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In a fantastic interview published last year by the Wall Street Journal, novelist Cormac McCarthy—quipping off-hand that “anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing”—reflects on what might or might not have caused the world-ending catastrophe that frames his recent book The Road.

The Road, of course, takes place in a relentlessly grey world, populated only by a father and his son. The anemic duo walks slowly south toward an unidentified coast over mountains and plains, through valleys and dead forests; everything is burned, molten, or obliterated. The father is coughing blood. They meet cannibals and the insane, and they stray into abandoned houses less uninhabited than they seem.

[Image: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming].

The only glimpse we’re given of what violently ends the known order of things is this brief scene; I have left McCarthy’s original spelling and punctuation intact:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I’m not.

After this, the landscape outside—everywhere—is described as “scabbed” and “cauterized,” heavily covered in ash. McCarthy memorably writes: “They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn.”

Later in his interview with the Wall Street Journal, McCarthy jokes that he and his brother once “talked about if there was a small percentage of the human population left [after a disaster], what would they do? They’d probably divide up into little tribes,” he and his brother decided, “and when everything’s gone, the only thing left to eat is each other. We know that’s true historically.”

In any case, McCarthy’s end-times scenario sounds, to me, remarkably like nuclear war, but in his interview McCarthy entertains, even if only casually, that it could also have been the caldera beneath Yellowstone National Park finally exploding. McCarthy:

A lot of people ask me [what caused The Road‘s apocalypse]. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

It was thus amazingly interesting to read that no less than 1,799 earthquakes have occurred beneath Yellowstone since January 17, 2010—a so-called earthquake swarm.

As of yesterday, however, the USGS reports that the current swarm has “slowed considerably.” Indeed, we read, while “the current number of earthquakes per day is well above average at Yellowstone… nevertheless, swarms are common… with 100s to 1000s of events, some of which can reach magnitudes greater than 4.0.” In other words, it is always and already a landscape prey to internal lurching deformations and displacements, as if fabricated in a fever dream by Lebbeus Woods, torqued and aterrestrially tuned to some strange counter-timescale.

Swarms like this are, structurally speaking, quite common; this is a landscape always on the move—though it doesn’t necessarily travel far: “The crust beneath Yellowstone is highly fractured already,” a scientist told the New York Times, “so we’re getting stress release in these earthquakes—a displacement of millimeters.”

Still, when “the park’s strange and volatile geology,” with its thrumming subterranean supervolcano that is “bigger, much bigger, than scientists had previously thought,” kicked back into trembling motion, McCarthy’s “bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and… just sort of pulsing,” a topographical sign of the apocalypse, instantly came to mind.

[Image: Wired Science | DIY Recordings of Awakening Sun].

1) MSNBC | World’s tallest tower closed a month after opening (see also)
2) Edible Geography | UNESCO Culinary Heritage Sites
3) Free Association Design | Incidently Shifting the Continental Divide and Space-Time Vertigo of Human-Designed Geology
4) Ogle Earth | Where does Google stand on the Thai-Cambodian border at Preah Vihear Temple?
5) Complex Terrain Laboratory | Flight of the Navigator and The Arctic: The Final Frontier

[Image: From “New Armored Wall System Assembles Like Legos, Could Replace Sandbags in Afghanistan”; here are the actual building modules].

6) Luke Jerram | Aeolus: Acoustic Wind Pavilion
7) Time | Industrial Strength Fungus (don’t miss this Flickr set of the mushroom-bricks being cultivated; related: The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong)
8) Builder | The Disaster-Proof House
9) ABC | University of Arizona’s tree ring lab unlocking the past (related: Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research)
10) Ptak Science Books | Killing London With the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

And one to grow on: Wikipedia | The Crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901

(Some links via Nicola Twilley, @geoparadigm, and my dad! Quick Links 1, 2, 3, and 4).

[Image: Mudslides strike Los Angeles; photo by Gary Friedman for the L.A. Times].

In his short novel Man in the Holocene, author Max Frisch describes the psychological implications of living in the presence of possible Alpine landslides. The idea that the very earth beneath your feet might someday start to avalanche takes on existential overtones.

“Nobody in the village,” Frisch writes, for instance, “thinks that the day, or perhaps night, will come when the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time.” He then supplies us with the image of a “laborer who has been working all his life on supporting walls and does not believe the whole mountain could ever begin to slide”; for someone such as that, a landslide’s accompanying loss of foundation is simply too extraordinary to think about.

Somewhere in the hills, though, Frisch suggests, is a hidden logic: it both explains and demonstrates how thousands of tons of rocks and the spaces between them can unlock, breaking open into discrete geometries to tumble toward the valleys below, perhaps bringing houses—whole cities—down with them.

And it can all start with a minor act: a small crack, perhaps a rainstorm, perhaps just the weight of one man hiking alone. “That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it,” Frisch writes.

Indeed, “One must be prepared for everything.”

[Images: Beneath the pavement, liquid terrain. All photos by Anne Cusack for the L.A. Times].

A few months ago, meanwhile, I bookmarked a short article in the L.A. Times. Published after massive wildfires had burned through the hills around the city, denuding them of all vegetation and thus destabilizing the rock and soil, the article reported on a number of city residents in the outlying hilltop communities who had begun to eye the slopes around them with alarm. It was as if the earth itself had been weaponized: every hill, scarred by fire now and insecure for void of plantlife, was a mudslide waiting to happen.

To protect against this cascading eventuality, a new municipal landscape architecture thus emerged: mazes of concrete barriers and walls of sandbags showed up to redivide the streets. Circulation through the neighborhood would be entirely redefined, and a massive landscape of waiting would be installed: a space patient for all the material locked inside those hills to arrive.

Officials have said the concrete barriers [they soon installed] will stay in place for three to four years because the hillsides are completely barren in the wake of the Station fire, which charred more than 160,000 acres. It was the worst wildfire in L.A. County’s history. Many measures had been put in place, including the clearing of debris basins, the notification of residents in high-risk areas, the distribution of sandbags and the laying of several thousand feet of K-rails.

These spatial precautions were put to heavy use last week when the hills disgorged themselves, liquifying, going mobile, and flowing through, past, and over the neighborhood houses.

It was a “Niagara of mud,” the L.A. Times reported.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

“The mudflow twisted garage doors into dented accordions,” we read, and it “disintegrated walls of sandbags and knocked over 4,000-pound concrete barriers that lined the road to divert water away from homes. About 25 vehicles were damaged, flowing down the street and smashing against walls, trees and one another.” In one case, “a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit.”

Another man, woken up in his Snover Canyon house in the middle of the night, looked outside to see “muddy water carrying boulders the size of bowling balls… through the 4-foot-high barricade of sandbags, a plywood wall and a chain-link fence. A sheet of mud nearly a half-foot deep and 16 feet wide cascaded across the backyard.”

He ran to the bathroom window. He had expected this. It was the weak point of his defense. There at the corner of the yard, a geyser of water crashed into the remains of the wall and shot into the air. He had to get his family out. He didn’t know what else might be coming down that mountain.

The terrestrial uncertainty of that final sentence is astonishing.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Once the mudslides abated in one district, “nine homes in the foothill area suffered enough damage to be red-tagged, which means they’re partially collapsed and uninhabitable. With crumbling walls, sunken roofs, shattered windows and mud-filled living rooms, the structures are in a precarious position,” themselves now more like residual appendages of the debris flow than freestanding architectural units.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

However, perhaps the best article ever written about mudslides in Los Angeles was produced nearly 30 years ago by John McPhee. Called “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” it was originally published in The New Yorker but was later collected in McPhee’s genuinely excellent and very highly recommended book The Control of Nature.

Among many other things, McPhee devotes several paragraphs to a description of the DIY architectural tweaks that have arisen in response to these landscapes-gone-mobile. “At least one family,” he writes, for instance, “has experienced so many debris flows coming through their back yard that they long ago installed overhead doors in the rear end of their built-in garage. To guide the flows, they put deflection walls in their back yard. Now when the boulders come they open both ends of their garage, and the debris goes through to the street.”

Not only has this image stuck with me for years now, ever since I first read McPhee’s book, but it has also been impossible for me to avoid thinking about when looking at the photographs you see here, particularly those taken on the mud-slicked streets themselves by Irfan Khan. But the very idea that one could deliberately open a causeway for the natural world to flow, with awe-inspiring violence, through one’s own personal space—that you could actually build a kind of sacrifice zone within your own house for forces otherwise well beyond spatial control—is, at the very least, an extraordinary metaphor for living with the natural world.

This minor architecture—of repurposed overhead doors, emergency ditching, concrete crib structures, deflection walls, and more—brings the ever-present possibility of geologic collapse into world of design.

After all, how do you build on an earth that keeps disappearing?

[Images: Photos by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Returning to Frisch’s book, there is a fantastic, if brief, image of sound being put to use to stimulate minor avalanches, perhaps as a way to help avoid the Big One later on. “Men blow three times on a little horn and wave a red flag,” Frisch writes, as if describing a fairy tale of precisely administered sonic land-disassembly, “and shortly afterward the bits come rattling down, pebbles and gravel from the Ice Age.”

I mention this out of the possibility that perhaps Los Angeles city officials should not be responding to the ever-present threat of landslides on the urban perimeter with hardened architectural defenses but with something more like preemptive techniques: why wait for the hills to come to you, in other words (see this diagram of how debris basins work), when you could simply bring them down on your own time and schedule, in rock-by-rock increments, pulling rivers of solid geology out from their halo’d terraces above the city? Could micro-landslides somehow keep apocalyptic avalanches at bay?

Or, more realistically, does L.A. need to ditch the bulky mazes of concrete switching walls and go for a massive replanting effort, instead? Like Beijing’s Great Green Wall against the coming desert, L.A. needs to plant a wall of minor roots against the instability of its mountains.

[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].

A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: “According to the International Olympic Committee,” we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city’s unseasonal condition of snowlessness, “the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue,” however, “carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes.”

This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.

[Image: “Chongqing XI” by Nadav Kander, winner of the 2009 Prix Pictet; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Speaking of the Prix Pictet, the winner of the 2009 prize was Nadav Kander for his project Yangtze, The Long River. It’s an amazing group of images.

From Kander’s artist statement:

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100 miles (6500km) across china, traveling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.

Kander “photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source”—a daunting task, for, as Kander points out, “more people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet.”

[Image: “Chongqing VII, (Washing Bike)” by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Part of Kander’s visual goal was “showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man,” the photographer adds, “has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.”

The images featured in this post have the feel of a film set—more cinematography than photography—as if Kander has unknowingly captured a mise-en-scène, some wrongly cut dramatic moment, unfolding on the river banks.

Actors, perhaps unsure of their larger narrative role, seem overwhelmed by their infrastructural surroundings.

[Image: “Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic)” by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

The stage set-design theories of Edward Gordon Craig come to mind. Craig was an early 20th-century stage set designer (and son of an architect), whose “architectonic scenery,” according to M. Christine Boyer, foregrounded architectural backdrops so strongly that his props ultimately became the only on-stage action an audience was meant to watch.

Craig “proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors,” Boyer writes. “The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination.” It is a stage devoid of actors, in other words, just large pieces of equipment moving about according to the rules of their own choreography.

What happens, then, if this depopulated dramaturgy becomes blown-up to the scale of national infrastructure?

In one sense, this perfectly empty landscape into which humans try vainly—and at great emotional cost—to situate themselves is the hallmark of J.G. Ballard. We might even specifically ask, looking at Kander’s photos: when will a Yangtze River-based rewriting of Ballard’s Concrete Island come along, exploring these spatial questions?

Concrete Island, of course, is Ballard’s 1974 novel about a London motorist—as it happens, an architect—who is stranded on his way home by a car accident. Freeing himself from his ruined vehicle at sundown, he finds himself trapped beneath the yawning arches of the motorway, stranded in a peripheral world of drainage culverts, ascent ramps, sliproads, and storm tunnels, a kind of urban blindspot (read Mike Bonsall’s awesome forensic archaeology of London’s Westway, a spatial interrogation of the built environment in order to discover where Ballard’s novel was meant to be set).

With no rescue in sight, Ballard’s architect is left to fend for himself, surrounded by gigantic pieces of urban infrastructure whose purpose now seems oddly counter-human; he is “alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines… an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness.”

I’m left wondering: who is the J.G. Ballard of contemporary China? Nadav Kander‘s photographs—many more of which can be seen at the Prix Pictet site—are an enticing glimpse of what a Ballardian sensibility might create there.

[Image: “Scene J3” from Snow Management by Jules Spinatsch, courtesy of the Prix Prictet].

I was reminded, via an old post on Pruned, of an amazing series of photographs by Jules Spinatsch called Snow Management; Snow Management was deservedly short-listed in 2008 for the Prix Prictet.

With those images, Spinatsch documents the infrastructure of snow control—and outright terrain manufacture—at an Alpine resort, including the labyrinths of retaining fences and the individual pieces of equipment that make snow creation and large-scale, though ephemeral, landscape-sculpting possible.

[Image: “Scene D6” from Snow Management by Jules Spinatsch, courtesy of the Prix Prictet].

In a way, these scenes are like a big-budget variation on Sergio López-Piñeiro’s idea, discovered via Mammoth, of a snow park or whitesward. López-Piñeiro’s own photographic documentation of urban plowing practices—that is, the deliberate reshaping of snow piles into an ephemeral, new, seasonal topography—is an attempt, he writes, “to show how standard plowing techniques can become creative tools for generating winter landscapes.” López-Piñeiro continues:

The white parks that I envision could be easily constructed: plowing master plans would carefully locate the snow mounds, and the resulting designs would artistically exploit the spatial conditions defined by these usually overlooked piles of snow.

In winter, an artfully shaped snow landscape could become a “whitesward”—underscoring the now obscured potential for plowing to positively transform public space. Such a white landscape could be considered a “snow observation ground” to encourage people to appreciate the snow and its accumulation, and to dispel the negative impressions and experiences that our combative approach has produced.

Ski resorts, with their huge array of technical devices and machinic subfamilies all geared toward—indeed, specifically invented for—the purpose of creating new landscapes below the thermal boundary at which their engineered shapes will liquify, become extraordinary experiments in terrain-generation on a massive scale. They are a kind of igneous hydrology: the controlled freezing of matter into artificial forms.

More images from Jules Spinatsch’s spectacular series are available on his website, and the Snow Management series itself can also be downloaded as a 3.2MB PDF.

[Image: From Empire by Andy Warhol, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art].

Tomorrow at noon here in New York City, a musical event that I would love to attend kicks off: 8 solid hours of sound, providing a live accompaniment for Andy Warhol’s Empire—a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building.

Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, and, most exciting at least for me, Jan Jelinek—who, bizarrely, I once introduced myself to at WMF in Berlin—will be providing the music.

The Museum of Modern Art describes Empire as follows:

Empire consists of a single stationary shot of the Empire State Building filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m., July 25–26, 1964. The eight-hour, five-minute film, which is typically shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened Empire‘s running time by projecting the film at a speed of sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of twenty-four frames per second, thus making the progression to darkness almost imperceptible. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time. According to Warhol, the point of this film—perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work—is to “see time go by.”

That live soundtrack/concert/event, which kicks off at Le Poisson Rouge, is just one small part of an amazing, multi-day musical event called Unsound. Unsound features several audio heroes of BLDGBLOG, including Tim Hecker, Ezekiel Honig, Moritz von Oswald, Vladislav Delay, and even Levon Vincent, among many more.

In fact, after a long day spent touring the involuted subterranea of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave back in 2001, Nicola Twilley and I drove home listening to Vladislav Delay’s Entain, our car creaking over the hollow roof of an earth below us, its caverns hidden beneath overgrown bedrock, sinkholes perhaps waiting on either side of the highway, heading northwest over collapse-prone mineral logics toward Chicago.

Volume magazine is hosting a conference this coming May about what they call “the Architecture of Peace.” Part of this will be assembling “an inventory of inspiring projects for (post-)conflict territories”—and they’re hoping that you will get involved.

Are you an architect, designer, urbanist or community leader? Have you developed a project that aids to channel social relationships in a more peaceful way? Then get in touch with Volume. Send a short description to info@archis.org with the subject “AoP projects call,” and we will endeavour to include it in our conference material, providing a unique overview of projects of this kind.

From post-military landscape remediation projects to transborder community exchange programs, from conflict gardens to films, from anti-gang territorial initiatives to bunker recycling services, from museums of slave history to a cartography of divided cities, I would imagine there is a huge range of ideas and examples out there to explore.

[Image: August Strindberg, Coastal Landscape II; via Andrew Ray’s excellent blog Some landscapes].

I’m horribly behind in my Quick Links… so here are fifteen:

1) New York Public Library | Life at the library: The New York Public Library’s live-in superintendents
2) Quiet Babylon | Woven Spaces
3) L.A. Times | Household chemicals linked to reduced fertility
4) Telegraph | Two thousand year old Roman aqueduct discovered
5) GOOD | The seed industry’s scary consolidation
6) Vague Terrain | Graffiti Markup Language
7) Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station | About those tunnels… and even more about those ice tunnels…
8) Related: mammoth | The City Beneath the City
9) Still related: WNYC | Journey to the Center of Manhattan and the Westside Tunnels

10) Still related! Scientific American | Mining for Algae: Could Abandoned Mines Help Grow Biofuel?
11) InfraNet Lab | Student Works: Trawling the Thames and Post-Peak Phosphorous
12) Speaking of InfraNet Lab, pick up a copy of -arium: Weather + Architecture (for instance, via Amazon)
13) Behance | Strange Worlds
14) The Onion | Stoner Architect Drafts All-Foyer Mansion
15) DARPA Strategic Technology Office | Comprehensive Interior Reconnaissance

And one to grow on: Alison Arieff | Space: It’s Still a Frontier

(Some links via @nicolatwilley, @maudnewton, @eatingbark, Archaeology News, Archinect, and possibly elsewhere. Quick Links 1, 2, and 3).

“Did you know,” the original caption for this image asks, “barium releases in space in 1969 caused an artificial aurora?”

[Image: Courtesy of NASA].

Perhaps cities like Montreal and Stockholm—even L.A., watching auroras torque and fold over the black waters of the Pacific—should simply hire small fleets of barium-carrying orbital vehicles to keep the skies interesting all winter long.