hacking-infrastructure – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: hacking-infrastructure

August 16, 2011 – 6:00 pm

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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 25, 2011 – 7:00 am

six dams and six reservoirs

[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world’s largest “hydraulically-filled” dam, which means that it was constructed by dredging suspended sediment from borrow pits and pumping it to discharge pipes at the dam site, where it settles onto the embankment.  (This […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, geography, infrastructure, landscape | Also tagged , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
March 14, 2011 – 6:21 pm

slugging

[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, urbanism | Also tagged , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 22, 2010 – 2:27 pm

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.  With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (9) | Permalink
May 31, 2010 – 10:05 pm

jam, hack

This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. [Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90] “Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the […]

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged | Comments (10) | Permalink
September 14, 2009 – 11:48 pm

dialogue: finance, context, scale, and intervention

In a recent back and forth between myself (Stephen) and Rory Hyde in the comments of On Finance, Rory noted: To zoom out even further, are we just talking about ‘context’? To understand the context in architecture normally means literally to understand the site context – the two terms are used interchangeably – but as […]

By Stephen | Posted in dialogue, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
July 17, 2009 – 1:38 pm

smart tagging garbage

New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, technology | Also tagged , , | Comments Off on smart tagging garbage | Permalink
July 13, 2009 – 12:18 pm

carlo ratti interview @ city of sound

Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect: This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, technology | Also tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 8, 2009 – 1:59 pm

congestion pricing manhattan

A great post by Felix Salmon discusses externalities, congestion pricing, and a spreadsheet by Charles Komanoff.  The comparison of the way the resulting costs from congestion pricing fall, depending on which scheme is used, is particularly important, as the original NYC plan would have disproportionately hit middle-class commuters from Brooklyn and Queens.  Congestion pricing is […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, urbanism | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on congestion pricing manhattan | Permalink