February 17, 2010 – 11:17 pm
Dan Hill has (another) excellent post at City of Sound examining what he’s referring to as “emergent urbanism”, or the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric” by community organizations and individuals acting “outside of traditional planning processes”. I’m particularly pleased by (a) the presentation of the example of Renew Newcastle, which, [...]
February 15, 2010 – 11:02 am
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) [...]
February 11, 2010 – 2:40 pm
[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 in [...]
January 15, 2010 – 12:41 pm
Jeff Maki writes at Urban Omnibus about New York City’s steam tunnels as a potential analog precursor to future mass civic participation in the maintenance of urban infrastructure, which may be an increasingly necessary tactic, given the massive repair deficit North America’s urban infrastructures face.
January 13, 2010 – 5:56 pm
[update: thanks to commenter цarьchitect, a screen capture from a demo for SIM Building, a program of the sort which likely provides the underlying architecture for UrbanSim]
An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the intersections [...]
January 12, 2010 – 8:11 pm
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 [...]
January 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm
I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention. In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay [...]
January 7, 2010 – 1:36 pm
Since I posted a link to Alec MacGillis’s piece on Richard Florida, it’s worth also posting links to Ryan Avent’s critique of the piece, MacGillis’s response, and Avent’s response-to-the-response-to-his-critique.
[update: see also the Next American City's commentary]
January 5, 2010 – 2:45 pm
Alec MacGillis has an appropriately harsh look at a decade of Richard Florida in the American Prospect.
[via @loudpaper]
December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am
Adrian Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth’s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical networks” (itself a response to another post by Lahoud on a recent studio he led), discussing how to properly read studio proposals, the master plan “as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one”, Lahoud’s ambivalence about the [...]
December 9, 2009 – 5:55 pm
The Dirt has a lengthy interview conducted by Pierre Belanger with Joe Brown, chief executive of planning, design, and development at AECOM, the architecture and engineering firm that swallowed EDAW (formerly the world’s largest firm primarily focused on landscape architecture, if I recall correctly). The interview covers a wide range of issues, from the [...]
December 9, 2009 – 8:36 am
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 [...]
December 3, 2009 – 8:10 pm
[Amos Coal Power Plant, from Mitch Epstein's fantastic series American Power]
Adrian Lahoud has a lengthy post on infrastructure and urbanism at Post-Traumatic Urbanism; the post is well worth reading. A handful of somewhat scattered comments on it follow.
I strongly agree with the emphasis on “complex urban interdependencies”, in addition to “physical artefacts” of infrastructure. [...]
November 6, 2009 – 9:05 am
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 2007 [...]
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 26, 2009 – 9:22 am
faslanyc has a good piece on the weakness of metaphor as a grounding literary device for landscape architecture. The post is in reaction to Andrew Blum’s “Metaphor Remediation”, recently run in Places.
I approvingly cited Blum’s article a couple times, so I re-read Blum’s article with faslanyc’s criticism in mind. Having done so, I think maybe [...]
October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am
Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct [...]
October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am
Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans:
Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to say [...]
October 20, 2009 – 10:25 am
[photograph by Maximilian Haidacher, via polar inertia]
The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are canvases [...]
October 9, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK:
…the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.
In fact, it’s surpassingly hard to [...]
