landslide

click image for film

The Norwegian village of Rissa is located on a large deposit of clay.

In 1978 it was subject to a landslide that destroyed several farms.

San Francisco´s Beatles House

How long does it take until local landmarks become part of the local heritage?

Nostalgia and identity seem to go hand in hand.

The Lost History of San Francisco´s Beatles House.

laser suit

A spectacular suit outfitted with 200 laser diodes by designer Wei-Chieh Shih.

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a cornucopia of assorted links part I

The sleeping quarters of homeless people in Austin, Texas, seen through the lens of architectural photographer Ryann Ford.

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Photographic material of abandonded isolated settlements on the outskirts of human civilization.

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The prison cell that saved the life of Ludger Sylbaris during the eruption of Mount Pelee 1902.

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Norway´s forgotten Antarctica explorer- Borchgrevink´s prefabricated huts at Cape Adare.

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Life in the Achterhuis

An interactive 3D model of the attic that hid Anne Frank and her companions from July 6, 1942 to August 4, 1944.

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The cities of Yemen

Dar al-Hajar rock house
A tour of the cities of Yemen.

homo naturaliter est animal sociale

The United States has the world´s highest documented incarceration rate.
In 2007 over 7.2 million adults, or about 2.4% of the U.S. adult population were on probation or parole, in jail or prison, 2.3 million of those actually incarcerated.
Since 1979 the US incarceration rate has quadrupled- but not its prison space, resulting in overcrowding.
Out of a political conviction that rehabilitation were a futile pursuit, countless work and education programs have been axed.
In the light of the widespread use of long-term isolation of individual inmates as an attempt to quell violence resulting from the combination of those factors, a recent article in the New Yorker aims to answer the rethorical question:

Is solitary confinement torture?


adpsr architects/designers/planners for social responsibility describes the current US prison system as a moral blight and the disciplinary model of the prison a failure.
The group´s Prison Alternative Initiative appeals to pledge not to participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons and instead to develop productive alternatives to incarceration.

seizure

image: Seizure by Roger Hiorns was open July 23rd to Oct 18th 2008 at 151-189 Harper Road, London SE1.
In autumn 2008 a large scale chemical experiment took over a ground floor flat in London´s Elephant and Castle.
Effectively infesting the concrete structure with an organically grown bedazzlement, artist Roger Hiorns sealed off the walls of a bedsit in the housing block scheduled for demolition, then poured 90,000 litres of hot supersaturated copper sulphate solution through holes in ceiling from the flat above covered the walls of a bedsit in a housing block facing demolition. When the liquid was drained weeks later, all exposed surface area of the flat was revealed to be taken over by chrystal growths in a vibrant electric blue.

Link to photographs of the installation and the process involved at ICON magazine.
video of the installation

sewer sound

click to open link to article and soundfile

Sounds and musical interventions recorded in a recently constructed sewage pipe under Vienna. At a length of approximately three km and a diameter of 8m, the tunnel produces a reverberation of more than 20 seconds.
via the completeness

Goli Otok- an abandoned prison island in the Adriatic sea

Between the Croatian tourist islands of Rab and Krk , in the Adriatic sea lies a barren island, two by two kilometers in size, with strange ruins of prisons, bunkers and industrial sites.
Until the fall of communism Goli Otok, "the naked island" was a taboo in former Yugoslavia.
Today the island´s history is still an uncomfortable topic for many.
Austrian journalist Reinhard Grabner and camera man Franz Schwaighofer have now produced the first film about the island: "Strahota- Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok".
In 1949, the entire island was officially made into a high-security, top secret prison and labor camp run by the authorities of SFR Yugoslavia.

Goli Otok "was the private concentration camp of the Communist Party, more specifically: of Marshall Tito" says a former inmate, one of the contemporary witnesses interviewed for the film. Starting in 1948 critics not conforming to the system and political prisoners were confined to the island and subjected to forced heavy labor and tortorous abuse.
From the mid-60ies when also convicted criminals were imprisoned on the island "the prison situation normalised".

