finance – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Category Archives: finance

November 12, 2013 – 3:10 am

finance fundamentals i

Mammoth has long held an interest in the broad social, economic, and logistical systems which provide the context within which any infrastructure, landscape, or building is designed and constructed. One particularly important contextual component is the nature of a project’s financing. This is true for the Panama Canal Expansion, it is true for the Fresh […]

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August 3, 2012 – 6:00 pm

brickstarter

Tim Maly interviews Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill about their new project, Brickstarter: Anyone who’s ever tried to get some change to their neighborhood done knows the pain of fighting through a bureaucracy that tends to dampen even the most enthusiastic of spirits. “This activism often occurs on the periphery, in the legal gray areas […]

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October 10, 2011 – 6:00 am

phantom stories

[Homes on the outskirts of Shanghai, via Google Maps.] A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a […]

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May 3, 2011 – 9:08 am

splash house

A group of graduate architecture students from Parsons’ Design Workshop is attempting to (partially) fund an unsolicited project called Splash House using Kickstarter: The Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center is an invaluable place for kids to play and learn. Yet for several months every summer the Washington Heights community is denied this critical resource when […]

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October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am

backyard farm service

[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic’s “Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed.  There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette […]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
March 15, 2010 – 6:00 am

the shelter category

Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication.  For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”: “What do cities look like in the eyes […]

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February 1, 2010 – 9:32 pm

requisite iPad post

My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything.   The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t.  Instead, here […]

By Stephen | Also posted in asides, technology | Tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm

the best architecture of the decade

[The Large Hadron Collider] The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture.   But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an […]

By mammoth | Also posted in architecture, economics, engineering, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, meta, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (71) | Permalink
August 24, 2009 – 1:37 pm

rory hyde on unsolicited architecture

Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past: [T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions […]

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July 6, 2009 – 11:44 am

the coming infrastructure bubble?

[Interior of an abandoned and incomplete home in a subdivision outside Phoenix, from an excellent slideshow of photographs taken by Edgar Martins, commissioned by the New York Times to document the real estate bust.] I’d highly recommend reading or re-reading Eric Janszen’s “The Next Bubble”, which was published in Harper’s almost a year and a […]

By rholmes | Also posted in energy, infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
May 31, 2009 – 2:21 pm

on finance

I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing.  Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism.  This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding […]

By Stephen | Also posted in architecture, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink