One of the Marvelous detritus that Tumblr occasionally spits out is this large bismuth crystal. As with most things on Tumblr, no other information is given, especially whether this sample was found naturally occurring or artificially grown. It's most likely the latter, which would explain the highly pronounced stair-step lattice distinctive to hopper crystals like bismuth. This characteristic structure occurs due to the crystal growing faster along the edges than at the center. As more mineral molecules are attracted to the edges, leaving less and less to fill the interior sections, the crystal craters. As for its iridescent color, that is due to oxidation.
If you want to make your own bismuth crystal, there are certainly plenty of YouTube instructionals for that, including this. In fact, bismuth has a low melting point (271°C or 520°F) that you could probably use a regular stove and some old kitchen wares rather than a fully outfitted smelting lab.
Though perhaps the world needs a smelting lab dedicated solely to fabricating gigantic bismuth crystals. A fantamagical stepwell factory.
Out in the desert or deep in the rain forest or hidden in a mountain valley, pools of molten bismuth are allowed to cool and crater down into the mantel, spiraling as they excavate their own labyrinths, like divining rods probing the earth for water to fill their lidos in the making. Not the comparatively uncomplicated “inverted ziggurats” they are usually described as, rather these bismuth stepwells might be more akin to a cancerous mass of Borobudurs hybridized with fetus in fetu Ankor Wats, inverted.
And then the factory is dismantled and carted away, leaving these “deeply wrinkled surfaces,” as Mary-Ann Ray might put it, for travelers to discover. “Like pieces on a game board, travelers move around within and upon it, discovering possible relationships with other travelers, hiding, seeking, losing, finding, passing by, encountering, entrapping, nearly missing.”
Tarsem Singh eventually flies in to film his interpretation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
[First posted November 4, 2010. In the latest mining disaster in China, about 50 miners are said to be trapped in a 760-metre-deep shaft.]
For the past few months, I-Weather.org, developed by Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, has been churning up a pastel maelstrom here on this blog for use by our spatially and temporally displaced readers to restore their circadian rhythms, whether this is actually possible or not. You, too, can embed this artificial sun on your website to blast your asynchronous readers into metabolic normality. Its open source code is freely available.
At the recent 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, we saw a less earthbound and less private platform for this quasi-light therapy: a flickering light tower for “confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles” and “speculative public spaces of distant colonies.”
To distribute and synchronize these pockets of simulant terrestrial cycles of day and night across vast distances, fabrica | ch proposes using a theoretical Deep Space Internet.
By coincide, we first learned about this project just as the first reports about the trapped miners in Chile started trickling in to our attention, specifically, the news that NASA scientists have been flown in by the Chilean government to offer advice on how to help the men stay physically and mentally healthy during the weeks-long rescue.
Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, says during a press conference:
One of the things that's being recommended is that there be one place, a community area, which is always lighted. And then you have a second area which is always dark for sleep, and then you have a third area which is work, doing the mining, and the shifts can migrate through these geographic locations within the mine and, in that way, regulate the daylight cycle of the shift.
It occurred to us that one should make a portable version of Deep Space Public Lighting for future mining disasters. It should be able to fit through bore holes and then easily assembled by survivors in the murky depths of a collapsed tunnel.
A deployable piazza for subterranean “distant colonies.”
Rather than being illuminated by the anemic brightness of a hard hat or video camera, one bathes in soothing electromagnetic wavelengths from a technicolor torch.
And yes, considering the high demand for coal and industrial minerals, there will be many more mining disasters, many more trapped miners and, depending on various fortunate circumstances, more tunnels to be reconfigured. In fact, only a few days after the last Chilean miner was brought to the surface, 11 miners were trapped at a coal mine in China after a deadly explosion.
Consider, too, the recent export ban by China on shipment of rare earth elements to Japan after a kerfuffle between the two countries involving a collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats near some disputed islands. The ban may have been brief, and China may have denied having instituted one in the first place, nevertheless, the incident points again that China is willing to use its near resource monopoly of rare earth metals as a political tool, to get its way, in other words. Other countries have again taken notice, and are scrambling to develop alternative sources, if not already, to ensure future supply. With new mines opening and even old mine operations being restarted, there are more potentials for disasters.
Reformatted in this context, Deep (Inner) Space Public Lighting engages not just with issues such as “public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate” but also with the geopolitics of natural resources, globalization and our collective networked boredom that seemingly can only be satiated by an epic spectacle of natural and man-made disasters and the ensuing heroic rescue of survivors.
In Chicago, don't call 811! / Our Solar Garden has rhizomatic subways bulbous with solar aviaries designed by Lequeu and Boullée. / In Mapping Abysses & The Catacombs of Rome in 3D, we call for a distributed network of autonomous laserscanning spelunking rovers to map out necropolises, ancient underground aqueducts, sewers, stormwater megatunnels, abandoned subway tunnels and transdimensional portals.
Over at Friends of the Pleistocene, they have an interview with Michael Madsen, director of Into Eternity. That film is a feature documentary on the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, Onkalo.
