Architecture

As reports and revelations about the diminishing credibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) continue to unfold daily, there is no question that it has major implications. If the science behind AGW were beyond doubt, it would provide a powerful argument for greater government regulation and economic participation. It would empower a worldview geared against greater personal liberty and a rising standard of living. Accumulating wealth would depend more on subsidies and catering to a marketplace in which supply and demand are dictated by government policy rather than actual needs and wants of free people.

As professionals who try to address such needs and wants in all of its variety, architects are very much subject to AGW’s affect on buildings, both in the way they are designed and engineered and in the way they respond to government mandates. In fact, architects are very much wedded to AGW, as it justifies their guiding design philosophy and helps structure their firms’ core values. Many signature designers, including a few that I personally know, have put global warming at the the center of all that their work aims to be about–whether it be in the aggressive employment of green technologies in their buildings, to their promotion of a planning solution (e.g. smart growth) or building type that can be shown to be earth-friendly (e.g. skyscapers). The issue’s inherent demand for greater control over the environment in the hands of an enlightened elite complements well with architects’ own (and as yet, unrealized) ambitions of becoming the major shapers of the built environment. Idealistic architects ultimately want to transcend the rough-and-tumble, at times crass, reality of the free market, and if the global warming issue makes this possible they will quickly jump on the bandwagon.

Now that the bandwagon’s coming apart due to the quickly evaporating authority of AGW’s leading scientific gatekeepers, will these same climate-fearing architects insist they won’t be fooled again? Will they gladly go back to merely designing pretty buildings that hopefully fullfill a client’s programmatic needs and budget? Such has been the reality for architects for most of human history, but the last couple of centuries seem to indicate that many designers will latch on to other issues that rely on the self-serving promotion of mass hysteria. These manufactured crises have helped spawn major architectural evolution and innovations we enjoy and often take for granted. However, they have also served as excuses for the abandonment of aesthetics that have bred public contempt for modern architecture and the oppressive dullness that it has wrought to our cities worldwide.

If anyone is bookish enough to read about the history architectural theory, one is struck by how the discussion changes dramatically around the late 18th century. Up to that point, when an architectural treatise was written, the question they tried to answer was simple but profound: how should one build to satisfy Nature or God? Before Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was written in first century BC, architecture in the academic realm was pretty much a religious matter, often done by priests, and rules were created for the proper design of temples and tombs. After fall of Rome (and with it, obscuring Vitruvius), a return to the religious question emerged during rise of European Cristendom until around the 14th century. Then the Renaissance kicked off 500 year-long stream of architectural treatises that tried to answer another seemingly inescapable central question: What was Vitruvius trying to say?

Far from being some sort of narrow academic obsession with the ruminations of an unremarkable Roman military engineer, it actually provided a highly practical basis on which it was possible discuss and debate about architecture from a secular point of view. Vitruvius plainly stated the values that architecture should embody: beauty, firmness, and commodity. The basis from which these values could be achieved was suddenly subject to all sorts of secular interpretation, whether through math, science, or some sort system of universal taste. Squabbles between architects over the minutiae of classical proportions may seem petty and a bit arbitrary to us now, but they were a part of a highly serious exercise in trying to figure out how to make good buidings and pleasant spaces. This strange fixation on Greco-Roman classicism left us a built legacy of undeniable appeal that continues to beloved by people the world over.

Before the industrial era of the latter half of the 18th century, architectural design neglected something else just as important as beauty: function. It wasn’t because it was deliberately ignored, but rather because life up to that point was relativly simple. Wealth was small and highly concentrated, physical comfort was unknown, people died like flies, and everyone was at the mercy of nature. The most a building was expected to do was to shelter the occupant from the rain, and have rooms big enough for a couple pieces and furniture, and, if you had the funds, some servants. Staying warm was futile, plumbing was non-existent, and you interiors were dark and draughty. The most an architect could do was to embellish the exteriors and interiors, which is partly why arguments about the Greek orders mattered so much to them.

The industrial revolution completely upended this state of affairs. Technological advances made it possible to live in a way that transcended what until then was nasty, brutish and short. Industrialization unleashed exponential increases in productivity, and with it, wealth, which then became more widely distributed and created a new middle class. The modern mentality was born, in which one was influenced by the idea that things are so new and changing that nothing from the past applies. Closely tied to this mentality was that the problems that afflicted man since the dawn of time were not immutable facts of nature, but capable of being solved or improved upon. Poverty, hunger, sickness and social injustice were no longer accepted as part of the natural order of things, since Reason, coupled scientific empiricism that made industry possible, would show the way towards a better, more enlightened future.

In this modern outlook, both age-old human problems and new problems resulting from the changes brought about by the industrial revolution were now neatly packaged under the term crisis. What was once the natural cycle of life, death, plagues and famines were now crises of public health, sanitation and unacceptable squalor. As the fecundity of the human population rose with ever greater production of food and improved medicine and a bit more money, there were crises of overpopulation, resource depletion, traffic congestion and pollution. Then later, when the masses were more properous than ever before, new crises were made out of more aesthetic and spiritual issues such as a low quality of life, poor education and more recently environmental damage. Labeling the existence of certain complex problems as a crisis instantly lends a sense of urgency and seem to imply that only grand (and preferably state driven) solutions will work. Those that operate with the crisis mentality attribute problems that afflict mankind to a lack of a rationally-inspired design. Naturally, architects of the modern era were quite keen on this.

In the past century, architectural theory changed from plodding treatises on the correctness of the classical orders or the moral quality of materials to blunt manifestoes, written often in an urgent tone and composed of a series of bold assertions and even bolder solutions. The overall attitude in these manifestos, whether it be written by the Italian futurists, the Bauhaus founders, or Le Corbusier himself, was that everything had to go. There were no small fixes. It was fundamental to start from scratch. One notices the term chaos used frequently in these manifestoes, referring to not only the rapid displacement of people and livelihoods due to the machine, but also in the way ideas, art and style continued to multiply exponentially in variety and personal whim. Corbusier’s own philosophical movement, Purism, began with the notion of a retour a l’ordre, or a return to order. To achieve this, it was necessary for the biggest players in society to take the lead, such as major industrialists and ultimately, the State.

To these Modern idealists, war had a practical benefit. It was seen by many as a way of cleansing, of ridding the old, chaotic order of the present. War’s aftermath would then bring about the opportunity to begin anew with supposedly better solutions. Closely tied to war was a financial crisis, the Great Depression, which would bring down the unjust, chaotic order of laissez-faire capitalism in which people freely make their economic choices and would then set the stage for the State to engage in centralized economic planning. Once the state was the only agent making economic choices, it would then also decide what gets and built and where, assuming it would follow the guidance of enlightened design experts. Ego-driven Nietzchean supermen such as Le Corbusier himself would be at the ready, with plans for a new radiant city, where up to three million residents would be housed in skyscrapers, multi-storied zigzaging apartment slabs, driving on highways, and enjoying abundant greenery and collective gardens. To further prove that these grand plans of his were based on the utmost rationality, he proposed to abolish the traditional urban street, which were emblematic of the chaos in traffic, inadequate daylight and fresh air, and architectural incoherence. Le Corbusier and his Modernist contemporaries were big believers in never letting a crisis go to waste.

For architects of above-normal aesthetic sensibility, their insistence that their design was based on functional considerations alone seems a bit naive to us nowadays. If one trudges through the oftentimes dry CIAM manifesto published in the 1940’s, one is stuck by how this club elite modern urban planners were so unflinchingly certain in their diagnosis of existing cities, in uncritically accepting population growth projections that often never panned out, and in their conviction that the solutions offered was the only way forward. And then to couch this all in an aura of objectivity and ’science’, it only seems a bit absurd to us today, especially upon taking stock on the havoc the CIAM movement has wrought to urban development in the latter half of the twentieth century.

But hey, they did offer a reasonable solution to all the crises as they were understood at the time. The CIAM city would fix traffic congestion by separating car traffic from people; quality of life would be dramatically better due to abundant parks and greenery; skyscrapers and towers would efficiently organize density while allowing more space for fresh air and vegetation, thus improving the health of its inhabitants. Housing would be of higher quality as well as a lot more equitable. Isolating the workplace from the residence, and confining walking to park-like pedestrian paths would also make life a lot better than what it was before. Still, in addressing the crises at the time, CIAM’s practices begot newer crises: encouraging car traffic to bridge the distance between work and home contributed to air pollution due to heavier auto traffic, the giant apartment blocks helped generated a crisis in criminality and ghettos. Modernism’s rejection of ornament and the human scale, along with copious amounts of concrete helped spawn an existential crisis, in which much of the public still doesn’t accept the works of its cultural elite, whether it be in art or achitecture. For all of modern planning’s collective fervor, their ideas seemed to disrupt cohesive communities and produced the most alienating landscapes.

Never learning from the law of unintended consequences, architects and planners responded to these new crises undiminished. Fears of a global population bomb, vanishing natural resources and a potential nuclear apocalypse led some to focus on sustainability, either as a self-sufficient village (Arcosanti, Drop City) to a new high-tech civilization based modular design (Archigram, Japanese Metabolists). These movements were quite short-lived, due to the fact they tried to address a global crisis in complete isolation from political, economic, and technological realities of the time.

Other architects and planners who were less driven by apocalytpic concerns tried instead to solve the existential crisis of communities and crime by looking backward into a simpler time before modern crises arose. A new classical historicism emerged, in which the restoration of traditional styles effectively addressed the pressing need for familiarity, security, and timelessness in a rapidly changing world. New Urbanism served as its planning arm, aiming to restore valuable social bonds through structuring streets and neighborhoods along traditional patterns. A popular theory of a “Pattern Language” argued that much traditional design resulted from natural experiences engrained in human memory. For the first time in many decades, much of the public responded favorably. Still, to much of the academic elite in the field, historicism was inadequate partly because it was too engrossed in formalism and surface treatment. Large social and environmental problems that afflicting the modern world were not being more directly engaged by a historicist movement that was busy narrowing the scope of architecture back to preoccupations of the past (eg. embellishing exteriors and interiors, keeping the rain out, worring about a building’s ‘appropriateness’). This wasn’t the premodern era where architects were mere artists-craftsment quietly serving their patrons. Now, architects expected themselves to be agents for radical change.

By the time centers of architectural thought, the schools, had rejected the historicists and isolated them to a couple of programs in the U.S. in the early 1990s, a new crisis began to take shape that would inspire many bright young architects from that point onward. Unlike previous crises, where architectural solutions were a bit out of touch with reality, this new one, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), had the potential of putting the design of buildings at the very epicenter of a broad strategy in combatting it. Since a hefty portion of overall carbon emissions (40%) is generated by buildings, architects were now in position to lead the way in devising critical solutions, and thus saving civilization from impending climate-induced collapse. Instead of wallowing in isolation imagining future fantasies as was often the case in the 1960s and 1970s, in the era of global warming, all things are aligned for architects to make a difference. Economic and political entities perceive the cost of climate change to be so great so as to fundamentally rethink how we build, how much our structures consume, and in what other new ways our buildings can perform. The technology has also caught up, thanks to modern computing, with new automated systems in adjusting energy usage, daylight, and enabling all kinds of surfaces to absorb and transmitt solar energy. Knowledge of green design had recently become more systematized, with widely accepted ratings such as LEED. And unlike the efforts of a few decades before, most green buildings looked mainstream, differing from non-green buildings only in terms of specified materials and systems.

All these improvements and advances don’t come cheap, and like anything that bills itself as environmentally friendly, they have yet to be competitive in the market place due to this inherent price premium. Businesses that push green projects can only circumvent this market disadvantage with taxpayer-funded subsidies and intensive government patronage. Supporting these projects thus relies on state policies aimed at regulating the marketplace based on an overruling belief in the public good. As long as AGW presents itself as a crisis that threatens everyone’s well-being, then the government sees itself as justified in redistributing wealth towards companies (and the designers that depend on them) that promote its definition of the public good. To put it crudely, many architects saturated in green orthodoxy, have become willing instruments of the state. This is nothing new in the profession, but it has become a prevailing pattern in the past century for architects to be joined at the hip with all kinds of regimes. To many idealistic architects (which is at least half of them) serving the goals of the state is fine so long as the policies pursued are enlightened. It beats having to make a living in the messy marketplace, to which many of values architects hold dear have either a high price tag or no worth at all.

If carbon emissions from humans are proved to have no affect on climate change, and thus government-led action is irrelevant to stopping what is a complex natural occurence, is it a valid public good? It’s important to remember that although crisis often bring about a lot of wrong-headed solutions, there are just as many innovations that we could not live without. Making buildings much more efficient over its lifecycle as a means of reducing carbon emissions is clearly a public good, especially as it adapts to growing competition for natural energy resources due to rapid economic development throughout the globe (which is also good). Implementing ways to reduce a building’s negative externalities to the environment is also a public good, if it improves air and water quality and minimizes the disturbance on ecosystems.

What is not a public good is expending extraordinary sums of other people’s money when the benefits are either meager or non-existent. Nor is it good when the vast sums of money shield producers from the market discipline, thus slowing real innovation. What AGW has done so far is to force lots of money to be spent on measures that achieve comparatively little benefit but incur an enormous burden for everyone whether through higher overal prices, increased taxes, and the uneconomic elimination of perfectly productive and profitable industries that employs millions. It has also apportioned even more gobs of state money towards subsidizing renewal energy, which, by the immutable scientific laws that apply to them, will remain a highly inefficient and expensive means of producing energy. In buildings, it has encouraged designers to integrate wind and solar generation, which dramatically raises construction cost and maintenance in exchange of providing a small fraction in the operation of the building itself. Another example is that the fear in the carbon produced in the transport of vegetables from farms has gotten a number of young architects to embrace the idea of growing produce on the building, whether through green screen walls or green roofs. Never mind that such practices do not make food cheaper nor make city dwellers better farmers nor our time more wisely spent. And then add to those the extra cost of moistureproofing and reinforcing structures.

Once the urgency in AGW sputters to a standstill, what are architects left to do? Maybe what they have always done, before modern crises appeared on the scene: focus on beauty, strutural soundness and the way it functions in relation to what is appropriate according to circumstances. It does not mean one has to resort to historicist styles or classicism. Rather, we should openly encourage aesthetic and technical experimentation and development, but within the limits placed by reality, such as the client’s wishes, the site’s urban context, natural properties and climate. For the more politically idealistic, these goals don’t go far enough. For the rest of us, it assures a more honest dialogue with the public that we serve, and in return, the public awards us with higher esteem for our creations. An added bonus is that we won’t be portrayed as elite dupes.

Go to Source

• Open Source Ecology
  "Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid 'resilient communities.' By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and 'evolve to freedom.'"
• Come Out & Play
  "Each year the Come Out & Play settles in a different neighborhood and explores the limits of play and games in that space."

Go to Source

(A house anxiously awaiting its erasure. Photo by Kane Cunningham.)

UK landscape artist Kane Cunningham is planning to rig his new home with cameras not to film the stunning views of the North Yorkshire coast but to document its imminent destruction. Sitting precipitously close to the edge of a cliff, the house could fall off at any moment. Coastal erosion has already eaten away most of the garden.

Some nearby houses were similarly threatened but were condemned and demolished in advance of the migrating cliff edge. Cunningham, however, wants the climate-changed sea itself to devour his bungalow.

Interestingly, Cunningham bought it, worth £150,000 two years ago, for just £3,000 on his credit card, “a deliberate financial transaction suggesting the link to credit, subprime mortgages, property ownership, debt, loans, the financial markets, property speculation, boom and bust.”

“It’s global recession and global warming encapsulated,” adds the artist.

In the Archives:
Operation Beachhead
Climate Ghettos
Sand Wars
The Retreating Village

Go to Source

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine opens tonight, March 9, at 7pm in New York City].

With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City].

Ready or not, then, and half-covered in paint, our jeans ruined, in need of new shoes, dehydrated, our exhibition participants recently returned from Uganda and the eastern Congo with photographs and a film, mounting illuminated comic book manuscripts on the wall, exploring nuclear-waste repositories as symbolic geological centers of a future world, diagramming parallel split cities with quarantine spaces merely an arm’s length away, and opening the facade panels of the gallery to allow bubbles and bulges and Tyvek screens to confuse the outside line with the street, and more, we will be there tonight, unloading dozens of cases of beer donated by Brooklyn Brewery, to celebrate this long project coming together at last in an exhibition space for everyone to see.

