Exploring the Megastructure: Smugglers' Caves and Shipwrecks

[Image: Archival view of the old mines at Grinkle, Yorkshire, UK].

Worth checking out is a massive post detailing photographer Phill Davison's recent exploration of the half-collapsing tunnels and overgrown hillside entrances of an old Yorkshire iron mine.

Right when you think it's over, they hike out through snow drifts and cross into another walled-up creek entrance—and the post just keeps on going.

[Images: Planetary vaultwork; photos by Phill Davison, from his monumental post exploring the Grinkle Ironstone Mine].

Davison remarks at one point that the structures he finds himself surrounded by down there remind him of smugglers' caves and shipwrecks—and pictures like this one, below, detailing the awesomely compressed strata of wood boards and rock, and the rusting ironwork that holds it all back from collapse, make that comparison viscerally obvious.

[Image: The earth is like a sandwich; photo by Phill Davison, from his monumental post exploring Yorkshire's Grinkle mine].

How amazing, though, to descend into the earth only to find it kitted-out like the hull of an oceangoing ship. Where the hills you're walking on are actually engineered archways of an earlier civilization, with the occasional entryway peeking out from beneath the weeds. And so you descend into the vaults and debris-support cages of an artificial interior, hidden behind fences and beneath the winter snow.

Check out Davison's post in its entirety—and then stop by the Flickr pool "Exploring the Megastructure," where I originally saw these photos.

Architecture on the Cusp

The Third & The Seventh, a short film by Alex Roman uploaded to Vimeo just last month and already viewed more than half a million times, is an entirely computer-generated, exquisitely rendered, photorealistic tour of architectural space.


While Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall unfortunately makes an appearance, the remainder of the film tours some pavilions, museums, wind farms, and other urban icons, from both inside and out, that you will no doubt recognize.

There's no plot as such, but the imagery is of such ridiculously high quality—although I could skip the soundtrack—that this seems much more visually promising to me then, say, the much hyped, half-a-billion dollar technologies used in Avatar; I would rather watch the opening two or three minutes of Roman's film stretched out to feature length and threaded through with some narrative cues than revisit James Cameron's badly rendered blue giants.

[Images: A Calatravian still from Alex Roman's The Third and the Seventh].

This also seems to be yet more evidence that architecture students are literally just on the cusp of expertise in several different industries, and that even the briefest of collaborations with interested writers could push many student projects instantly over into fully realized narrative films. While I'm aware that many architecture students couldn't care less about this—they didn't, after all, apply to film school—I think it is nonetheless a strategically interesting option to consider when it comes to developing, presenting, and recontextualizing spatial ideas: a slight tweak here and there, a presentation of the most bare-bones scenario imaginable, and you've gone from student thesis project to La Jetée after one late night and some 5 Hour Energy drinks...

[Images: Stills from Alex Roman's The Third and the Seventh].

In any case, Roman's website includes galleries of some gorgeous film stills, including these details, these lighting effects, a few examples of "man-made vs. nature," and multiple glimpses of classic furniture.

[Image: From Alex Roman's The Third and the Seventh].

However, Vimeo seems to be loading quite slowly at the moment, so I've included a few stills here.

[Image: Alex Roman, The Third and the Seventh].

Here's hoping Roman gets the attention he deserves for this, and that we someday see his work popping up in more venues. The film was created using 3ds Max, V-Ray, After Effects and Premiere.

(Thanks to Jim Rossignol and Ilari Lehtinen for the tip!)

Remnants of the Biosphere

[Editor's Note: The photographer has gotten in touch with me again, on January 13, 2010, requesting that these images be taken down due to the unexpectedly specific terms of a usage agreement originally signed with Biosphere 2. The images have thus also been taken down from Sheldon's own site. With any luck, however, these images will reappear in public sooner than later; for now, I have to honor the request of the photographer. The text of this post and the entirety of the often quite animated comments thread will remain. Apologies for this turn of events!]

Photographer Noah Sheldon got in touch the other week with a beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a semi-derelict bio-architectural experiment in the Arizona desert.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings"—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.

"The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure.

Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this winter threatened to mutiny if management did not repair a growing blot on the project's reputation.

The entire site was sold to private developers in 2007, leaving the buildings still functional and open for tours but falling apart.

Sheldon was originally inspired to visit and photograph the site after reading in the New York Times that "suburban sprawl" had come to surround the once-remote research site.

Indeed, we read, real estate development has "conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran Desert. The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart)." Traffic jams are not infrequent where there were once country roads, and new suburbs have sprung up within just a few miles of the research site.

Now, like something straight out of J.G. Ballard, the property might someday be home to a development called Biosphere Estates.

Sheldon's images, reproduced here with his permission, show the facility advancing into old age. A vast biological folly in the shadow of desert over-development, the project of Biosphere 2 seems particularly poignant in this unkempt state.

The fertile promise of the microcosm has been abandoned.

In this context, Biosphere 2 could perhaps be considered one of architect Francois Roche's "buildings that die," a term Roche used in a recent interview with Jeffrey Inaba. Indeed, in its current state Biosphere 2 is easily one of the ultimate candidates for Roche's idea of "corrupted biotopes"; the site's ongoing transformation into suburbia only makes this corruption more explicit.

Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth—the 2 in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate this place from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere 1—slowly taken over by the very forces it was meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. A replicant in its dying throes.

In any case, these images have all been taken from Sheldon's series; even more photos—and many other projects—can be found on his site.

Quick Links 1

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from On the Malecón].

As a few people have noticed, the Quick Links section here on BLDGBLOG disappeared a few days ago; there are a variety of reasons for this, including an overall streamlining of the site design (moving to two columns from three, for instance). More importantly, over the past few years those Quick Links never actually showed up as part of BLDGBLOG's RSS feed, meaning that people who don't stop by the site itself, but prefer instead to read it through things like Google Reader, never even saw those links. This further meant that, during busy periods when whole days slip by between posts, BLDGBLOG would appear totally silent to those readers—when, in fact, new links were still appearing here at a reliable pace.

In any case, to make a long story short, I will now be publishing frequent Quick Links posts—the first of which appears here. This will make those links easier to find and archive; these posts will now show up in my RSS feed; and this allows readers to comment on the articles I've linked to (something that the previous Quick Links system never allowed).

If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know; I hope the much cleaner site design seems appealing, and that these Quick Links will continue to point you in stimulating directions... And happy new year! I hope this is a good one for you.

• • •
—Olivia Judson looks at "memories in nature," where immune systems and plant forms display mnemonic traces. The biochemical archive.

—Perhaps a machine-assisted, agricultural equivalent of this: keeping rare strains of livestock, including "huge dreadlocked Cotswold sheep," alive using the subzero techniques of cryopreservation. Distant shades of Pleistocene Park, perhaps.

—Speaking of the Pleistocene, consider joining the Friends of the Pleistocene, "dedicated to exploring the conjuncture between landscape and contemporary human activity at sites shaped by the geologic epoch of the Pleistocene (2.588 million to 10000 years BP, Before Present)."

—Perhaps we met yet artificially preserve the world's glaciers by wrapping them in huge blankets.

—"Have researchers found dark matter at the bottom of a mine in Minnesota?"

[Image: Ahmadinejad emerges from a highway tunnel; photo by Henghameh Fahimi for the Agence France-Presse, via the New York Times].

—Like a minor character from Reza Negarestani's extraordinary book Cyclonopedia, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—busy burying his nation's nuclear program inside a "maze of tunnels"—is actually the founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association. Quoting at length:

Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played a recurring role—first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.
No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden. Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive.
Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed—and easy to attack—buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.

It might be time to revisit geology in the age of the war on terror.

[Images: A civilization beneath the trees; images via New Scientist].

—National Geographic visits the "geometric earthworks" previously hidden by tree cover in the Amazon but recently discovered via satellite photography. "Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon," we read.

—Lebbeus Woods kicks off the new year with a look at Cuba's "malecón," the coastal road skirting Havana's massive sea wall (see the image that starts this post).

[Image: Piles of road salt outside Toronto. Photo by Flickr-user katalogue; via InfraNet Lab].

—InfraNet Lab looked into the dispersed geological presence of road salt, used to melt ice and snow, last winter—building into a three-part series about "sea dust." Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

—Finally, for now, L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a long look at the building formerly known as the Burj Dubai and its growing role in cultural predictions of apocalypse.

(Some links via @masoncwhite, @eatingbark, and the consistently wonderful Archaeology News).

Crime is a way to use the city

[Image: Published in the New York Tribune, September 11, 1910].

Someday I'd like to write a cheap book about the architectural side of burglary—bank heists, home invasions, jewelry thefts, wall-scaling girl gangs of the Global South, trans-metropolitan tunnels dug vault-to-vault through crypts by men with names like Terry Leather, smoke & mirrors, props and decoys, CCTV control rooms, lock-pickers' guides, hourly updated routes of gold trucks leaving Manhattan, deterritorialized histories of the getaway car, impersonations and forgeries, spatial camouflage, criminal blueprints and future dream-technologies of the ultimate break-in—all in the name of looking at buildings, and the city itself, as puzzles, spatial systems you try very hard to get into. The well-guarded entrance and its multiple delays. Kafka meets HSBC.

Perhaps a Wired Guide to the Ultimate Bank Heist—a 108-page pamphlet of architecturally extraordinary, speculative break-ins—or Pamphlet Architecture #31, in which incomprehensible robberies are outlined, complete with floorplans and renderings, or even next year's best-selling stocking stuffer, a quasi-sequel to 15 Lombard Street, the BLDGBLOG Field Guide to Robbery. Illustrated by eBoy.

Until then, I'll just post images like this one, above, originally published in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1910, in which gangs of silent-airplane enthusiasts raid the metropolis from above. They coast down onto moonlit roofs while unsuspecting homeowners sleep soundly in the comfort of darkness.

(Via Paleofuture—note that, in this image, I have rearranged the headline slightly for legibility).

Golden Scans

[Image: The Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at the Palomar Observatory].

A new book of photographs curated, cropped, and digitally reprocessed by Michael Benson (previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here) has been reviewed by the New York Times as something you could flip through "for hours and never be bored by the shapes, colors and textures into which cosmic creation can arrange itself." The book shows us "stars packed like golden sand, gas combed in delicate blue threads, piled into burgundy thunderheads and carved into sinuous rilles and ribbons, and galaxies clotted with star clusters dancing like spiders on the ceiling."

The above image of the Pelican Nebula, photographed by Charles Shahar at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, brings to mind the later sky studies and weather paintings of John Constable, in particular Constable's Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827). As if there are nebulas here on earth with us, moving through the sky (and through art history).

Stars, here, would be chemical weather that emits light.

[Image: John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827); originally spotted at Pruned].

But such landscape comparisons only go so far; here are a few more photographs from the book, which you can buy at Amazon.

[Images: (top) The bewilderingly beautiful Cat's Paw Nebula, photographed by T.A. Rector at the University of Alaska, Anchorage; (middle) The Witch Head Nebula, photographed by Davide De Martin at the Palomar Observatory; (bottom) The Rosette Nebula, photographed by J.C. Cuillandre (Canada France Hawaii Telescope) and Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia)].

That final image shows us "3000 cubic light years of gas... heated to a temperature of over 10 million degrees Fahrenheit." To my discredit, I have never thought of volumes of space in terms of "cubic light years" before—it's an extraordinary unit of measurement. Perhaps someday it could even be applied to data: teraflops be damned, our harddrives will be filled with cubic light years of information.

Who rules the night

[Image: "Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs" by Linda Bennett].

Sydney-based blogger, architecture student, comic book illustrator, and muscle car enthusiast Linda Bennett has produced a beautifully tongue-in-cheek guide to the "Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs."

Summoning up her own ninja army from blogs like Super Colossal, City of Sound, ArchDaily, ArchitectureMNP, and Inhabitat, Bennett's graphic skills—and sense of humor—are on colorful display. The weapons given to designboom would inspire terror in any foe.

Bennett has also been running an occasional series of interviews on her site; check out her conversations with Bjarke Ingels, Gerard Reinmuth, and Andrew Maynard—and here's hoping she sits down someday to record one with fellow Sydneysider, and "Super Strength" blogging ninja, Marcus Trimble.

And, for that matter, here's hoping Bennett keeps producing more comic strips!