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

Monthly Archives: November 2010

November 30, 2010 – 12:44 pm

silk moses

Esquire profiles Janette Sadik-Khan in their series The Brightest: 15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope. Although it initially seems curiously focused on her personality instead of her accomplishments, the piece makes a convincing case that the two are inseparably linked, and as such, is a good example of the political and social acumen that designers […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on silk moses | Permalink
November 29, 2010 – 3:14 pm

generative capacity

At the end of October, Hillary Brown — founding principal of New Civic Works, a consulting firm which “promotes the adoption of sustainable design principles for buildings and infrastructure”, as well as a professor of architecture at the City College of New York — published an article on Places entitled “Infrastructural Ecologies: Principles for Post-Industrial […]

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
November 22, 2010 – 7:00 pm

out in the wind, above ground, out in the weather

[Appropriate for the gradual approach of winter in the mid-Atlantic: photographs from Alexander Gronsky’s “The Edge”, a series of shots taken along the outer boundary of Moscow; via @ballardian.  Thinking about whitesward and glacier wrap again…]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm

tools

In the comments on “fracture-prone” — where I argued that the set of political measures that New Urbanists tend to focus on are a necessary component of the urbanist’s operating toolkit, but not nearly sufficient — Carter says: I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, the-city-we-have, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Comments (10) | Permalink
November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am

territories of urbanism

On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program.  The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm

fracture-prone

[An image from Mark Luthringer’s “Ridgemont Typologies“] In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want? Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
November 14, 2010 – 6:00 am

heygate abstracted

Architect and photographer Simon Kennedy’s exhibition 635×508: Heygate Abstracted opens at the Bartlett School of Architecture this Monday.

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November 12, 2010 – 6:00 am

blueprint’s oddly misdirected second salvo

Not content with Tim Abrahams’ misdirected broadside against architecture blogs last spring — which badly missed its target by calling out the explicitly curatorial Things Magazine for failing the project of architecture criticism — Blueprint has now printed a similarly misdirected second salvo against various prominent architecture bloggers, again accusing them of not being sufficiently […]

By rholmes | Posted in meta | Tagged , | Comments (4) | Permalink
November 5, 2010 – 5:00 am

editing urbanism

MONU issues a call for submissions for their Winter 2011 issue, Editing Urbanism: These days, the need for new buildings or entire city quarters is decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether – at least in the Western world – due to the demographic changes and financially difficult times. Ever since, architects and urban designers, […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, the-city-we-have | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 4, 2010 – 6:45 pm

readings: blogs

[Nadav Kander, “Changxing Island VI, Shanghai”] 1. I am pretty sure that I have mentioned it before, but I have really been enjoying deconcrete. Somewhere between blog and tumblr, deconcrete posts fascinating scraps and ephemera themed roughly, as the subtitle notes, around “everyday urbanisms without architects’ architecture”. Recent posts, for instance, pair a fictional vision […]

By rholmes | Posted in readings | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 2, 2010 – 6:00 pm

bracket(s)

[An image from mammoth‘s contribution to Bracket 1: On Farming, “Hydrating Luanda”.] Places excerpts a piece from the soon-to-be-published first volume of Bracket.  In the excerpt, Mason White sketches towards a description of an alternate trajectory within twentieth century architecture, which he terms the “productive surface”: Productive surfaces articulate a new public realm, and with […]

By rholmes | Posted in meta, readings | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on bracket(s) | Permalink
November 1, 2010 – 5:55 am

hatherly on hadid and schumacher

At Mute Magazine, Owen Hatherly picks at tensions in the rhetoric and built work of Zaha Hadid Architects, with a particular emphasis on both the claims Patrick Schumacher makes about parametricism as a new avant-garde and the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, one of ZHA’s recent buildings.  Though it is not entirely representative of the […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on hatherly on hadid and schumacher | Permalink