Category: infrastructure

  • 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…

  • An Experimental Landscape Architecture

    Coverage of some of Alan Berger’s work with P-REX on the Pontine Marshes has appeared on mammoth, the most refreshingly non-architectural of architecture blogs, borrowing a note from BLDGBLOG and Pruned in their fascination with the large-scale landscape infrastructural interventions that don’t seem to make the pages of all but a few ‘landscape architecture’ media…

  • Telectroscopic Connections

    A post by Varnelis mentioned a couple of interesting ideas of crossing space, both virtually and physically through various modern forms of communication. Three items come from his post: 1. Chatroulette—a site that pairs you with a random person somewhere on the Internet so that you have a webcam conversation… which to me just seems…

  • Take Back the Streets 2

    A follow up to the story from Korea and the daylighted stream that was realized upon the removal of a highway, this ephemeral project from San Francisco (via Streetsblog SF) takes the same idea of remnant roadway and thinks of it in terms of gardening: “A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of…

  • Take Back the Streets 1

    From Fast Company: “Most metropolis’ are so busy building the future that they don’t have time to re-think the past. Not so with Seoul, South Korea. In 2003, the city demolished a downtown freeway to restore an ancient stream that once flowed beneath the thoroughfare. More than 75% of the scrap material from the demolition…

  • More on Digital Media

    A follow-up to the interactive interview on Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture Bradley Cantrell sent me a couple of links to the work he and others are doing in the digitial realm down at Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University. :: image via reactscape The first is his own blog, reactscape.visual-logic.com,…

  • Certificate in Urban Green Infrastructure

    My colleagues Brice Maryman and Nate Cormier, both landscape architects at SvR Design Company in Seattle, are teaching a pair of online courses this Spring and Summer with a focus on Urban Green Infrastructure. These two know the ins and outs of the topic, through their work locally and through the ever-expanding Green Infrastructure Wiki.…

  • On Landscape Criticism

    A great ongoing series of posts on Urban Omnibus delves into one of those topics that seems missing from the dialogue in landscape architecture — that of real criticism regarding the profession. I don’t mean the type of mindless carping that happens based on polarities of viewpoint or in response to the profession being declared…

  • DC Transit Visualization

    Via Urban Tick, a visualization of the Washington DC transit system. “Developed by Rahul Nair in Processing. It is visualised in processing with a data set from WMATA transit system. The transport network has made their dat available trough the open Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS).” Cool representation.Washington D.C. Transit from Rahul Nair on Vimeo.…

  • Hydrological Infill

    As an adjunct to the recent post on the abstract ‘Blue Road’ that attempts to restore in spirit hidden waterways, the inverse process (proposed, but thankfully not implemented) of river removal from in NYC, circa 1924 as a way to alleviate traffic congestion – via Gothamist: “In this issue of Popular Science, circa 1924, there’s…