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 […]
December 2, 2010 – 6:47 pm
Jim Rossignol (video game journalist, blogger, and occasional BLDGBLOG contributor, among other things) recently announced the start-up of an independent game development studio, Big Robot, as well as the first two games that studio is developing. I’m particularly excited by the second he’s described, which is currently (though likely not finally) titled “Walking City”. (That […]
November 30, 2010 – 12:44 pm
Esquire profiles Janette Sadik-Khan in their series The Brightest: 15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope. Although it initially seems curiously focused on her personality instead of her accomplishments, the piece makes a convincing case that the two are inseparably linked, and as such, is a good example of the political and social acumen that designers […]
November 22, 2010 – 7:00 pm
[Appropriate for the gradual approach of winter in the mid-Atlantic: photographs from Alexander Gronsky’s “The Edge”, a series of shots taken along the outer boundary of Moscow; via @ballardian. Thinking about whitesward and glacier wrap again…]
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm
In the comments on “fracture-prone” — where I argued that the set of political measures that New Urbanists tend to focus on are a necessary component of the urbanist’s operating toolkit, but not nearly sufficient — Carter says: I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle […]
November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am
On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program. The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in […]
November 5, 2010 – 5:00 am
MONU issues a call for submissions for their Winter 2011 issue, Editing Urbanism: These days, the need for new buildings or entire city quarters is decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether – at least in the Western world – due to the demographic changes and financially difficult times. Ever since, architects and urban designers, […]
November 1, 2010 – 5:55 am
At Mute Magazine, Owen Hatherly picks at tensions in the rhetoric and built work of Zaha Hadid Architects, with a particular emphasis on both the claims Patrick Schumacher makes about parametricism as a new avant-garde and the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, one of ZHA’s recent buildings. Though it is not entirely representative of the […]
October 28, 2010 – 6:00 am
[David Garcia Studio‘s “Dead Website Archive”, from MAP-003 “Archive”; read about the Dead Website Archive at DPR-Barcelona.]
October 27, 2010 – 8:48 pm
I’ve mentioned before my fondness for the blog Pathological Geomorphology, but this month’s theme is particularly fantastic: the interface of human landscapes and geomorphology. In Green River, Utah (above), for instance, an extinct oxbow determines contemporary land-use patterns; other examples so far include farmed alluvial fans in Asian deserts, Pennsylvania farmland interspersed between anticlines, and […]
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am
[Murmansk in polar night, photographed by flickr user euno.] The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ‘services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; […]
October 24, 2010 – 2:28 pm
BLDGBLOG recently ran an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which sent me plunging back into the BLDGBLOG archives to re-read a trio of interviews that Geoff conducted in 2007 with Inaba and two of the other editors of Volume, Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley. I could share any number of excerpts from those interviews, as each […]
October 22, 2010 – 6:31 am
[Barchan dunes — the recent, light sandy formations — layered atop older longitudinal dunes — darker, subtler lines roughly traced southwest to northeast — and braced against the pure Suprematist geometry of pivot irrigation along Idaho’s Snake River; via NASA Earth Observatory.]
