Tarmac Adam, Tarmac Eden
The most interesting stories about design are not design stories. They are the ones that allow us to think about the nature of design outside of the constraints of professions, clients, budgets and so on. And one of those if the story of the origins of the tarmac road. At its heart is a clumsy smash at the crossroads of geology, chemistry, economics, and city planning. A British county surveyor, Edgar Hooley, travelling the bumpy roads of Derbyshire came across a hard, smooth section. Curious, he asked how this patch had formed. The locals told him that a barrel of tar had accidentally fallen off a cart. To mop it up, slag from a blast furnace had been sprinkled on top. Hooley, recognising some potential in this gloopy recipe began experimenting. In 1902 he patented the process of heating tar adding slag or macadam to the mix then breaking stones within the mixture to form a smooth road surface. He formed TarMacadam (Purnell Hooley's Patent) Syndicate Ltd in 1903 and registered Tarmac® as a trademark. But like most innovators, he couldn't turn a big idea into a big business. He sold up to a Wolverhampton steel manufacturer who saw a way of turning furnace leftovers into cash. Sir Alfred Hickman formed a company called Tarmac, still doing business today. Tarmac is a sophisticated and forgiving kind of infrastructure. Its sophistication lies in its anticipation of changes, as though it remains perennially provisional. As its dug up and patched to accommodate the alterations, improvements, mistakes, extensions and erasings that operate on its surface. Mending and change are intrinsic to its characteristics, which one might regard as a capacity for forgiveness. Like glass, tarmac never sets completely solid, which means - if you think about it in the right way - our streets are really slow-moving rivers of thick black substance. A viscous gloop in whose depths lurk stringy wires and lumpy pipes like the chocolate topping on a crunchy muesli bar. On very hot days you can feel its velvety softness with your heel. Most road asphalt is a by-product of crude oil processing. Once all the valuable bits have been removed, the denuded leftovers are made into asphalt. While the Situationits claimed that the beach lies beneath the pavement reality, however, is more exotic. Roads are million year old sludge drawn from deep beneath the ocean - a sticky kind of dirt, rearranged into linear patterns. Even now a truck and a roller are adding a three-lane bypass extending freshly pressed blackness on to the horizon fresh, crisp and clean. It glistens like overnight snow, only blacker and harder. Its surface is as full of smooth promise as wedding cake icing. Its empty beauty asks you to dream of stepping barefoot onto its unspoilt new world. Surrounded by forests of signposts, and hosts of golden yellow sodium lamps, a Wordsworth of the highway might write Tarmac poetry - in deeper loneliness behind the wheel than one might ever find in the Lake District. Perhaps the real modern poets are those who create these landscapes: The Capability Browns of the motorway system or Gertrude Jekels of the parking lot. Tarmac is a brand new skin for the earth. It makes the world seem newborn and alien - and perhaps for a moment, more sublime than the craggy, scuffed old planet beneath. Perhaps highway engineers are driven by a sublimated desire to experience a fleeting moment of earth as an unspoilt paradise. Maybe they dream of being Tarmac Adams in a Tarmac Eden.
Images via
It's like mud that's been edited. Tarmac is an abstract version of the ground, somewhere between soil and stone. Dark, compressed, inert and flat it lays a consistent skin over the surface of the planet - consistent in meaning, appearance and performance. It is endlessly extendable and always, exactly the same.
Posted by anothersam at September 6, 2008 9:44 AM.
Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
Other:
|
Links:
IconEye
Leave a comment