[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com]

Wired’s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system:

In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, housing for doctors and nurses, one big park, a nuclear power plant, the New York Aquarium, an Egyptian museum, theaters, promenades, a new home for the bodies in Brooklyn and Queens cemeteries, casinos and a canal that would cut the island in half.

Eventually, planners settled on a utopian, car-free residential community for 20,000 New Yorkers. The narrow streets wouldn’t be fit for traffic, or for garbage collection, so a pneumatic trash system became part of the plans. In 1973, the island was dubbed Roosevelt, and construction of the system and the first residential towers was finished in 1975…

…A network of 20-inch tubes takes garbage from the island’s 16 residential towers, collecting from every floor, to a central collection point where it is compacted and trucked off the island.

Watch the entire slideshow at Wired.

More: Fast Trash was a recent exhibition about the same system, which argued “that service infrastructure plays a crucial role in cities and is even capable of inspiring the collective imagination”; watch a short film, “Nature Abhors a Vacuum”, at the Fast Trash website.

While the most important thing to note when correcting this sort of critique is, as Trimble says, that the generic quality of the architecture is true to the internal logic of the film (and a dreamlike architecture would not be), the demand for dreamlike architecture is quite consistent with a cultural predilection for evaluating the interest of architecture primarily in terms of its (visual) novelty.  (To me, questions that might arise from the suggested use of predictable architecture as a means for producing psychological comfort seem at least as interesting from an architectural standpoint as any questions that might be provoked by a CGI-enhanced tour of, say, a city populated by the MVRDV and FAT designs that Betsky suggests.  Which not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy the latter — I would — but that an architectural imagination which finds only the latter interesting seems very limited.)

Also pleasurable and speaking of Fashion Architecture Taste: Charles Holland on Inception: “It would be far better if the film had no ending at all and instead just carried on and on indefinitely until people finally grew bored and left the cinema”.

Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the coming dominance of mega-cities has been greatly exaggerated, (b) smaller cities are better positioned to succeed economically while providing a more liveable environment for their citizens, and (c) “the suburbs are not as terrible as urban boosters frequently insist”, but possibly even a better form of urban organization.  The linkage between (a) and (b) is relatively clear and the linkage between those first two points and (c) relatively opaque — Kotkin, for instance, spends a portion of the article making a case for the value of suburbs and then segues into Singapore as an example of how small cities are more successful than big cities, which seems an odd juxtaposition given the density of Singapore — but as a pair, Khanna and Kotkin’s articles at least demonstrate two of the major positions that might be staked out on global urban futures.

If there’s a particular part of Kotkin’s article I especially appreciate, it’s his discussion of the role of relatively unfashionable industries — “trade in goods, manufacturing, energy, and agriculture” — in driving “the world’s fastest-rising cities”; his discussion doesn’t dovetail perfectly with mammoth’s interest in re-industrialization (which we understand rather expansively, including much more than just the traditional industries whose value Kotkin calls attention to), but the appreciation for the economic act of production (in contrast to economies of service or knowledge) is similar.

The Nurbanist vision of carving up the city in this way is as diagrammatic and retrograde as Moses’ planning – and, similarly, it’s an assault on the complexity of the city, the city’s ability to generate its own fabulously complicated internal patterns that defy cursory inspection. The emphasis on little neighbourhoods, the stoop, local shops and walking distances, the “human scale” only tells part of the story of the city – after all, these things can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole. Elevated highways, crowds, tall buildings, interconnection and confusion – these things can be to some people dismaying and unpleasant, but the awe they strike is the overture of accepting the condition of living in a city. The Tube roundel is vaguely holy to Londoners – intensely reassuring – because it is a sign of connection with a system of vast complexity and importance. (The religious meaning of the Tube is a subject I keep meaning to write about at some point.) Nurbanism stems from a fear and hatred of the modern city as it is – a hatred that is ideological, that cannot and will not be shown that there are reasons to like the neon snarl of the cities we have, and their inner flows and surges.

Read Wiles’ entire post here.

In A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes, mammoth briefly described the Google data center in The Dalles; in an excellent recent article, local The Dalles Chronicle reporter Theodoric Meyer investigates the relationship between Google and local public officials, the impact of the arrival of a second data center — for Facebook — in this rural Oregon town, and the surprising contrast between the willingness of the two internet giants to share information about these physical instantiations of the Invisible City.

[Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic; via Andrew Blum, commentary on Meyer's article at Data Center Knowledge.]

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2″ pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of the virtual world”, in particular.

Regardless, you ought to read their argument for yourself.

“…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.

Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.

…

Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.”

It’d be hard to come up with a better description of what mammoth is about than “maybe the most important achievement of architecture over the last 30 years is a tax credit or a zoning change”.

More frivolously: the Vanity Fair poll is well worth reading, if only for the unintentional hilarity that ensues as architects shamelessly nominate their own buildings.  (Mammoth congratulates every architect on the list who left off his or her own buildings on their tastefulness.)  The humor is particularly acute when those buildings fail to appear in any of the other architects’ lists.

(Also, it has not escaped our notice that both Ben van Berkel (UN Studio) and Rafael Viñoly are biting mammoth.  We congratulate them on their good taste.)

Google Analytics tells me that Canadians make up the second largest portion of mammoth’s readership and that, of you Canadians, approximately one-quarter are located in Toronto.  Neither of these facts are particularly surprising, but I do hope that those of you who live (or happen to be) in proximity to that city are aware that Foodprint: Toronto — “a truly cross-disciplinary discussion that explores the past, present, and future of food and the city” — is this Saturday.  (It took two feet of snow and a pair of canceled bus routes last February to keep mammoth from attending the inaugural Foodprint event in Manhattan.)

If you’re not familiar with the event, I recommend reading this interview with the event’s founders, Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, at Pruned, as well as this interview, also with Twilley and Rich, at Azure Magazine.

It’s also worth mentioning that the event will be live-streamed.  For more on food, infrastructure, Toronto, and cities in general, I highly recommend Alphabet City: Food (and, on other topics, the entire Alphabet City series — “Water” is a particular favorite of mine, for obvious reasons).

It’s also worth reading the comments, particularly those from Enrique Ramirez and Fred Scharmen, as they (and Greenfield in response) address some of the obvious questions about the limitations (cities past and present do not lack for interested parties and engaged actors who aim to manipulate constituent parts and bureaucracies to their advantage) and potential exclusivity of such developments.