October 13, 2011 – 6:00 pm
Geoff Manaugh contributes a series to Arbitare that looks at the history, equipment, content, audience, and future of architecture blogging. Being “someone who has founded his entire present career through blogging”, Geoff obviously both brings serious qualifications and an innate (and admitted) bias to the topic; the resulting personal perspective of the series only serves […]
November 4, 2010 – 6:45 pm
[Nadav Kander, “Changxing Island VI, Shanghai”] 1. I am pretty sure that I have mentioned it before, but I have really been enjoying deconcrete. Somewhere between blog and tumblr, deconcrete posts fascinating scraps and ephemera themed roughly, as the subtitle notes, around “everyday urbanisms without architects’ architecture”. Recent posts, for instance, pair a fictional vision […]
November 2, 2010 – 6:00 pm
[An image from mammoth‘s contribution to Bracket 1: On Farming, “Hydrating Luanda”.] Places excerpts a piece from the soon-to-be-published first volume of Bracket. In the excerpt, Mason White sketches towards a description of an alternate trajectory within twentieth century architecture, which he terms the “productive surface”: Productive surfaces articulate a new public realm, and with […]
October 24, 2010 – 2:28 pm
BLDGBLOG recently ran an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which sent me plunging back into the BLDGBLOG archives to re-read a trio of interviews that Geoff conducted in 2007 with Inaba and two of the other editors of Volume, Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley. I could share any number of excerpts from those interviews, as each […]
August 14, 2010 – 3:41 pm
[Bird’s-eye view of “Wal-(medley mixed-up mélange montage mash-up shopping)mart”, an absurdly-titled (but also somewhat light-hearted) proposal for a Wal-Mart on the Gowanus Canal, drawn by (then?) Yale architecture students Alexander Maymind & Cody Davis; read an in-depth interview regarding the project at Archinect.] Catching up (post-viral and sister-visiting-from-Mongolia break) on the Infrastructural City, with two […]
FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy. Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors […]
A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation […]
[Jake Longstreth’s “Skybox”; while the pit mines and flood-control apparatus found in Irwindale are one particularly spectacular kind of marginal landscape, there are many other kinds, exhibiting varying degrees of marginality, including speedways — such as the Irwindale Speedway — and the ubiquitous suburban strip.] DPR-Barcelona returns to a familiar theme for that blog, the […]
[The Bou Craa conveyor, which is similar to the Negev desert belt previously discussed on mammoth, carries phosphate across the desert in Western Sahara, leaving the wind-swept sediment shadow above, and is the longest conveyor belt in the world; seen at deconcrete, image via bing maps.] It would befuddle me if there were anyone who […]
With the publication of their latest issue, The Atlantic Monthly launched a month-long sub-site that they’re calling “The Future of the City”, which interests us for obvious reasons. In particular, the articles on the potential of private transit and post-Jacobsian urbanists are worth reading (and if I get a chance I’ll pull excerpts from […]
[A still from Gumball Rally, via motortrend.com. As high-speed races on the clogged freeways of Los Angeles have become increasingly implausible, the wide-open expanse of paved riverbed has proven irresistible to filmmakers.] SUPRbrains’ “The Lowline” hypothesizes futures for the river as a series of Tschumi-esque event-spaces. F.A.D.’s “Visual Histories of the Los Angeles River: Past and Envisioned […]
Images by Robin Black Photography for the Owens Lake Project, an ongoing photo documentary chronicling the rejuvenation of Owens Lake. See the website for many more. Black comments at DPR – Barcelona: “No more is it a toxic wasteland, though it’s certainly odd, and occasionally ugly, and still troublesome along the portions deemed too disturbed to recover. Life is returning […]
[A portion of the Alameda Trench, a cut in the surface of Los Angeles which runs “ten miles long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-three feet deep”, carrying over $200 billion in cargo each year, as photographed by Lane Barden for The Infrastructural City; image via a Places Journal slideshow] — UPDATE: this book club is […]
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm
[all photographs from Andrea Frank’s series “Ports and Ships”] 1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar. Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool: Where […]
February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm
1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]
November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am
Whether immense re-configurations of watersheds on a geological scale or fine and playful tunings of the interactions between city-dwellers and the infrastructures that deliver their water, those that transmit water or those that sit on and in it, the intersection of hydrology and infrastructure is a continual fascination for mammoth. Image from Yue Yuan Zheng’s […]
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 23, 2009 – 9:13 am
Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]
October 20, 2009 – 3:39 pm
1. On the relationship between sports and urbanism, see Pruned on urban golf. Which led me to think that soccer might similarly be deployed with a similar future of appropriation, accomodation, commercialization, abandonment, and absorbtion, only to discover, via the Office for Unsolicited Architecture tumblr, that urban soccer has already been deployed as an architectural […]
October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am
A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence […]
By rholmes
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Also posted in architecture, asides, urbanism
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Tagged a456, archigram, bldgblog, criticism, io9, kazys-varnelis, lebbeus-woods, speculative-architecture, things, utopias
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