mammoth // building nothing out of something
December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am

thrilling wonder interview

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 in fifteen years based on how the canon currently exists, then you’re going to produce a very referentially limited type of architecture…

RH: I guess just to wrap up with one final thought on this ‘expanded discipline’ or expanded range of sources for the discipline, is that what’s always surprised me working in practice is that clients don’t bring with them the baggage of architectural training or architectural history, so to work outside of that is nothing shocking to them, and actually to work inside of that canon, to bring that baggage of references—of the seemingly arcane history lectures that are fed to us at school—is unusual in the real world. So to me the agenda you are both promoting through events like Thrilling Wonder Stories feels both at once like a challenge to the architectural tradition, but more like a correction.

LY: Architects are amazing self-censors. We put the parameters around our profession much more than anybody else does. Part of my teaching practice, when I get students in their final year of study, is very often about unlearning all the things they expect from their architecture degree, and opening up the possibilities of what it could be. And that’s part of the game, to try and subvert the idea of what they think they’re supposed to be doing, which is a culturally constructed form of what the architect is, and actually thinking on a project by project basis or thinking completely within a set of interests that the student might have to determine where they want to take their practice as an outcome of their own world view.

This seems like a potentially very powerful realization — that the directions we impose upon our work, even in the often-valid attempt to respond to an intradisciplinary discourse, can end up limiting the potential agency of our work in ways that might seem very strange to an outside observer or client, who is not burdened by the same disciplinary baggage.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on thrilling wonder interview | Permalink
December 2, 2010 – 6:47 pm

walking city

Jim Rossignol (video game journalist, blogger, and occasional BLDGBLOG contributor, among other things) recently announced the start-up of an independent game development studio, Big Robot, as well as the first two games that studio is developing.  I’m particularly excited by the second he’s described, which is currently (though likely not finally) titled “Walking City”.  (That is, Rossignol confirmed, indeed a reference to Archigram.  So you can see where I start to get excited.)

“I wanted to do something about the value of the future, and the value of cities, both of which seem, of late, to have been somewhat reduced in their placement on the stock market of our imagination. Creating a game that was about reclaiming a city came to mind, and this developed into something which will be both an interesting exercise in anti-dystopian playfulness, and an offbeat take on familiar ideas about strategy games. The Walking City is about starting with things in ruins. This is no blank slate, as you might expect with SimCity, but instead a catastrophe of cynicism and neglect. It’s about helping the people that remain in a collapsed civilization to pull themselves out of the hole. It’s also going to be a game about /influencing/ the people in the city, rather than simply telling them what to do, and it’s working on the idea that if you clean up and fix one thing in an environment than that will have a knock on effect for everything and everyone else in its area of effect.”

Obviously, the project is just beginning, but the thing that has me so excited about it is that it seems to me to be a game that is being explicitly produced to do what I have suggested games are capable of doing: producing critiques of cities.  (Or, more accurately, of ideas about cities.)

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments Off on walking city | Permalink
November 30, 2010 – 12:44 pm

silk moses

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 who wish to operate in the expanded field would do well to develop. I give her bonus points for being a hacker:

Whereas most city officials and past DOT commissioners would have insisted on capital funds for something like, say, a bike lane, Sadik-Khan teases them out on the cheap. When you use capital funds for a project, you need approval from a few different places, and it takes months, sometimes years. So she takes a bunch of guys already painting double lines and gets them to dot a bike lane with the extra paint. Where she wants a plaza to swallow a car lane, she convinces abutting stores and the local business-improvement chapter to pay for the cleaning and to take the chairs and tables in every evening and set them out every morning. She tells them that shutting down the street will actually help their business, the way it did in Times Square. She shows them the numbers and where once they may have been against her, suddenly they are footing her bill. She doesn’t even need to check in with Bloomberg. Like a high school a cappella group trying to get to Ibiza for spring break, Sadik-Khan finds money between seat cushions. She uses her guile and glamour to get what she needs, craftily but lawfully.

More downright rebelliously, she sometimes circumvents the community by experimenting with test swatches called pilots, like little harbingers of the future. With a pilot change, you don’t necessarily need community permission, since the idea is that you may end up just taking it down. For example, with the DUMBO parklet, a past commissioner might have educated the residents first, tried to get them to buy into the plan. But it takes months to convince a neighborhood to agree to a change. Instead, she just painted. She did the same thing in the Meatpacking District, when she drummed up a plaza next to the Apple store, and again on Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. She’s figured out a quiet way to get her way without getting the pesky public in her face.

Part of this is psychological warfare. Moses once said, “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” Sadik-Khan has co-opted those words. Under her rule, bike lanes materialize overnight. Sidewalks become pop-up cafés and flowers bloom inside repurposed pots in quick and cowering deference. New Yorkers aren’t used to this kind of change. So there they sit at their new café and they sip their Darjeeling, looking rather stunned or drugged and if not pleased, then at the very least seated.

And extra bonus points for this anecdote about the endurance of cities, and the importance of engaging the city we have:

“Broadway,” she says, “was simply a powerful farmer’s precolonial footpath, and the great thing it did was create these wonderful squares.” But now she doesn’t need it anymore. So she restored the grid by doing the math. There were seventy pedestrians for every ten cars in Times Square, but cars were louder and more catered to, so, “you know, the balance was in the wrong direction.” She turned it into a village green, where tourists have room to rubberneck on the sidewalks while busy New Yorkers can zoom out of their way across the plaza. That’s a pretty monstrous change, and it happened over a long weekend.

The full profile, which is well worth reading, is here.

[mammoth has mentioned Janette Sadik-Khan before in the context of Bus Rapid Transit here — also be sure to visit this comment by FASLANYC in that same post for a series of links to things he has written about Sadik Khan.]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on silk moses | Permalink
November 29, 2010 – 3:14 pm

generative capacity

At the end of October, Hillary Brown — founding principal of New Civic Works, a consulting firm which “promotes the adoption of sustainable design principles for buildings and infrastructure”, as well as a professor of architecture at the City College of New York — published an article on Places entitled “Infrastructural Ecologies: Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works”.  As you might expect, that title — infrastructure! ecologies! post-industrial! public works! — drew mammoth‘s immediate attention.

Though the central aim of the article is to provide a set of principles for what Brown describes as “the next generation” of American public infrastructures, the article can really be divided into three parts.  First, Brown provides an excellent summary of what might be called the infrastructural public policy problem:

Unfortunately, despite its ambitious label, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act doesn’t even begin to get us to [a] next generation [of infrastructures]. ARRA’s investment in infrastructure — $132 billion out of the total package of $787 billion — is a fraction of current needs, and for the most part it bolsters our dependence on dirty, carbon-intensive construction, underwriting an assortment of backlogged, so-called shovel-ready projects. (As of this writing, there is insufficient detail on the breakdown of the Administration’s proposed $50 billion in additional funding to merit comment.) Twenty percent of ARRA’s infrastructure funding, or $27.5 billion, is dedicated to roads and bridges, which overshadows the $17.7 billion for mass transit and rail systems. [1] $8 billion is targeted for nuclear power plant remediation, but just $2.5 billion for renewable energy networks. The $4.5 billion allocated to basic electrical grid upgrades [2] is a mere tenth of the projected $40 to $50 billion needed. [3]

In prioritizing private over public transportation and short-changing cleaner energy projects, ARRA has undercut the Obama administration’s claim to support a green economy. Still more worrisome, unbalanced investments that favor the old over the new position us unfavorably in comparison to other industrialized nations, which are investing heavily in public transit and renewable energy. [4] Worse yet, they perpetuate America’s disproportionately high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions: approximately 20 metric tons to Europe’s 9 and India’s 1.07. [5] Ultimately, of course, ARRA was more stop-gap compromise than comprehensive vision — and no doubt the hard-fought result of tense partisan politics. Still, ARRA 2009 will be remembered as a tragically missed opportunity at a pivotal moment in national history. And now, it seems, given the tepid response to the latest proposed infusion of funding, complacency may have set in; a public that has misconstrued a short-term stimulus as a long-range solution seems more focused on shrinking government than on endorsing investments in a 21st-century American infrastructure.

Brown is hardly the first to note this, but it is refreshing to see an article that aims at providing design principles for infrastructure begin by acknowledging the depth and scope of the gap between America’s need for new infrastructures and the political will to fund the construction of those infrastructures.  (The article perhaps fails to sufficiently emphasize the contribution of NIMBYist forces and dysfunctional political structures to the infrastructural crisis she describes, but it at least hints in those directions.  As we’ve discussed those matters elsewhere and, we are sure, will continue to discuss them in the future, we’re following Brown’s lead in this post.)

The third piece of Brown’s article (we’ll get to the second in just a minute) responds to this first challenge, making a proposal for a federal pilot program for infrastructural innovations:

Imagine, for instance, a small federal program aligned with the proposed National Infrastructure Bank, which would be charged with seeding progressive investment agendas and identifying promising infrastructural systems. This new program could privilege projects that were multi-purpose, carbon-efficient and resilient, and based upon well-developed regional transportation or public utility plans. It might recruit domestic or foreign investment, award grants, and provide loans or tax credits. It might award challenge grants, for example, to public/private infrastructural partnerships that integrate land use, housing, transportation, and energy, or that foster co-location and enhance community life. Such an enterprise would be charged with assessing social, economic and environmental returns on investment and ensuring political neutrality, accountability and transparency. Importantly, it would also focus on regulatory coordination and on interagency and cross-sector collaboration, and it would mandate speed, quality and other performance criteria. Lastly, it could promote alternative infrastructural delivery models, with design and construction procurements and contracts that reward innovative, cooperative accomplishments.

This proposal is certainly intriguing, and one which mammoth would like to see fleshed out and discussed further, particularly in a policy context.  (We have little doubt that a majority of architects and landscape architects would support a program of experimental infrastructures, but it would need to be shown that the idea makes sense in the ways that Brown describes, not just as an employment program for out-of-work designers.  Perhaps Brown has already done this elsewhere?  The piece on Places is too short to do it.)

The primary substance of the piece, though, is the second component, which is, as the title of the article promises, a list of design principles.  Brown provides four: infrastructures should be “multipurpose, interconnected and synergistic”, “captur[ing] efficiencies by integrating diverse functions”; they should be modeled on and incorporated into natural processes; they should couple (to borrow a term from Lateral Office) their ostensible functions with additional programming which serves the needs of the communities that they are built within; and they should be resilient, particularly in the context of instability produced by climate change.

[1] Though we’ll note that, if there’s anything here that makes us uncomfortable, it’s the third principle, which — particularly in the examples given — feels dangerously close to the suggestion that every infrastructure can be improved by making it also a public space. We don’t doubt that many infrastructures could be improved by coupling them with public spaces, or providing public access to them. But as FASLANYC notes in a comment on Brown’s piece:

“Also, it is striking that whenever landscape architects are involved in making multi-functional infrastructures or whatever, the contribution seems to be “umm… i don’t know… we could make a park… yes, we need a park there by the nuclear cooling towers!” and then renderings are produced with lots of lawn and cyclists. yikes.”

A highway. And a park. A bridge. And a park. A sewer treatment plant. And a park.

Our hesitant reaction is less a function of concern about the appropriateness of layering public space onto infrastructures (often quite appropriate) than it is disappointment that adding public space (why always parks? why not a mall? malls are significant public spaces, though much less romanticized than parks) is assumed to be automatically helpful, which has the detrimental effect of discouraging reflection about whether this hybridization is appropriate in a given case, so that public spaces becomes a default add-on option for new public works, like bad sculptures in front of mediocre condo towers.

