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

Monthly Archives: July 2012

July 31, 2012 – 6:00 am

the commonwealth approach

[The following is the text and (a slightly condensed set of) slides from the presentation that Laurel McSherry and I gave at the Drylands Design Conference in late March. The presentation walks through our highly speculative proposal for the reconfiguration of the political geography of the United States to better conform to the spatial distribution […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 25, 2012 – 6:00 am

very long radio waves

[Image via Panoramio user subdefective.] VLF Transmitter Cutler is a “very-low frequency” radio station on the north-eastern edge of Maine’s seacoast operated by the US Navy, primarily for the purpose of communicating with submarines. The perfectly geometric arrangements of antennas and support cables both recall the hexagonal logic of cellphone towers and suggest some kind of weird […]

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July 24, 2012 – 8:00 pm

the new modulated world of invisible fields

[A portion of Nicolas Rapp’s map of the internet for Fortune magazine.] Writing for Quaderns, Kazys Varnelis argues for an infrastructural urbanism that not only embraces and seeks to design (or design with) infrastructure, but also imagines new infrastructures “more appropriate to network culture”: But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments Off on the new modulated world of invisible fields | Permalink
July 24, 2012 – 6:00 am

collisions

[Via Pete Brook at Wired, Mary Lydecker’s collages splice together scenes from vintage postcards to create images of Pruned-worthy vacation locales (like the infrastructural beach above) and bundles of skyscrapers improbably close to dams, mountains, and rivers, as if the cities they belonged to were crashing suddenly into some unorthodox planner’s feverishly strict urban growth […]

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July 23, 2012 – 6:00 pm

landscape ontology

[A landscape in the process of becoming a different landscape: In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people. The image above […]

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July 3, 2012 – 9:12 pm

designing novel ecosystems

[Wildfires in the southern Rockies from space, June 23; via NASA Earth Observatory.] A recent post on the current wildfires in the southern Rockies at the New York Times‘ Green blog reminded me that I had intended to excerpt an earlier editorial, also at the New York Times, which defended the notion of the Anthropocene […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink