replace—a city’s existing sources of illumination, as if scaling the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel up to size of a whole city (something that might be useful for places where streetlights are being turned off and even physically removed because paying tax in support of public infrastructure is socialist).

In that post, one of my personal favorites here on the blog, we looked at the work of architect Liam Young, who once proposed the creation of bacterial billboards, squirrel-like living screens that would crawl through and inhabit the city. They would nest in trees like LED ornaments and spring up whenever there’s news (or advertisements) to display.

[Image: Bioluminescent billboards by Liam Young].

So could this vision of a bioluminescent metropolis be far off? UC San Diego suggests that their “flashing bacterial signs are not only a visual display of how researchers in the new field of synthetic biology can engineer living cells like machines, but will likely lead to some real-life applications.” Surely it would not take much work—even if only as a media stunt—to make a full-scale functioning prototype of a bioluminescent streetlight? Or a bioluminescent bathroom nightlight for your kids?

But, then, of course, the inevitable escape from domestication, when invasive bioluminescent organisms, from genetically-modified kudzu and street weeds to super-bright worms and bacterial mats, conquer the city.

(Via Wired UK).

[Image: “From Seismic Arrays on Drifting Ice Floes: Experiences From Four Deployments in the Arctic Ocean” by C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, from Seismological Research Letters].

In a paper published back in the July/August 2011 issue of Seismological Research Letters, authors C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research discuss the benefits of tracking deepsea earthquakes using “seismic stations mounted on drifting ice floes.” Indeed, they write, because of the lack of fixed ground points, “mounting conventional land seismometers on drifting sea ice is the only way to acquire seismic data in the Arctic Ocean.”

In other words, they want to turn drifting fragments of Arctic sea ice into floating research stations, mapping earthquakes at sea.

[Images: “From Seismic Arrays on Drifting Ice Floes: Experiences From Four Deployments in the Arctic Ocean” by C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, from Seismological Research Letters].

The authors have already seen considerable success with this method. In a short passage detailing how these systems are physically installed, we read that the seismic arrays “are deployed and recovered by helicopters operating from icebreaking vessels.” However, “the time for station installation is very limited,” due to weather and rough seas.

Station installation requires two people and a helping hand from the helicopter pilot, and takes about 30 minutes with the data loggers being programmed before the deployment flight. The limited time does not allow waiting for the sensor to equalize. Therefore, we only check the sensor response and locking of the GPS position before leaving the station.

While the authors compare this, briefly, to using buoys—indicating that their method is not all that different from other free-floating oceanographic instrumentation systems—the transformation of icebergs into scientifically useful platforms is a compelling example of how a natural phenomenon can become infrastructure with even the smallest addition of equipment. The iceberg has literally been instrumentalized: a temporary archipelago, too short-lived to appear on maps, turned into a scientific instrument.

In this context, it’s worth revisiting the story of Drift Station Bravo, one of many inhabited icebergs in the Cold War era that had its own postal system, complete with historically unique stamp cancellations. [Image: Drift Station Bravo postage cancellation mark, via Polar Philately].

As explained on the website Polar Philately, Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher, commander of an Air Force weather squadron stationed in the Arctic, discovered “a large tabular iceberg… that had broken off the Arctic ice shelf… [and] gone adrift.” This ice island was soon “codenamed T-1, taken from its original radar designation as a target.” Future “ice islands” were codenamed T-2 and T-3.

On March 19, 1952, the U.S. Air Force led by Colonel Fletcher and some scientists landed on this ice island [T-3] in a C-47 aircraft, setting up a weather observation station. Fletcher established a research station that was manned at this big ice sheet for roughly the next 25 years, despite a grim quote given by the head of the Alaska Air Command at the time, a General Old, who was quoted in a Life magazine article of the time as saying “I don’t see how any man can live on this thing.”

It’s worth repeating that Fletcher’s team operated this weather station on a repurposed ice floe for 25 years.

Fletcher’s Ice Island, and the research station that was located on it, rotated in circles in the Arctic Ocean, floating aimlessly along in the Arctic currents in a clockwise direction. The station was inhabited mainly by scientists along with a few military crewmen and was resupplied during its existence primarily by military planes operating from Barrow, Alaska.

The island—later renamed “Drift Station Bravo”—was inhabited long enough that it actually got its own postal network.

[Image: Letters postmarked from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

From Polar Philately:

During the period of active habitation, T-3 covers [postage stamps] were serviced, each stamped with a variety of hand-stamped cachets and markings, dated, and often marked with a manuscript notation of the geographic position of the drifting station on that particular day of ops. The T-3/Bravo covers were often cancelled at Barrow or at a USAF base in Alaska, and then placed in the mailstream.

In other words, envelopes would be stamped with the latitude and longitude of the iceberg at the moment of a letter’s departure.

