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[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.)

Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio.

The “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” (2014) was a fictional design project we originally set in the vast limestone province of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.

[Image: A rock-acid drip-irrigation hub for the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis,” a collaboration between BLDGBLOG and WROT Studio; all images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio.]

The Nullarbor Plain is a nearly treeless region, roughly the size of Nebraska. It is also the world’s largest karst landscape, and thus home to hundreds of natural caves.

“There is a great variety of cave types under the Nullarbor,” as Australian Geographic explains, “but the plain’s most interesting features are long, deep systems (such the Old Homestead Cave), which are found only here, in the U.S. state of Florida, and on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, all of which all have similar karst limestone layers.”

The Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis was imagined as a remote, thinly staffed site for applied geological research, where huge artificial caves could be generated below the Earth’s surface using a special acid mix—as safe as vinegar, but, importantly for our project, capable of dissolving limestone on a greatly accelerated timescale.

Subterranean spaces of every conceivable size, from tiny hollows and capillaries to vast megastructures, could thus be acid-etched into even the deepest karst formations, both rapidly and over decadal expanses of time.

The resulting rooms, tunnels, and interconnected cave systems could be used for a wide range of purposes: generating speleo-pharmaceuticals, for example, as well as testing recreational caving equipment, experimenting with underground agricultural systems, or developing new technologies for subterranean navigation, communication, inhabitation, and mapping.

As John writes on his own website—where you can also see larger, more-detailed versions of these images—our “aberrant caverns,” in John’s phrase, would be monitored in real-time by autonomous systems operating 24 hours a day.

The ever-growing caves could thus be left on their own, unsupervised, while the acid-drip system gradually etches down, drop by drop, reaching increasingly remote underground realms that the acid itself creates.

As a preliminary step, different blends of rock-acid mix would first be tested on large pillars aboveground, to choose or highlight specific spatial effects.

Controlled showers of rock-acid would result in totem-like sculptures, like industrial-scale menhirs—Stone Age ritual artifacts by way of 21st-century geochemistry.

Once the desired effects have been achieved, fields of bladders, nozzles, and injection arrays can be programmed and choreographed to enlarge an artificial cave mouth.

The irrigation system can then be continued underground. Necklaces of acid-drip arrays can easily be extended underground in order to expand the cave itself, but also to lengthen certain tunnels or to experiment with architecturally stable cave formations.

As John explains, the images seen here depict an “injection array using a pressurized system to move large quantities of solution to underlying areas of the cave network. These injection sites are outwardly the tell for a hidden world below. Much like oil derricks extracting resources from the earth, their density and scale across the landscape give you a glimpse into areas afforded the most resources for injection.”

Our initial siting of this in the Nullarbor Plain was motivated entirely by geology, but other large limestone provinces—from Kentucky or northern Arizona to southern France, and from California’s Lucerne Valley to Egypt—would also be good hosts.

While we looked into standard mining acids, currently used for stripping tailings piles of valuable minerals, it quickly became apparent that specific kinds of acetic acid—again, no more toxic than vinegar—offered a more viable approach for creating a maximally spacious site with minimally polluting environmental implications. (Of course, should someone without such qualms want to explore this set-up with no concern for its ecological impact, then much stronger acids capable of dissolving much stronger rocks could also be explored.)

In 2022, I was excited to see that John returned to this project, generating a new series of images using AI image-generation software trained on our earlier project documentation. Given their provenance, the resulting images are unsurprisingly cinematic—equal parts cyberpunk dereliction and underworldly luminescence.

Over the years, John has become a wizard at producing Modernist geological imagery, publishing images on his Instagram account—rock sculpted as smooth as paper and as diaphanous as a veil or curtain.

Check out his own website for more images of the Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis and other recent projects. And, if you like this, don’t miss “Architecture-by-Bee and Other Animal Printheads,” an earlier project of ours that I’m proud to say was published in Paul Dobraszczyk’s excellent recent book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us.

(All images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio. This post contains a Bookshop.org affiliate link, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.)