rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

October 25, 2012 – 10:39 pm

event horizon

[A seaplane taxis in Jamaica Bay, 1918, with Barren Island in the background; source.] I recently contributed a short piece to the excellent Fulcrum. The piece begins with a very short version of the bizarre history of Dead Horse Bay and Barren Island — about which I had to leave out eccentric anecdote after eccentric […]

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September 18, 2012 – 6:00 pm

“a map for what?”

Shannon Mattern, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”: What is the “aftermath” of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to “make visible the invisible” and thereby “raise awareness” are far too often regarded as ends […]

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September 18, 2012 – 6:00 am

petrochemical america

[From the top: diagram by SCAPE of off-shore oil facilities in the Gulf; Richard Misrach’s “Roadside Vegetation and Orion Refining Corporation, Good Hope, Louisiana, 1998” ; diagram by SCAPE of the various chemical products manufactured and refined in “Cancer Alley”. All from Petrochemical America, and visible at a higher resolution in this gallery at the New […]

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September 10, 2012 – 7:18 pm

a short video about dredge

Videographers Alex Chohlas-Wood and Ben Mendelsohn are among the many talented people who are helping us put together DredgeFest NYC, and they’ve just released this short trailer for the event. If you’re hoping to join us for the harbor tour — and hopefully the peak at a few landscapes of dredge that Ben and Alex […]

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August 6, 2012 – 6:00 am

dredgefest nyc

[Beach nourishment in Monmouth, New Jersey. Photo: USACE.] A few months ago, I posted the live interview that the Dredge Research Collaborative (Stephen, Brett Milligan, Tim Maly, and myself) did with Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley at Studio-X NYC. Both at that event and in the short post I did, we promised that we’d be […]

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August 3, 2012 – 6:00 pm

brickstarter

Tim Maly interviews Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill about their new project, Brickstarter: Anyone who’s ever tried to get some change to their neighborhood done knows the pain of fighting through a bureaucracy that tends to dampen even the most enthusiastic of spirits. “This activism often occurs on the periphery, in the legal gray areas […]

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July 31, 2012 – 6:00 am

the commonwealth approach

[The following is the text and (a slightly condensed set of) slides from the presentation that Laurel McSherry and I gave at the Drylands Design Conference in late March. The presentation walks through our highly speculative proposal for the reconfiguration of the political geography of the United States to better conform to the spatial distribution […]

Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
July 25, 2012 – 6:00 am

very long radio waves

[Image via Panoramio user subdefective.] VLF Transmitter Cutler is a “very-low frequency” radio station on the north-eastern edge of Maine’s seacoast operated by the US Navy, primarily for the purpose of communicating with submarines. The perfectly geometric arrangements of antennas and support cables both recall the hexagonal logic of cellphone towers and suggest some kind of weird […]

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July 24, 2012 – 8:00 pm

the new modulated world of invisible fields

[A portion of Nicolas Rapp’s map of the internet for Fortune magazine.] Writing for Quaderns, Kazys Varnelis argues for an infrastructural urbanism that not only embraces and seeks to design (or design with) infrastructure, but also imagines new infrastructures “more appropriate to network culture”: But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations […]

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July 24, 2012 – 6:00 am

collisions

[Via Pete Brook at Wired, Mary Lydecker’s collages splice together scenes from vintage postcards to create images of Pruned-worthy vacation locales (like the infrastructural beach above) and bundles of skyscrapers improbably close to dams, mountains, and rivers, as if the cities they belonged to were crashing suddenly into some unorthodox planner’s feverishly strict urban growth […]

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July 23, 2012 – 6:00 pm

landscape ontology

[A landscape in the process of becoming a different landscape: In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people. The image above […]

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July 3, 2012 – 9:12 pm

designing novel ecosystems

[Wildfires in the southern Rockies from space, June 23; via NASA Earth Observatory.] A recent post on the current wildfires in the southern Rockies at the New York Times‘ Green blog reminded me that I had intended to excerpt an earlier editorial, also at the New York Times, which defended the notion of the Anthropocene […]

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June 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

venue interview with edward burtynsky

[Edward Burtynsky’s “Drylands Farming #7” — farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.] Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly […]

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June 15, 2012 – 6:00 am

zones and extrastatecraft

[A zone: Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius. As a bonus, Ebene is also an excellent example of the capacity of the Tubes to direct urban futures, as one of its prime selling points is that it sits at a landing point for the “the SAT3/WASC/SAFE sub-marine cable which links Southern Europe, Western and Southern Africa and […]

Posted in architecture, futures, geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
June 14, 2012 – 7:00 pm

athabascan aereality

Business Insider‘s Robert Johnson has been touring various projects, sites, and landscapes in and around Canada’s Athabascan Oil Sands; the photographs he’s bringing back and articles he’s curating are a stunning mixture of the industrial sublime, raw instrumentality (such as: the world’s largest dump truck, and its forty-thousand dollar tires), and a visual testament to […]

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June 1, 2012 – 6:00 am

atlas of suburbanisms

[“Montreal: Percentage of residents who drive to work, live in single-detached housing, and own their homes”, from Moos and Kramer’s Atlas of Suburbanisms.] The University of Waterloo’s Atlas of Suburbanisms — a research project by the School of Planning’s Markus Moos and Anna Kramer — looks like a fantastic effort to understand Canadian suburbs on their […]

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May 29, 2012 – 7:00 pm

cryptoforestry in the homogenocene

Wilfried Hou Je Bek, author of the Cryptoforestry blog, has a nice article in the first issue of new journal The State on his particular topic of expertise, defining cryptoforestry, describing the place of cryptoforests within cities, and discussing the pleasure to be found in seeking out and treking through cryptoforests — a pleasure which […]

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May 24, 2012 – 8:20 pm

shift: process

SHIFT, North Carolina State University’s student-produced, professionally-reviewed journal on landscape architecture, is seeking submissions for its second issue, “SHIFT: Process”, which will “focus on new ways of thinking about the design process” that better engage “the designer, the community, and ecology”. More details can be found at the SHIFT website.

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May 24, 2012 – 7:00 pm

withdrawal and rise

[Detail from a map of groundwater wells in Jackson County, Texas, drawn by the U.S.G.S. in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board and Jackson County; satellite studies of groundwater levels — which use small changes in the Earth’s gravitational field to detect fluctuations in groundwater reserves — have indicated extreme depletion in Texas as […]

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May 24, 2012 – 6:00 am

shiptracks

[Ship tracks — “narrow clouds… form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust” — in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, captured photographically by a NASA satellite; the atmospheric trace of the seaborne transfer […]

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