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

Monthly Archives: October 2011

October 31, 2011 – 9:13 pm

squirrel highways

[“Squirrel Highways”, a drawing by Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Shaub Dunkley, from Denis Wood’s Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which Wood describes as a “cartographic poem” about the North Carolina neighborhood of Boylan Heights, where he lives.  Wood evidences a fantastic ability to animate prosaic terrain through the making of maps which are […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 24, 2011 – 8:27 pm

soft landscapes

This week, I’ve organized a short (very short) lecture series for the students in my studio (well, the “Post-Natural Ecologies” half of the studio) at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Tuesday at 5:15, Fred Scharmen (sevensixfive/the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) will give a talk entitled “Soft Sites”, examining four sites on the Middle Branch […]

By rholmes | Posted in events, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 14, 2011 – 6:00 am

auckland volcanic field

Above and below, snapshots from “Auckland Volcanoes”, a map by Carl Douglas. Carl’s map marks the location of each of the volcanic craters that dot the surface of Auckland.  The craters exhibit a fascinating variety: some have been heavily altered by mining operations (which particularly seek volcanic scoria, a type of rock suitable for use […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 13, 2011 – 6:00 pm

on blogging architecture

Geoff Manaugh contributes a series to Arbitare that looks at the history, equipment, content, audience, and future of architecture blogging.  Being “someone who has founded his entire present career through blogging”, Geoff obviously both brings serious qualifications and an innate (and admitted) bias to the topic; the resulting personal perspective of the series only serves […]

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October 13, 2011 – 12:00 pm

road ecologies

A nice slideshow by Laura Tepper on Places looks at the intersection of “wildlife habitat and highway design”, from “the six massive wildlife overpasses lining the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park” to HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s winning entry to the recent ARC competition for Vail Pass, “Hypar-nature” (pictured above) and across the Atlantic […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 12, 2011 – 6:00 am

unconventional intersections

At Slate, Tom Vanderbilt writes about the design of intersections to eliminate left-turns, which historically produced such oddities as the Jersey jughandle and the Michigan left, as well as more recent innovations like the diverging diamond interchange and continuous flow intersection.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, engineering, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on unconventional intersections | Permalink
October 11, 2011 – 6:00 am

quilian riano interviews chris reed

Quilian Riano interviews Chris Reed (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) for Places; the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including Stoss’s recent work, the importance of an expanded field for landscape architecture, and possibilities for inventing flexible alliances between design teams and collaborators in “related fields such as engineering, ecology, economics, etc.”: “Within this expanded […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on quilian riano interviews chris reed | Permalink
October 10, 2011 – 4:00 pm

window washing

[Facade of Pharos Building, Hoofddorp, Vanessa van Dam, 2002 — never realized.] Given our recent thinking about the role of maintenance in urban design, I was quite interested when I noticed, in a couple-year-old copy of 306090, an article by Hilary Sample (of MOS) on the potential of maintenance in architecture.  The piece, “Towers, Maintenance, […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 10, 2011 – 6:00 am

phantom stories

[Homes on the outskirts of Shanghai, via Google Maps.] A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, finance | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 4, 2011 – 6:00 pm

parainfrastructures

We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to consider why we are so drawn to infrastructural landscapes like Blue Plains — not just as sites of logistical and technological operations, but aesthetically as well: […]

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, infrastructure-without-architects, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 3, 2011 – 8:30 pm

shitscape

To wrap up this week of fecal matters, I want to talk briefly about Bret Betnar’s “Shitscape: Mumbai’s Landscape In-Between”, a brilliant project done while Betnar was at the University of Pennsylvania. 1 If you haven’t already read it, be sure to check out Peter Nunns’ post from Tuesday on “fecal politics”, which deals with exactly […]

By rholmes | Posted in fecal-matters, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 1, 2011 – 2:04 pm

psyttaleia island

[Psyttaleia Island, Alcatraz of wastewater treatment plants. Via the awesomely-named tumblr The Value of Garbage. Aerial photos from this slideshow of Psyttaleia construction images. For more, see this description of the island (in Greek).]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, fecal-matters, infrastructure | Tagged , | Comments (6) | Permalink