BLDGBLOG's 4th of July Live Interview Marathon in London

I'm in London – in fact, I'm sitting at a table in the basement of the Building Centre – with some great things lined up for the week. One event, in particular, though, seems worthy of mention here.
This Friday, on the 4th of July, I will be moderating an all-day series of live interviews hosted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up London venue in the Exhibition Road, South Kensington, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

[Image: The Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up space in London].

Surrounded by architectural models installed by the Bjarke Ingels Group, I will be in back-to-back conversations with:

10am: Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and author of The Parthenon and The Roman Triumph, among many others, and Simon Bradley, Editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and author of St. Pancras
11:30am: Architect Geoff Shearcroft of the Agents of Change
2pm: Novelist Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space
3pm: Landscape architects Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen, authors of Augmented Landscapes
4pm: Architect and theorist Alex Haw of atmos
5pm: Architectural gentlemen Sam Jacob, Sean Griffiths, and Charles Holland of FAT

I'm unbelievably excited about this, in fact, not least because I will finally be meeting in person so many people with whom I've long been in email contact – but also because I can hardly think of a better list of people with whom I'd rather spend the day here in London.
The interviews are live, free, and open to the public – but bear in mind that the space is quite small, and BIG's models are, yes, quite big, and so there will be very little room for a comfortable audience. We're thus downplaying the live nature of these discussions, but we are videotaping all of them for later posting on the Storefront's website. I also hope that these will be transcribed for later publication. I really can't wait, actually.
So if you are in London, please feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, whether you're a reader of BLDGBLOG or not. You'll be able to ask your own questions of the interviewees – and, who knows, maybe even get them to autograph a book or two.
And I hope to be posting at an acceptable pace this week, as well.
Finally, here is a map.

Martian Garden

[Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].

The soil chemistry on Mars is apparently just right for growing turnips. After digging up soil in a region of the Red Planet nicknamed Wonderland, the Phoenix rover "found trace levels of nutrients like magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride," which is "the same basic chemistry as garden soil." These soil samples are also "fairly alkaline," we read, "with a pH of 8 or 9. This level of alkalinity is common for many Earth soils, and myriad bacteria and plants, including vegetables like asparagus and turnips, can thrive at such a pH."
So could we develop Mars gardens in our landscape architecture classes – pre-emptive landscape grafts that we'll export off-world for future planting?

London is swimming

[Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger].

There was an interesting overlap the other week between Time Out London's cover story, "Swim City," about London's "best pools, ponds and lidos," and Polar Inertia's newest issue featuring beautiful photographs of abandoned swimming pools throughout the greater London area.

[Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger].

"Great pools?" Time Out asked. "From marble-clad baths dripping in history to modern leisure centres echoing with lifeguards' whistles, London is swimming in them."
Except, of course, many of its pools are also drained and forgotten.

[Image: Photo by Gigi Cifali; view larger].

The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called "Absence of Water." The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali's own website.

[Images: Photos by Gigi Cifali; view larger: top and bottom].

I'm reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun:

Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?

Why, indeed.

(All photos by Gigi Cifali).

For whom the bell tolls

[Image: Diagram of Taipei 101's earthquake ball via the Long Now Foundation].

Earlier this week, the Long Now Foundation looked at earthquake dampers inside skyscrapers, focusing specifically on Taipei 101—a building whose unanticipated seismic side-effects (the building's construction might have reopened an ancient tectonic fault) are quite close to my heart.

As it happens, Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of thick steel cables hung way up toward the top of the building. This secret Piranesian moment of inner geometry effectively acts as a pendulum or counterweight—a damper—for the motions of earthquakes.

[Image: The 728-ton damper in Taipei 101, photographed by ~Wei~].

As earthquake waves pass up through the structure, the ball remains all but stationary; its inertia helps to counteract the movements of the building around it, thus "dampening" the earthquake.

It is a mobile center, loose amidst the grid that contains it.

[Image: Animated GIF via Wikipedia].

However, there's something about discovering a gigantic pendulum inside a skyscraper that makes my imagination reel. It's as if the whole structure is a grandfather clock, or some kind of avant-garde metronome for a musical form that hasn't been invented yet. As if, down there in the bedrock, or perhaps a few miles out at sea inside a submarine, every few seconds you hear the tolling of a massive church bell – but it's not a bell, it's the 728-ton spherical damper inside Taipei 101 knocking loose against its structure.

Or it's like an alternate plot for Ghostbusters: instead of finding out that Sigourney Weaver's New York high-rise is literally an antenna for the supernatural, they realize that it's some strange form of architectural clock, with a massive pendulum inside—a great damper—its cables hidden behind closet walls and elevator shafts covered in dust; but, at three minutes to midnight on the final Halloween of the millennium, a deep and terrifying bell inside the building starts to toll.

The city goes dark. The tolling gets louder. In all the region's cemeteries, the soil starts to quake.

(Thanks to Kevin Wade Shaw for the link!)

RoboVault

RoboVault describes itself as a Maximum Security Robotic Storage facility.
Hurricane-resistant, fully insured, and protected by biometrics, RoboVault is proposed for "an extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport."

[Image: A glimpse inside RoboVault].

"No one enters the storage part of the facility," we read; this has the effect of "minimizing the risk of theft or damage." Indeed, "This revolutionary concept in storage uses robotic parking garage technology, allowing you to operate your rented storage unit automatically, so you can store and retrieve your possessions when you want."
Which raises the question: How much longer must we wait before robotic parking garage technology crosses over into other architectural typologies? Single-family homes (you move your bedroom to the ground floor every morning), libraries (where's that book? oh, that's right... whoosh), football stadiums (your seats greet you at the entry gate).
In fact, for me, this whole complex sounds more like something out of a design studio at SCI-Arc, combining transport infrastructure, personal consumption, import/export laws, national sovereignty, exurban geography, climate control (the building offers "atmospheric consistency," we're told), new business models, biometrics, and the mechano-Derridean future of the archive – together with the narrative possibilities of architectural representation.
"What's your building's story?" the concerned professor asks.
You could even invent a new – presumably quite boring – party game. Take a proposed building or business model from anywhere in the world and then work backward: Try to imagine the design studio in which that project would first have been proposed. Try to imagine what they read. Try to imagine the keywords.

[Image: The biometrics of RoboVault].

In any case:

Here’s how it works: If you rent a RoboVault Space, you simply place your prize possession on the elevator, use the retinal eye scan and keypad security features and your property is safely stored away in a matter of seconds. You use the same process to retrieve your possession. Since there are no floors or entries, you don’t have to worry about theft or vandalism. With RoboVault Spaces, you’re buying peace of mind!

It all seems to have been designed solely to be featured in an as-yet-unannounced Jerry Bruckheimer film.

[Image: RoboVault's "extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport"].

If you'll excuse the long quotation, this reads like the opening scene of Bad Boys III or Mission Impossible IV – or even Blade: Miami Nights:

A vehicle arrives at the overhead door and notifies the office of their impending entry. The overhead door is raised and the vehicle drives into the building after which the overhead door is then closed. The client is the only person/vehicle in this secure area. The client removes the contents to be stored from the vehicle and accesses the interior door by use of a pin code and biometric scan. When this occurs, the office staff is notified and meets the individual to provide access into the safe deposit box room. Once inside the dual locking system can be accessed by the client and RoboVault staff. The client then has the option to enter into one of two small viewing rooms. Exiting of the safe deposit box room will occur much in the same manner. An important feature is that there is one entry and exit out of the safe deposit box room. Each member of RoboVault personnel is bonded and have gone through background checks to ensure complete reliability.

Et cetera.
I love the idea, though, that certain building types – certain works of architecture – can actually catalyze new business models, complete with ripple effects outward into the worlds of insurance, tax law, and even the private behaviors of everyday citizens.

[Image: RoboVault].

And then you'll franchise this building type, and build one in London, and wild new filmic possibilities arise. Bank Job 2. National Treasure 3.
Architecture built only for the purpose of inspiring Hollywood sequels.

(Thanks to Adam S. for the link!)

Setting Up Shop in the Apocalypse

[Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].

Last week, Jonathan Shainan of Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper sent in a link to their recent article about a rather interesting mall over in China.
That mall, we read, is "not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins."

What sets the South China Mall apart from [other dead malls], besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires.

Briefly, this description reminds me of some towns along the Hudson: originally built out as if to attract their own Manhattanization – all lights, retail, grand theaters, and futurity – they found that those storied residents of tomorrow never came. Schenectady, Troy, Albany. But one need only look as far as the subprime super-suburbs, on the rims of U.S. cities and elsewhere, to see that speculative developments of this kind are not at all a thing of the past.
Like the South China Mall, these are spaces that don't simply go into decline: their expected populations just never show up.

[Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].

In any case, the architecture of the South China Mall is itself meant to inspire:

The big attraction of the South China Mall was supposed to be its “foreign” design. Learning from Las Vegas, where replicas of European monuments and New York landmarks draw throngs of tourists, the Dongguan mall modeled seven zones after various exotic world locations. Its rooftops reflect at least twenty different influences, from Czech town halls to Turkish mosques.

The mall even includes "fake herons in an indoor rain forest," a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe, a "553-meter flying railway known as Kuayue Shi Kong, or 'Moving Through Time and Space'," and, perhaps best of all, an entire wing, modeled after Venice and Amsterdam, whose construction was never completed. The buildings there thus have "ornate, generically European facades, but their insides remain shells filled with puddles, unrailed staircases, and random stacks of tile and concrete. The exotic palm trees lining the sidewalk have been invaded by homegrown south-China weeds."

[Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].

The article's author, Michael Donohue, soon finds himself walking past drained indoor water park rides, bored security guards, and "escalators sheathed in dust-covered plastic."
"It's not very exciting," a 23 year-old shopper comments to Donohue. She is sitting on the edge of a decorative pond somewhere deep in the emptiness.
The rest of the article is worth reading. It explores how leasing difficulties led to this situation in the first place, and how China's burgeoning "mega-middle class" has simply not arrived on time to coincide with the opening of the mall.
But what kind of future might such a giant space hold? I'd suggest that it'd make an ideal setting for an architectural studio, if such a thing hadn't been done before. Boing Boing readers suggest turning it into a venue for paint ball, or even a set for future zombie films.

[Image: South China Mall, photographed by Philip Gostelow for The National].

Less tangentially, Jonathan Shainin also sent me this link to an earlier article in The National about globe-trotting mega-mall designer – turned architect of whole Middle Eastern cities – Eric Kuhne. Kuhne – who is not responsible for the South China Mall, and I don't mean to imply that he is – has become somewhat notorious for his work designing Bluewater, the giant retail "city" outside London in northern Kent. Interestingly, that mall stands in the footprint of an old quarry.
My own first sense of the cultural hostility directed at Bluewater came while reading the 2002 novel Flood by Richard Doyle, wherein the whole complex is obliterated by the rising waters of an insurgent Thames. If I remember correctly, one of the characters is trying on clothes in a changing room when water begins to seep upward through the carpeted floor.
The National article suggests that, because "Kuhne himself described Bluewater as 'a city rather than a retail destination,' it is safe to assume that his cities may resemble his malls."

This possibility excites Kuhne; he has faith in retail. “Retail,” he tells [an] audience in Dubai, “is the only industry that can manage our city centres… We are the only ones who deal with experience. We are the only ones that understand how to customise and modify and release and replan and reorganise and administer a luscious experience for a group.”

Kuhne goes on to explain that malls should be "retail destinations," not "soulless concrete boxes," and that, through retail, these malls will "dignify the heroic routine of everyday life."
"He views himself," the article suggests, "not as a megamall designer turning cities into supermegamalls, but as a humanistic master planner creating 'mixed use' spaces that help people live and thrive together gracefully."
In any case, what imaginative role will the South China Mall, like some massive architectural folly, play in the region? Will it take up a place in urban legends, or in video games, or in films?
Or perhaps the South China Mall will be flooded in a new, bestselling novel by a young writer from Shanghai...
Perhaps, on the other hand, China's fabled mega-middle class will arrive just in time to make it thrive. This strange ruin will then see its walls replastered and its escalators fixed, and crowds of children will walk through its cavernous toy stores unaware that the space all around them had once been an uninhabited shell.

(Thanks to Jonathan Shainin for sending both article links and the photographs by Philip Gostelow!)

Pandemonium

[Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].

Some of the coolest photographs I've seen recently are these long exposure shots of crowds in St. Petersburg, Russia. They were taken by Alexey Titarenko for a project called "City of Shadows."
What I think is so interesting about this is that an otherwise unremarkable technique – the long exposure – has the effect of transforming these assemblies of people into demonic blurs, black masses moving through the city. These look more like scenes from Jacob's Ladder or Silent Hill.
In the photograph below, for instance, the repeating glimpse of a hand pulling itself up the banister seems strangely unnerving –

[Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].

– and, in the next photo, the crowd takes on the appearance of a machine, hauling itself through human gears up the stairs of old buildings. A mechanism of bones from the afterlife.

[Image: From "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko].

But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could see the residue of everyone who's ever passed through – a vast, multi-limbed creature made of tens of thousands of human bodies, winding its way through streets and buildings, looking for some place to go.
See more from this project and others at Alexey Titarenko's website.

(Thanks to Adam Billyeald for the tip!)