futures – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Category Archives: futures

November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm

the network as industry

["Interior components of the cooling system" at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal's report for Domus on Facebook's Open Computer Project, which "describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre".] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in architecture, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
June 20, 2011 – 8:29 pm

“a coordinated infrastructural ensemble”

In a great little piece for Domus, Geoff Manaugh looks at what the “critical foreign dependencies” cable says about the nature of the contemporary nation-state: “The sites described by the cable—Israeli ordnance manufacturers, Australian pharmaceutical corporations, Canadian hydroelectric dams, German rabies vaccine suppliers—form a geometry whose operators and employees are perhaps unaware that they define [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in asides, geography, infrastructure | Tagged | Comments (0)
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

the new north

[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; [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in asides, geography, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
October 1, 2010 – 11:58 am

wearable homes

["Mono Lake", 2008, from Mary Mattingly's "Nomadographies"] If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other.  In between, there would be “clothing”.  And if you really want to confuse [...]

By rholmes | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)
September 17, 2010 – 8:10 pm

a cyborg arboretum

[Not a cyborg plant, but certainly technobotanical; image by NL Architects via Inhabitat] 1. This post is for 50 Posts About Cyborgs. 2. This is a cyborg arboretum.  That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs.  Not augmented [...]

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September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm

networked containers

[A portion of the port of Tianjin -- radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in asides, infrastructure, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm

fifty posts about cyborgs

To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in architecture, technology | Tagged , | Comments (1)
August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm

“global hubs and mega-cities”

[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf's series "Architecture of Density"] In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state: The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in geography, urbanism | Tagged , | Comments (3)
May 6, 2010 – 10:56 pm

lo-fi seed dispersal

[Prepared Greenaid seedbombs, awaiting dispersal; photograph by Fletcher Studio via Sustainable Cities Collective] Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Tagged , , | Comments (1)
April 21, 2010 – 10:40 pm

recreational volcanism

[The Moscow Pool, built on the site of Stalin's abandoned Palace of the Soviets, via Polis.] As volcanism is, for obvious reasons, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an article posted a few months ago at English Russia which suggests that Moscow is a city built [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (8)
March 16, 2010 – 8:00 pm

geologic helium machine

[A portion of the Cliffside field snakes tentacles across flat pasture concealing ancient anticlines.] Just outside Amarillo, Texas, the Cliffside field stores much of the nation’s helium reserves in a naturally-occurring geologic dome. It is part of a complex of partially-privatized fields, mines, domes, and pipelines which extends nearly two hundred miles north-south, from the [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm

future forests of the eastern seaboard

[Mapping the transference of botanical threats from Japan to the Midwest, from a video presentation on Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in the Great Lakes region] From a recent article in the Guardian: Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (8)