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A Shrimp, the Spectrum, and Humanity’s Evolutionary Cockblock

Who is the master of the invisible? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not a man or a woman. It’s a shrimp. To be more specific, the mantis shrimp. His colorful appearance says, “I’m here, I’m queer, and don’t eat me because I probably contain a buttload of neurotoxins.” But the mantis shrimp has more tricks than flashy colors up his sleeve. The first thing you might notice when handling a mantis shrimp is the giant bleeding gash that just appeared on your hand. This is the result of the shrimp’s secret weapon: a claw punch that rivals the speed of at .22 calibre bullet. The claws are so powerful that even if the initial jab misses its target, the resulting shock wave can easily stun or kill small prey.

Seeing as you and I will most likely never find ourselves in a bare-knuckle boxing match with the mantis shrimp, you’re probably asking, “why should I care?” You should care for the same reason you care about Marion Cotillard: the eyes. The mantis shrimp has the most powerful and complex eyes in all of nature. Sunglasses will not do a damned thing for him because he can see polarized light. Throw your HDTV out of the window right now in envy of his HYPERSPECTRAL COLOR VISION. He can see not only red, green, and blue like us lowly humans, but also Ultraviolet and Infrared wavelengths.

If you are not by now completely jealous of this superman of the deep, you should be. It took us millions of years to even realize that ultraviolet, polarized, and infrared light even existed, and here he is waddling along using it to see plankton. The mantis shrimp is the greatest example of how truly suckish it is to be a human. We have, however, found ways around our handicap. Us lowly RGBers have in the recent years crafted our own set of mantis-eyes. We can now see deep into the farthest reaches of the universe using ultraviolet, infrared, and radio telescopes. We can see deep inside of our body with x-ray and MRI machines.

Yet it is never enough, because in the end, all that we see in the outer spectra is dumbed down into boring old red, green, and blue. When you look up into the night sky, all you see is little white points of light, not the rich, flowing tapestry that’s visible in the infrared or ultraviolet. We can sit around and watch our “3D” movies and “color” television, but in the end we will always be stuck in the middle of the spectrum, a desolate island in a sea of beauty. We are surrounded by an ocean of information, but our eyes can only handle a small percentage of it. As a species, we truly have been gypped.

There is, however, a temporary solution to our evolutionary woes, and as so many wonderful things in life are, it’s an app. The Invisible Universe, a collaboration between Joshua Peek and Xperia, allows us lowly humans to catch a glimpse of the real world. Hold your phone up to the sky, and you will be able to see like the mantis shrimp.

I can’t imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection

Remember that scene in Inception where Cobb asks Ariadine (I have no idea how to spell that) to draw a maze in two minutes that it takes one minute to solve? Like me, you were probably thinking to yourself how easy that is. But I tried it today, and it’s not. In fact, it took me at least ten tries to do it. This got me thinking. If someone asks you to draw a map to your house, you can do it very easily, in almost no time at all. We’re very good at making sense of a complicated system. But this maze exercise demonstrates that we are terrible at creating a system of complexity, and I want to know why that is.

Let’s start with the human mind. It is itself unimaginably complex, but it is very good at a few things, one of which is organization. We are born with an learn a natural system of order, how to arrange things in a pattern that makes sense to us. We’re much better at organizing books in a rational alphabetic order than putting them in an order that only we understand. If everyone had their own system of organization, the world could not function. So we teach ourselves how to create systems that anyone can understand.

This might as well be the job description for an architect or urban planner. Their task is always to create an environment that is easy and pleasing to use. Their goal, unlike a maze designer, is to help rather than hinder. 

There are two ways, then, that complex, maze-like systems emerge in our world. One of them is obvious, mazes that are created deliberately. If we go back to Inception, there are tons of mazes created specifically to confuse. That young architecture student is given the task of designing cities, hotels, and creepy snow fortresses that are so complex their enemies cannot chase them. In the real world we have hedge mazes, where you cannot help but feel you are being endlessly followed by Jack Nicholson. 

But mazes are not always deliberate. Think of the first time you arrived in a big city. For me, the most obvious example is Paris. When my friends and I first looked at a street map, we were terrified. The roads seem to be laid out with absolutely no coherent pattern. It’s easy to think to yourself, “what sick weirdo designed this madness,” but the answer is no one. Paris, like any other big city, was not just designed. It evolved. It’s the product of hundreds of years of organic growth. Someone is not trying to deliberately confuse you, because that would go against the entire point of city life. Rather, it’s the collective will of millions of brains, each contributing their own little piece of complexity to the puzzle. 

Unless you’re being chased by Jack Nicholson, mazes can be fun. There is nothing I love more than being completely lost in a strange city. And as I’ve said time and time again, it’s the imperfection where we find the greatest beauty. 

Return of the Airship

 If you’re like me, you’ve only seen three airships: one is owned by Goodyear, one is a pile of ashes in New Jersey, and one is made of Led. In our century of airplanes and Veyrons, blimps seem like a whimsical Steampunk fantasy of the past. It’s hard to imagine that only decades ago, many thought they were key machines of a mobile future. The world’s most famous building, Empire State Building was designed with an airship docking mast at the top, though it was only used once. Incidents like the Hindenburg disaster and the invention of the airplane seemed to make the airship obsolete.

The main problem was always safety, size, and speed. Flying in a blimp must have been the closest most people got to having a bomb strapped to them, with hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of highly explosive gas floating right above your head. Blimps routinely crashed in spectacular fireballs because of bad construction. They were also very slow, particularly in comparison to the jet plane. And for every seat added, the airship’s size grew astronomically.

But all these faults tend to overshadow the airship’s main advantages: endurance and efficiency. Unlike airplanes every other method of transportation, airships’ range is only limited by the expiration of their gas. They can fly for days, weeks without needing to stop for refueling, a clear advantage over other means of powered flight. They also produce relatively low emissions, because the gas they use is not combusted and released into the atmosphere.

It’s for these reasons that the airship is making a comeback. Behind the scenes at the Pentagon, the US military is going blimp-crazy. It seems they too have realized the potential impact modern technology could have on an old idea. Here are a few examples of what they’re working on:

Start with the Blue Devil. Due for delivery in January 2012, it’s chief claim to fame is the fact that it is “freakishly large”. Longer than a football field, it isn’t exactly stealth. But it will be used for surveillance, carrying a massive on-board supercomputer capable of 12 senses. It would also be a lot cheaper at $1000 dollars per hour of surveillance compared to today’s $8000. Shove that up your budget crisis.

A more forward-thinking airship also comes from the Pentagon. The ISIS is also an unmanned surveillance ship, but with a few extreme differences. To start with, it can fly without landing for 10 years thanks to an on-board solar collecting system that powers the ship’s rotors. It can travel at 115 mph and fly comfortably at 70000 feet. From there it could take hi-res images of objects more than 300 miles away. Enemies of the US have a few years to hide, as construction won’t begin until 2014.

Vespoidea

Ever destroyed an ant hill? I know I have. As a kid, I used to savor the sadistic pleasure of pouring water down their holes, kicking them, or even once dowsing it in nail polish remover and setting the whole mess ablaze. This love of killing ants came from the fact that every summer, the inside of my house would coated in a million sugar ants as my family and I cowered in fear of their kitchen-devouring power. To me, destroying ant colonies was like getting revenge.

I’ve since grown out of this feeling, and even though I still fight my annual battle with the ants in my house, I’ve developed a tremendous appreciation for the little bugs, and particularly their knack for architecture. It started with Ender’s Game, one of the most famous science fiction books of all time, written by Orson Scott Card. In the novel, the Earth is attacked by aliens that resemble ants. But one of the key turning points in the story comes when Ender and his fellow space soldiers realize that the ant-liens are thinking not as individuals, but as a whole, the millions of brains functioning as one.

But you don’t need to live in a world of science fiction to observe this kind of group thought. It’s been happening right under our feet for millions of years. Individually, ants are pretty dumb, even compared to other insects. Instead, they construct their massive cities by combining their brain power to function as a superorganism. Ant colonies both big and small operate as a unified entity, gathering food, constructing cities, and defending against predators. They are able to solve complex problems with ease that would baffle an individual. Ants do this by communicating with pheromones, chemical signals which are passed from one ant to another via smell and taste. In this way, messages can be passed almost instantly throughout the entire colony. Their chemical language is as effective as our verbal language because it surpasses the need for argument and gets straight to hard data.

What did ants do with all this power? They became architects. Along with their natural ability for food collection and defense, ants are some of nature’s best builders. Their underground colonies are as complex as human cities, but take only a few months to build. Vast labyrinths of tunnels and chambers stretch far below the surface, each part designed with a specific use in mind. From the surface, we can only see a fraction of a percent of their enormous cities, the construction of which requires the tireless effort of millions of individuals. But there is no architect ant who sits around and gives orders, no contractor, no construction manager, and no interior designer. The superorganism functions as one mind, whose instinct for construction can make a seemingly impossible task feasible. Ants have an innate sense of what, where, and when to build that is gained both genetically and through learning via the collective brain. On its own, a single ant would be incapable of such a massive undertaking. Each can only carry a few grains of sand in its mandibles, and could not possibly conceive the scale of the tunnels and chambers, which on a human scale would cover hundreds of miles. But they have the ability to come together as one and build some of the most astonishing cities in the world.

So how does this relate to us? There is no question that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, but that does not mean we cannot learn from our insect colleagues. We are superior builders, but as we are presented with more tools and new ideas about how to build our world, we need a point of reference, and I think that ants are just the place to look. Simply put, ants are socialists, in that the means of production are directly in the hands of the people…er…ants. In the human world, socialism is a viable form of governance because it ensures that everyone gets a piece of the cake they helped cook.

This is all well and good for things like healthcare and energy, but what about architecture? Buildings in our society have always been designed by a person or small group for a price. But with the power of the internet, we have the power to behave like ants. Using crowdsourcing, humans can become as efficient builders as ants, functioning as a democratic and collective building force. To some degree, we are already doing this. Cities aren’t built by one person, but by millions. Yet there is an enormous lack of input that has made most cities very inefficient and unfriendly. If we were to take the power of our collective minds, it’s possible to change that.

To use a real world example, let’s look at Los Angeles. The US’s second largest city is known for being the car culture capital of the world. This is not because Americans love our cars (we do) but because the city was built in such an impenetrable and inefficient manner that most people have no other option than to drive. Had the task of designing LA been given to one person, it would look nothing like it does. But because there is such a lack of communication between architects and inhabitants, between need for efficiency and desire for space, the city is nothing but a massive cesspool of pollution and traffic (sorry, it’s true). But if the city had been built by the people, by the superorganism, things would be different.

The city is in the process of designing a new football stadium for the LA Live area downtown. It’s being designed by an architecture firm, as all of today’s buildings are. There is a massive opposition to the stadium, from every corner of the city. There are questions on its impact on the economy, on traffic, and on the aesthetic of the city. These are big problems, and in my opinion, too big for one person to sort out. We all love to play god, but things would be better if we relied not on an individual perspective, but on the ideas of the population as a whole. Imagine instead that the stadium is being designed by everyone. LA residents could use the internet to voice opinions, vote on design aspects, and submit ideas of their own. It wouldn’t take any experience in architecture to change the built world a person lives in.

So maybe it’s time we stop our childish love of destroying ant cities, and instead learn from their perspective. As we move into a changing and growing world, it’s time to consider building our cities in a new way, the ant way. Only then can we truly reflect the needs and desires of the people that actually live there.

Airbenders

I’m in Albuquerque, New Mexico right now. If you haven’t heard, the city is surrounded in what seems like an inescapable ash cloud from a forest fire in Arizona. It’s annoying and often painful for the lungs, but it’s also beautiful. In the evenings, the entire sky is a brilliant orange. And during the day, you can actually see the patterns of the wind being traced in the smoke. This made me realize something: in a place like a forest or a desert, you can see the wind. It shakes trees, rustles leaves, and kicks up sand. In the concrete canyons of modern cities, we’re missing that. Save for hurricanes, wind has little impact on architecture. Currents of air are no match for walls of concrete. Yet wind is vital to our survival, creating tides, carrying pollen, moving ships, and someday powering cities. If we are truly to build architecture around humanity, we cannot afford not to integrate the wind.

The problem is, however, that we cannot build skyscrapers out of leaves or fill our streets with sand dunes. Wind is idiosyncratic and unpredictable, traits which architecture tends to avoid. The challenge, then, is bringing that flow of randomness to man-made materials, mobilizing the immobile.

Janet Echelmen is doing just that, but in a surprising way. In her TED Talk, she explains that even though she is not an architect or urban planner, she understands cities’ need for visual wind. Through her unconventional work, she hopes to reestablish a connection with the natural world that our modern civilizations are lacking. She constructs giant, billowing structures out of fishnet formed into lace. They are strung above streets and parks from the sides of buildings, so pedestrians can look up and actually see the patterns of the wind. On an unrelated note, another of her projects for downtown Philadelphia traces the paths of subway trains in real time using moving jets of steam set on a map-like fountain, which I find cool beyond compare.

Fishnet too light-weight? Try steel. Urban Art Projects has collaborated with artist Ned Kahn to build a parking garage at an airport in Brisbane. When I hear the words ‘steel’ and ‘parking garage’ I don’t think of movement, let alone wind. But their plan is to change that. The facade of the garage will be covered in a kinetic steel mesh that ripples in the breeze, while allowing the garage behind to breath. This project succeeds tremendously by taking a previously static and unnatural urban object and making it part of nature’s flow, no matter how hakuna matata that sounds.

