There’s an interesting post on archizoo about the concept of ‘Cathedral Thinking’:

For Rogers, the concept was about the care and commitment of people who contributed to building the cathedral, a decades-long task, yet would never see its completion. Its implications on vision and strategy development seemed to be about their outcome, a recognition that the successful implementation of the strategy may not be measured until long after it authors have moved on.

I think  starts to hint at the basic reason I’m so ambivalent about the project I posted earlier where a cathedral was converted into a bookstore. There’s something serene and foreign in the concept of thousands of people devoting their lives to a project they know they will never see finished; the sacrilege of that conversion in my mind has less to do with replacing religion with commerce and more to do with respecting the aspirations of all those craftsmen.  Especially in the US, there are very few objects which have remained important for more than a couple generations. We’re not going to be able to embrace long-term sustainability as a culture without retaining some reverence for the past; they’re two perspectives on the same process.

My Ninja, Please! just posted about a project I completely love: Sietch Nevada.

For those of you who don’t read a lot of Sci-Fi, the term ‘sietch’ comes from Frank Herbert’s masterpiece ‘Dune’.  The dune series takes place largely on a planet covered by (you guessed it) dunes; an entire planet covered by desert.  The inhabitants of the planet live in scattered settlements built into rock formations and their culture is largely based around an eons-long process of capturing water from the atmosphere to terraform the planet into a lush green forest.  The project above is a proposal which takes these settlements as a conceptual starting point and applies the idea to the imminent water shortage in the American Southwest.  From AMNP’s description:

MATSYS has created a subterranean city – taking the idea of waterbanking one step further, creating an underground canal system that both provides water to the inhabitants and allows for necessary irrigation of the proposed garden spaces in the center of each of the sietch’s cells.

There are so many things to love about this project; the apocalyptic desperation of moving underground, the synthesis of urban space and food production, the geothermal cooling approach, the voronoi diagram of the towers and canals, etc.  These are the types of though experiments that we need more of in theoretical architecture.

I’m generally annoyed at architectural proposals this divorced from the reality of what can be practically implemented; what makes this project different is that it starts from the perspective that eventually we will be forced to start thinking with a much longer time horizon that we have been, then proposes a design that could be plausible in this inevitable future.  This seems more like a contingency plan for an uncomfortable future than an ill-conceived and under-informed plan for what to do now.

If you’ve seen the holodeck on episodes of Star Trek here’s the real-life application. Essentially, Intel is working to create physical, three-dimensional replicas of people or objects, so lifelike that human senses accept them as real. This is interesting stuff for the field of medicine but it’s applications to architectural representation and built form merit discussion as well.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080108083214/http://www.intel.com/research/dpr.htm

Check out the section: ‘Potential applications of Dynamic Physical Rendering’

So the blogosphere is abuzz with some early entries to the Re:Burbia competition, and I thought I’d take this occasion to explain why I personally had no interest in the competition.  For anyone not familiar with the competition, the brief states “In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!”.  My basic response to this question is that we don’t redirect these existing spaces to promote all those wonderful things; we redirect the people living in those spaces to to our existing urban centers.

There’s a great article in the Atlantic which gets to the heart of the reason I have no interest in ‘fixing’ the suburbs:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

Here’s one for the next structural engineers we work with in California: physicists in france have recently extended their work on sonic invisibility cloaks to encompass buildings and earthquakes, and have proposed a method for designing buildings which are invisible to the shock waves of earthquakes.

Guenneau said that it’s possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren’t there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

“It’s the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it’s bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock.” The object, or building, is “invisible” to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. “Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object),” Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each “tuned” to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

This article has two facinating bits of information: that our planet has a regular cycle of mass extinctions which occur every 65-million years, and that these extinctions may be due to our solar system oscillating above and below the midplane of the Milky Way galaxy.  More from the physicist who proposed the idea:

From worldchanging:

Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.

…

In his recent Long Now talk (MP3 here), economist Paul Romer tells a story. In the early 1970s, China was stuck in a societal inertia after the death of Mao. However, right next door, Hong Kong (administered by the British) was a thriving city-state based on trade and innovative manufacturing. Chinese leaders decided to see if they could copy Hong Kong’s success on a limited scale, and set up four “Special Economic Zones” where foreign investment was encouraged and capitalism was unconstrained. The experiments were so successful economically that their rules soon more or less became the guiding principles of the Chinese miracle. As Romer says, “Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history.”

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

There’s also an interesting comment from Sean FitzGerald:

And now I realise why I find WorldChanging so frustrating.

The biggest barriers to social innovation are values, belief systems and world views.

Until you have a transformation of consciousness at all levels of society – individual, community, business and government – those institutional, legal and regulatory barriers will stay in place.

WorldChanging keeps pumping out innovative technologies, processes and systems and all I can think is: “Great, but it will never be implemented in time to save civilisation unless *we* change.”

…

I keep hearing from the technological optimists “All we need to do is swap out oil-based transport for electrified transport” or “All we need to do is retrofit our urban environments into paragons of sustainability” or now, “All we need to do is change the regulations that are holding innovation back”.

But it’s not “All we need to do.” You skip right over the very important step of having to change people first (or concurrently, at least). Until we change people’s values the latest, greatest sustainability-enhancing widget, technological breakthrough or grand social plan will stay on the drawing board.

To which ‘Brad’ comments:

True, Sean, the institutional, legal and regulatory barriers Alex describes derive from values, belief systems and world views, and it is those that need to change.However, in order to change those, you need to be able to propose a constructive vision based on differing world views by way of example.

Which gets to the heart of why this seems like an interesting idea to me; it allows the development of new models.  I see a lot of potential pitfalls here, most of the ‘restrictive’ building codes cities adopt are responding to catastrophic failures in the past – throwing these out opens the door to all sorts of unanticipated consequences.  The chinese free zones that are mentioned had one enormous benefit; they were duplicating a model which had already been tried and shown to work.

BLDGBLOG just picked up the story I posted yesterday about 16,000-year concrete, and refers to an earlier post with some facinating bits.  The post is for an interview with geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?.  Some excerpts:

The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of – and in large part because of – the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity. One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth’s surface will have been wiped clean of human traces.

…

Thus, one hundred million years from now, nothing will be left of our contemporary human empire at the Earth’s surface. Our planet is too active, its surface too energetic, too abrasive, too corrosive, to allow even (say) the Egyptian Pyramids to exist for even a hundredth of that time. Leave a building carved out of solid diamond – were it even to be as big as the Ritz – exposed to the elements for that long and it would be worn away quite inexorably.

…

So there will be no corroded cities amid the jungle that will, then, cover most of the land surface, no skyscraper remains akin to some future Angkor Wat for future archaeologists to pore over. Structures such as those might survive at the surface for thousands of years, but not for many millions.

…

Mexico City has a good short-term chance of fossilization, being built on a former lake basin next to active, ash-generating volcanoes; but its long-term chances are poor, as that basin lies on a high plateau, some two kilometers above sea level. The only ultimate traces of the fine buildings of [Mexico City] will be as eroded sand- and mud-sized particles of brick or concrete, washed by rivers into the distant sea.

This begins to address a discussion Calvin and I have had recently about the time horizon of architecture and the unconsidered possibilities of thinking in the very long term.  I wonder if we’re not the first sentient species to inhabit this planet?  Perhaps the great triassic extinction was actually caused by dinosaurs driving SUV’s from the grocery store to the movie theaters.  Maybe our iron ore mines are extracting the remnants of ancient metropolises.

I hadn’t heard much about this in a few years so I did some digging and it looks like we’re on the verge of having some very interesting technology for networking.  Back before wireless routers became commonplace there was talk of using a house’s electrical wiring as a data network – after all the copper is already there, why not use it for signalling as well as power.  The problem is that all the stuff we plug into our electrical wires creates a lot of noise, so transmitting data packets at a reasonable speed is difficult (older standards were too slow to use for networking).

Well it looks like they’re managed to solve most of those problems.  There are systems now that operate at up to 200Mbps (Wireless-G maxes out at 20Mbps in best-case scenarios), and there are standards being worked out which will provide gigabit/second transmission rates.  The first chips for these new standards are expected to start rolling out later this year or early 2010.  The most exciting of these new standards, G.hn, is designed to work over power lines, phone lines, or coax (I suspect the transmission rates will vary depending on which line is being used).

The reason this is interesting to me is that it allows practically anything in your house to be networked; toasters, garage door openers, fridges, televisions, lights, security systems, speakers, HVAC systems, PV arrays, etc.  Anything that plugs in could be networked by simply adding another chip to it’s internal circuitry (I would guess these chips will cost less than $10 in bulk).  Think of the possibilities!  This allows control and monitoring, so not only can the lights turn themselves off when you leave the house, you could graph the exact energy consumption of every appliance in your house.  Coupled with demand pricing for electricity, this would enable enormous gains in energy efficiency.

Penn State seems to have just started a video series dealing with the emergence of geospatial information as a significant cultural force – it looks very interesting:

We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”

Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

The project will feature a web-based serial release of eight video episodes—each telling an intriguing geospatial story.

There’s a preview video on the site that’s worth a watch.