While the principles feel to some degree underdeveloped — why, for instance, think about instability only within the context of climate change, when an increasing awareness of the presence of uncertainty in all complex systems is a recurrent theme in both contemporary urban and contemporary architectural thought — this is probably as much a function of brevity as anything else.  Each of them feels, at a minimum, potentially useful, and we suspect that a program of infrastructural construction centered around them would be a vast improvement over our current national infrastructure [1].

What seems missing to us, though — and critical to understanding the peculiar value that infrastructures have as objects of design — is a discussion of infrastructure as a point of agency for designers operating in urban systems.  How can infrastructure, in other words, be used to organize urban systems?

Here, it’s useful to step away from infrastructure for a minute, and think about the arguments that landscape urbanists — particularly James Corner and Charles Waldheim — made in the seminal text of landscape urbanism, The Landscape Urbanism Reader.  There (and elsewhere), Corner and Waldheim describe and define landscape urbanism as a design movement which is specifically constructed in reaction to the failures of traditional modernist planning.  Though the various essays in that text name multiple points of failure, notably including a split between art and instrumentality in landscape design practice and the construction of binary oppositions, particularly between culture and nature, the most important of them for our discussion is modernism’s object fixation, which manifests in architectural and planning practices as a tendency to view cities as collections of static objects and to use static tools — ranging from McHargian environmental preservation, to traditional zoning, or even to New Urbanism’s form-based codes — as the primary tools for ordering cities.  (Of course, object fixation has persisted in architecture and landscape architecture long past the expiration of modernism as a coherent consensus within design.)

The landscape urbanists argue that these tools are inherently flawed, that methodologies which seek impose control on urban systems are fundamentally ill-suited to operation in the contemporary city.  While this point could be overstated — clearly, zoning, for instance, is an effectual tool for ordering cities, though it often produces massive unintended consequences — we agree that more and better tools are needed, particularly those that are effective in indeterminate, fluctuating conditions.

[2] It’s worth noting here that there is obvious overlap between the potential latent in infrastructure which we are describing, and the tussle to describe an appropriate alternative to modernist planning which we have recently discussed.  We described this infrastructural potential with a more explicit focus on that overlap in our Bracket 1 essay, Hydrating Luanda:

“We suggest that infrastructure is an appropriate object of design for the urbanist, the architect, and the landscape architect, as infrastructure can be embedded with some characteristics that provide definition (a means for the urbanist to have influence on the direction of change), as well as characteristics that permit appropriation by inhabitants of the urban system. In other words, an infrastructure can withstand appropriation while remaining coherent as an intervention.”

This is where infrastructure seems peculiarly useful to us.  In Stan Allen’s monograph/manifesto Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, Allen describes infrastructures as elements in urban systems which, “although static in and of themselves… organize and manage complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange.  Not only do they provide a network of pathways, they also work through systems of locks, gates, and valves — a series of checks that control and regulate flow.” The potential of infrastructure, Allen argues — and we agree — resides in its ability to be at once “precise and indeterminate”, to specify both “what must be fixed and what is subject to change” [2].

In other words, an infrastructure can be a stable element which molds and manipulates the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, legal conditions, political actions, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies. Both governments and private developers have historically sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along new infrastructures or by reinforcing growth and density in a locale by supplementing existing infrastructures.

[3] This generative potential, of course, exists to some degree in all built objects, and so it seems appropriate to say that designing in this manner is not just designing infrastructure, but designing infrastructurally.  Libraries, parks, plazas, apartment buildings, factories, and all other objects of architectural design can and should — at least at times — be designed infrastructurally.  One particularly potent example of this which mammoth has described before is the building program in Medellin, where architectural projects were treated as opportunities to catalyze reactions within the urban system.

[4] The economic and performative aspects of infrastructure aren’t the only ways in which they generate urbanism; their phenomenal qualities can do so as well — for example, where freeways were run through more densely built environments, they bifurcated and compartmentalized neighborhoods.

This capacity of infrastructure, distinct from its capacity to carry the flows that it is specifically intended for (such as electricity in the case of power lines, or traffic in the case of highways), might be termed generative.  Generative capacity, then, is the effect on an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides [3].  The American interstate highway system, for instance, was built because it had the capacity to enable people and goods to move rapidly and with great independence.  Beyond that specifically intended effect, though, it also served to produce a novel and ubiquitous form of horizontally-distributed urbanism, as first services stations and stores and later entire towns clustered around on and off-ramps [4]. No one had to plan this new urbanism; it emerged from a confluence of economic and spatial incentives, binding together on an infrastructural framework in built form.

Understanding and appropriately wielding this generative capacity is, we believe, the single most important task for architects and landscape architects to undertake if they want to participate in the design of a new generation of American infrastructures, because it promises an alternative instrument for guiding the growth of cities, one which combines the unified vision of top-down planning with the vibrancy and resilience of emergent growth.

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
November 22, 2010 – 7:00 pm

out in the wind, above ground, out in the weather

[Appropriate for the gradual approach of winter in the mid-Atlantic: photographs from Alexander Gronsky’s “The Edge”, a series of shots taken along the outer boundary of Moscow; via @ballardian.  Thinking about whitesward and glacier wrap again…]

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By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm

tools

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 [urban problems] other than the local and national political ones.

This question is a very interesting one, and though I suspect there’s a lot more to a good answer than the brief things I noted in my reply, I don’t think we’ve collated our thoughts on tools in one place before (and I doubt there’s anyone out there subscribed to our comments feed, which means that most of our readers probably won’t see this unless I pull it up), so I’ll paste part of my brief reply here:

Here are three that immediately come to mind:

1. Infrastructure: We spent the summer reading a book, The Infrastructural City, which (among other things) lays out much of what is interesting, significant, and difficult about infrastructure as a tool for organizing or intervening in the city. I’d recommend in particular the posts “jam, hack” (which also discusses some of the same things I’m going to mention under the third tool here) and “starting from zero”.

We happen to be writing a short post at the moment on exactly how and why infrastructure is an appropriate tool for designers to use to engage, shape, and organize cities; I can’t promise a particular date when we’ll finish it, but it is coming.

2. Technological innovation: MIT’s CityCar, for instance; Stephen and I wrote about it and its significance in our “best architecture of the decade”. You’ll have to scroll down to locate the entry for CityCar. We also mentioned it in the post “jam, hack” linked above, saying:

“Instead of designing a new form for cities, and then producing buildings which fit that form, the Smart Cities group has designed both a technology — the CityCar — and a series of ways in which that technology would interact with the city (as a battery in a smart grid, as a part of an even more advanced traffic control system that would adjust congestion pricing in real time to efficiently distribute traffic over time and space), confident that doing so will enable ways of life [see point 3] that will generate positive changes in the city.”

3. Practices: One place where I significantly differ from a New Urbanist in how I understand urbanism is that I would argue that practices — including what Louis Wirth called “ways of life” — are generally more significant than physical form in determining the shape (used figuratively, not literally to mean “physical shape”) of a city. (Though there is, of course, feedback between the two.) Suburban practices will tend to dominate an urban form, for instance, rendering it functionally suburban. This is what has happened with the Kentlands. Or urban practices can exist and even thrive in forms that New Urbanists would consider sub-optimal. Greenwich Village might be considered the most pure example of New Urbanist form in New York City, but it’s hardly the locus of the city’s creative culture.

What does it look like to use practices as a tool for altering urbanism, then? Well, one thing that happens is that you have to look at the practice of urban design disciplines — in our case, specifically architecture and landscape architecture — in very different ways, because the traditional models for those disciplines are explicitly focused on building objects, not curating, encouraging, and seeding practices. We’ve got a whole category on the site devoted to alternate modes of practice, “the expanded field”. Another thing that happens is that you become very interested in the idea of participation — of opening the city up as something which its users can participate in the construction of. Adam Greenfield has done tons of interesting thinking about this (specifically in relationship to technology and media), much of which is recorded at his blog, Speedbird (here’s a good starting point for Speedbird). Efforts like Broken City Lab or Actions are also quite participatory and focused on practices.

The iPhone, by the way, is a fascinating instance of overlap between practice and technology, as we note both here and here.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, the-city-we-have, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Comments (10) | Permalink
November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am

territories of urbanism

On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program.  The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in the general direction of landscape urbanists, speaking at the school which he described as having been subjected to a successful “coup”.  (Two side notes: First, Duany’s description of Charles Waldheim as “circling in” from the “academic hinterland” to launch a “general strike” on the GSD neatly locates the intersection of hilarity and absurdity.  Second, the fetish for developing and delineating “_____ urbanisms” is growing tiresome.)

I’m less interested, though, in Duany’s further comments than I am drawn to Sherman’s recounting of Pierre Bélanger‘s arguments, which followed Duany’s:

[Bélanger] stated that the financial and environmental crises in fact exposed a serious weakness in traditional urban forms. Dense, vertical cities formed by Euclidean zoning, he said, were totally dependent on centralized infrastructure – including water extraction, waste landfilling, oil importing, food processing, and uniform transportation – that is crumbling, costly to maintain, and environmentally detrimental.

The future of infrastructure planning, therefore, is paramount, and the project of Ecological Urbanism is to design and integrate infrastructure into the city in a way that is both environmentally sound and economically productive. Civil engineers, Bélanger argued, are the true planners of the modern city [italics mine], but landscape architects will play a critical role in mediating how infrastructure meets the urban interface. Trained in constructing ecologies, landscape architects are the only professionals poised to consider how all infrastructure types – energy, food, waste, communications and transport – can be synthesized into a living system that covers the entire regional urban footprint.

I’d be interested to read or hear Bélanger’s full comment; though its rough outline should be familiar to readers of Bélanger, it would be interesting to see exactly how he frames it as a response to urban traditionalists.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm

fracture-prone


[An image from Mark Luthringer’s “Ridgemont Typologies“]

In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want?

Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in cities that are spread out. Decentralization and dispersal, the results of a demand for private property, privacy, and detached family homes, have been facilitated by a succession of transportation and communication technologies: first, the railroad and the streetcar; later, the automobile and the airplane; lastly, the telephone, television, and the Internet. In addition, regional shopping malls, FedEx, UPS, the Home Shopping Network, and Amazon.com have helped people to spread out. Even environmental technologies—small sewage treatment facilities and micro power plants—have allowed people to live in more dispersed communities than in the past.

Framed in this manner, Rybczynski’s question and this part of his answer (which is more complex than can be deduced from this brief excerpt) together indicate something important that has been missing from the latest series of shots fired by various New Urbanists at landscape urbanism (those shots and related posts have been handily collected by Jason King over at Landscape+Urbanism here, here, and here).  One of the primary roots of the disagreement between the two schools of thought is that New Urbanists tend to see dysfunction in the contemporary American city (roughly, sprawling suburbanization) as primarily political in origin.  This is why (true) narratives about the role of mid-century auto manufacturers in sabotaging street car lines or the illegality of building traditional urban forms under contemporary zoning codes are so central to the New Urbanist complaint.  (This is also, coincidentally, why New Urbanism has little to offer towards ameliorating one of the most massive global urban challenges, the question of how to deal with the sprawling and impoverished informal developments that one in six humans already live in — political actors may have a great deal of responsibility for those conditions, but it is extremely hard to see how political reorganization (of the sort that New Urbanists champion in the United States) is likely to successfully respond.)

