rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

May 15, 2009 – 7:45 am

more on criticism and blogs

Additional responses to Abraham’s Blueprint screed: 1. Owen Hatherley at sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy (who was named in said screed). 2. Infinite Thought gets at the heart of what is potentially the most valuable contribution of blogging (as a medium) to discourse: “Abrahams criticises Owen and Fantastic Journal for discussing Ford, as […]

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May 12, 2009 – 4:02 pm

criticism and blogs

Tim Abrahams of Blueprint Magazine has popped off his twelve-gauge on architecture blogs, charging them with failing the project of architectural criticism through ‘nostalgia’ (that nasty bogeyman of progressivism), ‘consensus’, and disconnection from the ‘real world’.  Oddly, the first name he names is that of Things Magazine.  This is odd both (a) because Things is […]

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May 8, 2009 – 2:53 pm

insert and instigate

A couple exceptionally fresh projects slipped into the ASLA awards this year (which were just released yesterday), both by CMG Landscape Architecture of San Francisco: “Panhandle Bandshell”, a temporary structure, composed entirely of recycled materials, erected in cooperation with the design collective Rebar. “The Crack Garden”, which Pruned has an excellent post on, under construction. […]

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May 7, 2009 – 11:54 am

zoned nimbus

Recent research ” demonstrates that local and regional patterns of land use change substantially altered cloud patterns” — “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’, creating regional (mesoscale) patterns in shallow (lower) cloud cover layers”. Cue BLDGBLOG to suggest a city built with the aim of controlling the cloud […]

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May 7, 2009 – 11:36 am

light-based regional product

Shouldn’t Florida just say: “I ranked the world’s cities based on how bright they are from space”?

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May 5, 2009 – 11:16 am

the city we have

In a recent feature on Archinect, Will Galloway of Front Office (they have a blog here) discusses the predilection of architects for the wholesale urban renovation (which, despite the prominence of theoretical frameworks that intend to offer alternatives, remains the dominant tendency of designers, even those working within frameworks — such as landscape urbanism — […]

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April 30, 2009 – 1:11 pm

the greenwashed city

At Yale Environment 360, Christina Larson explores the fate of China’s Dongtan project and the ramifications/lessons of its apparent failure for the ‘eco-city’.  The most important points she makes are probably (a) that such projects tend to “leave the population they were supposed to serve behind” while garnering “fame and money for the foreign firms […]

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April 29, 2009 – 3:09 pm

architecture without architects

Charles Holland points out how incredibly odd much of the architecture of the sort of ordinary housing developments that spot the suburbs of both the UK and the US is. Not exactly what Rudofsky meant by “architecture without architects”, I don’t think, but the questions Holland asks (“Where do these forms and materials come from?”, […]

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April 28, 2009 – 12:50 pm

a quick visual tour of the urban prairies of america’s heartland

Beginning with Detroit; Saint Louis and Buffalo after the jump.

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April 27, 2009 – 9:14 am

verbal cartoons

Suggested additional Ecological Urbanism conference cartoons for Klaus, roughly in the spirit of Dan Liebert: 1. Koolhaas standing before his firm’s crudely diagrammatic proposal for European energy production: “We still haven’t moved beyond the harmless arrows… [Piano is] either outrageously innocent or deeply calculating” 2. A pie chart. In red: the percentage of time devoted […]

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April 24, 2009 – 3:13 pm

biofuel skepticism

Biofuel skepticism — both cellulose alcohol and algae — albeit from a source with an obvious (and stated) agenda. While I’m skeptical of these skeptics’ agenda, the environmental and political problems that have resulted from pushing first-generation biofuels (corn ethanol, palm oil) here and abroad suggest that its worth at least listening to the skeptics […]

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April 24, 2009 – 12:21 pm

the most sublime room in the world

The French keep all of the nuclear waste from the last thirty years of energy production in one room, the storage vault at La Hague. la hague in penisular context portion of la hague facility [google maps] If, as the landscape theorist Beth Meyers has suggested, sublime sentiments can be stirred by the juxtaposition of […]

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April 21, 2009 – 10:56 am

slave labor and ecological urbanism

Finally got around to reading the article that Becker posted on Dubai; it is very disappointing that these problems were glossed over/not presented at all during discussion of Masdar (which is not in Dubai, but another one of the Emirates, Abu-Dhabi) and Dubai at the Ecological Urbanism conference, particuarly since (a) the discussion of Masdar […]

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April 21, 2009 – 7:30 am

a state of crisis

I could be wrong about this, I suppose, but I’d say that the ASLA’s continued fixation (“a state of crisis”, “international embarrassment”) on the quality of the turf grass at the National Mall (which remains, despite the patchy grass, a perfectly functional space, as demonstrated recently by the Inauguration) is symptomatic of the kind of […]

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April 16, 2009 – 7:39 am

twenty-five years of las vegas

Las Vegas, first in 1984 and then in 2009: [via NASA’s Earth Observatory]

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April 14, 2009 – 10:19 am

on a more positive note

Its not exactly high-speed rail, but, unlike Becker’s state, mine is adding rail service — Richmond-DC and Lynchburg-Charlottesville-DC, which should allow me to realize my dream of living in the Fan District and commuting to DC. Which isn’t to disagree at all with what Stephen noted — there is a real problem in the disconnect […]

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April 13, 2009 – 1:03 pm

the cemetery as landscape memory

Via bldgblog’s links bar, the northeast corner of Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, a 477-acre cemetery inside the city limits which concealed for over a century — and accidentally preserved, through neglect — a 25-acre remnant of tallgrass prairie, the grassland ecosystem which once flowed across the midwest, carried by seed and fire, capped by […]

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April 10, 2009 – 8:46 am

on koolhaas at ecological urbanism

I’m afraid that this cartoon is exactly right: Koolhaas’ keynote address at the Ecological Urbanism conference was a joke (on the attendees?). But, then, a very cynical person might say that this is typical, rather than atypical, of his recent work. Fortunately some of the other presentations were much better.

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April 9, 2009 – 2:08 pm

ecological urbanism conference, briefly

Reactions to last weekend’s Ecological Urbanism conference at GSD that are worth reading include: GSD student blog, Varnelis on informality, and Javier Arbona on the (mis)application of the term ‘ecological’ to architecture.

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