The Ice Warehouse

The Ice Warehouse was built around 1863 at Battlebridge Basin, along the Regents Canal north of Kings Cross. It currently stores the Canal Museum.

Large rectangular blocks of ice were cut and imported by ship from Norway to London, brought along the Thames, transferred to narrow boats at Limehouse Basin and pulled up the canal by Dobbin to the Ice House. Ice was then distributed through Victorian London by horse (Dobbin again) and cart.

The Ice Warehouse had a hybrid function of storing the horses on the first floor.

Below the floor slab of the warehouse two large cylindrical ice wells were built, used to store the ice. They were vast holes, approximately 13m deep and 10m in diameter. The volume of the ice enables it to retain its frozen state.

One of the two wells has been partially excavated to 3 - 4m, the brick lining of the void artifact can be seen. Someone at the museum has placed a large metal tub at the base of the ruin, which has become filled with odd coins. When one is faced with a well, dark, inaccessible, empty, there is a strange compulsion to throw money into it, a hopeful gesture towards fate, but a gesture which inspires a feeling of hopelessness in the face of nothingness.

The above diagram is a block of ice, easily handled by a man and his 'ice dog' for distribution, showing the inherent hexagonal lattice structure of ice. The ice can store information along pathways in a vascular pattern which threads through air gaps in the ice structure.

Dobbin (under the bridge) pulling the narrow boat up the canal - I have only just discovered this word and it's so quaint and appealing - comes from Robin - Robert. Image film still from Barging though London. Below: ice cut and handled in Norway.

Conversation with Angela Hay and Miltos Tsiantis on Biology

1. Genetics

The diagram above is a representation of the genetic system. DNA stores and transmits information. Genes, comprised of DNA, contain the coded information to make proteins. The proteins are the do-ers, can also be regulators or switches, they can control sets of genes that encode more proteins. As regulators they switch on or switch off specific attributes of the organism, such as colour, structure, material, texture*. Proteins are context specific, for example are expresses only in dark, or only in light, only in head, only in limb... Proteins also 'make' pigment as enzymes.

2. Adaptation

A definition of Life: DNA based, it can adapt, it can replicate itself.

DNA can change by mutation thus providing variation that can be selected for in response to changing environmental conditions.

A designer could harness 'adaptation' from biology.

Evolution is 'bricolage', evolution uses the materials available at hand to create. Evolution does not design to the optimal most efficient solution, it will evolve until it works, then will remain that way until environment radically changes.

3. The Vascular System

The vascular system is formed through 'canalisation'. It is not predetermined, but occurs as water flowing down a bank of soft sand will form pathways, the vascular system forms through cells in a plant. The vascular system, once the 'water' starts flowing down the 'bank', will self-organise into a pattern. Canalisation is conveniently also the term for the production of canals.

The cells die along the path of canalisation to form rigid tubes for water movement.

Thus the pipework has a fixed diameter, to increase flow the number of pipes is increased. Below is a film still of the Islington tunnel along the Regents Canal, reminiscent of a vascular tube...

4. Methodology

Miltos and Angela broke down their research interests for me like so: Miltos's research is how different species have different morphologies, specifically relating to leaf shape, and Angela's research is on mechanisms through which form evolved.

They developed together a framework, or system, for research which is based on genetics, as they required a different system to what already existed to allow them to ask different questions.

Angela described two methodologies she uses: 'Induced Variation' and 'Natural Variation'.

For the question: 'why a particular flower species has fewer petals?', using the first method of 'Induced Variation'

1. she introduces random mutations in the genome, creating an 'artificial evolution'

2. these plants are grown

3. she looks for mutant plants which have gained petals, ie. they have lost the function of the gene to have fewer petals. Therefore the gene lost is the gene required for petal loss.

4. the gene identified leads to identifying the protein expressed by the gene

5. she can work out what this protein does.

Using the second method of 'Natural Variation', Angela would collect plants of this species from all over the world, and look for variations in petal number. She is then able to map the genes responsible for the variation. By sequencing the DNA of these genes she can see what sequence variation evolved by natural selection.

Angela described a method to investigate structural components of cell walls, filming in high speed a seed pod's explosive release. The pod releases its seed in less then 3 milliseconds, an action one cannot see unless it is revealed through high speed film. The film takes 10-15,000 frames per second. The mechanism of the explosion and the residual stresses that build up in the pod to eventually cause explosion can be modelled and related back to the structural properties of cell walls in the pod.

