speculative – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: speculative

October 7, 2009 – 9:22 am

ephemeral infrastructures

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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Also tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 29, 2009 – 12:17 pm

it’s in ohio

[Black volcanic sand desert in Iceland, via flickr user meiburgin.] Back in August, while on vacation, I read David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.  A pair of geographies he invented, the suburb of East Corinth and the Great Ohio Desert, particularly fascinated me, as they demonstrate how ordinary ideas (the urban […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, urbanism | Also tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
July 31, 2009 – 12:27 pm

cloud skippers

Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”: Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the […]

By rholmes | Posted in speculative-architecture | Also tagged , | Comments (6) | Permalink
May 10, 2009 – 9:04 pm

49 utopias

I agree with all this. Big Bang Urbanism – what a great term.  Those ground up utopian visions are the lifted trucks of the architecture world – often technically proficient, yet generally ridiculous, public displays of ‘boldness’ or ‘vision’.  (Sadly, this isn’t a problem only suffered by select urban schemata, coughcalatravacough.) A couple of weeks ago, I […]

By Stephen | Posted in the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink