Lost Ships of New York City

[Image: Photo by Fred R. Conrad, courtesy of The New York Times].

An 18th-century ship has been discovered deep in briny muck "flecked with oyster shells" at the bottom of a World Trade Center construction site. As the New York Times reports, archaeologists called in to investigate the find soon realized that "a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street."

The article adds that "a 1797 map shows that the excavation site is close to where Lindsey’s Wharf and Lake’s Wharf once projected into the Hudson."

[Image: Photo by Fred R. Conrad, courtesy of The New York Times].

Recalling the buried ships of San Francisco that we explored several years ago, New York City stands astride landlocked boats, its foundations piled down through wrecks of hulls, grids of masts waiting to be uncovered, perhaps the whole island of Manhattan threatening to unmoor itself one day and set sail into the Atlantic. The prow of Battery Park, ramming through grey waves.

Like some magnificent fulfillment of Lebbeus Woods's "Slow Manifesto," all of the island metropolis-at-sea would embody "an architecture that rises from and sinks back into fluidity," rocking through rogue waves "into the turbulence of a continually changing matrix of conditions, into an eternal, ceaseless flux... drawing its sinews from webbings of shifting forces", like these buried ships far below, as buildings break down into maritime vessels according to other, more mobile tectonics, the city "struggling to crystallize and become eternal, even as it is broken and scattered" across the oceans of the world.

Manhattan is shaped like a ship, in any case.

[Image: Photo by Fred R. Conrad, courtesy of The New York Times].

The New York Times adds that these blackened timbers now emerging were clearly "more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River"—a fantastic image of potential structural confusion between the already highly artificial terrain of southern Manhattan (its "land" actually a thick gauze lodged inside "wooden cribbing" and held in place by seawalls and heavy office blocks above) and these strange foreign bodies of wooden ships, their diagonal counter-grids and unexpected stratigraphies piercing the underground matrix like slow bullets. That is, until a newfound archaeological buoyancy brings them up from the briny deep, like rare submarines surfacing through mud and darkness.

Buried ships—flaws in the wooden crystal of the city—interrupting New York's grounded logic from below.

Read more at the New York Times.

(Thanks to Alan Mitchell and @magicandrew for the tip!)

Stratford Kiosks

[Image: Partial site plan for the Stratford Kiosks design competition].

An interesting design competition has been announced to produce a suite of minor buildings at the 2012 London Olympics:

The Architecture Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of an open international competition to design a permanent yet flexible, free standing group of kiosks in Meridian Square, Stratford, London, for use before, during and after the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Situated at the front of Stratford Regional Station and hosting a variety of uses, the kiosks will serve as key venues for information, orientation and services within the rapidly changing town centre.

Here are all the basic site documents you need; you have to register, however, and the deadline for project submissions is 3 September 2010. Good luck!

Ice Patch Archaeology

[Image: From The Thing, directed by John Carpenter].

As glaciers and mountain snow packs recede, their disappearance sometimes reveals archaeological evidence of earlier human settlements, with tools and other implements dropping out of the melting ice. As LiveScience reported back in April, "patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic" are disappearing, revealing "a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools" in their wake.

The forensic investigation of these unexpected windows into human history has been dubbed "ice patch archaeology."

One of the field's originary archaeologists drew an analogy last week for how these artifacts probably got there:

Maybe you missed a shot and your weapon disappeared into the snowbank. It's like finding your keys when you drop them in snow. You're not going to find them until spring. Well, the spring hasn't come until these things started melting for the first time, in some instances, in many, many thousands of years.

The idea that historical surprises are in store for us, waiting to be revealed—as if by glacial metabolism—in an era of global climate change is a compelling one (and seemingly an inexhaustible plot device for burgeoning writers). In fact, the image that opens this post was taken from John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing, in which a spaceship—along with its infectious, shapeshifting passenger—is discovered buried in Antarctic ice that's at least 100,000 years old. It's a kind of moving archaeological site, carved from ancient ice and drifting along with the pulse of the glacier.

[Image: Antarctica's Blood Falls", via Atlas Obscura].

But we needn't turn to scifi to find extraordinary examples of "ice patch archaeology."

Earlier this year, for instance, Atlas Obscura noted a site in Antarctica called "Blood Falls." It is a "five-story, blood-red waterfall [that] pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys."

Roughly two million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a world with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

The scientific value of these previously inaccessible reservoirs of planetary history should only become more obvious in the years to come.

Climate change, together with melting glaciers, becomes an inadvertent archaeology of the human—and profoundly inhuman—past.

But, of course, we've seen other stories like this, in which caches of human history unexpectedly reappear as the climate heats up. Last year, for instance, we looked at melting glaciers as chemical archives: "As the world's glaciers melt, they've begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years."

Thirty years is nothing compared to the hundreds—often thousands—of years involved in ice patch archaeology, but the untimely release of dangerous chemicals we once thought long-forgotten is chilling proof that very few things are ever gone for good.

(Via Archaeology).

Offshore Oil Strike for All the Family

[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].

One of the most extraordinary—and timely—subcollections in the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture can be found resting on a few metal shelves in the basement, where you will discover stacks of old, oil exploration-themed board games.

Cartel: The International Oil Game.
La Conquête du Pétrole.
King Oil: Combine Luck and Strategy to Control the Oil Fields.
Oil: The Slickest Game in Town.
Total Depth: An Oil Man's Game.

There's even the confident one-word title of Gusher, with no description or subtitle needed—or, if none of those strikes your fancy, you can always play a few rounds of Gas Crisis. Its goals include an exhortation to "Master the Minicar" and "Shun the Sheikhs," showing that smaller cars (and better gas mileage) have been seen as tools of foreign policy since at least the 1970s, when many of these games were first released.

But the one game that seems particularly delirious, a kind of sad joke now, or unfortunate coincidence, is Offshore Oil Strike, "Designed and Manufactured by Printbox (Scotland) Limited in collaboration with The British Petroleum Company Limited." Offshore Oil Strike, brought to you by BP.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

With this "exciting board game for all the family," released in 1970, BP delivered all "the thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your own..."

Bring in your own "Offshore Petro-Dollars," that is.

[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The game's internal monetary supply comes in denominations of $200,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, $2,000,000, $10,000,000, and $20,000,000—which is good because you need to earn a lot of it: "The 1st player to make $120,000,000 cash is regarded as the winner."

After all, it's "a race to find and develop the riches 'neath the seabed," where no deepwater is beyond the horizon of possible drilling.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Accumulating this fortune, however, is not without its difficulties. Each player has "Hazard" cards to deal with; here are some of the risks BP thought to include:

—"Accident. Rig shuts down while replacement of key personnel takes place. Miss one turn."
—"Fire breaks out. Pay $2,500,000 for repairs."
—"Hit High-Pressure Gas—Rig Damaged. Specialists called in."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Repairs cost $2,000,000"
—"Drill pipe breaks. Pay $500,000 for replacement."
—"Strike High Pressure Gas. Platform Destroyed."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Oil Slick Clean-Up costs. Pay $1,000,000."

Players are assigned one of four competing oil company identities, each of which is associated with a specific urban headquarters: Chevron/Rotterdam, Mobil/Dieppe, Amoco/Bergen, and BP/Hull.

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

As the CCA wrote in their excellent book and exhibition catalog, Sorry, Out of Gas, "Historians and researchers often see games as a source of information about the customs and concerns of a given era. The way games work, their meanings and goals, are linked to the social context in which they are invented and popularized."

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

I've included several photos of BP's game here so that you can see the space of play for yourself. But perhaps it's time now for BP to release a new edition: Beyond Petroleum: Nightmare Well!, with whole new strategies for hazards and risks, with "Junk Shot" cards and "Top Kill" moves to deploy when needed. Perhaps they could even throw in a few special supplements for good measure: Perpetual Blow-Out! or It'll Take a Clean-Up of $6 Billion to Bring the Gulf Back!

