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[Image: 10 Mile Spiral, “A Gateway to Las Vegas,” by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch].

In their recent and immensely enjoyable book Tooling, New York-based architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch propose, among other things, a “10 mile spiral” that will “serve two civic purposes for Las Vegas”:

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

An aerial view of the spiral, in all its gas-guzzling glory, wound up like a snake on the periphery of the city:

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

Drivers will enter this vertical labyrinth of concrete, approaching a whirligig-like compression of the desert horizon and gradually lifting off into the sky. It’s a kind of herniation of space through which you could theoretically drive forever. (Given enough gasoline).
The spiral itself is beautiful –

– and absurd. Its form was generated algorithmically as “a helix whose radius varies randomly as it climbs and then falls back down to the valley floor.” The structure’s “intersection points” are then located, acting as stress-sites “through which the structure’s loads are channeled to the ground.”
It’s an internally buttressed Futuro-Suprematist cathedral to cars.

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

At the end of the book, Aranda/Lasch note that every project featured in Tooling was “constructed through simple steps, repeated over and over until something of substance was revealed”:

These steps are usually straightforward geometric transformations – short sets of rules that we develop – sometimes to build a custom tool that had not yet existed, but more often to better understand the forms we wish to make. Tapping the number-crunching power of the computer opens up new design possibilities and gives us the capacity to grow and proliferate structures that we otherwise could not, but probably more important is deciding when to curb their growth, cut their shape, or stop using them altogether.

In this regard, their architectural projects have much more in common with, say, the calculation-dependent music of Autechre than with anything explicitly spatial – unless that space is the coiling inward voids of conch shells, perhaps, or the strangely mathematical scaffolding of radiolaria.
At some point, Aranda/Lasch add, all the algorithmic tools they themselves used will be made available to anyone else who wants to explore them; to see if that’s happened yet, check this website in a few months’ time.

[Image: The spectacular glowing interior of that which has no outside: it’s the 10 Mile Spiral from above, at night, lit from within by automobiles. Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

I can’t end this post, however, without quoting J.G. Ballard; it’s like a nervous tic, seeing so many roads – and out comes Concrete Island, Ballard’s now-classic novel about an architect trapped by a car crash in the “compulsory landscaping” of Greater London’s excess motorways: “In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations.”
The man falls prey to thirst, insomnia, delirium: “Gazing up at the maze of concrete causeways illuminated in the night air, he realized how much he loathed all these drivers and their vehicles.”
The man then searches for “some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways” – but finds none. He is trapped, a new Crusoe of roads, “alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines… an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness.”
Leading me to wonder: what new futures of human experience could arise in the 10 Mile Spiral?

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

(For more on Concrete Island, see BLDGBLOG’s own Concrete Island, in which those same quotations appear. Then, after you’ve express-ordered your own copy of Tooling – because any book with a chapter called “Computational Basketry” should be required reading – you can visit Benjamin Aranda’s and Chris Lasch’s work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Non-Linear Systems Organization, where they were recently research Fellows).

“Blowup/Breakdown is an inflatable, biodegradable septic system that addresses sanitation and environmental issues at disaster relief and refugee camp sites. Fabricated using polyactide polymer (PLA) – a novel bioplastic – the Blowup/Breakdown system safely and ecologically isolates, treats and disposes of faecal waste in emergency situations minimizing human and environmental contact with harmful contaminants.”
Just don’t over-inflate it…

Designed by Studiocycle – and a runner-up at this year’s Metropolis Magazine Next Generation awards – the inflatable septic infrastructure has “a useful life of approximately two years.” After that time, the whole system “biodegrades into carbon, water and biomass allowing both its components and contents to safely assimilate into the surrounding soil and cause minimal environmental damage to the campsite.”
This 10.3mb PDF will tell you much, much more – including technical specs on air pumps, folding gaskets, and structural rings.

[Image: ©Renae Baker].

“Some of the coldest temperatures on Earth brought a rare cloud formation to the skies over Antarctica,” SF Gate reports. “Meteorological officer Renae Baker captured spectacular images of the nacreous clouds, also known as polar stratospheric clouds, last week at Australia’s Mawson station.”

[Image: ©Renae Baker].

