Espionage – BLDGBLOG

Celestial Detector

[Image: View larger! From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

I had a new piece of short fiction commissioned by the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale that was just published last week over at e-flux.

The theme of the Triennale this year is “How Heavy is a City?” To address that, I wrote about a fictional German physicist named Wendell Brandt. During the Cold War, Brandt proposed using cosmic particles—known as muons—to spy under the Berlin Wall.

[Image: From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

Although Brandt (and the story’s first-person narrator) is entirely fictional, muon tomography—or muography—is a real visualization technique.

Muons are constantly passing through all of us—through our skin and bones, our cars and buildings, through the mountains and landforms around us. They are so small, moving so quickly, that they have little interaction with matter. We never feel them, though they are inside our muscle and bone; we never see them, though they pass through our pupils and optic nerves.

Although muons are everywhere, they are surprisingly few in number: every second, fewer than ten muons pass through an area the size of your palm, literally just a handful. With the right instrumentation, however, the passage of muons can be recorded, like light on a digital sensor, which means that, given enough time, muons can be used to create images. Similar to an X-ray, the resulting “muographs,” as they are known, reveal otherwise inaccessible voids inside even the densest of materials.

Muography allows people to peer inside dense materials and structures, from cathedrals and hydroelectric dams to Mayan temples and Egyptian pyramids. Or, of course, entire neighborhoods in Cold War Berlin.

[Images: From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

Brandt’s experiment in celestial espionage took advantage of an abandoned church near the Berlin Wall where, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, he installed his first detector. As the data came in, however, Brandt became obsessed with exactly who he was spying on—perhaps even old friends and family members, now isolated in East Berlin by the construction of the Wall.

In a project notebook I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, I found that Brandt had used several pages as a personal journal, reflecting on his experience developing muographic techniques in Berlin. The notes—strangely, written in English, as if he had hoped his American sponsors would someday read them—suggested a scientific curiosity gradually becoming more philosophical. Whether muons could image strategically important military features gave way to speculation about families living in apartments nearby, about the quiet lives of fellow Germans separated by the Wall—people who, he believed, he would never meet face to face. All he would know of them were these shadows and blurs, etched by cosmic particles on secret electronics in the deep.

Brandt’s fixation with capturing the lives of strangers, using particles from space, led him onward from there to a series of increasingly ambitious scientific experiments. These included, after the fall of the Wall in November 1989, a purpose-built architectural facility for rigorously measuring the passage of muons.

[Images: From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

Although there is much more to the (fictional) story, Brandt’s experiments culminated in a massive lab constructed beneath a remote California town, within the San Andreas Fault.

[Image: From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

Although his scientific goal there was to see if muography could be used to image large-scale terrestrial phenomena, such as a moving tectonic fault, Brandt began to notice, within the data, the outlines of the town above, down to individual houses and rooms—even, over the course of fifteen years, specific pieces of furniture showing up in the resulting scans.

Once again, Brandt was looking into the lives of strangers from below, using particles from space.

[Image: From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

The story itself, I hope, is worth reading in full, but the visuals are a huge part of it. Those were all produced by John Becker of WROT Studio, a frequent collaborator of mine (for projects like the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” and 3D-printing concrete bees).

John put together some spectacular depictions of architecture as imaged using muons, including short AI-generated film sequences and a larger animation that will be screened in Lisbon at the Triennale next month.

[Image: View larger! From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.]

The story was at least partially inspired by my old friend Lebbeus Woods, whose fictional projects—including his proposal for an unmade film called “Underground Berlin”—are never far from my mind.

Check it out, if you get a chance.

(Thanks to Nick Axel of e-flux for editorial guidance, and to Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino of Territorial Agency for commissioning the story in the first place.)

Seer

A few weeks ago, The Economist looked at the growing problem of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” in the field of espionage. It describes the difficulty of maintaining a rigorous or believable cover story, for example, when genealogy websites might be consulted by adversarial border agents to verify that a potential spy is who she says she is, where internet cookies and undeleted search histories might reveal a hidden identity, or, of course, when fitness trackers, smartphones, and other networked devices specifically exist for the purpose of recording our current locations and recent activities. We now pay to be tracked, then seek self-awareness in the data.

I’ll admit, however, that I was expecting the Economist article to go into a bit more detail about the ubiquitous tech part of its headline. That is, we are living through the rise of an immersive, real-time, omnipresent environment of always-on sensors that are now coextensive both with urban space and with modern transportation infrastructure, from airports to ride-sharing apps. The article does refer to techniques such as “retroactive surveillance,” whereby an intelligence agency, investigative team, or police authority can spool backward in time, so to speak, following every move you made prior to arriving at a particular moment or destination; but, again, I think there’s more to be said about the fact that the built environment itself is, for all intents and purposes, becoming a gigantic archive, at all scales, forensically recording every event that occurs within it, with few or no options for opting out.

The recent story of the Coldplay concert kiss-cam is only one superficial example of how commercial experiences are now all but premised on the possibility of being archived, from the cameras in strangers’ pockets to all-seeing eyes like the one that caught a cheating couple mid-embrace. Indeed, being caught on camera is often presented now as one of the main highlights of attending a concert or sports event in the first place: looking up through a haze of light and anonymity to see your own face on a gigantic screen, then raising your arms and cheering, because the lottery of public surveillance has found you, momentarily pulling you out of the crowd and giving your life a taste of communal validation. For three seconds, you are the star. This is ubiquitous technical surveillance as both promise and thrill.

Again, though, cameras and such like are only the most superficial recording technologies at work. Recall that underground fiber-optic cable networks can also be tapped as seismic sensors, recording vehicle traffic and pedestrian footfall (and, in some cases, private conversations) or that smartphone accelerometers, networked microphones, and even self-driving vehicles are now recording not just our facial expressions but our vibrations and bodily movements.

To this can be added much longer-term recording processes, something I’m exploring in a new book project, whereby our everyday activities also often, if unintentionally, leave behind archaeologically legible electromagnetic traces. The ubiquitous technical surveillance The Economist discusses becomes intergenerational. A single campfire in a field somewhere can leave a magnetic trace in the soil that lasts centuries, even millennia.

It is often presented as a reason for nihilism or melancholy, that our lives are ultimately fleeting, insubstantial, and almost certainly destined for oblivion, leaving behind nothing to remember or memorialize us; but I think there’s a much stranger fate taking shape at the moment, which is that, no matter what we do, it is as if we cannot disappear. We can always be found. We, in a sense, cannot be left behind; we will always be remembered and carried along with everyone else—a statement that perhaps once inspired reassurance and comfort, even cultural cohesion, but increasingly feels like an authoritarian threat.

Assignment Baghdad

[Image: Screen-grab from a YouTube compilation of Desert Storm missile strikes].

In the summer of 2016, I heard an incredible story from a retired Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. It combined architectural history, international espionage, an alleged graduate research seminar in Washington D.C., and the first Gulf War. I was hooked.

According to this story, a graduate class at a school somewhere in D.C. had set out to collect as much architectural information as it could about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This meant, at one point, even flying to Europe on a group field trip to visit engineering firms that had done work for Saddam Hussein.

Given the atmosphere at the time, the students most likely thought that their class was an act of protest, a kind of anti-war gesture, meant to help record, document, and even preserve Iraqi architecture before it was destroyed by the U.S. invasion.

Ironically, though, unbeknownst to those students—possibly even to their professor—the seminar’s research was being used to help target U.S. smart bombs. Or, as I phrase this in a new article for The Daily Beast, “there was a reason U.S. forces could put a missile through a window in Baghdad: they knew exactly where the window was. Architecture students in Washington D.C. had unwittingly helped them target it.”

[Image: YouTube].

But then things got complicated.

When I called my source back a few weeks later to follow up, it felt like a scene from a spy film: he said he didn’t remember telling me this (!) before joking that he was getting old and maybe saying things he shouldn’t have. This obviously only made me more determined to find out more.

I called every major school in Washington D.C. I FOIA’d the CIA. I started down a series of rabbit holes that led me from true stories of Gulf War espionage, involving U.S. attempts to collect blueprints for Saddam’s bunkers from engineering firms all over Europe, to a conversation with the head of targeting for the entire U.S. Air Force during Operation Desert Storm.

Along the way, I also kept finding more and more examples of architects and espionage, from Baron Robert Baden-Powell’s incredible use of butterfly sketches to hide floor plans of enemy forts to a 16th-century Italian garden designer who was, most likely, a spy.

[Image: Robert Baden-Powell’s clever use of entomological sketches to hide enemy floorplans, from his essay “My Adventures as a Spy.” See also Mark David Kaufman’s interesting essay about Baden-Powell for the Public Domain Review].

Even Michelangelo gets involved, as his designs for urban fortifications outside Florence, Italy, were secretly modeled in cork and snuck out of the city by an architect named Niccolò di Raffaello dei Pericoli—or Tribolo—in order to help plan a more effective siege (an anecdote I have written about here before).