Some would argue that all this pretty fluff is useless because it does nothing to increase efficiency, and they’re partially right. That’s where Russia comes in. An architect there plans to build what is playfully titled a “wind dam”. No, it’s not a popular mid-range American hotel chain. It’s a new way to capture the wind’s energy. Most complaints about today’s wind turbines center around their ability to take up enormous amounts of land and sky. Personally, I think they’re beautiful, but then again, I’ve only seen them up close once on the A85 to Tours. But many find them ugly, so Laurie Chetwood, a London based architect plans to make wind energy pretty. His plan is to construct a giant sail-like structure over a lake in Russia, strapped to the surrounding cliff faces and held up by steel supports coming out of the lake. The wind would be directed down the canyon, into the sail, spinning the turbine. The project of course will draw many criticisms, particularly from the field of physics, which claims this is impossible. But either way, it shows our willingness to take the wind in new directions.

What cities need is a nice, healthy breeze. Here we see several examples of artists and architects helping humanity take off its briefs and put on some boxers. Aaaah. Doesn’t that feel nice?

The Seed Cathedral (Touch Part 2)

Last week I talked about Heatherwick Studio, which is moving to reintroduce a certain materiality and soulfulness that seems to be lost in the jump between small objects and big buildings. One of the criticisms of modern architecture is that it lacks any kind of tangibility, that it’s too cold and removed from our sense of the world’s intricacies. 

With Heatherwick’s Seed Cathedral, it seems the problem may have been solved. Simply put, it’s one of the single most powerful buildings of our time. For their pavillion at the Shanghai Expo in 2010, the United Kingdom chose the studio to carry out the project on a relatively small budget, with only the premise that they represent the country as a center both for creativity and environmentally friendly. 

Thomas Heatherwick is always drawn back to his childhood spent in his mother’s bead shop. He remembers the power held in even the smallest objects, learning their tiny beauties and appreciating them on the large and small scale. So, when he was looking for a theme for the pavilion, he chose another small object, the seed. Recently, there has been a massive movement in the UK to catalog and preserve the seeds of millions of plants from around the world. The seed was a natural choice to put at the center of his pavilion, because it embodied his idea of soulful materiality, as well as represent his country as a global leader in environmental preservation.

He had to look at the seed itself. Humans have always held a special relationship with these precious little objects. Without knowledge them, we would not be able to farm, and our society would never have developed. And in an age of Monsanto and Dow, it’s easy to forget the mighty power that has always been held in these tiny objects, with or without human intervention. Seeds are the culmination of a plant’s reproduction, containing all of the genetic and nutrient material needed to begin the next generation. Each plant has its own way of distributing its seeds, whether it be by wind, water, or animal ingestion. Each is unique, each is beautiful.

How to build a monument to something so vitally important to our past and future? Heatherwick could have put them on display in a pretty museum behind cases of glass, but that would not have done nature or architecture justice. Instead, he focussed his energy on making a singular structure that would be as powerful as those seeds, and as meaningful to both him and the buildings visitors as the feeling of small objects were. 

The Cathedral is built unlike any other building in history. It is one singular rounded cube, with one opening. Every square inch of its surface is adorned with more than 60000 ten foot transparent acrylic rods that jut out of the building. Inside the building, the tubes each have a seed at the bottom, which can be seen by guests. The tubes are flexible and sway in the breeze like blades of grass. During the day, they carry light into the building, and at night they broadcast outwards in a dazzling fiber-optic light show. From a distance, the building looks like a mirage, its edges blurry and undefined. Heatherwick jokes that it’s the only building that looks more like a computer rendering than an actual structure. 

There are no frills, nothing to distract the visitor from the personal feeling of the seeds and the building. There are no ads, no televisions, no fountains. It’s smaller than most of the other pavilions, but it’s surrounded by rolling and jagged hills of synthetic grass that mimic the texture of the building’s facade, creating an interesting and peaceful public space, with nature and architecture at the center. It invites the guest to first experience an open space for play and relaxation and then draws them in to have a personal and tangible experience with one of nature’s greatest wonders. Simply put, he’s made modern architecture more human.

And like the seed which it honors, the Cathedral has given itself up. The rods with the seeds embedded in them have been distributed to schools across China as a gesture of the UK’s care towards those children’s future and just how important the seed, and good architecture, truly is.