We’re reading The Infrastructural City. This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week. Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary.
[An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden's photo-essay "The Trench", which follows "Distribution" [...]
This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.
[Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90]
“Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the various meanings [...]
We’re back from our week off with another installment of Reading the Infrastructural City; if you haven’t been following along, you can catch up on the series here and see the introductory post here.
[Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI]
The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Margins [...]
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 [...]
Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it:
1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we were [...]
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 [...]
I agree with all this. Big Bang Urbanism – what a great term. Those ground up utopian visions are the lifted trucks of the architecture world – often technically proficient, yet generally ridiculous, public displays of ‘boldness’ or ‘vision’. (Sadly, this isn’t a problem only suffered by select urban schemata, coughcalatravacough.)
A couple of weeks ago, I went [...]
In a recent feature on Archinect, Will Galloway of Front Office (they have a blog here) discusses the predilection of architects for the wholesale urban renovation (which, despite the prominence of theoretical frameworks that intend to offer alternatives, remains the dominant tendency of designers, even those working within frameworks — such as landscape urbanism — [...]
