March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm
[Mapping the transference of botanical threats from Japan to the Midwest, from a video presentation on Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in the Great Lakes region]
From a recent article in the Guardian:
Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat [...]
[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape [...]
February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am
[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it's been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast. [...]
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 26, 2010 – 11:01 am
The following is another contribution to the constellation of blog posts supporting the Glacier/Island/Storm Studio at Columbia University; read mammoth’s previous Glacier/Island/Storm posts.
LANDSCAPE MACHINES
In Magic, Machines, and Architecture, published in Pidgin 6, we find a gloriously simple description of the function and nature of machines by a participant in a course at Princeton University:
“The question [...]
February 25, 2010 – 10:29 pm
[Above, the volcanic peaks of the South Sandwich Islands distort wave patterns over the Pacific Ocean, through processes described, and, of course photographed, by NASA Earth Observatory:
...the islands disturb the smooth flow of air, creating waves that ripple through the atmosphere downwind of the obstacles.
The cloudy-clear pattern that is produced highlights the location of wave [...]
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 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm
Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting [...]
January 12, 2010 – 1:13 pm
[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco's salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps]
I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the [...]
December 9, 2009 – 12:23 pm
An article from Sunday’s Washington Post discusses the development of “climate defense systems”, resulting from an increasing interest in not just climate change prevention, but also climate change adaptation. The article is particularly focused on the Netherlands, where “the Dutch are spending billions of euros on ‘floating communities’ that can rise with surging flood waters, [...]
November 24, 2009 – 4:18 pm
There’s nothing particularly original about the observation that the Dutch have a peculiar national relationship to their landscape (and, in particular, its hydrology), but that peculiarity produces endlessly fascinating oddities and, apparently, endless mammoth posts on Dutch hydrology. As lewism noted on one such post, Bulwarks and Flux:
…the whole of Dutch landscape and history can [...]
November 19, 2009 – 2:32 pm
["Landscape of Thorns", concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years]
Triggered by the recent revelation that tests at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reveal that a seemingly innocuous white substance filling a glass bottle dug up in 2004 is actually “the oldest existing sample [...]
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 14, 2009 – 5:31 pm
Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and [...]
November 8, 2009 – 10:32 pm
[Composite false color image of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a 7-mile-long, 33-foot-high sheet of ice projecting off the Erebus glacier in Antarctica, carved into unusual shapes by the summer waters of McMurdo Sound; via Wired Science: "During the summer, when the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo melts, the ice tongue floats on the [...]
October 26, 2009 – 1:53 pm
[Taiga at the glaciated and lake-spotted meeting of Finland and Russia]
The European Green Belt is an initiative to develop a pan-European conservation system as “an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black Sea”. Picking out the Cold War line of division between East and West, the initiative aims to thicken and [...]
October 21, 2009 – 3:35 pm
[Local speedway in Lancaster County, South Carolina; this is the speedway that sang me to sleep on Saturday nights for roughly twelve of the first fifteen years of my life]
In the comments on my post on soccer as a diagram traced on an exported landscape, Stephen notes that :
The landscape of [Formula One] racing is [...]
October 20, 2009 – 10:25 am
[photograph by Maximilian Haidacher, via polar inertia]
The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are canvases [...]
October 16, 2009 – 11:11 am
A New Urbanist (edit: see comments for update) proposal to channelize the Anacostia and extend a modified version of the L’Enfant Plan to its newly narrowed banks, summarized here, is attracting a bit of attention here in DC (also here, here, and here).
1As commentator “Capitol Dome” notes at Greater Greater Washington, the plan proposes [...]
October 16, 2009 – 8:58 am
[the Lockheed air terminal in Burbank, camouflaged during World War II for the benefit of Japanese aviators; via greg.org, who suggests that perhaps the next version of the 'Bilbao Effect' will be for struggling cities to commission similarly flimsy roofscapes for the benefit of the google maps audience; originals in a california state collection here, [...]
