Urban Crude
One the most fascinating passages of the book 'The Infrastructural City' was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a postPlaces portion of the Design Observer site.

As We Found Them... As We Leave Them
A provocative image found in an email from the local Audubon Society email offers the visual of 'As We Found Them... As We Leave Them', a Jay “Ding” Darling cartoon from 1923, as a statement about the state of our rivers in the face of urbanization.The reason for the email was an upcoming hearing on the Willame

Reading List: Subnature
Another book that engaged me on my hiatus from blogging is one I picked up on somewhat of a whim as it looked like a fascinating read. I wasn't disappointed, as 'Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments" by David Gissen, quickly became impossible to put down. The reason? It really tackles some interesting terrain that is definitely at the fringes of architecture and landscape, which typically addresses the realms purity and order, whether in terms of materials or the messy nature in cities.

Can I get a 'Hell Yeah!'
From AnArchitecture, quoting an article from Inside PR."I actually hate billable hours. Don’t get me wrong – I like working – I really like bringing in the money.. but I just don’t like tracking every minute of my time – especially when it comes to multi-tasking and working on more than one thing, or often a lot of things at once. I also think billable hours aren’t a good measure of the value people bring based on experience but may just take an hour to create. I know the reason why there are billable hours and wh

Portland Grid, revisited
The question of the efficacy of the grid system is continually interesting, and there have been some interesting conversations about this with a range of folks locally. Another resource to throw some information into this discussion is the recently released background documents in support of the Portland Plan. One worth checking out for any Portland-phile is the segment on Urban Form (it's a large file, so this is a link to