> jim rossignol

Some of you will already know what it is. Hopefully I will be able to blog about it soon. The project should soon result in www.big-robot.com pointing somewhere other than this blog.

For entirely unrelated robot-themed happenings from my fingers, check out Total Eclipse Of The Reactor Core.

More soon.

A couple of years ago we bought a house. Half a house, really, as it was the end of a 19th-century cottage. We’d been living there for a month or two when we found something peculiar in the letterbox. It was a sepia photograph of the house, which you can see below. (Click for full size.)

The print was in a cheap cardboard frame of the kind you might have used for class photographs in at school. There was no writing on it, no leaflet, nor any other explanation. It had almost certainly been delivered while I’d been in the house, so whoever had dropped it off clearly had no intention of explaining themselves. We put this mysterious gift above the fire and occasionally pointed it out - along with the accompanying tale of anonymity - to visitors.

Months later and my mother had come by. She - as is her inclination - went off to nearby second-hand bookshops, returning with random publications for us and the rest of my family. One of these included a book of photographs of the local area. Two of these photographs were of our house, and one of them was the photograph which had been put into our letterbox.

The caption read: “(c1903.) Here the photo-grapher has gathered a small group of ladies, and a dog, to stand still long enough for this superb picture to be constructed.”

That isn’t a dog. It’s a wheelbarrow.

Intrigued by this mistake, we began to discuss what this could mean. We soon realised that our house, being old and creaky, must be haunted by the ghost of a wheelbarrow. Perhaps the wheelbarrow was already dead when this picture was taken, and its appearance in the photograph is actually some kind of warning. The wheelbarrow could quite easily be the West Country equivalent of the black dog of legend.

Later, when clearing away the heavy undergrowth in the back garden, we found a standing stone. A gravestone. Who or what could be buried here?

The answer seemed clear: our house had been built on an ancient wheelbarrow burial ground.

Having crossed paths with Geoff Manaugh and BLDGBLOG a few years ago, I’m now a regular reader, and even an occasional contributor. My endorsement of this book does have a ring of inevitability to it.

The site seems to have captured the attention of thousands of people by allowing us to take an interest in the built environment in a way that hadn’t seemed viable before: allowing in elements of science fiction, fantasy, speculation, and general imagination. Of course architecture has always been about these things, but recently it seems as if the layman - outsiders to the profession - are being allowed to take a closer interest. Just another side-effect of the altered information flows of the early 21st century. That, and the work of some interesting writers.

Without Manaugh’s own fiercely speculative writing the site would be without its vital spark. He reports on stories, ideas, notions, flights of fancy, but adds his own context, an endless cascade of “What if?” scenarios to bring geological data-storage, subterranean sculpture, redesigned atmospheres, resurrected fortifications, and a million other architectural themes to life.

This is science fiction, but in the manner defined by Brian Aldiss. It is “the sub-literature of change”. The same is true of the book, which I’ve just finished reading. Manaugh storms through a number of his favourite blogging themes: The Underground (adventures in subterranean architectures, geology), Redesigning the Sky (atmospherics, artificial metereology, aurora on demand), Music, Sounds, Noise (architectural acoustics), and Landscape Futures. Each of these receives a series of small essays, which report on interesting phenomena, such as how cities and mountain ranges influence weather patterns, before plunging into the consequential possibilities: weather as spectator sport, weaponising the atmosphere, and so on.

It’s a book that contains multitudes. The core bits of essaying are supplemented by sidebar notes from the blog, as well as the site’s best entries, and a bunch of interviews with architects, musicians, artists, and writers. It’s also lavishly illustrated with dozens of colour pictures.

Through a couple of junctures in this book the sober British empiricist in me frowned at Manaugh’s more outlandish flights of fantasy. I’m not sure whether that’s because the context of reading such ideas in a book seemed to carry a different gravity to reading them on a blog, or whether the occasionally unscientific fiction he was creating challenged even my reasonably broad capacity for playfulness and optimism. He is not dealing in analytical “reality”, of course, as the introduction makes plain:

“…forget academic rigour. Never take the appropriate next step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program, and landscape in the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the span of three sentences - because it’s fun, and the juxtapositions might take you somewhere. Most importantly, follow your lines of interest.”

Which, as a statement of philosophy sounds rather like one of the book’s literary godfathers, JG Ballard: “My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.”

Over-using that quote. I’ll stop now.

Assuming the world does end up flooding, thanks to defrosted polar regions, then we’re unlikely to be taking to the seas. We’re more likely to just cluster along the new coastlines, dealing with the flooding and building our new homes around it. Bruce Sterling looks at such things happening right now in this Serbian documentary, where people living on uninsurable land, or regularly flooded sections of the Danube. They are building piecemeal dwellings that either float, or are on stilts, and repurpose and reuse materials from other dwellings.

I felt like this was perhaps a glimpse of how a flooded Europe might end up living, as we enjoyed our Mediterranean climate, and scrabbled for space to live amid the newly flooded valleys. A pretty tranquil kind of dystopia.

Last Friday, at the Architectural Association in central London, I attended a symposium called Thrilling Wonder Stories. It was a series of talks arranged by Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh, and attended by a whole bunch of people from a range of disciplines. (I was listed on the billing, but didn’t actually have a presentation and contributed little of interest. Not that my tiny mind was needed, because there was a colossal array of speaking talent in attendance.) Brief impressions follow.

Introduction by the director of the Architectural Association, then Liam Young, and then Geoff Manaugh. The BLDGBLOG author instantly started connecting science fiction, speculation and narrative with architecture, leaping from one idea to the next. He values this kind of collision of ideas, and wants everyone else to. I suspect we could all have listened to this for another hour or two, but it was onward to the first speaker.

Peter Cook, seventy-something Archigram founder and working architect, was full of energy. He stood up to talk about “Weird Shit International” as a much-needed movement in architecture across the decades. He cast off layers of t-shirts, each one seeming to show his association with weird shit in building design across forty years, while narrating a series of architectural pictures - near-abstract things that connected disparate ideas from robotics to kitchenware. He lamented “up and down” building design philosophy, and laughed that the Oslo school of architecture was pumping out such boring graduates of that philosophy, when a solar-powered autonomous robot was mowing the grass-lawn roof above their heads. A situational joke that they did not seem to get.

Viktor Antonov was next. The Citadel from Half-Life 2 is probably the most famed of his creations, at least among my people, and he discussed some of his angles on design production. He talked about rendering impressionistic, low-detail cities to bring forward psychological aspects - the most intense the situation, the less of the environment you see - as will be demonstrated in the forthcoming animated film, The Prodigies. Calm scenes mean painterly but detailed environments, and action reduces the rendering to mere pencil-form sketchiness. Then he showed us how altering a couple of architectural parameters - increasing the height of the ground floors of Paris, and the monumental size of the smokestacks - could instantly render a real city in a science fiction oeuvre. It’s fascinating to see some one as artistically accomplished as Antonov precisely pinpointing the theory that underlies how he goes about creating stuff. The Paris he was designing looked phenomenal, but will never likely be unveiled, as it was for The Crossing. The game was recently frozen by its developers, Arkane Studios.

Lunch was weird: a side room full of speakers eating roasted vegetables and creme caramel, discussing the importance of JG Ballard. “Do you have to be dead to be taken seriously?” asked one of the speakers. Visions of undead lich-architects taking the podium. What do architecture commentators talk about when confined to lunch? Tombs, death, other writers.

Then we returned to hear from Iain MacLeod, the science fiction author. He spoke, somewhat distressingly, of the way in which British schoolchildren writing science fiction almost inevitably write about dark futures. The rocketship wonder of earlier decades is gone, and our children write dystopias by default: a fascinating, terrifying realisation. He seemed rather earthy and upbeat, and talked of how problems mean invention, and creativity, but I couldn’t help think about a generation of kids for whom there is no bright imagined future: only Bladerunner, eco-death, the Drowned World, apocalypse. MacLeod talked about the problems for idealistic sci-fi now, and I wonder if there was something about the hip nihilism of modern fantasy, combined with relentless terror-cancer newsmedia shit, that really will stop future generations bothering to climb out of their doomed shrug. I wondered whether we needed to send some idealists into schools, give Chris Anderson’s essay on optimism an outing. “Percentage of males who died in violence in the 20th century complete with two world wars and a couple of nukes? Approximately 1%. Trends for violent deaths so far in the 21st century? Falling. Sharply.” And so on.

Next up: Nic Clear. A lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, Clear was focused on discussing how cross media influences of a kind that weren’t given the nod by the core architectural profession could be valuable. Film making, novels, were important to architectural education too, he claimed. I felt like his message got a bit lost. It was basically: JG Ballard should be on reading lists, and architects are educated people who don’t have one clear portfolio. That rather got swamped by oppressive student films that he played as the second part of his presentation. Clear wanted architects to step back and think, and not to buy into pre-packaged positive thinking of capitalist sales speak, something like that. Big downers are good for you, it seems.

Then a design firm called Squint Opera took the stage. They were a fun kind of antidote to the proceedings up this point, playing a glossy, colourful show reel in which giant pins fell from the sky into microcosm living-blueprints, and UFO-stadiums hovered amid blizzards of ticker-tape - these were the staple of their architectural energy. Before that they showed slides of “Flooded London“, which presented the submerged, ruined capital as actually rather playful: an opportunity to turn the city into a watery paradise. They seemed to have a kind of cut-and-paste notion of how architecture should be sold and discussed, and they mentioned later that how they pictured the Olympic stadium, and how it turned out, were rather different. There was some kind of antagonism between their angle and that of Clear: they were operating on the kind of bright optimism of epic cashflows that Clear was unhappy about, prescribing to some coffee-on-the-terrace decadence that he saw as unrealistic. Nevertheless they were at the heart of the symposium: science fiction as part the real, day-to-day business of making buildings.

Then the most extraordinary storm of science-madness came from Francois Roche (of architects R&Sie) whose thick accent masked incredible phrases: “strategies of sickness”, “protocolising the witch in the forest”, “the necrosis of the building”, “the penis of the wall”… he talked about feeding death and traditional fairy tales into design, and about creating a machine that would build an un-navigable glass maze in the courtyard between buildings, into which people would wander, and then die, unable to escape without GPS. “They die to become part of the building,” he said, grinning, and propping expensive sunglasses on his styled bonce. He talked about a building in which would be constructed from vast, moulded versions of bullet holes on wet clay, covered in rotting vegetation collected from the Korean de-militarized zone by a purpose-built “witch” robot, referencing Tarkovsky’s Stalker on the way. Oh and this electrified hairy skyscraper that would suck pollution from the Thai atmosphere, and only be a little bit dangerous. Roche’s firm seems like one of the world’s most valuable imaginative resources: technically accomplished, with a healthy streak of insanity. He would be the guy the evil genius would go to for the Volcano base plans. “Ten billion in blood money, what can you build me?” “A death-maze constructed from recycled local materials and plutonium!” Something like that.

Finally Warren Ellis took the stage and told the audience that science fiction wasn’t - and had never been - about predicting the future. He explained, in no uncertain terms, that it was - from War of the Worlds to Transmetropolitan - always about dealing with the present. Then he shouted at a passing ice-cream van and quoted Heinlein creating context for the new and unknown: “SF operates language differently than most other forms of literature. What SF does, which annoys most people, is subvert the sentence. Changing one word can put you in a new place. The usual example is from Robert Heinlein: ‘As the door dilated…’ Suddenly you’re in an entirely different place.” He also revealed a new project, which he called Electrograd. A city which had been a testbed for futures of the past, and is now being torn down to make way for futures of the present. And murder, of course, because it needs a good story. I can’t wait to see how that one unfolds.

In retrospect the entire event reminded me of a rather more lively version of the kinds of things my lecturers were trying to arrange during my philosophy degree: a cross pollination of ideas that told the students that what they were doing was about education, not vocation, and that mad, beautiful ideas were worth pursuing for their own sakes, because - damn! - all the people up on that stage were living them.

The whole thing was stamped, perhaps imperceptibly to everyone else, with a motto I come back to - paraphrasing Richard Rorty - which is: “anything can be redescribed”. Sometimes a new description is all you need.

Geoff Manaugh knows how to write:

The earth would become a kind of spherical harddrive, with information stored in those moving webs of magnetic energy that both surround and penetrate its surface.
This extends yet further into an idea that perhaps whole planets out there, turning in space, are actually the harddrives of an intelligent species we otherwise have yet to encounter – like mnemonic Death Stars, they are spherical data-storage facilities made of content-rich bedrock – or, perhaps more interestingly, we might even yet discover, in some weird version of the future directed by James Cameron from a screenplay by Jules Verne, that the earth itself is already encoded with someone else’s data, and that, down there in crustal formations of rock, crystalline archives shimmer.
I’m reminded of a line from William S. Burroughs’s novel The Ticket That Exploded, in which we read that beneath all of this, hidden in the surface of the earth, is “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.”

From the post Planet Harddrive on the peerless Bldgblog.

Incredible: WW2 images reshot and blended with modern day Russia.

The NYT on the tasks involved in fixing New York’s water system:

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.

For this, 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. They leave the tank only to transfer to a diving bell that is lowered 70 stories into the earth, where they work 12-hour shifts, with each man taking a four-hour turn hacking away at concrete to expose the valve.

BLDGBLOG continues to amaze with its link-dredging.

A long-exposure photograph from “City Of Shadows” by Alexey Titarenko.

A photo-essay.

Apart from his academic work, Robinson hardly ever leaves the flat except to go to the supermarket

For him, shopping is an experience of overwhelming poignancy

- Patrick Keiller, London