As a few people have noticed, the Quick Links section here on BLDGBLOG disappeared a few days ago; there are a variety of reasons for this, including an overall streamlining of the site design (moving to two columns from three, for instance). More importantly, over the past few years those Quick Links never actually showed up as part of BLDGBLOG’s RSS feed, meaning that people who don’t stop by the site itself, but prefer instead to read it through things like Google Reader, never even saw those links. This further meant that, during busy periods when whole days slip by between posts, BLDGBLOG would appear totally silent to those readers—when, in fact, new links were still appearing here at a reliable pace.
In any case, to make a long story short, I will now be publishing frequent Quick Links posts—the first of which appears here. This will make those links easier to find and archive; these posts will now show up in my RSS feed; and this allows readers to comment on the articles I’ve linked to (something that the previous Quick Links system never allowed).
If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know; I hope the much cleaner site design seems appealing, and that these Quick Links will continue to point you in stimulating directions… And happy new year! I hope this is a good one for you.
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—Olivia Judson looks at “memories in nature,” where immune systems and plant forms display mnemonic traces. The biochemical archive.
—Perhaps a machine-assisted, agricultural equivalent of this: keeping rare strains of livestock, including “huge dreadlocked Cotswold sheep,” alive using the subzero techniques of cryopreservation. Distant shades of Pleistocene Park, perhaps.
—Speaking of the Pleistocene, consider joining the Friends of the Pleistocene, “dedicated to exploring the conjuncture between landscape and contemporary human activity at sites shaped by the geologic epoch of the Pleistocene (2.588 million to 10000 years BP, Before Present).”
—”Have researchers found dark matter at the bottom of a mine in Minnesota?”
[Image: Ahmadinejad emerges from a highway tunnel; photo by Henghameh Fahimi for the Agence France-Presse, via the New York Times].
—Like a minor character from Reza Negarestani’s extraordinary book Cyclonopedia, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—busy burying his nation’s nuclear program inside a “maze of tunnels”—is actually the founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association. Quoting at length:
Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played a recurring role—first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels. No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden. Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive. Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed—and easy to attack—buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.
[Images: A civilization beneath the trees; images via New Scientist].
—National Geographic visits the “geometric earthworks” previously hidden by tree cover in the Amazon but recently discovered via satellite photography. “Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon,” we read.
—Lebbeus Woods kicks off the new year with a look at Cuba’s “malecón,” the coastal road skirting Havana’s massive sea wall (see the image that starts this post).
[Image: Piles of road salt outside Toronto. Photo by Flickr-user katalogue; via InfraNet Lab].
—InfraNet Lab looked into the dispersed geological presence of road salt, used to melt ice and snow, last winter—building into a three-part series about “sea dust.” Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
—Finally, for now, L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a long look at the building formerly known as the Burj Dubai and its growing role in cultural predictions of apocalypse.
[Image: Published in the New York Tribune, September 11, 1910].
Someday I’d like to write a book about the architectural side of burglary—bank heists, home invasions, jewelry thefts, wall-scaling girl gangs of the Global South, trans-metropolitan tunnels dug vault-to-vault through crypts by men with names like Terry Leather, smoke & mirrors, props and decoys, CCTV control rooms, lock-pickers’ guides, hourly updated routes of gold trucks leaving Manhattan, deterritorialized histories of the getaway car, impersonations and forgeries, spatial camouflage, criminal blueprints and future dream-technologies of the ultimate break-in—all in the name of looking at buildings, and the city itself, as puzzles, spatial systems you try very hard to get into. The well-guarded entrance and its multiple delays. Kafka meets HSBC.
Perhaps an Architectural Guide to the Ultimate Bank Heist—a 108-page pamphlet of speculative break-ins—or Pamphlet Architecture #31, in which incomprehensible robberies are outlined, complete with floorplans and renderings, or even next year’s best-selling stocking stuffer, a quasi-sequel to 15 Lombard Street, the BLDGBLOG Field Guide to Robbery. Illustrated by eBoy.
