[Image: The "Blythe Intaglios," via Google Maps]. After reading an article about the "Blythe geoglyphs"—huge, 1,000-year old images carved into the California desert north of Blythe, near the border with Arizona—I got to looking around on Google Maps more or less at random and found what looked like...
Urban Giants
The wife & husband team of director Davina Pardo and journalist Andrew Blum—the latter of whom you might also know as the author of Tubes and a prolific writer on architecture and design—have released a short documentary about the literal architecture of the internet: the huge buildings looming...
Mathematical Equations as Architectonic Forms
[Image: From the Altgeld Math Models Collection at UIUC]. Architects—or really anyone captivated by complex geometric forms—should find something of interest in a small set of images posted over at Wired. From the Altgeld Math Models Collection at UIUC, the photos show complex mathematical equations...
Drive-By Archaeology
[Image: From a patent filed by MIT, courtesy U.S. Patent and Trademark Office]. The technical systems by which autonomous, self-driving vehicles will safely navigate city streets are usually presented as some combination of real-time scanning and detailed mnemonic map or virtual reference model created...
London And Its Dead
[Image: By Andrew Winning, courtesy of Reuters, via National Geographic]. In her excellent and morbidly fascinating book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, Catharine Arnold describes in detail how parts of the London Underground were tunneled, blasted, picked, and drilled through a labyrinth of plague...
A Pyramid in the Middle of Nowhere Built to Track the End of the World
[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress]. The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Cavalier County, North Dakota, is the focus of an amazing set of images hosted by the U.S. Library of Congress, showing this squat and evocative megastructure in various states...
Where Borders Melt
[Image: From Italian Limes. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani, courtesy of Folder]. One of the most interesting sites from a course I taught several years ago at Columbia—Glacier, Island, Storm—was the glacial border between Italy and Switzerland. The border there is not, in fact, permanently determined,...
