My Bookmarks
Landscape Migration
Places Journal
We are now well into a geologic era — the Anthropocene — characterized by the acceleration of environmental change. This is the landscape medium in which we design.
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.
The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments
Places Journal
Inside the material archives of climate science, which get wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.
Traces of Traces
Places Journal
On the documentation of military landscapes by four American photographers: Richard Misrach, Jan Faul, Peter Goin, and David Hanson.
Experimental Preservation
Places Journal
Experimental preservationists are challenging old assumptions about cultural heritage, spotlighting objects once considered ugly or unsavory, long excluded from official narratives.
Control Earth
Places Journal
What is Earth’s baseline temperature? Good question. The climate scenario ‘historicalNat’ simulates a world without human intervention.
The Dilbit Hits the Fan: Alberta Oil
Places Journal
If the Keystone XL pipeline is dead, what is the future of the Alberta tar sands? A veteran environmental journalist looks at Canadian energy infrastructure.
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.
Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies
Places Journal
The word “ecology” has been co-opted so widely that it has lost real meaning, yet it remains a powerful lens for designers working with complex adaptive systems.
Illuminating the Petrochemical Landscape
Places Journal
A review of projects that mix photography and environmental activism, including Petrochemical America, by Kate Orff and Richard Misrach.
The Vernacular of Disaster
Places Journal
As climate change accelerates, your catastrophic language and mine — your flood and my drought — are connected as they’ve never been before.
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 1
Places Journal
Provisional, opportunistic, ubiquitous, and odd tactics in guerrilla practice and DIY urbanism.
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 2
Places Journal
DIY urbanists are making ingenious use of print media to spur urban activism — and sometimes revolution.
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 3
Places Journal
How do we judge the success of DIY tactics — of ephemeral works that skirt the edges of activist art and community organizing?
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 4
Places Journal
What happens when the grassroots tactics of activist designers collide with the top-down strategies of urban institutions?
The Trash Heap of History
Places Journal
How Monte Testaccio, Rome’s ancient landfill, can inform contemporary reclamation projects.
How to Be an Architecture Critic
Places Journal
We’re surrounded by buildings, but do we know how to talk about them?
Maps for a Narrative Atlas
Places Journal
A geographer maps the everyday things of a neighborhood, finding poetry in the distribution of wind chimes and the mailman’s delivery route.
A Short History of the Campsite
Places Journal
A landscape historian traces the story of the campground, from early wilderness caravans to today’s domesticated sites.
Mapping’s Intelligent Agents
Places Journal
How do machine intelligences read and write the world? And what Other intelligences deserve our attention?
Poems as Maps: An Introduction
Places Journal
We use maps to find our way in the world, to locate ourselves in relation to others, to measure distance and record change.
A City Is Not a Computer
Places Journal
This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing.
Preparing Ground
Places Journal
Two visionary landscape architects discuss their work on contested environments from the Mississippi to Mumbai.
Paper Architecture, Emerging Urbanism
Places Journal
Underemployed designers are proposing speculative solutions to unfolding environmental crises and infrastructural needs. Let’s ground this work in the realities of urban design.
The Infrastructural City
Places Journal
Los Angeles depends upon vast infrastructural systems that are breathtakingly complex, yet vulnerable to disruption, even disaster.
Metaphor Remediation
Places Journal
As cities become the new frontiers of green living, let’s revise the old metaphors. Will the high-rise replace Half Dome as the new emblem of environmentalism?
An Interview with James Turrell
Places Journal
From the first issue of Places: a 1983 interview with James Turrell, then beginning his transformation of the Roden Crater. The monumental work opened to the public in 2012.
The Death and Life of Great Architecture Criticism
Places Journal
A leading academic and journalist argues that architecture criticism is ripe for bold reinvention.
Perpetual Neglect
Places Journal
The racism that plagues African Americans in life is perpetuated in death. Today there is nothing less than a preservation crisis for Black burial grounds across the country.
Maintenance and Care
Places Journal
A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.
800 Miles: Photographing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline
Places Journal
Documenting a perfectly engineered, efficient structure dedicated to the ruthless and expedient exhaustion of nonrenewable resources.
Tracks: A Walk in the Arctic
Places Journal
A series of photographs — an ongoing experiment — that document walks taken in high summer in the Svalbard Archipelago, above the Arctic Circle.
Mitigations
Places Journal
In the coal country of Southeast Ohio, the past is a renewable resource, growing larger every year.
What You Don’t See
Places Journal
Follow the supply chains of architecture and you’ll find not just product manufacturers but also environmental polluters and secretive networks of political influence.
This Is Flint, Michigan
Places Journal
A design professor probes the deep decline of Flint — birthplace of GM — and wonders about the role of the architect in a city where there’s more demolition than design.
The Paradox of Security
Places Journal
Ecological security is a relatively new theme in design practice, and a resonant one. But we shouldn’t embrace the concept without considering the consequences.
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.”