The Whiskey Sea

Last week, Toby came over and we played with mylar and mirrors to see what sort of light we could direct down into airshaft spaces.

I. MYLAR
Around 3:00 in the afternoon we hung some mylar sheets from the roof ledge to see how light would reflect down into the airshaft/courtyard behind my apartment building. Below is a video of the reflections from three vertical sheets (~3×5ft) hung approximately 6ft apart from each other:

Mylar has the advantage of being light, flexible, and relatively cheap. I also like it because it is safer to work with from up high and would be less likely to hurt someone if it came loose. The light reflections was caused by the wind are pretty beautiful, and one could imagine how more intense it could be if there were more sheets.

One of the issues with mylar is the sound and the need to stabilize it against stronger winds: So right now I’m in the process of designing a few possibilities for housing, rolling/unrolling and weighting the mylar. Ideally it’d be nice to also design window versions that people could hang from the lower window sills in order to increase light reflections.

II. MIRRORS
Because the 1ft x 1 ft mirrors directs sharp sunlight so specifically, I think it is best used for focusing on people’s window sills where they can keep plants or install light diffusers to brighten up their room. Bending the mirror just slightly convex or concave will also cause the light to bend into vertical and horizontal columns.

We sketched some different possibilities for a solar panel mirroring system and we’ll be working on a small model to test the mounting, motor, and sensing system.

I. BACKGROUND
I’ve been thinking about NY airshaft spaces ever since I was introduced to them in ‘98. How can we convert these typically dark, funky-smelling concrete holes into something more friendly and appealing for people? Having looked into potential ways of transforming airshafts into useful environments in a Hundertwasserian vision of re-greening all horizontal surfaces, this exercise explores the possibilities of connecting individuals whose windows are confined to airshafts.

II. OUTLINE
Purpose:
To connect people whose apartments look out onto airshafts. The hope is that increasing social capital between commonly shafted people will increase their potential of helping each other to improve their airshaft environment.

Questions:

• which airshaft to start with (even as a thought exercise…. residential? NYU?)? how many people do you need to get something started in a single airshaft? or maybe reach out to anyone who’s shafted?
• incentives?
  • improves real estate value
  • improves quality of life: air, light, nature
  • connects and encourages people (to encourage each other) to change their environment
  • can build communities in peer-to-peer and modular units
• how can this be fun and incremental?
• would the goal be better achieved via management? if so, would there be a point in working from the people up?

Challenges:

• getting people connected; making it easier for actions to happen, together
• privacy! and not pressuring those who don’t want to join
• sustaining connections long enough for improvement to happen
• negotiation of the airshaft commons: private vs. shared space; apartment dwellers v.s management

Fun Options:

• Encouraging and uniting moss bombers and nocturnal planters
• Night lanterns and video projections
• Sunlight bridges: mirror to mirror reflections into airshaft
• Window lines
• Oh right: website/phone app

III. NETWORKING OPTIONS
As my non-Italian friend likes to say, piano piano! So while I have lovely visions of developing city-hippie communes and reclaiming our airshafts on nature’s behalf, the first “little by little” would be to design a website-phone app, maybe a cross between Foursquare and Windowfarms, that would allow New Yorkers who have airshaft access to get in touch with each other.

These are some of the features I would like feedback on:
Confidentiality/Anonymity and Levels of Openness––I’d like to encourage guerilla-gardening behaviors, such as seed-bombing and moss graffiti-ing. But the point is to also share strategies, outcomes, and documentation with each other. So in terms of developing trust, how do you give people the option to engage in authority-challenging actions while also enabling them to meet each other and offer mutual support. I don’t necessarily want building management folks, for example, to have access to this info. How exclusive, or thorough the identity/location check, should all this be? And should that even be a concern? People probably already know other people in the same airshaft predicament and to some extent, there’s already an in-built privacy/trust that can carry over from these pre-existing connections into the online world. But what about connecting and creating trust between people who don’t already know each other?

Personal profiles and categories of interest––Maybe people can connect via different interests and approaches they want to take in changing their airshaft environments. Some people might want to group within their specific airshaft, some might want to connect for sustainability issues, some might want to just see who else they know is shafted.

Documentation?––Begin with an overhead map of buildings that can zoom into who’s where, with the option of accessing people’s pictures/videos of their airshafts. It’d be interesting to see changes through time and to get multiple perspectives of the same space. This would also allow for comparisons between airshafts which might motivate people to improve those conditions. A potential risk is invading other people’s privacy––we don’t want pictures into people’s apartments, or of people per se! One counterbalance is that we, the info gate-keepers, would know who and where documenters live and violators can be taken care of accordingly.

Community benefits––I am specifically interested in connecting airshaft neighbors to each other, and airshaft communities to each other. While we don’t necessarily want the shadow of the future down the hallway, or outside our windows, I think the benefits could outweigh the annoying possibilities and people could negotiate how much of a community they want. In any case, it’d be nice for an airshaft community to develop their own page on the website. Perhaps their page could introduce members to each other, state some goals, share a calendar of community events, offer a forum for discussions, etc. It’d be interesting to see how this would affect people in the same building who were not part of airshaft….

IV. PHYSICAL OPTIONS
Because I am wanting to see airshafts transform into greener spaces, I would like to offer a few suggestions as to how people could improve and use their airshafts. I’m not too sure how much of these suggestions we would want to introduce, especially not right off the bat, but we’d want to do it in a way that also inspires people to come up with their own ideas that suit their needs/fancies. Having said that, here are some ideas I would love to experiment with:

Moss and fern walls––When I asked Paul Mankiewicz, who has done some great work in NYC, what he would do if he could convert airshaft spaces, he suggested that I look into cave mosses and the types of ferns that grow on the northside of rock basins in the Adirondacks. Just try and see if you can cover the walls with moss and other clingy vegetation, he said. Well, ok, then! It’d be great to get even one or two people in a number of different airshafts to try and spread moss along their airshaft walls and to get them to compare notes and see what takes.

Directing light––One of the most depressing things about facing the airshaft is the lack of light. If people could somehow coordinate how to reflect sunlight to cascade down into the lower levels, that’d be amazing. After researching fancy ways to direct light down into airshafts, a few hi-low tech options I’d like to try include the following:

• Mirrors in people’s windows, or mirrored windows: A few European villages, nested between high mountains have experimented with installing mirrors on the mountainside to direct sunlight down into their valley. I wonder if people could do the same using mirrors from window to window. Certainly, this would help people grow plants better!
• Hanging prisms: I like rainbows. They’re cheerful and easy.
• Light reflecting fabrics: People could hang light reflecting fabrics at different angles to lighten up the airshafts, even if they were just lined along the wall.  Painting the walls white would also help tremendously but you’d have less control of heating during the summer time.
• Water Pools: Water is much more difficult to work with but it does reflect light beautifully and even if airshaft communities could somehow install small water pools at the ground level, combined with mirrors at the top level, sunlight could be diffused throughout the space.

Nightlights––Every once in a while it might be fun to project movies, pictures, or data viz pieces down onto the airshaft ground. Or: individual spotlights with puppet shadows projected onto the ground would be beautiful. Or: people hanging lanterns outside their windows. Night gardens + floating lanterns = : )

Window lines and scaffolding––Even if two people could secure a single window to window line across an airshaft space, there could be so much potential for other stuff, especially with a pulley system! They could start a vine, they could hang some reflectant fabric, they could link some Christmas lights, they could devise communications systems. Of course, this raises all sorts of sharing issues. But since I’m in fantasy mode here, why not imagine a web of lines (that were magically management approved, infallibly secure, and universally loved) that could offer a scaffolding for hanging gardens?

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Some items of interest:

PART 1: Origins revisited

As an undergrad at Columbia, I quickly became acquainted with what it meant to “get shafted” in the housing lottery: there were, and are, always a number of doomed souls whose apartment windows opened onto dank, stagnant airshafts, usually a narrow column of space filled with darkness, trash, exhaust fumes, and the windows of other unfortunate souls.

It turns out these spaces have always been so. In 1879, James Ware won The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer design competition to increase housing for NY immigrants (and thereby profits for landords). At the time Manhattan lot sizes ran 25 by 100 feet and Ware’s design connected front and rear tenement lots with a long hallway, thus creating a “dumbbell” shape. When a new housing law that same year set minimum standards for lighting and ventilation, this dumbbell design quickly became ubiquitous. But whether this design actually offered light or ventilation was another matter. By 1903, Lawrence Veiller, secretary of the New York State Tenement House Commission (1900–01), declared that the “evil of the air-shaft” made NYC’s housing conditions “the worst in the world.” It was well known that the shaft was “simply a stagnant well of foul air” and moreover, “tenants often use the air shaft as a receptacle for garbage and all sorts of refuse and indescribably filth thrown out of the windows, and this mass filth is often allowed to remain, rotting at the bottom of the shaft for weeks without being cleaned out.” Fast forward to today, and we find that while conditions have improved somewhat, airshafts are still unpleasant pockets of dead spaces that fail to provide light or ventilation.

PART 2: Proposal to get unshafted and the role of permaculture

In an attempt to explore ways to actually redress the poor light and ventilation conditions, I have come across a few solutions for a) directing light, b) remediating air, and c) laying the foundations for developing a diverse vegetation system. However, while it is relatively straight-forward to consider each of these areas by themselves, it has been much harder to make design decisions that would combine these different elements together. To this end, I’ve found it very helpful to consider the designing process based on permaculture principles.

There are numerous definitions of what permaculture entails, all of which are rooted around an ethics of “earthcare, peoplecare, and fairshare” (I first heard this from Penny Livingston at the Omega Institute conference last fall). From these ethical values, permaculturalists have developed a set of design principles which point not so much to a specific mode of production as to a process of development itself. These principles include:

1. site specificity
2. multi-functional elements
3. functions supported by multiple elements
4. energy efficient planning
5. biological resourcing
6. energy cycling
7. small-scale intensive systems
8. natural plant layering/stacking and succession
9. diversity of species
10. increasing ‘edge’ within a system
11.replication of natural patterns
12. attention to scaling

Taking these principles into consideration has changed my approach to this project in a few ways. For one, I started thinking of converting the airshaft space as a more gradual, organic process rather than simply installing all the elements all at once. According to various studies on ecological succession, local species diversity and the overall ecological system becomes more resilient with gradual introductions and when disturbances are neither too rare or frequent. Furthermore, it makes more sense for us to introduce new elements via careful observation and adaptation rather than investing in a sweeping change that would not only increase chances of failure but prevent us from isolating what doesn’t work.

Another key shift in my thinking was how to model the airshaft on existing patterns or ecosystems in nature. It has been productive to consider, for example, cave environments:

or the small systems growing in hollowed out tree stumps, which often consist of moss, lichen, fungae, and fern:

This modeling will result in a hyrid of natural and humanmade elements, especially given the barren concrete environment of the airshafts and the fact that the primary organism living in these systems are homo sapiens. The specific outcome of the airshaft conversion, however, must arise organically and site-specifically tailored to each airshaft’s conditions as well as the community around it. Thus, the following outlines a set of decision-making steps that each airshaft community might take to convert a seemingly barren space into a living system.

PART 3: To light or not to light?

The first step for an airshaft community is to consider whether or not they want to pool their resources to push towards a change in their light condition, or if they want to work with the existing light conditions. When I first started thinking about this project, I just assumed that getting light down in the shafts would be the key step. My main impetus for getting sunlight into the airshafts, and by extension into apartment spaces facing the airshafts, was that it would not only increase people’s mental and physical health, but it would create opportunities for growing plants within the airshaft as well as in people’s apartments. I only later realized that this assumption precluded the possibility of transformation based on low-lighting conditions, such as seen in the aforementioned cave ecosystems. Nonetheless, I still think that light is a key choice airshaft communities should make on the outset (not that it can’t change later), mainly because it will determine what options they have for further conversion.

I’ve touched on various lighting options before and and here are a few more examples of light piping––in the first case, using light reflective piping at the Potsdamer Platz subterranean train station in Berlin (here above ground view):

and in the second design, using a heliostat and a piped prism system to refract light down in some D.C. law offices:

Other options I like include light reflective paint that could be applied to walls and light reflective fabric that could be hung strategically down into an airshaft at different angles. My amateurish instincts would choose a series of heliostats and reflective systems at rooftop borders of the airshaft which could direct solar (and lunar) light down into the shaft from above. This would provide for the most amount of light with the least amount of intrusion into the space, and the maintenance and control system would be relatively accessible. One could also optimize this system by daylighting with minor light reflecting devices on individual windows that could direct light into apartments (whether they be more sophisticated mirroring systems or simple prisms hung on windows).

If an airshaft community opts for light sourcing, then they can start developing a model for developing gardens and plant life based on those conditions (example below).

PART 4: Caves of Goblin’s Gold

If, on the other hand, the community doesn’t have the resources or desire to push for an overall lighting change, they can consider mimicking cave environments to transform their airshaft. A relatively easy solution would be to cover the airshaft walls with moss spores and start cultivating various forms of moss on the wall. This would not only enliven the space but it will also contribute to the air quality in the airshafts. Moreover, dark environments that support moss growth will also support cave ferns as well as decomposers such as mushrooms and lichen. In this case, the airshaft community can direct its energies towards building a minor composting system at the base of the airshaft, provided that it can arrange to have the compost be transported periodically to compost centers or local farms.

