[An artist’s conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970’s, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including “the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River […]
A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation […]
This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. [Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90] “Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the […]
[Aerial photograph of sludge mats swirling in the Los Angeles River by flickr user Vision Aerie] As we’re about to jump scales in our reading of The Infrastructural City — from the post-natural ecologies and mining operations of the first section of the book, “Landscape”, to the networks of cell towers and cable lines featured […]
[Jake Longstreth’s “Skybox”; while the pit mines and flood-control apparatus found in Irwindale are one particularly spectacular kind of marginal landscape, there are many other kinds, exhibiting varying degrees of marginality, including speedways — such as the Irwindale Speedway — and the ubiquitous suburban strip.] DPR-Barcelona returns to a familiar theme for that blog, the […]
[Narrow Streets L.A. is a blog which posts photographs of greater Los Angeles streets, digitally manipulated in exactly the way you would expect from the title: made narrower. While occasionally it may go a bit overboard and lurch towards self-parody, generally it is a fantastic experiment — postcards from an alternate Los Angeles — showing […]
We’re back from our week off with another installment of Reading the Infrastructural City; if you haven’t been following along, you can catch up on the series here and see the introductory post here. [Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI] The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural […]
[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 […]
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 […]
[Prepared Greenaid seedbombs, awaiting dispersal; photograph by Fletcher Studio via Sustainable Cities Collective] Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid […]
[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 […]
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 […]
In the comments at DPR-Barcelona, David Maisel points us to a pair of news articles on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s latest plan for the Owens Lake playa: The Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners [in December] unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of […]
Images by Robin Black Photography for the Owens Lake Project, an ongoing photo documentary chronicling the rejuvenation of Owens Lake. See the website for many more. Black comments at DPR – Barcelona: “No more is it a toxic wasteland, though it’s certainly odd, and occasionally ugly, and still troublesome along the portions deemed too disturbed to recover. Life is returning […]
From now until the beginning of August, mammoth is hosting a chapter-by-chapter reading and discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. This post is the first in that series, and discusses Owens Lake; for the full schedule of readings and an introduction to the series (and the book), click here. In addition […]
April 19, 2010 – 10:26 pm
[Owens Lake, via google maps] A quick note: our discussion of The Infrastructural City will kick off next Monday, here and elsewhere, with posts and comments related to the first chapter, “Reconstructing the Void”, which looks at the relationship between Los Angeles and Owens Lake. If you commented on the first post, you should have […]
[A portion of the Alameda Trench, a cut in the surface of Los Angeles which runs “ten miles long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-three feet deep”, carrying over $200 billion in cargo each year, as photographed by Lane Barden for The Infrastructural City; image via a Places Journal slideshow] — UPDATE: this book club is […]
