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

Monthly Archives: October 2010

October 28, 2010 – 6:00 am

dead website archive

[David Garcia Studio‘s “Dead Website Archive”, from MAP-003 “Archive”; read about the Dead Website Archive at DPR-Barcelona.]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 27, 2010 – 8:48 pm

pathological superpositions

I’ve mentioned before my fondness for the blog Pathological Geomorphology, but this month’s theme is particularly fantastic: the interface of human landscapes and geomorphology.  In Green River, Utah (above), for instance, an extinct oxbow determines contemporary land-use patterns; other examples so far include farmed alluvial fans in Asian deserts, Pennsylvania farmland interspersed between anticlines, and […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

the new north

[Murmansk in polar night, photographed by flickr user euno.] The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ‘services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, futures, geography, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on the new north | Permalink
October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am

backyard farm service

[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic’s “Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed.  There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette […]

By rholmes | Posted in finance, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
October 24, 2010 – 2:28 pm

future legitimacy

BLDGBLOG recently ran an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which sent me plunging back into the BLDGBLOG archives to re-read a trio of interviews that Geoff conducted in 2007 with Inaba and two of the other editors of Volume, Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley.  I could share any number of excerpts from those interviews, as each […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, readings, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments Off on future legitimacy | Permalink
October 22, 2010 – 6:31 am

competing geometries

[Barchan dunes — the recent, light sandy formations — layered atop older longitudinal dunes — darker, subtler lines roughly traced southwest to northeast — and braced against the pure Suprematist geometry of pivot irrigation along Idaho’s Snake River; via NASA Earth Observatory.]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments Off on competing geometries | Permalink
October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm

golden gate estates

[An abandoned portion of the “Golden Gate Estates” — a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960’s — whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn’t been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 7, 2010 – 7:38 am

magnasanti

[Screenshot from “Magnasanti”] Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game.  A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning.  Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, urbanism | Tagged | Comments (9) | Permalink
October 3, 2010 – 2:43 pm

“it just makes things different”

[Flushing Airport, one of New York City’s “places humans let be”, via Google Maps] Robert Sullivan’s recent article on the renaissance of urban ecology in New York City, The Concrete Jungle, is so outstanding that I’ve been sitting on it for two weeks, paralyzed by the plethora of great quotes I could pull from it. […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 1, 2010 – 11:58 am

wearable homes

[“Mono Lake”, 2008, from Mary Mattingly’s “Nomadographies”] If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other.  In between, there would be “clothing”.  And if you really want to confuse […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink