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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, here […]
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 in […]
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 […]
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 […]
January 12, 2010 – 1:13 pm
[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco’s salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps] I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the […]
January 11, 2010 – 4:05 pm
Lebbeus Woods has a fantastic piece, “Utopia Redux”, on the collages of Daniel Meridor, a student at the Cooper Union; the second paragraph, in particular, is a succinct summation of where young designers find themselves after the first decade of the third millenium: Meridor’s generation—a younger one—has no faith in grand architectural plans to make […]
January 10, 2010 – 9:58 pm
Today I finally got around to watching “Church Machine”, a short video project from a GSD studio run by Michael Meredith of MOS, which popped up just before Christmas. The video is the work of a student named Matt Storus and is well worth the sixteen minutes it’ll take you to watch it, as it […]
January 8, 2010 – 1:27 pm
Read Quiet Babylon‘s recent post on the slow production of ruins, scrubbing post-boom projects from architectural portfolios, fifteen hundred years of adaptive reuse of the Coliseum in Rome, and more; Maly gets bonus points for including a Wittgenstein anecdote of dubious provenance.
January 7, 2010 – 1:36 pm
Since I posted a link to Alec MacGillis’s piece on Richard Florida, it’s worth also posting links to Ryan Avent’s critique of the piece, MacGillis’s response, and Avent’s response-to-the-response-to-his-critique. [update: see also the Next American City‘s commentary]
January 5, 2010 – 2:45 pm
Alec MacGillis has an appropriately harsh look at a decade of Richard Florida in the American Prospect. [via @loudpaper]
December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am
Adrian Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth‘s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks” (itself a response to another post by Lahoud on a recent studio he led), discussing how to properly read studio proposals, the master plan “as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one”, Lahoud’s ambivalence about the […]