Until then, I’ll just post images like this one, above, originally published in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1910, in which gangs of silent-airplane enthusiasts raid the metropolis from above. They coast down onto moonlit roofs while unsuspecting homeowners sleep soundly in the comfort of darkness.
[Image: The Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at the Palomar Observatory].
A new book of photographs curated, cropped, and digitally reprocessed by Michael Benson (previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here) has been reviewed by the New York Times as something you could flip through “for hours and never be bored by the shapes, colors and textures into which cosmic creation can arrange itself.” The book shows us “stars packed like golden sand, gas combed in delicate blue threads, piled into burgundy thunderheads and carved into sinuous rilles and ribbons, and galaxies clotted with star clusters dancing like spiders on the ceiling.”
The above image of the Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, brings to mind the later sky studies and weather paintings of John Constable, in particular Constable’s Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827). As if there are nebulas here on earth with us, moving through the sky (and through art history).
Stars, here, would be chemical weather that emits light.
[Image: John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827); originally spotted at Pruned].
But such landscape comparisons only go so far; here are a few more photographs from the book, which you can buy at Amazon.
[Images: (top) The bewilderingly beautiful Cat’s Paw Nebula, photographed by T.A. Rector at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; (middle) The Witch Head Nebula, photographed by Davide De Martin at the Palomar Observatory; (bottom) The Rosette Nebula, photographed by J.C. Cuillandre (Canada France Hawaii Telescope) and Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia)].
That final image shows us “3000 cubic light years of gas… heated to a temperature of over 10 million degrees Fahrenheit.” To my discredit, I have never thought of volumes of space in terms of “cubic light years” before—it’s an extraordinary unit of measurement. Perhaps someday it could even be applied to data: teraflops be damned, our future harddrives will be filled with cubic light years of information.
Sydney-based blogger, architecture student, comic book illustrator, and muscle car enthusiast Linda Bennett has produced a beautifully tongue-in-cheek guide to the “Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs.”
Bennett has also been running an occasional series of interviews on her site; check out her conversations with Bjarke Ingels, Gerard Reinmuth, and Andrew Maynard—and here’s hoping she sits down someday to record one with fellow Sydneysider, and “Super Strength” blogging ninja, Marcus Trimble.
And, for that matter, here’s hoping Bennett keeps producing more comic strips!
It’s a house, it’s a ziggurat, it’s… 500 tons of TNT stacked in a dome on the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe. A later test-detonation of these architecturally arranged fissile materials left a huge, still-extent crater that “currently contains unique sub-species of shrimp” that have “evolved to survive the hypersaline conditions” in the artificially excavated hole.
Bringing to mind Greg Lynn’s Blobwall—amorphous and multicolored plastic “bricks” whose puzzle-like stacking produced (unfortunately quite garish) enclosures—or even Gramazio & Kohler’s robot-built wall in New York City, Pike Loop, the dome implies a kind of militarized vernacular through which new, functional architectures can be constructed.
20th-century prefab modularity by way of well-placed bricks of TNT.
But perhaps someday we’ll see autonomous instruments of robotic war crawling behind enemy lines, building fantastically elaborate, Dr. Seussian architectures on the shores of foreign continents. Artificially intelligent 3D printers, producing bomb-domes—explosive ziggurats—vast and terrible buildings awaiting their detonative spark from the sky.
Explaining their approach, the architects write that “the Guggenheim has become, in a sense, a victim of its own success due to an over-saturation of human movement in a singular space. Our proposal aims to accomplish the seemingly incompatible: to restore a museum environment conducive to experiencing art and to maximize and heighten other experiences brought about by the iconic status of the museum itself.”
The specific strategy here is “to trap, i.e., to force a pause. This programmatic component was not considered by Wright, who envisioned a space defined by tireless motion.”
The resulting project is a gigantic membrane stretched throughout the interior, supplying “180 saddle-like seats along the entire ramp for pausing and viewing the rotunda.”