For especially dark airshafts, a beautiful, though more fragile moss option would be the schistostega pennata, otherwise known as luminscent moss, or goblin’s gold:

This type of moss is known for its glowing effect in dark places. This greenish-gold glowing appearance is due to the clear, spherical cells in the protonema that can collect even the faintest light like lenses, and the chloroplasts nearby in turn give off the greenish glow from the reflected light.

1. Schistostega pennata (Hedwig) F. Weber & D. Mohr, Index Mus. Pl. Crypt. [2]. 1803.
Gymnostomum pennatum Hedwig, Sp. Musc. Frond., 31. 1801; Schistostega osmundacea D. Mohr: Leaves of sterile shoots 0.5-1.2 mm, ecostate, median cells smooth, oblong-rhomboidal, thin-walled, 16-20 µm wide, decurrent, confluent at the base, margin entire, weakly bordered by narrow, elongated cells. Protonemal gemmae sticky, obclavate, 80-200 × 15-20 µm, 3-4 cells in length, tapering and thickened near apex. Seta 2-5 mm. Capsule erect, light brown, smooth, subglobose or ovoid, annulus absent. Spores yellowish green, pitted-reticulate, 10-13 µm.

Luminous moss capsules mature late spring-early summer, and they’re usually found on mineral soil in crevices on lower, sheltered parts of upturned tree root wads, ceilings of caves, crevices in soil banks, animal burrows, rarely on the shaded sides of deep pits along the upper banks of perennial streams, occasionally on rock. They are becoming endangered due to being overrun by more dominant species but they are native to New York State.

PART 5: Sensors and Community building

An important role that sensors can play in airshaft spaces is raising and maintaining awareness. Aside from giving information on air quality, like VOC and oxygen levels, sensor data can be used to connect people to each other via an interest in their habitat. As various students have already demonstrated, although not 100% accurate, these sensors can be put into places at a relatively low cost. The power of the data would be magnified by a data visualization piece, which would not just serve informational purposes, but it could help stimulate social networks and community building.

We can conceive human networks as playing a role in connecting various airshaft ecosystems. An important concept in permaculture is the idea of expanding “edges” where different systems meet. The edge of an airshaft ecosystem can be expanded into a rooftop system. But we can also think of humans as edge expansion tools when we consider our physical mobility and networking capabilities. Just as bees and wind help carry seeds away from the source, humans also act as carriers, and if we were to switch subjectivities, in a sense various airshaft systems can use us to help them communicate and modify each other.

PART 6: Bamboo and companion planting

I’ve already written about the prospect of growing bamboo groves in airshafts and how perfect it is for growing in the NY environment and for urban biofiltering, but here are some further considerations.

Planting. Bamboo roots and rhizomes spread horizontally and require anywhere between 1-4 feet of rooting depth depending on the type of bamboo and soil (looser, sandier soils require more depth), and can grow in low as well as bright lights. Bamboo needs soil moisture, abundant nitrogen, and protection from harsh winds. Given that most airshaft spaces will be protected from heavy winds, we can direct our focus on the first two requirements.

One way to indicate soil conditions, for moisture and nutrients, is using companion plants. For example, indicator plants for soil moisture include sedges (Carex spp.), reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea), and horsetail (Equisetum); indicators of nutrient rich soil include brambles (Rubus spp.) and stinging nettle (Urtica dioacea); and nitrogren providers include numerous plants from the legume family such as ceonothus, vetch, eleagnus.

Other interesting options are beans and peas, which not only provide nitrogen to the bamboo and act as a secondary crop, but they would also use the bamboo as a live trellis. This last relationship brings us back to all the other potential functions that bamboo could provide based on its hardy skeletal structure. Airshaft communities could potentially use bamboo as a form of live and cut scaffolding for starting vertical farms. As Bill Mollisson pointed out long before it became trendy, the key to permaculture planting in urban spaces is verticality and in his introductory urban permaculture video, he mentions grape vines growing on a NY building wall as acting as an insulator as well as providing yummy sustenance. These type of options remain to be explored on a case by case basis, but after beginning with a few basic design choices, thinking in terms of multi-functional elements and synergetic relationships such as bamboo and their companion plants will not only be more efficient in the long run but allows people to think more creatively about how they establish their resources.

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Some of the Research

There are many obvious benefits of installing bamboo groves in airshaft spaces. These hardy tree weeds are beautiful, they provide excellent air remediation, they grow extremely fast, they can withstand the cold winter, and they can grow up to 75feet. They can also be harvested and used as building material, food, and even water filtration.

