[Image: Poster design by Atley Kasky of Outpost]. Although I hope to post again about the specific topics to be discussed at this event, I didn't want to lose any more time in announcing the Breaking Out and Breaking In final public event to be hosted at Columbia University's Studio-X NYC on Monday,...
Ephemeral islands and other states-in-waiting
[Image: Temporary islands emerge from the sea, via]. In the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Sicily, an island comes and goes. Called, alternately and among other names, depending on whose territorial interests are at stake, Graham Bank, Île Julia, the island of Ferdinandea, or, more extravagantly, a...
Glass Hills of Mars
More than 10 million square kilometers of landscape on the surface of Mars, a region nearly the size of Europe, is made of glass—specifically volcanic glass, "a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallize." [Image: An otherwise randomly grabbed...
Hydro-Electro-Musical Machinery
[Image: Flow]. A floating tidemill on the UK's River Tyne has been filled with "electro-acoustic musical machinery," powered by the river itself. The building, a collaboration between Owl Project and Ed Carter, called Flow, is "a floating building on the River Tyne that generates its own power using...
Building in a Bottle
[Image: Piece of Nature Preserved (1973) by Haus-Rucker-Co; photo by Hagen Stier, courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum]. A forthcoming exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt explores the world of the architectural model, from Frei Otto and Rem Koolhaas to Peter Eisenman. ...
Every House Has Cracks
[Image: Via English Russia]. In a story seemingly invented for future landscape architecture thesis projects, we find the city of Berezniki, Russia. "In the West," the New York Times explains, "mines are usually located far from populous areas, to reduce the risks of sinkholes to homes and other buildings....
Ghost Town Climatology
[Image: The ghost town of Animas Forks, Colorado, via Wikipedia]. Fred Chambers, an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, is studying what he calls "ghost town climatology," or the declining temperature of a region as it is abandoned by human activity....
New York Quarry
[Image: Gentlemen quarriers of a golden age, via]. Following on from earlier looks at the city as mining district, including a quarry on the Lower East Side, I was interested to read that parts of Manhattan were once productive marble quarries. A street and surrounding small neighborhood called Kingsbridge,...
Star Garden
[Image: Building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; ©ITER Organization]. An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage...
Spaces on Spec
A few opportunities for those of you looking for new outlets: 1) Kerb, the journal of landscape architecture from RMIT University in Melbourne, is publishing its 20th issue, on "speculative narrative" and other "fictional dispositions" in the field of landscape design. Submissions are due May 4. ...
Tunnel Plug
[Image: The plug, courtesy of Homeland Security's Resilient Tunnel Project, via Wired UK]. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's "Resilient Tunnel Project" has come up with a prototype 35,000-gallon "plug," or "enormous inflatable cylinder," in the words of PhysOrg.com, one that is "tunnel-shaped...
Making Waves
While looking for an image for the previous post, I found these videos of a lake or lagoon being opened up after intense rain so that the water flows out to sea—creating, within minutes, powerful rivers of water that can be surfed for what seems like the whole afternoon. The first one, above, in which...
Desert of the Real
[Image: Photo by M. Scott Brauer, via ScienceDaily]. Researchers at MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory is working on so-called "smart sand," which would allow for the "spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts." Current prototypes of the substance—essentially, large...