[Images: Postal marking and a letter from Drift Station Bravo, via Polar Philately].

The story takes on clear geopolitical dimensions when we remember that Drift Station Bravo and its ilk—such as Drift Station Alpha, about which you can watch an entire documentary film—were created in direct response to the Soviet Union’s own ice island program. The Soviets “already operated six drifting ice camps of this kind,” we read in the documentary transcript, downloadable as a 27kb PDF, but, “owing to the particular strategic importance and sensitivity of the Arctic Basin, little information from these early Soviet stations had reached the West.”

The transcript goes on to explain how the U.S managed to architecturally colonize these mobile platforms. Military civilization on the ice established itself as follows:

…a ski-equipped C-47 landed on the ice and deployed the first team of workers. It included an Air Force Major as camp commander and several soldiers with technical skills who had volunteered for 6 months duty on the ice, plus four of the typical tough and versatile Alaskan construction workers.

Modular buildings, called Jamesway huts, camp supplies, fuels, two small World War II Studebaker tractors, called Weasel, and a small bulldozer, were dropped by parachutes.

The story expands rapidly from here. In an article originally published in the September-October 1966 issue of Air University Review, we read that competitive Soviet drift stations apparently discovered a “second magnetic north pole… located near 80° N and 178° W, with magnetic medians extending across the Arctic Ocean,” and that sulfuric gas fumes from a badly timed undersea volcanic eruption killed at least one unlucky crew member. A particularly eye-popping detail comes when we read that these researchers deliberately generated earthquakes in the iceberg they lived on: “we generated tiny earthquakes in the ice. The propagation of the compressional waves generated in this way are used to study the elastic properties of the ice.”

This brings us back to C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, whose paper in Seismological Research Letters examines the problem of “icequakes,” or seismic activity internal to the ice floe on which their equipment rests, thus interfering with accurate measurements. They even mention at least one occurrence of a so-called “bearquake,” when a curious polar bear came by to nudge the seismometer and see what was really going on. The authors refer to these events as “special signals.”

In any case, will this floating seismic network adrift in the waters of the Arctic also receive its own stamps and postal cancellations? Presumably not, but it would nonetheless be interesting to examine the becoming-infrastructure of these ice floes in a larger geographic context.

[Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries].

In 1886, Los Angeles moved the Fort Moore High School. “A contractor who claimed he could accomplish the task hoisted the building onto scaffolding and, using rollers, horses, and human labor, slowly moved the schoolhouse toward its new location,” KCET explains. “After work was underway, the contractor decided that the task was impossible after all. The building remained where his crew left it”—unfortunately, not marooned on the stilts seen here, like some steampunk Walking City, but on its new ground-level site blocks away. Once lowered back to earth, it was “repurposed as a schoolhouse for younger students while a new, grander high school was built atop Fort Moore Hill.”

It’s as if, in a dreamtime state before any of us can remember, buildings once moved around Los Angeles, nomadic titans settling down only with the end of prehistory. Perhaps they will wake up and walk again, criss-crossing valleys, crawling over hills, rearranging roadways around themselves.

Eventually, most of Fort Moore Hill itself was physically removed from the city. “In 1949, construction crews transported away most of the hill by the truckload,” we read, turning it into one of the “lost hills of downtown Los Angeles.” If only the hill had disappeared, however, leaving all the buildings built upon it stranded on wooden scaffolds in the sunlight, a tablecloth trick in architectural form.

[Image: An otherwise unrelated image of the unmanned Draganflyer X8 system, courtesy of Draganfly].

A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the “small unmanned aviation system industry”—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.

Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that “has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes,” and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.

Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city land archives, how soon will drones become a state tool for regional landscape management?

[Images: Might semi-autonomous systems such as this someday track residential property lines? Images courtesy of Draganfly].

“Imagine your local planning officer having access to your back garden at a moment’s notice!” sUAS writes with alarm. “With the pullback from Iraq and other spots under way, this scenario is much easier to imagine. Perhaps it’s already happening.”

(Thanks to Ruth Lyons for the Achill Henge link).

[Image: Assembling the 7-mile rainbow one ring at a time, by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben’s diploma project, part of which proposed a farcical realization of a 7-mile rainbow reportedly seen on the occasion of Kim Jong-il‘s birth.

[Image: Assembling the rainbow; images by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Truckloads of vinyl are delivered to the capital city; teams of “volunteers” pump vast amounts of air into the unfolding structures—the imperial inflatable as architectural type; and, lo, the titanic pink and purple form ascends to its nostalgic place in the public firmament, assembled ring by ring across the sky.

[Image: The glorious 7-mile rainbow takes form].

While I have cherry-picked only one aspect of Ben’s overall North Korean research project, and thus this might seem like a bit of a one-note flute, I have to say that the absurdly over-the-top scale of the proposal actually seems spot-on for an architectural critique of Kim Jong-il’s surreal stage-managing of North Korean life.

In many ways, this spatial realization of the state’s own ridiculous mythology serves as a sadly necessary—because totally delirious—over-compensation for the otherwise monumentally vacuous cityscapes of North Korean urbanism, as if the grotesque political spectacle of a pink rainbow soaring seven miles over the city might retroactively justify that city’s empty stagecraft.

[Images: Rainbow diagrams by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In the annals of dictatorial natural history—where, apparently, “even nature is mourning” the death of Kim Jong-il—the tongue-in-cheek architectural manifestation of an otherwise impossible worldly phenomena acts not as celebration but as spatial parody. It is sarcasm, we might say, given architectural form.

[Image: The rainbow under construction; image by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In any case, a few more images from the project are available on Ben’s Flickr page.

[Image: From the Morpholio app].

A few of my colleagues at Columbia have just released a free portfolio app called Morpholio, with the aim of creating “a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture.”

As such, the app aims to be “both a utility and a community”—part social network, part alternative portfolio. “Capable of communicating with multiple devices,” the accompanying press release says, Morpholio “organizes image collections in a comprehensible and accessible format that makes sharing and presenting work seamless, and infinitely flexible.”

[Images: From the Morpholio app].

As the app’s co-creators explain it, “re-imagining the portfolio” like this in the form of interactive digital media was inspired by asking: “what would happen if you could merge processes of presentation, critique and collaboration into a single elastic platform?”

The app is optimized for iPad—so I haven’t been able to test it out—but you can download it for free and give it a spin.

[Image: The erstwhile basement hibernator, photographed by Brendan Kuty/Patch.com, via Gothamist].

I’m a sucker for tales of the after-market animal reuse of domestic architectural structures—such as wildcats taking over foreclosed California suburbs, bees colonizing the internal walls of a single-family house until honey drips from the electrical outlets, or the strangely elaborate saga of a pack of coyotes living in a burned-out home in Glendale—so I can’t resist this story, in which a man from the cable company descends into a basement in Hopatcong, New Jersey, only to find that a black bear had taken up residence there and had apparently been living in the basement for weeks.

According to the police, the bear had even “fashioned a den of his own in the basement, bringing in twigs and leaves, in anticipation of a winter-long stay.” The architecturally inclined bear—building a more comfortable bed for himself—was getting ready to hibernate.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

[Image: The museum inserted underground, by Brandon Mosley].

The town of Picher, Oklahoma, offers a range of spatial conditions that support speculative design projects.

On the most basic level, the town is “at risk of cave-ins” due to the “abandoned mines beneath the city”; this means that “trucks traveling along the highway are diverted around Picher for fear that the hollowed-out mines under the town would cause the streets to collapse under the weight of big rigs.”

Further, the now-defunct lead mines generated so much waste that the town is now surrounded by massive artificial mountain ranges of carcinogenic material called “chat,” as the creation of voids beneath the streets generated surreal landforms on the city’s edge. Third, a great deal of the town was destroyed in a tornado in 2008—and that’s all in addition to the fact that the town is under voluntary buy-out for the U.S. government, as it is considered too dangerous to live there.

[Images: Photos of Picher’s artificial landforms, courtesy of the USGS].

In any case, Brandon Mosley, a recent graduate from Louisiana Tech University, explored some possible future architectures for the town of Picher.

Mosley specifically proposes a kind of museum of abandoned mines, inserted directly into one of the old entry shafts.

[Images: A museum of mines in Picher, Oklahoma, by Brandon Mosley].

The local history of the region can thus be physically re-experienced, as well as visually represented, with museum visitors descending into the old mineworks along a spiraling ramp that has been inserted into the earth.

[Images: Sections through the museum, by Brandon Mosley].

It functions like a giant periscope in reverse, peering down into the planet, as the ramp leads visitors into the darkness of an open cavern where, standing atop a glass floor, they can gaze out into the artificially generated terrestrial void that surrounds them.

[Image: Inside the “cavern observation room,” by Brandon Mosley].

There is even a camera obscura there, for projecting images of Picher’s current, semi-ruined state on the walls of the underground space, powerfully placing blame on these subterranean excavations for serving as the engine of the town’s ill health and eventual demise. This is the landscape your creation destroyed, the project would seem to say.

As an idea for spatially explaining to visitors a region’s economic and environmental history, this is a powerful and intriguing idea; and, as an architectural form—a more interesting version of the so-called groundscraper in Mexico City that’s been making the rounds online recently—Mosley’s project has much to recommend it. A museum of the earth, drilled into the earth.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Tar Creek Supergrid).