Inside the Test Village

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night – a film I'll resist reviewing here, despite the temptation – but there is at least one scene that I want to point out. I won't give away any real plot details, but you might not want to read this post if you plan on seeing the movie.
So, quite early in the film, Indiana Jones escapes from a U.S. military warehouse at night on a remote base in Nevada, where he's been taken by alien-obsessed Russian captors. After the sun comes up the next morning, he finds himself climbing over a fence into a cul-de-sac of detached houses.
It's a suburb in the middle of nowhere, impeccably maintained.
He knocks on one of the doors, hears nothing, and so goes inside, calling for help. A TV is blaring in the other room – but when Indiana Jones walks through to the front of the house, he finds that the house is full of mannequins.
There are mannequins watching TV – fake, plastic people with their eyes fixed to the screen.
So he goes out onto the street – and the street, too, is lined with mannequins, little brown-haired kids on bikes and men outside in driveways as if to wash their family cars.
And then a distant, amplified voice booms out over the roar of an air raid siren: the weapons test will begin in ten... nine... eight...
Because he's just walked into an atomic bomb testing village – and now he has to find someplace to hide.

Deep-water city-states

[Image: Illustration by Holl Liou, courtesy of Wired].

Wired reports on "a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires" who hope to develop "a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters."
They call this practice seasteading.

The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform." In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top. The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.

Build enough of these spar platforms and you've got yourself a "deep-water city-state."
The group's 300-page book on the managerial practicalities of running "modular seastead groups" references everything from Sealand, the offshore micronation, to the Texas Tower, to houseboats, to the dangers of tropical storms.

[Images: The Maunsell Towers (top), unmentioned by the libertarian seasteaders, and the Texas Tower (bottom)].

They touch on the political and economic circumstances involved in steading the high seas, including SOLAS, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, and UNLOS, the United Nations Law of the Sea. They mention the process of buying a Flag of Convenience, in which hopeful microsovereigns can "shop around for a country that has the least objectionable laws and rates, and count on the seller’s apathy to minimize restrictions. A seastead is potentially high-profile, and if it proves a serious embarrassment to a registrar it may lose its flag."
The seastead's power storage needs are then discussed in terms of electrochemical batteries, gravity batteries, and supercapacitors, and the production of this power will, the authors presume, come from wind and solar systems, and even one or two fuel-powered generators. Of course, there's also the power of the sea to consider – and the authors' "favorite" method for harvesting "wave power" is something called Isaac's Wave Pump.

[Image: Tapping into oceanic motion with BioPower Systems].

In any case, one can fantasize forever about endless small changes in the construction of a functioning seastead. (Note to Chronicle Books: publish an architectural guide to seasteading; it'll be a huge hit on Father's Day).
What interests me here, aside from the architectural challenge of erecting a durable, ocean-going metropolis, is the fact that this act of construction – this act of building something – has constitutional implications. That is, architecture here proactively expands the political bounds of recognized sovereignty; architecture becomes declarative.
The stakes for design have gone up, in other words. It's not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it's a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa).
Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn't just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.

The Digital Replacement of the Natives

[Images: Garmin GPS devices].

"For their recent trip to Namibia," a short blurb in Wired magazine explains, "Greg and Anja Manuel packed light: PowerBars, clothes, and a Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler's Africa version 8.02, a user-generated map brimming with 50,000 points of interest. That last item meant they didn't have to hire an experienced guide."
Fair enough. The map looks beautiful, the idea is cool, and, within two or three trips, the GPS device does indeed save money; however, I can't help but wonder what this might foretell for local economies, all over the world, based on guided tourism. For instance, a small group of American tourists comes through your village, eating PowerBars and looking at handheld GPS devices. They don't go to any restaurants; they don't ask any questions of anyone; perhaps they don't even rent a hotel room.
For all economic purposes, it's as if they were never there. They were more like surreal poltergeists wearing Vasque boots, reading Jonathan Safran Foer on a Kindle.
What better way to avoid meeting Namibians! Just use their electrical grid to recharge your gadgets, pay no taxes, and leave.

[Images: Three examples of maps displayed on Garmin GPS devices].

I'm left imagining the inverse of this situation, of course, in which a small group of Namibians shows up in London. They ask no questions, eat at no restaurants, and avoid all hotels – before going off to wander round the countryside, sleeping in tents. It would all seem rather mysterious.
In any case, do handheld technologies mean that we'll soon be digitally replacing the native populations of the Third World, never needing them again for guidance, travel advice, or even insights into medicinal plantlife? You fly down to the Amazon to try ayahuasca, but you don't hire any local shamans or native botanists because you've got everything you need to know already saved on a 300GB iPod – as if that might be the atomized fate of the West in general: desperately seeking visions, alone in the wild, surrounded by portable gadgetry.
"Your tradition is right here," the tourist says, holding his Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler's Africa version 8.02 over the heads of impoverished villagers. "I don't need you anymore."
Next year, someone gives you a small handheld device with an interestingly honest tagline.
Go Everywhere, it says. Meet No One.

Mountain Monuments

[Image: From the series the water, the dams, the landscape by photographer Eduoard Decam].

