Through The Sandglass

The Bayeux Tapestry - the quicksand scene

 

My daughter is a great fan of The Simpsons (recently celebrating their 20th anniversary), and enjoys challenging anyone to name any topic for which she cannot quote an episode in which that topic featured. Sometimes, I feel as if I'm getting that way about sand, given the diversity of contexts in which it shows up, but I'm really not up to her professional level. However, until recently, if someone had challenged me to link the Bayeux Tapestry (which is not, incidentally, a tapestry, but more of an extravagant piece of embroidery) and sand, I would have been stumped: but not now.

I recently had the experience of seeing the Tapestry for the first time. The word "spellbinding" is not one I use often, but it seems the only way of describing it. The Tapestry, all 70 meters (230 feet) of it, is displayed in low light to preserve its extraordinary colours, and this adds to the magic as you walk along the story. It's an ancient graphic novel, an elongate comic book, almost an animation; you half expect to see Spiderman intercepting the Norman invaders, or the Sandman attacking their fleet. Such thoughts did not detract from my sense of wonder, but my reverence was briefly tested when I spotted Harold riding along with a hawk on his arm (as, I suppose, such noble folk generally did in those days); I was suddenly struck by a memory of my father reciting to me the comic monologue from music hall days (does anyone reading this remember Stanley Holloway?) of the Battle of Hastings, in which Harold was routinely depicted "on his 'orse with his 'awk in his 'and." Chuckling would have seemed entirely inappropriate, so I controlled myself.

But, back to the point. The early scenes depict Harold being captured in France by Duke William and, having sworn allegiance to him and giving his guarantee that he would not declare himself king, taking off on a campaign with William against a revolting member of the local aristocracy. In doing so, they had to pass by Mont St. Michel and cross the River Couesnon. Now in those days, the river was still behaving naturally, since it was long before human interference changed the regional sedimentology (see my piece on the massive experiment underway there). And the river contained quicksands. The scene that I've reproduced at the head of this post shows Norman horses struggling in the quicksand and Harold saving a couple of soldiers by dragging them out by hand (he carries one on his back). The Latin description reads "hic Harold Dux trahebat eos de arena" - "here Duke Harold pulled them from the sand."  The round hill with the structure on top of it (upper left of centre) depicts Mont St. Michel.

The story goes on to describe how Harold went back on his word and declared himself King, thereby incurring the wrath of William, who proceeded to invade England and defeat the Saxon army at the Battle of Hastings, in the course of which Harold was shot in the eye by an arrow:

And after the battle were over

They found 'Arold so stately and grand,

Sitting there with an eye-full of arrow

On his 'orse with his 'awk in his 'and.

And thus was our vocabulary doubled - but no need to sweat or perspire over that. 

Nature's patterns, fractal landscapes, and a beach laboratory

The termination of the seemingly endless stretch of beach and dunes that forms the Atlantic boundary of the Bordeaux region is Cap Ferret, a constantly changing and migrating spit of sand. This guards the entrance to the Bay of Arcachon, a sweeping tidal expanse of sand and mud, and a source of excellent oysters.

My arrival at Cap Ferret was serendipitous in two ways: it stopped raining and the tide was well on the way out (a condition referred to ominously in French as le reflux). I walked past diverse attempts to stabilise the dunes, and warning signs on the risks of "collapsing" and dangerous beaches in the no-access area towards the end of the cape (with suitable polite apologies for the inconvenience), and came upon an extraordinary sight.  

The massive and relentless movement of sand around the cape was reflected in a miniature landscape of shifting designs left behind by the tide and actively sculpted by the water draining down the beach.

A complex pattern of larger sand waves contained within it ripples, valleys, canyons, meanders, deltas, braided channels, point bars, channel bars - lilliputian river systems, actively eroding, transporting, and carving their topography before my eyes. The sand contained a significant proportion of dark minerals, heavier than the quartz grains, which, like the granular segregation of placer deposits, etched out the details and designs of these landscapes. Natural processes operating without heed to scale, features a meter across that could be images from Google Earth - truly fractal designs. I lost track of how many photographs I took - every few steps there was something different and wondrous going on (including the sensation of being sucked into almost quicksand). Endless complexity and beauty: here, just a sampling.

And it struck me that I was in the midst of a vast natural sedimentological laboratory, an ideal and exciting place to examine the complexity and dynamism of natural processes and structures, in the same way that Steve Gough does at Little River Research and Design, or like the model systems at the University of Minnesota's St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. Except that Cap Ferret is much, much, bigger and the landscapes change with every reflux.

Sand, glorious sand: Mars in high-resolution

[Just incredible. If you have a spare hour or so, go to http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ and browse - and then browse some more. Each of the thumbnail images on the site is actually from a satellite pass, and clicking the "RGB color (non-map projected)" link downloads a long narrow image; I've simply compiled segments of some for this "montage." Thousands of geologically and artistically staggering images, all, wonderfully, in the public domain -  Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. A good way to mark a hundred posts on Through the Sandglass.]

Sandstone-making microbes, tafoni - and an extraordinary design idea

I love connections. Those unexpected and wonderful threads of stories that link and flow from one subject to another, subjects that would have seemed to have had nothing in common whatsoever. So here's one such story. The thread is earthquakes-bacteria-desertification-tafoni-sustainable design.

Shake waterlogged sand, and liquefaction occurs: the grains move apart and the friction and adhesion between them is lost, destroying the stability of the material, which then flows and compacts, expelling the water. Earthquakes are particularly good at doing this, with catastrophic consequences. The earthquake that devastated the region around Bhuj in northwestern India in 2001 was one of the most damaging in the country’s history. Twenty thousand people were killed and the havoc caused more than $3 billion of damage. Because the vibrations provoked the sand and soil into liquefying, buildings no longer had a foundation, causing them to sink, tilt, and collapse. Huge cracks in the earth appeared, and water and sand erupted in volcanic fountains as the ground collapsed back on itself. This is a common result of earthquakes: more damage is done by liquefaction than by the tremors themselves. This was the case in Anchorage in 1964, the great San Francisco event of 1906, and in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, where some buildings in San Francisco sank until their third floors were at ground level, and sand volcanoes or “boils” erupted from the ground. Liquefaction was also amply demonstrated in the most powerful series of earthquakes to strike the lower 48 in recorded history—not in California, but in New Madrid, Missouri, between 1811 and 1812.

It is therefore no surprise that liquefaction is the focus of intense research by engineers, physicists, and lovers of granular materials. Is one solution to try to glue the grains together so that they can’t liquefy? In spite of the scale of the challenge, the answer is yes, and we may be able to seek help in this from a seemingly unlikely source. Currently, engineers can inject chemicals, such as epoxies, into sandy soil, but the chemicals may be toxic. The unexpected help comes from Bacillus pasteurii, a natural bacterium that lives between sand grains and in soils. Research by Professor Jason DeJong and his colleagues at the University of California at Davis and the University of Massachusetts have shown that the bacterium causes calcite, or calcium carbonate, to precipitate, which glues the grains together. Inject sand with cultures of these bacteria, feed them well, provide oxygen and a source of calcium, and they will turn loose sand into solid rock. As DeJong says, "Starting from a sand pile, you turn it back into sandstone." The remarkable scanning electron microscope images below are from Eric Seagren, Chiung-Wen Chou and co-workers at the University of Maryland who are also inducing bacillus pasteurii into lithification activities (see the full set of images here).

 

Now, desertification. An evocative word, conjuring up apocalyptic images of the spread of aridity and the destruction of habitable and agricultural lands. It is indeed happening, but often as much as the result of human activity - the massive destruction of forests and other vegetation in China, for example - as climate change. But the edge of the desert shifts, as it always has, sometimes simply because dunes inevitably move on, and sometimes because climate fluctuates. The semi-arid sahel region of North Africa has always had a complex and delicate relationship with the Sahara, suffering drought (as well as excessive rainfall) and dune encroachment; it is in may parts heavily populated and livelihoods are vulnerable to shifting sands and climate change, the current effects of which appear to result not necessarily in less rain, but in less predictable, and periodically more torrential, rain. Massive projects are underway to create immense barriers of vegetation - the "Great Green Wall" of North Africa, 7000 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide (China has its own version).

