Tag: Representation

Buy a Map

[Image: Photo by Barney Peterson, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle].

Something I meant to post three few weeks ago, before October became the Great Lost Month of constant busyness and over-commitment, is the story of a 70-ton relief map of California, unseen by the public for half a century, that has been re-discovered in San Francisco, sitting in “an undisclosed location on the city’s waterfront.”

[Image: Photo by Barney Peterson, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle].

In its time, the map was considered far too marvelous for simply cutting up and storing—but that’s exactly what’s happened to it.

It was as long as two football fields and showed California in all its splendor, from Oregon to Mexico, with snow-capped mountains, national parks, redwood forests, a glorious coastline, orchards and miniature cities basking in the sun. It was made of plaster, wire, paint, and bits of rock and sand. In the summer of 1924, Scientific American magazine said it was the largest map in the world.

However, we read, “The problem with the map is simple: it is huge and would cost a lot of money to move, restore and display it. The last estimate was in the range of $500,000. And that was 30 years ago. It is a classic white elephant, too valuable to scrap, but too expensive to keep.”

And, today, it’s not going anywhere: “The Port of San Francisco has no plans to be anything but stewards of its storage, and no one else has come forward in half a century to rescue the map.” If you have half-a-million dollars or so, and heavy moving equipment at your disposal, then perhaps it could soon be yours.

(Thanks to Steve Silberman for the link. In the archives: San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model; Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, and Buy a Silk Mill].

Optical Spelunking

[Image: The CAVE at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, now called the CAVCaM].

I mentioned a week or two ago that I had been out to Reno, Nevada, visiting, among other things, the Desert Research Institute, where Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography, Mark Smout of Smout Allen, and I began a roadtrip down to Los Angeles, through San Francisco—less a city than a peninsular amphitheater of conflicting microclimates—by way of the Virtual Reality CAVE that you see pictured here.

[Image: Daniel Coming, Principle Investigator of the CAVCaM, manipulates geometries that don’t exist, and we photograph him as he does so].

The facility is no longer called the CAVE, I should add; it’s now the CAVCaM, or Center for Advanced Visualization, Computation and Modeling. CAVCaM “strives to maintain a state-of-the-art visualization system, improve data collections, simulations, and analyses of scientific information from the environment.”

Advancements will create new capabilities for multidisciplinary research, produce top tier visualization environments for use by the broader scientific community, and offer opportunities to improve management decisions including prediction, planning, mitigation, and public education throughout Nevada and the world.

It also blows the minds of landscape theorists and practitioners in the process.

[Image: Touring virtual light].

In most of the photos here you see Matthew Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Bill Gilbert from the Land Arts of the American West program, and activist landscape historian and theorist Lucy Lippard all trying their hands at setting virtual forest fires, chasing digital terrains off cliffs, and navigating a world of overlapping proximities that sewed together around us like high-end neurological garmentry—a perfectly tailored world of pharaonic nonexistence, standing in tombs of imagery and light—to become almost seamlessly 3D. Glimpsing, in advance, possible afterlives of the optic nerve.

[Image: Cthulhoid satellites appear in space before you, rotating three-dimensionally in silence].

Of course, these photos also show the inteprid Dr. Daniel Coming, “Principle Investigator” of the CAVCaM—a fantastic job title, implying that this strange machinic environment that the DRI has built isn’t so much put to use, in a dry, straight-forward, functional way, but investigated, researched, explored. Daniel showed us all how to use the hand controls, putting on a display of virtual light and shadows. Objects that were never built, reflecting light that isn’t real.

We were all there on an invitation from the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art—who don’t appear in these photographs, but were absolutely key in making this tour happen.

[Images: Photos by BLDGBLOG and Nicola Twilley].

For whatever reason, meanwhile, that last photograph, above, featuring Matthew Coolidge, Bill Gilbert, and Lucy Lippard seemingly entranced—as we all were—by this new altarpiece of virtual surfaces, reminds me of the final lines from R.S. Thomas’s old poem “Once”:

Confederates of the natural day,
We went forth to meet the Machine.

Or perhaps it was the Machine that has come to meet us.

[Image: The CAVCaM reboots after a universe of simulation].

Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City

[Image: From Procedural Modeling of Cities by Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller].

Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol.

In 2001 Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller spoke at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California, to present a mathematical city. Their presentation contained an algorithmic approach for modeling city-like topologies. The results were remarkably realistic, and were one among a host of city-like generative systems to appear at the start of the decade.

Another, Jared Tarbell’s Substrate (pictured) remains a fantastic example of how a mathematical approach to generating apparently urban patterns can also be artful.

[Image: From Jared Tarbell’s Substrate].

But it was looking at the work of Parish and Müller that inspired game designer Chris Delay to develop his most recent project: the cryptic (and as-yet-unexplained) Subversion, of which little is known, other than it relies on large, procedurally generated cities for the backbone of its game world.

Having already been burned by the problems of creating content “by hand,” Delay set out to let algorithms do the work of building buildings in his new game. Not only that, but he was determined to create an artistically interesting experience without artists.

[Images: From Chris Delay’s Subversion].

Of course, videogames have long been the home of procedurally generated landscapes where numbers and mathematical equations played the role of the visual designer. Early paranoid classic The Sentinel made use of these techniques to create an astonishingly atmospheric 10,000 levels in simple vector graphics, from just a few kilobytes of data. Other games have used similar techniques as a shortcut to creating solar systems and vast fractal landscapes.

But when it came to cities, well, it took a long time for anyone to take up the challenge.

[Image: From The Sentinel by Geoff Crammond].

Rather than opt for procedural techniques, game designers usually elect to build their cities by hand, often with startling results. The re-imagined contemporary New York that features in last year’s Grand Theft Auto 4 required a small army of well-paid artists and designers to hand-craft the entire world. Their accomplishment is unmatched, but the cost to the company behind the project is in the tens—and perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars. To build up a living city from blank polygons is one of the most expensive possible projects in game design.

Delay, whose project is being undertaken with a tiny budget and by just a handful of staff based in Cambridge, UK, does not have the luxury of vast content teams. His vector-drawn city is far less realistic than Rockstar‘s textured, heaving metropolis, but there’s nevertheless a beauty to it. It’s a kind of mathematical map of the essential urban environment: there are roads, sidewalks, and a no-man’s land of corporate moats around great skyscrapers…

Identify the key equation that define urban patterns, and you, too, can summon a city into existence.

Delay has begun to show off how his cities emerge from the ground up in a series of videos, and he spoke to me about the process.

“I started out with road layouts, and then began to modify the parameters,” he explained. “Sometimes you’ll get lovely radial, spiral patterns, or you can tell it to create a really rigid Manhattan-style grid.” One set of numbers delivers the block logic of American cities, another is rather more like the spirals of Medieval European sprawls. The two merge to create something even more believable. “Every subsequent layer builds on the previous layer,” Delay points out, “so the very next layer looks for the spaces between layers, and makes judgments about ‘is this likely to be a skyscraper, or to be a house?’ Then you zoom in, and carry on. You do another procedural generation process for each layer of detail, filling in that world.”

[Image: From Chris Delay’s Subversion].

A few weeks after speaking with Delay I attended Thrilling Wonder Stories—a seminar at the Architectural Association in London, curated by Liam Young and BLDGBLOG—where I watched conceptual designer Viktor Antonov explain how he had created a science-fictionalized Paris (for a now-cancelled videogame called The Crossing).

Antonov approached the problem by altering just a few parameters in the standard architectural model. For instance, Antonov had noticed a few fundamental details about how the mid-nineteenth century neo-classical core of Paris had been constructed: big street-level floors, smaller attic spaces, complex chimney stacks. By increasing the emphasis on the lower floors, and stretching them out—and by emphasizing the height and complexity of the chimneys—Antonov was able to create a thematically consistent science fiction Paris.

