rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

December 3, 2009 – 10:43 am

readings: bloggers

A few blogs, mostly relatively recently added to the reading list: Millenium People, which is on an Arctic hiatus, but should return after Christmas; a recommended starting point: the data city + jules verne // Serial Consign, Greg Smith (of Vague Terrain) on “digital culture and information design” // Quiet Babylon; as it says, “cyborgs, […]

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December 1, 2009 – 4:58 pm

a superproject void

[Aerial image of the Hoover Dam Bypass under construction; I’d love to give credit for the image to the photographer, but it came to me through a long email chain, lacking any attribution, and I haven’t been able to locate the source] Economics journalist Louis Uchitelle complains about a “superproject void” in the Times; Infrastructurist […]

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November 24, 2009 – 4:18 pm

the new dutch water defense line

There’s nothing particularly original about the observation that the Dutch have a peculiar national relationship to their landscape (and, in particular, its hydrology), but that peculiarity produces endlessly fascinating oddities and, apparently, endless mammoth posts on Dutch hydrology.  As lewism noted on one such post, Bulwarks and Flux: …the whole of Dutch landscape and history […]

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November 20, 2009 – 12:53 pm

ordos, under construction

Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.

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November 19, 2009 – 2:32 pm

this place is best shunned and left uninhabited

[“Landscape of Thorns”, concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years] Triggered by the recent revelation that tests at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reveal that a seemingly innocuous white substance filling a glass bottle dug up in 2004 is actually “the oldest existing […]

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November 18, 2009 – 12:16 pm

pueraria lobata

A couple months ago, The Dirt highlighted an article from the Times about Alabama’s “War on Cogongrass”, in which Alabama’s forestry commission and a hired company of landscape managers, Mobile’s Larson & McGowin, deploy a series of escalating military metaphors (“killer”, “the Perfect Weed”, “war project”, “parallel attacks”, “eradicate”) against that rather aggressive species. Angela […]

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November 17, 2009 – 4:33 pm

varnelis interview at triple canopy

Kazys Varnelis follows up his recent interview of Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) by himself being interviewed, at Triple Canopy (whose last two issues on urbanism are indispensable): Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve […]

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November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm

the cloud

You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium.  The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is […]

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November 8, 2009 – 10:32 pm

beneath the antarctic ice

[Composite false color image of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a 7-mile-long, 33-foot-high sheet of ice projecting off the Erebus glacier in Antarctica, carved into unusual shapes by the summer waters of McMurdo Sound; via Wired Science: “During the summer, when the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo melts, the ice tongue floats on the […]

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November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am

readings: hydrologically situated infrastructures

Whether immense re-configurations of watersheds on a geological scale or fine and playful tunings of the interactions between city-dwellers and the infrastructures that deliver their water, those that transmit water or those that sit on and in it, the intersection of hydrology and infrastructure is a continual fascination for mammoth. Image from Yue Yuan Zheng’s […]

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November 5, 2009 – 10:59 pm

park supermarket

Dutch architects van Bergen Kolpa (with research ecologists Alterra) propose a “Park Supermarket” for the Randstad, transforming polders — historically landscapes of food production, now pressured by both development and rising waters — into a park subdivided into new climate zones (“moderate, Mediterranean, and tropical”) and constructed hydrological conditions (basins for the cultivation of tilapia, […]

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November 2, 2009 – 1:08 pm

re-inhabited circle-k’s

[“Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM”; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K’s include “a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and […]

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October 28, 2009 – 9:27 am

the museum of innocence

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul businessman, and the forbidden affair that derails his life, which is relatively standard stuff. What is fascinating, though, is that Kemal’s obsession with the affair leads him to collect an assembly of objects from […]

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October 26, 2009 – 1:53 pm

claiming involuntary parks

[Taiga at the glaciated and lake-spotted meeting of Finland and Russia] The European Green Belt is an initiative to develop a pan-European conservation system as “an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black Sea”. Picking out the Cold War line of division between East and West, the initiative aims to thicken and […]

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October 26, 2009 – 9:22 am

metaphor and landscape

faslanyc has a good piece on the weakness of metaphor as a grounding literary device for landscape architecture.  The post is in reaction to Andrew Blum’s “Metaphor Remediation”, recently run in Places. I approvingly cited Blum’s article a couple times, so I re-read Blum’s article with faslanyc‘s criticism in mind.  Having done so, I think […]

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October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am

polis on suburban cairo

Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct […]

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October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am

the atlantic on new orleans

Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]

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October 21, 2009 – 3:35 pm

vanished speedways

[Local speedway in Lancaster County, South Carolina; this is the speedway that sang me to sleep on Saturday nights for roughly twelve of the first fifteen years of my life] In the comments on my post on soccer as a diagram traced on an exported landscape, Stephen notes that : The landscape of [Formula One] […]

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October 21, 2009 – 11:33 am

extraterrestial infrastructure

“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.

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October 20, 2009 – 3:39 pm

an assortment of links relevant to previous conversations

1. On the relationship between sports and urbanism, see Pruned on urban golf. Which led me to think that soccer might similarly be deployed with a similar future of appropriation, accomodation, commercialization, abandonment, and absorbtion, only to discover, via the Office for Unsolicited Architecture tumblr, that urban soccer has already been deployed as an architectural […]

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