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One of the more unique road signs you’ll see between L.A. and Las Vegas is one that announces the nearby presence of an “Early Man Site.”

[Image: The excavation pit at Calico; photo by D. Griffin].

“One of the most controversial archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere,” we read, courtesy of the Calico Early Man Site website, “is located in the Mojave Desert of California, near the town of Barstow. The site, in low hills east of the Calico Mountains, displays evidence for the presence of tool-making humans in the Americas some 200,000 years ago, far earlier than any Western Hemisphere site that has been accepted by the majority of the archaeological community.”
Though no human remains have ever been found there, and the stone tools themselves are suspiciously rock–like, “It is hoped that [the region] may someday reveal early human remains, becoming America’s Olduvai Gorge.”
“The history of this site dates back to 1942,” the Bureau of Land Management explains, “when amateur archaeologists discovered what they believed to be primitive stone tools in this area. Fragments were embedded in the sediments of the shoreline of an ancient Pleistocene Era lake, called Lake Manix.”
Incredibly, famed anthropologist Louis Leakey once worked at the site – though his wife, Mary, was apparently so unconvinced by its early dating that she tried to prevent Louis’s excavations at Calico from being published.

[Image: A Calico Cutter – but is it a rock or a shaped tool?].

The phrase “Early Man Site,” in and of itself, also interests me, in all of its politically incorrect self-assuredness. There appears to be only one other “official” Early Man Site in the world, and that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Indonesia. Aside from these two places, the phrase is simply used as a descriptive term for definable areas of prehistoric anthropological settlement.
But the seeming incongruity – the quasi-Ballardian nature – of seeing an Early Man Site so close to the American highway system (between L.A. and Vegas, no less) would not sound real if you had invented it.
Looking into this strange coincidence of American roadworks and ancient humanity further, I soon discovered that Caltrans – the California Department of Transportation – actually maintains a series of ongoing archaeological projects, including an official Archaeology Branch. They study landscape phenomena such as “the ruins of linear structures” (i.e. “road ruins”).
There is even a Caltrans guide for how to identify a prehistoric site.

[Image: The astonishingly far inland dune-sea at 16th Avenue and Strawberry Hill in San Francisco, approximately 109 years ago, before being engridded and buried by homes (via); this seems to give an interestingly San Franciscan spin to the old, May ’68 idea that, beneath our streets and paving stones, we will find the beach (or the desert, as the case may be)].

[Image: An installation of work by photographer JR on the walls of a Rio favela].

“Undercover photographer” JR – who makes “photo galleries out of our streets” by exhibiting his work in public, as posters – has taken his exhibition strategy a step further. “What is at stake here,” he writes, referring to this change in tactic, “is the assessment of the possibilities of intervention in different environments.”
Amongst these environments are the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – however, here, these “possibilities of intervention” clearly include more opportunities for his work to gain greater exposure.

[Image: Work by JR in Rio].

I have a variety of reactions to this.
My first thought upon seeing these photos was actually that it was quite an interesting visual transformation of the favela. The realization that the Cubist surfaces of a mountain subcity might be transformed, through fragmentary glimpses of representational art – these shard-like pieces of larger works that only add up from certain angles, as if in parallax – seems to be a discovery worth taking further.
However, at least two problems open up here: are you visually transforming the ghetto so that those who live in the city below no longer have to look up and see themselves surrounded by blight? They will see, instead, a hot new contemporary artist on display?
Or could you visually augment the favela in a way that positively impacts both the self-image of, and the quality of life for, the people living there while not erasing the presence of that ghetto from the visual awareness of the central city dwellers? Perhaps there could even be something that looks, I might say, just as bad from the outside, but that nonetheless benefits the people living within.
So the question is: who is this art really for?
Because there’s actually a third player involved in all of this: the international art market, where these sorts of guerrilla exhibition strategies now increase one’s chances of canonization (and coverage on blogs).
Less critically, though, I’m also curious here about the use of representational art.
So often we’ve seen the walls of favelas repainted with primary colors and such like, in an attempt to beautify or, to be more sinister about it, visually correct an otherwise offensive built environment. However, using the faceted hillsides of a favela as a kind of gemlike canvas for representational art actually seems to open up more interesting possibilities.
Could you paint, or glue a poster of, all 200,000+ frames from a new film onto the surfaces of distant buildings? And treat the city as a kind of cinematic installation, a cubist filmography in which walking around is a form of experiential editing? You could live inside a fight scene, or in the closing credits.
Or perhaps you could hike to the top of Buena Vista Park here in San Francisco and look out toward the high-rises of downtown – and see a photograph, installed anamorphically across the rooftops of different buildings, only correctly visible from this precise location (but what if that photo… is a Coke ad?).
Perhaps the future of Cubism is not in some painter’s studio somewhere but in the ten million unexplored, minor surfaces of the city.
I’m reminded here of the (admittedly abstract) work of Felice Varini – and wondering what he might do, given a hillside with ten thousand surfaces all visible from multiple angles.
Finally, though, there are the eyes: in these images, you are being looked at in return. But who is meant to identify with this? Are these the eyes of the favela dwellers looking out upon a city they cannot access, as if to shame those more privileged residents? Or, as the poor wander home at night up steep streets, are these the eyes of the world looking down at them in judgmental scrutiny?
Again, though, there is a third class of people involved here. Perhaps these eyes aren’t looking at the favela at all, and they aren’t looking down at the city below.
They are looking out at the international art market, hoping for coverage in magazines and blogs, looking for their real, intended audience: the people who will see these photographs, at home, around the world. The city is merely their blank wall and host.

(Thanks to Adrian Giddings for the tip!)

Still embedded somewhere in the shores of California, buried by more than a century of sand, are lost hydroelectric machines.

[Image: The Pacific Wave Motor, via the San Francisco Western Neighborhoods Project].

Deep in the prehistory of green energy technologies now being researched by Alexis Madrigal for his forthcoming book, there is a whole series of devices intended to generate power from the sea.
Precursors of today’s interest in tide power, these were “wave motors” and mechanized basins that turned the coast into a series of timed catchment reservoirs. The landscape itself became a machine.
One of the earliest patents filed for such technology was by Oakland resident Henry Newhouse in 1877. The purpose of his machine was “[t]o utilize the tide for a water-power,” his patent text read, as quoted by the San Francisco-based Western Neighborhoods Project, “and preserve a continuous power by means of the arrangement of a reservoir to catch the water at high-tide, and a discharge-basin to let the water out at low tide and shut it out while the tide is rising.”
Like something designed by Smout Allen, tunnels would be drilled through littoral rockfaces, even as natural bays were both expanded and reinforced. The coastline is soon a linked sequence of valves through which the tides can flow, generating electricity as they pass through a maze of elevated waterwheels and pumps.
A great example of this type of wave motor comes to us from “the Armstrong brothers”; it was built on the coast of Santa Cruz in 1898. Quoting the Western Neighborhoods Project‘s description of that project:

The Armstrongs’ wave motor, an oscillating water column, was built inside the cliff. They had dug a thirty-five by six foot hole into the side of the cliff that ran to a level below low tide. From there another tunnel connected it with the ocean. Inside of the thirty-five-foot well was a pump, and attached to that a 600-pound float. When the waves crashed on the shore, they forced water through the tunnel and up the well, lifting the float, opening the valve and filling the pump. As the water receded, the well water would fall, dropping the pump and the float. The valve would close and the piston, under the weight of the float, forced the water through a pipe to a tank on the hill.

Certain to puzzle future archaeologists, “The only part of the wave motor that remains today is the thirty-five-foot deep well in the cliff.”
In other words, what now appear to be eroded cliffs and chipped coastal plateaus are actually derelict machine parts from the 19th century.

[Images: The Santa Cruz Wave Motor, originally from Scientific American; via John Haskey].

Take Adolph Sutro’s “Aquarium” project, eventually subsumed into his larger quest to create the Sutro Baths: Sutro’s “tide machine was built inside the rocky bluff at Sutro Cove that was then being referred to as ‘Parallel Point’.”

From a natural shelf 17 feet above mean tide level, a catch-basin was built to catch water from three directions. A canal, 8 feet high and 153 feet long with a downwards slope of 3 feet in a hundred carried the ocean water from the catch-basin to the settling basin on the beach. The settling basin, built of cement and of rock taken from boring the canal, was 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 10 feet deep. It held 250,000 gallons.

One might say that these “wave motors” were a kind of prosthetic stratigraphy upon the surface of the earth; left to their own devices, perhaps in a million years they’d even fossilize.
In other examples of this phenomenon, however, the machines weren’t embedded into the geology of the landscape; they were instead constructed, Constant-like, offshore on wooden piers.

[Image: Constant’s New Babylon… reimagined as an offshore wave power farm].

“Most notable” of these designs, we read, “was the Starr Wave Motor of Redondo Beach which began construction in 1907. It was a large project that hoped to supply power for six counties. In the end, the enormous machine collapsed in 1909 because of the flimsy construction of the pier on which it was attached.”
As the Western Neighborhoods Project continues, this was actually just one of many of “the wave motors of southern California.”
Included amongst that sub-class were the Wright Wave Motor of Manhattan Beach (built in 1897), the Reynolds Wave Motor of Huntington Beach (built in 1906) and the Edwards Wave Motor of Imperial Beach (built in 1909). “The Wright Wave Motor is the only one of these Victorian era wave motors still in existence,” we read; however, incredibly, it is now “buried in the sand at the foot of the present pier in Manhattan Beach.”
How fascinating to think that beneath the sand are strange devices long since forgotten by the general public; a retiree out for a stroll one day with a metal detector receives incredibly strong signals from a certain stretch of forlorn coastline – only to begin excavating, slowly and over the course of many months, a monumental hydroelectric machine for which no documentation can be found.
The site is soon renamed Machine Bay – and excavations continue for more than a decade.

[Images: A postcard featuring the Santa Cruz Wave Motor; via John Haskey].

In any case, the very real possibility of generating electrical power from the ocean is something I would absolutely love to see happen – and I would be particularly excited to see California, with its 100 years of research precedence, assume global leadership. As the Western Neighborhoods Project writes, “In California the idea of power from the ocean has been pursued since the 1870s. Experiments have taken place as far south as Imperial Beach near the Mexico border and as far north as Trinidad, in Humboldt County.” And, today, interest in wave-generated electricity only seems to be gaining in strength.
For instance, gubernatorial candidate and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has gone on record, in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, writing that we should “power America with ocean energy.” He even cites the working landscapes of Adolph Sutro; Sutro, San Francisco’s 24th mayor, “recognized the power of San Francisco’s waves,” Newsom writes, “building a wave catch-basin that he hoped to one day turn into a wave-powered ‘overtopping’ system near Cliff House.”
But Newsom also seems to be cultivating a vision in which San Francisco assumes a new position of centrality in the national debate over energy independence – and it would all be based in tides. He writes:

Today in San Francisco, we’re not just talking about ocean power, we are advancing its actual implementation. We have submitted an application to the federal government to develop an underwater wave project off San Francisco’s Ocean Beach that could generate between 30MW and 100MW of power. And we are actively working to develop a tidal power demonstration project in the San Francisco Bay that demonstrates the promise of technologies that capture tides.

I’m all for this, frankly. As Alex Trevi suggests in his post San Francisco As It Will Be (a response to the climage-change-inspired Bay Area design competition Rising Tides), there is an extraordinary amount of machinic innovation to be found in reimagining the region’s hydrology (from Trevi’s “Golden Gate Dam” to his idea for mobile sewers).

[Images: Via the Western Neighborhoods Project].

In fact, the very idea that, somewhere over the hills to the west of us here in San Francisco, there is a sequence of machines plugged into the oceanic itself, is extraordinarily inspiring.
In the process, the dynamic hydroelectric capacity of the sea – if it could replace inland, coal-burning power plants – would revolutionize the geography of power generation in the United States.
Could San Francisco be the next Houston?
Who knows – but a new landscape of electrical substations harvesting gigawatts of coastal electricity from the shores of California, and then delivering it to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, would not only be a more “sustainable” future for power generation, it would be a technologically amazing feat that verges on Romanticism, plugging directly into the elemental.
I could open my own power plant, the BLDGBLOG SeaBattery™, available on the microscale.

[Image: Antonio Sant’Elia‘s hydroelectric-like vision of a Città Nuova; now imagine the Los Angeles River redesigned by Sant’Elia…].

So while the idea of an architect-designed national power grid – for instance, OMA’s plan for a European wind farm – is easy to ridicule as being frivolous, superficial, and distracting, I find it nonetheless quite brilliant to wonder what Antonio Sant’Elia, for instance, might do with a massive Pacific Wave Motor Complex looming somewhere on the coast of Los Angeles or out on some isolated cliffside near Santa Cruz.
After all, if architectural design can make people excited about, and financially interested in, future energy sources, then isn’t the comparatively small extra expense of getting an architect to design pieces of that future landscape worthwhile? One needn’t claim that infrastructure will save the architectural profession – it won’t – while pointing out, unironically, that wave motors are fun to sketch.
I would personally be quite happy to see stylized tide machines take shape in the sea – future archaeological presences there amongst rocks and hills, lost in fog one morning only to reappear at sunset against a backdrop of cresting waves.

