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, and so focusing on two projects by Van Valkenburgh’s office, including the TerraGRAM High Line scheme that I’ve previously mentioned my fondness for), and UrbanLab’s eco-boulevard proposal for Chicago, “Growing Water”. Places has also placed either the entirety or an extensive portion of their archives online (I haven’t done the work of figuring out which), which means that you can pair The Infrastructural City’s (warranted) skepticism about the ability of infrastructure to “rescue” architecture with Linda Samuels’s “Infrastructural Optimism”, from the spring issue of Places. Or read Whitney Moon’s “Reclaiming the Ruin”, on “ad hoc, underground, and unsanctioned practices” as a “remedy for postindustrial ruin”; Dana Cuff on “Design after Disaster”; or Stephen Luoni on the ramifications of the emergence of the nonprofit sector, as expressed through architecture in Little Rock.
[link via varnelis]
