hydrology - mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: hydrology

March 2, 2010 – 11:00 am

absent rivers, ephemeral parks

[American Falls de-watered, via Flickr user rbglasson]
For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion.  During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was [...]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Also tagged , , , | Comments (10)
February 27, 2010 – 8:00 am

katabatia

[Perhaps the perfect image for mammoth to end our participation in Glacier/Island/Storm week (it's been great fun, and lots of great research, commentary, and speculation has been posted) with: an Antarctic glacier sinking past Inexpressible Island (really) into Terra Nova Bay, while providing graphic evidence of the powerful winds which operate on the Antarctic coast.  [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)
February 25, 2010 – 10:00 am

chinampas

[Chinampas, artificial agricultural islands in Xochimilco, Mexico, photographed by flickr user Colibri.  The chinampas have been constructed in the lakes around Mexico City since pre-Columbian times; posts are driven into the lake bottom in shallows, connected into walls by weaving branches horizontally between the posts, and the resultant enclosures are filled with fertile soil from [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture | Also tagged , | Comments (4)
February 18, 2010 – 8:03 pm

readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors

[all photographs from Andrea Frank's series "Ports and Ships"]
1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool:
Where the vision [...]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, readings | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am

the dead sea works

I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC’s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) [...]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)
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, [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Also tagged , , , | Comments (1)
November 24, 2009 – 4:18 pm

the new dutch water defense line

There’s nothing particularly original about the observation that the Dutch have a peculiar national relationship to their landscape (and, in particular, its hydrology), but that peculiarity produces endlessly fascinating oddities and, apparently, endless mammoth posts on Dutch hydrology.  As lewism noted on one such post, Bulwarks and Flux:
…the whole of Dutch landscape and history can [...]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (1)
November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am

readings: hydrologically situated infrastructures

Whether immense re-configurations of watersheds on a geological scale or fine and playful tunings of the interactions between city-dwellers and the infrastructures that deliver their water, those that transmit water or those that sit on and in it, the intersection of hydrology and infrastructure is a continual fascination for mammoth.
Image from Yue Yuan Zheng’s 2007 [...]

By rholmes | Posted in readings | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3)
October 16, 2009 – 12:19 pm

toxic waters

The New York Times is running a fantastic series on “worsening pollution in America’s waters and regulators’ response.”

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Also tagged , | Comments (0)
July 22, 2009 – 12:06 pm

readings: on water

1. Good Magazine’s Water Issue discusses clean water technologies for the developing world, the current and historical contamination of American tap water, fully recycled tap water, how the control of water is becoming central to the conflict between India and Pakistan and interviews Robert Glennon, author of the new book Unquenchable, which explores America’s water [...]

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July 20, 2009 – 8:56 pm

its prettiness and romance will then be gone

As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and forward-thinking project from a city not known for its innovative ecological design (though they have built a rather seductive [...]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2)
July 15, 2009 – 2:47 pm

death of the aral sea

The European Space Agency documents the decline of the Aral Sea, via Wired, whose 2002 article on the management of the Amu Darya explains in great detail the reasons for that decline.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Comments (1)
June 24, 2009 – 9:50 am

elementary school hydrological investigations

While researching the history of the Buffalo Bayou for a forthcoming post, I came across this fascinating series of lesson plans prepared by a Houston elementary school teacher, which would introduce students to the history of flooding, emphasize the dual value and danger of waterways to cities, teach the children to access and utilize real-time [...]

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