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

Monthly Archives: October 2009

October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm

urban systems design and the architectural disciplines

You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City.  A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, landscape-architecture, meta, technology, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Comments (3) | Permalink
October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm

translators for the networked city

Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK: …the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. In fact, it’s surpassingly […]

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October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am

dan hill on the sentient city

City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant to themes […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, readings, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
October 8, 2009 – 9:28 am

zibo

[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China.  Zibo is […]

By rholmes | Posted in urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on zibo | Permalink
October 7, 2009 – 9:22 am

ephemeral infrastructures

Between 1999 and 2004, Ruth Dusseault documented the transformation of Atlanta’s derelict Atlantic Steel Industries complex into Atlantic Station, a massive (138 acres, with a budget exceeding two billion dollars) residential and retail development.  The photos reveal a fascinating but ephemeral landscape marked by raw and unfinished structures that are eventually buried beneath more civilized […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 6, 2009 – 12:00 pm

brodsky’s ice pavilion

[Alexander Brodsky‘s pavilion on Lake Pirogovo, near Moscow, via flickr user Yuri Palmin.  Described in Metropolis in 2006: …in winter 2003 a team of laborers under his direction trudged out onto [Lake Pirogov’s] frozen surface and, in the frigid conditions, assembled a rectangular mesh cage about 40 feet long and 8 feet high that they […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm

burnham’s centennial

Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to […]

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October 1, 2009 – 4:41 pm

gameworlds

[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting] Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, technology, urbanism | Tagged | Comments (5) | Permalink