Month: November 2012

[Image: An otherwise only conceptually related photo by Steve Rowell shows the LAPD’s Edward M. Davis Emergency Vehicle Operations Center & Tactics/Firearms Training Facility in Granada Hills, CA; courtesy of the Center for Land Use Intrepretation].

I was fascinated to read yesterday that a cyberwarfare training city is under construction, to be opened by March 2013, “a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop.”

I envisioned whole empty streets and bank towers—suburban houses and replica transportation depots—sitting there in the rain whilst troops of code-wielding warriors hurl electromagnetic spells from laptops against elevator circuit boards, sump pumps, and garage doors, flooding basements, popping open underground gold vaults, and frying traffic lights, like some gonzo version of The Italian Job wed with the digital wizardry of a new sorcerer class, the “first-line cyber defenders” who will be trained in this place, our 21st-century Hogwarts along the freeway. Then they clean it all and start again tomorrow.

Alas. Although this, in many ways, is even more interesting, the entire “test city” truly is miniature: indeed, the whole thing “fits in a six by eight foot area and was created using miniature buildings and houses, [and] the underlying power control systems, hospital software, and other infrastructures are directly from the real world.”

Nonetheless, this 6-x-8 surrogate urban world will be under near-constant microcosmic attack: “NetWars CyberCity participants, which include cyber warriors from the Department of Defense and other defenders within the U.S. Government, will be tasked with protecting the city’s critical infrastructure and systems as they come under attack. Cyber warriors will be presented with potential real-world attacks; their job is to defend against them. Missions will include fending off attacks on the city’s power company, hospital, water system and transportation services.”

Which means, in the end, that this is really just an enlarged board game with an eye-catching press release—but there is still something compelling about the notion of an anointed patch of circuits and wifi routers, accepted as an adequate stand-in—an electromagnetic stunt double—for something like all of New York City, let alone the United States. A voodoo doll made of light, animated from within by packet switches, under constant surveillance in an invisible war.

(Via @pd_smith).

There are at least two events tonight, Tuesday, November 27th, that are worth stopping by if you’re in New York.

[Image: “Salvage Architecture” by production designer Paul Lasaine from Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb’s Drawing Building archive].

While I will be busy co-hosting a book release party for Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb—who just published a collection of images from their Drawing Building online archive of “works that convey architectural alternatives, by-products, expansions, or critiques of our inhabited environments”—at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, at 7pm, I also wanted to post a quick note that there is an interesting sonic event happening nearby, at 291 Church Street, for a new project by Marc Weidenbaum‘s Disquiet Junto exploring the sonic universe of retail sounds.

Weidenbaum is a highly prolific, Bay Area-based collaborative producer of always surprising music, sound, and noise projects, including a soundtrack for the city of Lisbon and Instagr/am/bient, which produced “25 sonic postcards” inspired by musicians’ images on Instragram.

Tonight’s event—part of an exhibition curated by Rob Walker called As Real As It Gets—will be “an exercise in sonic branding,” as the participating musicians “will gather to perform speculative sound works that employ as source material documentary audio from retail establishments.” Each “will present imagined soundscapes inspired by Émile Zola’s characterization of the department store, in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise, as ‘a machine working at high pressure.'” (Read an interview with Weidenbaum about the project at the Free Music Archive or Rob Walker’s essay on the project, “Listening to Retail“).

Retail soundscapes will buzz, hum, and sing starting at 6:30pm at 291 Church Street, and, a half-hour later, up the street at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, we’ll be kicking things off with Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb. Stop by both if you can.

The structure pictured below is a “microscopic pyramid,” New Scientist explains, “a cage for a living cell, constructed to better observe cells in their natural 3D environment, as opposed to the usual flat plane of a Petri dish.”

[Image: A pyramidal “cell trapping device,” via New Scientist].

It was constructed “by depositing nitrides over silicon pits. When most of the material is peeled away, a small amount of material remains in the corners to create a pyramid.”

This is called corner lithography, a technique used for creating the “cell trapping device” seen above.

The Giza-like, seemingly alien geometry of the pyramidal cage compared to the wild and barely containable spheroid burr of the cell itself is remarkable. The literally monstrous vitality of the cell caught inside the imposed order of the pyramid offers us an image of two fundamentally opposed methods of material organization in conflict with one another, a collision of orders as if the Gothic met the Doric or the Baroque met the Romanesque.

Interestingly, though, at least according to New Scientist, “Because the pyramids have holes in the sides and are close together, the cells can interact for the most part as they naturally do.” In other words, these apparently oppositional modes—the fuzzy and the straight—incredibly, even miraculously, don’t interfere with one another at all.

[Image: Via New Scientist].

Functionally speaking, it’s as if, from the cell’s perspective, the pyramid isn’t even there.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

While we’re on the subject of stepwells, I thought I’d post some photos taken of another well, this one in the town of Bundi, Rajasthan.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

While we were in India—or, more specifically, while we were traveling in Rajasthan—Nicola Twilley and I put stepwells very high on our list of things to go out of our way to see, having assembled a long list of architectural sites and sights to visit, from castles and towers to temples and, of course, these wells.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Being on something of an India binge the last week or two, I’ll try to get more of these photos up. These are extraordinary buildings, in purpose, structure, and ornamentation. Framing the everyday act of water-collection in such otherworldly architectural circumstances is a work of extravagant genius, yet seemingly one of a piece with the grandeur given to waterworks elsewhere.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

From the old brick sewers of London—beautifully sculpted hallways for water, all smooth knots and vortices below the city—to the strangely kitsch Greek columns of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works, and even the sprawling labyrinth of fountains and spigots that distribute water throughout Rome, hydrological infrastructure inspires and deserves these otherwise functionally unnecessary acts of monumental design.

[Image: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

So the Raniji ki Baori is roughly 150 feet deep. A central stairway takes visitors down to the well itself, passing beneath an archway home to bats.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

However, when you get down to the bottom of the staircase and you peer into the deep pit where fresh water was once collected, the dilapidated state of the facilities become instantly and sadly visible. The steps are covered in guano, dust, and litter. Pieces of broken pipe (or collapsed scaffolding) extend from the walls.

[Images: The Raniji ki stepwell, Bundi, India; photos by BLDGBLOG].

These photos—like those of Chand Baori—were taken during a trip to India earlier this year.

[Images: Inside the stepwell; bottom photo (by Nicola Twilley) gives a sense of scale].

These, too, are available in slightly larger sizes if you open them in a new window.

I had the pleasure earlier this year of visiting a site I’ve long been obsessed with from afar, the magnificent stepwell of Chand Baori, in Abhaneri, India.

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Nicola Twilley and I hired a car and driver for roughly USD $50-$60, for what turned out to be a total of about 5 hours, and we drove out from Jaipur to the small town of Abhaneri. Here is the site from above, on Google Maps. For anyone else interested in taking this trip some day, it is well worth the drive from Jaipur (and you can also visit the surreal ruined temple of Harshad Mata, photos of which I’ll try to post soon, as well).

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Taking information straight from the sign that greets you upon arriving at the stepwell—

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

—Chand Baori is the oldest stepwell in Rajasthan, having been constructed in the 8th-9th centuries A.D. It is 19.5 meters, or roughly 64 feet, deep. The overwhelming majority of its surface area consists of steps—thousands of steps—all of which lead down to the water table, turning weekly water-gathering trips by local families into a communal spectacle, a social event framed by this extraordinary act of excavation and architecture.

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Whether or not the following information is true, I don’t know, but Nicola and I heard various versions of why Chand Baori was constructed where it was, the most compelling of which was that the nearby water tables of two oppositely flowing rivers in the region mixed underground here, leading to particularly clean water.

The algae-choked green soup now seen at the bottom of Chand Baori doesn’t necessarily make an argument for this version of history, but it’s a compelling vision, nonetheless: architecture as a kind of depth probe, spiked down into buried waters inside the Earth.

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

So this is what you see when you first walk in.

[Image: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The well suddenly appears there, its own horizon line, like a landslide of masonry, a sinkhole stabilized by stairs, and the vertiginous sense of being drawn down into the maw of this place is extraordinary.

[Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

While we there, walking around the well’s upper edge and peering into alcoves lined with sculptures and fragments of statuary, we got to watch a flock of pigeons fly back and forth over the site seemingly subject to its own tides, birds washing from one side to the other and back again every fifteen minutes or so, nesting on heavily ornamented rock walls above the site or landing en masse on the steps themselves.

[Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

In any case, here are a bunch of images from our visit, looking down into the mouth of what is, in a sense, part pit, part building, part hydrological infrastructure, part ritual social space, an ocean of steps. Enjoy (and note that all images here are available in slightly larger versions if you open them in a new window).

[Images: Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Apropos of nothing, here is the route from Jaipur on Google Maps.