Category: BLDGBLOG

[Image: From Robocop, via Quiet Babylon].

Architecture and technology blogger Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon fame has declared September 2010 Cyborg Month.

In the September 1960 issue of Astronautics magazine, he explains, theoreticians Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline published a short paper called “Cyborgs and Space.” As Maly points out, “Aside from an early mention in the New York Times, this is the first time the word appears in print”:

September 1960. That’s 50 years ago. To commemorate, I’ve organized a project called “50 Posts About Cyborgs.” Over the course of the month, a whole gaggle of people have agreed to put up work ruminating on the use and abuse of the term.

This, of course, includes cyborg architecture and cyborg urbanism: neurologically interactive spaces that, directly or indirectly, integrate the built environment with a living body.

On the other hand, you might be asking, what’s a cyborg?

[Image: I have no idea what this photo is; it’s saved in my harddrive under the name “Machine Boy.jpg” It’s an infant’s gas mask from WWII].

Intriguingly, at the origin of the term we find a kind of anti-architecture. The word cyborg was coined in 1960, Maly reminds us, which was “the era of the Cold War and the Space Race”:

NASA is not yet two years old. Sputnik is not yet three. Kennedy is a year away from announcing America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon. A lot of people were getting together and asking, “How can we survive for the long term in space?” One solution is architectural. Using the latest construction techniques, you can build a little bubble of earth, and plunk it down on any old alien world. We can send people off to these environments and so long as the walls don’t burst and the air doesn’t run out, they’ve got all the comforts of home. A pair of scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, had a different idea. “What if we could just live in space?” they asked, “What if instead of adapting the environment to ourselves, we adapted ourselves to the environment?” To do that, they reasoned, you need a cybernetic feedback system to maintain homeostasis unconsciously. These systems need to become a part of the organism. A cybernetic organism. A Cyborg.

The cyborg, in this specific sense, then, is an organism that does away with the need for architecture—it brings its environment along with it, in the form of artificially created internal feedback systems that adapt, on their own, to often radically changing environmental conditions.

[Image: A “zombie ant” controlled by fungal brain parasites].

So what, then, is cyborg architecture—if, in the present context, there can really be such a thing? Would it be a cybernetic network or a living geotextile? And if a house is a machine for living in, then perhaps Le Corbusier was a cyborg, too. Scaling things up, what is a cyborg city—or urban planning in the cyborg vernacular? And what about cyborg landscapes and cyborg space, in its most fluid and abstract?

Unsurprisingly, Quiet Babylon has its own take on all this; a six-part series called “Cyborgs & Architects” is worth a read: Adaptation, Astronauts and Super Villains, Nomads and Homesteaders, Mobile Structures, The Invisible Infrastructure of Cyborgs, and 6 Points on a Continuum.

Stay tuned to Maly’s monthlong experiment to see what sorts of question, answers, and scenarios pop up—and consider participating yourself, simply by writing a cyborg-themed blog post. If you do, get in touch with Quiet Babylon and join the conversation. After all, there’s no reason “50 Posts About Cyborgs” can’t become 62 posts, or 75…

Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron’s recent book Hydromania has yet to appear in English, as far as I can tell, but I’d love to read it when it does.

[Image: The German cover of Hydromania by Assaf Gavron].

Set in a drought-stricken world “several decades into the future,” run by “water corporations from China, Japan and the Ukraine,” it follows the science fictionalized path of a “maverick water engineer” who has developed an illegal black-market technology for purifying rain water. As the website Qantara explains:

The constantly thirsty people drink “Ohiya Water” or “Gobogobo Water,” which they must buy from the companies. The private storage of water is not permitted and the ban is strictly enforced by means of an all-seeing surveillance system.

Further, the political geography of the region has been irrevocably changed:

Israeli territory has been reduced to a narrow strip bordering the Mediterranean Sea and to two major cities, one of which, Tiberias, is destroyed through Palestinian military action in the course of the novel. Israel is thus left with only its capital, Caesarea, and some surrounding districts. Countless Israelis are reduced to refugee status: the poorer living in primitive conditions aboard wrecked destroyers off the coast, whilst the better-off inhabit floating residential areas with appealing names such as “Ocean 8.”

