Author: Geoff Manaugh

[Image: ©Frederic Chaubin, Wedding Palace (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1985). Last month, PingMag ran a short interview with photographer Frederic Chaubin. Chaubin has spent the last several years documenting Soviet-era architecture in post-Soviet nations, with a focus on the odd, the unique, and the eccentric. “If you see the photographs all together in a small space like here, you might feel like there are quite a lot of these buildings around, but actually there are very few of them. You have to imagine that if you go to each Russian town you will only find one or two very special buildings there. But most of them are very boring and look very similar, and those here are the exceptions.” I just like the above building, really].

The New York Times last week introduced us to a “giggling guru” named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In addition to laughing quite a lot, one of his apparent goals “is to rebuild the world according to Vedic principles. He has called for the demolition of ‘improperly oriented’ buildings, believing them to be toxic, and includes among them the United Nations and the White House. There are proposals for New York and Paris to be cleared to make way for 3,000 marble peace palaces. (His organization operates such palaces in Bethesda, Md., Lexington, Ky., Houston and Fairfield.) Maharishi is also convinced that every country’s capital is wrongly located. In India and America, his organization has bought land near what it calls each country’s ‘brahmastan’ – or the geographical and energy center. The future capital of the United States would be Smith Center, Kan., population 1,931.”

(Thanks, David! Also at Archinect).

[Image: It’s an interstellar Kansas, where cosmic tornadoes form. “Light-years in length,” this is a jet of energy and molecular excitation “associated with the formation of young stars” – though “the exact cause of the spiraling structures apparent in this case is still mysterious.” Thanks, Jason!].

(Earlier: Struck by loops).

Several months ago, BLDGBLOG featured a collaboration with Leah Beeferman, a Brooklyn-based artist and the graphic designer for Cabinet magazine. That project was the Helicopter Archipelago.

The Archipelago was first published in Blend, however, a Dutch arts & culture magazine; and, having recently gotten hold of some PDFs from Blend‘s design team, I thought I’d post a quick glimpse of the page spread. (Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the text is in Dutch).
So, in case you missed it the first time round, the helicopter archipelago is an independent micronation of solar-powered helicopters, a flying island chain:

A kind of flying Hawaii, or anti-gravitational Micronesia, with tanned deck-hands leaping across aerodynamic tailfins to the soundtrack of ceaseless enginery, the helicopter archipelago would act as an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty. Its government would be a parliament of pilots, led by experts in storms, whose access to climatological data – future weather, air speed, barometric pressure – would determine the nation’s route and direction.
Never leaving the international airspace of unregulated trade winds, the archipelago would be impossible to map. Atlas-makers and manufacturers of globes will simply include a pack of removable stickers, featuring small clouds of helicopters, to approximate the country’s location…

Further:

Once the archipelago is aloft for more than a century, the International Geological Society will declare it a flying continent, the world’s first airborne tectonic plate.
Some speculate that, two million years from now, the archipelago’s ruins will still hover in the sky: a ghostly blur across the north Atlantic horizon…

In any case, you can read more at the original post – whilst also stopping by Leah Beeferman’s website to see her other work, including drawn circuits and these assorted architectural explorations. In the latter link, don’t miss Leah’s “box factory” (2005) and “built” (2004).
Meanwhile, I have five or six more columns from Blend to republish here, so expect to see those in the next few weeks.

[Image: Vicente Guallart, a Barcelona-based architect whose work explores the mineralogical remaking of whole terrains – including how to make a mountain].

Two articles have appeared in the last ten days or so about the impact of landscape on animal evolution.
In the first case, New Scientist reports, “one of the biggest mountain chains in the Earth’s history may be responsible for the explosive diversification of animals more than 500 million years ago. Sediments washed from the mountains – dubbed the Transgondwanan Supermountain – added vital nutrients to the ocean, opening new evolutionary opportunities.”
According to the theory’s main advocate, Rick Squire – whose research interests include “tectonic processes affecting the early evolution of animals” – it was all a question of landscape, the geochemical erosion of super-topographies into biologically accessible micro-nutrients:

[T]he trigger was the collision of a series of three large continental blocks – roughly corresponding to Arabia, India, and Antarctica – with the eastern edge of Africa from 650 to 515 million years ago. The drawn-out continental impact raised a vast 1000-kilometres-wide mountain range that stretched for more than 8000 kilometres along the equator on the ancient land mass known as Gondwana. Heavy rains typically fall along the equator, which would have produced a high level of erosion – it was before the evolution of land plants. Squire’s research group has traced the resulting offshore sediment deposits around the world, and say they eventually amounted to more than 100 million cubic kilometres – enough to cover the entire US up to 10 kilometres deep.

So the explosion in animal life was a kind of unintended by-product of landscape design; the surface of the earth became food – and anatomical structure, in the form of “protective carbonate shells” – for new species.
Leading to a question for landscape architects: how could your urban park design affect the bodily structure of future organisms…?

[Image: Vicente Guallart. Guallart’s speculations about “how to make a mountain” include the following: “The geological structure of the hill, on the micro, the medium and the macro scales, offers us rules with which to put forward a mineralogical system that will guide its functioning.” These are the internal rules of a landscape – and, Guallart implies, they can be reproduced architecturally].

Then there was an article published just yesterday about multi-million year extinction cycles in mammalian species, and how these cycles might actually be linked to “regular wobbles in Earth’s orbit“:

Changes in the Earth’s tilt and the shape of its orbit lead to climate cycles of around 1.2 and 2.4 million years. At their extremes both these cycles cause global cooling, expansion of polar ice sheets and changes in rainfall patterns. [Mammalian] extinction peaks coincided with global cooling maxima, while new appearance peaks coincided with periods of stable climate.

First of all, I like the idea of “new appearance peaks,” or moments in planetary history when speciation hits a kind of mutational warp-speed, and even your own generation might be the quiet origin of a new species. Cue X-Files soundtrack here.

[Image: Vicente Guallart. Guallart’s terrestrial speculations continue: “The limestone of the hill and its rhombohedric crystals of calcite enabled us to conceive, at multiple scales, a crystalline genesis for the project.” This thus forms a “coherent system, from the structure itself to its outer limit, that responds to a single system of crystallization. In this way, the skin, like soil in the hills, directly reflects the internal logic of the mass and its interaction with the environment.” With these rules in place, Guallart says, his firm could make mountains].

Second of all, this intertwining – of plate tectonics, planetary rotation, large-scale topographical change, and the birth, death, and even wholesale pruning of genetic lines – surely has a place in landscape design courses. At the very least, a phenomenally great architectural pamphlet, or even course syllabus, could be written about the possibilities: artificial mountain chains spurring micro-speciation; gardens as centers of genetic novelty; even mega-earthworks and the architectural manipulation of continental drift.
Which makes me wonder, for instance, since single architectural projects are apparently enough to cause earthquakes, that perhaps architecture itself could be used to over-weight the earth and thus guide, or subtly control, its changing rotation… thus destroying all mammalian life on the planet. Terrestrial weaponization.
The next Bond villain.
Or print t-shirts: Architecture is killing us all.

(Similar thoughts appear toward the end of this post).

[Image: Thomas Weinberger, “Zone 60”, München 2003].

Munich-based photographer Thomas Weinberger has a radiantly beautiful series of industrial and infrastructural landscape photographs called synthesen.
The images are otherworldly, Ballardian, gemlike. The thick, almost surreal dimensionality of their lighting comes from Weinberger’s technique, which is to combine two different photographs of the same scene – one taken during the day, one taken at night.
His shot “Nizza” (2004), for instance, almost literally glows, the city burning with a white light as if liquid chrome has drowned the streets; while “Alexanderplatz” (Berlin, 2003) makes the Kaufhof look stroboscopically frozen, even extraplanetary or ossified. Then there’s “Cracker” (2003), where we’re greeted with an ESSO gas refinery in Ingolstadt – down to its shining vortices of pressure tubes and valving. “Zone 30” (Munich, 2004) looks like the opening shot of a sci-fi thriller about radiation poisoning in suburban Germany… Etc.
The crispness – and gleaming, semi-symmetrical intricacy – of the shots totally amazes me.

[Image: Thomas Weinberger, “Flughafen München” 2003].

Readers of German can download five short reviews of Weinberger’s work; everyone else can just visit his website and gape.

(Discovered via Alexander Trevi and juniorbonner; also seen at Conscientious, kottke.org, things magazine – and so on. For photos of a very vague aesthetic similarity see The Total Horizon).

Over at WorldChanging, I’ve posted about “a decorative, three-dimensional architectural tile” by a Berlin- and London-based design firm called Elegant Embellishments.
The tiles – algorithmic in design and modular in assembly – are built to reduce vehicular air pollution, including nitrous oxide and ground-level ozone; they can thus “rapidly improve urban environments in terms of air quality and visual appeal.”
According to the company’s own press release:

The tiles are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a pollution-fighting technology that is activated by ambient daylight. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst already known for its self-cleaning and germicidal qualities; it requires only small amounts of naturally occurring UV light and humidity to effectively reduce air pollutants into harmless amounts of carbon dioxide and water. When positioned near pollution sources, the tiles neutralise NOx and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) directly where they are generated. They transform previously inert urban surfaces into active surfaces, re-appropriate polluted spaces for safer pedestrian use, and invert problem spaces – dark, polluted, uninhabitable – to benevolent spaces that benefit communities.

