dredge – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: dredge

Excavations, Shockwaves, and Limits

At the end of September, I spoke at an event organized by The Architectural League and co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design, “The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land”. The Architectural League has recently posted video from the event, so you can now watch the many presentations and discussions; I particularly recommend Jesse […]

sediment trap and release

[The annual sediment release procedure at Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River in Henan province, China. According to the Daily Mail, “this annual operation sees more than 30 million tonnes of silt sent downstream a year, with more than 390 million tonnes shifted this way over the last 13 years”. It is noteworthy, from the perspective […]

dredge research collaborative: live interview @ studio-x

[The Dredge Research Collaborative — Stephen, Tim Maly, and myself, with fourth member Brett Milligan present in spirit but not body — in live conversation back in January at Studio-X NYC about the dredge cycle, artificial islands, geotubes, sensate geotextiles coating aqueous terrain, the scale of human influence over sediment, the New York Bight’s “Mud […]

delaware dredge

[A pressurized pipe carries dredge along Bethany Beach, Delaware; photography by Chris Mizes.] On his blog space within lines, Chris Mizes writes about one of the more common ways that the landscapes of dredge intrude on everyday life: beach nourishment. As Mizes explains, this commonplace instance of landscape prosthesis is — like many of the […]

dredge @ studio-x nyc

We’re excited that we’ll have the opportunity in a couple weeks to do a live interview at Studio-X NYC: For the first LI@SX of 2012, Studio-X NYC is delighted to welcome Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon, three-quarters of the Dredge Research Collaborative (with Brett Milligan of Free […]

soft landscapes

This week, I’ve organized a short (very short) lecture series for the students in my studio (well, the “Post-Natural Ecologies” half of the studio) at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Tuesday at 5:15, Fred Scharmen (sevensixfive/the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) will give a talk entitled “Soft Sites”, examining four sites on the Middle Branch […]

the gulf intracoastal waterway

Another of the Mississippi River Delta region’s industrial infrastructures is the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which stretches 1,109 miles from Apalache Bay, Florida to Brownsville, Texas.  In the image above (which is rotated so that north is on the right, Port Arthur at the top, and New Orleans at the bottom), the Waterway is clearly visible […]

restoring the land-making machine

[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 […]

the atchafalaya basin project and the wax lake delta

[A map of the administrative units of the Atchafalaya Basin Project in 1982, produced by the Army Corps of Engineers.  The Atchafalaya Basin system is made up of three floodways: the Morganza Floodway (fed by the Morganza Spillway), the West Atchafalaya Floodway, and the Lower Atchafalaya Floodway; the latter is composed of the confluence of […]

bayou chene closure project

[During the May 2011 operation of the Morganza Spillway, the Army Corps of Engineers closed one channel within the southern Atchafalaya Basin, Bayou Chene, by dredging the edges of a narrow strait in the Bayou, lining it with rip-rap and sinking a 20,000-ton, 500-foot long barge in the resulting chokepoint.  By stemming the flow down […]

dredging fort peck

[A dredger at work in one of Fort Peck Dam’s borrow pits; photographer unknown.  (Fort Peck, you will recall, was the first of the six major dams on the Missouri to be built.)  The dredgers, pontoon boats, and booster barges used in the pumping of fill material from upstream borrow pits to the Fort Peck […]

west kowloon reclamation

[Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.] [“Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size.  Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent […]