October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm
You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City. A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient […]
October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am
City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant to themes […]
October 6, 2009 – 12:00 pm
[Alexander Brodsky‘s pavilion on Lake Pirogovo, near Moscow, via flickr user Yuri Palmin. Described in Metropolis in 2006: …in winter 2003 a team of laborers under his direction trudged out onto [Lake Pirogov’s] frozen surface and, in the frigid conditions, assembled a rectangular mesh cage about 40 feet long and 8 feet high that they […]
October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm
Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to […]
September 29, 2009 – 1:45 pm
Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to […]
September 21, 2009 – 3:38 pm
Entschwindet und Vergeht penned a thoughtful and clever critique of Hadid’s Museum of Transport (in Glasgow) a bit over a month ago: I’ve already discussed ZHA a number of times here, often in regards to unwittingly interesting things that they’ve done, such as the accidental brutalism of LF1 and the Wolfsburg museum (which I shall […]
September 6, 2009 – 1:17 pm
Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced. “Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020” The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by […]
August 24, 2009 – 1:37 pm
Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past: [T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions […]
Here’s one such strategy for applying architectural tactics to a much broader set of situations and materials, Stephen, from Rebar (who are perhaps the best current example of a group doing such things, at least that I’m aware of): The project, entitled “The People’s Public Works”, “[lures] the public into a carnival midway with infrastructure […]
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 […]
The Sea-Based X-Band Radar, recently deployed to the coast of Hawaii in response to the threat of North Korean ballistic missiles. National defense as exquisite functionalist sculpture, or the American military’s response to the Statoil advertisements. [see also this older post at eatingbark on the eglin fps-85 radar building]
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 […]
1. A post on Human Transit points out the “old habits of urbanist thought” that were built into the structure of SimCity. Would be interesting to not only expose the fallacious assumptions embedded in the game, but to ruminate on the ways in which the game, being a particularly late-arriving artifact of modernist urbanism, is […]
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 […]
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Also posted in finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism
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Tagged architectural-criticism, architecture, finance, incremental-urbanism, informality, infrastructure, microfinance, urbanism
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I went to an interesting lecture put on by the architecture league Monday night. From the description on their website: “Eric Firley will discuss his recent research for the book The Urban Housing Handbook (Wiley, 2009), co-authored with Caroline Stahl. Exploring the relationship between architecture and the urban fabric, the handbook provides graphic representations and […]
The following is a study of a hypothetical water farming infrastructure for the arid city of Luanda, Angola; using fog harvesting nets with varying capabilities. Luanda, the fastest growing city in the world, is desperately short of clean water. Only one in six Luandan households has running water, forcing most of the inhabitants of the […]
