December 7, 2011 – 6:00 am
Bracket has issued a call for submissions for their third issue, [at extremes]: Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. […]
December 6, 2011 – 6:00 am
[“Signs for Naturalized Areas”, from Windsor, Ontario’s Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers’ strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities. The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers’ strike; the […]
November 1, 2011 – 6:00 am
[“Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors”, a documentary short by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, looks at one of our favorite things — the physical infrastructure of the internet — and, in particular, the telco hotel at 60 Hudson Street. It’s particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the “tendency of communications infrastructure […]
October 31, 2011 – 9:13 pm
[“Squirrel Highways”, a drawing by Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Shaub Dunkley, from Denis Wood’s Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which Wood describes as a “cartographic poem” about the North Carolina neighborhood of Boylan Heights, where he lives. Wood evidences a fantastic ability to animate prosaic terrain through the making of maps which are […]
October 13, 2011 – 6:00 pm
Geoff Manaugh contributes a series to Arbitare that looks at the history, equipment, content, audience, and future of architecture blogging. Being “someone who has founded his entire present career through blogging”, Geoff obviously both brings serious qualifications and an innate (and admitted) bias to the topic; the resulting personal perspective of the series only serves […]
October 13, 2011 – 12:00 pm
A nice slideshow by Laura Tepper on Places looks at the intersection of “wildlife habitat and highway design”, from “the six massive wildlife overpasses lining the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park” to HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s winning entry to the recent ARC competition for Vail Pass, “Hypar-nature” (pictured above) and across the Atlantic […]
October 12, 2011 – 6:00 am
At Slate, Tom Vanderbilt writes about the design of intersections to eliminate left-turns, which historically produced such oddities as the Jersey jughandle and the Michigan left, as well as more recent innovations like the diverging diamond interchange and continuous flow intersection.
October 11, 2011 – 6:00 am
Quilian Riano interviews Chris Reed (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) for Places; the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including Stoss’s recent work, the importance of an expanded field for landscape architecture, and possibilities for inventing flexible alliances between design teams and collaborators in “related fields such as engineering, ecology, economics, etc.”: “Within this expanded […]
October 1, 2011 – 2:04 pm
[Psyttaleia Island, Alcatraz of wastewater treatment plants. Via the awesomely-named tumblr The Value of Garbage. Aerial photos from this slideshow of Psyttaleia construction images. For more, see this description of the island (in Greek).]
September 29, 2011 – 1:00 pm
On Pruned, Buttology is “a fantasy table of contents for… a fantazine for the spatial study of waste”, with links to a wide array of pieces ranging from a history of the deficiencies of Montreal’s wastewater treatment infrastructure and disagreements between cosmonauts and astronauts about who can use which nation’s astro-toilets to the role of the depletion of a tiny […]
September 29, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[Residue Treatment Center (or CTRV) in Vacarisses, designed by Batlle i Roig. While the CTRV is a municipal solid waste treatment facility, not a wastewater treatment facility (where flushed feces usually go), the two kinds of facilities are commonly linked by the need to dispose of solid materials separated out of water at wastewater treatment […]
September 28, 2011 – 1:00 pm
[After Pruned’s unfortunately lost egg digester Flickr set, satellite photography of egg digesters heating and breaking down sludge on Deer Island, just outside Boston.] [More egg digesters, this time at New York’s Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. A New York City press release describes the eggs: “The digesters will process up to 1.5 million gallons […]
September 21, 2011 – 9:08 pm
While there is a lot that has gone unfortunately unposted this summer (our drafts queue is more than a little bit out of control) — at least in part due to Rob’s failure to contain the floods series (which is finished, by the way, with yesterday’s final post on de-damming the Dutch delta) to anything […]
September 20, 2011 – 6:00 am
[The site of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC) Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, at the intersection of the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet; more detail on this Army Corps of Engineers project map.] [Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army […]
September 3, 2011 – 6:00 am
[As this summer’s flooding swept massive sediment loads down the Mississippi, it also sent much greater volumes than usual pouring through the Corps’ diversion projects. In the case of the West Bay Sediment Diversion (pictured in our previous post), the Times-Picayune notes, that volume carried enough sediment to construct an instant island: “In a demonstration […]
August 19, 2011 – 8:00 am
[One of the negative aspects of resource extraction in an area, such as the Atchafalaya Basin, designed as an outlet for floodwaters is the potential for floodwaters to overwhelm flood controls and widely distribute industrial contaminants used in the extractive process. In the photos above (taken by the Gulf Restoration Network at the end of […]
August 18, 2011 – 6:00 pm
[The “Wagonwheel”, an unusual circular pattern of canals just south of Yellow Cotton Bay, also owes its pattern to the combination of geology and extractive logistics. Here, the oil companies’ canals depart from their typically linear vocabulary to follow the roughly circular limit of a raised salt dome. Salt domes form when buried deposits of […]
[Before the use of articulated concrete mats was standardized, the Army Corps often relied on a variety of other methods of revetment construction. The weaving and placement of willow fascine mattresses, as seen above, was one such earlier practice; the installation process is remarkably similar to and prefigures the process for concrete mats. Images via […]
[Flooding on the Missouri River, up and downstream from Hamburg, Iowa. The distinct spray pattern produced by burst levees is visible in at least three locations, while the raised outline of the emergency Ditch 6 levee can be seen on the western edge of Hamburg, protecting the city from the insistent floodwaters. Imagery captured by […]
As I’m gathering projects, proposals, practices, and places to be covered before I wrap up our summer flood-blogging extravaganza (which I expect to do by the end of the month), I thought it worth looking back at a handful of notable posts from mammoth‘s past that concerned flooding. Hopefully some of these, since they are […]
