Of networks, grids, and infrastructures, or: How to make a planet

If I have several blogging resolutions for 2009 – and I do – one of them is definitely to read InfraNet Lab more often.

[Image: Offshore energy islands, via InfraNet Lab].

Easily one of the most interesting architecture blogs out there today – though it's really an infrastructure blog, hopefully heralding a new focus for design writers in the next few years – and written by Toronto-based architects Mason White and Lola Shepard, along with two contributors named Maya and Neeraj, it tracks massive infrastructure, waste, energy, and design projects across the global landscape, taking in geology, engineering, network economics, ecology, construction innovation, future fuels, and much more.
Read it and you'll know how to "harvest energy from the earth's rotation" using mega-gyroscopes, you'll discover how a more efficient offshore seaweed industry might work, you'll pick up clues for how to design a mountain and then how to connect that mountain to others using aerial tramways, you'll get an architectural glimpse of habitat meshing, you'll take an hallucinatory tour through Taiwanese mushroom farms, you'll visit underground waste isolation sites in New Mexico, you'll turn around and go the opposite vertical direction – into the sky – to farm water from the atmosphere, and you'll even punt around the artificial inland waterways of Britain using strange mechanized structures and seeing that archipelago as hydrology first, geography later.
So go check it out – and make 2009 the year of networks, grids, and infrastructures.