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malls of new york


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martin kippenberger schneewittchensarg (snow white's coffin)

One piece I've seen three times, first at Max Hetzler in 1989, then Metro Pictures when it opened in Chelsea, and now at Boesky, is Kippenberger's clear Plexiglass coffin with foam rubber pillows inside. On the outside is a round plastic plate with holes drilled in it. Ordinarily it would be imprinted with "Speak Here," but instead Kippenberger has stenciled " Hier Versprechen ," which translates "Promise Here" or in certain contexts, "Mis-speak Here." Underneath this, stenciled onto the side of the coffin in English, is "Misunderstanding Here." A typical Kippenberger joke. The empty, see-through coffin has a eerie silence now that Kippenberger has passed away. -r.goldman

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Anyone who has spent time with Pioneers of Modern Design knows what a brilliant and vexing work it is. It was based on a series of lectures Pevsner presented at Göttingen shortly before he departed for England. Pevsner is often incorrectly credited, as Stephen Games writes in his perceptive introduction to Pevsner on Art and Architecture, with first “assembling the chain of events that led from English utilitarianism to German functionalism” (xxii). But while Pioneers is not an entirely original book—many of its arguments are anticipated in Hermann Muthesius's Stilarchitektur und Baukunst, published in 1902, and in other pre-World War I writings)—it does offer, on first reading at least, a lucid account of Modern architecture's early origins. Yet the book raises far more questions than it answers. How do French and Belgian Art Nouveau lead to German functionalism? How do two currents so seemingly in opposition—the new engineering of the 19th century, with its faith in science and the machine, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to deny industrialization and rampant Capitalism—both fuel the rise of Modern design? Pevsner's answer, that all were the expression of a new Zeitgeist, is reassuring to some degree, but it also insistently begs the question.

"His prose is always a splendid amalgam of careful erudition, remarkable insight, scholarly conjecture, and unfettered opinion. To read Pevsner is to enter immediately into a dialogue, at times comfortable and affirming, at others, annoying and off-putting."

Pevsner's recourse to the “spirit of the age” runs through many of his writings. It allowed him, as Games notes, “to connect national differentiation in mid-thirteenth-century architecture with the experience of Crusader knights, and to write of the late eighteenth century as a period when artists 'were no longer satisfied with being servants of the ruling class' and a new type of patron emerged, 'self-made, self-assured and cultured'” (xix). Such “loose” scholarship by today's standards was very much part of the German academic world of Pevsner's earliest years, and it became a highly elastic tool for those engaged in the Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities, or, literally, the “sciences of the spirit”) to fashion broad and sweeping visions of the past, present, and future. On the one hand, it could offer, in the hands of a historian like Jakob Burckhardt, an extraordinary panorama of an entire era like the Renaissance. But too often it led to the sort of cursory reading one finds in works like Egon Friedell's Die Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (The Cultural History of Mankind, 3 vols., 1927-1932) or, worse, to the rabid nationalist drivel of Hitler's Mein Kampf.



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puke wall


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Pictures in The New York Times wordlessly told the story of those disappearing acts. On the morning after his finish over a crowded field of more famous and prolific competitors, an exultant Libeskind appeared on the Times's front page, beaming amid a sea of clamoring photographers and reporters. In a profession that lately has mimicked many aspects of celebrity culture, this image represented an extraordinary conferral of star status, like one of those unheralded Metropolitan Opera debuts the newspaper of record likes to put on page one every so often. But what had Libeskind actually won? The sponsoring body, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), had insisted from the first that it was conducting not a competition but an Innovative Design Study in which participants were to follow the LMDC's gen-eral guidelines and had to accept that their plans were subject to revisions.



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SAUSALITO, Cal. -- Responding to last week's release of the "Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World," Natural Capital Institute's Director Paul Hawken called the new ranking another example of the "black box" effect of social and environmental business research, and urged the SRI industry to increase the transparency of its evaluative processes.

According to its website (www.global100.org), the Global 100 is a list of "the 100 most sustainable corporations" based on ratings by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. The project, co-sponsored by Innovest and Corporate Knights, defines a sustainable corporation as one "that produces an overall positive impact on society and the environment." According to Hawken, such a definition is "nearly meaningless and has no value to science, people, or ecosystems."



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PARIS : An administrative enquiry into the fatal roof collapse at Charles de Gaulle airport last year will blame flaws in the design and construction of the newly-completed terminal, officials at the Paris airport authority ADP said.

Confirming a report in Le Parisien newspaper, the officials said that several senior figures at the airport authority -- including possibly its president Pierre Graff -- were likely to be placed under judicial investigation after the enquiry team presents its findings on Thursday.



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fmu blog debut


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free shit for blogging


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Noddy Holder of Slade is Terre's guest this Saturday at 3 PM on the Cherry Blossom Clinic. Tune in and hear the voice behind "Mama Weer All Crazee Now", "Cum On Feel The Noize", and other misspelled classics recount tales from the band's career as the kings of glam rock. The recent release of the Get Yer Boots On greatest hits collection will also be discussed.



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mvrdv silodam


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postcards from marfa


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