Cave of Kelpius

One of many things I hope to do next weekend while visiting family outside Philadelphia is take a trip to the so-called "Cave of Kelpius," an artificially enlarged "cave," complete with stone doorframe, on the banks of the Wissahickon.

[Images: The Cave of Kelpius, via Flickr-user veghead and U.S. History].

There, in the humidity and quiet of what is now Fairmount Park, "Philadelphia's first mystical guru came to meditate and await the Second Coming." He was called Johannes Kelpius, "and his followers arrived in newly-founded Philadelphia from Germany in 1694 and chose the wild and beautiful Wissahickon as the best place to await the millennium."

Wikipedia adds that "this belief, based on an elaborate interpretation of a passage from the biblical Book of Revelation, anticipated the advent of a heavenly kingdom somewhere in the wilderness during that year. Kelpius felt that the seventeenth-century Province of Pennsylvania, given its reputation for religious toleration at the edge of a barely settled wilderness, was the best place to be." That the heavily vegetated old valleys and hills outside Philadelphia were, at that time, wild enough to be seen as the possible site for an unnamed "heavenly kingdom" in the woods is not, in fact, all that surprising to anyone who has walked around on a particularly humid August evening, through the massive trees and rocky pathways of the region.

Oddly enough, though, this subterranean meditation chamber for a 17th-century doomsday cult—a kind of Rosicrucian NORAD in an era of breeches and buckled shoes—appears to be only a few hundred yards from the running paths on which my cross-country team practiced in high school. Yet it was something I had never heard of till a few weeks ago—probably because it's more likely a former springhouse, and not the Waco-like cave of a mystical group at all.

[Image: The Cave of Kelpius, photographed by BLDGBLOG after this post was written].

Nonetheless, a quick visit to the Cave of Kelpius—now in the absurd position of being ringed with suburbs—is in the cards.

Image Concrète

[Image: A sulphur tile from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

I had the pleasure last week of being introduced to the archives of Vikram Bhatt here at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, going through a mass of new material that is still in the process of being accessioned and catalogued.

Most of the files, artifacts, and documentary images found in this recently acquired subcollection are related to Bhatt's work with the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) at McGill University. The MCHG—founded by Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali, and Arthur Acheson—describes itself as "an educational and research program with an international orientation that focuses attention on the human settlement problems of poor nations."

[Image: A photo from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Bhatt's current work—and, now, the focus of the MCHG—is urban agriculture. There is, for instance, a program called Making the Edible Campus, winner of a 2008 National Urban Design Award. The awarding jury explained their decision as follows:

With simple, direct layouts [Making the Campus Edible] aims to employ underused corners and spaces within the public realm to grow produce linked to a food collection and meal delivery system, creating a sustainable prototype that could potentially be expanded to other university campuses and across the city.

This program is accompanied by Bhatt's Making the Edible Landscape initiative, "a three-year collaborative project [that] aims to demostrate the value of including urban agriculture as a permanent feature in city planning and housing design." The related "Edible Landscape Tools" catalog, featuring graduate student work produced in the winter of 2005, "gives a simple set of instructions on the basics of integrating urban agriculture into and around the home, and throughout the community. Areas explored include street furniture as planters, water reclamation, basic site planning and composting." Or, as we read elsewhere: "The act of growing in cities exists and has existed for millennia for various reasons, including food security. Our goal is to formalize its existence and to establish it permanently as an urban feature."

With the help of CCA assistant curator Pierre Édouard Latouche, I was able to see a voluminous quantity of archival material related to Bhatt's earlier experiments with alternative building technologies. These included sulphur bricks of his research group's own invention.

Sulphur is one of many chemical byproducts from, among other things, oil refining, and it is produced in such enormous quantities now that there is actually a sulphur glut. Is there a way, Bhatt asked, to reuse waste sulphur as a building material, reducing its unpleasant odor and strengthening its structural properties?

[Image: Brick-stacking in an image from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

A series of chemical experiments, using baking trays, different concrete mixes—which Latouche referred to as "cake mix"—and large kilns resulted in a functional prototype. Sulphur concrete, as it is known, is produced through "a very simple process and the use of energy is low," The Ecology of Building Materials explains. "Sulphur blocks are even waterproof as long as there are not many fibers in the mix."

For some reason the interest in this material disappeared after a very prolific period of use near the end of the nineteenth century, and the idea was first taken up again about 20 years ago by the Minimum Housing Group [sic] at McGill University in Canada, which has built a number of houses in sulphur concrete.

Bhatt's group later discovered that these new sulphur bricks were also capable of being infused with full-color images transferred directly from the newspapers or other documents in which they had been wrapped.

[Images: A sample sulphur brick and tile from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

What you see in the above photo, as well as in the photograph at the head of this post, is an image that has transferred from a newspaper or magazine onto one of Bhatt's sulphur bricks. This, too, then became a focus of experimentation for the group, leading to houses that had been pre-wallpapered, so to speak, with images taken directly from print media and chemically fused with the brickwork. The graphic possibilities of this sort of image-transfer technology seem well worth exploring in more detail.

[Image: One example of the endless modularity afforded by molded concrete. From the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

However, the bricks could also be "baked" into any mold a designer made for it, resulting in unique shapes, sizes, and formats—including the jack-like form you see above and in the left-hand side of the opening image. Buildings could be assembled like puzzle pieces, bright with baked-in imagery, produced from a deodorized industrial waste product available in huge quantities almost anywhere in the world.

[Image: The Ecol House, Montréal, Québec (1972). Ecol Operation, architects. Autonomous dwelling designed for use in developing countries. Photograph by Denis Plain © 1972. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

For instance, the Ecol House project, constructed at McGill, "was built from modular components, often the result of innovative ideas and approaches based on simple techniques introduced and tested by the group," we read in the catalog for Sorry, Out of Gas, an earlier exhibition at the CCA. "The walls were built, in part, of sulphur concrete blocks made by a method suited to small-scale production." This was at least part of the reason that McGill's Minimum Cost Housing Group became "an international point of reference for energy conservation, use of unusual materials, and experimental construction techniques" in the 1970s.

At one point, even Buckminster Fuller visited Bhatt's labs; you can see Fuller in the image, below, talking to Bhatt in one of the black-and-white prints near the center.

[Image: Buckminster Fuller visits Vikram Bhatt; to the right of this photo is an image of the Ecol House project. From the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The boxes and boxes of materials, of which you can barely see the beginning here, is an amazing—and seemingly totally unexplored—resource, one that deserves a return visit. I will see what I can do to get deeper into this over the summer, with more images and more information, both, including, I hope, a Q&A with Bhatt himself.

For now, here are some more photos of the various documents and files that we were able to go through that day.

[Images: Sample documents and files from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; in the final image you can see Bhatt experimenting with the proper "cake mix" and associated baking trays. Photo by BLDGBLOG].

Larger versions of these—and one or two others—are all available in this Flickr set.

#CCA

A Design History of Military Airspace

This is pretty great: a volumetric rendering of military airspace in East Germany during the 1980s, as imaged in Google Earth. "The air space over the GDR was a complex three-dimensional thing," we read.

[Image: DDR-Luftraum].

While the very idea of mapping military airspace is fascinating, the historical nature of the above image strikes me as its most provocative aspect. After all, what maps or archives now exist depicting lost military airspace volumes as defined by closed bases, renovated airfields, or no-longer-existing countries?

For that matter, what about the civilian airspace volumes of urban buildings that have since been torn down? How does real estate law account for property transactions based on air volumes for buildings that no longer exist?

How and where—and by what representational means—can these spaces be archived? Could there be an experiential museum of lost airspace volumes, and what atmospheric form might it take?

(Thanks to Nick Sowers for kicking off the idea for this post).

The Meadowlands

I've just finished reading The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City by Robert Sullivan, a book perfectly discussed in the visual context of Meadowlands, a collection of photographs by Joshua Lutz (for which Sullivan actually wrote an introduction).

[Image: From Meadowlands by Joshua Lutz].

"Just five miles west of New York City," the back cover of Sullivan's book reads, are the Meadowlands: "this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station, and maybe, just maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa." It is "mysterious ground that is not yet guidebooked," Sullivan writes inside, "where European landscape painters once set up their easels to paint the quiet tidal estuaries and old cedar swamps," but where, now, "there are real hills in the Meadowlands and there are garbage hills. The real hills are outnumbered by the garbage hills."

Lutz's book describes the region as a "32-square-mile stretch of sweeping wilderness that evokes morbid fantasies of Mafia hits and buried remains." As Lutz explained in a 2008 interview with Photoshelter, "When I first saw the Meadowlands I was completely blown away at this vast open space with the Manhattan skyline in the distance. It was this space that existed between spaces, somewhere between urban and suburban all the while made up of swamps, towns and intersecting highways. None of it made any sense to me, still doesn't."

All told, the area has become, Sullivan writes, "through negligence, through exploitation, and through its own chaotic persistence, explorable again."

[Images: The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City by Robert Sullivan and Meadowlands by Joshua Lutz].

To write his book, Sullivan went on a series of explorations through the Meadowlands, including by canoe and in the company of a former police detective.

While there are definitely some moments of rhetorical over-kill, the book is so filled with interesting details that it proved very hard to stop reading; in between learning about the "discharged liquefied animal remains" that were dumped into the region's streams and rivers, or the "major pet company and Meadowlands development firm" that "drove so many steel girders into the ground that people joked Secaucus would become a new magnetic pole," or even the old—and, unfortunately, forgotten—mine shafts that began swallowing a development called the Schuyler Condominiums, Sullivan's book, like any good and truly local history, builds to a level of narrative portraiture that is as braided and fractally involuted as the wetlands it documents.

[Image: From Meadowlands by Joshua Lutz].

For instance, Sullivan discovers a flooded radio transmission room, "its giant antenna felled in the water like a child's broken toy," as well as "little islands, composed wholly of reeds," one of which, in the middle of soggy nowhere and accessible only by boat, was "surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said."

Relating the litany of pollutions that exist in the swamps, he guides the reader's eye toward ponds of cyanide, truckloads of "unregulated medical waste," and soil so thoroughly contaminated with mercury that, "as recently as 1980, it was possible to dig a hole in the ground and watch it fill with balls of shiny silvery stuff."

This might even have affected the New York Giants football team after they moved into Meadowlands Stadium: "In the mid-1980s, playing football in the Meadowlands meant possibly risking your life, because shortly after the stadium opened players for the Giants began developing cancer... 'Players complained of occasionally foul-smelling water, and the high incidence of leukemia in adjacent Rutherford...'" No official medical link was either admitted or found. Indeed, certain streams are really a kind of "garbage juice"—an "espresso of refuse," as Sullivan nauseatingly describes it.

In many places, the so-called ground is, in fact, trash—so much so that "underground fires are still common today... you can see little black holes where the hills have recently burped hot gases or fire... huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm moist methane, giant stillborn tropical winds that seep through the ground to feed the Meadowlands' fires, or creep up into the atmosphere," forming a particularly Dantean local climatology of reeking crosswinds. One of these fires "burned for fifteen years."

[Image: Bow-hunting amidst the reeds, from Meadowlands by Joshua Lutz].

The Meadowlands are, after all, a massive dump, more landfill than landscape. The effect, though, is a kind of new picturesque, an engineered sublime of artificial hills, deltaic chemical accumulants, cheap hotels overlooking it all on the periphery, and even entire lost buildings buried beneath three centuries of dumping. "If you put a shovel anywhere into the ground and dig just about anywhere in the Meadowlands," Sullivan writes, "it won't be long until you hit rubble from a building that was once somewhere else."

In Kearny, one old dump contains pieces of what was once Europe. In 1941, under the auspices of the Lend-Lease Act, shipments of defense equipment went from the United States to Great Britain by boat. On their return trip, the boats used rubble from London bombings as ballast. William Keegan, a Kearny dump owner, contracted to accept the ballast. As a result, some of the hills of the Kearny Meadows are London Hills.

This is actually also true for New York's FDR Drive, which is partially constructed on British war ruins used as fill.

[Image: An awesomely sinister photo from Meadowlands by Joshua Lutz].

There is an amazing chapter about mosquito control in the region, something I want to return to in a future post someday; another about treasure hunters on a quest for Revolutionary War-era gold and silver; and another about the construction of the hulking and monumental Pulaski Skyway. Before that oddly tunnel-like, 3.5-mile, elevated roadway was built, "ferries and sailboats took passengers from New York to Newark via Jersey City," but, like something out of a Terry Gilliam film, "it was not unusual for papers to report that a ship making the trip had been blown out to sea and never been seen again."

I could go on and on. There is even an entire subplot in which Sullivan hunts down the buried remains of New York's Penn Station.

I want to end, though, with something said by the retired police detective who takes Sullivan under his wing on a series of driving tours toward the end of the book. When Sullivan asks the former investigator if he misses his job, the response is intelligent, thoughtful, and extraordinary. I'll quote it in full:

"I miss it to this day, to this minute," he said. "And do you know why? Because it takes you a long time to accumulate the knowledge."
He pointed out the car. "Like for instance," he continued, "look over there at that building, that warehouse. See how one door is open and one door looks like it's closed up. Now, what I'll do is store that. Keep it in my head. And see that sign over there in front of that building? You remember that. You remember that because you may need it someday. It may be useful. You accumulate the knowledge. Do you see what I mean? And then all of a sudden you're supposed to just stop."
He shook his head and started the car moving again, driving slowly up out of the swamp, up the hill. "The thing is, you just can't," he said.

This hermeneutic attention to everyday details—through which open warehouse doors or unusually parked cars all become raw data accumulated over decades for use in some later, possibly never-to-occur narrative dissection—is exactly the task not only of the detective but of the writer, and of anyone who would attempt to study an existing landscape in order to uncover its most unexpected and far-reaching implications.

In any case, together with Lutz's photos of the region and its very particular anthropology—which Lutz discusses in an interview with Conscientious, remarking that the Meadowlands are "an astonishing mixture of towns, swamps, trains, motels and an amazing array of bisecting highways all trying to keep you out"—both books have been invigorating encounters over the past week or two, and each is worth checking out if you get the chance.

Family Mines and the Basement Zoning Codes of Minnesota

One of many fascinating details to be found in the Underground Space Center Library archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture is something from a paper, written by a University of Minnesota law student, called "Zoning Ordinances as Obstacles to Earth Sheltered Housing: A Minnesota Perspective."

[Image: Random basement floorplan].

There, amongst other key legal points, the student weighs in on what he calls the "definitional problems" that arise when traditional zoning law is applied to underground space—indeed, "whether zoning regulations apply at all to underground structures."

Though the paper clearly focuses on the state of Minnesota, it goes as far afield as Texas; in the case of Hancox v. Peek, for instance, "a Texas Court of Appeals held that a fallout shelter which was wholly underground, except for a concrete slab which extended a mere two or three inches above the ground, was not a building—merely an appurtenance, and therefore not within the contemplation of a zoning ordinance requiring a minimum distance between buildings and adjacent property." One can easily imagine byzantine courtroom arguments and legal appeals of the future, citing legal precedents from wartime bunker construction, domestic fallout shelters in Texas, and perhaps even subsurface mine-safety regulations in some strange Kafkaesque scenario involving, say, the late Mole Man of Hackney and his contested underground estate.

But, as it happens, my reference to mining safety is deliberate.

[Image: Random basement floorplan].

At the time of the paper's writing—the late 1970s—underground facilities, from parking garages to hospitals and private homes, were considered so novel from the perspective of traditional Minnesota zoning law that there was no accepted legal means for how to define or describe them. These are the "definitional problems" mentioned above. "Examples," we read, "are the broad definitions of basement and cellar... defining excavations of greater than 400 cubic yards as 'mining'—thus requiring a special permit, and defining 'detached dwelling' as one 'entirely surrounded by open space'."

That's worth repeating: excavations of greater than 400 cubic yards were legally zoned as mines—whether it was a parking garage or your newly renovated basement rec room.

In other words, if you lived in Minnesota in the 1960s and 70s, and you had a particularly enormous basement, inside of which you and your siblings might have watched television, you could, legally speaking, have been playing inside a mine. Whether or not this gave you permission to harvest minerals is unclear.

[Image: A continuous mining machine at work; image courtesy of Salt Union Ltd].

No lawsuit, to my knowledge, has ever been retroactively filed against Minnesotan parents, accusing them of mine-safety violations—but there is always a first time.

Nor has the reverse of this scenario—in which a Minnesotan industrial minerals magnate from St. Cloud successfully rezones his mine or quarry as a domestic basement—been, to my knowledge, attempted.

#CCA

Subterranean Builders' Guide

In the underground-themed issue of Rassegna, mentioned earlier, author Nicola Sinopoli offers a brief subterranean builders' guide to bringing architecture underground. "There are now no technological limitations that could stop us from colonizing the underground," he declares, providing a short catalog of useful construction materials in the process.

[Image: The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Sedrun, Switzerland; photo by Brian Fulcher, Walnut, CA, courtesy of Engineering News-Record's 2006 "Year in Construction" recap].

Sinopoli's purpose is to point out "some of the new materials that chemistry and physics have offered this new world of construction." And this goes beyond mere drilling equipment—which Sinopoli does not, in fact, cover—to encompass things like high-density buckled polyethylene membranes that are "impervious to organic bacteria and mildews that may be in the ground," and that serve "as an effective barrier against radon, a radioactive gas sometimes found in the earth."

We see flexible geocomposite mats, fiber-optic lighting technologies, a wide variety of grass turf for roofs, and self-ventilating, anti-humidity wall panels, all of which allow "colonizing the underground," as Sinopoli puts it.

Cases, membranes and buckled plates protect the building from the infiltration of water and roots; woven and non-woven geotextiles, geocomposites, geomats and synthetic monofilaments stabilize and drain the land; and ultra high yield reflective films convey natural light inside the new underground spaces

He specifically focuses on issues of water and humidity, citing "an exciting array of innovative products in the field of green roofs and facades, where we now have an endless selection of materials for waterproofing and draining, water storage systems, draining sublayers, watering systems, hydrosowing systems and a panoply of plants modified in their deepest nature to adopt to any climate imaginable. The plants are often the fruit of an ingenious union of botany, genetics and new materials research. As if that weren't enough, we have found that natural earth is an excellent insulator from heat and cold."

The idea that "colonizing the underground" will be made possible at least partially through the use of genetically modified plants is pretty fascinating. This extends engineered biologies—future crops and oxygen gardens, perhaps even crypto-forestry—into the earth's subsurface. Speleonauts living inside an architecture of growth chambers three miles underground, shining UV lights at specialty plantlife bred specifically to produce a breathable atmosphere, researching new anthropological directions in the deep.

It's not much of an exaggeration here to say that gardening will be as important to the future of underground living as tunneling equipment.

[Images: Photos by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

Sinopoli suggests that building underground is, for all intents and purposes, a solved problem: "If anything," he quips, "we should explore what effects living and working in underground or almost underground spaces might have on behavior and quality of life. Sociologists will give their answers to this." This is what I have earlier called psychology at depth, or the unanticipated psychiatric implications of living underground.

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

I should note, however, that Sinopoli's article is less about moving into scifi mega-cities inside the earth than it is about making things like underground shopping malls and even suburban basements more safe for everyday use. Nonetheless, over-ambitiously applying these same techniques in the outright construction of artificial caverns on a continental scale is, for me, simply too interesting to pass up.

Indeed, I'm reminded of Jeff Long's scifi-horror novel The Descent, in which armed military units lead an invasion of the underworld, heading downward into the earth, Jules Verne-like, but with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV klieg lights, and truckloads of instant concrete. They "approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago," Long writes, "as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics." The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved, "tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots—three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves." It takes days at a time to get anywhere in Long's underworld; there are outbreaks of "tropical cave disease," we read, and claustrophobia.

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

In any case, at this point, Sinopoli suggests, questions of architectural style can re-enter the picture. Indeed, "there are questions about the consequences of underground building on architecture and its language. That's a discussion still waiting to be had."

We can assemble a subterranean builders' guide, in other words, and solve the problem of constructibility; but when it comes to architectural form, if we hope someday to move beyond mere underground shopping malls—for instance, Montreal's overwhelmingly anti-climactic "underground city"—then there is still an awful lot of work to do.

#CCA

Crypto-Forestry and the Return of the Repressed

[Image: My own "crypto-forest of Utrecht," via Google Maps].

While we're on the subject of PrimatePoetics!, I'm intrigued by their "Crypto-Forests of Utrecht" series, which kicked off back in October 2009. It's an ongoing exploration of botanical landscapes in and around Utrecht, Netherlands, that have sprung back from aggressive anthropological intervention. Weed patches in which the earliest emergent traces of a thicket can be found; clusters of trees growing semi-feral on the edges of railroad yards; forgotten courtyards sprouting with random saplings unplanted by any hand: these are all crypto-forests.

Each example of this type of landscape, PrimatePoetics! explains, is "almost entirely hidden from view and very few people know about it." Each is "a forest grown in the shadow of neglect, private ownership and municipal refusal." Each is a landscape that has been "left to fallow" but then spurts back in spikes of weedy regrowth, becoming "unnoteworthy from all angles, but pretty large when you are inside it."

All of them together would make an amazing travel guide or landscape pamphlet—a short tour through minor quasi-forests around the city of Utrecht (or elsewhere). I'm tempted to launch a global "crypto-forestry" group on Flickr for documenting exactly this sort of thing—in fact, I've gone ahead and done so. Feel free to contribute, if you're in the mood, burgeoning scholars of urban weeds. Photographic documents of minor landscapes on the rebound; urban forests in their earliest, stunted stage; insurgent fringes of suburbia coming back to vitality; derelict groves extending underground roots. The return of the botanical repressed.