Anthropogeomorphology Today

[Image: From Elevated Descent: The Helipads of Downtown Los Angeles, Center for Land Use Interpretation].

I was excited to see that Matthew Coolidge, of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), will be speaking at Pratt tomorrow night, Monday, February 22nd, in Brooklyn. His subject is "Anthropogeomorphology Today." The talk starts at 6pm, is free and open to the public, and starts at 6pm. Just head over to Higgins Hall at the Pratt Institute: 60 St. James Place, near the corner of Lafayette. Here is a map.

CLUI's exhibitions are always worth checking out in detail, as are their field trips through the American landscape. Meanwhile, for an infrastructural tour of Los Angeles, guided by Coolidge, check out an old article I wrote for Dwell.

Tactile Maps of Coastlines and Buildings

Two years ago, Colleen Morgan of Middle Savagery pointed out these amazing tactile maps of the Inuit, "3D wood carvings of the East Greenland coastline, with the details of inlets and islands in sculptural relief. These could be employed by [travelers] at night in conjunction with the stars, feeling your way along the coastline, navigating at an intimate scale."

[Image: tactile maps of the Inuit: 3D representations of the Greenland coastline].

She compares these to Braille maps for the blind—which I would further compare to the embossing printer used by a blind architect in San Francisco to produce tactile building plans. "He began drawing with Wikki Stix," the L.A. Times reported last month, "strands of wax-covered yarn that adhere to paper with just a little pressure. His most useful tool became a large-format embossing printer, which turns blueprints into raised line drawings that he can read with his fingertips."

As if using the Inuit maps pictured above, he simply runs his fingers along the creased lines of rooms and hallways, and buildings take shape in their every variation around him.

Briefly diverging here, I was fascinated to read elsewhere in that same article about the subtle architectural design cues that can be deployed for the blind or visually impaired. For instance, the architect once "collaborated on a room-numbering system to help blind students navigate the building. The facility will use different textured flooring in a few key areas so students can tell where they are by the tap of a cane." Further, "blind students who descend a staircase that deposits them in the middle of a vast lobby will be able to find their way because the ceiling will be enhanced, at [the architect's] suggestion, to create an acoustic corridor to the door." Designing "acoustic corridors" across the city sounds like a superb design challenge (as well as something that could be of much wider use in the event of prolonged urban blackouts).

In any case, like Middle Savagery, I am fascinated by the other applications these sorts of handheld, tactile maps might have—where else they might be useful and what other spaces they might be able to represent. Could there be a tactile map of a novel's plotline, or or the New York City subway system, or of the Appalachian Trail? What about of your own apartment, or the house you grew up in? Could there be tactile cinema? Could you make a tactile map of a song?

(Spotted via an old post on Tightgrid).

Where does your taco come from?

Like a culinary version of Sourcemap, Rebar has teamed up with landscape architect David Fletcher and some students from the increasingly interesting California College of the Arts in San Francisco to explore the ingredients of your local taco—from pinto beans to the aluminum foil it all comes wrapped in.

Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring [in our studio's investigation of the city]. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle for what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed.

This is a participatory undertaking; meet at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco at 7pm on Thursday, February 25, to find out how you, too, can map a taco. Here's a map.

The Studio for Urban Projects, meanwhile, has a pretty fascinating list of previous endeavors, including Foodshed, Strange Weather, and the awesome Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park. Large parts of what are now west San Francisco were once covered by nomadic sand dunes, a kind of peninsular erg; that granular presence is now only temporarily locked in place beneath the foundations of houses. Every grain you see blowing down a San Franciscan street is this lost geography attempting to reassert itself.

Beneath your feet, San Francisco, something ancient is patiently waiting.

[Image: "There are two basic types of taco trucks," we read; "the first and most common is the transient truck which is a truck that stops at approximately 20 different locations at 20-minute intervals during an 8-hour shift, typically beginning at 6am and ending at 2pm. The second type is the semi-permanent truck, which is a truck that has found a location that has a density of clientele to sustain it for an extended period of the day, creating a nearly fixed presence in a particular community." From Polar Inertia].

And I can't let this post end without calling attention to the excellent—in fact, extraordinary—Polar Inertia, specifically its photo-essay published more than four years ago tracing the taco-truck geography of greater Los Angeles. These dispersed infrastructures might now be quite trendy, but the functional networks things like taco trucks actually form on the streets of our cities are still worth mapping in full.

(On an unrelated note, my older brother apparently wanted to name me "Taco"—not Geoff—but my parents, luckily, got to decide).

Vs.

1) Constructed Territory: "A juried exhibition of work integrating the use of maps, cartography, or environmental and topographical explorations." Submissions due: May 14, 2010.

