[Before the use of articulated concrete mats was standardized, the Army Corps often relied on a variety of other methods of revetment construction. The weaving and placement of willow fascine mattresses, as seen above, was one such earlier practice; the installation process is remarkably similar to and prefigures the process for concrete mats. Images via [...]
[In the summer of 1916, a pair of cyclones -- one coming from the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in Mississippi, the other coming from the Atlantic and landing in Charleston, South Carolina -- poured torrential rains ("all previous 24-hour records for rainfall were exceeded") across the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially [...]
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm
[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]
December 11, 2010 – 1:01 am
[Photograph by William Notman & Son, photographers, of a building encased in ice after a fire, 65–83 Little St. James Street, Montréal, Québec, 1888. From the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, via Sense of the City.] We’re taking the remainder of the dimly-lit month of December to rest, eat, read, and [...]
November 22, 2010 – 7:00 pm
[Appropriate for the gradual approach of winter in the mid-Atlantic: photographs from Alexander Gronsky's "The Edge", a series of shots taken along the outer boundary of Moscow; via @ballardian. Thinking about whitesward and glacier wrap again...]
November 14, 2010 – 6:00 am
Architect and photographer Simon Kennedy’s exhibition 635×508: Heygate Abstracted opens at the Bartlett School of Architecture this Monday.
October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm
[An abandoned portion of the "Golden Gate Estates" -- a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960's -- whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn't been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that [...]
October 1, 2010 – 11:58 am
["Mono Lake", 2008, from Mary Mattingly's "Nomadographies"] If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other. In between, there would be “clothing”. And if you really want to confuse [...]
August 26, 2010 – 6:56 pm
[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com] Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system: In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, [...]
Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2″ pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression. I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of [...]
[At the Washington Post, photographer David Deal steps inside, above, and beneath the District of Columbia's infrastructure and other hidden spaces -- the "Third Street Tunnel blower room", pictured above; Blue Plains settlement ponds in Southwest; the specimen room at the Natural History Museum; the Hecht Company warehouse on New York Avenue; and so on.]
November 20, 2009 – 12:53 pm
Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.
November 2, 2009 – 1:08 pm
["Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM"; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K's include "a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and [...]
October 14, 2009 – 11:00 am
[oil field maintained by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, photographed by Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes), via dpr-barcelona; visit Burtynsky's website for additional images from the book] Edward Burtynsky’s latest book and exhibition explores the landscapes of, machinery that produces, and products dervied from oil: “When I first started photographing industry it was out [...]
October 8, 2009 – 9:28 am
[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China. Zibo is [...]
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.]
Critical Terrain asked photographers Alex Fradkin, Tim Griffith, Mark Luthringer, and David Maisel to contribute their thoughts on the Edgar Martins digital fabrication episode, which I accidentally stumbled into earlier this month.
“Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer… Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915.” [via opus // more about the digital [...]
Eat your heart out Richard Serra. http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking. After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. via Nico Sy, who doesn’t [...]
