Blogger Andrew Ray of Some Landscapes recently re-read The Wind in the Willows to his son, stumbling on “an intriguing passage that I’d forgotten all about, concerning Badger’s large underground home.” It is a scene where “the idea of the city has been literally buried,” where, “civilisations decline but nature endures,” an underground world of ruined architecture and vaulted halls disguised as forests.
Category: BLDGBLOG
Extra-Terrestrial Sand Dunes
Geologist Michael Welland has an interesting post up about the “first detailed examination of extra-terrestrial sand dunes” on Mars, coming later this year. His post also briefly discusses the life and career of Ralph Bagnold, after whom the Martian dunes are named, as well as the granular physics of a remote landscape that, in Welland’s words, “just seems, instinctively, to be unearthly.”
Under the Bridge
Photographer Gisela Erlacher has been documenting “the spaces found hidden underneath highways and flyovers across Europe and China,” as seen in the many photos posted over at Creative Boom. “Each photograph reveals not only her own fascination with these massive concrete monstrosities, but also her interest in how they’re now being used by the people who choose to wedge themselves into these forgotten areas.”
The Architecture of Readymade Air
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center].
I’ve got a short post up over at the Walker Art Center, as part of their new Hippie Modernism show featuring work by Archigram, Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and many more. The exhibition, curated by Andrew Blauvelt, “examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.”
A time of great upheaval, this period witnessed a variety of radical experiments that challenged societal and professional expectations, overturned traditional hierarchies, explored new media and materials, and formed alternative communities and new ways of living and working together. During this key moment, many artists, architects, and designers individually and collectively began a search for a new kind of utopia, whether technological, ecological, or political, and with it offered a critique of the existing society.
While the exhibition and its accompanying, very nicely designed catalog are both worth checking out in full, my post looks at a specific project by Haus-Rucker-Co called Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), seen in the above image.
Green Lung pumped artificially conditioned indoor air from within the galleries of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle to members of the public passing, by way of transparent helmets mounted outside; the museum’s internal atmosphere was thus treated as a kind of readymade object, “playing with questions of inside vs. outside, of public vs. private, of enclosure vs. space.”
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Oase Nr. 7 (Oasis No. 7), installation at Documenta 5, Kassel (1972); via Walker Art Center].
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model.
In any case, check out the post and the larger Hippie Modernism exhibition if you get the chance.
Marine Acoustic Zones
Outside looks at the idea of “acoustic sanctuaries” in the sea, designed to help marine life communicate free of “anthropogenic noise,” whether created by military sonar or commercial shipping. Meanwhile, how much would I love to visit an “acoustic sanctuary” on land—a landscape deliberately cleared of “anthropogenic noise”—almost like the sound gardens and acoustic forestry of a designer like David Benqué.
Avian Infrastructure
[Image: The turkey vulture’s “verification flight pattern,” taken from “The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture” by Kenneth E. Stager (PDF)].
In an article for New Scientist last year, I wrote about the expansion of urban infrastructure to include animal life, from pigs serving a de facto waste-management role in cities such as Cairo to falcons being used to patrol a Santa Monica business park against, less welcome species.
It was thus interesting to read last night that the noxious smell artificially introduced to otherwise odorless natural gas was originally added, at least partially, because it would attract turkey vultures.
In a 1964 paper by Kenneth E. Stager called “The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture” (PDF) we read that the “decision to conduct field tests with ethyl mercaptan (CH3CH2SH) as an olfactory attractant for turkey vultures came as a result of conversations with field engineers of the Union Oil Company of California.” Its purpose would be “to aid in locating leaks in natural gas lines”:
It was suggested to them by a company engineer in Texas that an effective way of locating line leaks in rough terrain was to introduce a heavy concentration of ethyl mercaptan into the line and then patrol the route and observe the concentrations of turkey vultures circling or sitting on the ground at definite points along the line… A high concentration of ethyl mercaptan was introduced into the forty-two miles of gas line and a traverse of the route was made. At several points along the line, turkey vultures were observed either circling or sitting on the ground. At those locations the odor of the ethyl mercaptan was very pronounced and examination of the line revealed the leaks.
There are at least two things worth highlighting here: one is the strange image of 20th-century oil company employees wandering through “rough terrain” in coordinated synchrony with families of turkey vultures, in effect bringing avian labor into the international supply chain of petroleum products.
It’s the turkey vulture as corporate companion species: a living being enlisted for assistance in shepherding—or flocking, as it were—natural gas to the final customer. It seems almost medieval.
But the second thing that seems worth commenting on is the broader implication that natural gas was made to smell like death—to smell like rotting corpses—thus becoming attractive to flocks of turkey vultures. This brings to mind Reza Negarestani’s book, Cyclonopedia, where Negarestani refers to the oil industry in only somewhat fictional terms as a kind of industrial cult organized around what he calls “the black corpse of the sun”: that is, oil, with all of its volatile by-products, the remnant hydrocarbons of once-living things, transformed through millions of years of burial.
That we would make petroleum gas smell like dead animals seems almost perfectly ironic, giving this image of necromantic Union Oil employees out scouting the backlands of Texas and California looking for gas leaks, following airborne animal trails, an even more bizarre interpretive bearing.
(Vulture anecdote originally spotted on Twitter, thanks to a retweet from @carlzimmer).
To roam hither and thither rather than plod a linear course
The blog Landscapism takes a look at the “integral but largely uncharted topography” of the combe, the “amphitheatre-like landform that can be found at the head of a valley.” There, the post’s author writes, amidst lichen-covered rubble and interrupted creeks, “these watery starting lines disguised as cul-de-sacs are a gift to the rural flâneur; sheep tracks, streams, crags, ruined sheep folds—all encourage the curious visitor to roam hither and thither rather than plod a linear course.”
San Francisco Sub Hub
I’ve got a short post up over at Travel + Leisure about a speculative proposal to build a “submarine hub” at San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay that could be used as a base for exploring local seamounts, canyons, reefs, and escarpments. The post simultaneously looks at the pioneering undersea work of Sylvia Earle, who is involved with the project, and the utopian maritime architectural projects of groups such as Ant Farm.
Assassin’s Creed
In Mexico, the widespread assassination of mayors indicates that cartel violence “is evolving far beyond the drug trade. Cartels now fight for political power itself.” The murder of Gisela Mota, newly elected mayor of Temixco, “was part of a regional campaign by [a local cartel] to control town halls and rob the towns’ resources.” Ominously, while “kingpins rot in prisons and graves, their assassins have formed their own organizations, which can be even more violent and predatory.”
No One Here Gets Out Alive
Live in a high-rise? Consider having your heart attack elsewhere: a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looks at “the relation between floor of patient contact and survival after cardiac arrest in residential buildings.” Their take-away was almost Onion-like in its obviousness: “the survival rate after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest was lower for patients residing on higher floors.” It literally took too long for help to arrive. Yet the authors also suggest devising “interventions aimed at shortening response times to treatment of cardiac arrest in high-rise buildings,” as this “may increase survival”—which sounds like an interesting design challenge.
The Sky Roads of Kauttua
[Image: A 17th-century engraving by Abraham Bosse, scanned from the excellent Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge by Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier].
Thanks to airborne ice crystals reflecting street lights into the sky—an effect known as light pillars—the small Finnish village of Kauttua was greeted with an astral image of itself, as seen in a photo that made the rounds earlier this week. The town’s night-lit streets and buildings became uncanny constellations: the village as self-reflecting planetarium.
“How is that possible?” asks a helpful blog post by Fiona MacDonald. “When the temperature gets close to freezing,” she writes, “flat, hexagonal ice crystals can form in the air—not just up high, but also close to the ground. When this happens, these crystals essentially form a collective, giant mirror that can reflect a light source—such as a streetlight—back to the ground.” They are like ladders of light, or perhaps optical arrow chains, pulling images of our world up to space.
While the effect is already amazing, it’s worth noting that Kauttua is also the site of an ongoing search for an Iron Age village buried beneath the existing streets and property lines.
“The oldest archive source, a cadastral map from the year 1696, presents a homestead of 10 houses by the bridge leading across Eurajoki River,” we read over at Day of Archaeology. “A later cadastral map from 1790 presents large holdings of one farm at the same site and around it.” Today, however, there is little more than one surviving building, “an area of black soil” next to it, and “two light lines, presumably the earlier roads,” revealed in aerial photographs taken in 2008.
While there is obviously no connection between a lost Iron Age village and the ghostly street map that appeared in the sky over Kauttua last week, there is nonetheless something quite striking about the idea of a small village in the far north poised between two versions of itself: an underground web of old buildings and streets, now turned to black soil beneath the wheat fields, and this perfect, far more ethereal version, hovering there in a crystallography of light.
It’s almost as if a strange and other-worldly calendar exists, where, every summer, the town turns downward, scraping through soil and rock to uncover what it used to be, and then, each winter, it turns its eyes to the skies to see an inverted cartography, like some municipal zodiac, of its thriving streets.
(Thanks to Finnish novelist Hannu Rajaniemi, who first pointed this out to me on Twitter. “In Finland,” he wrote, “we make city maps in the sky out of light and snow crystals.”)