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

Monthly Archives: March 2010

March 29, 2010 – 12:00 pm

a “cyborg planet”

At the excellent Human Landscapes, Erle Ellis (you may know him from his Wired Science article from last May, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet”, which you should stop and read right now if you have not) suggests that we need to start thinking about (and, presumably, constructing) a “cyborg planet”, where machines can feed […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 29, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: proposal

[A portion of the Alameda Trench, a cut in the surface of Los Angeles which runs “ten miles long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-three feet deep”, carrying over $200 billion in cargo each year, as photographed by Lane Barden for The Infrastructural City; image via a Places Journal slideshow] — UPDATE: this book club is […]

By mammoth | Posted in readings | Tagged , | Comments (54) | Permalink
March 22, 2010 – 8:00 pm

clui spring newsletter

[Part of the James River ghost fleet, one of the three remaining floating stockpiles in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, via wikipedia] CLUI’s spring Lay of the Land surveys the American landscape of ship breaking (which is largely fed by the Congressionally-mandated dismantling of the ghost fleets), develops a linkage between Kodak Park (“said to […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
March 19, 2010 – 12:30 pm

geodesign

In an article at Architect, Loud Paper‘s Mimi Zeiger explores the growing entanglement of GIS and BIM applications, and the potential impact of this relationship for architecture: Loosely defined as the integration of geographic analysis and tools into the design process, the term “geodesign”… as Dangermond [the president of ESRI, makers of ArcGIS] sees it, […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
March 16, 2010 – 8:00 pm

geologic helium machine

[A portion of the Cliffside field snakes tentacles across flat pasture concealing ancient anticlines.] Just outside Amarillo, Texas, the Cliffside field stores much of the nation’s helium reserves in a naturally-occurring geologic dome. It is part of a complex of partially-privatized fields, mines, domes, and pipelines which extends nearly two hundred miles north-south, from the […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments Off on geologic helium machine | Permalink
March 16, 2010 – 6:00 am

places on architectural criticism

While mammoth by no means aspires to fit within the category of architectural criticism (though we do occasionally have something to say about it), Nancy Levinson’s recent meta-criticism of the genre in Places strikes me as essentially correct: By now the rules are so familiar they seem almost inevitable. We’ve come more or less to […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, meta | Tagged , | Comments (7) | Permalink
March 15, 2010 – 6:00 am

the shelter category

Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication.  For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”: “What do cities look like in the eyes […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, finance, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
March 13, 2010 – 9:39 pm

infrastructure construction as jobs stimulus

Free Exchange posted this chart emphasizing the challenge long-term unemployment poses in this recession. It seems to indicate that construction-based stimulus could be especially effective in reducing such unemployment, furthering the case for a stimulus program emphasizing the construction and repair of infrastructure. But there’s just not that much room to cut unemployment by putting […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on infrastructure construction as jobs stimulus | Permalink
March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm

future forests of the eastern seaboard

[Mapping the transference of botanical threats from Japan to the Midwest, from a video presentation on Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in the Great Lakes region] From a recent article in the Guardian: Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
March 8, 2010 – 6:00 pm

landscapes of quarantine

[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape […]

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March 7, 2010 – 3:54 pm

productivity signaling and size borrowing

Ryan Avent, who maintains the indispensable blog The Bellows, is one of my favorite writers on economics and urbanism. He recently drew attention to two interesting papers which are related to his response to an article in the the American Prospect by Alec MacGillis which was critical of Richard Florida (which mammoth previously highlighted). Avent contends […]

By Stephen | Posted in economics, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
March 2, 2010 – 11:18 pm

from bogota to nyc

Fast Company author Cliff Kuang writes about New York City’s adoption of rapid-bus transit solutions developed in Brazil and Columbia: Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city’s bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It’s expected […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
March 2, 2010 – 11:00 am

absent rivers, ephemeral parks

[American Falls de-watered, via Flickr user rbglasson] For six months in the summer and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion.  During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (21) | Permalink