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parainfrastructures
We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to...
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phantom stories
[Homes on the outskirts of Shanghai, via Google Maps.] A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating...
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window washing
[Facade of Pharos Building, Hoofddorp, Vanessa van Dam, 2002 -- never realized.] Given our recent thinking about the role of maintenance in urban design, I was quite interested when I noticed, in a...
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low roads and architecture
[Building 20 at MIT, a "250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by...
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the network as industry
["Interior components of the cooling system" at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal's report for Domus on Facebook's Open Computer Project, which "describes in detail how to...
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hypothethical signs
[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu's mayoral campaign.] This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of...
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dharavi: globalization and spontaneously mixed uses
[The following piece, on the surprising ways that the residents of the Mumbai settlement of Dharavi have integrated that urban agglomeration into global economic networks, and the value of the unique...
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unknown unknowns
0. Everyone’s favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotation: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do...
View Article“brute force architecture”
We highly recommend checking out Bryan Boyer’s latest post, “Brute Force Architecture and its Discontents”, which is a fascinating take on OMA and its uinque impact on the operational models of other...
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zones and extrastatecraft
[A zone: Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius. As a bonus, Ebene is also an excellent example of the capacity of the Tubes to direct urban futures, as one of its prime selling points is that it sits at a...
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the new modulated world of invisible fields
[A portion of Nicolas Rapp's map of the internet for Fortune magazine.] Writing for Quaderns, Kazys Varnelis argues for an infrastructural urbanism that not only embraces and seeks to design (or...
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the geopolitics of subtraction
[Map of the IIRSA's Amazonian axis, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across the Andes; from IIRSA document "8 Ejes de Integración de la Infraestructura de América del Sur"] Keller Easterling,...
View Articlefinance fundamentals i
Mammoth has long held an interest in the broad social, economic, and logistical systems which provide the context within which any infrastructure, landscape, or building is designed and constructed....
View Articleglitches, flash crashes, and very bad futurists
Last fall, Vincent deBritto and Ozayr Saloojee invited me to come visit their Resilient Infrastructures project at the University of Minnesota; my main contribution was to deliver the lecture above,...
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semipile
[As a Friday return to blogging for mammoth, photographs of Formlessfinder's lovely half-pile under cantilevered canopy at Design Miami, December 2013. You can watch the architects talk about the...
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