October 16, 2009 – 12:19 pm
The New York Times is running a fantastic series on “worsening pollution in America’s waters and regulators’ response.”
October 16, 2009 – 8:58 am
[the Lockheed air terminal in Burbank, camouflaged during World War II for the benefit of Japanese aviators; via greg.org, who suggests that perhaps the next version of the ‘Bilbao Effect’ will be for struggling cities to commission similarly flimsy roofscapes for the benefit of the google maps audience; originals in a california state collection here, […]
October 14, 2009 – 11:00 am
[oil field maintained by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, photographed by Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes), via dpr-barcelona; visit Burtynsky’s website for additional images from the book] Edward Burtynsky’s latest book and exhibition explores the landscapes of, machinery that produces, and products dervied from oil: “When I first started photographing industry it was out […]
October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am
A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence […]
By rholmes
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Also posted in architecture, readings, urbanism
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Tagged a456, archigram, bldgblog, criticism, io9, kazys-varnelis, lebbeus-woods, speculative-architecture, things, utopias
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October 13, 2009 – 12:42 pm
The architecture/urbanism/landscape journal Places has recently taken up residency at Design Observer; notable new articles include a review of The Infrastructural City by Chris Stooss (with attached slideshow of Lane Barden’s wonderful photographs from that book), an article on the relationship between landscape architecture and ecology (excerpted from a new book on Michael Van Valkenburgh, […]
October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK: …the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. In fact, it’s surpassingly […]
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 23, 2009 – 10:07 am
[The sewer as limestone cavern, or the near-total hybridization of infrastructure and natural process, via Under Montreal.]
September 22, 2009 – 9:04 am
An article in the NYTimes on the successful first half-year of light rail in Phoenix makes note of an interesting point: only a small minority of users (27 percent) are commuters, which inverts the typical use pattern (60 percent of transit users nationwide are commuters). Despite that low use by commuters, the system has exceeded […]
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 15, 2009 – 12:00 pm
Talking about “an expanded notion of context”, as Stephen does below, reminds me that there’s a book from a few years ago, Site Matters, which explores the impact of that expansion (though it uses the term ‘site’ rather than ‘context’), in relationship to both landscape and architecture, in a number of very interesting ways. I […]
September 15, 2009 – 8:11 am
Pruned’s recent series Under Spaces (part one, part two, part three) is very good — I’m particularly enamored with Hans Herrmann’s Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project from Clemson University, which inserts an urban park beneath Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction“, mostly because I think the notion that the space of the park would […]
September 11, 2009 – 11:26 am
Ryan Avent has a very interesting post at streetsblog on the problems with the rehabilitation of Robert Moses, who is appealing urbanists for roughly the same reason that Thomas Friedman is pining for autocracy. The link Avent provides to a study which concludes that “one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population […]
September 1, 2009 – 11:59 am
Sorry to see Where reach its end, both because Brendan Crain is a fantastic blogger and because I think the group-blog format is one with a lot of potential, particularly to stir positive and useful debate. Its hard to believe that Where is only two-and-half years old. Fortunately Mario Ballestros is still blogging at Mañanarama […]
August 26, 2009 – 2:13 pm
Wunderkammer has a nice piece by Ned Shalanski on the High Line, which approaches the High Line from a rather different perspective than the one I’ve tended to bring to it (bemoaning the loss of the landscape that had developed over time, etc.). A couple of nice observations, about the High Line as the product […]
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 […]
August 18, 2009 – 11:35 am
Highly recommend reading Smudge’s account of a CLUI tour of nuclear New Mexico, if you missed BLDGBLOG and Pruned‘s recommendations (which seems unlikely, because I don’t know why anyone would be reading mammoth but not that pair): “This sense of the technological sublime in New Mexico runs from the earthships of Taos to the test […]