Eduoard Decam is a Barcelona-based French architect whose photographic project the water, the dams, the landscape won an EDF Foundation award back in 2006. The images in the series document massive hydrological installations in the Pyrenees Mountains of northeastern Spain, turning dams and spillways into abstract monuments, like some new piece of mountain infrastructure designed by Superstudio.
As Decam himself explained to A10 magazine: "I do not see the dam as a technical element in the mountain, but as part of the mountain, as a landscape."
Personally, I'm just blown away by the terraced stairways we see in the image, above; it's like some ultramodern update to the monastic retreats of Meteora, or perhaps even a new stage in Guild Wars.

(Spotted in A10, issue #19).

Botanical Otology

Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation is a small electronic listening device built for eavesdropping on the inner acoustics of trees.

[Image: "Peach Tree in Flower in Orchard" by J.E. Fee].

How does it work? The device is placed on the trunk of a given tree and then connected to as many as ten sets of headphones, which hang down from the tree's canopy. Botany becomes your iPod.
"This allows the public to listen 'live' to the sound of water being pulled up from the roots to the leaves through the xylem tube," Metcalf writes.
As he explained in an interview with the Guardian last week: "The technology for this is usually invasive. You bore into the tree and take away a section, then seal in a listening device. The thing about my device is that you don't have to cause any damage, and you can listen to any tree, anywhere, any time – plus you can do it long term. Cutting a hole in a tree means you are wounding and infecting it, which will affect the recording."
The "device" in question is a small and somewhat unassuming metal cone that looks more like an 18th-century otological device. You hold it up against the side of the tree – like an FBI roving wiretap on the natural world – and listen in...
But could you broadcast this? A pirate radio station pops up one evening after dinner time in the distant suburbs of west London – and it turns out that an eccentric old couple living on a large plot of land near Windsor Great Park have begun broadcasting their trees. It's soon an international sensation, and a great hit with cover bands; you go down to the Cafe du Nord one night to hear live music, but the band, visibly drunk, gets lost in a three-hour rendition, using only acoustic guitars, of the sound of young sessile oak trees.
Oddly, you're the only one there who enjoys it – legs crossed, beer in hand, listening intently.

Deep in the basement of an ancient tenement on Second Avenue in the heart of midtown New York City, I was fishing

Last summer, on the extremely short-lived blog Urbablurb – which only managed five posts before dying, yet still remains interesting today – we read about the little-known phenomenon of people fishing in the basements of Manhattan.

[Image: A map of the lost rivers of Manhattan, via Urbablurb].

Urbablurb quotes from The New York Times:

We had a lantern to pierce the cellar darkness and fifteen feet below I clearly saw the stream bubbling and pushing about, five feet wide and upon its either side, dark green mossed rocks. This lively riverlet was revealed to us exactly as it must have appeared to a Manhattan Indian many years ago.

With plum-bob and line, I cast in and found the stream to be over six feet deep. The spray splashed upwards from time to time and standing on the basement floor, I felt its tingling coolness.

One day I was curious enough to try my hand at fishing. I had an old-fashioned dropline and baited a hook with a piece of sperm-candle. I jiggled the hook for about five minutes and then felt a teasing nibble. Deep in the basement of an ancient tenement on Second Avenue in the heart of midtown New York City, I was fishing.

The lost rivers of Manhattan are real; hundreds of streams and whole wetlands were paved over and filled so that the roots of buildings could safely grow. But whether or not you could ever fish in them – and this whole thing sounds like Dr. Seuss to me – is the subject of a post on the also now defunct blog, Empire Zone. There, a commenter informs us that fishing for eyeless carp in the underground cisterns of Istanbul is something of a national past-time.
Alas, we also learn that, as to the question of "whether any carp could be found swimming under Manhattan today," the answer, sadly, is no.
But how much would I love to find myself in New York City for a weekend, perhaps sent there by work to cover a story – when the phone rings in my hotel room. It's 11pm. I'm tired, but I answer. An old man is on the other end, and he clears his throat and he says: "I think this is something you'd like to see." I doubt, I delay, I debate with myself – but I soon take a cab, and, as the clock strikes 12am, I'm led down into the basement of a red brick tenement building on E. 13th Street.
I step into a large room, that smells vaguely of water – and six men are sitting around an opening in the floor, holding fishing poles in the darkness.

(Also on Urbablurb: Who is Jack Gasnick?).

Vertical House

[Image: Vertical House by axis mundi architects].

Here are two views of a proposed mountain house for a site in Smugglers Notch, Vermont, by New York architects axis mundi.
"Entry is via a long and dramatic bridge to a viewing platform from which one ascends a staircase into the house," the architects' website explains. Kitchen, dining room, living room, and master bedroom are encountered in sequence as one moves upward through the structure.

[Image: Vertical House by axis mundi architects].

You eventually arrive at an "open air garden... situated on the roof."

The intention is that over time the house will become considerably lush as vines grow down from the roof, in effect making the house into a modern ruin.

The wood cladding you see is teak on a concrete and steel frame.
Give that thing wider corner posts, run the utilities and services down through through them, and you're good to go. Install a portaledge or two, and the house gets even better.
Then, three hundred years from now, refugees from a half-flooded Manhattan – that city all but destroyed by an unspecified disaster – make their way north to find the house still standing and covered in a thick labyrinth of vines, home to migrating tropical birds. They clear themselves a place to sleep amidst the dust and vines, and stay for nearly two weeks – before heading further inland, toward the ruins of Montreal, still fleeing whatever unknown fate awaits those stuck in that city down south.
Another hundred years and the building collapses, forming a debris field of wood, metal, and concrete across the hillside, washing down to nothing over decades of rain.