Simply by altering a few basic architectural parameters, he said, you were able to fictionalize the city, whilst at the same time retaining its fundamental identity. His designs were still recognizably—even mathematically—Parisian, in other words, but they were also otherworldly.

[Image: By Viktor Antonov].

This idea instantly connected back to Delay’s project: what parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor.

And perhaps this is not such an outlandish thing to aim for—especially when you consider the speed at which procedural city projects have been appearing across the tech landscape. Could one of these cities potentially be refitted to allow for this type of radical tweak?

Projects like Shamus Young’s impressive PixelCity, or Marco Corbetta‘s Structure seem ripe for such strange fictions. Corbetta’s system is particularly impressive in its verisimilitude: he aims to create a basic engine for rapidly generating the kinds of cities that games like Grand Theft Auto 4 require, and consequently doing so for much cheaper.

Could Corbetta’s engine come with a Paris or a Barcelona preload, which could then be put through Photoshop-style filters for alternate reality logic in its architecture? A stronger skyline, weirder street furniture.

[Image: From Marco Corbetta’s Structure].

More exciting, at least for the thrill-seeking gamer in me, is the fact that Corbetta is aiming one notch higher than any of his peers: he’s aiming to make these cities procedurally destructible. His site contains a demonstration video of neatly arrange office interiors and a domestic library being blown to pieces with a machine-gun. What good is an imaginary city if you can’t go inside the buildings? What good is a virtual downtown if you can’t go crazy with a bazooka? Corbetta’s work preempts these questions.

Further, it conjures visions of massive demolition exercises in parallel worlds—entering an Antonov-algorithm for neo-Rome, where gladiatorial escapades see us going through the walls of the coliseum and into the randomly generated plazas beyond.

That, perhaps, is the greatest promise of procedural cities: that soon they’ll be real enough that their destruction will seem like tragedy.

[Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol appeared on BLDGBLOG in May, and he has written a previous guest post, Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds].

The Landscape Anthropology of Photography Museums (and the spatial implications of graven images)

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Belgian architects and scenographers l’Escaut have completed a new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, Belgium.
In an email received this morning, l’Escaut describes the project as being “situated at the intersection of architecture, landscape, city planning, photography and fine arts.”
This wide-ranging program, they go on to point out, “matches the interdisciplinarity of l’Escaut both in its daily life (l’Escaut is situated in a building shared with theatre actors and artists) as in its architecture practice (anthropology, landscaping, city planning, communication intervene in the projects).”
They are not really architects, in other words; they practice something more like landscape anthropology.

[Images: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photos by Filip Dujardin].

L’Escaut’s new wing is a surprising addition to the existing structure.
Partly raised on stilts, partly cantilevered, and almost entirely defined by a very clean-lined modern geometry, the added galleries nonetheless include a brief glimpse of botanical free-will: a “winter garden” that “shelters fragrant plants inside the museum.” Photosynthesis meets photography.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

The galleries themselves, we’re told, are part of an overall “spatial scenography” of the site. Everything here is about views, counter-views, cross-views, and panoramas. Everything helps to frame everything else.
The architecture itself is photographic, you could say: the rooms flow into each other through a succession of bare white walls and exposed concrete, as if the space has been edited.
This raises the question, though, of the point at which space, actively experienced, becomes cinematic.
Are buildings ever truly photographic, or are they more like short films?

[Images: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photos by Filip Dujardin].

In any case, the story behind the original building itself is fascinating: it turns out that the Museum of Photography is a former Carmelite convent. The grounds include what used to be the nuns’ orchard.
This entails all sorts of interesting theological problems, as we’ll see.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Religious prohibitions against “graven images” become abstractly involved in the planning process:

The transformation of the convent into a museum of photography was a reverse process of existing logics in the building. A place where looking at the world was forbidden because of religious reasons became a place of revelation of the image for societal reasons. Its extension defies conventional museum logics by multiplying the relationships to photography, its history and its many facets of representation.