But what has this to do with bacteria? I recently came across (initially because it quoted from my book) a compelling report on BLDGBLOG, an eclectic and fascinating collection of writing on "Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures" by Geoff Manaugh in San Francisco. This particular report was on the design project that last year won first prize in the Awards for Sustainable Construction by the Holcim Foundation, based in Switzerland. The project is by Magnus Larsson, a student, and it is staggering in its imagination, creativity and scope. Titled  " DUNE: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture, An Adaptive Proposal for Sahel/Sokoto/Northern Nigeria" it proposes that “maybe there’s a way to sculpt the desert into living spaces.” The sculpture would cross the northern edge of the Sahel, supporting and complementing the Great Green Wall, and would be sculpted by bacillus pasteurii.

Larsson espouses "aggregation as a design strategy":

in one way, all design is aggregation. even the most austere minimalistic design usually produces an aggregation of elements that weren't there before. on one level, it is hard to do anything in the world without adding something to it: a trace, a movement; something.

sand is the very epitome of aggregation. a single grain of sand is almost nothing: a splinter of rock, something that once was something, but has now become a memory of that thing. but put myriad grains together and you get entire landscapes, deserts, the earth. you get fascinating forms and emergent patterns. you get possibilities, potentials, a fluid material from which to build our structures. and you get a force to do it for you: as the sand is carried by the wind, "all" we have to do is make sure we design with this in mind. work with the aggregation, not against it. allow the aeolian forces to put the sand in motion, allow saltation to do its thing, and then, when the sand has aggregated into a shape that we like, use an intelligent strategy for how to solidify it, petrify it, freeze it into a solid state that speaks of that one moment in time.

To me, of course, that is poetry.

Among the patterns and forms that inspired Larsson (and Gaudi - see previous posts) are tafoni, "a cavernous rock structure that formally ties the project back to notions of aggregation and erosion." He describes how bacillus pasteurii could be harnessed to sculpt the desert into those forms that speak of one moment in time, but endurably, sustainably, providing not only a barrier against desertification, but habitable and cultivatable envrionments:

I researched different types of construction methods involving pile systems and realised that injection piles could probably be used to get the bacteria down into the sand – a procedure that would be analogous to using an oversized 3D printer, solidifying parts of the dune as needed. The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids. If we allow ourselves to dream, we could even fantasise about ways in which the wind could do a lot of this work for us: solidifying parts of the surface to force the grains of sand to align in certain patterns, certain shapes, having the wind blow out our voids, creating a structure that would change and change again over the course of a decade, a century, a millenium.

The resulting forms of Larsson's vision are staggering, both in their scale and in their aesthetics:

 

Yes, this is a vision, a design fraught with practical challenges, questions, and difficulties in the real world, not to mention ethical aspects. But "if we allow ourselves to dream" (and we must), then beautiful, visionary, creative, and challenging ideas will result, and wondrous stories will be told.

[for details of Magnus Larsson's project, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/sets/72157612777908074/ and http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/sandstone.html. For the work of Jason DeJong and his colleagues, see  http://www.sil.ucdavis.edu/projects-bsi.htm and, for example, this Discovery Channel article. Images copyright Magnus Larsson, Eric Seagren et al.]

Guest Photographer - nature's sand designs

I was recently contacted by Larry Deemer, who is lucky enough to live in Breezy Point, a coastal neighborhood in Queens, the borough of New York City. Larry spends time on the beach, observing - obviously with great pleasure and in meticulous detail - what is going on, particularly after a high tide. He sent me some of his photographs, and I was captivated. As he says

Most people don't stop to notice the beautiful patterns, or believe that they would be found on a beach in New York City. The variety of patterns are intriguing...from the ones that repeat simple patterns over a large area to the ones that are strangely abstract to the ones that look like a Japanese landscape painting or a dental x-ray. The best photos do not come from expensive cameras or digital ones. The simple Ricoh lens captures the warmest feeling of the sand.... It's nice to know that others stop to look at sand.I make my time on the beach a blend of art and science. There is always something new to see and wonder over.

I asked Larry if I could use the blog to post some of the photos and he kindly agreed, sending me a selection of his favourites (or favorites). Here's a selection - enjoy and wonder over them.

 

 

 

[all photographs copyright Larry Deemer]

Sand as motif - further confessions of an arenophile

It was my intention to put together a more technical post on the challenges of measuring the shape of a sand grain - an apparently esoteric endeavour, but in fact of surprising importance in science and our daily lives. However, I not only realised that this would require more time for thought (including a probably vain attempt to comprehend fourier analysis), but I also became otherwise-occupied over the last day or so. 

I suppose, since I have written the book, that, in the strict sense, I have long been an arenophile, but it was only in the course of writing that my arenophilia has extended to collecting my subject matter. Sand collecting is a serious activity for a large community of enthusiasts around the world, and the diversity of sands and the uniqueness of family of grains means that any collection is endless. It was, I suppose, inevitable that, spurred on by two charming and helpful arenophiles, I should start gathering my own collection.  The first was Marco Bonifazi, whom I visited a couple of years ago at his wonderful old house in a village in the Swiss Jura mountains. Marco is a man of many interests and talents, among them collecting sand - he has more than 8000 samples:

 

A few years ago, Marco helped organise an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Neuchatel (set up by Louis Agassiz before he decamped to the US in 1846), simply titled Sable. The exhibition had to be extended because of popular demand - and is something that I would love to recreate at a museum in the UK or the US (see, in French, the Museum descriptions of the exhibition). Marco provided me with the start of my own collection and today my friends and family never leave home without a few ziplock plastic bags on my behalf. The second sand collector to whom I owe a great deal is Loes Modderman, who lives in the Netherlands and has a superb website on all things microscopic. I was captivated by some of the images on her site that demonstrated the beauty of the endlessly varying hues of natural sand, and she very kindly and enthusiastically allowed my to use one of these images as a plate in the book (the illustration at the top of this post, Sands of South Africa). And then, one day, I received an e-mail from Loes letting me know that I should expect a package; when it arrived, I was astonished and delighted to find that it contained dozens of sand samples from numerous far-flung parts of the world. This completed my conversion to a full-fledged arenophile, and, as further plastic bags arrived from family and friends, and as I filled many of my own, the question was how to do the spectrum of sands justice?

Fortunately, I have a long-suffering wife who has also been infected by arenophilia, whose life has unavoidably been deeply penetrated by sand over the last few years. And I'm also lucky enough to know Trevor, who builds things - extremely well and thoughtfully. The result, a few days ago was the installation in our apartment here in London of a set of shelves (of significant dimensions) specifically to display sands - interior decorating with an arenaceous motif. I had earlier found the ideal glass containers - in bulk, from a medical supplies website (heaven knows what they are supposed to contain). So fourier analysis went out the window and much of my time in the last day or so was devoted to filling and cataloguing the containers - a modest 150 of them. I think (and, wonderfully, my wife agrees) that the result is great - it's certainly unique, it displays the subtle and ever-varying colours and character of the world's sands, it's thematic, and it complements the colour of the room.

  

Now, of course, I'll have to get the microscope out and continue with the exploration of nature's wonderful debris. 

Granular films - sand the movie star

In the film blog of the British newspaper, The Guardian, a few days ago, the weekly feature called "Clip joint" called on readers to submit movie scenes featuring the desert, to compile "a tour of the best web morsels on Sahara-like expanses." The writer declared that "I can't find the exact quote, but somebody once said of Lawrence of Arabia something like, 'The desert is the screen.' Frankly, with films, that's all I need to hear. Help me to my seat forthwith, usher: I need an extra-large tub of grandeur, and sand in my hair." (For non-UK readers, the "usher" refers to the person in a cinema or theatre who shows you to your seat, and the "tub" is is a - traditionally mediocre, but you do find Baskin Robbins these days - container of ice cream). Now geologists obviously have a unique and idiosyncratic perspective on this; I have spent long periods in movie theatres losing the plot but trying to figure out from the background geology where a scene was actually filmed. And, of course, I'm particularly interested in films which don't simply occur in a desert setting, but which the desert - and, ideally, the sand - is a critical part of the plot, if not an actual character.

So I've just spent a very enjoyable couple of hours looking through the responses in The Guardian, and checking out many of the YouTube links (I'd already added my own, which I shall come to shortly). The nominations cover a spectrum, from films in which deserts show up, through films which are largely set in an arid place, finally to films in which the desert and the sand are not just the background but a constant theme - they have roles, they provide tension. In the first category of the spectrum, one can move from Casino, Ben Hur, through Paris Texas and There Will be Blood, to Zabriskie Point which starts the next category. Ice Cold in Alex, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Clint Eastwood's forced walk through the dunes includes some great granular bits), The Flight of the Phoenix (both versions, the older one the better), Humphrey Bogart in Sahara (see my "angle of repose" post), and, of course, Lawrence of Arabia. Next, there is an obvious group which initiates the final category in the spectrum - Dune, Star Wars (the sand people and the deserts of Tatooine), The Sheltering Sky, and The English Patient (the initial scene of which, with the plane flying over the sunset-illuminated dunes, is staggeringly beautiful - I might, carried somewhat away, argue that dunes are female....).

Which brings us to the extreme sand end of the spectrum. Runner-up is The House of Sand, from which the image at the head of this post is taken. Set in the spectacular landscapes of Brazilian coastal dunes, this 2006 film by Andrucha Waddington won that year's Alfred P. Sloan prize at the Sundance Festival - well-deserved, in my view. The story follows three generations of women (two played by the extraordinary Fernanda Torres and the other by her real-life mother) stranded in the dunes as a result of male dementia. Against the backdrop of this spectacular landscape, and with the ever-shifting sands playing their role, the film follows threads of history: from the 1919 expedition to the dunes to use a solar eclipse to attempt to demonstrate the curvature of space, as predicted by Einstein, through WW II to the moon landings. When her mother asks what they found on the moon, the daughter replies "nothing but sand." Scenery, science, history, drama, stunning cinematography, sex, and great acting, this movie has it all.

But the grand prize, in my personal "best arenaceous movies of all time" list goes to Woman of the Dunes, the 1964 film of Kobo Abe's book The Woman in the Dunes. The slight difference in translation is confusing, but the book title more accurately reflects the story. Hiroshi Teshigahara's film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes festival and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Filmed among Japan's Tottori coastal dunes, this surreal movie features a lost entomologist who finds himself essentially kidnapped and marooned at the bottom of a deep hole in the dunes where a widow is kept by the bizarre local inhabitants to sweep the ever-encroaching sand from her house. If it sounds weird, it is - but it's compelling. The characters - and the viewer - lose all sense of time, which becomes measured only by the movement of sand and the daily routine of their battle against it. There are constant and meticulously observed scenes of the behaviour of granular materials (hardly a common commendation for a film, but I thought they were brilliant). Sand really is a major character - and the concept of "sand and sex" takes on a whole new meaning. The film is wonderful, but the book is well-worth reading too  - one quote:

Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth...... While he mused on the effects of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.   

As an endnote, the theme of wind, sand, and madness is not a new one. Thanks to one of the comments in the Guardian blog, I came across scenes, evocative of Teshigahara, from the 1928 silent movie, The Wind, in which Lillian Gish (whom I have always thought extraordinary), is, in the end, saved from madness and driving sand. It was filmed, in part, in the Mojave Desert.

[to see the Guardian blog list in full, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/apr/01/1; for a taste of The House of Sand, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlxSR1-sErk; Woman of the Dunes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1mpRGqkpAs; The Wind, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Q2vDNyqXM&NR=1]

Ochre - the Colorado Provençal

A hundred million years ago, today's Mediterranean didn't exist. Continental bits and pieces that would become Spain, Italy, France, and the whole geological jigsaw that we see today jostled around in balmy tropical seas at the western end of the great Tethyan ocean that separated Africa from Asia. This ocean would later be consigned to the geological graveyard of the Alpine Mountain system, but, during much of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods, things were relatively peaceful. Tropical seas are limestone factories, and sometimes, wandering around the Alps, you can't help but wonder whether anything other than the carbonate cycle was going on -seemingly endless landscapes of limestone, now twisted and exhumed, dominate the scenery, as in the hills in the background of the photo above. But what's that in the foreground? Clearly something else was going on - rivers, coasts, and dunes were accumulating sands that would provide a brilliantly colourful relief from the gray limestone hills.  

The brilliance of the palette of these sandstones in Provence, at the southern end of the exposed Alps, is the product of the alchemy of geochemistry and mineralogy, and this is one of the largest deposits of ochre in the world. The sandstones contained iron-rich clays between the sand grains and the conspiracy of time and water moving through the sands changed those minerals into a variety of other clay minerals, many with not only exotic names but also exotic hues. This is the area of the Luberon, around the hilltop village of Roussillon (distinct from the region of Roussillon to the south where I'm currently enjoying warm March sunshine). Ochre has been quarried there for millenia, and, at its peak towards the end of the nineteenth century, seventeen different tints were extracted and exported worldwide. The area became known as the "Colorado Provençal" (colorado being one of the Spanish words for red, hence the US state) and today you can walk any number of trails amongst the old quarries and the outcrops of ever-varying colours - purples, yellows, browns, reds and oranges.

 

The French geological description of these sandstones refers to their originally containing the green mineral glauconite, a complex hydrous silicate of iron that commonly contains a range of other ingredients - aluminium, magnesium, calcium, and so on. It was the glauconite that got caught up in the alchemy and changed into a variety of iron-dominated rusty minerals, goethite, hematite, limonite. Each of those rust minerals has a different colour, but the spectrum is also influenced by the size of the grains and their differing ways of interplaying with light. The sandstone, as can be seen in the photos above, display a variety of sedimentary structures, including dramatic cross-bedding, suggestive of rivers and dunes. Now glauconite is a mineral that is generally regarded as forming in the calm waters of shallow seas, but these sandstones do not have the appearance of having been deposited in such tranquil environments - was the glauconite perhaps eroded out of other (marine) sandstones and transported along with all the other detritus that ended up as the sands of the Colorado Provencal?

Ochre has long been used as a pigment, mixed with natural oils, both for prehistoric art and body ornamentation; it was used by ancient Egyptian women as rouge and lip gloss, and the ancient Picts (and "Red Indians"?) coloured themselves with blood-red ochre. Ochre dyes were used to preserve the canvas sails of English fishing vessels, and it may have contributed to the processes of treating hides. Ochre has been used lavishly in burials from cultures all over the world, and it would seem that this may reflect  practical, as well as symbolic, properties. It was used by the Egyptians in the mummification process and in two thousand year old burials in North America; it is used today by native Australians to heal wounds and burns. Ochre would seem to be natural antiseptic.

And, of course, ochre is still used as a painting ingredient today. Visit the dazzling landscapes of the Colorado Provençal, and you can buy sets of natural pigments. Look in art supply catalogs and you'll find endless varieties of ochre colours. The alchemy of geochemistry and mineralogy is wonderful - no wonder Andrew Clemens could find all the coloured sand grains that he needed (see my Jan 9 post).

 

Sandstones of Barcelona (2): Gaudi (and tafoni again)

 

The Montjuic sandstones (March 5 post) that built, and rebuilt, Roman and medieval Barcelona went on to play a starring role in the wonderful, eccentric, stunning, creations of Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet. Barcelona and Gaudi are inextricably linked, and a visit to the city feels in some ways like a pilgrimage. This was my first visit (a return is necessary, having only sampled some of the highlights). Although I knew Gaudi's work, of course, from books, images, and friends' descriptions, it remained distant and beyond my grasp - I had no clear idea of what it really was. It's an architecture that can only be accessed directly and personally, through touch as well as vision. And where to start on this experience? Again like a pilgrimage, there is a compulsion to start with the icon of Barcelona, Gaudi's greatest and yet-unfinished masterpiece, the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia. I am no architectural expert, and the details of the history and symbols of the Sagrada are easily available elsewhere; I shall simply try to describe what fascinated me about the church, and, indeed, all of Gaudi's creations - the inspiration, the materials, the forms and the design. And I should make it clear that I don't approach the Sagrada, or any church, through the eyes of religious faith, but rather through the eyes of a faith in human nature, creativity, inspiration, capacity. And, of course, through the eyes of a geologist.

