To delete this building, press 3

A few weeks ago, I posted about the "typical dream" of a New Yorker, in which said New Yorker one night discovers a whole extra room hidden away somewhere in an otherwise cramped Manhattan apartment – opening up a disguised door, in the back of the closet... and finding a fully furnished 20'x20' master suite. With a bearskin rug. Or a new bathroom, with gold-plated taps and a trouser press. Or an entire backyard, full of gas grills, hidden behind the living room wall.
The ecstasy of having more space in Manhattan.
I then suggested that someone should go around New York interviewing people who have had this dream – or asking people who have never had this dream to ad lib, describing what sorts of extra rooms and spaces they would most like to find, tucked away behind the limited square-footage of walls and apartment living.
You'd then edit all the responses up into a radio show – and broadcast it live at rush hour, without explanation.
The city goes wild.
Manhattan is full of extra rooms! people scream. There are secret hallways everywhere! People start knocking on walls and rifling through closets, desperately searching for a place of their own. Maybe an undiscovered planetarium in the basement crawlspace.
In any case: we're now doing it.
We're making the radio show.

We, in this case, is BLDGBLOG and DJ /rupture (who spoke at Postopolis! last month); we'll be putting your extra room fantasies on the air...
Specifically, /rup's got a weekly radio show on WFMU – 91.1 FM in New York City – and, to collect your dreams, we've signed up for a free, joint voicemail account.
It's voicemail as public recording booth.
So what's your extra room fantasy? You don't have to live in New York to answer. If you woke up in the middle of the night and found a door... where would you want it to go?
Call +1 (206) 337-1474 and let us know. If we like your story, we'll put you – anonymous, woven into a background of music, without explanation – live on the air in New York City, then podcasted around the world and available via MP3.

Meanwhile, there are ten thousand other potential uses for a voicemail account and a weekly radio show.
Over the next few weeks and months, then, DJ /rupture and I will be switching things up: asking new questions and looking for new material. For instance, there'll be a field-recordings-by-phone project – where someone standing on the Oregon coast can call +1 (206) 337-1474 and record two minutes' worth of coastal ambiance, which will later be played live on the radio – and a sound-of-your-favorite-bus-stop-as-recorded-by-a-cell-phone project, and a sound-of-your-empty-office-elevator project, and any number of other possibilities.
The sound of migrating geese, recorded by cell phone.
The sounds of 5th Avenue, recorded using every public phone booth on that street – a kind of sonic history of public space.
Maybe even the sounds of famous architectural structures: you're standing inside an empty room in the Empire State Building – so you give us a call: +1 (206) 337-1474. The volumetric reverb of the Taj Mahal. Summer rain pattering against the windows of the Gherkin.
Or you're standing on a terrace outside L.A.'s Griffith Observatory, recording the desert wind on an iPhone.
It's the voicemail account as musical instrument. Field recordings by phone. How to listen to a landscape. Podcasting space. The unexpected future of audio surveillance.

[Image: DJ /rupture, live in France; DJ /rupture – aka Jace Clayton – speaking at Postopolis! (photo by Nicola Twilley)].

So stay tuned to WFMU, 91.1 FM in New York City, on Wednesday nights, to hear the results of the voicemail project – the first voicemail fantasies should appear within two weeks – mixed in with some kickin' rekkids by the one and only DJ /rupture.

(For a little more about the idea behind this project, see The undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan).

Cinematically mobile in the curved underworld of greater London

It's interesting: videos like these – made by Tube drivers in the tunnels under London as they route trains through the stations of the city – became controversial last week... but not for the reason I would have expected.

On Thursday, the BBC reported that "Tube drivers caught video-recording their journey and posting them on the internet could face disciplinary action" – and so my immediate thought was that this was because the videos would compromise Tube security.
In other words, wannabe terrorists would simply study these and other such videos in order to find points of vulnerability in London's infrastructure: soft spots, weaknesses, CCTV-free zones.
But no: apparently the real worry is that the drivers aren't paying attention. As one commuter explained to the BBC: "I'll wait for the next [train] because I feel the driver isn't focused and not doing what he should be doing."
After all, instead of paying attention to sudden and inexplicable deviations in the tracks ahead, the driver's too busy constructing a new subterranean Hollywood-on-Thames, cinematically mobile in the curved underworld of greater London.

(BBC story – and YouTube links – spotted on Metafilter. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: London Topological).

Wirebus

[Image: The Wirebus Concept by Mike Doscher. "What if you had a city... where the most common way to get around were cablecars?" Doscher asks. "Can you make a cablecar look cool?" Spotted at Core77].

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Gondolas of New York).

We'd all be living in dams

[Image: A "contour map" of Hoover Dam; view bigger].

I've found myself in an ongoing thought experiment for the last few months, trying to imagine what it would look like if theoretically non-domestic architectural styles were used to build the houses, or cities, of the future.
There are some obvious examples – designing houses like football stadiums, Gothic cathedrals, military bunkers, or nuclear missile silos – or even like Taco Bells, for that matter, or air traffic control towers – but there are also some less obvious, and far more interesting, possibilities out there.
Dams, for instance.
Why not build your house like a gigantic gravity dam? It wouldn't have to hold back water – so there'd be no flooding to worry about – and you'd have big windows on either side.
You'd span canyons and have an incredible roof deck.
In fact, when I first saw the image, below, posted on The Cool Hunter back in December, I nearly passed out.

[Image: A development in Songjiang, China, via The Cool Hunter].

Alas, it's not a dam at all, but the inner wall of a quarry (I still like it).
In any case, instead of building habitable bridges, like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence –

[Images: The Ponte Vecchio in Florence].

– or the Old London Bridge –

[Images: An image of "new houses" built across the river, followed by a spectacular image, by Peter Jackson, of the Old London Bridge itself].

– with the former example surely having been at least a subtle influence on the design of Constant's New Babylon –

[Images: Constant's New Babylon – not the same as this New Babylon, of course... though that would be interesting].

– you'd build habitable dams.
A whole suburb full of dam-houses, holding back no water. Great arcs of concrete towering over the landscape, full of kitchens. And there's not a river in sight. Or dozens of micro-dams, only three or four stories tall, forming Oscar Niemeyerian monoliths arranged around a cul-de-sac.
Families barbecue dinner in the backyard, shaded from the late summer sun by volumetric geometries of well-rebar'd slabs – great dorsal fins of engineering, sticking up from the landscape on all sides.

[Image: The "mechanisms" of Hoover Dam; view slightly larger. Imagine living inside a valve, or inside a penstock...].

You'd come home to this!

[Image: The Eder Dam on the Edersee, Germany].

Your own little love-nest, nestled between hills – or standing out in the middle of nowhere.
The bachelor pad of the future... is a diversionary dam.
But habitable dams aren't even the main source of structural ideas that, I think, have been sadly neglected when it comes to designing houses; what really gets me going is thinking about how to use elevated highway ramps as a new form of single-family housing.

[Images: A truly awesome image of an elevated highway-house, architect unknown (if you know, please inform!); and some L.A. freeways, photographed by satellite].

But that will have to wait till another post...

The Island of Forgotten Diseases

[Images: Vozrozhdeniya Island, via Wikipedia].

On the desolate central Asian island of Vozrozhdeniye – or Vozrozhdeniya – near the south rim of the shrinking Aral Sea, you'll find "the remains of the world's largest biological-warfare testing ground."
As The New York Times reported back in 2002, for nearly four decades Vozrozhdeniye Island was "a practice field for the most hideous kind of warfare."
The whole site is now abandoned.

Amidst "hundreds of cages designed to hold guinea pigs, hamsters and rabbits," the New York Times continues, the old Soviet germ labs lie in ruins:

A germproof full-body suit, complete with a glass face mask and an airhose attachment in the back, lies in a corner. An odd smell – ether, chlorine and something indefinable – lingers in the air. Poking out of the rubble are dusty issues of The British Medical Journal and The Journal of Infectious Diseases. It is all surprisingly low tech: nails are everywhere, but no screws. There are books by Marx and Lenin and yellowed, handwritten ledgers that would not seem out of place in a museum devoted to a 19th-century Russian writer.

Despite the island's pedigree, as a site of weaponized viruses and other unknown contagions, its buildings are now being taken apart by scavengers.
In fact, we're told, the "only access to the island now is in the company of the scavengers, who say they began stripping the island bare back in 1996." They've now stolen "everything from floorboards to wiring," and have begun "working on galvanized-steel piping, sealed and towed at a snail's speed to the mainland shore."
The real – and much more pressing – question seems to be: what else will these scavengers find on Vozrozhdeniye Island?

When they arrived for last year's toil, in July, the scavengers discovered that an official U.S.-Uzbek expedition had come earlier in the year and burned down a row of eight warehouses. But much of the contents of the warehouses survived the blaze, including a vast array of test tubes, bottles and petri dishes, some still in their original wrapping. The fire left some half-melted, looking like figures in a Dalì painting, but most are intact underneath a coat of dust.

Like a scene from W.G. Sebald, the actual test site itself is on a nearby plateau. The landscape there is covered with "scrubby trees" that "have leaned into the road," as there are no cars driving by to stop them. The "range," as it's called – where temperatures can apparently reach 120ºF in the summer – is itself lined with "a row of three-foot-high concrete posts at 300-foot intervals, oriented in the direction of the prevailing winds."

Further on, four poles have been set horizontally on pickets two feet from the ground. Rusty chains hang down, even a few feed troughs. This is where the horses and donkeys were tied up. You can imagine them standing patiently in a row at dusk, when the wind would ease and deadly aerosols would be released. At the highest point on the island, a 40-foot observation tower stands near the foundations of a gutted building. A spindly radio antenna still soars. It was a weather station. From the top of the tower, six dirt roads can be seen stretching in various directions to other test sites. It is all very spare and quiet. The scavengers are silent, too.

Alarmingly, we then read that some of Vozrozhdeniye's "local rodents" may have been exposed to a super-resilient, weaponized strain of bubonic plague – and that the plague could thus have spread beyond the test range, hopping from flea to flea and following families of rats, just waiting to be passed on to humans.
Bubonic plague, the article quietly notes, already "affects a handful of people each year in Central Asia."
It's here that the ongoing risks of the site are made clear: "if a scavenger contracts the plague and makes it to a hospital, he could start an epidemic."
Worse, Vozrozhdeniye Island is now attracting representatives of the oil industry – who have begun to perform some exploratory drilling. What might they really dig up...?

[Image: An aerial view of Kantubek, an abandoned town on Vozrozhdeniye Island; via Wikimedia].

The implied storylines here for future science fiction, or horror, films is totally out of control – and yet there is still more to learn about Vozrozhdeniye Island.
For instance: it's no longer really an island.
The Aral Sea, in which Vozrozhdeniye sits, has been evaporating since the 1980s, due to catastrophically mismanaged Soviet irrigation plans – which means that Vozrozhdeniye is now a peninsula.
This otherwise unremarkable geographical shift has frightening implications:

Many of the containers holding the [biowarfare agents] were not properly stored or destroyed, and over the last decade many of the containers have developed leaks. As the Aral Sea continues to recede, the area will eventually connect further with the surrounding land. Many scientists fear that animals will move to the surrounding land and eventually carry these deadly biological agents out.

Such a scenario may sound far-fetched, but it's worth pointing out that there was, indeed, an outbreak of smallpox in 1971 in the nearby city of Aralsk.
According to "a previously secret Soviet medical report," which included "autopsy reports, pathology reports, containment tactics, and an official Soviet analysis of the outbreak's source," there were 10 cases of smallpox reported in Aralsk alone – after which "officials quarantined the city for weeks."
In the process, "Homes and belongings were decontaminated or burned."
Potential novelists or screenwriters might want to start paying attention here, though, because this is a near-perfect plot device.

The person believed to have introduced the virus to Aralsk was a young female ichthyologist who had just returned from a four-week research expedition on the Aral Sea aboard the Lev Berg, a small fishing boat. According to official documents, she was bed-ridden with a fever, headache, and muscle aches aboard the ship beginning Aug. 6, five days before returning to Aralsk on Aug. 11. Before public health officials diagnosed smallpox as the cause of her illness six weeks later, the young woman had exposed her nine-year-old brother, who had exposed others.

Even more interesting, this woman – referred to as Patient 1 – is still alive, and she disputes the official narrative of the outbreak. Nonetheless, it's now more or less accepted that the woman's ship must "have strayed too close to [Vozrozhdeniye Island] as smallpox viral particles, alighted on the wind by a Soviet weaponizing additive, floated across the ship's decks, where Patient 1 netted fish day and night."
You can read more about the outbreak at the website of Sandia Labs.
Finally, there was even speculation, back in 2001, that Vozrozhdeniye Island may have been distantly involved in the U.S. anthrax attacks.
But I could go on and on. If you want to know more, though, just follow the links, above, or check out CNN – and, if you're a budding novelist, and you decide to go somewhere with this material, let me know!
And if you're anywhere near the Aral Sea, beware the wind...

(Thanks to Neddal Ayad for pointing Vozrozhdeniye Island out to me!)

Gastro-Astronomical Tableware

[Image: Locating your own constellations for My Private Sky; via dezeen].

dezeen's got the goods on a new line of plateware that brings astronomy to your dinner table:

Called My Private Sky, the plates combine computer technology and traditional craft techniques: the designers ask customers where and when they were born, and then use a specially written computer programme to generate the precise arrangement of stars and planets as they would have appeared at that particular time and place.

The designers in question here are Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar, aka Kram/Weisshaar.

[Image: Painting the plates of My Private Sky; via dezeen].

If I can be permitted a fairly self-indulgent side-note, meanwhile, this is actually similar to something my wife and I did for our wedding invitation. Since we got married in London – and since we're so romantic we make fire retardants burn – we had the Royal Observatory at Greenwich generate a star-map (free of charge!) showing what the skies would look like at 10pm on the evening of our wedding (see an incredibly blurry photograph of said invitation here), with the effect that, once the party was over and you were falling down drunk, you could crawl outside onto the gravel path and look up... awed by the sight of a whole sky's worth of stars exactly as it appeared on the wedding invitation.
I don't think anyone actually did this – minus the falling down part – but hey.

[Image: Sample plate designs for My Private Sky; via dezeen].

We later learned that there is a similar sort of star-map embedded in the concrete at Hoover Dam.
In any case, read more about My Private Sky at dezeen.

Snake Of Earth

[Image: The Earth, as it appears from above, outside Mexican Hat, Utah: sliced by the great lobed canyons of a desert riverbed. I believe you're looking down at Goosenecks State Park. Images collected via Google Maps. View bigger. Earlier: Fossil Rivers].