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I’ve mentioned the following story to so many people, I thought I might as well put up a quick post about it. There are strong Kristian Birkeland vibes with this—and, of course, anything involving an entire mountain transformed into a kind of passive-cosmic megamachine is bound to get my attention. [Image: Watercolor by Karl Lemström, … Continue reading "The Landscape Architecture of Auroras on Demand"
I was in Maastricht, Netherlands, for a couple nights last week, mostly as a way to break-up my trip across the Atlantic and thus help get over jet-lag before attending an archaeology conference (where I currently type this). I went specifically to Maastricht, however, because it’s home to an astonishing number of subterranean sites, from … Continue reading "Star Forts, Mines, and Other Maastricht Subterranea"
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. Surreally, the screening I attended was held inside a Cedars-Sinai medical-imaging center in west Los Angeles. Seeing this particular film, with its intensely granular focus on the geological underpinnings of … Continue reading "Mineral Hurricane"
I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of garbage being stored in giant, artificial landforms—or simply buried underground like false geological deposits—might be inadvertently catalyzing chemical processes we neither understand nor know how to stop. I was thus excited to see a long investigation of this topic in … Continue reading "Uncontrolled Remains"
Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio. The “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” (2014) was a fictional design project we originally set in the vast limestone province of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. [Image: A rock-acid drip-irrigation hub for the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis,” a collaboration between BLDGBLOG and WROT … Continue reading "Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis"
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Technology may reduce production hours, but that lengthier process has been a crucial learning time for younger professionals.
Keeping on with the construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building”… Unlike my previous dive into the construction photos of the Equitable Trust Building on Broad Street, the main sequence photos here (which are numbered and dated) begin with the superstructure steel being erected. There are two foundation […]
This just in: The U.S. Supreme Court today allowed construction of Trump's $400 million White House ballroom project to proceed indefinitely while legal challenges continue. In a 5–4 decision, the court blocked lower-court rulings that would have paused the aboveground portion of the project (Archinect reported on August 7). The challenge, brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, argued that Trump lacked unilateral authority to proceed without congressional approval. The court’s unsigned eight-page ruling found that the trust likely lacks standing to bring the case but stopped short of deciding whether the president actually has the authority to build the ballroom without Congress. "Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project," the ruling states. "We conclude only that, based on the submissions before us, the government is likely to prevail in showing that the Trust lacks Article III standing to challenge the project in federal cou...
