landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Category Archives: landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect

June 20, 2012 – 6:00 am

venue interview with edward burtynsky

[Edward Burtynsky’s “Drylands Farming #7” — farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.] Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly […]

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August 18, 2011 – 6:00 am

pipelines and straight lines

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 […]

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March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm

a short aerial tour of the arrival of canadian oil in the united states

[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly […]

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March 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

ecologies of gold

[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and […]

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April 13, 2010 – 12:00 pm

pathological geomorphology

[Russian thermokarst near Nova Zembla] I’ve been tremendously entertained lately by Pathological Geomorphology, a blog run by “a loosely defined and unified group of geobloggers” which catalogs “images of extreme landscapes, landforms, and processes”.   April is “delta month” (or, as one of their bloggers put it, “April deltas bring May fold and thrust belts”), so […]

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February 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm

the city beneath the city

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 […]

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November 24, 2009 – 4:18 pm

the new dutch water defense line

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 […]

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July 14, 2009 – 3:04 pm

songdo’s tendril

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 […]

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May 28, 2009 – 9:41 pm

bonus freeway interchange info

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?]

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May 27, 2009 – 9:30 am

field guides to highway interchanges

From the beginning of last week, A Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges (part one // part two) on Infrastructurist. Below, one of my favorite interchanges, the interbreeding of I-95, I-295, and I-395 over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in Baltimore.

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April 24, 2009 – 12:21 pm

the most sublime room in the world

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 […]

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