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

Monthly Archives: September 2011

September 30, 2011 – 11:59 am

blue plains

Last spring, Mammoth visited the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. This massive facility — which claims to be the largest plant of its particular kind in the world — exists to remove the solids that the 2 million residents of Washington, D.C. and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia introduce into wastewater from their parking […]

By mammoth | Posted in district-surrounds, fecal-matters, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
September 30, 2011 – 8:00 am

reversing the chicago river

One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most notably, the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, seen under construction in 1896 above — the river was made to flow not into […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, fecal-matters, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
September 29, 2011 – 1:00 pm

pruned’s buttologies

On Pruned, Buttology is “a fantasy table of contents for… a fantazine for the spatial study of waste”, with links to a wide array of pieces ranging from a history of the deficiencies of Montreal’s wastewater treatment infrastructure and disagreements between cosmonauts and astronauts about who can use which nation’s astro-toilets to the role of the depletion of a tiny […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, fecal-matters | Comments Off on pruned’s buttologies | Permalink
September 29, 2011 – 12:00 pm

residue treatment center

[Residue Treatment Center (or CTRV) in Vacarisses, designed by Batlle i Roig. While the CTRV is a municipal solid waste treatment facility, not a wastewater treatment facility (where flushed feces usually go), the two kinds of facilities are commonly linked by the need to dispose of solid materials separated out of water at wastewater treatment […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, asides, fecal-matters, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on residue treatment center | Permalink
September 28, 2011 – 1:00 pm

egg digesters

[After Pruned’s unfortunately lost egg digester Flickr set, satellite photography of egg digesters heating and breaking down sludge on Deer Island, just outside Boston.] [More egg digesters, this time at New York’s Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. A New York City press release describes the eggs: “The digesters will process up to 1.5 million gallons […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, fecal-matters, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on egg digesters | Permalink
September 27, 2011 – 11:00 am

fecal politics

The following piece is a guest post from Peter Nunns. Peter is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland, with a MA in Political Science; mammoth readers may be familiar with him from his contributions to last summer’s discussion of the Infrastructural City. His current research interests include shelter and urban development challenges in developing-world cities, the […]

By pnunns | Posted in fecal-matters, guest post, infrastructure, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
September 26, 2011 – 6:00 am

fecal matters

This week — really, we promise it will just be a week — we’ll be looking at landscapes of shit.  We’ll take a guided tour of DC’s huge wastewater treatment plant, Blue Plains, we’ll have an excellent guest post from Peter Nunns on “fecal politics”, we’ll look at a student project that proposes “the making of […]

By mammoth | Posted in fecal-matters, meta | Comments (1) | Permalink
September 22, 2011 – 6:00 am

border box

The following piece is a part of Border Town’s supplementary online discussion, which is collated at the Border Town website.  Border Town is a “10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that investigated the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones” this summer, led by Tim Maly and […]

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 21, 2011 – 9:08 pm

behind the scenes

While there is a lot that has gone unfortunately unposted this summer (our drafts queue is more than a little bit out of control) — at least in part due to Rob’s failure to contain the floods series (which is finished, by the way, with yesterday’s final post on de-damming the Dutch delta) to anything […]

By mammoth | Posted in asides, meta | Comments Off on behind the scenes | Permalink
September 20, 2011 – 6:00 pm

de-damming the dutch delta

[The Haringvliet Dam] In recent years, as they seek to rethink the flood control infrastructures and climate defense systems of the Mississippi Delta, American politicians, engineers, planners, and designers have, with good reason, looked to the Netherlands for inspiration and expertise. This is entirely natural, as the Netherlands has long been the world’s most sophisticated […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, student-work, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on de-damming the dutch delta | Permalink
September 20, 2011 – 6:00 am

IHNC Lake Borgne Surge Barrier

[The site of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC) Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, at the intersection of the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet; more detail on this Army Corps of Engineers project map.] [Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods, infrastructure | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on IHNC Lake Borgne Surge Barrier | Permalink
September 19, 2011 – 6:00 pm

pump test

[“On Tuesday, May 24, pump number eight at the West Closure Complex was successfully tested. There are a total of 11 pumps at the [Complex], and each can individually fill an olympic-sized swimming pool in less than a minute.” (Source.)] [While most of the Mississippi River flood control infrastructures that we have looked at have […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure | Tagged , | Comments (4) | Permalink
September 19, 2011 – 6:00 am

the gulf intracoastal waterway

Another of the Mississippi River Delta region’s industrial infrastructures is the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which stretches 1,109 miles from Apalache Bay, Florida to Brownsville, Texas.  In the image above (which is rotated so that north is on the right, Port Arthur at the top, and New Orleans at the bottom), the Waterway is clearly visible […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 16, 2011 – 12:00 pm

the port of south louisiana

[A map of properties in the Port of South Louisiana (outlined in blue and red), via the Port’s website.] One of the primary ways that the Mississippi River presently serves as an industrial infrastructure is by hosting the Port of South Louisiana. There are several things that make the Port of South Louisiana unique.  First, unlike […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 13, 2011 – 6:00 am

“the climax of the riverboat era”

Over the course of this summer’s discussion of floods, we’ve talked a great deal about channelization and levees and dredging and the other acts of industrial landscaping that have produced the riverine landscapes of the Mississippi watershed. Those acts, though, are multi-purposed: they are executed to control floods, yes, but they are usually also intended […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, geography, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 3, 2011 – 6:00 am

instant island

[As this summer’s flooding swept massive sediment loads down the Mississippi, it also sent much greater volumes than usual pouring through the Corps’ diversion projects.  In the case of the West Bay Sediment Diversion (pictured in our previous post), the Times-Picayune notes, that volume carried enough sediment to construct an instant island: “In a demonstration […]

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September 2, 2011 – 6:00 am

restoring the land-making machine

[The fluctuating terrain of the lower Mississippi River Delta, from the USGS’s map of “land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010”.  Loss is in red; accumulation is in green.  The map is seen via Free Association Design, where you can see the map in more detail, including the rapidly accreting area of […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink