rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

May 8, 2013 – 9:24 pm

the geopolitics of subtraction

[Map of the IIRSA's Amazonian axis, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across the Andes; from IIRSA document "8 Ejes de Integración de la Infraestructura de América del Sur"] Keller Easterling, speculating about “a new counterintuitive economic model” of “infrastructural subtraction” in Domus last November: “What are the points of leverage, trip distances or economies [...]

Posted in architecture, economics, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0) | Permalink
February 21, 2013 – 9:52 am

changing industrial landscapes and the city that never was

Quickly, a pair of events (well, an event and an event series) that I am a bit late to mentioning. [photograph by Ricardo Espinosa] The first is “The City That Never Was”, a symposium “organized by Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa, in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York; speakers include Iñaki Abalos, Dominique Alba, Enric Batlle, William Braham, Rania Ghosn, Llàtzer Moix, Robin [...]

Posted in events, the-expanded-field | Tagged | Comments Off | Permalink
February 7, 2013 – 3:54 pm

bracket goes soft

1 This is not entirely true. There was a third launch, at the University of Waterloo, earlier this morning. I’m a bit late to getting notice of these events up, but at least I’m doing it before they happen1: there are two book launches scheduled for the latest installment of Bracket, [goes Soft]. Bracket [goes [...]

Posted in dredge, events | Tagged , , | Comments Off | Permalink
January 11, 2013 – 11:17 am

louisiana state university

So, I should say something about what I’m doing this spring, though this is kind of the brief version. I’m very excited to be joining the faculty and students at LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture as the visiting Marie M. Bickham Chair. In addition to taking in the extremely interesting work that they’re [...]

Posted in events, infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
November 28, 2012 – 6:00 am

making the geologic now

[Jinanqiao Dam under construction on the Jinsha River. New "mega-dams" such as Jinanqiao in high seismic risk zones -- territories prone to earthquakes, in other words -- are at the center of a highly consequential scientific debate about whether the dams are making disasters like catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake more likely and frequent. Fascinatingly, the argument is [...]

Posted in dredge, events, landscape, publications | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
November 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

longshore transport and littoral drift

[Dauphin Island, Alabama, at the south opening of Mobile Bay.] Continuing the theme of Sandy-inspired rumination on the risks and rewards of littoral urbanization, a pair of articles by Justin Gillis and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times utilize the example of Alabama’s Dauphin Island — a hurricane-battered barrier island near the port of [...]

Posted in asides, dredge, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
November 15, 2012 – 6:00 pm

ivanpah

[At Wired, a gallery of photographs of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, by Jamey Stillings. At completion, the Ivanpah facility is expected to be the largest operational solar power facility in the world.]

Posted in asides, energy, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments Off | Permalink
November 13, 2012 – 7:00 pm

response survey

[A lost cargo container located by the NOAA ship Thomas Jefferson (below, in operation post-Sandy) on the bottom of the New York harbor.] After Sandy, ports along the east coast path of the hurricane were closed, including the Port of Virginia in Hampton Roads and, of course, the Port of New York and New Jersey, in large [...]

Posted in asides, dredge, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
November 2, 2012 – 6:00 am

dredgefest nyc: video archive

[Audience discussion during DredgeFest; photo by Nicola Twilley.] One of the primary reasons that mammoth has been relatively quiet this year is the effort that Stephen and I, as two of the four current members of the Dredge Research Collaborative, have put into organizing DredgeFest NYC.  We did this with no small amount of assistance from [...]

Posted in dredge, events, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
October 30, 2012 – 9:16 pm

palletized

[Massive warehouse districts both east and west of I-35 in Laredo, Texas, filled with goods shipped across the Mexican border.] Tom Vanderbilt, with a short history of the pallet, one of those logistical objects whose dimensions and properties format much of the space we live in, from store shelves to exurban warehouse districts: For an [...]

Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
October 25, 2012 – 10:39 pm

event horizon

[A seaplane taxis in Jamaica Bay, 1918, with Barren Island in the background; source.] I recently contributed a short piece to the excellent Fulcrum. The piece begins with a very short version of the bizarre history of Dead Horse Bay and Barren Island — about which I had to leave out eccentric anecdote after eccentric [...]

Posted in dredge, landscape, publications | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
September 18, 2012 – 6:00 pm

“a map for what?”

Shannon Mattern, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”: What is the “aftermath” of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to “make visible the invisible” and thereby “raise awareness” are far too often regarded as ends [...]

Posted in asides, infrastructure, meta | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
September 18, 2012 – 6:00 am

petrochemical america

[From the top: diagram by SCAPE of off-shore oil facilities in the Gulf; Richard Misrach's "Roadside Vegetation and Orion Refining Corporation, Good Hope, Louisiana, 1998" ; diagram by SCAPE of the various chemical products manufactured and refined in "Cancer Alley". All from Petrochemical America, and visible at a higher resolution in this gallery at the New [...]

Posted in asides, events, landscape | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
September 10, 2012 – 7:18 pm

a short video about dredge

Videographers Alex Chohlas-Wood and Ben Mendelsohn are among the many talented people who are helping us put together DredgeFest NYC, and they’ve just released this short trailer for the event. If you’re hoping to join us for the harbor tour — and hopefully the peak at a few landscapes of dredge that Ben and Alex [...]

Posted in dredge | Tagged , , | Comments Off | Permalink
August 6, 2012 – 6:00 am

dredgefest nyc

[Beach nourishment in Monmouth, New Jersey. Photo: USACE.] A few months ago, I posted the live interview that the Dredge Research Collaborative (Stephen, Brett Milligan, Tim Maly, and myself) did with Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley at Studio-X NYC. Both at that event and in the short post I did, we promised that we’d be [...]

Posted in dredge, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
August 3, 2012 – 6:00 pm

brickstarter

Tim Maly interviews Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill about their new project, Brickstarter: Anyone who’s ever tried to get some change to their neighborhood done knows the pain of fighting through a bureaucracy that tends to dampen even the most enthusiastic of spirits. “This activism often occurs on the periphery, in the legal gray areas [...]

Posted in asides, finance, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
July 31, 2012 – 6:00 am

the commonwealth approach

[The following is the text and (a slightly condensed set of) slides from the presentation that Laurel McSherry and I gave at the Drylands Design Conference in late March. The presentation walks through our highly speculative proposal for the reconfiguration of the political geography of the United States to better conform to the spatial distribution [...]

Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 25, 2012 – 6:00 am

very long radio waves

[Image via Panoramio user subdefective.] VLF Transmitter Cutler is a “very-low frequency” radio station on the north-eastern edge of Maine’s seacoast operated by the US Navy, primarily for the purpose of communicating with submarines. The perfectly geometric arrangements of antennas and support cables both recall the hexagonal logic of cellphone towers and suggest some kind of weird [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off | Permalink
July 24, 2012 – 8:00 pm

the new modulated world of invisible fields

[A portion of Nicolas Rapp's map of the internet for Fortune magazine.] Writing for Quaderns, Kazys Varnelis argues for an infrastructural urbanism that not only embraces and seeks to design (or design with) infrastructure, but also imagines new infrastructures “more appropriate to network culture”: But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations [...]

Posted in architecture, asides, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments Off | Permalink
July 24, 2012 – 6:00 am

collisions

[Via Pete Brook at Wired, Mary Lydecker's collages splice together scenes from vintage postcards to create images of Pruned-worthy vacation locales (like the infrastructural beach above) and bundles of skyscrapers improbably close to dams, mountains, and rivers, as if the cities they belonged to were crashing suddenly into some unorthodox planner's feverishly strict urban growth [...]

Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , | Comments Off | Permalink