January 2012
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Ubud Hanging Gardens Hotel in Bali has one of the nicest pools I’ve ever seen. Image source here.
October 2011
2 posts
I’m becoming increasingly impressed with phone cameras. For me, it’s the correct mix of low-fi quality and accessibility that I have come to cherish. Here are a few pictures of the North Carolina State Fair. I hope there’s an anthropologist out there somewhere researching state fairs and interviewing the people who make them work.
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September 2011
1 post
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August 2011
2 posts
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Triangle Life Science Center
My first abandoned spaces expedition in RTP, NC landed me at the now demolished Triangle Life Science Center. These photos are from February 2010. The building was demolished shortly after. There are plenty more photos here. I hope you enjoy.
July 2011
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June 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
1 post
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February 2011
3 posts
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Metropolitan Mining
“Some 1,200 feet beneath the streets of Detroit, under the north end of Allen Park, Dearborn’s Rouge complex and most of Melvindale, runs 100 miles of subterranean roads over an area of more than 1,500 acres. It is the Detroit Salt Mine and as a Detroit industry it is older then automobiles. As a geological entity, this salt deposit is older even than the dinosaurs.” (Via...
WatchHans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen.
January 2011
3 posts
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A New Mega City is Born →
According to the chief planner, Ma Xiangming:
“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas.”
He further added,
“It will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will also be distributed more fairly.”
I think this idea...
Dear SuperfluousCity Readers:
I am sorry for slacking as of late. I have just finished all my graduate school applications and will be starting a new job in the next few weeks, so expect a return soon.
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December 2010
6 posts
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An Old Friend
For a while I had this project exploring abandoned buildings and public space in Wilmington, NC [34°13′24″N 77°54′44″W]. If you’re interested you can read about a couple of my experiences here. Since moving I haven’t really kept up with the picture taking/urban exploring activities but I’m still interested in these forgotten places. Just for kicks, I’ve decided to post some...
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WatchImagine a building that could turn with the sun, maximizing on this energy source, not only in terms of the light it provides, but for air conditioning purposes as well, thus bringing innovation together with sustainability. This was the challenge presented to boolab by the agency Soon in Tokyo for its client, the Building Engineering Department of the Elisava design school. In reality, the...
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SoundTransit Ending?
It looks like SoundTransit, an online community of field recordings, will be shutting down at the end of this year. According to their site:
After 5 years, the end of an era has come. On the last day of 2010, the Soundtransit.nl site will officially close. The Waag Society in Amsterdam, who physically hosts our server, has more than quadrupled the rent in the past year. Relocating to a cheap...
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November 2010
11 posts
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Simon Elvins Radio Map
Site-specific map plotting the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. Power lines are drawn in pencil on the back of the map which conduct the electricity from the radio to the front of poster. Placing a metal pushpin onto each station then allows us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.
Via Simon Elvins
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Architecture & Spatial Inquiry
Non-Sign II by Lead Pencil Studio.
A new voice in the emerging field created from the interdisciplinary overlap of architecture and site specific art. Their creative output is informed by their dedication to independent research in structural typologies and the visual arts. The spaces, objects and buildings resulting from their studio process establish new territories that surprise and alter...
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Health Impact Assessments take on Transportation
A health impact assessment (HIA) is a flexible, data-driven approach that identifies the health consequences of new policies, and develops practical strategies to enhance their health benefits and minimize adverse effects.
The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, is a national initiative designed to promote the use of health...
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WatchRecently many bloggers have brought attention to the Tom Cordell documentary Utopia London. I would like to echo these nods of approval to what looks like a neat documentary. The idea of locating and connecting the original architects and designers to talk about a process reminds me of Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, a fascinating documentary about the life and times of...
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Watch
Some years ago, Harvard architecture professor Alex Krieger made one of the most memorable and withering critiques of the New Urbanism: in too many cases it was, he said, “sprawl in drag.” What he meant was that the underlying patterns of sprawl were still dominating, and no mere repositioning of colorful traditional buildings on streetscapes would be enough to change that. While the...
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From Brownfields to Greenfields: A Field Guide to... →
Urban designer Kaja Kühl illustrates how to use plants to clean up contaminated sites, a cost-effective way to add productive, healthy land to the City’s environment
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WatchShot off the coast of Phuket in Thailand, and in the Hudson River, New York. Cinematrographer and Editor, Trevor Tweeten. Colorist and Post-Production, Jerome Thelia. by Richard Mosse 2009 Made with the assistance of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts and Jack Shainman Gallery.