“At the core of Into Eternity,” write Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “is an attempt to imagine communicating to humans hundreds of thousands of years into the future (the film is structured as an address to the future). We talked with Michael about why he chose this mode of address and how he hoped audiences of today would respond to it. We also discussed how the circumstances that necessitate the building of facilities such as Onkalo demarcate a fundamentally new chapter in human history.”
Friends of the Pleistocene: Over the course of working on this project, did you sense your own ability to project your imagination into long spans of time increase?
Michael Madsen: Well, I have to say that there is an element of the scientific disease.
While in the tunnel, I was of course looking at notes written on the walls. There are these different tracings measuring cracks and how much water is dripping in. I remember looking at it and thinking if this place is ever opened, which I think it will be, these notes will be the cave paintings of our times. But what will it mean to the persons looking at it? This was strange to think about.
Even if the cave is never marked in any sense, it will be a sign itself. The very construction will be a sign. Deep into time, even the canisters will be gone, but there will still be the scars in the bedrock. The bedrock will still have this hollow, spiral, triangular entry. There will be these symmetrical deposits of high-level or radioactive material. So, any intelligent entity in the future will be able to discern that there is symmetry in this area. Symmetry, I think, does not appear in nature as a natural phenomenon except perhaps in crystals, which are different. So any creature in the future will understand that this has been made. In this sense it will always be a sign.
To see if it's showing in a city near you, check out the schedule here.
While at Friends of the Pleistocene, also check out the first report from their recently initiated long-term project to create a typology of debris basins. Not many can arouse us more than landslide mitigation structures.
Last week Tim Malytweeted, “I live in a world where I own a machine that chimes whenever a new planet is discovered.”
But how about a machine that alerts you to an impending supernova?
There's already the Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS), a network of five subterranean neutrino observatories, two of which we've covered here before: Super-Kamiokande and the recently completed IceCube. Neutrinos are produced in huge quantities before a massive star explodes into a supernova, and are blasted out in advance of the visible light. Since these “ghost” particles travel very close to the speed of light, they can reach us hours before we see the explosion.
The proposal here, then, is to create an app that will vibrate mobile devices when SNEWS sends out a supernova alert. Fuck making the invisible hertzian rain visible. It's just the pitter-pattering of @justinbieber's followers. Physicalize and spatialize an interstellar neutrino super-hurricane instead. Tell us when trillions and trillions and trillions of neutrinos, birthed by one of the greatest shows in the universe, are passing through us, though very rarely, if ever, does even a single one of those particles hit an atom in our body. When telescopes finally see the star's spectacular death, we hear a melodic chime.
For the past few months, I-Weather.org, developed by Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, has been churning up a pastel maelstrom here on this blog for use by our spatially and temporally displaced readers to restore their circadian rhythms, whether this is actually possible or not. You, too, can embed this artificial sun on your website to blast your asynchronous readers into metabolic normality. Its open source code is freely available.
At the recent 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, we saw a less earthbound and less private platform for this quasi-light therapy: a flickering light tower for “confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles” and “speculative public spaces of distant colonies.”
To distribute and synchronize these pockets of simulant terrestrial cycles of day and night across vast distances, fabrica | ch proposes using a theoretical Deep Space Internet.
By coincide, we first learned about this project just as the first reports about the trapped miners in Chile started trickling in to our attention, specifically, the news that NASA scientists have been flown in by the Chilean government to offer advice on how to help the men stay physically and mentally healthy during the weeks-long rescue.
Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, says during a press conference:
One of the things that's being recommended is that there be one place, a community area, which is always lighted. And then you have a second area which is always dark for sleep, and then you have a third area which is work, doing the mining, and the shifts can migrate through these geographic locations within the mine and, in that way, regulate the daylight cycle of the shift.
It occurred to us that one should make a portable version of Deep Space Public Lighting for future mining disasters. It should be able to fit through bore holes and then easily assembled by survivors in the murky depths of a collapsed tunnel.
A deployable piazza for subterranean “distant colonies.”
Rather than being illuminated by the anemic brightness of a hard hat or video camera, one bathes in soothing electromagnetic wavelengths from a technicolor torch.
And yes, considering the high demand for coal and industrial minerals, there will be many more mining disasters, many more trapped miners and, depending on various fortunate circumstances, more tunnels to be reconfigured. In fact, only a few days after the last Chilean miner was brought to the surface, 11 miners were trapped at a coal mine in China after a deadly explosion.
Consider, too, the recent export ban by China on shipment of rare earth elements to Japan after a kerfuffle between the two countries involving a collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats near some disputed islands. The ban may have been brief, and China may have denied having instituted one in the first place, nevertheless, the incident points again that China is willing to use its near resource monopoly of rare earth metals as a political tool, to get its way, in other words. Other countries have again taken notice, and are scrambling to develop alternative sources, if not already, to ensure future supply. With new mines opening and even old mine operations being restarted, there are more potentials for disasters.
Reformatted in this context, Deep (Inner) Space Public Lighting engages not just with issues such as “public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate” but also with the geopolitics of natural resources, globalization and our collective networked boredom that seemingly can only be satiated by an epic spectacle of natural and man-made disasters and the ensuing heroic rescue of survivors.
