October – 2009 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: October 2009

October 28, 2009 – 9:27 am

the museum of innocence

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul businessman, and the forbidden affair that derails his life, which is relatively standard stuff. What is fascinating, though, is that Kemal’s obsession with the affair leads him to collect an assembly of objects from […]

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October 26, 2009 – 1:53 pm

claiming involuntary parks

[Taiga at the glaciated and lake-spotted meeting of Finland and Russia] The European Green Belt is an initiative to develop a pan-European conservation system as “an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black Sea”. Picking out the Cold War line of division between East and West, the initiative aims to thicken and […]

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October 26, 2009 – 9:22 am

metaphor and landscape

faslanyc has a good piece on the weakness of metaphor as a grounding literary device for landscape architecture.  The post is in reaction to Andrew Blum’s “Metaphor Remediation”, recently run in Places. I approvingly cited Blum’s article a couple times, so I re-read Blum’s article with faslanyc‘s criticism in mind.  Having done so, I think […]

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October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am

polis on suburban cairo

Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct […]

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October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am

the atlantic on new orleans

Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]

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October 21, 2009 – 3:35 pm

vanished speedways

[Local speedway in Lancaster County, South Carolina; this is the speedway that sang me to sleep on Saturday nights for roughly twelve of the first fifteen years of my life] In the comments on my post on soccer as a diagram traced on an exported landscape, Stephen notes that : The landscape of [Formula One] […]

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October 21, 2009 – 11:33 am

extraterrestial infrastructure

“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.

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October 20, 2009 – 3:39 pm

an assortment of links relevant to previous conversations

1. On the relationship between sports and urbanism, see Pruned on urban golf. Which led me to think that soccer might similarly be deployed with a similar future of appropriation, accomodation, commercialization, abandonment, and absorbtion, only to discover, via the Office for Unsolicited Architecture tumblr, that urban soccer has already been deployed as an architectural […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, readings | Comments (3) | Permalink
October 20, 2009 – 10:25 am

as diagram traced on exported landscape

[photograph by Maximilian Haidacher, via polar inertia] The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are […]

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October 19, 2009 – 12:20 pm

ownership culture

[“Subdivision: Sunshine Acres”, by Ross Racine.] Thomas Sugrue, in a Wall Street Journal article on the American culture of home ownership from August: Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation’s saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 1:30 pm

TED talks architecture

I’m loving the architecture series of TED talks – 20 minutes seems to be the perfect amount of time to get a handle on the key driving forces behind an architect’s practice. Also, the TED audience (which as far as I can tell is comprised mainly of brilliant non-architects) forces architects to talk about their […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm

our collective spatial memory, modeled

From the description of the above video at PopSci: Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, speculative-architecture, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 12:19 pm

toxic waters

The New York Times is running a fantastic series on “worsening pollution in America’s waters and regulators’ response.”

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October 16, 2009 – 11:11 am

paris on the anacostia

A New Urbanist (edit: see comments for update) proposal to channelize the Anacostia and extend a modified version of the L’Enfant Plan to its newly narrowed banks, summarized here, is attracting a bit of attention here in DC (also here, here, and here). 1As commentator “Capitol Dome” notes at Greater Greater Washington, the plan proposes […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (21) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 8:58 am

camouflaged lockheed

[the Lockheed air terminal in Burbank, camouflaged during World War II for the benefit of Japanese aviators; via greg.org, who suggests that perhaps the next version of the ‘Bilbao Effect’ will be for struggling cities to commission similarly flimsy roofscapes for the benefit of the google maps audience; originals in a california state collection here, […]

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October 15, 2009 – 9:34 am

abandoned sites as energy production fields

[The Lackawanna Eight, windmills located in Buffalo on the former site of a Bethlehem Steel facility; background via bing maps] A partnership between the EPA and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is looking at the advantages of re-purposing contaminated sites as production sites for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power (dull report here and slightly […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 14, 2009 – 11:00 am

edward burtynsky, oil

[oil field maintained by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, photographed by Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes), via dpr-barcelona; visit Burtynsky’s website for additional images from the book] Edward Burtynsky’s latest book and exhibition explores the landscapes of, machinery that produces, and products dervied from oil: “When I first started photographing industry it was out […]

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October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am

city, battlesuit, archigram

A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence […]

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October 13, 2009 – 12:42 pm

places at design observer

The architecture/urbanism/landscape journal Places has recently taken up residency at Design Observer; notable new articles include a review of The Infrastructural City by Chris Stooss (with attached slideshow of Lane Barden’s wonderful photographs from that book), an article on the relationship between landscape architecture and ecology (excerpted from a new book on Michael Van Valkenburgh, […]

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October 13, 2009 – 10:04 am

city of sound, sentient city, continued

I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images.  Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and […]

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