The concrete-domed radioactive landfill of Runit Island

(According to the Brookings Institution, “beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll, built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crate[r] created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test.” Photo by the Defense Special Weapons Agency. Thanks, Capability B., for the link.)

Fountain Throwies

(Helmut Smits, Street fountain, 2002. Thanks to the artist for the photo.)

Here's a lovely piece of intervention by the Dutch artist Helmut Smits. A minor act but profoundly marvelous.

Smits briefly notes that his street fountain spurts via a small water pump. But how small is it, we wondered. How complex are its wirings and how great is its energy requirement? One certainly wishes that it could be mass produced, bought by the dozens, or at least hackable from easily procured cheap parts, a craft project whose step-by-step instructions can be downloaded from Instructables, like LED Throwies. When the rains do come and fill up pot holes or shallow pedestrian depressions, you can sow little fountains everywhere, adding a bit of playfulness to the concrete playgrounds of weary city-dwellers. It's Banksy meets Salomon de Caus hydro-graffiti.

Should you want to add a subversive underlayer, you could say that at the same time it highlights the deplorable condition of urban infrastructure, that pouring in billions of dollars into these pot holes isn't going to solve the problem. The collapse is perpetual.

In the Archives:
On fountains

(Spotted on Vulgare.)

Bloggers with Large Breasts, Three Eyes, Deformed Ears and Four Hands Standing in a Landscape

(Or “A Female Figure with Large Breasts, Three Eyes, Deformed Ears and Four Hands Standing in a Landscape,” from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585. Source.)

It's been a while since we posted a list of recently discovered blogs. Despite the lamentations of my colleagues about the demise of both the quality and quantity of blogs on the built environment, for every one that goes dimmer with each passing week without a post, there's a handful that crops up, most of which are worth keeping tabs on.

Of course, these newer blogs aren't going to be any less ephemeral. In fact, those started by thesis students and studios will most likely expire with the end of term, but at least a record of their investigations exists for anyone to use for whatever purpose. Because what if before they published the book, Venturi and Scott Brown's Las Vegas studio had maintained a blog in which students and instructors recorded all their initial observations, posted their pre-collaged photos, lecture podcasts and unedited videos using Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube, and the Web 2.0 crowd participated wiki-like, unencumbered by notions of proprietary and editorial control? It would have been interesting at the very least.

Here, meanwhile, is the list. The bloggers responsible for these blogs may or may not be as described above, but they all possess fertile minds and fecund imagination, are consummate observers, have individualized but keen insights into important issues of the day, and are voracious collectors of net flotsam and jetsam.

21st Century Plowshare

Arts and Ecology

christian barnard landscape blog

Edificial

fruitful contradictions

Geometry of Bending

Infrastructurist

Invent Civil

Mockitecture

Pop-up City

there is a lot to say, of this we are sure

Urban Floop

U.S./Mexico Border Wall as Architecture

Vulgare

The following are maintained by the incredibly fortunate three who were awarded The John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship.

Re:mote.......Controlled

Soundscrapers

Untested City

For our public blogroll, see our list of RSS feeds [good links] on Bloglines. Which of these you are going to subscribe to (or whether or not you are going to follow even one of them) will be up to you.