los angeles – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: los angeles

April 16, 2011 – 6:00 am

“we’d rather people forgot about us”

[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking “our subterranean infrastructure”; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, geography, landscape, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments Off on “we’d rather people forgot about us” | Permalink
July 27, 2010 – 2:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter nine index

“Once a vast carpet of healthy vegetation and virgin forest, the Amazon rain forest is changing rapidly. This image of Bolivia shows dramatic deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Loggers have cut long paths into the forest, while ranchers have cleared large blocks for their herds. Fanning out from these clear-cut areas are settlements built in […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club | Also tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 17, 2010 – 1:07 pm

risk

These are chapters eight and nine of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. Thinking about the new urban landscape and public space and wondering where to start, I suddenly remember how, as a boy, I built my first crystal receiver […] You would […]

By Stephen | Posted in economics, infrastructure, mammoth book club | Also tagged , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
June 17, 2010 – 9:00 pm

starting from zero

This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Also tagged | Comments (17) | Permalink
June 10, 2010 – 4:55 pm

urban crude

While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail.  Oil wells sprout like hardy […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, landscape | Also tagged , , , , | Comments Off on urban crude | Permalink
May 14, 2010 – 1:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter three index (updated 17 may)

[Crude City today: a woman crosses oil pipelines in the Niger delta; photograph by Ed Kashi for National Geographic.] Nam Henderson ponders the relationship between urban density and oil production in Los Angeles, and wonders if future landscapes might develop from the evolution of Leo Marx’s classic formulation, the machine in the garden, to the […]

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May 11, 2010 – 11:52 am

oildorado

You’ve arrived at week three of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It’s cliche to reference dinosaurs when describing the oil well pumps which are ubiquitous throughout the LA basin, but as a 5 year old obsessed with those prehistoric […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club | Also tagged , , | Comments (19) | Permalink
May 5, 2010 – 8:38 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter two index (updated 6 may)

[A still from Gumball Rally, via motortrend.com. As high-speed races on the clogged freeways of Los Angeles have become increasingly implausible, the wide-open expanse of paved riverbed has proven irresistible to filmmakers.] SUPRbrains’ “The Lowline” hypothesizes futures for the river as a series of Tschumi-esque event-spaces. F.A.D.’s “Visual Histories of the Los Angeles River: Past and Envisioned […]

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Also tagged , | Comments (9) | Permalink
May 3, 2010 – 5:00 am

“the parrot, the weed, and the sludge mat”

You’ve arrived at week two of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here — taking particular note of the index of contributing posts for the first chapter, which tracks the sprawl of the discussion across other blogs. [The lower reaches of […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (22) | Permalink
April 15, 2009 – 2:44 pm

new books!

New Books! On the left (The author’s blog is absolutely worth reading regularly as well.) On the right Has anyone else read either of them? I’ll post some thoughts as I work my way though. UPDATE: Speaking of books, this one has just been added to my must-buy list, and I’m on the waiting list […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Comments (4) | Permalink