[American Falls de-watered, via Flickr user rbglasson]
For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was [...]
February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm
[Model of "Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface"; all images from and by Smout Allen]
I can’t let Stephen’s mention of Smout Allen pass — particularly in the context of a discussion of process and event in architecture — without also saying a word about their proposal for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is one of my favorite [...]
February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am
[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri. The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from [...]
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm
The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find [...]
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) [...]
February 12, 2010 – 12:35 pm
[Thin veins of augmented and imported snowpack wind down Cypress Mountain, prepared for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver ("snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations" and "organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down"), via NASA Earth Observatory. Read more about whitesward at [...]
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, infrastructure, 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 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm
I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention. In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay [...]
January 5, 2010 – 12:07 pm
["Ice Protector OPTIFORCE®", in situ; images via Eiger International]
Or, the second implement in a developing toolbox of landscape tactics for the deployment of snowed architecture: a new f*cking wilderness reminds me that the Swiss have been wrapping their snow to preserve it (and their ski slopes) through the summer, hoping to stave off the melting [...]
December 17, 2009 – 1:09 pm
I’m entranced by the simplicity (and, in retrospect, obviousness) of the suggestions in the short text accompanying Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro’s series of photographs at Places, entitled “White Space”. Lopez-Piñeiro says:
…even everyday plowing practices — practices with no artistic or design ambitions — have the capacity to transform snowed-in parking lots into beautiful winter gardens… We [...]
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 [...]
November 18, 2009 – 12:16 pm
A couple months ago, The Dirt highlighted an article from the Times about Alabama’s “War on Cogongrass”, in which Alabama’s forestry commission and a hired company of landscape managers, Mobile’s Larson & McGowin, deploy a series of escalating military metaphors (”killer”, “the Perfect Weed”, “war project”, “parallel attacks”, “eradicate”) against that rather aggressive species.
Angela West’s [...]
November 5, 2009 – 10:59 pm
Dutch architects van Bergen Kolpa (with research ecologists Alterra) propose a “Park Supermarket” for the Randstad, transforming polders — historically landscapes of food production, now pressured by both development and rising waters — into a park subdivided into new climate zones (”moderate, Mediterranean, and tropical”) and constructed hydrological conditions (basins for the cultivation of tilapia, [...]
October 26, 2009 – 9:22 am
faslanyc has a good piece on the weakness of metaphor as a grounding literary device for landscape architecture. The post is in reaction to Andrew Blum’s “Metaphor Remediation”, recently run in Places.
I approvingly cited Blum’s article a couple times, so I re-read Blum’s article with faslanyc’s criticism in mind. Having done so, I think maybe [...]
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 13, 2009 – 10:04 am
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and [...]
October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm
You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City. A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s [...]
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 [...]
October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm
Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s [...]
