Audio
Lee “Scratch” Perry & Dubblestandart – I foo China dub – Collision
Mungo’s Hi Fi – Fire pon dubplate – Scrub a Dub
Illyah & Ltd Candy – Fight the formation – Jahtari
Afrikan Simba – Power version – Jahtari
Soom T – Dirty Money – Jahtari
Tapes – Good thing you came along – Jahtari
Two Fingers - Bad Girl (the Bug rmx) – Paper Bag Records
Sister Carol – Culture mi vote – Scotch Bonnet
Destroy Babylon - Spectral Perceptor – MusicADD Records
Lo-Fi Soundsystem – De lion’s den – Intrusion/Echospace
Dub Terror – Armini rmx
Kush Arora – SFShuffleRiddim - Record Label Records
Eating Betty – Good and strong dub - ACEtone Records
Teleseen - The echo will triumph over the voice – Percepts Records (Fear of the Forest)
Dubkasm - On the Wire
Augustus Pablo - Ras Menelik - Daddy Kool
King Tubby Meets Prince Jammy - Throne of Judgement - Sky Juice label
Sly & Robbie - Demolition City - Island
Mad Professor - Zion - Ariwa
Jah Shaka - Dependence Dub - Jah Shaka Music
Alpha & Omega meets Dub Judah - Almighty Jah - A&O
Keety Roots & Tena Stelin - Mighty Dub - Black Legacy
Mixman - Who Is The Hooligan - Blakamix
Bomb the Bass Featuring Spikey T - Darkheart (Sabres of Paradise Main Mix) -
Island
Aqua Levi & The RootsImention - Babylon Must Set Me Free - Roots I
Dubkasm Featuring Dub Judah - From the Foundation - Unreleased Dubplate Mix
Dubkasm - City Walls - Unreleased Dubplate Mix
Dubkasm featuring Ras B - Moses - Sufferah's Choice Recordings
Dubkasm featuring Ras B - Moses (Forsaken Remix) - Unreleased Dubplate Mix
MPB-4 - Iaia Do Cais Dourado - Phillips
In a recent post I included an image from Margaret Bursa's project New Local NY, which she produced while a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Bursa's tutors for that project were Mark Smout and Laura Allen, of Smout Allen; and I should right away that I'm consistently amazed at the quality of work coming out of Smout Allen's studios.
I thought, then, that I should take the occasion to share more images from Bursa's projects. You can check out her website here. 
New Local NY features "a ‘landscape of movement’," Bursa writes. It "takes the form of a condensed urban playground on the west side of Manhattan, overhanging onto the River Hudson," and it was at least partially inspired "by the ongoing relocation of immigrants and cultures to America, in particular Sokol, a Czech mass-exercise movement, promoting togetherness, flocking, fresh air and cultural pride."
The result is an intensely colorful, wind-powered megastructure, sitting comfortably astride the worlds of home craft and experimental architecture. 
Here are some amazing sectional sketches:
Then there is New Local Zlín, an earlier companion piece to New Local NY.
Zlín, Bursa explains, is the fading capital of the Bata shoe-making empire:
- The Czech town of Zlín is the site of a social, industrial and architectural experiment begun by Tomas Bata in 1894. However, his shoe-making factories that were once the town’s driving force no longer operate and so the social and commercial structure of the town and its suburbs are in decline. Responding to the New Local Manifesto, a layer of facilities is laid over and interwoven into the residential neighborhoods where seven housing typologies are afforded dual functions of work and domestic life such the House of Drink, where both production and consumption are combined.
[Images: "House of Drink," "Greenhouse," and town plan from New Local Zlín by Margaret Bursa].The next project is a kind of tube-diorama: you look into the miniature landscape and see autumn trees, a ruined Greek temple, and a many-windowed architectural section standing in silhouette.
The project seems to come with the implication that, when you look inside a telescope, perhaps it's possible that you might simply be seeing a world inside the telescope—that is, an optical device that, instead of revealing new worlds from afar, actually contains local worlds within it.
[Image: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].Called Layered Landscapes, the project is a "compositional map," Bursa writes, and it comes complete with hardcover book and poster.
[Images: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].Finally, I have a weird affinity for sketches of archways, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't include this short series of brick studies—called, unsurprisingly, Brickscape.
[Images: From Brickscape by Margaret Bursa].In any case, there's some great work in there. Check out Bursa's site for a bit more.
A beautiful new book of photographs by Guggenheim Fellow Michael Light has been released. Called Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, and released by Radius Books, it includes an essay by "experimental geographer" Trevor Paglen.
Light, well known for, among other things, his aerial photographs of the American west, "pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime," as Radius Books describes it, has put together a collection of 22 images from his surveys of the Bingham Pit and the Garfield smelter stack.
The sheer scale of each site—one a void excavated into the surface of the earth, the other one of the tallest structures in the United States—is mind-blowing:
- Located at 8,000 feet in the Oquirrh Mountains—20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City—the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest man-made excavation on the planet. Its hole reaches more than half a mile deep and its rim is nearly three miles in width. It has produced more copper than any mine in history.
[Image: Michael Light, "Garfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake" (2006)].Meanwhile:
- The mine’s Garfield smelter stack, situated at the edge of the Great Salt Lake about 10 miles away, is the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, and is only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building.
- I work with big subjects and grand issues, and I am fascinated about that point where humans begin to become inconsequential and realize their smallness in relation to the vastness that is out there. In my archival work I also enjoy inserting a certain kind of revisionist politics into big iconic subjects that are owned by the world, where I can tell a story through my particular prism, in a way that hopefully offers a fresh perspective.
The book is available through Radius.
Just as with Bauhaus abstract painter and animator Oskar Fischinger who worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia, Walt Disney invited Salvador Dali to invigorate the artistic boundaries of his studio. The two met at a party that WB studio head Jack Warner gave around the time Dali was designing a sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. Shortly thereafter, Dali started work on the Disney lot designing visuals for a short entitled Destino which was intended for inclusion in one of Disney’s anthology features, like Make Mine Music. Walt Disney stated in 1946: “Like the Night On Bald Mountain sequence Kay Nielson designed for Fantasia, I want to give more big artists such opportunities. We need them. We have to keep breaking new trails.”
The funny thing is that the film hasn't been released in a DVD. A disc featuring Destino was slated to be released on November 11, 2008 but has been put back in the company's release schedule. It's not known at this time when the DVD will be released.
The Dombeya plant is in full bloom. The pink flowers attract lots of bees, and sometimes I will find spiders taking advantage of the ample food supply (the bees, that is.)
This was a rather skinny looking female. Ordinarily, at this time of year I would expect to see her guarding an egg sac, or perhaps a recently hatched brood of spiderlings. But it was just her by herself, and I liked the say she had her legs draped over the flower in a most casual way.
Hello y'all!
I'm not American, but my sweet sister in law is and I've been asking for tips.
So tomorrow we are going to bake Halloween themed cupcakes. Photographic evidence WILL be provided.
And when you have a beautiful daughter who dresses up at every opportunity and usually only in pink it would be silly not to join encourage her to have fun.
Instead she is dressing up with her brothers...in black. It's the first time since she was born she has not worn pink. Seriously.
I think she looks pretty cute. In a scary kind of way....
So tonight we are going to our local surf club for a Halloween party
ETA below are shots taken as the sun was setting over the surfclub and I'm a very proud mother as my son won for best costume!!!
and tomorrow we are taking our two oldest trick or treating for the very first time!
I'll be updating this blogpost with more photos after we have done that, so please pop back to see what Aussie trick or treating looks like and tell me how we can improve on it!
ps thank you to my brother Richard for these fabulous photos xxxx
For the last couple of years, I have noticed that something eats the leaves on the fast-growing young branches of the Ombu tree at the arboretum. Last year, right after I noticed the chewed up leaves, the tree received its annual pruning. All the chewed up shoots ("suckers", really), were gone. For most of the last few months, I hadn't really ventured under there, but last week I returned because I needed to prepare for our school tours. I saw the chewed up leaves again, but couldn't find any bugs... till today.
During today's tour, I noticed a child was watching a small caterpillar on his finger. When I asked him where he found it, he said, "Right here", and pointed to the Ombu sprouts.
I told him to please put the caterpillar back, and he did, although he kept and eye on it for the remainder of his time under the tree. And so did I.
After the tour was over, I returned to the Ombu tree and searched until I found the caterpillar again. I broke off a little piece of branch, and carried him home on it. I also found 2 dessicated caterpillars on it, and a small spider who I suspect may have killed them. (I think the spider got lost somewhere in my car.) The caterpillar is currently on my kitchen table, his branch staying fresh in a container of water. Close inspection has revealed yet another, but slightly darker, live caterpillar that I had missed earlier. So I have 2 now.
They look to be some kind of geometer larvae. It would be nice to find out what kind. They are nice little moths.
Today I received an email from a guy who wanted to use some of my photos on his website. I'm always happy to oblige in such cases. It doesn't happen very often.
In this case, it's for UC Riverside. They have an impressive website about Invasive Species. Here's a little blurb about them:
The Center for Invasive Species Research based on the University of California Riverside Campus provides a forward-looking approach to managing invasions in California by exotic pests and diseases. It is well recognized that inadvertent introductions of exotic insect pests, plant diseases, weeds, and other noxious organisms (e.g., exotic crabs and mussels) provides a major and continuing threat to California's agricultural, urban, and natural environments as well as the State's precious supplies of fresh water.
California acquires one new exotic species, on average, every 60 days. At this rate, around six new species establish in California each year. Estimated losses arising from the uncontrolled population growth of these pests amounts to an estimated $3 billion per annum. The problems caused by invasive species in California are likely to worsen as population growth continues and imports from an ever increasing diversity of countries accelerates. Read more
These Brooklynian Darlings have a sweet video out for their poisonously catchy garage popper "Teenage Girl" that's made of scruffy pictures and fun tymes.
"Who would want to be an architect?" the Times asks. In answering that question, the article focuses more or less entirely on London's Bartlett School of Architecture—whose students have been producing some amazing work lately, work that I have often posted about here on BLDGBLOG. Here, here, here, and here, for instance.
But, the article claims, "Leave the future to Bartlett students and we’ll all be living in car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea." 
Reading such things easily prompts the familiar zing of schadenfreude—but it also seems totally inaccurate. If only it were as cut-and-dried as mistaking student work for what someone will produce professionally later; if only it were as easy as extrapolating from someone's earliest university sketchbooks to see how they'll someday end up.
I'm reminded here of Lebbeus Woods's recent short essay on the work of Rem Koolhaas: there was "another Rem," Lebbeus writes. Looking back at one of Rem's early projects—an unsuccessful bid for the Parc de la Villette in Paris—Lebbeus suggests:
- This project reminds us that there was once a Rem Koolhaas quite different from the corporate starchitect we see today. His work in the 70s and early 80s was radical and innovative, but did not get built. Often he didn’t seem to care—it was the ideas that mattered.
(Of course, parenthetically, Truong's formulation opens up a whole series of possible readings through which we could interpret Rem's ongoing career moves; we could say, for instance, that Rem is still "punk," to use that term deliberately, but his decisions to work for clients like the Chinese government are just him giving the finger to you. That is, if punk is a universal form of energetic rebellion, then don't assume that every punk will remain forever on your side).
[Image: From Rem Koolhaas's unbuilt proposal for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, via Lebbeus Woods].In any case, my point in citing Lebbeus's essay in this context is to agree with the Times that student work can often stand on the absolute fringes of incomprehensibility, charged with the energy of poetry, myth, or confrontational politics, even verging on functional uselessness—but it's also an ongoing joke at nearly every architecture crit I've been to over the past few years that, upon surviving their final day of project criticism, those students "can now get back to designing minimalist boxes." In other words, there simply is not the assumption in these studios that now you are prepared only for the construction of rhizomes and biomorphopedic multi-agent typology swarms. There is obviously a problem if that is all you have been taught to do; but it's not one or the other. Being taught how to make short films about architecture—more on this, below—doesn't mean you can't simultaneously be taught how to renovate a kitchen or how to market yourself to new clients.
The fact of the matter, anyway, is that very few clients today will actually pay to construct "car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea." If architecture school is the only time and place in which you can have the freedom to explore that sort of thing, then I don't see any reason why you should be told not to do so. Again, if that's all your architecture school offers you, leaving you alone to sort out the business of client management as you go, then of course your educational track needs reconsidering.
However, much of the Times's criticism seems predicated on the assumption that, if architecture is a vocational trade, similar to plumbing, then it cannot simultaneously be an expressive art, akin to film, painting, or literature. But, of course, it is both. In fact, the controversy more or less instantly disappears: architecture is the imaginative production of future worlds even as it is the act of building houses for the urban poor or the obtaining of technical skills necessary for rationally subdividing office floorplates.
[Image: From a project by Margaret Bursa for the Bartlett's Unit 11, taught by Smout Allen].Having said all this, the Times article ends up being a formulaic list of reasons why such-and-such an industry is doomed to fail—too many people want to pursue it, we read, not enough people want to fund it, and hardly anyone understands anymore what made it so popular in the first place. But replace the word "architecture" with "writing," and "Bartlett School of Architecture" with "Iowa Writers Workshop"—or use "music" and "Mills College"—and you'd get a nearly identical article.
There are some very real questions to ask about the nature of architectural education today—and, when it comes to things like how architects write, I am probably in agreement with the author of the Times article (and with many of the students quoted in the piece)—but holding up the overall profitability of the industry, and the likely financial success of its individual practitioners, as the only criteria by which we should judge an architecture school seems absurd to me.
I'll end this simply by citing some provocative statements made in the article's comments thread—provocative not because I agree with them but because they're well-positioned to spark debate. I'll quote these here, unedited, and let people discuss this for themselves.
- —The Bartlett "seem to want to be an architecture school and a school of alternate visual media culture at the same time. More often than not these agendas work against each other... They should make a choice and be clear about it. Are you training students to be architects or something else that has to do with architecture? What should a student expect to learn when they finish school? What are you being prepared for. If bartlett graduates go on to become film-makers, and video game designers, and such, maybe its a good idea to say it is not an architecture school and say it is a school of visual media. Then you will attract students with that goal in mind."
—From the same commenter: "Consider, if a school opens up and starts teaching alternative medicine (acupuncture, aromatherapy, Atkins diet, chiropractic medicine, herbalism, breathing meditation, yoga,etc), gives its graduates medical degrees and sent them off to hospitals and emergency rooms to perform surgery, a lot of people would have a problem with that. This is, in effect, what the architectural profession is doing when it allows schools like the Bartlett to give architecture degrees."
—"architectural education is still a leftover of that idea of the businessman/artiste producing unusual shapes for art critics"
—"The profession does not work. It’s economically non viable. Our work is pure iteration. Far too time consuming, and as a result, it’s impossible to charge anyone for the work we have actually done."
(Spotted via @brandavenue and @ArchitectureMNP).
I have mastered the Heimtrainer and can now cycle 30 kilometers in the comfort of my study while I gaze at the sky and the lady across the road in Beatrixgasse working in her kitchen. She obviously doesn't know I am here or she would have her blinds closed.
