The Auditory Configuration of Hell

[Image: The howling of Hell, illustrated by Gustave Doré for Dante's Inferno].

Nearly seven years ago, we took a brief art historical look at the "landscape architecture of Hell," quoting critic Adrian Searle's description of the medieval abyss:

Terraced, pinnacled, travelling forever downward, the ledges, cities and basements of hell are furnished with sloughs, gorges and deserts; there are cities, rivers of boiling blood, lagoons of scalding pitch, burning deserts, thorny forests, ditches of shit and frozen subterranean lakes. Every kind of sin, and sinner, is catered for. Here, descending circle by circle, like tourists to Bedlam, came Dante and Virgil. Following them, at least through Dante's poem, came Botticelli.

In a recent issue of The Wire, writer and composer David Toop, in a short article about the various cultural uses of bass, comes to this topic from a different angle, asking what the netherworld of the damned might sound like.

He calls this, citing the Aeneid and Paradise Lost both, the "auditory configuration of Hell": "The auditory configuration of Hell is an opposition of low homogeneous moan and confused Babel, of deep tones and threnodic shrieks, as if combining the outer extremes of human perception is the most authentic expression of damnation." There is acoustic "distress," Toop writes, somewhere "between roaring water and the tumult of the wandering helpless unburied," where dogs howl and angels whirling to their doom are deafened by "the bellowing of the Earth itself."

Toop refers to the recent work of Hillel Schwartz, who has pointed out, in Toop's words, that "Hell was largely silent until Virgil"—a place of total silence—not the pandemonium of noise it seems in popular imagination to have since become.

So let's hear it for a much longer paper cataloging the shifting sounds of Hell—an interesting thesis topic for an comparative literature department somewhere, at the very least.

Morse Road

[Image: Curiosity's tire treads, courtesy of NASA and the nation's taxpayers].

It turns out that Bradbury Landing is also a kind of literary site, an interplanetary Newspaper Rock: the tracks left behind by the Curiosity rover are actually a form of Morse code.

The tire treads—wheeled hieroglyphs—spell out JPL, for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here on earth.

[Image: Curiosity reveals its Morse code, courtesy of NASA].

From a JPL press release: "Careful inspection of the tracks reveals a unique, repeating pattern, which the rover can use as a visual reference to drive more accurately in barren terrain. The pattern is Morse code for JPL, the abbreviation for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the rover was designed and built, and the mission is managed."

This trackable terrain augmentation is a clever form of so-called visual odometry: "The purpose of the pattern is to create features in the terrain that can be used to visually measure the precise distance between drives," such that the visual appearance of the inscribed code will reveal signs of slippage and, thus, a need to re-chart or correct the rover's navigation. This will be especially useful on "featureless terrain."

[Image: Curiosity's tire treads, courtesy of NASA].

The example NASA uses is a picket fence:

"Imagine standing in front of a picket fence, and then closing your eyes and shifting to the side. When you open your eyes, you wouldn't be able to tell how many pickets you passed. If you had one picket that was a different shape though, you could always use that picket as your reference," said [Matt Heverly, lead rover driver at JPL]. "With Curiosity, it's a similar problem in featureless terrain like sand dunes. The hole pattern in the wheels gives us one 'big picket' to look at."

In other words, somewhere on the surface of Mars, codes from Earth—a new Linear A—will slowly drift apart over the years, becoming an unreadable road in the sand.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip).

A First Look At The New Iris Apfel Documentary

IRIS APFEL PROMO from Laura Coxson on Vimeo.
In celebration of Iris Apfel's 91st Birthday yesterday, I am posting this wonderful trailer to Maysles Films' upcoming documentary featuring our favorite style icon. I can't wait to see the completed film!

Folk Artist Malcah Zeldis Explains How Dressing Up Healed Her Pain

Malcah Zeldis is a celebrated  folk artist with paintings in museums all over the country.She has always used painting as means of self expression, but severe hip pain left her unable to sit for long periods of time. Malcah began to discover creative inspiration in the many colorful pieces of clothing she had collected and found in thrift stores over the years. Dressing became her new form of expression and healing. Watch the video above to hear Malcah's inspiring story in her own words.(I am happy to say that Malcah is feeling much better now and has returned to creating her amazing works of art.)

Bradbury Landing

[Image: Bradbury Landing, via the Planetary Society; courtesy of NASA and the nation's taxpayers].