Here's the trailer to what sounds like a very interesting feature documentary, Into Eternity, about the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, Onkalo, which means “hiding place.” Located in Finland, the underground facility must last 100,000 years.
Once the waste has been deposited and the repository is full, the facility is to be sealed off and never opened again. Or so we hope, but can we ensure that? And how is it possible to warn our descendants of the deadly waste we left behind? How do we prevent them from thinking they have found the pyramids of our time, mystical burial grounds, hidden treasures? Which languages and signs will they understand? And if they understand, will they respect our instructions? While gigantic monster machines dig deeper and deeper into the dark, experts above ground strive to find solutions to this crucially important radioactive waste issue to secure mankind and all species on planet Earth now and in the near and very distant future.
For the above questions, we have some ideas here and here.
A disused gold mine might soon provide geothermal energy for the city of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, reportsCBC.ca.
Yellowknifers have long thought about drawing geothermal heat from the abandoned mine, as former miners have reported temperatures exceeding 30 C when they were underground.
If the project goes ahead, a network of distribution pipes would have to be built to deliver heat from the mine to various downtown buildings.
Oil would still be used under the proposed geothermal plan, but would make up five per cent of the energy used. Still, Yellowknife could save 7.6 million litres of oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 17,000 tonnes a year under the proposed plan.
To quickly change to a related or unrelated subject, we've often wondered if you can excavate a system of underground tunnels wherein differentials in atmospheric pressure (or some other laws of physics unknown to us) create air movements at speeds fast and consistent enough to produce appreciable wind energy.
If you perforate a mountain (or an entire mountain range) that's buffeted by strong winds all the time from all sides and then populate it with burrowing giant helium balloons to keep the air moving when the Chinook or Katabic winds are at a standstill, how many homes can be powered? The entire downtown area or just the reclusive hamlet of a rogue Swiss tunnel digger?
Wind power and the cost-benefit headaches of such a multi-billion-dollar project aside, can you perforate a mountain simply to hum a tune, to turn it into a gigantic wind organ playing a melancholic song from deep geologic time? You won't be singing it to the mountain; the mountain will instead, to you.
What you're seeing in these photographs isn't an underground refugee camp for people escaping from some surface fracas nor is it a commune for those made homeless by the Great Foreclosure. These people are not card carrying members of the Freegan Establishment nor are they the many-times great-grandparents of a future race of mole people. While the reason for them slumbering amid an ambient symphony of fluorescent flickers is medical in nature, they are not volunteers in a scientific experiment inspired by the research of MaurizioMontalbini, the Italian sociologist who lived in caves for long periods of time to study the effects of total isolation on the body's natural cycles.
Rather, these are people suffering from asthma or other respiratory diseases undergoing speleotherapy in a salt mine near the village of Solotvyno in Ukraine.
The photographs were taken by the London-based Russian artist Kirill Kuletski, and he writes of this underground clinic and alternative therapy:
This therapy was discovered in Poland in the 1950s when it was noticed that salt mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Scientists found that the salt-permeated air of the working salt mine helped to dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and also killed the micro-organisms which caused infections — and that this greatly helped patients who were undertaking treatment for asthma.
The clinic at Solotvyno salt mine is unique because its tunnels, which are 300 metres below ground level and remain at a steady 22°C (72°F) all year round, are the deepest in the world to be used for such purposes. Around three to five thousand people are treated here every year and there is often a waiting list — in fact, at any one time up to 200 people, a third of whom are usually children, can be receiving therapy. Patients spend an average of 24 days at the facility, using a lift to travel underground for afternoon or overnight sessions. During this time they talk, read or sleep on beds, grouped together in alcoves which are carved out of the rock and lit by fluorescent tubes.
It's nice to hear of subterranean landscapes not in the context of nuclear and biological apocalypses or as the domiciles of the subhuman. Pure geology not as a devour of the self but as an antidote to the aberrant.
All records of the city's subterranean infrastructures are no longer in the public domain, their maps classified by the federal government as state secrets.
Public works employees have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Those who break their contract, Guantanamo awaits. Similarly, urban adventurers are charged with espionage if found hiking down in the sewers and subway tunnels. If they try to evade capture, security forces have orders to shoot to kill.
Digging is banned, so among other things, this means that gardening is done with containers, hydroponics, roofs, walls and zeppelins. Exposed ground is carpeted with feral turf or, more likely, prairie grasslands that once grew thick in the region. Parks are mere prosceniums on which plants-on-wheels and fountains-on-wheels are rearranged in countless configurations by parkgoers and passing storms, until of course they've all been wheeled away and there are no more planters to play with. This botanical piracy is but one outward manifestation of strange pathologies brewing in a city now geologically oppressed.
Lest they were to sprout DIY tunnels that might accidentally brush up against or puncture the network, a lunatic Rachel Whiteread was let loose on all the city's basements. Open any door that once led to those lower floors, and you'll be greeted with bare concrete.
Meanwhile, all post-blackout structures, from houses to street lights to skyscrapers, must use non-geologically invasive support systems. You can't plant anything. As a result, the city's famed skyline is beginning to look like Tatlin towers wrapped inside a jungle gym designed by Superstudio with buttresses sloping down towards the periphery. Hanging jewel-like within are the Millennium and Grant Parks re-landscaped as a cubic shrub and a parterred cylinder.
A boy went missing once when he fell down a blank spot on the map, but no search party was ever organized. There were no prayer vigils, no strapping firemen, and no television vans camped for days on end in front of the boy's home to provide 24-hour news coverage of a local melodrama for international consumption. There was no prolonged national hysteria over his fate, and definitely no photogenic heros confected by the whims of the masses. The missing kid was simply censored from the day's news.
If only his parents knew the existence of those anarchist cartographers. They could have helped. Armed with GPS-equipped mobile laser scanners, these spiritual descendants of Harry Lime and Trevor Paglen nightly infiltrate in secret these dark geographies to map them anew, to reclaim their lost cultural heritage. Their ultimate goal, however, is to solve the mystery of why these rhyzomatic contours were redacted in the first place, hopefully before the last cell member is caught or gets lost permanently in the interdimensional knotted terrain the city had constructed to deter and imprison aberrant surveyors.
But the grief stricken parents didn't and eventually were plainly informed that they never had that child. The boy, like the maps, was redacted.
If we were multibillionaires, we would thumb our noses at yachts, the ubiquitous Picasso and Old Master, a seat on the board of The Met, invitations to mingle with the Veuve Clique at Davos, and yes, even at orphanages. We would devote all our money and time instead into buying a disused subterranean neutrino observatory and retrofitting it into a kind of 3D IMAX theater. Filling this vast negative would be a technicolorized 3D projection of our sun in (near) real-time, languorously spinning, soundtracked, prominences and coronal loops efflorescing. No cumbersome glasses needed.
Naturally, we'd then dig a tunnel, at the end of which we'll hollow out a second antechamber for a different star. And then yet another access tunnel to another solar aviary. Because our vast fortune would have definitely caused us to go unhinged, we'd keep on excavating more naves, naves within naves within even larger naves, naves filigreed with vestibules and internal buttresses, all terminating in abysses of spherical bosquets sprouting rhizomatic subways bulbous with Lequeus and Boullées.
Why buy an island in Dubai when we could have an interior constellation of flaming islands, a lithospheric Versailles braceleted with burning fountains of many brightnesses.
Edible Geography has another deliriously interesting post, this one on a mythological or not-so mythological tunnel in New York City through which cattle may or may not have been herded on their way from distant pastures to the slaughtering houses in the city.
Real or not, it's fascinating to speculate what might be the ideal geometry of such an underground thoroughfare for livestock. Quoting Nicola Twilley (emphasis ours):
[A]ccording to Temple Grandin, the autistic savant who is also known as “the woman who thinks like a cow,” cattle can happily walk through a tunnel—but only if it’s designed correctly. The ideal cow tunnel, she explains in her book Animals in Translation, would use indirect lighting and a non-slip floor, as well as grey or beige paint, and sound-absorbent surfaces. Any sloping sections would be single file, the tunnel should get bigger along its length in the direction of movement, and finally—fabulously—it should be curved, so that the cattle “just sort of go round and round and round like the Guggenheim Museum.”
Incidentally, we have collected quite a few CAD drawings of cattle sorting pens based on Grandin's ideal sorting program. Their serpentine design takes advantage of the cattle's circling behavior and tendency to want to go back where they came from. Moreover, it prevents the animals from seeing people and other moving objects at the end of the chute.
Splice hundreds of these units together, and you might have the basic configuration of an urban corral. Instead of a (relatively) straight tunnel with sharp turning angles, you have a tunnel smoothly weaving through New York's or some other city's subways, sewers and basement floors like a meandering stream, following perhaps the old route of a desiccated river.
While clearing several months' worth of accumulated bookmarks, we rediscovered an article from The New York Times about laser scanning in Glasgow — or to be more precise: laser scanning the city itself.
A few years ago, we read, a group from the Glasgow School of Art “began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes.” The project led to commissions from the Scottish government's heritage agency to scan other historical landmarks in the country. And later this spring, the group will be part of a team that will scan Mount Rushmore to create “the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accurate than the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter.”
So precise are these digital models that they can be used not only to facilitate much needed restoration work of deteriorating monuments but also to recreate them if they are completely destroyed by natural or man-made disasters. In other words, if the Bamiyan Buddhas had been laser scanned before they were obliterated by the Taliban, they could now be reconstructed with unbelievable accuracy.
We're inevitably led to fantasize a team of laser scanners shooting billions of pinpricks of light at the Acropolis or Machu Picchu, converting them into deterrestrialized point clouds. Not waiting until the buildings get corroded down to bedrock by an abrasive mixture of tourists and climate change, or even until the scans are completed to start reconstruction, the surveyors connect their data servers to a distant swarm of Pike Loop robots, which immediately begins to fabricate these ancient sites in foreign terrain. It's BLDGBLOG's wettest wet dreams.
Better yet, forget those surface monuments. How about something subterranean like the underground necropolis of Domitilla outside Rome or La Subterranea in Guanajuato, Mexico? Both of these places have been laser scanned, and their ghostly digital facsimiles await to be physicalized.
