rholmes - mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm

future forests of the eastern seaboard

[Mapping the transference of botanical threats from Japan to the Midwest, from a video presentation on Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in the Great Lakes region]
From a recent article in the Guardian:
Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat [...]

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March 8, 2010 – 6:00 pm

landscapes of quarantine

[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape [...]

Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged | Comments (0)
March 2, 2010 – 11:00 am

absent rivers, ephemeral parks

[American Falls de-watered, via Flickr user rbglasson]
For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion.  During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was [...]

Posted in landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)
February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am

katabatia

[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it's been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast.  [...]

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February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm

“blooming landscape, deep surface”

[Model of "Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface"; all images from and by Smout Allen]
I can’t let Stephen’s mention of Smout Allen pass — particularly in the context of a discussion of process and event in architecture — without also saying a word about their proposal for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is one of my favorite [...]

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February 26, 2010 – 1:20 pm

saharan miami

[The future soil of Miami, captured by satellites while drifting off the coast of Africa.]
At InfraNet Lab, Mason White posts about “Particulate Swarms”, or three storm typologies: dust, water, and gas.  The first image in the post, of a dust storm over Sydney, reminds me (because in my haste, I mistakenly read the form of [...]

Posted in asides, geography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
February 25, 2010 – 10:29 pm

islands draw the clouds, and glaciers are wind-catchers

[Above, the volcanic peaks of the South Sandwich Islands distort wave patterns over the Pacific Ocean, through processes described, and, of course photographed, by NASA Earth Observatory:

...the islands disturb the smooth flow of air, creating waves that ripple through the atmosphere downwind of the obstacles.
The cloudy-clear pattern that is produced highlights the location of wave [...]

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February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am

chinampas

[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri.  The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from [...]

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February 24, 2010 – 1:56 pm

thilafushi

[A ferry arrives at Thilafushi, the world's largest island composed primarily of garbage, in a photograph from an excellent photo-essay on Thilafushi by flickr user AB Watson Year.  Thilafushi, which is located in and was constructed by the Maldives on the site of a former lagoon, spreads across 124 acres in the Indian Ocean, ever [...]

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February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm

the north american storm control authority

[Comparative historic and contemporary heat maps of the wind energy potential of the continental United States, via NASCA.gov; NASCA documents indicate sources for their imagery include AWS Truewind/NREL via Wired Science and NOAA/NASA]
The North American Storm Control Authority (NASCA), like its predecessor, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which rebuilt the Rocky Mountains [...]

Posted in infrastructure, speculative-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (12)
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm

a glacier is a very long event

The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find [...]

Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13)
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm

readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors

[all photographs from Andrea Frank's series "Ports and Ships"]
1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool:
Where the vision [...]

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February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm

paul kersey, yimbyist

Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”.  I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, [...]

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February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm

double happiness

Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim [...]

Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Comments (3)
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am

the dead sea works

I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC’s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) [...]

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February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm

mine the gap

Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise:
…at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate bubble [...]

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February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm

vancouver whitesward

[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver ("snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations" and "organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down"), via NASA Earth Observatory.  Read more about whitesward at [...]

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February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm

metropolis prognostications

[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source]
In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade.   It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers in [...]

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February 8, 2010 – 3:27 pm

olympic ballardia

[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG's call for a "J.G. Ballard of contemporary China" (or drive home Kongjian Wu's repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the "empty shells" of Beijing's Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; [...]

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February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm

readings: the digital city

1. Keiichi Matsuda’s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare:

Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else.
2. In BLDGBLOG’s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that suggestion intrigues [...]

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