The book’s speculative fictionalization of future water politics won the Geffen Prize in 2009, and has already been published in Hebrew and German, with a Dutch translation forthcoming next year. Anyone out there read it yet? Is it good?

[Image: A future site for Austin + Mergold’s House-In-A-Can].

Architects Austin + Mergold have a proposal for how to reuse agricultural silos and other circular structures of the U.S. farm belt: it’s what they call A-House-In-A-Can.

Pitched for a farm in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, the project comes complete with a faux-Craiglist hard sell: “36-foot in diameter American grain dryer with 2000 SF single family starter home inside. Instantly assembled off-the-shelf 14 GA galvanized corrugated steel exterior a 2000 SF developer house inside. Optional greenhouse. Buy 5 get one free!!!”

The images are all you really need to see how it would work: an internal shell is slipped inside the grain silo, services are established shortly thereafter, and the client can then schedule a move-in date. In some ways, I’m reminded of Zecc Architecten’s project for a converted water tower in Holland, or even Piercy Conner’s Martello Tower Y renovation.

[Images: A-House-In-A-Can by Austin + Mergold].

And while these study-models could use a bit more detail, in concept, they’re both delightfully absurd and inspiring.

[Images: A-House-In-A-Can by Austin + Mergold].

A thesis presentation performed as a series of metal cans extruded outward into models of inhabitable architecture… Cinema-In-A-Can. Library-In-A-Can. Gym-In-A-Can. Dome-In-A-Can Republic.

(Perviously: Austin + Mergold’s Fortifications Tour).

[Image: Jack Whitten prepping octopi on the rocky coast; photo via Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Quarterly].

Jack Whitten is an octopus-hunter—or octopus fisherman, we might say, both more and less accurately. This activity, which he performs without the use of air tanks, requires a surprisingly niche architectural knowledge: “Millions of years ago,” Whitten writes, “the octopus had a shell, but slowly they lost it through the evolutionary process. Since then, the octopus is always looking for a home. They occupy the abandoned shells of other sea creatures, cans and car tires or make their own houses, which I call ‘octopus architecture.'”

[Image: Jack Whitten prepping octopi on the rocky coast; photo via Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Quarterly].

The trick, Whitten says, is to lure the octopus out of its site of undersea domesticity using nothing but a white handkerchief; after all, “they are addicted to the color white like a bull is to red. They can’t control themselves. Thus, I always keep a white handkerchief tucked into my wetsuit, which I use to seduce them from their lair.”

Until that point, however, the hunt is as much about stalking architectural signs across the seafloor as it is about locating an animal’s body:

When hunting for octopus, one must learn to recognize the morphology of the bottom of the sea. Octopus prefer a specific setting identifiable by a certain quality of stones, sand and plant life. Octopus architecture is unique, constructed with stones, shells, wood, bits of sea glass or anything available for building a nest. And of course, they prefer white stones. The nest is always semicircular and built at the base of a large rock, which serves as an anchor. They burrow a tunnel deep beneath the rock, usually with an exit for escape if attacked. The semicircular structure is built five, six or eight levels of rock high depending on the size of the octopus. It is masonry without mortar: closely fitted, tight and fortified. Most of the time I only see the architecture.

The rest of the process involves, as you might imagine, handheld weaponry and some local cooking practices—but the predatory detection of animals by means of their lairs adds an intriguing chapter to the story of architectural history.

(Thanks to Alexis Madrigal for sending this link long ago!)

[Images: Casa Kike by Gianni Botsford Architects, photographed by Christian Richters].

Reestablishing myself here on a desktop computer that had been sitting inside a storage unit for the past 15 months, I’ve been having a good time going through old bookmarks: rediscovering what I saved way back in 2008 and 2009, and seeing whether or not I’m still interested in the stories. Articles about mining the ocean floor, about the state of California selling landmarks to raise cash, and about design competitions that came and went sit beside pages for various architecture offices and now-outdated technology reviews.

Among these old links, though, is a house I still absolutely adore, one that many of you will probably have already seen on other blogs, but is still worth posting: the Casa Kike, a private residence in Costa Rica by Gianni Botsford Architects, seen here in photographs by Christian Richters.

[Image: Casa Kike by Gianni Botsford Architects, photographed by Christian Richters].

