Refuge

[Image: Photo by Bas Princen, from Five Cities Portfolio].

Photographer Bas Princen has a new book out, Five Cities Portfolio: Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Istanbul, coinciding with a conference to be held this Friday, November 20, at the Netherlands Architecture Institute.

That event, called "Refuge: Architectural Propositions for Unbound Spaces," will feature—among many other things—a presentation by Philipp Misselwitz and Can Altay, whose research accompanies (and seems to have at least partially inspired) Princen's photos.

[Images: Photos by Bas Princen, from Five Cities Portfolio].

About the conference:

"Refuge" explores the causes and spatial impact of migration through voluntary or involuntary "refugees" who are transforming cities around the globe. Individuals or groups are elegantly or forcefully encapsulated from within the context of the city and society. Refuge produces an ever more atomized urban tissue where the "camp" has become both spatial paradigm and everyday reality, be it in the form of a gated community, slum, or humanitarian refugee camp.

You can check out the conference schedule in this PDF—in which you will also see that there is a release party this week for the new issue of Pedro Gadanho's Beyond, as well as a lecture by Eyal Weizman.

More of Princen's work can be found at Icon magazine, meanwhile, and an interesting interview with Princen was published in Oase #76 last year.

Salt Space / Biospeleology

The previous post reminded me of a news item reported roughly two weeks ago, that the town of Carlsbad, NM, is in danger of collapsing into the earth below due to the out-of-control dissolution of underground salt deposits.

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photograph of a house radically subsiding; courtesy of NOAA].

"The cavern was formed over three decades," the AP writes, "as oil field service companies pumped fresh water into a salt layer more than 400 feet below the surface and extracted several million barrels of brine to help with drilling... Over the past few decades, communities in Texas, Kansas, Michigan, Canada and Europe learned of similar underground danger only after cracks appeared and the ground began to sink." Unsurprisingly, then, "this man-made salt cavern has residents nervous."

It's interesting to point out, however, that Carlsbad, NM, is, of course, home to Carlsbad Caverns—making this delirious salt cave a kind of upstart simulacrum, a replicant geology intent on asserting its prominence over the natural formations nearby. We will be assaulted by copies from below.

But I mention this here because of the idea that Carlsbad could easily become the setting of some future variant of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's story "Quadraturin," mentioned previously, in which the fabled room-expanding substance is accidentally deployed underground, deep-injected in an act of misguided chemical sequestration, only to form vast and endlessly self-expanding caverns miles below the earth's surface.

Unpredictably fractal and resistant to all known forms of cartography—perhaps it could even be a Mandelbulb—these weirdly life-like systems of space coil and surge through bedrock, threatening to destroy all those who live above. Living space, crawling through geology.

(Thanks to Steve Silberman for the tip!)

Room Painting Ideas - 32 Pics

Beautiful colour combinations for your room paintings.
While most of us may not spend a lot of time thinking about color, it affects every day of our lives. Color can influence our mood and our thoughts. Colors affect people in many ways, depending upon one’s age, gender, ethnic background or local climate. Certain colors or groups of colors tend to get a similar reaction from most people - the overall difference being in the shade or tones used. So it’s important to choose wisely.