[Image: Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova; alternatively, imagine a future Hydroelectric Monastery designed by Peter Zumthor in which monks of water live surrounded by technical equipment, timing their valves with tides, calculating lunar wave algorithms, opening silent gates at night while the rest of the world sleeps].

Until then (if such a day comes), detailed exploration of these derelict motors left corroding in the sand – remnant machinescapes of artificial holes and tide pools, amongst the drowned foundations of forgotten piers – absolutely must continue.
At the very least, I can see an incredible Pamphlet Architecture produced about these lost mechanisms, with sketches and photographs, maps and stratigraphic diagrams in which inexplicable machines appear, several feet below ground.
A Graham Foundation-funded cartography of abandoned coastal machines hidden in the sands of premodern California.
It all seems straightforward enough: we could start that archaeology now – while planning more of such installations for the future.

(Thanks to Alexis Madrigal for the tip!)

A man, unexcited by his own possessions and increasingly confused as to why he collected all these things in the first place, decides to hire someone else to live amidst his books and clothes, DVDs and framed photographs, so that he can learn how another person might more intelligently put it to use.
Perhaps, then, he thinks, he’ll come to appreciate what he owns.
So he submits an ad to Craigslist, interviews dozens of candidates, and soon settles on a one-time professional actor who has since fallen on hard times. They negotiate a one-year contract; catering details are worked out; bank transfers are made. The man’s girlfriend even agrees to take part, as she had once been a fan of the actor’s films.
Then, on a warm summer day, this new man moves into the house.
Overseen by a network of surveillance cameras, he settles into a life amongst the possessions of another. He establishes a breakfast routine, eating from the owner’s tableware, and he familiarizes himself everyday with the material nooks and crannies of another person’s life history, that sediment of souvenirs and home decoration that has developed over time.
The owner, meanwhile, insufficiently awed by the experience of watching someone impersonate himself – wearing his clothes, reading his books, watching his videos, flipping through his college photo albums – finds himself slowly accumulating more possessions. One day he simply gets tired of watching this actor make love to his girlfriend – so he buys a novel to read. But then he finishes that novel.
So he buys another one.
He then ruins a shirt one evening, tearing it on a kitchen implement – so he buys a new shirt. But it comes with 50%-off of a second shirt (so he buys two).
Etc.
Gradually, the memory of those previous possessions – there on film being held by an actor – begins to fade. He no longer misses his girlfriend, and what was once a distracting labyrinth of things that, long ago, lost their attraction becomes something even less meaningful than that.
Soon, he is just watching an expensive folly: a man he doesn’t know, interacting with objects that mean nothing to him.
When it becomes clear that no moment of reconciliation is on its way – no point at which he will learn to love the things he’s accumulated over a lifetime – he simply abandons the project altogether.
He leaves the house and everything in it to the actor, and he waves goodbye to his now ex-girlfriend – who has since fallen in love with his surrogate.
And he walks away.

[Image: The Age of Civilization by Jan Soucek].

Nearly three years ago, in an email I have subsequently misplaced, a reader sent in some scans he had made of a book about Jan Soucek, a Czech artist whose work consists, it seems, almost entirely of elaborate architectural fantasies.
The one image that really stood out for me, and that I’ve just rediscovered here today in the many, many files of images stored on my computer, is called The Age of Civilization: it features the ruined walls and eroding arches of a Brueghelian Tower of Babel, subsequently built over and subsumed beneath future rings of urban growth.
Very little can be found about Soucek online; from what I can gather, though, he was born in 1941 (which means he is not the other Jan Soucek who pops up a lot whilst Googling) and he has participated in “numerous exhibitions in Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Austria, France, USA and Belgium.”
A slightly larger version of this very painting was also uploaded to Flickr two years ago – perhaps by the same person who initially sent me the scan (the image description, oddly, mentions BLDGBLOG).

