[Map of the IIRSA's Amazonian axis, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across the Andes; from IIRSA document "8 Ejes de Integración de la Infraestructura de América del Sur"] Keller Easterling, speculating about “a new counterintuitive economic model” of “infrastructural subtraction” in Domus last November: “What are the points of leverage, trip distances or economies [...]
By rholmes
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Also posted in architecture, economics, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field
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Tagged domus, formatted-terrain, iirsa, keller-easterling, organization-space, organization-work, planetary-urbanization, protocols, south-america, territorial-design
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The following piece was published last summer in La Tempestad; given that La Tempestad circulates primarily in Mexico and is published in Spanish, we — Brett Milligan and I, who co-authored the piece — thought that it would be worth re-publishing it on our respective sites for English-language audiences. The article builds on a pair of [...]
January 11, 2013 – 11:17 am
So, I should say something about what I’m doing this spring, though this is kind of the brief version. I’m very excited to be joining the faculty and students at LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture as the visiting Marie M. Bickham Chair. In addition to taking in the extremely interesting work that they’re [...]
November 15, 2012 – 6:00 pm
[At Wired, a gallery of photographs of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, by Jamey Stillings. At completion, the Ivanpah facility is expected to be the largest operational solar power facility in the world.]
November 2, 2012 – 6:00 am
[Audience discussion during DredgeFest; photo by Nicola Twilley.] One of the primary reasons that mammoth has been relatively quiet this year is the effort that Stephen and I, as two of the four current members of the Dredge Research Collaborative, have put into organizing DredgeFest NYC. We did this with no small amount of assistance from [...]
September 18, 2012 – 6:00 pm
Shannon Mattern, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”: What is the “aftermath” of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to “make visible the invisible” and thereby “raise awareness” are far too often regarded as ends [...]
[The following is the text and (a slightly condensed set of) slides from the presentation that Laurel McSherry and I gave at the Drylands Design Conference in late March. The presentation walks through our highly speculative proposal for the reconfiguration of the political geography of the United States to better conform to the spatial distribution [...]
[A portion of Nicolas Rapp's map of the internet for Fortune magazine.] Writing for Quaderns, Kazys Varnelis argues for an infrastructural urbanism that not only embraces and seeks to design (or design with) infrastructure, but also imagines new infrastructures “more appropriate to network culture”: But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations [...]
[Via Pete Brook at Wired, Mary Lydecker's collages splice together scenes from vintage postcards to create images of Pruned-worthy vacation locales (like the infrastructural beach above) and bundles of skyscrapers improbably close to dams, mountains, and rivers, as if the cities they belonged to were crashing suddenly into some unorthodox planner's feverishly strict urban growth [...]
[Edward Burtynsky's "Drylands Farming #7" -- farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.] Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly [...]
[A zone: Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius. As a bonus, Ebene is also an excellent example of the capacity of the Tubes to direct urban futures, as one of its prime selling points is that it sits at a landing point for the "the SAT3/WASC/SAFE sub-marine cable which links Southern Europe, Western and Southern Africa and [...]
[The Placer County Courthouse, in Auburn, California -- imagine it swarmed by a glitch jam.] NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, [...]
[Chart showing the typical lifespans of a wide variety of infrastructures (and components of infrastructures), from treated wood ties to deep geological repositories for high-level radioactive waste. The descriptive text reads: "This chart visualizes the lifespans of equipment associated with waste, water, energy, and transportation systems across North America. As we approach -- and pass [...]
[The strangely geometric edge of Nambe Falls Dam in New Mexico; Nambe Falls Dam is a component of the San Juan-Chama Project, which delivers water from the San Juan River Basin through 26 miles of tunnels under the Continental Divide into the basins of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, providing drinking water for Albuquerque; [...]
Writing at Fast Company, Tim Maly ties recent interest in autonomous cars and related intersection-managing algorithms back to the guest post he wrote for mammoth during our reading of The Infrastructural City: What’s interesting about the skepticism towards automated driving is that it reveals how invisible the current systems of automation already are. Traffic control [...]
February 21, 2012 – 9:51 pm
The wonder of inter-basin transfer, in the August 1937 issue of Popular Mechanics: (The cover of that same issue, which wonders at the electrical power produced by and transmitted from Lake Mead, is also worth a look.)
February 7, 2012 – 6:00 am
[A pressurized pipe carries dredge along Bethany Beach, Delaware; photography by Chris Mizes.] On his blog space within lines, Chris Mizes writes about one of the more common ways that the landscapes of dredge intrude on everyday life: beach nourishment. As Mizes explains, this commonplace instance of landscape prosthesis is — like many of the [...]
January 30, 2012 – 6:00 am
[Warehouse at 1200 E McNichols Road, Highland Park, Michigan. The small red sign at the bottom right corner of the second image says "Metro".] The warehouse above — and a network of others like it, scattered around the industrial abandonia of Detroit — is a crucial bottleneck in the global aluminium trade. Before I explain how this [...]
December 20, 2011 – 6:00 am
Recommended reading: Alan Wiig’s “everyday structures”, a blog “explor[ing] the place of infrastructure in the urban landscape”, with a particular focus on “Hertzian space” and digital communications infrastructure. Wiig is studying geography at Temple University, so his blog most typically deals with landscapes in Philadelphia or its surrounds. Like many of mammoth‘s favorite things at [...]
November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm
["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 [...]
