[An artist's conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970's, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including "the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River [...]
["The faults induced by military speleogenesis will lead to gradual yet certain failure of the jet noise barrier."]
Nick Sowers (Soundscrapers) has recently posted a series at the Archinect school blog project exploring his recently-completed thesis project from a succession of disciplinary perspectives, which he titles the Archaeologist (who introduces the project), the Forensic Engineer, the [...]
Readers of mammoth may be interested in contributing to the 3rd Coast Atlas, “a platform for research and design initiatives that explore the urbanization, landscape, infrastructure and ecology of the Great Lakes Basin and Great Lakes Megaregion.” Submissions — which may take the form of written essay, design project, research, or visual essay — are [...]
Smudge Studio’s Geologic Time Viewer re-casts the “official Geologic Time Scale” as not only a way of looking back into the past, but also a window into the present: “the materialities of every previous geologic epoch flow into the present-as-middle and give form to our daily lives.” We learn, for instance, that iron infrastructures, [...]
[Narrow Streets L.A. is a blog which posts photographs of greater Los Angeles streets, digitally manipulated in exactly the way you would expect from the title: made narrower. While occasionally it may go a bit overboard and lurch towards self-parody, generally it is a fantastic experiment -- postcards from an alternate Los Angeles -- showing [...]
[The Bou Craa conveyor, which is similar to the Negev desert belt previously discussed on mammoth, carries phosphate across the desert in Western Sahara, leaving the wind-swept sediment shadow above, and is the longest conveyor belt in the world; seen at deconcrete, image via bing maps.]
It would befuddle me if there were anyone who reads [...]
One of the best of the print architectural critics, Christopher Hawthorne, writes about his recent visit to Medellin in the LA Times, and offers a well-rounded evaluation of the significance of the notable projects completed there in the past decade. While the most important thing about Medellín’s new architecture is, as Hawthorne writes and mammoth [...]
In the comments at DPR-Barcelona, David Maisel points us to a pair of news articles on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s latest plan for the Owens Lake playa:
The Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners [in December] unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of lake [...]
April 27, 2010 – 10:19 pm
[Halley VI, a British research station on ski pods, via Wired.]
At Wired, Andrew Blum surveys the architecture of Antarctic research stations, which, as it includes buildings which have to be towed to remain at fixed geographic points, hydraulic lifts that raise buildings in reaction to snowfall, and architecturally-induced “subzero maelstroms”, reads like a photographic companion [...]
The infrastructurally-obsessed will appreciate the Transport Politic’s summary of the Chinese boom in local rapid transit, prompted by the observation that Shanghai now has the longest metro network in the world, despite having begun the first tracks merely fifteen years ago. The local transit boom parallels the Chinese investment in high-speed rail which mammoth previously [...]
For various reasons (vacations, other projects, et cetera), I have failed to direct readers of this blog to the interview with Kate Orff (of SCAPE) that FASLANYC posted about a month ago. The interview touches on, among other things, SCAPE’s “Oyster-tecture” project for the Rising Currents exhibition, strategies for expanding the engagement of (landscape) architects [...]
April 19, 2010 – 10:26 pm
[Owens Lake, via google maps]
A quick note: our discussion of The Infrastructural City will kick off next Monday, here and elsewhere, with posts and comments related to the first chapter, “Reconstructing the Void”, which looks at the relationship between Los Angeles and Owens Lake. If you commented on the first post, you should have received [...]
April 15, 2010 – 11:38 pm
An article in the New York Times discusses Europe’s waste-to-energy plants (which are key components of a successful closed-loop manufacturing process) and why no such plants are under construction in the United States:
The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here [in Horsholm, Denmark] are at peace with the hulking neighbor just [...]
April 13, 2010 – 12:00 pm
[Russian thermokarst near Nova Zembla]
I’ve been tremendously entertained lately by Pathological Geomorphology, a blog run by “a loosely defined and unified group of geobloggers” which catalogs “images of extreme landscapes, landforms, and processes”. April is “delta month” (or, as one of their bloggers put it, “April deltas bring May fold and thrust belts”), so far [...]
March 29, 2010 – 12:00 pm
At the excellent Human Landscapes, Erle Ellis (you may know him from his Wired Science article from last May, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet”, which you should stop and read right now if you have not) suggests that we need to start thinking about (and, presumably, constructing) a “cyborg planet”, where machines can feed [...]
[Part of the James River ghost fleet, one of the three remaining floating stockpiles in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, via wikipedia]
CLUI’s spring Lay of the Land surveys the American landscape of ship breaking (which is largely fed by the Congressionally-mandated dismantling of the ghost fleets), develops a linkage between Kodak Park (“said to be [...]
March 19, 2010 – 12:30 pm
In an article at Architect, Loud Paper’s Mimi Zeiger explores the growing entanglement of GIS and BIM applications, and the potential impact of this relationship for architecture:
Loosely defined as the integration of geographic analysis and tools into the design process, the term “geodesign”… as Dangermond [the president of ESRI, makers of ArcGIS] sees it, is [...]
While mammoth by no means aspires to fit within the category of architectural criticism (though we do occasionally have something to say about it), Nancy Levinson’s recent meta-criticism of the genre in Places strikes me as essentially correct:
By now the rules are so familiar they seem almost inevitable. We’ve come more or less to accept [...]
Free Exchange posted this chart emphasizing the challenge long-term unemployment poses in this recession. It seems to indicate that construction-based stimulus could be especially effective in reducing such unemployment, furthering the case for a stimulus program emphasizing the construction and repair of infrastructure.
But there’s just not that much room to cut unemployment by putting [...]
[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape [...]
