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

Monthly Archives: July 2014

suburban futures

At Next City, Amanda Kolson Hurley reports on two examples of contemporary suburban growth, Montgomery County in Maryland and the York region of Ontario, and ties those two examples into broader questions regarding the future viability of suburbanism: Dead malls. Zombie subdivisions. Metastasizing sprawl. Not a horror movie, but the suburbs circa 2014, or at […]

pilot projects

In an article for the recently-launched ARPA Journal, Kate Orff describes a pair of SCAPE pilot projects in New York Harbor, both testing the viability of ecological design concepts for specific harbor-dwelling species along the edge of Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront. [The blue mussel pilot project; image by SCAPE via ARPA Journal.] The first, located near […]

landmarks

[Two images from artist Jenny Odell’s series Landmarks, which traces “inadvertent monuments” produced by remote infrastructural operations, such as the Athabasca Oil Sands (top) and a network of “unknown detonation sites” (above) at the Nevada Test Site. The images can be seen in larger and much larger versions on Odell’s website.]

territorial reclamation

[The Spratly Islands] A series of reports from the Philippine government recently emerged and came to the attention of the international press, describing a series of semi-clandestine island-building operations undertaken by the Chinese government in the South China Sea. (To quote a local fishing contractor who works in the vicinity: “there was this huge Chinese […]