Stop by at 7pm tonight, March 9, if you’re around and say hello—or drop in on Storefront for Art and Architecture during its regular opening hours any time before April 17. Orange will after-image through your brain for days to come…

Go to Source

(After being diagnosed with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, Robert Daniels was incarcerated in the jail unit of an Arizona hospital, locked up in a murky legal terrain where the bounds of individual civil rights and public health are tenuously demarcated. For a little over a year starting in July 2006, he lived under what could be described as inhumane conditions: 24-hour surveillance, lights always on, no TV, no way of contacting the outside world except a pay-phone and one tiny window looking out to some dull hallway. Other doctors then determined that he didn’t have XDR-TB after all. Photo by Danielle Levitt for Details.)

If you’re in New York in the next few weeks, consider stopping by Storefront for Art and Architecture for Landscapes of Quarantine, an exhibition curated by Geoff Manaugh, of BLDGBLOG, and Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography.

Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control. It is used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria and, as a result, may (or may not) be carrying the infection themselves. But quarantine does not apply only to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native—however those labels are defined.

As a result, the practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.

An opening reception will be held this week on Tuesday, March 9. It’s free and open to the public.

(Poster for Landscapes of Quarantine.)

Meanwhile, we did some curating again and hashtagged 10 relevant posts: #quarantine.

(Thanks to Geoff for the photo of Robert Daniels.)

Go to Source

(Illustration by Tim Simpson.)

Natural Selection by Tim Simpson, now of Studio Lithero, is “an instrument that competes plants against each other. The device empowers plants to control the fate of others using sensors and mechanised shears in a Darwinian race for survival. The sensors set above the plants detect the first to grow to a specified height, at which point it is saved, and the others fatally chopped.”

One wishes this was marketed for the home decorating market, perhaps through a partnership with Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia or Home Depot; a mass produced kinetic sculpture that approximates the violence and savagery of nature, the brutal facts from which indoor plants seem happily divorced, that is, if they’re lucky enough to have attentive owners.

You can take bets from your houseguests on which one will win the race, and everyone can check the status of the race on Twitter. The victor will tweet, “I RULEZ!” The losers, “PWNED.”

In any case, be sure to watch this video of an actual race.

(Spotted awhile back on We Make Money Not Art. Thanks to @doingitwrong for triggering the recall.)

Go to Source

(Nicolas Moulin, Panclimn A, 2006. More images of Moulin’s work here [pdf]. Via Vulgare.)

1) The Guardian on the 21st century African land grab. In 20 or more African countries “land is being bought or leased for intensive agriculture on an immense scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era.

An Observer investigation estimates that up to 50m hectares of land — an area more than double the size of the UK — has been acquired in the last few years or is in the process of being negotiated by governments and wealthy investors working with state subsidies. [...]

The land rush, which is still accelerating, has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages and the European Union’s insistence that 10% of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015.

In many areas the deals have led to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of “land grabbing”.

One of the countries is Ethiopia. It’s “one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.”

2) Serial Consign on airlocks.

3) Foreign Policy on China’s golf obsession. “While between 100 and 300 courses are expected to be built [on China's tropical island province of Hainan], the most mysterious project — and by far the most audacious — is the latest offering from Hong Kong’s Mission Hills Group, already owners of a 12-course resort in southern China’s Guangdong province. Its Hainan club, when completed, will be the world’s largest, with some 22 courses covering an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Manhattan.”

4) Wikipedia on the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.

5) Spiegel on the garbage of Naples. “The Italian-German solid-waste profiteering scandals provide insights into a booming industry. According to investigations by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), up to two million tons of household waste have already been dumped illegally in German waste dumps and former landfills.”

Go to Source

[Image: National Geographic: "A spelunker in a glacier cave in Greenland gazes upon colors and shapes that look more like a swirling galaxy than a cave formation." Photo by Carsten Peter].

Having now spent every available moment of every day for more than a week stuck inside Storefront for Art and Architecture, painting the floors and walls, installing vinyl, coordinating deliveries, sweeping up loose tape and sawdust, and more, I’ve decided to upload a slightly longer than normal cache of links. It might be a few more days before I can post again.

I hope to see some of you at the exhibition opening, though, which takes place Tuesday, March 9, at 7pm: Landscapes of Quarantine.

[Image: The future is not what it used to be: MIT's thresholds seeks essays on critical futurism].

thresholds 38 | Futures: Call for Submissions: “Whether it is a revolt against the futures of the past or a curiosity towards the unknown, thresholds 38 invites methods, projects, practices and alternative kinds of critique that imagine unorthodox futures that can emerge from within this institution.” Submissions due March 12.

Synthetic Aesthetics | Call for Participants: “We seek participants for a project on synthetic biology, design, and aesthetics. The project will provide funding to bring together scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology with artists, designers, and other creative practitioners.”

Synthetic biology is broadly defined as the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing biological systems for useful purposes. Design is central to synthetic biology, as the living world becomes a product of design and manufacturing choices, rather than evolutionary pressures alone. Thus, it becomes important to ask what role design–and the related concept of aesthetics–play in this burgeoning field. Other forms of engineering and manufacturing work in close conjunction with creative practitioners: structural engineers work with architects; mechanical engineers with product designers. Can synthetic biology benefit similarly from such collaborations?

Applications due March 31.

Open Agenda | Call for Submissions: “Open Agenda is a new annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental Australian architecture. Open to recent architecture graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment… Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration.” Register by May 1.

[Image: The Niagara Falls without their water, photographed by Flickr user rbglasson, via mammoth].

mammoth | Absent Rivers, Ephemeral Parks: “For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were ‘de-watered’ as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was drip-irrigated, like some mineral garden in a tender establishment period, by long pipes stretched across the gap, to maintain a sufficient and stabilizing level of moisture. For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape.”

BBC | North Tyneside high street “revived” by fake shop front: “Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside… The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required.”

InfraNet Lab | Terrestrial Discontinuities: “…these [energy corridors in the western United States] range from 3,500-feet wide to upwards of 5 miles wide. With these widths, we could almost begin to see these corridors as an ecology in and of themselves—rather than an ecology competing with National Parks, they could become the New National Parks, infrastructural vectors, protected as natural reserves by virtue of their very danger to us.”

Guardian | Greece should sell islands to keep bankruptcy at bay: “Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art works to cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands…” It might be ethically wrong, as well as politically dubious, and I have no money, but BLDGBLOG would certainly buy one. The Sovereign Neo-Cyclades.

[Image: Tactical drone seed-bombing, courtesy of Design Under Sky].

Design Under Sky | Ludic Guerrilla Gardening Drone Warfare: “…with recent advancements in augmented reality and virtual gaming, I can’t help but imagine that a new style of drone-based urban landscape replenishment isn’t a far off possibility.”

Post-Traumatic Urbanism | Mediterranean Union: “A [high-speed rail] line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region—linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe—all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees. The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?”

City of Sound | Notes on New Songdo City (Part 1): “…it occurs to me that the logical thing to do would be the greatest engineering project of the next centuries; quite possibly the greatest diplomatic and economic project of the next centuries too, linking Japan with China via Korea via a high-speed rail link across gigantic bridges.”

Spaceinvading | Sandwiched by INABA: “As part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Jeffrey Inaba’s firm INABA was commissioned to design a pop‐up café located in the museum’s interior courtyard. The project consists of three large‐scale lanterns that occupy the courtyard’s double‐height space; a 24‐foot long service counter; communal tables; high‐top counters; and ‘droopy’ seat cushions.”

[Image: A project by CJ Lim].

SCI-Arc | London Eight Exhibition: “SCI-Arc presents London Eight, curated by renowned English architect Sir Peter Cook. A founding member of the 1960s futurist group Archigram and a visiting faculty member at SCI-Arc, Cook invited five architects who currently teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where Cook was professor from 1990 to 2005, to participate in an exhibition at the SCI-Arc Library Gallery. These architects were then asked to select a ‘protege’ whom they had mentored through their studies at the Bartlett to exhibit alongside their own work in the gallery.” Includes work by Smout Allen, Johan Hybschmann, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz, Yousef Al-Mehdari, CJ Lim, and Pascal Bronner.

Hudson Valley Seed Library | “The Hudson Valley Seed Library strives to do two things: to create an accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners; and, to create gift-quality seed packs featuring works designed by New York artists in order to celebrate the beauty of heirloom gardening.”

Urban Forest Map | “The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative project among city agencies, tree advocacy groups, and citizen foresters like you to map every tree in San Francisco, which will help protect and expand our urban forests.”

GOOD | Fallen Fruit’s Tree-planting Dreams Are Uprooted In Madrid: “For the last 10 days Fallen Fruit had been scouring the area [around Madrid], leading urban foraging trips to find what other fruit-bearing trees existed in the neighborhood around the city-funded Matadero art space, plotting the best locations for future apples, peaches, plums, pears, and apricots… The plan was to have the trees planted before their final presentation that night, giving the people of Madrid a map to all the public fruit they could eventually eat.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer | Galleria mall is giant greenhouse, raising organic crops in Cleveland: “…by late spring or early summer, there will be fresh tomatoes for sale among the shops and galleries at the downtown Cleveland mall. Very fresh—as in vine-grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center that stretches between East Ninth and East 12th streets.”

[Image: King's Vineyard, London by Soonil Kim, via Pruned].

Pruned | King’s Vineyard, London: “One can certainly imagine such a network [of aerial vineyards and urban viticultural installations] built to grow others things, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, cash crops, commercial flowers and plants, with the winery turned into a farmer’s market.”

Independent | Syria’s Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered: “Dr. Mason explains that he ‘went for a walk’ into the eastern perimeter of the site—an area that hasn’t been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it’s likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East’s Neolithic Period—a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC – 4300 BC. It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe.”

New York Times | A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature: “From Washington to New York State, a series of ’snowmageddons’ have wreaked a particular form of havoc for Orthodox Jews. The storms have knocked down portions of the ritual boundary known as an eruv in Jewish communities… Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house. Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them—Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically.”

Spillway | Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us: “One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realize that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we’ve fallen in 10 years.”

[Image: The "High Houses" of Lebbeus Woods].

Lebbeus Woods | High Houses: “The High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995. Their site is the badly damaged ‘old tobacco factory’ in the Marijn dvor section near the city center.”

Serial Consign | Toronto Sound Ecology: “Toronto Sound Ecology is a web mapping project dedicated to archiving field recordings collected in and around Toronto.”

Some landscapes | Alpine Symphony: “Birdsong, thunderstorms and flowing water are pretty standard, but… would it be possible to move away from the sublime and the picturesque, to convey more unusual settings or simply nondescript landscapes through purely orchestral sound?”

Google Earth Blog | Solving a Murder With Google Earth: “On January 24, 2006, Jennifer Kesse vanished. The police quickly determined that she was abducted, but nothing solid has turned up in the past four years… During this time, users on her site discussed the new events and came to a stunning revelation: using Google Earth’s historical imagery, they found an image from approximately one month after she disappeared. The image seems to show some promising information.”

Related from last summer: Sydney Morning Herald | Mugging suspects snapped by Google Street View: “Dutch police have arrested twin brothers on suspicion of robbery after their alleged victim spotted a picture of them following him on Google Map’s Street View feature.”

National Geographic | Quintana Roo Underwater Cave Project: “Beneath the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, [Sam] Meacham and his team are exploring and mapping the longest underwater cave system in the world.” See also: Blue Holes Project: “Blue holes can run extremely deep underground, with one Bahamian blue hole exceeding 600 feet (180 meters) below sea level, and contain a series of mazelike passageways going miles in many directions. These cave systems can transition from giant rooms to tiny holes that divers must remove all of their gear in order to squeeze through. To add to the challenge, currents reverse in the ocean caves, making timing of dives critical.”

[Image: Architizer comes to Los Angeles].

Architizer | Los Angeles Launch Announcement: “We are happy to announce that on March 18th, we will be hosting a party in Los Angeles at the new A+D Museum space [at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard]. In partnership with Haworth, Dwell Magazine, LA Forum, SCI-Arc, and BLDGBLOG, the event will be an evening to meet fellow Los Angeleno architects as well as a celebration of Los Angeles architecture culture.” Here is a map. If you’re in LA, stop by and say hello!

[Image: Rendering of the new A+D Museum].

(Some links via @doingitwrong, @javierest, @geoparadigm, @stevesilberman, and possibly elsewhere. Don’t miss Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).

Go to Source

Just a quick note, on a break from painting the interior of Storefront, that I will be live on the air in NYC in about ten minutes, speaking with Harry Allen on his show Nonfiction. We’ll be discussing architecture, The BLDGBLOG Book, and more. Tune into WBAI for audio…

Go to Source

Go to Source