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

Monthly Archives: June 2010

June 29, 2010 – 9:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter seven index

[A “feral house” in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, mammoth book club | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 22, 2010 – 2:27 pm

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.  With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
June 22, 2010 – 10:04 am

FAT, falcons

At Action!, Rory Hyde has written a great review of ‘extra/ordinary’, the national conference of the Australian Institute of Architects. Framed around a description of work presented by Elemental, Teddy Cruz, and F.A.T., the post raises some of the same issues we’re discussing in mammoth’s recent post on The Infrastructural City. On the necessity of a […]

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June 20, 2010 – 5:30 pm

ordinances, sculpted

[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 19, 2010 – 3:32 pm

inside svalbard

[For more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, see our hyperbolically-named post on the best architecture of the decade]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 19, 2010 – 11:15 am

changing rooms and holding cells

[Iconeye goes inside the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, Green Point, ignoring facades and roofs in favor of spaces we rarely see: changing rooms, holding cells, offices, and, above, the pre-match warm-up room; photographs by Justin McGuirk.]

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June 17, 2010 – 9:00 pm

starting from zero

This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments (17) | Permalink
June 15, 2010 – 9:20 pm

additional traffic

Since it’s now buried below a mini-avalanche of posts and I doubt anyone will notice the updates unless I point to them, I’ve added a few things to the chapter five (“Blocking All Lanes: Traffic”) index below.  To further ease your reading experience, the links added are: contributions to the traffic discussion from Nam Henderson […]

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June 14, 2010 – 5:30 pm

of jane jacobs and ipods

An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly: …Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to […]

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June 12, 2010 – 12:41 pm

driving blind

The following is a guest post from Tim Maly — of the excellent Quiet Babylon — concerning the topic of traffic and The Infrastructural City. About a year ago, a business trip found me camped out with my laptop in the top floor lounge of a hotel in LA, overlooking the San Diego Freeway. There […]

By tmaly | Posted in guest post, infrastructure, mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
June 11, 2010 – 9:32 pm

as-built on the pitch

[‘Alan Ball — full match’, working drawing (ink on trace); artist David Marsh] Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966.  Using archival footage played back at quarter- and […]

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June 10, 2010 – 4:55 pm

urban crude

While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail.  Oil wells sprout like hardy […]

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June 8, 2010 – 10:28 pm

alternate los angeles no. 2

[An artist’s conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970’s, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including “the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River […]

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June 6, 2010 – 11:22 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter five index

A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation […]

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