rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

October 20, 2009 – 10:25 am

as diagram traced on exported landscape

[photograph by Maximilian Haidacher, via polar inertia] The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are […]

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October 19, 2009 – 12:20 pm

ownership culture

[“Subdivision: Sunshine Acres”, by Ross Racine.] Thomas Sugrue, in a Wall Street Journal article on the American culture of home ownership from August: Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation’s saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside […]

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October 16, 2009 – 12:19 pm

toxic waters

The New York Times is running a fantastic series on “worsening pollution in America’s waters and regulators’ response.”

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October 16, 2009 – 11:11 am

paris on the anacostia

A New Urbanist (edit: see comments for update) proposal to channelize the Anacostia and extend a modified version of the L’Enfant Plan to its newly narrowed banks, summarized here, is attracting a bit of attention here in DC (also here, here, and here). 1As commentator “Capitol Dome” notes at Greater Greater Washington, the plan proposes […]

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October 16, 2009 – 8:58 am

camouflaged lockheed

[the Lockheed air terminal in Burbank, camouflaged during World War II for the benefit of Japanese aviators; via greg.org, who suggests that perhaps the next version of the ‘Bilbao Effect’ will be for struggling cities to commission similarly flimsy roofscapes for the benefit of the google maps audience; originals in a california state collection here, […]

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October 15, 2009 – 9:34 am

abandoned sites as energy production fields

[The Lackawanna Eight, windmills located in Buffalo on the former site of a Bethlehem Steel facility; background via bing maps] A partnership between the EPA and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is looking at the advantages of re-purposing contaminated sites as production sites for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power (dull report here and slightly […]

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October 14, 2009 – 11:00 am

edward burtynsky, oil

[oil field maintained by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, photographed by Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes), via dpr-barcelona; visit Burtynsky’s website for additional images from the book] Edward Burtynsky’s latest book and exhibition explores the landscapes of, machinery that produces, and products dervied from oil: “When I first started photographing industry it was out […]

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October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am

city, battlesuit, archigram

A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence […]

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October 13, 2009 – 12:42 pm

places at design observer

The architecture/urbanism/landscape journal Places has recently taken up residency at Design Observer; notable new articles include a review of The Infrastructural City by Chris Stooss (with attached slideshow of Lane Barden’s wonderful photographs from that book), an article on the relationship between landscape architecture and ecology (excerpted from a new book on Michael Van Valkenburgh, […]

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October 13, 2009 – 10:04 am

city of sound, sentient city, continued

I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images.  Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and […]

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October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm

urban systems design and the architectural disciplines

You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City.  A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient […]

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October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm

translators for the networked city

Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK: …the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. In fact, it’s surpassingly […]

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October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am

dan hill on the sentient city

City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant to themes […]

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October 8, 2009 – 9:28 am

zibo

[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China.  Zibo is […]

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October 7, 2009 – 9:22 am

ephemeral infrastructures

Between 1999 and 2004, Ruth Dusseault documented the transformation of Atlanta’s derelict Atlantic Steel Industries complex into Atlantic Station, a massive (138 acres, with a budget exceeding two billion dollars) residential and retail development.  The photos reveal a fascinating but ephemeral landscape marked by raw and unfinished structures that are eventually buried beneath more civilized […]

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October 6, 2009 – 12:00 pm

brodsky’s ice pavilion

[Alexander Brodsky‘s pavilion on Lake Pirogovo, near Moscow, via flickr user Yuri Palmin.  Described in Metropolis in 2006: …in winter 2003 a team of laborers under his direction trudged out onto [Lake Pirogov’s] frozen surface and, in the frigid conditions, assembled a rectangular mesh cage about 40 feet long and 8 feet high that they […]

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October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm

burnham’s centennial

Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to […]

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October 1, 2009 – 4:41 pm

gameworlds

[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting] Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in […]

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September 29, 2009 – 1:45 pm

from constant to variable

Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to […]

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September 29, 2009 – 12:17 pm

it’s in ohio

[Black volcanic sand desert in Iceland, via flickr user meiburgin.] Back in August, while on vacation, I read David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.  A pair of geographies he invented, the suburb of East Corinth and the Great Ohio Desert, particularly fascinated me, as they demonstrate how ordinary ideas (the urban […]

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