Stephen – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Author Archives: Stephen

March 13, 2010 – 9:39 pm

infrastructure construction as jobs stimulus

Free Exchange posted this chart emphasizing the challenge long-term unemployment poses in this recession. It seems to indicate that construction-based stimulus could be especially effective in reducing such unemployment, furthering the case for a stimulus program emphasizing the construction and repair of infrastructure. But there’s just not that much room to cut unemployment by putting […]

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March 7, 2010 – 3:54 pm

productivity signaling and size borrowing

Ryan Avent, who maintains the indispensable blog The Bellows, is one of my favorite writers on economics and urbanism. He recently drew attention to two interesting papers which are related to his response to an article in the the American Prospect by Alec MacGillis which was critical of Richard Florida (which mammoth previously highlighted). Avent contends […]

Posted in economics, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
March 2, 2010 – 11:18 pm

from bogota to nyc

Fast Company author Cliff Kuang writes about New York City’s adoption of rapid-bus transit solutions developed in Brazil and Columbia: Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city’s bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It’s expected […]

Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
February 26, 2010 – 11:01 am

translation, machines, and embassies

The following is another contribution to the constellation of blog posts supporting the Glacier/Island/Storm Studio at Columbia University; read mammoth‘s previous Glacier/Island/Storm posts. LANDSCAPE MACHINES In Magic, Machines, and Architecture, published in Pidgin 6, we find a gloriously simple description of the function and nature of machines by a participant in a course at Princeton […]

Posted in geography, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
February 12, 2010 – 5:22 pm

but do they know how you take your coffee?

Charles Petersen, in the New York Review of Books, on the rise of facebook. If anything, Zuckerberg looks, in some distant but discernible way, like the Robert Moses of the Internet, bringing severe order to a chaotic milieu. While several efforts have been made to create more open versions of social networks, none has found […]

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February 1, 2010 – 9:32 pm

requisite iPad post

My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything.   The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t.  Instead, here […]

Posted in asides, finance, technology | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 29, 2010 – 4:39 pm

the large higgs field galactic archive

This post was originally written for inclusion in our list of the decade’s best architecture, but then excluded, both for fit and because we realized the novel it references — Darwinia — was published in 1998. [We haven’t got any images of the Large Higgs Field Galatic Archive, for reasons that will become obvious, so […]

Posted in speculative-architecture | Tagged | Comments (2) | Permalink
December 13, 2009 – 12:50 am

quarantine economies

I’d like to echo Rob’s delight at being able to attend the final critique of the Landscapes of Quarantine Studio in NYC hosted by BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography.  We’ll make sure and keep folks posted on the details of the studio’s exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, which is due to open in […]

Posted in economics | Tagged , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
December 3, 2009 – 9:46 am

Larsson TED talk

Magnus Larsson, of BLDGBLOG fame, talking about the same project at TED.

Posted in asides | Tagged | Comments (1) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 1:30 pm

TED talks architecture

I’m loving the architecture series of TED talks – 20 minutes seems to be the perfect amount of time to get a handle on the key driving forces behind an architect’s practice. Also, the TED audience (which as far as I can tell is comprised mainly of brilliant non-architects) forces architects to talk about their […]

Posted in architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm

our collective spatial memory, modeled

From the description of the above video at PopSci: Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond […]

Posted in asides, speculative-architecture, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 14, 2009 – 11:48 pm

dialogue: finance, context, scale, and intervention

In a recent back and forth between myself (Stephen) and Rory Hyde in the comments of On Finance, Rory noted: To zoom out even further, are we just talking about ‘context’? To understand the context in architecture normally means literally to understand the site context – the two terms are used interchangeably – but as […]

Posted in dialogue, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
August 12, 2009 – 2:56 pm

mammoth suburban land infusions

Here is a little something Rob and I put together for the Re-burbia competition.  Our entry asks the questions: What if the challenge suburbs face is not that they over-consume land, but have too little? How could an infusion of new land simultaneously (and paradoxically) mitigate some of the issues caused by the under-utilization of […]

Posted in landscape, speculative-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
July 21, 2009 – 9:19 pm

miscellany

Somewhere, Louis Kahn is blushing. HOW DARE THEY. Is this Landscape Urbanism? Or is this? More on Seoul here. And here.

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July 7, 2009 – 1:20 am

my dreams, squashed

If you folks haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend this article on Will Allen, founder of Growing Power and a ‘street farmer’ in Milwaukee, highly enough.  I’m not even going to pull a quote from it – just go read the whole thing.  Given a choice between having the career of Rem Koolhaas, or […]

Posted in urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
June 27, 2009 – 9:57 pm

Don’t look now, but there’s an ant on your Southeast leg.

This is an endlessly fascinating article about the role language plays in cognition. Forgive me for quoting at length: Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words […]

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June 14, 2009 – 8:59 am

nytimes magazine: on infrastructure

The New York Times Magazine annual architecture issue is here. This year’s theme? Infrastructure.

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June 12, 2009 – 7:26 pm

edward burtynsky

Eat your heart out Richard Serra.  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking. After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. via Nico Sy, who doesn’t […]

Posted in architecture, asides, geography, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
May 31, 2009 – 2:21 pm

on finance

I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing.  Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism.  This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding […]

Posted in architecture, finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
May 28, 2009 – 9:41 pm

bonus freeway interchange info

More on freeway interchanges from James Fallows. [I accidentally deleted this post last night, losing robs comment and potentially any links to it folks might have saved – sorry.  I don’t suppose anyone knows how to recover posts foolishly deleted on the wordpress platform?]

Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on bonus freeway interchange info | Permalink