Over the course of four decades, apart from cell tracts and living quarters for the guards, the forced labour of the prisoners built a whole industrial zone, a number of factories for the production of furniture and tiles, even a pig farm that supplied the surrounding tourist islands. Former prisoners interviewed in the film tell about torture and abuse, and compare the conditions and the treatment with Guantánamo.
The island was eventually evacuated in 1988, leaving the facilities to decay.
"Strahota - Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok" premiered on May 5 2009.
A Croatian version is in the making. Alfred Pal, a former prisoner of Goli Otok plans to open an exhibition in Zagreb in July 2009.

Sources for further historic background and original photodocumentary material:
article in the Austrian newspaper derstandard.at (in German)
website about the film "Strahota- Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok
goliotok.com photodocumentation about the island
"Golit Otok- hell in tourist´s paradise" , photodocumentation about the island Goli Otok
"Die nackte Insel" a visit of Goli Otok- article in "Neue Zürcher Zeitung"
historical-political background (pdf, in German) from www.fraumuennich.de
"Goli Otok- hell in the Adriatic" book review

Putting a lid on it

"Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island (part of Enewetak Atoll), built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards (84,927 cubic meters) of radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot (9 meter) deep, 350-foot (107 meter) wide crater created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test. Note the people atop the dome." The Brookings Institution. via pruned

After the nuclear testing is over the dilemma arises on how to clean up any highly toxic radioactive leftovers. In a large scale equivalent of brushing things under the carpet, contaminated soil has been filled into a crater conventiently created by another nuclear test, before slapping a giant concrete lid on top.

The US Department of Energy aims to successfully clean all sites presently contaminated by "millions of gallons of radioactive waste", "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water" by 2025. The United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable.
On the problematics of radioactive waste, logistic and otherwise.


image: Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Department of Energy´s underground nuclear storage facility.
source: United States Department of Energy, screenshot.

"Ten thousand years from now, the last remaining momument of the U.S. military-industrial complex could well be the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant." article in WIRED magazine


image: SPIKE FIELD, a forest of menancing concrete spikes.
Proposal for sculpture on contaminated site.
Concept by Michael Brill, art by Safdar Abidi.
source: screenshot WIREDarticle

The longterm toxicity of radioactively contaminated material raises the strange moral issue on how to communicate the danger of contaminated sites to future generations that may have developed a different understanding of how to interpret a warning visual.
The planners of today have to imagine tactics to create a deterring genius loci for these modern cult sites of invisible danger and dread to keep the location and its physical contents taboo for the next thousands of years, resulting in the conceptualisation of markers and perimeter monuments and the development of an elaborate warning system by a conclave of scientists, linguists, anthropologists and sci-fi thinkers assembled by the US Department of Energy.
article in WIREDmagazine.



Approximate locations of information centers or large monuments (4 large circles) and perimeter monuments (small black circles) around the surface boundaries of the repository area. The smaller round circles with radiation symbols indicate the general locations of additional ground markers.
See also "The Monumental Task of Warning Future Generations"
See also article by Ulrich Beck in The Guardian " All aboard the nuclear power superjet. Just don't ask about the landing strip"- quote: "Climate change and the oil crisis are being used to project atomic energy as a green panacea. In fact it is a reckless gamble".

primal source

source: screenshot from www.haque.co.uk
Primal Source consists of a monumental screen of water illuminated by backprojection.
Set up against the night sky at the 2008 GLOW festival in Santa Monica, this installation allowed the audience to interact via a number of stationary microphones. Sound, music and the response emanting from the crowd of festivalgoers were translated directly into constantly changing visualisations.

source: screenshot from www.haque.co.uk
London based architect Usman Haque of Haque Design + Research specialises in the design and research of interactive architecture systems, building his practice around the concepts of hard space and soft space working in conjunction, considering architecture not as static, but dynamic, responsive and conversant.

click to watch video of installation.

