Contraption Structure Bridge

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick's Sitooterie II, a "small outdoor retreat" made from "square, hollow tubes... Each tube points to the exact center of the structure, so a single light source can illuminate them all. They also serve a structural purpose, supporting the whole building like a bed of nails." Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired – larger version here].

"When he was 6," we read in the new issue of Wired, British artist-engineer Thomas Heatherwick "would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor":

He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension – and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato.

31 years later, Heatherwick has become "a modern da Vinci."
Scattered throughout Heatherwick's King's Cross studio, Wired reports, "are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls." A 2004 profile in the Observer describes this same studio as "an unconventional set-up that includes experts in landscape architecture, architecture, product design, theatre design, civil and structural engineering and metal working."
Wired goes on to relate how, one "cold winter morning," Heatherwick showed the visiting reporter a photograph of "a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College."
The bridge was made of glass:

In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.

The three photographs below, then, each taken by Donald Milne for Wired, show another of Heatherwick's bridge projects: the deservedly famous "hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats."
Of course, that's the bridge that can "curl itself into a ball" – not the canal. Or the Thames. Though I would like to see that.

[Image: Thomas Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge. Photographed by Donald Milne for Wired].

To "retract" the bridge, Wired explains, "an 11-kW hydraulic pump drives a master cylinder 16 inches in diameter, which in turn drives a series of 6-inch slave cylinders. These power 14 vertical shafts beneath the bridge’s hinged handrails. As the shafts rise, the railings fold in, causing the 39-foot span to curl. Because all the cylinders are driven at a constant rate regardless of the load on each bridge segment, the structure moves smoothly, taking two minutes to open or close. The pumps and related equipment are housed in the basement of an adjoining building, so the bridge is almost silent as it operates."
Bear in mind, however, that the "canal" this bridge crosses is really only nine or ten feet wide, as well as the maritime equivalent of a cul-de-sac – so the bridge is more of an artistic curiosity than a real piece of city infrastructure. Nonetheless, it's awesome.
In an older interview with PingMag, Heatherwick explained, referring to his work in general, that "[b]ehind all this, it always remains important that something is achievable! You can have a perfect wonderful plan, but if it never happens it doesn’t really matter to anybody anyway."
So, speaking of achievement – and as everyone in the universe already knows – Heatherwick has also designed B of the Bang, the tallest sculpture in Britain – beautifully photographed, while under construction, here.

Towers of Silence

[Image: A Zoroastrian "tower of silence," on top of which corpses would be left, arranged in rings, exposed to sun, weather, and vultures].

By indirections, find elevators out

You wake up in a New York hotel room, your vision cloudy. You have hazy memories of guests arriving, all grins and champagne glasses, coming in the night before to snort coke as you watched the Weather Channel – only you don't remember inviting anyone over, and you can't seem to figure out who they were.
Nevermind, you think: you like champagne.
Sometimes a bit too much.
It's only after rising with a headache like iron clamps strapped to your temples, squinting at the morning light, that you remember the syringe, and the struggle, and the fact that someone must have drugged you. But why you?
That's when you see that: 1) you are still dressed; 2) your suitcase is gone; and 3) there is a small note taped to your bedside table, next to a free copy of International Salesman. The note says:

Shakespeare's Hamlet is being performed in an elevator somewhere in Manhattan. You have ten hours to find it.

This is terrible news.

Architectural Film Fest: Call For Entries

I'm incredibly excited to announce that Materials & Applications and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to curate an architectural film fest, as part of this year's Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles. In fact, we're putting together a ton of interesting stuff; I'll be making more announcements here on BLDGBLOG soon.
But part of our little sub-festival will be an entire evening full of short architectural films – so we thought we'd put out a general call to anyone with a film of their own that they might want to see screened for the adoring, semi-famous, and well-tanned crowds of southern California.
The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment – or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn't just backdrop.
Even more specifically, we'd love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces, such as the short films generated annually by the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 15. (International submissions are encouraged).
Need more ideas? Then check out cinematic urbanism; stop by the glass avenues of Paris 2054; or watch one of these two films. If that's not enough, consider reading this article by Jonathan Glancey, in which he claims that:

What is fascinating, and very much an area for further research, is the close relationship between radical architectural design and the cinema. Much of the best of modern architecture, combining digital and three-dimensional design processes, is cinematic in scope and feeling.

Of course – though Glancey doesn't explicitly state this – many of the most exhilirating films to watch are architecural in both structure and reference, whether this means Die Hard or Stalker or even David Fincher's Panic Room – or Aliens, Tativille, and The City of Lost Children, for that matter.

[Image: From Christian Volckman's architecturally awesome Renaissance].

Less abstractly, perhaps you've just recorded a video interview with an architect or urban planner – and it's actually interesting – or you've just driven around Manhattan fifty times, filming each circuit, speeding the whole thing up till it's less than three minutes... Or whatever: we just want films about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment. There's a whole lot of leeway there.
Your film has to be at least a minute long – though it can consist of multiple, smaller films, edited together – and no longer than ten minutes. It also has to be good.
Finally, to be included, your film has to be submitted either to BLDGBLOG or to Materials & Applications before Friday, April 6th, 2007. Include your name; your affiliation, if you have one; the title of your film; its running length; and a short description of the actual film. We'll then go through all the submissions and choose the ones that will be featured at the festival (specific date, time, and location to be announced shortly).
Pending further developments, eligible formats for submission include Region 1 DVDs (email me for my address, or just ship it to Materials & Applications) or files sent via services like YouSendIt and MegaUpload.
So get cracking! Who knows who will see your film. This time next year, you could be directing X-Men 4 and flipping the bird at all the kids you went to architecture school with...

The Guatemala City Abyss

[Image: The abyss, courtesy of National Geographic News].

"After rumbling for weeks," we read, "part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth on Friday."
The gigantic sinkhole into which those homes plummeted is referred to as "the Guatemala City abyss."

(Via gravestmor. But don't miss The town at risk from cave-ins, earlier on BLDGBLOG).

The Wind Bank and the Battery

When it was announced at the beginning of January that Australian researchers had developed a kind of wind battery – an "electricity storage system that promises to transform the role of wind energy" – I immediately thought of a scene from Virgil's Aeneid.

[Image: The wind bank and the battery, via New Scientist].

There, we read about a place called "Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle," where all the winds of the world are stored:

Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus
Rules the contending winds and moaning gales
As warden of their prison. Round the walls
They chafe and bluster underground. The din
Makes a great mountain murmur overhead.
High on a citadel enthroned,
Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury,
Else they might flay the sea and sweep away
Land masses and deep sky through empty air.
In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away
In caverns of black night. He set above them
Granite of high mountains – and a king
Empowered at command to rein them in
Or let them go. (Book 1, 75-89)

In other words, King Aeolus, "high on a citadel enthroned," ruler of these "contending winds and moaning gales," serves as a kind of literary precedent for the new wind bank project off the coast of Australia.
Less abstractly, New Scientist explains how a local utility company on King Island has "installed a mammoth rechargeable battery which ensures that as little wind energy as possible goes to waste":

When the wind is strong, the wind farm's turbines generate more electricity than the islanders need. The battery is there to soak up the excess and pump it out again on days when the wind fades and the turbines' output falls. The battery installation has almost halved the quantity of fuel burnt by the diesel generators, saving not only money but also at least 2000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The battery actually works through an ingenious system of chemical mixture and separation. It is thus referred to as a "flow battery":

In the lead-acid batteries most commonly used, the chemicals that store the energy remain inside the battery. The difference with the installation on King Island is that when wind power is plentiful the energy-rich chemicals are pumped out of the battery and into storage tanks, allowing fresh chemicals in to soak up more charge. To regenerate the electricity the flow is simply reversed.

Interestingly, this bit of news arrived at the same time as an article about offshore oil rigs, on the Gulf coast of Texas, being retrofitted to act as gigantic windmills.

[Image: Via Wired].

In other words, an offshore energy firm is hoping to "mount conventional windmills on decommissioned oil platforms," and then anchor those platforms, like artificial islands, out at sea, where the planet's winds are at their strongest.
Combining both these stories, though, I can't help but picture a suitably mythic vision of gigantic flow batteries, standing on iron strutworks and gantried legs, like some sci-fi sea-city on the Texas horizon, dispensing power to all those who visit it: a modern-day version of Aeolia, in other words, the weather-breeding isle.
In any case, all of this takes a turn inland when we add yet another article, published last month in Metropolis. Metropolis introduces us to a man named Mark Oberholzer. Oberholzer has proposed "integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes," which would thus "harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy."

[Image: Via Metropolis].

By tapping into an otherwise overlooked urban energy source, Oberholzer's plan transforms a space of pollution, waste, and indulgence – i.e. the modern interstate highway system – into a place of energetic productivity.
Better yet, his system capitalizes not on already existing wind patterns, such as those roaring across the ocean waters of the world, but on inland breezes generated by human activity. His highway-based turbines thus exhibit an interesting, if problematic, symmetry when it comes to anthropocentric climate change: these devices rely entirely on the passage of automobiles, even as they generate an electrical supply that doesn't itself burn fossil fuels.

[Image: Via Metropolis].

Returning to the Classical theme with which this post started, though, there is one aspect to all of this that perhaps even Homer himself would like to hear. I'm referring to the Anemoi, Greek gods of wind, each associated with one of four cardinal directions. There was Boreas, the north wind; Eurus, the east wind; Notus, the south wind; and Zephyr, the west wind.
To these, though, Oberholzer's highway project would seem to add a new wind, and another direction: the wind of Man and Cities, those agitated inland breezes from our architectural world, where constant motion now generates its own unruly weather.
An even larger symmetry opens up here, then, when we realize that Oberholzer's inland winds of highways and boulevards might yet be stored, years from now, in wind batteries like those on King Island, Australia.
In other words, these new winds of modernity – urban weather – would be welcomed back into the embrace of King Aeolus, tying the knot, joining those older breezes locked deep inside the isle of Aeolia, where their energy will be stored for another day.

(This post originally appeared on Worldchanging).

Infections of the Earth vs. Statue City

[Image: Mt. Nemrut stone statue heads].

Naturally occuring soil bacteria, called Bacillus pasteurii, could someday "be used to help steady buildings against earthquakes."
These microbes "can literally convert loose, sandy soil into rock."
Through a kind of geological infection, they cause "calcite (calcium carbonate) to be deposited around sand grains, cementing them together," transforming "loose, liquefiable sand into a solid cylinder." This alone could help buildings survive an earthquake.
Interestingly, "similar techniques have been used on a smaller scale, for example, to repair cracks in statues, but not to reinforce soil."
But hearing this reminds me of an article published last year in New Scientist, about "a disease which gradually turns people into living statues." Officially known as sporadic fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, it's "a disease in which muscle gradually turns into bone."
According to Wikipedia, this "mutation of the body's repair mechanism causes fibrous tissue (including muscle, tendon, and ligament) to be ossified (turned to bone) when damaged. In many cases they can cause joints to become permanently frozen in place. The growths cannot be removed with surgery because such removal causes the body to 'repair' the area of surgery with more bone."
So the idea here would be to give "statue disease" to the Earth itself: wherever the planet is wounded, it turns itself to rock – or bone, as the case may be – saving us from earthquakes.

But what amazing architectural structures might result if the world was swept by statue disease! The crowds of Paris, frozen hard as rock in an epidemic of Gothic statuary, webbed together in one vast church of bone. All of Rome becomes a sculpture gallery.
Discovering that you, too, are infected, you deliberately seek out a crowd of others, wearing hospital gowns, and you join together in a group to form huge gymnastic shapes – knowing that your joints will soon fuse, becoming an artwork that will outlast Manhattan.
Future archaeologists will burst into tears as they scrape away layers of the Gobi Desert, revealing ten million human statues in an abandoned Beijing...

(Thanks, Alex and Bryan!)