field-guides – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: field-guides

December 6, 2011 – 6:00 am

signs for naturalized areas

[“Signs for Naturalized Areas”, from Windsor, Ontario’s Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers’ strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers’ strike; the […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , | Comments Off on signs for naturalized areas | Permalink
November 29, 2011 – 7:00 pm

hypothethical signs

[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign.] This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization.  (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 22, 2011 – 6:00 pm

urban field manuals

[Photographs from Christoph Engel’s series “Exterieur”, which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscape-architecture, publications, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink
June 12, 2009 – 12:04 pm

field guide to standpipes (infrastructurist)

I’ve mentioned my love for Infrastructurist’s field guides before; the latest, A Field Guide to NYC Standpipes, teaches you to read the relationship between standpipes and the fire control systems embedded in the buildings they serve.  So much fascinating information is encoded on and in the built environment, if we know how to read it […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure | Also tagged | Comments Off on field guide to standpipes (infrastructurist) | Permalink