rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

February 13, 2012 – 8:00 pm

spanish bubble landscapes

[Suburban abandonia on the outskirts of Madrid, via google maps.] During the presentations at Visualizar last summer, one of the presenters (I think it was José Luis Muñoz Muñoz, but I haven’t re-watched his presentation, so I’m not totally sure) mentioned a photography project that sought to document the post-bubble abandonment of parts of the […]

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February 7, 2012 – 8:57 pm

an atlas of iphone landscapes

[MMG Century, in northwest Queensland — the world’s second-largest zinc mine, owned and operated by the Chinese metals conglomerate China MinMetal. MMG Century features prominently in the talk below.] 1 Note that if you are reading this indirectly, i.e. on Google Reader, you may not see the video below. 1. A conversation the other day reminded […]

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February 7, 2012 – 6:00 am

delaware dredge

[A pressurized pipe carries dredge along Bethany Beach, Delaware; photography by Chris Mizes.] On his blog space within lines, Chris Mizes writes about one of the more common ways that the landscapes of dredge intrude on everyday life: beach nourishment. As Mizes explains, this commonplace instance of landscape prosthesis is — like many of the […]

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February 1, 2012 – 8:00 pm

schafran on race and foreclosure

Speaking of the geography of financialization, Alex Schafran had a fantastic post at Polis last December on race, foreclosure, and rhetoric surrounding the “death of the fringe suburb”. In forthcoming work done with my colleague Jake Wegmann, analyzing real-estate data in the region since 1988, we can show that the zip codes to which African […]

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January 30, 2012 – 9:46 pm

dry commonwealths

[The eighty-six proposed “commonwealths” of the lower forty-eight states, from “The Commonwealth Approach”.] 1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced. I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that […]

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January 30, 2012 – 6:00 am

metro international trade services

[Warehouse at 1200 E McNichols Road, Highland Park, Michigan. The small red sign at the bottom right corner of the second image says “Metro”.] The warehouse above — and a network of others like it, scattered around the industrial abandonia of Detroit — is a crucial bottleneck in the global aluminium trade. Before I explain how this […]

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January 19, 2012 – 6:00 am

emergency interventions

[One of the five sites for OPPTA’s 2012 competition, “El Monton”, “an accumulation of stratified waste classified as public space” by the city of Lima, in the impoverished riverbank neighborhood Márgen Izquierda del Río Rímac; images via OPPTA.] OPPTA, the “observatorio panamericano”, is holding an international ideas competition under the theme of “emergency interventions”, looking […]

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January 13, 2012 – 1:00 pm

dredge @ studio-x nyc

We’re excited that we’ll have the opportunity in a couple weeks to do a live interview at Studio-X NYC: For the first LI@SX of 2012, Studio-X NYC is delighted to welcome Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon, three-quarters of the Dredge Research Collaborative (with Brett Milligan of Free […]

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December 20, 2011 – 6:00 am

everyday structures

Recommended reading: Alan Wiig’s “everyday structures”, a blog “explor[ing] the place of infrastructure in the urban landscape”, with a particular focus on “Hertzian space” and digital communications infrastructure. Wiig is studying geography at Temple University, so his blog most typically deals with landscapes in Philadelphia or its surrounds. Like many of mammoth‘s favorite things at […]

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December 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

bracket [at extremes]

Bracket has issued a call for submissions for their third issue, [at extremes]: Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. […]

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December 6, 2011 – 6:00 am

signs for naturalized areas

[“Signs for Naturalized Areas”, from Windsor, Ontario’s Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers’ strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers’ strike; the […]

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November 29, 2011 – 7:00 pm

hypothethical signs

[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign.] This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization.  (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced […]

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November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm

the network as industry

[“Interior components of the cooling system” at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal’s report for Domus on Facebook’s Open Computer Project, which “describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre”.] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the […]

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November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm

cellular confinement

[Cellular confinement systems were originally developed by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate the quick construction of temporary roads for heavy military vehicles; photograph from a Neoloy brochure.] In a remote polar region, there is a small country that is rarely visited by outsiders.  On the advice of a rogue Army Corps of Engineers […]

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November 9, 2011 – 6:00 am

low roads and architecture

[Building 20 at MIT, a “250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by early hackers”.] 1. Alexis Madrigal writes about “Low Road” buildings: …startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got […]

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November 1, 2011 – 6:00 am

“bundled, buried, and behind closed doors”

[“Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors”, a documentary short by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, looks at one of our favorite things — the physical infrastructure of the internet — and, in particular, the telco hotel at 60 Hudson Street. It’s particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the “tendency of communications infrastructure […]

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October 31, 2011 – 9:13 pm

squirrel highways

[“Squirrel Highways”, a drawing by Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Shaub Dunkley, from Denis Wood’s Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which Wood describes as a “cartographic poem” about the North Carolina neighborhood of Boylan Heights, where he lives.  Wood evidences a fantastic ability to animate prosaic terrain through the making of maps which are […]

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October 24, 2011 – 8:27 pm

soft landscapes

This week, I’ve organized a short (very short) lecture series for the students in my studio (well, the “Post-Natural Ecologies” half of the studio) at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Tuesday at 5:15, Fred Scharmen (sevensixfive/the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) will give a talk entitled “Soft Sites”, examining four sites on the Middle Branch […]

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October 14, 2011 – 6:00 am

auckland volcanic field

Above and below, snapshots from “Auckland Volcanoes”, a map by Carl Douglas. Carl’s map marks the location of each of the volcanic craters that dot the surface of Auckland.  The craters exhibit a fascinating variety: some have been heavily altered by mining operations (which particularly seek volcanic scoria, a type of rock suitable for use […]

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October 13, 2011 – 6:00 pm

on blogging architecture

Geoff Manaugh contributes a series to Arbitare that looks at the history, equipment, content, audience, and future of architecture blogging.  Being “someone who has founded his entire present career through blogging”, Geoff obviously both brings serious qualifications and an innate (and admitted) bias to the topic; the resulting personal perspective of the series only serves […]

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