In other words, is a museum of photography – a temple of the graven image – a site for the “revelation of the image,” as the architects write – an inherent violation of Christian doctrine?
Is it de facto heresy to celebrate photography in a site formerly dedicated to the worship of god?
These unresolved tensions help to animate the interlinked spaces of the museum itself.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l’Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Here are some photos of the construction process, More about the project, meanwhile, can be found here.

Mars Bungalow and the Prison of Simulation

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

Following a few links from the perennially great things magazine, I discovered this new attempt at a future Martian architecture.

Meant to house “visitors,” we read, at the Martian north pole, “ANY Design Studios has designed a robot on legs built of Martian ice.” It comes complete with padded walls and a nice little bed.

Note, however, that the walls (on the right) have been painted to look like the Pacific northwest: even on Mars, we will live within simulations.

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

“What would it be like to spend nearly two Earth years at the Martian north pole,” we’re asked, “a place where darkness falls for nine months of the year, carbon dioxide snow flutters down in winter and temperatures drop to a chilly minus 150 centigrade?” I, for one, think it would be wonderful.

[Image: ANY Design Studios, via Building Design].

The architecture itself is “a self assembling six module robotic design on tracked landing legs.” It’s thus a cluster of smaller buildings that, together, “would allow for ten people to live indefinitely at the pole.”

The architects behind the project go on to explain that they “have also been exploring the possibility of reproducing programmable Earth environments in a room we have called the ‘Multi Environment Chamber’. Settlers on Mars may well be able to make themselves a cup of tea and settle into a chair with the sun gently warming their skin, cool breezes, and the sound of songbirds of an English orchard on a warm July afternoon” – assuming that such an experience wasn’t precisely what you were trying to get away from in the first place.

These “programmable Earth environments,” though, should undoubtedly include a setting in which you are sitting in a room in southern California, which has been kitted out to look like a Martian base – inside of which a man sits, reminiscing about a room in southern California that he once decorated to look like a Martian bungalow… Which would be referred to as the interplanetary architecture of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Phrased otherwise, of course, all of this would simply be an inversion of what William L. Fox describes in his recent book, Driving to Mars. There, Fox writes about “the idea of practicing Mars on Earth” – which means simply that, even as I write this, there are teams of astronauts on a remote base in northern Canada, acting as if they are already surrounded by Martian topography.

It’s a form of psychological training: act as if you have already arrived.

So you simply turn that around and find, here, that anyone living inside this “self assembling six module robotic design on tracked landing legs” will really be “practicing Earth on Mars.”

Act as if you never left.

But why not practice, say, Jupiter, instead? Why not be even more ambitious and use each planet in this solar system as a base from which to simulate the rest?

Or you could just abandon simulation altogether, of course, and experience Mars as Mars.

It’s interesting, though, in this context, to look at the naming practices used by NASA through which they claim – or at least label – Martian territory. Landscapes on Earth toponymically reappear on the Martian plains; there is Bonneville Crater and Victoria Crater, for instance; there is Cape Verde and a cute little rock called “Puffin.”

Mars is an alien landscape, then, in everything but name.

Even more fascinating, at least for me, is the small range of Martian hills now “dedicated to the final crew of Space Shuttle Columbia.” Accordingly, these hills now appear on maps as the Columbia Hills Complex. An entire landscape named after dead American astronauts? Surely there’s a J.G. Ballard story about something exactly like this?

Then again, according to one reviewer: “A story by J.G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don’t think.” Uh oh.

(Note: For more on Martian architecture don’t miss the unbelievably weird proposal behind Mars Power!, discussed earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Mars and its stunt double


[Images: A “faux Mars” being air-brushed and constructed in a lab in southern California “to simulate the environment” on the red planet. Contrast that with a photo taken by Spirit, the robotic Ansel Adams of Mars, showing “Larry’s Lookout, a pit stop along the robot’s uphill trail as it explores the red planet.”