climate-defense-systems – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: climate-defense-systems

September 20, 2011 – 6:00 am

IHNC Lake Borgne Surge Barrier

[The site of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC) Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, at the intersection of the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet; more detail on this Army Corps of Engineers project map.] [Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army […]

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September 19, 2011 – 6:00 pm

pump test

[“On Tuesday, May 24, pump number eight at the West Closure Complex was successfully tested. There are a total of 11 pumps at the [Complex], and each can individually fill an olympic-sized swimming pool in less than a minute.” (Source.)] [While most of the Mississippi River flood control infrastructures that we have looked at have […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure | Also tagged | Comments (4) | Permalink
July 21, 2011 – 8:46 pm

casting fields

[Map of revetments under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Team New Orleans, on the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers; image produced by mammoth using data from the Army Corps.] I’ve already talked a fair about the idea that the Mississippi River is, at this point in its history, an artificially-constructed system that should […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, infrastructure, infrastructure-without-architects, landscape | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
May 24, 2011 – 6:00 am

floods

The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun.  We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding.  Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Also tagged , , | Comments (9) | 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
December 9, 2009 – 12:23 pm

climate defense systems

An article from Sunday’s Washington Post discusses the development of “climate defense systems”, resulting from an increasing interest in not just climate change prevention, but also climate change adaptation.  The article is particularly focused on the Netherlands, where “the Dutch are spending billions of euros on ‘floating communities’ that can rise with surging flood waters, […]

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