Urban Islands

[Image: For a few heady weeks I actually thought I was going to be teaching at this thing... but no more. Alas. Still, though, how can you resist applying for a two-week architectural design studio in Sydney, Australia, themed around the spatial rehabilitation of a semi-derelict, post-industrial island, complete with "early convict settlement structures" and heavily incised sandstone foundations? More information, including how to apply, available here; larger, though low-res, version of the flyer available here. Have fun!].

BLDGBLOG in San Francisco

[Image: BLDGBLOG's second event! The flyer uses photos by Nicolai Morrisson].

I'm excited, honored, flattered, stoked, etc., even slightly stunned, to announce that BLDGBLOG and Chronicle Books have teamed up to host an afternoon of talks about landscape and architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, from 2:30-5:00pm on Saturday, April 7th.
The line-up, as you'll see from the flyer, above, includes John Bela & Matthew Passmore, of Rebar; Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State; Lisa Iwamoto, of both IwamotoScott Architecture and UC-Berkeley; myself, against all better judgement and in contrast to last time; and Walter Murch, three-time Oscar winner and co-author, with Michael Ondaatje, of the excellent and highly recommended book, The Conversations.
Each speaker will have 15-20 minutes in which to do their thing; you'll have two different Q&A periods in which to ask questions, and there'll be a 10-minute break between the third and fourth speaker. Everything will be timed to within a millisecond...
I'll be re-posting about all this in ten days or so, however, complete with more information about each speaker, including some examples of Lisa's work at IwamotoScott and a full-length interview with Walter Murch; so, for now, just mark your calendars! And if you're anywhere near San Francisco, I hope to see you there. Be sure to introduce yourself; I like people.
Finally, if you want a larger version of the flyer, go here. Of course, if you like what you see, photographically, don't miss the other work of Nicolai Morrisson (formerly known as Nicolai Grossman).

Adventures in Real Estate

[Image: Art ©Peter Garfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York; from the New York Times].

The New York Times Magazine published another issue on the state of Real Estate this past weekend.
Some highlights include the above image, by Peter Garfield, used to illustrate an article about the housing bubble, and whether or not that bubble really exists – including a brief look at Robert Shiller's "housing futures" market, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
But why not a landscape futures market...?
The N.Y. Times then takes a look at crazy dorm rooms – most notably at DePaul University, in Chicago – where students can expect "loft- and villa-like settings, private bedrooms and baths, professional-style kitchens with granite countertops, weekly housecleaning services, plasma-screen TVs, wireless and high-speed Internet connections in every room, fitness centers, swimming pools, even hot tubs and tanning booths." All of which differs rather fantastically from my own experience of dorm life, which involved living on the 9th floor of a 10-floor high-rise called "Hinton James," with a roommate who drank huge amounts of Mountain Dew till nearly one o'clock every morning, had a poster of Top Gun above his bed, and wanted to run for President.

[Image: A dorm room at DePaul, as photographed by Nikolas Koenig for the New York Times].

Returning to the article, we read that "some parents are willing to pay as much as 50 percent more than the cost of a comparable campus dorm room for a private room in an outsourced, off-campus 'dormitel.'" The dormitel, as an architectural type, is surely now coming to an architectural design syllabus near you...
There's also a longish history of home renovation and house-flipping shows, as recounted for us by Rob Walker. Walker opines that, whilst these shows may be entertaining and sometimes even quite thorough in their economic analysis of a given home improvement scheme, "much is left out. Buyer’s remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites."
Meanwhile, Goa seems to be where "India's investor class" is now moving – helped along by a friendly Indian-American developer named Roy Patrao:

Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa’s enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. “One billion people. Limited land supply. It’s a no-brainer,” he concluded.

Back in the U.S., a man who looks remarkably like a young Dabney Coleman wants you to be rich – and, at least in the case of myself, I heartily agree.
We're then meant to contemplate whether Richard Meier has designed a Brooklyn condo tower that "will be compared to Modernist masterpieces"? But if you mean compared favorably to said masterpieces, then BLDGBLOG would say: nope. But don't let that stop you from reading the article.
Finally, at least for the purposes of this round-up, there is a frankly unbelievably interesting article about the Tejon Ranch, located 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

[Image: Tejon Ranch from the air; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].

The ranch survives from the 19th century and is "roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island," but it may soon be broken into smaller parcels for the construction of a future instant suburb called Centennial – where Huxley-esque corporate land use planners are "engineering a balanced society, mainly through the use of real estate prices."

[Image: The land of Tejon Ranch, where there may soon be suburbs; photographed by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times].

It's a great article, actually, and seems to encapsulate, in its own abbreviated way, a lot of the arguments going on right now about land use in the United States, from Brand Avenue and Joel Kotkin to James Howard Kunstler. You've got questions of infill, sprawl, demographic change, resource depletion, the environment, transporation, regionalism vs. localism, and even centuries-long economic shifts from agriculture to domesticity.
"Nevada and Arizona may still build one new city after another," we read in one pithy formulation. But "Los Angeles will thicken more than it will spread."
In any case, check it out if you get a chance.

Earth's Secret Surfacing

There's been a lot of interesting news lately about the earth's surface.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

First, deep beneath Beijing, there is apparently "a reservoir holding as much water as the Arctic Ocean."
Two scientists have just "analysed more than 600,000 seismic waves generated by earthquakes" – only to find that "the waves weakened below eastern Asia at depths between 600 and 1200 kilometres, corresponding to Earth's lower mantle." They thus concluded "that there must be massive amounts of water in porous mantle rock muffling the seismic waves mainly below Beijing, China."
That water, they estimate, took no less than 200,000,000 years to accumulate there, dragged down, in large part, by the movements of plate tectonics.
But that's nothing.

[Image: Via Wikipedia].

In other news, there seems to be "a huge hole in the earth's crust on the sea bed," described rather dramatically as "a gaping open wound in the Earth's skin."
Last month, a group of British marine geologists discovered that part of "the Earth's crust was missing in an area covering thousands of square kilometres. The big gap is midway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They say the sea isn't going to be sucked away – although they admit the discovery defies science."
This also means that the mantle is showing.
As one of the scientists explained: "The oceanic crust is usually 6km to 7km thick but the Earth's crust seems to be absent in this area of the Atlantic. Instead we have a window into the interior of the Earth, that simply shouldn't be there, according to the standard ideas of how the Earth works."
He asks: "Was the crust never there? Was it once there but then torn away on huge geological faults? If so, then how and why?"
To help answer these questions they'll use "a robotic sea-bed drill to explore the area in more detail," hoping to "find out what bizarre mechanisms were in place to lead to the mantle being exposed."
A whole slew of commenters on Metafilter then chimed in, pointing out this absurd plot summary of The Core... A film I will admit to never having seen.
Meanwhile, it turns out there is also a gigantic crater hidden beneath the visible surface of north-central California. "The 5.5km-wide bowl is buried under shale sediments west of Stockton, in San Joaquin County," the BBC reports, and it "is thought to be between 37 and 49 million years old."
It has been dubbed the Victoria Island Structure.
"Data from a 3D seismic survey of an ancient sea bed clearly shows a circular structure buried 1,490-1,600m (4,890-4,250ft) below sea level" – but some think this "circular structure" is not a crater at all.
Some think it is a buried spaceship, bearing the name of Jesu...
In any case, the crater may actually have been created during an event known as "the late Eocene bombardment... an episode of multiple impacts" that took place roughly 35 million years ago. This "bombardment" also generated "one of the largest craters in the world – the 45km-wide (28 miles) Chesapeake Bay structure on the eastern shore of North America."

[Image: The Chesapeake Bay structure, via Wikipedia].

Finally, you can take it with you: the surface of Ireland, I mean.
Thanks to the Auld Sod Export Co., you can import "official Irish dirt" through "a new patented process." This "process" is not further explained.
The company "allows Immigrants of Irish decent [sic]" – but no one else? – "to keep part of their heritage, the Irish connection to their land, in their new homes. Its uses vary but mainly it serves as a connection to home by giving all of life’s milestones a traditional Irish feel." They recommend scattering this official Irish dirt "over the casket or grave of a dearly departed loved one."
Your portion of the Irish earth even comes with a refund policy.
How much stranger, though, will geological surveys someday be! When bits of Ireland are found lining the graveyards of Boston!
The shores of England are already part-French, for instance, as architect Sam Jacob pointed out last Spring. He writes of news that "Lyme Regis beach [is] being restored with French sand and Norwegian rocks. This will certainly puzzle future geologists, perhaps precipitating erroneous revisions to plate tectonic theory."
So would this make The Auld Sod Export Co. a kind of rogue agent, resurfacing the earth in secret? A deliberate plan to forsake the science of geology?
Might they even be responsible for the deepsea mantle-hole?
And what would happen if someone places far too large an order? Could Ireland itself be ground up – and FedEx'd to a ranch in Texas?
Our investigations will continue.

(Thanks to John Devlin for the Californian crater link).

Cover Bands of Space

In David Toop's excellent book Ocean of Sound – a short history of ambient music – he quotes composer Brian Eno, at great length, on the connections between landscape, sound, time, and the city.

"There's an experiment I did," Eno tells us; it was "a good exercise that I would recommend to other people."

I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater Road I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this – a 3-1/2 minute section, the length of a single – and I tried to learn it? So that's what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made a fade-up, let it run for 3-1/2 minutes and faded it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried to learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercise to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: "Right, then he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brilliant!" Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role.

All of which is interesting already – but it makes me wonder if a band could then reproduce that tape, live, as a kind of cover song, in concert. Godspeed You! Black Emperor plays the sounds of Bayswater in their closing set, a perfect rendition of Eno's old tape...
Instead of another Led Zeppelin cover band, you book a Times Square cover band for your daughter's Bat Mitzvah; they play the traffic, voices, and horns of a typical Times Square day, for hours. Even lifetime Manhattanites can't tell the difference.
Or an International Space Station cover band, playing for you, live, acoustic versions of the Station's lonely clicks and whirs.
A St. Louis Arch cover band – the St. Louis Arches® – reproducing the sounds of Eero Saarinen's structure on stages around the world. "It's just like being there," The New Yorker reports. "The effect is uncanny."
An Elevators of the Empire State Building cover band. Alexanderplatz acoustically reproduced on guitar... by a busker in Alexanderplatz.
The sounds of Death Valley – live, at the Hollywood Bowl.
What the Kremlin would sound like if it had been built in the Piazza Navona – played live, in a small room outside Tokyo.
Or a man who tunes the infrastructure of his building till it sounds exactly like a hotel he once stayed in in Paris. The ducts rattle in just the right way, and the door hinges creak... reminding him of better days. He then hires a band to reproduce those sounds at the office Christmas party.
He is promptly fired.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Soundtracks for Architecture and Silophone resonance: architecture to play by phone. Coming soon: a great interview with Walter Murch, in which I ask him about the Brian Eno quotation, above).

Color Shift

Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, of terraswarm, creators of the infamous 10 Mile Spiral as well as the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, will be unveiling a new project on Monday night in Manhattan.
Called Color Shift, the installation "is an urban-scaled art project made by inputting a continuous stream of alternating colors into the FreshDirect video billboard, the largest in the country." As such, it's a kind of creative mis-direction of urban light pollution – a post-Duchampian optical relief in technicolor, throbbing through a dozen spectra across the roofs and walls of New York City.

You can watch a virtual version of Color Shift, installed online – it's a weird, hypnotic abyss of slow alteration that, at one point, made my eyes feel broken. Very Olafur Eliasson-esque.
Ben and Chris will be speaking Monday night, March 19th, at 6:30pm in Columbia University's Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall. Tell them BLDGBLOG sent you.

TV Mine

Your TV is helping to alter the metallic structure of the earth.
New Scientist reports that the planetary supply of "minor metals" – such as ruthenium, bismuth, and indium – is being depleted. Depleted how? By going into cellphones and flat-screen TVs, into resistors and harddrives.

[Image: Like a print by M.C. Escher, it's a landscape featured on TV – a TV made of the landscape it features. It's the television as simulated micro-geology, an elemental landscape in miniature].

"To meet demand," the magazine reports, "tech firms must mine the growing mountains of electronic waste to recover the materials."
Growing mountains?
So what future geographies of electronic waste might our descendents someday explore? There will be the Plateau of Circuitboards and the Cliff of Printers – the Dot-Matrix Range – each showing up on new maps of distant continents.
Outside magazine will run a series of articles about a man camping in central Africa, in the shadow of 200,000 used photocopiers; their scanning beds still intact, the copiers reflect the man's stunned face in moonlight as he walks by, notebook in hand...
A day later he crests a ridge, crunching through the gravel of broken office machinery – only to look down into a whispering abyss: uncountable ten millions of discarded radios sit, chattering to themselves between stations with the last traces of power still trapped in their rusting batteries, speaking in tongues.
A thousand years later, a Third Testament will be added to The Bible, and this place – known as the Valley of Voices – will figure prominently.
For it seems that our rugged explorer heard something there... something he'll never forget... and it soon becomes the stuff of legend. An absent broadcast around which future religions take shape.
Endlessly re-intepreting the missing words that only one person ever heard.

(Note: For a more serious – not to mention practical – look both at recycling electronic goods and at the environmental problem posted by these mountains of waste, click around the site of Earthworks Action; for some cool photographs of discarded mobile phones, meanwhile, check out the work of Chris Jordan).