Outside Barney's

I ran into Tziporah Salamon in front of Barney's on a rainy day in New York. She was looking for   blue and white shoes to complete one of her stunning ensembles and found a great pair on sale. I always love spotting Tziporah riding her bike around in town in the most wonderful outfits.

Proprietary Microcosms

[Image: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images, via In Focus/The Atlantic].

Spaces of military simulation have long been a theme of interest here, including the desert test-cities of California's Fort Irwin or the law enforcement training architecture of U.S. police departments, so this shot of Brazilian police training "in a mock favela set up in Rio de Janeiro" caught my eye as part of a recent round-up of shots looking at preparations for the 2014 World Cup.

Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. Their interest is always both political (declaring whole neighborhoods spatial threats, quarantining their population from the rest of the metropolis, then "pacifying" the streets with military force) and philosophical (how humans engage in highly ritualized, repetitive behaviors deep inside these proprietary microcosms of the world, like little demigods of a model universe lording over labyrinths and copies).

Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint—to supply a testbed on which somebody else's spatial ideas can be verified (or violently disproven).

Finally, like the 1:1 scale model in which Google self-driving cars operate, techniques learned inside these proto-cities are then imposed upon the very thing those sites were meant to model, tricking the real-world favela into resembling its denigrated copy: a wild space neutered by the decoy it played no role in authorizing.

A Vintage Suit

I have run into Roz several times walking down Madison Avenue and she always looks perfectly elegant in a wonderful suit and hat. Roz told me a quick story when I asked to take her photograph. She said that her grandson asked her the other day why she was so different from all the other grandmothers. Roz answered, "Maybe its because I fee like I'm 35 inside."

The Advanced Style Of Beatrix Ost

Photography: Ari Seth Cohen, Styling; Valentina Ilardi Martin, Hair: Thomas McKiver, Make Up: Joanna Lily Wong  

 

 

 

I'm excited to finally share my full cover story for Grey Magazine featuring the always incredible Beatrix Ost. Check out the Grey Magazine Issue X in stores or online HERE.

Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach

[Image: The new plastic geology, photographed by Patricia Corcoran, via Science].

Incredibly, a "new type of rock cobbled together from plastic, volcanic rock, beach sand, seashells, and corals has begun forming on the shores of Hawaii," Science reports.

This new rock type, referred to as a "plastiglomerate," requires a significant heat-source in order to form, as plastiglomerates are, in effect, nothing but molten lumps of plastic mixed-in with ambient detritus. Hawaii with its coastal and marine volcanoes, offers a near-perfect formational landscape for this artificially inflected geology to emerge—however, Patricia Corcoran, one of the discoverers of these uncanny rocks, thinks we'll likely find them "on coastlines across the world. Plastiglomerate is likely well distributed, it’s just never been noticed before now, she says."

We've been surrounded by artificial geologies all along.

But is it really geology? Or is it just melted plastic messily assembled with local minerals? Well, it's both, it seems, provided you look at it on different time-scales. After heavier chunks of plastiglomerate form, fusing with "denser materials, like rock and coral," Science writes, "it sinks to the sea floor, and the chances it will become buried and preserved in the geologic record increase." It can even form whole veins streaking through other rock deposits: "When the plastic melts, it cements rock fragments, sand, and shell debris together, or the plastic can flow into larger rocks and fill in cracks and bubbles," we read.

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suggest that our landfills are also acting like geologic ovens: baking huge deposits of plastiglomerate into existence, as the deep heat (and occasional fires) found inside landfills catalyzes the formation of this new rock type. Could deep excavations into the landfills of an earlier, pre-recycling era reveal whole boulders of this stuff? Perhaps.

The article goes on to refer to the work of geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, which is exactly where I would have taken this, as well. Zalasiewicz has written in great detail and very convincingly about the future possible fossilization of our industrial artifacts and the artificial materials that make them—including plastic itself, which, he suggests, might very well leave traces similar to those of fossilized leaves and skeletons.

In a great essay I had the pleasure of including in the recent book Landscape Futures, Zalasiewicz writes: "Plastics, which are made of long chains of subunits, might behave like some of the long-chain organic molecules in fossil plant twigs and branches, or the collagen in the fossilized skeletons of some marine invertebrates. These can be wonderfully well preserved, albeit blackened and carbonized as hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen are driven off under the effect of subterranean heat and pressure." Plastiglomerates could thus be seen as something like an intermediary stage in the long-term fossilization of plastic debris, a glimpse of the geology to come.

Ultimately, the idea that the stunning volcanic beaches of Hawaii are, in fact, more like an early version of tomorrow's semi-plastic continents and tropical archipelagoes is both awesome and ironic: that an island chain known for its spectacular natural beauty would actually reveal the deeply artificial future of our planet in the form of these strange, easily missed objects washing around in the sand and coral of a gorgeous beach.

(Spotted via Rob Holmes. Vaguely related: War Sand).

Debra and Stan

Debra and Stan are a stunning duo no matter the season. One of their favorite past times is shopping at their local thrift stores and bargain hunting for creative additions to their wardrobes.

Asbury Park

Growing up in San Diego, my family and I spent a lot of time on the beach during the summer. I always looked forward to seeing my grandmother's bright and colorful beach outfits. We had so many wonderful summer memories together.

Yesterday I went to Asbury Park, NJ where I photographed this lovely lady. She reminded me of my grandmothers with her floral shirt and matching gold sandals, hat, and jewelry. I can't remember a day when my grandmothers didn't look perfectly glamorous. Even for a day at the beach.

City of Buried Machines

[Image: Courtesy of London Basement].

A story of buried digging machines made something of an unexpected splash over at New Statesman this week, quickly becoming their weekend's most-read article.

It turns out that all those elaborate basements and artificial show caves built for Londons' nouveau riche have led to an interesting spatial dilemma: contractors are unable to retrieve the excavation equipment they used to produce all those huge underground extensions in the first place, and they have thus developed a technique for simply abandoning their machines underground and burying them in place.

London is thus becoming a machine cemetery, with upwards of £5 million worth of excavators now lying in state beneath the houses of the 1%. Like tools invented by M.C. Escher, these sacrificial JCBs have excavated the very holes they are then ritually entombed within, turning the city into a Celtic barrow for an age of heroic machinery.

What will future archaeologists make of these interred devices, densely packed in earth and left behind in unmarked graves?

[Image: Courtesy of London Basement].

As we explored here on BLDGBLOG six years ago, deep below the mansions and row houses of the city's wealthiest residents, colossal cave adventures are taking shape: massive swimming pools, TV rooms, personal gymnasia, full-scale cinemas, and whole subterranean flats are being constructed in order to side-step strict historic preservation laws on the earth's surface.

Pioneered by firms such as the appropriately named London Basement, these massively expanded homes now feature "playrooms and cinemas, bowling alleys and spas, wine cellars and gun rooms—and even a two-storey climbing wall," the Guardian reported in 2012. "It is leading to a kind of iceberg architecture, a humble mansion on the surface just the visible peak of a gargantuan underworld, with subterranean possibilities only limited by the client's imagination."

As the architect of one such mega-basement explained, "We analyzed the planning laws and realized that they cover everything about the surface of the ground, but nothing beneath it. There was nothing whatsoever that could stop us from drilling all the way down to the south pole."

[Image: Courtesy of London Basement].

Those grand old piles you see lining the streets of Belgravia thus might hide vertically sprawling domestic labyrinths down in the soil and clay beneath their ever-growing foundations, as home ownership fractally expands downward into the planet by way of waterproof geotextiles and carefully buttressed retaining walls.

However, these vast catacombs are by no means uncontroversial and might yet see their era come to an end due to local frustration with the disruption caused by construction crews and because of ever-growing municipal fees and penalties.

Until then, though, this abyssal impulse is surely approaching the inevitable point where we will see a private home legally redefined as a mine, a site of excavation closer in spirit to the extraction industry than private housing.

