mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm

mine the gap

Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments Off on mine the gap | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm

vancouver whitesward

[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (“snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations” and “organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down”), via NASA Earth Observatory.  Read more about whitesward at […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments Off on vancouver whitesward | Permalink
February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm

metropolis prognostications

[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source] In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade.   It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
February 8, 2010 – 3:27 pm

olympic ballardia

[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG’s call for a “J.G. Ballard of contemporary China” (or drive home Kongjian Wu’s repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the “empty shells” of Beijing’s Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments Off on olympic ballardia | Permalink
February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm

readings: the digital city

1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]

By rholmes | Posted in readings, technology, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm

the city beneath the city

Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 1, 2010 – 9:32 pm

requisite iPad post

My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything.   The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t.  Instead, here […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, finance, technology | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 30, 2010 – 9:45 pm

haiti rewired: quinta monroy, hackability, incremental housing

For a bit over a week now (presuming I’ve got the timeline right), Wired‘s been building a very interesting community at their subsite Haiti Rewired, aimed at developing “tech and infrastructure solutions for Haiti”.  A couple of items there tie back into the themes mammoth discussed in relation to Quinta Monroy: first, this brief post […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 29, 2010 – 4:39 pm

the large higgs field galactic archive

This post was originally written for inclusion in our list of the decade’s best architecture, but then excluded, both for fit and because we realized the novel it references — Darwinia — was published in 1998. [We haven’t got any images of the Large Higgs Field Galatic Archive, for reasons that will become obvious, so […]

By Stephen | Posted in speculative-architecture | Tagged | Comments (2) | Permalink
January 29, 2010 – 2:21 pm

high-speed rail funding

The Transport Politic reviews the distribution and impact of this week’s high-speed rail funding announcement in a cautiously optimistic fashion, with the important caveat that “eight billion dollars of spending won’t be enough for even one true high-speed line”, while Infrastructurist explains why the prioritization of the Orlando-Tampa line, which is slated to receive $1.25 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments Off on high-speed rail funding | Permalink
January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm

the best architecture of the decade

[The Large Hadron Collider] The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture.   But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, economics, engineering, finance, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, meta, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (71) | Permalink
January 22, 2010 – 2:38 pm

alan berger interviewed

While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare.  The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
January 19, 2010 – 12:45 pm

“the landscape of contemporary infrastructure”

Urban Tick has a review of a new publication, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, which catalogs a variety of (mostly high-profile) infrastructural projects designed by architects in the past couple decades. Though I haven’t read the book, the first point of critique that Urban Tick makes is quite astute and demonstrates a common problem in […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 15, 2010 – 12:41 pm

analog civic maintenance

Jeff Maki writes at Urban Omnibus about New York City’s steam tunnels as a potential analog precursor to future mass civic participation in the maintenance of urban infrastructure, which may be an increasingly necessary  tactic, given the massive repair deficit North America’s urban infrastructures face.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
January 13, 2010 – 5:56 pm

simcity baghdad

[update: thanks to commenter цarьchitect, a screen capture from a demo for SIM Building, a program of the sort which likely provides the underlying architecture for UrbanSim] An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 12, 2010 – 8:11 pm

re-industrial detroit

An interesting article by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at The New Republic looks at how Detroit might recover from decades of decline; this includes looking at how Detroit might be re-industrialized (the re-industrial path is an even more fascinating proposition than the well-tread path to post-industrial health, though there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
January 12, 2010 – 1:13 pm

the scale of infrastructural landscapes

[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco’s salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps] I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , | Comments Off on the scale of infrastructural landscapes | Permalink
January 11, 2010 – 9:54 pm

the blind watchmaker

[A manhole near Halifax marks the Canadian arrival point for one of the eleven major cable lines carrying the bulk of trans-Atlantic Internet traffic; photographed by Randall Mesdon; from this excellent Wired slideshow on the physical infrastructure of the internet; the text accompanying that show is by Andrew Blum, whose forthcoming book on said infrastructure […]

By rholmes | Posted in the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
January 11, 2010 – 4:05 pm

“utopia redux”

Lebbeus Woods has a fantastic piece, “Utopia Redux”, on the collages of Daniel Meridor, a student at the Cooper Union; the second paragraph, in particular, is a succinct summation of where young designers find themselves after the first decade of the third millenium: Meridor’s generation—a younger one—has no faith in grand architectural plans to make […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 10, 2010 – 9:58 pm

church machine

Today I finally got around to watching “Church Machine”, a short video project from a GSD studio run by Michael Meredith of MOS, which popped up just before Christmas. The video is the work of a student named Matt Storus and is well worth the sixteen minutes it’ll take you to watch it, as it […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink