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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You find this mass anchored in the Yellow Sea (google map) off the Korean coast, attached by a thin line of gravel and asphalt (drawn in the straight line which is the international tell of the engineer) to New Songdo City, the massive planned addition to the port of Incheon. A perfect rectangle in a […]
Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect: This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft […]
A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff. The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens. Congestion pricing is […]
Here’s one such strategy for applying architectural tactics to a much broader set of situations and materials, Stephen, from Rebar (who are perhaps the best current example of a group doing such things, at least that I’m aware of): The project, entitled “The People’s Public Works”, “[lures] the public into a carnival midway with infrastructure […]
[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 […]
Wired comments on a topic — high-altitude wind power — that mammoth explored a couple years ago while developing a competition entry: The wind blowing through the streets of Manhattan couldn’t power the city, but wind machines placed thousands of feet above the city theoretically could. The first rigorous, worldwide study of high-altitude wind power […]
Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, returning from a tour of the Netherlands’ coastal armaments, says America needs to “rethink its entire approach to low-lying coastal areas and adopt an integrated model of water management like that of the Netherlands.” Here at mammoth, we (of course) think that this is a fantastic idea, and not only because […]
I’ve mentioned my love for Infrastructurist’s field guides before; the latest, A Field Guide to NYC Standpipes, teaches you to read the relationship between standpipes and the fire control systems embedded in the buildings they serve. So much fascinating information is encoded on and in the built environment, if we know how to read it […]
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, finance, the-expanded-field, urbanism
|
Tagged architectural-criticism, architecture, finance, incremental-urbanism, informality, infrastructure, microfinance, urbanism
|
|
Permalink
Pruned asks: “Has there ever been an ideas competition of any kind for Mexico City and its water crisis?”, in response to this post at the Guardian outlining that crisis. While I’m not aware of a competition, the unrealized project that immediately comes to mind is Kalach and de Leon’s The City and the Lakes, […]
More on freeway interchanges from James Fallows. [I accidentally deleted this post last night, losing robs comment and potentially any links to it folks might have saved – sorry. I don’t suppose anyone knows how to recover posts foolishly deleted on the wordpress platform?]
In a recent feature on Archinect, Will Galloway of Front Office (they have a blog here) discusses the predilection of architects for the wholesale urban renovation (which, despite the prominence of theoretical frameworks that intend to offer alternatives, remains the dominant tendency of designers, even those working within frameworks — such as landscape urbanism — […]
April 24, 2009 – 12:21 pm
The French keep all of the nuclear waste from the last thirty years of energy production in one room, the storage vault at La Hague. la hague in penisular context portion of la hague facility [google maps] If, as the landscape theorist Beth Meyers has suggested, sublime sentiments can be stirred by the juxtaposition of […]