These seats protrude into the void with access ladders arranged in between the floor and the ceiling over the guardrails. Each of the 90 access ladders holds two cantilevering seats, which are angled gradually as they ascend to allow a view of the central area at ground level that functions almost like a stage—as though the rotunda were a new hybrid of opera house and arena. The 180 protrusions over the void are draped with a single, soft and translucent membrane that functions as a safety net.
The architects continue, writing that “the pop-out pods, each approximately 60 cm deep, contain seats,” and “each pod has five openings for the head and limbs, which make the membrane”—and I love this metaphor—”much like a garment that can be worn collectively by 180 people.”
Imagining a piece of clothing so huge you mistake for a building is an awesome change in both scale and context; you would go inside by putting the building on, slipping in one arm at a time.
Of course, this also raises the possibility of tailoring clothing specifically to function only within certain very specific architectural structures: nylon tights that only make sense to wear when seated in one of Cho’s “pop-out pods,” or sweaters that allow you to experience the spatial extravagance of luxury elevators at a new W Hotel in London. You and some friends zip yourselves up into the wall, forming a new private room that would otherwise not be there.
But Cho saves the best analogy for last: once the overflowing crowds of art-drunk tourists come to fill the “pop-out pods,” it “as if they were performing as a part of a living Baroque ceiling sculpture.”
I had the pleasure of seeing Cho present this project in person at a lecture he gave back in October at Columbia University; this was the project with which he kicked-off the evening, and it set a fantastically giddy tone for the rest of Mass Studies’ work.
For a forthcoming exhibition called Contemplating the Void, New York’s Guggenheim Museum “invited more than two hundred artists, architects, and designers to imagine their dream interventions in the space.”
In this exhibition of ideal projects, certain themes emerge, including the return to nature in its primordial state, the desire to climb the building, the interplay of light and space, the interest in diaphanous effects as a counterpoint to the concrete structure, and the impact of sound on the environment.
Many of the images provide great eye-candy, as you’ll see, and I’ve included the best of those here (with my personal favorite coming up in the next post).
The interior is taken over by coastal rain forests; there are mystical arabesques of colored music wrapping upward in spatially impossible curls through the museum’s disappeared roof; there are trampolines and climbing nets strung from wall to wall above the lobby.
The Museum of Simulated Suicides, you could call it, where go to experience what it might be like to throw themselves into the void. You get a certificate of survival at the end.
There are photo-collages and sectional diagrams of internally returning ecosystems.
[Images: (top) Morris in Guggenheim by M/M (2009), (center) Perfection_Perversion by West 8 (2009), and (bottom) The House of GI–A Proposal by Matthew Ritchie (2009)].
There are vast white balloons with visible structures trapped inside them rising out into New York’s winter skies—
[Image: State Fair Guggenheim by MAD Architects (2009)].
—as well as storms of red dust falling downward in a kind of gravitational pollution of the lobby.
Perhaps predictably, though, I might say an even better intervention into the Guggenheim’s space is not a series of objects or architectural alterations at all, but an event—by which I’m specifically referring to one of 2009’s most talked-about spatial moments, at least in architectural circles, when we see that very same museum annihilated in a hail of bullets in the film The International.
[Image: A poster for The International featuring the Guggenheim Museum (2009)].
For all these calls for ideas and architectural design competitions, what if Hollywood set designers and location scouts are doing a more provocative job in non-preciously reimagining the inherited icons of the global built environment than 21st century architects?
These and many other images will be on display when the exhibition, Contemplating the Void, opens February 12, 2010.
Temporary lakes have sprung up all over Manhattan again this week, sometimes more than twenty feet wide and a foot deep, spanning curbs and pooling in gutters, the aquatic remains of last week’s rain and snowmelt.
This surprise limnology—often demanding new, indirect lines of approach from one side of the street to the next—reminded me of David Gissen’s recent, recommended book Subnature, which includes an entire chapter on urban puddles.