(Thanks to Martin John Callanan, Peter Flint, Paul Black, and Nicola Twilley! Meanwhile, if you like this, you might also like Subterranean Machine Resurrections)

Guided By Voices

At last week's inaugural Infrastructure Observatory conference, MacroCity, archivist Rick Prelinger delivered a fantastic opening lecture, looking back at the history of telephony in the Bay Area.

From the earliest exposed copper wires vulnerable to shorting out in San Francisco's morning fog to 1970s phone phreaks and the future of NSA surveillance, it was a great talk; you can view the slides here (and follow Rick on Twitter for yet more).

[Image: From the Ellensburg Daily Record, June 16, 1914].

Amidst dozens of examples and images in his talk, the one that really stood out for architectural purposes was his citation of something called the "human telephone," as originally reported in the Ellensburg Daily Record on June 16, 1914. A reorganized and cleaned-up version of that article appears above.

As Prelinger described it, the human telephone was like an electromagnetic update to the oracle at Delphi: a lone female figure with access to distant voices, dancing slowly across a dance floor secretly wired from below, an interactive surface whose hidden technology extended up into her very clothing.

There were copper wires woven through her dress, copper-soled shoes on her feet, even copper nails hammered in the floor below, and this all effectively turned her into a living telephone network—the "human telephone" of the article's title—receiving voices from some continent-scale network invisible to spectators' eyes. Oracular and alluring, she would then invite members of the audience to join her in this choreography, where ghostly conversations-at-a-distance would ensue.

[Image: An otherwise irrelevant photo of people ballroom dancing, via Wikipedia].

In Prelinger's own words:

Prior to the opening of PPIE [the Panama Pacific International Exhibition], Pacific Telephone was asked to furnish service to the Ball of All Nations in May 1914. They built a hidden network of wires under the floor, connected with copper nails set close apart in the floor. The spouse of a telco employee wore copper-soled shoes from which wires ran up through her clothing to a telephone set. She asked her dancing partners whom they'd like to talk with, and suddenly they were on the phone. A switchboard operator listened in on all conversations and whenever she heard a name rushed through a call on special lines.

This wired ballroom—like some telephonic update of the khôra, that Platonic dance floor and moving surface so mythologically important to the first days of Western architecture—presents us with an absolutely incredible image of people waltzing amidst voices, metallurgically connected to a matrix of wires and lines extending far beyond the room they first met within.

The copper woman in the center of it all becomes more like an antenna, stepping and turning inside a glossolalia of distant personalities all vying for time on the invisible network she controls with every move of her feet. Sheathed in metal, she is part golem, part conjurer, part modern oracle, kicking off the weird seance that was the early telephone system, guiding us through a switchboard of words from nowhere all woven together in this awesome dance.

Summer Color

 Summer is ushering beautiful colors all over the streets of New York!

Ilona Heads To Provincetown

I met up with Ilona right before she headed to Provincetown for the summer. She told me that she can't wait to swim in the sea and take in all the colors and warmth of Cape Cod. I always miss Ilona during her summers in P-Town, but am excited to catch up on all her adventures back in the city in September.

Summer Accessories

Hat by Louise Green, Sunglasses by l.a. Eyeworks

Irene has the perfect accessories for a hot summer's day in Los Angeles.

Gretchen Schields

Jewelry by Gretchen Schields

Last week I posted some photos from my shoot at Suzi Click's California Home. Here are are some more shots from a wonderful afternoon with jewelry designer Gretchen Schields and Suzi Click. Gretchen and Suzi are not only great friends, but they collaborate on many creative projects including a brand new blog coming soon... Next time I'm in California I plan on photographing Gretchen's wonderful home in Laguna Beach, but for now check out her inspired designs HERE.

Red and White

I was walking around the city with some  friends when a gorgeous woman passed by. My friends immediately turned to tell me that I need to photograph her. I love how all my friends and family are now taking notice of older people. I get messages from people all over the world telling me about the older people in their lives or about some incredible person that they have spotted walking down the street. Let's continue to bring visibility to the inspiring seniors in all of our communities.