Gaudi took over the building of the church in 1883, a year after it was started as a conventional gothic design; he radicalized it, sculpting into reality his extraordinary visions of naturally-inspired design, together with the innovative construction techniques that these visions demanded. The building became his passion; he lived and worked like a hermit within its embryonic structure, designing, calculating, modeling, redesigning, and starting over. When he died in 1926, run over by a tram, he was impoverished and unkempt, unrecognized in the paupers' hospital to which he was taken. The church was perhaps a quarter finished. The work continues today, made possible by the capabilities of modern design software, the extraordinary creative skills of today's craftsmen - and a continuing shared passion.

The Montjuic sandstone forms the bones and the flesh of the building, providing, together with sculptures from its cousins in Lleida to the west of Barcelona, the flowing organic forms of the Nativity Façade (right) and the glowing, soaring structure of the Passion Façade (left) - appropriately named even by the secular use of the word. But the quarries on Montjuic were closed many decades ago, and the stone, even recycled, is scarce. For some elements of the structure, specialty concrete is used, the sand content carefully selected to harmonize with the natural sandstone; this has been controversial, vigorously condemned by the purists - who choose to ignore the fact that Gaudi himself was using reinforced concrete for some of the early construction, since the stresses and strains some of the radical design elements necessitated its use. In today's project, the methods used are on the cutting edge of concrete design and construction.

The Sagrada is nothing but curves, light, colour, and space, made possible only by Gaudi's creativity and his seemingly intuitive grasp of the mathematics of form. The columns, inspired by the structure of trees, vary in form according to their position and role; their shapes twist and counter-twist in ways that it took considerable effort by modern minds (and computers) to understand. They are cored by reinforced concrete and faced with natural stone - the Montjuic, together with basalts and granites. The interior is staggering, quite literally awe-inspiring (below). But, as I have already said, photographs don't do it - you have to be there, feel the place for yourself.

The Montjuic sandstone is joined for some of the interior elements by Scottish sandstone from the Clashach quarries on the Moray Firth. A "New Red" sandstone from the desert dunes of the Permian Period, some 250 million years ago, it is famous for its preservation of the tracks of ancient (and doomed) reptiles, all very geologically different from the Montjuic. But the two are similar in important ways. The Clashach sandstone had been used during refurbishment of Barcelona's old cathedral, and came to the attention of the Sagrada architects because of its similar appearance to the Montjuic, the warmth of its colour, its texture, and its durability. Its distinctive character has also led to its being featured in the British Memorial Garden to 9/11 victims in New York's Hanover Square.  

I could add much more on the glorious design, the materials, and the fascination of the place, but enough - if you haven't seen it, you must. The Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia is a temple - to creativity, inspiration, passion, and skill.

After the Sagrada, a break to catch the breath, a non-Gaudi interlude, is recommended. But then go to his other icons, those of domestic architecture, the Casa Mila and the Casa Batlló. The first has also been named "La Pedrera," the stone quarry, and the second, the "House of Bones," reflecting perceptions of the character of their design. The quarry in question for Casa Mila is in Vilafranca del Penedes, and it provided the Catalonian limestones for the façade; the undulating form of that facade (below) has stimulated much metaphorical hypothesizing with respect to its inspiration - ocean waves, desert dunes, and the sculpted weathered sandstone terrain around the monastery of Montserrat, northwest of Barcelona, are among the most popular. And then, on the extraordinary roof terrace, appear the strange forms of the chimneys that were said to be the inspiration for Darth Vader and his troops......

But to return to Gaudi and his beloved Montjuic sandstone, a visit to the Casa Batlló is needed. The existing building was completely redesigned by Gaudi, essentially straight out of his imagination; its almost hallucinatory façade (the yawns or the bones) is inspired by St. George, the patron saint of Catalonia, and, more immediately, the dragon (left). There are no straight lines in the flowing sandstone of the facade - or any where else in the building, for that matter. Every detail was designed by Gaudi, down to the window handles and each piece of stained glass, each tile, every idiosyncrasy. Every individual element of Gaudi's design is fascinating and unique; sometimes, in juxtaposition en masse, they become overwhelming.

