December 15, 2009 – 11:41 am
While this recent Infrastructurist post (entitled “Reasons Not to Bike to Work: You Can Die”) on the sad news of another cycling fatality is unfortunately an excellent example of the importance of remembering that data is not the plural of anecdote, The Next American City has an excellent post by David Alpert (of Greater Greater […]
December 9, 2009 – 5:55 pm
The Dirt has a lengthy interview conducted by Pierre Belanger with Joe Brown, chief executive of planning, design, and development at AECOM, the architecture and engineering firm that swallowed EDAW (formerly the world’s largest firm primarily focused on landscape architecture, if I recall correctly). The interview covers a wide range of issues, from the “need […]
December 9, 2009 – 12:23 pm
An article from Sunday’s Washington Post discusses the development of “climate defense systems”, resulting from an increasing interest in not just climate change prevention, but also climate change adaptation. The article is particularly focused on the Netherlands, where “the Dutch are spending billions of euros on ‘floating communities’ that can rise with surging flood waters, […]
December 9, 2009 – 8:36 am
Via @bldgblog‘s link to this great post on the Mexican city of Guanajuato (which I first became fascinated with when the friend who introduced Stephen and I spent part of a summer there with an architecture studio), I see that Brett Milligan, whose project “Inundating the Border” mammoth briefly touched on in an earlier post […]
December 3, 2009 – 10:43 am
A few blogs, mostly relatively recently added to the reading list: Millenium People, which is on an Arctic hiatus, but should return after Christmas; a recommended starting point: the data city + jules verne // Serial Consign, Greg Smith (of Vague Terrain) on “digital culture and information design” // Quiet Babylon; as it says, “cyborgs, […]
December 3, 2009 – 9:46 am
Magnus Larsson, of BLDGBLOG fame, talking about the same project at TED.
November 20, 2009 – 12:53 pm
Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.
November 17, 2009 – 4:33 pm
Kazys Varnelis follows up his recent interview of Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) by himself being interviewed, at Triple Canopy (whose last two issues on urbanism are indispensable): Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve […]
November 14, 2009 – 5:31 pm
Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and therefore […]
November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm
You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium. The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is […]
November 8, 2009 – 10:32 pm
[Composite false color image of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a 7-mile-long, 33-foot-high sheet of ice projecting off the Erebus glacier in Antarctica, carved into unusual shapes by the summer waters of McMurdo Sound; via Wired Science: “During the summer, when the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo melts, the ice tongue floats on the […]
November 2, 2009 – 1:08 pm
[“Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM”; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K’s include “a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and […]
October 28, 2009 – 9:27 am
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul businessman, and the forbidden affair that derails his life, which is relatively standard stuff. What is fascinating, though, is that Kemal’s obsession with the affair leads him to collect an assembly of objects from […]
October 26, 2009 – 9:22 am
faslanyc has a good piece on the weakness of metaphor as a grounding literary device for landscape architecture. The post is in reaction to Andrew Blum’s “Metaphor Remediation”, recently run in Places. I approvingly cited Blum’s article a couple times, so I re-read Blum’s article with faslanyc‘s criticism in mind. Having done so, I think […]
October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am
Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct […]
October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am
Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]
October 21, 2009 – 11:33 am
“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.
October 20, 2009 – 3:39 pm
1. On the relationship between sports and urbanism, see Pruned on urban golf. Which led me to think that soccer might similarly be deployed with a similar future of appropriation, accomodation, commercialization, abandonment, and absorbtion, only to discover, via the Office for Unsolicited Architecture tumblr, that urban soccer has already been deployed as an architectural […]
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm
From the description of the above video at PopSci: Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond […]
