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 the vision [...]
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 suggestion intrigues [...]
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 2007 [...]
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 maybe [...]
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 say [...]
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 [...]
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 of [...]
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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October 13, 2009 – 12:42 pm
The architecture/urbanism/landscape journal Places has recently taken up residency at Design Observer; notable new articles include a review of The Infrastructural City by Chris Stooss (with attached slideshow of Lane Barden’s wonderful photographs from that book), an article on the relationship between landscape architecture and ecology (excerpted from a new book on Michael Van Valkenburgh, [...]
October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK:
…the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.
In fact, it’s surpassingly hard to [...]
October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am
City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant [...]
September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm
A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are:
How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures raise [...]
1. Good Magazine’s Water Issue discusses clean water technologies for the developing world, the current and historical contamination of American tap water, fully recycled tap water, how the control of water is becoming central to the conflict between India and Pakistan and interviews Robert Glennon, author of the new book Unquenchable, which explores America’s water [...]
1. Fantastic Journal’s post Lines of Defense, which I would cheapen if I summarized it. More nostalgia, I suppose.
2. The NYTimes on Brussels, “traumatized” by the “dreadful architecture” of the European Union headquarters, and how planners hope to rectify the rift between bureaucrats and residents. What a direct metaphor for the conflict between the old [...]
1. BLDGBLOG on the singing ruins of our suburban fever dream.
2. Lewism links Nokia’s plans for mobile phones that would recharge themselves by harvesting electromagnetic radiation out of the air with Nikola Tesla’s derelict tower.
3. Worldchanging reviews the film Garbage Dreams, which tells the story of the Zabbaleen, a community composed primarily of minority Coptic [...]
