Quick Links 6

[Image: "Melbourne's Future Wheel" by Büro North].

Danger Room: "As part of its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon extreme research agency Darpa is launching the Transparent Earth project. They’ll invest $4 million into the creation of real-time, 3-D maps that display 'the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily-relevant spatial scales.'"

InfraNet Lab: "When snow prospects at lower Cypress looked dim, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) unrolled the contingency plan to use snowcats, trucks, helicopters and a team of about 45 people to equitably redistribute snowfall. This led to two basic weather engineering practices: snow transfer and snow-base packing. Trucks and snowcats are moving snow from higher elevations, while helicopters are ferrying in bales of straw to bolster bases, walls and turns. Snow is being moved hastily—none of the ice brick techniques found at Innsbruck here—almost more as a cut-fill soil strategy. VANOC is trucking in about three dozen loads of snow a day from as far away as Manning Park, more than two hours drive east of Vancouver. That is over 300 truckloads and counting."


[Image: Snow-hardening in Olympic Vancouver; photo by Jae C. Hong courtesy of the Associated Press (via InfraNet Lab)].

e360: "A group of solutions is emerging under the rubric of 'rewilding,' and this new movement has made considerable progress over the past decade. A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the 'island' effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators."

Mother Jones: "A new study shows how North American birds have changed the shape of their wings in the past century as the landscapes around them have been fragmented by clear-cutting."

New York Times: "Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future."

Sify: "Reports indicate that the third national survey on cultural relics in China has revealed more than 700 km of ancient Great Wall in the northwestern part of the country."


[Image: Rho Ophiuchus. Photo courtesy Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA].

PhysOrg.com: "According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation... 'We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life.'"

PhysOrg.com: "NASA to Study Seeds in Space to Understand Plant Growth... 'There's only one way to determine exactly why plants grow differently in weaker gravity environments, like on the moon and Mars, than on Earth—and that's by using the microgravity environment in spacecraft orbiting Earth.''

White House: "The Environmental Protection Agency is developing regulations that address the safety, efficacy, and environmental soundness of injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground. The Department of the Interior is assessing, in coordination with the Department of Energy, the country's geologic capacity to store carbon dioxide and promoting geological storage demonstration projects on public lands."

The Sofia Echo: "Possession and use of a metal detector in Bulgaria [now] requires registration with the Culture Ministry and lack of such registration [will be considered] a crime... Efforts to legalize the open use of metal detectors have consistently been rebuffed by state bodies, which have treated it as attempts to legalize tomb-raiding."

(Some links via @Tree_Museum, @nicolatwilley, the bewilderingly awesome @treestrategist, and Jessica Saraceni;s posts on Archaeology News, one of my consistent top ten web favorites. Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).

The Atomized Library

[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

For a recent studio at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, taught by Douglas Burnham of envelope A+D, students Duncan Young and Brett Walters produced what they call "The Atomized Library." It was produced as part of an overall studio exploring the space of the public library in an age of rapidly changing information storage.


[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

The basic idea was to scatter smaller information spaces throughout the city: buildings, kiosks, cafes, computer labs, public-access WiFi envelopes, media production centers, "teen spaces," public meeting rooms, and more. Importantly, though, the entire point of Young's investigation was to ask what libraries might look like if information was no longer accessed through books.


[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

"This methodology," Young and Walters write, "increases the density of the urban fabric, and allows for a new reading of how we use and access information." His units would be particularly well-suited, he suggests, for "unbuilt and under-used" urban sites.


[Image: The "Atomized Library" by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

Think of it as a network of partially prefab, rapidly deployable, plug-in, book-less micro-libraries, with potential for global distribution. EasyLibrary, perhaps.

In fact, it raises an interesting question: when it comes to public libraries, whether we're referring to New York City or Ciudade del Este, what is the architectural equivalent of One Laptop Per Child? Is the future of the community library a modular shed, or has an entire building type been made obsolete by handheld devices?

Larger versions of these images are available on Flickr.

A bulge in the floor now 100 feet high

In a fantastic interview published last year by the Wall Street Journal, novelist Cormac McCarthy—quipping off-hand that "anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing"—reflects on what might or might not have caused the world-ending catastrophe that frames his recent book The Road.

The Road, of course, takes place in a relentlessly grey world, populated only by a father and his son. The anemic duo walks slowly south toward an unidentified coast over mountains and plains, through valleys and dead forests; everything is burned, molten, or obliterated. The father is coughing blood. They meet cannibals and the insane, and they stray into abandoned houses less uninhabited than they seem.


[Image: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming].

The only glimpse we're given of what violently ends the known order of things is this brief scene; I have left McCarthy's original spelling and punctuation intact:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.

After this, the landscape outside—everywhere—is described as "scabbed" and "cauterized," heavily covered in ash. McCarthy memorably writes: "They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn."

Later in his interview with the Wall Street Journal, McCarthy jokes that he and his brother once "talked about if there was a small percentage of the human population left [after a disaster], what would they do? They'd probably divide up into little tribes," he and his brother decided, "and when everything's gone, the only thing left to eat is each other. We know that's true historically."

In any case, McCarthy's end-times scenario sounds, to me, remarkably like nuclear war, but in his interview McCarthy entertains, even if only casually, that it could also have been the caldera beneath Yellowstone National Park finally exploding. McCarthy:

A lot of people ask me [what caused The Road's apocalypse]. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

It was thus amazingly interesting to read that no less than 1,799 earthquakes have occurred beneath Yellowstone since January 17, 2010—a so-called earthquake swarm.

As of yesterday, however, the USGS reports that the current swarm has "slowed considerably." Indeed, we read, while "the current number of earthquakes per day is well above average at Yellowstone... nevertheless, swarms are common... with 100s to 1000s of events, some of which can reach magnitudes greater than 4.0." In other words, it is always and already a landscape prey to internal lurching deformations and displacements, as if fabricated in a fever dream by Lebbeus Woods, torqued and aterrestrially tuned to some strange counter-timescale.

Swarms like this are, structurally speaking, quite common; this is a landscape always on the move—though it doesn't necessarily travel far: "The crust beneath Yellowstone is highly fractured already," a scientist told the New York Times, "so we’re getting stress release in these earthquakes—a displacement of millimeters."

Still, when "the park’s strange and volatile geology," with its thrumming subterranean supervolcano that is "bigger, much bigger, than scientists had previously thought," kicked back into trembling motion, McCarthy's "bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and... just sort of pulsing," a topographical sign of the apocalypse, instantly came to mind.

Quick Links 5

[Image: Wired Science | DIY Recordings of Awakening Sun].

1) MSNBC | World's tallest tower closed a month after opening (see also)
2) Edible Geography | UNESCO Culinary Heritage Sites
3) Free Association Design | Incidently Shifting the Continental Divide and Space-Time Vertigo of Human-Designed Geology
4) Ogle Earth | Where does Google stand on the Thai-Cambodian border at Preah Vihear Temple?
5) Complex Terrain Laboratory | Flight of the Navigator and The Arctic: The Final Frontier


[Image: From "New Armored Wall System Assembles Like Legos, Could Replace Sandbags in Afghanistan"; here are the actual building modules].

6) Luke Jerram | Aeolus: Acoustic Wind Pavilion
7) Time | Industrial Strength Fungus (don't miss this Flickr set of the mushroom-bricks being cultivated; related: The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong)
8) Builder | The Disaster-Proof House
9) ABC | University of Arizona's tree ring lab unlocking the past (related: Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research)
10) Ptak Science Books | Killing London With the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

And one to grow on: Wikipedia | The Crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901

(Some links via Nicola Twilley, @geoparadigm, and my dad! Quick Links 1, 2, 3, and 4).

Toward the city come hills

[Image: Mudslides strike Los Angeles; photo by Gary Friedman for the L.A. Times].

In his short novel Man in the Holocene, author Max Frisch describes the psychological implications of living in the presence of possible Alpine landslides. The idea that the very earth beneath your feet might someday start to avalanche takes on existential overtones.

"Nobody in the village," Frisch writes, for instance, "thinks that the day, or perhaps night, will come when the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time." He then supplies us with the image of a "laborer who has been working all his life on supporting walls and does not believe the whole mountain could ever begin to slide"; for someone such as that, a landslide's accompanying loss of foundation is simply too extraordinary to think about.

Somewhere in the hills, though, Frisch suggests, is a hidden logic: it both explains and demonstrates how thousands of tons of rocks and the spaces between them can unlock, breaking open into discrete geometries to tumble toward the valleys below, perhaps bringing houses—whole cities—down with them.

And it can all start with a minor act: a small crack, perhaps a rainstorm, perhaps just the weight of one man hiking alone. "That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it," Frisch writes.

Indeed, "One must be prepared for everything."


[Images: Beneath the pavement, liquid terrain. All photos by Anne Cusack for the L.A. Times].

A few months ago, meanwhile, I bookmarked a short article in the L.A. Times. Published after massive wildfires had burned through the hills around the city, denuding them of all vegetation and thus destabilizing the rock and soil, the article reported on a number of city residents in the outlying hilltop communities who had begun to eye the slopes around them with alarm. It was as if the earth itself had been weaponized: every hill, scarred by fire now and insecure for void of plantlife, was a mudslide waiting to happen.

To protect against this cascading eventuality, a new municipal landscape architecture thus emerged: mazes of concrete barriers and walls of sandbags showed up to redivide the streets. Circulation through the neighborhood would be entirely redefined, and a massive landscape of waiting would be installed: a space patient for all the material locked inside those hills to arrive.

Officials have said the concrete barriers [they soon installed] will stay in place for three to four years because the hillsides are completely barren in the wake of the Station fire, which charred more than 160,000 acres. It was the worst wildfire in L.A. County's history. Many measures had been put in place, including the clearing of debris basins, the notification of residents in high-risk areas, the distribution of sandbags and the laying of several thousand feet of K-rails.

These spatial precautions were put to heavy use last week when the hills disgorged themselves, liquifying, going mobile, and flowing through, past, and over the neighborhood houses.

It was a "Niagara of mud," the L.A. Times reported.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

"The mudflow twisted garage doors into dented accordions," we read, and it "disintegrated walls of sandbags and knocked over 4,000-pound concrete barriers that lined the road to divert water away from homes. About 25 vehicles were damaged, flowing down the street and smashing against walls, trees and one another." In one case, "a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit."

Another man, woken up in his Snover Canyon house in the middle of the night, looked outside to see "muddy water carrying boulders the size of bowling balls... through the 4-foot-high barricade of sandbags, a plywood wall and a chain-link fence. A sheet of mud nearly a half-foot deep and 16 feet wide cascaded across the backyard."

He ran to the bathroom window. He had expected this. It was the weak point of his defense. There at the corner of the yard, a geyser of water crashed into the remains of the wall and shot into the air. He had to get his family out. He didn’t know what else might be coming down that mountain.

The terrestrial uncertainty of that final sentence is astonishing.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Once the mudslides abated in one district, "nine homes in the foothill area suffered enough damage to be red-tagged, which means they’re partially collapsed and uninhabitable. With crumbling walls, sunken roofs, shattered windows and mud-filled living rooms, the structures are in a precarious position," themselves now more like residual appendages of the debris flow than freestanding architectural units.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

However, perhaps the best article ever written about mudslides in Los Angeles was produced nearly 30 years ago by John McPhee. Called "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," it was originally published in The New Yorker but was later collected in McPhee's genuinely excellent and very highly recommended book The Control of Nature.

Among many other things, McPhee devotes several paragraphs to a description of the DIY architectural tweaks that have arisen in response to these landscapes-gone-mobile. "At least one family," he writes, for instance, "has experienced so many debris flows coming through their back yard that they long ago installed overhead doors in the rear end of their built-in garage. To guide the flows, they put deflection walls in their back yard. Now when the boulders come they open both ends of their garage, and the debris goes through to the street."

Not only has this image stuck with me for years now, ever since I first read McPhee's book, but it has also been impossible for me to avoid thinking about when looking at the photographs you see here, particularly those taken on the mud-slicked streets themselves by Irfan Khan. But the very idea that one could deliberately open a causeway for the natural world to flow, with awe-inspiring violence, through one's own personal space—that you could actually build a kind of sacrifice zone within your own house for forces otherwise well beyond spatial control—is, at the very least, an extraordinary metaphor for living with the natural world.

This minor architecture—of repurposed overhead doors, emergency ditching, concrete crib structures, deflection walls, and more—brings the ever-present possibility of geologic collapse into world of design.

After all, how do you build on an earth that keeps disappearing?


[Images: Photos by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Returning to Frisch's book, there is a fantastic, if brief, image of sound being put to use to stimulate minor avalanches, perhaps as a way to help avoid the Big One later on. "Men blow three times on a little horn and wave a red flag," Frisch writes, as if describing a fairy tale of precisely administered sonic land-disassembly, "and shortly afterward the bits come rattling down, pebbles and gravel from the Ice Age."

I mention this out of the possibility that perhaps Los Angeles city officials should not be responding to the ever-present threat of landslides on the urban perimeter with hardened architectural defenses but with something more like preemptive techniques: why wait for the hills to come to you, in other words (see this diagram of how debris basins work), when you could simply bring them down on your own time and schedule, in rock-by-rock increments, pulling rivers of solid geology out from their halo'd terraces above the city? Could micro-landslides somehow keep apocalyptic avalanches at bay?

Or, more realistically, does L.A. need to ditch the bulky mazes of concrete switching walls and go for a massive replanting effort, instead? Like Beijing's Great Green Wall against the coming desert, L.A. needs to plant a wall of minor roots against the instability of its mountains.

Format and Reinstall

[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].

A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: "According to the International Olympic Committee," we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city's unseasonal condition of snowlessness, "the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue," however, "carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes."

This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.

The Long River

[Image: "Chongqing XI" by Nadav Kander, winner of the 2009 Prix Pictet; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Speaking of the Prix Pictet, the winner of the 2009 prize was Nadav Kander for his project Yangtze, The Long River. It's an amazing group of images.

From Kander's artist statement:

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100 miles (6500km) across china, traveling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.

Kander "photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source"—a daunting task, for, as Kander points out, "more people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet."


[Image: "Chongqing VII, (Washing Bike)" by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Part of Kander's visual goal was "showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man," the photographer adds, "has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work."

The images featured in this post have the feel of a film set—more cinematography than photography—as if Kander has unknowingly captured a mise-en-scène, some wrongly cut dramatic moment, unfolding on the river banks.

Actors, perhaps unsure of their larger narrative role, seem overwhelmed by their infrastructural surroundings.


[Image: "Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic)" by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

The stage set-design theories of Edward Gordon Craig come to mind. Craig was an early 20th-century stage set designer (and son of an architect), whose "architectonic scenery," according to M. Christine Boyer, foregrounded architectural backdrops so strongly that his props ultimately became the only on-stage action an audience was meant to watch.

Craig "proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors," Boyer writes. "The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination." It is a stage devoid of actors, in other words, just large pieces of equipment moving about according to the rules of their own choreography.

What happens, then, if this depopulated dramaturgy becomes blown-up to the scale of national infrastructure?

In one sense, this perfectly empty landscape into which humans try vainly—and at great emotional cost—to situate themselves is the hallmark of J.G. Ballard. We might even specifically ask, looking at Kander's photos: when will a Yangtze River-based rewriting of Ballard's Concrete Island come along, exploring these spatial questions?

Concrete Island, of course, is Ballard's 1974 novel about a London motorist—as it happens, an architect—who is stranded on his way home by a car accident. Freeing himself from his ruined vehicle at sundown, he finds himself trapped beneath the yawning arches of the motorway, stranded in a peripheral world of drainage culverts, ascent ramps, sliproads, and storm tunnels, a kind of urban blindspot (read Mike Bonsall's awesome forensic archaeology of London's Westway, a spatial interrogation of the built environment in order to discover where Ballard's novel was meant to be set).

With no rescue in sight, Ballard's architect is left to fend for himself, surrounded by gigantic pieces of urban infrastructure whose purpose now seems oddly counter-human; he is "alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines... an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness."

I'm left wondering: who is the J.G. Ballard of contemporary China? Nadav Kander's photographs—many more of which can be seen at the Prix Pictet site—are an enticing glimpse of what a Ballardian sensibility might create there.