[The “project design flood” is the maximum flood that the Army Corps of Engineers has engineered the Mississippi River’s flood control structures to accommodate; the image here (via America’s Wetland and Loyola University) shows those flows in cubic feet per second. I’ve been slow to link (though, as promised, the flood blogging is going to pick […]
[Nerea Calvillo’s “In the Air” — “a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air” — Visualizar ’08] A brief interruption to the flood-blogging (which will resume shortly, with more on 1927 and crevasses) to note that I’ll be speaking in Madrid at Visualizar ’11 “Understanding Infrastructures”. The […]
[Before the 1928 Flood Control Act, the Mississippi River flood control plan consisted of two basic elements: levees and outlets. Earthern levees would hold the water back. When necessary, outlets would be utilized to divert flood waters. In an emergency, more levees could be created with sandbags; more outlets could be created by blowing levees […]
The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun. We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding. Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the […]
[“Enroute high” aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com. American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose “imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space” […]
[Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.] [“Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size. Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent […]
In advance of another event related to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda’s recently-published Aerotropolis, Andrew Blum asked twitter for questions for Lindsay. I responded with the central point from my previous post on Aerotropolis: ajblum Good chatter about tonight’s Aerotropolis event so I’ll put it out there: Any questions from the cloud*? (*Not actually a […]
April 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[Colonnade Park, photographed by Brett Milligan.] Free Association Design reports from Seattle’s Colonnade Park, an “urban mountain bike skills park” constructed by volunteers from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance: It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is […]
March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly […]
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm
[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]
[FedEx’s “Superhub” at Memphis International Airport; via Bing maps.] 1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis. (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.) The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree […]
[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers […]
[Photo of Global III, by Alan Berger via NAi Publishers] Approximately seventy-five miles due west of the gleaming towers of Chicago’s Loop, Union Pacific Railroad, the United States’ largest railroad company, operates the Rochelle Global III Intermodal Facility, twelve-hundred acres of switching yards, train tracks, loading facilities, and container-sized parking spaces. Rochelle, a small Midwestern […]
[Library of Congress images of Robert Moses and Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, via Pruitt-Igoe‘s flickr set] 1. A couple months ago, Slate published a series of articles by Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic, which I hear is excellent) on “Unbuilt Highways”, which began with the installment “How a Road Can Change a City, Even […]
February 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm
[Inside Terremark’s “NCR NAP” facility in Northern Virginia, a key data center; photographed by flickr user nlaudermilch.] Alexis Madrigal points out an article in the New York Times this morning which starts to uncover some of the specifics of how the Egyptian government unplugged the internet. Quoting from that article: Because the Internet’s legendary robustness […]
February 11, 2011 – 12:58 pm
I’ve been reading the blog Market Urbanism quite a lot recently. Writing recently about “the problem with “public” transportation” (and after noting the frequent use of ‘public transit’ where the broader ‘mass transit’ would be more appropriate), they argue: …although the [New York] Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it […]
January 27, 2011 – 6:00 am
Mammoth will be in New York tomorrow night — January 28th — presenting at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in an event tied to the recent release of Lateral Office/Infranetlab’s Pamphlet Architecture 30: MANIFESTO SERIES 02 INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM PAMPHLET ARCHITECTURE 30 + Storefront for Art and Architecture presents Manifesto Series 02: Infrastructural Opportunism showcasing […]
November 29, 2010 – 3:14 pm
At the end of October, Hillary Brown — founding principal of New Civic Works, a consulting firm which “promotes the adoption of sustainable design principles for buildings and infrastructure”, as well as a professor of architecture at the City College of New York — published an article on Places entitled “Infrastructural Ecologies: Principles for Post-Industrial […]
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm
In the comments on “fracture-prone” — where I argued that the set of political measures that New Urbanists tend to focus on are a necessary component of the urbanist’s operating toolkit, but not nearly sufficient — Carter says: I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle […]
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm
[Detail from Andrew tenBrink’s “Staging Ground”; all images in this post are from “Staging Ground”; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink. In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent […]
