engineered cementitious composites

ECC incorporates super fine (100 microns in diameter) silica sand and tiny polyvinyl alcohol-fibres covered with a very thin (nanometer thick), slick coating. ECC has a strain capacity of 3%, regular concrete has a strain capacity of 0.1%.

ECC: a ductile concrete that does not use coarse aggregate and does include a coated network of fine polymer fibres within the cement that allow it to slide under stress, so no irreparable breaches, just thousands of fine cracks, dusted with cement, that self-repair with water.  

Engineered cement composites were developed at the University of Michigan by Victor Li in the early 1990s.  Although fibre reinforcement comes in many modes; the ECC uses micro-scale (10 micron) fibres that actually bond the cement within the concrete. They introduce a plasticity that allows the concrete to deform rather than break. In a paper by Victor Li, the abstract states: Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is a material micromechanically designed with high ductility and toughness indicated by multiple micro-cracking behavior under uniaxial tension.

Neat.  Apparently ECC is of great use in bridge repairs where there is an incompatibility between old concrete under stress and new normal concrete patched in, which is both shrinking and calcifying at a different rate, introducing weakness at the old/new interface.  ECC's flexibility – its internal slipperiness – does not allow it to shrink and crack.  And in  2003 in Japan where most of the applications seem to be, it was sprayed in a 20mm layer over 600m2 of the aging, cracking, leaking and spalling Mitaka Dam.

To add to all of this wonderfulness is that its life cycle costs are lower than conventional concrete (tested on bridge deck systems: agency costs – material, construction, and end-of-life costs, plus social costs – emissions damage costs from agency activities, and vehicle congestion, user delay, vehicle crash and vehicle operating costs. These costs were estimated across all life-cycle stages (material production, construction, use, and end of life) over a 60-year analysis period.)

At 40 times lighter than conventional concrete, and with its bendiness, clearly it is headed towards earthquake zones, which perhaps is why it is well-deployed in Japan.  Life cycle costs can be misleading: although over a 60 year period it might be less expensive than ordinary concrete construction, I'll bet those little polyvinyl alcohol fibres with their slidey nano-coating cost a bundle, and are inaccessible to most of the people so devasted, and so regularly, by earthquakes.

aggregate

Metalled road, Reinga, New Zealand.

Aggregate, in general, is mined, either as gravel or as stone which is then crushed to roughly 10mm sized pieces for concrete.  Historically this rock was called metal, from the Greek, metallon, or quarry/ore/metal, from which comes the term, a metalled road, something one finds in John Buchan novels where the hero and his invariably boyish girl companion hurtle across Scotland in their roadster on narrow tracks and if lucky, a metalled road.  Which merely means a gravel road.  The term is still used in New Zealand evidently.

Metalling is a process developed by John McAdam in 1820 where layers of ever-smaller sized aggregate are laid down on the road bed and with wear the sharp edges will pack together making a dense and weatherproof surface.  It is made even finer if the surface is coated with a mixture of stone dust and water, filling up any gaps between the stones.  Coating the lot with tar (tarmac) reduces dust as the surface stones break down with excessive wear.  

Asphalt is a name for bitumen, something we know a lot about here: originally called the tar sands of northern Alberta, the scientifically neutral term is the bitumen sands, the industry term is the oil sands: it is all heavy semi-solid petroleum.  Whatever, an asphalt concrete road which is what most of our roads are, is a gravel road topped with a layer of aggregate mixed with bitumen as the binder, rather than cement.

None of this is exotic, the basic materials seem to be everywhere, and evidently aggregate mining is what most of mining consists of.  There is a nasty history to rock breaking however, considered hard labour and done by prisoners well into the 20th century – including Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, and it is still done by women and children in the more benighted parts of the world.

concrete cities

Palestinians sort through the rubble of a house hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Nov. 18, 2012. Alessio Romezi, photographer, for Time

In the recent coverage of the civil war in Syria and just this past few weeks, the bombings in Gaza City, one is struck by the sheer amount of concrete and rebar left in great tumbled piles.  No trees, no wood, no parks or lawns, Palestinian refugee camps and Gaza itself are dense concrete worlds.  

North Africa and the Middle East sit on a shield of limestone, interleaved with layers of sandstone.  It is all made clear in a really interesting paper on the significance of reef limestones. Calcareous limestone: fossils and shells, sand from the edges of the ocean, oil from the animals and vegetation that lived there: it is geology itself that produces the wealth, the tensions and the landscapes of the Middle East, and has for a long time: the pyramids are sandstone blocks, faced with limestone sheets.  Photographs of Palestine in the 1920s show a sandstone architecture, however, quarrying and building in stone is not the process for quick reconstruction in war, concrete clearly is.  

Concrete debris can be re-used as aggregate: it isn't as strong, but there is lots of it.  All the steel reinforcing bars and mesh can be hammered out and re-used, and concrete can always be mixed in small batches, by hand if necessary.  Not that the entire Gaza Strip is in rubble; there are concrete companies with perky websites just as there are anywhere else.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza allows the entry of construction materials from Egypt only for Palestinian Authority projects.  As the PA does not operate in Gaza, Hamas does, the list is effectively embargoed.  Nonetheless, the territory sits on limestone, abuts an ocean full of sand, and is provided with rubble of all kinds on a regular basis.

limestone

Palliser Limestone Formation: at the base of Heart Mountain, next to the Canadian Pacific Railway at Exshaw, Alberta, about 900 000 tonnes are quarried annually, sliced off the hillside like carving a block of butter. Natural gas supplies the energy to turn it into cement powder.

Portland cement: limestone is fired at 1450C, a process which frees CO2 from calcium carbonate to form calcium oxide, or quicklime. Gypsum is added, and depending on geography, a number of other additives such as fly ash, blast furnace slag, silica fume, various clinkers, sometimes metakaolin (to make it very white).

Strangely, cements are considered natural materials, I suppose because they are made of 'natural' mined minerals, such as limestone and bauxite.  Now here is an interesting one: calcium sulfoaluminate low-energy cements require lower kiln temperatures, less limestone, thus less fuel consumption, less CO2 emissions, but 'significantly higher' SO2 emissions, which if I recall leads to acid rain.

Green cements using waste containing calcium, silica, alumni or iron, can replace clay, shale and limestone in the kiln, and other waste material can be used as fuel rather than coal or natural gas.  It isn't clear if this produces cement that can be used for structural concrete.

Novacem, a research facility in the UK, has developed a magnesium silicate-based strong cement which absorbs CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative.  Geologically speaking, limestone is very common throughout the world, supposedly so are magnesium silicates.  Although one can develop a new carbon negative cement, getting it to replace existing, long-standing industrial processes is more difficult.  Magnesium silicate is more commonly known as talc [Persian تالک] as in talcum powder: soft metamorphic rock, the main ingredient of soapstone.

But. but. and this is what I can't find, does the concrete made from all these different cements feel and look different from the energy consumptive Portland cement?

Isabelle Hayeur: in the middle of nowhere

L'île, 1998, Paysages incertains / Uncertain Landscapes, 107 cm X 244 cm / 42" X 96"

Isabelle Hayeur:  Au milieu de nulle part

As part of Paris Photo at the Canadian Cultural Centre
5, rue de Constantine 75007 Paris
November 14, 2012 to March 22, 2013
Opening reception on November 13, 6h30 pm

From Isabelle Hayeur's press release:

"in the middle of nowhere", which, come to think of it, raises the idea of a strange encounter between geometry and geography. A paradoxical expression that has a wide range of connotations (from irony to poetry, from disenchantment to contemplation), it is used to refer to an object or a place from a relatively unplaceable space. Here, photography demonstrates its power to represent space-time continuums outside our everyday world, outside its flux, noise and inattention. The subjects seem to be uprooted, deprived of rooting in nature, of links to the earthly continuum. For Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler, the framing is a crucial process that proposes another way of dividing up reality to take us elsewhere. Not towards some form of exoticism but, on the contrary and more colloquially, to the middle of nowhere.

« Au milieu de nulle part » est une expression qui pointe une chose ou un emplacement isolé, qui sort de l'ordinaire ou qui fait saillie de manière inopinée à partir de l'immensité plane. Littéralement une situation insituable – une absurdité, un paradoxe, une tromperie, un leurre, un éclat – qui représente un objet fabuleux pour la photographie. Les photographes Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur et Thomas Kneubühler, réunis ici pour la première fois, ont en commun cet intérêt manifeste pour ce qui n'est pas censé être au centre de l'attention. Par le cadrage photographique ils proposent un autre découpage du réel pour nous emmener ailleurs. Non pas vers quelque forme d'exotisme mais, bien au contraire et plus familièrement, « Au milieu de nulle part ».

Great Lake Swimmers: Your Rocky Spine :: land as love

We should make this the theme song for On Site 29: geology.

Great Lake Swimmers. Original album was Ongiara, 2007; here a performance from the neighbor's dog.

Call for articles for 29:geology here.

37.2: Arteology

ARTEOLOGY / installation / wood, 120x100m / "Festival Arts Nature Horizons 2012" / Puy de Serveix, France / 2012 / built.

37.2 [very hot], Atelier de Microarchitecture, is Francesca Bonesio and Nicolas Guiraud, an architect and a photographer, based in Paris.

Arteology is a 37.2 project in the Auvergne: a skeleton that might be found had the Puy de Serveix, a volcanic hill, been an ancient living thing – which it was of course, but had it been an ancient living animal with vertebrae and ribs.  The scale is large, 100m from ridge to base, the scale of the enigmatic chalk reliefs in England: the Uffington White Horse, for example.

From 37.2's description of the project, roughly, 'the volcanic region of the Auvergne in the massif du Sancy seems both grand and sacred.  Our project is to stir the soil, to interpret the form of a ridge, to send a piton into the rock to see, as if by magic, the art in this singular form of nature.
As artists, our arteological search is to reveal nature's memory, rekindling the fire, the fear, the mystery, the questing metaphysics at the heart of volcanic activity'.

ARTEOLOGY / installation / wood, 120x100m / "Festival Arts Nature Horizons 2012" / Puy de Serveix, France / 2012 / built.The aims are immense, the project is simple: wood recovered from construction, no challenging structure, but rather 'it registers as a drawing, a layer, an intervention in the landscape, a poetry reading, a phantasmagoric of nature'.

We have a new call for articles out now, for On Site 29: geology.  We are interested in projects of this kind, where land is reinterpreted in a way that connects us with a deep past. 

The Deep of the Modern: Manifesta 9

Coal Sack Ceiling homage to Marcel Duchamp, Manifesta 9. Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Association Marcel Duchamp, Paris

This year, the biennial Manifesta is centred on the Waterschei mine in Genk, in in the coal-mining region of Belgium.  Adrian Searle has written a fulsome review of it in the Guardian, and there is a slide show of some of the work here.  
Searle talks about the Bechers and their recording of the industrial landscapes and infrastructure of eastern Belgium, Holland and the northern Ruhr, where Manifesta 9 is being held.  The Bechers are in this exhibition as well, but the arresting image of the coal sacks indicates the interventionist nature of some of the work, beyond the recording of landscapes that shock by their mere presence alone.

The catalogue is here.  The first paragraph of the curatorial concept for Manifesta 9 states, 'The Deep of the Modern intends to create a complex dialogue between different layers of art and history. Its point of departure is the geographical location itself—the former coal-mining region of the Campine in north-eastern Belgium as a locus for diverse issues, both imaginary and ecological, aligned to industrial capitalism as a global phenomenon. Manifesta 9 takes its cue from the previously abandoned, recently restored Waterschei mine complex in Genk.'

The Deep of the Modern.  What a title.  The image above is an homage to Duchamp's 16 Miles of String of 1942. This free ranging through the twentieth century of art and industry, production and politics shows how they inflect each other, rather than presenting the isolation of each of these activities into the discrete silos that they have generally pretended to be.  This is an obvious and natural discussion of the world in which art is an integral part, however it signals a big change from late twentieth century art discourse.

On Site 26:DIRT looked at the surface of the earth, issue 27:rural urbanism investigated in many of the articles how the earth, the dirt, agriculture, the mines and resource-extraction industries locate cities.  On Site 28: geology, next spring, will be continue this discussion of geological consequences and how we are both shaped by them and try to intervene in them ourselves. 

stone scotland

Charles Rennie MackIntosh. Glasgow Scool of Art, 1897-1909There is something of the black stony towns of Scotland to be found in MacIntosh's school of art in Glasgow.  Although pilgrims go to see its dried thistle-leaf steel window racks and its art nouveau arabesques, it is a hulk of a building – tough, and before it was cleaned, grim.  Less tea room and more castle keep.

William Daniell. Kinnaird Head Castle Lighthouse, Aberdeenshire, 1822.

Louis Helbig: aestheticising the unconscionable

Louis Helbig. Bitumen Slick N 57.19.28 W 111.25.44 Syncrude Aurora North

Helbig writes of the image above: Booms confining bitumen floating near the edge of Syncrude's Aurora North tar pond.  This is where industry suffered its most serious massive public relations setback in the spring of 2008 when someone alerted the public and the authorities to flocks of ducks landing on its surface.  In this particular incident about 1,600 ducks were killed.  Syncrude was convicted in 2010 of breaching both federal and provincial environmental reglations.

He has a series of aerial photographs of the oil sands region, and although his view is activist, as one can see from the captions, the images are beautiful.  How is it that our visual acuity has been trained to find abstraction so sublime.  Context is removed and we gaze at such images with the appreciation other eras gave to flowers or girls with pearl earrings.  This is precisely what is so dangerous about the removal of context, scale, consequences and facts.  They are removed.  

We need people such as Louis Helbig to keep explaining not just his photographs, but the abstract nature of the oil sands enterprise itself.  Whatever it does there is a diagram on the map with pipelines dotted in to Texas, maybe to Prince Rupert and on to China.  It is a series of mirrored glass office towers in Calgary and Houston. It is every plastic bag we throw hopefully into the recycling bin, it is the cloud of exhaust everytime we start our cars. 

rockfall net

Rockfall netting, Trans-Canada Highway, Kicking Horse Pass near Golden BCThis is a prosaic image of the steel mesh curtains in the Kicking Horse Pass just east of Golden, on a dangerous, narrow, steep, winding part of the Trans-Canada where there is only half a shoulder and no where to stop.  I usually pass these curtains in the winter and have seen them covered in hoarfrost, or wet and shimmering in the sun, or packed with snow.  They are very beautiful, but it is suicidal to try to take a photo of them while driving.  And one cannot stop.  

This is Burgess Shale territory and both the highway and the railway tracks sit on narrow ledges hacked out of the cliffs cut by the Kicking Horse River.  These cliffs, limestone and slate, shatter with the freeze/thaw cycle and crumble away landing on the road surface, thus the curtains which hang in front to catch falling rock.

A little farther east, the rubble beside the road is pale green, a particular formation that is compressed calcium carbonate, they say.  All this rock is fragile, it weathers easily and continuously.  The road is in a permanent state of repair and reconstruction and is often closed.  There is no radio signal, cell phones do not work: one is in the middle of a large stretch of unalloyed geology.  There are gabions, there are straw erosion bales, there are curtains, there are tiny cars and trucks hurtling their way through it all, there are accidents and a primitive understanding that this is still a dangerous landscape.

destination earth

Tidy segregated piles of construction waste placed in between piles of blasted granite.  They take on a kind of beauty as they subside into the landscape.  The gently sagging drywall might simply be fill, but given that one of the remedial actions on an acidified terrain is to spray it with lime, perhaps gypsum has the same effect. 

Drywall. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Brick. Sudbury building site, Sepember 2011

Concrete. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Aha! The ubiquitous blue tarp. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Tire mat, used to blanket a rock explosion. Sudbury buidling site, 2011

the north

Terminology, very confusing.  As a child I learned that the difficulty in laying down the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s was crossing muskeg, which swallowed tracks and even whole trains.  This is what happened in the north, which I assumed was in Northern Canada, somewhere in the Northwest Territories, and as with things you learn in grade 8, I never examined it again until this past week in Sudbury.  

It is not that muskeg isn't a treacherous thing, great wetlands that form where there isn't drainage: bogs, full of decaying plant material, trapped moose and train tracks which eventually form peat and I suppose, ultimately coal.  No, the other treacherous thing is the word north.

The northern imagination written about by Northrop Fry, Margaret Atwood, embodied in the Group of Seven and Georgian Bay is not the north I thought it was, The North, north of the provinces.  It is actually western Ontario.   
This came as something of a surprise, given that Sudbury sits at 46°N and has a growing zone of 4b.  Calgary, which no one would consider north at all, sits almost 600km north at 51°N in zone 2b.

In another instance, the Ring of Fire is generally known as the zone of earthquake and volcanic activity that rings the Pacific Ocean, where the Pacific tectonic plate grinds against the North American plate, the Eurasian, Australian and Nazca plates.  In the west we hear a lot about it, especially in Vancouver where all buildings have been essentially rebuilt to earthquake standards.

But in Ontario, Ring of Fire is a mine in the James Bay region where chromium was recently discovered and for which a smelter is planned, much to the purported benefit of First Nations in the area.  It is seen as a revitalisation of Ontario's mining interest and will be introducing Chinese development interests to Sudbury.   I only know this because I watched Steve Paikin's Agenda last night on TVO where there was a debate on whether industrial development or species protection was more important in the north.  Their north.  The wishy-washy conclusion was that we should have both, which means that mining and forestry will proceed with glee and with a few ameliorative concessions to fish, birds and migrating herds. Who do not vote.

It is a different country, Ontario.

Preparing the ground for flatland housing development. Lonely yellow hydrant awaits.  
Anyway, this train of thought was triggered by a new subdivision (above) on a ridge that looks down on Sudbury.  Downtown Sudbury has a problem with drainage, sitting as it does on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield.  Water sits in lakes or in muskeggy wetlands, (they'd be called sloughs on the prairie, bogs on the coast).  In older districts, streets and the little houses lining them in the bottom of the basin in which downtown Sudbury sits, regularly flood, the streets become culverts and swales, the water hasn't got a lot of options.  Thus, new development perched on ridges above the city has a certain appeal.  

Putting in services for new development requires, by convention, that they be underground.  But there is no underground here, it is solid rock, so ground is created in a cut and fill way.  The rock is blasted into rubble and shifted around to make flat sites for houses with the sewer and water safely installed beneath.  
There are a lot of similarities between Sudbury and Yellowknife, where new development does exactly this, rock blasted into coarse gravel for developer houses on cul-de-sacs one could find anywhere in Canada.  Aleta Fowler wrote about this in On Site 14: does one go to the north to live as if one was in a southern Canadian suburb?

Kenneth Hayes has introduced the term geo-cosmopolitanism to the discussion of urban development which, in its rough outlines means being aware of and taking into account the deep geo-logic of place.  The naming is important, we can put geo-cosmopolitanism in all its complexity onto a different way of looking at cities, more deeply rooted in their history, their industries, their place in the world. 

the canadian shield, yesterday

17 September 2011, 12:30 EDTWhere the flat, polished Canadian Shield slides into Georgian Bay, and

17 September 2011, 5pm MDTan oncoming storm, east of Calgary, looking over what was Lake Agassiz 10,000 years ago, ice age meltwater caught between the Rockies and the Canadian Shield.

addendum:  well, that isn't quite right.  Evidently we are looking at the Bassano Basin, formed by the same melting of the Wisconsinan Laurentide ice sheet.  Calgary is 1048m elevation, Winnipeg in the Agassiz Basin is 238m, Regina, halfway between them is 577m.   The land sank with the melting of the glacier, and Bassano drains south into the Missouri system, rather than north as does the Agassiz system.  So somewhere on the great flat prairies that seems like a table top if you are driving across it, there is a series of different divides, different ancient watersheds. 

rivers and borders

International Joint Commission map of the Souris River Basin

The Souris River is flooding Minot, North Dakota.  On the CBC news a Minot resident blames Saskatchewan for this, 'they should have done something'.  The Souris eventually joins the Assiniboine, after it crosses the border again, back into Manitoba.  The Assiniboine flooded earlier this spring and will perhaps flood again.  Winnipeg also keeps its eye on Fargo, North Dakota, on the Red River.  The Assiniboine joins the Red in downtown Winnipeg.  In the 1996 Red River flood Winnipegers blamed Fargo for not better controlling the river flow. 

BC Treaty Commission. Statement of Intent. Traditional Territory Boundary, Sliammon Indian Band.The 49th parallel is an abstract political division that serenely ignores topography: global mathematics trumps geophysical realities.  Before the US Survey, before the Dominion Grid, before enlightened Europeans started to delineate territory in this seemingly empty-ish land, there were aboriginal territories: precise, negotiated at their borders by treaty, surveyed orally in a metes and bounds system.  
Sliammon First Nation territory clearly is topographically based: it controls the watershed on the western slopes of the Coast range, the waterway and fishing beds of the inland passage and the opposite beach, securing the whole width of the strait.  Fresh water systems, food, sea borne transportation capacity, security: these are the things that boundaries delineate. 

 Arid Region of the United States, showing drainage districts. Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana-MissoulaThis 1891 map of watersheds in what was called the arid regions of the western United States shows a division of land that could have been a series of small states, with control over their own water resources and all the potential agricultural and animal resources a watershed contains.

Pre-contact North American cultural areasOr, looking at a map of pre-contact cultural zones in North America, one can see how there is a huge territory that controls the Great Lakes.  Another has the whole western watershed of the Mississipi, another group the eastern side.  The Great Divide separates the peoples of the watersheds that go to the Pacific from those of the plains: the north to Hudson's Bay, south to the Gulf of Mexico.  The boreal forest is one huge cultural group, as is the high Arctic. 

