Landscape+Urbanism

Category: infrastructure

  • Siftings: 01.11.12

    ““All great art is born of the metropolis.” – Ezra Pound  :: image via NY Times A great little snapshot on urban serendipity from the NY Times that looks at the accidental ‘curation’ of spaces that the urban environment yields, such as the framed view from the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Perhaps the uniformity…

  • Siftings 01.06.12

    Another round of Siftings from the past couple of days.  Starting off with a couple of Occupy-related posts, including a great article from Saskia Sassen and Hans Haacke from Artforum entitled ‘Imminent Domain‘.  The first sentence – “OCCUPYING IS NOT THE SAME as demonstrating…” points out a recent and annoying trend of calling any sort…

  • Source: Whatever Happened to Urbanism? – Koolhaas

    In 1995, Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau published ‘S,M,L,XL’, one in a line of oversized volumes so fondly disseminated by the Dutch.  Amazon mentions the work as “extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city–and complex illustrations…” giving shape to a mixed…

  • Reading the Landscape: Terra Fluxus

    This essay, Terra Fluxus by James Corner, from the Landscape Urbanism Reader is considered one of the seminal texts in formulating landscape urbanism theory.  Obviously it has had an impact on me personally, as I used it for the name of my firm, with a respectful tip of the hat to Mr. Corner.  The concept…

  • Reading List: Landscape Infrastructure: Case Studies by SWA

    ‘Landscape Infrastructure: Case Studies by SWA‘ published in 2011, is edited by the Infrastructure Research Initiative of SWA including Los Angeles office principals Gerdo Aquino and Ying-Yu Hung.  This is supplemented with contributions from Charles Waldheim, Julie Czerniak, Adriaan Geuze, Matthew Skjonsberg and Alexander Robinson.  While ostensibly about landscape infrastructure, this type of book is…

  • Mississippi Modelling

    An article that came up amidst discussions on the Landscape Urbanism Reader revisits the question of scale brought by up Linda Pollak in her essay ‘Constructed Ground’.   On Design Observer, Kristi Dykema Cheramie investigates the wonderful history of the massive model built to simulate river conditions in her essay The Scale of Nature: Modeling…

  • RBC: Zeekracht (OMA)

    Zeekracht | OMA A related follow-up to the essay by Koolhaas, this short essay explores Zeekracht, a master plan for the North Sea, driven by it’s “high wind and consistent wind speeds and shallow waters…” making it “…arguably the world’s most suitable area for large-scale wind farming.”  The project master plan (below) outlines the strategy. …

  • The Red Brick Chronicles – ‘Advancement verus Apocalypse’ by Rem Koolhaas

    As I mentioned in the recent reckoning of the L+U blog, I wanted to focus on a number of recent texts that I’ve had the chance to delve into (by disconnecting myself from the nefarious teat of the RSS feeder)  Of significance is finally getting around to expanding on the initial readings of the book…

  • More Hidden Rivers – NYC

    An interesting post from Urban Omnibus from earlier in January entitled ‘Grey vs. Green: Daylighting the Saw Mill River‘ is less intriguing in design concept that in larger idea of envisioning the expression of the variety of waterways that are hidden/buried/forgotten within our urban areas.  As referenced by Eric Sanderson through  his work on the…

  • More Hidden Rivers

    Always a fan of explorations of lost rivers, this one is takes the existing urban pattern and erases the former route of the Fleet River in London (via the Londonist) “As most readers will know (and we’ve seen first hand), the river is now entirely underground and used as a sewer, but you can still…