[Image: Window by Susanna Battin, courtesy of the artist]. If you're out driving in Los Angeles this coming Friday, December 2, consider using the second lane from the left, heading south on I-15 immediately after the 91 Freeway interchange and before the East Ontario exit: artist Susanna Battin's new...
The Limits of Preservation
[Images: From Minescape by Brett Van Ort]. The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to...
Brick Swarm
[Image: From "Flight Assembled Architecture" by Gramazio & Kohler]. Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler "will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks" next month—starting 2 December 2011—at the FRAC Center in France. The result, they...
Detection Landscapes
[Images: Botanical photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt]. I've been going through a lot of old files and papers recently, and I thus found a short piece I clipped from New Scientist five years ago. I absolutely love stories like this, and I swoon a little bit when I read them; it turns out that "plants...
Aerial Sheriff
[Image: A U.S. Predator drone, photographed by Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia]. The Send Equipment for National Defense Act, sponsored by Texas Representative Ted Poe, would "require that 10 percent of certain equipment returned from Iraq—like Humvees, night-vision...
Debt Cemetery
Spanish cities are "buckling under bills for empty swimming pools, shuttered sports facilities and unpopular vacation complexes," according to Miller-McCune. Their economies are "saddled with thousands of publicly funded construction projects made in the starrier moments of a mid-2000s property boom....
Infra
[Image: Men of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)]. Photographer Richard Mosse, whom long-time readers might recognize from his two interviews here on BLDGBLOG, will be celebrating a new show tonight, Thursday, November 17th, at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City....
Pole Farm
[Image: Photo by Alissa Walker of Gelatobaby]. An overlooked urban land-use typology is the telephone pole farm, used for honing the climbing skills of telephone-repair personnel, as seen here in a photograph from Los Angeles by Alissa Walker. Along these lines, it might be interesting to explore a...
Project Ice Shield
[Image: "L.A. Ice" by Victor Hadjikyriacou, produced for Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of last year's Landscape Futures Super-Workshop]. The city of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, will attempt to keep itself cool over the summer by way of a kind of artificial glacier. According to the...
Unnatural History
[Image: Liam Young flying self-illuminated drone quadcopters in Holland for a celebratory nighttime crowd]. Architect Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today is apparently speaking in only a few hours at the CCA in San Francisco. Be sure to check it out, if you're anywhere nearby; Liam will be discussing...
State of Air
[Image: Via China Digital Times]. China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according...
