rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

July 30, 2010 – 6:00 am

on “dubai-bashing”

Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are writing about research from Al Manakh at the Huffington Post, describe what they call the phenomenon of “Dubai-bashing”, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai.  While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than […]

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July 28, 2010 – 8:00 pm

“a tax credit or a zoning change”

Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together: “…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces […]

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July 28, 2010 – 6:00 am

foodprint: toronto

[Architect Christ Hardwicke, whose project “Farm City” is pictured above, is one of the diverse group of panelists assembled for Foodprint: Toronto.] Google Analytics tells me that Canadians make up the second largest portion of mammoth‘s readership and that, of you Canadians, approximately one-quarter are located in Toronto.  Neither of these facts are particularly surprising, […]

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July 26, 2010 – 2:00 pm

the infrastructural district

[At the Washington Post, photographer David Deal steps inside, above, and beneath the District of Columbia’s infrastructure and other hidden spaces — the “Third Street Tunnel blower room”, pictured above; Blue Plains settlement ponds in Southwest; the specimen room at the Natural History Museum; the Hecht Company warehouse on New York Avenue; and so on.]

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July 26, 2010 – 6:00 am

distribution

We’re reading The Infrastructural City.  This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week.  Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary. [An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden’s photo-essay “The Trench”, which follows […]

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July 24, 2010 – 4:10 pm

the revealing habits of human beings, and other tips for urban navigation

In an “Op-Art” at the New York Times, author Tristan Gooley and illustrator Ross MacDonald share with us fascinating tips for “navigating the urban jungle” (tips which would fit neatly into Free Association Design‘s call for a study of embodiment and urbanism, like a manual for enhanced urban sensory awareness).  The prevailing winds can be […]

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July 19, 2010 – 9:38 pm

queryable urban landscapes

Adam Greenfield (Speedbird) wrote a brief piece a bit over a week ago for Urban Omnibus entitled “Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism”, which is worth a read.  Greenfield first extrapolates from services like New York City’s 311 and the UK’s FixMyStreet the probable development of an “urban issue-tracking board”, “visual and Web-friendly, […]

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July 18, 2010 – 11:41 am

“anchors in a mutable field”

[“City Market”, a photomontage of the negotiated space of flower market in Bangalore, from Mathur and da Cunha’s 2006 book and exhibition Deccan Traverses; image via Places] In addition to describing a theory of the transactions that govern the interactions between property owners, Roger Sherman’s “Counting (on) Change” also makes the broader argument that architects […]

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July 15, 2010 – 7:00 am

latent

A blog post whose sentence structure, when diagrammed correctly, unfolds to reveal the blueprints for some strange building.

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July 13, 2010 – 10:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter eight index

[Image via flickr user Grahamko] Yes, we’ve fallen a bit behind with The Infrastructural City.  But we’ve got a plan to remedy that — we’re pushing back the schedule.  This is actually less because of our lag (this week was supposed to be an “off” week, so we’d be caught up with Stephen’s hybrid “Mobile […]

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July 11, 2010 – 2:00 am

soccer city under construction

[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander’s photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg — site of today’s final — but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in […]

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July 7, 2010 – 8:00 pm

sid meier and peter cook

Serial Consign has posted an excellent short essay on the overlap between representations of cities in video games and representations of cities in architecture: Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural […]

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July 6, 2010 – 7:00 am

soccer city, in infrastructural context

Soccer City stadium, site of Sunday’s World Cup final, is the largest stadium in Africa — though it seats a bit under ninety thousand spectators in its current configuration, which sacrifices spectator seating in favor of “reserved seating” for the press, FIFA officials, and other “Very Important Persons” — but even its bulk is relatively […]

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July 5, 2010 – 1:31 pm

“waits awards”

FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy.  Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors […]

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July 3, 2010 – 9:48 pm

transposed sporting landscapes

After a rather exciting series of quarter-finals, and in anticipation of the semi-finals: the last fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and Germany, transposed onto urban landscapes near Lyon by the artists collective Pied La Biche: [Seen at Polis; Pied La Biche were last spotted playing three-sided anarchist-rules soccer on a hexagonal […]

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June 29, 2010 – 9:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter seven index

[A “feral house” in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; […]

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June 22, 2010 – 2:27 pm

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.  With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter […]

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June 20, 2010 – 5:30 pm

ordinances, sculpted

[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the […]

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June 19, 2010 – 11:15 am

changing rooms and holding cells

[Iconeye goes inside the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, Green Point, ignoring facades and roofs in favor of spaces we rarely see: changing rooms, holding cells, offices, and, above, the pre-match warm-up room; photographs by Justin McGuirk.]

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June 15, 2010 – 9:20 pm

additional traffic

Since it’s now buried below a mini-avalanche of posts and I doubt anyone will notice the updates unless I point to them, I’ve added a few things to the chapter five (“Blocking All Lanes: Traffic”) index below.  To further ease your reading experience, the links added are: contributions to the traffic discussion from Nam Henderson […]

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