2) made up: "This call welcomes designers, filmmakers, architects, scholars, researchers, and artists to submit proposals for design-driven research projects to be conducted in Summer 2010 in the Graduate Media Design Program studio [at the Art Center College of Design in sunny Pasadena]. We are looking for projects that are motivated by research questions and that use design/making as a mode of inquiry. We are particularly interested in projects that address the theme 'made up' which explores the role of fiction in design." Submissions due: March 23, 2010.

[Image: From Mine the Gap].

3) Mine the Gap: "An international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap?" Submissions due: "anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010."

4) All That Glitters Is Good: "How do you prepare your architectural drawings? What mediums do you allow yourself in your quest to explain three dimensional intent and ideas on a two dimensional surface? Answer truthfully, when was the last time you did anything beyond hitting print?

All That Glitters Is Good asks you to submit your most accomplished architectural representation that uses glitter. This includes new drawings made with glitter, old drawings pepped up with a little sparkle, as well as anything else that you can imagine so long as it satisfies two criteria:

1. It’s a drawing of architecture.
2. It uses glitter."

Submissions due: March 15, 2010.

5) You just missed: GOOD magazine, Studio-X, and PRE Office teamed up to judge Spontaneous Architecture—the results of which can be seen at that latter link. For some background to that call-for-ideas, read Studio-X's Gavin Browning debate with Cameron Sinclair about the efficacy of design competitions inspired by natural disasters over at Building Design. While you're there, refresh your memory about Building Design's stance on climate change.

(Constructed Territory spotted via Katie Holten; made up spotted via Anne Burdick).

Expedition to the Geoglyphs of Nowhere

BLDGBLOG and Atlas Obscura have teamed up to lead an outing into the deserts of southern California on Saturday, March 20: an afternoon-long photographic expedition through the dusty grids of unpaved streets on the northeastern fringe of California City.


To quote from an earlier post here on BLDGBLOG:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). Bill & Ted meet Cerne Abbas Man.

The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all.


Take a look.

On Google Street View, distant structures like McMansions can be made out here and there amidst the ghost-grid, mirages of suburbia in the middle of nowhere. Meaningless STOP signs stand guard over dead intersections.


And it's a weird geography: two of the most prominent nearby landmarks include a prison and an automobile test-driving facility run by Honda. There is also a visually spectacular boron mine to the southeast—it's the largest open-pit mine in California, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation—and an Air Force base.


To make things more surreal, in an attempt to boost its economic fortunes, California City hired actor Erik Estrada, of CHiPs fame, to act as the town's media spokesperson.

The history of the town itself is of a failed Californian utopia—in fact, incredibly, if completed, it was intended to rival Los Angeles. From the city's Wikipedia entry:

California City had its origins in 1958 when real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres (320 km2) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of master-planning California's next great city. He designed his model city, which he hoped would one day rival Los Angeles in size, around a Central Park with a 26-acre (11 ha) artificial lake. Growth did not happen anywhere close to what he expected. To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, scarring vast stretches of the Mojave desert, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed area of the city. A single look at satellite photos shows the extent of the scarred desert and how it stakes its claim to being California's 3rd largest geographic city, 34th largest in the US. California City was incorporated in 1965.

California City is now the site of a proposed mega-farm for solar energy harvesting, as well as for a bizarre plan to build the so-called Cannabis City of the Future.

Sign up to join us over at the Obscura Day site.


Note, however, that this is not a guided tour; it is simply an organized simultaneity of people all going out to investigate these streets en masse. Armed with cameras, microphones, sketchbooks, GPS devices, quickly scrawled notes for future blog posts, and more, we'll be exploring the site at our own pace, perhaps even miles apart at various times. This is not a guided tour with an expert on the area.

As such, all questions of transportation (including tires suitable for travel over unsealed dirt roads); adequate food, fuel, and water; personal safety (including protection from sprained ankles and snakes); and navigation are up to individual participants.

We will meet at 1pm on Saturday, March 20, 2010, in the parking lot of Rite Aid in California City: 9482 California City Boulevard, California City, CA 93505. There will be a very brief group introduction there—and you can run inside to buy Cokes or whatever—before we set off to document the uninhabited streets outside town. Let's photograph, film, blog, Lomo, Twitter, and audio-record the crap out of this place! I've started a Flickr group, which will be opened up soon. If you arrive late, simply head out Randsburg Mojave Road, onto 20 Mule Team Parkway, and look for the cars; our eventual cluster of destinations is approximately 15 minutes’ drive northeast of town.

And, in the unlikely event of torrential rains, I will post travel updates here on BLDGBLOG.


Meanwhile, the incomparable Atlas Obscura has a whole slew of amazing trips planned for March 20, all over the world, all part of their first annual "Obscura Day." Definitely check out that list for sites closer to you, if you're not in southern California.

(California City was originally pointed out to me by David Donald, and it was written up by The Vigorous North last year. The "cannabis city" and solar farm links come courtesy of Alexis Madrigal. All images in this post via Google Maps and Google Street View).

The Moving, Self-Powered Room

During the New York City blackout of 1965, roughly "one thousand overseas passengers were affected," the New York Times reported at the time, and "many of them were put up in nearby hotels or motels."


[Image: "Runway at Sky Harbor Airport" by Kevin Dooley, via Creative Commons].

A slightly different scenario unfolded at the city's airports, however:

At Kennedy, American Airplanes rolled out all its planes, which are equipped with independent power systems, and loaded eight hundred stranded passengers. They were fed a meal and shown motion pictures until the lights came back.

These self-powered moving rooms—airplanes become hotels become cinemas become emergency shelters, in a jet-setting transformational sequence like something out of the early visions of Archigram—revealed an unexpected flexibility to the infrastructure of global transport.

Next time, perhaps, when the lights go out in your own home city, that jumbo jet parked nearby on an airport runway will be the best place for you to go: an aboveground disaster shelter, independent from the grid whose loss it temporarily saves you from.

(You can watch a short video about the blackout, courtesy of James Burke; here is part one).

Sonic Warfare

The opening scene of The Forever War by Dexter Filkins presents us with the sight of U.S. soldiers preparing for their invasion of Falluja. Filkins is there to witness the attack; amidst the growl of tanks and Humvees, and "by the light of airstrikes and rockets," he writes, there is suddenly something sonically unexpected.


[Image: "An Advanced Individual Training Soldier in the Psychological Operations Specialist Course attaches a loud speaker on top of a High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle, or HUMVEE, at Forward Operating Base Freedom, Camp MacKall, N.C." Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School].

"And then, as if from the depths," Filkins writes, "came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire."

I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.

It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately: "Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield.

While by no means advocating the use of sonic warfare as a tool in U.S. military adventures or police operations, I nonetheless instantly thought of this scene—of armed soldiers holding aloft rock-blaring boom boxes, like some John Milius-directed remake of Say Anything—when I read, in a very different context, that bark beetles can be driven out of the pine forests they currently infest if you play digitally-altered sounds of their own chewing back at them through loud speakers. The high-volume sound of themselves drives them away.

A research assistant suggested using sounds to aggravate the beetles, much as police sometimes blare music in hostage situations. The researchers tried Queen and Guns N' Roses and played snippets of radio talker Rush Limbaugh backward. None produced the desired results.

Then, the beetles were exposed to digitally altered recordings of their own calls, the sounds they make to attract or repel other beetles. The response was immediate. The beetles stopped mating or burrowing. Some fled, helter-skelter. Some violently attacked each other.

Most important, they stopped chewing away at the pine tree, suggesting that the scientists may have discovered a sort of sonic bullet that could help slow the beetles' destructive march.

Again, I do not mean to imply that infestation metaphors are the most appropriate to use when discussing Operation Phantom Fury, or that military action in that city was analogous to clearing a forest of bark beetles; but the audio possibilities here, and the specifics of the set-up, seem amazing.


[Image: A ponderosa pine forest; within those trunks might be beetles].

More about the actual experiment, run at Northern Arizona University's Forestry Lab:

They collected tree trunks infested with bark beetles... Working in the lab, [research assistant Reagan McGuire] piped in the music through tiny speakers, the sort you might find in a singing greeting card. He watched the reaction of the beetles using a microscope. The rock music didn't seem to annoy the bugs, nor did Rush in reverse.

McGuire and [Northern Arizona University forest entomologist Richard Hofstetter] decided to try something different. They recorded the sounds of the beetles and played them back, manipulating them to test the response.

Suddenly, every little thing they did seemed to provoke the beetles.

"We could use a particular aggression call that would make the beetles move away from the sound as if they were avoiding another beetle," Hofstetter said.

When they made the beetle sounds louder and stronger than a typical male mating call, he said, the female beetle rejected the male and moved toward the electronic sound.

These audio simulations, in other words, had demonstrable physical effects on another species; their own warped sonic portrait drove them crazy.

So could you reprogram your Marsona 1288A ("create a personalized sound environment") with the digitally-altered ambient sounds of termites and thus clear your house of insectile pests? The USDA, after all, has published a paper—download the PDF—explaining how a "portable, low-frequency acoustic system was used to detect termite infestations in urban trees." Indeed, "termite sounds could be detected easily underneath infested trees, despite the presence of high urban background noise." So why not reverse this—drive them out of the city using weird MP3s specially produced for boom cars?

Perhaps we should petition Clear Channel or Sirius XM to premiere a new, insect-only broadcast hour, killing ants and roaches in every city where it's played (or perhaps just driving them all out, streaming from the floorboards, in a moment of utter horror).

I'm reminded here of the famous example of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, with its "dog whistle—which humans can't hear—buried on the album's second side." Only, in our case, it would be a different kind of beetle-whistle, and one with anti-infestational effects.

(Bark beetle story found via @treestrategist).