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Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, of terraswarm, creators of the infamous 10 Mile Spiral as well as the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, will be unveiling a new project on Monday night in Manhattan.
Called Color Shift, the installation “is an urban-scaled art project made by inputting a continuous stream of alternating colors into the FreshDirect video billboard, the largest in the country.” As such, it’s a kind of creative mis-direction of urban light pollution – a post-Duchampian optical relief in technicolor, throbbing through a dozen spectra across the roofs and walls of New York City.

You can watch a virtual version of Color Shift, installed online – it’s a weird, hypnotic abyss of slow alteration that, at one point, made my eyes feel broken. Very Olafur Eliasson-esque.
Ben and Chris will be speaking Monday night, March 19th, at 6:30pm in Columbia University’s Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall. Tell them BLDGBLOG sent you.

Your TV is helping to alter the metallic structure of the earth.
New Scientist reports that the planetary supply of “minor metals” – such as ruthenium, bismuth, and indium – is being depleted. Depleted how? By going into cellphones and flat-screen TVs, into resistors and harddrives.

[Image: Like a print by M.C. Escher, it’s a landscape featured on TV – a TV made of the landscape it features. It’s the television as simulated micro-geology, an elemental landscape in miniature].

“To meet demand,” the magazine reports, “tech firms must mine the growing mountains of electronic waste to recover the materials.”
Growing mountains?
So what future geographies of electronic waste might our descendents someday explore? There will be the Plateau of Circuitboards and the Cliff of Printers – the Dot-Matrix Range – each showing up on new maps of distant continents.
Outside magazine will run a series of articles about a man camping in central Africa, in the shadow of 200,000 used photocopiers; their scanning beds still intact, the copiers reflect the man’s stunned face in moonlight as he walks by, notebook in hand…
A day later he crests a ridge, crunching through the gravel of broken office machinery – only to look down into a whispering abyss: uncountable ten millions of discarded radios sit, chattering to themselves between stations with the last traces of power still trapped in their rusting batteries, speaking in tongues.
A thousand years later, a Third Testament will be added to The Bible, and this place – known as the Valley of Voices – will figure prominently.
For it seems that our rugged explorer heard something there… something he’ll never forget… and it soon becomes the stuff of legend. An absent broadcast around which future religions take shape.
Endlessly re-intepreting the missing words that only one person ever heard.

(Note: For a more serious – not to mention practical – look both at recycling electronic goods and at the environmental problem posted by these mountains of waste, click around the site of Earthworks Action; for some cool photographs of discarded mobile phones, meanwhile, check out the work of Chris Jordan).

[Image: Tower demolition in Philadelphia, as photographed by werdsnave. Perhaps that room at the very top could be rehabbed and kitted out with a small suburban house… or some version of this thing… making it worth the climb. Elsewhere: A tunneling project by werdsnave on Pruned. Earlier: Chicago’s Inner Flute-Ruins].

[Image: From “Splitting,” by Gordon Matta-Clark].

“A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck,” Reuters reports.

The man then “picked up his half with the forklift truck and drove to his brother’s house where he has since been staying.”

The police seem less than outraged. “The man said he was just taking his due,” one of them stated.

And you thought building a wall was a bad way to get divorced…

(Read more about Gordon Matta-Clark in BLDGBLOG’s Museum of Assassination).

New Scientist reports that “lane markings on roads could one day be changed at the click of a mouse.”
If electronics firm Philips has its way, roadway markings will no longer use paint; instead, “ultrathin plastic strips would be attached to road surfaces,” utilizing “a hard-wearing version of the electronic ink used in emerging flexible displays for e-books” – transforming roads into a kind of literary hieroglyph, or infrastructural e-book.
Paving the way for Da Vinci Code 2: Road to Calvary, in which a strange message is found encoded in the pavement outside Mel Gibson’s Malibu home…
More prosaically, this just means that “lane marking or speed limits [could] be changed at will.” But whose will…? And does that mean that you could program the M25 to be like I-95 for a day, and vice versa? Exploring cultural exchange via roadway markings?
Of course, if these programmable markings do become an everyday reality, it will inevitably mean that every fifteen year-old on the planet will waste hours and hours trying to hack the local roadways, engineering gruesome pile-ups. J.G. Ballard will be arrested, remote control in hand, staring glassy-eyed through a window at the final crashes he has staged.
And, who knows, maybe somebody will figure out how to make these magic roadways show films. The face of Cary Grant, shining upward from a freeway in Montana.
Earth Surface Television™. Brought to you by BLDGBLOG.

This “12th century chapel and priory,” located “between Poitiers and Limoges in the Vienne region of France,” is for sale.

The property “includes cellars, seven bedrooms, eight main reception rooms (!), a small library, bathrooms, kitchen, double garage and further attics capable of conversion. The chapel’s porch is registered as a Historic Monument. It has central heating and a security system. The grounds extend to some 3000 sq m and is planted with a range of trees etc.”

[Image: “Stout members of the sixth column dislodge an enemy machine gun post on the dome of St. Paul’s,” by W. Heath Robinson; via Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery].

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Sitooterie II, a “small outdoor retreat” made from “square, hollow tubes… Each tube points to the exact center of the structure, so a single light source can illuminate them all. They also serve a structural purpose, supporting the whole building like a bed of nails.” Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired – larger version here].

“When he was 6,” we read in the new issue of Wired, British artist-engineer Thomas Heatherwick “would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor”:

He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension – and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato.

31 years later, Heatherwick has become “a modern da Vinci.”
Scattered throughout Heatherwick’s King’s Cross studio, Wired reports, “are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls.” A 2004 profile in the Observer describes this same studio as “an unconventional set-up that includes experts in landscape architecture, architecture, product design, theatre design, civil and structural engineering and metal working.”
Wired goes on to relate how, one “cold winter morning,” Heatherwick showed the visiting reporter a photograph of “a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College.”
The bridge was made of glass:

In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.

The three photographs below, then, each taken by Donald Milne for Wired, show another of Heatherwick’s bridge projects: the deservedly famous “hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats.”
Of course, that’s the bridge that can “curl itself into a ball” – not the canal. Or the Thames. Though I would like to see that.

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge. Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired].

To “retract” the bridge, Wired explains, “an 11-kW hydraulic pump drives a master cylinder 16 inches in diameter, which in turn drives a series of 6-inch slave cylinders. These power 14 vertical shafts beneath the bridge’s hinged handrails. As the shafts rise, the railings fold in, causing the 39-foot span to curl. Because all the cylinders are driven at a constant rate regardless of the load on each bridge segment, the structure moves smoothly, taking two minutes to open or close. The pumps and related equipment are housed in the basement of an adjoining building, so the bridge is almost silent as it operates.”
Bear in mind, however, that the “canal” this bridge crosses is really only nine or ten feet wide, as well as the maritime equivalent of a cul-de-sac – so the bridge is more of an artistic curiosity than a real piece of city infrastructure. Nonetheless, it’s awesome.
In an older interview with PingMag, Heatherwick explained, referring to his work in general, that “[b]ehind all this, it always remains important that something is achievable! You can have a perfect wonderful plan, but if it never happens it doesn’t really matter to anybody anyway.”
So, speaking of achievement – and as everyone in the universe already knows – Heatherwick has also designed B of the Bang, the tallest sculpture in Britain – beautifully photographed, while under construction, here.

[Image: A Zoroastrian “tower of silence,” on top of which corpses would be left, arranged in rings, exposed to sun, weather, and vultures].

You wake up in a New York hotel room, your vision cloudy. You have hazy memories of guests arriving, all grins and champagne glasses, coming in the night before to snort coke as you watched the Weather Channel – only you don’t remember inviting anyone over, and you can’t seem to figure out who they were.

Nevermind, you think: you like champagne. Sometimes a bit too much.

It’s only after rising with a headache like iron clamps strapped to your temples, squinting at the morning light, that you remember the syringe, and the struggle, and the fact that someone must have drugged you. But why you?

That’s when you see that: 1) you are still dressed; 2) your suitcase is gone; and 3) there is a small note taped to your bedside table, next to a free copy of International Salesman. The note says:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is being performed in an elevator somewhere in Manhattan. You have ten hours to find it.

This is terrible news.