2010 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

June 10, 2010 – 4:55 pm

urban crude

While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail.  Oil wells sprout like hardy […]

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June 8, 2010 – 10:28 pm

alternate los angeles no. 2

[An artist’s conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970’s, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including “the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River […]

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June 6, 2010 – 11:22 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter five index

A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation […]

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May 31, 2010 – 10:05 pm

jam, hack

This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. [Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90] “Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the […]

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (10) | Permalink
May 31, 2010 – 1:51 pm

a tertiary river

[Aerial photograph of sludge mats swirling in the Los Angeles River by flickr user Vision Aerie] As we’re about to jump scales in our reading of The Infrastructural City — from the post-natural ecologies and mining operations of the first section of the book, “Landscape”, to the networks of cell towers and cable lines featured […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 28, 2010 – 5:00 am

“a state of perpetual fracture”

[“The faults induced by military speleogenesis will lead to gradual yet certain failure of the jet noise barrier.”] Nick Sowers (Soundscrapers) has recently posted a series at the Archinect school blog project exploring his recently-completed thesis project from a succession of disciplinary perspectives, which he titles the Archaeologist (who introduces the project), the Forensic Engineer, […]

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May 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter four index (updated may 31)

[Jake Longstreth’s “Skybox”; while the pit mines and flood-control apparatus found in Irwindale are one particularly spectacular kind of marginal landscape, there are many other kinds, exhibiting varying degrees of marginality, including speedways — such as the Irwindale Speedway — and the ubiquitous suburban strip.] DPR-Barcelona returns to a familiar theme for that blog, the […]

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May 26, 2010 – 5:00 am

3rd coast atlas

Readers of mammoth may be interested in contributing to the 3rd Coast Atlas, “a platform for research and design initiatives that explore the urbanization, landscape, infrastructure and ecology of the Great Lakes Basin and Great Lakes Megaregion.”  Submissions — which may take the form of written essay, design project, research, or visual essay — are […]

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May 25, 2010 – 8:00 pm

geology as infrastructure

Smudge Studio’s Geologic Time Viewer re-casts the “official Geologic Time Scale” as not only a way of looking back into the past, but also a window into the present: “the materialities of every previous geologic epoch flow into the present-as-middle and give form to our daily lives.” We learn, for instance, that iron infrastructures, like […]

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May 25, 2010 – 7:00 pm

alternate los angeles no. 1

[Narrow Streets L.A. is a blog which posts photographs of greater Los Angeles streets, digitally manipulated in exactly the way you would expect from the title: made narrower.  While occasionally it may go a bit overboard and lurch towards self-parody, generally it is a fantastic experiment — postcards from an alternate Los Angeles — showing […]

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May 24, 2010 – 5:00 am

“for every pile there is a pit”

We’re back from our week off with another installment of Reading the Infrastructural City; if you haven’t been following along, you can catch up on the series here and see the introductory post here. [Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI] The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural […]

By mammoth | Posted in landscape, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
May 18, 2010 – 11:00 pm

feedback: architecture’s new territories

[The Bou Craa conveyor, which is similar to the Negev desert belt previously discussed on mammoth, carries phosphate across the desert in Western Sahara, leaving the wind-swept sediment shadow above, and is the longest conveyor belt in the world; seen at deconcrete, image via bing maps.] It would befuddle me if there were anyone who […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, readings, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 18, 2010 – 8:00 pm

teenagers and young people, in the city like locusts

With the publication of their latest issue, The Atlantic Monthly launched a month-long sub-site that they’re calling “The Future of the City”, which interests us for obvious reasons.   In particular, the articles on the potential of private transit and post-Jacobsian urbanists are worth reading (and if I get a chance I’ll pull excerpts from […]

By rholmes | Posted in readings, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (35) | Permalink
May 14, 2010 – 1:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter three index (updated 17 may)

[Crude City today: a woman crosses oil pipelines in the Niger delta; photograph by Ed Kashi for National Geographic.] Nam Henderson ponders the relationship between urban density and oil production in Los Angeles, and wonders if future landscapes might develop from the evolution of Leo Marx’s classic formulation, the machine in the garden, to the […]

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May 11, 2010 – 11:52 am

oildorado

You’ve arrived at week three of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It’s cliche to reference dinosaurs when describing the oil well pumps which are ubiquitous throughout the LA basin, but as a 5 year old obsessed with those prehistoric […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
May 10, 2010 – 6:00 pm

youth of today

One of the best of the print architectural critics, Christopher Hawthorne, writes about his recent visit to Medellin in the LA Times, and offers a well-rounded evaluation of the significance of the notable projects completed there in the past decade.  While the most important thing about Medellín’s new architecture is, as Hawthorne writes and mammoth […]

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May 6, 2010 – 10:56 pm

lo-fi seed dispersal

[Prepared Greenaid seedbombs, awaiting dispersal; photograph by Fletcher Studio via Sustainable Cities Collective] Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 5, 2010 – 8:38 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter two index (updated 6 may)

[A still from Gumball Rally, via motortrend.com. As high-speed races on the clogged freeways of Los Angeles have become increasingly implausible, the wide-open expanse of paved riverbed has proven irresistible to filmmakers.] SUPRbrains’ “The Lowline” hypothesizes futures for the river as a series of Tschumi-esque event-spaces. F.A.D.’s “Visual Histories of the Los Angeles River: Past and Envisioned […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Tagged , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
May 3, 2010 – 5:00 am

“the parrot, the weed, and the sludge mat”

You’ve arrived at week two of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here — taking particular note of the index of contributing posts for the first chapter, which tracks the sprawl of the discussion across other blogs. [The lower reaches of […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (22) | Permalink
April 28, 2010 – 9:00 am

solar owens lake

In the comments at DPR-Barcelona, David Maisel points us to a pair of news articles on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s latest plan for the Owens Lake playa: The Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners [in December] unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, mammoth book club | Tagged , | Comments (19) | Permalink