rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

May 22, 2012 – 7:00 pm

comments

In an attempt to stem the flow of comment spam, we’ve adjusted the comment policy to increase the scenarios under which comments are held for moderation and we’ve turned off comments on old posts.  If you’d like to contact us about an older post or you’ve posted a comment and it seems to be stuck […]

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May 21, 2012 – 6:00 am

voices going viral

[mammoth is among the blogs included in the “Voices Going Viral” exhibition accompanying “Going Viral”, an event tonight at the New York Center for Architecture: Going Viral explores the impact that social media, technology and device culture are having on ourdesign process, and ultimately the way we practice. How do we shape a global conversation? […]

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May 15, 2012 – 7:30 pm

dredge research collaborative: live interview @ studio-x

[The Dredge Research Collaborative — Stephen, Tim Maly, and myself, with fourth member Brett Milligan present in spirit but not body — in live conversation back in January at Studio-X NYC about the dredge cycle, artificial islands, geotubes, sensate geotextiles coating aqueous terrain, the scale of human influence over sediment, the New York Bight’s “Mud […]

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May 7, 2012 – 9:00 pm

“google/arctic/mars” at studio-x nyc

If I were in New York City tomorrow night, I’d be at Studio-X for what sounds like a really great evening: first, a live interview with Michael Gerrard on “drowning nations” and climate change law, and, second, a roundtable on “sovereignty, governance, and the nation-state itself in a range of geographic and spatial scenarios, from […]

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May 3, 2012 – 7:00 pm

glitch jam

[The Placer County Courthouse, in Auburn, California — imagine it swarmed by a glitch jam.] NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, […]

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April 3, 2012 – 6:00 am

empire negative

[The negative image of the Empire State Building, carved out of oolithic Indiana limestone, and aged into an enormous swimming pool; via Atlas Obscura, which writes: [Indiana limestone] was in such demand that a massive industry cropped up around it, and hundreds of thousands of tons of mammoth stone slabs were carved out of the […]

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April 2, 2012 – 6:00 am

minus extraction

[Miami’s Lake Belt, the zone in which the city of Miami becomes a mirror image of itself — reflected in blue polygons induced by the mining of the limestone rock literally used to construct the city — before it disintegrates into the Everglades.] I’ve gotten part way through listening to the portions of last weekend’s Landscape Infrastructures […]

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March 27, 2012 – 8:43 pm

unknown unknowns

0. Everyone’s favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotation: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.” (As evidence […]

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March 20, 2012 – 8:00 pm

expiration dates

[Chart showing the typical lifespans of a wide variety of infrastructures (and components of infrastructures), from treated wood ties to deep geological repositories for high-level radioactive waste. The descriptive text reads: “This chart visualizes the lifespans of equipment associated with waste, water, energy, and transportation systems across North America. As we approach — and pass […]

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March 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

stable borders

My wife pointed me to a short but very interesting piece on NPR last night, about the re-surveying of the line between North Carolina and South Carolina: JULIE ROSE: Way before there was GPS, years even before the Revolutionary War, surveyors on horseback drew the line between the colonies of North and South Carolina. Every […]

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March 18, 2012 – 2:02 pm

nambe falls dam

[The strangely geometric edge of Nambe Falls Dam in New Mexico; Nambe Falls Dam is a component of the San Juan-Chama Project, which delivers water from the San Juan River Basin through 26 miles of tunnels under the Continental Divide into the basins of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, providing drinking water for Albuquerque; […]

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March 15, 2012 – 8:00 pm

“the last remaining organic components of a city-wide cybernetic system”

Writing at Fast Company, Tim Maly ties recent interest in autonomous cars and related intersection-managing algorithms back to the guest post he wrote for mammoth during our reading of The Infrastructural City: What’s interesting about the skepticism towards automated driving is that it reveals how invisible the current systems of automation already are. Traffic control […]

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March 14, 2012 – 9:00 pm

center pivot pixelation

[A particularly stark example of the pixelated patterns produced by pivot irrigation, in northern Saudi Arabia. The patterns produced by irrigation in Saudi Arabia are so stark because what water is available in the Arabian penisula is buried as fossil waters at such great depths that wells may reach as much as three thousand feet […]

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March 6, 2012 – 6:00 am

“landscape infrastructure” at harvard gsd

[“Reclamation and slope stabilization on a volcanic ash hillside” in Japan; photograph by flickr user GeoJuice.] If I weren’t going to be in California March 23rd and 24th, I’m pretty sure I’d be in Boston at the GSD’s “Landscape Infrastructure” symposium, which promises a fascinating range of discussion on “the future of infrastructure and urbanization […]

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March 5, 2012 – 7:00 pm

drylands design conference

[The Colorado River Basin as a hydrological mega-object; image by the Commonwealth Approach project team: Alex Gonski, Rob Holmes, Rebecca May, and Laurel McSherry.] I mentioned a little while ago that Laurel McSherry and I would be presenting our work on “The Commonwealth Approach” at the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Conference near the end […]

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February 21, 2012 – 9:51 pm

giant tube to supply water for ten millions

The wonder of inter-basin transfer, in the August 1937 issue of Popular Mechanics: (The cover of that same issue, which wonders at the electrical power produced by and transmitted from Lake Mead, is also worth a look.)

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February 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

visibility

[“The Digital Dump”, a graphic about e-waste from Good.is‘s “Transparency” series and Column Five Media.] Mostly for our own purposes (keeping track of things we see), we’ve started Visibility, a tumblr collecting items related to An Atlas of iPhone Landscapes. I make no promises about how frequently it will or won’t be updated, but if […]

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February 18, 2012 – 6:00 am

eight-bit baroque

Via BLDGBLOG, Timo Arnall’s “Robot Readable World”, “an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye”: This video is rather obviously fantastic, but I do think it’s worth calling attention to a perceptive comment left on the Vimeo page. Arnall describes the video as exploring the questions “how do robots see […]

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February 16, 2012 – 6:00 am

munitions landscape

[The Radford Army Ammunitions Plant on the New River, in southwest Virginia.] FASLANYC takes us on a tour of particularly bizarre militarized landscape typology — the World War II-era munitions plant, beginning with the Radford Army Ammunitions Plant in southwestern Virgina. Digging into the archives at the Historic American Landscapes Survey, Davis excavates the fascinating […]

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February 15, 2012 – 9:00 pm

urbnfutr interview with liam young

In an interview with URBNFUTR, Liam Young describes how he sees the relationship between his training as an architect and his current work as the head of “urban futures think tank” Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today: As architects we span the gulf between the cultural and the technological, we are in a unique position to synthesize complex […]

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