Year: 2012

[Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].

An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. “If all goes well,” the magazine explains, in a few year’s time the pit will “rage with humanity’s first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.”

[Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].

Reaching that point, however, requires an ambitious reformatting of the entire site, seemingly the very limit of landscape architecture: a kind of concrete garden that produces stars.

As the project now stands, construction involves inserting a supergrid of rebar into the quarried pit, securing the limestone walls with concrete foundation work, then pouring seismically-stabilized plinths that will support the so-called International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (or ITER) upon completion.

[Image: Checking plinths at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as if Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin could be repurposed for building stars. Photo ©ITER Organization].

Superficially—i.e. they’re both in France and they both involve limestone—I’m reminded of the Crazannes Quarries project by Bernard Lassus, for which cuts, sections, “artificial rock formations,” shaped cliffs, and other designed geologies were introduced into and through the side of a French road. In effect, Lassus milled a new, powder-white landscape from the limestone.

But the ITER project seems to take the ambitions of Crazannes and turn them up to a nearly overwhelming degree: using a (to be clear, all but unrelated) landscape design process to produce moments of stellar combustion on the earth. It’s like an undeclared monument to Giordano Bruno—or, for that matter, to Aleister Crowley. A quarry in which we’ll build stars.

In any case, nestled there in its semi-subterranean, mine-like site and buzzing inside with radiation-resistant robot elevators, each “about the size of a large bus,” the ITER will recreate, again and again, “the process that powers the sun and most other stars. At extremely high temperatures, hydrogen nuclei will fuse to form helium, spitting out more energy than the process consumes, something that has never yet been achieved by a human-made device.”

[Image: A blanket of rebar is installed inside the pit at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].

The photos seen here—reproduced in accordance with ITER‘s image-use policy—shows the site work in action: quarrying, gridding, pouring, smoothing, and stabilizing, in preparation for the birth of new heavens.

[Images: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization].

More images are available at the ITER website.

A few opportunities for those of you looking for new outlets:

1) Kerb, the journal of landscape architecture from RMIT University in Melbourne, is publishing its 20th issue, on “speculative narrative” and other “fictional dispositions” in the field of landscape design. Submissions are due May 4.

[Image: Kerb 20].

Read more on their website.

2) Spend three weeks in a renovated cotton mill in the woods of upstate New York, drawing, projecting, building, and discussing architecture. Arts Letters & Numbers, run by the Cooper Union’s David Gersten, “is conceived of as: an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a reenactment and a school, all inside each other.” The workshop will begin “by drawing in the landscape with the elements; fire, air, water, and earth. These explorations will be a starting point for an evolving conversation between inside and outside, between fire and film, water, theater, air, drawing, earth and architecture. The entire site will be used to explore these interactions and develop amplifying exchanges and unpredictable questions.”

[Image: The cotton mill].

There will be daily seminars, visiting lecturers, near-continuous workshops, and don’t forget “great food.”

The photos below document a related workshop, also run by David Gersten, held in Aarhus, Denmark; while the space in upstate New York presents a different set of possibilities for work and display, a similarly immersive approach will be followed.

[Image: Photos from Aarhus Arc, led by David Gersten].

Applications are due May 1, and the workshop itself runs July 7–28. More information is available on the workshop website.

3) The newest issue of The State dives into the spatial imagination of “speculative geographies.”

We welcome submissions around the theme of “Speculative Geographies,” and encourage experimentation with form, transmedia, and (web)site-specific installations; critical texts, interrogative narratives, slow journalism, sensuous net-artwork, moving or still images, psychogeographic mappings, place hacking, manifestos and conversations, among others. Because of the nature of The State, please do not feel restricted by the above; please feel free to alternatively submit a wall of text.

Submissions are due April 30.

[Image: Urban Animal].

4) The Animal Architecture Awards are back with a look at the “urban animal.”

Urban areas are quickly becoming the densest concentrations of human life on the planet and with that comes the well documented positive and negative impacts to local biodiversity and ecologies. But humans are not the only urban animals—squirrels, pigeons, mice, rats, crows, raccoons, beetles etc.—all species identified as synanthropes—that “live near, and benefit from, an association with humans and the somewhat artificial habitats that humans create around them.” These are highly-urbanized non-human animals and our potential design partners.

Accordingly, “Animal Architecture wants your ideas about how synanthropic design can reshape, expand and redefine the context of urban thought and space.”

Register by May 13—and check out a few submissions to last year’s Animal Architecture Awards here on BLDGBLOG.

5) Finally, for those of you Down Under, Open Agenda is seeking “text and graphic based proposals that seek to develop research through architectural design” specifically from “graduates from a professional Australian or New Zealand degree [program] in architecture in the last ten years.” Register by May 27th.

[Image: Open Agenda].

Good luck!

[Image: The plug, courtesy of Homeland Security’s Resilient Tunnel Project, via Wired UK].

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Resilient Tunnel Project” has come up with a prototype 35,000-gallon “plug,” or “enormous inflatable cylinder,” in the words of PhysOrg.com, one that is “tunnel-shaped with rounded capsule-like ends” and “can be filled with water or air in minutes to seal off a section of tunnel before flooding gets out of control.”

The idea is to prevent underground floods from taking down whole subway systems or otherwise destroying subterranean logistical networks, such as telecom cables (or Chicago’s infamous abandoned coal-delivery tunnels).

The plug itself is made from tear-resistant fabrics—including liquid-crystal polymers—that can expand around irregular surfaces and objects, producing, in effect, an impassable blockade. As Wired UK points out, this means the plug could also be used as a quarantine barrier, stopping the passage of chemical or biological agents.

On an unrelated note, meanwhile, I’m looking forward to receiving a review copy of The Insurgent Barricade by Mark Traugott next week, and, in the context of that book, this “enormous inflatable cylinder” could take on other, aboveground roles, such as intervening in and impossibly redirecting urban movement (both in the name of security and insurgency). To put this in somewhat absurd terms, what might the Paris Commune have looked like, for instance, had its participants used giant, knife-proof inflatable objects, like revolutionary sausages blocking access to whole streets?

[Image: Paris barricade made from cobblestones (1871), photographed by Pierre-Ambrose Richebourg, via Wikipedia].

In any case, whether or not these or other such “plugs” will be permanently installed, like automotive airbags, inside underground infrastructure is yet to be decided; but it seems quite likely that affordably fabricated, inflatable barriers will become regular architectural safety features of a subterranean system near you.

While looking for an image for the previous post, I found these videos of a lake or lagoon being opened up after intense rain so that the water flows out to sea—creating, within minutes, powerful rivers of water that can be surfed for what seems like the whole afternoon.

The first one, above, in which the channel is excavated by hand, is probably more interesting for its literally hands-on, DIY hydrology, but the second video’s resulting torrent of black rolling water, visible at the 3:22 mark—



—is incredible. Just some eye candy for a Thursday afternoon.

[Image: Photo by M. Scott Brauer, via ScienceDaily].

Researchers at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory is working on so-called “smart sand,” which would allow for the “spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts.” Current prototypes of the substance—essentially, large cubes, seen in the photograph above—operate by way of “rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets” on their edges, as ScienceDaily explains.

A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.

Outlining what this might actually look like, should the Distributed Robotics Lab succeed at implementing their vision, ScienceDaily suggests you “imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.”

You can read more at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory news site; but it’s too tantalizing a scenario to pass up mentioning other, much larger-scale possibilities for this technology, especially a scenario where “smart sand” has, as it were, escaped into the wild. Imagine whole deserts of this stuff, magnetically self-assembling into temporary sandstone cities, walls, and hills, a landscape of shifting urban forms you have to travel through, map, or settle. Like a deleted scene from Invisible Cities as rewritten by Magnus Larsson.

[Image: Kaleidoscope Ridge, Arizona (1982), photo by James Blair, courtesy of National Geographic].

Wandering tribes armed with mysterious handheld magnetic technologies reach into the sides of dunes and pull out whole buildings—where they proceed to sleep for the night before moving on the next day, their instant villages dissolving at dawn, “returned to the heap,” as ScienceDaily would say.

Or—perhaps in some future game brought to you by BLDGBLOG and Big Robot—you have to battle your way forward through infinite sandstone buildings that rise up, one after the other, like endless violent waves rolling as far as the eye can see, a desert of shapes lurching and unbuilding themselves toward you, forever. You jump through doors, up stairways, over walls, never advancing forward more than a few feet at a time, blinded by clouds of sand crashing on all sides, always another building ready to rise up out of the moving dunes and block you.

[Image: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

A project featured on designboom a few weeks ago explored the architectural possibilities of billboards: the Billboard House by Apostrophy is a “residential prototype that combines the concept of outdoor media with housing.” As such, it recalls earlier projects, such as Single Hauz, squeezing domestic space into an unlikely structural situation.

[Image: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

Apostrophy’s house was installed and debuted at a fair in Bangkok, serving as a demonstration project, or proof of concept; it is transportable by truck, so, in theory, it can move between urban sites, being reattached to different masts in whole other neighborhoods and cities, while one of its facades remains operational as a revenue-generator for residents, displaying ads or other media content (it could also be a kind of live-in outdoor cinema for traffic jams).

[Images: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

In any case, here are some shots of the interior, which features your standard modern amenities, including things like hydroponic gardens, a partially outdoor dining room, and space for storing bikes.

[Images: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

More images and diagrams can be seen over at designboom.

[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].

Andrew Evans, previously featured on BLDGBLOG way back in 2007, recently got in touch with some composite photographs taken of demolition sites in Philadelphia.

If you look closely through the layers, you can see remnant images of wrecked interiors.

[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].

And, on the edge of the city, ruined buildings stand like ghosts guarding an urban perimeter that keeps expanding, the city always flinging more pieces of itself further into what used to be woods and streams in a spectral ballet of cranes and skyhooks.

[Images: Composite photographs by Andrew Evans].

So we could roam the streets and suburbs holding cameras, like architectural PKE meters, tracking the profiles of erased buildings, earlier roads, forgotten districts, even entire islands entombed beneath airports, scanning sites for lost towers and halls that once stood there, twisted interiors still hovering somewhere in memory and broken rebar.

See a few more demolition composites over at Andrew’s Flickr page.

[Image: The Chand Baori stepwell, courtesy of Wikipedia].

Just a quick note that I will be in India without a computer for the next two and a half weeks, visiting stepwells, cave temples, the 18th century astronomical garden of Jantar Mantar, hill forts (including Mehrangarh), the Water Palace (or Jal Mahal) in Jaipur, and more, and I will thus be offline until late March. Unfortunately, this also means that I will be unable to moderate new comments or reply to emails; please be patient, though, and I will get to all that when I return. Meanwhile, feel free to visit the BLDGBLOG archives, through the extensive list of previous posts in the lefthand column. I’ll be back…