Category: books
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Working the Line
My current (re)fascination with the Center for Land Use Interpretation involves getting up to date on their latest events (as well as tearing through their bookstore and grabbing some gems to dig through – reviews/info coming soon). A recent announcement caught my eye. The ideas of margins and borders is constantly fascinating, along with the…
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The Beauty of Reading (Books)
The lack of functioning monitor and wonder of summer have given me the opportunity to dive in and complete a few books that have been laying around unfinished. While I am intrigued by the Kindle and my sister espouses the merits of B&Ns’ Nook – I still am drawn to the written word – on…
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3rd Coast Atlas
Having resided in Portland for over 13 years, I now consider myself solidly ‘West Coast’ and an adapted non-native (as opposed to invasive) resident of the Cascadia Megaregion. But 20+ years living literally near the middle and continued explorations of some midwestern cities has given me an appreciation for the third coast – a term…
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Walhattan
An amazing if somewhat shocking graphic spotted on A Daily Dose of Architecture, “The above is from Jesse LeCavalier’s essay “All Those Numbers” at Places: Design Observer. In it, the architect investigates “the design possibilities latent not only in Walmart’s building types but also in the organizational practices — especially its unparalleled expertise in logistics.”…
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Ecological Urbanism: Introduction Part 2
Continuing the investigations of the introduction to the book ‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (read Part 1 here) – we pick up on the concepts of ecological urbanism in the explosion of interest in urban and local food production. Near and dear to my interests, the ability to transform such shrinking cities like Detroit, emulating the lessons and…
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Ecological Urbanism – Introduction Part 1
‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (640 pages, Lars Müller Publishers; 1 edition (May 1, 2010) edited by Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty) literally arrived with a thud last week, the 650 page brick like tome touching down on the front step of the house with much anticipation. Tempted as I was, a number of deadlines made me hold…
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Reading Owens Lake
One of my favorite chapters of the great Infrastructural City (read my review here) is the chapter by Barry Lehrman entitled ‘Reconstructing the Void: Owens Lake’ which delves into the ‘accidental preservation’ of the Owens Lake basin due to the depletion of water resources as they were diverted to Los Angeles. As part of the…
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Drawing the Land
A unique opportunity to tap into one of the most creative minds in modern landscape architecture representation, Brad Cantrell, via an online webinar/interview on Land8Lounge conducted by Drew Maifield of The LANDWIRE. Cantrell is author of Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture (Published by Wiley, 2010) which promises to be the most complete resource of landscape…
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Bibliophilic Mecca
As a book lover, purchasing new reading materials is always one of those things that I both relish and anguish over, as it tends to put a sizable dent in the wallet. While fiction is one thing, the the high cost of many arch and landscape related volumes is sometimes laughable when deciding which $80…
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On Weather
Via InfranetLab, a fascinating book that looks interesting is entitled ‘-arium: Weather + Architecture’ spawned from a research investigation at the University of Toronto. With a cursory glance, it looks to be something of the same genus (at least in overall ideology) to that of Gissen’s recent book Subnature – which provides a focus more…