The rest of the post explores how the tiles can be used – how they assume “endless varieties of physical structures” even whilst being “composed with only two modules.” Chemically scrubbing the air, so to speak, the grids also define respiratory oases within the city – becoming what Elegant Embellishments call “a recognizable symbol of a safer place to breathe.”

The piece ends by speculating about other, more explicitly artistic uses of the tiles – including how someone should install abstract, sculptural assemblages of them on plinths across London…
Somewhere between an alien totem pole and a new artwork by Alexander Calder, the tiles could then mark pedestrian routes and historical sites, offering residents a geometric glimpse of the city’s green future. Trafalgar Square, Berlin’s U-Bahn, even J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World – all get thrown in for good measure.
So check it out.

Real estate magnates: if you have to name your newest subdivision, look no further. The below grid does it all for you.

The Quarters at Eagle Shire Place, perhaps? Or maybe The Plantation at Hawk Falls Run? Tough choice. I might have to go with The Harbor at Coyote View Cove. Or The Refuge at Buffalo Peak Ridge. The Summit at Wolf Tree Point.
As Curbed LA points out, the Southern California version of this table is still waiting to be made. In which case I hope to see, say, The Cañon at Dolphin Mesa.
The Villa at Del Hercules Grove.

(Grid and original idea from the DenverInFill Blog).

I finally got a chance to see Christian Volckman’s Renaissance last week, even after having posted about the film several months ago.

The movie’s not bad, though the writing leaves a lot to be desired, the “acting” is rather dubious, and realistic character motivation seems somewhat lacking, to say the least.
On the other hand, the movie is gorgeous, and its architectural vision of Paris in the year 2054 deserves comment. The city’s streets have been replaced with bulletproof glass, for instance, so action on the underground Metro platforms can be seen from above – and vice versa. Weird little houses rise and fall on hydraulic platforms; a geneticist’s home, on the mansard-roofed top floor of a riverside flat, contains a whole indoor forest; the city itself has become a massively cross-buttressed machine of arches, superhighways, and elevated trains. There are tunnels, archives, and holographic surveillance screens – and lots of iron, glass, and brick. The Seine has been concretized into a kind of industrial mega-canal. At one point, the mosque at Cordoba appears, faithfully reproduced as a gangster’s steambath. Etc. etc.
As it happened, there was a short article by Volckman in a magazine I picked up after the movie; there we read how Renaissance was intended as “an expressionistic film, transforming Paris into a futuristic metropolis, using motion capture and creating everything from scratch in 3D.” Volckman cites film noir as both a structural and aesthetic influence: “Great shadows, wild angles, and weird characters living in dark cities where the line between good and evil is not so obvious.”
So it’s a great film to catch, on a purely visual level – though beware of the screenplay, which nearly does the whole thing in.

(PS: Renaissance is dubbed, not subtitled, and includes the voice of Daniel Craig).

[Originally spotted on gravestmor].

Scientists from the University of South Florida have come up with a way to reduce the effects of gravity – albeit on a very small scale. It’s a kind of mini-anti-earth, on demand.
Their technique uses microgravity to grow cancer research cells:

Tiny beads of gelatine – around 200 micrometres in size – are mixed together with collagen and fine particles of magnetite (the magnetic iron oxide used to coat recording tape). This mix is then sealed in a gas-permeable bag and dosed with the cells to be cultured. The bag sits on a platform and is sandwiched between two graphite plates, beneath a powerful permanent electromagnet. The magnet is used to exert an upwards force on the magnetite particles that exactly counters the downward force of gravity. The tissue cells, gelatin and collagen can then grow suspended in “zero-g.”

So here’s my vote for finding new applications in the world of landscape architecture: entire zero-g gardens grown in gas-permeable bags. Sent drifting across the Pacific.
Leading to the question: if a medieval theologian had proposed that the Garden of Eden was actually a zero-g garden floating across the Dead Sea in a gas-permeable bag… would he or she have been excommunicated?

(Via).

[Image: The North American and Pelican Nebulas; from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day].

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve read in months: in order to combat light pollution, city officials in Reykjavik, Iceland, “will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark.” The clincher: “While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.”

(Via WorldChanging and Z+).