The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong

[Image: Shiitake logs on racks in the Mittagong mushroom tunnel. All photos by the author].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

As Geoff mentioned here on BLDGBLOG a few weeks ago, we spent our last full day in Australia touring the Li-Sun Exotic Mushroom Farm with its founder and owner, Dr. Noel Arrold. Three weeks earlier, at a Sydney farmers' market, we had been buying handfuls of his delicious Shimeji and Chestnut mushrooms to make a risotto, when the vendor told us that they'd all been grown in a disused railway tunnel southwest of the city, in Mittagong.

[Image: The mushroom tunnel, on the left, was originally built in 1886 to house a single-track railway line. By 1919, it had to be replaced with the still-functioning double-track tunnel to its right, built to cope with the rise in traffic on the route following the founding of Canberra, Australia's purpose-built capital city. The tunnel is still state property: the mushroom farm exists on a five-year lease].

The idea of re-purposing abandoned civic infrastructure as a site for myco-agriculture was intriguing, to say the least, so we were thrilled when Dr. Arrold kindly agreed to take the time to give us a tour (Li-Sun is not usually open to the public).

Dr. Arrold has been growing mushrooms in the Mittagong tunnel for more than twenty years, starting with ordinary soil-based white button mushrooms and Cremini, before switching to focus on higher maintenance (and more profitable) exotics such as Shimeji, Wood-ear, Shiitake, and Oyster mushrooms.

[Images: (top) Dr. Arrold with a bag of mushroom spawn. He keeps his mushroom cultures in test-tubes filled with boiled potato and agar, and initially incubates the spawn on rye or wheat grains in clear plastic bags sealed with sponge anti-mould filters before transferring it to jars, black bin bags, or plastic-wrapped logs; (middle) Shimeji and (bottom) pink oyster mushrooms cropping on racks inside the tunnel. Dr. Arrold came up with the simple but clever idea of growing mushrooms in black bin bags with holes cut in them. Previously, mushrooms were typically grown inside clear plastic bags. The equal exposure to light meant that the mushrooms fruited all over, which made it harder to harvest without missing some].

A microbiologist by training, Dr. Arrold originally imported his exotic mushroom cultures into Australia from their traditional homes in China, Japan, and Korea. Like a latter-day Tradescant, he regularly travels abroad to keep up with mushroom growing techniques, share his own innovations (such as the black plastic grow-bags shown above), and collect new strains.

He showed us a recent acquisition, which he hunted down after coming across it in his dinner in a café in Fuzhou, and which he is currently trialling as a potential candidate for cultivation in the tunnel. Even though all his mushroom strains were originally imported from overseas (disappointingly, given its ecological uniqueness, Australia has no exciting mushroom types of its own), Dr. Arrold has refined each variety over generations to suit the conditions in this particular tunnel.

Since there is currently only one other disused railway tunnel used for mushroom growing in the whole of Australia, his mushrooms have evolved to fit an extremely specialised environmental niche: they are species designed for architecture.

[Images: (top) Logs on racks (Taiwanese style) and mounted on the wall (Chinese style) in the tunnel; (bottom) Wood-ear mushrooms grow through diagonal slashes in plastic bags filled with chopped wheat straw].

The tunnel for which these mushrooms have been so carefully developed is 650 metres long and about 30 metres deep. Buried under solid rock and deprived of the New South Wales sunshine, the temperature holds at a steady 15º Celsius. The fluorescent lights flick on at 5:30 a.m. every day, switching off again exactly 12 hours later. The humidity level fluctuates seasonally, and would reach an unacceptable aridity in the winter if Dr. Arrold didn't wet the floors and run a fogger during the coldest months.

In all other respects, the tunnel is an unnaturally accurate concrete and brick approximation of the prevailing conditions in the mushroom-friendly deep valleys and foggy forests of Fujian province. This inadvertent industrial replicant ecosystem made me think of Swiss architecture firm Fabric's 2008 proposal for a "Tower of Atmospheric Relations" (pdf).

[Image: Renderings of Fabric's "Tower of Atmospheric Relations," showing the stacked volumes of air and the resulting climate simulations].

Fabric's ingenious project is designed to generate a varying set of artificial climates (such as the muggy heat of the Indian monsoon, or the crisp air of a New England autumn day) entirely through the movements of the air that is trapped inside the tower's architecture (i.e. by means of convection, condensation, thermal inertia, and so on).

If you could perhaps combine this kind of atmosphere-modifying architecture with today's omnipresent vertical farm proposals, northern city dwellers could simultaneously avoid food miles and continue to enjoy bananas.

[Images: (top) Li-Sun employees unwrap mushroom logs before putting them on racks in the tunnel. The logs are made by mixing steamed bran or wheat, sawdust from thirty-year-old eucalyptus, and lime in a concrete mixer, packing it into plastic cylinders, and inoculating them with spawn. (middle) Fruiting Shiitake logs on racks in the tunnel. Once their mushrooms are harvested, the logs make great firewood. (bottom) The Shiitake log shock tank – Dr. Arrold explained that the logs crop after one week in the tunnel, and then sit dormant for three weeks, until they are "woken up" with a quick soak in a tub of water, after which they are productive for three or four more weeks. "Shiitake," said Dr. Arrold, in a resigned tone, "are the most trouble – and the biggest market."]

Outside of the tunnel, Dr. Arrold also grows Enoki, King Brown, and Chestnut mushrooms. These varieties prefer different temperatures (6º, 17º, and 18º Celsius respectively), so they are housed in climate-controlled Portakabins.

[Images: (top) The paper cone around the top of the enoki jar helps the mushrooms grow tall and thin. (second) Chestnut mushrooms grow in jars for seven weeks: four to fruit, and three more to sprout to harvest size above the jar's rim. (third) Thousands of mushroom jars are stacked from floor to ceiling. Dr. Arrold starting growing these mushroom varieties in jars two years ago, and hasn't had a holiday since. (fourth) Empty mushroom jars are sterilised in the autoclave between crops, so that disease doesn't build up. (bottom) The clean jars are filled with sterilised substrate using a Japanese-designed machine, before being inoculated with spawn].

The fact that the King Brown and Chestnut mushrooms only thrive at a higher temperature than the railway tunnel provides makes their cultivation much more expensive. Their ecosystem has to be replicated mechanically, rather than occuring spontaneously within disused infrastructure.

I couldn't help but wonder whether there might be another tunnel, cave, or even abandoned bunker in New South Wales that currently maintains a steady 17º Celsius and is just waiting to be colonised by King Brown mushrooms growing, like ghostly thumbs, out of thousands of glass jars.

[Image: Temperature map of the London Underground system (via the BBC, where a larger version is also available), compiled by Transport for London's "Cool the Tube" team].

In the UK, for instance, Transport for London has kindly provided this fascinating map of summertime temperatures on various tube lines. Most are far too hot for mushroom growing (not to mention commuter comfort). Nonetheless, perhaps the estimated £1.56 billion cost of installing air-conditioning on the surface lines could be partially recouped by putting some of the system's many abandoned service tunnels and shafts to use cultivating exotic fungi. These mushroom farms would be buried deep under the surface of the city, colonizing abandoned infrastructural hollows and attracting foodies and tourists alike.

[Image: A very amateur bit of Photoshop work: Li-Sun Mushrooms as packaged for Australian supermarket chain Woolworths, re-imagined as Bakerloo Line Oyster Mushrooms].

Service shafts along the hot Central line might be perfect for growing Chestnut Mushrooms, while the marginally cooler Bakerloo line has several abandoned tunnels that could replicate the subtropical forest habitat of the Oyster Mushroom. And – unlike Dr. Arrold's Li-Sun mushrooms, which make no mention of their railway tunnel origins on the packaging – I would hope that Transport for London would cater to the locavore trend by labeling its varietals by their line of origin.

[Images: Shiitake logs on racks in the Mittagong mushroom tunnel].

Speculation aside, our visit to the Mittagong Mushroom Tunnel was fascinating, and Dr. Arrold's patience in answering our endless questions was much appreciated. If you're in Australia, it's well worth seeking out Li-Sun mushrooms: you can find them at several Sydney markets, as well as branches of Woolworths.

[Image: Nicola Twilley is the author of Edible Geography, where this post has been simultaneously published].

Extreme Environments

Opening today in Paris is a new exhibition called Uninhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments. Featured artists include Catherine Rannou, Connie Mendoza, and Studio Orta, among many others.

[Image: From Numerical Desert by Connie Mendoza].

Rannou's work has ranged from speculative building projects for spatially challenging sites in the city (seen below) to her work Colonisation 2041, featured in the exhibition. This latter project is "an installation reflecting the active and actual occupation that the development of scientific stations in Antarctica represents; energy dependence, waste management, roads and tunnels, planes, tractors, helicopters, and building materials all point to a form of 'urbanisation' that is clearly in progress."

[Image: Parentheses, an "habiter dans les interstices de la ville," by Catherine Rannou].

Meanwhile, Connie Mendoza produces diagrammatic artworks, analyses of the optical landscapes of mirages, and fascinating quasi-documentary photo-projects, including the stunning Moon Landscapes and Numerical Desert. Numerical Desert, which will be on display in Paris, explores the Atacama Large Millimeter Array through black-and-white photos; it comes with "drawings based on the data of the astronomical observation of stars and galaxies in coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere." She's also got a blog.

[Image: Antarctic Village by Studio Orta].

Studio Orta's work touches on political questions associated with empty landscapes – including the question of whether or not one could ever be a citizen of Antarctica. Their Antarctic Village, for instance, pictured above, falls somewhere between an experiment in extreme camping and a stab at temporary utopian space unaffiliated with national governments.

Antarctic Village is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people.

For more information about the exhibition, check out the website.

(Thanks to William Fox for the tip!)

Pamphlet Infrastructure

[Image: From InfraNet Lab's submission to the WPA 2.0 competition, "centered on the twin dilemma of rising population and water shortages in the US southwest."]

As a longtime fan of Mason White's and Lola Sheppard's work both at InfraNet Lab – an amazing web resource for anyone interested in cities, infrastructure, built landscapes, hydrological processes, international communications networks, and more – and at their architecture firm, Lateral Office – mentioned many times on BLDGBLOG before, from IceLink and A.I.R. Unit to Reykjavík's Runways to Greenways – and as an enthusiast for Princeton Architectural Press's Pamphlet Architecture series, I was absolutely thrilled to learn last week that InfraNet Lab will be authoring Pamphlet Architecture 30. Their book will be called Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, and it will be published in 2010.

Along with Lola and Mason, Neeraj Bhatia and Maya Przbylski from Lateral Office will also be contributing – and this promises to be one of the best pamphlets yet. It's also fantastic news for Lateral Office, who well deserve this exposure for their ideas and work. Congrats, guys! I can't wait to see the results.

(By way of a brief PS, Mason will actually be speaking at the North American launch of The BLDGBLOG Book on Saturday, September 26, at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, along with Lebbeus Woods, another Pamphlet Architecture author).

Book of Space

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

One of the pleasures of participating in Urban Islands this past summer was meeting Johan Hybschmann, a recent graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-instructor, with Mark Smout, of one of the design studios hosted down there in Sydney. Johan is contagiously good-humored; even our pre-coffee, breakfast-less 7am ferry rides through cold winds across the Sydney Harbor in a surging boat were spent laughing. In fact, when I told him that my wife and I were about to celebrate our 7-year wedding anniversary... he started laughing.

Johan's projects at the Bartlett were a fascinating mixture of ornate technical detailing and abstract ideas: simulation, reproduction, and the nature of spatial perception. "The idea of visually connecting spaces has been my architectural obsession for a long time," he wrote to me in an email after we had all returned from Sydney, "and I find that perceptual/referential recognition [of specific spatial details] often plays a key role."

