Category: BLDGBLOG

[Image: The Castle House tower by Hamiltons architects; via Inhabitat].

Unless a “green” building actively remediates its local environment – for instance, scrubbing toxins from the air or absorbing carbon dioxide – that building is not “good” for the environment. It’s simply not as bad as it could have been.
Buildings aren’t (yet) like huge Brita filters that you can install in a city somewhere and thus deliver pure water, cleaner air, better topsoil, or increased biodiversity to the local population.
I hope buildings will do all of that someday – and some architects are already proposing such structures – but, for the most part, today’s “green” buildings are simply not as bad as they could have been.
A high-rise that off-sets some of its power use through the installation of rooftop wind turbines is great: it looks cool, magazine readers go crazy for it, and the building’s future tenants save loads of money on electricity bills. But once you factor in these savings, something like the new Castle House eco-skyscraper still ends up being a net drain on the system.
It’s not good for the environment; it’s just not as bad as it could have been.

[Image: The Castle House tower by Hamiltons architects; via Inhabitat].

My larger point, however, is that you can write about a tower that uses less structural steel, and that tower might be better for the environment than, say, a steel-intensive luxury high-rise with three rooftop wind turbines, but your article probably won’t get 890 Diggs – and so you write about flashy gizmos with huge downsteam maintenance bills, instead.
To use an inappropriately over-simplified example, imagine two identical 60-story high-rises. The architect of Tower A convenes his engineering team one day and they proceed to rearrange some of the building’s internal structural steel; they’re thus able to cut out some cantilevers, for instance, and to eliminate excess building material, more generally. This reduces the structure’s embodied construction energy, by which I mean transport costs, steel manufacture, etc. A few days later, maybe the architect of Tower A even cuts out 10% of the track-lighting, or he makes the office lobbies a tiny bit smaller and, thus, easier to climate-control.
The architect of Tower B makes no such changes – but he does add a wind turbine to the roof.
Architect A has arguably had a much greater impact on his building’s environmental bottom line – but we don’t hear about Architect A.
We hear about Architect B, because wind turbines look great, they are easy to explain, and they don’t require much journalistic research.
Architect B – who has mastered the art of ornamentalizing sustainability – comes off as a hero; Architect A, despite his accomplishments, is overlooked.
Again, my point is simply that relatively unspectacular design decisions can be made in the process of constructing a building that will help lessen that building’s environmental impact – but often these decisions aren’t flashy. They don’t photograph well, and they don’t require cool new pieces of Digg-friendly technology.
And so your building, however not bad it is for the environment, doesn’t receive any free publicity on green building blogs. I’m not pointing fingers, either: this diagnosis is at least as true for BLDGBLOG.
A relatively lame example here is Tudor residential architecture: as I mentioned back in November, Tudor-style houses are remarkably energy efficient. “Wind turbines, solar panels and other hi-tech green devices might get the media attention,” I quote in that earlier post, “but the smartest way to save energy may be to live in a Tudor house and insulate the attic and repair the windows.”

[Image: Little Moreton Hall, “an early model of energy efficiency,” according to the Guardian Weekly].

In any case, I just think it’s worth pointing out that you can compare a new building to the environmental impact of no building at all – in which case you have quite a high bar to clear before your new building is truly “green” – or you can compare that new building to how bad it might otherwise have been.
If you’re only doing the latter, then almost literally any minor design decision – including ornamental wind turbines or a few arbitrary solar panels – will make that building “green.” In the process, “green building” slowly loses any rigor or integrity it might previously have had.
Wind turbines, solar panels, rainwater catchment systems, etc., are totally awesome – I unironically endorse their architectural use – but they don’t make a building good for the environment. Or at least they don’t yet.
They just make that building less bad for the environment than it would have been without them.
Which is still great – but we shouldn’t mistake restraint for generosity.
In other words, we shouldn’t pretend that a steel-intensive high-rise with a few wind turbines on top is somehow good for us; it’s just not as bad as it could have been.
I would hope that at least long-term readers know that this blog is “pro-sustainability” – I’ll even sheepishly point out my own interview with Ed Mazria – but I think it’s extremely important to realize that you may be building less bad high-rises, but you are still building high-rises. I remain radically unconvinced that a “green” skyscraper is better than no skyscraper at all – and yet green skyscraper enthusiasts are out high-fiving each other as if their own positive energy is enough to counteract carbon emissions from the global steel industry.
This is actually one of the reasons why I like Ed Mazria and his Architecture 2030 organization so much.
In a recent press release, Architecture 2030 pointed out that “the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized (500 MW) coal-fired power plant” are enough to negate the effects of planting 300,000 trees in only ten days, among other amazing statistics – including the fact that the entire Architecture 2030 effort, as applied to building renovations, would be negated by the “CO2 emissions from just one 750 MW coal-fired power plant each year” from now till 2030.
If we want to be “green,” Mazria’s press release implies, then a far more effective route toward that goal is to change the coal industry – not to become a luxury high-rise developer in Miami’s South Beach (or, worse, in Dubai).

[Image: The Lighthouse, in Dubai; via Treehugger].

Being not as bad as you could have been is not a viable future goal for sustainable architecture.
Build something that genuinely improves the environment – build something that has a measurably negative carbon footprint, for instance, from the manufacture of its steel to the billing of its electricity – and then I’ll be as excited as you are about how “green” the project really is.
Until then, people who are only guilty of screwing the environment over partially win huge accolades: thank you, we say, for only mugging two people last night – I thought you were going to mug three…
Which is positive reinforcement, sure – but it’s not necessarily good for the state of architectural sustainability.

(I apprehensively want to make clear that this post may have been motivated by a post at Inhabitat, but it is in no way meant as an attack on that site; I’ve linked to, hosted an event with, and even written several posts for Inhabitat. I also want to make clear that I am 100% behind so-called green building practices; I just don’t think a “green” building should be mistaken for an environmental improvement; otherwise it’s like mistaking fat-free pound cake for health food: deluded by the packaging, you eat tons of the stuff and you end up like Dom DeLuise).

[Images: Rosslyn Chapel, container of symphonies].

I meant to post this ages ago – at the beginning of the summer – but it slipped right by… So this isn’t exactly news, but I still love it: Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel, world famous for its appearance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, has apparently been hiding a fascinating secret, after all.
It turns out that “[a] father and son who became fascinated by symbols carved into the chapel’s arches say they have deciphered a musical score encrypted in them.”

[Image: The intricate ceilingry of Rosslyn Chapel, photographed by Benjamin Lee; via Sacred Destinations].

From the website of Thomas J. Mitchell, who “decrypted” the music: “Rosslyn Chapel holds a musical mystery in its architecture and design. At one end of the chapel, on the ceiling are 4 cross-sections of arches containing elaborate symbolic designs on each array of cubes (in actual fact they are rectangles mostly). The ‘cubes’ are attached to the arches in a musically sequential way.”
In the over-ambitious application of a cryogenics metaphor, Mitchell says that the music has now “thawed out” to be understood – and heard – by people today. Being a composer, he also seems to have released the music on CD.

[Image: The Rosslyn Chapel doorway, photographed by seth + lara m.; via Sacred Destinations].

Whether or not there really is music encoded in the arches of Rosslyn, the implications of this are exciting.
Will someone detect, for instance, a thousand years from now, a symphony encoded in the runways at Heathrow? Or will the New York City subway system be reunderstood as a series of sub-terrestrial folk songs, themed around a chorus of transportation?
Or perhaps the International Space Station will be revealed after all as an étude of pressurized air tanks, awaiting its musical decryption; it is three-dimensional music, hovering in space.

(Thanks, Christopher! And happy birthday!)

[Image: Center for Biodiversity by Tecla, part of the Waterpower project; via Domus].

There was an interesting, though brief, article posted on Domus last month about Italy’s Valle dei Mulini, which Domus describes as “a fascinating microcosm of industrial history, dotted by abandoned paper mills.”
In order “to prevent this heritage from disappearing,” a local planning and design group, calling itself Waterpower, “asked a series of Italian and foreign designers to make projects for the renewal of the deserted water and paper mills. There was one condition: that they take the ‘power of water’ as the poetic metaphor and technological guideline of their projects, turning the valley into an eco-sustainable environment.”

[Image: A parking garage and “river remodelling” structure by Labics, part of the Waterpower project; via Domus].

The resulting proposals look at programmatically different reuses of the old mills, including purposes as diverse as a youth hostel (complete with water from the Canneto River flowing through part of the building), a Center for Biodiversity –

[Image: The Center for Biodiversity by Tecla, via the Waterpower project].

– newly cultivated “lemon terraces,” a spa, a kind of outdoor historical walkway, a “Waterfall Home” deeply fixed into the bedrock, complete with some kind of Slow Food studio/kitchen –

[Images: The Waterfall Home by Nemesi, via the Waterpower project].

– and a hydraulics museum.

[Image: A “Hydraulics Museum & Panoramic Bar” by Sudarch, part of the Waterpower project; via Domus].

The Waterpower website has a lot more information about the various projects, including a short history of the Valle dei Mulini itself.

[Images: A topographical view of the Valle dei Mulini, via the Waterpower project].

We read, for instance, that the project “aims to recover a landscape and a system of pre-industrial water mills (mulini) currently in danger of collapse beyond repair.”

As described with a wealth of illustrations in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie, from the early 13th century the paper mills, iron mills, and later hydro-electric power stations exploited water power through ingenious systems of channels, tanks, level drops, funnels and water wheels to produce energy to make things. The mills were carefully distanced one from the next to exploit the height differential and hence the water power. From the port of Amalfi the network of mills rises 3km inland and 350m in height.

It’s the river valley as landscape-machine.
In any case, I think it’s a cool project. Read more at the official website.

I went out to meet the folks behind Planetizen last night at a rooftop party near Wilshire and Western, in L.A.’s Koreatown, to celebrate the recent publication of their new book, Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning. The book has contributions from the usual suspects in today’s city planning debates, such as Joel Kotkin and Andrés Duany, and it includes a variety of short essays by other writers, critics, and practitioners, from Alex Garvin and Robert Olshansky to James Howard Kunstler, Harriet Tregoning, and Constance Beaumont.

What made the night particularly memorable, however, was that I had to park several blocks away – and so, to get back to my car in the darkness, the sun having set on Los Angeles, I found myself walking past the Aroma, a multi-level indoor golf driving range, well-lit and thriving there on a Tuesday at 9pm.
I looked up at the glowing structures of netting that surround the place, a soft-focus rectangle of light, nearly the size of a city block, only to see little white flashes like meteors – falling stars – streaking across the sky in front of me. Everything else was silent.
Then another flash – and another – as the nets at the end of the driving range rippled with the impacts.
Then more flashes.
And that artificial astronomy of tiny white spheres crossing space went on and on as I walked away.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be doing a “Conversation” at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles on the evening of October 10, with National Book Critics Circle Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Lawrence Weschler – of whom I’m a huge and long-time fan (he even spoke at Postopolis! – in fact, it was Weschler who introduced me to Walter Murch).

So we’ll be talking, I assume, about things like cities and writing and architecture, but also about war and music and climate change, by way of science, Athanasius Kircher, contemporary politics, and – of course – Weschler’s brand-new-in-paperback book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. You can check out the online companion to that book over at McSweeney’s.
I can’t wait! So if you happen to be a reader of BLDGBLOG or a fan of Lawrence Weschler, please be sure to come by – it should be a fun conversation, and who know where we’ll end up.
Meanwhile, I can’t recommend Weschler’s earlier book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, highly enough (although, for the most part, it falls outside the purview of this blog); and his Vermeer in Bosnia is a great collection of essays, about everything from independence movements in Eastern Europe and Balkan genocide to furniture design, the light in Los Angeles, and the musicological history of Weschler’s own family.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

Event Details: 7pm on October 10 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA; free and open to the public.

BLDGBLOG’s radio collaboration with DJ /rupture continues…

We’re still (always!) looking for extra room fantasies – but now we’re looking for field recordings, as well… field recordings by phone.
So if you’re anywhere that seems sonically interesting over the next few weeks – a waterfall, a migratory bird preserve, a shuddering freight elevator, the Cornish coast, a screeching Red Line train, the International Space Station, a secret meeting between Bush and Ahmadinejad – feel free to give us a ring: +1 (206) 337-1474.
You’ll be connected to a voicemail account where you can simply hold your phone up high – and proud – and record whatever it is that you’re listening to.
Meanwhile, feel free either to leave a brief explanation of what it is we’re hearing, or even call back and explain what sounds you’ve left for us to sort through.
And then the best of the best will be played live on the radio in New York City – and podcast round the world – via DJ /rupture‘s weekly radio show on the incomparable WFMU, 91.1 FM.

The basic idea, if you’re curious, is to open up the artistic possibilities of field recordings to anyone with a telephone – whether that’s a mobile phone, a public phone, or even a phone attached to the wall in your kitchen.
The results should prove that you can acoustically experience a landscape through the telephone. Tele-scapes. As it is, mobile phones in particular present us with an untapped microphonic resource; these roving recorders encounter different environmental soundscapes everyday – the insides of lobbies and elevators, cars stuck in traffic, windy beaches – yet we’re so busy using them for conversation that we overlook (overhear?) their true sonic possibilities.
The telephonic future of environmental sound art is thus all but limitless – and putting some of that on the radio is just fun.
In any case, we’ll be posting many more calls for sounds soon…

(For a tiny bit more info, click here).

[Image: Beneath the Neon by Matthew O’Brien, with a photo of O’Brien, by Danny Mollohan].

I was intrigued to learn that Las Vegas, instant city of fast food and shrimp buffets, air-conditioning itself in the middle of the desert, actually rests upon a veritable labyrinth of flood-control tunnels, almost all of which have been constructed since 1988. This sub-desert network, literally beneath the neon of Las Vegas, is now expanding rapidly: 413 miles of new tunnels, at an estimated cost of $1.7 billion, are planned over the next 30 years.
In a recent book called Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, author Matthew O’Brien goes down into that complex of storm-sensitive concrete waterways to document both the occasional flash flood – and the people who have taken up residence there.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

In a brief email exchange with BLDGBLOG, O’Brien explained to me that his interest in writing the book “started with a murder.”

A guy named Timmy “T.J.” Weber killed his girlfriend and one of her sons and raped her 14-year-old daughter. He was on the run for a week, then returned to the crime scene and attacked one of the surviving family members. The police descended on the scene – but Weber vanished. When he was caught a few weeks later in a trailer park, he told police he used a storm drain to go underneath the dragnet.
That piqued my interest. I wondered what Weber experienced in the storm drains. What he saw, what he heard, what he smelled. How, apparently without a light source, he’d splashed more than three miles upstream. I also wondered what was beneath Las Vegas. What secrets the storm drains kept.

What’s interesting about the book’s focus is that it’s motivated less by the standard tropes of urban exploration – abandonment, space, adventure, or even gonzo photography – than by a kind of anthropological interest in the people who, for a variety of complex reasons, temporarily live beneath the city.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

For instance, O’Brien found that “hundreds of people – veterans, women, children – are living in the storm drains of Las Vegas, addicted to drugs and gambling, dying of diseases and getting washed away during floods.”
I asked him about some of the people he met down there, and he replied that “there have been several memorable experiences.”

Exploring a wet drain under McCarran International Airport one night, I discovered a man named Lawrence sleeping on an elevated bed. The bed, which was about four and a half feet from the floor, was made of couch cushions, a steel frame and a door that provided additional support. Baling wire looped around the head and foot of the bed, angled tightly through the manhole, and wrapped around the rungs. Backpacks hung from the side on hooks.
I squatted and swept the beam of my flashlight under the bed. It was legless. No steel poles, no wooden beams, no milk crates – nothing. A square-shaped wire dangled from the side, serving as a stepladder. Except for his bikes, the whole camp was at least three feet above the stream of urban runoff.
Lawrence told me he designed the bed after reading about mountain climbers at a local library. “This is how they sleep when they stop and rest in the middle of a climb,” he explained.
Also, encountering madmen wandering around in the depths of a drain, without a light source, is something I won’t forget. That happened on a few occasions. Madwomen, too.
I stumbled on a naked man and woman smoking crack in a drain behind a Budget Suites. A man, who lived in a three-foot-in-diameter lateral pipe, washing his clothes in a stream of runoff. Street teens setting up home.
There were several experiences like this, strange but very real, most of which are detailed in the book.

The book, of course, is available through Amazon, and O’Brien’s ongoing reading tour, with appearances scheduled from now through November, is outlined on his blog.

[Image: From Beneath the Neon; photo by Danny Mollohan].

I will say that the writing can be a little uneven at times – the dialogue, for instance, is often a bit Bill & Ted-like, which is unfortunate because the material is sociologically important enough without needing to remind us that the writer and his friends are Really Cool – but if you come across a copy, be sure to check it out!

(Note: All photos in this post by Danny Mollohan. Figures for the Las Vegas Flood Control District’s expansion – 413 miles of tunnel worth $1.7 billion over the next 30 years – come from Beneath the Neon).

Luke Jerram’s Sky Orchestra project “explores how one can perceive an artistic experience” while sleeping. To do this, Jerram has “develop[ed] music specifically for sleeping people which is delivered out of the sky.”

From the artist’s website:

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at dawn to fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score creating a massive audio landscape.
“Like whales calling in the ocean, the same sounds may be heard in succession passing from one balloon to another across the sky …”
Many hundreds of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. The music is audible, both consciously and subconsciously, to all those in the balloon’s flight paths.

Wired covered the project last summer, writing: “If you’re lulled awake by electronic music at daybreak, look up. The tune may be coming from the seven hot-air balloons in artist Luke Jerram’s Sky Orchestra as it bumps ’80s-synth-style ambient tracks from the heavens.”
The Telegraph jumped in, reporting that “residents of Stratford-upon-Avon awoke yesterday to find a flotilla of hot air balloons drifting over their roofs serenading them with ambient music and readings from Shakespeare.”
Last but not least, way back in 2004, the Guardian claimed that residents of Birmingham had been “helplessly lulled into deeper sleep at dawn yesterday morning, by specially composed music played from a flight of hot air balloons drifting over the dozing city… The flutes and oboes, bird song and whale calls, were based on scientific research to promote deeper and sweeter dreams.”
However, it’d be interesting to see if something like this could be abused for political purposes, whispering subliminal messages into the sleeping, pre-dawn brains of the local electorate…
But it also raises an interesting paranoid-philosophical question: if you experience a particularly good night’s sleep, and you live alone in the countryside somewhere, with neither witnesses nor neighbors, how do you know if the Sky Orchestra has – or has not – come floating through…?
Is this how myths begin?

(Huge thanks to Marilyn Terrell for pointing this out to me! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Is that a geostationary banana in the sky – and what is it trying to say…?)

There’s a great new article in New Scientist about what the surfaces of other planets – with their variable air pressure and chemical humidities – might actually sound like.
Unfortunately, the article is subscriber-only, so I’ll have to summarize a few of its more interesting points.

The basic trouble, the article says, is that we haven’t sent microphones to many of the places we know so well visually.
The Mars rovers, for instance, those wheeled landscape photographers whose work is destined to appear in tomorrow’s art history textbooks, “are oblivious to the soundscape of Mars.” After all, with no sensors to hear with, “they can’t hear the buzz of grit whirling around in dust devils, the rumbles of Martian thunder, or even the noise of their own wheels crunching across the dusty plains.”
We could be listening to literally extraterrestrial soundscapes on our iPods, riding through Manhattanite subway tunnels:

Imagine listening to babbling brooks of methane on Titan, or hearing deep thunder booming through Venus’s dense, noxious atmosphere. Or what about the creaking and groaning of ice on Jupiter’s satellite Europa, which could reveal whether the moon’s frigid exterior hides a warm ocean, hospitable to life?

