August 17, 2009 – 4:26 pm
Trying to figure out what the meaning of the apparent popularity of the “T-Tree” reburbia entry is. It is currently right behind the New Urbanist submission “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”, both of which have over twice as many votes as any of the other finalists. “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”‘s popularity doesn’t surprise me, as it […]
August 17, 2009 – 4:16 pm
I heard this in the car on my return trip to Hartsfield Sunday and then Stephen brought it up again this afternoon, so I suppose I should mention it: two friends, one who lives in LA and one who lives in Richmond, VA, go on a cross-country road-trip using google maps. Which wouldn’t be remarkable, […]
The After/Afterparty is a Processing application (or series of applications) developed by David Lu in collaboration with Michael Meredith (of MOS), which uses the forms from MOS’s PS1 project (Afterparty) to explore how architects and software developers might work together, both through generative processes and crowd-sourcing applications. The later, though described by Lu as a […]
August 3, 2009 – 11:50 am
Worldchanging has a nice feature extrapolating the future of suburbia from current trends, which has long been one of Stephen and I’s favorite pastimes. Excited to see what further ideas for said future(s) may percolate out of the Reburbia design competition, which just concluded this past Friday (results should be posted within a week or […]
The High Line receives a glowing review from the New York Review of Books (which, due their odd desire to maintain the pretense that they publish book reviews and not journalism, pretends that the article is a review of the pamphlet-sized Designing the High Line, though it merits only a single paragraph in the article). […]
Critical Terrain asked photographers Alex Fradkin, Tim Griffith, Mark Luthringer, and David Maisel to contribute their thoughts on the Edgar Martins digital fabrication episode, which I accidentally stumbled into earlier this month.
Somewhere, Louis Kahn is blushing. HOW DARE THEY. Is this Landscape Urbanism? Or is this? More on Seoul here. And here.
Adam Goodheart mulls over the place of the wind turbine in the American landscape: Just a century ago, however, windmills by the hundreds of thousands dotted many of the same landscapes where their present-day descendants now loom. Nearly every farmyard had its own spindly device atop a steel tower, pumping water and powering lamps. Those […]
Via things, a list of 50 “strange buildings” which mashes icons of modern architecture (Nagakin Capsule Tower, Habitat 67, Lloyd’s) with ducks and idiosyncratic vernacular structures. As things notes, the interesting thing here is not the list, but the (inclusive) attitude towards architecture revealed by the list.
“Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer… Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915.” [via opus // more about the digital […]
New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.
The European Space Agency documents the decline of the Aral Sea, via Wired, whose 2002 article on the management of the Amu Darya explains in great detail the reasons for that decline.
Article at the New York Times on the value of bus rapid transit systems, particularly Bogota’s Transmilenio.
Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect: This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft […]
My father was trained as an agronomist, so I endured a fair number of lectures as a child about the importance of distinguishing between soil and dirt. Nonetheless, I recently added David Montgomery’s Dirt (which is about soil) to my reading list, and Jim Rossignol’s review of another book entitled Dirt (this one — also […]
A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff. The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens. Congestion pricing is […]
Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto is a waist-high concrete casting of the old town of Gibellina, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 (image via flickr user claude05). The town of Nuova Gibellina, which was built to house Gibellina’s displaced residents, is now fantastically eerie, as it was imagined as a triumphant convergence of modern […]
This is an endlessly fascinating article about the role language plays in cognition. Forgive me for quoting at length: Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words […]
Summer cottages, despite migrating inland, lose out to the tide and erosion: Thayer, 46, who estimated his family had spent $35,000 to move the camp twice, huddled with his three brothers recently to weigh their options during a 50th birthday celebration. But that was before the storm. The camp had been in the family for […]
1. Fantastic Journal’s post Lines of Defense, which I would cheapen if I summarized it. More nostalgia, I suppose. 2. The NYTimes on Brussels, “traumatized” by the “dreadful architecture” of the European Union headquarters, and how planners hope to rectify the rift between bureaucrats and residents. What a direct metaphor for the conflict between the […]
