Tomorrowland

Fractal Africa

Wow-inducing presentation from ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash on the fractal structures of African villages. Non-linear scaling, self organization, sand divination and search engines all factor into the show. Highly recommended.

Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, Architect, b. 1931

High Desert House, Joshua Tree, CA, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg

Rising from the desert like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg's High Desert House exemplifies the free-form ideals of organic architecture. It's transcendental, sculptural, radically non-Euclidean and eerily timeless. It harmonizes with its environment like a perfect 5th. The interior design is just as eccentric and bewildering as its exterior, and it happens to be the home of Bev Doolittle, 1980s "mall art" painter extraordinaire.

Not much has been written about Kellogg, although he does have his own website if you're interested in seeing some more examples of his brand of architectural abstraction. I also found a discussion of the High Desert House at pushpullbar and an article about Kellogg's relation to biomorphic architecture (with bizarre photos):

"His structures actually tend to derive from Modernist pavilion structures, his organic forms tending toward macro-structural elements which enclose large clear-span spaces rather than building up from cellular room elements. Still, he makes extensive use of integrated furnishings despite an open-plan layout approach, sculpting elaborate interior landscapes within these larger clear-span spaces. His hybrid composition makes his work extremely complicated and expensive to build and limits its use to the wealthiest of clients."

Kellogg has built only a handful of projects, so it was pretty weird to find that one of his celebrated works is the Chart House seafood restaurant on the south bank of downtown Jacksonville (not a town known for its architecture). I used to live near the Chart House in San Marco and always wrote it off as beachy kitsch. (Has anyone actually eaten there? Is the "organic" aesthetic distributed throughout the interior? Does the carpet match the drapes?)

More on Kellogg here, here and here. 

Garden of Earthly Delights

Cast your eyes on this astonishing photoset of Dubai's hyperdevelopment over the past 16 years. In a matter of months, Dubai will have the world's tallest/largest/busiest:

• residential building (100 stories)
• amusement park ("Dubailand," natch)
• airport
• mall
• indoor skiing facility ("Ski Dubai," already complete)

The list goes on. The new Dubai offers a sprawling inventory of 21st century entertainment architecture, a phantasmagoria of kitsch and deluxe fantasy, smack dab at the crossroads of capitalism and the Muslim world. Urban theorist Mike Davis' dispatch from Dubai is the most fascinating account of the nation's rapid development:

"Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill."

Naturally, the lightning pace of development requires a steady flow of cheap labor, and in Dubai over 80% of the population consists of expatriates and non-citizens. Human rights abuses are reportedly rampant among the predominantly Indian and Pakistani workforce, many of whom function as indentured servants. They're not allowed to leave Dubai, and if they run away, what little cash they've saved is often confiscated by their shady employers.

Let's hope that Dubai doesn't break a new Guiness world record, this time for human rights violations. Sinister paradise, indeed.

[photo via Flickr]

Utopia and Anti-Utopia

Left: Perfecta #13/14, 1971 (New Haven). Right: Architecture Principe #7, 1966 (Paris).

Architectural Digest this ain't. Assembled by Princeton's School of Architecture, Clip/Stamp/Fold is an exhibition of little architectural magazines from the 1960s and 70s. I've never heard of any of these publications, but they're all beautiful and weird and radical in their own way.

Ideology critiques, urbanism, theoretical manifestoes... the magazines cover a lot more than just quote-unquote architecture. There's a total of 70 publications profiled on the site's interactive timeline, full of thoughtful writeups and high-res scans of the covers. The grassroots vibe and handmade issues give it all a very punk feel. Great stuff.

"This architecture floats on the surface of an earth that has lost its materiality."

The People of the Sky

NASA renderings of space colony living (from the 1970s).

[via landscape architecture blog Pruned]

Invisible Architectures of the Southern Dimension

I’m writing from SR82, somewhere between scenic Ty Ty and Sylvester, Georgia.

The car’s CD player is broken, so we’re quietly jamming to Dylan, Mylo, Seefeel, Kaki King and The National Trust on my iBook’s tinny internal speakers. Basslines have temporarily become a thing of the past.

My return trip to Jacksonville from a friend’s wedding in Birmingham, Alabama has been pleasantly uneventful. Life’s as slow as it can be at 80 mph. With all this disconnected time to reflect on the weekend and stare out the window, I come face to face with the kudzu-choked wilderness and sacred landscapes of the former Confederacy.

Billboards advertising vasectomy reversals and 24/7 country kitchens cast shadows across bright green tobacco fields. A family’s material goods are strewn across a vacant lot at a truck stop yard sale. (I came *this* close to taking home the crappy little air organ shown above.) And the churches… they’re everywhere. This trip has supplied a full life-dose of Confederate flags and churches.

They’re in strip malls, sheds, trailers and converted restaurants. They’re virtually all Protestant-flavored. And from my air-conditioned Ford rental vantage point, the new churches appear to conform to a standard, invisible architecture.   

Rather than stand out as a “church,” these places adopt a sort of corporate camouflage. The idea is probably to repackage the experience of entering a Bed Bath & Beyond on a quest for the ultimate home appliance as a quest for spiritual redemption. Surely these featureless, commercial structures seem less threatening than a traditional church. We enter them riddled with domestic anxieties (“I need a trash can that fits my active lifestyle!”) and exit them as satisfied customers.

Contemporary church design appeals to a new generation of consumers trained to desire the stark, boxy uniformity of exurbian development. Steeples, bell towers and other sacred architectural references have mostly been replaced with a corporate, mass-produced look that fetishizes grayscales and cavernous spaces. In their halls of worship, churchgoers have traded the static feature of a stained glass window for the kinetic pop of a widescreen PowerPoint presentation.

The Birmingham church that hosted the wedding looked nothing like a church (from the outside, at least). But it didn’t adopt the corporate camouflage, either. Structurally, it resembled a hybrid of a Vermont ski lodge and an 18th century meeting hall. Visualize a Steak and Ale restaurant on steroids, and you’re almost there. It was a nice break from the continuum of the invisible, but something about it begs to be grouped with the rest of them under the architecture of denial. Like hamburger shaped tofu, really. 

Enough of my Rybczynski impersonation. It was a great wedding. And now I'm going home.