According to Sports Illustrated, Gilbert Arenas of the NBA has “hired a company to reduce the oxygen content in his house.” This way he can “train under high-altitude conditions similar to those in Colorado.”
Interviewed by a blog at the Washington Post, Arenas then claimed “that ‘at least 14 players’ have contacted him about having the same simulated conditions” installed; this includes “the whole Chicago Bulls team,” who now want “to get that in their homes.”
But ESPN’s headline says it best: “Arenas sorry for Team USA vent; thins air in house.”
So what I want to know is: if you do this to someone’s house without them knowing, is that illegal – and what would such a crime be called?

Last year, New Scientist reported that “a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole,” might represent “the future of humanity.”
That “large concrete room” is the now somewhat infamous “doomsday vault” in which seeds from all of the world’s known crops and plantlife will be stored.
The vault – described as “the ultimate safety net for the world’s most important natural resource” – will be constructed “deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but ‘the mountains are patrolled by polar bears’,” we read.
In choosing a location and determining other key physical parameters for the project, its designers “ran drastic climate change modelling scenarios, projecting 200 years into the future and factoring in potential increases in water levels due to melting ice from pole to pole.”
Well, as the BBC reported yesterday, the final design for the vault has been unveiled.

[Image: Inside the vault, rendered by Statsbygg; via the BBC].

This complex, pictured above, will now “safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008.”
Thus, a whole new building type has quietly emerged into architectural history – update your textbooks. Vitruvius would be proud: it’s the botanical Arctic Ark-archive.
But is Spitsbergen really that safe? Perhaps these seeds should really be stored on, say, the International Space Station? Leaving aside how it would be possible to retrieve them, in the event of a truly global catastrophe, the premise nonetheless reminds me of China’s “space seed” project – which seems to have all but disappeared from public discourse.
Quoting at length:

Plant seeds have been blasted into orbit in the hope that “space breeding” holds the key to improving crop yields and disease resistance. Wheat and barley strains developed by the Department of Agriculture and Food in Western Australia (WA) have just landed back on Earth following a 15-day orbital cruise on board China’s Shijian-8 satellite. “Space-breeding refers to the technique of sending seeds into space in a recoverable spacecraft or a high-altitude balloon,” said Agriculture WA barley breeder Chengdao Li. “In the high-vacuum, micro-gravity and strong-radiation space environment, seeds may undergo mutation.”

Surely this must herald the birth of the most interesting era in garden design since Versailles? Cultivating “a number of new species” through genetic interaction with the universe?
Or is that the plot of a Donald Sutherland film?
After all, we read, China may have “nearly 405,000 hectares of rice fields planted with space seeds and 8,100 hectares of space vegetable growing. An estimate of 243,000 hectares of space rice fields will be added this year.” Is this being taught in landscape design courses?
Or, more germane to this post: will these space seeds be stored with the rest at Spitsbergen…?

In a fantastic hybrid of edible architecture and temporary summer pavilion, architect Caroline O’Donnell has proposed Bloodline, a free-standing, self-consuming grilling shelter.

[Image: Sectional model through the preparation bench, Bloodline pavilion by Caroline O'Donnell; Bloodline is supported by the Akademie Schloss Solitude].

Bloodline is the outcome of O’Donnell’s 2007 fellowship and residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, a grant-making and residency institution housed in the late-Baroque “Solitude Castle” near Stuttgart in southern Germany.

Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, built Schloss Solitude in 1763 as a private pleasure house—a cross between a party castle, summer retreat, and hunting lodge. Solitude was intended to be more intimate and less formal than his royal palace at Ludwigsburg, like the Trianons were to Versailles.

[Image: Akademie Schloss Solitude, via Wikimedia].

Among the prerequisites for an eighteenth-century aristocrat to achieve relaxation were a natural setting and, perhaps more importantly, minimal interaction with the servant classes. However, since domestic service was still required (aristocratic relaxation did not encompass preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals, for example), palace architects had to resort to an extremely elaborate set of spatial tricks and distortions to make the servers as invisible as possible. The original design for the Petit Trianon even included a mechanism for raising and lowering the dining table through the floor so that it could be set and cleared out of sight.

According to O’Donnell, “The guides at Schloss Solitude could not understand why I wanted to see the service spaces, and tried to convince me that they were not interesting. I kept telling them in bad German that I was an architect and therefore interested in uninteresting spaces, but that seemed to cause more confusion.”

[Image: The secret service spaces at Ludwigsburg (left) and Schloss Solitude (right)].

What she found, eventually, were a series of awkward and cramped service cupboards and passages, filling in the spaces around the formal, symmetrical rooms. They are the negative space of pure classical order; the banished evidence of domestic effort and bodily needs.

