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mad housers


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He builds houses out of sand, beer crates, even paper - and he's just been chosen to create the Pompidou's new outpost. Steve Rose meets Shigeru Ban.

Shigeru Ban is not your average architect. You can tell this before you even open the door to his Paris office, because to get to that door, you have to ascend to the top of the Pompidou Centre and out on to the roof terrace. There, Ban is stationed in a sort of elongated covered wagon, which clings to the high-tech structure like a parasite. Inside, the office reveals itself to be the near-opposite of its host building: rather than industrial steel and giant ducts, it is made of synthetic sheeting, timber and cardboard tubes.


"I just asked the president of the Pompidou Centre as a joke if he would lend me the roof terrace for my temporary office," Ban calmly explains. "I needed to rent space somewhere in Paris, and it's good to be close to the client."

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no6

more current emailed image files from jim louis in new orleans's fourth ward
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looks familiar yet different


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pumpkin house

The Pumpkin House
16 Chittenden Ave. at 186th St.
© Douglas Elliman
Differing accounts exist of the origin of this unique three-story brick townhouse, known as the Pumpkin House. The AIA Guide to New York City (3rd ed., p.466) states that it was the guest house of the former Paterno estate. However, according to a New York Times report (12/5/99 Real Estate p.7), the land on which this house stands was in the estate of James Gordon Bennett, the original publisher of the NY Herald. Bennett is said to have sold the tract in 1923 to a Cleveland Walcutt, who had the house designed by Franklin Pagan and Harold Verna. Construction on the house, its the steel-framed base cantilevered far over the Henry Hudson Parkway, finished in 1925. The windows of the west façade, reflecting the orange light of the setting sun, bring to mind a jack-o-lantern. The house offers breathtaking views, from the Manhattan skyline to the south, across the Hudson RIver to the Palisades to the west and the Tappan Zee Bridge to the north.

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elmhurst's jamaica savings bank


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Samuel H. Gottscho at the old print shop


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dom 1
domus 885

Cover : Photographer and artist Amir Zaki (1974) draws inspiration from the mutations and impurities in the architectural heritage of the city of Los Angeles, such as these houses designed by Richard Neutra in the ’60s (p. 32), later disavowed by his descendents



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A cool roof, or “white roof” -- as simple as a basic coating of light-colored water sealant – is the roof of the future in New York, says Laurie Kerr, an architect in the Office of Sustainable Design, the eco- conscious division of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “The city controls maybe one in ten buildings in terms of square footage. Over the next 20 years, all of those buildings should have cool roofs.”

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designboom

history of rocking chairs

cersaie fair report - 1000 exhibitors from 30 different countries present the latest technologies and aesthetic - new trends in bathroom products ranging from ceramic tiles to sanitary installations and bathroom furnishings.


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m-ch micro compact home


via fab-prefab newsletter 11

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What would you do if you were asked to build a house on a rocky island with only five pencil drawings to go by? This was the challenge given to Thomas Heinz, AIA, a renowned Frank Lloyd Wright scholar. The house he was asked to model and execute was designed by Wright in 1950 but never built.

What Heinz had to start with were floor plans, three elevations, a section, and a perspective, with no materials, no dimensions — very few notations at all. Unlike Wright's designs for "Usonian" residences, which followed a rectangular or square grid, this house was to be triangular in plan, based on a grid of equilateral triangles five feet (1.5 meters) on a side.

The design incorporated an existing 60-foot long, 12-foot wide, 12-foot high (18 by 4 by 4 meters), whale-shaped rock extending through the center of the house, and the site presented many other technical challenges for the architect and the builders.

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It is quite a thrill: zooming from outer space through cloud layers into your continent, country, state, city and neighborhood, finally onto the roof of your very own house, then zooming back out again, twirling the globe and landing at another spot. But after a while, you might want to explore the higher applications of Google Earth - for example, browsing modern and contemporary architecture.

Pointingit (0lll.com/pointingit) started last month with the sole purpose of linking Google Earth (which only Windows users can download at earth.google.com) to 0lll.com (that's a zero and three L's), a Web site that compiles everyday, not-always-glamorous photographs of architecture.