Meanwhile, Wired introduced us last month to Werner Herzog’s forthcoming science fiction film, The Wild Blue Yonder, which uses the undersea Antarctic seascape as a stand-in for liquid extraterrestrial environments.

[Image: Werner Herzog/Wired – many more photos here].

“Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek,” Wired writes. “He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created ‘characters’ from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts.”

[Image: Werner Herzog/Wired].

Apparently, whilst viewing “mesmerizing images of ethereal jellyfish and swarms of crystalline microorganisms mingling in a cobalt twilight beneath a 20-foot-thick sheet of ice,” Herzog instinctively felt: “This is not our planet.” (One assumes the sentiment should, in Herzog’s case, be taken literally).

[Image: Werner Herzog/Wired].

The film “opens with a wide shot,” Wired explains: “A vast, vaulted ice canopy stretches over the horizon as two human silhouettes descend through a glowing portal into the dim indigo void. They fan out weightlessly, their breath echoing like whispers in an empty cathedral. Something approaches – a speck, silently swelling into what looks like a translucent bullet lined with undulating fringes of silk. The creature hovers in close-up, then darts away in a cascade of ice shards; dissonant music fades, then swells as the humans forge farther into the blue-green deep.”

[Image: NOAA – who, elsewhere, presents us with the literature of abysses].

That “blue-green deep,” however, is also an uncanny incubator of evolutionary weirdness. The deep sea octopus, for instance, first made its appearance in Antarctica’s waters: “Australian researcher Dr. Jan Strugnell of Queen’s University Belfast and the British Antarctic Survey says the formation of ocean currents around the continent millions of years ago provided the right conditions for ocean creatures to evolve,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports.
Amazingly, deep sea octopi appear to register, in their genes and anatomy both, the continental make-up of plate tectonics at the time of their earliest evolution – think of it as forensic landscape history at a biological remove: “About 34 million years ago, Antarctica separated completely from South America, with the opening up of Drakes Passage. This allowed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to form, which insulated the continent and allowed it to get really cold. As cold water is more oxygen rich than warm water, oxygen from Antarctic waters would have been able to then diffuse into the deep seas along with Antarctic octopuses, which then evolved into deep sea octopuses. ‘The opening of the Drakes Passage fits in with evolution of the group,’ says Strugnell.”
Which leads me to wonder if a specific mountain range in Africa – or Asia, for that matter – catalyzed an exact and specific thousand-year microclimate in which simian ingenuity could last across sufficient generations that some group eventually opposably-thumbed its way toward a larger brain. Or a certain valley, a specific rain corridor, a particularly comfortable belt of well-grassed savannahs – these landscapes could afford the time and space in which specific organisms would gradually develop themselves and evolve.
Writing this, of course, I realize how obvious it is that that’s exactly what did happen; but, then, assuming someday we discover the exact mountain (or gorge) that helped produce a rain-shadow that helped produce a climate that helped produce a fertile niche in which tool-using hominins could hang-out long enough to discover gods, writing, and warfare, shouldn’t that specific landmark receive some kind of protected, even vaguely familial, status? The Ur-mountain.
What if it’s been turned into a copper mine?
Or if there is no such thing?
Reversing the question, of course, could you bulldoze, plow, till, and plant your way toward some wild mega-landscape specifically engineered – topographically, climatically, acidically, and so on – based upon how it will catalyze the evolution of new species in a hundred thousand years’ time? Landscape architecture as a distant subset of genetic engineering: planting your garden based on what cross-hybridized evolutionary outgrowths may someday appear – but doing this on a continental scale, and with a time-frame of eons. Landscape futures, indeed.
Werner Herzog can film the design process.
A species will look back at its originary landscape, like an octopus drifting through Antarctic waters, overwhelmed with strange feelings of gratitude.

(Big thanks to Bryan Finoki for the Antarctic clouds article!)

[Image: “The Alliance to Rescue Civilization differs from other so-called doomsday projects. It envisions a lunar base where, in the event of global catastrophe, humans could carry on, protecting DNA samples of life on Earth and maintaining a bank of human knowledge.” They will all be avid readers of BLDGBLOG].

“What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?” the New York Times asked this morning. Indeed.
After all, any doomsday deserving of the word would surely destroy London – as well as every other city along with it. Perhaps even the whole planet.
Thankfully, then, there’s the so-called Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC. According to the New York Times, ARC is “a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge – the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah.”
It’s interesting to read Biblical metaphors in the context of what amounts to science fiction, I have to say; at the very least, this raises the question of what officially banned Catholic heresies might once have existed – whose practitioners were all burnt at the stake for simply having reimagined the Bible as a kind of space opera written by Isaac Asimov. Emerging from the desert is a machine, full of light, called The Transubstantiator. Satanic anti-churches of dark matter spiral through magnetic voids…
In any case, the “mission” of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization is, in their own words, “to protect the human species and its civilization from destruction that could result from a global catastrophic event, including nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague and asteroid collisions. To fulfill its mission, ARC is dedicated to creating continuously staffed facilities on the Moon and other locations away from Earth. These facilities will preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements, and of the species important to our civilization. In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth.”
The near impossibility of choosing exactly what “species [are] important to our civilization” is an issue for another day.
Finally, the idea of building a post-terrestrial earth surrogate that will save – or even mischievously re-direct – the human future is nothing new; a somewhat similar project, for instance, is Asteromo, Paolo Soleri’s space-based drifting utopia, an artificial asteroid within which astral pilgrims will breed.

(Earlier: Lunar urbanism 6, Lunar urbanism 5, Lunar urbanism 4, Lunar urbanism 3 – and so on).

[Image: Courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory].

There are a wide variety of overlooked and forgotten ways in which humans participate with, and alter, the biological systems around them. A few seeds, trapped in the soles of our shoes, can cross oceans with us in airplanes, bringing gardens, and weeds, and parasite species, to the other side of the earth; trace amounts of infectious diseases can cling to our clothes and decimate livestock several nations away; snakes, rats, spiders, mosquitoes – all can easily ride the ships and planes of globalization.
Our economy is crowded with invasive stowaways intent on surviving elsewhere – even if survival means irretrievably altering the new host environment.
In other words, travel itself can be something of a biological activity: we do the migratory work of other species for them. We take them with us. Importations of even the smallest microbe can sufficiently alter an ecological niche, opening it up to further changes – then compounding over time into whole new landscapes. What would happen naturally is accelerated: a thousand years in a decade.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to learn that strange things are afoot in Antarctica.

(To read more, you’ll have to visit WorldChanging – for whom this post was originally written).

[Image: From Spam Architecture, ©Alex Dragulescu].

Alex Dragulescu has some extremely interesting projects up on his website right now. For the most part, they’re “experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.”
However, this one – called Spam Architecture – totally blows me away: “The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.”

[Image: From Spam Architecture, ©Alex Dragulescu].

Applying this to large-scale architectural design would be endlessly and hypnotically fascinating – not to mention quite profitable if you turned it into a kind of immersive, 3-dimensional version of Tetris. You turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into architectural structures; your Ph.D. thesis, exported as an inhabitable object; every bank statement you’ve ever received, transformed into a small Cubist city.
Your whole DVD collection, informationally re-presented as a series of large angular buildings.
Of course, you could also reverse the process, and input CAD diagrams of a Frank Gehry building – thus generating an inbox-clogging river of spam email. The Great Wall of China, emailed around the world in an afternoon. The collected works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
In any case, Dragulescu currently works at the Experimental Game Lab at UC-San Diego – the same institution at which Sheldon Brown developed his Scalable City project.

(Thanks to Brent Kissel for the tip about Dragulescu – and you can read more here – and to Brian Romer for Scalable City).

The Marine Mammal Center (MMC) in Sausalito, California, treats elephant seals injured by “shark bites, gunshot wounds, and untenable toxins in their liquid habitat,” Architecture magazine explains. “Half of all injured pinnipeds and cetaceans found in the United States – typically 700 over recent years, mostly reported by vigilant fishermen – are treated here.”
More relevant to the present website, however, the MMC is now receiving a much-needed, multi-million dollar architectural upgrade – and the new design fascinatingly incorporates a derelict “pair of Nike missile silos.”

[Image: Architecture Magazine].

