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 [...]
February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm
[Comparative historic and contemporary heat maps of the wind energy potential of the continental United States, via NASCA.gov; NASCA documents indicate sources for their imagery include AWS Truewind/NREL via Wired Science and NOAA/NASA]
The North American Storm Control Authority (NASCA), like its predecessor, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which rebuilt the Rocky Mountains [...]
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm
[all photographs from Andrea Frank's series "Ports and Ships"]
1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar. Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool:
Where the vision [...]
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am
I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC’s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) [...]
January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm
[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 exciting [...]
By rholmes
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Also posted in architecture, economics, engineering, finance, landscape-architecture, meta, urbanism
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Tagged alan-berger, china, city-car, elemental, fresh-kills, groundwater-replenishment-system, high-speed-rail, iphone, james-corner, kiva, large-hadron-collider, medellin, parque-biblioteca-espana, pontine-systemic-design, quinta-monroy, svalbard-global-seed-vault
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January 22, 2010 – 2:38 pm
While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare. The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane [...]
January 12, 2010 – 1:13 pm
[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco's salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps]
I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the [...]
December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am
Adrian Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth’s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks” (itself a response to another post by Lahoud on a recent studio he led), discussing how to properly read studio proposals, the master plan “as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one”, Lahoud’s ambivalence about the [...]
December 9, 2009 – 5:55 pm
The Dirt has a lengthy interview conducted by Pierre Belanger with Joe Brown, chief executive of planning, design, and development at AECOM, the architecture and engineering firm that swallowed EDAW (formerly the world’s largest firm primarily focused on landscape architecture, if I recall correctly). The interview covers a wide range of issues, from the [...]
December 9, 2009 – 12:23 pm
An article from Sunday’s Washington Post discusses the development of “climate defense systems”, resulting from an increasing interest in not just climate change prevention, but also climate change adaptation. The article is particularly focused on the Netherlands, where “the Dutch are spending billions of euros on ‘floating communities’ that can rise with surging flood waters, [...]
December 3, 2009 – 8:10 pm
[Amos Coal Power Plant, from Mitch Epstein's fantastic series American Power]
Adrian Lahoud has a lengthy post on infrastructure and urbanism at Post-Traumatic Urbanism; the post is well worth reading. A handful of somewhat scattered comments on it follow.
I strongly agree with the emphasis on “complex urban interdependencies”, in addition to “physical artefacts” of infrastructure. [...]
December 1, 2009 – 4:58 pm
[Aerial image of the Hoover Dam Bypass under construction; I'd love to give credit for the image to the photographer, but it came to me through a long email chain, lacking any attribution, and I haven't been able to locate the source]
Economics journalist Louis Uchitelle complains about a “superproject void” in the Times; Infrastructurist responds, [...]
November 14, 2009 – 5:31 pm
Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and [...]
October 15, 2009 – 9:34 am
[The Lackawanna Eight, windmills located in Buffalo on the former site of a Bethlehem Steel facility; background via bing maps]
A partnership between the EPA and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is looking at the advantages of re-purposing contaminated sites as production sites for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power (dull report here and slightly more [...]
October 7, 2009 – 9:22 am
Between 1999 and 2004, Ruth Dusseault documented the transformation of Atlanta’s derelict Atlantic Steel Industries complex into Atlantic Station, a massive (138 acres, with a budget exceeding two billion dollars) residential and retail development. The photos reveal a fascinating but ephemeral landscape marked by raw and unfinished structures that are eventually buried beneath more civilized [...]
September 28, 2009 – 7:53 pm
[Sensors lining the coast of Monterrey Bay, measuring surface currents]
A NYTimes article reports on the increasing interest of scientists in “Lagrangian coherent structures”, physical constructs within liquid and gaseous flows which are essentially invisible to unaided eye, but revealed and mapped with the aid of networks of sensors and pattern-discerning algorithms:
The concept of the structures [...]
September 23, 2009 – 4:14 pm
There’s a discussion about the economics and politics of urbanizing suburbia taking place between economics bloggers Ryan Avent and Tyler Cowen right now (if you’re not familiar with the two, Avent is roughly liberal and Cowen is roughly libertarian, though both are more or less independent thinkers). It begins with this Washington Post article which [...]
September 7, 2009 – 10:45 am
The New York Times had a nice article yesterday on a pair of Brooklyn landfills that are, with generous assistance from John McLaughlin, from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, and landscape architect Leslie Sauer (of Andropogon), developing functional, self-regulating artificial ecologies:
In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain [...]
September 6, 2009 – 1:17 pm
Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced.
“Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020″
The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by the underwater [...]
As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and forward-thinking project from a city not known for its innovative ecological design (though they have built a rather seductive [...]
