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

Monthly Archives: November 2009

November 24, 2009 – 4:18 pm

the new dutch water defense line

There’s nothing particularly original about the observation that the Dutch have a peculiar national relationship to their landscape (and, in particular, its hydrology), but that peculiarity produces endlessly fascinating oddities and, apparently, endless mammoth posts on Dutch hydrology.  As lewism noted on one such post, Bulwarks and Flux: …the whole of Dutch landscape and history […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
November 20, 2009 – 12:53 pm

ordos, under construction

Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.

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November 19, 2009 – 2:32 pm

this place is best shunned and left uninhabited

[“Landscape of Thorns”, concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years] Triggered by the recent revelation that tests at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reveal that a seemingly innocuous white substance filling a glass bottle dug up in 2004 is actually “the oldest existing […]

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November 18, 2009 – 12:16 pm

pueraria lobata

A couple months ago, The Dirt highlighted an article from the Times about Alabama’s “War on Cogongrass”, in which Alabama’s forestry commission and a hired company of landscape managers, Mobile’s Larson & McGowin, deploy a series of escalating military metaphors (“killer”, “the Perfect Weed”, “war project”, “parallel attacks”, “eradicate”) against that rather aggressive species. Angela […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
November 17, 2009 – 4:33 pm

varnelis interview at triple canopy

Kazys Varnelis follows up his recent interview of Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) by himself being interviewed, at Triple Canopy (whose last two issues on urbanism are indispensable): Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve […]

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November 14, 2009 – 5:31 pm

landscape infrastructures: posthumous live blog

Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and therefore […]

By mammoth | Posted in asides, dialogue, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm

the cloud

You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium.  The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 8, 2009 – 10:32 pm

beneath the antarctic ice

[Composite false color image of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a 7-mile-long, 33-foot-high sheet of ice projecting off the Erebus glacier in Antarctica, carved into unusual shapes by the summer waters of McMurdo Sound; via Wired Science: “During the summer, when the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo melts, the ice tongue floats on the […]

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November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am

readings: hydrologically situated infrastructures

Whether immense re-configurations of watersheds on a geological scale or fine and playful tunings of the interactions between city-dwellers and the infrastructures that deliver their water, those that transmit water or those that sit on and in it, the intersection of hydrology and infrastructure is a continual fascination for mammoth. Image from Yue Yuan Zheng’s […]

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November 5, 2009 – 10:59 pm

park supermarket

Dutch architects van Bergen Kolpa (with research ecologists Alterra) propose a “Park Supermarket” for the Randstad, transforming polders — historically landscapes of food production, now pressured by both development and rising waters — into a park subdivided into new climate zones (“moderate, Mediterranean, and tropical”) and constructed hydrological conditions (basins for the cultivation of tilapia, […]

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November 2, 2009 – 1:08 pm

re-inhabited circle-k’s

[“Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM”; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K’s include “a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and […]

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