“Although we often think of puddles as inconsequential,” Gissen writes, “they appear in architectural history in prominent ways—in drawings of ruins, photographs of decaying buildings, and experimental designs that attempt to use water in provocative ways.” Now, however, “these stagnant pools of water, once signifying society’s vulnerabilities, appear to have disappeared in much contemporary work”; indeed, he adds, contemporary architects have seemingly always “viewed stagnant water with suspicion.” There is good medical reason for this suspicion, of course; indeed, the Centers for Disease Control advised last year that “neglected swimming pools“—i.e. stagnant bodies of water—are fast becoming vectors for mosquito-borne disease.
The CDC specifically cites “the adjustable rate mortgage and associated housing crises” as unexpected disease incubators: “Associated with home abandonment was the expanding number of neglected swimming pools, jacuzzis (hot tubs), and ornamental ponds. As chemicals deteriorated, invasive algal blooms created green swimming pools that were exploited rapidly by urban mosquitoes, thereby establishing a myriad of larval habitats within suburban neighborhoods,” they wrote.
In any case, Gissen describes “visions of the undrainable city” as a kind of sickly counterpart to the modern, infrastructurally managed, rational metropolis, pointing out that “the waters inundating the modern city rained from above and surged from below.” These overload our modern streets and sewers, bringing even 21st-century cities closer to the flooded Roman basements of Piranesi than to the hygienic visions of Le Corbusier, Gissen suggests. I’m reminded here of a disconcerting remark made by Alan Weisman in The World Without Us that the subways of New York City would be irreparably flooded within only 36 hours if the city’s underground pumps ceased to function.
While reading Gissen’s chapter on puddles, however, one of the first things that came to mind is that someone should produce a puddle map of New York—an urban atlas of temporary flooding. Set your parameters—puddles one foot deep by thirty-feet wide, say, or, more accurately, a volumetric guideline (at least one hundred square-feet of water or no less than 120 gallons)—and bring these fleeting aqueous forms into the geographic consciousness of the city.
From one rainy season to the next, an accelerated paleolimnology of New York thus comes into being; the Lake Lahontans and Lake Agassizs of the five boroughs are given their cartographic due. Here a tiny lake once stood, historical plaques could read, bringing to mind a liquid version of Taylor Square, the famed “smallest park” in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What monstrous puddles have existed in your neighborhood, and how have the urban circumstances of their existence changed over time? Did curb-cuts or new drains eliminate these hydro-geographies—or even make them worse? And whose lives have been affected by these unmapped bodies of water, whether through hydroplaning, sidewalk splashes, or even an expensive pair of ruined shoes?
Whole personal histories of human contact with puddles, and the effects such exposure might have, could be produced or recorded. This is extraordinary: we live beside temporary lakes and inland seas in cities all over the planet, yet these landmarks never make it onto our maps.
Writing about the human experience of night before electricity, A. Roger Ekirch points out that almost all internal architectural environments took on a murky, otherworldy lack of detail after the sun had gone down. It was not uncommon to find oneself in a room that was both spatially unfamiliar and even possibly dangerous; to avoid damage to physical property as well as personal injury to oneself, several easy techniques of architectural self-location would be required.
Citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Émile, Ekirch suggests that echolocation was one of the best methods: a portable, sonic tool for finding your way through unfamiliar towns or buildings. And it could all be as simple as clapping. From Émile: “You will perceive by the resonance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the middle or in a corner.” You could then move about that space with a knowledge, however vague, of your surroundings, avoiding the painful edge where space gives way to object. And if you get lost, you can simply clap again.
Ekirch goes on to say, however, that “a number of ingenious techniques” were developed in a pre-electrified world for finding one’s way through darkness (even across natural landscapes by night). These techniques were “no doubt passed from one generation to another,” he adds, implying that there might yet be assembled a catalog of vernacular techniques for navigating darkness. It would be a fascinating thing to read.
Some of these techniques, beyond Rousseau and his clapping hands, were material; they included small signs and markers such as “a handmade notch in the wood railing leading to the second floor,” allowing you to calculate how many steps lay ahead, as well as backing all furniture up against the walls at night to open clear paths of movement through the household.
Entire, community-wide children’s games were also devised so that everyone growing up in a village could become intimately familiar with the local landscape.
Games like “Round and Round the Village,” popular in much of England, familiarized children at an early age to their physical surroundings, as did fishing, collecting herbs, and running errands. Schooled by adults in night’s perils, children learned to negotiate the landscapes “as a rabbit knows his burrow”—careful after dark to skirt ponds, wells, and other hazardous terrain. In towns and cities, shop signs, doorways, and back alleys afforded fixed landmarks for neighborhood youths.
Incredibly, Ekirch points out, “Only during the winter, in the event of a heavy snowfall, could surroundings lose their familiarity, despite the advantage to travels of a lighter, more visible landscape.” The mnemonic presence of well-known community landmarks has been replaced by what mammoth calls a “whitesward.”
But this idea, so incredibly basic, that children’s games could actually function as pedagogic tools—immersive geographic lessons—so that kids might learn how to prepare for the coming night, is an amazing one, and I have to wonder what games today might serve a similar function. Earthquake-preparedness drills?
In any case, we return to Rousseau. We see him advancing, now, heading forward into unknown architecture, dark space enveloping him on all sides, the walls fading into obscurity, black, leg-breaking stairwells threatening in the distance, unsure of where he stands, entirely alone in this shadow… until we hear a series of claps. And then another. Then one more.
And the philosopher, echoing himself, finding comfort and location based on objects he can’t see, soon works his way out of the labyrinth.
[Images: Two diagrams stitched together showing acoustics of bat echolocation at Carlsbad Caverns].
For those of you with audio-spatial interests, Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio ran a twenty-minute conversation between myself and Jace Clayton yesterday called “Music for Landscapes.”
We talk about urban acoustics, the sounds of flooded cities, DJing in ruined border towns on the divided island of Cyprus, some thoughts on echolocation by way of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and more. Enjoy!
Photographer Richard Mosse, originally from Ireland, is a graduate of the Yale MFA program in photography, as well as a recipient of a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts. This Fellowship has funded Mosse’s ongoing and extraordinary series of travels around the world.
Readers of BLDGBLOG will recognize his work from its previous appearances here—whether that’s the air disaster simulations of a year or two back or the full interview with Mosse about his, until then, unpublished photographs of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.
Having worked together all Autumn as part of the quarantine studio here in New York, Mosse and I coordinated another interview, via email, about his most recent solo exhibition. That show, called The Fall, features photographs of extremely remote airplane crash sites, with often partially dismantled or disintegrated wrecks disappearing into an uninhabited landscape; Mosse compares these structures to the Arctic shipwrecks and ruined forest abbeys of painter Caspar David Friedrich. The images will be on display for only two more days—closing Wednesday, 23 December 2009—at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery.
In the following interview, Richard Mosse discusses the visual representation of catastrophe; conceptual links between terrorism, advertising, and photography; the 2006 disappearance of pilot Steve Fossett; surveillance subcultures along the U.S./Mexico border; the short fiction of J.G. Ballard; and Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana.
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BLDGBLOG: I’d like to start off with a fairly practical question: how do you actually locate these plane wrecks, many of which received no media coverage at all?
Mosse: These photos are the result of months of online research, skimming forums, YouTube videos, Google Earth, Flickr, emailing wreck chasers, and cold-calling bush pilots. I’d even surf the web for jpegs of plane wrecks, then bring this information into Google Earth in the hopes of finding tiny silhouettes of downed planes. I was searching for accidents so disintegrated and remote to civilization that they only really exist in the virtual imagination of transient and anonymous online communities. Others had become landmarks, a destination for the intrepid to come and leave their trace.
Like 19th-century survey photography, it became a process of charting the unknown—but it’s also a kind of picaresque quest narrative. I think the work has echoes of the poète maudit, the immoral artist figure who will go to any extreme, transgressing any boundaries in pursuit of the ultimate aesthetic experience.
BLDGBLOG: Abstractly speaking, was it that idea of trespassing and transgression—photographing something that terrifies so many people and that so few people actually witness or see—that drew you to this project?
Richard Mosse: I’m fascinated by contemporary art’s ability to point to the limits of experience, making visible what can’t otherwise be represented. Photography, meanwhile, is supposed to be rooted in the world of things, as it carries an actual physical memory of the world at a specific time and place. Between these poles, I think photography has a unique potential to represent human suffering—which is, after all, something that cannot be represented. I cannot literally feel your pain; you cannot adequately express that pain. Pain is an essentially private affair, yet it is something experienced by all of us. Starting from these basic ideas, I’m hoping to find a better way to describe the catastrophe. By this I mean a totalizing concept of warfare, disaster, the battlefield—the things that define our era but which have become increasingly abstract, impersonalized, invisible, simulated and global.
So how is the catastrophe popularly represented? Through terrorism. Terrorism is a gesture of advertising; it’s a literary act, a form of representation, before all else. Its aim is not primarily to kill, but to capture the popular imagination through killing. It’s for this reason that I’m drawn to the air disaster: there is no finer, more succinct, more international, and more culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than a plane crash. An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity’s complete failure. It is horrifying, but also aesthetically powerful—and it’s for these reasons that terrorists covet the air disaster. I feel that photographers, who work in close proximity to advertising, can enter the terrorist’s symbolic order and violate the same taboos.
Like the catastrophe, the air disaster is virtually impossible to represent. After the Continental crash near Buffalo last year, I traveled immediately to the site. It was totally inaccessible. In only a few hours, various authorities had come together to form a kind of firewall around the event; it had become opaque with layers of jurisdiction.
BLDGBLOG: How did you manage to get near the wreckage?
Mosse: The plane had crashed into a suburban neighborhood, and state troopers were waving down the traffic about a mile or so from the site. I parked up in the woods nearby, slung my camera and tripod in a shoulder bag, and trespassed through people’s backyards in the hope of being taken for a resident. I was able to walk almost to the crash site itself, about 100 yards from the wreckage, where I stood and watched the disaster bureaucracy arrange and rearrange itself while body bags were carried out.
Unable to get any closer than that, and with no clear line of sight, I looked for some trace of the disaster violating this residential idyll and found police tape slung around trees whose branches had been broken by the crash. I set up the tripod and within about twelve seconds the veil had closed in. First came the local officers, and then the Feds. They kept me there for about an hour, ran my name and social security number, and threatened me with arrest.
I began to understand this larger project as a kind of deferral: I started to look sideways at the air disaster through older wrecks, forgotten relics in the middle of nowhere. There are layers of deferral here which attempt to access a crystallization of themes surrounding the air disaster. Control. Remoteness. Archaeology. Time. Environment. Form. Scale. Quest. The hidden. Taboo. In making these images, I’m aiming towards something aligned in spirit with Caspar David Friedrich‘s painting, Das Eismeer: spatial remoteness becomes temporal remoteness, and the forgotten plane wreck is swallowed by the primeval landscape.
BLDGBLOG: Friedrich’s Arctic shipwreck brings to mind a pretty incredible video that you’ve put together, called Leviathan. It features wrecked airplanes emerging from, or being dropped into, the sea. Can you tell me more about that project?
Mosse: I met an extraordinary Dutchman out in Thailand who is known in wreck-chasing circles as the Dakota Hunter. Once an advertising director for a cigarette company, the Dakota Hunter ventures into the world’s remotest places to salvage the wingtips of C-47 Dakotas, which he then ships back to the Netherlands to be sandblasted and turned into luxury tables for boardrooms and executive offices. He very generously tipped me off about a Thai-organized project sinking Dakota aircraft into the waves off Phuket. These aircraft were vintage American military bombers (and Sikorsky attack helicopters) from the Vietnam War that had been donated to the Thai Army upon America’s withdrawal from Saigon. They had been flown by the Thai Air Force until they could fly no longer, and have since lain rusting in the jungle.
