Category: BLDGBLOG

Benjamin Bratton of The Culture Industry is lecturing tonight at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, presenting his talk The Program Is Not on the Floor: Stories about Projection, Planning, and Partition. According to SCI-Arc, Bratton’s “research, writing, and practical interests include contemporary social theory, the perils and potentials of pervasive computing, architectural theory and provocation, inverse brand theory, software studies, systems design and development, and the spatial rhetorics of exceptional violence.” If you go, tell him BLDGBLOG says hello…

[Image: Courtesy of Morris Architects].

Could nearly 4000 oil rigs soon to be decommissioned in the Gulf of Mexico be retrofitted into an American Dubai of offshore luxury hotels?
If so, would that really be a good idea?

[Image: Courtesy of Morris Architects].

Either way, Morris Architects has proposed exactly that:

There are approximately 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico varying in size, depth and mobility that will be decommissioned within the next century. If a deck on one of these rigs is about 20,000 square feet, then there is potentially 80 million square feet of programmable space just off the coast of the United States. The current method for rig removal is explosion, which costs millions of dollars and destroys massive amounts of aquatic life. What if these rigs were recommissioned as exclusive resort islands? Could the Gulf be America’s “Dubai” and the rig the artificial island on which to build it? This project examines the possibilities of creating a self-sufficient, eco-friendly high-end resort experience in our own backyard – the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Curbed LA, the hotel rooms themselves “are pre-fabricated, designed to be transported out to the rig as a standard cargo container.”

[Images: The rooms arrive by ship – before sliding open to form individual cabinettes. Courtesy of Morris Architects].

Once there, a new world of luxury interiors unfolds above the continental shelf – apparently an ideal environment in which groups of semi-nude women can watch James Bond films.

[Image: Courtesy of Morris Architects].

Of course, if the real Dubai is any model for what might actually happen with such a resort, then we’ll probably see dozens of oil rigs partially converted to luxury hotels only then to be abandoned by their construction crews and investors. As the lands of southern Louisiana continue to disappear into the Gulf, heavily armed refugees on fishing boats will move out to sea, recolonizing the derelict structures. There will be campfires at night, burning driftwood, and specialty gardens.
Within four or five decades of inconsistent contact, the Library of Congress sends out a new, 21st century Alan Lomax to visit those thriving offshore subcultures and record their folk songs and oral histories.

[Image: Courtesy of Morris Architects].

He discovers a sort of new Kalevala, written by dwellers of empty structures at sea, somewhere between creation myth and national folk history. The Kalevala of Abandoned Oil Rigs.
Alas, it turns out to be a latter day Ossian – that is, he just makes the whole thing up.

[Image: Courtesy of Morris Architects].

Or, of course, the economy will recover, this plan will work, and within a decade you’ll be suntanning on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico, reading Self.

(Via Curbed LA, with thanks to David Donald).

[Image: “Not-ice! Wonderful phenomenon!” A flyer by the Proprietor of the London Glaciarium, 1844, from the National Library of New Zealand].

From the National Library of New Zealand, this flyer announces a “spectacular event,” held in London’s Covent Garden back in 1844, “in which a model of Lake Lucerne and a glacier of ice were to be thawed. There would be sledges available for women and children,” we read, and “members of the Glaciarium Skating Club were to meet and ‘perform their Elegant Evolutions.'” Strangely enough, “the event was to be held in conjunction with a four-day cattle show on adjacent premises.”
Reproducing the terrains of other nations through simulacra of ice in our streets.

(Via David Lovely).

[Image: The geometry of geology, by Vicente Guallart].

If anyone in London happens to attend this lecture at the Architectural Association – beginning in only about an hour and a half – can you let me know how it is? Vicente Guallart – whose work I’ve discussed both on BLDGBLOG and in lectures over the past few years – is speaking on Geologics: Geography Information Architecture.

[Image: The invitation. View larger!]

The Bjarke Ingels Group – BIG – are kicking off their first solo exhibition with a party next Friday, February 20, in Copenhagen. Check out the invitation, above, for more info.
They’ve got a lot to celebrate, so the mood should hopefully be high. For instance:

“Playful,” “controversial,” “cheeky,” “innovative” and “provocative” are just some of the terms used to describe BIG. Headed by Bjarke Ingels, this architectural company has in the space of a few years created prize-winning projects, a long list of innovative buildings and an international reputation, as well as taking an active part in current debates in society. Starting out from a vision aiming to free architecture from tired clichés, choosing instead to see modern life as an inspiring challenge, BIG has made a major contribution to the renewal of the Danish architectural tradition.

The exhibition itself opens on the 21st. (Somebody fly me over, please!)

[Image: The revised tower, via the Las Vegas Sun].

A new boutique hotel in Las Vegas designed by architect Norman Foster – who is soon to lose his seat in the House of Lords after becoming a Swiss citizen to avoid paying taxes – is being cut almost in half due to a construction error: “15 floors of wrongly installed rebar.”
The hotel, called the Harmon, was meant to stand at 49 stories; it will now reach a mere 28.
“It’s still unclear how the Harmon will be capped,” the Las Vegas Sun reports, “and what reengineering will be required for such infrastructure elements as elevators and vents. If the Harmon’s exterior isn’t significantly redesigned, it risks looking unmistakably out of proportion. Think 28 oz. of tomatoes squished into a 16 oz. can.”
Midway through becoming what you were meant to be, an unanticipated internal flaw forces you to become something else entirely – for good or for bad, that remains to be seen.

(Via Archinect).

A Welsh farmer has become an “agricultural saboteur” by “secretly planting and harvesting genetically modified varieties of maize and feeding them to local sheep and cattle.” This undercuts Wales’s ability to claim that it is a GM-free nation.

An unrepentant Harrington [the farmer in question] said he had resorted to the secret planting after the Welsh assembly, which voted unanimously for GM-free status in 2000, refused to have any meaningful discussions over its policy. He said: “Out of frustration I went and bought some varieties of maize bred to be resistant to a pest called the European corn borer and which are grown widely in Spain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic.”
The varieties he chose were on the EU common variety list, and as such it is legal to grow them anywhere in Europe.

The ease with which this sort of thing could happen makes it obvious that the genetic purity of a nation’s agricultural supply cannot be rigorously policed.

[Image: “Johnny Apple Sandal” by Lift].

Briefly, I’m reminded of a design project from nearly half a decade ago called “Johnny Apple Sandal,” where the soles of a pair of sandals had different varieties of wildflower seeds embedded in their plastic; as your soles wore down, the seeds were released – theoretically going on to form new landscapes. A kind of pedestrian agronomy.
But what a perfect tool for agricultural smuggling! You load up your sandals with genetically modified seeds, fly to Wales, and go for a long hikes in the Brecon Beacons. Soon enough, you’ve contaminated the hills with illegal plants, or forms of life subject to government regulation.
In any case, I also can’t imagine that this is the only example of such a thing; this farmer just seems like the only one who was caught. It’s not hard to speculate that there are what might be called – with no small amount of irony – protest gardens full of genetically modified plants sprouting in secret across the world.
What strange cultivations might we yet stumble upon in some unofficial garden in the woods?

(Thanks, Alex, for the Welsh farmer article!)

[Image: By David Gray for Reuters, via The New York Times].

Amongst many, many signs that the building boom has come to an end, from gridlocks of cars abandoned at the Dubai airport by fleeing workers to massive holes in the urban surface of Chicago, to entire architectural firms going out of business, to delayed towers and theme parks on pause, none seem quite as explicitly apocalyptic as the sight of OMA’s CCTV complex – that is, the part of it known as TVCC, containing a luxury hotel – roaring with flames.

[Image: By Andy Wong for the Associated Press, via The New York Times].

The boom ended long ago, but its icon are now on fire.

(Note some updates on this story in the comments thread, below).

[Image: Photo by soupandtea].

Catching up on some news, emails, and links sent in over the past few weeks, I was amused to see that financially hard-hit homeowners in the Los Angeles area have begun temporarily renting out their houses as filming locations for TV commercials and pornos.
One man in Burbank, unable to sell his house for its asking price and having to compensate for a loss of rental income, “posted an Internet notice that the property, which has an eight-person hot tub, was available to the adult-film industry, which he had heard pays as much as $5,000 a day. A few months ago, ‘I probably would’ve said, “You want to do what in here?”‘ he said. ‘That’s reserved for me and the missus.'”
Apparently, “Income from residential filming for fewer than 15 days a year isn’t subject to federal taxes,” so there might yet be something of a boom in short-term film sites around the city, a distributed micro-Hollywood of economically depressed domestic space.

(Thanks, Javier!)