Thursday, August 05, 2010

Ecosystem Beach reading

While on the beach I managed to read The Infrastructural City, edited by Kazys Varnelis. 


It is a contemporary take on Banham's Four Ecologies, updated to the fascinating mess that LA has become. 
Highlights include "Flood Cotrol Freakology" by David Fletcher which studies the evolution and disparate ecology of the LA River,


(a fake building that hides oil drills inside)
 Mark Ruchala's "Crude City" which talks about how LA has transformed itself from an oil city to an entertainment city, 


(a lonely tree that is not a tree but a cellphone antenna)

Kazys Varnelis' "Invisible City" on the surprising infrastructure of telecoms, 


Warren Techentin "Tree Huggers" on how trees shape the city, Ted Kane and Rick Miller "Cell Structure"  
and Roger Shermans' great "Counting on Change", 
an analysis of the hopscotch urbanism and exchange that takes places between awkward properties








3 comments:

dpr-barcelona said...

Hi Andreas
We've been participating in an interesting kind of "virtual book club" started by mammoth on Reading The Infrastructural City and the experience is great!

You can see the original idea here:
http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/03/reading-the-infrastructural-city-proposal/

And the index of all contributors, sometimes including the authors of some chapters, here:
http://m.ammoth.us/blog/tag/reading-the-infrastructural-city/

Kazys Varnelis said...

wonderful images! hello andreas!

i always hoped that the book would look like something you might find on the floor of an LA DWP truck cab.

Andreas Angelidakis said...

yes I read that, and I thought maybe the truck fell into the LA River, and then the book got washed up on a beach in Greece. Really good read :)