BLDGBLOG

I’m back from London now to find the news cycle absolutely abuzz with so many interesting stories that it’ll be hard to keep up – but I’ll start posting the best of the best in a bit.

[Image: A photo from Jacob Carter’s ridiculously gorgeous River Thames Series].

First, though, last week’s lecture was a blast; I talked way too fast, of course, bungling several points in the process, but, in the main, I had a great time and can only hope that everyone who came out on a Wednesday night in London – including my father-in-law! – to hear perhaps a bit too much about geology and not enough about offshore structures, or about the colonial politics of naming alien territories, or about urban iterative architecture, had a good time, as well.
The Bartlett may or may not be uploading a film of the lecture at some point, meanwhile; until then, a few notes from the talk can be seen courtesy of Matt Jones and Mark Simpkins. Also, if you attended BLDGBLOG’s recent lecture at SCI-Arc then you would have heard a lot of this before – but you would have missed out on instancing gates and billboard houses and the Indonesian mud volcano and China Miéville’s “slow sculptures” and what I thought was a really fun Q&A.

[Image: Another one from Jacob Carter’s River Thames Series].

So here’s a huge thanks to Iain Borden for hosting the lecture, and to Alex Haw, both for setting it up and for introducing me. Expect more from Alex here on BLDGBLOG, by the way, hopefully soon.
Now: back to regular posting…

(Note: The title of this post is a line from London Orbital by Iain Sinclair).

A British novelist has been awarded legal damages in excess of £100,000 because she writes thrillers, not literary masterpieces. What’s at fault?
She’s been inhaling fumes from a nearby shoe factory.

The author “claimed to have become so intoxicated” by the fumes that “she was reduced to writing thrillers.” Indeed, the fumes grew so intense “that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier.”
That book went on to sell 10,000 copies.
So there are several unspoken arguments being put forward by her claim. Such as:

1) Literary judgement. Why is one “reduced” to writing crime thrillers? Perhaps Henning Mankell is more interesting than, say, Zadie Smith. This writer thinks so, at least. I.e. me. Perhaps the traumatized British author under discussion here should actually owe money to the shoe factory – a small percentage of her royalties, for instance – or at least an acknowledgment in the book.
2) Environmental causality. Perhaps BLDGBLOG is caused by the fact that I do not inhale fumes from a nearby shoe factory. Perhaps I find it difficult to concentrate on anything but architecture because of my city’s aroma… I’d thought it’d been all the coffee.
3) Paranoia. Perhaps you, right now, are inhaling something that prevents you from writing your own Ulysses. Perhaps you are being held back by untraceable smells. Perhaps your life is being quietly reshaped by something you can neither see nor properly talk about, some vast and mysterious influencing machine that manipulates you from the outside. Perhaps that machine is a giant shoe factory.
4) Theft, unauthorized use of services, and/or copyright infringement. Perhaps this woman has been using the shoe factory’s fumes without permission. Perhaps, Delphi-like, they have been wafting through the neighborhood for someone else’s use, mesmerizing home scribblers into a state approaching hypergraphia. Perhaps there was another writer in the flat next door furiously pounding out thrillers and loving every minute of it. Perhaps this woman had no right to use the fumes in the first place – like taping a film whilst sitting at the cinema. Put the pen down, love. These fumes aren’t for you. It’s a form of neurochemical shoplifting.
5) Scapegoating. Perhaps you can’t finish the novel you started writing last summer because of London. You don’t live in London – in fact, you’ve never been there – but it’s distracting you. It’s forcing you to write emails to friends, instead. You haven’t touched your novel in ages. You should sue London… Or perhaps all those buildings you see everyday are preventing you from being a good architecture critic. It’s not your eye for detail – it’s the buildings you’re forced to write about. Perhaps the streets you take to work each day are not inspiring you to travel abroad and be interesting and do something fun with your life. Perhaps your coworker’s cubicle makes you terrible at data entry. Perhaps nothing is your fault at all. Perhaps the color of Manhattan taxi cabs prevents you from writing good music. You’re now homeless. You prepare to sue.
6) Aromatherapeutic innovation and/or the future of global perfume. In 2010, Burberry will release a new scent. It will smell like the fumes of British shoe factories. Within days of buying your first bottle you begin to convulse – and write thrillers…

So is your neighborhood causing you to write – or not write – highbrow novels? Can you prove it? Or do you only cook spaghetti because of the sad little street you live on – when, really, you’re a gourmet chef…?
What is your city doing to you?

(Thanks, Steve T!)

[Image: Photo by Eran Brokovich for National Geographic News].

For the next 8 or 9 days I will be in and out of range, possibly unable to post. I’m flying to London tonight and I will be back the following weekend.
However, I will be giving a lecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture on Wednesday, January 23, at 6:30pm – so if you’re in London, and you’ve got an overwhelming need to hear about artificial reefs and tectonic warfare and urban soundscapes and climate change and sovereign trapdoors and dungeon instancing and the future of surveillance and offshore utopias – in other words, all the things that normally appear here on BLDGBLOG – then please feel free to come out, bring your friends, and roar for urban speculation. The more the merrier.
It’s my first international lecture, and I’m excited!

I believe, as well, that I’ll be introduced by Alex Haw, who helped set up the lecture in the first place, so it’ll be worth coming out just to hear him speak.
And then I’ll be back posting next week. If you’ve never been to BLDGBLOG before, by the way, as good a place as any to start reading might be here and here.
Hope to see some of you there!

(Meanwhile, don’t miss the White House Redux competition!)

[Image: Maison elastique by Etienne Meneau].

Don’t miss the maison elastique, or elastic house, a modular system of somewhat theatrical scaffolding, by Etienne Meneau – “made for those who like instability.”

[Images: More views of Elastic Houses by Etienne Meneau].

One or two of those might be fun to bounce around in here in California during an earthquake… Deformable grids absorbing tectonic shock. Popping back into place. Waiting for the next one.
There are some interesting videos on Etienne’s site.

[Image: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – you must view larger!].

Another project that’s been knocking me out these past few weeks is “Wish You Were Here! Postcards from our Awesome Future,” by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings. A brief description:

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, “what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?” Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed, and perhaps mildly exaggerated by Steve and Packard to create a series of 6 posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Program.

These posters are actually now on display at bus kiosks down along Market Street in San Francisco. A little bit of urban speculation on your way to work.

[Image: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – view larger!].

I love these things! Every city should do this. And they should hire Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings, because their illustrations are ace.
Seriously, every city should do this: Produce visions of your city in the future, then pin them up at bus shelters. That’s how SCI-Arc and The Bartlett should start exhibiting student work.

[Images: By Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – view larger: top, middle, bottom].

Be sure to check out the whole Flickr set, which includes documentation of the posters in situ.

(With huge thanks to both Ross Perlin and Steve Lambert for pointing these out!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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