Topological environmental divisions as political territories: what a novel idea.  One could only blame oneself for mismanaging one's resources.

building a forest

Colour-infrared image of Sudbury region using Landsat imagery from 1987. Vegetated areas appear in reddish in colour where urban/disturbed areas are green. The yellow boundary represents the study area for vegetation change detection and approximates the municipal boundary of the City of Greater Sudbury.

I heard this story on the news a while ago, but it took a while to figure out the keywords necessary to find it again.  In the lunar landscape that is the old Sudbury nickel mines and smelters there has, over the last 40 years, been a massive tree planting program, however because the soil is so acidic and toxic, there is no forest floor – that blanket of leaf mould, seeds, bugs, little animals, lilies and orchids, wild flowers, birds, from which new trees grow.  

When new roads are hacked out of the wilderness, such as the twinning of the Trans-Canada highway through Banff National Park, first the forest is logged, then bulldozers come and shovel and grade the top metre of ground into road bed.  All the little seedlings and mice die instantly.  

What Sudbury is doing is removing mats of ground cover and top soil from nearby road construction sites and placing them in the reforested areas that lack that essential floor that sustains a biodiverse ecology.

Pictures show the depth of these mats as about 4".  Is that enough?  Is the soil still toxic underneath?  I'm sure someone has figured all this out otherwise the project wouldn't be so extensive, however it does make one realise how very thin the skin is that supports life.  It also questions the expectation that it will be technology that reconstructs the toxic landscape of the oil sands: cutting and laying turf is not high technology.  It hardly even low technology.  Plants and insects are perhaps more powerful agents in reconstruction than we realise.

Land Reclamation 1978-2008. City of Sudbury.

City of Sudbury Re-Greening Program

there is a short video on this CBC report of the programme: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/06/environment-sudbury-forest-floor-transplant.html

alabaster

Alabaster windows, San Paolo fuori le Mura
, Rome. 13th Century

Alabaster windows – a search for images has taken me to some very odd tourist sites, but never mind, these windows seem quite wonderful.  This is the tradition from which Sigmar Polke drew, adding colour from stained glass traditions.  Before glass there was alabaster, before church windows as text.  

Sigmar Polke's Agates

Sigmar Polke. Agate Window, Grossmünster Cathedral, Zürich. 2006-2009

Sigmar Polke, who died last June, apprenticed as a stained glass painter before going on to art school and studying under Joseph Beuys.  The work we know him best by is heavily layered, referential work - drawings over drawings so that a dense surface appears to be made of many transparent and translucent screens, all holding different kinds of information. 

Sculpturally he worked with deeply, geologically romantic, translucent materials such as jade, quartz and amber. His last work was a set of windows for the Grossmünster Cathedral in Zurich (2006-2009), five of which are drawn from Old Testament figural descriptions, seven are thinly sliced agate held in place as with traditional stained glass by lead track.
The windows conflate narrative, biblical time and geologic time in a most graceful way, all held within the frame of the 11th century Romanesque stone cathedral.  There is a book about them with a number of essays: Marina Warner et al. Fenster-Windows for the Grossmünster Zürich.  Parkett, 2009.

I think as with most of the art I love and which I have never actually seen, it is the concept of these works which appeals.  I know there would be a phenomenological intensity, and here with the agate windows, a spiritual space that one can only experience by being there.  This is the ongoing problem with art in the age of reproduction, we only get a diagram of what a work is.  It will have to do – for me I'd rather have the diagram than not know about this work at all. 

Primary Russian Oil and Gas Pipelines to Europe

Living in oil & gas industry-obsessed Alberta, I find this map very interesting.  This is why Russia must be kept on side.  This is the underpinning to the cold war; this is all more important than the arms race/reduction treaty. 

OIL: a new town in a resource extraction region

Just a reminder of On Site's exhibition / competition / call for entries for a new town in a resource extraction area. 
We are looking for ideas, ideas, ideas.  There are resource links on the call for entries page for general starting point information, however, you are being asked to figure out what the strategy should be, in 2011, for starting up a new town. 

On the Strand over the weekend there was a piece on video artist Diana Thater's installation on Chernobyl, which was effectively a new city built in the 1970s, something I hadn't realised when it was abandoned just 20 years later.  It is now inhabited by animals, wild horses walk the streets, swans nest on the tailings ponds.  Thater says it is a necessity of nature to persist.  She also talks about what a post-human world looks like, where political systems that built such installations were abandoned along with the site. 

We usually think of designing or planning a new town from point zero, or near to it, that builds into a community with shape and form.  One might also think of the new town when it becomes a discarded post-nuclear installation: what will it say about what we were?