Acqua Veritas

The city of Venice has begun to rebrand its tap water, calling it Acqua Veritas, in an attempt to woo both residents and tourists away from the environmental hazards (and waste collection nightmare) of bottled water.
After all, Italians are "the leading consumers of bottled water in the world," the New York Times reports, "drinking more than 40 gallons per person annually." Further, "Venice’s tap water comes from deep underground in the same region as one of Italy’s most popular bottled waters, San Benedetto" – so turning Venetians on to the miracles of the tap (and setting an example for cities elsewhere) is clearly overdue.
However, as we saw earlier on BLDGBLOG, in a guest post by Nicola Twilley, bottled water now sits on the cusp of becoming as pretentious as the wine industry, complete with a developing vocabulary for taste preferences and even an emerging geography of aquatic terroir. In other words, it will be hard to break the Duchampian habit of seeking water in a bottle. Why Duchampian?
Because bottled water is the ultimate readymade object; I'd even suggest that Marcel Duchamp very nearly discovered the bottled water industry when he first captured 50 cc of Paris Air, in an artwork of the same title, back in 1919.

[Image: Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art].

It's hard not to wonder what might have happened had Marcel Duchamp been alive just slightly later, and able to exhibit his artwork alongside – or even simply to hang out with – Andy Warhol; combine the readymade object with Warholian mass reproduction, substitute pure glacial water for Paris air, and perhaps today we'd all be drinking L'Eau de Duchamp.
In any case, if cities around the world engaged in marketing campaigns similar to this one in Venice, however tongue-in-cheek it may be, might people finally regain interest in their own municipal water supplies?
Croton Silver: The Taste of Manhattan™.

(Vaguely related: The next bottled water industry? Chinese Air Bars).

Serving Space

Tom Vanderbilt – author of the excellent book Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, as well as the recent Traffic, and subject of a short but interesting interview in The BLDGBLOG Book – has a long article out in the The New York Times Magazine about the architecture (and energy implications) of large-scale data centers.
This is the world of "increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers" that now dot the global landscape.
What is this new type of space? "Call it the architecture of search," Vanderbilt writes: "the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year – often built on, say, a former bean field – that lie behind your Internet queries."
Such buildings often blend in with the everyday urban landscape. For instance, Vanderbilt describes "NJ2, a data center located in Weehawken, N.J., just through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan." It is "an unmarked beige complex with smoked windows"; inside it "hum the trading engines of several large financial exchanges."
The interesting thing here is that the machines stored inside NJ2 are stored there so that they can be as close as possible, geographically, with other machines: the ones that handle trades on Wall Street. Spatial proximity, in this case, cuts down on information-relay time, thus enabling large-scale financial processes to unfold nearly in real-time.
We might say, then, that the built environment you see here – the distances between buildings and their urban or geographical locations – is thus an articulation not of architectural theory or of the stylistic assertions of one particular architect, but of the processing power of today's supercomputers.
Future changes in processing speed might then ramify outward to further tweak the built environment.
Vanderbilt explains that when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange moved its computers north, into NJ2 – a distance, we read, of 80 miles – they saved three milliseconds on every trade. Lest we laugh that off as the spatial equivalent of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we're told that "it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent."
It's an awesome article – check it out if you get a chance.

Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City

UCLA's cityLAB has launched a new design competition called (somewhat lamely) WPA 2.0, where the WPA refers to the Works Progress Administration. But the competition itself looks cool.
Its tagline? Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City.
It's a call for new visions of urban infrastructure:

We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning.

Sounds good in the abstract, but what are they specifically looking for? Quite a range:

This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including but not limited to parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, "green" infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities.

Judges include Stan Allen, Cecil Balmond, Elizabeth Diller, Walter Hood, Thom Mayne, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor – two of whom (Allen and Diller) I'm proud to say that I've served I've been on design juries with in the past.
Here's the competition brief as a downloadable PDF. Read more at the competition website – and good luck!

The Great Lakes Paleolandscapes Project

[Image: Evidence of an ancient hunting site; photo by John O'Shea, courtesy of ScienceDaily].

In more archaeological news, evidence of an ancient human settlement, including "caribou-hunting structures and camps," has been found deep beneath the waters of Lake Huron: "More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron," ScienceDaily reports, "on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes."
Of course, this goes rather well with our earlier look at the so-called "Lake Michigan Stonehenge."
All told, then, it sounds like the Great Lakes need their own version of the North Sea Paleolandscapes project, an unbelievably interesting archaeological program, run by the University of Birmingham, that hopes "to rediscover Doggerland, the enigmatic country which once linked the Yorkshire coast with a stretch of Continental Europe from Denmark to Normandy but which now lies beneath the North Sea."

(Spotted via Archaeology Magazine).

