fecal-matters – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Category Archives: fecal-matters

October 3, 2011 – 8:30 pm

shitscape

To wrap up this week of fecal matters, I want to talk briefly about Bret Betnar’s “Shitscape: Mumbai’s Landscape In-Between”, a brilliant project done while Betnar was at the University of Pennsylvania. 1 If you haven’t already read it, be sure to check out Peter Nunns’ post from Tuesday on “fecal politics”, which deals with exactly […]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 1, 2011 – 2:04 pm

psyttaleia island

[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).]

By Stephen | Also posted in asides, infrastructure | Tagged , | Comments (6) | Permalink
September 30, 2011 – 11:59 am

blue plains

Last spring, Mammoth visited the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. This massive facility — which claims to be the largest plant of its particular kind in the world — exists to remove the solids that the 2 million residents of Washington, D.C. and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia introduce into wastewater from their parking […]

By mammoth | Also posted in district-surrounds, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
September 30, 2011 – 8:00 am

reversing the chicago river

One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most notably, the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, seen under construction in 1896 above — the river was made to flow not into […]

By rholmes | Also posted in engineering, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
September 29, 2011 – 1:00 pm

pruned’s buttologies

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 […]

By rholmes | Also posted in asides | Comments Off on pruned’s buttologies | Permalink
September 29, 2011 – 12:00 pm

residue treatment center

[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 […]

By mammoth | Also posted in architecture, asides, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on residue treatment center | Permalink
September 28, 2011 – 1:00 pm

egg digesters

[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 […]

By rholmes | Also posted in asides, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on egg digesters | Permalink
September 27, 2011 – 11:00 am

fecal politics

The following piece is a guest post from Peter Nunns. Peter is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland, with a MA in Political Science; mammoth readers may be familiar with him from his contributions to last summer’s discussion of the Infrastructural City. His current research interests include shelter and urban development challenges in developing-world cities, the […]

By pnunns | Also posted in guest post, infrastructure, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
September 26, 2011 – 6:00 am

fecal matters

This week — really, we promise it will just be a week — we’ll be looking at landscapes of shit.  We’ll take a guided tour of DC’s huge wastewater treatment plant, Blue Plains, we’ll have an excellent guest post from Peter Nunns on “fecal politics”, we’ll look at a student project that proposes “the making of […]

By mammoth | Also posted in meta | Comments (1) | Permalink