*proteins also 'make' pigment as enzymes.

The Structure of Ice

This drawing explores the phase change of water from liquid to ice, at a molecular scale.

Liquid water is partially ordered, where hydrogen bonds are constantly being formed and breaking up. Through the phase change, the crystallisation, the molecules assemble into a rigid hexagonal lattice, which is the ice structure. Air spaces are formed within the lattice structure. Interesting: ice is considered a mineral.

The hexagonal lattice structure resembles a container of sorts, a metaphor which parallels the use of ice as a medium to store goods, to transmit goods or to suspend time, suspend the deterioration of resources. The suspension is released through the phase change back to liquid water.

Ice can store information about the past, releasing it upon arrival through a phase change.

Conversation with Nigel Cook

Nigel is an architect from New Zealand, we had a conversation about various interests, his walks around London, New Zealand architecture, his methodology for design and many other tangents, an assorted selection undermentioned:

1. The Ahipara House, how the scent from the plants hangs in the central courtyard, and the scent creates a distinct space, which one can enter.

2. How the fountains at the Barbican have no guardrail around them and it is suggested that the vision and sound of the water falling alerts the person to the drop.

3. How in the House of Lords, there is the Queen's Robing room, the 'symbolic centre of the British empire'. And this contains large artworks devoted to King Arthur, a fantastical, mythical character. 'Resonant themes for the British imperialist knights'.

4. On the settlement of New Zealand: the US and Australia, going through the same settlement process, were creating their own vernaculars, whereas New Zealand, with a gentle climate and peaceful shores was able to copy and borrow building types from other countries and not be harmed by this... NZ has a culture of copiers and borrowers.

5. Nigel's methodology, based on a diagram from 1977, is a way of embedding his architecture into the country. Later he said: Information - know everything about the site, the costs, the client. Discard the first initial response to site. Depression. Then the architecture... form happens somehow, yet it's not form driven.

6. It has to be beautiful and it has to be architectural.

7. Advice for me: Look at a cross section of a birds nest, one can see the growth of the birds nest, hair and twigs and leaves, formed around the birds body.

8. More advice: Could cellular walls thicken in winter and as warmth came could degrade and die. Can cells possess intelligence about the wind, rain and sun.

Map of Cholera 1866

This drawing is based on a map showing the distribution of cholera victims in East London in June to July 1866. It was drawn to demonstrate most victims were in the service area for the Old Ford Reservoir of the East London Water company at Bow, confirming a hypothesis of the link between cholera and sewerage contaminated water.

The drawing shows Bazelgettes sewer lines and the reservoir (blue line), the district served by the reservoir (dashed), Regents Canal and River Lea (grey), and the dots represent the location of death by cholera.

I like two things about the cholera map: firstly that a mapping technique is used to prove a medical hypothesis, and secondly the two extremities of scale within the drawing, the micro (bacteria) plotted onto the macro geographical scale.

One can (mis)translate the drawing in this way: the outline of district served by the reservoir creates a geographical cast or cavity, similar to the process of a fossil where the original organism decays to create a cast.

The smaller villages where there is a concentration of deaths, Stratford, Limehouse, Bow, Halleville, I have selected points from which a needle-like crystallization grows over the fossil cavity, and leaks through the outline where some bodies carried the bacteria beyond the boundary of the serviced district.

Most of the villages sound familiar, and the landmarks are still present today little changed. One could almost draw this condition from the past onto a present map of London.

To extrapolate this using the physicist theory on past/present/future (see post on the Future) - if one can draw a condition from the past onto the present, the inverse is also true, one can represent a condition in the future mapped onto the present.

'...the equations work just as well...if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future... instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.'

Crystallization fantasy

This drawing attempts to reveal crystallization along a path, the growth through time and projected into future. The form is contained by a geographical fossil - the service area for the East London Reservoir in 1886, the line of the Thames is echoed long the southern edge.

From one instant in time, multiple paths branch out as history branches out. And different outcomes are imagined on each branch. The paths also fold back on themselves and the crystal attempts to affect its earlier states. The paths could also be collaborative.

In conversation Nigel Cook mentioned the road layout of London is similar to paths made by children across a paddock. If you imagine farm buildings set around a paddock, how children, when running from one to the other, slowly etch dirt paths into the grassy field.

