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 […]
The infrastructurally-obsessed will appreciate the Transport Politic‘s summary of the Chinese boom in local rapid transit, prompted by the observation that Shanghai now has the longest metro network in the world, despite having begun the first tracks merely fifteen years ago. The local transit boom parallels the Chinese investment in high-speed rail which mammoth previously […]
Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication. For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”: “What do cities look like in the eyes […]
Ryan Avent, who maintains the indispensable blog The Bellows, is one of my favorite writers on economics and urbanism. He recently drew attention to two interesting papers which are related to his response to an article in the the American Prospect by Alec MacGillis which was critical of Richard Florida (which mammoth previously highlighted). Avent contends […]
Fast Company author Cliff Kuang writes about New York City’s adoption of rapid-bus transit solutions developed in Brazil and Columbia: Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city’s bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It’s expected […]
February 23, 2010 – 1:12 pm
[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 […]
February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm
Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”. I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, […]
February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim […]
February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm
Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate […]
February 2, 2010 – 9:52 pm
Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting […]
January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm
[The Large Hadron Collider] The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture. But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an […]
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Tagged alan-berger, china, city-car, elemental, fresh-kills, groundwater-replenishment-system, high-speed-rail, iphone, james-corner, kiva, large-hadron-collider, medellin, parque-biblioteca-espana, pontine-systemic-design, quinta-monroy, svalbard-global-seed-vault
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January 22, 2010 – 2:38 pm
While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare. The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane […]
January 11, 2010 – 9:54 pm
[A manhole near Halifax marks the Canadian arrival point for one of the eleven major cable lines carrying the bulk of trans-Atlantic Internet traffic; photographed by Randall Mesdon; from this excellent Wired slideshow on the physical infrastructure of the internet; the text accompanying that show is by Andrew Blum, whose forthcoming book on said infrastructure […]
January 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm
I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention. In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth‘s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay […]
January 5, 2010 – 12:07 pm
[“Ice Protector OPTIFORCE®”, in situ; images via Eiger International] Or, the second implement in a developing toolbox of landscape tactics for the deployment of snowed architecture: a new f*cking wilderness reminds me that the Swiss have been wrapping their snow to preserve it (and their ski slopes) through the summer, hoping to stave off the […]
December 21, 2009 – 2:47 pm
[Manhattan skyscraper zoning ordinances, given visual form by Hugh Ferriss; image from Kosmograd’s flickr account] 1 The tricky thing with Duany is sorting out what is a genuine attempt to improve cities and what might be a carefully-constructed shield for the extension of the corporate real estate economy (so long as Duany says things like […]
December 17, 2009 – 1:09 pm
I’m entranced by the simplicity (and, in retrospect, obviousness) of the suggestions in the short text accompanying Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro’s series of photographs at Places, entitled “White Space”. Lopez-Piñeiro says: …even everyday plowing practices — practices with no artistic or design ambitions — have the capacity to transform snowed-in parking lots into beautiful winter gardens… We […]
December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am
Adrian Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth‘s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks” (itself a response to another post by Lahoud on a recent studio he led), discussing how to properly read studio proposals, the master plan “as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one”, Lahoud’s ambivalence about the […]
December 9, 2009 – 5:55 pm
The Dirt has a lengthy interview conducted by Pierre Belanger with Joe Brown, chief executive of planning, design, and development at AECOM, the architecture and engineering firm that swallowed EDAW (formerly the world’s largest firm primarily focused on landscape architecture, if I recall correctly). The interview covers a wide range of issues, from the “need […]
