In The Dust Of This Planet

[Image: Photo by Dmitry Kostyukov, courtesy of The New York Times].

The New York Times has the strange story of an abandoned and overgrown military base near Paris where "scientists blew up more than half a ton of uranium in 2,000 explosions... often outdoors, just 14 miles from the Eiffel Tower."

The site is now being considered for demolition, the ground beneath it to be excavated as part of a new gypsum mine—however, all that construction work risks stirring up clouds of "toxic uranium dust" from an earlier generation's detonations.

Today, the old fort is part picturesque ruin, part Tarkovsky film:

These days curtains flap from rows of overgrown buildings; radiation symbols and other graffiti cover the security post, which is filled, weirdly, with women’s shoes. The empty housing of a vast supercomputer sits in gloom; vines spill into laboratories. The ruins recall the post-apocalypse landscape of Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

For all the controversy and narrative suspense, however, there are surprisingly few sites of detectable radioactivity. "In 2011," we read, for example, "Christophe Nedelec, a local environmentalist, broke into the fort and, using an amateur Geiger counter, found three spots with elevated levels of radiation." Three spots—considering that no fewer than an astonishing 150 kilograms—or roughly 330 pounds—of uranium are estimated to have blown around the grounds of the fort, that's a seemingly reassuring find.

Yet the less optimistic view is that the uranium dust has already been and gone, lost and dissipated over decades into the surroundings neighborhoods, that are only "about nine miles from central Paris," perhaps even blowing back into the city itself on windy days over a timespan of decades—uranium dust swirling down onto the streets and sidewalks, landing on the shoes, coats, and coffee cups of everyday Parisians who would otherwise have no real reason to worry about what appeared to be ordinary soot.

So, in a sense, the site has already depleted itself. This, certainly, resembles the view of the mining company that now wants to tear down the old fort and rip the landscape into a gypsum mine.

In any case, the site—and the people now guerrilla-gardening there—is worth a quick look over at the New York Times.

(The title of this post is borrowed from a pamphlet by Eugene Thacker, which has surreally and hilariously been in the news this past month after popping up on Glenn Beck's show as an example of the threat of nihilism in U.S. popular culture; there is otherwise no connection between this post and the book—just toxic uranium dust...).

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Touchscreen Landscapes

[Image: Screen grab via military.com].

This new, partly digital sand table interface developed for military planning would seem to have some pretty awesome uses in an architecture or landscape design studio.

Using 3D terrain data—in the military's case, gathered in real-time from its planetary network of satellites—and a repurposed Kinect sensor, the system can adapt to hand-sculpted transformations in the sand by projecting new landforms and elevations down onto those newly molded forms.

You can thus carve a river in real-time through the center of the sandbox, and watch as projected water flows in—

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

—or you can simply squeeze sand together into new hills, and even make a volcanic crater.

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

The idea of projecting adaptive landscape imagery down onto a sandbox is brilliant; being able to interact with both the imagery and the sand itself by way of a Kinect sensor is simply awesome.

Imagine scaling this thing up to the size of a children's playground, and you'd never see your kids again, lost in a hypnotic topography of Minecraft-like possibilities, or just donate some of these things to a landscape design department and lose several hours (weeks?) of your life, staring ahead in a state of geomorphic Zen at this touchscreen landscape of rolling hills and valleys, with its readymade rivers and a thousand on-demand plateaus.

The military, of course, uses it to track and kill people, filling their sandbox with projections of targeting coordinates and geometric representations of tanks.

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

But there's no reason those coordinates couldn't instead be the outlines of a chosen site for your proposed architecture project, or why those little clusters of trucks and hidden snipers couldn't instead be models of new buildings or parks you're hoping will be constructed.

Watch the original video for more.

(Spotted via the Quartz Daily Brief).

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The Civic Minimum

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

Gravesend is a suburb east of London, hosting on its own eastern edge something of a secondary suburb: a mysterious town on the edge of town that turns out not to be a town at all.

It is a simulated English village built in 2003 by the Metropolitan Police working with Equion Facilities Management and a firm called Advanced Interactive Systems (AIS).

The barren streets and hollow buildings of this militarized non-place were designed for use as an immersive staging ground for police-training exercises, fighting staged riots, burglaries, bank robberies, and other crimes.

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

Facades with no buildings behind them line the empty streets; in some cases, it is only through the aerial views afforded by a service like Google Maps that this reality is made clear.

Imitation bus stops, make-believe banks, and an oddly whimsical Pizzaland—like an end-times chain restaurant from Shaun of the Dead—sustain the illusion on the ground.

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

Somewhat incongruously, an airplane fuselage also now rests beside a chainlink fence near the roadway, giving officers an opportunity to prepare for airplane hijackings.

There are even empty Tube carriages parked outside town for improvisatory police raids.

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

According to AIS, their consultant-designers kitted out the site's "live-fire ranges with internal ballistic and anti-ricochet finishes, simulation and targetry equipment, and range sound systems," a complete multimedia package that would soon also include HD video projectors and even "laser-based 3D virtual training environments."

Architectural simulations embedded with high-tech, upgradeable media technology thus supply the necessary level of detail for repeating crimes, on demand, like strange social rituals.

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

The photos seen here were all take by designer and photographer Chris Clarke, whose Flickr set of the series, including a dozen or so further images, is worth a look.

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

For Clarke, the "facsimile" urbanism of this site at the end of Gravesend is actually something of "a warning—a prophecy of society's potential to alienate itself from itself." He suggests that these surreal scenes threaten to become indistinguishable from everyday life, our cities and streets stripped down to the civic minimum, used as nothing more than bleak stomping grounds for futuristic security forces armed with military-grade tools.

"We have estates, parks, nightclubs, tube stations," Clarke writes, "but is the community missing from Gravesend significantly more present in our inhabited cities and towns?" His own answer remains unspoken but obvious.

[Images: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

Writing about this same site back in 2008, Brian Finoki of Subtopia called it a "new theater of the absurd."

It is, he wrote, "a city standing on the planet for one purpose: to be rioted, hijacked, trashed, held hostage, sacked, and overrun by thousands of chaotic scenarios, only so that it can be reclaimed, retaken, re-propped in circuitous loops of more dazzling proto-militant exercise, stormed by a thousand coordinated boots for eternity, targeted by hundreds of synchronized crosshairs of both lethal and non-lethal weapons."

[Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].

Check out more photos at Chris Clarke's Flickr page.

(Related: In the Box: A Tour Through the Simulated Battlefields of the U.S. National Training Center).

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A Geography of Devices

[Image: Tokyo subway map, via re:form].

"Just as postal systems remade geographic places into zones determined by politics and history," Amy Johnson writes for re:form, "social media technologies are remaking them today."

"Historically," Johnson writes, "the categories of both who helps in natural disasters and who is helped have largely been organized around place, in this case mapped according to its political and geographic dimensions, by government agencies and relief organizations with parallel structures. Recently, social media has broadened the category of who helps—and in doing so, new technological places have joined political and geographic ones."

Johnson is describing the various spatial metaphors at work in Japanese disaster response plans following the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, and the communication of those plans to the public via social media platforms. Evacuation zones defined by "suspiciously round numbers," so-called geocasting ("when a producer targets publishing to a particular region or location"), and the abandonment of traditional post codes in favor of "device locations" all play a part in her analysis.

After all, Johnson continues, "this is a decidedly different moment of history and politics, and the power balance among people, corporations, and states has shifted. The resultant new zones—and new configurations of zones—will further change this balance."

The internet of things, we might say, is also an emergency network of things, marking our spatial locations more efficiently than previous methods of territorial administration.

Read the rest over at re:form.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

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We Can Terraform It For You Wholesale

[Image: Real estate development or avant-garde earthwork? The future streets of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

The website for the stalled Las Vegas development known as Ascaya—which we saw in the previous post through the aerial photographs of Michael Light—is itself quite remarkable and worth a quick visit.

At first glance, the site could actually be mistaken for some kind of strange new media art project, a near-future ad for an interplanetary terraforming corporation dedicated to selling huge geometric shapes directly to consumers.

Slow transitions drift from shot to shot as we peer out over these strangely beautiful, unfinished landforms in the desert, seemingly endless in number as they step back—and back, and back—toward the horizon.

It's like a planet reconfigured by obsessed geometricians—where, surreally, each individual form is actually for sale.

[Image: Another view of the abstract landforms of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

Accordingly, the website presents us with Romantic shots of uninhabited geometry, the gleaming towers of Las Vegas only barely visible in the background, catching the final rays of an arid sunset, as if this is actually the sprawling backdrop for a more interesting remake of Total Recall.

[Image: One more glimpse of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

In any case, my initial reaction in seeing the Ascaya website was that it could actually pass as a kind of online art auction for the world's most ambitious land art installation—not a real estate site at all—selling the work of someone far ambitious than, say, Michael Heizer or James Turrell.

After all, surely Ascaya, specifically in its unfinished state, is more seductive—and more interpretively exciting—than the, by comparison, almost absurdly boring "Spiral Jetty"?

Perhaps, next to the work of people like Walter De Maria, we should be studying Ascaya—and a pilgrimage to these weird black steps in the desert should be on the list of any collector of American land art.

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Landscape, Redacted

[Image: "Looking east over unbuilt Ascaya lots, Black Mountain beyond, Henderson, Nevada," 2010; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

Photographer Michael Light has a new book coming out this fall, published by Radius Books, with work documenting the construction and large-scale terrestrial formatting of two housing developments in the American southwest, one unfinished, one gaudily over the top.

They are known as Ascaya and Lake Las Vegas.

[Image: "Unbuilt Ascaya lots and cul-de-sac looking west, Henderson, Nevada," 2011; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

Ascaya was meant to ascend into the desert hills like a vast residential staircase, its plots patiently shaped and awaiting their architecture—but these ambitious plans were radically decelerated into a state of suspended animation by the economic collapse of 2008.

It is now something more like a stalled earthwork, a vast land art installation made all the more amazing when seen from above.

[Image: "Unbuilt Ascaya lots and culdesac looking northwest, Sun City MacDonald Ranch development beyond, Henderson, Nevada," 2012; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

The resulting landforms—huge berms, winding streets, flat-capped foundation piles, and carefully graded podiums of dirt and gravel—look at times like hard drive platters, chocolate bars, or even the tailings piles of a colossal mine.

This latter comparison was made by Light himself in a long interview Nicola Twilley and I recorded with him for Venue.

There, Light told us that "the more work I do in Las Vegas, the more I see parallels between the mining industry—and the extraction history of the west—and the inhabitation industry."

They do the same sort of things to the land; they grade, flatten, and format the land in similar ways. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between a large-scale housing development being prepped for construction and a new strip mine where some multinational firm is prospecting for metals.

"In other words," he continued, "the extraction industry and the inhabitation industry are two sides of the same coin. The terraforming that takes place to make a massive development on the outskirts of a city has the same order, and follows the same structure, as much of the terraforming done in the process of mining."

[Images: (top) "The Falls at Lake Las Vegas construction road looking north, Henderson, Nevada," 2011; (bottom) "Future house lots and abandoned mattress at The Falls at Lake Las Vegas, looking west, Henderson, Nevada," 2011; both from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

"That was a revelation for me," Light added. "The mine is a city reversed. It is its own architecture."

The mine is a city reversed.

[Images: "Unbuilt Ascaya lots looking northwest, Henderson, Nevada," 2012; both from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

"Until 2008," the book's accompanying press release explains, "Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered."

They call these homes "castles on the cheap," and one look at the houses of Lake Las Vegas reveals how apt this comparison can be.

[Image: "V At Lake Las Vegas pool complex, Via Visione at left, Henderson, Nevada," 2010; from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

In one of the book's two essays, veteran landscape activist Lucy Lippard writes that the images offer "a disturbing juxtaposition of geologic and current time that the Surrealists could only have imagined."

[Image: "Monaco Lake Las Vegas home and foreclosed neighbor, on guard-gated Grand Corniche Drive, Henderson, Nevada," 2010; from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

Honestly, these shots blow me away; it's as if Light has captured an act of topographical blackout—a whole landscape, redacted—as what should be hills and valleys are erased and obstructed by this imposed crystallography of settlements that never arrived.

[Image: "Ascaya Boulevard looking south up Black Mountain, morning, Henderson, Nevada," 2012; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

In any case, the forthcoming book is already generating quite a bit of buzz—for example, being chosen as one of the "Best Fall Photo Books" of 2014 by Time Magazine.

[Images: Some shots of the books, which are actually bound together, back-to-back].

The reproductions look fantastic, as well; consider pre-ordering a copy (and, while you're at it, consider reading our interview with Michael Light over at Venue).

The book comes out somewhat appropriately on Halloween—a kind of economic horror story of landscapes gone awry.

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Atmospheric Crystallography

[Image: From the original research paper (PDF), via Popular Science].

Popular Science reported last week that a "weird crystal"—a "salt made from cobalt"—can "absorb all the oxygen in a room," and, more crucially, release all that oxygen later, at which point it can safely be breathed.

I will confess that I initially thought this sounded more like some terrifying new air-weapon: after all, if "just a spoonful of the stuff can suck up all the oxygen in a room," then you're looking at a very potent, seemingly instantaneous method for causing mass suffocation. Drop a few spoonfuls of these crystals into a building's ventilation system, and... Well, you get the idea.

But the actual, far more productive implications are incredible (assuming further tests with the material pan out). The University of Southern Denmark-based researchers suggest, for example, that this could revolutionize SCUBA diving, "as the material can absorb oxygen from the water around the diver and supply the diver with it," meaning that "scuba divers could potentially leave their tanks at home," gearing up with just a few grains of salt. "

Extrapolate from this for a moment, however, and imagine all of the other confined spatial environments in which oxygen-emitting cobalt salts could upend conventional thinking. Long-term submarine missions; underwater scientific bases or other submerged structures of any kind; mines, collapsed buildings, and other underground spaces; or, perhaps most interestingly, even offworld space missions could all be equipped with radically minimalized oxygen storage systems, reducing costs.

You can thus imagine some strange new everyday reality several decades from now in which deep-sea divers or long-haul astronauts turn to a chewing gum-sized pack of salt crystals which they pop open as needed for emergency oxygen.

Think of this portable atmospheric crystal as the gateway to new spatial possibilities, letting us bring our atmospheres with us in just a few handfuls of salt.

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