[Image: For a few heady weeks I actually thought I was going to be teaching at this thing… but no more. Alas. Still, though, how can you resist applying for a two-week architectural design studio in Sydney, Australia, themed around the spatial rehabilitation of a semi-derelict, post-industrial island, complete with “early convict settlement structures” and heavily incised sandstone foundations? More information, including how to apply, available here; larger, though low-res, version of the flyer available here. Have fun!].

[Image: The unbuilt Australian World Exposition (1972); read the PDF for more].

Having just returned from Melbourne, and preparing to go back to Sydney in July, I’ve got Australia on the brain.
Amongst the huge variety of things I’ve come across in the last few days while researching Australian architecture is the AA Prize for Unbuilt Work – particularly the historical series “Unbuilt Australia,” published by Architecture Australia.

[Image: “Perth as it Should Be” (PDF)].

There are some great stories here, ranging from early plans for “Perth as it Should Be” (check out the PDF) to an under-known, September 1950 sketch by Le Corbusier for the redesign of Adelaide (worth viewing the PDF in full).
Did Corbu’s speculative plans Down Under reveal ideas that he would later go on to build in Chandigarh?

[Image: Corbu’s Adelaide (PDF)].

One of my favorite unbuilt projects from the series is one that was, in fact, partially implemented: Edwin Codd’s Industrialised Building ’74 project, a prefabricated, modular classroom intended for deployment throughout rural Queensland.
“These schools with flat roofs were slab-on-ground buildings with long axes running east–west on a 1.2-metre module, steel-framed with trusses spanning 10.8 metres at 4.8-metre centres,” Don Watson writes in a brief article (read the PDF). Each structure was “naturally ventilated,” he continues, as well as “strongly coloured: steel framing blue, doors red and distinctive funnel-like downpipes yellow.”
In fact, I’ve been running into more and more plans lately for modular, prefab, easily-deployable instant classrooms – so perhaps a future post is in order, exploring some of those more interesting ideas.

[Image: Edwin Codd’s prefabricated Queensland classrooms (PDF)].

Other projects from the series include a “Venetian ‘City of Hope'” (PDF), a new Australian Parliament House (PDF), a look at something called Hackney Modern (PDF), and the “Dream City of Mackay” (PDF), Karl Langer’s excessively rational plan for a sub-tropical garden city.

[Image: Karl Langer’s “dream city” of Mackay (PDF)].

It’s a brilliant series, and it would be extremely interesting to see this reproduced elsewhere – from a regular look at “Unbuilt London” to a series of articles about unrealized Colonial-era plans for U.S. cities. “Unbuilt Philadelphia,” “Unbuilt Savannah,” “Unbuilt Washington D.C.”
Check out the rest of the series at Architecture Australia (scroll down).

If you happen to be in Melbourne, Australia, this weekend, I will be speaking at Parallax, the Australian National Architecture Conference.

My subject will be architectural media, broadly speaking, in a dual session co-hosted with Aaron Betsky:

The role of the media in disseminating architectural theory and practice has been debated as long as media has engaged with architectural practice and production. These debates – pitting access to information against authenticity of mediated versus real experience – have become even more complex in the contemporary environment where magazines are joined by blogs, YouTube, Facebook and web alerts.
We are interested in the veracity of these various forms of media and in the types of architectural activity and architects they promote. Will architectural tendencies change as modes of media evolve? How are the two related?

In addition to myself and Betsky, the conference also features Tatiana Bilbao, Sou Fujimoto, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Veronika Valk, Winka Dubbeldam, Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai, Edwin Chan, Peter Wilson, and, last but not least, Slavoj Žižek.
This is in addition to a number of other speakers who will be leading workshops throughout the conference. For instance, I’m also scheduled for a workshop – again, on “Architectural publishing: The future” – with Winka Dubbeldam and Andrew MacKenzie, editor-in-chief of Architectural Review Australia.
Finally, I’ll also get to meet, after nearly five years of emails, the legendary Mr. Marcus Trimble from Super Colossal. This will be at a live design critique hosted in a Melbourne pub Friday night; other judges include Slavoj Žižek, Aaron Betsky, Edwin Chan, Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai), Veronika Valk, and Peter Wilson, and it will all be moderated by Leon van Schaik.
While I’m at it, let me add that I’m also excited to meet architect Andrew Maynard, as well as Simon Sellars from Ballardian.
So while my time in Melbourne will be short, unfortunately – and hopefully swine flu-free – if you happen to be around this week, it’d be nice to meet.
Regular posts will resume shortly…