Rock Type

[Image: Recording a landscape; photo courtesy of Jan Magne Gjerde, via Past Horizons Archaeology].

Last winter, Past Horizons Archaeology ran some remarkable photos from a site in NW Russia, close to the border with Norway, where more than a thousands petroglyphs have been discovered carved into the horizontal surface of the local bedrock.

Most of the site had been buried under 5,000 years' worth of mud, soil, and plant roots, and was only recently cleared by Jan Magne Gjerde, who otherwise works as a project manager at Norway's Tromsø University Museum.

[Image: The team looks down at the earth they will soon record; photo courtesy of Jan Magne Gjerde, via Past Horizons Archaeology].

"In the summer of 2005," we read, "Gjerde drove more than 1000 kilometres east to Lake Kanozero," where the glyphs are located.

"Together with Russian colleagues he discovered what he calls some of the world’s oldest animated cartoons." The glyphs, in other words, constituted a narrative—in this case, of a bear hunt. The sprawling series of images depict "a hunter who is heading uphill on skis and tracking a bear. The ski tracks are just as one would expect for someone going up a slope with a good distance between the strides. The hunter then gets his feet together, skis down a slope, stops, removes his skis, takes four steps—and plunges his spear into the bear."

Indeed, "The figures depicted in the Lake Kanozero rock carvings include moose, boats, whales, humans, harpoon lines, beavers and all kinds of other ordinary and extraordinary images and scenes from the distant past."

[Image: The petroglyphs; photo courtesy of Jan Magne Gjerde, via Past Horizons Archaeology].

Interestingly, though, "Boats represent one of the most popular motifs in the rock art of Kanozero; they form 16% of all figures," historians E.M. Kolpakov and V.Y. Shumkin explain in a paper published in Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

[Image: Boat glyphs from Lake Kanozero, courtesy of Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia].

In addition to the obvious interest of the site itself, though, the ensuing method of documentation is pretty awesome: Jan Magne Gjerde and his team camped out for ten days and traced all of the petroglyphs with chalk, covered the whole thing with huge plastic sheets, and then traced onto the sheets with felt-tip pen the graphic storyboards seen on the rocks below. This could then "be brought back home and properly photographed and documented." [Image: The petroglyphs and their tracing paper; photo courtesy of Jan Magne Gjerde, via Past Horizons Archaeology].

It should be published as a graphic novel! The world's oldest comic book.

Meanwhile, as part of the ongoing Venue project—which has slowly been accumulating posts, for those of you who haven't checked in for a while—we have been visiting a number of petroglyph sites out west in the United States, including images of animal hunts and atlatl-throwing etched into the rocks outside Las Vegas, of all places, and Utah's famous "Newspaper Rock," a kind of literary pilgrimage site, or monument to narrative media.

But these sorts of sites also always make me think that we cannot be far away from having easily deployable, personally affordable, field-rugged 3D milling machines capable of carving petroglyphs of our own into hard rocks anywhere in the world. Set up a Petroglyph National Sacrifice Zone or a Petroglyph Park on private rocky land somewhere in the Peak District or the mountains northeast of Yuma and build up the scaffolding for your inscription robot -slash- writing machine, and a future mythology of rock glyphs might emerge, carved two inches deep in solid granite.

[Image: Field scaffolding set up to study rock art in Egypt; photo ©RMAH, Brussels, courtesy of YaleNews].

Literature becomes a place you visit, a rock-carving district of canyons and massifs tattooed with bands and sprays of plots and character arcs. Shelled, self-repairing robots chisel all day and night, GPS-stabilized and surrounded by clouds of rock dust. Goggled supervisors—librarians of geology partially deafened by chisels—wander the site, preparing themselves to someday lead tours through this labyrinth of glyphs and words.

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Caustic Engineering

New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to "create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight."

[Image: A piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne].

They do so by "taking control of a seemingly chaotic optical phenomena known as caustics," in the words of New Scientist. Mark Pauly and Philippe Bompas have been experimenting with so-called "caustic engineering," combining Pauly's background in computational geometry and Bompas's interest in manipulating otherwise "unintentional light shows produced by the reflection and refraction of light from curved mirrors or glass structures." Indeed, Bompas's work has a somewhat Neoplatonic overtone, as it involves "working backwards from a pattern of light to deduce the structure needed to create it."

Working together, Pauly and Bompas—not Bompas and Parr—set out to fabricate "a large, transparent plate capable of generating a high-resolution image when a light was shone through it," and they "chose to make the plate in perspex, which is easier to shape than glass." You can see it in the image included in this post.

The architectural implications are obvious, and are brought to the fore by the New Scientist article from which I'm quoting. For instance: "Now [Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors," which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day. After all, "it should be possible to create a transparent plate containing several overlayed caustics that become visible as an animation as the light source moves."

One piece of glass, infinitely dense with visual imagery, a kind of dream-prism casting slow two-hour films across the floor as the day goes by.

[Image: Reflections off glass or other polished surfaces could be controlled—that is, manipulated into producing recognizable images or specific shapes—by way of "caustic engineering"; Creative Commons photo by Flickr user passer-by].

This can work not only with light passing through milled transparent surfaces but with light bouncing off complexly shaped reflective surfaces—something the article describes as pieces of metal that look like "the mildly dented bodywork of a car" (i.e. parametric formalism in architecture today) creating recognizable images in the weird sprays of light they produce.

Curve a building just right with the daily passage of the sun, placing caustic windows at key moments so that their reflections or projections overlap like edits, and your building is now a cinema: an optical landmark with content, in the narrative life of the city. Buskers offer optional soundtracks. Reflection festivals arise on sidewalks. Milled glass objects play filmloops in the sun.

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Soft Launch

The long-awaited second installment of Bracket, a co-publication of Archinect, InfraNet Lab, and ACTAR, is finally here. The new issue is themed around "soft systems" in architecture and landscape design, or "systems, networks and technologies that are responsive, adaptable, scalable, non-linear, and multivalent," as the editors describe it. The resulting soft-systems issue was edited by Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia of InfraNet Lab, with guest input from Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Philippe Rahm, Charles Renfro, and myself.

This month, Bracket will be hosting no fewer than three launch parties for the issue: Thursday, February 7th, at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge, Ontario, at 11am; Sunday, February 17th, at Architecture Center Houston, with presentations by Neeraj Bhatia, Scott Colman, Ned Dodington, and Christopher Hight; and this Friday, February 8th, at Studio-X NYC in Manhattan, kicking off at 6:30pm, with short presentations by Neeraj Bhatia, Fionn Byrne, Michael Chen, Leigha Dennis, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Chris Perry, and a few brief comments of my own about the guest-editorial process. The Studio-X event is free and open to the public, and takes place at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; information about the other events can be found through the links, above.

Read more about the Bracket editorial project at their website.

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Detecting lost rooms with architectural antennae

[Image: "Constant time slices" reveal buildings buried in northwestern Argentina; image from, and courtesy of, the Journal of Archaeological Science, "Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina," by Néstor Bonomo, Ana Osella, and Norma Ratto].

While reading The Losers last night for the first time—a graphic novel about a team of ex-CIA members now executing a series of elaborate heists against their former employer—I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the final scenarios involves a small volcanic island featuring an abandoned village that had very recently been buried by ash and pumice.

In a nutshell, the buildings beneath all that rock and ash are still intact—and one of them contains a locked safe that our eponymous group of "losers" is searching for. So begins an unfortunately quite short scene of vertical archaeology: locating the proper building amidst the featureless landscape of ash, blasting a hole down through the building's roof, stabilizing the ceiling from within so that heavy-lifting equipment can be installed on the rooftop, and then descending into the hallways and staircases below by way of mountaineering ropes to find the safe.

For whatever reason, there are few things I find more exciting to read about than high-risk descents into buried cities, especially one that, as in the case of The Losers, remains otherwise indistinguishable from the surface of the earth, only gradually revealing itself to be an extraordinary honeycomb of connected rooms and passages—and this brief moment in the book was made even more interesting when I remembered a handful of articles I'd saved last year, one of which also involves a lost village, buried by volcanic ash.

[Image: A selection of "time slices" from the buried buildings of northwestern Argentina; image from, and courtesy of, the Journal of Archaeological Science, "Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina," by Néstor Bonomo, Ana Osella, and Norma Ratto].

In a 1998 paper from the Journal of Applied Geophysics, called "The use of ground penetrating radar to map an ancient village buried by volcanic eruptions," we read about a village in Japan called Komochi-mura, in Gunma prefecture: "The entire area surrounding the village is covered by a thick deposit of pumice derived from the eruption of Futatsudake volcano of Mt. Haruna, approximately 10km to the southwest of the village."

Beneath the modern village, its predecessor from the middle of the 6th century is buried by the pumice deposits. Since these were laid down over a very short period, the ancient village should survive in a high state of preservation and will therefore contain much significant archaeological information. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been used to investigate this site over a period of 10 years. As a result, the plan of the ancient village can be accurately mapped... In this paper, the authors demonstrate how GPR was able to map the structural remains of the ancient village under a deposit of pumice.

In addition to various buildings, "pit-dwellings," and other destroyed structures preserved but invisibly buried beneath today's village, "traces of brushwood hedges, paths and other slight features have also been identified by the survey."

These types of articles—on the remote-sensing of buried architectural remains, using technologies that "can detect and map buried structures without disturbing them," in the words of the paper I am about to cite—are increasingly easy to find, but no less interesting because of their ubiquity.

Another paper, then, called "Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina," published in 2010 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, describes an archaeological survey in which ground-penetrating radar was used "in order to detect new buildings," including a system of "complex wall distribution and a number of unknown enclosures." These "new buildings," however, were just signals from the earth awaiting spatial interpretation:

The exploration showed signals of mud-walls in a sector that was located relatively far from the previously known buildings. A detailed survey was performed in this sector, and the results showed that the walls belonged to a large dwelling with several rooms. The discovery of this dwelling has considerably extended the size of the site, showing that the dwellings occupied at least twice the originally assumed area. High-density GPR surveys were acquired at different parts of the discovered building in order to resolve complex structures. Interpreted maps of the building were obtained.

"From the joint analysis of the transverse sections, time slices and volume slices of the data and their time averaged intensity," the authors explain, "we have obtained a final map for the new building"—where the "new" building, of course, is a much older, forgotten one, a structure interpretively remade and refreshed through this newfound legibility.

[Image: From "Archaeological microgravimetric prospection inside don church (Valencia, Spain)," by Jorge Padín, Angel Martín, Ana Belén Anquela, in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science].

Architecture, in this context, comes to our attention first as a series of "intensity blots continued through consecutive slices," an almost impossibly abstract geometry of signals and reflections, of patterned "electromagnetic responses" hidden in the landscape.

In all of these cases, it'd be interesting to propose a kind of archaeological discovery park the size of a football stadium, whose interior is simply a massive, open-span paved landscape on which small devices like floor-waxing machines or lawnmowers have been parked. Paying visitors can walk out onto this vast, continuous monument of bare concrete where they will begin moving the machines around, cautiously at first but then much more ambitiously, revealing as they do so the underground perimeters and outlines of entire villages buried deep in the mud and gravel beneath the building. The "park" is thus really a kind of terrestrial TV show of invisible architecture previously lost to history but beautifully preserved—that is, entombed—in the geology below.

In any case, in writing this post I've realized that I've accumulated over the past two years or so several gigabytes' worth of PDFs about these and other archaeological technologies—from mapping ancient ships buried in the Egyptian pyramids and micro-gravity detection of "shallow subsurface structures" in a church in Italy ("indicating," in the authors' words, "that the actual church was constructed above another one") to "archaeomagnetic data" taken from Roman sites in Tunisia—but here's at least one more reference for good measure.

In a paper called "Ground penetrating radar (G.P.R.) surveys applied to the research of crypts in San Sebastiano’s church in Catania (Sicily)," from a 2007 issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage, a team of Italian geophysicists explored "natural or anthropic buried cavities" under a church in Sicily—that is, both architectural chambers and caves physically inaccessible in the foundations of the building. Soon enough, the authors write, "the existence of hidden structures was revealed."

"In fact," they add, "a crypt with a barrel vault, under the central aisle of the church, and a room of small dimensions next to this crypt were identified. Moreover, near the altar, the presence of a quadrangular crypt with a cross-vault was revealed. The presence of such buried masonries confirms that the church, rebuilt on previous building rests, has been subjected along the centuries to repeated repairs."

[Image: The church of San Sebastiano in Catania, Sicily, courtesy of the regional tourism council].

There is something particularly awesome—that is, it is a story that lends itself particularly to metaphor—about envisioning a squad of well-equipped scientists setting up shop in a church in Sicily, using radar and rigs of strange antennae to scan the structure around them for secret rooms, heavenly nooks and crannies out of human reach. A kind of electromagnetic baroque. The paper cited in a caption above—"Archaeological microgravimetric prospection inside don church (Valencia, Spain)," by Jorge Padín, Angel Martín, Ana Belén Anquela, from a 2012 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science—even includes such strangely resonant lines as calculating against "residual gravity anomalies" in a "microgravimetric correction for the altar," as if the high science of geophysical investigation has been rhetorically wed with theological speculation.

In the words of a paper by N. Farnoosh et al., published in a 2008 issue of NDT & E International, analyzing a given architectural space becomes a question of "buried target detection" using high-tech means—that is, establishing a sustained and coordinated "electromagnetic interaction among the radar antennas, ground, and buried objects."

Here, the study of architectural history can very, very loosely be compared to astronomy: using tools of remote-sensing, including antennae, but targeted downward, into the earth, to reveal the flickering, gossamer traces of something that, for a variety of reasons, humans can't yet physically reach. Like astronomy, then, archaeology and architectural history become a case of interpreting signals from afar, not of stars and supernovae but of lost rooms and buildings beneath our feet.

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Spreading Ground

In Richard Mabey's excellent history—and "defense"—of weeds, previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG back in December, he tells the story of Oxford ragwort, a species native to the volcanic slopes of Sicily's Mount Etna. Exactly how it arrived in Oxford is unknown, Mabey explains, but it was as likely as not brought back deliberately as part of an 18th-century scientific expedition.

[Image: Cropped photo of Oxford ragwort from the UK National Education Network].

But once it took root in Oxford, it began to spread—and Mabey tells the tale of its territorial expansion in forensic close-up. You can literally track this on Google Maps. Quoting him at length:

Within a few years the ragwort had escaped from the garden (which is sited opposite Magdalen College) and begun its westward progress along Oxford's ancient walls. Its downy seeds seemed to find an analogue of the volcanic rocks of its original home in the cracked stonework. It leap-frogged from Merton College to Corpus Christi and the august parapets of Christ Church, then wound its way through the narrow alleys of St. Aldate's. It got to Folly Bridge over the Isis, and then to the site of the old workhouse in Jericho, where, as if recognizing that this was a place of poverty, threw up a strange diminutive variant, a type with flower heads half the normal size (var. parviflorus). Sometime in the 1830s it arrived at Oxford Railway Station, the portal to a nationwide, interlinked network of Etna-like stone chips and clinker. Once it was on the railway companies' permanent ways there was no holding it. The seeds were wafted on by the slipstream of the trains, and occasionally traveled in the carriages. The botanist George Claridge Druce described a trip he took with some on a summer's afternoon in the 1920s. [Ragwort seeds] floated in through his carriage window at Oxford and "remained suspended in the air till they found an exit at Tilehurst," twenty miles down the line.

So ragwort came to be everywhere, spreading across "analogous" landscapes that chemically and texturally mimicked the plant's home ground, establishing itself as an all but ubiquitous plant—an itinerant super-weed riding the nation's trains and piggybacking stone wall to stone wall—across the United Kingdom.

This step-by-step expansion of a life form's zone of habitation came to mind when reading the bizarre story of a runaway fungus in Kentucky. "The sooty-looking black gunk has been here for as long as anyone can remember," the New York Times reported back in August 2012, "creeping on the outside of homes, spreading over porch furniture, blanketing car roofs, mysterious and ever-present." People in town thought it must be the result of pollution, or perhaps just the town being reclaimed by whatever original moldy life had once inhabited those valleys.

But no: "[I]t turns out the most likely culprit is Kentucky’s signature product, its liquid pride: whiskey, as in bourbon whiskey, distilled and bottled across the city and nearby countryside." The mold—called Baudoinia—"belongs to a class of fungi that is almost prehistorically tenacious" (and, for good measure, Wired adds that it is "a fungus that's millions of years old, older than Homo sapiens").

And it is a dark and spreading presence on the buildings, streets, cars, and even road signs near distilleries, "indiscriminately colonizing exposed surfaces ranging from vegetation to built structures, sign posts and fences (including those made from glass and stainless steel)," the U.S. Department of Energy warns, describing this ancient and sooty form of life.

[Image: Baudoinia growing on a fire hydrant; photo by Ben Sklar, courtesy of the New York Times].

Indeed, it's gotten so bad that towns along the historic Kentucky Bourbon Trail are bringing suit against the distilleries, the New York Times continues: "The dark residue is visible throughout neighborhoods on days when the air carries a slight yeasty smell from nearby whiskey warehouses and on days when it does not, in heat and in damp. It is difficult to get rid of, the lawsuit alleges, returning after repeated commercial cleanings."

A similar suit in Scotland is now in the works, where "the fungus is so rampant that it almost seems like part of the architecture." Here, I'm reminded of novelist Jeff VanderMeer's idea of domesticated species of lichen being used as living architectural ornament—that, in his words, "much of the ‘gold’ covering the buildings was actually a living organism similar to lichen that [had been] trained to create decorative patterns."

[Image: Buildings covered in black, growing spotches of Baudoinia; photographer unknown, via Discover].

In any case, this prehistoric "weed," if you will—a mold not from the slopes of Mount Etna but escaped from barrels of whiskey—offers us an interesting variation on Richard Mabey's forensic tale of rooted but footloose infestation.

At the center of each story, we find an organism spatially and chemically dependent on the built environment of humans for its success, a species ready and perfectly able to "invade niches which resemble its original habitat," in Mabey's words. Living stowaways, they make themselves at home on walls, porches, car hoods, trees, even, in the case of Baudoinia, stainless steel, quietly thriving on whatever systems of objects they might find, eventually merging with and becoming part of the everyday landscape.

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Crashing Through Dark Matter Walls

[Image: An otherwise unrelated image from NASA, an artist's rendition of the heliosphere and magnetic fields].

The Earth is "constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter," New Scientist explains, "and we already have the tools to detect them."

This dark architecture in space consists of so-called "domain walls" that are like the boundaries between soap bubbles in foam. "The idea is that the hot early universe was full of an exotic force field that varied randomly. As the universe expanded and cooled, the field froze, leaving a patchwork of domains, each with its own distinct value for the field."

The Earth now randomly "crashes" through this "grid of domain walls"—a remnant "patchwork" of frozen, remnant force fields and now something perhaps less like soap bubbles and metaphorically closer to cosmic-scale magnetic ice, a structured frost we move through without seeing—on a scale of once every several years. So, not quite "constantly," as the lead sentence implies, but, given the age of the universe, I suppose that's constant enough.

But how do we find them, this grid of domain walls we apparently live within? We simply need to install dedicated magnetometers at stations around the world, and look for evidence of this colossal architecture wrapped all around us in the dark.

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Operation Deep Sleep: or, dormant robots at the bottom of the sea

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of lift bags being used in underwater archaeology; via NOAA].

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is hoping to implement a global infrastructure for storing mission-critical objects and payloads at the "bottom of the sea"—a kind of stationary, underwater FedEx that will release mission-critical packages for rendezvous with passing U.S. warships and UAVs.

It's called the Upward Falling Payloads program.

The "concept," according to DARPA, "centers on developing deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they 'fall upward.'" This requires innovative new technologies for "extended survival of nodes under extreme ocean pressure, communications to wake-up the nodes after years of sleep, and efficient launch of payloads to the surface."

As Popular Science describes it, it's a sleeping archive of "'upward falling' robots that can hide on the seafloor for years [and] launch on demand."

And you can even get involved: DARPA is currently seeking proposals for how to realize its vision for Upward Falling Payloads.

DARPA seeks proposals in three key areas for developing the program: Communications, deep ocean 'risers' to contain the payloads, and the actual payloads. DARPA hopes to reach technical communities that conduct deep-ocean engineering from the telecom and oil-exploration industry to the scientific community with insights into signal propagation in the water and on the seafloor.

An informative "proposer's day" will be held on January 25, 2013, where you can learn more about the program. It seems that, just a few years from now, storing objects for at-sea retrieval will be as ordinary as receiving an email.

Briefly, it seems worth mentioning that this vision of waking things up from slumber at the bottom of the sea reads like a subplot from Pacific Rim, or like some militarized remake of the works of H.P. Lovecraft—wherein Lovecraft's fictional Cthulhu, a monstrous and alien god, is described (by Wikipedia) as "a huge aquatic creature sleeping for eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age."

Only, here, it is a gigantic system of military jewelry laced across the seafloor, locked in robotic sleep until the day of its electromagnetic reawakening.

(Thanks to Brian Romans for the link!)

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