Interestingly, O’Donnell noticed that at Karl Eugen’s main palace, Ludwigsburg Castle, the formal rooms are arranged around the edge, concealing a rabbit warren of service spaces in the interior.

Meanwhile at Solitude, the reverse is true: the cupboards, closets, and service passages are banished to the edge, with the result that seven of the fourteen windows on the perfectly symmetrical south façade actually open onto these deformed, hidden spaces.

Mammoth has posted a great list of the best architecture of the decade. It runs the gamut from groundwater replenishing infrastructure and Chinese high-speed rail to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the iPhone, by way of the Large Hadron Collider, Rome’s Pontine marshes, and a library in Medellín (among others).

The purpose of the list, they write, is “to share a handful of the reasons that we’re genuinely excited about the future of architecture, and to hopefully engender a bit of that excitement in a reader or two.” It’s an inspired (and refreshingly non-building-centric) list of innovations (like microfinance) that have affected the built environment—and yet another reason why Mammoth is one of the best architecture blogs being written anywhere in the world today.

As a list, it also fares very favorably against the mind-numbing self-congratulation of other critics’ decade-in-retrospect lists, in which the last ten years appeared to exist only to validate the publishing decisions of people who, long ago, forgot how to engage with anything more than a shaving mirror.

As we’ve explored on BLDGBLOG before, the earth is constantly humming. Specifically, there “is a low rumble continually present in the ground even when there are no earthquakes happening,” and it is “detectable only by very sensitive seismometers. Its frequency is near 10 millihertz, below the range of human hearing.”
Now, though, out of the mess of competing explanations – which have included everything from changes in global air pressure (or wind rocking against mountains), to constant, almost undetectably small earthquakes deep inside the earth’s crust – the hum’s cause has apparently been found.
And he is being held by Afghan authorities in a small – wait –
As it happens, the hum’s real sonic origins “appeared to be linked to large ocean storms along certain coastlines,” New Scientist writes, but the mechanism itself remained a mystery.
It now seems that the hum begins rather humbly, so to speak, with “the combination of two waves of the same frequency travelling in opposite directions.” These “alternately cancel out and amplify each other,” creating “a standing wave that ‘goes thump, thump, thump on the ocean floor’.”
This, then, is the secret of terrestrial resonation.
After all, if you take millions upon millions of these standing waves every day of the year, along every coastline, in ceaseless percussion, you get an earth that quietly hums – a spherical musical instrument that rotates through space.

Marcus Trimble, of gravestmor, has a cool little article in the new issue of Mark Magazine, about the work of Sydney’s Durbach Block Architects; a few of the projects he covers deserve a second look.
First, there’s the abandoned “brick pit” last seen in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, in which Mad Max battled Master Blaster in a huge cage full of chainsaws… Apparently that old quarry has been transformed by Durbach Block into a kind of ecological scenic zone.

[Images: The Brick Pit Ring by Durbach Block Architects].

This “disused brick pit in amongst the abattoirs and toxic dumps of Homebush Bay, Sydney,” Marcus writes, now houses “a perfect circle set propped over the excavated site. It is set tangential to the ragged edge of the brick pit and its circumference passes through the exact centre line of the pit.” Further, “small viewing platforms poke outside the ring” – so you can walk around in colorful circles and look down into the pit, recalling Mad Max in his glory days…
Personally, I think Durbach Block should be hired to build tens of thousands of these things, spanning whole continental interiors, framing canyons and deserts and inland seas – or perhaps a labyrinth of pedestrian bridges should come to link the Great Lakes: vast, thousand-miles stretches of raised platforms in every color, forming stilted whorls of roofless corridors, full of ramps and platforms and spiraling rings, making lacework of the horizon.
Marcus then goes on to explore the “charged geography” of Sydney’s coast, where the Holman House now stands: “The house is built out of a series of curves set in opposition to one another. A bent and split beam reaches out in an improbable cantilever to the north and south before folding in on itself to capture a small piece of outdoor space that steps down to the pool below. These arcing spaces contain the living areas of the house.”

[Image: A room inside the Holman House, Sydney, by Durbach Block Architects].

From there we meet a structure that is “as much a lawn as a building”: it’s Commonwealth Place in Canberra.
“On either side of the [lawn-building's] axis,” we read, “the ground is peeled up to create an inverted mound. Beneath these wings are placed various functions, currently a restaurant and an art gallery.”
So you are dining within a new and artificial surface for the earth.

[Image: Commonwealth Place by Durbach Block Architects – the hot air balloon, alas, is not a permanent part of the structure].

Finally, whilst clicking around Durbach Block’s website, I came across these Amenities Buildings, built within the Sydney Olympic Park –

[Images: The Sydney Amenities Buildings by Durbach Block Architects].

– and I think they’re gorgeous. They also remind me (very vaguely) of the work of Theo Jansen.
In any case, if you see a copy of Mark Magazine lying around somewhere, be sure to check it out.

Earlier this month, the New York Times took its readers to Angel Falls, Venezuela – and onto the terrain of a lost supercontinent called Gondwana.

[Image: A remnant glimpse of a lost supercontinent, via the New York Times; photographer unknown. "The path in some stretches was completely overgrown with trees, reminding me how oppressively dark the jungle can be," we read].

Throughout Venezuela, we read, there are dozens of sandstone mesas, or tepuis. These tepuis are “remnants of what geologists believe were the mountains of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana.”
Incredibly, some of these “isolated mesas are two billion years old, preserving an array of unique plant and animal life that rivals that of places like the Galápagos.”
According to the article, some of the “distances involved” in flying from one mesa to the other can be so extreme that many species of bird cannot make the trip; each mesa thus acts as a kind of evolutionary island, where genetic lines unfurl and develop in complete isolation over thousands of generations. Weird birds and flowering plants thrive.
Studying these sites might therefore give us a glimpse into “what the world was like more than a billion years ago.”
That last quotation is from Charles Brewer-Carías, a man the NYTimes describes as “a Caracas-based naturalist and explorer who is an eminent expert on Auyantepui and the country’s other mesas.”
He is also an “ex-dentist.”
In fact, during “186 expeditions into Venezuela’s backlands, Mr. Brewer-Carías has discovered the world’s largest sinkholes, on a tabletop mountain called Sarisariñama, and practiced dentistry among the Yekuana tribe, whose language he speaks fluently.” And he’s still going: “Accompanied by Czech speleologists” in early 2006, Brewer-Carías “documented what may be the world’s largest quartzite cave.”
In any case, it’s the tepuis that fascinate me here; these “sandstone mountains,” Brewer-Carías explains, “are the majestic leftovers of an enormous washover of sand that came from Africa.” This makes them “a window into what once was Gondwanaland” – laminated dunes of a lost desert – the remnant geography of a world that no longer exists.

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.

[Images: "Saint Etienne Two Times," taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].

Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot “Treppe.”
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including “On the side of the cathedral,” “Don’t drink and pray,” and “Notre-Dame de Reims.”
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within…
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.

A mountain quarry in the county of Fumin, China, has been “artificially painted green by the local forestry bureau” as a way “to simulate planted trees.”
Doing this apparently cost $51,000.
“Workers who began spraying Laoshou mountain last August told villagers they were doing so on orders of the county government but were not told why,” the Associated Press reports.
“Some villagers guessed officials of the surrounding Fumin county, whose office building faces the mountain, were trying to change the area’s feng shui” – others think they were told to do it by Pruned.
That, or they were just responding over-literally to the horrific slogan of chemical giant Sherwin Williams – who exhort their customers to “cover the earth” with paint.

Last year, Ed Mazria and his New Mexico-based non-profit organization, Architecture 2030, revealed that architecture – or the building sector, more generally – is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide.
To help prevent “catastrophic” climate change, then, the building sector must become carbon neutral. Reaching that state before the year 2030 is what Mazria has dubbed the 2030 Challenge.
In an effort to speed things along, Mazria will be co-hosting an event, on February 20th, called the 2010 Imperative. This will be a “global emergency teach-in” broadcast live on the web from New York City. The 2010 Imperative – discussed in more detail, below – has been specifically organized around the idea that “ecological literacy [must] become a central tenet of design education,” and that “a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today.”
I recently spoke to Mazria about climate change, sustainable design, and carbon neutrality; about the present state, and future direction, of architectural education; about suburban development, Wal-Mart, and SUVs; and about the 2030 Challenge itself.
What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

• • •

BLDGBLOG: First, how did you choose the specific targets of the 2030 Challenge?

Ed Mazria: Well, let’s see. The way we developed the 2030 Challenge was by working backward from the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that scientists were telling us we needed to reach by 2050. Working backwards from those reductions, and looking at, specifically, the building sector – which is responsible for about half of all emissions – you can see what we need to do today. You can see the targets that we need to reach so we can avoid hitting what the scientists have called catastrophic climate change.

If you do that, you see that we need an immediate, 50% reduction in fossil fuel, greenhouse gas-emitting energy in all new building construction. And since we renovate about as much as we build new, we need a 50% reduction in renovation, as well. If you then increase that reduction by 10% every five years – so that by 2030 all new buildings use no greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to operate – then you reach a state that’s called carbon neutral. And you get there by 2030. That way we meet the targets that climate scientists have set out for us.

That’s how we came up with the 2030 Challenge – meaning a 50% reduction today, and going to carbon neutral by 2030.