re-industrial – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: re-industrial

dharavi: globalization and spontaneously mixed uses

[The following piece, on the surprising ways that the residents of the Mumbai settlement of Dharavi have integrated that urban agglomeration into global economic networks, and the value of the unique spatial formatting that both enables and results from that integration, is the second thoroughly-footnoted guest post we’ve run from Peter Nunns. (The first was […]

the network as industry

[“Interior components of the cooling system” at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal’s report for Domus on Facebook’s Open Computer Project, which “describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre”.] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the […]

kotkin contra khanna

[Sorting facilities at Port of Singapore in the foreground, downtown Singapore in the background; via flickr/Storm Crypt] Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the […]

waste-to-energy plants

An article in the New York Times discusses Europe’s waste-to-energy plants (which are key components of a successful closed-loop manufacturing process) and why no such plants are under construction in the United States: The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here [in Horsholm, Denmark] are at peace with the hulking neighbor just […]

clui spring newsletter

[Part of the James River ghost fleet, one of the three remaining floating stockpiles in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, via wikipedia] CLUI’s spring Lay of the Land surveys the American landscape of ship breaking (which is largely fed by the Congressionally-mandated dismantling of the ghost fleets), develops a linkage between Kodak Park (“said to […]

readings: cars, ships, and nuclear reactors

[all photographs from Andrea Frank’s series “Ports and Ships”] 1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool: Where […]

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) […]

readings: the digital city

1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]

re-industrial detroit

An interesting article by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at The New Republic looks at how Detroit might recover from decades of decline; this includes looking at how Detroit might be re-industrialized (the re-industrial path is an even more fascinating proposition than the well-tread path to post-industrial health, though there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the […]