Dive into the archives.
- Stored Potential
[The 62-interlocked concrete silos as seen from I-80, Omaha, Nebraska. Courtesy flickr user bnmelvin.]
It is a typical North American scene: the hulking iconic residue of 20th-century industrial farming sitting there mocking any would-be re-user. Demolition costs are considerable enough that across North America, these monoliths have sat there vacant, unused, and on very few occassions [...]
- Frozen Cities / Liquid Networks. (air)port & Infrastructural Autonomy
[Air/Port, a new infrastructure for Igloolik. Image courtesy of Lubell and Phull]
The melting of the polar caps will not only open up new shipping routes such as the North-West and Northern Passage, it has the potential to connect existing communities in the Arctic to a larger network of distribution. Presently, most Arctic communities depend [...]
- Frozen Cities Liquid Networks: Landjacking the Mackenzie
[The amphibious landscape of Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories]
At 4,200 kilometres in length, the Mackenzie River in North-western Canada is one of the longest rivers in the world (11th). Its watershed, 1.8 million square kilometres in size, drains one-fifth of the country. The River, whose headwaters begin in the Peace and Athabasca rivers, [...]
- Geoengineering After the Tipping Point
[Eruption of Mount Pinatubo pumped large quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, effectively changing the climate]
The increasing speed that climate change is impacting our globe, coupled with slow transformations of lifestyle and policy to radically reduce GHG emissions, have prompted many climate change scientists to (re)consider Geoengineering, A.K.A planetary climate-engineering, to rapidly cool the [...]
- Hygeia: A City of Health, 1876
[Hygeia: A City of Health Re-Imagination of the 20th Century by Joshua Arnold, completed under Norman Klein while at SciArc, 2005.]
Dr. Benjamin Richardson conceived of a city of health called Hygeia in 1876. Dr Richardson is an M.D., and he calculated a death rate for Hygeia of 8 per 1,000 in the first generation and [...]
- Inverted Infrastructural Monuments, pt. 3
[The Escondida Mine in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Image courtesy NASA GSFC, MITI, ERSDAC, JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.]
The nationalization of the Chilean copper mines, originally pioneered in the 1950s, was built around the considerable dependence of the Chilean economy on copper exports–some 60 to 75% of the Chilean GDP comes from copper exports. [...]
- Oil + Water
[Oil+Water Conference April 8-10, 2010.]
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC-SB is presenting a series of fantastic events this year on the theme Oil+Water. With this event they turn to their own backyard: the case of Southern California. Oil + Water commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Santa Barbara oil spill, and provides an opportunity to [...]
- 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 [...]
- Particulate Swarms
[Radar image of Sydney during the dust storm of September 2009 - its largest in 70 years.]
Editors Note: File under Glacier / Island / Storm, a studio run by BLDGBLOG at Columbia University GSAPP. Storm edition.
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"It is time / It is time for / It is time for stormy weather" – The Pixies
Storms deal in [...]
