2010 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

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 […]

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 […]

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.]

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 […]

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 […]

“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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]