rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

August 3, 2009 – 11:50 am

future suburbia

Worldchanging has a nice feature extrapolating the future of suburbia from current trends, which has long been one of Stephen and I’s favorite pastimes. Excited to see what further ideas for said future(s) may percolate out of the Reburbia design competition, which just concluded this past Friday (results should be posted within a week or […]

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July 31, 2009 – 12:27 pm

cloud skippers

Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”: Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the […]

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July 28, 2009 – 1:05 pm

high line, briefly

The High Line receives a glowing review from the New York Review of Books (which, due their odd desire to maintain the pretense that they publish book reviews and not journalism, pretends that the article is a review of the pamphlet-sized Designing the High Line, though it merits only a single paragraph in the article). […]

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July 24, 2009 – 12:44 pm

there is no such thing as photographic truth

Critical Terrain asked photographers Alex Fradkin, Tim Griffith, Mark Luthringer, and David Maisel to contribute their thoughts on the Edgar Martins digital fabrication episode, which I accidentally stumbled into earlier this month.

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July 22, 2009 – 12:06 pm

readings: on water

1. Good Magazine’s Water Issue discusses clean water technologies for the developing world, the current and historical contamination of American tap water, fully recycled tap water, how the control of water is becoming central to the conflict between India and Pakistan and interviews Robert Glennon, author of the new book Unquenchable, which explores America’s water […]

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July 21, 2009 – 2:52 pm

american turbine

Adam Goodheart mulls over the place of the wind turbine in the American landscape: Just a century ago, however, windmills by the hundreds of thousands dotted many of the same landscapes where their present-day descendants now loom. Nearly every farmyard had its own spindly device atop a steel tower, pumping water and powering lamps. Those […]

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July 21, 2009 – 8:58 am

strange buildings

Via things, a list of 50 “strange buildings” which mashes icons of modern architecture (Nagakin Capsule Tower, Habitat 67, Lloyd’s) with ducks and idiosyncratic vernacular structures.  As things notes, the interesting thing here is not the list, but the (inclusive) attitude towards architecture revealed by the list.

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July 20, 2009 – 8:56 pm

its prettiness and romance will then be gone

As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and forward-thinking project from a city not known for its innovative ecological design (though they have built a rather seductive […]

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July 18, 2009 – 2:18 pm

sergey prokudin-gorsky

“Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer… Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915.” [via opus // more about the digital […]

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July 17, 2009 – 1:38 pm

smart tagging garbage

New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.

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July 15, 2009 – 2:47 pm

death of the aral sea

The European Space Agency documents the decline of the Aral Sea, via Wired, whose 2002 article on the management of the Amu Darya explains in great detail the reasons for that decline.

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July 14, 2009 – 3:04 pm

songdo’s tendril

You find this mass anchored in the Yellow Sea (google map) off the Korean coast, attached by a thin line of gravel and asphalt (drawn in the straight line which is the international tell of the engineer) to New Songdo City, the massive planned addition to the port of Incheon.  A perfect rectangle in a […]

Posted in infrastructure, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 14, 2009 – 8:41 am

transmilenio and bus rapid transit

Article at the New York Times on the value of bus rapid transit systems, particularly Bogota’s Transmilenio.

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July 13, 2009 – 12:18 pm

carlo ratti interview @ city of sound

Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect: This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft […]

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July 10, 2009 – 8:49 am

dirt

My father was trained as an agronomist, so I endured a fair number of lectures as a child about the importance of distinguishing between soil and dirt.  Nonetheless, I recently added David Montgomery’s Dirt (which is about soil) to my reading list, and Jim Rossignol’s review of another book entitled Dirt (this one — also […]

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July 8, 2009 – 1:59 pm

congestion pricing manhattan

A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff.  The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens.  Congestion pricing is […]

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July 8, 2009 – 10:47 am

the people’s public works

Here’s one such strategy for applying architectural tactics to a much broader set of situations and materials, Stephen, from Rebar (who are perhaps the best current example of a group doing such things, at least that I’m aware of): The project, entitled “The People’s Public Works”, “[lures] the public into a carnival midway with infrastructure […]

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July 7, 2009 – 1:45 pm

grande cretto

Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto is a waist-high concrete casting of the old town of Gibellina, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 (image via flickr user claude05). The town of Nuova Gibellina, which was built to house Gibellina’s displaced residents, is now fantastically eerie, as it was imagined as a triumphant convergence of modern […]

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July 6, 2009 – 11:44 am

the coming infrastructure bubble?

[Interior of an abandoned and incomplete home in a subdivision outside Phoenix, from an excellent slideshow of photographs taken by Edgar Martins, commissioned by the New York Times to document the real estate bust.] I’d highly recommend reading or re-reading Eric Janszen’s “The Next Bubble”, which was published in Harper’s almost a year and a […]

Posted in energy, finance, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
June 29, 2009 – 5:30 pm

re-engineering the earth

An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores aggressive “geo-engineering” projects: “Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen—one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy—recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the […]

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