It is actually harder to cycle 30 kilometers on the Heimtrainer than on the bicycle as I don't get to coast down hills and slow down for roller bladers and the ancient naked men and women carrying their clothes in plastic bags across the paths on the Donauinsel.
However, I also don't have to ride into the teeth of the howling gales that infest Donauinsel.
My German Teacher Heidi Erdbeer was trained by the Gestapo and will only talk to me in German. This is the only German I actually talk – other than in shops. I don't know enough German words to have a sustained conversation so I throw in French words, Australian colloquialisms and Pidgin English. We get along fine.
She gave me a test yesterday just to let me know how little German I really know. It made me very sad to realise that after a year of not doing very much work at all on German – it has paid off – I know Bugger All.
Notwithstanding my earnest protestations I decided to upgrade to Windows 7. I did this simply because I couldn't stand the enormous number of crashes I was having each day with Vista.
It was a real struggle doing the upgrade and I had problems – but not as many as I expected. Windows 7 is now loaded – and works. So far everything I have tried actually seems to function – which in itself is astonishing – but I just know there will be some problems.
It is very, very fast. Windows open in seconds. There have not been any crashes. It is cleaner and much less cluttered that the previous versions.
Despite their best efforts this is my last windows upgrade and as next year is a PC rollover year it's Mac Time for me.
I made the best pasta dish I have ever made. I am getting to be a pretty good 'common or garden variety' cook – meaning that I can cook a number of basic dishes very well. I will never be a chef – but I can keep Cate happy with a variety of nice meals when she gets home from a hard slog at the office doing whatever it is that she does – and that's all that matters.
Anyway – I invented this pasta dish. It involves what the Austrians call Paprikas, the Australians call Capsicums and the Americans call Bell Peppers (and by the way these vegetables raw have an astonishing amount of Vitamins A and C), Pfeffer Salami, Fresh Tomatoes, Garlic, Olive Oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano (a cheese to die for).
Served with Penne this proved to be a sensation and brought a round of applause from an appreciative audience.
Melissa arrives on Friday so I am looking for opportunities to explore some parts of Wien we have not seen (there are many of these). For example – there are cemeteries as yet unvisited.
Cate goes to India on Sunday – for a week!
The cats are learning to love the fire and we can get two in front of it at the same time. Three will be a bit more difficult but we are working on it.
I haven't heard from my children in Australia for a while but assume that if they had been eaten by Lions someone would have told me (well…unless they were ALL eaten by Lions – then there would be no one left to tell me).
But as they live in different places this would entail a coordinated attack by Lions and I don't think Lions have the capacity to do that – so I am not really worried.
Lenny hasn't updated his Blog for while but he works in fits and starts. He is probably totally absorbed by the new season of a Cook Your Nuts Off or perhaps American Chopper (and it took me a long while to understand that this was not about a serial killer but is in fact about some very strange men who shout at each other a lot and build motorcycles in between shouts).
And where is Quolly?
"Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then afterward you go back to the serious stuff."
Here's Arnold in Heaven at the age of 28. Ever see such mindblowing biceps?
We went to Keszthely in Hungary – the largest town on Lake Balaton - and saw Festetics Palace.
There was no explanation about it anywhere we could find - except that it was built about 1745.
However as Palaces go it was a fine example and full of the usual old stuff. It does have an excellent coffee shop – with astonishingly good coffee.
It has delightful gardens and we took many unmemorable photos – one of which will grace this Blog soon. Merisi has probably been there so there will be much better photos on her Blog.
For reasons which we don’t quite understand we didn’t take the camera to Tihany village so were not able to record the fish on sticks performance. This is probably an annual event to coincide with the start of winter. I have put a note in my diary to go back there this time next year – provided of course that Annabella has been able to find the name of that restaurant.
This is serious – Some Truly Scary Things
Scary Thing 1
Cate employed a young woman lawyer from Germany. The woman is married to a black American and has two children. She has started work in Vienna and is looking for an apartment. She looked at one with her children – the person renting the apartment looked at the children and said:
“We don’t allow Negroes in here – if everyone stayed where they were supposed to there wouldn’t be so many problems.”
This flabbergasted Cate but Rozalin pointed out that there is much racism in Wien. It did not surprise me and reflects the many comments I have read about this type of thing on the Virtual Vienna Net which is an expatriate chat site.
Scary Thing 2
There is a report in the Austrian Times “Number of Austrian Holocaust deniers hits lowest level.”
This should be a good thing right? But….. “The number of Austrian Holocaust deniers occurred has fallen to its lowest level ever - five per cent, according to new research.”
5%?
The population of Austria is about 8 Million. Let’s assume that there are at least 4 Million functionally literate adults. That means that there are at least 200,000 Holocaust Deniers in Austria.
Holy Toledo!
They had concentration camps in Austria – I have been to one – where do these people get this information. How can they believe this in 2009?
Scary Thing 3
I have just finished reading Richard Dawkin’s latest book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. It is a wonderful, elegant, and beautifully written book about Evolution.
A table in the back of the book shows the percentages of people in Europe who responded to the proposition that ‘human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals’.
In Austria the percentage of ‘True’ responses was 57 – a good result compared to, say, the USA. But – 28% said the proposition was ‘False’ – and 15% said ‘Don’t know’.
I just don’t know what to say about this.
An illustration for an article about (dumb) animal smugglers...
other cartoons @ http://www.doodle.nl
The shouting and bouncing Helsinki-sweethearts, Le Corps Mince de Françoise, have a new video out for the upcoming single "Something Golden" due out December 7th on the French label Kitsuné.
The video feature's a lot of serious cycling action on the streets of Helsinki or was it Paris?
The third in the series of Polyvinyl's masters of timeless music is Tim Kinsella's brother, Mike Kinsella who goes by the acronym Owen.
The beautiful new album, "New Leaves" was released just on last Thursday and it can also be listened on Spotify.
There's also a new video for the song "Good Friends, Bad Habits" that feature many of Mike's friends that have bad habits and suprisingly cocky looking Mike. Also brother Tim can be spotted a few times.
The first in the series of Polyvinyl's masters of timeless music, Tim Kinsella's sweethearts, Joan of Arc, have released a nervous instrumental jam "Flowers", that looks like a madly flickering and scrolling Word-document.
The song is from their eponymous eleventh album, that can be listened at Spotify.
Dr. Georges Benjamin is executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former Secretary of Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; there his responsibilities included updating the state’s quarantine laws in response to the threat of bio-terrorism. Dr. Benjamin is publisher of both the American Journal of Public Health and The Nation's Health.
He is also co-editor, with Laura B. Sivitz and Kathleen Stratton, of the 2005 report Quarantine Stations at Ports of Entry: Protecting the Public's Health. That report consists of more than 300 pages of policy guidelines for how the United States can operate, maintain, and even expand its network of national quarantine stations. The very idea of a national quarantine policy, let alone phrases like the international "Quarantine System," can inspire, at the extreme, all manner of conspiracy-laden theories—including the specter of fully militarized, FEMA-administered concentration camps on U.S. soil. In reality, however, "today's quarantine stations are not stations per se, but rather small groups of individuals located at major U.S. airports. Their core mission remains similar to that of old: mitigate the risks to residents of the United States posed by infectious diseases of public health significance originating abroad."
A jurisdictional map of CDC quarantine stations is available online, complete with informational PDFs ready for download.
As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Dr. Benjamin about the APHA’s policy recommendations for pandemic flu quarantine, about the role of eminent domain in the medically-motivated seizure of private property, and about the architectural challenge of designing dual-use facilities for public emergencies.
Edible Geography: I was interested to read the American Public Health Association’s flu policy recommendations from 2007—in particular, to see the APHA’s emphasis on mental health support for people held in quarantine. What led to that being included in your official guidelines?
Dr. Georges Benjamin: If people are going to be confined for some time within a facility, then you want to make sure that you’re identifying those people who are already being treated for mental health issues. You want to make sure they’re getting their therapy and their medications, and you want to deal with any issue that might occur when someone has to stay alone under that level of stress.
Remember that someone who is quarantined is different from someone who is isolated. Quarantined people aren’t sick; they’re people who may get sick. They’re people who have been exposed to a disease but who are not physically ill. In many cases of voluntary quarantine, people are being asked to stay at home by themselves, or to stay self-isolated, and we need to make sure that someone is paying attention to them. We want to identify people who are not able to handle being by themselves or being in a relatively confined space—even if it’s inside their own home.
We were also concerned about making sure people have the basic needs of life: food, water, access to medical care, and access to social services. You want to make sure that you’ve addressed whatever those needs might be. All of these things were part of our package for people who might be quarantined.
BLDGBLOG: Who were the specific constituencies that called for those guidelines, and did anyone try to push you in another direction?
Dr. Benjamin: These guidelines come from our members. A lot of these discussions started way back when we were talking about smallpox, rather than pandemic influenza. We were thinking seriously about the idea of having people stay at home and be isolated, if they’re ill, or quarantined should there be a terrorist attack.
No one actually has access to smallpox now, but we were going out and vaccinating people against a potential terrorist threat, anyway. So we started having these discussions around the idea of whether or not you really needed to reinstitute large-scale—primarily voluntary—quarantine. In addition, we were talking about the risk of a pandemic.
Then, as you know, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. You had people there who, by virtue of the fact that they ended up in the Superdome, did not have all of the things they needed. Certainly a lot of that stuff had been planned for, but it hadn’t been done as robustly as it needed to have been—and, obviously, they had more people in there than they could take care of.
Our thinking, based on that experience in New Orleans, was: in an emergency situation, how do you make sure that people have what they need? And, quite frequently, the mental health needs of people are something that matters in every kind of large-scale public health emergency—whether that’s a tornado, a hurricane, the flu, or an event where large numbers of people have died. It’s one of those things that people don’t really think about ahead of time, unless you remind them to think about it.
Our recommendations don’t just apply, by the way, to the people who are confined; there are huge stresses on the people who are managing those events. The EMTs, the paramedics, and the public health personnel who are all actually managing things can be really challenged—and you have to pay attention to them, too.
