March – 2011 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: March 2011

March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm

a short aerial tour of the arrival of canadian oil in the united states

[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
March 30, 2011 – 6:00 am

in and out of the terrain of water

[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.] This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm

stabilization

[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm

aerotropolis

[FedEx’s “Superhub” at Memphis International Airport; via Bing maps.] 1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis.  (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.)  The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree […]

By rholmes | Posted in economics, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 14, 2011 – 6:21 pm

slugging

[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
March 12, 2011 – 1:05 pm

infrastructure without architects

[Photo of Global III, by Alan Berger via NAi Publishers] Approximately seventy-five miles due west of the gleaming towers of Chicago’s Loop, Union Pacific Railroad, the United States’ largest railroad company, operates the Rochelle Global III Intermodal Facility, twelve-hundred acres of switching yards, train tracks, loading facilities, and container-sized parking spaces.  Rochelle, a small Midwestern […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, infrastructure-without-architects, landscape-architecture | Comments (3) | Permalink
March 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

ecologies of gold

[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments Off on ecologies of gold | Permalink
March 5, 2011 – 6:00 am

“highway proposals never die, they just get more expensive”

[Library of Congress images of Robert Moses and Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, via Pruitt-Igoe‘s flickr set] 1. A couple months ago, Slate published a series of articles by Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic, which I hear is excellent) on “Unbuilt Highways”, which began with the installment “How a Road Can Change a City, Even […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink