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

Monthly Archives: September 2010

September 30, 2010 – 10:28 pm

fake cyborgs

Readers who are both familiar with mammoth and the 50 cyborgs project are likely expecting a post arguing that cities are, in fact, cyborgs. It’s true. They are. And I’ll be happy to argue the point in the comments should anyone wish. But at the risk of straying too far from typical mammoth topics, I […]

By Stephen | Posted in other, technology | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 27, 2010 – 10:27 pm

landscape maintenance

FASLANYC writes about the possibility of re-thinking the constitution, role, and importance of the maintenance manual, an idea which seems to me to be wholly appropriate to the practice of landscape architecture.  Surely the languid pace at which the commands contained within a maintenance manual are executed (as FASLANYC suggests, “manual” need not be read […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments Off on landscape maintenance | Permalink
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm

staging ground

[Detail from Andrew tenBrink’s “Staging Ground”; all images in this post are from “Staging Ground”; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink.  In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, student-work | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
September 20, 2010 – 6:58 am

sub-plan

[A drawing from SUB-PLAN; click to enlarge] I’ve mentioned before that we try not to link to things that we suspect you, our readers, are already reading; this, of course, means that we rarely link to some of our favorite blogs.  However: BLDGBLOG‘s latest missive — which is on David Knight and Finn Williams’ explorations […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged | Comments Off on sub-plan | Permalink
September 17, 2010 – 8:10 pm

a cyborg arboretum

[Not a cyborg plant, but certainly technobotanical; image by NL Architects via Inhabitat] 1. This post is for 50 Posts About Cyborgs. 2. This is a cyborg arboretum.  That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs.  Not augmented […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures | Tagged , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
September 17, 2010 – 7:44 am

obama’s national infrastructure bank

Infrastructurist has a quick summary of reactions to the Obama administration’s proposed National Infrastructure Bank.  (The reactions are mostly positive, from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and The New Republic.)  Of course, enthusiasm for the proposal — which, as far as I can tell, is an excellent idea — should be grounded […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Comments Off on obama’s national infrastructure bank | Permalink
September 16, 2010 – 6:27 am

commuting, wireless, and desirability

Writing for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel now, Alexis Madrigal makes a simple but important argument about how cellphones and other mobile devices, by enabling new ways of life, are affecting the form and density of cities: …the latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, technology, urbanism | Tagged | Comments Off on commuting, wireless, and desirability | Permalink
September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm

networked containers

[A portion of the port of Tianjin — radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, futures, infrastructure, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on networked containers | Permalink
September 13, 2010 – 4:43 pm

architects without architecture

As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related, what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future of architecture in the wake of global economic […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, economics, infrastructure, interviews, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (6) | Permalink
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm

fifty posts about cyborgs

To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, futures, technology | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink