rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm

stabilization

[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]

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March 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm

aerotropolis

[FedEx’s “Superhub” at Memphis International Airport; via Bing maps.] 1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis.  (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.)  The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree […]

Posted in economics, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 14, 2011 – 6:21 pm

slugging

[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers […]

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March 12, 2011 – 1:05 pm

infrastructure without architects

[Photo of Global III, by Alan Berger via NAi Publishers] Approximately seventy-five miles due west of the gleaming towers of Chicago’s Loop, Union Pacific Railroad, the United States’ largest railroad company, operates the Rochelle Global III Intermodal Facility, twelve-hundred acres of switching yards, train tracks, loading facilities, and container-sized parking spaces.  Rochelle, a small Midwestern […]

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March 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

ecologies of gold

[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and […]

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March 5, 2011 – 6:00 am

“highway proposals never die, they just get more expensive”

[Library of Congress images of Robert Moses and Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, via Pruitt-Igoe‘s flickr set] 1. A couple months ago, Slate published a series of articles by Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic, which I hear is excellent) on “Unbuilt Highways”, which began with the installment “How a Road Can Change a City, Even […]

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February 23, 2011 – 8:00 pm

tahrir square

Apparently anticipating our post yesterday on revolutionary space, Dwell‘s Aaron Britt interviews Nezar AlSayyad, author of the forthcoming Cairo: Histories of a City, about the design of Tahrir Square: Why from a design angle was it so successful as a point of protest? Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it […]

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February 21, 2011 – 8:00 pm

kongjian yu and the conscientizacao of the landscape

FASLANYC posts an interview with pioneering Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, who I’ve heard speak a couple times and always been impressed by.  They talk about the origins of Yu’s firm’s name (Turenscape), how Yu worked to convince Chinese officials that landscape architecture was a useful discipline, what defines a productive landscape, and the relationship […]

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February 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm

switches and access points

[Inside Terremark’s “NCR NAP” facility in Northern Virginia, a key data center; photographed by flickr user nlaudermilch.] Alexis Madrigal points out an article in the New York Times this morning which starts to uncover some of the specifics of how the Egyptian government unplugged the internet.  Quoting from that article: Because the Internet’s legendary robustness […]

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February 10, 2011 – 6:00 am

spillway on simcity

At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity: “…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? […]

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February 2, 2011 – 6:00 am

“will we all one day be eating away the evidence of government corruption?”

At Domus, Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki relates the troubling story of a secret government cyberwar organization’s efforts to co-opt a current architectural design competition.  Brilliant reportage.

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February 1, 2011 – 6:00 am

geologic city

[SPL’s open-pit salt mine in the Tarapacá salt flats, via Google Maps.] In December, after we began our winter hiatus, Urban Omnibus posted ran a fantastic post by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Geologic City”, which briefly summarized several of the much longer “Geologic City Field Reports” which have run on the Friends of the […]

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January 27, 2011 – 6:00 am

infrastructural opportunism

Mammoth will be in New York tomorrow night — January 28th — presenting at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in an event tied to the recent release of Lateral Office/Infranetlab’s Pamphlet Architecture 30: MANIFESTO SERIES 02 INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM PAMPHLET ARCHITECTURE 30 + Storefront for Art and Architecture presents Manifesto Series 02: Infrastructural Opportunism showcasing […]

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January 22, 2011 – 6:00 am

fourth natures

“Fourth Natures” is an upcoming conference at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, which sounds like it will be quite interesting: …landscape theorist John Dixon Hunt elucidate[d] three categories of landscape first defined during the Renaissance: ‘first nature’ being wilderness, ‘second nature’ being the cultivated landscape, and ‘third nature’ being the garden, a combination […]

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January 5, 2011 – 6:00 am

winter hiatus (polar night)

[Fantastic Norway‘s 2005 installation “Polar Night”, built in the Arctic town of Bodø.  A total of 40 daylight lamps — bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy — were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted […]

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December 13, 2010 – 6:40 pm

winter hiatus (basilica snowbirth)

I hope everyone has watched the video of the Metrodome collapse. The moment when the fabric tears and a inverted volcano of snow pours onto the field is incredible, like a roof giving birth.  (I tried to capture a still, but the wonder is all in the fluid motion.) Parametrics should be the study of […]

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December 11, 2010 – 1:01 am

winter hiatus

[Photograph by William Notman & Son, photographers, of a building encased in ice after a fire, 65–83 Little St. James Street, Montréal, Québec, 1888.  From the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, via Sense of the City.] We’re taking the remainder of the dimly-lit month of December to rest, eat, read, and […]

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December 8, 2010 – 6:30 am

glass house conversations

This week’s Glass House Conversation may be of particular interest to mammoth readers.  Deborah Marton, of the Design Trust for Public Space, asks: Everyone agrees that public space is important, but why? We know that quality public space is the bellwether of a healthy society. Strong communities supported by well-conceived public spaces are better positioned […]

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December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am

thrilling wonder interview

On his blog, Rory Hyde interviews Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young at Thrilling Wonder Stories 2.  I’m particularly taken by an idea the three converge on at the end: GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be […]

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December 2, 2010 – 6:47 pm

walking city

Jim Rossignol (video game journalist, blogger, and occasional BLDGBLOG contributor, among other things) recently announced the start-up of an independent game development studio, Big Robot, as well as the first two games that studio is developing.  I’m particularly excited by the second he’s described, which is currently (though likely not finally) titled “Walking City”.  (That […]

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