Advanced Holiday Style

I was on my way out of the Met for lunch, when I spotted this lovely woman across the street. She was perfectly dressed for the holiday season and happy to pose for a quick photo.

Happy Holidays From Advanced Style

New York is full of holiday inspiration, from the decorated windows of 5th Avenue department stores, to all the festively dressed people around town. I stopped this woman walking down Madison Ave on Christmas Eve. I loved her joyful and fun holiday look, and it turns out we have a mutual friend, Maryann, a regular of Advanced Style. I am celebrating the holidays with my family in Cancun and will be posting all of last weeks holiday outfits over the next few days. I hope everyone I has had a wonderful season so far!

Return of the Brick Swarm

A short video has been released documenting the brick swarm project mentioned here last month, in which Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler deploy semi-autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure of foam bricks. However, it's as if the architects underestimate the interest of their own work, fast-forwarding through the bulk of the assembly process as if no one would want to watch such a thing (or perhaps their robots were less graceful than originally hoped). Either way, check out the results, embedded above.

(Thanks to phenrydelphia for the tip!)

Speleological Superparks

[Image: Downtown Reno on a Saturday night with people queuing up to climb the BaseCamp wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

As part of an overall strategy to rebrand itself not as a city of gambling and slot machines—not another Las Vegas—but as more of a gateway to outdoor sports and adventure tourism—a kind of second Boulder or new Moab—Reno, Nevada, now houses the world's largest climbing wall, called BaseCamp, attached to the side of an old hotel.

[Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

BaseCamp is "a 164-foot climbing wall, 40 feet taller than the previous world’s highest in the Netherlands," according to DPM Climbing. "The bouldering area will also be world-class with 2900 square feet of overhanging bouldering surface."

You can see a few pictures of those artificial boulders over at DPM.

[Image: The wall; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Fascinatingly, though, the same company who designed and manufactured this installation—a firm called Entre Prises—also makes artificial caves.

One such cave, in particular, created for and donated to the British Caving Association, is currently being used "to promote caving at shows and events around the country. It is now housed in its own convenient trailer and is available for use by Member Clubs and organizations."

[Image: The British Caving Association's artificial cave, designed by Entre Prises; photo by David Cooke].

These replicant geological forms are modular, easily assembled, and come in indoor and outdoor varieties. Indoor artificial caves, we read, "are usually made from polyester resin and glass fibre as spraying concrete indoors is often not very practicable. Indoor caves provide the experience of caving without some of the discomforts of natural or outdoor caves: the air temperature can be relatively easily controlled, in most cases specialist clothing is not required [and] the passage walls are not very thick so more cave passage can be designed to go into a small area."

Further, maintaining the exclamation point from the original text: "The modular nature of the Speleo System makes it possible to create any cave type and can be modified in minutes by simply unbolting and rotating a section! This means you can have hundreds of possible caving challenges and configurations for the price of one."

It would be interesting to live in a city, at least for a few weeks, ruled by an insane urban zoning board who require all new buildings—both residential and commercial—to include elaborate artificial caves. Not elevator shafts or emergency fire exits or public playgrounds: huge fake caves torquing around and coiling through the metropolis. Caves that can be joined across property lines; caves that snake underneath and around buildings; caves that arch across corporate business lobbies in fern-like sprays of connected chambers. Plug-in caves that tour the city in the back of delivery trucks, waiting to be bolted onto existing networks elsewhere. From Instant City to Instant Cave. Elevator-car caves that arrive on your floor when you need them. Caves on hovercrafts and helicopters, detached from the very earth they attempt to represent.

This brings to mind the work of Carsten Höller, implying a project someday in which the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern could be transformed into the world's largest artificial cave system, or perhaps even a future speleo-superpark in a place like Dubai, where literally acres of tunnels sprawl across the landscape, inside and outside, aboveground and below ground, in unpredictably claustrophobic rearrangeable prefab whorls.

The "outdoor" varieties, meanwhile, are actually able "to be buried within a hillside"; however, they "must be able to withstand the bearing pressure of any overlying material, eg. soil or snow. This is usually addressed by making the caving structures in sprayed concrete that has been specifically engineered to withstand the loads. Alternatively the cave passages can be constructed in polyester resin and glass fibre but then they have to be within a structural 'box' if soil pressure is to be applied."

In any case, here are some of the cave modules offered by Entre Prises, a kind of cave catalog called the Speleo System—though it's worth noting, as well, that "To add interest within passages and chambers, cave paintings and fossils can be added. This allows for user interest to be maintained, creating an educational experience."

[Image: The Speleo System by Entre Prises].

As it happens, Entre Prises is also in the field of ice architecture. That is, they design and build large, artificially maintained ice-climbing walls.

These "artificial ice climbing structures... support natural ice where the air temperature is below freezing point." However, "permanent indoor structures," given "a temperature controlled environment," can also be created. These are described as "self generating real ice structures that utilize a liquid nitrogen refrigeration system."

[Images: An artificial ice structure by Entre Prises for the Winter X Games].

Amongst many things, what interests me here is the idea that niche sports enthusiasts—specifically cavers and climbers—have discovered and, perhaps more importantly, financially support a unique type of architecture and the construction techniques required for assembling it that, in an everyday urban context, would appear quite eccentric, if not even avant-garde.

Replicant geological formations in the form of modular, aboveground caves and artificially frozen concrete towers only make architectural and financial sense when coupled with the needs of particular recreational activities. These recreational activities are more like spatial incubators, both inspiring and demanding new, historically unexpected architectural forms.

So we might say that, while architects are busy trying to reimagine traditional building typologies and architectural programs—such as the Library, the Opera House, the Airport, the Private House—these sorts of formally original, though sometimes aesthetically kitsch, designs that we are examining here come not from an architecture firm at all, or from a particular school or department, but from a recreational sports firm pioneering brand new spatial environments.

As such, it would be fascinating to see Entre Prises lead a one-off design studio somewhere, making artificial caves a respectable design typology for students to admit they're interested in, while simultaneously pushing sports designers to see their work in more architectural terms and prodding architects to see niche athletes as something of an overlooked future clientele.

Rita's Style Influences(VIDEO)

A few days ago I got great feedback on a photo I took of Rita Hammer. You guys asked for more, so I made a small video of Rita talking about her style influences. I hope you enjoy and look forward to some great new shots of her next week!

Color Coordination

Mary has mastered the art of color coordination. Each outfit she puts on is a masterpiece full of wonderful accessories and beautiful,harmonious colors and textures. A while back I asked Mary her opinion on dressing age appropriate and she answered," I think that saying women can’t wear color at a certain age says step back and die. Most important is to develop a sense of objectivity. I go by an instant reaction--if it's negative that I don’t do it. Obviously you shouldn’t wear super short skirts. You don’t want to look like a crazy old lady.In short avoid those Baby Jane moments."

Brooklyn Vent

[Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].

In the novel Foucault's Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People "walk by" this certain house in Paris, we read, "and they don't know the truth. That the house is a fake. It's a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld..."

[Image: The door to the underworld; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Two days ago, Nicola Twilley and I went on an early evening expedition over to visit the house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, with its blacked out windows and unresponsive front door.

This "house" is actually "the world's only Greek Revival subway ventilator" and disguised emergency exit.

[Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG].

According to a blog called the Willowtown Association, "the ventilator was a private brownstone dating from 1847. The substation was built in 1908 in conjunction with the start of subway service to Brooklyn. As reported in the BKLYN magazine article, the building's 'cavernous interior once housed a battery of electrical devices that converted alternating current to the 600-volt direct current needed to power the IRT.'"

[Image: A view through the front door of 58 Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].

It is New York's more interesting version of 23/24 Leinster Gardens in London. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote last year, "the exit disguised as a brownstone leads to a grimy-lit set of metal stairs that ascend past utility boxes and ventilation shafts into a windowless room with a door. If you opened the door, you would find yourself on a stoop, which is just part of the façade."

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG].

You'll notice on Google Maps that the 4/5 subway line passes directly beneath the house, which brings to mind an old post here on BLDGBLOG in which we looked at the possibility that repurposed subway cars could be used someday as extra, rentable basement space—that is, "temporary basements in the form of repurposed subway cars," with the effect that "each private residence thus becomes something like a subway station, with direct access, behind a locked door, to the subterranean infrastructure of the city far below."

Then, for a substantial fee—as much as $15,000 a month—you can rent a radically redesigned subway car, complete with closets, shelves, and in-floor storage cubes. The whole thing is parked beneath your house and braked in place; it has electricity and climate control, perhaps even WiFi. You can store summer clothes, golf equipment, tool boxes, children's toys, and winter ski gear.
When you no longer need it, or can't pay your bills, you simply take everything out of it and the subway car is returned to the local depot.
A veritable labyrinth of moving rooms soon takes shape beneath the city.

Perhaps Joralemon Street is where this unlikely business model could be first tried out...

In any case, Nicola and I walked over to see the house for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the disguised-entrance-to-the-underworld is undoubtedly one of the coolest building programs imaginable, and would make an amazing premise for an intensive design studio; but also because the surface vent structures through which underground currents of air are controlled have always fascinated me.

These vents appear throughout New York City, as it happens—although Joralemon, I believe, is the only fake house—serving as surface articulations of the larger buried networks to which they are connected.

[Image: Two views of the tunnel vent on Governors Island; photos by BLDGBLOG].

The Battery Tunnel has a particularly noticeable vent, pictured above, and the Holland Tunnel also vents out near my place of work.

[Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].

As historian David Gissen writes in his excellent book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, New York's ventilation control structures are "strange buildings" that have "collapsed" the difference between architecture and civil engineering:

The Holland Tunnel spanned an enormous 8,500 feet. At each end, engineers designed ten-story ventilation towers that would push air through tunnels above the cars, drawing the vehicle exhaust upward, where it would be blown back through the tops of the towers and over industrial areas of the city. The exhaust towers provided a strange new building type in the city—a looming blank tower that oscillated between a work of engineering and architecture.

As further described in this PDF, for instance, Holland Tunnel has a total of four ventilation structures: "The four ventilation buildings (two in New Jersey and two in New York) house a total of 84 fans, of which 42 are blower units, and 42 are exhaust units. They are capable, at full speed, of completely changing the tunnel air every 90 seconds."

[Image: The Holland Tunnel Land Ventilation Building, courtesy of Wikipedia].

Several years ago a friend of ours remarked that she didn't like staying in hotels near Columbus Circle here in New York because that's the neighborhood, she said, where all the subways vent to—a statement that appears to be nothing more than an urban legend, but that nonetheless sparked off a long-term interest for me in finding where the underground weather systems of New York City are vented to the outside. Imagine an entire city district dedicated to nothing but ventilating the underworld!

[Image: The house on Joralemon Street; photo by BLDGBLOG].

This is a topic I will no doubt return to at some point soon—but, for now, if you want to see a disguised entrance to the 4/5 line, walk down Joralemon Street toward the river and keep your eyes peeled soon after the street turns to cobblestones.

(The house on Joralemon Street first discovered via Curbed).