February 7, 2012 – 8:57 pm
[MMG Century, in northwest Queensland -- the world's second-largest zinc mine, owned and operated by the Chinese metals conglomerate China MinMetal. MMG Century features prominently in the talk below.] 1 Note that if you are reading this indirectly, i.e. on Google Reader, you may not see the video below. 1. A conversation the other day reminded [...]
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 – 9:46 pm
[The eighty-six proposed "commonwealths" of the lower forty-eight states, from "The Commonwealth Approach".] 1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced. I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that [...]
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 [...]
January 13, 2012 – 1:00 pm
We’re excited that we’ll have the opportunity in a couple weeks to do a live interview at Studio-X NYC: For the first LI@SX of 2012, Studio-X NYC is delighted to welcome Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon, three-quarters of the Dredge Research Collaborative (with Brett Milligan of Free [...]
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 [...]
December 6, 2011 – 6:00 am
["Signs for Naturalized Areas", from Windsor, Ontario's Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers' strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities. The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers' strike; the [...]
November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[Cellular confinement systems were originally developed by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate the quick construction of temporary roads for heavy military vehicles; photograph from a Neoloy brochure.] In a remote polar region, there is a small country that is rarely visited by outsiders. On the advice of a rogue Army Corps of Engineers [...]
October 31, 2011 – 9:13 pm
["Squirrel Highways", a drawing by Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Shaub Dunkley, from Denis Wood's Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which Wood describes as a "cartographic poem" about the North Carolina neighborhood of Boylan Heights, where he lives. Wood evidences a fantastic ability to animate prosaic terrain through the making of maps which are [...]
October 24, 2011 – 8:27 pm
This week, I’ve organized a short (very short) lecture series for the students in my studio (well, the “Post-Natural Ecologies” half of the studio) at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Tuesday at 5:15, Fred Scharmen (sevensixfive/the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) will give a talk entitled “Soft Sites”, examining four sites on the Middle Branch [...]
October 14, 2011 – 6:00 am
Above and below, snapshots from “Auckland Volcanoes”, a map by Carl Douglas. Carl’s map marks the location of each of the volcanic craters that dot the surface of Auckland. The craters exhibit a fascinating variety: some have been heavily altered by mining operations (which particularly seek volcanic scoria, a type of rock suitable for use [...]
October 13, 2011 – 12:00 pm
A nice slideshow by Laura Tepper on Places looks at the intersection of “wildlife habitat and highway design”, from “the six massive wildlife overpasses lining the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park” to HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s winning entry to the recent ARC competition for Vail Pass, “Hypar-nature” (pictured above) and across the Atlantic [...]
September 30, 2011 – 8:00 am
One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most notably, the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, seen under construction in 1896 above — the river was made to flow not into [...]
September 27, 2011 – 11:00 am
The following piece is a guest post from Peter Nunns. Peter is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland, with a MA in Political Science; mammoth readers may be familiar with him from his contributions to last summer’s discussion of the Infrastructural City. His current research interests include shelter and urban development challenges in developing-world cities, the [...]
By pnunns
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Also posted in fecal-matters, guest post, infrastructure, urbanism
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Tagged agency, fecal-politics, india, mumbai, peter-nunns, politics, poverty, pune, right-to-the-city, slums, waste
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September 19, 2011 – 6:00 am
Another of the Mississippi River Delta region’s industrial infrastructures is the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which stretches 1,109 miles from Apalache Bay, Florida to Brownsville, Texas. In the image above (which is rotated so that north is on the right, Port Arthur at the top, and New Orleans at the bottom), the Waterway is clearly visible [...]
August 18, 2011 – 6:00 pm
[The "Wagonwheel", an unusual circular pattern of canals just south of Yellow Cotton Bay, also owes its pattern to the combination of geology and extractive logistics. Here, the oil companies' canals depart from their typically linear vocabulary to follow the roughly circular limit of a raised salt dome. Salt domes form when buried deposits of [...]
August 18, 2011 – 6:00 am
The history of the Atchafalaya Basin — and much of the history of the greater Mississippi Delta region — is marked by an important transition in the 19th century from an agricultural economy (which had developed with the appearance of European settlers, including the Acadians who became the Cajun) to an extractive economy (initially also [...]
[Map of revetments under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers' Team New Orleans, on the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers; image produced by mammoth using data from the Army Corps.] I’ve already talked a fair about the idea that the Mississippi River is, at this point in its history, an artificially-constructed system that should [...]
[Flooding on the Missouri River, up and downstream from Hamburg, Iowa. The distinct spray pattern produced by burst levees is visible in at least three locations, while the raised outline of the emergency Ditch 6 levee can be seen on the western edge of Hamburg, protecting the city from the insistent floodwaters. Imagery captured by [...]
[The Mississippi River Basin Model today, via Bing Maps.] At Places, Kristi Dykema Cheramie writes about the one of Mississippi flood control’s most fantastical landscapes, the Basin Model — “a 200-acre working hydraulic model [replicating] the Mississippi River and its major tributaries — the Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri Rivers”, on a small tract of land [...]