[Image: Sample covers of the American Journal of Public Health; design by Kropf Design].BLDGBLOG: The APHA has also written about who exactly should have the authority to make decisions about who goes into quarantine and why. Can you talk us through your policy on that issue?
Dr. Benjamin: First of all, we try to guide by the least restrictive policy possible—and, to the extent that someone can be voluntarily in quarantine, that’s our first principle. Voluntary quarantine and the least restrictive quarantine possible is what we think is the most important way to start.
Simply giving people the facts about a disease process and keeping them well-educated and well-informed long before you’re going to need to take any action is the best policy. We, as an association, along with our colleagues in the federal agencies, have been trying to talk to the public about what the risks are for various diseases. How do you catch a disease—and how do you not catch it? How you protect yourself? How do you protect your loved ones? Usually, armed with this information, most people will follow the basic recommendations.
However, to the extent that you have to have compulsory quarantine—because you have someone who is continuing to put people at risk—then that is imposed, in the United States, by public health authorities. They have powers, mostly at the state and local level: those powers give them the authority to incentivize people not to put others—or themselves—at risk. In some cases, they can do that by having the police authorities act; in other cases, they have to go to court first. It depends on the individual jurisdiction.
In most cases, federal authorities’ powers end at the borders of the nation and then at the borders of each state. They can deal with issues across state lines, in some cases, and, of course, at our national borders and at ports of entry; but most of these quarantine authorities rest at the state and local health officer level.
BLDGBLOG: Has any of that legislation been revised in light of SARS, H1N1, or even the anthrax attacks?
Dr. Benjamin: There has been a national effort to modernize our public health laws. A lot of them were written years and years ago.
For instance, I was a state health official in Maryland from 1995 to 1999, and I was the secretary of health in Maryland from 1999 to 2002. During that time we began a process, which we finished when I was secretary, to update and modernize our laws. We had started talking about it before 9/11, but after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks , we realized that biological terrorism was a significant risk, and we really worked to strengthen the public health laws.
To give you an example of the kinds of changes and updates we made: we worked to put in some additional patient protections. The law at that time gave the health secretary enormous police powers to hold and to quarantine individuals—but there were no rights or rules for those individuals, or regulations about what they needed to receive while they were in confinement. The assumption was, of course, that they would get reasonable support and care—but we felt it was very important to guarantee that.
So we worked with several members of our advocacy community to strengthen the authority that the health officer had, and to make the authorities that I had at the time, as secretary of health, much clearer. But, on the same token, we were writing in protections. We guaranteed people due process. We guaranteed that, if we had to forcibly confine someone, then they would get medical care, social services, and social supports that they actually need. We put that in writing.
Other states around the nation have begun doing the same thing. There have been some public health law centers set up through various foundations, and they have also been working very hard to strengthen the various laws. There was a model public health law—I think it was produced with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and several of the public health groups working with them. That law was then shared with all of the states and their elected officials, and it was used as a template through which states could look at their own laws and see how they matched up to the model.
Some states simply took the model and implemented it, exactly as it was written; some took pieces of it out; others took it and said, no, compared to the law we currently have, ours is better and we like ours. Either way, it served as a useful catalyst for people to begin looking at their own public health laws—not only in terms of the authorities that the public health officer had around isolation and quarantine, but also about reportable diseases, which diseases ought to be reported, and how, and who should do the reporting. There were also things that we added around patient protections, citizen protections, and due process. And there were sections that meant to clarify existing law, based on case law in the state, or nationally.
That work has been going on since late 2001, and it continues to this day in a variety of formats.
[Images: Hong Kong's entire Metro Park Hotel was put under quarantine for seven days after an H1N1-positive Mexican tourist stayed there in May 2009; "psychologists were on standby," we read. All photos courtesy of the China Post].BLDGBLOG: In terms of these public health laws, where can quarantine occur? It was interesting during the SARS outbreak in Toronto, for instance, to see that hotel rooms were simply repurposed as temporary quarantine facilities.
Dr. Benjamin: Quarantine can occur anywhere—that’s the short answer.
Remember that quarantine is basically telling someone who has been exposed to a disease, even if they haven’t come down with that disease, to stay away from others, and to stay somewhere that we can observe them and see if they get sick. Functionally, that can occur anywhere—as long as you have the support that you need, and as long as you’re not kept somewhere where other people will be at risk. For someone who’s quarantined, a hospital is probably not a good place for them, because there are sick people in that hospital and, in any case, the hospital will usually need those beds.
Let’s say I travel to England for a business meeting, and there’s a big infectious disease outbreak. They’re not quite sure what it is, but I could theoretically have been exposed. They don’t want me to travel back home because they don’t want me on an airplane; I could expose people on that airplane. So they ask me to stay in my hotel room, and to get room service. That’s probably a perfectly reasonable request—as long as you know that, in everybody who’s had this disease, it shows up within 48-72 hours. It might be very inconvenient, but, in the interest of public health, somebody could ask me to do that. Now, there are issues around the air circulation in the hotel, and whether or not that’s appropriate—but let’s just assume that it is. From the APHA perspective, that request would be fine, particularly if you have somebody who can call and check on you a couple times a day and make sure that you’re not getting sick in the hotel room.
