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 [...]
By mammoth
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Also posted in architecture, economics, engineering, finance, infrastructure, meta, the-expanded-field, 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 [...]
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 “need [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 convenient [...]
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 plan to [...]
October 1, 2009 – 4:41 pm
[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting] Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in [...]
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 [...]
The High Line receives a glowing review from the New York Review of Books (which, due their odd desire to maintain the pretense that they publish book reviews and not journalism, pretends that the article is a review of the pamphlet-sized Designing the High Line, though it merits only a single paragraph in the article). [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