The problem with this primarily political conception is that the contemporary city has been produced not just by political forces, but also by the social desires and technological changes that Rybczynski so succinctly describes.  Attempting to impose a New Urbanism through political means — however wisely planned — on the complex matrix of technological, economic, and social forces that produce cities is asking for that urbanism to be fractured by pressure from below.

I make this point in more detail here and here. Conveniently, the comments of my interlocutor in both cases — Sandy Sorlien, the principal of SmartCode Local and a New Urbanist of some note — indicate that New Urbanists tend to be as focused on political causes as I have argued.

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
November 14, 2010 – 6:00 am

heygate abstracted

Architect and photographer Simon Kennedy’s exhibition 635×508: Heygate Abstracted opens at the Bartlett School of Architecture this Monday.

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By rholmes | Posted in architecture | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on heygate abstracted | Permalink
November 12, 2010 – 6:00 am

blueprint’s oddly misdirected second salvo

Not content with Tim Abrahams’ misdirected broadside against architecture blogs last spring — which badly missed its target by calling out the explicitly curatorial Things Magazine for failing the project of architecture criticism — Blueprint has now printed a similarly misdirected second salvo against various prominent architecture bloggers, again accusing them of not being sufficiently concerned with the thing — criticism of buildings — that they have never claimed to be particularly concerned with.

Helpfully, Geoff Manaugh has scanned that article, written by Peter Kelly and entitled “The New Establishment”, and you can read it here, along with his response, which argues that it is rather odd for Kelly to complain about a lack of “criticism of significant new buildings” on blogs which claim to do nothing of the sort.  (To read Kelly’s article, you’ll need to click on and enlarge the images that Geoff has provided.)

What really puzzles me about “The New Establishment” is that, above and beyond this misdirection of its critical aim, exceptionally well-established blogs like Archidose and sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy (or even Christopher Hawthorne’s pieces for the LA Times‘ Culture Monster blog) — which do traffic in the criticism of buildings — are not mentioned.

I think that’s what makes the piece feel less like the non-antagonistic argument that Anonymous 7:09 describes in the comments of Geoff’s post (“[Kelly] is questioning why, in an age of digital media, there is not a blog, just as popular as BLDGBLOG, that feeds the desire of Kelly, me, you and lots of others for critical analysis of new architectural design”) and more like a specific attack on the legitimacy of blogging about architecture in more expansive or less building-centric ways.

(Which, by the way, hardly bothers me.  I’m a landscape architect.  Of course I don’t write about architecture like an architecture critic.)

I wrote about Abrahams’ complaint last spring here — note that, as misdirected as it was, I do think there is value in it, just as Geoff notes that there is value in Kelly’s call for more and better architectural criticism — and rounded up various responses to his complaint here.

Edit: Abrahams’ post does not appear to be available anymore, so the link at the top of this post is rather broken.

By rholmes | Posted in meta | Tagged , | Comments (4) | Permalink
November 5, 2010 – 5:00 am

editing urbanism

MONU issues a call for submissions for their Winter 2011 issue, Editing Urbanism:

These days, the need for new buildings or entire city quarters is decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether – at least in the Western world – due to the demographic changes and financially difficult times. Ever since, architects and urban designers, who were trained by schools that focused their education first of all on the past and mainly taught urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, or adaptive reuse of old structures might be best prepared for a future, in which cities will be edited rather than extended or even newly designed.

In such a future, which has become reality in most Western cities of this day and age, architects and urban planners will become urban editors. But it will probably become reality, too, in emerging and developing economies such as China, Brasil, or India in the far future, where historical city parts are currently being bulldozered out of existence by uncontrolled developments. Urban editors will be released from the modernistic burden to constantly replace the old world with a new one. But they will be involved in processes of selecting, correcting, condensating, organizing, or modifying the existing urban material. The process of urban editing will originate from an idea for the existing urban structures itself and will continue in a relationship between the users and producers of the city and the urban editors. Urban editing, therefore, will be also a practice that includes creative skills, human relations, and a precise set of methods.

But the question is: what kind of methods will the urban editors use? What will be their exact tasks? What will the process of urban editing look like exactly? With what kind of urban challenges will urban editors be confronted and how will they solve them? How will they judge how to deal with the existing structures, and with preserved and protected parts of the city? Will it be the job of the urban editors to define the value of existing urban structures? Which structures will they keep an which will they destroy? How will they deal with urban nostalgia towards history, and how with memory? What will be their criteria for action, their values, their moral issues? Will urban editors perhaps only occupy an advanced version of an already existing profession: the interior architect, re-designing, re-programming and renovating the interiors of the existing urban fabric according to the changing needs? Or will urban editors be merely the mediators between the old and the new in general?

While I’m not sure that I would say there was any point in anything like recent history where designing cities was not primarily about editing existing fabric (regardless of how many utopian fantasies architects and planners have produced), this theme resonates strongly with mammoth‘s avowed belief in the importance of designing for the city we have, and so strikes me as descriptive accurate.  (For that matter, there is also a bit of resonance between it and the current barrage of vitriol that various New Urbanists have launched in the general direction of landscape urbanism, as questions of “urban nostalgia” and who holds responsibility for negative aspects of the legacy of modernist planning are central to those arguments.)

Abstracts are due by December 31.

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November 4, 2010 – 6:45 pm

readings: blogs


[Nadav Kander, “Changxing Island VI, Shanghai”]

1. I am pretty sure that I have mentioned it before, but I have really been enjoying deconcrete. Somewhere between blog and tumblr, deconcrete posts fascinating scraps and ephemera themed roughly, as the subtitle notes, around “everyday urbanisms without architects’ architecture”. Recent posts, for instance, pair a fictional vision of Manhattan as a swimming pool with the world’s longest swimming pool; note the foggy photography of Nadav Kander along the Yangtze (above); spotlight the adaptive appropriation of the courtyard of a police-station-turned-apartment-block in Shanghai; or take us to a “car catwalk” in Berlin, an informal and open-air market where sellers appropriate public parking spaces to hawk their automotive wares. deconcrete travels between Europe and China (which we at mammoth, being North America-bound, appreciate vicariously), and mixes re-blogged fragments with a healthy dose of direct (or embodied, to use one of Free Assocation Design‘s pet terms) urban observation.

2. Since Alexis Madrigal re-surfaced at The Atlantic Monthly as a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com‘s new(ish?) technology focus, the content in their technology feed has been consistently fascinating, supplementing the expected (but thoughtful) notes on tech products with fascinating pieces on topics like Russia building floating nuclear power plants for the Arctic or America’s languishing rare elements production capacity.


[Nadav Kander, “Changxing Island II, Shanghai”]

3. The Pop-Up City — “an online magazine by Amsterdam-based design agency Golfstromen which explores new ideas, trends, strategies and methods for a dynamic and flexible interpretation of contemporary urban life” — typically features items that fall somewhere between Actions: What You Can Do With the City and unsolicited architecture.  “Augmented Foraging With Boskoi”, for instance, describes an open-source urban foraging iPhone app (which I’ve been meaning to mention since I ran across it at the excellent Urbaniablism a little while ago), while “Welcome to Tora Bora Inn” highlights a proposal for a sarcastic “terrorist motel” to be built at 51 Park Place.

By rholmes | Posted in readings | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
November 2, 2010 – 6:00 pm

bracket(s)


[An image from mammoth‘s contribution to Bracket 1: On Farming, “Hydrating Luanda”.]

Places excerpts a piece from the soon-to-be-published first volume of Bracket.  In the excerpt, Mason White sketches towards a description of an alternate trajectory within twentieth century architecture, which he terms the “productive surface”:

Productive surfaces articulate a new public realm, and with that a new public — a public characterized not by whether it is urban, suburban, or rural, but by whether it participates in the cultivation of its necessities, of its energy and food. The shift in emphasis from the “function” of Modernism to the “production” of contemporary practice can be charted through relationship of architecture to the larger environment. The productive surface yields, making it not only responsive to its environment but indeed operational because of it. This is not a sustainability mantra so much as it is a biological one — the goal is an architecture of synthetic surfaces servicing variously scaled constructed environments, including the roof, the site, and the wider climatological and ecological territory.

Mason links a series of seemingly widely divergent projects — from Garnier’s Une Cité Industrielle to Buckminster Fuller’s World Game to the recent River Rouge Complex — through their relationship to this trajectory, suggesting that the “productive surface” is fertile territory for the design of “new economies, programs, typologies and public realms”.

More than a few of these, of course, are suggested in Bracket 1: On Farming, which you can pre-order now; while waiting for your copy to arrive, you might enter a submission for the second volume, which is themed Soft:

Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others– the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems…

While designers such as Cedric Price, Yona Friedman, Archigram, and Buckminster Fuller embraced the early soft project, envisioning alternate models of urbanization, mobility, and infrastructural networks, this project has remained dormant for the past decades, only to reemerge with increased urgency today. Acknowledging fluid and indeterminate situations with complex feedback loops that allow for reaction and adaption, the possibility of soft systems has re-entered the domain of design, necessitating a repositioned role of the designer.  The present era, characterized by crisis, provides a new platform to revisit the soft project in the 21st century.

Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design. Bracket 2 invites designers, architects, theorists, ecologists, scientists, and landscape architects to position and leverage the role of soft systems and recuperate the development of the soft project.

Entries are due December 10th.

If you missed it: mammoth talks with Mason White and Lola Sheppard about architecture, infrastructure, method, and much more.

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November 1, 2010 – 5:55 am

hatherly on hadid and schumacher

At Mute Magazine, Owen Hatherly picks at tensions in the rhetoric and built work of Zaha Hadid Architects, with a particular emphasis on both the claims Patrick Schumacher makes about parametricism as a new avant-garde and the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, one of ZHA’s recent buildings.  Though it is not entirely representative of the full thrust of the piece, I found this particular paragraph insightful:

Nonetheless, there’s at least a few signs that [parametricism] really is an avant-garde, most notably the fact that many digital designers want absolutely nothing to do with the term, considering Schumacher a mere arriviste who has co-opted the digital underground. The architect Daniel Davis wrote on the blog Digital Morphogenesis that, rather than truly entering into a design with the machines and programmes, Hadid and Schumacher created a design in a top-down, artistic manner, as much as any other architect would. ‘Whether ZHA uses a parametric model to generate the construction drawings of their signature is meaningless because the design was generated through a different medium. So Parametricism in this weird double-talk is Schumacher’s attempt to associate ZHA (and even claim the ZHA created) a movement with which they have nothing to do. Stick at what you are good at Schumacher, making money, and let the third generation show you what this ‘revolution’ is really about.’ In its combination of claiming the term for an unacknowledged underground, political sniping and sectarianism, a statement like this is perhaps the nearest proof that there really is an avant-garde called Parametricism, although perhaps Schumacher has little to do with it.

Read the whole piece here.

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October 28, 2010 – 6:00 am

dead website archive


[David Garcia Studio‘s “Dead Website Archive”, from MAP-003 “Archive”; read about the Dead Website Archive at DPR-Barcelona.]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
October 27, 2010 – 8:48 pm

pathological superpositions

I’ve mentioned before my fondness for the blog Pathological Geomorphology, but this month’s theme is particularly fantastic: the interface of human landscapes and geomorphology.  In Green River, Utah (above), for instance, an extinct oxbow determines contemporary land-use patterns; other examples so far include farmed alluvial fans in Asian deserts, Pennsylvania farmland interspersed between anticlines, and glaciofluvial urbanism in Peru.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

the new north


[Murmansk in polar night, photographed by flickr user euno.]

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ‘services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change” — are fueling both international involvement and urban growth in the Arctic:

Much of the planet’s northern quarter of latitude, including the Arctic, is poised to undergo tremendous transformation over the next century. As a booming population increases the demand for the Earth’s natural resources, and as lands closer to the equator face the prospect of rising water demand, droughts and other likely changes, the prominence of northern countries will rise along with their projected milder winters…

[In 2050, this] New North… might be something like America in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase from France. It, too, possessed major cities fueled by foreign immigration, with a vast, inhospitable frontier distant from the major urban cores. Its deserts, like Arctic tundra, were harsh, dangerous and ecologically fragile. It, too, had rich resource endowments of metals and hydrocarbons. It, too, was not really an empty frontier but already occupied by indigenous peoples who had been living there for millennia.

Flying over the American West today, one still sees landscapes that are barren and sparsely populated. Its towns and cities are relatively few, scattered across miles of empty desert. Yet its population is growing, its cities like Phoenix and Salt Lake and Las Vegas humming economic forces with cultural and political significance. This is how I imagine the coming human expansion in the New North. We’re not all about to move there, but it will integrate with the rest of the world in some very important ways.

I imagine the high Arctic, in particular, will be rather like Nevada—a landscape nearly empty but with fast-growing towns. Its prime socioeconomic role in the 21st century will not be homestead haven but economic engine, shoveling gas, oil, minerals and fish into the gaping global maw.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.

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October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am

backyard farm service


[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 competition, or the Tschumi design for Downsview Park, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s a rule.  (While this is at times a failure of judging, I suspect it is also equally likely to be a function of the extreme difficulty of figuring out what schemes will prove prescient without the advantage of hindsight.)

So while there were a variety of interesting entrants to (and winners of) the recent One Prize “Mowing to Growing” competition, it isn’t particularly surprising that an entry mammoth finds at least as interesting as any of the winners, Visual Logic‘s “Backyard Farm Service”, failed to make the final cut of winners and finalists.

The “Mowing to Growing” competition (which is, at least theoretically, only the first in a series of annual competitions on the theme of urban agriculture) prompted entrants to “devise workable means for growing more of America’s food closer to more of America’s communities, and to do so at less expense to our economy and our environment”.  This theme, of course, is rather broad, and so the entries ranged from levee-farms and agriculturized-highway embankments to the predictable vertical farms or (unpredictably) the Waterpod.

The Visual Logic team (Aron Chang, Bradley Cantrell, Natalie Yates, and Patrick Michaels) start in a relatively ordinary place: noting that, while the American food delivery system is constructed by the logistical logic of “points and lines of [delivery] infrastructure” instead of a holistic consideration that would include ecological demands and opportunities — “regional climates”, “soils”, “aquatic resources”, the presence and availability of “biological nutrients and organic matter” — the United States does already produce the vast majority of the foods it consumes.  This suggests to Visual Logic that “though the US may be incapable of supplying its fossil fuel needs, the country should soon be able to rely almost entirely upon American soils for the farming of the fruits and vegetables consumed by its residents.”

Analyzing the logic of the food delivery infrastructure and narrowing into Louisiana, the test case for Visual Logic’s study.

Where “Backyard Farm Service” begins to diverge from the ordinary, though, is when it starts to sketch one branch of a solution by mapping the vast reach of the professional landscaping industry: in the United States, Visual Logic says, there are nearly a million landscapers, maintaining the lawns of over thirty-four million Americans.

Why does the professional provision of lawn care matter in the discussion of the productive capacity of residential lawns?

In contrast to the monolithic forms of agricultural production which dominate the public consciousness, lawn-service providers constitute an under-appreciated mode of “farming” in America, one in which the farmer goes directly to the customer, in which the act of farming is fully integrated into the rhythms of everyday life, in which the highly specific predilections and site conditions of each customer and their yard trump the dictates of industrial eefficiency, and in which the convenience of the customer and the cultural value of a well-maintained landscape outweighs the productive value and ecological benefits of the farming practice. The demand for lawn care continues to rise with the continued construction of single-family homes in innumerable suburban developments. With readily available cheap labor and a relatively modest investment in equipment as the only requirements for entry into the field, the lawn-service industry now comprises a diverse multitude of overlapping networks of providers and customers spanning the entire country with its myriad climatic zones and geographic regions.

Thus, there already exists a system of decentralized farming with local providers attuned to the micro-climates and conditions of their respective service areas, one that relies upon a highly mobile infrastructure of trucks and portable equipment to farm grass and maintain yards for millions of Americans. The key to the productivity of America’s residential landscapes lies then, not with the homeowner who more often than not has neither the time nor interest for gardening, but in tapping the remarkable potential of the existing lawn-service industry.

Our proposal begins with two assumptions.  The first is that there is an increasing demand amongst consumers for fresh and locally-grown produce, for healthier foods, and for more sustainable lifestyles.  The second is that people who want to garden, have the know-how, and who have the time to garden already do garden.  The lawn-service industry serves as a model for how the farming of produce can become integral to the lifestyle of American families, without necessitating an investment on the part of the homeowner in farming equipment, time, or agricultural education.  Instead, networks of local urban farmers, acting much as lawn-service professionals already do, will provide farming as a service to individual clients.

…The reframing of the lawn-service industry forms the basis of our proposal.  We ask not that every American tear up their lawns – an untenable proposition in the present day and foreseeable future – but that every homeowner is offered the means to become local food producers without requiring them to abandon their jobs and take up farming on their own.  Our strategies can be implemented anywhere homeowners and yards exist, while relying on local knowledge and farmer-to-household relationships.   Though modest in terms of technical requirements or shifts in policy, “Backyard Farm Service” builds on existing business models, infrastructural capabilities, and current trends in cultural values and consumer desires to suggest how we can diversify and localize food production in order to enhance each neighborhood’s ecological diversity and food security, to physically reintegrate agricultural production into the fabric of our cities and suburbs, and to bridge the psychic gap between farming and everyday consumption that has formed over the last century with the advent of modern agriculture.

This re-purposed lawn service industry would not be deployed just as a replacement for currently existing models of local food delivery to individual homeowners — farmer’s markets, CSA’s — but would also hybridize that function (every homeowner employing the Backyard Farm Service would indeed receive produce from their yard) with a larger scale of economic logic, as the Backyard Farm Service would also sell produce grown on private lawns to local “restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, caterers, and schools”.  It is thus not only a proposal for hyper-localizing food production, but also for distributed farming.  That is truly post-industrial urban agriculture — not occurring after industry in time (after the decline of urban industries) and space (after the abandonment of industrial plots), but post-industrial in method, technique, and logistics.  A system which was once held together by spatial and temporal logic would now be sustained by the capacity to coordinate, track, and know.

To demonstrate the potential of this approach, Visual Logic has produced an impressively deep study (partially pictured here) of how the system might unfold at a multitude of scales — mapping a single crew’s route on one Friday through New Orleans, mapping the overlay of a number of routes in that same area of New Orleans, studying the costs and economic value of the service, charting the relationships between ornamentals, vegetables, and fruits for determining a typical planting palette (which would be refined to the tastes of each homeowner and local conditions), and tracking how the service might expand from a single local network in 2010 to regional networks and nation-wide impact by 2025.

The spatial idea here is not terribly new.  Essentially, it is present in the premise of the competition brief.  Lawns (“mowing”) can be edible gardens (“growing”).  But as a proposal for how you get from thinking that it would be great if lots of unproductive lawns were turned into productive gardens to a providing a reasonable mechanism by which to accomplish that transformation, “Backyard Farm Service” is rather valuable.

The thing that makes it valuable is that it looks at altering practices rather than objects.  Doing so, of course, alters objects too — as objects and practices necessarily interact and alter one another — but the point of entry into that feedback loop matters.  Why?  In this case, it is because the point of entry is essentially a landscape business plan.  A business plan is self-funding; a traditional architectural proposal requires a client or a patron.  (Hence, the belief that “architects… design buildings for wealthy people”.)  While there is nothing necessarily wrong with having clients and patrons, phrasing proposals in terms of business plans with calculated spatial and programmatic effects massively expands the potential agency of the architect or landscape architect.

1. I think it is quite reasonable to say that Free Association Design‘s current experiment with goat-based maintenance regimes in southeast Portland is another (fine) example of practicing landscape architecture through a business plan.  (In that case, through the effort of convincing a property owner and a service provider that they could have a mutually beneficial business relationship.)

2. Of the other entrants to “Mowing to Growing”, I am particularly fond of “Growing the Hydro Fields”, a scheme developed by University of Toronto students and covered here by InfraNet Lab.

By rholmes | Posted in finance, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
October 24, 2010 – 2:28 pm

future legitimacy

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 is quite excellent, but this exchange between BLDGBLOG and Bouman on the relationship between architects and clients is particularly interesting:

Bouman: …Of course, there are at least three different layers of clients. First of all, there are the people with money who want a program to be accommodated by an architectural work – in other words, a client in the traditional sense. But I don’t think that there is a sufficient market for a magazine that would address that specific group.

There is also the client, in terms of the decision-maker. Maybe that person is not about to commission an architect to do something now, but they may ask an architect to do something in the future. And there are decision-makers throughout society – so this is a much larger group. If magazines can address this group of decision-makers specifically, then they already have a bigger reader base.

But, of course, there is also a group of clients that thinks, maybe in a more metaphorical way, about architecture as a way of fulfilling their dreams or serving their interests, in both a material way and in a more idealistic sense. And if our readership is this larger group of people – a very mixed group – then you could say that we already do address clients as the people who ask questions to architects – not just ask for buildings from architects, but who ask architects to engage with these issues. They ask architects to address larger social issues, rather than just supply built stuff. This is a redefinition of architecture, from delivering an object to a definition of architecture that challenges certain issues within a larger cultural strategy.

I think there could be a great dialogue between architects and this group of people. And this spirit and interpretation of the client is perhaps what we are addressing. Of course, the question comes up: is it still necessary to call this group clients and not just the public? But I think it is a nice way to put it: to see those people, this larger group of people engaged in cultural issues, as clients, who ask questions without an immediate budget, without pointing at a specific site, without asking you to accommodate a program. They ask general questions of architecture, and that helps us mobilize architecture beyond one specific purpose.

BLDGBLOG: So we need a new, or different, kind of architect now, in addition to a new way of interacting with clients?

Bouman: Yes – and that brings me to the role of the architect in responding to the client. This can no longer be the reactive way that most architects work with clients. In the first definition I gave of the client, the client is asking a question: Architect X or Architect Y, can you do something for me, because I need you? The output of architecture, in that sense, is very reactive. It can only be based on a program, a budget, a site, an existing location, etc. etc. – but there is always something coming first, before the architectural act.

In the other description I gave of the client, there is more of a shared interest – a common interest – with architects addressing a cultural or political issue from the angle of architecture. So there is a dialogue between different people with a common curiosity, and that can evolve into a completely different output of the architectural discipline. It gives architects a new role, I think, in the long-term, and this may even give architecture its future legitimacy.

Read the entire interview here.

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October 22, 2010 – 6:31 am

competing geometries


[Barchan dunes — the recent, light sandy formations — layered atop older longitudinal dunes — darker, subtler lines roughly traced southwest to northeast — and braced against the pure Suprematist geometry of pivot irrigation along Idaho’s Snake River; via NASA Earth Observatory.]

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