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Author Archives: mammoth

August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm

“what to do when there is nothing to do”

["Weather Field"; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative]
As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth’s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series [...]

Posted in architecture, infrastructure, interviews, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (4)
July 22, 2010 – 9:53 am

SMALLATLARGE

“The objective is to convey 55 years of experience in the architectural profession and say what I can before the end comes.”

Posted in Links, architecture, asides | Comments (0)
May 31, 2010 – 10:05 pm

jam, hack

This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.

[Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90]
“Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the various meanings [...]

Posted in infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (7)
May 24, 2010 – 5:00 am

“for every pile there is a pit”

We’re back from our week off with another installment of Reading the Infrastructural City; if you haven’t been following along, you can catch up on the series here and see the introductory post here.

[Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI]
The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Margins [...]

Posted in landscape, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)
April 27, 2010 – 8:29 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter one index (updated 5 may)

Images by Robin Black Photography for the Owens Lake Project, an ongoing photo documentary chronicling the rejuvenation of Owens Lake. See the website for many more.  Black comments at DPR – Barcelona:
“No more is it a toxic wasteland, though it’s certainly odd, and occasionally ugly, and still troublesome along the portions deemed too disturbed to recover. Life is returning to [...]

Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Tagged | Comments (1)
April 26, 2010 – 5:05 am

wyoming is in los angeles

From now until the beginning of August, mammoth is hosting a chapter-by-chapter reading and discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles.  This post is the first in that series, and discusses Owens Lake; for the full schedule of readings and an introduction to the series (and the book), click here.  In addition [...]

Posted in infrastructure, landscape, mammoth book club | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (12)
March 29, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: proposal

[A portion of the Alameda Trench, a cut in the surface of Los Angeles which runs "ten miles long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-three feet deep", carrying over $200 billion in cargo each year, as photographed by Lane Barden for The Infrastructural City; image via a Places Journal slideshow]
–
UPDATE: this book club is underway [...]

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March 15, 2010 – 6:00 am

the shelter category

Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication.  For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”:
“What do cities look like in the eyes [...]

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January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm

the best architecture of the decade

[The Large Hadron Collider]
The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture.   But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an exciting [...]

Posted in architecture, economics, engineering, finance, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, meta, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (62)
November 14, 2009 – 5:31 pm

landscape infrastructures: posthumous live blog

Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and [...]

Posted in asides, dialogue, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (8)
April 9, 2009 – 1:45 pm

BKRT Essay: on fog nets and cities

The following is a study of a hypothetical water farming infrastructure for the arid city of Luanda, Angola; using fog harvesting nets with varying capabilities.  An edited, improved (in drawings and writing) version will be published in the upcoming first edition of [Bracket] in winter 2009.  It can be seen at the website under the [...]

Posted in architecture, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (12)