Skyscraper Bridges

[Image: "Skyscraper Bridges" by Raymond Hood (1929), as seen in the project PDF for Rael San Fratello's Bay Line].

The Bay Line

[Image: The Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello; modular additions can be seen bolted on from below. Read the project PDF].

Combining Rails to Trails, William Gibson's Virtual Light, and the same repurposed-preservation strategies behind New York's High Line, Bay Area architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello have called for stabilizing the disused – and soon to be entirely dismantled – portion of the Bay Bridge. They would then turn it into a pedestrianized urban park and outdoor sports attraction.

[Image: The Bay Bridge and its replacement; on the right is the piece that Rael San Fratello would like to see stabilized. Image via Wikipedia].

And if it works for the Bay Bridge, they suggest, it could work for other disused bridges elsewhere.

"This proposal seeks to repurpose abandoned and closed bridges as sites of potential for parks, cultural centers and housing," the architects write in the project's accompanying PDF. In the process, they hope "to demonstrate the potential for re-purposing historic American bridge infrastructure as possible sites for sustainable urban housing and linear parks."

The immense load capacity of rail bridges allows for the support of program beyond that of parks, suggesting the urbanization of bridges. While the current economic climate suggests a surplus of housing, the economic reality also suggests a push towards urbanization and often the “affordable” housing constructed in suburban environments, which encroaches on the rural, is not what is needed. Instead, by using abandoned bridges in urban areas, we are creating opportunities for sustainable low-cost housing within the urban realm—creating the potential for creative speculation among housing developers by expounding upon the nascent potential of a layered housing-park-bridge typology.

While, on one level, this simply side-steps the immense financial implications associated with structurally maintaining these bridges, and, on another level, it bears an unfortunate resemblance to Boris Johnson's recent – if not necessarily well-received – call for an inhabitable bridge across the Thames, it does also kick-start a conversation about what we might be able to do with the massive pieces of civic infrastructure that dot the U.S. and are currently scheduled for replacement and demolition.

[Images: (top) Tennis court, bicycle path, and observation module; (middle) Outdoor auditorium; (bottom) swimming pool on the Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello].

And, I have to admit, it would simply be cool:

Imagine housing, recreational and cultural facilities connected to a continuous, lushly planted, green strip, floating above the water—an aerial garden, as the city's newest park through which you could walk and wander and enjoy the most spectacular views of the bay.

Of course, critics like James Howard Kunstler might suggest that reusing rail infrastructure – or, in this case, highway infrastructure – as anything other than a rejuvenated national rail service is "decadence at its purest," it is surely just as decadent to watch as functional pieces of infrastructure rot on all sides, as you sit there with your arms crossed, waiting for the nation's taxpayers to agree with your views on reuse.

[Images: Other habitable bridge: (top) Florence's Ponte Vecchio; (second) a painting by Peter Jackson of "Old London Bridge"; (third and bottom) Constant's New Babylon].

In any case, as someone who literally never enjoyed driving across the Bay Bridge for seismic-safety reasons, I have to point out that this proposal still comes with its own set of earthquake-related issues. I was interested, however, to read in the Economist just this week that "there are few safe places to ride out an earthquake. Surprisingly, though, a recently constructed bridge is often one of them."

Engineers have become good at designing bridges that are earthquake-resistant enough to preserve the lives of those caught crossing when a quake strikes. The problem is that the bridge is often unusable afterwards.

Nonetheless, if you had put millions of dollars' worth of landscape and housing onto a bridge that was then left abandoned and "unusable" after an earthquake, it would be a very foolhardy investment, indeed.

[Image: Final render of the Bay Line by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello].

But what of bridges in non-seismic zones? In Sydney, for instance, due to the peninsular nature of walks along Cremorne Point and through Kirribilli, there are places where the Sydney Harbor Bridge appears not to be crossing over water at all, but standing over the rooftops of the city, anchored into the neighborhood. It looks more like a new kind of inland megastructure, strung above the streets and restaurants, like something designed by Perdido Street Station-era China Miéville, than a harbor bridge. An industrial cathedral of exposed ribs and steel tension lines, arcing up into the skyline.

So what if you hung houses from it? What amazing typologies of bolt-on architectural prosthetics could we create, if bridges were aerial foundations and they carried not cars or locomotives but schools and piazzas?

In fact, I'm reminded of this unexpectedly inspiring – structurally speaking – proposal by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which sought to string the suspension cables of a new pedestrian bridge from inside the nearby buildings of a rebuilt Leamouth Peninsula (click through to their image gallery for more).

[Image: A proposal for London's Leamouth Peninsula by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill].

Returning to Rael San Fratello's Bay Line, though, there are obviously still huge issues associated with the unusually catastrophic nature of structural failure when it comes to inhabitable bridges, as well as the financially prohibitive needs of regular maintenance, but treating suspension bridges simply as another type of district in the city is an undeniably interesting urban idea.

(Via Streetsblog SF and Ronald Rael. Meanwhile, Rael's recently published book Earth Architecture is an excellent and thoughtful survey of earthen structures across the world and throughout building history; Rael's old school blog, megablog, is also worth a read for its eye-popping and often literally world-altering architectural ambitions).

Extreme agricultural statuary

[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].

I mentioned a recent issue of Mark Magazine the other day, but I deliberately saved one of the articles for a stand-alone post later on. That article was a long profile of the work of Philip Beesley, a Toronto-based architect and sculptor, whose project the "Implant Matrix" BLDGBLOG covered several years ago.

In issue #21 of Mark, author Terri Peters describes several of Beesley's projects, but it's the "Endothelium" that really stood out (and that you see pictured here).

[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].

Peters refers to Beesley's work as a "lightweight landscape of moving, licking, breathing and swallowing geotextile mesh" – a kind of pornography of ornament, or the Baroque by way of David Cronenberg. "Inspired by coral reefs," she continues, "with their cycles of opening, clamping, filtering and digesting," Beesley's biomechanical sculpture-spaces are "immersive theatre environments" in which "wheezing air pumps create an environment with no clear beginning or end."

I'm reminded of the penultimate scene in James Cameron's film Aliens, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) meets the alien "queen." The queen is laying eggs, we see, through a gigantic, semi-prosthetic, peristaltically-powered external ovarian sac – and the scene exemplifies the encounter with the grotesque in all its H.R. Giger-influenced, sci-fi extremes. Put another way, if organisms, too – not just buildings – can reach a point of ornamental excess, then James Cameron's aliens are perhaps exhibit number one.

[Images: Screen grabs from James Cameron's Aliens].

In any case, Beesley's work is a fascinating hybrid of advanced textile design, geostructural modeling, and rogue biology experiment. Peters's descriptions of the "Endothelium" are worth quoting at length:

[The structure consists of] a field of organic "bladders" that are self-powered and that move very slowly, self-burrowing, self-fertilizing and are linked by 3D printed joints and thin bamboo scaffolding. The bladders are powered using mobile phone vibrators and have LED lights. It works by using tiny gel packs of yeast which burst and fertilize the geotextile.

This latter detail – "using tiny gel packs of yeast which burst and fertilize the geotextile" – brings to mind something at the intersection of an improvised explosive device (or IED) and a green roof: you hire Philip Beesley to design a landscape-machine for installation atop a new building downtown, and, over the course of many decades, it vibrates, yeast-bursts, rotates, crawls, and grows through extraordinary cycles of grotesque architectural fertility. A solar-powered landscape of mold and microroots, generating its own soil. Within a few years, the original sculpture it all came from is gone, archaeologically undetectable beneath the vitality of the forms that have consumed it.

One wonders what Philip Beesley would think of the mushroom tunnel of Mittagong.

[Images: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].

Elsewhere in the article, Peters writes:

Endothelium is an automated geotextile, a lightweight and sculptural field housing arrays of organic batteries within a lattice system that might reinforce new growth. It uses a dense series of thin "whiskers" and burrowing leg mechanisms to support low-power miniature lights, pulsing and shifting in slight increments. Within this distributed matrix, microbial growth is fostered by enriched seed-patches housed within nest-like forms, sheltered beneath the main lattice units.

I'm a bit rhetorically stuck on "between" statements, I'm afraid, but it's as if Beesley's work falls somewhere between a loaf of sourdough bread and a sculpture by Jean Tinguely.

[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].

I'm curious, meanwhile, if you could bury a Philip Beesley sculpture in the woods of rural England somewhere, and allowed it to articulate new ecosystems slowly, over the cyclic course of generations. In fact, I'm reminded of an article in the New York Times last week, spotted via mammoth, in which we learn that two abandoned landfills in Brooklyn have since been used as unlikely foundations for new ecosystems:

In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill with a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000 trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of nature preserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York City long ago.

"Once the plants take hold," the article adds, "nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates." But what if those weren't landfills down there but sculptures by Philip Beesley? Strategically sown seed-patches and gel packs of yeast wait underground for new roots to rediscover them.

It's living geostatuary, buried beneath the surface of the earth – a kind of extreme agriculture, with soil-preparation by Philip Beesley.

[Images: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].

I'd genuinely like to see what Beesley might do if he was hired by, say, a NASA R&D program dedicated to terraforming other planets. Could you fly a modular, self-unfolding Philip Beesley sculpture into the depths of radiative space, land it on a planet somewhere, and watch as revolting pools of bacteriological mucus begin to coagulate and form new fungi? Beesley's whiskered vibrators begin to shiver with signs of piezoelectric life, as small crystals surrounded by radio transmitters and genetically engineerined space-seed-patches imperceptibly tremble, evolving into mutation-prone "organic batteries" unprotected beneath starlight. Give it a thousand years, and vast infected forests, the width of continents, take hold.

You've colonized a distant planet through architecture and yeast.

For more, check out Mark Magazine's issue #21. Beesley's also got a book out, called Hylozoic Soil, that I would love to read.

Light Graphs in the Andes

[Image: From "Imprints on the Andes" by Studio Orta].

While writing a post earlier this week about an exhibition in Paris, called Uninhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments, I stumbled upon this project by Lucy and Jorge Orta, aka Studio Orta.

Performed fourteen years ago, "Imprints on the Andes" used "PAE light cannons," which "enable[d] gigantic mobile images to be projected up to 1km in distance." The artists thus projected massive hieroglyphic shapes onto the ruins of Macchu Picchu and on the mountainsides beyond.

In fact, the cannons are strong enough to be seen in broad daylight.

[Image: From "Imprints on the Andes" by Studio Orta].

The effect is quite amazing, especially if one were to encounter these things without foreknowledge of what they were or that they'd be there.

You hike over a remote rise in the mountainous deserts of Utah – and there, ahead, moving ever so slightly, is a strange shape, like an enemy ship from Space Invaders, a shining path of alien signs hovering on the geologies all around you.

[Images: From "Imprints on the Andes" by Studio Orta].

Unfortunately, the effect is not quite as exciting when used on buildings.

Gonzo Green

[Image: Preflooded Wetlands by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

Unexpectedly apropos of the previous post, Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, together with Darryl Chen, has created a series of quite beautiful images called "Postcards from a Green Future" – one of which, seen above, uses the Maunsell Sea Forts as a gantried foundation for suburban anti-flood design in an idyllic southeast England.

The entire suite of images is almost farcically green – it's sustainability redone as Grand Guignol. These speculative scenes of "a green future" show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it's an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London's most distant scattered cityscape.

[Image: Waste and Biogas and Permacultural Hinterland by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

But the images also betray an interest in the murky borders between the synthetic and the geological, the organic and the mass-produced. What if those verdant fields of green out there are actually cloned and genetically-modified? What if that well-trimmed nature is simply an exhibition on display?

[Image: Primordial Garden Sanctuary and Incarceration Tower by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

You can read about the entire project in new four-part series of blog posts over at Tomorrow's Thoughts Today – just go to the righthand column ("Slow Thoughts") and keep scrolling down...

Maunsell Towers

[Image: The Maunsell Sea Forts, photographed by Pete Speller, courtesy of Nick Sowers].

I missed an amazing opportunity the other week to visit the Maunsell Towers – aka the Maunsell Sea Forts – with Nick Sowers, author of an excellent Archinect school blog and one of my students from this summer's studio down on Cockatoo Island in Sydney.

For the last year or so, Nick has been traveling around the world on a much-deserved John K. Branner Fellowship, documenting army bases, abandoned bunkers, and other sites of historical military interest. From South Korea to the Maginot Line, from classical war zones and medieval walled cities to "bunker recycling services" and D-Day, Nick's itinerary is breath-taking. It is also, I hope, intriguing enough to catch the eye of future publishers or gallerists who might want to give Nick the space in which to break down all that he's seen; there are very many of us who would love to learn more.

Of course, we could also hear more about his trip: Nick is acoustically-inclined, and he has been documenting the sounds of these militarized landscapes over on another blog he runs, called Soundscrapers.

[Images: Photos by Nick Sowers].

So Nick and his wife were in England the other week, and we unfortunately missed meeting up – but they managed to take a boat tour out to the Maunsell Sea Forts, iconic architectural structures in the Thames Estuary, inspirations for Archigram, and one of the few real-life buildings (if you can call them that) that gave me the idea to start BLDGBLOG. In fact, I've mentioned these places in lectures and I've posted about them on the blog before – but I've never had a chance to visit.

Nick's photos, presented here, alongside photos by Pete Speller, will tell the story instead.

[Images: Photos by Nick Sowers].

As Underground Kent explains, "The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell."

Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway. All the forts followed this plan and, in order of grounding, were called the Nore Army Fort, the Red Sands Army Fort and finally the Shivering Sands Army Fort. All three forts were in place by late 1943, but Nore is no longer standing. Construction of the towers was relatively quick, and they were easily floated out to sea and grounded in water no more than 30m (100ft) deep.

They thus entered into the imaginations of speculative architects everywhere; they helped give visual shape to Archigram's Walking City; and they continue to offer a kind of real-life spatial analogue for Constant's New Babylon for anyone with access to a boat.

[Image: The Maunsell Sea Forts, photographed by Pete Speller, courtesy of Nick Sowers].

Nick explained in an email that he visited the structures with Tony Pine, a "sound engineer" – i.e. pirate radio operator – who spent the afternoon "telling stories of the days in the 60s when Archigram came out to visit the structures, and also about incredibly cold winters when they burned the wood-fibre linings of the tower interiors to stay warm."

Also along for the ride was Robin Adcroft, director of Project Redsand, who "describes himself as the caretaker of the structures." Adcroft points out the genealogical importance of these structures:

The Thames Sea Forts are the last in a long history of British Marine Defences. The Army Anti Aircraft forts have played a significant role in post World War 2 developments. Notably in offshore fuel exploration and drilling platforms. The successful rapid deployment of the Maunsell Forts soon after led to the construction of the first offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1940s.

Both conceptually and materially, the Maunsell Towers have an architectural legacy that seems oddly under-explored.

[Images: Inside the forts; photos by Pete Speller, courtesy of Nick Sowers].

But "it's interesting," Nick adds: "no one actually owns these things."

Apparently the transport authority wanted to give Project Redsand a deed but they declined it, not wanting the liability. A ship crashed into Shivering Sand (an outpost which is visible from Redsand) in the 60s, taking out one of the towers and killing two maintenance personnel. Red Sand is not actually in the shipping lane, but it is very much a hazard. The original 1/4 inch plate steel is rusting through to a paper thickness. We had to wear hardhats when the boat pulled in next to the structures.

Project Redsand has more information about efforts to preserve the forts – and they link to this short YouTube video in which you can see how these clustered towers might be stabilized and maintained for generations to come.

[Images: Photos by Pete Speller, courtesy of Nick Sowers].

Meanwhile, be sure to follow Nick Sowers's slowly-ending travels around the militarized world on his Archinect blog – and he can also be found on Twitter.

Tarty

[Image: Peyton and Byrne by Fashion Architecture Taste].

While buying a fig roll today at Peyton and Byrne – a little cake shop tucked away inside the shared lobby of Heal's and Habitat on Tottenham Court Road – I remembered that the space I was standing in had been designed by Fashion Architecture Taste.

[Image: Peyton and Byrne by F.A.T.].

The design of the shop "aims to bring to mind an archetypal cake shop," the architects write. They add, however, that "the floor is an Op Art version of a traditional Victorian mosaic floor," updating the archetype, so to speak, by way of the optical strategies of Josef Albers.

In a way, the shop is as much an act of spatialized graphic design as it is an example of interior architecture; indeed, we read, "Display shelving and units are kept simple and elegant to allow the packaging and food to become part of the decoration." Plates full of cupcakes, jammy dodgers, and gingerbread men thus become edible ornaments – colorful geometries of cookies and tarts that temporarily augment the visual impact of the space before disappearing into customers' unlabeled white paper bags – perhaps even implying a new, highly sugared return of Art Nouveau (wed with generous helpings of Gill Sans). The shop is almost literally a white cube: a gallery of dessert.

Like something out of Willy Wonka – or the more hallucinatory scenes of Young Sherlock Holmes – you go to visit Notre Dame in Paris one morning, only to see that the building's stained-glass windows are actually little flavored wafers and glacé fruits that you can break off and eat... before they're replaced the next day with colorful trays of macaroons.

Thus does architectural ornament find common ground with boutique baking.

[Image: Peyton and Byrne by F.A.T.].

F.A.T.'s other architecture projects can be explored on their website – and, of course, principals Sam Jacob and Charles Holland also blog at Strangeharvest and Fantastic Journal, respectively.

And the fig roll was good!

(Apologies for the self-reference here, but there is also an interview with Sam Jacob in The BLDGBLOG Book, discussing "spatial debauchery" and the literary work of Joris-Karl Huysmans).