A blog post whose sentence structure, when diagrammed correctly, unfolds to reveal the blueprints for some strange building.
[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander’s photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg — site of today’s final — but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in […]
Serial Consign has posted an excellent short essay on the overlap between representations of cities in video games and representations of cities in architecture: Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural […]
Soccer City stadium, site of Sunday’s World Cup final, is the largest stadium in Africa — though it seats a bit under ninety thousand spectators in its current configuration, which sacrifices spectator seating in favor of “reserved seating” for the press, FIFA officials, and other “Very Important Persons” — but even its bulk is relatively […]
Just quick note to let you all know that last week’s chapter, Cell Structure by Ted Kane and Rick Miller, and the upcoming week’s Counting (On) Change by Roger Sherman have been rolled into a single post, which should go live sometime in the next several days. Polis have published their take on Cell Structure […]
FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy. Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors […]
After a rather exciting series of quarter-finals, and in anticipation of the semi-finals: the last fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and Germany, transposed onto urban landscapes near Lyon by the artists collective Pied La Biche: [Seen at Polis; Pied La Biche were last spotted playing three-sided anarchist-rules soccer on a hexagonal […]
At Action!, Rory Hyde has written a great review of ‘extra/ordinary’, the national conference of the Australian Institute of Architects. Framed around a description of work presented by Elemental, Teddy Cruz, and F.A.T., the post raises some of the same issues we’re discussing in mammoth’s recent post on The Infrastructural City. On the necessity of a […]
[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the […]
[For more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, see our hyperbolically-named post on the best architecture of the decade]
[Iconeye goes inside the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, Green Point, ignoring facades and roofs in favor of spaces we rarely see: changing rooms, holding cells, offices, and, above, the pre-match warm-up room; photographs by Justin McGuirk.]
Since it’s now buried below a mini-avalanche of posts and I doubt anyone will notice the updates unless I point to them, I’ve added a few things to the chapter five (“Blocking All Lanes: Traffic”) index below. To further ease your reading experience, the links added are: contributions to the traffic discussion from Nam Henderson […]
An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly: …Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to […]
While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail. Oil wells sprout like hardy […]
[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, […]
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, like […]
[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 […]
