2010 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
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.] […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 30, 2010 – 6:00 am

on “dubai-bashing”

Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are writing about research from Al Manakh at the Huffington Post, describe what they call the phenomenon of “Dubai-bashing”, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai.  While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (16) | Permalink
July 28, 2010 – 8:00 pm

“a tax credit or a zoning change”

Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together: “…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 28, 2010 – 6:00 am

foodprint: toronto

[Architect Christ Hardwicke, whose project “Farm City” is pictured above, is one of the diverse group of panelists assembled for Foodprint: Toronto.] Google Analytics tells me that Canadians make up the second largest portion of mammoth‘s readership and that, of you Canadians, approximately one-quarter are located in Toronto.  Neither of these facts are particularly surprising, […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, events | Tagged , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 27, 2010 – 2:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter nine index

“Once a vast carpet of healthy vegetation and virgin forest, the Amazon rain forest is changing rapidly. This image of Bolivia shows dramatic deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Loggers have cut long paths into the forest, while ranchers have cleared large blocks for their herds. Fanning out from these clear-cut areas are settlements built in […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 26, 2010 – 2:00 pm

the infrastructural district

[At the Washington Post, photographer David Deal steps inside, above, and beneath the District of Columbia’s infrastructure and other hidden spaces — the “Third Street Tunnel blower room”, pictured above; Blue Plains settlement ponds in Southwest; the specimen room at the Natural History Museum; the Hecht Company warehouse on New York Avenue; and so on.]

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July 26, 2010 – 6:00 am

distribution

We’re reading The Infrastructural City.  This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week.  Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary. [An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden’s photo-essay “The Trench”, which follows […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
July 24, 2010 – 4:10 pm

the revealing habits of human beings, and other tips for urban navigation

In an “Op-Art” at the New York Times, author Tristan Gooley and illustrator Ross MacDonald share with us fascinating tips for “navigating the urban jungle” (tips which would fit neatly into Free Association Design‘s call for a study of embodiment and urbanism, like a manual for enhanced urban sensory awareness).  The prevailing winds can be […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 22, 2010 – 9:53 am

SMALLATLARGE

“The objective is to convey 55 years of experience in the architectural profession and say what I can before the end comes.”

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, asides, Links | Comments Off on SMALLATLARGE | Permalink
July 19, 2010 – 9:38 pm

queryable urban landscapes

Adam Greenfield (Speedbird) wrote a brief piece a bit over a week ago for Urban Omnibus entitled “Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism”, which is worth a read.  Greenfield first extrapolates from services like New York City’s 311 and the UK’s FixMyStreet the probable development of an “urban issue-tracking board”, “visual and Web-friendly, […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments Off on queryable urban landscapes | Permalink
July 18, 2010 – 11:41 am

“anchors in a mutable field”

[“City Market”, a photomontage of the negotiated space of flower market in Bangalore, from Mathur and da Cunha’s 2006 book and exhibition Deccan Traverses; image via Places] In addition to describing a theory of the transactions that govern the interactions between property owners, Roger Sherman’s “Counting (on) Change” also makes the broader argument that architects […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink