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 drip-irrigation hub for the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis,” a collaboration between BLDGBLOG and WROT Studio; all images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio.] The Nullarbor Plain is a nearly treeless region, roughly the size of Nebraska. It is also the world’s largest karst landscape, and thus home to ..read more

“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 waste disposal and its aging dumps.” If landfills are the extreme endpoint of a cultural practice of burial—we bury to memorialize, to forget, to protect, to hide, store, and retrieve—then the idea that what we’ve made subterranean might take on a life or chemical activity of its own has a strange irony. Landfills seem ..read more

[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 institute would spend its time, in his words, “looking downward instead of up.” The group’s main goal would be archaeological: to map, and thus help preserve, sites of human settlement before they are lost to development, natural decay, climate change, and war. Archaeologist Stefano Campana, at the University of Siena ..read more

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 abandoned homes, haunted offices, auto-repair yards, and even millionaires’ yachts all over the country, using aggression to overcome his own fears and maintain the upper hand. The times ghosts truly scare me aren’t from the shock of a dead face staring up from the bottom of a basement staircase; I’m usually too drunk or ..read more

Exercise has been a central part of my life since at least the age of 17. Nearly three decades’ worth of hiking, running, lifting, and more have taught me conclusively that physical activity, combined with a daily writing regimen, is central to my well-being. Writing and exercise are, for me, unusually effective—and surprisingly complementary—ways of metabolizing the world. I would be lost without either one. I’m thus incredibly honored to have five short pieces of speculative fiction included in Nike’s new book, No Finish Line, published on the occasion of the firm’s 50-year anniversary, loo ..read more

[Image: “Forest and Sun” (1946) by Max Ernst.] When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun” (1946) 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 human congregants or religious pilgrims, people approaching a huge, alien landform out of some strange act of homage or scientific curiosity. Alas, it’s just Max Ernst’s signature. Whatever you’re approaching in 2023, may it be unfamiliar, potentially threatening, and new ..read more

[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 Cities.” Muons are cosmic particles, similar to neutrinos, that pass through us constantly—but also through solid rock and concrete, through cathedrals, pyramids, dams, and roads. In the 1960s, physicist Luis W. Alvarez of UC Berkeley launched a whole new form of architectural imaging when he realized that, if you can cap ..read more

[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.” According to researchers Žiga Kos and Jörn Dunkel, calculations would be performed by—and registered as—crystal orientations in the liquid, induced or controlled by electromagnetism: “Electric fields could… be used to manipulate the molecules to perform basic calculations, similar to how simple circuits called logic gates ..read more

[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 Kabbalah and had twin dogs and who, when seeing that I had bought myself a portable typewriter because I was going through a William Burroughs phase, blessed it one night in her apartment near the synagogue in a ceremony with some sort of bronze sword. It’s almost literally unbelievable how long ago that was. More year ..read more

I should have included this in A Burglar’s Guide to the City: a magical procedure used “to open every Kind of Lock, without a Key, and without making any noise,” whether you’re dealing with individual padlocks or entire prisons, taken from a 15th-century grimoire called The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, the Mage, translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The book also includes spells to demolish architecture and for detecting stolen and missing objects, all operating by way of linguistic grids and ritual repetitions. A kind of supernatural Sudoku. On a superficially related no ..read more