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Optical Calibration Targets

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BLDG BLOG 2013-02-15 15:59:00
[Image: "Three tri-bar targets remaining at Cuddeback Lake... the flat surfaces are peeling, crumbling and sprouting, producing dimensionality, and relief." Photo by and courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation]. "There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA," the Center for Land Use Interpretation reports, "curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography …

Fault Wall

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BLDG BLOG 2013-02-10 19:57:00
With my eyes on all things fault-related these days, as we're now in the third week of the San Andreas Fault National Park studio up at Columbia, I was interested in a brief moment from poet Simon Armitage's new memoir, Walking Home. [Image: Hadrian's Wall (not the wall described below) on the Whin Sill, via Wikipedia]. While hiking with a friend …

Librarian of Rocks

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BLDG BLOG 2013-02-10 17:22:00
[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 …

Caustic Engineering

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BLDG BLOG 2013-02-06 12:54:00
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 �cole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne]. They do so by "taking control of a seemingly chaotic optical …

Soft Launch

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BLDG BLOG 2013-02-06 08:00:00
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 …

Detecting lost rooms with architectural antennae

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-29 20:00:00
[Image: "Constant time slices" from 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 N�stor 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 …

Spreading Ground

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-20 18:16:00
In Richard Mabey's excellent history?and "defense"?of weeds, previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here, 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 …

Crashing Through Dark Matter Walls

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-20 16:06:00
[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 …

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

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-16 17:41:00
[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 …

Desert Traverse

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-16 16:42:00
This autumn?October 12-19, 2013?High Desert Tests Sites aims "to take in everything from Joshua Tree, California, to Albuquerque, New Mexico," through a weeklong open event in which "artists and audience alike [will] traverse the desolate desert roads and explore the hidden gems, both old and new," between these two locations. A call for participation is up if you'd like more …

San Andreas: Architecture for the Fault

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-15 13:34:00
[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)]. I thought I'd upload the course description for a studio I'll be teaching this spring?starting next week, in fact?at Columbia University's GSAPP on the architectural implications of seismic energy and the possibility of a San Andreas Fault National Park in California. The images in this post are just …

Test Room

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-05 04:03:00
[Image: The World Trade Center towers, photographer unknown]. Amongst many other interesting moments in Siobhan Roberts's new biography of Alan Davenport, the "father of modern wind engineering," is the incredible story of a room in Eugene, Oregon. In August 1965, Roberts explains, "ads in the local newspaper... promised complimentary checkups at the new Oregon Research Institute Vision Research Center." But these …

Fence Phone

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-02 04:02:00
[Image: Barbed wire, via Wikipedia]. One more radio-related link comes via @doingitwrong, who mentions the use of barbed-wire fences as a kind of primitive telephone network. "Across much of the west," C.F. Eckhardt explains, "...there was already a network of wire covering most of the country, in the form of barbed-wire fences. Some unknown genius discovered that if you hooked two …

Project Sanguine and the Dead Hand

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-02 02:54:00
[Image: One of the stations of Project ELF, via Wikipedia]. Further exploring the radio-related theme of the last few posts, Rob Holmes?author and co-founder of mammoth?has pointed our attention to something called Project Sanguine, a U.S. Navy program from the 1980s that "would have involved 41 percent of Wisconsin," turning that state into a giant antenna "farm" capable of communicating with …

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-02 01:30:00
The previous two posts have led to a number of interesting links, including several comments over at Reddit that seem worth reproducing here. There, a commenter named clicksnd "used to be in a special forces Signal Detachment (as a server guy) and got awesome cross training from our radio section. One cool thing they taught us is that if we ever …

Antarctic Island Radio

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BLDG BLOG 2013-01-01 21:01:00
[Image: Deception Island, from Millett G. Morgan's September 1960 paper An Island as a Natural Very-Low-Frequency Transmitting Antenna]. Yesterday's post reminded me of an interesting proposal from the 1960s, in which an entire Antarctic island would be transformed into a radio-conducting antenna. Signals of international (or military submarine) origin could thus be bounced, relayed, captured, and re-transmitted using the topographical features …

Tree Receivers

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BLDG BLOG 2012-12-31 20:05:00
[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch]. Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined." General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm …

Books Received

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BLDG BLOG 2012-12-19 21:36:00
[Image: The Wiederin bookshop in Innsbruck, Austria; photo by Lukas Schaller, courtesy of A10]. Barely in time for the holidays, here is a quick look at some of the many new or recent books that have passed through the home office here at BLDGBLOG. As usual, I have not read all of the books listed here, but this will be pretty …

Sound Signature

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BLDG BLOG 2012-12-18 15:14:00
Electrical networks emit such a constant, locally recognizable hum that their sound can be used to help solve crimes. [Image: Random sound file using Sound Studio]. A forensic database of electrical sounds is thus being developed by UK police, according to the BBC. "For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London," we read, "audio specialists …

Not a grid, but a fleet

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BLDG BLOG 2012-12-17 02:59:00
Some of my favorite architectural images of all time come from a series of photos taken by Fred R. Conrad for the New York Times, showing the remains of an 18th-century ship that had been uncovered in the muddy depths of the World Trade Center site, a kind of wooden fossil, splayed out and preserved like a rib cage, embedded in …

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