The house is an “intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica,” with a budget that topped out at just over $100,000. From the architect’s own description:

A main studio space, with library, writing desk and grand piano, is the writer’s daytime space. The pavilion’s wooden structure, sourced from local timber, sits on a simple foundation of wooden stilts on small concrete pad foundations. Roof beams of up to 10 m long and 355 mm deep allow for an interior with no vertical columns. The mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore, while the interior is through ventilated via a completely louvred glazed end façade.

There is then a second pavilion: “set at a short distance along a raised walkway,” we read, it “contains sleeping quarters and a bathroom.”

[Images: Casa Kike by Gianni Botsford Architects, photographed by Christian Richters].

I’m basically just posting these images without comment—other than to say it’s a gorgeous project, and I’m glad I rediscovered it in my bookmarks from 2008.

[Image: Sellafield; photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Visit Cumbria].

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking of a story from nearly two years ago: that LLWR, new owners of the English nuclear facility at Sellafield, had arrived at their new property to find so little paperwork about where nuclear waste had been stored—and by whom, and how—that they had to put an ad in the local newspaper asking if anyone else remembered where the nuclear waste was dumped.

“We need your help,” the ad began.

Did you work at Sellafield in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s? Were you by chance in the job of disposing of radioactive material? If so, the owners of Britain’s nuclear waste dump would very much like to hear from you: they want you to tell them what you dumped—and where you put it.

In turn, having just moved back to LA last week, I’ve been thinking of a story from this past spring, when part of the the Los Angeles neighborhood of Carson was discovered to be built above a 50-acre sea of contaminated soil. “In March,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the water quality board told residents not to eat fruit or vegetables grown in their backyards. Shell Oil Co., which once stored millions of gallons of crude oil in giant tanks where the houses now stand, sent letters to more than 20 homeowners recommending they minimize contact with ‘exposed soil in your yard.'” In one case, a local resident—and avid gardener—”watched investigators pull dark, wet soil from her backyard that smelled like oil.”

[Image: A circulation diagram of the underground nuclear waste repository at Onkalo, Finland, from Containing Uncertainty by smudge studio, exhibited as part of Landscapes of Quarantine at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. “Deep geologic repositories are difficult spaces to imagine,” the artists write. “They exist below us, hundreds of feet into the earth. Their spaces are not easily accessed by the public, if at all. The most challenging thing to imagine about a deep geologic repository is invisible to human eyes: its relationship to geologic time.”].

Dealing with the toxic after-effects of an earlier industry—or an earlier civilization altogether—especially if that contaminated geography remains insufficiently marked, is also the topic of a remarkable film released last spring by director Michael Madsen. Called Into Eternity, that film explores the philosophical and technical challenges involved with safely storing nuclear waste underground for a minimum period of 100,000 years. As Madsen explained to NPR, however, in slightly broken English:

100,000 years from now would most likely, in my mind, also mean another kind of human beings. It’s perhaps 100,000 years that we left Africa, the human, the Homo sapiens species; 40,000 years ago in Europe there were Neanderthals, a different kind of human species. So in 100,000 years from now, I think that we humans will be something different from today, and when you’re building something to last for that time span and to be safe under all circumstances, I thought that these people, they must have some considerations about the scenarios that might arise in the future and how to counteract upon these scenarios.

Put another way, how on earth might a transformed human inhabitant of the earth, 100,000 years from now, put out an ad in the local newspaper asking if someone whose ancestors once worked at Sellafield—or Onkalo, the repository explored by Madsen’s film, or even the coastal waters of Somalia or San Francisco—could remember if there were any life-threatening toxins buried in the ground nearby? Even if those nameless predecessors have left signs?

Or will future myths of this planet consist not of Mediterranean scenes of sun-blessed fertility—a world like none other—but lamentations of deformity and radioactive clouds, its rivers chemical weapons, its kings plagued by amnesia? Demeter replaced by Moros—forever?

[Image: The entryway to Onkalo’s moribund underworld, from Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity].

In any case, perhaps my favorite scene in Madsen’s film—or, at least, one of the most thought-provoking—comes when the engineers in charge of blasting down through the Scandinavian bedrock to create vast artificial caverns in which copper barrels of nuclear waste will be stored, joke that they sometimes half-expect to reach the proper depths required for disposal… only to dig up a collection of copper canisters buried there 100,000 years ago by a forgotten civilization, one that otherwise left no marks, no archaeology, no traces or remnants of paperwork describing its health-threatening (mis)deeds.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the Sellafield link. Related: One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham van Luik).

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

Architectural photographer Jim Stephenson got in touch the other week with some photos he recently took of an elaborate stage set, constructed by the group dreamthinkspeak, for a new play based on Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.”

The play was performed in Brighton, England, inside an old department store, the entirety of which had been transformed into a labyrinthine performance space, complete with a Russian supermarket, a simulated department store (within the very frame of the abandoned one), and a cottage surrounded by artificial snow.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

There are nurseries and ballrooms, writing desks and dioramas, all stashed away inside a massive performance space through which the audience must walk, as if chasing down scenes.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

I’ll let Stephenson himself describe the building:

The venue was the old Co-Op building on London Road, Brighton, familiar to most people who live in the city. Opened in 1931, the Co-Op was the largest department store in the city when it closed 3 years ago. It has been neglected since… A large department store, wandering around it was incredible to see how quickly it had fallen into such a bad state. It reminded me of the first few chapters of The World Without Us, where Weisman talks about the processes that would take place around, inside and on our buildings should humans disappear. Indeed, it could be a study of such processes—damp creeps in everywhere, stripping render from the basement walls and warping and tearing the plywood paneling upstairs. Plant life eases through gaps and cracks. Carpet has lifted and the building has a terrific smell of decay. Yet in the stockrooms, still evident, is graffiti from the early 70’s—name checking footballers that have long since retired, bought pubs and passed on. Locally, there has been calls, growing stronger and stronger, for the owners or the council to inhabit the building. This is where dreamthinkspeak stepped in to temporarily transform the former department store into an incredible series of set-pieces, opening up such a familiar building to a public for the first time in three years, curious to see what had happened the their local shop.

The ensuing world of the play included some interesting moments of self-reference; as Stephenson writes: “The basement of the Co-Op used to feature some beautiful leaded windows around the circulation areas and these have been re-used with elaborate models of show apartments and odd and surreal rooms placed behind the glass. Closer inspection shows that these surreal rooms are models of the rooms we’ve already passed through and (we’ll soon learn) rooms to come.”

[Image: The “leaded windows… re-used with elaborate models of show apartments and odd and surreal rooms,” photographed by Jim Stephenson].

Indeed, one of the most architecturally interesting details of the production was its use of small models that refer to, repeat, or reveal in advance spaces of the play itself. Or, as Stephenson writes, “Repetition of themes continues throughout the show, using increasingly imaginative set-pieces to remind us of where we’ve been.” It’s as if the play somehow stutters, blurting out smaller versions of itself—like an inhabitable 3D printer that can’t help but create images of its own surroundings.

In one of the images below, for instance, Stephenson writes that we see a table “covered in a forest of formerly lit candles”—and within the melted wax, “models of the couple from earlier [in the play] sit drinking tea.” It’s microcosmic self-repetition—a kind of ontological splintering in architectural form.

This takes on a somewhat mind-bending dimension when we learn that, in the fake department store (within the ruined department store…), attendees are confronted with architectural models “lent to the show by the architects Conran & Partners (so, interestingly, these models are for actual redevelopments that may someday be built).” That is, real buildings, constructed perhaps ten or more years from now, could someday be realistically interpreted as hypertrophied spatial aftereffects of this particular stage set.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

In any case, I’ve included many of Stephenson’s photos here, documenting the experience, but there are more on his website (along with a much longer description of the space).

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

You’ll find that I’ve barely even begun to describe the set’s intricacy: there are internal CCTV networks covering the unfolding of the play, multi-lingual actors and actresses wandering through the scenes, and even a secret passageway through a department store cupboard. The final space, like the boss level of some massive new game, “is a huge room, almost an entire floor of the Co-Op,” Stephenson explains, “filled with the remains of a former orchard. A deforestation scene, with woodchips all over the floor and tree stumps left.”

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

And, with that, this particular variation on Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” comes to an end.

(Also check out Jim Stephenson’s straight-ahead architectural photography while you are at his site).