image by SnowCrystals.com

You might be surprised to learn there is a Caltech professor studying snow crystals. (Or if you've ever been to a party at Caltech, it might actually make sense.) He runs a website and owns a database of some strikingly beautiful images of snow crystals. He writes:

Snowflakes and snow crystals are made of ice, and pretty much nothing more. A snow crystal, as the name implies, is a single crystal of ice. A snowflake is a more general term; it can mean an individual snow crystal, or a few snow crystals stuck together, or large agglomerations of snow crystals that form "puff-balls" that float down from the clouds... The water molecules in an ice crystal form a hexagonal lattice... There are two hydrogens for each oxygen, so the chemical formula is H2O. The six-fold symmetry of snow crystals ultimately derives from the six-fold symmetry of the ice crystal lattice.

snapshot of a laser cut file

You might not be surprised to learn that I have a deep fascination with walled cities or 'star forts.' This military planning science originated in the 15th and 16th century and was taken to its "logical extreme" by architects such as Vauban and Menno van Coehoorn (via Wikipedia). And if you ever see the drawings that Michaelangelo did for Florence's earthworks, they are erotic, if a little impractical. Lets learn more about these things:

The original 'Italian' fortresses were comparatively simple structures. During the seventeenth century, however, the growing power of the cannon with which they were confronted, as well as their own logic, caused them to grow and become more complicated. At first, outlying or detached structures would be built to protect the corners of the basions; next, those structures themselves would require protection, and the whole lot would have to be linked with the main fortress, at which point the process repeated itself. Thus first-class fortresses, such as those constructed by Vauban or Coehoorn around 1690, became ever larger. They acquired ravelins and redoubts, bonnetttes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and cuvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps...

-from the Oxford History of Modern War by Charles Townshend pp. 211-212



In October I was in Northern Italy and visited the walled city of Palmanova with Branner fellow Nicolette Mastrangelo. The fortress, curiously enough, is a hexagon at the center and contains nine points. The logic is that a commander at the center can view the action on the ramparts and direct the cannon reinforcements with utmost speed. Contrary to what the plan might suggest, this is not a panoptic system in the pure sense. The commander at the center can't actually see over the ramparts - to build such a tower would be to invite decapitation. However, walled cities did function to project power over a large section of territory, which is a very panoptic concept. Imagine how the function of a walled city is now accomplished by satellites and drones today, a dramatic reduction in material though certainly not in engineering effort.

Neuf Brisach, a walled city planned by Vauban

Tis' the season, right? Naturally, one needs Christmas ornaments... the most symmetrical walled cities could be done paper snowflake-style, but if you have access to a laser cutter in your neighborhood...

---

postscript

How does this Caltech professor study snow crystals? The production of snow crystals also embodies an architecture. We learn that they are grown in a convection chamber, shown schematically below.


a convection chamber, image by SnowCrystals.com (larger)

Basically it is just a cold chamber about a meter tall, with two containers of heated water on the bottom. Convection mixes the water vapor into the cold air, creating supersaturated air for growing snowflakes. We nucleate crystals by dropping a speck of dry ice in the chamber, or by rapidly expanding some cold compressed air inside the chamber.

Can you imagine the sort of chamber that would grow walled cities? Exchange humidity for population, temperature for animosity with your neighbors, input available building materials...

Happy Holidays everyone! And email me if you want the CAD file.

I am excited to announce my first published work, a two-page article titled "Military Estates: exact edges" in the current issue of on site, a semi-annual publication put out by the Association for Non-Profit Architectural Fieldwork [Alberta]. On site #22 contains some worthy reading on camouflage, border crossings, linear memorials, dark tourism, and more. They also have an online exhibition on war memorials called beyond cenotaphs, currently taking submissions.

In my article I take a look at Camp Zama, Tokyo, which I visited back in March. I had a tour with three Japanese civilians who work in the real estate department of the Army's Installation Management Division. I wasn't allowed to take photographs but one of them took photographs for me. I would point at what I wanted, and he took the shot.

We were looking at the fence edges, which really began in earnest my analysis of that thin space of negotiation, the threshold between a base and its context.

It was comical though. They were driving me around to point out decorative plastic squirrels perched on the barbed-wire, or a clothes hanger strung through the chain-link. The funniest thing about it is that the Army employs people to work on the 'encroachment team' yet they have no right to actually take down these violations of military space. These minor interventions by the base's neighbors offer a means of resisting the Army's presence. I asked one of my 'encroachment team' experts, at the end, if she thought the city was encroaching on the base, or if it was really the other way around. She said nothing, but the smile said everything.

I finish the article by asking: what happens if when these tacit gardens and over-hanging branches are amplified? The base edge begins to erode in this incipient form of demilitarization.

While I was out inspecting bunkers and imagining how they might be integrated into some kind of territorial infrastructure for the Atlantic coast/North Sea this past fall, two teams working under Berkeley professors were busy putting together their phase II proposals for the WPA 2.0 competition sponsored by UCLA's cityLAB. Ron Rael/Virginia San Fratello and Nicholas de Monchaux (Ron and Nicholas are my advisors for thesis) along with their teams composed largely of Berkeley students, were selected along with four other teams out of 300 entries nationwide. They just got back from Washington D.C. a few weeks ago, and though neither team ended up coming out on top, I think it's great that some ideas and conceptual practices from Berkeley got national attention. Here's just a few quick snippets from the projects:

Rael San Fratello Architects: Border Wall as Infrastructure


Bi-National Library in Nogales, Arizona by Rael San Fratello Architects

From the project website:

By some measures, the U.S. Secure Fence Act of 2006 funded the single largest and most expensive building project in the United States of the 21st Century. It finances 700 miles of fortification dividing the U.S. from Mexico at the average cost of $4 million dollars per mile. ... This project suggests that the wall, at such prices, should and could be thought of not only as security, but also as productive infrastructure–as the very backbone of a borderland economy. Indeed, coupling the wall with viable infrastructure—and this proposal focuses on water, renewable energy, and urban social infrastructure—is a pathway to security and safety in border communities and the nation beyond them.

Read more here.

A 20 million gallons/day wastewater treatment facility on the border between Mexicali, Mexico and Calexico, California by Rael San Fratello Architects

Rael San Fratello's project is a good precedent for what I'm looking at, military bases also being US borders. Some questions linger for me. What does it mean to infuse these military-security infrastructures with the services of an architect? The task is how to be more projective in imagining what they could be, and not to get bogged down with so much criticality - or worse - to let that sort of project become a satire on a politically-loaded frontier.

---

Nicholas de Monchaux: Local Code:Real Estates

WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.

Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen.

Nicholas was my first studio professor at Berkeley and this is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of his work, at the beginning of which I was fortunate to take part in. While mapping and 'landscape urbanism' might sound like old news to some, I think actually making this work - as in, getting cities to really look at their underused lots and develop them as a networked infrastructure - is a novel idea. Nicholas is developing the scripting tools/work paths and making them accessible via Grasshopper.

With two advisors who've got infrastructure on their minds, it should be no surprise that my thesis is headed that way...

With the fellowship travels now over, I have already been taking the next steps. There is an internal circuit to follow: the ever-lurking thesis. It is the final country to conquer, and what a vast territory it is. Thesis, my own infinite game. I'm trying to heed the advice of one of my advisors: "Edit, edit, edit. Think of a project that would only take a month to do because to do it well will actually take four months." From today, December 1st, I have about five months to go. So, one month to set it all up.

When I think about the thesis, I of course turn to what is most fresh on my mind. There are so many sites I've seen that would just make good projects: transform a Maunsell Tower, put Bunker Recycling Services into action, or reclaim Yongsan Garrison in Seoul. Again, I hear the voice of another advisor: "Don't think of the thesis as a 'project' to do..." Thesis is more of something that is continuous with your other work, a set of strategies. Thesis is synonymous with a way of thinking. So I've tried to put blinders on to deriving a project from a place I've been to, and instead I think more about a trend of things I've been looking at. This blog is, in fact, a good indication of my world view.

