[Image: Posters for Grand Illusion, currently out of print from the Criterion Collection]. For the first film in Breaking Out and Breaking In a distributed film fest—where you watch the films at home and return here to discuss them online—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC,...
Architectural Nonessentials
306090, under the guest editorship of David Hays, is seeking "possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge." Hays asks, "What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices,...
Breaking Out and Breaking In
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC. [Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!]. Breaking Out and Breaking...
Landscapes of Dredge
[Image: The expansion of Manhattan island, via Urban Omnibus]. For those of you in New York, consider stopping by Studio-X NYC for a short visual history of geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, engineered earthforms, and other monuments of the dredge cycle as Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of...
Space Jack
[Image: "White Elephant" by Jimenez Lai, via Archinect]. Archinect is currently featuring a project called "White Elephant (Privately Soft)" by Jimenez Lai. Lai describes it as "a building inside a building," falling "somewhere between super-furniture and a small house." It's a flippable object, able...
Submarine City
[Image: New York Harbor, mapped in 1966, courtesy of NOAA]. Going through old links this morning, I found a story originally published in New York Magazine back in 2009 about the waters of New York City—a maritime metropolis that, many forget, is also an archipelago. "What, exactly, is down there?"...
Drone Landscapes, Intelligent Geotextiles, Geographic Countermeasures
[Image: The "buried cable intrusion detection sensor," courtesy of G-Max Security]. 1) The Israeli-based company G-Max Security makes a "buried cable intrusion detection sensor" that is "totally concealed and operates effectively under any type of surface," from open fields and highways to mountains,...
Remnant Infrastructure
[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of electric cables being installed in the Golden Gate Bridge, October 1935; courtesy of the NPS]. In an interestingly archaeological story from the world of digital infrastructure, engineers who discovered "an unused fibre optic cable in Mongolia" were able, after...
Loop Geography as Defensive Tactic
In a fascinating detail from a long series of articles published two years ago in the Washington Post, recently expanded as a stand-alone book called Top Secret America, we learn about one way to hide classified government infrastructure in plain sight. [Image: Photo by Michael S. Williamson, courtesy...
The Baffler
[Image: From "Baffles and Bastions: The Universal Features of Fortifications" by Lawrence H. Keeley, Marisa Fontana, and Russell Quick, courtesy of the Journal of Archaeological Research (5 March 2007)]. In a paper called "Baffles and Bastions," published in the Journal of Archaeological Research, anthropologists...
