…what interests me here is the idea that you could build one thing—a ship—that only becomes what it’s really meant to be—a building—when the circumstances it’s surrounded by undergo a phase change (here, water turning into ice).
I’m thinking here of about the artificial island Geoff posted about that’s build from rocks and the husks of ships. I’m thinking about bridges and piers and other structures which are floated into place before being sunk and sealed in.
I’m thinking about floating restaurants and the gambling riverboats that never leave dock. Especially the floating casinos; they never wanted to be water-faring in the first place, were forced into mobility by laws, and are slowly reverting to their natural state.
Many of the floating palaces of fortune that cling to the Mississippi’s banks like mussels in the five states where they are legal still look like the elegant steamboats that plied the river in Twain’s time. The resemblance ends at the waterline, however, as many have no engines, and those that do rarely, if ever, fire them up and weigh anchor.
Others — the so-called “boats on moats” — don’t look anything like floating wedges of wedding cake, a description applied to the paddle-wheel steamboats of old. These “vessels” are large barges designed to float in pools adjacent to the river with casinos on their decks.
I’m thinking about the concrete tents, where the phase change is in the material of the structure itself. “Add water to make this permanent.”
Lastly, I’m thinking about the many, many, many science fiction and fantasy scenarios where what was once thought to be an ancient temple turns out to be a fully operational starship/battle station/moving castle waiting for the right people to come along and bring it back to life.
Biologists have identified a pair of complementary evolutionary phenomena relating to isolated populations of island-dwelling animals. Island gigantism happens when birds or reptiles step into the apex predator niche that would normally be held by a large mammal. Because they aren’t as naturally efficient killers as their mammalian counterparts, pressure eases off their prey who can afford to grow larger than normal as well. Island dwarfism occurs when a combination of inbreeding and lacking resources forces animals to grow smaller and consume less, maintaining the balance and viability of the ecosystem.
Which is all just to say that the situation gets weird when you stick things on islands.
View in Google Maps (I highly recommend clicking through and zooming in on the circles.)
Under a Titanium Net
In the Pacific ocean, about halfway between Japan and the Philippines, there is a patch of coral called Okinotori that may or may not include a pair of islands. They might only be rocks. The status of these two possible-islands is of deep personal interest to the governments of both China and Japan. If they’re islands, the atoll grants Japan exclusive economic zone rights over an area of ocean about the size of California. If they’re rocks, then Japan loses the claim. In 2004, the Chinese started calling them rocks. There is no dispute over who owns the atoll, instead the dispute is about what the atoll is.
For those keeping score at home, according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is “a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” Also, “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.” There used to be five rocks peeking over the surface of the waves, but erosion has claimed three of them. The remaining pair are barely larger than mattresses, which leaves very little room for habitation or economic life.
To preserve the alleged islands, Japan surrounded them in 60m diameter concrete sea walls (these are the circular structures you can see in the satellite images). The smaller one got a titanium net to protect it from chipping by wave-hurled debris. There are slits in the walls to ensure that the ‘naturally formed’ land remains ’surrounded by water’.
The entire preservation project is gloriously tautological. A solar-powered unmanned lighthouse, installed in 2007, provides economic life to the islands because they need economic life in order to be islands. An ongoing project to preserve the rocks and encourage new coral growth continues because it’s critical that the islands be naturally formed. A concrete barrier isn’t natural, but a reef grown from transplanted coral in the shelter of artificial structures is.
China might simply need to wait. With sea levels expected to continue to rise, Japan may not be able to grow coral fast enough.
Here’s a fun conspiracy story for you: When the Copenhagen climate talks failed to come to any real conclusion, Mark Lynas blamed it all on China. This led Jamais Cascio to wonder whether the cold war over warming he’d predicted was coming true. Could China be using delayed action on climate change as a kind of passive weather control to drown Okinotori once and for all? Surely that’s overkill.
Here’s what fascinates me about artificial islands. They tend to be colossally impractical constructions rendered practical by some byzantine combination of laws and culture. Artificial islands contrast nicely with the woven spaces idea I wrote about last month. Instead of a physical space sub-divided by rules and norms, these are fabrications forced into existence by laws. They are architecture at the margins of the high end, the inverse of Stewart Brand’s beloved slums and Sterling’s favelas. This is real gothic high tech. Expensive, complicated, barely functional constructions that will be abandoned as soon as the winds of finance or international law shift (and they will shift).
Japan spends $600 million encasing coral in concrete and titanium because Chinese diplomats suddenly start calling them rocks. The Chinese start doing this because China is worried that the US Navy might use the surrounding ocean to ferry warships and supplies to Taiwan.
This isn’t Japan’s first foray into making artificial islands. Yesterday’s InfraNet Lab post discusses Dejima, an artificial island built in Nagasaki bay in 1634. The island serves to house Portuguese and then Dutch merchants, part of a strategy for keeping Japan culturally isolated while still allowing for some trade. When Commodore Perry forces an end to sakoku, the island is quietly absorbed into the mainland.
Real estate bubbles render beachfront property untenably valuable. A burst of construction never quite seems to reach the promise of the brochures, be they the incomplete Venetian Islands in Miami (also discussed by InfraNet Lab) or Dubai’s drowning Palm Islands.
In a more contemplative vein, BLDGBLOG points us to an island slowly growing in Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor around a rock that looks like the Virgin Mary. Over time, sailors and pilgrims add ships and stones in a process that feels more organic than the seeded coral around Okinotori but that will survive only as long as Christianity remains in the region.
(For an alcohol soaked vision of the same kind of construction, see Bacardi’s Island commercial.)
In the North Sea, the UK builds gun platforms in order to repel Axis bombers. Once the war is over, they are abandoned, only to be repopulated by pirate radio stations, driven there by broadcast laws and a thirst for pop music. One declares itself a sovereign nation and attempts to run a data haven. (Archinect’s Nick Sowers visited some of these platforms last year.)
At the Edge of the Law
Data havens are a staple of cyberpunk fiction and its offshoots. They’re a natural evolution of offshore banking and flags of convenience, both typically conducted from island nations. It’s a tenuous existence. Many rely on foreign aid and sovereignty is maintained only through the general legal goodwill of the international community. Few island nations could repel invaders so their main line of defence is not being worth invading. At the same time, what makes them attractive places to store one’s money or bits is an alternate system of laws that permit foreign nationals to skirt their own country’s rules.
These countries seem to survive on the idea of being a country. Look through their economic activities and you see a bizarre portfolio of enterprise on the edges of sovereignty. Nauru, stripped of its natural resources has tried being a tax haven, renting fishing rights, and hosting an Australian detention centre. Tonga is known for its colourful postage stamps. The Cayman Islands have 285 registered banks. It’s fitting that Tuvalu would end up with the .tv domain, a valuable property that it leases out along with its area code for 900 numbers.
Iceland, still recovering from its law-induced role as one of the epicentres of the financial crisis, seems intent on reinventing itself as real data haven. First, it began pointing out that its low temperatures and virtually unlimited supply of geothermal energy would make it a great place to put your server farms. Now it’s working on readjusting the laws to be much more media-friendly. (A move which may or may not work as intended.)
Building for Abandonment
What lessons in all this for the budding architect? If you’re going to grow your own island, understand how tenuous a construction this is. We live in an era when the natural island nations are at risk of becoming ghost states, let alone their artificial companions, many of which barely crest the waves. Artificial islands tend to be inhabited as briefly as possible, a pressure which conflicts with the relatively slow process of semi-natural growth. You need an egress-plan. What will become of your island when the legal and cultural environment that sustains it inevitably changes? Who will inhabit it after the lawyers, scientists, diplomats, bankers, and soldiers all go home?
In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and take this walkway. It passes over the luggage claim area and then passes over the people waiting for their loved ones to emerge. A few meters later, its own set of doors opens and you are outside in a loading area, hailing a cab. Unremarkable.
But there is that brief moment when you are crossing above the waiting throng. You are cleared through security, vetted and behind the cordon. They are random people milling about the airport. Physically, you are within shouting distance. Legally, they are miles away. It’s not a big drop, I’ve made worse without hurting myself. Physically, it’d be a simple movement. Legally, it would be as if I’d teleported.
At some point during a 36 hour multi-flight marathon, I have this dim memory of an airport escalator that skipped a floor. There was plexiglass on either side and as we were going from floors 3 to 1, we passed an escalator that ran from 2 to 4. Who was the other escalator for? I have no idea. Probably employees sporting a special badge with chips and magnetic codes that allow them to open certain doors. Doors that I’d be arrested for loitering near, alert levels being what they are.
Years ago, in a philosophy of mind seminar, we talked about abstract reasoning skills. I’m going to mangle it but the basic idea was something like this: Water has no abstract reasoning at all. You can trap water with a bowl. From water’s perspective, the floor is infinitely far away once the bowl has collected it. Animals like dogs can get out of obstacles like a bowl, but you can mess them up with a picket fence. They can see the thing they want to get, and they’ll stay stuck right where it is, barking. They are unwilling to move “away” from the tasty bone even though the open gate down the lane is actually the shortest route from their current position to the morsel. A human is able to make that kind of higher order of reasoning, happily sauntering down the road, popping the latch and collecting the prize. On the other hand, dogs don’t get tricked by lines painted on the ground.
Jackie is smiling at the zoo security guard like she’s not terrified. The guard is yelling something or other.
“Blah blah blah,” he yells. “Blah blah blah blah.” Jackie’s classmates are crowded around him now, watching her. She looks crazy up here, but they’re the ones who think that a little fence like that can stop them.
Ordinarily, legal and physical architecture work in concert. You aren’t allowed into a certain area, so they helpfully wall it off and lock the doors. They’d prefer you to be in some other area and so offer you bright lighting and wide aisles. But there are times when the two work at cross purposes, either when some architect is being clever (as in the walkway and escalators) or when the subtleties of legal distinction are too much for dumb mortar and brick to implement. I’ve started thinking of these areas as woven spaces.
We start building legal architecture when we’re young. “Don’t touch the floor, it’s made of lava!” “The big comfy chair is ’safe’!” “No boys allowed!” Chalk, debris, and language are the tools of the budding legal architect. A patch of playground morphs between uses, guided only by a few well placed rocks or backpacks, some lines scratched in the dust, and an elaborately argued consensus.
This kind of rule-making gives us a means to shape our environment when we’re otherwise powerless. We can’t get together a voting block, draw up plans, lobby for, and build a new arena for kids’ hockey, but we can cart a net into the street and declare a manhole cover centre ice.
At the same time, the most prolific legal architects of our childhood are parents and authority figures. Under their watchful eye, otherwise easily traversed spaces become mazes of prohibition and regulation. It hardly seems fair. But these are hacks, allowing layers of use in a single space. Without stern looks and sharp words, it would be impossible to have a usable kitchen that was not also a toddler deathtrap.
As kids mature, the likely uses for a given room begin to collapse into a roughly consistent set of needs. The physical and legal spaces coalesce and begin to operate in concert once more. But even as kids turn into young adults, there are plenty of exceptions. Siblings argue about each other’s bedroom use (“His stuff is on MY SIDE.”), parents and children have to negotiate privacy and access, and politeness constrains what rooms guests do and don’t enter during parties. Finally, there is always the threat of being grounded.
Restraining orders, probation, curfew, and house arrest are legal architecture is literally legal. House arrest ties you to a specific place, imprisoned by purely theoretical walls. Probation offers more freedom but turns the city into a maze customized to your particular circumstances and crime. Restraining orders create roving spheres of forbidden space, a protective bubble around those to whom you have been deemed a threat.
The current technology used for these measures is pretty primitive, relying on phonecalls, eyewitnesses, and crude ankle monitors. It’s not hard to imagine a GPS-enabled or networked monitor that translates rulings into a highly granular set of instructions. According to a schedule negotiated with the courts, virtual pathways open and close to allow you to travel to and from your community service workplace, before sealing you in at home for the night or downtown for your mandated shifts. In the case of restraining orders, the system could monitor the location of all parties, warning victim, perpetrator, and authorities in case of a breach.
If this seems at all draconian, consider that the rest of us are already pretty used to this kind of thing. We happily use theatre tickets, conference badges, time-locked access cards, metro passes, and other tokens to open and close spaces according to all sorts of schedules and regulations. It’s all tricks and hacks. It’s a cybernetic solution to an architectural problem.
Imagine instead an environment built out of some suite of smart materials able reconfigure themselves in a highly contextual manner. Guests checking in to a hotel are assigned a room and then follow a path that lights up at their feet, guiding them to rest. An ancient forest reconfigures itself, trapping and confusing enemies, while friendlies pass unmolested. Adventurers become lost in a dungeon of shifting walls and traps. The entire plot of the movie Cube.
There is a possibly apocryphal story about a conversation on the subject of the solar system between Wittgenstein and a student. Wittgenstein asks the student why early people thought that the sun went around the earth. The student says that it’s because it looks that way. Wittgenstein asks, “And how would it look if the earth went around the sun?”
2.
