Emerging Geopolitical Constellations

For the next five days, I'll be hosting and moderating an online discussion as part of the Glass House Conversations, sponsored by the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Every week this autumn, the Glass House Conversations have presented one question, posed by a new host each week, for general discussion online; previous queries have come from designers, writers, architects, critics, and educators, including 2x4, Steven Heller, John Maeda, Alice Twemlow, Alice Rawsthorn, Alissa Walker, and many more.

Click through to read the specific question I'm asking, and feel free to chime in; hopefully we can generate a good exchange over there throughout the week (note that the commenting function closes Friday evening).

On the art of drinking ice cores

[Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].

Edible Geography has a fun interview up this morning with glacial scientist Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. The interview is remarkable not only for its descriptions of the technicality of drilling, shipping, preserving, and studying ancient ice cores removed from landscapes as far afield as Greenland and Tibet, but also for Mayewski's confession that unneeded ice cores are sometimes melted down and drunk by the scientists.

[Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].

"But, you know," he clarifies, "it’s not as if we have a lot of ice lying around and we drink the water on a regular basis. We are pretty careful to restrict it to pieces that we know we don’t need for any measurements, and that come from places where they could be repeated if need be. We have to be sure that they’re not valuable to anybody. And we only use them for special events—we don’t drink it very often."

[Images: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].

These special events include wedding receptions, where shavings of ancient ice, dropped into water, bubble and pop like champagne, Mayewski explains:

Probably the most exciting thing about it is when you have real ice—that’s where the snow has been gradually compacted and eventually formed into ice, and the density has increased. When that happens, if the ice is old, it will often trap air bubbles in it. Those air bubbles can contain carbon dioxide from ten thousand years ago or even a hundred thousand years ago. And when you put an ice cube of that ice in a glass of water, it pops. It has natural effervescence as those gas bubbles escape. You get a little a puff of air into your nostrils if you have your nose over the glass. It’s not as though it necessarily smells like anything—but when you think about the fact that the last time that anything smelled that air was a hundred thousand years ago, that’s pretty interesting.

Atmospheres trapped for a half-a-million years suddenly freed, as wedding guests inhale these vaporous paleoarchives.

[Image: From the 2006-2007 U.S. ITASE expedition to Antarctica].

The whole interview, though long, is a quick and good-spirited read.

Design and Existential Risk

I'm thrilled to be kicking off this fall's Design and Existential Risk lecture series, hosted by Ed Keller and the Parsons School of Design in New York. Things kick off tomorrow, Saturday, October 9th, at 6pm EST, with a simulcast lecture featuring myself here in Los Angeles and legendary writer Bruce Sterling in New York.

As you can see from the flyer, above, the whole series will address the strategic use of science fiction-inflected scenario planning and the rise of "extreme existential risks" at this particular point in human history.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, we are challenged by unprecedented planetary scale events—resource wars, climate change, emerging diseases—which increase in frequency and pose unprecedented problems for mapping and design. What can the role be for design when the reality that faces us is more extraordinary than the worlds we have imagined in science fiction?

Each lecture in the series will thus "explore the ways design thinking engages sustainability and indeed our very survival across near term (5 years), mid term (20 years), through very, very long term (tens of thousands of years and longer) time frames."

Tomorrow will involve some technical intricacies—such as getting a video feed of myself and architect Ed Keller recorded live here in Los Angeles broadcast into the auditorium in New York City where Bruce Sterling will be interviewed by Carla Leitao and introduced by Elizabeth Ellsworth. But it should work. If all hell breaks loose, though, and the video feeds fizzle, you can still attend Bruce Sterling's talk in person at Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Avenue, and videos from both Bruce's and my talks will be released online later this fall.

Other speakers in the series include Benjamin Bratton, Jeffrey Inaba, Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio, Keller Easterling, David Gersten, and many more.

Check out the program's website for more info.

An Ancient Comedy of Urban Errors

[Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

For his final thesis project this year at the Cooper Union in New York City, student Andrejs Rauchut diagrammed and modeled "a constellation of architectural set pieces" meant for "a day-long performance of The Comedy of Errors" by William Shakespeare. Rauchut's project presentation included an absolutely massive, wood-bound book: it started off as a flat chest or cabinet, before opening up as its own display table.

[Images: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

The diagrams therein are extraordinary: they map character movement not only through the ancient city of Ephesus, where Shakespeare's play is set, but through the "constellation" of set pieces that Rauchut himself later designed.

[Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union; view larger!].

As Rauchut describes it, The Comedy of Errors "follows a single day in the life of the port city of Ephesus through the eyes of its commuting citizens, from the high perch of the duke to the city’s prostitutes." This has interesting spatial implications:

The shrewdest and most elaborate part of the play is its circuitous, knotted plot. The city starts to fold in on itself when a merchant named Antipholus arrives in Ephesus unaware that his long-lost twin brother now lives in Ephesus. The local citizenry misidentify the brothers as each Antipholus is shuffled in and out of scene. A complex strand of chaos breaks out throughout the city that climaxes with one of the brothers attempting to publicly murder his wife out of shear frustration. While the play investigates how the circulation patterns in a city can be hijacked to create chaos, it also demonstrates how, through the art of gathering, peace can be obtained via discussion and the exchange of information. We see this in the last act when all the characters gather and finally make sense of the day’s events.

Urban design becomes public dramaturgy.

[Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

The bulk of Rauchut's work went into producing a series of timelines and graphic depictions of character movement in Shakespeare's play.

[Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

In the massive image seen above, for instance, "Each box represents the time and space of an act and the crossing of a box by a line signals a character’s entrance onto the stage. One can see that it is in the final act, when nearly all the lines collectively intersect the last rectangle, and all the characters are on stage, that they can finally straighten out the events of their collective day. Up to this point, as the timeline demonstrates, the characters have been weaving in and out of contact with one another, multiplying the fragmented misinformation that spreads throughout the city."

[Images: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

He then went on to experiment with overlaying these character paths onto Staten Island, part of the New York City archipelago, as if trying to draw an analogy between the seafaring, splintered island geography of the ancient Mediterranean—with its attendant heroes and unacknowledged gods—and the contemporary commuter landscape of greater New York.

This transposition of Shakespeare's characters' movements onto Staten Island, Rauchut explains, became "the backbone for the design of a series of architectural set pieces inserted into the suburban fabric of Staten Island. At each of the points where characters interact, an architectural set is built."

[Image: From Andrejs Rauchut's thesis project at the Cooper Union].

Ultimately, the project aimed for the indirect choreographing of a public, urban event—it was to be a "guerilla instigator of public space," as Rauchut describes it:

The final design is a constellation of architectural set pieces that would be used for a day-long performance of The Comedy of Errors. Actors would travel along their scripted routes through the city dressed in plain-clothes crossing paths and delivering lines. The audience would consist of interested citizens, gathering, following, growing, leaving, and occasionally returning as they continue through their daily routines.

"After the play is over," he concludes, "the architecture would remain and would be used by the locals of Staten Island"—the remnants of a play incorporated into everyday urbanism.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of that sort of participatory street theater, but the spatial ideas underlying Rauchut's project—that is, the precipitation of architectural forms from the public passing of an unannounced literary event—is certainly thought-provoking and could have some pretty awesome effects applied elsewhere, with different texts. Books become clouds, raining events and built forms onto the city.

(Thanks to Hayley Eber for inviting me to see Andrejs Rauchut's project at midterm last spring! Of possible earlier interest: Bloomsday).

Urban Optometry

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

The Solitary Life of Cranes is a short film by Eva Weber about the work performed by construction crane operators in London. I've mentioned it many times in various talks I've given over the past year, but I realized last night that I never actually posted about it—so I thought I'd correct that. It's a great film, and it's worth seeking out. At only 27 minutes in length, as well, it's also quick to watch.

