rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

January 12, 2010 – 8:11 pm

re-industrial detroit

An interesting article by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at The New Republic looks at how Detroit might recover from decades of decline; this includes looking at how Detroit might be re-industrialized (the re-industrial path is an even more fascinating proposition than the well-tread path to post-industrial health, though there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the […]

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January 12, 2010 – 1:13 pm

the scale of infrastructural landscapes

[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco’s salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps] I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the […]

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January 11, 2010 – 9:54 pm

the blind watchmaker

[A manhole near Halifax marks the Canadian arrival point for one of the eleven major cable lines carrying the bulk of trans-Atlantic Internet traffic; photographed by Randall Mesdon; from this excellent Wired slideshow on the physical infrastructure of the internet; the text accompanying that show is by Andrew Blum, whose forthcoming book on said infrastructure […]

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January 11, 2010 – 4:05 pm

“utopia redux”

Lebbeus Woods has a fantastic piece, “Utopia Redux”, on the collages of Daniel Meridor, a student at the Cooper Union; the second paragraph, in particular, is a succinct summation of where young designers find themselves after the first decade of the third millenium: Meridor’s generation—a younger one—has no faith in grand architectural plans to make […]

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January 10, 2010 – 9:58 pm

church machine

Today I finally got around to watching “Church Machine”, a short video project from a GSD studio run by Michael Meredith of MOS, which popped up just before Christmas. The video is the work of a student named Matt Storus and is well worth the sixteen minutes it’ll take you to watch it, as it […]

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January 8, 2010 – 1:27 pm

ruins, colosseums, squelettes

Read Quiet Babylon‘s recent post on the slow production of ruins, scrubbing post-boom projects from architectural portfolios, fifteen hundred years of adaptive reuse of the Coliseum in Rome, and more; Maly gets bonus points for including a Wittgenstein anecdote of dubious provenance.

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January 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm

object fixations

I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention.  In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth‘s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay […]

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January 7, 2010 – 1:36 pm

florida, continued

Since I posted a link to Alec MacGillis’s piece on Richard Florida, it’s worth also posting links to Ryan Avent’s critique of the piece, MacGillis’s response, and Avent’s response-to-the-response-to-his-critique. [update: see also the Next American City‘s commentary]

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January 5, 2010 – 2:45 pm

“the ruse of the creative class”

Alec MacGillis has an appropriately harsh look at a decade of Richard Florida in the American Prospect. [via @loudpaper]

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January 5, 2010 – 12:07 pm

glacier wrap

[“Ice Protector OPTIFORCE®”, in situ; images via Eiger International] Or, the second implement in a developing toolbox of landscape tactics for the deployment of snowed architecture: a new f*cking wilderness reminds me that the Swiss have been wrapping their snow to preserve it (and their ski slopes) through the summer, hoping to stave off the […]

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December 21, 2009 – 2:47 pm

ordinance sculptors

[Manhattan skyscraper zoning ordinances, given visual form by Hugh Ferriss; image from Kosmograd’s flickr account] 1 The tricky thing with Duany is sorting out what is a genuine attempt to improve cities and what might be a carefully-constructed shield for the extension of the corporate real estate economy (so long as Duany says things like […]

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December 17, 2009 – 1:09 pm

whitesward

I’m entranced by the simplicity (and, in retrospect, obviousness) of the suggestions in the short text accompanying Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro’s series of photographs at Places, entitled “White Space”. Lopez-Piñeiro says: …even everyday plowing practices — practices with no artistic or design ambitions — have the capacity to transform snowed-in parking lots into beautiful winter gardens… We […]

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December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am

post-traumatic urbanism, ii

Adrian Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth‘s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks” (itself a response to another post by Lahoud on a recent studio he led), discussing how to properly read studio proposals, the master plan “as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one”, Lahoud’s ambivalence about the […]

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December 15, 2009 – 11:41 am

on bicycling infrastructure

While this recent Infrastructurist post (entitled “Reasons Not to Bike to Work: You Can Die”) on the sad news of another cycling fatality is unfortunately an excellent example of the importance of remembering that data is not the plural of anecdote, The Next American City has an excellent post by David Alpert (of Greater Greater […]

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December 12, 2009 – 2:42 pm

@eatingbark

I’ve joined the masses on twitter. If that’s the kind of thing that you’re into, I’m @eatingbark. Feel free to help me pressure Stephen into doing the same.

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December 9, 2009 – 5:55 pm

total service delivery

The Dirt has a lengthy interview conducted by Pierre Belanger with Joe Brown, chief executive of planning, design, and development at AECOM, the architecture and engineering firm that swallowed EDAW (formerly the world’s largest firm primarily focused on landscape architecture, if I recall correctly). The interview covers a wide range of issues, from the “need […]

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December 9, 2009 – 12:23 pm

climate defense systems

An article from Sunday’s Washington Post discusses the development of “climate defense systems”, resulting from an increasing interest in not just climate change prevention, but also climate change adaptation.  The article is particularly focused on the Netherlands, where “the Dutch are spending billions of euros on ‘floating communities’ that can rise with surging flood waters, […]

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December 9, 2009 – 8:36 am

free association design

Via @bldgblog‘s link to this great post on the Mexican city of Guanajuato (which I first became fascinated with when the friend who introduced Stephen and I spent part of a summer there with an architecture studio), I see that Brett Milligan, whose project “Inundating the Border” mammoth briefly touched on in an earlier post […]

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December 7, 2009 – 4:56 pm

quarantine theater

Stephen and I were (of course) delighted to have the opportunity to join BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography (as well as many others) over the weekend for the concluding presentation from the Landscapes of Quarantine studio they’ve been conducting this fall.  The work that’s being produced (for a forthcoming book and exhibition at the Storefront for […]

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December 3, 2009 – 8:10 pm

infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks

[Amos Coal Power Plant, from Mitch Epstein’s fantastic series American Power] Adrian Lahoud has a lengthy post on infrastructure and urbanism at Post-Traumatic Urbanism; the post is well worth reading. A handful of somewhat scattered comments on it follow. I strongly agree with the emphasis on “complex urban interdependencies”, in addition to “physical artefacts” of […]

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