[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Anderson Cooper and Joe Barton could play a few rounds on national TV.

#CCA

Piranesi and the inhabitable hard drive

[Image: "Fantastic Monuments" (1747-1750), pen and brown ink and brown wash over traces of graphite, on laid paper, 19.8 x 27.7 cm, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

Speaking of the CCA, a brief Twitter discussion last summer, in July 2009, between architect Sam Jacob, journalist Will Wiles, historian and blogger Enrique Ramirez, and myself, discussing monuments, "plug-in memorialism," and the prefab design possibilities for enshrining public memory, is the starting point for a short new post up at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

That post eventually zeroes in on an image, seen above, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, called "Fantastic Monuments," which is held in the CCA archives. Piranesi's scene is an "ornamental dreamscape of monuments-to-be... in memoriam for anything that has happened, in anticipation of anything that has yet to occur." Check it out if you get a chance!

#CCA

On Method

Just a quick note that I will be speaking in Montreal Wednesday evening, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as part of an informal series of summer research presentations hosted in the historic Shaughnessy House.

[Image: One of the CCA's "cold vaults"; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The talk is free and open to the public, so if you are around please feel free to stop in (if you are not, it will be live-streamed). From the event description:

Blogger Geoff Manaugh discusses the strategic opportunities and limitations of blogging as a form of architectural research. Manaugh has been testing out a program called “Bloggers in the Archive,” meant to see if the point-and-shoot pace of a blog and the inertia of an archive can work together to generate public interest in artifacts that are usually stored in vaults. In his seminar, he also discusses blogging in general, based on his experience of writing BLDGBLOG.

The talk is called "On Method," as the bulk of this informal presentation—and, I hope, the ensuing discussion—will be about the pros and cons of using a blog as a publicly accessible research notebook for the ongoing exploration of certain themes, whether they are architectural, literary, scientific, cinematic, sonic, or otherwise. I believe there will also be a reception of some kind immediately afterward, and things kick off at 6pm. Hope to see some of you there!

Sound not as memory but experience

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Take a Closer Listen is a project by the talented Dutch graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt in which a variety of people have been asked to describe their favorite sound. The results—which range from quick, five-word responses to entire short narratives about found sounds—were collected into an eponymous booklet, Take a Closer Listen, this past winter.

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Flipping through the pamphlet is like reading a silent soundtrack to a landscape you will never see in full.

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Zuydervelt's original inspiration for the project is worth quoting in full:

It was a beautiful, sunny day in July, and I was lying in a park in Geneva. My iPod was out of batteries, but I still had my headphones on. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds surrounding me. Having these earphones in somehow gave me the idea that I was more actively listening than I normally would. As if these environmental sounds were playing on my iPod. A world was slowly unfolding to me. I could hear people talking, cycling, walking and roller-skating. A dog barking. A truck passing. Behind me, there was the rhythmic sputter of a sprinkler installation, and kids laughing and fooling around. I could hear a wine bottle being uncorked 3 and a box of crackers being opened. But most enjoyable were the sparrows, flying around nervously, trying to get hold of breadcrumbs. They were flying from tree to tree, from my left ear to my right. A chirp here and there. Sometimes they would burst out in an excited chirping laughter, as if they were watching a ballgame and someone scored. It felt like listening to a great radio play. I just had to do something with this. A project on environmental sound. Maybe a book?

Here, below, are some sample spreads from the book, as well as one or two examples I particularly enjoyed reading.

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Many of the stories are worth reading in full, if for no other reason than to watch how acoustic information is made narratively accessible through verbal description. Here is Romke Kleefstra, for instance, on "the flapping of birds' wings":

In winter, over 30,000 geese spend the night at a roost near one of the Frisian lakes, not far from my house. At sunrise I often go there to watch them. Especially their spectacular departure. To fly to a nearby place to spend the day feeding on meadows, the geese will lift off together, in one big movement. Imagine a group of over a thousand percussionists, positioned in a diamond shape, all having a floor tom and two brushes. A split second after the rightmost percussionist starts a five second ruffle, the percussionists left of him do the same, and so forth. Further to the middle of the group, the sound grows louder, fading again when the middle is passed, leaving the leftmost percussionist to make the final beat on his kit. A group of alto sax players is mimicking this movement by simultaneously blowing short puffs. It’s truly incredible.

Or here is Chris Herbert on "echoes in a tube station," the London Underground turned into a vast musical instrument made of compressed human voices:

A few years ago, I wandered into a tube station on the deeply buried Central Line in London. Along the platform and out of my line of sight, three or four girls were singing close RnB harmonies. By the time this arrived at my ear, it had been bounced along several hundred metres of tunnel, an unfathomable series of natural comb filters that rendered it an unintelligible but gorgeous wooze, speckled with the faint percussive clank and rumble of a fully operational mass transit system.
Although I sometimes record environmental sounds, you can never really be prepared for those one-off events that take you by surprise. In a way, I’m glad all I was able to do was stand and listen when I chanced upon the most beautiful improvised arrangement. I think every piece of music I have ever made has tried but fallen short of recalling this moment.

The assumed ephemeral nature of these found sounds becomes readily apparent after reading Zuydervelt's edited collection; but is the intangible, nostalgic, beyond-grasp nature of sound inherent to the sonic experience, or simply an artifact of the rhetorical tone most often used in today's writing about the acoustic environment?

In other words, are sounds really the disappearing remnants of a world that we are always trying—and failing—to reassemble? Is there really always a connection between sound and memory or sound and nostalgia—not sound and physical experience, say, or even sound as a subset of astronomy?

[Images: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

For instance, as a rhetorical counterexample—one that does not rely on memory at all in order to communicate the acoustic and experiential value of a given sound—here is Nate Wooley on "the drone of an electrical generator":

There’s a giant generator that heats and cools the large library building for the main campus of New York University. The sound of its drone is very deep, rich and colorful. The overtones seem to dance above a base set of fundamentals the same way as in an Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece. It changes slowly and organically, almost imperceptibly, from one place to the other. No one just walking by would ever even notice its almost human quality, but if you stand and listen for five minutes, the building seems to breathe and sing.

And I was particularly struck by this one—here is Felicity Ford on "the clunk of a cooling paint can":

I love the sound of paint tins in an outside building responding to shifts in temperature. When they get warm, the air inside the tins expands, and then when they cool down again, the air contracts, pulling the metal lids down with a subtle, percussive clunk. I love how it sounds a little bit like a steel drum—sort of musical and metallic. And I love how the sound always comes as a surprise.

The crisp, animate nature of both of those—the electrical generator and the paint cans alike—is astonishing.

[Image: From Take a Closer Listen, designed and edited by Rutger Zuydervelt].

Of course, certain sounds do seem maddeningly unrepeatable and lost to time—for instance, the utter weirdness of things like the Bloop, Julia, and the eery Slowdown, even, for that matter, #pdxboom—but I have to wonder if the gossamer-like ghostly nature of sound, its always-slipping-away-into-nothing-ness, is not simply the result of writers emotionally acting out their own inability to conjure a sound in its precise and every detail. The language used becomes a performance of personal yearning, not a description of the sound at all.

But descriptions are descriptions, not technical reproductions of noise itself. I'm reminded of those ads from seven or eight years ago—perhaps produced by Meineke?—in which customers were shown unsuccessfully acting out the strange noises their car engines had begun to make, implying that fixing an automobile is at least as much about re-tuning industrial machinery to fit within an appropriate acoustic range as it is about remedying potentially fatal mechanical flaws. It also makes me wonder if a car has ever been recalled because it sounded bad. (See also my recent Q&A with sonic historian Sabine von Fischer for the Canadian Centre for Architecture about some of these ideas: Noise versus noise).

In any case, Take a Closer Listen is a fascinating project, and I would love to see it opened up to the entire commenting public, perhaps as a dedicated website, a global archive of acoustic descriptions from anyone who wants to log-in.