[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape [...]
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 to [...]
February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am
[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it's been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast. [...]
February 26, 2010 – 1:20 pm
[The future soil of Miami, captured by satellites while drifting off the coast of Africa.]
At InfraNet Lab, Mason White posts about “Particulate Swarms”, or three storm typologies: dust, water, and gas. The first image in the post, of a dust storm over Sydney, reminds me (because in my haste, I mistakenly read the form of [...]
February 25, 2010 – 10:29 pm
[Above, the volcanic peaks of the South Sandwich Islands distort wave patterns over the Pacific Ocean, through processes described, and, of course photographed, by NASA Earth Observatory:
...the islands disturb the smooth flow of air, creating waves that ripple through the atmosphere downwind of the obstacles.
The cloudy-clear pattern that is produced highlights the location of wave [...]
February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am
[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri. The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from [...]
February 24, 2010 – 1:56 pm
[A ferry arrives at Thilafushi, the world's largest island composed primarily of garbage, in a photograph from an excellent photo-essay on Thilafushi by flickr user AB Watson Year. Thilafushi, which is located in and was constructed by the Maldives on the site of a former lagoon, spreads across 124 acres in the Indian Ocean, ever [...]
February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim [...]
February 12, 2010 – 5:22 pm
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 much [...]
February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm
Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise:
…at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate bubble [...]
February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm
[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver ("snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations" and "organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down"), via NASA Earth Observatory. Read more about whitesward at [...]
February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm
[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source]
In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade. It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers in [...]
February 8, 2010 – 3:27 pm
[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG's call for a "J.G. Ballard of contemporary China" (or drive home Kongjian Wu's repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the "empty shells" of Beijing's Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; [...]
February 1, 2010 – 9:32 pm
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, [...]
January 30, 2010 – 9:45 pm
For a bit over a week now (presuming I’ve got the timeline right), Wired’s been building a very interesting community at their subsite Haiti Rewired, aimed at developing “tech and infrastructure solutions for Haiti”. A couple of items there tie back into the themes mammoth discussed in relation to Quinta Monroy: first, this brief post [...]
January 29, 2010 – 2:21 pm
The Transport Politic reviews the distribution and impact of this week’s high-speed rail funding announcement in a cautiously optimistic fashion, with the important caveat that “eight billion dollars of spending won’t be enough for even one true high-speed line”, while Infrastructurist explains why the prioritization of the Orlando-Tampa line, which is slated to receive $1.25 [...]
January 19, 2010 – 12:45 pm
Urban Tick has a review of a new publication, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, which catalogs a variety of (mostly high-profile) infrastructural projects designed by architects in the past couple decades. Though I haven’t read the book, the first point of critique that Urban Tick makes is quite astute and demonstrates a common problem [...]
January 15, 2010 – 12:41 pm
Jeff Maki writes at Urban Omnibus about New York City’s steam tunnels as a potential analog precursor to future mass civic participation in the maintenance of urban infrastructure, which may be an increasingly necessary tactic, given the massive repair deficit North America’s urban infrastructures face.
January 13, 2010 – 5:56 pm
[update: thanks to commenter цarьchitect, a screen capture from a demo for SIM Building, a program of the sort which likely provides the underlying architecture for UrbanSim]
An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the intersections [...]
January 12, 2010 – 8:11 pm
An interesting article by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at The New Republic looks at how Detroit might recover from decades of decline; this includes looking at how Detroit might be re-industrialized (the re-industrial path is an even more fascinating proposition than the well-tread path to post-industrial health, though there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the [...]