October 2010
6 posts
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What is a Food Desert?
A vast portion of the modern landscape provides little or no access to food that is needed to maintain a healthy diet. These food deserts are a serious problem for public officials, public health researchers, and city planners.
[Image Credit]
In Retail Concentration, Food Deserts, and Food Disadvantaged Communities, a report by Troy C. Blanchard [Mississippi State University] and Thomas A....
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Tent City
What does a temporary tent city for 3 million people look like? A recent visit to Expo 2010 in Shanghai clued me in to what is probably the largest ephemeral urban design in the world, the Mina Tent City in Saudi Arabia, erected each year to house Hajj pilgrims visiting Mecca during the last month of the lunar Islamic calendar. — Via bricoleurbanism
Image and content...
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Serious Antarctic Architecture
I’m not sure why but recently I’ve had a “thing” for that mass of ice, Antarctica. I think it started back in April when I read this great piece from Wired and shortly after watched Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Tonight I saw the Lee Hotz: Inside an Antarctic time machine TED Talk and decided it was time to revisit some beautiful Antarctic...
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Architecture of Fear
The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work …...
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September 2010
2 posts
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Seattle: Brought to you by TiltShift
The classic Seattle view. It makes the Space Needle look more impressive than it really is.
Vegetation on part of the Seattle Convention Center.
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Piecing together the skyline
It’s been a long time since my last post. I was vacationing in the great northwest - Washington. I have hundreds of pictures, which will eventually end up here. Here are some collage-style panorama pictures of Seattle.
August 2010
7 posts
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DIY Bike Lane In Helsinki
Hämeentie is the longest street in Helsinki, Finland, and one of the city’s main thoroughfares. It has four lanes of traffic, but no space whatsoever for cyclists. There’s no bike lane between the buses and the sidewalk.
To create their own, the Finnish collective Länsiväylä poured paint along one section of the street and then invited a group of cyclists to ride through it at...
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Traffic in China
Drivers in northern China have been stuck along a 60-mile stretch of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway, some for days.
The Chinese authorities are struggling to clear the congestion, now entering its eleventh day and which, at its peak, stretched for more than 60 miles (100km). But the drivers still joining it are not optimistic about reaching their destinations swiftly. [Via The Guardian]
This...
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Paviljoen de Posbank | Rheden, Netherlands
The teahouse Pavilion attempts to meld into the landscape through the architectural and structural treatment of floors and walls. Floors appear to float in flowing, contiguous spaces. Walls disappear as the structure, tree trunks, resemble the surroundings. A glass skin lends an ambiguity between inside and outside. Here architecture and structure have a symbiotic relationship, to achieve a...
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Western Eno River
I took a hike around the trails of Western Eno River State Park [36°4′24″N 78°56′3″W]. The Eno River, named for the Eno Indians who once lived along its banks, is the initial tributary of the Neuse River in North Carolina. Here are a few images from my walk.
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Kirill Kuletski Speleotherapy
Salt therapy, halotherapy or speleotherapy is the therapeutic use of salt mines, caves or other forms of exposure to salt air.
The photographs were taken by the London-based Russian artist Kirill Kuletski, and he writes of this underground clinic and alternative therapy:
The therapy which takes place at Solotvyno is based on a method known as Speleotherapy, an alternative therapy for asthma...
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Watch
When it was built in 1833 Colonnade Row was the biggest thing in New York since the British occupation, a 200-foot-long sweep of glistening white marble in the form of a Corinthian colonnade, nine houses combined into one great Greek revival statement on what is now Lafayette Street, opposite the Public Theater. But five of the houses were destroyed early in the last century, and their graceful...
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8-Story Antigravity Forest Facade Takes Root
The vertical garden at the Athenaeum, which is eight stories tall, has 260 plant species and more than 12,000 plants. Eighty percent of the plants at the Athenaeum are evergreen; 20 percent are seasonal. They are planted according to environmental demands — those that need more sun, for example, go up top. Ferns go below, where there’s more shade.
Read more here.
July 2010
13 posts
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Blue Gold
Water is one of the world’s greatest and most precious natural resources, yet most of the time it is entirely hidden. The map of “blue gold” [pdf] was released mid 2008 and is the result of nearly a decade of talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. With the increasing demand for water around the globe, ‘blue gold’ seems like a fitting name for...