In any case, I was sitting on this story for the past two years, waiting for my FOIA request to come back from the CIA and trying to set up interviews with people who might have known, first-hand, what I was asking about. The resulting article, my attempt to track down whether such a class took place, is finally up over at The Daily Beast. If any of the above sounds interesting, please click through to check it out.

Finally, of course, if this rings any bells with you—if you took a class like this and, in retrospect, now have doubts about its real purpose—please be in touch.

Worth the Weight

In the midst of a long New York Times article about the serial theft of offensive cyberweapons from the National Security Agency, there’s a brief but interesting image. “Much of [a core N.S.A. group’s] work is labeled E.C.I., for ‘exceptionally controlled information,’ material so sensitive it was initially stored only in safes,” the article explains. “When the cumulative weight of the safes threatened the integrity of N.S.A.’s engineering building a few years ago, one agency veteran said, the rules were changed to allow locked file cabinets.”

It’s like some undiscovered Italo Calvino short story: an agency physically deformed by the gravitational implications of its secrets, its buildings now bulbous and misshapen as the literal weight of its mission continues to grow.

In Case You Missed Them

There are a few books I wanted to mention here at the height of the holiday season, not because they’re new or even necessarily recent but because, selfishly, I simply wish more people had read them. If you’re looking for an extra gift, or just a last-minute surprise, for anyone with an interest in architecture, landscape, archaeology, acoustics, geopolitics, history, and more, here are eight titles to consider.

(1) The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History by Daniel Jütte (Yale University Press)—This is an academic work, in both tone and approach, but of the ideal kind: nearly every page had something I wanted to underline, write down, or scramble to look up elsewhere. Put simply, The Strait Gate is a history of the door, but, as Jütte shows, this ultra-quotidian architectural detail—the dividing line between inside and outside—has political, psychological, Constitutional, philosophical, mythological, narrative, cultural, and even material implications that are easy to overlook. Whether it’s a controversial order that “all door handles and knobs be removed from homes and shops” so that the metal could be melted down for war materiel, divine gateways as described in the Book of Revelation, or the resonant phenomenon of Torschlusspanik—“panic of gate closure,” aka a fear of being locked out—Jütte’s book is a superb example of how we can still look at architecture afresh.

(2) The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton University Press)—What did cultures without the benefit of modern scientific knowledge think of the monstrous skeletons and fossilized bones they occasionally unearthed? Quite a lot, as it happens. It turns out that huge chunks of human mythology, including the existence of dragons and the idea of an extinct race of titanic super-human ancestors, can all be traced back to misinterpretations of paleontology. Mayor’s writing is casually engaging—even quite funny, at times—and the book’s many examples of ancient human societies encountering monstrous, inexplicable, and possibly otherworldly things hidden in the earth stuck with me long after reading it.

(3) The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World by Trevor Cox (W.W. Norton)—If you have even a passing interest in sound, this is the book to read. Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer, introduces readers to sonic phenomena around the world, both naturally occurring and artificially induced, from the frozen surface of Russia’s Lake Baikal to Stone Age tombs in rural England. There are examples of sound art, acoustic science, and even landscape-scale auditory effects that easily justify the subtitle, “sonic wonders of the world.” This would pair well with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound, for those of you interested not just in acoustics but in avant-garde composition and ambient music, as well.

(4) The Tomb of Agamemnon by Cathy Gere (Harvard University Press)—This slim book, part of classicist Mary Beard’s excellent (but, sadly, now hibernating) “Wonders of the World” series for Harvard University Press, hit so many sweet spots for me. Author Cathy Gere convincingly shows how Mediterranean archaeological discoveries over the course of the 19th century helped to shape an emerging European mythos of the glories of war and historical empire. These same emphases lent themselves extremely well, however, to tragic and grotesque distortions that soon fed into the twin ideologies of Nazism and 20th-century fascism. Along the way, Gere writes, Classical discoveries misinterpreted by modern biases helped to justify British involvement in World War I. Gere’s book includes a brief, beautiful, and monumentally sad description of young, Homer-quoting scholars being shipped off to war to fight a rising evil from the East—only to be annihilated in the sodden trenches of the Somme. The Tomb of Agamemnon is probably one of my favorite ten books of the past decade; no other book I’ve read in that time conveys the true political stakes of archaeological research and the clear and obvious risks in distorting history for ideological ends.

(5) Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson (Anchor)—It’s a little disingenuous to suggest that this widely publicized book has been overlooked, but Lawrence in Arabia is nonetheless an uncannily well-timed history of the post-World War I Middle East and well worth taking the time to read. I was utterly absorbed by it for nearly a week. Part military adventure, part geopolitical biography of Lawrence of Arabia, part soul-crushing alternative history of a region that could have been—complete with agonizing descriptions of the infamous assault on Gallipoli—this book will make you see the entire 20th century differently, up to and including our own century’s Iraq War and the rise of ISIS.

(6) Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt (Granta)—I mentioned this book in a recent post and I would recommend it again. Map of a Nation tells the story of the British Ordnance Survey, the institute’s original geopolitical context, and the experimental cartographic tools it used to make its imperial surveys more accurate. For anyone interested in geography, maps, landscape, or British history, Hewitt’s book is a must-read.

(7) Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley (Grove/Atlantic)—You don’t need to be interested in the wonkish details of the telephone system to be amazed by the weirdness of Exploding the Phone, Phil Lapsley’s introduction to so-called phone phreaking. On one level, it’s a story of bored teenagers using synthesized sound and DIY home electronics to hack the global telephone network; on another, it’s a story with hugely metaphoric, almost occult undertones. The phone system’s diffuse and labyrinthine system of “inward operators,” robotic mechanical test numbers, and secret military phone exchanges—to name only a few ingredients—takes on the air of something invented by Alan Moore or Grant Morrison: teens encountering a world of numerological connection and mechanical intelligence through handheld receivers in the long afternoons of the 1960s and 70s. So good.

(8) Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor by Ben Hellwarth (Simon & Schuster)—The only thing that makes me pause before recommending Ben Hellwarth’s Sealab right now is that a brand new paperback edition is due out in June 2017; but, that aside, I heartily endorse this one. Imagine Archigram teaming up with a secretive branch of the U.S. military to invent an utterly bonkers new version of human civilization on the ocean floor, and you’ve roughly pictured what this book is about. Whether it’s describing what were, in effect, moon bases at the bottom of the sea or bizarre experiments with farm animals, submerged ecological research stations or Cold War espionage in the Sea of Okhotsk, Sealab is as much outsider architectural history as it is a maritime geopolitical thriller. At the very least, preorder the forthcoming paperback if you want to wait before diving in.

Finally, it’s super-obnoxious to end with my own book, but if you’re looking for something to read this winter—or if you need a gift for someone who can be hard to shop for—consider picking up a copy of A Burglar’s Guide to the City. It’s a mix of true crime, architectural theory, and first-person reporting, from a Chicago lock-picking club to flying with the LAPD’s Air Support Division, from an architect who became the most prolific bank robber of the 19th century to fake apartments run by the British police. A Burglar’s Guide includes interviews with a Toronto burglar known for using the city’s fire code to help pick his next target, with renowned architect Bernard Tschumi, with game designers, and with FBI Special Agents, among others, and the whole thing is currently being adapted for TV by CBS Studios. Check it out, if you get the chance and let me know what you think.

Hot Rock, Lost Rock, Router

21012003800_7a51bd2882_z [Image: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist’s Flickr page].

This past summer, Aram Bartholl installed a project called Keepalive in the woods of Neuenkirchen, Germany. Keepalive was a hollow boulder that contained “a thermoelectric generator which converts heat directly into electricity.”

Visitors are invited to make a fire next to the boulder to power up the wifi router in the stone which then reveals a large collection of PDF survival guides. The piratebox.cc-inspired router which is NOT connected to the Internet offers the users [an opportunity] to download the guides and upload any content they like to the stone database. As long as the fire produces enough heat the router will stay switched on.

First, a chamber was cut into a large rock; the router was then installed inside it.

21189727272_1053f18340_z [Image: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist’s Flickr page].

Next, the chamber was sealed with a piece of metal, and the rock itself was strapped to a delivery truck, to be dropped off in its new home in a wooded meadow.

21173830066_8ef1158b1a_z 21012179148_aa5be0090e_z [Images: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist’s Flickr page].

Finally, a small campfire was started—and, lo and behold, the secret documents made their electromagnetic way to a nearby iPhone, as if conjured into digital existence through the most primitive means of a campfire.

It’s a kind of library in waiting.

21208073201_85db419959_z [Image: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist’s Flickr page].

While the actual, technical realization of the piece leaves something to be desired—by which I simply mean that there is just a large metal plate hiding the cavity inside of which the router is stored, which is visually disappointing—I love the idea that a better-hidden version of this might actually serve a real survivalist purpose someday.

Out on the remote periphery of the city, where you and your family agree to meet should there ever be an earthquake, a hurricane, or an act of terrorism or war, a cached collection of digital files waits utterly hidden from view, sealed inside a boulder with no visible exterior signs. When the Big One hits, out to your hot rock you go.

Of course, in real life, you’d doubtless lose track of the thing and spend two agonizing weeks lighting fire after fire after fire under every boulder in the region, desperately checking your dying phones to see if the digital documents appear… and they never do…

Think, for example, of the genuinely weird—and seemingly half-fictional—story of “Rocky II,” artist Ed Ruscha’s lost geological sculpture in the California desert.

As the Guardian explains, “Rocky II” is a “little-known and unexhibited work by the American artist Ed Ruscha: an artificial rock made out of resin and named ‘Rocky II’ after the Sylvester Stallone movie. A BBC crew filmed Ruscha during its creation for a 1980 documentary, which also captured him depositing the work somewhere in the Mojave desert, where it has apparently remained ever since, indistinguishable from all the other rocks around it.”

Ruscha’s rock is apparently more than just forgotten, it is seemingly nonexistent: “‘Rocky II’ is so mysterious it neither appears on the call for information about missing artworks listed on the artist’s website, nor in the catalogue listing all his known works—almost as if its existence has been intentionally obscured.”

21189756822_ca095d0c0d_z [Image: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist’s Flickr page].

In any case, surely Bartholl’s Keepalive could also be used as an interesting geological tool for espionage, merely a different kind of spy rock, tucked away at a campsite somewhere, waiting for a foreign agent to come along and light a fire.

A few minutes later—invisibly, unexpectedly to anyone but the agent—a tiny router inside the rock whirs to life in the heat and an electromagnetic cache of classified files begins streaming.

(Originally spotted via @curiousoctopus).

Model Warfare

[Image: A carved sandstone model of the incredible walled fortress-city of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, found where else but within the walled fortress-city of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan; photo by BLDGBLOG].

In his new book Oblique Drawing, architectural historian Massimo Scolari refers in a footnote to a story that I have to assume is familiar to many readers, but one that was new to me, connecting architectural models to acts of espionage.

“A significant example [of this connection] is reported by Vasari in the case of the siege of Florence of 1529,” Scolari explains.

During the night, Tribolo and an assistant secretly built an accurate relief model in cork, several meters wide, of the city and its fortifications. It was smuggled out of the besieged city in various pieces concealed inside bales of wool. This allowed the pope, aided by Baldassarre Peruzzi, to direct operations from a distance.

“Although the relief was made in the style of a pictorial view,” Scolari adds, “it was considered evidence of espionage.”

This cork model, meanwhile, conjures images from some as-yet-unwritten novel in which small, seemingly discontinuous models of a city are made in cork and then set floating down the river out of town; guards seeing the models float past simply assume some toymaker’s cart has overturned upstream or that a careless woodshop has tossed its inventory into the river.

But these models are acts of war, to be assembled into a complete model later, and the spatial details they reveal are the vulnerabilities of the city.

[Image: Model of Jaisalmer; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Elsewhere, Scolari refers to other connections between spatial representations of the city and the possible military implications of those representations, once they reach their intended audience. He describes, for instance, “painter-spies who depicted the enemy’s fortresses,” under the guise of a leisurely aesthetic pursuit, and even Goethe once being forced to watched powerlessly as “local authorities” in Malcesine, Italy, “tore up the drawing he had made for his own pleasure of an abandoned castle.” After all, they reasoned, it might have been a fortifications study, or what we might call structural espionage disguised as sketching.

Among many things here, what’s interesting about all this—aside from the dizzying variety of possibilities that arise when thinking about a kind of alternative history of the architectural model as a tool for heists, espionage, assassination, and urban warfare—is that this feared dual-use of architectural images is still alive and well today. We need look no further, for instance, than to often-illegitimate photography bans inside government buildings (or subways), or limits on cameras inside retail stores, or, in the case of my trip to India earlier this year from which the above photos come, a ban on taking photographs from a boat of the Mumbai harbor and even a nationwide ban on aerial photography that was only lifted back in 2004.

In all cases, images depicting architecture are seen not as representationally innocent parts of architectural history but, we might say, as warfare by other means. Indeed, one could easily imagine an entire wing of a spy museum somewhere consisting of nothing but declassified architectural models made with whatever raw materials were available at hand, assembled for no other purpose than to undercut the very spaces they aim to depict.