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

Monthly Archives: November 2011

November 29, 2011 – 7:00 pm

hypothethical signs

[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign.] This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization.  (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm

the network as industry

[“Interior components of the cooling system” at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal’s report for Domus on Facebook’s Open Computer Project, which “describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre”.] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, futures, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm

cellular confinement

[Cellular confinement systems were originally developed by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate the quick construction of temporary roads for heavy military vehicles; photograph from a Neoloy brochure.] In a remote polar region, there is a small country that is rarely visited by outsiders.  On the advice of a rogue Army Corps of Engineers […]

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November 9, 2011 – 6:00 am

low roads and architecture

[Building 20 at MIT, a “250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by early hackers”.] 1. Alexis Madrigal writes about “Low Road” buildings: …startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got […]

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November 1, 2011 – 6:00 am

“bundled, buried, and behind closed doors”

[“Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors”, a documentary short by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, looks at one of our favorite things — the physical infrastructure of the internet — and, in particular, the telco hotel at 60 Hudson Street. It’s particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the “tendency of communications infrastructure […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, the-city-we-have | Tagged | Comments (7) | Permalink