[Image: "Lower Manhattan" (1999) by Lebbeus Woods, discussed extensively here]. Like many people, I was—and remain—devastated to have learned that architect Lebbeus Woods passed away last night, just as the hurricane was moving out of New York City and as his very neighborhood, Lower Manhattan, had...
Dismantling
Here are some old photos of mines and quarries, like antique views of the planet being disaggregated into rocks and waste heaps. Here, human civilization is nothing more than a thin lace of extraction camps and train tracks, blast patterns and crowbars, men sweating over landscapes they've learned to...
Lower Manhattan National Park
[Image: Past Futures, Present, Futures at Storefront for Art and Architecture, designed by Leong Leong; photo by Naho Kubota]. A two-part exhibition called Past Futures, Present, Futures opened its second phase—Present, Futures—tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture, exploring contemporary "reenactments"...
Wall Mart
[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture]. While digging around this morning through my embarrassingly disorganized hard drive, I found a project I'd saved a while back by Adrienne Lau, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Lau came...
Cliff Nest
Reader Louis Schulz recently sent me a link to an incredible set of photos by Eric Valli, a French photographer and former cabinetmaker whose work has taken him all over the world visiting, among other places, the vertiginous and mind-bending world of "honey hunters" in the Himalayas. However, Louis...
Sleeping Astronaut Causes Earthquake on the Moon
[Image: NASA's lunar seismometer, via Wikipedia]. First of all, I know it's inaccurate to say there was an "earthquake" on the moon, but I'll use the phrase nonetheless. In any case, I was delighted to read that the tax-funded Apollo 11 astronauts, upon landing on the surface of the moon, installed...
Memorial to a Buried Village
[Image: From the project "Resonance, memory" by Bo Li and Ge Men, students at ETH Zürich]. An interesting new project by Bo Li and Ge Men, students of architecture at ETH Zürich, proposes a kind of buried chandelier to memorialize lost villages in Switzerland—architecture destroyed by landslides, replaced...
Landscapes by Remote Control
One of many interesting things I've been reading this month is the new book by William J. Clancey, Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers. [Image: Curiosity pokes its heavily instrumented "head" around the Red Planet; photo courtesy of NASA and U.S. taxpayers]....
