rholmes – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: rholmes

May 27, 2011 – 6:00 am

unusual flood typologies ii: scabland

[The unusual agricultural pattern of eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” can be traced to a (series of) massive glacial outburst flood(s) which cut the deep into the region’s volcanic basalt, leaving fertile plateaus and barren, rocky valleys.  Mammoth looked at that event, the Missoula Floods, in a post last year, “a glacier is a very long event”. […]

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May 26, 2011 – 5:00 pm

suspension

[In the summer of 1916, a pair of cyclones — one coming from the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in Mississippi, the other coming from the Atlantic and landing in Charleston, South Carolina — poured torrential rains (“all previous 24-hour records for rainfall were exceeded”) across the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially […]

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May 26, 2011 – 10:00 am

unusual flood typologies i: dam failure

[Friant Dam, on the upper San Joaquin in California, filled to the top in spring of 2006.  Though the dam held, downstream flooding ensued.  When a dam does fail, as the Teton Dam did in 1976 or the Toccoa Creek Dam did in 1977, the flash-flooding that occurs can be deadly, resulting in relatively high […]

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May 26, 2011 – 6:00 am

a century of significant floods

[“During the 20th century, floods were the number-one natural disaster in the United States in terms of number of lives lost and property damage. They can occur at any time of the year, in any part of the country, and at any time of the day or night. Most lives are lost when people are […]

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May 25, 2011 – 8:00 pm

“waiting for the chute to open and the bull to come out bucking”

[Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah; the reservoir’s primary dam is highlighted in red.  In anticipation of record summer floods, the reservoir’s waters are “being released as fast as [they] can flow”, making space in the reservoir to hold snowmelt.  Downstream, rafters are finding that typical rafting trips of two-and-a-half hours are […]

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May 24, 2011 – 6:00 am

floods

The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun.  We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding.  Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the […]

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May 22, 2011 – 6:00 pm

urban field manuals

[Photographs from Christoph Engel’s series “Exterieur”, which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the […]

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May 11, 2011 – 6:00 am

the maracanã as public space

Nate Berg has a nice article in the New York Times on how Brazil’s Maracanã — the massive stadium built for the 1950 World Cup, where some two hundred thousand spectators watched the final between Brazil and Uruguay — has traditionally served as an important public space (“a rare type of space in Rio where […]

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May 9, 2011 – 7:00 pm

the economist on american infrastructure

[“Enroute high” aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com.  American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose “imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space” […]

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May 9, 2011 – 6:00 am

island infrastructures, border towns, and unknown fields

There are a lot of things you could do this summer. Unknown Fields [Baikonur Cosmodrome, via Unknown Fields Division] Liam Young and Kate Davies lead the 2011 edition of this “annual nomadic studio” on an expedition through “landscapes of obsolete futures” in the former USSR: This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first […]

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May 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

i-beams and networked screens

[A pair of projects by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living); top, Amphibious Architecture; above, Living Light.] The thirtieth anniversary issue of Metropolis has a number of great articles in it (and I hope to write at length shortly about one of those, Andres Duany’s apology for the New Urbanism), so I’d recommend picking […]

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May 3, 2011 – 1:10 pm

a pre-modern critique of the new urbanism

A minor point, but this is kind of fascinating — a critique of New Urbanism which, rather than going the common route of charging New Urbanism with nostalgic pre-modernism, argues that New Urbanism is insufficiently pre-modern — in this specific case, arguing that New Urbanists have praised a certain kind of narrow traditional street but […]

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May 2, 2011 – 9:32 pm

predictive gis and geospatial intelligence

A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software […]

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April 29, 2011 – 4:02 pm

west kowloon reclamation

[Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.] [“Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size.  Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent […]

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April 22, 2011 – 4:05 pm

aerotropolis, continued

In advance of another event related to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda’s recently-published Aerotropolis, Andrew Blum asked twitter for questions for Lindsay.  I responded with the central point from my previous post on Aerotropolis: ajblum Good chatter about tonight’s Aerotropolis event so I’ll put it out there: Any questions from the cloud*? (*Not actually a […]

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April 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm

colonnade park

[Colonnade Park, photographed by Brett Milligan.] Free Association Design reports from Seattle’s Colonnade Park, an “urban mountain bike skills park” constructed by volunteers from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance: It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is […]

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April 16, 2011 – 6:00 am

“we’d rather people forgot about us”

[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking “our subterranean infrastructure”; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of […]

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April 15, 2011 – 11:51 am

“like autistic squirrels”

The Guardian interviews Benjamin Bratton: What can be done to foster and encourage more social entrepreneurs and innovators? …I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation […]

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March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm

a short aerial tour of the arrival of canadian oil in the united states

[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly […]

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March 30, 2011 – 6:00 am

in and out of the terrain of water

[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.] This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or […]

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