A month ago, in Italy, I thought: What if I did a project for a site that I didn't visit? What about Afghanistan? That's not uncommon for a thesis student to pick somewhere distant. The abstractness provided by distance, by the lack of a site visit, gives license to an internal exploration, as though the geography emanates from your own mind. Distance plays with your perception. It forces the analytical gaze through the various lenses that we understand the world by proxy: news, fiction, film, or an old atlas. So there is the attraction, the exoticism, of a site in a far off desert land.

Everyone is paying attention to Obama's build-up. Not that that makes a case for a good thesis (e.g. post-Katrina, how many thesis projects struggled with what to do there?), and do I really want to walk that political minefield? Still I want to know how fast will the build-up happen. How temporary is a temporary base? What happens to the bases when everyone is supposed to pull out in July 2011? If Obama is serious about that date, then it would behoove the military to install a demilitarization time-bomb into the base design. Would that actually mean more permanent construction so that it is more easily re-used? Or a prefabricated, rapidly assembled/disassembled fortress of trailer units and sand bags. Something like Flatpak.



Danger Room's August visit to Bagram Air Base, where construction is beginning to look a lot more permanent, brings up a trend in the military:

(Brig. Gen. Steven) Kwast said the real challenge is to get the military to adapt to Afghan culture, rather than the other way around. “Let’s maybe live a little bit more like the Afghan people, because maybe, one, they can relate to us much better when we aren’t wearing sunglasses,” he said. “They can relate to us a lot better when we aren’t in a metal building that has no windows. They can relate to us much better when they can see us and shake our hand.”


Bagram Air Base via Danger Room


Sounds like what Teddy Cruz mentioned in the recent Archinect interview, that General Petraeus wants soldiers to think more like anthropologists or social workers.

This logic confirms what I've heard from another corner of the US military empire, at a Navy base in Souda Bay, Crete. A navy engineer told me about some of the challenges of designing bases in the Middle East. For one, they discovered that Iraqis were tearing out the toilets in the bases that were handed over to them. Why? Because some base planner didn't take note of the direction to Mecca. You can't sit on the toilet with your back facing Mecca. In A'stan, engineers discovered that Afghanis weren't using the top-of-the-line stainless steel kitchen equipment that the military put in. It would sit, unused, next to a wood-fired oven that the Afghanis carved out of the kitchen.

Or, leave alone the task of the military base to the military. We should be putting in infrastructure, and designing purely in the civilian realm. Schools, for example, constitute some of the more than $1 billion spent by the military on "high impact" projects in A'stan. The idea is that schools will keep kids away from the Taliban, who don't build schools. Coca-Cola vending machines might do the trick.


Joao Silva for The New York Times

And yet, a recent NY Times article made me realize how neo-colonial the whole enterprise is. Top of the line hospitals sitting vacant. Energy infrastructure running at a marginal percentage of its capacity. So what role could an architect, or could Architecture, possibly have there? Good will has no place when it's towed in by a tank.

I've been running thesis end-game scenarios like this for a project in Afghanistan, to test my moral satisfaction with the potential outcome. I could design bases that are easily recycled to civilian uses. It might even get fun designing things like a church which becomes a mosque, or a defensive wall which provides some kind of infrastructure for refugee housing. Making a base easier to recycle will also make it easier for the military to plant bases wherever they please, under the guise of providing future infrastructure.

Will a Thesistan be something I can even stomach, or will it just provide me for long sessions of banging my head on a concrete wall in Wurster hall?

Sorry to disappoint: I'm not announcing the title of the latest X-Box 360 game. It's just another day on the Branner Fellowship and only two days from the end.

MOUT 1 appeared way back at the beginning of the year when I posted some pics from my first encounter with Military Operations on Urban Terrain. On what will end up being my final base visit of the year, I again unexpectedly encountered a MOUT site. This past week in Guam, among some fascinating discoveries (thanks to meeting some great people over there), I had the opportunity to explore a former Air Force housing area that closed in the mid 90s. Now this MOUT site sees troops crawling through its busted windows and learning how to better kill people in and around buildings. This is about securing our freedom, remember.

In the typical fashion of the US military's maniacal acronyms and initialisms, however, they no longer call it MOUT but rather it's UO or Urban Operations. Sounds familiar, like a so-called 'landscape urbanism' office based in New York. It's also worth noting how much more clever and less efficient the British are with an acronym describing the same thing: FISH and CHIPS (Fighting In Someone's House and Causing Havoc In People's Streets). Let's just stick with MOUT since I'll be citing other pieces which use the term.


