2010 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

July 17, 2010 – 1:07 pm

risk

These are chapters eight and nine of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. Thinking about the new urban landscape and public space and wondering where to start, I suddenly remember how, as a boy, I built my first crystal receiver […] You would […]

By Stephen | Posted in economics, infrastructure, mammoth book club | Tagged , , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
July 15, 2010 – 7:00 am

latent

A blog post whose sentence structure, when diagrammed correctly, unfolds to reveal the blueprints for some strange building.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Comments Off on latent | Permalink
July 13, 2010 – 10:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter eight index

[Image via flickr user Grahamko] Yes, we’ve fallen a bit behind with The Infrastructural City.  But we’ve got a plan to remedy that — we’re pushing back the schedule.  This is actually less because of our lag (this week was supposed to be an “off” week, so we’d be caught up with Stephen’s hybrid “Mobile […]

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 11, 2010 – 2:00 am

soccer city under construction

[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander’s photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg — site of today’s final — but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in […]

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July 7, 2010 – 8:00 pm

sid meier and peter cook

Serial Consign has posted an excellent short essay on the overlap between representations of cities in video games and representations of cities in architecture: Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural […]

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July 6, 2010 – 7:00 am

soccer city, in infrastructural context

Soccer City stadium, site of Sunday’s World Cup final, is the largest stadium in Africa — though it seats a bit under ninety thousand spectators in its current configuration, which sacrifices spectator seating in favor of “reserved seating” for the press, FIFA officials, and other “Very Important Persons” — but even its bulk is relatively […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 5, 2010 – 3:05 pm

infrastructural city update

Just quick note to let you all know that last week’s chapter, Cell Structure by Ted Kane and Rick Miller, and the upcoming week’s Counting (On) Change by Roger Sherman have been rolled into a single post, which should go live sometime in the next several days. Polis have published their take on Cell Structure […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, mammoth book club | Tagged | Comments Off on infrastructural city update | Permalink
July 5, 2010 – 1:31 pm

“waits awards”

FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy.  Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, readings, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged | Comments Off on “waits awards” | Permalink
July 3, 2010 – 9:48 pm

transposed sporting landscapes

After a rather exciting series of quarter-finals, and in anticipation of the semi-finals: the last fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and Germany, transposed onto urban landscapes near Lyon by the artists collective Pied La Biche: [Seen at Polis; Pied La Biche were last spotted playing three-sided anarchist-rules soccer on a hexagonal […]

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June 29, 2010 – 9:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter seven index

[A “feral house” in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, mammoth book club | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 22, 2010 – 2:27 pm

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.  With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
June 22, 2010 – 10:04 am

FAT, falcons

At Action!, Rory Hyde has written a great review of ‘extra/ordinary’, the national conference of the Australian Institute of Architects. Framed around a description of work presented by Elemental, Teddy Cruz, and F.A.T., the post raises some of the same issues we’re discussing in mammoth’s recent post on The Infrastructural City. On the necessity of a […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, mammoth book club | Tagged , | Comments Off on FAT, falcons | Permalink
June 20, 2010 – 5:30 pm

ordinances, sculpted

[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 19, 2010 – 3:32 pm

inside svalbard

[For more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, see our hyperbolically-named post on the best architecture of the decade]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 19, 2010 – 11:15 am

changing rooms and holding cells

[Iconeye goes inside the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, Green Point, ignoring facades and roofs in favor of spaces we rarely see: changing rooms, holding cells, offices, and, above, the pre-match warm-up room; photographs by Justin McGuirk.]

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June 17, 2010 – 9:00 pm

starting from zero

This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments (17) | Permalink
June 15, 2010 – 9:20 pm

additional traffic

Since it’s now buried below a mini-avalanche of posts and I doubt anyone will notice the updates unless I point to them, I’ve added a few things to the chapter five (“Blocking All Lanes: Traffic”) index below.  To further ease your reading experience, the links added are: contributions to the traffic discussion from Nam Henderson […]

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June 14, 2010 – 5:30 pm

of jane jacobs and ipods

An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly: …Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 12, 2010 – 12:41 pm

driving blind

The following is a guest post from Tim Maly — of the excellent Quiet Babylon — concerning the topic of traffic and The Infrastructural City. About a year ago, a business trip found me camped out with my laptop in the top floor lounge of a hotel in LA, overlooking the San Diego Freeway. There […]

By tmaly | Posted in guest post, infrastructure, mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
June 11, 2010 – 9:32 pm

as-built on the pitch

[‘Alan Ball — full match’, working drawing (ink on trace); artist David Marsh] Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966.  Using archival footage played back at quarter- and […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink