Month: September 2017

Crash Ballet

I had a surprisingly interesting conversation with the guy cutting my hair the other day. It turned out he had studied dance in college, but, roughly fifteen years ago, had been forced to find other work as both age and a nagging injury took their toll.

He mentioned various forms of movement therapy that exist for coping with, and even reversing, these sorts of injuries, which led to a conversation about styles of dance that might have been specifically invented not as art but as medicine, as a means of physical convalescence for aging performers, even choreographic styles devised for performance by injured dancers.

My barber then referred to a particular type of movement—whose name I can’t remember—that was all about using the body’s skeleton, rather than its musculature, for standing up and down, as well as something about spreading energy into the floor, not resisting gravity, etc., but the way he described it reminded me of studies I had read that suggested drunk people are often less injured in car crashes than their sober counterparts because their bodies don’t resist the movement. They are simply flung along with the motion of the vehicle. Sober people should thus learn not to clench up and go rigid if they’re about to be in a car accident; they should instead loosen up and, in effect, go with the flow.

Note, of course, that this is not scientific advice; I was speculating with someone in a barber shop.

Nevertheless, we went on to discuss the fact that car accidents are so common in American culture today that it would not be out of the question to devise some sort of movement-preparation course for kids to study in gym class—like tai chi for car wrecks—to help them safely interact with crashing vehicles. A kind of preparatory crash ballet.

Would this be more interesting or fun than dodgeball, or floor hockey, or whatever else it is that kids do in gym class these days? Teach kids how to be flung through windshields, how to roll out of collapsing houses in an earthquake, how to jump from burning buildings, or other survival techniques for the everyday catastrophes that might exist for all of us, hiding just around the corner.

Fab

[Image: “The Sphere” by Oliver Tessman, Mark Fahlbusch, Klaus Bollinger, and Manfred Grohmann].

The Bartlett School of Architecture has made all three volumes of Fabricate, their excellent series of books and conference proceedings dating back to 2011, free to download.

[Image: Matter Design’s La Voûte de LeFevre, Banvard Gallery (2012)].

More than 700 pages’ worth of technical experiments, speculative construction processes, new industrial tools, and one-off prototypes, the books are a gold mine for research and development.

[Image: Greg Lynn’s “Embryological House,” Venice Biennale (2002)].

3D printers, buoyant robots, multi-axis milling machines, directed insect-secretion, cellular automata, semi-autonomous bricklaying, self-assembling endoskeletons, drone weaving—it’s hard to go wrong with even the most cursory skimming of each volume, and that doesn’t even mention the essays and interviews.

[Image: “Custom forming tool mounted on the six-axis robotic arm,” via Fabricate 2014]

Download each book—from 2017, 2014, and 2011—and be prepared to lose a few days reading through them.

Extraction Town

[Image: Empty homes in Picher, Oklahoma; photo by BLDGBLOG].

On the way west, I managed to stop by the town of Picher, Oklahoma, the subject of a new exhibition featuring photographs by Todd Stewart.

Picher is something like the Centralia of Oklahoma, where Centralia is the town in Pennsylvania that has been slowly abandoned over a generation due to coal mine fires burning away beneath its streets. In Picher, however, it’s not coal smoke but collapsing lead mines that have led to a forced buy-out and evacuation, a haunting process tragically assisted in 2008 when a massive tornado hit town, ripping apart many of its remaining houses and buildings.

Today, Picher is not entirely empty, but it has become more of a macabre curiosity on the state’s border with Kansas, its quiet streets overgrown and surrounded by looming piles of “chat,” or mine tailings, alpine forms that give the landscape its toxic profile.

[Image: Picher, surrounded by its toxic artificial landforms; via Google Maps].

The Washington Post visited the town back in 2007. “Signs of Picher’s impending death are everywhere,” they wrote at the time. “Many stores along Highway 69, the town’s main street, are empty, their windows coated with a layer of grime, virtually concealing the abandoned merchandise still on display. 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.” Note that this was written a year before the tornado.

Oklahoma native Allison Meier has written up Todd Stewart’s exhibition, including a longer, horrific backstory to the town, with red rivers of acidic water “belching” up from abandoned mines, kids playing in sandboxes of powdered lead, and horses poisoned by the runoff.

“The poisoning of Picher may seem like a local story,” Meier writes, “and, indeed, remains little known on a national level. Yet the state of Oklahoma continues to practice environmentally hazardous extraction, including fracking for gas. And in the United States, the promotion of toxic industry—even if it results in the destruction of the very place it is supporting—endures.”

Here’s a link to the actual exhibition, and you can buy a copy of Todd Stewart’s book here. Wired also visited Picher a few years back, if you’re looking for more.