This angular, helium-filled balloon was produced for atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo by Junya Ishigami (who is too cool to have a website), for an exhibition entitled Space for Your Future. It uses an aluminium truss frame and thin reflective alumnium panels (they look almost like foil, but I think they are a bit thicker than that). Apparently it weighs about a ton! Images are from Japan Architect 72. A couple of flickr images here.
Early in the third volume of his Spheres trilogy, Foams, Sloterdijk says that to understand the twentieth century, you need to understand terrorism, industrial design and the concept of the environment. These three things come together in a crucial scene early in the century: at 6pm on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, 150 tonnes of chlorine gas were released into a north-north-easterly breeze by a newly formed German gas regiment. The efficacy of this attack is still debated: the Germans claimed that 5 000 had died, and many more had been injured, while French officals insisted that while 625 had been injured, only three had died. Gas warfare was to become a major element of the battlefields of World War I. A range of toxic gases were employed on both sides of the trenches. For Sloterdijk, this event marks a crucial innovation; instead of attacking the bodies of its enemies, the war machine could now attack their environment, their very conditions of life. The weaponisation of the landscape (see previously: The Diffused Fortress) had given way to the weaponisation of the atmosphere.
The decisive element was rather that the techniques of Modernity pierced, by means of gaseous terrorism, the horizon of a non-objective design – which imposed the explicitation of latent themes like the physical qualities of the air, artifical atmospheric supplements, and other factors of climate creation in sites of human occupation. Humanism and terrorism are chained to one another by progressivist explicitation. [dodgy translation via French mine]
Explicitation is Sloterdijk’s term for the process by which something becomes a subject of intention or operation (well, it has a more nuanced sense than that, I think, but I’m still working it out, and that will do for now). He follows the way that this explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life leads on to later examples of gas chambers used to exterminate humans, either one at a time, as in the USA, or en masse, as in Germany. The explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life can also be traced in the development of air-conditioning. Reyner Banham’s Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see previously: Chilling) gives an historical account of the modern development of architecture as the maintenance of a certain climatic condition. (There is also a good chapter ‘Air Conditioning’ by Sze Tsung Leong in The Harvard Design Guide to Shopping ). The implication is that architecture is a form of life-support system.
Diller+Scofidio’s Blur building (2002) explicitated architectural atmosphere in a new way. The solid matter of architecture is diminished to an apparatus for generating an atmospheric state. The project marks the end of a period of emphasis on how architecture produces meaning or content, and inaugurates an era of affect: the question is longer ‘what does it signify?’ but ‘what effects does it produce?’ In the context of Sloterdijk’s observations on the explicitation of the atmosphere brought about by gas warfare, interest in a dematerialised architecture of atmospheric effect takes on a troubling cast. Sloterdijk does not propose that atmospheric design be rejected as tainted by its military origins. But he does require us to recognise that humanist and terrorist aims are not separated by much. The apparently humanist idea of constructing sensory experience rather than abstract form is not at all far from the terroristic idea of using the environment as a means of manipulating another’s body.
This article in the NYT (previously noticed by mammoth and jargon etc) reports on studies of large-scale fluid-dynamics at Monterey Bay in California. Scientists using a land-based network of high-frequency radar sensors have made detailed maps of flows and currents, revealing a ‘hidden skeleton’ of hydronamic structures that determine their movements. Across the mouth of the bay, for example, is a line of turbulence, ‘like the filaments created by stirring milk into cold coffee’. This line forms a barrier: a floating object on one side will drift out to sea, while on the other it will not escape the bay. The structure is not fixed in place, but although it drifts, it doesn’t disperse.
“The structures are invisible because they often exist only as dividing lines between parts of a flow that are moving at different speeds and in different directions… ‘They aren’t something you can walk up to and touch… but they are not purely mathematical constructions, either’… The line is not a fence or a road, but it still marks a physical barrier.”
The article refers to these as Lagrangian coherent structures, and points out that they exist in water currents, turbulent airflow, and blood circulation. A more general term for these regularities in dynamic systems is singularity. Singularities can be static (the rest state of a system for example), or periodic (an oscillating equilibrium like a pendulum or orbital path). The collection of singularities that determine the behaviour of a system forms an invariant manifold. Manuel Delanda describes them this way:
“Singularities may influence behaviour by acting as attractors for the trajectories. What this means is that a large number of different trajectories, starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold, may end up in exactly the same final state (the attractor), as long as all of them begin somewhere within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the attractor (the basin of attraction)… singularities are said to represent the inherent or intrinsic long-term tendencies of a system.”
