rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am

chinampas

[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri.  The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from […]

Posted in asides, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 24, 2010 – 1:56 pm

thilafushi

[A ferry arrives at Thilafushi, the world’s largest island composed primarily of garbage, in a photograph from an excellent photo-essay on Thilafushi by flickr user AB Watson Year.  Thilafushi, which is located in and was constructed by the Maldives on the site of a former lagoon, spreads across 124 acres in the Indian Ocean, ever […]

Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm

the north american storm control authority

[Comparative historic and contemporary heat maps of the wind energy potential of the continental United States, via NASCA.gov; NASCA documents indicate sources for their imagery include AWS Truewind/NREL via Wired Science and NOAA/NASA] The North American Storm Control Authority (NASCA), like its predecessor, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which rebuilt the Rocky […]

Posted in infrastructure, speculative-architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm

a glacier is a very long event

The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find […]

Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm

readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors

[all photographs from Andrea Frank’s series “Ports and Ships”] 1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool: Where […]

Posted in infrastructure, readings | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors | Permalink
February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm

paul kersey, yimbyist

Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”.  I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, […]

Posted in architecture, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on paul kersey, yimbyist | Permalink
February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm

double happiness

Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim […]

Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Comments (3) | Permalink
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am

the dead sea works

I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC‘s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) […]

Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm

mine the gap

Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate […]

Posted in architecture, asides, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments Off on mine the gap | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm

vancouver whitesward

[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (“snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations” and “organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down”), via NASA Earth Observatory.  Read more about whitesward at […]

Posted in asides, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments Off on vancouver whitesward | Permalink
February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm

metropolis prognostications

[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source] In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade.   It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers […]

Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
February 8, 2010 – 3:27 pm

olympic ballardia

[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG’s call for a “J.G. Ballard of contemporary China” (or drive home Kongjian Wu’s repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the “empty shells” of Beijing’s Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; […]

Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments Off on olympic ballardia | Permalink
February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm

readings: the digital city

1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]

Posted in readings, technology, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
February 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm

the city beneath the city

Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting […]

Posted in landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
January 30, 2010 – 9:45 pm

haiti rewired: quinta monroy, hackability, incremental housing

For a bit over a week now (presuming I’ve got the timeline right), Wired‘s been building a very interesting community at their subsite Haiti Rewired, aimed at developing “tech and infrastructure solutions for Haiti”.  A couple of items there tie back into the themes mammoth discussed in relation to Quinta Monroy: first, this brief post […]

Posted in asides, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 29, 2010 – 2:21 pm

high-speed rail funding

The Transport Politic reviews the distribution and impact of this week’s high-speed rail funding announcement in a cautiously optimistic fashion, with the important caveat that “eight billion dollars of spending won’t be enough for even one true high-speed line”, while Infrastructurist explains why the prioritization of the Orlando-Tampa line, which is slated to receive $1.25 […]

Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments Off on high-speed rail funding | Permalink
January 22, 2010 – 2:38 pm

alan berger interviewed

While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare.  The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane […]

Posted in architecture, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
January 19, 2010 – 12:45 pm

“the landscape of contemporary infrastructure”

Urban Tick has a review of a new publication, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, which catalogs a variety of (mostly high-profile) infrastructural projects designed by architects in the past couple decades. Though I haven’t read the book, the first point of critique that Urban Tick makes is quite astute and demonstrates a common problem in […]

Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 15, 2010 – 12:41 pm

analog civic maintenance

Jeff Maki writes at Urban Omnibus about New York City’s steam tunnels as a potential analog precursor to future mass civic participation in the maintenance of urban infrastructure, which may be an increasingly necessary  tactic, given the massive repair deficit North America’s urban infrastructures face.

Posted in asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
January 13, 2010 – 5:56 pm

simcity baghdad

[update: thanks to commenter цarьchitect, a screen capture from a demo for SIM Building, a program of the sort which likely provides the underlying architecture for UrbanSim] An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the […]

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