It’s hard to untangle the conflicting feelings of grief, frustration, exacerbation, guilt, complicity, and denial that swill around with the millions of barrels spewing from the seafloor wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead.  Progress in capping the well is maddeningly slow, perhaps because BP is only pursuing solutions that would allow them to recover “their” oil, or because the wellhead itself is perilously close to toppling, leading to a collapse of the seafloor in the immediate vicinity: a kind of slow motion chain reaction of environmental doom.  Yet again our maddening addictions come home to roost; so many people and animals are suffering, and vital ecosystem may be crippled for a long time (so much for rebuilding the natural wetlands hurricane barrier to protect the Louisiana coast from hurricane storm surge).

I’m not one to spout off about our oil problem:  I drive my car too much, I could take shorter showers, and I could stand to sweat a little more in the summer.  However, feel at liberty to take the opportunity to mention the dependence of agriculture, and specifically meat production, on fossil fuels by way of the oil spill.  I thought about making an infographic about it, but there are already too many bad oil spill infographics out there.  Instead, I’ve made some graphic-info.  I’ve done some back-of-the-napkin calculations (my own calculations are in bold, the rest are just factoids):

According to Cornell University, on average it takes 54 kilocalories (kcal) for every kilocalorie of beef protein produced in the United States.

1 gallon of gasoline equals 31,268 calories, or 31.3 kcal.

One pound of beef contains 1,000 calories, or 1 kcal.

So, 54 kcal of fossil fuel input / 31.3 kcal per gal. of gasoline = 1.73 gal. of gasoline per 1 lb of beef.

One barrel (bbl) of oil produces about 28 gallons of gasoline.

28 gal. per barrel / 1.73 gal. per lb. of beef = 16.18 lbs of beef per bbl of oil.

The Deepwater Horizon spill dumps 52,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

52,500 bbl per day x 16.18 lbs. of beef per bbl of oil = 849,500 lbs of beef per day that could have been produced by the spilled oil.

The average American eats 0.25 lbs of beef a day (95 lbs per year).

849,500 lbs of beef could provide 3.398 million Americans with their quarter pound per day of beef.

From the beginning of the spill 7.8 million barrels have been spilled.  That amounts to 126,204,000 lbs of beef by my reckoning.  Or 504,816,000 Quarter-Pounders with or without cheese.

To wrap up the calculations, 609 million barrels of our over 7.5 billion barrels of crude oil consumed annually goes to the agricultural production of beef.  This includes transport costs of animal, product, and feed, chemical fertilizer production, and so on.  But I could be wrong.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  this all is not to say that the oil spill will affect our food supply, or that people will go hungry as a result.  I want to make a connection between our demand for cheap fuels and our over-consumption of meat made artificially cheap by those fuels and subsidy.

I’m reading my way through Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 series.  One of Clarke’s magnificent little ideas dropped, seemingly-lackadaisically, into the narrative really grabbed my attention.  In the third book, 2061: Odyssey Three, Clarke makes mention that the Soviet rescue ship Leonov from the second book

Now hover[s] high above Farside [of the moon] as one of the main exhibits at the Lagrange Museum…

Clarke presents a solution of what promises to be a problem of the physical legacy of the early history of space exploration: what to do with obsolete but significant space hardware?  The inevitable end of the International Space Station’s (ISS) lifecycle is perhaps the most significant chance to begin to answer this question.

NASA, under the direction of President G.W. Bush had planned to deorbit the ISS in 2016.  Fortunately, the Obama administration has decided to try to extend the operation of the most expensive single thing ever built by humanity (at an estimated cost of $157 billion) until 2020.  Evidentially, the international support program for the station ends in 2016, but talks are currently underway to extend funding to 2028.

How could the station be deorbited?  If left to its own devices, atmospheric drag would eventually slow the ISS until it came flaming into the atmosphere.  An accidental deorbit could end badly (see Skylab v. Austrailian Outback).  It turns out that the maneuvering thrusters on the station do not posess enough power to perform a controlled deorbit, so a variety of solutions have been studied, including employing a modified resupply vehicle or specially constructed craft to push the ISS into the atmosphere.  Interestingly, the Russians value things with history and embodied costs, and are making plans to detach and save their own modules before the station meets its fiery demise.  Good thinking (though they have decided to name their new station built from salvaged modules the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex.  Maybe it’s more catchy in Russian).

Obviously, it costs a great deal to maintain the station for inhabitation, but even if it were mothballed, orbital velocity would need to be actively maintained against atmospheric drag.   But if it takes effort to bring the station down, couldn’t we employ similar efforts to take the station up, into a hirer orbit?

Or, as Clarke suggests, to a Lagrange point?

If you’re not in the know when it comes to orbital mechanics, a Lagrangian point

Mark[s] positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them. They are analogous to geostationary orbits in that they allow an object to be in a “fixed” position in space rather than an orbit in which its relative position changes continuously.

In other words, any object placed into a Lagrange point between orbital masses will be held stationary in relation to one of the masses by gravity alone.  There are five Lagrange points (L1-L5) between any two orbital masses, such as the Sun and the Earth or the Earth and the Moon.  Already, there are several satellites in the Earth-Moon and the Sun-Earth Lagrange points respectively.  Additionally, the Lagrange points frequently hold other celestial objects: the Trojan Asteroids hang out in the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points, for example.  President Obama has suggested that future missions to Lagrange points might serve as helpful proving grounds for future deep space manned-missions.

Back to Clarke’s Lagrange Museum.  What if L1, the Lagrangian point between the Earth and the Moon became a place to deposit future space hardware and vehicles with historical significance.  Already, there are plenty now-or-soon-to-be-discarded future-exhibits: Saturn IVB rocket stages that took Apollo astronauts to the moon, the Hubble Space Telescope, a whole Lunar Module left unused by Apollo 10, and of course, the ISS.

Certainly, moving the ISS, which has a mass nearly 400,000 lbs to the L1 point, almost 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, is beyond our technical and financial means today.  But who knows what the future holds, right?

And what of the planetary legacy of the first 50 years of space exploration?  On Mars for example, there are the Viking, Pathfinder, Surveyor, and Pheonix landers from the United States in addition to a few crashed and quasi-successful Soviet missions.  Mars experiences weather, so who knows in what condition we’ll find our unmanned landers if and when we finally land a man or woman on the surface.

The Moon is a different case entirely.  With only slight disturbance from its low gravity and space weathering, the six Apollo landing sites and countless other unmanned probes and landers should be in pristine condition.  Apollo 12 touched down near the Surveyor 3 lander in 1969, which itself had landed on the Moon in 1967.  This was the first time a manned mission had “caught up” to an unmanned one.  Several parts of the lander were brought back to Earth for study, where it was found that bacteria that had inadvertently contaminated Surveyor’s camera had survived dormant on the Moon for one and a half years.  For this reason, the Galileo probe studying the Jovian system was intentially crashed into Jupiter to insure it would not one day contaminate the moon Europa, which was shown to have saltwater seas (again, see Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two).

How will the Apollo 11 National (Lunar?) Park need to be constructed if we are not to disturb Armstrong and Aldrin’s first footsteps on another world?

I’m seeking funding for a little project over at Kickstarter.  I was inspired by the success of the Lasersaurus project initiated by Nor/d.  Hopefully, we’ll do as well as they are!

I want to draw an assembly manual for a LACK coffee table from IKEA that documents every step of the manufacturing process from raw material to flat-packed product. This manual will employ the same graphic style as IKEA’s other consumer assembly manual, but will shift step one back to the harvesting of raw materials so to better appreciate the industrial heft of the seemingly simple product.

Anyone who has assembled anything from IKEA is familiar with the wordless, boldly delineated IKEA assembly manual, which placidly describes the process of assembly. The LACK coffee table’s assembly instructions are a neat four pages: one cover page, one list of tools and parts, and five assembly steps spread between the remaining two pages. We propose to research and design a kind-of prequel to the existing manual that describes the production and logistical processes that go into the manufacturing of the LACK table.

Our premise is that the manual inside that flat package is just the tip of the iceberg, and we want to discover and diagram all that’s below the surface.

Step one could begin in the forests of China or Poland where a tree is felled that will eventually be processed into the pulp that comprises the LACK’s honeycomb interior. Step 100 could be the application of glue that joins the birch-effect veneer to the honeycomb. Finally, step 1,000 could be step one in the existing manual…

Our assembly manual will follow the same graphic standards that govern any IKEA assembly manual, and will therefore remain similarly objective. The ferocious objectivity of its presentation– from the standardized cover, to the cartoon version of yourself shown assembling your new furniture on a rug so as not to damage its corners–is one of the many enchanting things about IKEA’s assembly manuals. Our hope is that one can simultaneously be amazed by the technical complexity and logistical prowess embodied in the LACK table’s simplicity while also considering the enormous resources consumed in the name of efficiency. Our manual will be apolitical: it can serve as the underpinning of scorn just as readily as it can inspire admiration.

Sound sweet?  Show us some love here:  http://kck.st/cdcESD

Heatherwick’s Shanghai Expo pavilion is a precious object for on our screen, one that we can seem to relate and place ourselves within and around without having to actually leave our chairs.

If you haven’t seen the pictures/video of Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo AKA the “Seed Cathedral,” you must be under a rock (or at least not subscribing to any architecture/design blogs).  The building is a delight; its so easy to just get it, even though most of us will not travel to Shanghai to see it in person.  How can this be?

First, the building fulfils a simple program: pavilion.  In fact, as a program, “pavilion” implies hardly more than a shelter, so Heatherwick (plus an extensive team, no doubt) have overlaid a what I read as a programmatic narrative: seeds can be collected and distributed to and from all corners of the earth, and if you listen to them closely enough, you can read both the natural and human history of our planet.  These seeds are portable, condensed databases of millions of years of plant evolution and tens of thousands of years of human agricultural development.  The envelope of the pavilion, in the way it mediates the elements, cultivates a space that seems to want to tune the visitor into a mode of concentrated reflection and discovery.

But how do I know? I’ll never see it, except in pictures.  Here, the simple effect of the cast acrylic tubes that comprise the pavilion’s undulating, hairy skin evoke a childhood memory as a spatial nostalgia: the interior is a big Lite-Brite.  The metaphor is so direct that photographs of the interior triggers a childhood euphoria like the smell of some favorite comfort food.  All the better, the memory is scaled large enough transform the Lite-Brite into a spatial experience, which is something you can never do with fried chicken.

(When I Google “Lite-Brite” for an image conjured by the Seed Cathedral’s interior, I’m trying to find an image of children playing with the toy underneath their bedspread, an image burned into my mind by advertising no doubt, but carrying the weight of a memory as if I had actually played with a  Lite-Brite under my bed spread.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t, and I can’t find the picture anyway.)

Nostalgia for childhood objects have a peculiar grasp on my generation, as we spend our unemployed days chatting on Facebook about the Improve Everywhere Ghostbusters in the NY Public Library, laughing at Family Guy’s parody of MC Hammer, and having just got home from the latest Hollywood blockbuster remake of some 80’s shlock (GI Joe, A-Team, Transformers, Land of the Lost, etc.)  Calculated or not, the relate ability of the building’s effect makes it understandable even halfway around the world.

The pavilion’s metaphorical tectonic doesn’t end there.  The perfectly drooping light gathering rods that define the exterior give the pavilion a precious zoomorphism (or maybe it is botanomorphism).  The pavilion becomes alive as one envisions the rods rippling in the wind; describing the pavilion as hairy or furry emphasize this point.  Or maybe the rods aren’t hairs at all, they are vectors tracing the collection and dispersion of the seeds (human and natural knowledge), like the red strings bomb investigators use the trace the path of shrapnel during an investigation.

Even from a distance the pavilion looks like a really big iPhone app icon in some kind of tessellating field, an apple on a picnic blanket.  The pavilion is a precious object on our screen, one that we can seem to relate to and place ourselves within and around without having to actually leave our chairs.  Without the trigger of memory by tectonic and of metaphor by form, and more complex program, the pavilion might be doomed to be ignored by the internet architectural fanboys…

Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger.  Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program.  In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight.  As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector.  Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced.

Simberg loves his metaphors.  He likens his scheme for the exploration of space en-masse by any private citizen or organization that can foot the now lower launch costs to the way the “old west” was settled.  He begins:

The critical requirement of a reusable space system is refuelability. Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers’ hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn’t have been able to pull it.

And presses the metaphor into service to describe his own vision:

…we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.

To me, though, the real gem of Simberg’s article is a throw-away line. He asserts that NASA’s job should be to make it possible for any group, be it “the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company”  to colonize Mars  (the emphasis is all mine).

The Mormons as interstellar pioneers!  It makes so much sense.  Consider:

a) Proven track record. In 1847, Brigham Young let a group of Mormons onto what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.  Only back then it was Mexican territory.

b) Plural marriage. Undoubtably,  the Mormon settler’s success in Utah owes something to this strong family structure developed for the rapid production of children.

c) Fastidious record keeping. An obsession with geneology has inspired a vast collection of birth and death certificates, kept within a mountain in Utah, and tended to by impeccable Mormon archivists.  Exploring new planets demands a fair amount of data collection, indexing, and storage, I’d imagine.

Arch Daily rooted up a lovely little Truffle this week.  Duh, not the kind you eat, but a modest building project by Ensamble Studio in Spain.  I want to call it process architecture (though it’s not at all something Phillip Glass would think up) but given its gastronomic nomenclature, maybe we should call it slow architecture.  More or less, Ensamble dug a big hole in the ground for the building’s outer formwork and then, as they describe it:

We materialized the air building a volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built air [with concrete] to solidify it. The poured mass concrete wrapped the air and protected itself with the ground.

In short, hay is used as the positive mold against which concrete is cast.

Once the concrete has fully entombed the hay, the outer dirt formwork is excavated away, and a quarry machine is brought onsite to excise one end of the mass to create and opening.  As the quarry machine leaves the site, a second machine arrives on site to remove the compressed, organic formwork from the now exposed interior: Paulina the cow.  Ensamble writes:

To empty the interior, the calf Paulina arrived, and enjoyed the 50 [cubic meters] of the nicest food, from which she nourished for a year until she left her habitat, already as an adult and weighing 300 kilos. She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.

They go on to become obsessed with the dense materiality of the edifice, waxing poetic about how the hay-formed concrete “contrasts with the continuous liquidity of the ceiling that evokes the sea, petrified in the lintel of the spatial frame.”  Yeah, fine, whatever…I’m more interested in the cow!

The scope of Ensamble’s diagrams are myopic.  What about the cow’s waste?  Is it a milk cow, or will she become the first meal served on Truffle’s table?  I won’t hold the oversight against them, because the expanding ecosystem of the building’s construction is so exciting.  Edible formwork, construction without waste, the construction site food web: the BLDGBLOG post nearly writes itself!

The Truffle brings to mind Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s Poop House.  If I recall correctly, Maynard proposes a kind of Quonset hut made of consecutive arches of double-walled polypropolyne bladders. The inner bladder is filled with fresh, potable water and the outer bladder is empty.  Overtime, the water in the walls is consumed by the house’s inhabitants, who in turn, produce poop.  The poop is pumped into the empty outer bladders where it hardens in the unforgiving Austrailian sun.  By the time all the water is consumed, the outer bladder has been filled with poop, now a hardened, durable building material.

The uncanny, sublime construction process in Ensamble’s Truffle and Maynard’s Poop House forgives any compromise that must be made on the building’s behalf.  In each, food plays an implicit role in the subtractive or additive narrative of its construction: the cow eats the hay formwork in one, while human waste becomes a building material in the other.  These buildings would like Michael Pollan happy: not only do they provide shelter, but the satisfying process of their construction satiates the mind.

An architectural resolution
The degree project seeks to project a facility for the production of Hydrogen rocket fuel grown from algae. The facility’s slow harvest of Hydrogen coincides with the periodic return of Halley’s Comet; culminating in the launch of a scientific probe to study the comet and the solar system. Implicit in the facility’s programming is a cycle of growth, launch, and obsolescence.

Sited within the zone of exclusion, the Hydrogen production array, gasometer, Vertical Assembly Array cultivate and store Hydrogen rocket fuel, grown sustainably from massive hydrogen arrays, forming a mega-pavilion.

During most of the building’s life, the gasometer within the geodesic at the heart of the facility slowly collects and stores Hydrogen harvested from the array. However, as the perigee of Halley’s orbit brings it nearer to Earth, the Hydrogen in the gasometer is emptied into the rocket as fuel. Visitors to the array are at an apogee and the now irrelevant gasometer is converted to a planetarium.

As an analogy for architecture, the discourse about NASA and spacecraft is not esoteric. Thirty years on, we can see how the space race panned out; we can visit its artifacts in museums. Will architecture reach détente with its environment? Will its now state-of-the-art assemblages visited by our grandchildren, obsolete relics of a brave past?

A flattened house, inspired by Joesph Cornell’s boxes and Walker Evans photography, transforms into various locations.  Projected collages reinforce a tone of  claustrophobic nostalgia.

The production was awarded 1st place by the National Opera Association (2004).  Honorable mention for set design, David Weiss Design Competition, Region IV KC/ACTF (2004).