rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

June 14, 2010 – 5:30 pm

of jane jacobs and ipods

An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly: …Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to […]

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June 11, 2010 – 9:32 pm

as-built on the pitch

[‘Alan Ball — full match’, working drawing (ink on trace); artist David Marsh] Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966.  Using archival footage played back at quarter- and […]

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June 10, 2010 – 4:55 pm

urban crude

While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail.  Oil wells sprout like hardy […]

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June 8, 2010 – 10:28 pm

alternate los angeles no. 2

[An artist’s conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970’s, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including “the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River […]

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June 6, 2010 – 11:22 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter five index

A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation […]

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May 31, 2010 – 1:51 pm

a tertiary river

[Aerial photograph of sludge mats swirling in the Los Angeles River by flickr user Vision Aerie] As we’re about to jump scales in our reading of The Infrastructural City — from the post-natural ecologies and mining operations of the first section of the book, “Landscape”, to the networks of cell towers and cable lines featured […]

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May 28, 2010 – 5:00 am

“a state of perpetual fracture”

[“The faults induced by military speleogenesis will lead to gradual yet certain failure of the jet noise barrier.”] Nick Sowers (Soundscrapers) has recently posted a series at the Archinect school blog project exploring his recently-completed thesis project from a succession of disciplinary perspectives, which he titles the Archaeologist (who introduces the project), the Forensic Engineer, […]

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May 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter four index (updated may 31)

[Jake Longstreth’s “Skybox”; while the pit mines and flood-control apparatus found in Irwindale are one particularly spectacular kind of marginal landscape, there are many other kinds, exhibiting varying degrees of marginality, including speedways — such as the Irwindale Speedway — and the ubiquitous suburban strip.] DPR-Barcelona returns to a familiar theme for that blog, the […]

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May 26, 2010 – 5:00 am

3rd coast atlas

Readers of mammoth may be interested in contributing to the 3rd Coast Atlas, “a platform for research and design initiatives that explore the urbanization, landscape, infrastructure and ecology of the Great Lakes Basin and Great Lakes Megaregion.”  Submissions — which may take the form of written essay, design project, research, or visual essay — are […]

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May 25, 2010 – 8:00 pm

geology as infrastructure

Smudge Studio’s Geologic Time Viewer re-casts the “official Geologic Time Scale” as not only a way of looking back into the past, but also a window into the present: “the materialities of every previous geologic epoch flow into the present-as-middle and give form to our daily lives.” We learn, for instance, that iron infrastructures, like […]

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May 25, 2010 – 7:00 pm

alternate los angeles no. 1

[Narrow Streets L.A. is a blog which posts photographs of greater Los Angeles streets, digitally manipulated in exactly the way you would expect from the title: made narrower.  While occasionally it may go a bit overboard and lurch towards self-parody, generally it is a fantastic experiment — postcards from an alternate Los Angeles — showing […]

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May 18, 2010 – 11:00 pm

feedback: architecture’s new territories

[The Bou Craa conveyor, which is similar to the Negev desert belt previously discussed on mammoth, carries phosphate across the desert in Western Sahara, leaving the wind-swept sediment shadow above, and is the longest conveyor belt in the world; seen at deconcrete, image via bing maps.] It would befuddle me if there were anyone who […]

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May 18, 2010 – 8:00 pm

teenagers and young people, in the city like locusts

With the publication of their latest issue, The Atlantic Monthly launched a month-long sub-site that they’re calling “The Future of the City”, which interests us for obvious reasons.   In particular, the articles on the potential of private transit and post-Jacobsian urbanists are worth reading (and if I get a chance I’ll pull excerpts from […]

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May 14, 2010 – 1:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter three index (updated 17 may)

[Crude City today: a woman crosses oil pipelines in the Niger delta; photograph by Ed Kashi for National Geographic.] Nam Henderson ponders the relationship between urban density and oil production in Los Angeles, and wonders if future landscapes might develop from the evolution of Leo Marx’s classic formulation, the machine in the garden, to the […]

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May 10, 2010 – 6:00 pm

youth of today

One of the best of the print architectural critics, Christopher Hawthorne, writes about his recent visit to Medellin in the LA Times, and offers a well-rounded evaluation of the significance of the notable projects completed there in the past decade.  While the most important thing about Medellín’s new architecture is, as Hawthorne writes and mammoth […]

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May 6, 2010 – 10:56 pm

lo-fi seed dispersal

[Prepared Greenaid seedbombs, awaiting dispersal; photograph by Fletcher Studio via Sustainable Cities Collective] Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid […]

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May 3, 2010 – 5:00 am

“the parrot, the weed, and the sludge mat”

You’ve arrived at week two of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here — taking particular note of the index of contributing posts for the first chapter, which tracks the sprawl of the discussion across other blogs. [The lower reaches of […]

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April 28, 2010 – 9:00 am

solar owens lake

In the comments at DPR-Barcelona, David Maisel points us to a pair of news articles on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s latest plan for the Owens Lake playa: The Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners [in December] unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of […]

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April 27, 2010 – 10:19 pm

“like a conveyor belt built to toss tea-drinking scientists into the icy sea”

[Halley VI, a British research station on ski pods, via Wired.] At Wired, Andrew Blum surveys the architecture of Antarctic research stations, which, as it includes buildings which have to be towed to remain at fixed geographic points, hydraulic lifts that raise buildings in reaction to snowfall, and architecturally-induced “subzero maelstroms”, reads like a photographic […]

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April 23, 2010 – 12:00 pm

marsh experiments

[A model built by Alan Berger, Harvard graduate student Gena Wirth, MIT professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf, and CEE graduate student Jeff Rominger, to test for the optimum design of pollutant-removing vegetated channels, as part of Berger and P-REX’s Pontine Systemic Design; image via MITnews.] I love this: [T]he Pontine Marshes project […]

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