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BLDGBLOG
geo/acc Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary...
2 weeks ago
18
2 weeks ago
Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently “found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have...
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Uncontrolled Remains I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of...
a month ago
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a month ago
I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of garbage being stored in giant, artificial landforms—or simply buried underground like false geological deposits—might be inadvertently catalyzing chemical processes we neither...
BLDGBLOG
Seer A few weeks ago, The Economist looked at the growing problem of “ubiquitous technical surveillance”...
2 weeks ago
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2 weeks ago
A few weeks ago, The Economist looked at the growing problem of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” in the field of espionage. It describes the difficulty of maintaining a rigorous or believable cover story, for example, when genealogy websites might be consulted by adversarial...
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Architectural Dressage You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single...
4 weeks ago
16
4 weeks ago
You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single block and walked to an adjacent site by a phalanx of miniature robots. Then walked back into place again. The 432 individual machines used for the move were “actually...
BLDGBLOG
Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio. The...
a year ago
13
a year ago
Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio. The “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” (2014) was a fictional design project we originally set in the vast limestone province of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. [Image: A rock-acid...
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Agency of the Subsurface [Image: The Heathen Gate at Carnuntum, outside Vienna; photo by Geoff Manaugh.] Last summer, a...
a year ago
12
a year ago
[Image: The Heathen Gate at Carnuntum, outside Vienna; photo by Geoff Manaugh.] Last summer, a geophysicist at the University of Vienna named Immo Trinks proposed the creation of an EU-funded “International Subsurface Exploration Agency.” Modeled after NASA or the ESA, this new...
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The Reaction Area “Enigmatic chemical reactions” have broken out underground inside two Los Angeles-area landfills,...
a year ago
11
a year ago
“Enigmatic chemical reactions” have broken out underground inside two Los Angeles-area landfills, according to the L.A. Times. These “highly unusual reactions at Los Angeles County’s two largest landfills have raised serious questions about the region’s long-standing approach to...
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Every Room A Battlefield [Image: Looking out over the center of “Razish,” a simulated city at the Fort Irwin National...
over a year ago
10
over a year ago
[Image: Looking out over the center of “Razish,” a simulated city at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.] I had an opportunity to revisit the Fort Irwin National Training Center this weekend as part of a series of field trips I’ve put together for the...
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Lost Animals I don’t normally link to my short stories here, but I’m proud of a new one called “Lost Animals”...
over a year ago
10
over a year ago
I don’t normally link to my short stories here, but I’m proud of a new one called “Lost Animals” that went up earlier this week. It’s about a man hired by private clients to clear houses of ghosts, not using supernatural equipment but a baseball bat. He’s been storming into...
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Cleared For Approach [Image: “Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst.] When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun”...
over a year ago
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over a year ago
[Image: “Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst.] When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst, a composition and theme he continually revisited and changed over the course of his career—I mistook the tiny white squiggles in the lower right for a procession of...
BLDGBLOG
Potsdamer Sea [Image: From Kiessling’s Grosser Verkehrs-Plan von Berlin (1920).] It’s funny to be back in Berlin,...
over a year ago
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over a year ago
[Image: From Kiessling’s Grosser Verkehrs-Plan von Berlin (1920).] It’s funny to be back in Berlin, a city where I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life, first arriving here as a backpacker in 1998 and temporarily moving in with a woman 14 years older than me, who practiced...
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Numbers Pool [Image: “Solomon’s Pools & ancient aqueducts…,” via Library of Congress.] There’s a beautiful...
over a year ago
8
over a year ago
[Image: “Solomon’s Pools & ancient aqueducts…,” via Library of Congress.] There’s a beautiful description over at New Scientist of a hypothetical new form of computing device, a “liquid crystal computer” in which calculations would move “like ripples through the liquid.”...
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Through This Building Shines the Cosmos [Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG of public domain images from NASA and the Library of Congress.] An...
over a year ago
8
over a year ago
[Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG of public domain images from NASA and the Library of Congress.] An opportunity to explore the use of muons as a tool for architectural and archaeological imaging came up this summer while I was in Europe for my Graham Foundation project, “Invisible...
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World Store There was an article last year in the New York Times about a California start-up called Inversion...
over a year ago
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over a year ago
There was an article last year in the New York Times about a California start-up called Inversion that wants to “speed delivery of important items by storing them in orbit.” Their goal is to build “earth-orbiting capsules”—“hundreds or thousands of containers”—that could “deliver...
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Mineral Hurricane I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton,...
3 days ago
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3 days ago
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. The screening I attended was held inside a Cedars-Sinai medical imaging center in west Los Angeles; seeing this particular...