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Category Archives: speculative-architecture

March 2, 2010 – 11:00 am

absent rivers, ephemeral parks

[American Falls de-watered, via Flickr user rbglasson]
For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion.  During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)
February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm

“blooming landscape, deep surface”

[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 [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm

the north american storm control authority

[Comparative historic and contemporary heat maps of the wind energy potential of the continental United States, via NASCA.gov; NASCA documents indicate sources for their imagery include AWS Truewind/NREL via Wired Science and NOAA/NASA]
The North American Storm Control Authority (NASCA), like its predecessor, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which rebuilt the Rocky Mountains [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (12)
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm

a glacier is a very long event

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 [...]

By rholmes | Also posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13)
January 29, 2010 – 4:39 pm

the large higgs field galactic archive

This post was originally written for inclusion in our list of the decade’s best architecture, but then excluded, both for fit and because we realized the novel it references — Darwinia – was published in 1998.

[We haven't got any images of the Large Higgs Field Galatic Archive, for reasons that will become obvious, so this [...]

By Stephen | Tagged | Comments (2)
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm

our collective spatial memory, modeled

From the description of the above video at PopSci:
Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, [...]

By Stephen | Also posted in asides, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)
August 12, 2009 – 2:56 pm

mammoth suburban land infusions

Here is a little something Rob and I put together for the Re-burbia competition.  Our entry asks the questions: What if the challenge suburbs face is not that they over-consume land, but have too little? How could an infusion of new land simultaneously (and paradoxically) mitigate some of the issues caused by the under-utilization [...]

By Stephen | Also posted in landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (10)
July 31, 2009 – 12:27 pm

cloud skippers

Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”:
Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the clouds [...]

By rholmes | Tagged , , | Comments (3)