katten
Cloud and Field
Places Journal
On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age. We’ve moved from birding to dronewatching, from natural history to dark ecology. But are we still looking through colonialist binoculars?
14 to 1: Post-Katrina Architecture by the Numbers
Places Journal
The focus on Make It Right might suggest that contemporary residential architecture is typical of post-Katrina New Orleans. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Things They Piled
Places Journal
Mountains of petcoke in Southeast Chicago finally came down this month. Terry Evans photographs an industrial landscape in transition.
Notes Toward A History of Change
Places Journal
The remarkable career of David Bowie was defined by restless transformation. His passing is a prompt to consider the curious nature of change in an era that’s given up on progress.
You (Still) Have to Pay for the Public Life
Places Journal
Half a century ago Charles Moore was a rising architect and Ivy League academic. He was also the first in the field to look seriously at Disneyland — and he liked what he saw.
Indexing the World of Tomorrow
Places Journal
How the 1939 World’s Fair anticipated our current obsession with urban data science and “smart” cities.
Speculative Archaeology
Places Journal
Faux-ethnographic dioramas, modern interiors reimagined as psychedelic ruin-worlds, invented histories of proto-architecture: archaeology, as model or metaphor, has been surfacing a lot in art practice and design theory.
Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards
Places Journal
The world’s most ambitious “smart city” project is here. Should we worry that New York City is becoming an experimental lab?
Library as Infrastructure
Places Journal
Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch the public library?
Little Libraries in the Urban Margins
Places Journal
One of the most promising dimensions of tactical urbanism is the rise of pop-up, guerrilla, and ad-hoc libraries.
Interfacing Urban Intelligence
Places Journal
As we build so-called “smart” cities, we need to consider the point of engagement where citizens interface with the city’s operating system.
Infrastructural Tourism
Places Journal
For decades tourists have marveled at monumental dams of the American West. These days they trace infrastructures like satellite communications and nuclear waste transport.
Methodolatry and the Art of Measure
Places Journal
The new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of method.
History of the Urban Dashboard
Places Journal
Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.
From Architecture to Landscape
Places Journal
Landscape architects have begun to venture from the confines of garden, park, and plaza into more adventurous practice. Now the field needs a new name: landscape science.
Isthmus: On the Panama Canal Expansion
Places Journal
The shockwave of Panama Canal expansion is reshaping cities throughout the Americas. We need to look through the lens of landscape, not logistics.
Curious Methods
Places Journal
On the mud flat of the Great Salt Lake, two landscape researchers follow Gregory Bateson and Bruno Munari in search of a mode of practice that “probes” but does not “prove.”