September 20, 2010 – 6:58 am
[A drawing from SUB-PLAN; click to enlarge] I’ve mentioned before that we try not to link to things that we suspect you, our readers, are already reading; this, of course, means that we rarely link to some of our favorite blogs. However: BLDGBLOG‘s latest missive — which is on David Knight and Finn Williams’ explorations [...]
September 13, 2010 – 4:43 pm
As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related, what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future of architecture in the wake of global economic [...]
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm
To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the [...]
August 25, 2010 – 7:43 pm
A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky). At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films. While the most important thing to note when correcting [...]
August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm
["Weather Field"; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative] As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series [...]
August 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm
[A model from SITE Architects' series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don't think this particular one was built (I'd like to be told I'm wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.] [...]
Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together: “…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces [...]
We’re reading The Infrastructural City. This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week. Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary. [An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden's photo-essay "The Trench", which follows [...]
“The objective is to convey 55 years of experience in the architectural profession and say what I can before the end comes.”
[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander's photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg -- site of today's final -- but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in [...]
[The massing of "Sliced Porosity Block"; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the [...]
[For more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, see our hyperbolically-named post on the best architecture of the decade]
This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few [...]
["The faults induced by military speleogenesis will lead to gradual yet certain failure of the jet noise barrier."] Nick Sowers (Soundscrapers) has recently posted a series at the Archinect school blog project exploring his recently-completed thesis project from a succession of disciplinary perspectives, which he titles the Archaeologist (who introduces the project), the Forensic Engineer, [...]
April 27, 2010 – 10:19 pm
[Halley VI, a British research station on ski pods, via Wired.] At Wired, Andrew Blum surveys the architecture of Antarctic research stations, which, as it includes buildings which have to be towed to remain at fixed geographic points, hydraulic lifts that raise buildings in reaction to snowfall, and architecturally-induced “subzero maelstroms”, reads like a photographic [...]
While mammoth by no means aspires to fit within the category of architectural criticism (though we do occasionally have something to say about it), Nancy Levinson’s recent meta-criticism of the genre in Places strikes me as essentially correct: By now the rules are so familiar they seem almost inevitable. We’ve come more or less to [...]
Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication. For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”: “What do cities look like in the eyes [...]
February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm
[Model of "Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface"; all images from and by Smout Allen] I can’t let Stephen’s mention of Smout Allen pass — particularly in the context of a discussion of process and event in architecture — without also saying a word about their proposal for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is one of my [...]
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm
The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find [...]
February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm
Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”. I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, [...]
