mammoth // building nothing out of something

Yearly Archives: 2010

January 8, 2010 – 1:27 pm

ruins, colosseums, squelettes

Read Quiet Babylon‘s recent post on the slow production of ruins, scrubbing post-boom projects from architectural portfolios, fifteen hundred years of adaptive reuse of the Coliseum in Rome, and more; Maly gets bonus points for including a Wittgenstein anecdote of dubious provenance.

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January 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm

object fixations

I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention.  In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth‘s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay […]

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January 7, 2010 – 1:36 pm

florida, continued

Since I posted a link to Alec MacGillis’s piece on Richard Florida, it’s worth also posting links to Ryan Avent’s critique of the piece, MacGillis’s response, and Avent’s response-to-the-response-to-his-critique. [update: see also the Next American City‘s commentary]

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January 5, 2010 – 2:45 pm

“the ruse of the creative class”

Alec MacGillis has an appropriately harsh look at a decade of Richard Florida in the American Prospect. [via @loudpaper]

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January 5, 2010 – 12:07 pm

glacier wrap

[“Ice Protector OPTIFORCE®”, in situ; images via Eiger International] Or, the second implement in a developing toolbox of landscape tactics for the deployment of snowed architecture: a new f*cking wilderness reminds me that the Swiss have been wrapping their snow to preserve it (and their ski slopes) through the summer, hoping to stave off the […]

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