rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

September 27, 2010 – 10:27 pm

landscape maintenance

FASLANYC writes about the possibility of re-thinking the constitution, role, and importance of the maintenance manual, an idea which seems to me to be wholly appropriate to the practice of landscape architecture.  Surely the languid pace at which the commands contained within a maintenance manual are executed (as FASLANYC suggests, “manual” need not be read […]

Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments Off on landscape maintenance | Permalink
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm

staging ground

[Detail from Andrew tenBrink’s “Staging Ground”; all images in this post are from “Staging Ground”; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink.  In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent […]

Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, student-work | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
September 20, 2010 – 6:58 am

sub-plan

[A drawing from SUB-PLAN; click to enlarge] I’ve mentioned before that we try not to link to things that we suspect you, our readers, are already reading; this, of course, means that we rarely link to some of our favorite blogs.  However: BLDGBLOG‘s latest missive — which is on David Knight and Finn Williams’ explorations […]

Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged | Comments Off on sub-plan | Permalink
September 17, 2010 – 8:10 pm

a cyborg arboretum

[Not a cyborg plant, but certainly technobotanical; image by NL Architects via Inhabitat] 1. This post is for 50 Posts About Cyborgs. 2. This is a cyborg arboretum.  That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs.  Not augmented […]

Posted in futures | Tagged , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
September 17, 2010 – 7:44 am

obama’s national infrastructure bank

Infrastructurist has a quick summary of reactions to the Obama administration’s proposed National Infrastructure Bank.  (The reactions are mostly positive, from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and The New Republic.)  Of course, enthusiasm for the proposal — which, as far as I can tell, is an excellent idea — should be grounded […]

Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Comments Off on obama’s national infrastructure bank | Permalink
September 16, 2010 – 6:27 am

commuting, wireless, and desirability

Writing for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel now, Alexis Madrigal makes a simple but important argument about how cellphones and other mobile devices, by enabling new ways of life, are affecting the form and density of cities: …the latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with […]

Posted in asides, infrastructure, technology, urbanism | Tagged | Comments Off on commuting, wireless, and desirability | Permalink
September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm

networked containers

[A portion of the port of Tianjin — radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and […]

Posted in asides, futures, infrastructure, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on networked containers | Permalink
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm

fifty posts about cyborgs

To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the […]

Posted in architecture, futures, technology | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
August 31, 2010 – 6:16 pm

our decrepit infrastructures

In the wake of last Monday’s Long Island Rail Road snafu — where “a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys installed nearly a century ago” knocked out train service for hours — the New York Times looks at five other American infrastructures which are exceptionally vulnerable due to the combination […]

Posted in asides, engineering, infrastructure | Tagged | Comments Off on our decrepit infrastructures | Permalink
August 28, 2010 – 8:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index

[The Studio Zone, a 30-mile radius in Los Angeles which serves to determine the “rates and work rules for workers in the entertainment industry”; the majority of Los Angeles’ prop houses are located within the Studio Zone; image via the California Film Commission] Robert Sumrell’s “Story of the Eye: Props”, noted elsewhere: DPR-Barcelona skip between […]

Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged , , | Comments Off on reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index | Permalink
August 27, 2010 – 11:53 am

props

[Omega/Cinema Props’ C.P. Three, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue; via bing maps] At some point, presumably, continuing to open our commentaries on The Infrastructural City by noting that the chapter of the week — in this case, Robert Sumrell’s “Props” — reads significantly different from the other chapters will ring […]

Posted in mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
August 26, 2010 – 6:56 pm

roosevelt pneumatic

[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com] Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system: In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, […]

Posted in asides, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on roosevelt pneumatic | Permalink
August 25, 2010 – 7:43 pm

“tim burton’s inception is not a film that needs to be made”

A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky).  At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films. While the most important thing to note when correcting […]

Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
August 19, 2010 – 1:23 am

kotkin contra khanna

[Sorting facilities at Port of Singapore in the foreground, downtown Singapore in the background; via flickr/Storm Crypt] Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the […]

Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
August 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm

spillway on jacobs

Will Wiles writes about the veneration of Jane Jacobs by New Urbanists, delving into his own history of reading Jacobs and coming back out with a series of well-made points, from the realization that battling over the legacy and proper reading of a single urbanist like Jacobs is rather unhelpful, to noting that proximity to […]

Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm

“global hubs and mega-cities”

[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf’s series “Architecture of Density”] In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state: The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age […]

Posted in futures, geography, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
August 16, 2010 – 7:00 am

“cheap land, abundant power, and accessible fiber optic lines”

[Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon; photographed by flickr user The Impression That I Get] In A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes, mammoth briefly described the Google data center in The Dalles; in an excellent recent article, local The Dalles Chronicle reporter Theodoric Meyer investigates the relationship between Google and local public officials, the […]

Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
August 14, 2010 – 3:41 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index

[Bird’s-eye view of “Wal-(medley mixed-up mélange montage mash-up shopping)mart”, an absurdly-titled (but also somewhat light-hearted) proposal for a Wal-Mart on the Gowanus Canal, drawn by (then?) Yale architecture students Alexander Maymind & Cody Davis; read an in-depth interview regarding the project at Archinect.] Catching up (post-viral and sister-visiting-from-Mongolia break) on the Infrastructural City, with two […]

Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index | Permalink
August 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm

public landscapes of distribution

[A model from SITE Architects’ series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don’t think this particular one was built (I’d like to be told I’m wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.] […]

Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
August 5, 2010 – 1:00 pm

robert overweg

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2” pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of […]

Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink