We were going to lead with the striking image of Russia's proposed new artificial island, but 24 hours is a lifetime in the internet, and the renders and faux-satellite shots are pretty much everywhere by now. So here's something by Superstudio, just one node in the long tradition of megastructural provocation. It's not surprising that the Russian Federation wants to get on board the artificial island bandwagon with its miniature doppelganger to appear in Black Sea by 2014. Erick van Egeraat's scarcely credible proposal is another sign of the Dubai-ification of high-end architecture. 'According to the plans, the 250-hectare island, to cost an estimated 155 billion rubles (over $6 billion), will have two marinas, religious centers, roads, parkland and artificial rivers, mimicking Russia's major rivers.' EEA is calling the Black Sea scheme Federation Island - it is shaped like a scaled-down version of Russia itself - and notes that 'the Dutch experience in reclaiming land from water will benefit the project, which [we] consider to be unique among its kind.' Construction costs are estimated at between $6 to $10 billion.



The Russian scheme has more in common with the science fiction-scale terraformations taking place in the Middle East than the relatively humdrum reclamation schemes that have been practised for centuries (e.g. Kansai International airport, large chunks of the Netherlands, or Korea's New Songdo City, built on '1,500 acres of reclaimed land along Incheon's waterfront'. This is a grandiose, wired up version of the UK's Samphire Hoe, 'the newest part of Kent, made from 4.9 million cubic metres of chalk marl dug to create the Channel Tunnel). As the Independent points out, this is a 'land fit for oligarchs... [an] island of the super-rich'.

Arguably, the project has more in common with terraforming elsewhere in the solar system than with conventional architectural discourse. Admittedly, creating land is quite the rage in the 21st century, although the reasons are primarily political rather than social (let alone architectural). The Russians have advanced plans for a submarine land grab, a concept that seems to be catching on elsewhere (see 'The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic' in last week's papers), but there are few bolder expressions of intent than continental re-engineering and the dominance of the geographic process as a means of projecting national pride. Volcanic activity occasionally creates islands right before people's eyes, but the accepted modern method is spraying millions of tons of sand into the ocean to create the countless ongoing projects in Dubai (at least one of which, The World, is dredged, bulldozed and sprayed into a vague approximation of the world map, blurry Russia included).



Sochi will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, but megastructural plans as ambitious as these have little to do with real world concerns. Instead, this is conceptualism as status symbol, the explicit use of fantasy - i.e. the lack of reality - as a means of boosting image and national self esteem (what Ian Martin calls oligarchitecture: 'My clients' primary aim is to be conspicuously more extravagant than their rivals. So I tell them what these rivals are planning and how to outdo them. I mean, they could find all this out for themselves if they bothered to read the Times online property section, but reading their own newspapers is as unthinkable as preparing their own breakfast.'). Martin is right on the money, as usual.

Artificial islands are being talked up as the new vanguard of regeneration strategies around the world (Plan to float villages on the Clyde, in Scotland). But do we need to build any of it? Superstudio's global-scale provocations still elicit the intended chill or awe, so surely Russia's absurd ambitions can remain unbuilt and still exude an aura of power and futuristic thinking. Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema (at Quiet Please, a film review site with an extensive section on architecture and design) traces the cinematic view of the future conurbation from 'cities of hope' in the 1920s and 1930s to the steely dystopias of the present. The greater the ambitions of the architects, the more oppressive their concepts became: 'At the conference Utopia and/or Revolution in Turin in 1970, Utopie, a Marxist collective of architects, urban theorists and sociologists including Jean Baudrillard, condemned megastructures as 'chimera of utopia', thereby damaging further what little left there was of optimism in utopian architects in the 1960s.' Today, most of us are happy to leave our flawed dysto-utopias to video games. Sadly, sub-Blade Runner neon cityscapes and 'Lego-land medievalism' (from 'The Role of Architecture in Video Games') are still rife in the real world. Federation Island only serves to confirm this.

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Incredible photography by Terry Evans: Steel Work, a project about the scale, complexity and sheer weight of manpower and materials behind the modern steel industry / aesthetechtonik has a very contemporary look and feel. These renders have a texture that speaks uniquely of now, fuzzy, soft but also curiously sterile. What CAD package is used to create them? / hidden CGI in David Fincher's Zodiac, a revealing few minutes of the modern art of special effects (via golden fiddle) / Paul Rudolph on flickr, one of modern architecture's greatest draftsmen (via aggregat 4/5/6) / wallpaper has an extensive gallery from the Basil Spence Archive.

Urban Landscapes, a self-explanatory gallery. Lots to explore, especially the work of site founders Mike Seaborne and Peter Marshall (via hapax). Some of Marshall's panoramas are only a decade old but feel like they've been unearthed from a distant, long-forgotten era / London Calling: a musical map of the city. Matching lyrics to places. See also Rodcorp's slightly more useful map of October 2007's London Art fairs / how Tate Modern might have looked / art by Mark Bradford / 60 years of civil aviation in Hong Kong.

Marc Tuters' weblog, including a post on the Rear Window Curiosity Cabinet. See also The Wrong House, which looks at Hitchcock's 'single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen.' / How to Shop, IKEA presents a slick virtual pop-up book of what is by now bleeding obvious to everyone from Coventry to Turkey (via rat and mouse) / First We Kill The Architects, phase one of Danny Lyon's 10-step manifesto for a new New York.

Is lazy reporting harming the visual arts?, Jonathan Jones on art world reporting cliches, or how just six stories make up the majority of arts coverage. Most of his categories - expensive art works, graffiti, lost masterpiece rediscovered, art world plagiarism, 'earth-shattering' discovery (on the up since the Da Vince Code, probably), restoration news' - apply equally to architectural journalism, with the possible exception of graffiti and lost masterpiece. posted by things at 19:19 / 0 comments