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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.
The most important thing is to enjoy your life & to be happy. It’s all that matters.
The London-based ScanLab Projects, featured here many times before, have completed a new commission, this time from the British Postal Museum & Archive, to document the so-called «Mail Rail,» a network of underground tunnels that opened back in 1927.
As Subterranea Britannica explains, the tunnels were initially conceived as a system of pneumatic package-delivery tubes, an «atmospheric railway,» as it was rather fantastically described at the time, «by which a stationary steam engine would drive a large fan which could suck air out of an air tight tube and draw the vehicle towards it or blow air to push them away.»
That «vehicle» would have been a semi-autonomous wheeled cart bearing parcels for residents of Greater London.
A gorgeous project called Non_Sequitur: A Neighborhood by Anthony Morey, made while still a B.A. student at SCI-Arc under the guidance of Dwayne Oyler and Thom Mayne, is well worth a look.
Morey describes the project as a strict exploration of drawing, tracking the effects of architectural «spillovers,» freely moving between volume, shadow, ground, and perspective while never fully arriving at a fixed state.
This has the effect of making the elaborate black shading spatially misleading. In other words, it is deliberately unclear if we are looking at rooms, walls, and landscapes, or merely at their secondary effects, at echoes, shadows, and repetitions extruded from an original form made illegible by the shapes that now surround it.
The form casts its own ground, so to speak, existing in a context of its own delays and translations.
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.