One of Johan's student projects, in particular, continues to astound me. What you're looking at in the images reproduced here (alongside Johan's answers to a series of questions I had posed over email) are painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark.

The book's "content" is thus a three-dimensional, perspectivally accurate space.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

From Johan:

The inspiration came directly from the single shot film sequence in Sokurov’s Russian Ark, where the camera is taken through the timeless spaces of the Winter Palace, jumping decades from one room to another. The distortion of time is, of course, interesting in terms of the timelessness of the spaces – but I was interested in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the viewer never sees the full dimensions of these spaces, we are still left with a sense of coherence and wholeness. But what if the back of the room was mindblowingly different? It’s as if we constantly use the previous space to create an understanding of what should be behind us.

The book is an attempt to spatially prolong that perceptual idea. Two different spaces from the film sequence have been cut into each half of the book, as constructed perspectives. When the pages spread, the silhouettes of the elements visually collide, and the space within the book changes in character as the user travels through it by flicking through the pages.

You pick up a book, and you open the covers... and a series of rooms begins to pass by, like the frames of a film or sequences in a flipbook, and it's all due to laser-cut gaps and remainders. How amazing to think that we could slice entire works of architecture into all the books around us, so that "reading" a book would actually be a forward-moving optical journey through page-sized rooms and hallways.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

The physical realization of this was actually quite difficult to work out. As Johan explained over email:

The book is made from layered silhouettes with inbuilt distorted perspectives that are laser-cut into the individual pages of a standard sketchbook. There is a drawing for each page, and these are all cut separately: turning the page, loading up a new drawing and cutting, page by page.

Aside from the seemingly overwhelming task of working out exactly how much or how little needed to change with each page, Johan also achieved a kind of spatial layering effect: the turning pages add (or subtract) from the structure of each "scene" you see.

[Image: The diagram of architectural outlines that was laser-cut into the book's pages, recreating the illusory volume of a cinematic space].

Rooms and perspectives shift; spaces blur one into the other, edited by laser; and the book re-enacts, on a bibliographic level, the act of watching Sokurov's film.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

This project has a lot in common with another of Johan's student works.

In the following project, called "Replicating a Replica," he proposed "a redesign of the Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City." Johan basically created two buildings that would occupy the same place at the same time, visually interlocking but spatially separate.

As you walk through the building, Johan explained, you would pass through a series of "choreographed viewpoints," or visual positions at which the spaces around you would shift. Here you would feel as if you are inside one particular building (a Museum of the Constitution, Johan suggests); there, even if only steps away, you would feel as if you were inside another building altogether (a Court of Law, for instance).

Each building would exist as if tucked inside the optically complicated spaces of the other. After all, Johan added, he is "interested in the spatial potential of being in-between."

The resulting model of the project was thus more like a small machine, moving between two states of being. In one state, it was simply a pile of loose wire frames and disconnected vaults; in the other, a battery-powered act of reanimation has brought these apparently discarded parts whirling back to life, forming a functional building space.

[Images: Another project by Johan Hybschmann].

The final images are fantastic: a building comes to life from whirring motors stored below.

[Images: By Johan Hybschmann].

Tying all of this together, and bringing us back to the laser-cut book project, Johan writes:

There is a scene in the film Blade Runner where Rick Deckard uses a machine to visually move around corners within a regular photograph. The machine traces all reflective surfaces in the “still-life” setting, and it collects information from objects represented from different spatial positions – but only from one viewpoint. This allows the machine to travel around the corner of the threshold within the photograph, but also to give an assumed image of what otherwise cannot be seen. Even though Rick Deckard gets a picture of a woman laying in a bed, we still have to consider that the image is constructed from distorted surfaces of mirrors and glass objects.

In some ways, the above description of Blade Runner could also be a description of the convex mirrors deployed throughout the Sir John Soane Museum, which distort and re-reflect the sarcophagi and Egyptian statuary scattered all around the place, making even the definition of a single room somewhat hard to settle on.

But it also ties in very nicely with the optical themes from Johan's and Mark's studio this summer in Sydney (which I hope to write about before too much longer): how we see architecture, how we visually comprehend built space, and what we might try to design in order to make this everyday experience both more complicated and more interesting.

Fire Lookout Towers

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Constituting their own architectural typology, and falling perhaps somewhere between Lew Welch and Tom Kundig (someone hire Kundig to design the next Serpentine, please!), are the fire lookout towers of the Pacific Northwest.

Search the photo archives – assembled and maintained by Rex Kamstra, complete with lookout tower trivia – from Oregon and Washington to the hills of South Dakota (or just check out the site's newsfeed) to explore these often extraordinarily remote structures in all their minimalist – and historically fascinating – glory.

And did you know that you can actually adopt a fire lookout?

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

While you're at it, don't miss the U.S. Forest Service's own catalog of these overlooked minor building types: fire lookout towers in Sequoia National Forest, for instance, and Umatilla.

The fact that there are any lookout towers still standing at all is, it seems, slightly amazing. "In their heyday during the 1930s," the Forest Service explains, "there were over 8,000 fire lookouts that dotted mountain tops across the United States with over 600 in California. Today there are only a few hundred in operation. Once considered a proud symbol of our nation's conservation heritage, fire lookouts are a fading legacy. There are 10 lookouts left on the Sequoia National Forest."

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

A definitive history of these timber structures and lonely cabins has not yet been written (attention Princeton Architectural Press!), although they constitute not only a distinctive family of structures, they also have a regional, ecosystemic importance that only the best pieces of civic infrastructure attain.

They also figure into the national mythology in a way that few other forms of architecture do; from Jack Kerouac disappearing off into the mountains for a summer of fire-spotting, to the poems of Gary Snyder, these awesomely elevated perspectives on the natural world – as well as sites of enforced introspection – deserve their NorCalMod moment. That is, they deserve their architectural rediscovery.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Instead of a definitive reference work, there are simply books (albeit still fascinating) like How to Rent a Fire Lookout in the Pacific Northwest: A Guide to Renting Fire Lookouts, Guard Stations, Ranger Cabins, Warming Shelters and Bunkhouses in the National Forests of Oregon and Washington; Adirondack Fire Towers: Their History and Lore; Lookouts: Firewatchers of the Cascades and Olympics; and the so-called "fire lookout research" of David E. Lorenz (now out of print). So people are clearly still interested in these structures. For instance, check out this photo-log of a hike up to the spectacular mountain views of the Mule Peak Lookout.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Even better, take a long read through the Skagit River Journal's look at the fire lookout towers of the Cascades. This latter link includes some amazing material, including references to interviews with former fire watchers and their colleagues:

They told many unusual stories of the watchers, who were prepared to be alone on a mountain ridge in a tower measuring less than 200 square feet. Towers were sometimes built on nearby ridges so that two watchers could combine their observations of a section of forest, which enabled them to triangulate and more accurately call in resources to fight fires. A broad spectrum of watchers developed, from college students to housewives to hermits and those who loved to be surrounded by wilderness and mountains. The authors discovered one watcher who was so frightened during a lightning storm that he ran all the way down the mountain.

There is also the story of Maxine Meyers, a former forest lookout.

More architecturally, the Skagit River Journal also gets into the ways and means of these towers' construction: "Before mountain roads were built of a size to accomodate trucks, the materials were largely packed in on backs or on mules, and then another team had to slog through the brush, stringing telephone wire before the use of two-way radios." Thus were distant structures assembled in the woods.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

Plus, where, now, are the people who actually lived in these structures – stationed there for whole seasons at a time to eat canned peaches and watch the stars, looking out for signs of distant fires? Are they still alive, and, like Maxine Meyers, could you interview them? It's an architectural form that comes with its own anthropology: narratives of use and inhabitation.

Further, who designed these structures – based on what plan, and from what material inspiration? What would a fire lookout tower, built today, look like? Perhaps like the awesome "Prairie Ladder" by Anderson Anderson?

And how do these towers frame the landscape, and to what extent could you put them into the visual tradition of things like panoramas?

These towers, after all, aren't just towers; they have a kind of optical functionality, built specifically for the purpose of viewing the landscape in a certain, specific, highly regulated way. They spatially frame this act of disciplined surveillance. In a sense, they are like the British watchtowers so beautifully photographed by Donovan Wylie.

[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service].

But, more to the point, where do fire lookout towers – as a minor design typology – fit into architectural history?

On Your Mark

The flight over from London today also gave me a chance, finally, to read through the two most recent issues of Mark Magazine (a bit late, I admit, so forgive me if you've already read about these issues elsewhere).

[Image: Filip Dujardin photographs a new building by Jan de Vylder Architects; spotted in Mark Magazine].

I've long thought Mark to be one of the best architecture magazines out there – and, in full disclosure, I've written for them before – but it was nice to catch up with issues #20 and #21. In fact, on the way out of Australia last month I had dinner in a pizza restaurant in Surry Hills... where Mark Magazine, oddly enough, was available for customers to read. That particular issue included a great little essay by Tino Schaedler about comic book architecture, its translation into functional set designs by Hollywood concept artists (in this case, Alex McDowell), and the steps through which an imaginary building eventually appears on the silver screen. Schaedler's specific point of reference here was an Arctic structure from Zach Snyder's Watchmen.

Stand-outs from my afternoon reading experience of issues #20 and #21 include the earthbound office of Selgascano architects, with its lime green concrete walls and yellow pipework, and autumnal foliage hanging colorful and even Romantic above the building's transparent ceiling. All of it is semi-embedded into a Spanish hillside, and it looks like an amazing place to work. "The concept of the studio is very similar," the architects explain: "to work under the trees." (Warning: the firm's website is further proof that, if only architects could avoid being smooth-talked by Flash designers, then their work might be more widely known...).

The auditorium at Brest, by Bigoni-Mortemard Architects also caught my eye, with its call for public gardens, office space, and, of course, an auditorium. The bulk and looming mass of the concrete is something that, done right and twinned with the public gardens, could be extraordinary.

[Image: Photos by Filip Dujardin of a new building by Jan de Vylder Architects].

Paris-based Luxigon's rendering capabilities are made abundantly clear, as well, in the magazine's opening "Notice Board" spreads, which are full of the architectural eye-candy we all now know from blogs. Cinematic and exquisitely colored, Luxigon's work certainly puts them at the very top of their field: they produce knock-out images of unbuilt architecture in as accurate and seductive a way possible. I would love to see them do some environments for a graphic novel.

Sticking with this apparent French bias, meanwhile, Chartier-Carbasson Architects make an appearance with their exceedingly clever structural intervention on the side of a Paris public housing unit. By adding a large steel exoskeleton to an existing building, inside of which are brand new steps and doorways, the architects transformed a dead wall in the city, overlooking an unused site, into an unexpected facade. The resulting steel mesh is gorgeous – but I do have to express some reservations that, in a few years, in might appear quite claustrophobic and cage-like to the building's residents. Only time will tell, of course – but the basic idea here, that you can attach external parasites to the sides of existing buildings, and that these new addenda will bring with them structurally surprising new ways of gaining entrance to a building's interior, is an exciting one.

What other buildings throughout Paris – or New York, or Beijing, or elsewhere – could benefit from this literally lateral form of architectural augmentation? Such structures would almost be more like mine heads, opening up the world of architectural space, and not urban buildings at all.

Moving on, Mark also takes a look at the Forest Lookout Tower by SeARCH; and the bewilderingly awesome Orquideorama makes an appearance, as well.

[Images: The Colegio Las Mercedes by Juan Manuel Pelaez].

Amidst the many other projects worth mentioning briefly here are the new ballet school and dance theaters by Jan de Vylder Architects, pictured above in photographs by Filip Dujardin; a sobering profile of architects Made in; and the Colegio Las Mercedes by Colombian architect Juan Manuel Pelaez.