"Bradbury Landing is the first named site on Mars not marked by an object, but by ephemeral burn scars from [Curiosity's] landing thrusters. Project scientist John Grotzinger describes the site as 'four scour marks with wheel tracks that basically begin from nowhere.'"

British Exploratory Land Archive

Speaking of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, I'm thrilled to be an exhibitor this year in the UK pavilion, as part of a collaborative project undertaken with Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen.

[Image: The British Exploratory Land Archive's "capture blanket" in use on Hampstead Heath, London; photo by Mark Smout].

Smout Allen are the authors of Augmented Landscapes, easily one of my favorite installments in the Pamphlet Architecture series, as well as long-time instructors at the Bartlett School of Architecture—in fact, many of their students' projects have been featured here on the blog over the last half-decade—and working with Mark and Laura on a project such as this has been fantastic.

Specifically, as part of the "Venice Takeaway" project curated by Vicky Richardson and Vanessa Norwood, Smout Allen and I have proposed what we call the British Exploratory Land Archive (or BELA).

The British Exploratory Land Archive is, in essence, a British version of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, albeit one defined as much by the use of unique instruments designed specifically for BELA as by its focus on sites of human land-use in the United Kingdom as by.

[Images: Going through the archives, maps, and files of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, including one of my favorite headlines of all time: "Emptiness welcomes entrepreneurs"; photos by Mark Smout].

In an essay for the Venice Takeaway book, we describe the inspiration, purpose, and future goals of the—still entirely hypothetical—British Exploratory Land Archive:

BELA is directly inspired by the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). It aims to unite the efforts of several existing bodies—English Heritage, Subterranea Britannica, the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust and even the Department for Transport, among dozens of others—in a project of national landscape taxonomy that will combine catalogues created by distinct organisations into one omnivorous, searchable archive of human-altered landscapes in Britain... From military bases to abandoned factories, from bonded warehouses to national parks, by way of private gardens, council estates, scientific laboratories and large-scale pieces of urban infrastructure, BELA’s listings are intended to serve as something of an ultimate guide to both familiar and esoteric sites of human land use throughout the United Kingdom.

In the end, a fully functioning BELA would offer architects, designers, historians, academics, enthusiasts, and members of the general public a comprehensive list of UK sites that have been used, built, unbuilt, altered, augmented and otherwise transformed by human beings, aiming to reveal what we might call the spatial footprint of human civilization in the British Isles.

Thanks to the generosity of the Venice Takeaway organizers, with funding from the British Council, Mark Smout and I had the pleasure of traveling to Los Angeles back in April 2012 specifically to meet with Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Even better, we were able to take Matt, Ben, and Aurora out on a daylong road-trip through gravel pits, dry lake beds, Cold War radar-testing facilities, airplane crash sites, logistics airfields, rail yards, abandoned military base housing complexes, and much more orbiting the endlessly interesting universe of Greater Los Angeles.

[Images: Exploring Greater Los Angeles with Matthew Coolidge, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang; photos by Mark Smout].

That trip was documented in a series of photographs, in a (very) short film, and in the essay mentioned above, all of which will be available for perusal at the UK pavilion for the duration of this year's Biennale.

I'll also include here a few diagrams depicting one the instruments Smout Allen and I devised as part of our land-investigation tools—making BELA a kind of second-cousin to Venue—with the real objects, including a portable explorer's hut, also on display in Venice.

[Images: Assembly diagrams for the BELA "clinometer," a speculative device "for the measurement of variable slopes on sites such as scrap yards, landfills, slag heaps and other industrial dumping grounds... functioning as an easily readable survey tool and as a unique design object that calls public attention to the process of measuring artificial landscapes"].

Taken together, these are what we call, in the essay, "prototypical future survey instruments and experimental site-identification beacons." They are "both semi-scientific and speculative, portable and permanently anchored."

From telescopes to Geiger counters, from contact microphones to weather satellites, the devices and scales with which we measure and describe the landscapes around us determine, to a large extent, what we are able to see. BELA will thus work to pioneer the design, fabrication and expeditionary deployment of new landscape survey tools—instruments and devices both functional and speculative that will aid in the sensory cataloguing and interpretive analysis of specific locations.

While the British Exploratory Land Archive is, for now, merely a proposition, I think Mark, Laura, and I are all equally keen to see something come of that proposition, perhaps someday even launching BELA as a real, functioning resource through which the various human-altered landscapes of Britain can be catalogued and studied.

For now, those of you able to visit Venice, Italy, before the end of the 2012 Biennale can see our instruments, photos, drawings, and texts as they currently exist, and, in the process, learn more about the possibilities for a British Exploratory Land Archive.

(Thanks to Sandra Youkhana for her invaluable help with the project, and to Matthew Coolidge, Sarah Simons, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang at the Center for Land Use Interpretation for hosting us back in April).

As if dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers

One of many things you might be missing at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture—which opens this week and runs till November 25th—is a new acoustic installation by Katarzyna Krakowiak inside the Polish Pavilion.

Her piece, called Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers is, in the words of Michal Libera, the pavilion's curator, a controlled "amplification of the Polish Pavilion as a listening-system."

[Image: A sound-study of the 2012 Polish Pavilion by Andrzej Kłosak for Katarzyna Krakowiak].

In an interesting accompanying essay that foregrounds the acoustic experience of space, Libera goes on to suggest that "we live, work and play in gigantic complexes of sounds—their distribution is what we call architecture."

Architectural micro-deformations of the building’s walls and floor, the renovation of the ventilation system, and reinforcement of the resonant frequencies serve to bring this latent acoustic experience to the fore. The focus is on the secret but audible knowledge inscribed in the niches, apses, bays and vestibules, full of long-acknowledged deficiencies and forgotten paradoxes. None of the sounds in the Pavilion are alien to the building. They are all always already there.

One of the techniques deployed by Krakowiak, for instance, is to reinforce architecturally the Pavilion's own resonant frequencies; this leads to "excessive reverberation" that will make "even regular conversation difficult" inside as visitors are enveloped in echoes, everything out-of-synch and returning again in time-delay. Further:

To enhance the experience of being immersed in sound, the floor and one of the walls are tilted at a slight angle. The introduction of a different material (a wooden floor) and the incline itself will also influence sound propagation. With 50 sound sources, the interior of the Polish Pavilion will take the visitor to the heart of an unknown, unfathom- able realm of sound.

Libera describes in detail how Krakowiak partially dismantled the Pavilion itself, performing a kind of acoustic surgery on the various surfaces and materials used inside, analyzing them for their sonic side-effects and picking and choosing which spaces—"the niche, the vestibule and the walls"—to augment, tune, or dampen.

[Image: Another sound-study of the 2012 Polish Pavilion by Andrzej Kłosak for Katarzyna Krakowiak].

While reading about Krakowiak's work, I was reminded of a short piece by Richard Pinnell in a recent issue of The Wire. There, Pinnell describes the, for him, uncomfortable experience of hearing sound artists Mark and John Bain perform under a railway arch in London, work themed "on the principle of self-destruction." Mark Bain has been mentioned many times here on BLDGBLOG for his ongoing interest in the possibility of architectural demolition using nothing but bass, and this particular performance seems like one of a piece with those earlier explorations.

Pinnell describes how the "American sibling duo" of the Bain brothers used "seismic sensors to translate the feedback of the actual building itself into heavy, really heavy droning bass tones. The wall of subsonic pressure that hit me as I squeezed alongside others into the arch space threatened to turn my ribcage inside out." More to the point, he quips that, "If the shock of how physical the sound was caught me off guard, I was even less prepared for the small chunks of crumbling masonry that began to intermittently fall from the bare brick archway above my head as the Victorian building itself struggled against the assault." We could level whole cities with sound. Building and anti-building with LRAD.

The Bains' "architectural bass tremors" haunted Pinnell's sense of equilibrium so much that, he jokes, now, "whenever I enter a room under a railway arch I keep one eye looking over my shoulder," lest the Bain brothers arrive, acoustic weaponry in hand.

In any case, while Krakowiak's installation is not premised on the idea of demolition—and thus the connection between these two stories is entirely anecdotal—I am nonetheless struck by the idea of a pavilion, perhaps some future version of the Serpentine, that deliberately interferes with, or manipulates through time-delay, the acoustic events taking place inside it, whether those are human conversations or simply monstrous waves of sub-bass rumbling up from a concert in the basements below.

In fact, you could imagine some strange new art form, a kind of acoustic variation on Noh theater, that takes place only inside buildings tuned to echo at precise intervals, with whole new forms of dialogue—an entire literary genre—written with actors playing the roles of multiple characters, speaking lines perfectly timed for an endless return of disorienting synchronizations, ten, even fifteen, minutes later still listening for the delayed lines of an earlier phase of self-conversation.

Or, for that matter, a mis-built suburban house somewhere lost in echoes, driving its owner insane, as everything said inside is destructively echoed and reverbed to the point of utter incomprehension, for whole days at a time. A tragi-comedy starring Tom Hanks, muttering to himself in a roaring airplane engine of noise—things he said yesterday!—sitting at the dinner table, starring at a salt shaker, unable to talk to his date.

Red, White, and Blue

I ran into this woman in Chelsea and asked if I could take her photo. She told me, " I am on my way to a 90th Birthday party and the Birthday boy will surely get a kick out of this!"

Linda Rodin

Last week I had the pleasure of photographing stylist turned beauty guru, Linda Rodin, outside her NYC apartment. Besides working full time on her skincare line, Rodin olio lusso, Linda has become a favorite among fashion bloggers, and is currently featured in the   J.Crew catalog. Linda believes that lots of sleep and a good diet are two of the keys to aging gracefully.

When it comes to looking older she says,"First of all it's not easy getting older. It catches up on you all of a sudden. It's definitely more interesting to let yourself go through the process than do a bunch of surgery and get addicted to a face that's not even yours. You can't chase youth. You'll just look older with a face lift."  Check out more of Linda's story and her amazing  Rodin olio lusso products HERE.

( For those of you who asked about Linda's lip color she is wearing Make Up Forever, #16 pencil, then Make Up Forever lipstick #36. Under both: Fran Wilson's green mood matcher)

Striper

Speaking of the accidental artistry of colorful street markings, artist Simon Rouby became fascinated by the ongoing painting and repainting of traffic lines on the freeways and streets of Los Angeles, like some vast and unacknowledged readymade art project.

[Images: Photos by Simon Rouby for "Yellow Line"].

Could this huge urban painting apparatus be temporarily repurposed, Rouby wondered—leading him to contact Caltrans directly and embark upon a project with the rather straightforward name of "Yellow Line."

That project, Rouby explains, introduced him "to the California Transportation 'Striping Crew.' I followed them while they poured miles of yellow paint onto the concrete of Los Angeles. With them I got to know the biggest and most congested network of freeways in the United States, and built my understanding of Los Angeles, a gigantic city where people meet everyday, but at 60 miles per hour on the freeways. Millions of cars per day, from which 75% drive alone, despite traffic and smog."

"We also did canvases," Rouby adds, "painted directly with their trucks."

[Image: From "Yellow Line" by Simon Rouby].

Nonetheless, it's not those canvases but the project's most basic conceptual move—putting the Caltrans striping crews into the same context as, say, Jackson Pollack or Marcel Duchamp—that interests me the most here, implying new possibilities for interpretation, even whole new futures for art history and landscape criticism, with this recognition of avant-garde projects going on disguised as the everyday environment.

[Image: From "Yellow Line" by Simon Rouby].

Pushing this further, the transportation system itself becomes an earthworks project that dwarfs the—by contrast—embarrassingly unambitious Michael Heizer or Robert Smithson, revealing Caltrans, not Field Operations or any other white-collar design firm, as one of the most high-stakes landscape practitioners—a parallel civilization of mound builders hidden in plain sight—at work in the world today.

In any case, Simon Rouby's "Yellow Line" is on display at the Caltrans District 7 Building—100 South Main Street, Los Angeles—until 28 September 2012.

Dot Urbanism

[Image: From Nick Foster's "Hidden Signals" project].

Intrigued by the colorful dots he found spray-painted on the streets of San Francisco, always near drains, Nick Foster began photographing them.

[Images: From Nick Foster's "Hidden Signals" project].

He soon learned that these marks are not some emerging genre of street art—at least not intentionally—but are, in fact, quasi-Pynchonian signals left behind by the San Francisco Mosquito Abatement Courier Team, or SFMAC.

Formed in 2005 following the rapid increase of West Nile Virus in California, this band of pest controllers cycles around San Francisco dispatching sachets of Vectolex into the drains to kill the little biters before they breed. After each drain is treated, the courier sprays a little dot of paint to mark it as completed—this season’s color is blue.

Like full-spectrum hieroglyphs, these spray-painted dots are "infrastructural forensic evidence," in Foster's words, marking the ritualistic elimination of insects from urban space.

Maze Machine Garden

[Image: From "Landscape Abbreviated" by Nova Jiang].

"Landscape Abbreviated" by Chinese-born, New York-based artist Nova Jiang is "a garden that is simultaneously a machine." It is an algorithmically controlled "kinetic maze"—a different kind of switching labyrinth—"that periodically generates new pathways for the viewers to follow."

The resulting landscape, Jiang explains, is controlled by "a software program that continuously generates new maze patterns based on mathematical rules; they rotate to form shifting pathways that encourage visitors to change direction and viewpoints as they move through the space." In a sense, they are landscape turnstiles, blocking or enabling pedestrian movement.

[Image: From "Landscape Abbreviated" by Nova Jiang].

Individual rotating "modules" in the animated landscape have been "planted with moss gathered from backyards, sidewalks and subway grates around New York," we read, and, although the project is, for now, confined to a gallery space, the artist hopes to produce a larger, more robust outdoor version, perhaps even at the urban scale, imagining it "taking over a town square somewhere, where the inhabitants wake up each morning to find a new pathway for them to explore."

[Images: From "Landscape Abbreviated" by Nova Jiang].

The photos shown here give only a relative sense for the landscape's machinations in small-scale, but a short video is also available on Jiang's website.

Aging Gracefully At 101 Years Old

Ruth is turning 101 next month and she is looking forward to celebrating with all of her friends and family. She is a wonderful example for us all to take care of ourselves and to age gracefully. I was just looking through the September issue of Vogue and couldn't spot one photograph that revealed a line, wrinkle, or even pores on any of the model's faces. There is definitely a photoshop epidemic going on. Everyone is so concerned with aging and looking younger, but wouldn't you rather see Ruth advertising a beauty brand  than a photo-shopped 20 year old with no character or expression?

The One and Only Iris Apfel

Yesterday I had the privilege of not only having lunch with an amazing 100 year old, but breakfast with the legendary Iris Apfel as well. Iris is as busy as ever working on her handbag line, a line of jewelry for HSN, and a collaboration with eye-bobs. At 90 years old Iris is proof that keeping active is the secret to aging gracefully.

These Boots Were Made For Walking

Here are some more shots of Carol Olten in La Jolla, CA . Check out her amazing sunglasses and boots! I'm out the door to meet with our favorite 100 year old Ruth, so expect some new photos very soon.

Bakelite and Boyscouts

Alice Carey loves mixing elements of  menswear with slight feminine touches. Here she wears her husband's childhood Scout's shirt with wonderful bakelite accessories. Check out the video below to hear more about Alice's penchant for menswear. You can also read more about Alice in the latest issue of GLU magazine and don't forget to purchase her novel HERE.

Summer Platforms

The secret to Mary's personal style is great shoes, accessories, and attitude. For our lunch on Friday she wore matching blue  Nanette Lepore  and coordinated Sergio Rossi platforms. Everywhere we went people commented on Mary's fantastic shoes. Doesn't she look great at almost 73 years old ?!!!

The Secret To Beautiful Skin

I first photographed Mrs. Rock near Madison Avenue a few months ago. She was in a hurry, so I quickly took her photo and handed her my card. Ever since then, I have walked up and down Madison looking for her. I wanted to tell her that she is in the Advanced Style Book, and hoped to interview her about her style and beauty secrets. About a month ago, I received an email from her saying that she saw her photograph in a New York Times article about the book. I was thrilled to hear that she wanted to meet for lunch, and couldn't wait to photograph her again.

Yesterday Mrs. Rock and I finally met up for a wonderful lunch and inspiring conversation. She told me that ever since she set foot in New York City, as a little girl, she knew that she would make it her home. She loves the theater that takes place on the streets of New York and can't imagine living anywhere else. Like many of the Advanced Style ladies Mrs. Rock believes in the power of a great hat, not only as, " an organizational tool," but also as a great way to stay out of the sun. She also revealed that the secret to great skin is to keep it lubricated and fresh. Beauty products don't have to cost a fortune. Mrs. Rock swears by the Vaseline products that her mother first introduced her to as a young girl. Watch the video above to hear more about her favorite products including her wonderful Revlon lipstick.

Update On The Advanced Style Documentary Film

Here are some behind the scenes shots of our recent interview with Lynn Dell for the Advanced Style Documentary. Lina Plioplyte and I have been working on this project for over three years, and we are finally ready to sit down and edit over 150 hours footage! In fact, Lina just left for the mountains where she will be editing the film in peace and quiet, to get it ready for the 2013 film festival circuit. We have filmed so  many inspiring interviews, stories, and interactions and I can't wait to share the finished product with everyone.Check out the trailers again below and for updated information on the film CLICK HERE and find us on Facebook HERE .

Lynn Dell ran into another one of our stars, Iris Apfel, while shopping at a gift show.

While in Los Angeles we met up with Dita Von Teese, to an interview her about Advanced Style!