February – 2010 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: February 2010

February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am

katabatia

[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it’s been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast.  […]

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February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm

“blooming landscape, deep surface”

[Model of “Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface”; all images from and by Smout Allen] I can’t let Stephen’s mention of Smout Allen pass — particularly in the context of a discussion of process and event in architecture — without also saying a word about their proposal for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is one of my […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on “blooming landscape, deep surface” | Permalink
February 26, 2010 – 1:20 pm

saharan miami

[The future soil of Miami, captured by satellites while drifting off the coast of Africa.] At InfraNet Lab, Mason White posts about “Particulate Swarms”, or three storm typologies: dust, water, and gas.  The first image in the post, of a dust storm over Sydney, reminds me (because in my haste, I mistakenly read the form […]

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February 26, 2010 – 11:01 am

translation, machines, and embassies

The following is another contribution to the constellation of blog posts supporting the Glacier/Island/Storm Studio at Columbia University; read mammoth‘s previous Glacier/Island/Storm posts. LANDSCAPE MACHINES In Magic, Machines, and Architecture, published in Pidgin 6, we find a gloriously simple description of the function and nature of machines by a participant in a course at Princeton […]

By Stephen | Posted in geography, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
February 25, 2010 – 10:29 pm

islands draw the clouds, and glaciers are wind-catchers

[Above, the volcanic peaks of the South Sandwich Islands distort wave patterns over the Pacific Ocean, through processes described, and, of course photographed, by NASA Earth Observatory: …the islands disturb the smooth flow of air, creating waves that ripple through the atmosphere downwind of the obstacles. The cloudy-clear pattern that is produced highlights the location […]

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February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am

chinampas

[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri.  The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 24, 2010 – 1:56 pm

thilafushi

[A ferry arrives at Thilafushi, the world’s largest island composed primarily of garbage, in a photograph from an excellent photo-essay on Thilafushi by flickr user AB Watson Year.  Thilafushi, which is located in and was constructed by the Maldives on the site of a former lagoon, spreads across 124 acres in the Indian Ocean, ever […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm

the north american storm control authority

[Comparative historic and contemporary heat maps of the wind energy potential of the continental United States, via NASCA.gov; NASCA documents indicate sources for their imagery include AWS Truewind/NREL via Wired Science and NOAA/NASA] The North American Storm Control Authority (NASCA), like its predecessor, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which rebuilt the Rocky […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, speculative-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm

a glacier is a very long event

The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm

readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors

[all photographs from Andrea Frank’s series “Ports and Ships”] 1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool: Where […]

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February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm

paul kersey, yimbyist

Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”.  I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, […]

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February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm

double happiness

Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Comments (3) | Permalink
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am

the dead sea works

I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC‘s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 5:22 pm

but do they know how you take your coffee?

Charles Petersen, in the New York Review of Books, on the rise of facebook. If anything, Zuckerberg looks, in some distant but discernible way, like the Robert Moses of the Internet, bringing severe order to a chaotic milieu. While several efforts have been made to create more open versions of social networks, none has found […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on but do they know how you take your coffee? | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm

mine the gap

Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate […]

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February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm

vancouver whitesward

[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (“snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations” and “organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down”), via NASA Earth Observatory.  Read more about whitesward at […]

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February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm

metropolis prognostications

[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source] In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade.   It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
February 8, 2010 – 3:27 pm

olympic ballardia

[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG’s call for a “J.G. Ballard of contemporary China” (or drive home Kongjian Wu’s repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the “empty shells” of Beijing’s Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; […]

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February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm

readings: the digital city

1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]

By rholmes | Posted in readings, technology, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm

the city beneath the city

Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink