Archinect - Archaeologies of the Future

Exile and the Sun // Future Light Cones

2011-11-17T22:19:59-05:00

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We learn at elementary school that the morning sunlight took eight minutes to arrive. Each ray of light from the sun acts as an exiled messenger who indicates whether the star is on or off. When the sun dies, it will take eight minutes for its last message to reach the Earth.

As Stephen Hawking states in A Brief History of Time, ‘the death of the sun does not affect us immediately because we are not in its future light cone‘. Since the fastest way we can perceive distant events is through light, its direction and speed of travel limits how quickly we can experience an event. Mapped through time, the event forms a conical horizon around itself whose width is determined by the speed of light rays; if the observer is within its boundary, we can perceive the event; if outside, there is no way we can know of it. In other words, our universe is structured so that we are always looking at the past.

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Throughout history, light had been the signal that bridges past, p...

Exile and The Scientist // the technological sublime

2011-10-21T03:33:22-04:00

Nuclear Bomb Test, Bikini Atoll, 1946. The small black figures just outside the cloud are decommissioned World War II Battleships from the US Navy.

// In addition to an urban investigation into the power structures of Moscow, I've been looking at ideas about the sublime and its relation to technology, and thought I'd look into the massive shift in scales brought about by experimental science //

Albert Einstein arrived in America on October 17 1933, an exile from the Nazi regime that had just risen to power. The scientist was 54 years old and spent a lot of his time at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton becoming a public figure, investigating subatomic physics, and opposing the military aspects of the nuclear age he helped to create.

His work provided a catalyst for the transmutation of matter into energy – a new form of power that had as much social and cultural impact as the development of steam engines and electricity had during the 19th century. The origin...

Exile and the Space Station

2011-10-04T14:05:06-04:00

Yesterday China launched Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace-1), its first step towards a manned orbital space station. I remembered reading that the last Space Shuttle mission, STS-135, finished earlier this year, signalling an end to America’s utopian dream of colonizing space.

As I read more about the history of these inhabitable satellites, they started to attain personalities independent from the astro/cosmonauts who passed through their airlocks. The life of satellites began to take on similar narrative arcs – beginning with a dramatic countdown to a launch sequence filled with nationalist pride, followed by a productive scientific research phase, and then a long period in exile as space debris. They would eventually spiral back down to Earth, burn up in the atmosphere, and finally disappear into the sea.

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This fact that these skeletal, modular, fully functional structures possessed an animistic fate triggered a realization that the Japanese Metabolists...

First Days - Exile and the Tower with Lebbeus Woods

2011-09-27T22:37:34-04:00

I've just started on the Cooper Union MArch II course, and am excited to be here in New York to say the least! I'll be sharing my project work for studio, sculpture, and elsewhere over the upcoming year.

For this first post I thought I'd share something I wrote for a course appropriately titled 'Blogging Architecture'. It's taught by Professor Lebbeus Woods, who I hope doesn't need an introduction!

So, to deal with the 'medium' of the blog, I've started a Wordpress site called exilliteratur, 'a platform for projects about incomplete, inaccessible, or fragmented acts of architecture – places that we cannot visit but can discover in our imagination.'

exilliteratur (German for ‘Exile Literature’) encompassed the work of writers such as Theodor Adorno and Bertoldt Brecht who had to leave Germany because of their ideological and political beliefs. This divide led to simultaneous critique and nostalgia for their homelands, which they had to write about from a nomad’s perspective, ...