“A dozen anti-aircraft missiles were first secured here in two 3,000-square-foot underground berths,” Architecture tells us. “Soon, one of those deep concrete wells will contain all of the hospital facility’s water processing equipment, keeping it away from the sun’s damaging rays and freeing the territory above ground for recovery functions… The other silo will contain long-term freezer storage of animal tissue specimens for study.”
Let’s hope neither of them accidentally go off.
Of course, reusing missile silos for architectural purposes is nothing new – and, in skimming the original article, I actually thought the silos would be turned into functioning aquariums – but the project still works as a brilliant engagement with existing site conditions.
You can see one or two more images of the design at the website of Gyroscope, Inc., the project architects –

– where, for instance, we find the above diagram. “Because the center operates around the clock,” Architecture explains, “illumination for night had to be directed in a manner sensitive to the fact that animals in the bay use light for migration. A portion of the pools will always be shaded by overhead awnings – many of which will be lined with photovoltaic panels, thanks to a generous donor – giving the animals a choice of where to hang out, and cutting down on cooling costs.”
On the other hand, at least one question remains: seeing as how the missile silos will not be turned into functioning aquariums, is there an aquarium avant-garde anywhere else – and, if so, what does it look like? My provisional vote is for a series of truly gargantuan blimps dragging huge, transparent, cable-tethered aquariums full of coral reefs, fish, and blue whales through the skies of Baghdad.
The insurgency might end right then and there: dazzled, confused, feeling touched by the miraculous, the only thing the militias will know how to do is just put down their guns – and stare.

In April 2006, a city-wide writing program began in Philadelphia. Called the Autobiography Project, the program’s basic idea was to invite residents of the city to tell ther own life stories – or simply individual stories taken from their lives – using 300 words or less. The Project even sponsored community writing workshops for those Philadelphians unsure of their literary abilities – and some workshops were so successful that similar such groups may become regular fixtures at the institutions involved.
More than 340 memoirs were submitted over a six-week period. A panel of local writers and cultural figures then chose 20 particularly memorable autobiographies, and these were printed as full-size posters, complete with a photograph of each author, and installed within bus shelters throughout the city. The posters were taken down on July 23rd.
You can read more about the project at WorldChanging, where this post was originally published.

[Image: A partially inflatable immigrant-detention center, photographed by The New York Times – though their article is now pay-per-view].

Between statelessness and Westphalian sovereignty you apparently get inflatable architecture, instant cities on the carceral edge between two systems of power: “As the Bush administration gets tougher on illegal immigration and increases its spending on enforcement,” the New York Times reported last week, “some of the biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that have been building and running private prisons around the country.”
This is referred to as the “detention market,” and it is “projected to increase by $200 million to $250 million over the next 12 to 18 months” – an astonishing increase of 400%. (Invest now).
These “beds within the border region” are managed with Wal-Mart-like efficiency. Indeed, making beds “available quickly is considered an advantage in the industry since the government’s need for prison space is often immediate and unpredictable. Decisions about where to detain an immigrant are based on what is nearby and available. Immigration officials consider the logistics and cost of transportation to the detention center and out of the country.”
All of which defines a new political space wherein real-time logistics, transport infrastructure, the rise of the market-state, private investment, and post-Archigramian inflatable architecture strangely merge.
Two quotations seem appropriate here, both taken from Philip Bobbitt’s recent – and extraordinarily dense – look at historical mutations within the concept and practice of constitutional sovereignty.
As the nation-state is superceded by the market-state, Bobbitt explains, we are witnessing a clash of tactical responsibilities: “What is appropriate for the market-state – with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment – seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation.” Of course, this is exactly what we see today in the U.S. immigration debate: an argument for the economic necessity of immigrant labor, including financial opportunity for all, vs. an argument for national border security and the protection of legal citizens.
“There is a grotesque disparity,” Bobbitt writes, “between the rapid movement of international capital and the ponderous and territorially circumscribed responses of the nation-state, as clumsy as a bear chained to a stake, trying to chase a shifting beam of light.”
The almost Dr. Seussian world of inflatable immigrant-detention camps, as explored by The New York Times, is perhaps evidence of this sovereign clumsiness.

(The NYT article was also covered by Bryan Finoki over at Subtopia; meanwhile, a rather old BLDGBLOG post explores the idea of “criminal aliens needing beds“).