But acoustics play second fiddle in most scientific investigations of other planets.
Our heavens are silent.
New Scientist points out that microphones “are usually smaller, lighter, cheaper and less power-hungry” than are cameras – imagine live-streaming the winds of Venus on your car radio, driving past Spudnuts! – but this very simplicity “may have had the adverse effect of underselling them as instruments able to deliver subtle and rich scientific information.”
Our sonic understanding of other planets is thus rather lacking – leaving us, more or less, to guess.
Call it speculative acoustic planetology.

[Image: The canyonlands of Mars; courtesy of NASA].

So it may not immediately be obvious that things will literally sound different on other planets; but atmospheric chemistry and air pressure – or the complete lack thereof – are two major factors in the transmission of sound waves.
For instance, because “Mars’s atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth’s – the average distance between molecules is about 120 times greater – sound waves attenuate very quickly.” This has the following horror movie-like effect:

While a typical scream on Earth might still be audible a kilometre away, it would only travel about 16 metres on Mars.

This “low sound speed” would also “lower the pitch of your voice” – and give burgeoning screenwriters something to consider.

[Image: A stunning view of Venus, which looks more solar than planetary; courtesy of NASA].

On Venus, meanwhile, “sulphuric acid rains down through a CO2 atmosphere with a crushing surface pressure 90 times greater than Earth’s.” A Soviet lander actually brought microphones there in 1982 – picking up “deep rumbles that might have been thunder” – but we have no real idea of what Venus actually sounds like.
We can speculate, however, using some kind of computer program, that “only low-frequency sounds carry well in the crushing CO2 atmosphere,” nearly cutting treble altogether.
It’s a planet perfect for hip-hop.

[Image: The Earth’s moon].

The article goes on to explain how the crust of the Earth’s moon is almost constantly groaning with “stresses and stains… due to the tidal forces of the Earth’s gravity,” and that there are a surprising number of “quakes triggered as heat from the sun swell[s] the moon’s crust.”
But what do these moonquakes sound like?
Titan, meanwhile, one of Saturn’s moons, actually has been heard before: a microphone attached to the Huygens probe, in 2005, “recorded the whistle and whoosh” of the probe’s own distant arrival.
It’s worth pointing out, in a brief but fascinating side-note, that drops of methane “about a centimetre wide” rain down onto the surface of Titan seven times slower than rain falls here on Earth. Imagine thunderstorms in bullet-time…
In any case, Titan’s atmosphere is actually “a factory for complex hydrocarbons.” The sky thus has “all this photochemistry going on,” one scientist is quoted as saying, with the result that Titan’s surface is dotted with “dark hydrocarbon lakes” – and these lakes will probably be bubbling, we read, and each bubble will probably “pulsate like a vibrating bell” when it bursts.
The acoustic effect of this would be like “having a chorus of little bubbles each ‘plinking’ at its own pitch,” and it would all sound rather “robotic.”

[Image: The cracked icy surface of Europa].

Finally, Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons and a celestial body long suspected of hosting life, is covered with a shell of ice. That ice, however, is constantly compressed by Jovian gravity, causing huge fissures and breakages – with, I’d think, spectacular, micro-continental bursts of atonality and noise.
But who knows?
First, we have to get a microphone there to find out.
Personally, I’d love to hear music that’s been deliberately tuned for alien atmospheres – slow, shuddering drones, or crystalline symphonies of accelerated acoustics. Even more, I’d love to read an acoustic analysis of different landscapes here on Earth: how far a scream propagates in the gardens of Versailles, for instance, or in the new Orange County Great Park. Or whether your voice sounds deeper in the deserts of Utah. Or whether you can unexpectedly overhear people talking far away, on some humid curve in the Parisian Seine.
It’s the science of acoustic planetology.