But the diving clubs of Phuket, struggling to re-stimulate the dive-tourism industry as well as the coral reef environment that had been virtually wiped out by the recent tsunami, came up with the idea of sinking these decommissioned aircraft onto the ocean floor.
I pulled this footage from Thailand together with a second video showing the 2009 US Airways crash in the Hudson River. In this piece, I became fascinated by themes of tourism, disaster, globalization, the military-industrial complex, and history. But most of all, I’m drawn to the aesthetic power of the air disaster, and the majesty of watching airplanes be submerged and re-emerge from water, like a kind of baptismal rite. The sea has a wide array of psychoanalytic and mythic associations which I feel produce sparks of meaning when they coincide with the airplane’s modern form.
You can watch an unfinished version of the film below. This was shot and edited by Trevor Tweeten, with coloring and post-production by Jerome Thelia, and sound by Martin Clarke. Please note that this piece is not yet finished; it’s just an early draft.
BLDGBLOG: You’re not a pilot yourself, meanwhile, so getting to these sites must have required a tremendous amount of assistance. Can you tell me a bit more about the people who helped you visit—like the Dutchman in Thailand—and the process you had to go through to get to these places?
Mosse: I actually had to abandon one trip to see a wreck in a high mountain pass because of bear-paw prints in the snow! On my return trip, I brought a local fellow with a shotgun. I asked him whether he’d ever had an encounter with a bear, but he wouldn’t tell me, saying that he’d give me an answer after we reached the wreck and were making our way back down the mountain. Once I’d finished making the photograph and we’d started for home, I asked impatiently for an answer. He told a fabulous story of being charged by a five hundred pound grizzly who picked him up in her jaws and flung him like a ragdoll. Lucky for him, he managed to fire a shot at the bear while it was coming at him, saving his life. He showed me the wounds on his shoulder and forearm.
That trip was by all-terrain vehicle—with a few hours of heavy walking through snow—but, on other forays, I’ve hired a helicopter. I had a choice of pilots in a town in the Yukon, and decided to go with the Swiss pilot, thinking he’d be safer. But he totally failed to find the wreck and flew me to the top of a mountain range where we sallied out into the snow to frown at the horizon. I made a second attempt the same day with a different pilot, one who had lived there all his life. He took me straight to the wreck and suggested many others. Always shop local.
Another pilot dropped me into a swamp, way out in the Yukon wilderness. He left me there alone and flew off to refuel. I had to wade up to my armpits in the swampy water for hours, apprehensive that the helicopter would never return. But my fears were forgotten when I discovered that an animal, perhaps an otter or a mink, had built a nest out of reeds in the shelter of the belly of the plane wreck, and birds had propped their nests in holes in the back fin.
[Images: (top) “C-47 Beaver Creek” and (bottom) “C-47 Snag” by Richard Mosse].
BLDGBLOG: What about particularly unexpected or surreal plane wrecks?
Mosse: The tail of an old Nazi Junkers was discovered while dredging a lake in northern Finland. I suppose nobody knew what to do with it, because it was simply dumped in the car park of a supermarket, in the same sort of place that joyriders might abandon a burned out car. I like to imagine the local people driving carefully around the old Nazi tailfin, and it becoming a well-known attraction in the region.
There’s also a crashed Cold War bomber that has been salvaged from the Icelandic wastes and is now used as a garden shed. And, in Sicily, the remains of an Alitalia disaster were propped proudly on the roof of a scrap merchant’s shed. Sadly, this monument no longer survives.
But scrappers are not always the plane wreck’s enemy. At 13,000 feet in the Patagonian Andes, there’s an old Curtiss Commando which has been neatly cannibalized leaving only the cockpit. In the winter, flamingoes migrate to this freezing and inhospitable salt lake in northwest Argentina to mate.
[Image: “Curtiss Commando Patagonia” by Richard Mosse].
