Author: Geoff Manaugh

“By the end of January,” The Scotsman writes, “it’s essential to be back in Edinburgh… where Nicholas Bone’s intriguing performance company Magnetic North stages a version of Henry Thoreau’s Walden, one of the most famous essays ever written on the idea of self-sufficiency and human harmony with nature.” The set has been designed by Sans Façon.

[Image: Photograph ©Richard Barnes. More info at Magnetic North].

What blows me away, though, is the suggestion, in the image, above, that one could build a kind of personal retreat in the middle of an underground car park.
You’re fed up. You want to be alone, to spend some time getting to know your own inner tendencies, how you react to things free from the influence of others, what you think about when you’re not at work or out drinking with friends or consumed with constricting deadlines; you want to sit alone in the emptiness, surrounded by nothing, implanting yourself there in the void, all deliberate solitude and meditation.
But you don’t go to the woods.
You don’t go out to some canyon somewhere. Forget nature.
You build a cabin in an underground car park and you eat canned spinach.
You’re the only one there. Sleeping at night is almost literally sublime: the whole place roars with unseen machines, ventilation flues droning at all hours. It’s like living inside a resonator, a whorling microclimate inside the earth, cavernous.
No one knows you’re down there.
No one’s ever parked this far underground.
Like the grain of sand that becomes a pearl, you know you’ll someday re-emerge, psychologically transformed by that encounter with stale air and concrete.
In Walden, Thoreau famously wrote:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived… I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

But what Thoreau didn’t have was a good underground car park – that modern solitude of slanted floors and cold air.
Car parks will be the catalysts for our future evolution.

The design pictured below – for “a track, supported above the water by pontoons,” forming a sea-based airport on top of which planes could land – was published in Science and Mechanics back in 1936.
The project was “not, of course, intended for deep-sea operation, like the proposed floating seadromes, but for the quiet water of harbors.”

[Image: From Modern Mechanix, originally published in 1936 – the same year Raiders of the Lost Ark takes place, on a completely unrelated note].

Those deep-sea “floating seadromes,” however, are really quite interesting.
An idea by engineer Edward R. Armstrong, seadromes were “steel islands” that would be “anchor[ed] 375 miles apart across the Atlantic.”

[Each seadrome] will have an unobstructed airplane runway 1,200 ft. long by 200 ft. wide. At the mid-sides the platform will project to give room for a hotel (with restaurant and bar), hangars, storage sheds, weather bureau, offices, hospital wards, lighthouse. Platform and buildings will be 80 ft. above calm water level. Because no Atlantic waves have ever been seen more than 45 ft. high, it is improbable that the runway ever will be awash. The buoyancy columns with their stabilizing disks will reach 160 ft. below water level. That is considerably deeper than any wave action has ever been noted.

In other words, the seadromes wouldn’t fare too well if they got hit by a rogue wave…
We learn that Armstrong “long planned to anchor his first full-size seadrome midway between Manhattan and Bermuda. Studying hydrographic charts of the region he figured that there must exist a high spot on the ocean floor about where he would like it. He asked Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams to send a survey ship to check his calculations. He was right.”
There was, indeed, “a little plateau” out there, to which one of Armstrong’s floating islands could anchor.
By flying from one seadrome to the next, Armstrong believed that aerial transit time between North America and Europe could eventually be cut to “as low as 20 hrs.”
According to American Heritage, Armstrong’s “chain of seadromes would stretch across the Atlantic to the Azores, from which planes would continue on to Spain, with connections to the rest of Europe. The seadromes would be equipped with patrol boats and Seasleds so that, as a newspaper article explained, ‘a disabled plane forced down … between seadromes, could be reached in five hours or less.'”
However, the seadromes were also extra-constitutional spaces located outside landed sovereignty. Some interesting governmental questions arise here – such as: If you were born out there, and raised there, and educated there, what passport would you hold? What if no country would receive you – leaving you to wander, Odysseus-like, from one seadrome to the next, flying the Atlantic trade winds in a state of infinite anti-residential exile? To whose laws would you be bound?
The idea of floating airports has mutated into a variety of similar such schemes, meanwhile, including so-called modularized ocean basing systems for the U.S. Navy, also known as mobile offshore bases.
And then, of course, there’s SeaCode…

Might the cultivation of “shiny crops” be a good way to reflect solar energy back into space – thus helping cool the surface of the planet in the fight against global warming?

These “fields of shiny crops,” the Guardian reported this morning, “could send more of the sun’s heat back into space, and even reverse temperatures in parts of the world.”
“Encouraging farmers to grow shinier crops” would presumably be most successful “in agricultural and forestry areas,” we read, “where the land surface is already under significant human influence.”
How exactly this would be done is fascinating – because it’s about increasing the surface area of each individual plant, not growing tentacular cacti of living silver, or mirrored roses in rows unfolding across remote landscapes. Rather than metallic plantlife, that is, or cyborg-plants, we just need denser, lighter colored leaves.
For instance, “an extra-hairy variety of soya bean… reflects about 5% more sunlight than normal,” and “growing broadleaf varieties of trees instead of conifers” could be enough to reflect several percentage points more.
And there is an architectural side to all this: “Other scientists have suggested different ways to cool the planet [such as] painting roads, roofs and car parks white.”

[Image: A rendering of the Polish Pavilion, designed for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai].

Architects Wojciech Kakowski, Natalia Paszkowska, and Marcin Mostafa will be designing the Polish Pavilion for Shanghai’s World Expo in 2010.
The building’s design, the architects write in a mass-circulated press release, was required to “denote, by its esthetic distinctiveness, the country of origin,” and it had to “constitute, by the strength of its stylistic connotations, an evocative, recognizable and memorable cultural ideogram.”
In this case, the “cultural ideogram” their winning design was meant to embody is “the motif of folk-art paper cut-out[s].”

[Images: Two more views of the Polish Pavilion, designed for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai].

As the below diagram makes clear, this “paper cut-out” theme has been taken quite literally: the outer envelope of the building is actually a kind of incised wrapper, capable of unfolding to form a flat surface again (albeit one in which the patterns do not always match up).

[Image: A structural diagram of the building’s exterior, unfolded].

So is this mere ornament, nostalgia, and postmodern reference? Or is today’s growing inclination for decorative hyper-complexity in architecture put to interesting and novel use?
On an unrelated note, I feel like this is the type of structure we’ll someday learn has been entirely 3D printed. It also makes me think of the gorgeously baroque plasma-cut sculptural work of artist Cal Lane, as recounted last week on materialicious.
Read more at the project’s website.

[Images: Mitsubishi‘s new elevator testing tower in Japan].

Mitsubishi has opened a “test tower,” built for experimental new elevator designs and technologies. It’s “the world’s tallest elevator testing tower” – and it’s a functionalist monolith, standing at 567 feet.
It’s just one gigantic elevator shaft.
The building will be used “to conduct research into high-speed elevators to serve the next generation of super-tall buildings,” including stress tests on “new drives, gears, cables and other lift systems.”
I see at least one scene from Mission Impossible IV being filmed here – there’s some sort of world-destroying nuclear device hidden above that vertical maze of moving platforms and our hero’s got to find it… Or perhaps some future game world called Batman: Japan, in which the Caped Crusader lives and works entirely in various locations throughout the Japanese archipelago, burning incense and punching through Cor-Ten steel blocks in an underlit dōjō near the sea. One night he follows a lone criminal back to what looks like a vertical fortress… only it’s not a fortress: it’s this weird experimental elevator complex looming over him in the darkness.
He enters.
He hears machines.
Hijinks ensue.

A story I’ve been meaning to write about for several weeks now involves a family in South Carolina who moved into a newly purchased house.
They were all messing about one day, doing chores, cleaning up, moving in, when they “found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase” – but “what was inside,” we read, “was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams.”

[Image: A suburban house that is otherwise unconnected to this post].

Inside the room was a hand-written note.
The note said “You Found It!”
It turns out, the note explained, that the house was infested with “the worst types of mold including Stachybotrys, the so-called Toxic Black Mold,” which can cause “respiratory bleeding” in infants.

[Image: Toxic black mold].

The stunned homeowners, thinking they might be the victims of a weird hoax, hired an environmental engineer – only to discover that the problem was even worse than they thought; the house contained “elevated levels of several types of mold, including Aspergillus, Basidiospores, Chaetomiu, Curvularia, Stachybotrys and Torula.”
The town’s local news station calls this “the horrible secret of Number 6 Whitten Street.”

(Thanks, David W.!)

“A magnetically levitated train could theoretically take you from New York to London in 54 minutes,” the Discovery Channel informs us. “But you’d have to go 5,000 mph through a 3,100-mile-long tunnel that was itself floating in the Atlantic Ocean. How might that work?”
Well, let’s find out.

Of course, if this interests you, don’t miss parts two and three.

New Scientist published an awesome article this week about nothing more complex than stacking blocks of wood (subscriber-only)… But, oh, how complex that task can be. It’s the combinatorial architecture of the well-balanced stack.

[Image: The diagrammatic mathematics of a structural experiment by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick, as reported in New Scientist].

Computer scientists Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick have calculated new shapes and arrangements for the so-called “overhang problem,” by which one attempts to stack blocks outward from the edge of a table so that the blocks “overhang” as far as possible (before the stack collapses, or before you and your friends go out for more beer).

Strategically speaking, it turns out to be a matter of well-placed gaps, pressures, and weights.

[Image: Two abstract stacks by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick].

In two papers, available as PDFs (here and here), Paterson and Zwick write about balancing “harmonic stacks,” then stabilizing them, through “minute displacements” of space and weight within the stack structure.

A stack is said to be balanced if there exists a collection of forces acting between the blocks along their contact intervals, such that under this collection of forces, and the gravitational forces acting on them, all blocks are in equilibrium.

We read about loaded stacks and point weights, and “combinatorially distinct arrangements.”

[Image: May the force stack with you; diagram by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick].

The authors advise that

one should, at least in principle, consider all possible combinatorial stack structures and for each of them find an optimal placement of the blocks. The combinatorial structure of a stack specifies the contacts between the blocks of the stack, i.e., which blocks rest on which, and in what order (from left to right), and which rest on the table.

They talk about parabolic stacks and spinal stacks (“A stack is spinal if its support set has just a single block at each level”), and about the spatial structure of brick walls, describing “well-behaved collections of forces that stabilize symmetric and asymmetric brick-wall stacks.”

[Image: More stack madness by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick].

But what are the architectural implications of all this? Are there any?
Or, in this age of advanced materials, are basic formal considerations such as these reduced to useless tinkering? Why worry about well-balanced stacks, in other words, when you can just put some cantilevered I-beams up there and be done with it, making experiments like these instantaneously obsolete?

Superficially, these diagrams actually remind me of the demolition of London’s P&O Building this summer, in which the building was taken apart from the ground up, as if disappearing into the sky – thus exhibiting a rather unique variety of the overhang problem.

[Image: London’s P&O Building gets demolished in reverse; via the Daily Mail. To see what brain death feels like, meanwhile, don’t miss the typically moronic comment thread over at Gizmodo, where brains go to die].

So are there tens of thousands of overhang problems on display right now in the jungly tangles of rebar and steel that remain camouflaged behind the facades of architectural structures? Deep in the guts of engineered buildings the world over, are there interesting mathematical lessons to learn – provided we change how we look at walls and windows?

Is this the architectural equivalent of Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses” – to see mathematics and topology where others see mere elevators and unused attic floors? Inside our buildings, might there yet be more to find?

[Image: View larger! Speculative demolition in Halle-Neustadt, via Nickzilla].

We could actually attempt to answer that question.

Given billions of dollars, zero insurance liability, and a whole fleet of Komatsu wrecking machines, could you re-examine the overhang problem from an architectural standpoint, seeing how many floors and offices you can remove before a building tips over?

You’d make little Gordon Matta-Clark-esque incisions throughout the city – taking out whole floors and elevator shafts – cutting away at every building, one executive office suite at a time, till each building begins to tilt, warp, or list… at which point you’d stop, take a photograph, calculate something, then submit the image to a mathematics journal, thus winning the next Fields Medal for Applied Mathematics.

All of Manhattan a demolitionist research lab for extremely well-funded and aggressive mathematicians.

Could you then exhibit these removed pieces elsewhere – showing, say, the entire, fully intact eastern elevator shaft from the Empire State Building at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, forming some weird and abstract concrete pillar in the sky, whistling quietly in the desert wind, home to seagulls?

Modernist Totem Poles, you’d call it – and you could then steal the elevator shafts from the Transamerica Pyramid, the Sears Tower, the Chrysler Building, and Taipei 101.

In any case, does the stacking problem contain an architectural lesson? Read the original two papers featured in New Scientist to find out.

[Image: Castle Rushen, Castletown, Isle of Man, via Old UK Photos].

I was poking around for images this morning and I somehow ended up at a site called Old UK Photos. They collect old, public domain photographs of the UK (rather cheekily including Ireland) – but some of the photos are so extraordinarily beautiful, and so hard to believe that they really are photographs, that I felt like re-posting a few here.

[Image: Wiltshire, Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, via Old UK Photos].

The fact that I’ve also been to many of these places adds a weird layer of delayed misrecognition to many of the scenes, as if stumbling upon landscapes from trips I forgot I’d taken (which is almost accurate).
The old pier in Bangor. One of the Peak District caves. Edinburgh castle.
And, of course, Stonehenge, pictured above from those years in which it hadn’t yet been fenced off.

[Image: Caerlaverock Castle, Dumfriesshire; Peel Cathedral, Isle of Man; castle in Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; Peel Castle, Isle of Man; and Ballower Mount, Ramsey, Isle of Man; all via Old UK Photos].

I don’t have all that much to say about these, in fact, other than to point out that they seem to instill something between nostalgia (for myself, an Anglo-American) and a wistful need to travel through non-automobile-based landscapes – and perhaps even a somewhat Gothicized sense of fictive possibilities, like something out of BLDGBLOG’s recent interview with novelist Patrick McGrath.
That said, then, here are some photos, with crumbling castles on distant hills and even mysterious pieces of old machinery.

[Images: Castle at Bolsover, Derbyshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; bridge in Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire; the Wheel at Laxey, Isle of Man; Devil’s Bridge, Aberystwyth; Templand Bridge, Cumnock, Ayrshire; The Blackrock in Cromford, Derbyshire; entrance to a cave outside Castleton, Derbyshire; all via Old UK Photos].

Some of the coastal photographs – of bays, inlets, coves, rock arches, and cliffs – seem to imply a labyrinthine island geography so complicated and ornate in its expanse, and so remote, that people still must be discovering new places there today… But then, of course, that describes the British Isles. Unless you spend all your time in Leicester Square.

[Images: Castle in Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire; Petite Bot, Guernsey, Channel Islands; La Coupee, Sark, Channel Islands; Dixcart Bay, Sark; Sugarloaf Rock at Port St. Mary, Isle of Man; the coast at the Gouffre, Petite Bot, and the harbor at La Moye Point (3 images), Guernsey; via Old UK Photos].

Actually, I’m reminded of something I read a few years ago in a book called The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin – which is that a particular stretch of British coastline, near Lyme Regis, is full of fossils.
The book opens with the story of Mary Anning, an amateur “fossilist” – she made an income selling bits of backbones and fragments of mastodons, jigsaw puzzle-like pieces of species that no longer exist – who stumbled upon, if I remember correctly, the body of an ichthyosaur – but only because there had been a landslide. Without that tidally inspired collapse of a nearby cliff, Anning perhaps would never have found her fossil; it would have remained buried in the cliffside for years – decades, centuries – to come.

Although she had an eye for fossils, she could not find them until they had been exposed by weathering – an achingly slow process. But when wind and rain and frost and sun had done their work, she would find them, peeking through the surface. Others were buried so deeply in the cliffs that it would be aeons before they were ever discovered.

The idea that the fossils of as yet undiscovered creatures still lie buried somewhere in the cliffs of Dorset is almost overwhelmingly interesting.
In any case, the bottom two images are from Bangor, Wales, where my brother and I once stayed in a youth hostel and ate soup. We hiked outside of town one afternoon and we looked up at a tree covered in drooping sleeves of loose vegetation, then we fell asleep on a hillside in some farmyard nearby, jumping over a fence and lying down amidst lichen-covered rocks and small bushes.
In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I was reading The Lord of the Rings and so the whole experience was tinged with an air of the mythic.

[Images: Garth’s Pier in Bangor, Caernarfonshire, and a view of Bangor from Anglesey, via Old UK Photos].

Anywho, the old lighthouse at Corbiere, on the Channel Island of Jersey, makes a nice painterly silhouette in this next photo.

[Image: The lighthouse at Corbiere, Jersey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].

And the old paths still whirl and turn through hills, leading somewhere, going everywhere.

[Image: Moulin Huet, Guernsey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].

All of these images, plus a few more, are also saved in a Flickr set I put together this afternoon.

(The title of this post paraphrases a line from William Blake’s poem Milton. Meanwhile, it may not be entirely related to the images in this post, but I do recommend giving at least a quick read to BLDGBLOG’s interview with Patrick McGrath for some thoughts on the literary impact of these – or similar – landscapes).