landscape-infrastructures – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: landscape-infrastructures

venue interview with edward burtynsky

[Edward Burtynsky’s “Drylands Farming #7” — farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.] Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly […]

minus extraction

[Miami’s Lake Belt, the zone in which the city of Miami becomes a mirror image of itself — reflected in blue polygons induced by the mining of the limestone rock literally used to construct the city — before it disintegrates into the Everglades.] I’ve gotten part way through listening to the portions of last weekend’s Landscape Infrastructures […]

expiration dates

[Chart showing the typical lifespans of a wide variety of infrastructures (and components of infrastructures), from treated wood ties to deep geological repositories for high-level radioactive waste. The descriptive text reads: “This chart visualizes the lifespans of equipment associated with waste, water, energy, and transportation systems across North America. As we approach — and pass […]

“landscape infrastructure” at harvard gsd

[“Reclamation and slope stabilization on a volcanic ash hillside” in Japan; photograph by flickr user GeoJuice.] If I weren’t going to be in California March 23rd and 24th, I’m pretty sure I’d be in Boston at the GSD’s “Landscape Infrastructure” symposium, which promises a fascinating range of discussion on “the future of infrastructure and urbanization […]

munitions landscape

[The Radford Army Ammunitions Plant on the New River, in southwest Virginia.] FASLANYC takes us on a tour of particularly bizarre militarized landscape typology — the World War II-era munitions plant, beginning with the Radford Army Ammunitions Plant in southwestern Virgina. Digging into the archives at the Historic American Landscapes Survey, Davis excavates the fascinating […]

de-damming the dutch delta

[The Haringvliet Dam] In recent years, as they seek to rethink the flood control infrastructures and climate defense systems of the Mississippi Delta, American politicians, engineers, planners, and designers have, with good reason, looked to the Netherlands for inspiration and expertise. This is entirely natural, as the Netherlands has long been the world’s most sophisticated […]

marsh experiments

[A model built by Alan Berger, Harvard graduate student Gena Wirth, MIT professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf, and CEE graduate student Jeff Rominger, to test for the optimum design of pollutant-removing vegetated channels, as part of Berger and P-REX’s Pontine Systemic Design; image via MITnews.] I love this: [T]he Pontine Marshes project […]

geologic helium machine

[A portion of the Cliffside field snakes tentacles across flat pasture concealing ancient anticlines.] Just outside Amarillo, Texas, the Cliffside field stores much of the nation’s helium reserves in a naturally-occurring geologic dome. It is part of a complex of partially-privatized fields, mines, domes, and pipelines which extends nearly two hundred miles north-south, from the […]

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) […]

alan berger interviewed

While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare.  The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane […]

landscape infrastructures: posthumous live blog

Been more or less out of it this week due to a little quarantine situation, but fortunately a lot of reading material has arrived on my doorstep and it’s been topped off with the arrival of the Landscape Infrastructures symposium DVD (available here). So Stephen’s joined me for a new (and entirely unannounced and therefore […]