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I’ll commit a write-up soon!
Inhabitat is itself a site I wish I could live in.
If you are here, then there is a must-see…
Time is skinny but wears cinch-tightened fat pants right now, so all I can offer are some reads:
Roman roads – Tabula Peutingeriana: an uncovered copy of a Roman mapquest.
Infestation: this article was sent to me by a friend, and to him by his. The speed of an email forward might be a gawky analogy for the methods of the interiorization of space, but at least we’re not “in conflict”. Sidelined politics might be necessary to read this one properly.
Drought in Atlanta: Atlanta is a metropolis with one of the lowest population densities on the planet. It has a mere 1,783 people per square mile, and with the land area it covers I’d even debate whether it can even be classed a ‘city’ in any traditional sense of the word. Moreover, with its immense growth rate and dependence on landscape irrigation to counteract very hot summers, I’m not surprised that this drought appears consequentially. Perhaps it’ll help us realize that ready access to potable water one of the only enablers of a rich society: archived New Yorker article. My closing remark is only how dishonourable it is for the Governor of Georgia to PRAY for rain: It’s dishonourable.
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This monster looms over the western boundary of the Old Port in Montreal. It is also a thorn in my side right now as I’m trying to turn in a late paper that compares certain revitalizing initiatives to the Tate Modern in London (well, analyzing the comparability of the schemes).
Even the name echoing on in modernity, Silo No. 5 has had quite a few things happen to it. Among the more interesting was a collective’s idea to rig it for its accoustics to become an instrument, or Silophone.
Now, it is not only being lobbied by Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal to be converted to a monolithic repository of modern art but also being anteed up by the federal government to entice the United Nations to move their headquarters to Montreal.
Whaddya think?
Quartier Ephemere; Photo: Diana Shearwood
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: howard hughesesque, imaginary cities, lighter-than-air
On a flip-through of sites for pictures that give pause, I typed in ‘dirigible’. Maybe it was their close proximity to both absurdity and grace that drew me in. Or the feeling of industrial triumph and wonder they impose on the onlooker. Either way, a yellow-lit picture, part of which I cropped for the above banner, caught my eye. And I was led to a write-up for a short called The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. I am fascinated by the portrayal of fantastic cities and societies, and the ability to drift above them in such a corpulent yet serene vehicle as a dirigible has kept many a dream of these cities afloat.
While I think the content should define this site -a para-site of sorts to the many eminent and informed sites and thinkers preexistent- I do believe I owe an introduction.
The ambivalent potency of the word ‘crisis’ is lost in English. Derived from the Greek for ‘decision’, it indicates a place in time -a crest, a crux, a crossroads, a locus, a consolidation- that has the privilege of information and projective imagination necessary to determine a course of action. Taken purely, in and of itself it has no moral attribution.
The human being is a crisis. As Protagoras said: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Our life is decidedly dependent on a critical stage of a smouldering rock, a critical distance from a star which itself is at a critical point in its life. And we are the embodied crisis of this arrangement’s evolution. It is sheer coincidence that our awakening to the powers of decision stir at the same point as our realization that humanity threatens life. With this statement, I don’t mean to undermine the way we do use the word crisis, I only mean to emphasize one undeniable reason why.
So, our planet is a threshold to a source of light –the source of life. Our society is the transitional stage -the limen- to ‘enlightenment’, definable only by itself. And this blog is a bricolage and scrapbook to assist my role as an amateur urban planning student. It runs alongside the more variegated and silly sistersite, whomunculus, but takes construction, built form and humanity’s interaction with the environment as its flashpoint, as physical creation and recreation is where ideas become manifest. And subsequently either confines them or sets them free.
ps. The script will not always be this stiff, I promise. Plus, pictures will be abound.
of murk and sky 
