Author: Geoff Manaugh

Apparently, “almost half” of the fluorescent light bulbs used in the Japanese module of the International Space Station have begun burning out far earlier than expected.
An entire section of the station thus might soon be left in darkness.

[Image: Kibo, the Japanese module of the International Space Station, soon to be without internal light].

Although an impending delivery of new bulbs will undoubtedly bring light back to the failing module, the implication that astronauts aboard something like the International Space Station – or some special, trans-galaxial touring edition, launched twenty-five years from now – might be faced with total darkness, a darkness from which they cannot be rescued, is mind-boggling.
At the very least it would make a great film: ten minutes into what you think is a science fiction adventure story, all the lights on the ship go out. There is no way to replace the bulbs.
The next hour and a half you listen – after all, you can’t watch – as a group of orbiting athletes and scientists slowly comes to grips with their situation. They are drifting out past the rings of Saturn inside a strange constellation of unlit rooms – and they will never have light in the station again.
Five years from now one of them will still be alive, half-insane, speaking into a dead transmitter. The price of seeing stars is darkness, he whispers to himself over and over again, as his failing eyes gaze out upon nebulas and planets he’ll never reach.

(Via Wired Science).

Something about the previous post reminded me of a project by Elliott Malkin called Graffiti For Butterflies.

[Images: Graffiti For Butterflies by Elliott Malkin].

Graffiti For Butterflies attempts to “direct” monarch butterflies “along migratory routes in North America,” using “images of milkweed flowers to broadcast the location of food sources.”
Malkin applies sunblock to these images in order “to optimize the graffiti for butterfly vision.” He calls this Urban Interspecies Communication.
Overlooking the most basic question here – of whether or not this would actually work – the very idea that we might deliberately construct an alternative visual system inside our cities, legible only to other species, is totally fascinating. What devices of route-finding and navigation could we purposefully produce for non-humans?
Is there a burgeoning field of graphic design for other species? Post-human signage and symbology?
There are already olfactory labyrinths left behind by dogs, for instance, and there are accidental but extraordinarily complex sense-trails following us everywhere – from food scraps to automobile exhaust to whiffs of perfume on the subway – but what deliberate “graffiti,” otherwise undetectable by humans, could we create in order to help other species navigate the urban world?
Using special UV paints to mark artificial migration routes across the continent seems like an amazing way to begin the investigation.

[Image: Route-finding and spatial perception in the brain; via the BBC].

Like something out of a short story by China Miéville, “scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt ‘sat-nav’ system in the brains of London taxi drivers,” the BBC reports. “They used magnetic scanners to explore the brain activity of taxi drivers as they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London’s streets. Different brain regions were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks or thought about their customers.”
Taxi cab drivers’ brains, we read, “even ‘grow on the job’ as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London’s labyrinth of streets – information famously referred to as ‘The Knowledge’.”
It’s interesting to note, meanwhile, that this appears to be an almost complete retread of news released more than eight years ago. There we learn not only that “the hippocampus is at the front of the brain,” but that it “was examined in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans on 16 London cabbies.”
Cabbies’ brains, that article reports, “‘grow’ on the job.”
However, it’s also interesting to speculate here that “sat-nav” was not referred to by that earlier article because certain technologies – such as dashboard navigation and handheld GPS – simply had not yet reached an adequate price-point, or the required level of social acceptance, for “sat-nav” to be useful to that writer as a metaphor.
If this were true, then perhaps you could track the infiltration of GPS and sat-nav technologies into the fabric of everyday life by the speed with which they have become recognizable as urban-spatial metaphors.

(Via Boing Boing and Geoffrey S. George).

I just discovered Floater Magazine, “an inventory for floatation mechanisms within architecture,” published and edited out of Athens, Greece.

[Image: The cover of Floater Magazine #01; view larger].

The first issue includes articles about Laputa Island, OMA’s Riga Port City development, floating territories, and an artistic device called the “Oscillation of the Sea,” among many others, including the magazine’s inaugural editorial statement.
The design of the website itself – with mobile images you can rearrange according to taste – can be quite cool, as in this featurette about the micronational principality of Sealand.
Better yet, all the articles can be downloaded as PDFs – so you can read them on the go.

[Image: Le Corbusier’s Maison Citrohan undergoes speculative regulatory alterations, as applied by Finn Williams and David Knight].

An interesting architectural exhibition, put togther by Finn Williams and David Knight, closed today in London. Called The Rule of Regulations, it looked at what effect today’s building codes and zoning regulations might have if retroactively applied to an historic structure such as Le Corbusier’s Maison Citrohan.
As the Architect’s Journal described the show’s more wide-ranging spatial implications, “perhaps we can seek out creative opportunities within the current legislative framework, maybe to arrive in a wonderland where new forms of architecture emerge.”

In The Rule of Regulations, Williams and Knight pit architectural conceits – here Le Corbusier’s five points of Modern architecture – against five pieces of current housing legislation. They have remodeled Corb’s early mass-housing prototype, the single-family dwelling Maison Citrohan (1922), to see how it might look in today’s climate of environmental paranoia, lowest cost, equal opportunities and accessibility.

The phrase “environmental paranoia” seems unnecessarily dismissive of very realistic – and reasonable – energy-performance criteria for the construction, maintenance, and use of buildings in the 21st century, but this excerpt still offers us a glimpse of what was at stake in the exhibition’s premise.

[Image: View larger].

And the premise was brilliant.
Architectural practice is so thoroughly shaped from the outside-in by building codes, something which perhaps only becomes obvious when different historical periods are forced to collide.
Semi-absurd thought experiments might ensue: What would the Taj Mahal, or Angkor Wat, look like if subjected to Manhattan’s 1916 Zoning Law, as so thoroughly explored by Rem Koolhaas? Or how might the city of London be different if subject, overnight and without warning, to the urban regulations of Los Angeles, Dubai, or Beijing?
Perhaps cities could even set aside small test-plots, urban labs in which gardens of architectural form can grow. 10 square blocks of west Los Angeles are re-zoned as if they’re part of Paris; when new laws are passed in Paris, they go into force there, too.
What new buildings and lifestyles might result?
Sections of the city could take on the characteristic of a skin-graft. Suddenly three streets in downtown Chicago adopt the building codes of Amsterdam. You fly there on a business trip one summer when you realize that something just isn’t quite right with the layout of a certain building…
Perhaps you could even assign building regulations from different cities to specific rooms in a single Manhattan high-rise; there’s a London room, a New York room, a Moscow room. The whole thing a test structure or legal demonstration project. Architects and architectural students alike come through for tours of the rooms to see what effects, both large and small, a simple change in the rules can generate.

[Image: View larger].

But if architectural interiors and exteriors alike are shaped by the spatial expectations of certain historically specific legal regimes, to what extent are the familiar landscapes and experiences of everyday life shaped off-stage, in the planning books and lunchtime meetings of urban planning boards?
When we look back at what made certain cities thrive in different phases of modern history, are we wrong to cite artistic movements and architectural schools – when we should be crediting their planning departments?
In any case, Williams and Knight raise a series of interesting questions about the relationship between architectural style and architectural regulation, and the historical tensions that exist within that partnership.
I suppose one fundamental question here might be: Do architects need less regulation in order to pursue the art of spatial design – or simply more creative rules?
Indeed, is it really possible to study Le Corbusier without also studying the legal codes within and around which he was forced to design?
I’m reminded of Michael Sorkin’s book Local Code, in which an entire city is described and presented – without the use of a single image – through the droll recitation of absurdly specific building regulations.
How do invisible legislative skeletons shape modern space?

[Image: New flats, part of the AHMM master plan in Barking, England, specifically cited by the BBC as being so small that they’re mere slums in the making; via Building Design].

“Are the gleaming new apartment buildings of the past decade the inner-city slums of tomorrow?” the BBC asks this morning in an interesting, if insufficiently argued, opinion piece about the state of private housing in England.
New, privately developed apartment complexes there – the exact same apartment complexes of visual interest to architecture magazines such as the one for which I work – might, in the end, simply be too small and too cramped to become anything other than the slums of tomorrow.
Affordable now, ghettoized later.
The problem, the essay argues, is that there are no real minimum space standards for private housing developments in England. Tiny flats suitable only for single men and women, or for weekend getaways, are filling up valuable land in city centers – which is great for the duration of a real estate boom, but which might have sociologically frightening future implications.
“Alone in the UK,” the BBC points out, “Scotland does have legislation on minimum sizes for homes in the commercial sector. Northern Ireland has rules on social housing – while in England and Wales many local authorities also have size regulations for affordable housing. But none of this covers private sector developments.”
One point, by no means minor, that goes totally unexplored comes from the BBC‘s own table of apartment space data. There we see that the average apartment size in Italy is actually smaller than the average apartment size in England.
So why all the scare talk about future slums and ghettos? Is there a legitimate concern here that smaller living spaces might become crime-infested labyrinths when the economy dries up – or is this simply fear of other forms of social organization?
Nuclear families living in several comfortable rooms = good.
Single men and women living alone in small apartments = moral hazard.
In any case, I thought suburbs were the next slums?
In fact, it’d be interesting to do a kind of comparative slum futurology: to see what building types different countries and cultures fear will become the “next slum.” What does it say about you, politically? On the left, perhaps, you think it’s the suburbs, waiting to be taken over by wildcats and gangs; on the right, you think it’s affordable housing.
But who’s got the data on their side?

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking on a panel at the upcoming Art + Environment Conference hosted by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from October 2-4.
Other speakers include Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, artist and architect Vito Acconci, photographer Michael Light, artists Fritz Haeg and Katie Holten, Bill Gilbert from Land Arts of the American West, and cultural organizer Cheryl Haines, among many others.
The entire thing is being moderated by William L. Fox, a prolific writer, poet, and friend who often documents his own travels through extreme natural environments, describing those landscapes’ effects upon human cognition.
Here is a PDF with all the information you’ll need to register for the conference; for more info about the speakers themselves, and their conference schedules, check out the conference website.

[Image: Panel description; view larger].

My own panel, “Placing Space,” will be on Saturday, October 4, at 9:30am. Hopefully I’ll see a few of you there!
I hope to come back not only with several new posts, but possibly with some interviews. Stop by if you get a chance.

Perhaps in the spirit of the Wonders of the World, the nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, has been declared a national historic site.
“National Historic Landmarks,” the Department of Energy explains, “can be nationally significant districts, sites, buildings, structures, and/or objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.”
In a late-August news release (PDF) we read:

U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer today announced the designation of DOE’s B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark and unveiled DOE’s plan for a new public access program to enable American citizens to visit B Reactor during the 2009 tourist season. The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II (WWII).

As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, however, Hanford is but “one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.” Another site is the so-called Chicago Pile.
The atomic infrastructure of mid-century American warfare is thus slowly being converted into a distributed landscape of historic monuments.
Perhaps it’s dark tourism with a physics bent – the national memory of nuclear fission, a geography of Cold War nostalgia. They are places where the atom opened up – a series of small entryways into matter.

Google has filed a patent for what the New York Times describes as “mobile data center platforms out at sea.”

[Image: A view of the R/P FLIP ship, which has absolutely nothing to do with Google’s offshore server plan; it just looks cool and seems appropriate. Image altered by Alexander Trevi].

This means “stacking containers filled with servers, storage systems and networking gear on barges or other platforms.” These would be “‘crane-removable’ data center modules on ships.” From the actual patent application:

In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in this era of alternative energy sources, “Google has theorized about powering these ocean data centers with energy gained just from water splashing against the side of the barges.”

[Image: From Google’s patent application for servers at sea; via the New York Times].

I have to assume, then, that we’re moving ever closer to true deep-water city-states – only they won’t be libertarian ocean-going homesteads, after all, they’ll be distributed networks of supercomputing villages afloat on, and drawing power from, the tides.
Two weeks ago, meanwhile, the NYTimes also looked at the privatization of civic infrastructure – but perhaps Google’s literally offshore experiment in information technology implies a coming world of privatized services at sea.
A fleet of tankers shows up in a nearby port one day… and suddenly your city has telephone services. It’s Archigram‘s instant city all over again, but on the level of specific – and highly billable – urban amenities.
The services show up. The network takes over.
Your city will never be the same.

[Image: The Instant City at work; diagrams by Peter Cook/Archigram. An original interview with Peter Cook appears in the forthcoming BLDGBLOG Book].

I’m further reminded of the five-week-long power outage that struck Auckland, New Zealand, just slightly more than ten years ago. Peter Gutmann describes some of the possible ship-borne solutions to that city’s loss of electricity:

Apparently the idea of moving ships from the naval base on the other side of the harbour across to the Auckland waterfront to act as floating generators was considered, but there are problems with feeding the power from the ships to the city. There’s also the problem that there’s nothing around which can generate even a fraction of the power required. Another idea which was considered is using one of the Cook Straight ferries (which could in theory provide around 10MW) as a floating generator (the term “ferry” is a considerable understatement). Currently a couple of waterfront businesses are being run with power from ships acting as floating generators, and when both repaired cables failed their testing, Mercury finally brought in a diesel-electric trans-Tasman freighter, the Union Rotorua, to act as a 12MW floating generator, and is considering bringing in another ship or installing generators on barges.

In any case, the seafaring future of civic infrastructure is something we’ll have to keep our eyes on. Entire new untold types of urban experience could be yours the minute that strange shape on the horizon comes in to dock.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

Wildcats are taking over the foreclosed homes of Southern California. According to the neighbor of an abandoned house near Lake Elsinore, “this is the first she has heard of a wild animal taking over a foreclosure.”

[Image: Karen Brown/The Press-Enterprise].

So is the wild coming back for good – or has the ongoing U.S. real estate bubble simply produced temporarily ideal conditions for the return of bobcats and other large feline predators?
After all, what sort of burgeoning ecosystem does the world of foreclosed homes represent? Mold, lichen, and vines; bears, deer, and wildcats.
Repurposed McMansions, emptied of their human inhabitants, are filled in later by a troupe of mountain lions.
I sense a children’s film here.
But is this really the way the wild will reclaim our world? Starting with foreclosed homes and moving inward, to the centers of cities, from there. Soon ivy crawls across the well-polished tables of New York boardrooms, as the suburbs fall prey to nests of field mice.