I came to Metropotamia because I had heard about the cats. They were known to crawl along the tattered ruins of unrealized utopias and scratch the surfaces of cast-off concepts. They climbed the partial follies of failed architectural proposals, jumped onto the damaged models of urban imaginings and slept in the crevices of fictional propositions.

Metropotamia, an urban grid filled with the remains of vacated office blocks and demolished social housing, was scheduled for demolition. The kittens who lived there were getting too old to still be tugging on their mother for milk, and their sibling play was turning into adolescent violence. I had come to find myself a kitten before they were all displaced as wandering strays.

My visit coincided with the cleaners, who were sweeping and attempting to make sense of the ruins. The cats were distracted and anxious… more

Last summer, I captured the image shown above on a trip back home to San Juan, Puerto Rico. There’s not much to see. Behind those drooping banners sits an unassuming building where fishermen clean and sell their catch. The building intrudes onto an otherwise stately promenade disrupting bureaucratic ambitions for a touristed city. Perhaps the structure was there before vanity inspired officials to beautify the town? I believe it was. In this classist twist to the archetypal building-as-billboard typology, the Puerto Rican Department of Tourism has commandeered the facade as a venue for a campaign to present San Juan “desde el cielo” (from the sky). I assume that passersby are not meant to see what must appear to some politicians as unsightly. The building is accordingly covered like the Statue of Liberty in preparation for its disappearance by the magician David Copperfield. The banner’s suggestive view “from the sky” is delightfully distanced from the intricacies of everyday tasks, such as fishing, and is as thin as the vinyl tarp it is printed on.

Heather Ring

Javier Arbona

For the first time in my short life, I am starting to feel old. Not because I have physically aged all that much—my skin still has a great deal of elasticity—but because I cannot figure out Grasshopper. No, not the natural variety of grasshopper that jumps around the yard, but the generative modelling software by the same name.

Unable to design via generative algorithms, I am forced to rely on antiquarian inventions such as the sketchpad and pen, along with my primitive Homo sapien brain (there is also the marginally more advanced Autocad and unadulterated Rhino). When confronted with those rare design problems that cannot be solved through any other means, there is always that last fallback, which is to take advantage of perceived aged-ness and demand the help of that younger more tech savvy generation, also known as “the intern”. This feat carried through in confidence, with the knowledge that someday they too will stumble upon their own Grasshopper and the cycle will begin anew.

In the supposedly $300 million science-fiction movie Avatar, audiences are taken to the phantasmagorical world of the moon-like planet Pandora where the nine-foot tall, blue-skinned Na’vi live. The 3D computer-generated sphere of Pandora is an immersive, brightly-colored forest, containing trees with mile-long branches, floating mountains and a stunning tropical flora.

James Cameron and other moneyed producers are not the only non-architects generating imaginary landscapes out of twenty-first century digital software. Many young artists and filmmakers, who take a DIY approach, are producing work which makes it possible to understand architecture in ways that drawings and photographs alone never could.

In the English artist Thomas Lock’s piece Breaking Points—triggered by Paulo Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology—grand melancholic photographs of weather-beaten war bunkers on the French coast have been coded… more

E. Sean Bailey

Josefine Wikström

In 1986, “Tour of the Universe”, a space flight simulator for the masses, opened at the CN Tower in Toronto. Making use of two Boeing 747 simulators, the ride rattled passengers in sync with a projection of a flight towards Jupiter, asteroid collisions and all. While the ride gained local notoriety as “the world’s first simulator-based attraction”, to this young visitor, even more significant than the simulated space travel was the space/time travel required to access these future technologies. Before experiencing the ride proper, passengers were led to an elevator transporting them not only forty years into the future, but to a space port located 1,816 feet beneath the ground, as deep as the CN Tower is tall. Void of windows, it was impossible to tell the real depth of the space station, and so the illusion of a subterranean inverted tower was maintained. (In reality, the ride was located in the tower’s basement level, mere feet below ground.)

In 2004, artist Euan Macdonald produced “The Tower”, a full scale replica of the top twenty-five feet of the CN Tower, the remainder of the structure having been buried after millions of years of geological sedimentation. While not a deliberate reaction to the “Tour of the Universe”, the two pieces are linked by their common subject matter, the CN Tower, but also by their use of the subterranean world to cloud our understanding of our present reality. The only means of dis-proving either of these… more

The act of digging often works in tandem with sheltering, typically as a means of collecting resources or clearing space. In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film, Woman in the Dunes, digging becomes essential for survival. For the sometimes amorous protagonists—a widow and an entymologist—who are trapped in a house at the bottom of a sandpit, clearing the sand to ensure that their dwelling is not buried by the encroaching dunes is critical. The character of the sand, it remains unforgivingly and unapologetically itself, and the design of the house does little to withstand the nature of its context. As a result, the building and its inhabitants are isolated, threatened, controlled, abused and irritated by their environment.

Social problems exacerbate physical ones, with the local community trapping the couple in the pit. They are denied basic supplies and even water if they refuse to dig. The community depends on the survival of the widow’s house in order to preserve the structure of the neighborhood, if her house fails then those nearby will also inevitably fail. The community also relies on sales from the sand, which is sold illegally to the city (despite its high salinity). Thus, the stability of the village is contingent on the integrity of the house, which depends on clearing the sand, which is then sold to the city to build ultimately unstable buildings. Here stability and instability are inter-dependent.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva