While researching the history of the Buffalo Bayou for a forthcoming post, I came across this fascinating series of lesson plans prepared by a Houston elementary school teacher, which would introduce students to the history of flooding, emphasize the dual value and danger of waterways to cities, teach the children to access and utilize real-time […]
Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire. I had always assumed that fire was notable because it marked the peak of an era of careless industrial polluting, but the truth is apparently that the fire was notable because it demonstrated the persistence of an era that Americans thought they had left […]
The Sea-Based X-Band Radar, recently deployed to the coast of Hawaii in response to the threat of North Korean ballistic missiles. National defense as exquisite functionalist sculpture, or the American military’s response to the Statoil advertisements. [see also this older post at eatingbark on the eglin fps-85 radar building]
SEED Magazine has a slideshow of images from the recently completed Svalbard Seed Vault, coverage of which is especially timely in light of the rather apocalyptic report (short version: in 2080 DC will feel like South Florida, and might be just as underwater) issued yesterday by the US Global Change Research Program. The accompanying article, […]
1. BLDGBLOG on the singing ruins of our suburban fever dream. 2. Lewism links Nokia’s plans for mobile phones that would recharge themselves by harvesting electromagnetic radiation out of the air with Nikola Tesla’s derelict tower. 3. Worldchanging reviews the film Garbage Dreams, which tells the story of the Zabbaleen, a community composed primarily of […]
Interstate Traveler: proof that you should never let anyone tell you that you can’t build your offbeat megaproject (complete with Equestrian Explorer and Triage Traveler), particularly if you have a friend skilled in the production of vintage Popular Mechanics diagrams. Or else proof that the Michigan state legislature is completely nutty. Do watch the video, […]
The New York Times Magazine annual architecture issue is here. This year’s theme? Infrastructure.
Eat your heart out Richard Serra. http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking. After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. via Nico Sy, who doesn’t […]
I’ve mentioned my love for Infrastructurist’s field guides before; the latest, A Field Guide to NYC Standpipes, teaches you to read the relationship between standpipes and the fire control systems embedded in the buildings they serve. So much fascinating information is encoded on and in the built environment, if we know how to read it […]
Tommy Manuel has a very interesting interview with photographer Harald Finster, who specializes in the industrial. Points of discussion which obviously cross-pollinate landscape/architecture ensue: “Let me give an example: Essen and the Ruhr area will be “Kulturhauptstadt Europa 2010″ (Capital of Culture 2010). The official pamphlet says “Die Identität dieser Metropole ist nicht mehr geprägt […]
1. A post on Human Transit points out the “old habits of urbanist thought” that were built into the structure of SimCity. Would be interesting to not only expose the fallacious assumptions embedded in the game, but to ruminate on the ways in which the game, being a particularly late-arriving artifact of modernist urbanism, is […]
I took a bit of the past week off to spend time with my sister, who is back in the states on vacation after completing her first year with the Peace Corps in Sergelen, Mongolia. Saturday we found ourselves in Baltimore, which gave us the opportunity to check out the Visionary Art Museum, where I […]
Time-lapse videos of the urbanization of Dubai, the draining of the Aral Sea, deforestation in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, the depletion and replenishment of southern Iraq’s wetlands, and drought in Utah’s Lake Powell, at Wired Science, compiled from NASA Earth Observatory imagery.
More on freeway interchanges from James Fallows. [I accidentally deleted this post last night, losing robs comment and potentially any links to it folks might have saved – sorry. I don’t suppose anyone knows how to recover posts foolishly deleted on the wordpress platform?]
From the beginning of last week, A Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges (part one // part two) on Infrastructurist. Below, one of my favorite interchanges, the interbreeding of I-95, I-295, and I-395 over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in Baltimore.
Everything about this project highlighted on Infranet Lab is great, except for the title (“Arctic-tecture”). Enough with the “archi-” and “-tecture” titles. On the other hand, both of the research projects that Arctic-tecture’s author, Andrea Brennan, was/is involved in at MIT pair good work with equally good names (both projects were published in Volume, in […]
Total energy use in the United States traced from source, through use, to total waste vs utilization. via https://eed.llnl.gov/flow/02flow.php
Another addendum: a dialogue at the New York Times asks various urbanists and authors, including Rybczynski and Hayden, “Is [going carless] a realistic goal in a culture like ours?”, as an extension of the article Stephen mentioned.
Carfree suburban living in Germany, as described in the New York Times.
Recent research ” demonstrates that local and regional patterns of land use change substantially altered cloud patterns” — “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’, creating regional (mesoscale) patterns in shallow (lower) cloud cover layers”. Cue BLDGBLOG to suggest a city built with the aim of controlling the cloud […]
