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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Fast Company author Cliff Kuang writes about New York City’s adoption of rapid-bus transit solutions developed in Brazil and Columbia: Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city’s bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It’s expected […]
February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am
[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it’s been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast. […]
February 26, 2010 – 1:20 pm
[The future soil of Miami, captured by satellites while drifting off the coast of Africa.] At InfraNet Lab, Mason White posts about “Particulate Swarms”, or three storm typologies: dust, water, and gas. The first image in the post, of a dust storm over Sydney, reminds me (because in my haste, I mistakenly read the form […]
February 25, 2010 – 10:29 pm
[Above, the volcanic peaks of the South Sandwich Islands distort wave patterns over the Pacific Ocean, through processes described, and, of course photographed, by NASA Earth Observatory: …the islands disturb the smooth flow of air, creating waves that ripple through the atmosphere downwind of the obstacles. The cloudy-clear pattern that is produced highlights the location […]
February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am
[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri. The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from […]
February 24, 2010 – 1:56 pm
[A ferry arrives at Thilafushi, the world’s largest island composed primarily of garbage, in a photograph from an excellent photo-essay on Thilafushi by flickr user AB Watson Year. Thilafushi, which is located in and was constructed by the Maldives on the site of a former lagoon, spreads across 124 acres in the Indian Ocean, ever […]
