readings – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: readings

June 22, 2010 – 10:04 am

FAT, falcons

At Action!, Rory Hyde has written a great review of ‘extra/ordinary’, the national conference of the Australian Institute of Architects. Framed around a description of work presented by Elemental, Teddy Cruz, and F.A.T., the post raises some of the same issues we’re discussing in mammoth’s recent post on The Infrastructural City. On the necessity of a […]

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March 22, 2010 – 8:00 pm

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 […]

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February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm

metropolis prognostications

[Storm surge barriers under construction near New Orleans; image source] In their January issue, Metropolis asks architects and designers to offer predictions, inspirations, and prognostications for the coming decade.   It’ll be no great surprise to readers of mammoth that I’m particularly intrigued by the predictions grouped under “landscape architecture”, which involve reconstructed storm barriers […]

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January 8, 2010 – 1:27 pm

ruins, colosseums, squelettes

Read Quiet Babylon‘s recent post on the slow production of ruins, scrubbing post-boom projects from architectural portfolios, fifteen hundred years of adaptive reuse of the Coliseum in Rome, and more; Maly gets bonus points for including a Wittgenstein anecdote of dubious provenance.

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December 9, 2009 – 8:36 am

free association design

Via @bldgblog‘s link to this great post on the Mexican city of Guanajuato (which I first became fascinated with when the friend who introduced Stephen and I spent part of a summer there with an architecture studio), I see that Brett Milligan, whose project “Inundating the Border” mammoth briefly touched on in an earlier post […]

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December 3, 2009 – 10:43 am

readings: bloggers

A few blogs, mostly relatively recently added to the reading list: Millenium People, which is on an Arctic hiatus, but should return after Christmas; a recommended starting point: the data city + jules verne // Serial Consign, Greg Smith (of Vague Terrain) on “digital culture and information design” // Quiet Babylon; as it says, “cyborgs, […]

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November 17, 2009 – 4:33 pm

varnelis interview at triple canopy

Kazys Varnelis follows up his recent interview of Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) by himself being interviewed, at Triple Canopy (whose last two issues on urbanism are indispensable): Triple Canopy: You’ve argued that it’s no longer possible to rebuild existing infrastructures or, for that matter, to build better ones. And you’ve […]

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November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am

readings: hydrologically situated infrastructures

Whether immense re-configurations of watersheds on a geological scale or fine and playful tunings of the interactions between city-dwellers and the infrastructures that deliver their water, those that transmit water or those that sit on and in it, the intersection of hydrology and infrastructure is a continual fascination for mammoth. Image from Yue Yuan Zheng’s […]

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September 15, 2009 – 8:11 am

pruned on under spaces

Pruned’s recent series Under Spaces (part one, part two, part three) is very good — I’m particularly enamored with Hans Herrmann’s Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project from Clemson University, which inserts an urban park beneath Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction“, mostly because I think the notion that the space of the park would […]

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August 26, 2009 – 2:13 pm

wunderkammer on the high line

Wunderkammer has a nice piece by Ned Shalanski on the High Line, which approaches the High Line from a rather different perspective than the one I’ve tended to bring to it (bemoaning the loss of the landscape that had developed over time, etc.).  A couple of nice observations, about the High Line as the product […]

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August 18, 2009 – 11:35 am

smudge clui tour

Highly recommend reading Smudge’s account of a CLUI tour of nuclear New Mexico, if you missed BLDGBLOG and Pruned‘s recommendations (which seems unlikely, because I don’t know why anyone would be reading mammoth but not that pair): “This sense of the technological sublime in New Mexico runs from the earthships of Taos to the test […]

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July 10, 2009 – 8:49 am

dirt

My father was trained as an agronomist, so I endured a fair number of lectures as a child about the importance of distinguishing between soil and dirt.  Nonetheless, I recently added David Montgomery’s Dirt (which is about soil) to my reading list, and Jim Rossignol’s review of another book entitled Dirt (this one — also […]

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