There are also those abandoned sewers, stormwater tunnels and subway tunnels. Day and night, laser scanners that have gone mobile will be deployed into these voids, and bit by pinprick bit, these labyrinths that once confounded, concealed and even consumed trespassers with their disorienting mazes will resolve into total comprehensibility. Every detail will be known to you.
Simultaneously, disembodied limbs out in some vast tract of land will get to work replicating these filigreed abysses. Once completed, it will look like a city eroded down to its subsurface infrastructure. It'll be the playground for urban explorers who might be looking for more muted thrills and for architects who could no longer wait for the mythical Golden Age of WPA 2.0 to play out their desires.
Last month, a cadre of guerilla architecture critics (or just plain vandals) splashed the white walls of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum with green and red paint, thus rendering the Italian tricolor in an unintentional homage to America's greatest living painter, though permanent Roman habitué, Cy Twombly.
It was presumably the first outwardly visceral manifestation of popular distaste for the building.
Many others no doubt would like nothing more than to deface the museum. The mayor, for instance, has been very vocal about wanting to remove it (minus the altar, of course) and then reconstruct it fuori le Mura. Whether this would mean that the original will be recycled for the new building or entirely torn down into unsalvageable detritus, these urbicidal fantasies of demolition, alteration and displacement are pretty much on par with the spatial history of the piazza.
The new building, for instance, replaced a pavilion partly designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo under Benito Mussolini to house the Ara Pacis, which was discovered somewhere offsite and relocated to its present location. This earlier building was dismantled, because it was deemed incapable of protecting the ancient monument from Rome's damaging pollution and summer weather. However, a stone wall containing inscriptions of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti was saved from total annihilation and incorporated into Meier's building design. A new temple built on top of the foundations of an old temple.
Meanwhile, the demolished pavilion itself was part of a Fascist program of erasure. Mussolini wanted to create a new piazza, the center piece of which would be the Mausoleum of Augustus. At the time, parts of the tomb laid buried beneath several layers of urban fill and topped with a concert hall, the latest in a long line of adaptive reuse programs. The tomb was further “hidden” by narrow streets and dense urban growth. To “liberate” it, Mussolini simply obliterated the surrounding neighborhood.
Left untouched were a couple of churches, one of which, San Rocco, is a fascinating impasto of Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical and Palladian styles. These survivors — together with Morpurgo's pavilion and a complex of new modern buildings for use by Fascist Party functionaries — were calibrated to frame the bounded space of the new Piazza Augusto Imperatore.
It's interesting to note here that embedded on the facades of the new buildings are friezes, mosaics and inscriptions, a decorative program no doubt intended to create a link with the sculptural reliefs on the Ara Pacis on the other side of the piazza. One of those inscriptions, apart from mythologizing Mussolini and Fascism, actually commemorates the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus and by extension celebrates the urban pogrom that had to be metted out in order to “liberate” the tomb from its shadowy grave. So perhaps if the mayor were to carry out his own pogrom, then he, too, may commemorate it with yet another set of friezes on the front of his new museum. And obviously these new friezes will also memorialize our liberation from starchitectural stupor.
In any case, to add to these violent, cross-spatiotemporal architectural critiques, Meier stated after the demolition of Morpurgo's pavilion but before the start of construction of his new museum that he wanted (and may yet still want) to tear down the other Fascist-era additions to the piazza. These buildings may have perfectly acted out Mussolini's urban scenography of Fascist ideologies but the resulting piazza is an incredibly failed urban space. It's inhospitable to everyday use and pedestrians avoid it. Meier presumably knows better. And if he gets his way, then there would be another occasion for textual frotteurism and iconographical link-orgy: a sculptural band of friezes in which we see the wannabe urban planner in the guise of the Angel of Modernism — Meier Dux, the liberator of the Eternal City from its own ancientness.
But we're obviously digressing.
When reading about the incident, what grabbed our complete attention wasn't the paint job. What actually spurred us into confecting this post was the porcelain toilet and the two packs of toilet paper left at the scene.
Because these scatological implements aren't the most imaginative form of “activism” (or for no other reason than just because), we set about concocting less facile, though dubiously practical, strategies of protest. We used the following as points of departure.
1) As far as we know, no one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism. The presence of Graziano Cecchini in the crowd of onlookers at the scene, however, elicited some very faint accusatory speculations. Cecchini, you might remember, was the artist and member of the neo-Futurist group, ATM Azionefuturista 2007, who dyed the Trevi Fountain red nearly two years ago, an incident which we covered here then. If you can also recall, he turned the fountain's crystal clear waters into a vermillion Nile as a way to protest the obscenely high cost of organizing that year's International Film Festival of Rome — like a self-righteous Moses preaching to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.
2) Earlier that summer, another incident occurred at the Trevi Fountain and at other Roman fountains. You can say that it was similarly faintly Biblical: the waters parted — or rather dried up — which is probably the same thing. The culprits that time weren't hydro-anarchists venting out grievances with the hegemonic elite. Vandal-artists weren't enacting one of their staged happenings using the built environment as their canvas and minor urban disasters as their paint. As we reported at the end of last year, the water supply to the fountains was cut short when construction workers across town damaged an ancient pipe while building a private underground car park. The blockage was discovered when a waterborne camera was slithered through the city's rhyzomatic ecosystem of voids to pinpoint its location.
While the tired, sweaty tourists around the city didn't erupt into a riotous mob, this incident left us wondering whether they could be agitated into a pillaging horde, ransacking archaeological sites and museums, by strategically pinching the right combination of ganglial pathways of the city's infrastructural network.
3) Staying in Rome but venturing more than a century back in time: in the 1870s, we read in The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, archaeologists dug up the floor of the Colosseum and exposed its basement corridors. This apparently upset so many people, including the Pope, because it meant removing the arena's religious paraphernalia, such as the Stations of the Cross, a huge crucifix in the center and a hermitage and its hermit. The recently unified Italian state, in other words, was seen to be trampling over sacred ground, and the birthplace of so many martyrs and saints, was to be converted into a secular artifact, an archaeologist's play pen.
But of greater interest for us here is the fact that during the excavation, drainage was such a problem that the sewers and underground corridors had filled with water. Harkening back to when it used to host mock naval battles, the Colosseum remained an artificial lake for many years until a new sewer was built to channel the water away.
4) Returning to the present but now venturing out of the city: decorating this post are CC-licensed photos of Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, one of several installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora at this year's Venice Art Biennale.
5) Further afield: in an article published by The New York Times in 2003, we learned that public works officials in New York sent a self-propelled, submersible Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) down into in the 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct that supplies New York City with half of its drinking water. Millions of gallons have been leaking, and they wanted to know where and how it was seeping out.
Leakage of up to 36 million gallons a day was detected starting in 1991. The leaking stretch lies somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskills and the West Branch Reservoir, a way station for city-bound water here in Putnam County.
The escaping water is just a small percentage of the 1.3 billion gallons supplied by the system each day, but still equals the daily consumption in Rochester.
Water percolating upward hundreds of feet from tunnel leaks has created wetlands and damp areas in Ulster and Orange counties that endure even in the region's worst droughts.
The city's engineers have been periodically sending, as recently as last month, torpedo-shaped, deep-sea robots to monitor the cracks.
There are important lessons about crumbling infrastructure and the importance of surveillance and maintenance in an age of peak water and climate change that no doubt could be extracted from here, but we have to move on.
So. Instead of leaving cute trinkets next to one's object of disgust, you go for the jugular.
First assemble together a fleet of self-propelled, subterranean dirigibles. Be sure that they can navigate through both water-filled tunnels and more airier ones. To be able to track their location and velocity, implant each one with an iPhone or any cheap, GPS-enabled mobile device.
With maps of the negative labyrinth on hand, you let them loose. At designated strategic nodes, you phone them. They pause in mid-flight. Seconds later, they inflate and wedge themselves very tightly in the tunnel. If the tunnel is too big, then several of your dirigibles will clump together to ensure total blockage. And then finally, using the sewers' miasmic vapour as a reagent, their nylon skins fantamagically fuse with the tunnel walls and turn metallic, nearly diamond-hard. An hour or two later, manholes and storm drains begin venting your furious critique. A further hour or two, an artificial lake lays stagnant next to (or better yet, surrounds) the target building.
Of course, the target needn't be a building. It could be a new plaza as anti-pedestrian as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Or an obscenely overbudget hyper-park. Or a grotesquely earnest memorial. Or a similarly ghastly public art installation whose aesthetics suggest it has time-travelled from the 80s. Whatever it is, you consider it a pestilential addition to the built environment in the same way your artificial lake is a deadly public health hazard.
Not surprisingly, others with their own beef and their own agenda will copy your tactics. Sewers all over the world will be swarming with dirigibles, buzzing with the amplified hum of their tiny propellers. Artificial lakes will bubble up and vanish, rising and falling in accordance to the perennially shifting climate of architectural taste.
Not surprisingly as well, officials will try to stop these acts of sabotage. They will take sewer maps out of the public domain. They will even request the federal government to classify them as state secrets. Consequently, all public works employees will have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Urban adventurers will be charged with espionage if found hiking through the tunnels. Or simply shot on site as they claw their out of the sewers like Harry Lime in The Third Man.
If the public before were oblivious to the vast underground landscape that makes their life possible, only getting a hint of what lies beneath when an underpass is flooded or when a boy mysteriously goes missing while out exploring an abandoned section, then they will now be utterly, completely, permanently ignorant.
When a boy does indeed go missing, there will be no search and rescue and thus no wall-to-wall television coverage of melodrama. There will be no prolonged national hysteria over the fate of the child, and there definitely will be no photogenic heros confected out of the whims of the masses. The missing kid will simply be censored from the day's news, and the parents will be told they never had that child.
The kid, like the sewer maps, will be redacted.
In response, sewer anarchists will outfit their dirigibles with DIY sonars or laser scanners. They will make their own maps.
As a counter-countermeasure, combat engineers will reconfigure the network into an even more bewildering jumble of tunnels. They will dug fake tunnels, tunnel that leads to dead ends, tunnels that impossibly knot into themselves, tunnels with sonar-cancelling pings, tunnels that lead to police headquarters, tunnels that effloresce into a thicket of infinitely bifurcating tunnels, and tunnels that lead to other dimensions.
Alternatively, they will de-tangle the network. Obsolete tunnels will be filled in, others consolidated. Certain segments will be expanded into rationally planned, naturally lighted, cathedral-like vaults. These tunnels will actually be more than what the city needs to funnel its wastewater and stormwater, but at least they will be hard to be barricaded. It's the Haussmannisation of the sewers.
The other side, of course, will simply hack their dirigibles into more sophisticated mapping tools and employ advanced computer modeling techniques to simulate alternative infiltration strategies.
It's one side always trying to outwit the other side.
For the past 3 years, a team of archaeologists, architects and computer scientists have been laserscanning the underground network of burial chambers, tunnels and chapels carved out of the soft, volcanic tufa rock of Lazio.
The scanner, according to BBC News, “looks like a cylinder on a tripod, stands a metre or so high and is a piece of kit you usually find in the construction industry.”
Gone are the days when archaeologists just used shovels, brushes and sieves to unearth the past.
The scanner has been placed in hundreds of different locations in the Catacombs.
It turns slowly, sending out millions of light pulses that bounce off every surface they come into contact with. The light pulses rebound back into the scanner and are recorded on a computer as a series of white dots, known as a "point cloud".
Gradually, every wall, ceiling, and floor is bombarded with the dots, enabling the computer to build up a picture of each room.
All told, “four billion dots” were gathered, and on a computer screen, they coalesce into a digital 3D model of the necropolis: a filigreed network of subterranean voids that's not unlike the complex clustering of a Romanesque basilica and its companion buildings.
You can zoom in and zoom out, rotate about the axis, and render it with color. Perhaps you can record your scopic drive through this digitized world, as one would with Google Earth. Give it a soundtrack, and you've got yourself a YouTube music video.
And maybe Radiohead would like to give it a go for a sequel to House of Cards.
One of the stated goals of the project is to study the paintings in the Domitilla catacombs: from the pagan images of the early 3rd century to the theologically fully developed Christian iconography of the late 4th century, and how this micro-history of early Christian art reflected the broader changes in late Roman society.
Now if only someone could make the laserscanner mobile (a spelunking Paranoid Android) and then send it roving through other labyrinths — other necropolises, ancient underground aqueducts, sewers, stormwater megatunnels, abandoned subway tunnels — kicking up an underground maelstrom of point clouds.
Google comes a-knockin', and soon everyone will be exploring these passages in a flurry of nighttime clicks. Google Hadesview®.
Something about the Tiber River nearly breaching its banks and nearly submerging Rome in torrents and mud earlier this month reminded us of an antipode event last year. It's one of our favorite stories that entire year.
As reported by Reuters, “water supplying Rome's world-famous Trevi Fountain was cut off when a builder across town damaged a 2,000-year-old pipe.” Luckily enough for the carabinieri who might have had a riotous mob of tired, sweat-drenched tourists on their hands, the fountain didn't dry out; it simply recycled the water already in its basin. Unfortunately, “many smaller Rome fountains spluttered to a halt.” Equally unfortunate, we didn't hear too much of pissed-off Germans and English hydro-hooligans ransacking museums and pillaging nearby archaeological sites.
But what could have caused these minor urban disasters?
A search using a waterborne video camera through the ancient pipe tracked the blockage to a house in the high-end Parioli neighborhood on the other side of the Villa Borghese park, where builders were making a private underground car park.
A spokesman for the [local] water company said the builder had broken the pipe, then tried to mend it with concrete, but instead had filled it in.
Interconnected narratives of spaces, infrastructures, people, histories — all of that — all incredibly fascinating.
But we weren't satisfied with how the story ended (the water was temporarily diverted to a “younger pipe” while repairs were being done): so let's concoct some plot points for the pilot episode of, say, CSI: Rome. Let's imagine that a body has been encased in that concrete.
To solve this murder case, an obscenely photogenic forensic cartographer must map out the Eternal City's subterranean trash heap of functioning and disused aqueducts. Is it a simple mafia hit or is it something more deliciously sinister, a more expansive, twist-n-turny mystery that can be story arced through an entire season, even the whole run of the series?
“Follow the flow,” orders his supervisor.
However, he soon realizes that the technology at his disposable can't possibly do such a complex task. He calls 811, but no one answers, and it's not even lunch time. “So Italian,” he grumbles, in Italian.
Desperate, he makes a call to the Italian subsidiary of some leading global research company to see if they can supply him with advance technology. He knows that it'll be tit-for-tat, that at an unannounced later date, they will call in their favor and he will have to oblige them unconditionally, he is still willing to go into a bargain. Primetime televisual exposition requires that the company immediately procures for him exactly the right tools for the job: he is given a batch of RFID-tagged robo-spiders and dedicated access to their private fleet of spy satellites.
The mapping begins. Large sets of numbers are uploaded, downloaded and then crunched by supercomputers. Slowly, Rome's negative voids get digitally unearthed.
So begin as well those disembodied whispers, furtive glances from strangers in the streets, vague feelings that the contents of his office desk have been messed about. Up in those gilded residences of Parioli, a curtain parts slightly each time he comes by to conduct his investigation. There are forces working to derail him, but there are also others who want his map completed. But why?
During one espresso-filled night, he gets his first major break in the case: from out of that rhizomatic mess of ancient and modern hydro-infrastructure, a pattern emerges...
Easily one of the best stories we read last month came from The New York Times, and it was about a leak in the tunnels that bring water to New York City. It's no ordinary leak, we read.
For most of the last two decades, the Rondout-West Branch tunnel — 45 miles long, 13.5 feet wide, up to 1,200 feet below ground and responsible for ferrying half of New York City’s water supply from reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains — has been leaking some 20 million gallons a day. Except recently, when on some days it has lost up to 36 million gallons.
Using previously posted news items to put 36 million gallons of wasted drinking water into perspective, in May, Barcelona imported via ship cargo some 6 million gallons of emergency drinking water in the first of 6 shiploads per month for three months. Then in June, drought-hit Cyprus started importing from Greece some 14 million gallons of water per day until, presumably, this past November.
One lesson that can be gleaned from these figures is that a properly maintained infrastructure should be part of any conservation program, as important as reducing, recycling and reusing, in a climate-changed post-water world.
Meanwhile, the task to repair the leak is similarly extraordinary:
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has embarked on a five-year, $240 million project to prepare to fix the tunnel — which includes figuring out how to keep water flowing through New Yorkers’ faucets during the repairs. The most immediate tasks are to fix a valve at the bottom of a 700-foot shaft in Dutchess County so pumps will eventually be able to drain the tunnel, and to ensure that the tunnel does not crack or collapse while it is empty.
This is actually the best part:
The city has enlisted six deep-sea divers who are living for more than a month in a sealed 24-foot tubular pressurized tank complete with showers, a television and a Nerf basketball hoop, breathing air that is 97.5 percent helium and 2.5 percent oxygen, so their high-pitched squeals are all but unintelligible to visitors. They leave the tank only to transfer to a diving bell that is lowered to the bottom of the oval-shaped shaft, where they work 12-hour shifts, with each man taking a four-hour turn hacking away at concrete to expose the valve.
Considering that “New York has one of the world’s most complex water systems” and that its hydraulic infrastructure will expand in ever greater complexity to meet the demands of an exploding population in the city and “upriver,” we like to imagine here a type of urbanism derived from a perpetual cycle of infrastructural repair and disrepair.
It all starts with a leak. Once fixed, another one is discovered immediately, and so the city dispatches another crew of deep-sea divers to disassemble the concrete and whack and wedge and screw shut a replacement tunnel.
Then more leaks, larger crews, longer time spent in aqueous near-darkness.
As the city's surface population grows to a billion — or billions — so will the denizens of its negative surface, because there is always a leak to repair in this urban ticking time-bomb of cholera and dysentery. To let it go uncaulked and flood the basements of suburbs and towns is to invite hydro-anarchy.
So with less and less opportunity to decompress, these deep-sea public works service corps will simply make camp permanently. They will live and work inside hyperbaric chambers. They will marry inside submarine cathedrals and synagogues; have children; rear them under compressive, metal-buttressed skies; drop them off to helium-filled schools; develop indigenous customs, idioms and myths.
They will even evolve a new dialect to accommodate their “high-pitched squeals.” Hydroengineering has reconfigured their biology, and so they must adapt.
They will also die there, with their bodies sent to the surface for burial.
It's a satellite city grafted onto an infrastructural rhizome of hydraulics; the spatial consequences not of some surface cataclysm but, to rephrase Koolhaas, of its parent city becoming a mere accumulation of minor urban disasters.
While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?
In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.
And self-powered lighting fixtures; some artificial turf and mildly meditative Zen boulders; a few dozen rabbits, cute or otherwise; anti-gravity hydrology; and of course, the all-important signage: “Warning: If Not Rapture, May Cause Death.”
And after you push a few buttons, flick one or two switches and drain Europe of all of its electricity, your floating garden then goes on an endless subterranean ringed journey.
It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.
In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.
We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.
In other words:
Where the Big Bang might have been simulated endlessly, extra dimensions observed for the first time, and the fundamental construct of Nature elucidated, it might soon be filled with the buying patterns of ex-urbanites at Wal-Mart, hilariously awful credit ratings of college graduates, and our entire archive of bukkake porn.
You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.
Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London's Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it's the “Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.” The Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, and because of the close pairing, we naturally thought that its subterranean equivalent, the Rhizotron, was just as spectacular in terms of design and engineering.
Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, before when we couldn't help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind museum glass windows), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (“The soil has architecture?!?!” the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)
This was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — until somehow you emerge out into the open at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.
Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.
Consider, then, “the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.” The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.
What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.
Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park. Open it to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.
There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the “giants of coal age forests,” the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.
The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It's a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of “ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.”
As splendid as Lascaux's prehistoric cave paintings. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (though this might have a truer version of the Creation story).
