Here are some opportunities for writers, designers, and filmmakers, in case you're looking for ways to challenge yourself over the summer.[Image: "Angels" (2006) by Ruairi Glynn, one of the co-organizers of Stories of Change].1) Arup Foresight and the Bartlett School of Architecture have teamed up to...
Urban Spelunking
[Image: The underground city of Derinkuyu, also mentioned in The BLDGBLOG Book].I'm heading out of town on yet another summer trip, so I wanted to give any Coloradans out there a quick heads up that I'll be speaking on the subject of "urban spelunking" at this Friday's Mixed Taste event at the David...
Discontinuous, contingent, and nontraditionally vulnerable
A recent article of mine for Domus, on the "critical foreign dependencies" list revealed last winter by Wikileaks, is now online, in case you missed it here, complete with some maps and infographics.[Image: Map by, and courtesy of, Domus, "in homage to Buckminster Fuller’s famous Dymaxion projection,...
Chicagoland
[Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].Photographer Noah Vaughn has been busy documenting the city of Chicago and its midwestern environs, both in his own images and in screenshots taken from films set there. [Image: Photo by Noah Vaughn].Here is some of Vaughn's own work, from demolition sites and windowless...
Waiting for the River
[Image: "Waiting for the River" by Observatorium]. Waiting for the River is a 125-foot-long inhabitable bridge, complete with dormitories, outdoor eating areas, and a bathroom, built by Dutch art group Observatorium back in 2010. The project was constructed in anticipation of the newly cleaned and renaturalized...
Manhattan Interzone
While we're on the subject of Domus #948, that issue also includes a short profile of Luc Sante's home book collection, including titles by Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and the Situationists. The article itself is by Gianluigi Ricuperati, a young writer who spoke long ago in the medieval days of Postopolis!...
City Double
First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city "of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris," and it would "contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums."[Image: The original Hallstatt, Austria; photo courtesy of Der Spiegel].Now,...
The Hit List
I'm thrilled to have two articles in the new issue of Domus, issue 948. One of those articles—on the list of "critical foreign dependencies" (page is very slow to load) released by Wikileaks in December 2010—is reproduced, below; the other is a short look at the Open Source Ecology movement. Keep your...
The Subterraneans
In an article published back in 2008—but pointed out afresh by a new post on Friends of the Pleistocene, exploring the aquatic infrastructure of New York City—there is an extraordinary image. New York's Rondout-West Branch Tunnel, we read—"45 miles long, 13.5 feet wide, up to 1,200 feet below ground...
A Can of Air, or: C.S.I. Duchamp
In 1919, artist Marcel Duchamp purchased a 50cc glass ampoule filled with Paris air as a souvenir for a friend; the sealed glass object was later exhibited as a readymade art piece called 50 cc of Paris Air. [Image: Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art].For...
Bass Ganglia
[Image: E13 000625 by Alberto Tadiello; photo by Martino Margheri, courtesy of T293, Napoli].Inspired by experimental Japanese sound weapons prototyped during World War II, Alberto Tadiello's E13 000625 (2010) mounts a bass cannon onto the wall of an art gallery, where it greets visitors with an alarming,...
Earth Moves
For more than a month now, a "slow-motion landslide" near the New York/Vermont border has been dismantling a small town, day by day, square foot by square foot. The landslide is "oozing slowly," New York state geologist Andrew Kozlowski explains to National Public Radio, "no faster than three feet per...
Peripheral Porosity
Last week at the Political Equator 3 conference, which described itself as a "2-day cross-border event" occurring simultaneously in Tijuana and San Diego, something very interesting happened on an inner edge of North American nation-state geography. [Image: The U.S./Mexico border photographed by Quilian...
The Space of Preparation
Swiss artist Zimoun, previously covered here for his work with the acoustics of woodworms, has been producing a long series of installations involving immersive cardboard structures—both surfaces and spaces—sonically activated by embedded motors. The rain-like plinks and plonks that greet you as you...