Now let’s say this happens at a wedding party taking place at a small hotel. For all practical purposes, if everybody at that hotel had been at the wedding, it would be reasonable to ask everybody to stay at that hotel—and, actually, they wouldn’t even have to stay in their rooms. They could be out and amongst each other, as long as they were fully informed about the symptoms that you get when you start to come down with whatever this disease process is. If those symptoms start to show, those people would then self-isolate, call public health authorities, and tell them, “I’m in my room, and I’ve got a cough and a fever, and I didn’t have that yesterday.”
If it turns out that this disease process is something mild, and we know you can take care of it there in the hotel room, then we’d probably just say, OK, isolate yourself in the hotel room. Before, you were able to get up and walk around the hotel—no big deal—but now you have to stay in your room. We’ll have the concierge send up your meals, and we’ll give you some Tylenol for your temperature. If it was something like H1N1—or some other viral illness that we knew is susceptible to antiviral agents—then we may very well give you antiviral agents, too. Of course, we’d also have the hotel doctor come up and see you. However, we would still ask you to stay in your room. That’s a voluntary isolation, now, within a quarantine facility, because you’ve been separated from everybody else.
The people who run the hotel, on the other hand, could say that they really don’t want this sick person staying in the hotel, for whatever reason. We’d then actually ask you to come out of the hotel; we’d come pick you up; and we’d take you to someplace else where people are being held and provided with medical care. At that point, you’re in isolation. It could be a hospital; it could be another facility. It could be a hotel; it could be a home. It could be anyplace where they’ve designated that as an isolation point. Again, in most cases it would be voluntary.
So it depends—these examples show that quarantine could take place anywhere, in a variety of forms.
[Images: (left) Reporter Will Weissert, quarantined in China, receives his lunch sealed in a plastic bag; (right) Weissert's wife receives a medical check-up in the hotel room].BLDGBLOG: Things like eminent domain and the government seizure of private property—these legal issues surely play a role in quarantine guidelines?
Dr. Benjamin: You’re right—and we’ve had long discussions about those issues.
For example, let’s say we have to isolate people due to a very severe disease process. In most cases, when people are sick enough, they need to, and are willing to, go to a hospital—but one of the challenges we’ve found is that hospitals don’t want to be known as the “X-disease hospital”: the SARS hospital, the swine flu hospital, the smallpox hospital. There’s some history there—in the United States, it began with places that became known as tuberculosis sanatoriums. If the public begins to shun a place because they’re afraid of catching a disease that has somehow been associated with that hospital, then it takes that hospital out of business—even if you only have one or two cases.
We saw this during the anthrax attacks at hospitals where somebody had been exposed, in whatever way, to anthrax. Even though we know anthrax is not a contagious disease, we had patients who were very concerned—at OBGYN services, in particular. Pregnant women just wouldn’t go to that hospital. As it turns out, we only had a very few cases of anthrax, but the press got onto this, and they publicized the fact that a person with anthrax had been at this particular hospital. Then that hospital had patients who were concerned about going there. So, of course, what we had to do was get on TV ourselves and say: “No, no, you don’t need to worry about that. It’s not contagious. That’s not how you get anthrax. You can still go there; you can still deliver your baby there.” But reassuring the public is sometimes very difficult. In many cases, it’s more about fear than anything else.
The other piece of this is that, if you have a disease outbreak that is so widespread that you have lots of sick people, then it’s unlikely that you’ll have only one hospital impacted. One of the fallacies of people worrying about their hospital being the SARS hospital, or their hospital being the smallpox hospital, or the flu hospital, is that, in most cases, those diseases are so infectious that lots of cases are already in the hospital environment. They’re in the ER, in the outpatient clinics, etc. One hospital might have an intensive care unit, and the very sick patients may end up in that unit—but the other hospitals in the area will end up taking care of the outpatients. The likelihood of only one hospital being the hospital with a particular disease process, and being stigmatized because of that, is very low.
There are exceptions, of course: let’s say you’ve got a research hospital and it has a novel therapy, and the only way to get that novel therapy is by going there—well, that hospital is going to end up with a disproportionate number of those patients. That’s one of the communication issues that hospital is going to have to manage with the public.
Now, to your question, many of the public health laws do have statutes that allow for the taking of stuff. In Maryland, for example, the state can confiscate your facility—and it’s not just your facility: it could be your pharmaceuticals; it could be your box of syringes. If the state declares an emergency, and it has the authority of the law and it goes through the proper procedures, then, yes, it can confiscate things.
But what we did in Maryland was we clarified a few things: firstly, that you would be compensated. We thought that was very important to put in. We also wanted to make sure that it requires extraordinary efforts to make it happen. In Maryland, for instance, a disaster has to be declared by the governor, and there’s a legal process that one has to go through in order to confiscate someone’s stuff.
A lot of the plans in the U.S. for where we’ll put sick people raise some interesting issues. For example, some of these plans say that if we need to expand bed-space beyond the hospitals, then we need to use schools, gymnasiums—anyplace where you have a wide-open ward. Of course, there’s a big debate going on about whether those are the best places for these folks—and the reason for that debate is that they’re not built as health facilities. You couldn’t put your sickest people there. You might be able to quarantine people there—people who are well enough to get up and wash their hands and go to the bathroom, etc.—and you might be able to put people there who are moderately ill, but you couldn’t put very sick people there. It’s simply not set up as an intensive care unit.
The other thing to remember is that, even though you’ve got a disease outbreak going through your community, you still have the other, baseline disease processes. There are still heart attacks and strokes and people with seizures and kids with fever unrelated to the flu or unrelated to the infectious disease going on. You still need beds for people at ICUs for heart attacks, and you still have to treat cancer. The management challenge is to make sure that local providers don’t set up a process, of either isolation or quarantine, that deprives them of the resources they need to maintain their ongoing health system.
Edible Geography: Where are the gaps, as you see it, in public preparations for quarantine?
Dr. Benjamin: There are a couple of things I can think of right away. There’s the public education aspect that we and our colleagues are continuing to work on—there’s always more that could be done there.
The other thing is that we need buildings and facilities that have multiple uses. When you build hospital emergency rooms, for example—and it’s been fascinating watching this shift occur—we’ve gone from a situation where people had individual rooms in the ER to open-bed concepts. But what you need is flexibility. You need facilities flexible enough to accommodate multiple purposes.
You remember I talked about a gym being utilized as a potential quarantine spot? Well, some of the issues that get in the way of that are that there are not enough electrical outlets. You can’t bring up walls to partition the place in a way that easily allows you to isolate one group and quarantine another. There also isn’t the plumbing, and there probably aren’t enough bathrooms. You’ve put a lot of people together who may have a disease—and now you have a problem, because not everybody can wash their hands. We’re all using hand sanitizers today, and they’re wonderful, and they work; but, frankly, good old soap and hot water is the best thing to use.
Then again, most elementary schools were designed for little people, and now you’re about to put a bunch of adults in there; they might not have as many soap dispensers as you need, or the bathrooms are too large, or the toilets are too low, or there aren’t enough sinks. Or, again, maybe the sinks aren’t in the right place: they’re not by the bedside where infection-control needs to occur.
Building an environment that thinks about these other potential uses is extremely important, for places like hotels or gyms or the other big spaces that might be used to hold a bunch of people. And, by the way, quarantine is only one need for those things: as part of our overall public health preparedness, we have to look at putting people up because of a hurricane, or floods, or a tornado, or a big infectious outbreak.
The single-center principle means that a place needs to be flexible enough for large numbers of people, and in which you can have adequate infection-control, adequate toilet facilities, and adequate food facilities so that everyone can eat.
If we build places that do those kinds of things, then they’ll meet all the needs for isolation, all the needs for quarantine, and all the needs for housing people in an emergency.
[Images: Shuhei Endo's "tennis dome/emergency center" (left), photographed by Kenichi Amano, next to the New Orleans Superdome, post-Katrina].BLDGBLOG: That actually reminds me of some stadiums in Japan that were built both as sports stadiums and as earthquake-disaster centers. There’s food and water stockpiled in the basement, the entryways are sized for emergency vehicles, and so on. How would you recommend this sort of architectural adaptation, on a policy level?
Dr. Benjamin: We wouldn’t have much trouble convincing the presidents of universities today, who are already challenged with a disease process big enough to affect the whole student body. In the United States right now, with H1N1, the number of sick kids is big enough that they’re having to manage those kids on campus. For a disease process in which people are going to be sick for five or seven days, it’s unrealistic to send them home once they’ve shown up on campus. Colleges are having to deal with accommodating them right now. You can bet that, at least on college campuses in the United States, they would be very sensitive to this idea of dual-use facilities, because there’s an operational need for it.
The second thing is, if I was trying to do this, I would be working directly with architects and engineers, convincing them of the need to do it and then letting them sell it. They can say how best to do this, in a way that does not obstruct the primary purpose of the facility. We don’t want to interrupt anyone’s football games, but at the moment, everyone says, yes, we can put people here but it’s only going to happen once or twice in my lifetime, when the truth is that, if you design it that way, then you could use it much more frequently for that purpose. You could get dual-use out of it. Getting the people who design these places to tell us how to do it, in an appropriate and cost-efficient manner, and then having them make the case to the owners and users, so that they know that this is value added to their facility: that’s how I would get this message across.
Then I would talk to elected city and state officials about ways they could leverage tax-payer dollars to get these dual-use facilities built. Let’s say I’m in city government and I have someone coming up to me wanting the city to put up tax-payer dollars to support the building of a football stadium or a basketball stadium or a new school. If I get this additional bonus—this dual-use that helps my emergency-preparedness—I’m more likely to want to use taxpayer dollars to support it. Increasingly, as you know, private sector guys are coming to the government and asking for fiscal support to build these facilities. If tax-payers are going to be paying for things, then the city or the community needs to get something out of it.
I can tell you that a lot of work had to be done to fix and clean the New Orleans Superdome—but if you had built it so that it could be much more functional in an emergency situation then you would have had less damage. And from an image perspective, a dual-use sports facility now has much more of a public value.
That’s my personal view, not the Association’s view; but I think it’s an effective argument.
This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a coursepack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.
For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes, The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen, and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford.
More interviews are forthcoming.