I do have one definite complaint, however: Mark is an unbelievably heavy magazine. This sounds trivial – not to mention subjective – but this makes the issues quite difficult to travel with and a bit less than convenient to flip through out at a coffeeshop or park bench. So if something could be done about page weight and paper stock (and thus, perhaps, issue price), Mark would instantly be all but peerless.

Oil Rocks

[Image: The offshore metropolis of Oil Rocks, Azerbaijan, via Wikipedia].

There are a number of massive artificial peninsulas extending offshore from the Azerbaijani city of Baku. The most famous of these is known as Oil Rocks, and it is an offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea.

It even appears on a postage stamp.

[Image: The Oil Rocks postage stamp, via Wikipedia].

As Wikipedia informs us:

The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some workers' dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex's 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure.

These "new additions... grafted onto the existing structure" are at least partially responsible for the epic nature of the place, as it seems to push ever further outward into the tides and weather.

Funded with private money, and created entirely for the purpose of extracting oil from the Caspian's shallow seabed, these and other peninsular extensions of Baku are functional urbanism at its most giddy: uni-purpose structures like something dreamt up by Guy Maunsell, by way of the obligatory reference to Constant's New Babylon.

This metropolis of platforms would not be out of place in a design studio themed around micronations, the future of private urbanism, or even failed utopias.

[Image: Other artificial peninsular cities of Baku, seen from above. View larger! Via Google Maps].

Oil Rocks, we read elsewhere, "is a full town on the sea: it has 200 km of streets built on piles and landfill... There are tall blocks of flats, a bakery, a cinema, a garden, [and] a school." There are also helipads, helping to shorten the journey from the city's outer architectural limits back to shore.

According to Statoil, meanwhile, Oil Rocks "looks from the air like a cobweb scattered with large drops of water." Over-extending the metaphor a bit, they point out that a "closer inspection shows that the 'web' is made up of gangways across the sea, the 'spider' at its heart is the field centre and the 'water drops' are the many production installations." Structurally speaking, "Sand and stone were shipped out to create dry land, and steel pillars attached to the seabed as the foundation for huge living quarters."

Of course, it would interesting to see if something similar could be created if only we could connect all the unused ships of the global, recession-hit shipping industry together with gangways and thus institute our own Armada – but, until then, this is still absurdly interesting.

[Images: Photos of offshore oil structures in the Caspian by Stanley Greene; spotted via Artificial Owl].

In a recent issue of John Knechtel's Alphabet City, called Fuel, there is a proposal by architect Maya Przybylski called "Occupying the Caspian Sea: A One Hundred Year Plan." Przybylski specifically addresses the derelict – or soon to be derelict – extraction platforms of the Caspian. She approaches the sea as if seeing it "through the filter of oil operations: concession systems, contract blocks, pipelines, tanker ports and routes, national boundaries, bathymetric and climatic conditions, and the oil fields themselves."

Przybylski focuses, among many things, on the fact that the architectural remains of the extraction industry are being gradually recolonized by the region's wildlife. She writes, for instance, that "many birds have claimed abandoned oil rigs as resting points along their routes," and that "the offshore oil installations have become an important alternative sanctuary," both for birds and for fish. Indeed, "birds have begun to fly from rig to rig during their migration, avoiding contact with the shore altogether." In many ways, and for obvious reasons, I'm reminded of the EcoRigs project (about which I've written a short paper for a forthcoming issue of New Geographies), which seeks to turn abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico into new endoskeletons for specially curated ecosystems at sea.

While Przybylski does not, in fact, mention Oil Rocks, this stilted metropolis-at-sea is quite easy to think of it when she writes that, "When the oil companies begin to wind down their operations, the key to the proposed renewal of the sea will be the reexploitation of the relics they leave behind." If Oil Rocks is one of these relics, then, in all of its sprawling, labyrinthine wonder, what could we do with it?

Whether subject to historic preservation or transformed into a Dubai-style resort, what might Oil Rocks yet become?