hardware and robotics

A hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, near Bicester, in Oxfordshire. Photograph: English Heritage
The Guardian reports that this bunker is 'one of the best preserved Cold War landscapes in Britain' and it is now on the schedule of monuments to be protected from development.  It is a hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, built in 1967 after the unprotected Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground by Israel.  Decommissioned in 1994, it was a piece of little America with hamburgers and a supermarket.  

As I was considering this, and the rather crouching appearance of a hardened aircraft shelter, part one of Robo Wars by Stephen Sackur came on the radio.  He described a British lieutenant sitting in Nevada controlling drones in Afghanistan, doing his shift then driving home to his wife and kids.  Clearly this beats flying out of Kandahar and living in a dusty FOB. 

Sackur's investigation is about the nature of combat when it is conducted by robots dependent on satellite systems.  The country with the best hackers will win I suppose, however, all these things still deliver bombs which will still land on civilians who aren't hackers, and who will be the statistics that indicate success or failure.   The ultimate direction of all the handheld electronic toys that keep being launched on our wallets is not literacy with Kindle, or connectivity with the iPad, it is probably their weaponisation.

Jaclyn Shoub

Jaclyn Shoub. At This Point in Time. 2004Jaclyn Shoub works with large photographs, removing information in a process of distillation.  They are highly painterly as the removal of much of the photograph is done with a brush and solvent: one knows one is looking at a photograph, but so much content is leached from the surface that these landscapes become magical.  Shoub removes everything about the landscape except for the marks of human occupation which appear small and fragile.

For On Site 23: small things, we have been sent a narrative, a short story written in notes, as the beginning of an architectural process.  This narrative, which you will read when 23 is published in May, also has a delicacy – it describes the process of removing a building from public perception, so that the architecture is everything but the building. 

Both these two works are the opposite of abstraction, where one thinks of an essence and then displays that essence.  These start with the large and complex environment, urban or rural, and remove everything but a thin line of meaning.  What we are looking at is almost incidental to the fullness of life and world but, incidental or not, is extremely important to us.

Park Bridge, Golden BC

Park Bridge in construction, 2006. Kicking Horse Canyon, east of Golden, BC

One of the most spectacular bridges on the Trans-Canada is the new (2007) Park Bridge on the descent into Golden.  Now that it is open you barely know you are on a bridge, so wide and smooth is it, but during the several years of its construction you drove on the old highway underneath it (the highway and the CPR tracks show in the image above).  The central piers are about 150 feet high, tall and elegant; from the old highway it was clear we were all going to pitch off into space way up the hill, shoot across the ravine and catch the hill on the other side, bypassing the dangerous twisting old road all together.  You can't see any of this now from the new road, it is all just more highway, safe and fast and that marvellous registration of the extreme topography is lost. 

Anything under construction is so exciting.  It is when concept, theory and practice are all evident to the eye, and the architecture, in its widest sense, is diagrammatic and understandable.  Construction workers give the scale, one understands the size of the project.  Once it is all done, scale is subsumed by a comfortable opacity, the process of building has become an object, with a function, and we use it unthinkingly.

Placing the girders on the piers

This photo is from the Park Bridge girder launching on the Kicking Horse Canyon highway construction website photo gallery.  This is the link to the girder launching, but the rest of the site is worth a look.

the Dominion Grid

an image that everyone on the prairies has: incoming weather, driving in a straight line, fall fieldsThe Dominion Survey turned land into property in the tradition of the Enclosures Acts in Britain, where land commonly and traditionally farmed was enclosed by fences and walls by often self-appointed land-owners.  The Dominion Survey prepared the ground for the CPR and western settlement. Land held for millennia and used in accordance with constantly re-negotiated peace treaties, all of a sudden within a few years in the 1880s, was ruled off into one-mile squares, 6 mile sections, 36 square mile townships.  Road allowances were made at the edges of the sections and the first nations were bundled into reserves.

Metes and bounds, the survey system that measures land between this rock and that river, this mountain ridge and that path at least acknowledges that land has form, and in determining reserves in eastern Canada often the boundaries were negotiated according to an organic and aboriginal understanding of land use.  Not so for the Sarcee Reserve, now the Tsuu T'ina Nation, which was given three townships sitting in a row, a 36 x 6 mile rectangle running from 37th Street in south Calgary to the mountains.  Rivers and streams cut into this block and out again.  One could perhaps understand the same area being defined by the watershed of the Elbow River perhaps, but not this indifferent and random assignation of land. 

If you can measure land, you can draw it and if you can draw it, you can sell it.  Is this not at the base of survey systems?  I grew up with a western Canadian and an architect's love of the Dominion Grid, its absolute rationality that was nonetheless full of errors, correction lines that occur because of the curvature of the earth, delightful incongruities as a road slices over a hill and down a valley, standing on an escarpment and seeing the road go to the horizon twenty miles away.  Old Saskatchewan farmers could still reel off the legal description of homesteads they'd left in the 30s:  Section 22, Township 26, Range 2, West of the 4th Meridian.  I thought all this was magical, and in some sense still do.  But I also see it as a commercial project.  The CPR was given astounding bonuses for building the railway connecting BC with eastern Canada: $25 million (about $500 million today), 25 million square miles (exactly half the land) in a 50-mile zone either side of the main line and a monopoly on rail connections to the US.  Why does most of Canada live within a hundred miles of the US border?  Does the CPR have something to do with this? Are section roads straight?

CPR land was evenly dispersed, effectively limiting the size of a homestead (obtained free from the Canadian governmnent) to one section.

Cyclophobia

2nd Street SW. Calgary, Alberta