Month: March 2015

Models & Prototypes

[Image: “Dome-shaped Architectural Staircase Model,” courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].

If you liked those two staircase posts from earlier today, a reader has pointed out that the Cooper Hewitt has a whole slew of “Models & Prototypes” on display that seem worth checking out.

More specifically, it’s “a gallery devoted to exhibiting three-dimensional representations of ideas that demonstrate the design process; test concepts and resolve problems; enhance presentations; and display complex technical skills.”

Take a look at the “Dome-shaped Architectural Staircase Model” from the mid-19th-century, for example, seen above, or this gorgeous “staircase model from France“.

[Image: A “staircase model from France,” courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].

Freestanding and divorced from their ultimate architectural context, they become more like vertebrae or genetic helices spiraling in midair.

[Image: “Staircase Model, France,” courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt].

See more over at the Cooper Hewitt.

(Thanks to John O’Shea for the tip!)

The Subterranean Celebrity Libido Labyrinth of Greater Hollywood

[Image: A blueprint of tunnels rumored to connect the Playboy Mansion with nearby celebrity homes, via Playboy].

This is hilarious and amazing: there may (or may not) have been secret underground tunnels connecting the Playboy Mansion to the homes of nearby celebrities, including Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson. It’s like the becoming-priapic of the Mole Man of Hackney.

According to some blueprints literally unearthed from the Playboy Mansion basement after overhearing a rumor about some “tunnels,” it seems that, at the very least, underground routes were designed all the way to the point of construction diagrams, to connect the homes from below.

Those construction documents imply, according to the post over at Playboy, that “tunnels were built to the homes of ‘Mr. J. Nicholson,’ ‘Mr. W. Beatty,’ ‘Mr. K. Douglas’ and ‘Mr. J. Caan.’ We’ll go ahead and assume they’re talking about Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas and James Caan—all of whom lived near the Playboy Mansion during the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are no dates on the architectural schematics, but the dates on the Polaroids were from 1977.”

The Polaroids referred to show excavations and construction material, and can be seen at the original article.

Of course, no one seems to know if the tunnels were, in fact, ever constructed—or even if the Playboy story itself isn’t just a rumor-stirring bit of architectural fiction—but a staff member apparently “heard they were closed up sometime in 1989.”

The idea that the libidos of Hollywood stars are all secretly linked by a maze of underground tunnels is awesomely perfect: equal parts psychoanalytic metaphor and potential plot for a new David Lynch film. Has-been celebrities clad head to toe in fur wander through a maze of multicolored halls beneath Los Angeles, experiencing bizarre moments of time travel that serve no narrative function other than to let them spy on earlier versions of themselves, making love in a wood-paneled mansion where wall-sized fireplaces roar with logs that never burn. Everyone is played by Bill Pullman.

(Thanks to Josh Glenn for the tip!)

Grimm City

[Image: Grimm City University from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

Later this summer, London’s Flea Folly Architects—Pascal Bronner & Thomas Hillier—will be running a workshop in what they broadly call “narrative architecture” at the Tate Modern.

“What would a town inhabited by Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder and Man Ray look like?” they ask. “Taking inspiration from works in the Tate collection, in particular the speculative etchings by architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin and paintings by the Surrealists, our objective is to design and build a fictional miniature village made entirely from paper.”

Their own project, Grimm City, is perhaps an example of what might result.

[Image: The Barometer from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

As architect CJ Lim describes it in his introduction to the project in a gorgeously produced, limited print-run hardcover catalog, as “Grimm City is a future state derived from architectural extrapolations of the fairytales by the Brothers Grimm.”

That is, it is an elaborate narrative disguised as a city—a story given urban form.

[Image: The Bremen Town-Musicians from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

Bronner and Hillier explain that the “blueprint” for their city was “conceived in ink exactly 200 years ago,” and “was shaped by 86 magnificent tales collected by two of the most distinguished storytellers of their time.”

They are referring, of course, to the Brothers Grimm.