In 1997, a real-estate bubble driven by financial speculation in the Asian Tiger economies reached its peak and burst. The resulting crash sparked international panic, threatening to bring down the world economy. In Thailand, construction halted on dozens of massive projects. 13 years later, those buildings are still standing.
Ban Phe is a fishing village about 2 hours outside of Bangkok. Look it up in travel guides and they will confidently tell you that the only reason you’ll be there is to catch a ferry to Ko Samet, a popular vacation island. There are at least 7 massive resorts within a 15-minute scooter drive. Nearly all are unfinished and abandoned. They tower incongruously over the countryside. The total capacity would have been in the tens-of-thousands.
3.
The Skyscraper Index posits that record-breaking construction projects are indicators of an irrationally exuberant economy and harbingers of doom.
4.
Up close, the Thai resorts are being slowly reclaimed by the jungle.
These are not slap-dash projects. They were well funded and carefully designed. They would have been nice places. Rooftop patios overlook what would have been ornate pools.
5.
*We’ve long had a term of art for old buildings that are ruined: they’re called “ruins.”
*However, we lack a term of art for “ruins” that are actually buildings never completed. Sometimes they’re completed buildings that are never sold, and therefore they start falling over before they were ever inhabited. This would be the American real-estate bust version of the phenomenon.
*Another version is the abandoned, incomplete high-rise. Commonly a steel and cement framework is erected (because that’s pretty easy), and then there’s some legal or economic brouhaha and the builders just down tools and walk off. In Brazil a skeleton framework of this kind is called a “squelette.”
The post-apocalypse is a comforting fantasy. It implies that things will only ever get that bad due to catastrophe. We say Detroit looks like a post-apocalyptic city because we are really bad at conceptualizing decline. Detroit got that way gradually.
“How would it look if it had just slowly fallen apart?”
7.
What would it have been like to live through the fall of Rome? You’d have been very old. The decline of the Roman Empire took 320 years. That’s 12 generations of people. Did each generation say that things used to be better in the old days? They were right, I suppose.
8.
When then end came to Thailand’s boom, somewhere an architecture firm – perhaps specializing in premium exotic locations – quietly removed all reference to certain projects from their portfolio.
9.
In Towards Hackable Architecture, Ethan Zuckerman considers the problem that architects face when they are asked by people with more money than sense to envision insane projects, in this case, building a hotel that is “Dubai meets Disney in Dakar”.
Many of the teams fought the question, arguing that the goal was to persuade the developer that the only way to compete in a global market was combining luxury with responsibility. But my favorite response came from an architect who referenced the ideas of creative reuse in my talk and said, “Build the hotel. Assume it’s going to fail and be left to fall apart. How do you build a building so that it can be hacked after the fact?”
In my mind, there are two images of the Coliseum. The first is of the contemporary ruin. The second is of gladiators, lions, and Christians. But the last gladiatorial fights happened in 435 and the modern ruin wasn’t fully excavated until the 1930s.
That’s 1,500 years of neglect and adaptive re-use that aren’t part of the cultural picture of the building. Here are some things that happened: A church was built into the side; it was fortified and possibly used as a castle; a religious order lived in the northern third from the 1350s to the 1800s (what was happening in the other two thirds?); they considered turning it into a wool factory; they used it briefly for bullfights.
11.
*Occasionally squatters move into “squelettes” and bring in some breeze-block, corrugated tin and plastic hoses, transforming squelettes into high-rise favelas. This doesn’t work very well because it’s tough to manage the utilities, especially the water.
Anecdotally, there is a feeling that the increasing homogenisation of the soundscape (i.e. places all sounding the same) is speeding up, yet no one is systematically keeping tabs on this change. This is not a prompt for some kind of museum-like stance, but it begs the question, shouldn’t we be considering the soundscape as an integral part of our heritage in the same light as we do for historic building facades?
Paging Nick Sowers and Dan Hill: Imagine an app that let you walk through the city and experience how it sounded a decade ago?
The path for the adoption of voluntary prosthetics seems to go amputees -> disabled people -> wider use? I wonder if monitoring systems for the elderly which give them MORE freedom and independence (at least, felt independence) will be the path that drives the adoption of self-surveillance technology.
4. Drones.
After I posted The Lost Drone Army, Geoff Manaugh pointed me to his piece about UAVs controlled with thoughts. Which then quickly spirals into a roving fantasy about all of the crazy things that can happen when you link machines directly to the brain.
photo credit: gordontarpley
