August 2025 – BLDGBLOG
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. | BLDGBLOG
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. | BLDGBLOG
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. Surreally, the screening I attended was he…| BLDGBLOG
A few weeks ago, The Economist looked at the growing problem of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” in the field of espionage. It describes the difficulty of maintaining a rigorous or believable cover story, for example, when genealogy websites might be consulted by adversarial border agents to verify that a potential spy is who she says she … Continue reading "Seer"| BLDGBLOG
Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently “found a series of outcrops made from an unfam…| BLDGBLOG
[Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG of public domain images from NASA and the Library of Congress.]| BLDGBLOG
You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single block and walked to an adjacent site by a phalanx of miniature robots. Then walked back into place again. The 432 individual machines used for the move were “actually omnidirectional modular hydraulic jacks that are capable of … Continue reading "Architectural Dressage"| BLDGBLOG
I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of garbage being stored in giant, artificial landforms—or simply buried underground like false geological deposits—might be inadvertently catalyzing chemical processes we neither understand nor know how to stop. I was thus excited to see a long investigation of this topic in … Continue reading "Uncontrolled Remains"| BLDGBLOG
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 … Continue reading "Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis"| BLDGBLOG
[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.” … Continue reading "Agency of the Subsurface"| BLDGBLOG
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 … Continue reading "Lost Animals"| BLDGBLOG
[Image: Looking out over the center of “Razish,” a simulated city at the Fort Irwin National Training Center; photo by Geoff Manaugh.] I had an opportunity to revisit the Fort Irwin National Training Center this weekend as part of a series of field trips I’ve put together for the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera program. … Continue reading "Every Room A Battlefield"| BLDGBLOG
[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…| BLDGBLOG
“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 la…| BLDGBLOG