[Images: Two views of the Church and the neighboring Destruction Structure from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

Briefly, in what now feels like another lifetime, when I was backpacking through Germany after graduating from college, I made a beeline to the small city of Marburg after reading that it was a university town overlooked by an 11th-century fort—and that it was also once home to the Brothers Grimm.

I showed up by train and spent a few days there, mostly reading Grimm stories, feeding ducks, and walking around the roads that spiraled up to the castle; and I later learned, with equal interest, that one of the weird coincidences of history would make Marburg the same city where a strain of hemorrhagic fever would be isolated.

The disease, which is now rather straight-forwardly called Marburg, seems a fittingly strange continuation of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, in terms of the dark and often fatal transformations humans can undergo.

In any case, Grimm City is an architectural translation of their various stories, plots, allegories, and characters, and it took on a life of its own. “With enormous spinning wheels, tower-like limbs and turrets for claws, it began to resemble a machine that had been unjustly woken from its deep slumber,” they write.

[Image: The Timber Factory from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

At times visually reminiscent of Aldo Rossi or even John Hejduk, the black diagrams are unexpectedly carnivalesque, monochromatic yet fizzing with lively detail.

There are structures such as The Ink Factory, a Silver Forest (made entirely of money-producing slot machines, eg. a forest where silver grows), an economic Barometer spinning over the city, and a school of thieves and burglary.

[Image: The Ink Factory from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

There are also banks, churches, and a “windowless monolith” filled with forensic evidence of the city’s crimes.

Then, tacked way at the top of massive stairways so inclined they look like ladders, there are Confession Booths where the city’s sins are meant to be narrated and explained.

[Image: The Confession Booths from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

Your exposure and isolation in ascending to the Booths is part of the process: a confessional infrastructure that compels one toward self-incrimination.

Elsewhere, there’s The Morning Star, a kind of heliogenic megabulb that hangs over the city, casting shadows and making time, burning at the center of an urban calendar that guides the lives of those living in the streets below.

[Image: The Morning Star from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

And, finally, there is a huge plateau known as The Golden Compound where a vast sprawl—of what appear to be batteries—promises a “commune for the living-dead,” a dormitory those who “cheat death and remain everlasting” in this fairy tale metropolis.

“No one really knows if those inside” of these endless, battery-like structures, “are dead or alive,” we read, “and no one dares to find out.” They could be described as electrical mausoleums where sleeping beauties lie, equally alive and dead.

[Image: The Parliament from Grimm City by Flea Folly Architects].

There are many, many further images, of course, as well as an intricate physical model that accompanied them; the whole thing was displayed at the London Design Museum back in October-November 2013 and, with any luck, the images and model both will someday show up in a gallery near you.

In a Pinch

[Image: A staircase in the Grands Magasins Dufayel; view larger].

The second staircase I wanted to post today—here’s the first—is from the Grands Magasins Dufayel, a vast, 19th-century department store in Paris. View it larger.

Aside from the obvious grandeur of the structure, what makes this spatially noteworthy is the fact that one floor is pinched together with the next, and that the self-supporting “pinch” that results then becomes formalized as a stairway, a hyperbolic object in space that allows passage from one level to the next.

It’s as if a loop has been pulled or extracted from each level and then woven together—in effect, using a self-intersecting geometric pattern as the basis of a floorplan.

In any case, what I like in both examples (this one and the previous staircase), is that you have two floors or levels, obviously, but then there is the emptiness that separates them, a gap buzzing with unrealized forms of connection, and that you can fill that gap with pinches, spirals, knots, and loops, and that the magic of a well-designed staircase is precisely in giving material form to the invisible math that hovers in the space between floors.

(Originally spotted via ARCHI/MAPS).

Solved by Knots

[Image: Stairs inside the New York Life Insurance building, Minneapolis, by Babb, Cook and Willard; view larger].

There are two stairways I wanted to post, as they each solve the problem of getting from one floor to another in a particularly interesting way. The first example, seen above, is from the New York Life Insurance building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, designed by Babb, Cook and Willard.

View it larger.

What I love about this is incredibly simple, and it’s nothing more than the fact that a constrained approach from one floor to the next—with the far wall serving almost more like a cliff face—gave the architects no real room to operate. So they put in two, mirror-image spiral stairways, which kept the center of the room clear while dramatically increasing its available circulation space.

Today, of course, we’d probably just stick an elevator there and be done with it—but the compression of space made possible by spiral staircases is amazing. They are elegant prosthetics, connecting two levels like a casual afterthought with their efficient knots and coils.

Here’s the second staircase.

(Spotted via the always interesting ARCHI/MAPS).

Squeeze Play



An Australian company called Ingström designs and manufactures “escape chutes” for use both inside and outside of buildings.

These are fabric chutes—like large sleeves or pant legs—that allow relatively quick evacuation from an architectural structure, where the word “evacuation” takes on a somewhat comical double meaning, as the examples seen in the YouTube video, above, genuinely look like an alien bowel has taken up residence inside an office building somewhere in India, with people squeezing themselves down through its sphinctrous maw to a soundtrack of tablas.

Like the “SkySaver” system we looked at last summer, Ingström chutes offer a kind of secondary or alternative method of circulation through and around architectural space. What’s interesting about the “Multi-Entry” chute in particular, however, is that it seems to go so far as to suggest an entire secondary interior for the building, one that cuts through existing rooms like a web to form a bulbous topology that would be just as useful as some strange new form of children’s playground as an actual, life-saving system for emergency egress.

(See also Rain Noe’s take on escape chutes over at Core77. Originally spotted via @machimachinc).

Unconventional Sports Require Unconventional Spaces and Landscapes

[Image: Pier Two Athletic Center by Maryann Thompson Architects, Brooklyn; via Architizer].

Unconventional sports…

A profile of Reebok published the other week on Bloomberg Business—which you needn’t read, unless you are really into either shoe design or the global fitness industry—there’s a brief but interesting observation about what people seem to want to do these days, in terms of physical activity.

Not exercise, as such—which is the wrong way to think about it—but physically moving through space together and having a good time.

The article points out the obvious, for example, that CrossFit is on the rise, and that things like Tough Mudders, Spartan Races, etc., are all gaining in popularity; to this, I would also add climbing, which—based on my own entirely unscientific observations—appears to be undergoing its own boom time, at least gauged by the madhouse of over-attendance you often see at local climbing gyms in the hour after school gets out, turning a place like my local Brooklyn Boulders into an awesome new kind of home away from home for many local teenagers.

The article calls these “unconventional sports,” and they don’t require the traditional gym set-up. They require unconventional spaces and landscapes.

This is thus at least partially a question of design.

[Image: Via Brooklyn Boulders].

…require unconventional spaces and landscapes

The new emphasis is on “social fitness,” the article claims—but I’d say that even that phrase misses the primary motivation, which is really just screwing around with your friends, doing something fun, extreme, memorable, a little crazy, and simply different.

It means something that gets your heart rate up, lets you run around or climb on things for no reason to blow off steam, and that turns your immediate spatial environment into a place of often berserk new physical opportunities—another way of saying that you can literally climb the walls.

It’s like The Purge meets phys ed—not just “exercise,” with all the moral overtones of such a misused word.

[Image: Via CrossFit].

“We’ve seen a real shift in the fitness world away from using heavy equipment like treadmills and stair climbers and toward much more social, class-based fitness—Zumba, Pilates, yoga, CrossFit,” an analyst named Matt Powell explains to Bloomberg Business. “These activities are really ramping up. So for a brand to stake out the fitness activity as their cornerstone makes a lot of sense right now.”

He’s talking about Reebok exploring new shoe designs made specifically for CrossFit and other forms of unconventional training apparel—but I’m genuinely curious what the architectural implications are in such a shift. Put another way, if Reebok was an architecture firm in charge of high school gymnasiums, what would this corporate revelation do to their spatial products? If what people physically do together has shifted toward the social, how might school gyms follow suit?

This isn’t just idle, Archigram-meets-Gold’s-Gym speculation. It we want to reverse the utterly insane trend toward removing gym class from children’s educational experiences, then it’s 100-times more likely that we’ll be able to do so not by cracking the whip harder and turning schools into militarized boot camps, but by designing spatial environments in which kids can do the things they actually want to do, where “exercise” is just a beneficial side-effect.

Even if that means adding BMX tracks, parkour competitions, trapeze routines, or—why not?—afternoon mud fights.

[Image: Via Clif Bar].

“Recess has been reduced or eliminated in many schools”

As Kaiser Permanente has pointed out, “the trend line for physical activity and education in schools is headed downward. As of 2006, only 4 percent of elementary schools, 8 percent of middle schools, and 2 percent of high schools nationwide provided daily physical education. Even recess has been reduced or eliminated in many schools.” This is horrifying.

Yet, if you stop by a place like the aforementioned Brooklyn Boulders on a weeknight, you’ll see not only that the place is often packed with teenagers who are as stoked as hell to be out of the classroom, doing weird physical things together, but that, awesomely, it’s often the very kids most often stereotyped as not giving a crap about exercise who are there hanging out and literally climbing the walls.

How can it be that gym class—or, more broadly speaking, physical activities in American schools—are so out of touch with what kids actually want to do these days that kids need to make a bee-line to the nearest climbing gym to burn off all their energy?

Is this purely a liability issue—because everyone’s perfect angel might scrape a knee—or has there been a failure of spatial imagination amongst the people building gyms and playgrounds today?

[Images: Ray’s MTB].

Just think of the underground bike park in Louisville or even just a local skatepark—or, for that matter, any of the more youth-oriented playgrounds I wrote about a few years ago for Popular Science.

In fact, just the other week, my wife and I were learning how to do 40-foot high falls off of scaffolding inside a warehouse over in Greenpoint as part of this random stunt-training thing we did. We were in a cavernous room full of huge mats, climbing walls, an oversized trampoline, and all sorts of other random things, like swords—and, what do you know, but there were also tons of kids of there, from the genuinely young to teenagers going through the most awkward phase of teenagerness, and there was no evidence on display that we live in a world where kids don’t want to do weird physical things together.

In other words, most people do want to “get exercise,” as it is unfortunately and rather Calvinistically known; they just want to do in a way where it’s a side-effect of having fun.

[Images: “Mega Bike” at the Louisville Mega Cavern; photos courtesy Louisville Mega Cavern].

“I will be multifaceted”

Outdoor design consultant Scott McGuire of The Mountain Lab said something really interesting in a long interview published here back in 2013. McGuire suggested that “sport specificity” is being thrown out the window these days in favor of a general state of pure physical activity. Or, in his words:

When I grew up, you were a surfer or you were a skater or you were a climber or you were a road biker. But kids today don’t think anything like that—they think, “I do all of those things! Why would I not be someone who is a skier who’s also into bouldering who’s taking up trail running and who competes in Wii dance competitions? Why can’t I be that person?” There’s a sense that I will be whoever I want to be, whenever—and, of course, I will be multifaceted.

McGuire went on to suggest, similar to the Bloomberg Business article cited above, that “this is a generation who don’t see why they can’t leave the trail, go to town, have lunch, and go to the skate park and skate all afternoon, and not change gear. But the outdoor industry is having a hard time reconciling that.”

But, crucially, architects are having a hard time reconciling that, too. The spatial environments currently being designed and built to foster “exercise,” or physically engaged play, today rarely correspond to the activities people seem most excited to pursue.

In fact, I’d suggest that this is part of a much larger narrative, one that includes the decline in interest in heavily formalized Olympic sports, where the rise of alternative activities, such as X Games, parkour, BMX, and skateboarding, are proof that something else could very well fill that niche, but our spatial environments are lagging too far behind.

[Image: The Lake Cunningham Regional Skatepark, via The Skateboarder Mag].

Designing the gym of tomorrow

If at least part of the crisis in phys ed today is that school gyms are simply being built wrong, then the obvious next question would be: what should they really look like?

This is, among other things, an architectural problem: what sorts of physical activities have been designed out of the school environment—not to mention the city, the suburb, the home, or the office?

Conversely, what activities should the schools, gyms, and buildings of today actually foster or allow?

[Image: Hyundai Motors FC Clubhouse by Suh Architects, South Korea; via Architizer].

At the most mundane level, could the architecture of the school building itself somehow absorb or otherwise channel the infamous distractibility and hyper-activity of kids today into deliberately frivolous physical activities (that is, “exercise”)?

In other words, if it looks like those kids in the back of class are literally about to climb the walls from eating too much breakfast cereal, then why not let them? Put whole spiraling labyrinths of climbing walls and tunnels throughout the school, with mats and helmets everywhere, and make exploring these inner wilds a genuine reward for sitting still in class.

There is nothing radical in such an observation, but it is nonetheless a genuine and important social issue: how to inspire, not to mention architecturally encourage, intense physical activity at all ages.

It’s not just urban design that’s “making us fat,” which is, after all, just an overly moralizing way of saying that urban design doesn’t let us have fun. It’s the fact that almost none of our buildings, including our schools and playgrounds, have been built to allow the kinds of physical activities people actually want to engage in these days.

[Image: Aerial view of the Lake Cunningham Regional Skatepark].

So, if we go back to the Reebok example from the very beginning of this post, we’ll find an architectural conversation hiding in the details. We see a company realizing that its products no longer correspond to what its potential consumers actually want to do, and then forcing itself to fundamentally redesign those products in order to reflect the needs of this overlooked market.

What is the architectural—or more broadly speaking spatial—equivalent of this, and what should the gyms, schools, and playgrounds of tomorrow actually look like?

Whorled Maps

[Image: “Sights” by Shannon Rankin].

I wrote about the map-based work of artist Shannon Rankin a few years back, featuring elaborately cut, pinned, sliced, and remade bits of global cartography.

Rankin is currently participating in a group show at the New Art Center up in Newton, Massachusetts, if you happen to be nearby, but I basically just thought I’d use that as an excuse to post this great print, “created from digitally altered ocean and star maps.” It’s not actually in the current show—I just think it looks cool. Consider supporting the artist by buying a print.

Dropping Light

[Image: Photo courtesy Nellis Air Force Base].

Black eyedrops made from a “chlorophyll analog” have allowed human subjects to experience night vision—without the use of special goggles.

The chemical, called Chlorin e6, “is found in some deep-sea fish and is used as an occasional method to treat night blindness,” according to Mic.

The group who actually ran the experiment, Science for the Masses, is based in Tehachapi, California, somewhat amusingly described by Mic as being “a couple hours north of Los Angeles,” which is rhetorically equivalent to saying they’re in the middle of nowhere (in fact, Tehachapi is quite close to California City).

In effect, the modified eyedrop procedure was just a tactical misuse of a known cancer treatment: that is, Chlorin e6, or Ce6, is normally used as “a photosensitizer in laser assisted cancer remediation,” the group explained. “The light amplification properties of the Ce6 are used to use the energy from a low power light source to destroy cancerous cells with literal laser precision.”

It is this “light amplification” that enables the alleged night vision.

“To me, it was a quick, greenish-black blur across my vision, and then it dissolved into my eyes,” Gabriel Licina, the team’s voluntary guinea pig, explained.

[Image: Screen grab via Mic, courtesy of Science for the Masses].

According to the team’s own report—which must be taken with a grain of salt, at least until other researchers have reproduced the results—it actually worked: it gave Licina night vision. From Mic:

It started with shapes, hung about 10 meters away. “I’m talking like the size of my hand,” Licina says. Before long, they were able to do longer distances, recognizing symbols and identifying moving subjects against different backgrounds.

The team has posted a “review” of the experience on their website, which offers some more insight into the process.

But, again, assuming this isn’t simply an exaggeration or even a hoax, the idea that humans can now see in the dark with the help of eyedrops based on chlorophyll—as if borrowing an optical superpower from the vegetable kingdom, incorporating other species and experiencing self-hybridization in order to capture light at even its wispiest and most ghostlike extremes—is jaw-dropping. Or eye-popping, as the case may be.

You can easily imagine this becoming standard for nighttime police operations or military raids—with Special Ops teams giving themselves eyedrops before sneaking into an unlit town—but one could even imagine this having an effect on global energy bills.

What if improving grid efficiency is at least partially also a medical question—that is, if you could just drop some Ce6 in a dark city without the need for streetlights, or even walk through your own apartment with pupils the size of dinner plates, seeing everything?

[Image: Photo courtesy Nellis Air Force Base].

The possibility that human self-augmentation might serve as an alternative to urban infrastructure is a pretty mind-boggling scenario, implying a whole new suite of possibilities for the future of urban design.

At the very least, it suggests a bizarre—if not quite dystopian—situation where we might find that redesigning the city is less effective than redesigning ourselves.

(Via @ziyatong).

The Los Angeles County Department of Ambient Music vs. The Superfires of Tomorrow

You might have seen the news last month that two students from George Mason University developed a way to put out fires using sound.

“It happens so quickly you almost don’t believe it,” the Washington Post reported at the time. “Seth Robertson and Viet Tran ignite a fire, snap on their low-rumbling bass frequency generator and extinguish the flames in seconds.”

Indeed, it seems to work so well that “they think the concept could replace the toxic and messy chemicals involved in fire extinguishers.”



There are about a million interesting things here, but I was totally captivated by two points, in particular.

At one point in the video, co-inventor Viet Tran suggests that the device could be used in “swarm robotics” where it would be “attached to a drone” and then used to put out fires, whether wildfires or large buildings such as the recent skyscraper fire in Dubai. But consider how this is accomplished; from the Washington Post:

The basic concept, Tran said, is that sound waves are also “pressure waves, and they displace some of the oxygen” as they travel through the air. Oxygen, we all recall from high school chemistry, fuels fire. At a certain frequency, the sound waves “separate the oxygen [in the fire] from the fuel. The pressure wave is going back and forth, and that agitates where the air is. That specific space is enough to keep the fire from reigniting.”

While I’m aware that it’s a little strange this would be the first thing to cross my mind, surely this same effect could be weaponized, used to thin the air of oxygen and cause targeted asphyxiation wherever these robot swarms are sent next. After all, even something as simple as an over-loud bass line in your car can physically collapse your lungs: “One man was driving when he experienced a pneumothorax, characterised by breathlessness and chest pain,” the BBC reported back in 2004. “Doctors linked it to a 1,000 watt ‘bass box’ fitted to his car to boost the power of his stereo.”

In other words, motivated by a large enough defense budget—or simply by unadulterated misanthropy—you could thus suffocate whole cities with an oxygen-thinning swarm of robot sound systems in the sky. Those “Ride of the Valkyries”-blaring speakers mounted on Robert Duvall’s helicopter in Apocalypse Now might be playing something far more sinister over the battlefields of tomorrow.

However, the other, more ethically acceptable point of interest here is the possible landscape effect such an invention might have—that is, the possibility that this could be scaled-up to fight forest fires. There are a lot of problems with this, of course, including the fact that, even if you deplete a fire of oxygen, if the temperature remains high, it will simply flicker back to life and keep burning.

[Image: The Grateful Dead “wall of sound,” via audioheritage.org].

Nonetheless, there is something awesomely compelling in the idea that a wildfire burning in the woods somewhere in the mountains of Arizona might be put out by a wall of speakers playing ultra-low bass lines, rolling specially designed patterns of sound across the landscape, so quiet you almost can’t hear it.

A hum rumbles across the roots and branches of burning trees; there is a moment of violent trembling, as if an unseen burst of wind has blown through; and then the flames go out, leaving nothing but tendrils of smoke and this strange acoustic presence buzzing further into the fires up ahead.

Instead of emergency amphibious aircraft dropping lake water on remote conflagrations, we’d have mobile concerts of abstract sound—the world’s largest ambient raves—broadcast through National Parks and on the edges of desert cities.

Desperate, Los Angeles County hires a Department of Ambient Music to save the city from a wave of drought-augmented superfires; equipped with keyboards and effects pedals, wearing trucker hats and plaid, these heroes of the drone wander forth to face the inferno, extinguishing flames with lush carpets of anoxic sound.

(Spotted via New York Magazine).