Aside from these well-documented benefits which I will describe more in-depth in relation to this airshaft project, I think bamboo holds a lot of promise in other ways that could be implemented in modular ways:

a) Directing Light
Revisiting Solatube’s manipulation of light as well as fiber optic cabling, I wonder if bamboo wouldn’t be a good encasing for piping light.


b) Directing Water
Because of its unique structural properties, bamboo could be used as a way of collecting and directing rain water.

c) Live scaffolding
Bamboo is notoriously strong and is oft used as scaffolding for building construction. I’m really curious to see if it could be used as a living scaffolding on which a light-weight vertical garden can grow.

And did I mention they’re beautiful?

Below are some examples of existing lighting options that could be customized for airshaft spaces. (Interesting work has been done on solar technology for space exploration and orbital greenhouses.) Incidentally, this post will be updated periodically as I gather more information about installation, maintenance needs, costs, etc.

a)Solar Tracking Mirrors:

Various solar tracking mirrors direct sunlight to a specific target by locating the position of the sun and adjusting mirrors accordingly. One could also build a network using the “master-slave” mirroring system.

Other examples of a heliostat:



b) Fiber Optic Light Cables:
Extremely expensive, fiber optics is nonetheless a worthwhile model to look at for channeling light into dark spaces. The Swedish company, Parans, has developed a way to use fiber optic cables to get natural light into buildings. Again, a bit much for airshaft space, but keeping this on the back burner.

c) Piping Light
Another way of piping light was developed by Solatube, a company that uses highly reflectant material to redirect sunlight into interior spaces. From what I can tell it simply uses reflection and then a lense diffuser to deliver strong and even light. I’ve included this model as a way to think about how to get light into individual apartments to enable indoor gardening, but also as a springboard for considering what sorts of reflectant materials with which we could paint or afix to airshaft walls.

Many of New York City’s apartment buildings offer a unique feature: the airshaft.

In the shape of a square or “u”, these airshafts were originally made to ensure airflow through apartments buildings, but more often than not, they are dark, stale spaces to open your windows to.



I’m curious how feasible it would be to convert these ubiquitous “dead” spaces into a place for community oriented living systems that could serve multiple uses. This is primarily a research project that will delve into existing technologies, as well as social models, for implementing the principles of permaculture in an urban environment. Beginning with issues of light and water, I’ll be looking at ways to grow things seasonally in NY, as well as how to build communities around the shaft spaces so that it can not only become more like courtyards, but also possibly producing food. I love the idea that eventually, different shafts could be growing different foods or plants that could be exchanged with other shafts…. Crops by Blocks perhaps?

-Aiwen Wang-Huddleston

If, as Berkeley posits, “to be is to be perceived” perhaps an interesting component to understanding the rest of you is perceiving how other beings perceive you.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of enabling plants to vocalize the point at which your touch hurts them. Two materials I’d like to use for their tactile appeal are moss and magnets. I started playing with magnet suspension on strings and I’d like to eventually map the breaking point of the tension caused by your touch matches to the point at which moss gets harmed by your touch.

Here are a few models I’ve been experimenting with (imagine the magnets covered with moss):

Audio-wise, I was thinking about sounds that, um, sound acoustic or “organic” and as people touch too much or too hard, the sound breaks down into a more digital version. I don’t know, I’ll have to play with sounds more to develop a better sense of how to give voice to plants. I’ve also been thinking of instruments such as the theremin and capacitance sensors, as well as flex and stretch sensors.

I decided to drop my Wearables and Personal Expressions class, even though it seems very promising in its critique structure and as a way of expanding one’s physical computing repertoire. Nonetheless, I’d like to continue thinking of the idea of a wearable living system—something that could functionally and symbolically link personal living orbits (i.e. fashion) with the greater environments we’re all a part of (man-made and natural living systems).

There are definitely fashion experiments with live plants, and insofar as plants constitute living systems, I suppose we could call these wearable living systems, though most seem barely “wearable”:

Yet few of these plant fashions offer a way to wear them and keep the plants alive. In fact, jewelry is probably more promising in that respect:

What would be interesting is somehow combining a living system that you can wear, which could also have a relationship to a living system beyond what you’re simply wearing. Take, as a clunky example, the moss ring above. Among other things, moss is great for air filtration, and we’re in fact in the process of building an indoor moss wall for the purposes of purifying the air. If people could also connect a moss necklace to the wall for regenerative purposes, one could perhaps both receive the health benefits of wearing moss as well as being symbolically reminded of a connection to a greater living system.

Now I have no idea how the above example could actually work, but it’s really fun to think about how we can use personal fashions to connect the self to a greater whole, and feel good and hip about it. It’s also worth keeping in mind the usefulness of wearable biofeedback systems that could help monitor your vital statics and help you be conscious of things like your breathing pattern.