[Image: Cincinnati Public Library, 1870s; photo via Steve Silberman]. It's that time of the year again, to take a look at the many, many books that have passed through the halls of BLDGBLOG the past season or two, ranging, as usual, from popular science to fiction, landscape history to the urban future...
Ghosts of Planets Past: An Interview with Ron Blakey
[Image: The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey]. The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show...
Sukkah City
[Image: The official poster for Sukkah City by Jason Hutt]. A documentary film about the Sukkah City design competition from 2010 is finally on its way into the public eye, with a free outdoor premiere this weekend in New York City's Union Square. The filmmaker, Jason Hutt, will be on hand for the...
Almost Nature
[Image: From "Almost Nature" by Gerco de Ruijter]. The previous post reminded me of the work of Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter, whose fantastic images of gridded, altered, and semi-artificial landscapes have been featured here on the blog before, first with a stunning series of low-altitude aerial...
Offworld Glaciology
[Image: Photo by Gerco de Ruijter, via but does it float]. A short article by Sam Kean for the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia explores the world of "bizarro ice—ice that burns, ice that sinks instead of floating, ice literally out of this world." For the most part, these are ices that...