split

Photographer, writer and documentarian Camilo José Vergara is renowned for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban neighbourhoods, often returning to the same areas to track the decline and development of specific buildings and urban environments over time.
In a recent photo-essay he explores the striking contrast between inhabited and deserted architecture, documenting the effects of declining urban population and property deterioration in paired townhouses in Camden, N.J.

image: 908 N. 24^th St., Camden, 2004. source

image: The same spot, five years later. The boarded-up house has been demolished. 908 N. 24^th St., Camden, 2009. source

link (via dorknob designs)

atlantropa

Atlantropa, also sometimes referred to as Panropa was a gigantic engineering and colonization project devised by the German architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s and propagated by him until his death in 1952.
A hydroelectric dam spanning the Strait of Gibraltar would cut off the water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean sea lowering water levels by 200 meters, provide Europe with an enormous energy supply and connecting Europe and Africa with several landlines. Enormous inland lakes would be created in Africa, whole countries (Congo) be flooded to create fruitful soil.
Europe and Africa would amalgate naturally into the new self-sustaining super-continent of "Atlantropa" and together with Asia and America be one of the three great geographic and economic units.

link

link (in German, visualisation of Sörgel's project at the Technical University Darmstadt)

link (article on 'Strange Maps')

nurikabe

Nurikabe , hiragana: ぬりかべ , a demon or yōkai from Japanese mythology and part of folklore on the Island of Kyushu.

Manifesting as a white or invisible wall with arms and legs blocking the path, it obstructs and misdirects walking travellers at night, blocking roads and delaying the journey . Trying to walk around it is futile- it extends itself eternally, blocking those trying to avoid it or running away, it may even fall on and crush the traveller. Many- sensing the invisible barrier around them- instinctively try to navigate around him and find themselves more lost than before or taking a longer route.

Some tales relate that Nurikabe is sticky, and upon contact the victim is unable to extricate himself, becoming part of the wall.

Only knocking on the lower part of the wall with a stick will make it vanish.

Also found in modern manga and videogames (the inspiration for the Whomp in Mario Brothers) and the namesake of a binary determination puzzle.

chora

Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in the
McGraw-Hill building in New York City for forty-one hours.
Video of his ordeal accompanying Nick Paumgarten´s essay
on elevators in the New Yorker.

quote:

"We borrow the term *chora* from Plato's *Timaeus* to denote an
essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted
by movements and their ephemeral stases." ... "Although our
theoretical description of the *chora* is itself part of the discourse
of representation that offers it as evidence, the *chora*, as rupture
and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, versimilitude,
spatiality and temporality. Our discourse - all discourse - moves with
and against the *chora* in the sense that it simultaneously depends
upon and refuses it. Although the *chora* can be designated and
regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can
situate the *chora* and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can
never give it axiomatic form."
(Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva,
translation Margaret Waller)

Choric space has clearly always been portable, as evident from the
description of the space between horse and chariot described as
‘Chora’ in Homer’s Iliad.
Even in the confinement of a prison cell, the pacing of
the cell by a prisoner in one critically defines the
interior space from its exterior.
The ‘chora’ described by ancient Greeks is a space, often
transient, and not necessarily described by walls.
Like choreography, architecture is significantly concerned with the
movement of people through space.
The Western origins of the space of
'Chora' or Khora in Plato's Timaeus – is as something animate and
moving – not detached and abstract.
It has been noted that architecture is not
only comprised of built matter, but is constituted of experience of space
byhuman ritual and interpretation.
Jonathan Hill, in the introduction to a book about this relation,
describes the user of architecture as an'illegalarchitect'."
- http://puffin.curtin.edu.au/~cowan/nomad/3/"
source

Junya Ishigami

The japanese pavillion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, the Venice Biennale features the work of Junya Ishigami.
20 students transferred his drawings of greenhouse structures in pencil onto the snow white interior walls of the exhibition space.
Outside the pavillion, a series of delicate one to one scale greenhouses are installed, turning the surroundings into a garden.

obligatory Venice Biennale post

Still shaking the confetti from the Belgian pavillion out of your socks and shoes?
Enjoy these articles for the perennially blasé..

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