My man Subtopes has written on this subject. Have a read of MOUT Urbanism for starters. He writes,

The essence of MOUT is that it prepares one for the conditions of an elsewhere; it is an active ghost town this way empowering its subjects to descend on cities the other side the world and enact their will wherever they see fit.

The key there for me is "active ghost town" for I am thinking about the ghost towns we continually produce, and not just military ones. Can we use dead malls or unfinished housing subdivisions for some other kind of simulation, in between Hollywood and urban warfare? Boomtowns, even resort towns in the off-season could be rented by the military. We needn't erect new MOUT sites when the global economic downturn is readily producing them.

BLDG BLOG has also had stuff on the subject. In the first link Geoff is looking at how MOUT is "a cross between Dick Cheney and Archigram" producing instant cities and such. The second link is a preview to a lecture titled "Feral Cities" that he gave at the beginning of the year, in which Geoff laid out a fascinating set of questions:

If a growing majority of the human population has now been urbanized, moving into what are often incorrectly described as "cities," what will warfare mean – and how will it be practiced – in these increasingly complex spatial environments? If urban insurgency is, indeed, the future of the global battlefield, as many theorists have proposed, how does the changing nature of urbanism itself help to redefine war? Conversely, how does insurrection work to redefine the space of the modern city?
Finally, if the future of war can be seen as Military Operation on Urban Terrain – or MOUT – what mutations will we see when that one key variable, the urban, is redefined?

Geoff is pointing out how simulation is not just a mock-up of the real but rather it is producing the real. It may not be far-fetched when urban planners take a look at strategy reports from MOUT facilities in order to write an anti-insurgent 3-dimensional zoning code. There is consistency in this inquiry with what he and Nicola Twilley's research/studio on Landscapes of Quarantine is looking at right now. Basically take a threat ('terrorist' or epidemic) and examine the security products which result from the effort to contain this threat.



MOUT is interesting as a mode of architectural simulation like a model of a war-zone. The geographer in me wants to attack the important issues of neo-colonialism and the consequences of building mock-cities of countries we are at war or might be at war with in the near future. But the architect, in the spirit of Bunker Recycling Services, is just fascinated by the potential uses of former military bases.

While not bunkers or even overtly of a military nature, these buildings and the sites on which they sit are every bit as difficult to recycle. Military space gets mired in issues of local politics, environmental cleanup, aging infrastructure, etc. When the buildings are no longer of operational use and the jungle continues to creep up, what can be done? In Panama, I saw the jungle neatly manicured while the buildings themselves were a wreck. Bosque San Patricio, a former housing area in the middle of San Juan, Puerto Rico, is now a nature conservation park, totally overgrown except for the streets. Here on Guam, the more of a wreck the buildings and landscape, the better a simulation it is of a war-zone. There is already some evidence of this wreck being curated:



The housing area is divided between a set of one-story bungalows and a group of six three-story barracks. I begin to wonder if the site should be labeled MOST: Military Operations on Suburban Terrain. Perhaps that says something about the wars we plan to wage. Gated communities might become the medieval walled cities they always wanted to be.

There is also a mock US military base or fortified outpost in the form of plastic imitation Jersey barriers such as those found in Iraq. The weird thing about this structure is how it overlaps with the housing area, as if that is the intention of things, like floating fortresses and instant cities as Bryan and Geoff, respectively, would look at them.

We discovered some noteworthy artifacts. First there were the human targets, painted black. (Later we spotted another one that someone put on the side of the road, advertising a garage sale.) Then we found some standard restroom signs with Arabic stenciled over them. Last I checked there isn't any jungle in Afghanistan, but there is in Indonesia... And Guam, after all, is going to be ever-sharper the tip of the American spear in the Pacific. More on that later.

The working title for this suckah was MOUT 2: The Ruins of Empire, but as my eyelids are hanging heavy in this gamer cafe in the Philippines, I feel my ambition overrunning me. Ruins of Empire is the subject of a grander post or set of posts which will help set the framework for my thesis. I did just say that word didn't I...bring that shit on.