But the curves and the flow and the outrageousness of the designs are compelling, each often personally evocative of those endless metaphors of natural forms. At the Sagrada was a small exhibition with examples of natural architecture that appear in Gaudi's designs - trees, leaves, spirals, the Fibonacci series, twinned crystals, and weathered landscapes. Tafoni (my 22 February post) were strangely not included, but they should be. Below are two examples, the gates of the entrance to La Pedrera and the façade of the Casa Batlló - for the latter, when I took the image of tafoni in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California (credit below) and simply overlaid it on the facade of the House of Bones, I admit that my jaw dropped. 

 

And Salvador Dali described the modernist architecture, and that of Gaudi in particular, as "the patisserie of Barcelona", so I will end with one final metaphor.

[all photographs are my own, except for the image of tafoni in the El Corte de Madera Creek by Vicki and Chuck Rogers, creative commons license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/two-wrongs/104484095/in/set-516287/]

Drawing lines in the sand - the art of Jim Denevan

Anyone who builds a sandcastle, or doodles on the beach, feels the impermanence of such creations. It's one of sand's many qualities - for a material that lends itself to sculpture, writing, and drawing, and for all the toughness of the individual grains, it resists, in conspiracy with waves, rain, and wind, any kind of durability of form. Ripples shape-shift with every tide, dunes move on with every gust of wind - however nature or we may attempt to shape it, these works are ephemeral. There are stories, some perhaps true, many no doubt apocryphal, of Pablo Picasso sketching in the sand on a beach; in one, he is pursued by a woman asking for a small sketch, and he obliges by drawing a picture in the sand.

It is its ephemeral character that gives sand its role in the imagery of passing time - and its uniqueness as a medium. It is that very impermanence that is an intrinsic part of land art of all kinds, but of the work of one extraordinary artist in particular.

Jim Denevan walks out onto a freshly washed Northern California beach, bends down, and draws a circle, the size of a coin, in the sand with his finger. More circles create a spiral nest, the outer ones growing larger. Using a driftwood stick as his paintbrush, he draws bigger circles in the sand, each one nestling with the previous; the design grows fractally. Denevan does all this freehand—there is no outline, no preliminary design; the artwork simply flows from his mind through the choreography of his movement. His work evokes a Japanese karesansui, popularly known as a Zen garden, with its contemplative design of raked sand. Denevan’s design is monumental, ultimately occupying the entire width of the beach. He uses a large rake to highlight the outline and to fill in the spaces with texture. A few hours later, the tide destroys the art and renews the canvas. For Denevan, the transience is part of the art; it recognizes “some kind of truth about life—what is grand, or what is fragile. . . . Everything is transitioning into something else.” Denevan’s designs are diverse, ranging from huge perfect spirals, to representational images, to complex circles and linear shapes, suggesting a more fragile version of the Nazca lines, the gigantic figures in the Peruvian desert—themselves created by the removal of desert stones to expose the light-colored sand beneath.

For Denevan, the process, the dance, the intimacy with the sand is a fundamental component.

He recently made the world's largest freehand drawing, this time on a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. It's three miles across and he walked a hundred miles in eight days to complete it. A desert storm washed it away the following week.

Denevan also excels in a completely different form of ephemeral art - he's a renowned chef, creating unique culinary works inspired by local produce and landscapes. Outstanding in the Field is now staging feast tours internationally as well as throughout North America - Jim was incredibly helpful when I was writing my book, and I have an aspiration to coincide with and indulge in one of his events.

But to finish, I'll return to sand, and celebrate the pleasure of its impermanence through Jim Denevan's own words:

One part of drawing in the sand that’s really great is that, no matter what I do, no matter how big it is, I have a completely clean sheet of paper, meaning a completely clean strip of sand that I can return to every day, and there’s an incredible freedom in that kind of artwork.

[see http://www.jimdenevan.com/ and http://www.outstandinginthefield.com/. The Northern California Public broadcasting station, KQED, has a terrific short video of Denevan working and talking about it - http://kqed02.streamguys.us/anon.kqed/spark/jimdenevan.m4v]