BLDGBLOG: When Steve Fossett, the aviator, disappeared over Nevada last year, there was a huge technological effort to find his plane again—people using Google Earth from all over the world, for instance, to spot the wreckage. It became a kind of landscape challenge. Did the enormous response to that air disaster, or even the public’s use of satellite surveillance technology, have any influence on your project?
Mosse: The hunt for Fossett’s wreck on Google Earth reminds me of a group of webcam vigilantes who I discovered while shooting on the Mexican border. These anti-immigration volunteers spend their free time monitoring footage from live border cameras situated in the Sonoran Desert or overlooking the banks of the Rio Grande River. I’ve encountered these surveillance camera rigs in the middle of absolutely nowhere along the US-Mexico border. The project, BlueServo Virtual Borderwatch is a public-private partnership described by Justin Hall as “an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime.”
I’m intrigued by the idea of people logging into, and staring at, live webcam views of an unchanging landscape on their home computers. What drives people to do this? I suppose it’s the same lure that draws people to Google Earth. These are both a pursuit of the real within—and through—simulacra, and you are apprehending the world as if it were a computer game. That is enormously empowering, because the tools at your disposal are extremely powerful. You can go virtually anywhere without putting yourself at risk.
But, ultimately, it’s a form of entertainment: you’re consuming a representation of the world—one that’s been produced—and not representing the world for yourself.
[Images: “Miss Piggy Churchill” 1 and 2 by Richard Mosse].
BLDGBLOG: In J.G. Ballard’s fiction, there is often a character who is a wounded aviator—someone who’s been in a minor plane crash or car accident, has a ruined knee, and can never fly again. They are exiled on the earth, so to speak. Ballard sometimes included lost aviators in his fiction: amateur pilots who have taken on the air of Arthurian knights flying pioneer missions into the skies of undiscovered worlds. Does this romance or mythology of the figure of the pilot—not the airplane—have any role in your interest in photographing crash sites? There’s even someone like Amelia Earhart, whose disappearance only amplified her already global fame.
Mosse: Certainly. Since I was a boy, I’ve been haunted by Ballard’s story of a journalist visiting the site of an air disaster in the Mexican mountains. But I’m also thinking along the lines of Robert Smithson or Bas Jan Ader: the artist heading out to his death in the wilderness, like the protagonist at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, whose body disappears into a ghostly fog on a drifting boat.
[Image: From Fata Morgana, directed by Werner Herzog].
BLDGBLOG: Finally, is there a crash site that you really want to get to but either haven’t had the time to visit or the wreck might even just be a rumor, an urban legend?
Mosse: That would have to be the plane wreck in Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana. It was like an epiphany for me when Herzog’s lens comes across this ruin in the Saharan desert; he examines the twisted form as if it were a sculpture in the landscape, like the Sphinx. I immediately pressed rewind and watched the scene again and again, swearing to myself that I would retrace his journey south through Algeria to search for the ruin. But it’s impossible to find.
• • •
Be sure to read BLDGBLOG’s earlier interview with Richard Mosse: Saddam’s Palaces. Mosse’s solo exhibition The Fall closes on 23 December 2009.
[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from On the Malecón].
[Image: Ahmadinejad emerges from a highway tunnel; photo by Henghameh Fahimi for the Agence France-Presse, via the New York Times].
[Images: A civilization beneath the trees; images via New Scientist].
[Image: Piles of road salt outside Toronto. Photo by Flickr-user katalogue; via InfraNet Lab].
[Image: Published in the New York Tribune, September 11, 1910].
[Image: The Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at the 
[Image: John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827); originally spotted at 
[Images: (top) The bewilderingly beautiful Cat’s Paw Nebula, photographed by T.A. Rector at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; (middle) The Witch Head Nebula, photographed by Davide De Martin at the Palomar Observatory; (bottom) The Rosette Nebula, photographed by J.C. Cuillandre (Canada France Hawaii Telescope) and Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia)].
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