December 9, 2009 – 8:36 am
Via @bldgblog‘s link to this great post on the Mexican city of Guanajuato (which I first became fascinated with when the friend who introduced Stephen and I spent part of a summer there with an architecture studio), I see that Brett Milligan, whose project “Inundating the Border” mammoth briefly touched on in an earlier post […]
December 3, 2009 – 8:10 pm
[Amos Coal Power Plant, from Mitch Epstein’s fantastic series American Power] Adrian Lahoud has a lengthy post on infrastructure and urbanism at Post-Traumatic Urbanism; the post is well worth reading. A handful of somewhat scattered comments on it follow. I strongly agree with the emphasis on “complex urban interdependencies”, in addition to “physical artefacts” of […]
December 1, 2009 – 4:58 pm
[Aerial image of the Hoover Dam Bypass under construction; I’d love to give credit for the image to the photographer, but it came to me through a long email chain, lacking any attribution, and I haven’t been able to locate the source] Economics journalist Louis Uchitelle complains about a “superproject void” in the Times; Infrastructurist […]
November 17, 2009 – 4:33 pm
Kazys Varnelis follows up his recent interview of Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) by himself being interviewed, at Triple Canopy (whose last two issues on urbanism are indispensable): Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve […]
November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am
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 […]
October 21, 2009 – 11:33 am
“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.
October 7, 2009 – 9:22 am
Between 1999 and 2004, Ruth Dusseault documented the transformation of Atlanta’s derelict Atlantic Steel Industries complex into Atlantic Station, a massive (138 acres, with a budget exceeding two billion dollars) residential and retail development. The photos reveal a fascinating but ephemeral landscape marked by raw and unfinished structures that are eventually buried beneath more civilized […]
September 23, 2009 – 10:07 am
[The sewer as limestone cavern, or the near-total hybridization of infrastructure and natural process, via Under Montreal.]
September 15, 2009 – 8:11 am
Pruned’s recent series Under Spaces (part one, part two, part three) is very good — I’m particularly enamored with Hans Herrmann’s Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project from Clemson University, which inserts an urban park beneath Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction“, mostly because I think the notion that the space of the park would […]
September 11, 2009 – 11:26 am
Ryan Avent has a very interesting post at streetsblog on the problems with the rehabilitation of Robert Moses, who is appealing urbanists for roughly the same reason that Thomas Friedman is pining for autocracy. The link Avent provides to a study which concludes that “one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population […]
The High Line receives a glowing review from the New York Review of Books (which, due their odd desire to maintain the pretense that they publish book reviews and not journalism, pretends that the article is a review of the pamphlet-sized Designing the High Line, though it merits only a single paragraph in the article). […]
Adam Goodheart mulls over the place of the wind turbine in the American landscape: Just a century ago, however, windmills by the hundreds of thousands dotted many of the same landscapes where their present-day descendants now loom. Nearly every farmyard had its own spindly device atop a steel tower, pumping water and powering lamps. Those […]
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.
You find this mass anchored in the Yellow Sea (google map) off the Korean coast, attached by a thin line of gravel and asphalt (drawn in the straight line which is the international tell of the engineer) to New Songdo City, the massive planned addition to the port of Incheon. A perfect rectangle in a […]
Article at the New York Times on the value of bus rapid transit systems, particularly Bogota’s Transmilenio.
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 […]
Here’s one such strategy for applying architectural tactics to a much broader set of situations and materials, Stephen, from Rebar (who are perhaps the best current example of a group doing such things, at least that I’m aware of): The project, entitled “The People’s Public Works”, “[lures] the public into a carnival midway with infrastructure […]
[Interior of an abandoned and incomplete home in a subdivision outside Phoenix, from an excellent slideshow of photographs taken by Edgar Martins, commissioned by the New York Times to document the real estate bust.] I’d highly recommend reading or re-reading Eric Janszen’s “The Next Bubble”, which was published in Harper’s almost a year and a […]
Interstate Traveler: proof that you should never let anyone tell you that you can’t build your offbeat megaproject (complete with Equestrian Explorer and Triage Traveler), particularly if you have a friend skilled in the production of vintage Popular Mechanics diagrams. Or else proof that the Michigan state legislature is completely nutty. Do watch the video, […]
The New York Times Magazine annual architecture issue is here. This year’s theme? Infrastructure.
