Day: 24/12/2014

Back to opportunities in real estate: if you were tempted by the Minneapolis skyway but you’re saving your money for something a bit warmer throughout the year, consider snapping up the «Submarine Pits on Boca Chica Key.»

As Sotheby’s describes the carved landscape of submarine docking pens, the pits can be found amidst «approximately 122 acres of vacant land just north of Key West.»

They’re basically just deep slots blasted through the coral and limestone, barely visible beneath the water line in the form of somewhat ominous black strips where the ground drops away.

The site is zoned as a «Commercial Fishing Special District,» perhaps implying some future reuse of the submarine pens as exotic fish farms.

But imagine all the weird opportunities here for submerged foundations, underwater hotel rooms, or other half-aquatic facilities—even something like the Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG—looped in and around these linear, Nazca-like features.

From Sotheby’s:

This parcel was used by the Navy Air Station to house its submarine war ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and has a very colorful and distinct history. Perfect for marine use and development in a great location. Property includes seven finger cut coral canals that are 90 feet wide and over 25 feet deep, plus a deep water basin with dredged entry channel that provides passage to Boca Chica Channel (Oceanside) and Key West Harbor (Bayside).

The asking price?

A mere $21.2 million—but then these drowned geoglyphs in the semitropical sun can be all yours.

I just spent the bulk of the day out on a tour of the Global Containers Terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey, courtesy of the New York Infrastructure Observatory.

That’s a new branch of the institution previously known as the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, who hosted the MacroCity event out in San Francisco last May. They’re now leading occasional tours around NYC infrastructure (a link at the bottom of this post lets you join their mailing list).

There were a little more than two dozen of us, a mix of grad students, writers, and people whose work in some way connected them to logistics, software, or product development—which, unsurprisingly, meant that everyone had only a few degrees of separation from the otherworldly automation on display there on the peninsula, this open-air theater of mobile cranes and mounted gantries whirring away in the precise loading and unloading of international container ships.

The clothes we were wearing, the cameras we were using to photograph the place, even the pens and paper many of us were using to take notes, all had probably entered the United States through this very terminal, a kind of return of the repressed as we brought those orphaned goods back to their place of disembarkation.

A post yesterday over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun described a new game called «Kieru,» in which monochromatic ninjas lost in a monochromatic landscape alternately blend in with and radically stand out from their architectural surroundings.

As Rock, Paper, Shotgun explains, the design of the game is such that «you’ll be trained to react to colour and shadow—two things that are traditionally irrelevant for most games—in completely new ways.»

This statement combined with the aesthetic of the game itself also brought to mind an undergraduate thesis project that we looked at last week, by Anthony Morey at SCI-Arc, where a rotating, monochromatic exploration of architectural space plays havoc with your sense of volume, shadow, and massing.

Is it a neoclassical temple casting shadows in all directions at once, or some other explosion of architectural representation to suggest new ways of drawing space?

One of many things I like about this project is how it suggests architecture is, in a sense, the art of interrupting shadows, not playing with light but an artful rearrangement of darkness.

South of San Francisco, a whole town is being deformed by plate tectonics. These are the slow but relentless landscape effects known as “fault creep.”

The signs that something’s not right aren’t immediately obvious, but, once you see them, they’re hard to tune out.

Curbs at nearly the exact same spot on opposite sides of the street are popped out of alignment. Houses too young to show this level of wear stand oddly warped, torqued out of synch with their own foundations, their once strong frames off-kilter. The double yellow lines guiding traffic down a busy street suddenly bulge northward—as if the printing crew came to work drunk that day—before snapping back to their proper place a few feet later.

This is Hollister, California, a town being broken in two slowly, relentlessly, and in real time by an effect known as “fault creep.” A surreal tide of deformation has appeared throughout the city.

A Washington state legislator has channeled his inner Hans Hollein, proposing the radical adaptive urban reuse of discarded military equipment: turning old aircraft carriers into a new toll bridge for Seattle.

From gCaptain:

A Washington state lawmaker looking to ease traffic congestion for several Puget Sound-area communities near Seattle has proposed building an eye-catching new toll bridge made from retired Navy aircraft carriers.
It would involve at least two—although possibly many more—aircraft carriers laid «end to end» to cross a local stretch of water known as the Sinclair Inlet.

«This would definitely be a unique way to tackle some of those problems,» the representative stated to the AP, «but at the same time it would serve as a floating memorial to veterans and the sacrifice they have given to our country.

Just think of the epic possibilities here for pedestrian paths, interstitial business opportunities, weird spaces for physical fitness, peripheral plazas and decks available for private events, and new public park space.

Perhaps even, deep in the labyrinth of the old ships’ underbellies, you could open a restaurant, a bookstore, a cinema. A SCUBA academy. An architecture school.

It would be like a return to the inhabited bridges of an earlier age —— only gunmetal grey and prickly with artillery, like a surreal hybridization of Constant’s New Babylon and the U.S. Navy.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a real plan—it’s more of a casual remark by a state politician. No feasible studies, environmental reviews, or financial plans have yet been put in place, for example (although apparently one is in the works), and I personally doubt that such a thing could ever see the light of day.

