Excavations, Shockwaves, and Limits – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Excavations, Shockwaves, and Limits

At the end of September, I spoke at an event organized by The Architectural League and co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design, “The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land”. The Architectural League has recently posted video from the event, so you can now watch the many presentations and discussions; I particularly recommend Jesse LeCavalier’s dissection of UPS’s advertising slogan “Logistics makes the world”, Eric Sanderson and Ted Steinberg on New York City’s natural history and development (Steinberg’s image of the “1914 plan to redeem 50 square miles in New York harbor” is amazing), Albert Pope’s discussion of urban morphologies (which concludes by “reimagin[ing] the Fifth Ward in Houston as a dense, carbon neutral neighborhood”), and Charles Waldheim’s meditation on the disciplinary history of landscape architecture (of particular interest to readers of my previous post on “landscape science”). My own presentation is embedded below. You can also watch the panel discussion that followed with LeCavalier, Alex Klatskin, and moderator Coral Davenport.

Urban Omnibus has a longer recap of the full event.

This presentation drew on work that I’ve been doing both with the Dredge Research Collaborative (Stephen Becker, Brian Davis, Tim Maly, Brett Milligan, and Gena Wirth) and Casey Lance Brown (P-REX); in particular, a talk that Brian, Brett, and I worked on for last summer’s EDRA45 conference, entitled “The Engineering Shockwave of the Panama Canal Expansion”. (If you pay close attention to the credits on the slides, you’ll see that some of the drawings shown in the presentation belong to several of those collaborators.)

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