Zoe Roller

How did they do it?

Without the mighty efforts and bitter tears of the Israelites, it's hard to imagine how an ancient society could move and shape massive stones into enduring monuments. Stonehenge is one of the most puzzling ancient sites: theories about its construction range from the mythic (Merlin asked a giant to transport it from Ireland (leaving the question open as to how it was built in Ireland); the devil did it), to the extraterrestrial (perhaps the same aliens responsible for the Great Pyramids and the Anasazi lines), to the natural (glaciers!), but all agree that tremendous man-power would be needed to recreate the process without mechanical aid; the stones themselves came from Wales, so they were transported a great distance as well as upended and arranged. Wally Wallington, a Michigan construction worker, claims to have figured out how the feat was executed, and is building a Stonehenge-like site to prove it.

Watch how he did it.

I find this endeavor quite endearing.

Weighting and raising a pillar

Wally Wallington with concrete monoliths

I'm not convinced that a tiny stone fulcrum could moved stone from Wales to England, over rough terrain, but his process of standing blocks on end is quite plausible. What strikes me about Wallington's project is the perfect convergence of outsider art-like drive and the perpetual magnetism of ancient monuments. The determination of the lone obsessive, moving blocks in his back yard, is as impressive as the efforts of the Druids (or Merlin's giant, aliens, etc.) dragging those stones the first time, although Wall-henge is greeted with bemused affection rather than awe-struck reverence. I hope Wallington's monument fascinates future civilizations as much as Stonehenge does us; it will stand as an enigmatic testament to the proud American tradition of eccentric hobbyists creating magnificent structures out of odds an ends, in their spare time.

Stonehenge seems to hold a particularly magnetic appeal for people who share Wallington's sensibility and work ethic: replicas of questionable taste and accuracy pop up all over the world, including Carhenge, Strawhenge, Phonehenge, Fridgehenge, and, shedding all vestiges of dignity, Twinkiehenge. Some, like the latter, are flippant and tacky, but many were built by genuine weirdos who clearly respected the gravity of the original.

I think Foamhenge is surprisingly pretty

Carhenge has a certain surreal charm as well

Also charming

Perhaps closest to Wallington's iteration of the site is Stonehenge II, a replica built by two cowboys outside Hunt, Texas. In 1989, Doug Hill gave his friend Al Sheppard a slab of limestone left over from a project. Sheppard stood it upright in his yard, and the two began constructing a ring of arches and monoliths to complement it. They fabricated stone lookalikes from steel, plaster, and concrete. Later, they built a pair of Easter Island heads nearby.

Stonehenge II

Hill and Sheppard

According to a comprehensive list of American Stonehenges from the online guidebook Roadside America, "it's hard to explain why America is filling up with replica Stonehenges. Thousands of miles from England, on solitary vistas in places such as Alliance, Nebraska, and Fortine, Montana, citizens have taken it upon themselves to build their own Stonehenges, sometimes true to the original, sometimes merely inspired by it. It's an obsession as mysterious and primal as the original circle of rock slabs." Sites like Stonehenge and Easter Island persist in the public imagination not merely because of their historic or aesthetic value, but because their physical presence, whether seen in person, imagined from pictures, or experienced online and in movies, is so compelling, so weighted with labor and mystery, so impresionante, that they linger in the mind. The awareness of such powerful objects spurs the desire to answer that imposing power with an equally mighty endeavor. Only by recreating them can people get at the heart of the attraction and relieve the fascination they exert.

Trying to get at the heart of the Stonehenge obsession reminds of an essay called "Confessions in Stone", from Chuck Palahniuk's collection Stranger than Fiction. Readers who wearied of Palahniuk's schtick after slogging through tripe like Invisible Monsters should give this book a chance: he shines as an insightful observer of others' strange proclivities rather than a celebrator of his own. The essay profiles a number of men who built their own castles in the Pacific Northwest, and it explores the attraction to massive stone creations that feel tied to history, even if the act of building them severs these ties. Palahniuk appreciates the way these guys throw themselves into a totally absurd, romantic goal, often at great personal and financial cost. I think he'd recognize the same irrational nobility in Wally Wallington. You can read it on Google books; it starts on page 61.

I took a sculpture class once devoted to scale, and one of our assignments was to build a model of a monument. The monument I designed, and built out of wire and mud, was the wreckage of a twentieth-century power plant half interred in a barren mesa; it was supposed to be a wordless warning to future civilizations to avoid the environmental hubris of our civilization. It was also an excuse to work with mud, one of my favorite mediums. I was partly inspired by this image, although it did not actually function as a warning in the film; I assume the apes were impervious to the pathos of the scene.

The appeal of ruins is a subject that has been fully appreciated and explored elsewhere, but their ability to communicate highly specific messages, rather than just the inevitable downfall of decadence and the eroding effects of the sands of time, deserves further investigation. Most ruins provide a picturesque memento mori, a reminder that something went terribly wrong, but using ruins to determine what the ancient disaster entailed is more complex.

Of course, our society uses archaeology to determine the details of ancient occurrences, but we have no way of knowing how future civilizations will approach the ruins we bequeath them. Given that much of what we leave behind will no doubt be hazardous or toxic, our ruins must send a clear warning signal to future occupiers. This brings me to the Yucca Mountain Project, which cloaks our civilization's horrifying legacy in a diverting design challenge. In 2002, Congress approved President Bush's proposal to create of a massive underground storage facility for nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge 80 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. After widespread outcry from environmentalists, the Obama administration stated that the site was no longer an option. The facility is being examined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and whether or not it is eventually built will depend on the next administration's political bent.

Diagram of the facility

Regardless of whether the waste is dumped at Yucca Mountain, it will have to be contained somewhere. U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu stated: "Yucca was supposed to be everything to everybody, and I think, knowing what we know today, there's going to have to be several regional areas." When the Yucca Mountain Project was still on the table, the Department of Energy decided to design a monument to be placed over the facility to scare away any future explorers, and the need for such monuments grows more pressing as we produce more waste. Their hope is to find a design so freaky that no alien visitor or future humanoid would even approach it. Human curiosity has proved itself a powerful force, and we must assume that any other Nevadan explorers will be just as curious, so the task is incredibly daunting. The potential for miscommunication is staggering when one factors in different languages and cultures, let alone species and life forms. And the waste will remain toxic for 100,000 years, so the DOE has to account for many evolutionary--or interplanetary--developments.

This monument needs to achieve what I was going for in my wire and mud sculpture: something so desolate and forbidding that no one would even approach it, for fear of suffering the same fate as whoever built it. It must at once convey the rise and fall of a civilization, eliciting admiration and pity for its creators. Most of all, it must be clear enough to make further investigation unnecessary.

In order to meet this challenge, the DOE asked a group engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists to design an structure, using known archaeological sites as precedents. Their design consists of a 33 foot tall berm filled with salt (??), 48 Stonehenge-like granite monoliths, each inscribed with cautionary messages in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Navajo, as well as images (presumably alarming). An underground information center will detail the the contents of the storage facility. Thousands of small inscribed warning markers buried around the site, will frighten off unambitious excavators. 

This design suffers from lack of imagination as well as general weirdness. Why would a bland monument vaguely in the style of other more ancient monuments scare anyone away? So far, enigmatic arrangements of stones have only stoked the flames of curiosity. And the warning messages seem a bit optimistic as to humanity's role in the future (especially Navajo speaking humanity!). Thanks to President Obama, the monument will not be built for a while, if ever. Perhaps the DOE should use this time to commission Lebbeus Woods to design something suitably horrifying.

While most of the high-profile architectural innovation in the Gulf is derided for its wasteful luxury (Versace-funded air conditioned beaches, indoor mountains), the region’s desire for novelty and willingness to experiment could prove an incubator for progressive design. Moreover, the Gulf cities are more open to imagination and fantasy than more conventional urban areas. Although so far most of the showpiece buildings in Qatar and the Emirates are little more than hulking trophies, the quest for spectacle engenders an interest in buildings that do something, as opposed to sitting there declaring the city’s extravagance. Buildings like the rotating skyscraper do a lot more to change our idea of what a building can be than whatever deconstructionist pile of blocks Frank Gehry is computer-modeling right now.

This interest in dynamic architecture could potentially make the Gulf a pioneer in green design. Ideas that are normally confined to Eugene Tsui’s drawing board have a chance there, and ecological design is certainly not opposed to spectacle; I think the two could have a powerful symbiotic relationship.

This building in Doha, Qatar illustrates my point: its design is based on a cactus, both functionally and aesthetically, making it an architectural onomatopoeia as well as a Robert-Venturi-and-Denise-Scott-Brownian “duck”.

The biomimetic building, which will house the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture, resembles a cactus in function as well as form; it will be covered in shutters that open at night to let in cooler air, like the pores of a cactus. This eliminates the need for a wasteful air-conditioning system by matching the building to its surroundings. 

It is very easy to mock the Gulf, but their willingness to experiment with the way buildings work, in addition to how they look, could revolutionize green architecture.

In a development almost too delightful for words, Abu Dhabi has reinforced its commitment to luxurious absurdity with gold-dispensing ATM machines.

Presumably laughing in the face of world-wide recession, and specifically neighboring Dubai's hubris-driven financial ruin, the Emirate now boasts Gold to Go ("The Gold ATM") kiosks in the lobby of the Emirates Palace Hotel. The ATM monitors the price of gold and offers plutocrats their choice of bars or coins, each packaged in a black velvet gift box.

I just discovered this video by Rob Carter, in which architectural fragments of Gothic churches sidle up to Corbu's buildings, and spread over them like creeping vines. I'm not quite sure what the filmmaker's point is--he's just pasting flat images over the original buildings, so his technique is more like trompe l'oeil wallpaper then reconstruction. It's a charming animation though, and the sound effects are particularly cute. I found it through entschwindet und vergeht, the surliest, and thus best, architecture blog I know.

Stone on Stone [CLIP] from Rob Carter on Vimeo.