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

As the film describes itself:

Part city symphony, part visual poem, The Solitary Life of Cranes explores the invisible life of a city, its patterns and hidden secrets, seen through the eyes of crane drivers working high above its streets. (...) From their elevated positions, crane drivers are the unsung chroniclers of our ever-changing metropolis: the bulk of their time is spent waiting, looking, observing the wind, the weather, and the people down below. From their airy towers, they do not only have the best overview of the construction site and some of the most impressive panoramic views of the city but also an unparalleled insight into any of the buildings surrounding them.

Looked at one way, Weber has made an oral history of crane operators: documenting where they work, what they think about, what they see, and—perhaps most interestingly—how they view the city.

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

These operators, I would suggest, have a view of the metropolis that architects and planners have little or no access to, an optical insight into city life that often gives their job an almost mystic feel. “Many people don’t know that there’s somebody up there, don’t even think that there’s somebody up there," one of the operators suggests. "They’re quite surprised when you tell them, ‘yeah there’s a guy up there, you know and this guy is me’.”

There are moments of both inadvertent and advertent voyeurism in the process. “You see really private moments of people’s lives... because people can’t see you or aren’t aware of you." Indeed, “There’s a couple of people in—how can I put this now without sounding like a voyeur? There are flats right opposite me with the same people in, every day, if you know what I mean, and they’re there, you cannot not look.”

“If you did meet the same person on the street," one of them says, "then you’d think twice... you wouldn’t introduce yourself, but you stop and think and turn your head when they walk by, you know, as if to say, look I’m part of your life but you don’t know it.”

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber, like a shot from Michael Wolf's book The Transparent City].

One of them even compares the experience to living and working inside a cloud: "Coming down... it’s like coming out of a cloud. You sort of come down it, and it just disappears and then you’re back on normal ground again. You think, ‘Jesus, what a different way of life down here than what it is up there’.”

This terrestrial dislocation is not necessarily a good thing: “We’re getting operators that we all call ‘cab happy’, and they just want to stay on the cab all the time. You know, it’s hard to get them out... I think all crane operators, to a certain degree, I think they’re ‘cab happy’—when you’re on the floor you always miss being in the crane.”

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

One of my favorite moments in the film is when we hear an operator talk about storms. "You can see a storm develop," he says, looking out over the city, "sort of 10-15 miles away, you can see the cloud shapes, you know, you can watch the rain come in," and we see moving fronts of English weather cross over the city, "and the rain physically comes in as a wall. You can see that curtain," he says, "moving across the town, moving across the city."

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

When I talked about this film at an event in New York City last winter, architect Ed Keller, the event's host, compared these crane operators to Daedalus figures, looking down into the labyrinth that they themselves have built—only here the labyrinth is London, and the there is not one Daedalus but thousands, and they are awake all the time in overlapping shifts, keeping eyes on the city from above, in perpetuity.

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber; the building in the lower left of this image is actually the London office of Foster and Partners].

"The sky is full of stories," as author Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in an essay for the book A Manual For the 21st Century Art Institution. Looking at the social, economic, and even narrative implicatons of architectural verticality in East London, Sandhu specifically cites Weber's film:

These men, perched in their metal boxes, invisible to ground-bound Londoners, speak with precision and poetry about the beauty they are afforded by their enhanced perspectives—about the pale delicacy with which the sun rises above the city, the lush greenery of far-off hills, the way streets curve and snake into the distance. They are blessed with the opposite of tunnel vision, able to spot oncoming storms at a distance of fifteen miles, and witnesses to the teeming life that takes place above pavement level: roof-garden parties, office workers taking fag breaks, pigeon fanciers chatting to their birds. London, one of them observes, consists of a series of layers.

Sandhu calls for a need "to gaze out across the callous metropolis—and conjure forth connections," taking advantage of these unprecedented viewpoints, perspectives on the city that were literally impossible before these buildings and cranes came along, to help fashion a new understanding of how the metropolis works, how people live within it, and where it might yet go. As if the building boom brought with it a new optics of the city—a new picturesque—an angled optometry of everyday space.

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

Briefly, I'm reminded of the story of Babu Sassi, a crane operator atop the Burj Dubai/Burj Khalifa who, the legend goes, didn't come down to earth for a full year, as it would have taken too long to make the trip. You can read more about Babu at that earlier post, but the overall question would be the same: how does your understanding of the social world change after spending time inside these massive, temporary constructs without names or fixed addresses, as if only unofficially present in the built landscape that surrounds them? They are towers that disappear, never to be seen again in the same location, and you are perched there, like some rogue landscape theorist, at fantastic height above the very thing you both assemble and secretly study.

[Image: From The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber].

More information about the film can be found at its—unfortunately Flash-based—website, and the film itself is worth seeking out.

Building Lifter

[Image: Proposal image for Skylifter, capable of "delivering whole buildings to remote locations"].

Before I realized that Up is actually an unwatchable film about talking dogs, I probably would have used it as an analogy here: an Australian firm called Skylifter has devised what Popular Science describes as "a better way to transport heavy equipment to remote areas that are beyond the reach of railways, roads and runways." The Skylifter system can lift up to 150 tons, which means it "could be [used for] delivering whole buildings to remote locations" within just a few short years (after they, you know, figure out how to make it work).

But, yes, please: I would like to air-lift Angkor Wat to a small town in northern Wisconsin. Thank you. Imagine the hijacking scenarios! In fact, I can imagine a whole new cable television series emerging from this, like Ice Road Truckers gone airborne, in which amazed home viewers watch the international building-transportation industry literally take off: whole villages of detached buildings drift across the sky, disappearing over the nearest horizon.

Upside Dome / Architectural Understudy

[Image: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

Looking at "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, installed inside the St. Michiel Church in Leuven, Belgium, is like seeing the underlying geometric logic of Western space bleed through from a hidden dimension.

The project was at least partially inspired, the architects write, by their recognition that the church itself actually has no dome: their intervention "takes this seemingly trivial fact as a starting point and generate[s] the missing dome in a remarkable way."

Using the design technique of the catenary, a new structure emerges in the church. The Upside Dome is a real size scale model, comprised of hundreds of meters of chain, which is literally and figuratively the counterpart of the unfinished dome.

Abstract, bulbous, heavy with itself, this network of chains thus forms an inverted counter-dome—a reflective surrogate, a back-to-front double, an upside dome—inside the nave.

[Image: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

The actual installation shots are pretty cool, as well: glimpses of the church's innards—its otherwise unseen attics and backspaces—complete with long chains dropped down from above.

[Images: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

The final result is both model and realization, then, simultaneously a demonstration and the final product.

[Image: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

In a sense, the geometry of gravity itself collides with the ornamental excess of Baroque architecture in a surprisingly appropriate and optically interesting way: the installation suggests a kind of minimalist Baroque, where emerging nests of curved surfaces take shape, mocking and repeating the logic of the buildings around it.

[Images: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

Way back in March 2005, meanwhile, I caught a lecture by architect Mark Goulthorpe at the University of Pennsylvania, where he demonstrated a piece of software that I believe had been produced in-house at his firm; it allowed the architect to model the hanging of chains in virtual catenary curves, and thus to generate a huge variety of possible architectural shapes for future projects. He produced, with the click of a mouse, live there in the lecture hall, new species of curves in space.

[Image: "Upside Dome" by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh; photo by Jeroen Verrecht].

But the method of analog calculation seen in "Upside Dome"—that is, drooping pieces of chain or string through space until they stabilize—gives force and form to gravity and to the potential architecture tucked away in empty space.