Inaba projects has made a verifiably fantastic video (available on YouTube) forecasting a gently totalitarian, evolving, regenerative urban future. The title, “Moore’s Law Meets Sustainability,” should give you a teaser of it’s unbridled positivism. This relentless, mechanistic optimism could have easily derailed the video, but it is just creepy and unreal enough to inspire rather than pacify.

On the other end of the spectrum, the City of Santa Cruz provides us with a powerpoint presentation entitled “Turning the Tide.” Buried within the promises to cut emissions and provide more greenspace, which (to me) only highlight the issues of attempting local solutions for a global problem, is the following slide:

This list can be seen as histrionic and alarmist by some (100 year flood levels, widespread drought, etc etc), but I actually found it to be comforting: here is the end result on urbanism in a few decades if we can’t manage to turn around world trends in industrial pollution and unbridled waste– desalinization plants, levees and dikes, and– as was suggested in a recent NYT article — urban shorelines that look more and more like Venice or Amsterdam.

I am somewhat reminded what I was once told on a tour of Prague, that centuries of debris had made the former first floors of many old buildings into the basements. I can only imagine, if the worst-case scenarios for ocean levels come true in fifty years, that some localities might choose canals and waterlogged first floors over losing long-held property. How do property rights fit in when the shoreline moves 200 feet inland in a decade?

One of the localised weather phenomena that I had to get used to, alonside the Santa Anas and “fire season”, is the fact that most of the early summer here is cloudy. Not just a little cloudy. End-of the world cloudy.

They give it cute names like “May Grey” and “June Gloom,” but the fact is, if you live and work west of Overland Avenue (such as I do), you get pretty depressed this time of year. And it doesn’t even rain– these are angry, but impotent clouds.

It’s as if, for the few months of the year the rest of the country is having clear weather, southern California is forced to borrow their clouds, and store them in the first few miles of land next to the Pacific, for use later in the fall.

Doulas Tomkins, the man who brought us North Face, allowing us to have wonderfully warm clothing that was either fuzzy on the outside, or makes little zip-zip-zip noises when you move, has been buying land in South America, piece by piece, as a private ecological preserve. At last count, he owns around a million acres in Argentina and Chile.

This is something like .15% of these two countries combined. This may seem small, but it is also over 1500 square miles, much of it in a long skinny squath about 35 miles across, next to the ocean. So there is a wee bit of controversy, not only for reasons of access, but because the land also happens to be on top of a very large resivoir.

All of this aside, I wonder what it would be like if someone purchased a long, skinny piece of, say, Utah, piece by piece, until they had bisected the state completely. All of a sudden, you would have a new datum, a Mason-Dixon line of the 21st century. Not to mention that you could now feel free to start a whole series of linear enterprises, from a linear accelerators to speedways for land-speed records, and, maybe, in the future, magnetic space launch facilities.

UPDATE: speaking of strategic reserves in the desert, this just appeared on archinect.

… Tony Garnier’s Prix de Rome-winning “project for a national bank”, of 1899. Image lifted from “Theory and Design in the First Machine Age”, in which Banham notes the embarassment “young progressive architects” had explaining how such a formalistic, nonfunctional plan could win a trip to Italy. To get a sense of the
scale, check out the tiny conference tables in the lower third. There were no sections or elevations in the submission.

I almost wish that this had been built, leveling some declared “slum-ridden” portion of Paris in the early part of the last century. Over the years, it would decay and the maintenance costs would skyrocket, until 100 years later (perhaps today), Parisians would decide that the only recourse would be to remove all of the windows and make an enormous enclosed city park, much as they did with some slaughterhouses a few decades back. A now-acclaimed losing entry from that competition would be revived and the marble halls meant originally only for “monumental circulation” would be reinterpreted as badminton courts, skating rinks, and art galleries (and, of course, a boulodrome). The collonades provide perfect goalposts, and the main banking room would become a quasi-open air cafe from which one could watch sumptuous anarchy unfolding in every direction.

Softball today. All I have to show for my efforts this time is a left thumb that looks like a link sausage. Therefore, today’s unearthed audio file is of me kicking ass at a perhaps slightly less athletic sport: boules (or petanque, if you’re snooty about it):

http://www.snapdrive.net/mp3player.swf

[Chris Jordan makes fantastic images of sifted waste. I can’t help but imagine Scrooge McDuck swimming in this pile of cellphones.]

Yesterday, I found out (thanks to BLDGBLOG) that Shell Oil Plans to create 1,700 ft high walls of ice in shale under the Rocky Mountains. This is to prevent groundwater contamination when they pump 800 billion gallons of crude sequestered in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Today, NY Magazine told me about a much smaller oil deposit — only in the range of 30 million gallons — that is notable because a) it sits in the middle of Brooklyn, and b) it is manmade (thanks, Mobil!). BLDGBLOG made a quick notice of this one as well.

This oil is going to be massively expensive to recover, and it’s not crude but an amalgam of decayed motor oil, benzene and other lovely poisons, but all the same, how long is it going to be before we start mining our own waste? Thanks to microelectronics, there is a higher concentration of gold in some landfills than in many mines. The only problem is that current recovery methods would be as destructive and messing as strip-and-leach mining already is; in other words, we’d just be making a lovely soup out of our trash and sucking up what we like. Kind of makes me think that the real action of much of industry is to select and purify specific, rare materials, make intricate weavings of these threads of pure stuff, and then pulverize these assemblies and scatter them into a giant pit.

The Isle of Man TT Race turned one hundred last weekend.

The thirty-seven mile circumference of this island, located between England and Ireland, is completed in about seventeen and a half minutes, by motorcyclists, frequently exceeding 150 miles an hour. The world record lap time features an average speed of 129.451 mph.

The villages along the race path are often transited in only a few seconds. For the entire day of the race, motor traffic is shut down, and over 600 volunteers are placed in a continuous line of sight along the entire course. In this way, the entire 37 mile journey is witnessed and protected, not unlike that of Xiang Xiang, the panda whose “return to the wild” was recorded in minute detail until her death.

In the past century the Isle of Man TT has claimed 226 lives. At current speeds, in the two-lap race, this is a death every 15 minutes. To add to this insanity of velocity, there is the annual “Mad Sunday” in which any member of the public can run the 1300 foot mountain section of the course. To those of you that wonder what this might have to do with architecture, may Marinetti visit you in your sleep (as the ghost of futurism’s past, of course), crashing ancient motor cars into your dreams.

(All images courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Went to the season opener for Sam’s summer-league ultimate team (go blue!). They won, of course, and we also got to dig out and play with my over-powered pre-digital flash from high school. Dragging the shutter is the coolest.

Continuing on my perusal of old recordings.

To go here:

Look at this:

While listening to this:

http://www.snapdrive.net/mp3player.swf

But first, a brief moment of silence for new beginnings.

Dreamsketch 3: alcove with light panel.
(the most hastily and blearily composed to date)

Here we have, at the ceiling of an unfathomably cavernous space, a narrow, long alcove hidden behind sliding frosted glass doors, in which there are a few concrete benches and a panel emitting a sodium-lamp orange shade of light. The air is hot, still, and tinged with ozone. There is a dry stifling wind in the open space beyond. There is no sunlight.