In advance of another event related to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda’s recently-published Aerotropolis, Andrew Blum asked twitter for questions for Lindsay. I responded with the central point from my previous post on Aerotropolis: ajblum Good chatter about tonight’s Aerotropolis event so I’ll put it out there: Any questions from the cloud*? (*Not actually a [...]
[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking "our subterranean infrastructure"; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of [...]
April 15, 2011 – 11:51 am
The Guardian interviews Benjamin Bratton: What can be done to foster and encourage more social entrepreneurs and innovators? …I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation [...]
[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.] This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or [...]
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm
[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]
[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers [...]
[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and [...]
February 27, 2011 – 2:23 pm
Go read this micro history of a block in New York City: We usually analyze Development at the national level. Why not other levels? At the other extreme, here is a short and surprising illustrated history of one city block [...] Its history had been a series of unexpected events involving many actors, from Nicholas [...]
February 23, 2011 – 8:00 pm
Apparently anticipating our post yesterday on revolutionary space, Dwell‘s Aaron Britt interviews Nezar AlSayyad, author of the forthcoming Cairo: Histories of a City, about the design of Tahrir Square: Why from a design angle was it so successful as a point of protest? Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it [...]
February 22, 2011 – 2:25 pm
Bridging the gap between mammoth’s interest in infrastructure, global logistics, economies, and really, really big things is this announcement from Moller-Maersk: Danish shipper Moller-Maersk, the biggest container carrier, confirmed Monday it has signed a contract for a South Korean shipyard to build it 10 giant container ships over the next three years… The new container [...]
February 21, 2011 – 8:00 pm
FASLANYC posts an interview with pioneering Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, who I’ve heard speak a couple times and always been impressed by. They talk about the origins of Yu’s firm’s name (Turenscape), how Yu worked to convince Chinese officials that landscape architecture was a useful discipline, what defines a productive landscape, and the relationship [...]
February 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm
[Inside Terremark's "NCR NAP" facility in Northern Virginia, a key data center; photographed by flickr user nlaudermilch.] Alexis Madrigal points out an article in the New York Times this morning which starts to uncover some of the specifics of how the Egyptian government unplugged the internet. Quoting from that article: Because the Internet’s legendary robustness [...]
February 10, 2011 – 6:00 am
At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity: “…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? [...]
February 2, 2011 – 6:00 am
At Domus, Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki relates the troubling story of a secret government cyberwar organization’s efforts to co-opt a current architectural design competition. Brilliant reportage.
February 1, 2011 – 6:00 am
[SPL's open-pit salt mine in the Tarapacá salt flats, via Google Maps.] In December, after we began our winter hiatus, Urban Omnibus posted ran a fantastic post by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Geologic City”, which briefly summarized several of the much longer “Geologic City Field Reports” which have run on the Friends of the [...]
January 22, 2011 – 6:00 am
“Fourth Natures” is an upcoming conference at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, which sounds like it will be quite interesting: …landscape theorist John Dixon Hunt elucidate[d] three categories of landscape first defined during the Renaissance: ‘first nature’ being wilderness, ‘second nature’ being the cultivated landscape, and ‘third nature’ being the garden, a combination [...]
December 13, 2010 – 6:40 pm
I hope everyone has watched the video of the Metrodome collapse. The moment when the fabric tears and a inverted volcano of snow pours onto the field is incredible, like a roof giving birth. (I tried to capture a still, but the wonder is all in the fluid motion.) Parametrics should be the study of [...]
December 8, 2010 – 6:30 am
This week’s Glass House Conversation may be of particular interest to mammoth readers. Deborah Marton, of the Design Trust for Public Space, asks: Everyone agrees that public space is important, but why? We know that quality public space is the bellwether of a healthy society. Strong communities supported by well-conceived public spaces are better positioned [...]
December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am
On his blog, Rory Hyde interviews Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young at Thrilling Wonder Stories 2. I’m particularly taken by an idea the three converge on at the end: GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be [...]
