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

Monthly Archives: August 2010

August 31, 2010 – 6:16 pm

our decrepit infrastructures

In the wake of last Monday’s Long Island Rail Road snafu — where “a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys installed nearly a century ago” knocked out train service for hours — the New York Times looks at five other American infrastructures which are exceptionally vulnerable due to the combination […]

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August 28, 2010 – 8:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index

[The Studio Zone, a 30-mile radius in Los Angeles which serves to determine the “rates and work rules for workers in the entertainment industry”; the majority of Los Angeles’ prop houses are located within the Studio Zone; image via the California Film Commission] Robert Sumrell’s “Story of the Eye: Props”, noted elsewhere: DPR-Barcelona skip between […]

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August 27, 2010 – 11:53 am

props

[Omega/Cinema Props’ C.P. Three, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue; via bing maps] At some point, presumably, continuing to open our commentaries on The Infrastructural City by noting that the chapter of the week — in this case, Robert Sumrell’s “Props” — reads significantly different from the other chapters will ring […]

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August 26, 2010 – 6:56 pm

roosevelt pneumatic

[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com] Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system: In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, […]

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August 25, 2010 – 7:43 pm

“tim burton’s inception is not a film that needs to be made”

A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky).  At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films. While the most important thing to note when correcting […]

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August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm

“what to do when there is nothing to do”

[“Weather Field”; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative] As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, interviews, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
August 19, 2010 – 1:23 am

kotkin contra khanna

[Sorting facilities at Port of Singapore in the foreground, downtown Singapore in the background; via flickr/Storm Crypt] Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the […]

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August 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm

spillway on jacobs

Will Wiles writes about the veneration of Jane Jacobs by New Urbanists, delving into his own history of reading Jacobs and coming back out with a series of well-made points, from the realization that battling over the legacy and proper reading of a single urbanist like Jacobs is rather unhelpful, to noting that proximity to […]

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August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm

“global hubs and mega-cities”

[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf’s series “Architecture of Density”] In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state: The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures, geography, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
August 16, 2010 – 7:00 am

“cheap land, abundant power, and accessible fiber optic lines”

[Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon; photographed by flickr user The Impression That I Get] In A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes, mammoth briefly described the Google data center in The Dalles; in an excellent recent article, local The Dalles Chronicle reporter Theodoric Meyer investigates the relationship between Google and local public officials, the […]

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August 14, 2010 – 3:41 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index

[Bird’s-eye view of “Wal-(medley mixed-up mélange montage mash-up shopping)mart”, an absurdly-titled (but also somewhat light-hearted) proposal for a Wal-Mart on the Gowanus Canal, drawn by (then?) Yale architecture students Alexander Maymind & Cody Davis; read an in-depth interview regarding the project at Archinect.] Catching up (post-viral and sister-visiting-from-Mongolia break) on the Infrastructural City, with two […]

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August 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm

public landscapes of distribution

[A model from SITE Architects’ series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don’t think this particular one was built (I’d like to be told I’m wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.] […]

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August 5, 2010 – 1:00 pm

robert overweg

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2” pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of […]

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