Month: May 2012

[Image: Prisons for sale; photo by Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times].

The State of New York is hoping to sell its old prisons.

“One property, in the Hudson Valley, includes a 16-car garage, a piggery and hundreds of yards of lake frontage,” the New York Times explains. “Another offers 69 acres of waterfront land on the west shore of Staten Island, complete with a two-story gymnasium, a baseball diamond and an open-air pavilion.” Some of the sites actually sound amazing:

Among the facilities the team is considering selling are 23 state-owned residences set aside for prison superintendents. Some are quite lavish: one in Auburn, to be auctioned this summer, is an 8,850-square-foot brick mansion with eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, an attached gazebo and a barn-size garage.

The article somewhat ironically suggests that “the ideal buyer” of one the prisons would be “someone who craves space to spread out.”

Despite the piece’s pessimistic tone—”You couldn’t make it into a hotel. You couldn’t make it into an apartment complex. You’re talking millions of dollars to renovate. Who’s going to do it?”—I can’t help but wonder if someone couldn’t buy one of these places anyway, admit that most of the complex will simply be left to ruin, consumed by weeds and filled with pigeons, but then transform some core part of it into a kind of architectural research center, its very setting the most intense spatial lesson of your time spent writing and studying there.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Buy a Tube Station, Buy an Archipelago, Buy a Map, Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, Buy a Silk Mill).

[Image: “Zero-Gravity Design” at the Domus Academy in Milan].

Given all the justifiable excitement in the past few days about the successful launch of SpaceX, Milan’s Domus Academy is hosting a rather well-timed two-week design intensive this summer called “Zero-Gravity Design: Products & Microenvironments for Orbiting Hotels.”

It runs from July 2-13, 2012, and will be taught by “aerospace entrepreneur” Susmita Mohanty.

From the studio brief:

As the race to open up the space frontier to tourists revs up, so will opportunities for designers and architects. The participants of this course will design products and microenvironments for living aboard future Orbiting Hotels. The Space Tourists, will have to, after all, eat, drink, sleep, cleanse, exercise, work, play, improvise, relax, move, stay still, contemplate, congregate, seek privacy and look out of the window. These everyday tasks, and more, open up an infinite range of design possibilities.

Participants will be challenged to “come up with creative antidotes for isolation, confinement, boredom, sensory deprivation, bone-muscle atrophy, as well as social-psychological-and-cultural stressors characteristic of living in cramped spaces where privacy is limited and so are resources.”

Perhaps, best of all, “this course will groom designers and architects to work for space tourism companies.”

[Image: “Zero-Gravity Design” at the Domus Academy in Milan].

More information is available at the Domus Academy website.

(Thanks to Rajeev Thakker for the tip!)

[Image: Art by Joe Alterio].

New Yorkers, stop by Studio-X NYC tonight, Wednesday, May 23rd, at 7pm for free drinks and the launch of Man-Made Lands, “a collection of seven stories and five real architectural and landscape proposals for cities around the world,” the first chapbook from Ninth Letter.

The chapbook, guest-edited by Scott Geiger and including work by Bjarke Ingels Group, James Corner Field Operations, Steven Holl, Will Wiles, and many others, explores, in Geiger’s words, “marbled boundaries: between cities and nature; between the infinity of the digital and the analog of every day life; between the past and our present, our present and many possible futures; between fictions we envision and the facts that we construct to transform lives.”

Geiger will also be interviewing contributors Seth Fried, Dong-Ping Wong, Archie Lee Coates, and Joe Alterio in a live conversation about the book, about the influence of fiction on architectural design (and vice versa), and on some speculative future possibilities for urban design here in New York.

[Image: The +Pool, featured in Man-Made Lands].

Even better, we’ll also be kicking off a small exhibition of new work by Joe Alterio, who some of you might recognize from, among other things, his work in The BLDGBLOG Book, where he and I collaborated on two graphic storyboards featured in the book’s inside covers. Tonight, Joe will be premiering several gorgeously screen-printed new posters, called “There’s No One There,” originally commissioned for Ninth Letter, as they go on display at Studio-X NYC.

Meet Joe, say hey to Scott, pick up a copy of Man-Made Lands, and enjoy our Manhattan views from the 16th floor at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here’s a map. Hope to see you at 7pm!

Two design competitions that might catch your eyes and ears:

1) Legendary L.A. radio station KCRW is looking for a mobile sound booth: a “space where conversation can happen amidst the urban chaos. A comfortable space that isolates sound for good recording, but also gives the listener a sense of place.”

KCRW is hoping to go on the road, “taking this booth all over the city—to churches, food fairs and schools. To rock, jazz and cumbia concerts. We will be at the park, at the coffee shop and hanging at the tamale hot spots. We’ll be setting up and closing shop alongside food trucks and observing public transportation from bus stops and corner shops.”

[Image: Theatre for One].

Remember LOT-EK’s Theatre for One? Do something even better, and watch—or listen to—your interview booth as it moves around Los Angeles. More specific info is available at KCRW.

2) Alternatively, design a floating cinema.

[Image: Ole Scheeren’s “archipelago cinema” in Thailand].

Britain’s Architecture Foundation, in collaboration with UP Projects, have announced a fairly straight-forward brief: for those of you who never thought you’d never be on a boat, “this vessel will need to accommodate intimate on-board film screenings, larger outdoor film events as well as provide a base for film related talks and activities. The Floating Cinema will navigate the waterways that connect the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney with the new Olympic Park, hosting events, activities and also tours into the Olympic Park.”

A bit more information is available via the Architecture Foundation.

Hidden in an article about New York City’s first million-dollar parking space is the somewhat incredible fact that, up in the apartment building this parking space will be attached to, “the shower water will be pumped full of vitamin C and aloe” for the building’s economically distinguished residents.

Like the home vodka tap we joked about years ago, this enhanced water supply seems to be further evidence that literally every aspect of the human environment can not only be redesigned, it can be aggressively capitalized upon in its ensuing augmented state.

The article also mentions, for instance, that even the building’s “lighting patterns and air quality” have been re-designed so as to maximize the quality of residents’ sleep, bringing to mind Stalin’s “sleep labs,” in which aromatherapy and ambient music would have been used to lull stalwart workers of the CCCP back into bed each evening:

At either end of the long buildings were to be situated control booths, where technicians would command instruments to regulate the temperature, humidity, and air pressure, as well as to waft salubrious scents and “rarefied condensed air” through the halls. Nor would sound be left unorganized. Specialists working “according to scientific facts” would transmit from the control center a range of sounds gauged to intensify the process of slumber. The rustle of leaves, the cooing of nightingales, or the soft murmur of waves would instantly relax the most overwrought veteran of the metropolis. Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin gently to rock until consciousness was lost.

It doesn’t seem far-fetched that New York City buildings will add, to their already existing stock of doormen and cleaning crews, lifestyle technicians working behind the scenes like conductors of a sensory orchestra, recalibrating sounds, scents, and lighting intensity, even dialing up barometric pressure at certain key times of day, for the strangely mummified people living inside.

[Image: Konstantin Melnikov’s “Sonata of Sleep“].

Specialty mixtures of air—perhaps even air subscriptions—could be piped in through luxury ducts as atmospheric brewmasters toggle dials in the basement, frantically trying to zero-in on domestic perfection for expectant customers breathing calmly above.

Design writer Alissa Walker recently took a tour of L.A.’s original subway system, one whose tunnels are no longer in operation, though they remain down there—

[Image: L.A.’s original subway, now walled-off beneath downtown; photo by Alissa Walker].

—bricked off and all but forgotten beneath buildings downtown.

[Image:Photo by Alissa Walker].

Cue horror movie soundtrack here, with hapless apartment dwellers in a newly renovated downtown loft complex finding strange things coming up from the facility’s voluminous basement floors; the power flickers on and off; pets disappear; strange sounds skitter and thump down the corridors at night, leaving muddy trails; then somehow, someone, as in the following photograph—

[Image: A walled-up sign announces, “TRAINS”; photo by Alissa Walker].

—knocks a hole in the wall, perhaps accidentally losing their grip on a piece of furniture as they move their new table or couch into the building, revealing the eery, abandoned subway tunnels below. And, soon, they go down to find the answers to what’s gone wrong in their otherwise perfectly photogenic multimillion dollar building, only to open the door to something altogether much worse.

[Image: Photo by Alissa Walker].

In any case, absent of these clichéd public-transit-is-a-source-of-horror motifs, Alissa’s write-up of the tunnel visit is worth reading in full—and, even better, they will be leading another such visit again some time soon. You’ll see sights like this.

Sign-up on the Design East of La Brea website for this and other such events, and don’t miss any future announcements.

I finally became a paying member of Subterranea Britannica this week, a website and historical organization whose interests (and influence) cast a long shadow over this blog’s early years.

Joining is £28 a year for overseas members and seems well worth it so far, having received my first issue of their internal newsletter, Subterranea, just last night. From Irish souterrains—described as “the ‘underground castles’ of early medieval Ireland, used as strongholds and escape tunnels,” or, in the words of Current Archaeology, “secret tunnels dug to outwit marauding Norsemen”—to World War I tunnels in La Boisselle, France, and from plans for future deep-level “supersewers” beneath both Milwaukee and London to, amongst many other fascinating things, a project I can’t wait to learn more about called the London Power Tunnels, a mafia boss who was captured in an “underground hideout” built twelve miles outside Naples (“access from within the house was via a sliding door on rails in one of the bedrooms,” Subterranea explains), the fact that Northern Ireland had “secret contingency plans” for surviving a nuclear war and they involved stockpiling “more than 100,000 pieces of plastic cutlery,” to the enormous “stacks of gold bars worth £156 billion stored in an old canteen deep below the streets” of London in a former WWII air-raid shelter now used by the Bank of England, there is a mind-boggling amount of interesting things to read.

Even better, membership comes with otherwise unobtainable invitations to events and underground site tours throughout the UK. Consider joining, if this sort of stuff piques your interest.

[Image: Wifi-blocking wallpaper from the Grenoble Institute of Technology].

1) A collaboration between the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the Centre Technique du Papier has produced wifi-blocking wallpaper: a printable electromagnetic shield that “only blocks a select set of frequencies used by wireless LANs, and allows cellular phones and other radio waves through.”

As The Verge explains, the wallpaper uses “conductive ink containing silver crystals” printed in an otherwise innocuous abstract snowflake pattern. In other words, only if you know exactly what to look for—or in a strange moment of speculative paranoia—would you realize that the paper on the walls around you is actually an electronic device.

Competitively priced with standard wallpapers, it might soon be decking and protecting the walls in a house or office near you.

[Image: Printed electronics produce 2D loudspeakers; photo by Hendrik Schmidt, via Printed Electronics World].

2) 2D printable loudspeakers have become a reality. Fully functioning speakers can now be “printed with flexography on standard paper” using “several layers of a conductive organic polymer and a piezoactive layer.”

Like something out of The Ticket That Exploded, we read that “paper loudspeakers could, for instance, be integrated into common print products. As such, they offer an enormous potential for the advertising segment.” In other words, books, newspapers, and magazines could soon literally be yelling at you to buy more products. Less cynically, though, this also raises the fairly fascinating possibility that we could someday release songs inside pamphlets, audiobooks inside the very hardcovers they narrate, field recordings inside road maps, or even add strips of ambient acoustics to rooms through loudspeaker wallpaper.

After all, sound wallpapers are, incredibly, also possible, resulting in large-scale, acoustically active surfaces, from objects to interior walls. The rave of the future will be one person with a roll of paper, pasting up sounds till sunrise.

[Images: Lasercut survival kits by Steffen Kehrle].

3) However, if wifi-blocking wallpaper and printable 2D loudspeakers aren’t your cup of tea, then you can also laser-cut any reasonably stiff 2D surface into an urban survival kit.

Designer Steffen Kehrle‘s work implies that, with the right laser patterns and a thin sheet of cardstock—even wood veneer—the keys to the city could be yours. Done right, this same approach could offer more than just tactical culinary devices, as seen above, but small-scale urban equipment: pop-out objects for navigating the built environment around you.

[Image: A map of fictional mega cities, via 2000AD].

A short review in the most recent Wire discusses a new album by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury: a speculative urban soundtrack to Mega City One, a “post-apocalyptic sprawl covering the eastern seaboard of the United States” from Judge Dredd. “Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and BBC soundtrack composer Ben Salisbury’s instrumental interpretation” of the city, The Wire writes, “evoke[s] the gunmetal grey of life in Mega City One, its multilevel labyrinth of self-contained blocks, zipstrips and boomways reflecting darkly in the album’s tarnished metallic textures and gridlike structures.”

The retro-Alan Howarthian synthesizers, a “rigorously imagined sound map” of the city, can be streamed in full via Bandcamp.

For those of you in London, meanwhile, Barrow and Salisbury will perform excerpts from the “weirdly addictive“—or is it “hackneyed“?—album at Orbital Comics on 16 May.