It is fascinating to consider the possibilites of specifying matter not through its static positions, or as a series of temporal frames, but in terms of the singularities which form it: an invisible topography. The currently ubiquitous arch-school procedure of analysing a dynamic condition and then using it to generate static form barely scratches the surface of this way of specifying matter and its behaviour.
Three Curious Singularities
The behaviour of two masses orbiting each other can be accurately modelled using the equations of classical mechanics; but as soon as a third is added to the scenario it becomes irreducibly complex. This is the famous three-body problem. However, in the complex phase-space of a three-body system, there are five stable points – called Lagrange points – in this system, at which one object will remain stationary relative to the others. From a spaceship at a Lagrange point, the sun and earth would appear fixed.
Above the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, there is a lightning storm that has been there at least since the sixteenth century. On each of about 150 nights per year there are over 200 lightning strikes. The storm, which was first described by Francis Drake in 1595 complaining that the lightning gave away the position of his soldiers waiting to capture the city of Maracaibo, is fed by anomalies of atmospheric composition, and is a major source of the world’s ozone.
Solitons are stable waves which form in turbulent conditions. Rogue waves, spontaneously generated mountains of water, are believed to be phenomena of this kind, as is the Morning Glory Cloud, which forms over the Gulf of Carpenteria in North Australia. In studies of traffic flows, the term ‘jamiton‘ has been proposed (I’m not sure if that’s serious or not).
Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream at the Venice Biennale, 2008
In Philippe Rahm’s Digestible Gulfstream (2008), two polite innocuous elements are separated by a distance of several metres. One sits just off the floor, a white rectanglar slab with a corner folded up. The other is suspended, with a corresponding corner folded down. The lower element is heated, while the other cooled. The effect produced is a loop of air cycling up from the ground, and descending as it cools. The space, which was installed at the 2008 Venice Biennale, is what Rahm describes as an “invisible landscape… a plastic, dynamic activation of forces and polarities that generate a landscape of heat… literally structured on a current of air, opening up a fluid, airy, atmospheric space” (AD 79, 2009: 33).
The space was inhabited by a languid, intermittently-dressed group, who could seek out the ideal climatic conditions for their current activities. But what are these activities? As it turns out: tinkering on a little keyboard, sleeping, playing cards, chatting in a little circle…
Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream, 2008
Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream, 2008
A group of drawings by illustrator Piero Macola for this project show it removed to a forest clearing. And here again, there is distinct air of laziness (perhaps chilling would be a thermally-appropriate term). The denizens of this clearing rub warming ointments onto each other’s backs, read, sleep, and bask in the sun. There’s a hint here of the old-fashioned futurism of thinking that with robots to do our jobs, we could all adopt Edenic lives of leisure (assuming the popularly-imagined version of the garden of Eden, where it was just a really nice park, not a space of inconceivable relationship with God).
Although Digestible Gulfstream may at first glance be one of those impossibly high-tech projects, it’s also worth observing that it maintains a streak of quite conventional primitivism. Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise traces the longstanding fascination architects have had with the idea of the first architecture. The idea that architecture occurs at precisely the moment when nature becomes culture has been persistent. The forest clearing becomes a site for this imagined transfer. Amongst the forest-clearing stories, Reyner Banham’s is my favourite:
“A savage tribe (of the sort that exists only in parables) arrives at an evening camp-site and finds it well-supplied with fallen timber. Two basic methods of exploiting the environmental potential of that timber exist: either it may be used to construct a wind-break or rain-shed—the structural solution—or it may be used to build a fire—the power-operated solution. An ideal tribe of noble rationalists would consider the amount of wood available, make an estimate of the probable weather for the night—wet, windy, or cold—and dispose of its timber resources accordingly. A real tribe, being the inheritors of ancient cultural predispositions would do nothing of the sort, of course, and would either make fire or build a shelter according to prescribed custom—and that… is what Western, civilised nations still do, in most cases.”
Enclosure or fire? As Luis Fernández-Galiano points out, “an entire theory of architecture is encapsulated in this simple question”. “Architecture,” he writes, “can be understood as a material organization that regulates and brings order to energy flows; and simultaneously and inseparably, as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forms”.
Banham goes on to talk mostly about work-spaces: hospitals, parking garages, offices, shops, banks. Energy is potential work (that’s its technical definition, anyway). But Rahm’s project seeks stasis (although the air is moving, it is in cyclical equilibrium). Of course Digestible Gulfstream is a prototype, a demonstration, so perhaps it isn’t to be taken too seriously. But I’d be interested to know how work fits into the picture.
Diffusive Architectures 
