January 30, 2012 – 9:46 pm
[The eighty-six proposed "commonwealths" of the lower forty-eight states, from "The Commonwealth Approach".] 1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced. I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that [...]
December 6, 2011 – 6:00 am
["Signs for Naturalized Areas", from Windsor, Ontario's Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers' strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities. The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers' strike; the [...]
November 29, 2011 – 7:00 pm
[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu's mayoral campaign.] This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization. (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced [...]
November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm
["Interior components of the cooling system" at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal's report for Domus on Facebook's Open Computer Project, which "describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre".] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the [...]
November 9, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Building 20 at MIT, a "250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by early hackers”.] 1. Alexis Madrigal writes about “Low Road” buildings: …startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got [...]
October 11, 2011 – 6:00 am
Quilian Riano interviews Chris Reed (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) for Places; the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including Stoss’s recent work, the importance of an expanded field for landscape architecture, and possibilities for inventing flexible alliances between design teams and collaborators in “related fields such as engineering, ecology, economics, etc.”: “Within this expanded [...]
October 4, 2011 – 6:00 pm
We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to consider why we are so drawn to infrastructural landscapes like Blue Plains — not just as sites of logistical and technological operations, but aesthetically as well: [...]
September 2, 2011 – 6:00 am
[The fluctuating terrain of the lower Mississippi River Delta, from the USGS's map of "land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010". Loss is in red; accumulation is in green. The map is seen via Free Association Design, where you can see the map in more detail, including the rapidly accreting area of [...]
[A dike field in the Mississippi River near Greenfield, Mississippi; via bing maps.] In the Mississippi River, dike fields are constructed in order to direct the river’s flow to a central channel, scouring it and reducing the need for dredging. Though their primary purpose is to thus maintain navigability for shipping, dike fields tend, as [...]
In yet another great little piece at Domus, Fred Scharmen and Molly Wright Steenson look at the history and potential of the relationship between architecture and the field of interaction design, arguing that further disciplinary promiscuity would benefit both architects and interaction designers: “Instead of bringing together users through machines, what if interaction design were [...]
A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Fantastic Norway's 2005 installation "Polar Night", built in the Arctic town of Bodø. A total of 40 daylight lamps -- bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy -- were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted [...]
December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am
On his blog, Rory Hyde interviews Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young at Thrilling Wonder Stories 2. I’m particularly taken by an idea the three converge on at the end: GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be [...]
November 30, 2010 – 12:44 pm
Esquire profiles Janette Sadik-Khan in their series The Brightest: 15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope. Although it initially seems curiously focused on her personality instead of her accomplishments, the piece makes a convincing case that the two are inseparably linked, and as such, is a good example of the political and social acumen that designers [...]
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm
In the comments on “fracture-prone” — where I argued that the set of political measures that New Urbanists tend to focus on are a necessary component of the urbanist’s operating toolkit, but not nearly sufficient — Carter says: I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle [...]
October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am
[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic's "Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed. There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette [...]
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 [...]
September 27, 2010 – 10:27 pm
FASLANYC writes about the possibility of re-thinking the constitution, role, and importance of the maintenance manual, an idea which seems to me to be wholly appropriate to the practice of landscape architecture. Surely the languid pace at which the commands contained within a maintenance manual are executed (as FASLANYC suggests, “manual” need not be read [...]
September 13, 2010 – 4:43 pm
As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related, what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future of architecture in the wake of global economic [...]
August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm
["Weather Field"; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative] As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series [...]
