rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

September 28, 2009 – 7:53 pm

not purely mathematical constructions

[Sensors lining the coast of Monterrey Bay, measuring surface currents] A NYTimes article reports on the increasing interest of scientists in “Lagrangian coherent structures”, physical constructs within liquid and gaseous flows which are essentially invisible to unaided eye, but revealed and mapped with the aid of networks of sensors and pattern-discerning algorithms: The concept of […]

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September 23, 2009 – 4:14 pm

avent and cowen on tysons corner

There’s a discussion about the economics and politics of urbanizing suburbia taking place between economics bloggers Ryan Avent and Tyler Cowen right now (if you’re not familiar with the two, Avent is roughly liberal and Cowen is roughly libertarian, though both are more or less independent thinkers).  It begins with this Washington Post article which […]

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September 23, 2009 – 10:07 am

the sewers of cote st. paul

[The sewer as limestone cavern, or the near-total hybridization of infrastructure and natural process, via Under Montreal.]

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September 22, 2009 – 9:04 am

light rail in phoenix

An article in the NYTimes on the successful first half-year of light rail in Phoenix makes note of an interesting point: only a small minority of users (27 percent) are commuters, which inverts the typical use pattern (60 percent of transit users nationwide are commuters).  Despite that low use by commuters, the system has exceeded […]

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September 21, 2009 – 3:38 pm

hadid in glasgow

Entschwindet und Vergeht penned a thoughtful and clever critique of Hadid’s Museum of Transport (in Glasgow) a bit over a month ago: I’ve already discussed ZHA a number of times here, often in regards to unwittingly interesting things that they’ve done, such as the accidental brutalism of LF1 and the Wolfsburg museum (which I shall […]

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September 15, 2009 – 12:00 pm

footnote to dialogue

Talking about “an expanded notion of context”, as Stephen does below, reminds me that there’s a book from a few years ago, Site Matters, which explores the impact of that expansion (though it uses the term ‘site’ rather than ‘context’), in relationship to both landscape and architecture, in a number of very interesting ways.  I […]

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September 15, 2009 – 8:11 am

pruned on under spaces

Pruned’s recent series Under Spaces (part one, part two, part three) is very good — I’m particularly enamored with Hans Herrmann’s Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project from Clemson University, which inserts an urban park beneath Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction“, mostly because I think the notion that the space of the park would […]

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September 11, 2009 – 11:26 am

ryan avent on robert moses

Ryan Avent has a very interesting post at streetsblog on the problems with the rehabilitation of Robert Moses, who is appealing urbanists for roughly the same reason that Thomas Friedman is pining for autocracy.  The link Avent provides to a study which concludes that “one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population […]

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September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm

class, inequality, social media, and the public sphere

A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are: How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures […]

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September 7, 2009 – 10:45 am

a pair of landfills

The New York Times had a nice article yesterday on a pair of Brooklyn landfills that are, with generous assistance from John McLaughlin, from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, and landscape architect Leslie Sauer (of Andropogon), developing functional, self-regulating artificial ecologies: In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the […]

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September 6, 2009 – 1:17 pm

wpa 2.0

Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced. “Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020” The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by […]

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September 1, 2009 – 11:59 am

so long, where

Sorry to see Where reach its end, both because Brendan Crain is a fantastic blogger and because I think the group-blog format is one with a lot of potential, particularly to stir positive and useful debate.  Its hard to believe that Where is only two-and-half years old.  Fortunately Mario Ballestros is still blogging at Mañanarama […]

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August 26, 2009 – 2:13 pm

wunderkammer on the high line

Wunderkammer has a nice piece by Ned Shalanski on the High Line, which approaches the High Line from a rather different perspective than the one I’ve tended to bring to it (bemoaning the loss of the landscape that had developed over time, etc.).  A couple of nice observations, about the High Line as the product […]

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August 24, 2009 – 1:37 pm

rory hyde on unsolicited architecture

Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past: [T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions […]

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August 19, 2009 – 7:44 am

tree cultivation in the sahel

Farmers in the Sahel are combating desertification with trees — but by cultivating them, not planting them: Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum, Sawadogo is also growing trees. And the trees, he says, work wonders.  The temperature here is very different than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air […]

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August 18, 2009 – 11:35 am

smudge clui tour

Highly recommend reading Smudge’s account of a CLUI tour of nuclear New Mexico, if you missed BLDGBLOG and Pruned‘s recommendations (which seems unlikely, because I don’t know why anyone would be reading mammoth but not that pair): “This sense of the technological sublime in New Mexico runs from the earthships of Taos to the test […]

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August 17, 2009 – 4:26 pm

t-tree

Trying to figure out what the meaning of the apparent popularity of the “T-Tree” reburbia entry is.  It is currently right behind the New Urbanist submission “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”, both of which have over twice as many votes as any of the other finalists.  “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”‘s popularity doesn’t surprise me, as it […]

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August 17, 2009 – 4:16 pm

google maps road trip

I heard this in the car on my return trip to Hartsfield Sunday and then Stephen brought it up again this afternoon, so I suppose I should mention it: two friends, one who lives in LA and one who lives in Richmond, VA, go on a cross-country road-trip using google maps.   Which wouldn’t be remarkable, […]

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August 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm

burn down the suburbs, and other comments on reburbia

Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it: 1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we […]

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August 4, 2009 – 1:05 pm

the after/afterparty

The After/Afterparty is a Processing application (or series of applications) developed by David Lu in collaboration with Michael Meredith (of MOS), which uses the forms from MOS’s PS1 project (Afterparty) to explore how architects and software developers might work together, both through generative processes and crowd-sourcing applications.  The later, though described by Lu as a […]

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