Dive into the archives.
- Postcards from a Future
[Scenario: The iconic City office tower is now high-rise housing. Originally converted into luxury flats, the block soon slid down the social scale to become a high-density, multi-occupation tower block. The Gherkin now worries the authorities as a potential slum. Refugees from equatorial lands have moved north in search of food. They make their [...]
- Corn Belt 2.0: Syncing the Starchscape
[Mountain of Corn.]
Editors Note: File under Feedback: Architecture’s New Territories, an InfraNet Lab seminar at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto. Guest post and images are by Matthew Spremulli. Matthew will be continuing this work in his MArch thesis, which will be blogged at the ever-expanding reField.
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Corn has unquestionably become [...]
- InfraNet does HotDocs
[Chelyabinsk, Russia, a nuclear dumping site for decades, is the subject of the film Tankograd.]
Festival season is starting. In particular, we are excited about a slew of films that are part of the Canadian International Documentary Festival, nicknamed HotDocs, that runs April 29 – May 9, 2010 here in Toronto. With so many fascinating accounts [...]
- Frozen Cities Liquid Networks: Re-rigging Aumanil
[Arctic nations, continental shelves and territorial limits]
[Ed note: this work was produced in the Frozen Cities Liquid Networks studio.]
At 162,000 km (including the Arctic Archipelago), Canada is the country with the longest Arctic shoreline – ahead of its compatriots Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, and the USA. Arctic Nations have been racing to chart their respective under-water [...]
- Terrestrial Discontinuities
[In 2007, an ill-conceived 6,000 mile network of energy corridors in the US West represents the collective ambition of Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service. The project is called the West-wide Energy Corridor.]
Following a trail from our Dust Bowl post last week, we [...]
- -arium: Weather + Architecture
[Arium: Weather + Architecture]
Is Weather the last vestige of nature in the City?
Do the forces in Weather systems hold the key to the energy crisis?
Is instability and disorder something that can be designed?
Is Weather the nemesis of Architecture or its best friend?
Is Weather becoming the last form of cultural specificity?
Does it all come down to [...]
- Vortex streets
[Alternating eddies of vortex street.]
[The Canary Islands as an eddy-creating obstacle via GSFC/NASA.]
Vortex streets emerge when the right wind and cloud formation encounters the right kind of obstacle. Theodore von Kármán, a fluid dynamicist, observed and documented this phenomenon. Swirling rings sequence along a street-like corridor trail beyond the obstacle. Each ring stems from an [...]
- HYDROCity Exhibition opens tonight
[HYDROCity exhibition opens tonight at the Toronto Free Gallery and features 30 projects on hydrology and urbanism.]
With almost 30 projects and proposals addressing the opportunities and challenges of water in/around/under/through the city, we are excited to announce the HYDROCity exhibition opening tonight at the Toronto Free Gallery (1277 Bloor St W).
HYDROCity features the work of [...]
- Petropolis
[A tailings pond is a toxic lake so dangerous that air cannon and scarecrows are used to deter wildlife. © Greenpeace / Eamon Mac Mahon]
One of my favorite films from this year’s TIFF has to be Peter Mettler’s Petrolis. Mettler, who was the cinematographer for Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes, takes on a directorial role on [...]
- Clean Urbanism / Dirty Realism
[Cover of issue #11 from Rotterdam-based MONU.]
The output of MONU (Magazine on Urbanism) continues to impress, and with issue #11, Bernd Upmeyer and company raise the bar. This issue is dedicated to clean urbanism and a range of responses, mostly antagonizing or shoring up sustainability and its discontents, come pouring in. An initial browse reminds [...]
