talk20

Though I'm not convinced anyone in the Philadelphia region actually reads BLDGBLOG – and that includes myself – I'll be giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department this Thursday at 6pm. In Philadelphia.


The talk will be exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long, and is part of talk20. I'll be joining Winka Dubbeldam, Ferda Kolatan, Anuradha Mathur, Jenny Sabin, and many others – so come out, drink wine, look at some pictures of offshore utopias, Christopher Walken, tunnels under London, replicant landscapes, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan – and so on. And listen as I slur my words, make things up, hiccup uncontrollably – then collapse into the arms of a horrified crowd...

Titan Arch

[Image: Thomas Athey, Ben White Overpass 66; Athey's got some amazing photos, including Ballardian drains, concrete abstractions of exposed rebar, parking lots, motorways, etc.].

(See also Concrete Island).

Remnant landscapes and living rocks

A few marshes in north-central Mexico are so chemically unique that some scientists think they're "little versions of the primordial sea, before the dawn of nucleated cells."


[Image: New Scientist].

"Fed by underground waters coursing through the mountains' limestone layers and caves, as well as gushing up from deep and ancient aquifers, the pools – or pozas as the locals call them – have strange chemistries. Phosphorus tends to be in short supply, whereas calcium, magnesium and sulphur are richly available... Primitive microbes flourish here."
Some of these marshes are choked with "microbial mats. Under certain conditions, some microbes, such as photosynthetic cyanobacteria, sulphur-reducing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and other helpful waste-eaters, glue themselves together into slimy cooperatives that are often layered like a cake. The incorporation of silt and minerals creates a harder structure, a 'living rock' called a stromatolite."


[Image: An underwater field of stromatolites, from MIT's geobiology lab].

These ecosystems are so chemically abrasive and oddly unlifelike that scientists from Caltech's Virtual Planetary Laboratory hope they might even reveal what forms organisms could take on other planets.

(For a bit more on this see Lunar urbanism 3 or Super Reef; and for some very vaguely – in fact really not – related photographs, see this interview with David Maisel).

Isolation and change

"Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group." – Andrew Knoll, Life on a Young Planet


And so we live, every one of us, the potential origin of new species.

Other subterranean structures

[Image: Lost rivers and bedrock beneath today's rivers and bedrock].

Hurling Taj Mahals into the Sky

[Images: The Taj Mahal, the Ariane 5 rocket, the Space Shuttle – all buildings built to be hurled into the sky at high speed?].

The Taj Mahal looks like a cluster of secret rocketry structures; so what if we tested it out? Built engines in freshly excavated subcellars, cleared the area, trucked in fuel...?
What other buildings are rockets waiting to happen? Could the Empire State Building be a secret space shuttle – deep down in the tunnels of Manhattan, spelunkers find an unbelievable enginery locked inside tombs of bedrock?
Or, if we discovered a way to hurl all the high-rises and skyscrapers of the world into space, could we form our own rings of Saturn – loose buildings aggregated in orbits, linked by bridges, turning in circles above a planet we've left behind? What would Arthur C. Clarke or Hugh Ferris have to say about this?
And would the Indian government mind if we started with the Taj Mahal?

Of ships and archipelagos

In the summer of 2005, the San Diego-based company SeaCode announced that they would permanently anchor a cruise ship off the coast of Los Angeles, in international waters, filling it with an army of "offshore" computer programmers.

This odd new micronation would beam the results of its cheap labor back to mainland clients via microwave and T3 internet connections. It would have a steady labor base, sovereign terrain, potentially even immunity from taxes – and loads and loads of code.

As the journal Application Development Trends writes: "the ship will retain all of its cruise ship facilities and will feed and house workers in style. During off hours, programming teams can partake of the ship’s recreational facilities or head for the lights of L.A. on a water taxi, since each worker will be required to have a U.S. tourist visa." (But check out the comments at the end of that link for some Archigram-worthy speculation).

Work teams will be broken up into "pods," with "pod leaders," and they will work around the clock.

Interestingly, both sides of the political spectrum seem outraged by the idea; right-ish and left-ish observers have responded with outright hostility, even making sarcastic comments about where the ship's toilets will flush.

But I like it; if there's some loophole in international maritime law that allows you to start a free state off the coast of Los Angeles – then I want several. A whole island arc of decommissioned cruise ships, with BLDGBLOG offices on a super-boat somewhere, helicoptering architects out on weekends for coffee; feeding sharks; shooting skeet; awarding novelist-in-residence titles to Jeff VanderMeer, J.G. Ballard, China Miéville, Don DeLillo... We can host the world's first Miss Micronation Pageant, as well as conferences on the state of plate tectonics. Grow orange trees on a hydroponic barge to stay healthy. Panic when storms come in.

Meanwhile, a fully inhabited ghost-archipelago of Chinese "zombie ships" has been found off the coast of West Africa – but it's a lot less interesting than it sounds. This account, by Greenpeace, doesn't like the ships – and has nothing to say about their implications for offshore architectural design. Or whether Constant would be pleased.

Nor does the article offer any thoughts about the first truly great horror film of our globalized times: a weird industrial accident in China has somehow turned all the local workers into flesh-eating zombies; for whatever reason, these zombies are put onto an archipelago of rusting ships in the Indian Ocean; a band of pan-European scientists studying deep ocean-floor tomography sees the ships on the horizon... and the film goes on from there.

(SeaCode discovered via Scott Webel and his Museum of Ephemerata; Chinese zombie ships found via things magazine).