[Image: The Central Park bolt, photographed by The Bowery Boys]. One of many memorable images from Marguerite Holloway's recommended new book The Measure of Manhattan is the Central Park bolt, a 19th-century survey marker affixed in place by John Randel Jr., original surveyor of Manhattan's street grid....
Parallax View
Spatially speaking, the game Parallax looks pretty amazing, especially now that, in the words of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the developers—two students at Queen's University, calling themselves Toasty Games—have "decided to turn off all the gravity." The resulting "gravitational surface test," seen in...
Cool Dam
[Image: The Auburn Dam site, via Google Maps]. While re-reading John McPhee's excellent book Assembling California last month for the San Andreas Fault National Park studio, I was struck once again by a short description of a Californian landscape partially redesigned in preparation for a reservoir...
Rockets to Reefs
[Image: Fallen rockets at the bottom of the sea; photo by Bezos Expeditions, via Discovery News]. News this week that the discarded engines of the Apollo rockets from the moon missions of the 1960s have been found at the bottom of the ocean by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos is perhaps further indication...
Build a Bridge
Last year, I posted about a summer workshop held in upstate New York run by architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union. Well, it's back and this summer's 8-week program is even more ambitious. However, note that the deadline for applications fast approaches (due March 25). [Images: Photos from Arts...
Meshworm
The last few years have seen the rise of "soft robots," squirming, biomorphic, and highly flexible little machines that can be used to slip through cracks, infiltrate tight spaces, even explore architectural ruins in the wake of earthquakes and warfare. But soft robots are also getting closer to becoming...
Landscape Futures
[Images: The cover of Landscape Futures; book design by Brooklyn's Everything-Type-Company]. I'm enormously pleased to say that a book project long in the making will finally see the light of day later this month, a collaboration between ACTAR and the Nevada Museum of Art called Landscape Futures: Instruments,...
