January – 2014 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: January 2014

January 31, 2014 – 9:54 am

glitches, flash crashes, and very bad futurists

Last fall, Vincent deBritto and Ozayr Saloojee invited me to come visit their Resilient Infrastructures project at the University of Minnesota; my main contribution was to deliver the lecture above, “Glitches, Flash Crashes, and Very Bad Futurists”. The lecture examines a particular class of landscape problem, which I’ve provisionally described as “glitches and flash crashes”, […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, futures, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 29, 2014 – 10:36 am

north coast design competition

[Map of annual dredging volumes in American cities in the Great Lakes Basin, via Matthew Moffitt’s project “Dredge City”, which won the 2013 ASLA Student Award of Excellence in General Design.] The city of Toledo is the epicenter of dredging on the Great Lakes: of the roughly three million cubic yards of material dredged in […]

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January 24, 2014 – 9:47 am

sediment and wind

[The even grid of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the London Array, surrounded by swirling sediment in the Thames Estuary. Seen at NASA Earth Observatory: To date, the London Array includes 175 wind turbines aligned to the prevailing southwest wind and spread out across 100 square kilometers (40 square miles). Each turbine stands 650 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, dredge, energy, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on sediment and wind | Permalink
January 9, 2014 – 10:50 am

land-making machines

[The Audubon Society’s micro-dredger, the John James, making new land in the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in South Louisiana. Karen Westphal, Audubon’s Atchafalaya Basin program manager, will be speaking about this participatory micro-dredging project at DredgeFest Louisiana’s symposium, which is this Saturday and Sunday at Loyola University in New Orleans.] Tim Maly and I […]

By rholmes | Posted in dredge, futures, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on land-making machines | Permalink
January 6, 2014 – 12:12 pm

the collision of geologic time and infrastructural control

“Before artificial levee construction, the river avulsed and a new delta was constructed every 1,000-1,500 yr: the active Plaquemines-Balize Delta began to form about 1,000 yr ago, and was for some time contemporaneous with the older Lafourche Delta, whereas diversion to the Atchafalaya River course began about 500 yr ago, but is now managed by the US Army Corps […]

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