Architectural Conjecture | Urban Speculation | Landscape Futures
In an otherwise unpromisingly-titled article—“Could the US really release more of its strategic oil reserves?”—the Financial Times points out a surprising architectural vulnerability of the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve. “The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas,” the article explains. “Many are Continue reading…
I’ve mentioned the following story to so many people, I thought I might as well put up a quick post about it. There are strong Kristian Birkeland vibes with this—and, of course, anything involving an entire mountain transformed into a kind of passive-cosmic megamachine is bound to get my attention. [Image: Watercolor by Karl Lemström, Continue reading "The Landscape Architecture of Auroras on…
[Image: View larger! From “Celestial Detector,” 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; all text by Geoff Manaugh, all images by John Becker/WROT Studio.] I had a new piece of short fiction commissioned by the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale that was just published last week over at e-flux. The theme of the Triennale this year is “How Heavy Continue reading "Celestial Detector"
I was in Maastricht, Netherlands, for a couple nights last week, mostly as a way to break-up my trip across the Atlantic and thus help get over jet-lag before attending an archaeology conference (where I currently type this). I went specifically to Maastricht, however, because it’s home to an astonishing number of subterranean sites, from Continue reading "Star Forts, Mines, and Other Maastricht…
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 held inside a Cedars-Sinai medical-imaging center in west Los Angeles. Seeing this particular film, with its intensely granular focus on the geological underpinnings of Continue reading "Mineral Hurricane"
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"
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 unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition. It Continue reading "geo/acc"
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"
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…
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…