organization-work – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: organization-work

May 8, 2013 – 9:24 pm

the geopolitics of subtraction

[Map of the IIRSA’s Amazonian axis, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across the Andes; from IIRSA document “8 Ejes de Integración de la Infraestructura de América del Sur”] Keller Easterling, speculating about “a new counterintuitive economic model” of “infrastructural subtraction” in Domus last November: “What are the points of leverage, trip distances or economies […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, economics, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on the geopolitics of subtraction | Permalink
October 30, 2012 – 9:16 pm

palletized

[Massive warehouse districts both east and west of I-35 in Laredo, Texas, filled with goods shipped across the Mexican border.] Tom Vanderbilt, with a short history of the pallet, one of those logistical objects whose dimensions and properties format much of the space we live in, from store shelves to exurban warehouse districts: For an […]

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June 15, 2012 – 6:00 am

zones and extrastatecraft

[A zone: Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius. As a bonus, Ebene is also an excellent example of the capacity of the Tubes to direct urban futures, as one of its prime selling points is that it sits at a landing point for the “the SAT3/WASC/SAFE sub-marine cable which links Southern Europe, Western and Southern Africa and […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, futures, geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Also tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 30, 2012 – 9:46 pm

dry commonwealths

[The eighty-six proposed “commonwealths” of the lower forty-eight states, from “The Commonwealth Approach”.] 1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced. I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , | Comments (5) | Permalink
September 22, 2011 – 6:00 am

border box

The following piece is a part of Border Town’s supplementary online discussion, which is collated at the Border Town website.  Border Town is a “10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that investigated the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones” this summer, led by Tim Maly and […]

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure | 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
June 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm

reluctant migration

In yet another great little piece at Domus, Fred Scharmen and Molly Wright Steenson look at the history and potential of the relationship between architecture and the field of interaction design, arguing that further disciplinary promiscuity would benefit both architects and interaction designers: “Instead of bringing together users through machines, what if interaction design were […]

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