Author: Geoff Manaugh

“Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep,” Reuters tells us. “Meet California’s most alternative new energy.”

[Image: Photo via Reuters].

You’ve no doubt seen this elsewhere by now in our internet-flattened world, but this geometrized pool of cow manure will “provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day.”

To tap the renewable gas from cow manure, the Vintage Dairy farm first flushes manure into a large, octagonal pit, where it becomes about 99 percent water. It is then pumped into a covered lagoon, first passing through a screen that filters out large solids that eventually become the cows’ bedding.

The covered lagoon, or “digester,” is the size of nearly five football fields and about 33 feet deep. It is lined with plastic to protect the ground water and the cover, made of high density polyethylene, is held down at the edges by concrete.

Vast octagonal lagoons of cow crap festering in the California heat.
As one of the companies involved, BioEnergy Solutions, explains it: “We capture the methane released as livestock waste decomposes, then ‘scrub’ it to create clean, renewable natural gas that is delivered to power plants. The process can reduce methane emissions by up to 70%, or an estimated 1,500 tons per year, on a 5,000-cow dairy farm.”

[Image: Photo courtesy of American Images, Marshfield, WI, via CNET News].

Of course, news like this has been coming out for years now – for instance, in this story about Californian farmer Albert Straus and his “poop-filled lagoon”:

In addition to the energy savings, Straus’ new methane digester [the “lagoon”] will eliminate tons of naturally occurring greenhouse gases and strip 80 to 99 percent of organic pollutants from the wastewater generated from his family’s 63-year-old dairy farm. Heat from the generator warms thousands of gallons of water that may be used to clean farm facilities and to heat the manure lagoon. And wastewater left over after the methane is extracted, greatly deodorized, is used for fertilizing the farm’s fields.

Meanwhile, complete with photographs, CNET News introduced us to “industrial-sized ‘digesters’ that, through heat and microbes, reduce mountains of waste into gas or electricity that can be reused on the farm or sold on the open market” – and USA Today explained how, “at a time when state and federal energy bills have called for increasing renewable energy sources, there is more focus on developing cow dung as an alternative to coal or natural gas.”
In any case, I’m wondering what effects the cow poo boom will have on civic infrastructure – and even if human sewage might someday be tapped for its decompositional energy potential.
What strange new world of plumbing awaits us on the alternative energy horizon? How might it reshape the urban landscape?

(Thanks, Michael G.!)

The “remote Arctic settlement” of Longyearbyen, apparently the northernmost town in the world, “is buzzing with excitement and expectation” this week, the New York Times writes – because the sun will rise on March 8, the first time it’s done so since October. The town has been in polar darkness for the last five months.

[Image: Photo by Dean C. K. Cox for The International Herald Tribune].

Already, we read, “with the sun climbing closer to the horizon, each day is 20 minutes longer than the day before, and noticeably brighter. On Saturday, direct sunlight, with shadows and warmth, will arrive, starting with an actual sunrise.” Night as a function of the curvature of the earth.
Night as the experience of spherical geometry.
In any case, I’m reminded of at least two things here: 1) The graphic novel series 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, in which a small Alaskan town plunged into darkness by the earth’s curvature is overrun by – yes – vampires, and 2) a short story I’ve always wanted to write about a man who, fed up with the world, goes out to revive his sense of awe and too-long-lost capacity for self-appreciation by camping for a few nights alone in southern Utah. He wants to see sunrise, a kind of zero-moment out of which all emotional calibrations can be reset and centered once again – in illo tempore, as Mircea Eliade might say – and he’s all prepared for it, with a journal and gloves, feeling warm, surrounded by geology, sitting there beneath the stars, glad to have given himself this experience, relieved that amidst all the failure there can still be dawn, still something as simple as that to look forward to – except the sun doesn’t rise.
He’s two days’ drive away from home, there’s no one else in sight, he can’t get a cellphone signal in the midst of these rocky canyonlands in southern Utah, and it’s already noon. And it’s still dark.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

As interesting for its form as for its content, the project pictured here is something called “Willa’s Wonderland,” a one-off urban design comic strip set on the urban fringes of Atlanta by LOOMstudio and Amy Landesberg Architects, in collaboration with artist John Grider and writer Julia Klatt-Singer.
I’ve always thought that comic books – in fact, entire graphic novels – are an underused graphic resource for communicating architectural and urban design ideas, so it’s exciting to see that this project more or less puts that statement to the test.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

In a nutshell, it attempts to relay a series of thoughts about how the Atlanta Beltline could be put to better use, and to do so through the narrative structure of a comic strip.

[Image: A scene from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

It suggests that the Beltline “must include supportive connections to neighborhoods along the way and a pathway filled with wonder.” It is this pathway filled with wonder on which a young girl, Willa, quietly walking.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

The designers write:

As a visionary collaborative model, we have constructed an idealized world in the representational form of a comic book. We were motivated to select a form of communication that would provide a platform for a writer, two artists and a gaggle of architects. We were able to work together by carrying forward our individual strengths to form a new synthetic vision. Though we are also aware of the comic nature of all idealized vision, this did not prevent us from joyful and serious forward progress.

Some of the ideas put forward are a Sound Field, a Mind Garden, a Bike Forum, and the Cinema Paradise.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

Further:

Thinking of our comic book as a model for reality, we know every community needs a vehicle that joins and carries many voices, many visions and many hands. These must be carried forth with human perspective in the context of actual human experience. Large projects are often developed in cities where rational economic and executive force usurps human comfort, practicality and beauty. Bird’s-eye planning rarely addresses human perspective from the street. Every city has need for humane stories, woven into the fabric of daily life and the places that nurture and inspire.

Fundamentally, though, I want to come back to the idea that comic strips are a legitimate narrative vehicle for the communication of architectural ideas. I can’t help but wonder how interesting it would be if, say, Sin City had been produced with Delirious New York-era Rem Koolhaas as its architectural consultant – or if all the action had taken place inside buildings designed by Minsuk Cho or Andrew Maynard or FAT.
Or, not even going that far, if Richard Rogers hired an illustrator – if he hired Geof Darrow – to present all of his projects in one 225-page graphic novel, complete with plot, how much more interesting might studying architecture be?
You see vast airports and multi-million pound London flats and train stations and private homes and art museums, and people come wandering through.
By the end of the book you’ve seen every single project Richard Rogers has designed – and you didn’t need to buy some $300 hardcover retrospective to do so.

[Images: Scenes from “Willa’s Wonderland“].

In any case, I’ve uploaded all of the “Willa’s Wonderland” images – in their original, legible size – to a Flickr set; but be sure to check out the project website, where you can read the storyboards and check out more credits for the creative team behind it all.

(Originally spotted at Super Colossal).

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times yesterday about a mine disaster just waiting to happen.

[Image: “Abandoned equipment stands in the snow near the top of an underground tunnel that was once used to drain mine water.” Photo by Kevin Moloney for The New York Times].

In Leadville, Colorado, we read, people now wake up every morning wondering if they “will be washed away by toxic water that local officials fear could burst from a decaying mine tunnel” on the edge of town.

For years, the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Environmental Protection Agency have bickered over what to do about the aging tunnel, which stretches 2.1 miles and has become dammed by debris. The debris is holding back more than a billion gallons of water, much of it tainted with toxic levels of cadmium, zinc and manganese.

The article continues, describing the background for this “potentially catastrophic release of water”:

Abandoned mine shafts honeycomb the surrounding hillsides. The old drainage tunnel, built by the federal government in 1943 to drain hundreds of these shafts, began falling apart in the 1970s, causing water to pool. In 2005, the E.P.A. offered to start pumping the clogged water toward a Bureau of Reclamation plant, which treats the water flowing through the tunnel; but the bureau contended that the additional water was part of the E.P.A.’s Superfund cleanup responsibility.

And so nothing was done. The threat of “release” is now so great that property in the town can no longer be insured.
One wonders if it might be possible to build something like this deliberately, as a military tactic: a kind of long-delay, underground water cannon that only fires once, several decades after construction.
You leave a few dozen of these things lying around, beneath a terrain you have to evacuate… and so whenever your enemies move in, they’ve got some rather big problems beneath their feet.

[Image: The Zoo de Vincennes, by Beckmann N’Thepe].

These are some plans for a new zoological park in Vincennes, France. The zoo’s landscapes are designed by TN PLUS Landscape Architects, its buildings by Paris architects Beckmann N’Thepe.
The project is noteworthy for, among other things, what could be called its simulated geology.

[Image: Landscapes in the Zoo de Vincennes, designed by TN PLUS Landscape Architects].

These artificial earthforms will contain simulated environments within which animals will live. The whole complex will encompass 15 hectares and six “biozones,” and it will run partly on solar power.

[Image: The Zoo de Vincennes, by Beckmann N’Thepe].

The park’s “biozones” include the savannah, the equatorial African rain forest, Patagonia, French Guiana, Madagascar, and Europe.

[Image: More landscapes in the Zoo de Vincennes, by TN PLUS Landscape Architects].

So the zoo – like all zoos, of course – will be a simulation intended for animals. Zoos, in other words, are a particularly bizarre form of trans-species communication, attempted on the level of architecture and landscape design.
They’re like hieroglyphs that animals inhabit – spaces defined entirely by their ability to refer to something they are not.

[Images: Zooscapes by TN PLUS Landscape Architects].

More information, if you read French, is available in this PDF.

[Image: The Zoo de Vincennes, by Beckmann N’Thepe].

And I have to say that the renderings of this place look pretty cool.
But why do we only build zoos like this? Why not suburbs or college campuses? You mold landforms out of reinforced concrete, and you install artificial waterfalls and fake rivers, and you grow rare orchids under the cover of geodesic domes. And then your grandkids can grow up in a savannah-themed suburb outside Orlando. The next town over, kids run around through giant fern trees, chasing parrots.
Perhaps themed biozones are the future of suburban design?

[Image: The Zoo de Vincennes, by Beckmann N’Thepe].

Google opens a new administrative complex outside London – on the grounds of a former zoo. Your “cubicle” is partly outside.
Hidden nozzles mist your neck on every lunch break.

[Image: The Zoo de Vincennes, by Beckmann N’Thepe].

(Zoo de Vincennes discovered by Architectural Record).

The structural engineers over at Hyder Consulting have announced that they are planning what will be, by an overwhelming margin, the world’s tallest skyscraper, coming in at double the height of the Burj Dubai – or very nearly one vertical mile. The firm has “confirmed that the tower would be located in the Middle East region,” we’re told, “but would not give any further details.” So is it just a media stunt?
I decided, nonetheless, to alter an old BBC diagram about the world’s tallest buildings to give myself a sense of what this might mean, size-wise; the results appear above. I have to assume that the building’s actual profile will not resemble what I’ve created… but you never know.
Note the comparative size of the Empire State Building.

(News item spotted on Archinect – where we’re reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois project).

[Image: A submission to London’s recent Bat House Project by Andrew Brown, Gareth Jones, and James Falconer; view larger].

The above project, by Andrew Brown, Gareth Jones, and James Falconer, proposes “a home for bats in London.” It was produced for the Bat House Project, the stated aim of which was to highlight “the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design. It connects the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues.”
This is pretty old news, of course – but I just saw this particular design yesterday, and I have a thing for architecture delivered from the sky, dropped off by what appear to be military helicopters.
I’d like to see a short, inspirational video in which a dozen U.S. families are standing in a cul-de-sac. Everyone’s hair is whipping to and fro – and there are helicopter gunships flying overhead, dropping off complete Toll Brothers homes. The houses are ready for inhabitation, complete with pots and pans, pillows and sheets. There are five bedrooms, and three and a half baths. Wives are hugging wives; men are cheering.
The slow motion thud of helicopter blades fills all audible space.
The video ends.

[Image: 3d-printing new deltas into existence, courtesy of New Scientist].

If we could divert certain segments of the Lower Mississippi River into subsidiary canals, we’d “create up to 1000 square kilometres of new wetlands between New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, forming a vital storm surge buffer against hurricanes,” New Scientist reports.
It’s prosthetic deltas as the future of landscape design:

The proposed diversion would cut breaches into a levee some 150 km south of New Orleans, Louisiana, and 30 km above where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. With the diversions in place, flooding would cause the river to empty into shallow saltwater bays on either side of the river, releasing sediment-rich water to produce new deltas.

As Robert Twilley of Louisiana State University phrases it: “You keep the sediment within the coastal boundary current that keeps it running along the shoreline, whereas now it gets ejected into the Gulf.” This thus constructs “new delta land” instead of uselessly shooting all that sediment over the continental shelf – and that newly aggregated land, like a literal land bank, will help protect New Orleans and its surrounding parishes from future hurricane damage.

[Image: Courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

But I’m left wondering if this might not also imply some new form of 3D printing, using river sediments as ink and machine-controlled deltas as printheads: you open certain valves, gates, and locks according to predetermined schedules, in some massive inhabitable printhead complex run by the local flood control board, and you can print deltaic land into existence, at will, moving peninsulas here and there, forming islands, atolls, archipelagos, all through the directed sediments of the Mississippi River… It’d be a kind of horizontal spray-gun, bringing terra nova into existence.
For what it’s worth, meanwhile, my wife and I have co-authored a chapter in a forthcoming book called What Is A City?, published by the University of Georgia Press, in which we talk at great length about these sorts of post-Katrina hydrological projects – including the use of genetically-modified marshgrasses to anchor artificially dredged fill, in a more or less complete deterrestrialization of the earth’s surface. Or, to use a bad pun, you could say that these projects are literally outlandish.
Finally, don’t miss the show up now at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Birdfoot: Where America’s River Dissolves Into The Sea.

The end of the Mississippi River Delta – the Birdfoot – is a national landscape of disintegration, a fractal labyrinth of dendritic channels, a blend of water and earth, bisected and rerouted by linear, engineered forms of pipeline canals and levees. The people who live and work here, beyond the reach of roads, do so tenuously, in a delicate, disappearing place that is battered by hurricanes, and eroding into the sea.

The closing date for the exhibition is not available.

[Image: Photo by Doug McKinlay, courtesy of The Observer].

“Deep in the Arctic Circle,” we read, there is “a remarkable hotel made up of fishing huts on a frozen lake.” Of course, you don’t check in for the modern amenities: after all, the hotel is more like “a cross between camping and pottering in a garden shed,” Doug McKinlay writes.

Instead, you check in to watch the Northern Lights.

[Images: By Doug McKinlay, courtesy of The Observer].

Called the Abisko Ark Hotel, it’s located 250km north of the Arctic Circle, on Sweden’s Lake Tornetrask. “Guests are expected to bring essentials such as thermal underwear, fleeces and woolly hats, but the hotel provides thick outerwear and heavy snowmobile boots.”

Each hut “is about six meters square and sleeps three comfortably on single beds. The best part is that by each bed is a resealable hole in the wooden floor, allowing guests to fish from the comfort of their down-filled sleeping bags.”

[Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

These photos of the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, just popped up everywhere. I think this might literally be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. It makes me wonder if architects might someday CNC-mill buildings out of glaciers.
“You sleep in a thermal sleeping bag on a special bed of snow and ice, on reindeer skins,” we read. “You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot lingonberry juice at your bedside.”

[Images: All photos by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

“Breakfast buffet, morning sauna and towels [are] included,” of course – and there’s a restaurant on site, made from ice, serving “whitefish roe, venison and reindeer, cloudberries and arctic raspberries. All transformed into tasty delicacies guaranteed to please the most discerning gourmet.”
This year, the hotel was built with collaborative input from students of Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology.

So how is the ICEHOTEL actually built?
“The building process starts in mid-November,” the hotel’s managers explain, “when the snow guns start humming and large clouds of snow start to drift along the Torne River.”

The snow is sprayed on huge steel forms and allowed to freeze. After a couple of days, the forms are removed, leaving a maze of free-standing corridors of snow.

[Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

They continue:

In the corridors, dividing walls are built in order to create rooms and suites. Ice blocks, harvested at springtime from Torne River, are now being transported into the hotel where selected artists from all over the world start creating the art and design of the persihable material.

These “corridors of snow,” of course, could be used to form instant cities almost anywhere; with a few “snow guns” and a bunch of “huge steel forms,” you too could build an ICEHOTEL – or an ICECITY, or an ICETOWN, just waiting to be inhabited.
It’s architecture as controlled phase transition: coaxing temporary forms out of what wants to be liquid.
To mis-paraphrase Sanford Kwinter paraphrasing Alfred North Whitehead, we might say that this is an example of Misplaced Concreteness.

[Image: By Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

In any case, here are some photos of the construction process, documenting how the hotel was made – and here is a price list, in Swedish krona, should you want to book a few nights.
Send me, please!

(Also covered by Dezeen).