February – 2012 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: February 2012

February 21, 2012 – 9:51 pm

giant tube to supply water for ten millions

The wonder of inter-basin transfer, in the August 1937 issue of Popular Mechanics: (The cover of that same issue, which wonders at the electrical power produced by and transmitted from Lake Mead, is also worth a look.)

By rholmes | Posted in asides, engineering, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
February 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

visibility

[“The Digital Dump”, a graphic about e-waste from Good.is‘s “Transparency” series and Column Five Media.] Mostly for our own purposes (keeping track of things we see), we’ve started Visibility, a tumblr collecting items related to An Atlas of iPhone Landscapes. I make no promises about how frequently it will or won’t be updated, but if […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape | Tagged | Comments Off on visibility | Permalink
February 18, 2012 – 6:00 am

eight-bit baroque

Via BLDGBLOG, Timo Arnall’s “Robot Readable World”, “an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye”: This video is rather obviously fantastic, but I do think it’s worth calling attention to a perceptive comment left on the Vimeo page. Arnall describes the video as exploring the questions “how do robots see […]

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February 16, 2012 – 6:00 am

munitions landscape

[The Radford Army Ammunitions Plant on the New River, in southwest Virginia.] FASLANYC takes us on a tour of particularly bizarre militarized landscape typology — the World War II-era munitions plant, beginning with the Radford Army Ammunitions Plant in southwestern Virgina. Digging into the archives at the Historic American Landscapes Survey, Davis excavates the fascinating […]

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February 15, 2012 – 9:00 pm

urbnfutr interview with liam young

In an interview with URBNFUTR, Liam Young describes how he sees the relationship between his training as an architect and his current work as the head of “urban futures think tank” Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today: As architects we span the gulf between the cultural and the technological, we are in a unique position to synthesize complex […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
February 13, 2012 – 8:00 pm

spanish bubble landscapes

[Suburban abandonia on the outskirts of Madrid, via google maps.] During the presentations at Visualizar last summer, one of the presenters (I think it was José Luis Muñoz Muñoz, but I haven’t re-watched his presentation, so I’m not totally sure) mentioned a photography project that sought to document the post-bubble abandonment of parts of the […]

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February 7, 2012 – 8:57 pm

an atlas of iphone landscapes

[MMG Century, in northwest Queensland — the world’s second-largest zinc mine, owned and operated by the Chinese metals conglomerate China MinMetal. MMG Century features prominently in the talk below.] 1 Note that if you are reading this indirectly, i.e. on Google Reader, you may not see the video below. 1. A conversation the other day reminded […]

By rholmes | Posted in events, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 7, 2012 – 6:00 am

delaware dredge

[A pressurized pipe carries dredge along Bethany Beach, Delaware; photography by Chris Mizes.] On his blog space within lines, Chris Mizes writes about one of the more common ways that the landscapes of dredge intrude on everyday life: beach nourishment. As Mizes explains, this commonplace instance of landscape prosthesis is — like many of the […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged | Comments Off on delaware dredge | Permalink
February 1, 2012 – 8:00 pm

schafran on race and foreclosure

Speaking of the geography of financialization, Alex Schafran had a fantastic post at Polis last December on race, foreclosure, and rhetoric surrounding the “death of the fringe suburb”. In forthcoming work done with my colleague Jake Wegmann, analyzing real-estate data in the region since 1988, we can show that the zip codes to which African […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, real-estate, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink