In between reports from CNN of Paris Hilton's impending subtopian incarceration (in a section of Los Angeles' Century Regional Detention Center reserved for celebrities, public officials, police officers and other high-profile inmates, in a cell shared with a “reckless driver”)‚ and Lindsay Lohan's upcoming 21st birthday bacchanalia (in Las Vegas, right after spending 30 days at the celebrity architecture du jour — the rehab center), we heard reports of the jet-setting TB-infected Atlanta lawyer quarantined in Denver (an accidental celebrity in a rehab center of a different kind, as it were), flown there yesterday with an escort of federal marshals.
His flight manifest immediately piqued our interest. It's a doozy.
News reports tell us that after it was discovered that he had been infected with tuberculosis and advised not to travel, Andrew Speaker took a flight anyway for his wedding and honeymoon, first to Paris and then to Greece, presumably taking sidetrips here and there. After Greece, Speaker took another flight to Rome. There, he received a phone call telling him that further tests have revealed that his TB was of an extremely dangerous form. Now placed on the US no-fly list, he decided to cirumvent this restriction on his movement by flying to Montreal via Prague — in a confined space(!) for over 8 hours(!) with other people(!) within close transmission range! From Canada, he then crossed the border back to the U.S. by car. The CDC was frantically trying to get in touch with Speaker during this time. Upon learning that he was back in the country and en route to New York, they instructed him to check himself into a hospital there.
(We want to mention that he was phoned by one Dr. Martin S. Cetron, who as the director of the CDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, should definitely be interviewed.)
His travels were not yet over. After being quarantined for three days in New York, he was put on a flight — this time on a CDC-operated plane with masked passengers and crew — to Atlanta where he was detained under a federal health order, making him the first patient to be placed in forced isolation in more than 40 years. And yesterday, as previously mentioned, he was flown yet again to Denver. Whether this is the last leg of his Infection Tour of 2007, we don't know.
As dizzying as this sounds, one only needs to imagine health officers tracking down the passengers and crew, their connecting flights (if any) and their connecting flights afterwards (if any), and to their drive home with family and friends, to hotels and restaurants, and their countless passings through crowded public spaces, to realize that there's a lot to trace and retrace still.
For a cartographer, it must sound absolutely spine tingling. It's like mapping out the initial migration of the 1918 flu pandemic from Kansas to the trenches of World War I and then to the rest of the world; or plotting the route taken by the HIV virus from its incubation chamber in the rain forests of Congo and its journey up and down the Kinshasa Highway (a.k.a. AIDS Highway) before bursting out of Africa.
In what must have been some amazing synchronicity, Critical Spatial Practice reminded us yesterday about Terminal Air by Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy.
Spatialized as a CIA office-cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia, from where the Extraordinary Rendition Program is presumably coordinated, the project explores the “complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program. Since the mid-90’s, the CIA has operated the extraordinary rendition program, in which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation. A thoroughly modern enterprise, the extraordinary rendition program is largely carried out using leased equipment and private contractors. These private charter planes often use civilian airports for refueling, making their movements subject to public record and visible to anyone who knows which tail numbers to look for.”
In the future Ebola-SARS-smallpox-Avian flu scourge, rendition flights for the terminally ill will be coordinated in a CDC/WHO office-cum-travel agency and carried out using remotely operated private charter planes departing from little known and abandoned airports, stopping for refueling at major international airports, where they sit on the tarmac like ticking biological time bombs.
“High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them,” writes Richard Preston in The Hot Zone, this after recounting, in gory details, the progression of the Ebola-like Marburg virus on a man in central Africa (in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital, we read, his internal organs failed, and he “bleeds out” from every orifice).
The image of contrails crisscossing overhead, stitching distant places together, is an apt premonition of what comes later in the book — that of an outbreak of Ebola among a population of monkeys halfway around the world in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC, imported there on those white contrailed airplanes, and about to break out into the general population.
Our pustuled and hemorrhaging cargo will similarly pass over enchanting landscapes, leaving vaporous tracings for Ebola enthusiasts to track, eventually finding its way to highly specialized medical treatment centers, which from the outside look like typical suburban houses with picket fences and generic landscaping but are actually top secret Biosafety Level 4 labs.
In any case, there are other things of particular spatial interest to us.
There's his quarantine room, for instance, an isolation chamber with its own independent ventilation system, irradiated with ultraviolet lights, and where any normal conversation probably gets droned out by the beeps and whirrings of machinery, the technical mutterings of nurses and doctors, and benedictions from the worried. Or so we imagined. Who designs these rooms, one wonders. Are there any elements engineered purely out of aesthetics, surpassing any functional concerns, or is the former inherent in the latter? Is there a simulation epidemic chamber where they get tested, where one could inspect for leaks as one would assess a home inside an earthquake simulation hangar?
And there's that liminal space separating the patient from the outside world, that semi-impervious partition for preparation and decontamination. It's a zone of waiting, where one is possibly compelled to pray — Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me — while wondering what the cafeteria is offering for lunch today.
Etc.
Since we've obviously gone off in the fetid deep end, we'll mention one last thing: Wikipedia describes Reston, Virginia as “an internationally known planned community that revolutionized post-World War II concepts of land use and residential/corporate development in American suburbia.” And although the city was “planned before the term New Urbanism entered into mainstream use, in many ways it follows new urbanism guidelines.”
One can only therefore wonder here whether the Ebola outbreak represents a form of critique of New Urbanism and corporate landscapes, the same way AIDS, as Preston remarks, was an immuno-response by the earth to the human species creeping deeper and deeper into the jungle, clear cutting everything in sight for agriculture, diamonds and gold.
To put it in another way, urban planning can only be considered successful if it can spatially repel Nature's WMDs.
In her amazing book Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, Cornelia Dean recounts all too briefly what Galvestonians did to their city after the hurricane of 1900, which killed nearly 6,000 people and reduced what was then considered “the center of commerce for the entire Southwest” into a mountain of driftwood. Rather than retreating from the shifting sands to higher elevations, perhaps on the Texas mainland, we read that the city decided to remain where it stood and build a seawall to fence itself off from future disasters. More incredibly, it then raised everything behind the wall — houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens — by as much as 17 feet, and the revealed negative stratum was flooded with silt.
It was a “plan that even in an era of engineering daring stood out for its size, cost, and audacity.”
According to Dean:
The lifting operation was one of sheer brawn. Laborers ran beams under the buildings and mounted them on screwjacks that burly men turned by hand. In this way, 2,156 buildings were laboriously hoisted, a quarter of an inch at a turn, until they reached the requisite height and new foundations could be built beneath them. Meanwhile, children climbed rickety catwalks to reach their schools; housewives hung their laundry from lines strung fifteen feet above the ground.
Even substantial structures took to the air. At St. Patrick's Church, a three-hundred ton brick structure, services continued as it rose to the grunts of laborers manning two hundred screwjacks beneath it.
To repeat: At St. Patrick's Church, a three-hundred ton brick structure, services continued as it rose to the grunts of laborers manning two hundred screwjacks beneath it!
Once airborne—a proto-Archigram city in quasi-flight—dredged fill was delivered from a canal that engineers had dug down the middle of the island.
Day and night, dredges moved back and forth between Galveston Harbor and this canal, dredging up fill from the harbor bottom and spewing it out on either side of the canal in a slurry of water and sand.
There were some residents who did not want to jack up their properties; these same people then witnessed their houses getting “drowned in the slurry of sand.”
The owners of several elegant Victorian mansions declined to subject them to the rigors of the screwjack. Instead they let the pumped sand fill their first reception rooms or turned them into basements. The lawn of one graceful brick house, once surrounded by a ten-foot wrought-iron fence, is now edged by ornamental ironwork about a foot high—the top of the fence is peeking up through the surface of the fill that now surrounds it.
So who wants to take a bet on when Galveston will get jacked up again?
Or for that matter, when will it be done to New Orleans, Dakha, Venice, New York, and every other major cities in the world threatened by sea-level rise?
Our second anniversary is fast approaching, so we've been looking for something to treat ourselves with, the same way we treated ourselves to some passkeys to Kubrickian and Schnitzlerian sex orgies. A very promising candidate comes from the University of Florida: the world's largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator.
According to the article linked above, the simulator has eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans that can whip up winds up to 130 mph (Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale). Researchers at the university will use it to blast vacant homes not only with hurricane winds but also with high-pressure jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.
“The goal: to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage.”
Obviously, we'll have better use for it:
1) Take it to New York during Postopolis! and blast the Storefront to see how well Vito Acconci and Steven Holl can structurally withstand a Category 3, if its configurable façade is supple enough, malleable enough to respond to weather (architecture vs. landscape; objectified forms vs. enigmatic forces; formalism vs. uncertainty; fixed dynamism vs. ambiguous processes; starchitects and MoMA'd provacateurs vs. landscape architecture bloggers). That or to demonstrate the effects of climate change on the city with exceedingly more immediacy and greater visceral effects than some Google Earth overlay showing the city inundated by sea-level rise. In any case, we'll call it an art installation.
2) Take it to Montana where we'll seek out a Hollywood mogul with millions of dollars to spare, and because he is bored out of his wits, he's more than willing to fund our proposal for a landscape intervention: a hurricane-scoured Floridian landscape simulated on the badlands - terrifying, sublime, beautiful.
A team of astrophysicists and engineers are busily boring through the ice caps of Antarctica. More than 70 holes will be drilled, spread out over an area approximately 1.5 square miles. Each one will be 1.5 miles deep, or at least 4 times the height of Sears Tower, and wide enough to fit one person snugly. A string with about 60 optical sensors will be lowered into each hole, after which water is pumped in and allowed to freeze, thereby locking the sensors in place.
So what is it?
It's a telescope, of course.
Called the IceCube, it's a chunk of the polar ice caps turned into a gigantic scientific instrument, which astronomers hope will capture a few wayward neutrinos, those extremely elusive subatomic particles that travel for millions of light years through space, passing right through galaxies, planets and extraterrestrial civilizations but rarely colliding with even a single atom. In fact, trillions of them are passing through your body while you're reading this post. Right now. Every second. Undetectable.
These ghost particles come from exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes and neutron stars. So when completed, this cubic kilometer telescope will enable scientists to gaze into some of the most distant bodies in the cosmos and witness its most violent events. And if those aren't enough, it may even help to unravel some of the mysteries behind dark matter.
Trying to observe neutrinos — and other cosmological phenomena — always seem to make for fascinating landscape and architecture.
For instance, there is the Super-Kamiokande, that water-filled “giant crystal cathedral” somewhere deep underground in Japan. It once suffered a catastrophic accident six years ago but was recently restored to its former beatific grandeur, as the photo below can attest.
And then there's CERN's Large Hadron Collider, featured twice before on Prunedhere and here, which when it comes into service later this year or the next, will help scientists detect subatomic particles far more elusive than neutrinos.
Lastly, we've always been fascinated by this unfortunately resized photo, downloaded via this BBC Newsarticle, of UK professor Jim Hough. At his feet is “a shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig through until you realize it stretches for hundreds of metres.”
“The sheeting hides a trench,” the article goes on to explain, and protected within is “the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves.” Angled perpendicularly to another tube, both of which have been plopped down on the countryside, both running next to some country road (which must surely offer travelers picturesque views of quaint English cottages and pastoral landscapes), besides hedges, through farms and pastures, surriptitious and rather banal looking — it's a new kind of telescope for a new kind of astronomy.
Which leads us to wonder what other astronomical infrastructure lies half-hidden somewhere in the landscapes, masked as public works in the streets of, say, Chicago or as ornamental decorations on the sides of gentrified high rise condos and intentionally innocuous office towers or as patches of urban forests whose trees spend all their time detecting and capturing intergalactic radio waves instead of sunlight for photosynthesis — all of which have been aggregated and networked into a kind of telescope the size of North America.
The vernacular built environment as a subfield of astronomy. Or vice versa.
Landscape architects and neighborhood gardeners would be recruited. You sign up on some website, and before the week is over you receive a small package containing seeds in the mail. But they are not just any seeds. These ordinary-looking seeds have actually been genetically modified to detect X-ray bursts from the sun or from some extragalactic sources located halfway across the Universe and emitted billions of years ago. Come winter, you send in dead flowers, leaves and whatever seeds that have been produced to a central processing lab where they are grounded, bombarded with lasers, and analyzed. Gardening as collaborative distributive astronomy.
Or instead of plant material, you get some weirdly futuristic devices and contraptions that look like — and do indeed function as — lawn edgers or cupolas for your gazebo, but obviously you know full well that they attuned to the songs of black holes.
Large professional firms, meanwhile, will get something a bit larger — a freight shipment of what must seem like a full-scale version of Frank Gehry's stainless steel acoustical tresllis, which must be installed in their next Super Park project. There, above the heads of picnickers enjoying the night's program of light classical music, it will scan the heavens for remnants of the Big Bang.
The whole earth upturned so that we might get a glimpse of Creation.
Surely this can be applied here in Chicago, right?
Enwave and the City of Toronto have created an innovative cooling system that brings an alternative to conventional air conditioning to cool Toronto's downtown core — one that is clean, price competitive and energy efficient. A permanent layer of icy-cold (4°C) water 83 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario provides naturally cold water. This water is the renewable source of energy that Enwave's leading-edge technology uses to cool office towers, sports & entertainment complexes and proposed waterfront developments.
The system has been in operation since 2004.
A similar form of air condition is being used in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At Purdy's Wharf, we read here, it “provides all the cooling for the building for 10 ½ of the year. During the remaining six weeks, the buildings use conventional chillers, but the seawater is used to cool the condensers. The system was paid off in two years, and saves the complex more than $100,000 annually in electricity and maintenance costs.”
In the U.S., Cornell University is implementing its own deep lake water cooling system.
In 1962, entomologist Jean Ruelle — as if possessed by the unborn spirit of Rachel Whiteread — filled a mature Macrotermes michaelseni mound with cementitious slurry, waited until it hardened, and then eroded every bit of the sculpted soil with water and trowels.
The revealed solidified negatives was nothing short of spectacular.
Of course, Ruelle and all the other entomologists who have performed similar “moundectomies” after him weren't actually pandering for a solo show at the Guggenheim or Tate Modern. In actuality, they were trying to find out how these earthen towers — which serve the respiratory needs of millions of termites busily tending to their underground fungi-farms — self-regulate their living environment in response to changing internal and external conditions.
They were investigating as well whether similar principles could be used to design buildings that need few or no mechanical services (e.g. heating and ventilation) and so use less energy and other resources than conventional structures.
According to Dr. Scott Turner at SUNY-ESF, “these mounds are devices for capturing wind energy to power active ventilation of the nest. They are adaptive structures, continually molded by the termites to maintain the nest atmosphere. This ability confers on the colony emergent homeostasis, the regulation of the nest environment by the collective activities of the inhabitants.”
Understanding how these mounds function, then, might inspire new types of structures that are self-suficient, environmentally friendly and cheap to run.
Quoting at length this article found at SciDevNet:
Evidence suggests that the temperature inside termite nests rarely varies by more than a few degrees, though outside temperatures can range from below freezing at night to 40 degrees Celsius during the day.
Researchers believe the structure of fine tunnels and ducts inside the mound play an important role in regulating temperature, as well as moisture levels and the replenishment of oxygen.
It seems that different parts of a mound's structure control different aspects of the nest environment. Moisture, for instance, appears to be regulated both in the mound's underground 'cellar' and possibly through evaporation from the top of the mound.
And although the termites must generate waste, none ever leaves the mound, indicating that there is some kind of internal system for recycling waste.
But what is most remarkable is that all this is achieved without drawing any energy from the outside world, or, as [Dr. Rupert Soar of Loughborough University's School of Mechanical and Manufacture Engineering] puts it, “they do it without being near the power station”.
[...]
“As we approach a world of climate change, we need buildings that are more responsive to our environment,” says Soar. If the average temperatures rise, he explains, there will not be enough energy to power air conditioners around the world.
And of course, there is also the possibility of constructing similar structures suited for use not only on arid, hostile environments on Earth but maybe one day on the Moon and beyond.