The Hollow Hills

In a quick read through the consistently – and often amazingly – interesting links supplied by Archaeology Magazine, I came across an example of what is easily one of my favorite nonfiction plot twists: someone discovers that what they thought was a natural hill somewhere on their family property is actually an extremely ancient building.
It has an interior, perhaps even underground corridors linking to other, nearby hills.
It is not the surface of the earth, in other words, but a piece of architecture. Your backyard, to this way of thinking, might actually be a roof; you simply have to discover a way inside the building deep below.

[Image: The artificial hill at Cuween, an Orkney burial cairn, perhaps anticipating by thousands of years the architecture of Vicente Guallart; photos by Sigurd Towrie of Orkney Jar].

In this case, we read, a farmer in the Orkney Islands of northwest Scotland, while plowing a relatively untouched field on his family land, uncovered a Neolithic chambered tomb just sitting there beneath the soil.
It was a room – and suddenly he had access to it.
"The structure itself is neat drystone construction," a local archaeologist explains, and "the wall curves round tightly and is beehived in by corbelling at the top. On the opposite side to the wall is a space topped by lintels, and indeed it was breaking one lintel that caused the site to be found. It’s early days yet, but it may be a Neolithic chambered cairn, some five or six thousand years old."
Of course, readers of The BLDGBLOG Book, finally published this week in the United States, will recognize this same idea from the beginning of that book's "Underground" chapter (where the discovery of a tomb now known as Crantit Cairn is described in slightly fictionalized form). The bare bones of that story, however, are worth repeating here: one day, back in 1998, we read, a farmer "decided to plough [his] field in a different direction to normal – a seemingly insignificant decision that led to the discovery of what was hailed as one of 'the greatest archaeological finds of recent years.'"
Specifically, "While ploughing, the tractor disturbed the roof of the tomb, dislodging a roofing slab. The slab fell to reveal a hole and daylight streamed into the underground chamber for the first time in millennia."
With today's penchant for green roofs and other forms of "vegitecture," one wonders if similar such experiences might become exponentially more common in the distant future; two kids, playing around in the garden, pull a stone up from the flowerbed only to discover that they are standing atop the main gallery of a science museum constructed back in 2009 A.D.
Zork Begins.
In fact, as I mentioned in my lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York back in April, a similar sort of idea made a cameo appearance in The Day After Tomorrow. There, we watch as Dennis Quaid and his two colleagues are hiking across a rapidly forming glacier – only for one of them to crash through a skylight into the snow-buried mall below.
It was not a glacier at all, in other words, but an unrecognized architectural form.
In any case, perhaps the great human adventure of the year 45,000 A.D. will not be in outer space at all, but a terrifying Dantean super-tour through the deeply buried cities of our present age. People stumble through this seemingly endless underground labyrinth, spanning nearly the whole surface of the globe, utterly unaware of who created these buildings and why.
In this context, old Celtic/Britannic myths of the Hollow Hills take on an especially interesting architectural resonance. I'm yet further reminded of many bunkers in the hills around San Francisco; seen from one side, these buildings appear to be mere mounds covered with gravel and weedy vegetation, like a gently rolling, even bucolic American landscape – but, from the other side, you find that they have heavily rusted metal doors...
The implication here, that you could open a door and walk inside a manmade earth, where the hills around you are actually the roofs of old buildings, will never cease to amaze me.

Chinese Islam and the Case of the Disappearing Prison

What do you do when you're trying to shut down a high-profile prison for unofficially accused international terrorists? Ship the prisoners off to a nation of disappearing islands.
The U.S. might shortly begin sending Chinese Muslim prisoners from its facility at Guantanamo Bay – itself an extra-judicial territory, or semi-sovereign administrative enclave, that both is and is not part of the United States – to a terrestrially complicated new situation in the Pacific island nation of Palau.
Palau, of course, is disappearing.
From one black hole to another, then.

(Via @pruned).

Watershed Down

[Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed being towed through Venice towards the Arsenale basin, against a backdrop of Italian palazzi].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

The 2009 Venice Biennale opened this week with an unexpected and quite beautiful piece of performance art. Artist Mike Bouchet had built a one-to-one scale replica of a typical American surburban home that he planned to install on floating pontoons in the Venice Arsenale basin. He called the project Watershed.

David Birnbaum, the Biennale's curator, told camera crews filming the installation that he thought the project "sounded a bit megalomaniac," but the sight of the oversized house, clad in beige vinyl, flimsily bobbing up and down against a backdrop of palazzi and piazzi as it was towed through Venice's canals, was breathtaking. It was an architectural icon of the American Dream revealed in all its formulaic absurdity.

Amazingly, then, one of the pontoons capsized, and the entire house sank to the bottom of the canal—an unintentional yet utterly perfect coda to the house's own built-in commentary. Now, a fake generic American suburban home will add its ruins to the underwater archaeology of Venice.

[Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed goes down].

A two-minute video of the house's journey, and eventual fate, can be seen in full on YouTube.

(Originally spotted on Flavorwire).