[Image: Tokyo at night, courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory].At the height of the Cold War, the sprawling, decentralized suburban landscape of the United States was seen by many military planners as a form of spatial self-defense. As historian David Krugler explains in This Is Only a Test: How Washington...
Islands at the Speed of Light
A recent paper published in the Physical Review has some astonishing suggestions for the geographic future of financial markets. Its authors, Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, discuss the spatial implications of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such...
Color Code
[Image: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. Here's some eye-candy for a Tuesday evening: Arc en Ciel, a new building in Bordeaux, France—part residential, part office—by Bernard Buhler Architects, spotted via Architizer.[Images: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. With a building as...
Forensic Geology
[Image: The "Trevisco pit," Cornwall, from which the kaolinite used in space shuttle tiles comes from; photo by Hugh Symonds].Photographer Hugh Symonds recently got in touch with a series of images called Terra Amamus, or "dirt we like," in his translation, exploring mining operations in Cornwall."The...
Anti-Flat
[Image: By Gerry Judah]. Artist Gerry Judah's paintings are massively and aggressively three-dimensional, piling up, away, and out from the canvas to form linked cities, ruins, and debris-encrusted bridges, like reefs. [Images: By Gerry Judah]. They are perhaps what a tectonic collaboration between...
House Music
[Image: "Pass the Mic" by Sean Galbraith].The company Airborne Sound has a near-infinite website on which you can listen to royalty-free sound effects for everyday scenarios like dishwashers, traffic noise, office ambiance, overhead helicopters, vacuum cleaners, elevator shafts, construction sites,...
The Cloud Tent
[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC]."Artificial clouds" driven by solar-powered engines might be deployed at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to help keep the stadiums from overheating. Each cloud, as a...
Soundscape Ecology, or: An Archive Fever of the Ear
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Purdue College of Agriculture/Tom Campbell, via ScienceDaily].Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University is hoping to start a new research discipline that he calls soundscape ecology; it will "use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape," as...
The Elephant's Foot
[Image: Parable of the elephant, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai].An article this past weekend in the New York Times introduced us to a man named Sergei A. Krasikov, caretaker for the concrete "sarcophagus" inside of which rest the remains of Chernobyl's stricken reactor. The article is at once a...
Printable Insects and the Rise of the Architectural Superprinter
[Image: Courtesy of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory].Simulated insect wings have been 3D-printed by a research team at Cornell. The Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory explain that they are in the process of "developing a flapping-wing hovering insect using 3D printed wings and...
Truth Windows
[Image: An Australian truth window, photographed by Peter Halasz, courtesy of Wikipedia]."Truth windows" are false windows cut into the interior walls of buildings, used to reveal what lies within that wall and, thus—like something out of an architecturally themed remake of The Matrix—what the building...
Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay
In his book London Orbital, Iain Sinclair writes that Heathrow Airport—with its "inscrutable geometry," surrounded by "international hotels, storage facilities, [and] semi-private roads"—is utterly "detached from the shabby entropy" of London. Indeed, "Heathrow is its own city, a Vatican of the western...