It could also be useful to look at the spaces between the paths, the analogy being these spaces are like the city blocks and buildings of London, constrained in plan by the non-orthagonal street map.

Mineralization along path

A drawing tracing the Regents Canal as a geographical cast for a fossil, and the industrial building growth in the early1800's stemming from the basins as crystalline growth.

A path is defined, and growth is organised along the path.

The density of crystallization is increased around basins which can be seen as 'nodes', a cluster of the crystalline growth.

Processes of Mineralization

This triptych describes an imagined process of crystallization, using drawing as a way to re - image the crystal over time. Crystals can be analysed as a 'self organising' and 'bottom-up approach to assembling material'.

This drawing is based on a beautiful sample of Wavelitte, green radiating needles from Devon, found in London's Natural History Museum.

Conversation with Bernard James

Map of conversation.

I recently interviewed Bernard James, engineer, teacher, narrow boat skipper, on the general topic of historical London sites, a conversation which evolved into a detailed history of the Regents Canal and how it affected and continues to affect the environment alongside it. The canal (opened in 1816 and 1820) enabled a dramatic economical change along its path, from farmland to industry.

Now for a tenuous leap; if the canal is a 'path', literally a path of transportation and commerce, there is an analogy to a saturated solution which carries raw elements or molecules, the building growth enabled by the canal and directly adjacent to the canal is a 'crystallization' of the industry along the canal. A spacial process, a path is defined, and growth is organised along the path.

The density of crystallization is increased around basins which can be seen as 'nodes', a cluster of the crystalline growth. Materials and commodities carried along the canal inform the building type and function.

As an example, the Kingsland basin, just west of the intersection of Kingsland Road (an old Roman road) and the canal, was the site of the various businesses which were dependent on the canal as source of raw materials and imported goods.

There was the 'Spice Building', which originally traded in hay from the surrounding countryside, then spices, the scent of which was present in the air up to the mid 1990's. There was a three storey horse parking stable, traces of the ramps still visible on external brickwork. There was a building for the manure trade - which collected the manure from the streets to send out to the country. There was a brickworks which used the clay excavated from the canal, and a building materials warehouse, still trading.

At the Battlebridge basin there was an Ice warehouse with two large deep holes to store ice from Norway. Horses were also stored upstairs from the ice. Not sure on the logic behind that. Currently the canal museum.

The Regents Canal was built to connect the Docks at Limehouse with the Grand Union Canal at Paddington Basin, which linked to the nationwide canal network. The industrial revolution hinged on the canal system. The canals were the linear link of the factories to the ports. The canals supplied materials for construction of the developing railway system, which in turn made the canal redundant, the technology of the canal working towards its own obsolescence.

Another site to note, a site of industry and female activism alongside the canal: the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, and the match-girls strike of 1888. Now the Bow Quarter, a gated community.

'Crystallization' is an ongoing process, another element is added and the formation changes. The path of the canal is no longer representative of a commercial trade & transportation route, but has become a desirable path of habitation... artists studios (as those found in the urban wasteland of Hackney Wick), and speculative apartment development.

Forgive me, Bernard, for the random mixing of careful fact with whimsical spacial analogy, and any mistranslations, later posts may reveal why and whether this leads anywhere or not.

The Future and the Shape of Time

News cutting from the NY Times on the Large Hadron Collider, following a series of ongoing glitches: a 'crazy enough' theory on the future folding into the present. The process of 'boundary conditions' is described, and a comment from a reader describing the shape of time as rapidly branching tree.

'...the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...'

'Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Following the published article was a great comment...

'So many naysayers! And it seems less knowledge leads to a stronger opinion.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory could explain the "fate theory" pretty nicely. Simply stated, it says that at each instant history branches out into as many paths as there are possible quantum states - a quite fast branching tree. In each path we experience what that path is like. So the cat is dead and alive and stays that way. We just experience a different outcome in each different paths.

Now, if something 'bad' happens when a machine like the LHC or the SSC is successfully activated then we are not going to be there to experience it. Maybe, these machines seem to fail because these are the only history paths in which we are still alive to notice what happened... and read about it in the NYT!'

Mistranslation: how do these very spacial models challenge the constructs of biology, how does it suggest a non-linear interpretation of life - biology - and biotechnology.

Link To NYTimes Article