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

Monthly Archives: May 2011

May 31, 2011 – 5:38 pm

visualizar ’11

[Nerea Calvillo’s “In the Air” — “a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air” — Visualizar ’08] A brief interruption to the flood-blogging (which will resume shortly, with more on 1927 and crevasses) to note that I’ll be speaking in Madrid at Visualizar ’11 “Understanding Infrastructures”.  The […]

By rholmes | Posted in events, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 28, 2011 – 5:00 pm

artificial crevasse

[Before the 1928 Flood Control Act, the Mississippi River flood control plan consisted of two basic elements: levees and outlets.  Earthern levees would hold the water back.  When necessary, outlets would be utilized to divert flood waters.  In an emergency, more levees could be created with sandbags; more outlets could be created by blowing levees […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 27, 2011 – 1:00 pm

the mississippi river flood of 1927

[Map prepared by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey (the fore-runner of today’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of that year.  The map shows “flooded areas and the field of operations”.  The great devastation produced by the 1927 flood — it flooded an area approximately equal to the […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 27, 2011 – 6:00 am

unusual flood typologies ii: scabland

[The unusual agricultural pattern of eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” can be traced to a (series of) massive glacial outburst flood(s) which cut the deep into the region’s volcanic basalt, leaving fertile plateaus and barren, rocky valleys.  Mammoth looked at that event, the Missoula Floods, in a post last year, “a glacier is a very long event”. […]

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May 26, 2011 – 5:00 pm

suspension

[In the summer of 1916, a pair of cyclones — one coming from the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in Mississippi, the other coming from the Atlantic and landing in Charleston, South Carolina — poured torrential rains (“all previous 24-hour records for rainfall were exceeded”) across the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially […]

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May 26, 2011 – 10:00 am

unusual flood typologies i: dam failure

[Friant Dam, on the upper San Joaquin in California, filled to the top in spring of 2006.  Though the dam held, downstream flooding ensued.  When a dam does fail, as the Teton Dam did in 1976 or the Toccoa Creek Dam did in 1977, the flash-flooding that occurs can be deadly, resulting in relatively high […]

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May 26, 2011 – 6:00 am

a century of significant floods

[“During the 20th century, floods were the number-one natural disaster in the United States in terms of number of lives lost and property damage. They can occur at any time of the year, in any part of the country, and at any time of the day or night. Most lives are lost when people are […]

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May 25, 2011 – 8:00 pm

“waiting for the chute to open and the bull to come out bucking”

[Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah; the reservoir’s primary dam is highlighted in red.  In anticipation of record summer floods, the reservoir’s waters are “being released as fast as [they] can flow”, making space in the reservoir to hold snowmelt.  Downstream, rafters are finding that typical rafting trips of two-and-a-half hours are […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 24, 2011 – 6:00 am

floods

The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun.  We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding.  Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
May 22, 2011 – 6:00 pm

urban field manuals

[Photographs from Christoph Engel’s series “Exterieur”, which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscape-architecture, publications, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 11, 2011 – 8:26 am

matter battle sublime

[Gravity Probe B, the most perfect sphere humans have created, comes within 40 atomic layers of matching its Platonic Form. The litany of innovations it took to conduct a theoretically simple experiment – one which needed precise execution – is a testament to the wondrous complexity of meatspace.]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, engineering, technology | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on matter battle sublime | Permalink
May 11, 2011 – 6:00 am

the maracanã as public space

Nate Berg has a nice article in the New York Times on how Brazil’s Maracanã — the massive stadium built for the 1950 World Cup, where some two hundred thousand spectators watched the final between Brazil and Uruguay — has traditionally served as an important public space (“a rare type of space in Rio where […]

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May 9, 2011 – 7:00 pm

the economist on american infrastructure

[“Enroute high” aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com.  American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose “imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space” […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
May 9, 2011 – 6:00 am

island infrastructures, border towns, and unknown fields

There are a lot of things you could do this summer. Unknown Fields [Baikonur Cosmodrome, via Unknown Fields Division] Liam Young and Kate Davies lead the 2011 edition of this “annual nomadic studio” on an expedition through “landscapes of obsolete futures” in the former USSR: This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first […]

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May 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

i-beams and networked screens

[A pair of projects by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living); top, Amphibious Architecture; above, Living Light.] The thirtieth anniversary issue of Metropolis has a number of great articles in it (and I hope to write at length shortly about one of those, Andres Duany’s apology for the New Urbanism), so I’d recommend picking […]

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May 3, 2011 – 1:10 pm

a pre-modern critique of the new urbanism

A minor point, but this is kind of fascinating — a critique of New Urbanism which, rather than going the common route of charging New Urbanism with nostalgic pre-modernism, argues that New Urbanism is insufficiently pre-modern — in this specific case, arguing that New Urbanists have praised a certain kind of narrow traditional street but […]

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May 3, 2011 – 9:08 am

splash house

A group of graduate architecture students from Parsons’ Design Workshop is attempting to (partially) fund an unsolicited project called Splash House using Kickstarter: The Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center is an invaluable place for kids to play and learn. Yet for several months every summer the Washington Heights community is denied this critical resource when […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, finance | Tagged , | Comments Off on splash house | Permalink
May 2, 2011 – 9:32 pm

predictive gis and geospatial intelligence

A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software […]

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