But here’s to weird architectural visions popping up in unexpected contexts—and to the future civilian reuse of discarded military equipment, even (or especially) in spectacular urban ways such as this.

I found this thing in my desk again last night, and, as you can tell from the date in the image, below, it’s been following me around since 1998 (!). However, after seventeen years of carrying random clippings like this around in files, folders, drawers, and envelopes—after all, this is only one of many dozens—I decided it was time to get rid of it.

But not before writing a quick post.

The original article actually appeared in Scientific American way back in their 1898 issue, making the fragment, scanned above, just a snippet published 100 years later.

The original was called «A Brazilian Indian Telephone,» and you can read it over at Archive.org. Here’s the bulk of the story:
Mr. Jose Bach, in a narrative of his travels among the Indians of the regions of the Amazon, describes in L’lllustration an instrument by means of which these people communicate with each other at a distance.

These natives live in groups of from one hundred to two hundred persons, and in dwellings called «maloccas,» which are usually situated at a distance of half a mile or a mile apart. In each malocca there is an instrument called a «cambarisa,» which consists essentially of a sort of wooden drum that is buried for half of its height in sand mixed with fragments of wood, bone, and mica, and is closed with a triple diaphragm of leather, wood, and India rubber.

When this drum is struck with a wooden mallet, the sound is transmitted to a long distance, and is distinctly heard in the other drums situated in the neighboring maloccas. It is certain that the transmission of the sound takes place through the earth, since the blows struck are scarcely audible outside of the houses in which the instruments are placed.

After the attention of the neighboring maloccas has been attracted by a call blow, a conversation may be carried on between the cambarisas designated.

According to Mr. Bach, the communication is facilitated by the nature of the ground, the drums doubtless resting upon one and the same stratum of rock, since transmission through ordinary alluvial earth could not be depended upon.
While, in and of itself, this is pretty awesome, there are at least two quick things that really captivate me here:

1) One is the simple idea that the geology of the forest itself can be instrumentalized and turned into a «telephone» network, in the most literal, etymological sense of that word (voices [-phone] at a distance [tele-]). The landscape itself becomes a percussive grid of underground communication, pounding out messages and warnings from home to home, like submarine captains pinging Morse code to one another in the deep.

It’s fascinating and, in fact, deeply strange to imagine that little rumblings or booms in the soil are actually homes corresponding to one another—and that, given the context, they might actually be talking about you.

2) The other thing is how this could be updated or, as it were, urbanized for today. You go down into the basement to get away from your family, bored of your life, trapped in a house you want to leave, wondering if you’ll ever meet true friends, and you start randomly tapping away on the sump pump, when—lo!—someone actually answers back, skittling out a little rhythm for you from another cellar just up the street. A whole suburb of feral children, drumming messages to each other in the dark, hammering on their basement floors.

It’s like those scenes in old prison flicks, where two men tap back and forth all night on their cell walls, only, here, it’s people banging on cellar floors in New York City high rises or hitting sump pumps with mallets in the wilds of suburbia, speaking back and forth through their own «Brazilian Indian Telephone,» a kind of terrestrial sonar.

Many people, especially young students looking at becoming architects and enrolling in an architecture school, often wonder if architecture is an art form.

Can they call themselves artists, without too much pretension?

A large number of architects will probably agree that those who create or design buildings are certainly not artists, at least not in the traditional sense. However, whatever they create are akin to paintings on a very large canvas. Buildings have some limitations; the number one need is to be practical. They need to conform to measurements and standards established by the laws of physics and regulatory entities.

In fact, architecture is sometimes considered a form of science. Spatial awareness, math, and logic are all involved and once you have mastered all these abilities, you are able to be more creative with the designs of your buildings. It is also up to the public to determine whether a building is art – or not so much.

To some people, art is anything that can convey an emotion. There are many buildings that can make a person feel emotional, as soon as people set their eyes on them.

For instance, the Louvre is said to be energetic and beautiful, not because of the lighting and the content, but due to the shape of the building. The reason a building exists, can also add to its perception and luster. As soon as you step into the museum, you don’t want to leave. On the other hand, there are buildings you enter that make you want to spin on your heels and leave immediately.

Many architects treat architecture as art, as they feel that by integrating art pieces into architecture, it tends to make their work richer. Some architects believe that architecture is stand-alone art, and an argument can certainly be made for that stance. Architecture is functional, whereas art is mostly about visual aesthetics and philosophy. Unlike architecture, art is not often thought of as functional and art certainly does not need to be useful on a daily basis, like many people feel about architecture. But that doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive, either.

If you are interested in studying architecture, speak to as many professional architects as you can. Get an idea of hard it might be or other areas in which you need expertise – municipal law for example. As them the art question and how they view themselves and the world of architects. It’s a fairly small one, but with 1,000s of new buildings being built every year, obviously influential.

One more thing to keep in mind; art is often thought of as fleeting but buildings are meant to last.