california – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: california

May 3, 2012 – 7:00 pm

glitch jam

[The Placer County Courthouse, in Auburn, California — imagine it swarmed by a glitch jam.] NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, urbanism | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
July 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

san francisco bay model

The San Francisco Bay Model was, like the Mississippi Basin Model, built by the Army Corps of Engineers to study the flow of water — in this case, simulating “the rise and fall of tide, flow, and currents of water, mixing of salt and fresh water, and… trends in sediment movement”, permitting the study of […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Also tagged , | Comments (5) | Permalink
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm

staging ground

[Detail from Andrew tenBrink’s “Staging Ground”; all images in this post are from “Staging Ground”; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink.  In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, student-work | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4) | Permalink