So far, Pointingit, which is quite complicated to use, has posted fewer than a hundred architectural works, mostly in Europe and mostly new. They have been organized into odd categories: five structures designed by Santiago Calatrava; four banks and insurance company headquarters; four Herzog and de Meuron projects under construction; 14 bridges around the world; seven buildings in São Paulo; three egg-shaped structures; seven houses in Heitzing, a residential district of Vienna, plus all the houses within the estate known as the Werkbundsiedlung; and nine past winners of the RIBA Stirling architecture prize.

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NO1

Jiml's house in NO's fourth ward.


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9600 faQ


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just heard from fellow digitalmediatree blogger jim louis calling in via cell phone from new orleans louisiana. he's driven back down from virginia to check in on his small flood damaged house in (i believe) the impoverished fourth ward. he promises to send digital photos as e.mail attachments which i will faithfully post here on this page. keep an eye out for pictures to follow here and new information showing up on his page


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10/26/05 kenny g whispers the names of two thousand dead soldiers from the iraq war


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galerie artificial


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ive been assigned an internet research project by my mothers technically challenged cousin. john mcdowell (big charlie's son) asked me to research our ancestor samuel mcdowell's (aka super sam) involvement in the spanish conspiracy.

notes follow in the comments section
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civil war era house in washington va


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oldest english church in the us at jamestown va


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christopher wren building at william and mary


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motel postcards of williamsburg


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nested in the heart of colonial wiliamsburg is an interesting enigma. some where along the way the williamsburg inn built a modern annex. it appears to date from the late 50's early 60's. a smart looking late international style two story block of painted white brick apartments with flat roofs, sliding glass doors and handsome little squared off balconies and terraces overlooking the tennis courts. there seams to be no mention of them on line at all. a latter day embarrisment i assume. my relative who lives near by hates them and apologised for them. i assume most of the locals hate them as well. i loved 'em. the white painted brick has been allowed to peal in places giving them a terrific old south patina. i am aware that the rockafeller family has been involved with the CW project since the time of its original restoration. perhaps they recommended someone. i can find nothing on the identity of the architect of this annex. photo follows on 1st comment page of this post.


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You know that David Bowie song on Diamond Dogs where he talks about, “Fleas the size of rats suck on rats the size of cats”? Well, most people think he was talking about some imaginary, post-apocalyptic future; but, in actual fact, he’d just spent a few nights sleeping at my flat in the early seventies. We lived by the law of the jungle, man — eat, or be eaten!

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There are some who will perceive a confounding desire to gloss over the apocalyptic anxieties that grip the American consciousness, from ground zero to the Gulf Coast. But the show's focus on formal aesthetics does plant it firmly within the Modern's tradition. When Philip Johnson, the founder of the museum's department of architecture, first introduced the International Style to an American audience in the 1930's, he famously stripped the movement of its social and political meanings.

That agenda continued through the cold-war era, when critics charged, with some justification, that the museum's support of abstraction fit neatly within a broader government agenda to project a progressive image to the world.

But in some ways, the show also brings to mind the bent-plywood furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, which became alluring emblems of the postwar American dream. "Safe" seems to be shaped by the innocent belief that good, clever designs can lead to a more enlightened world.

Today, that notion seems naïve. It's hard to remember a time in American history when the unnerving effect of world politics on daily life has been more palpable. A sign in the subway alerting passengers that the police are checking bags and knapsacks triggers a sequence of emotions: fear, repression and, finally, denial. That sign - mounted on a cheap board, with simple lettering - is more likely to leave a lasting imprint than the most beautiful objects in this show.

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Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington
An Oral History of American Music

Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve

The first opportunity to read—and hear—interviews with and about great American composers and musicians of the early twentieth century

The first decades of the twentieth century were a fertile and fascinating period in American musical history. This book and the two CDs that accompany it present an exceptional collection of interviews with and about the most significant musical figures of the era. Tapping the unparalleled materials contained in the Oral History American Music archive at Yale University, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington is a unique account of what it was like for musicians and composers to live and work in those years. It is also the story of the making of the archive, as told by Vivian Perlis, who personally conducted many of the interviews.

Music aficionados can now hear Eubie Blake describe the birth of ragtime or listen to a firsthand account of how Ira Gershwin came to write those famous lines in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” In-depth interviews with such figures as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and Duke Ellington are included in the book, which also features chapter introductions and fascinating sidebars, illustrations, and anecdotes throughout. Two CDs complete the set, enabling today’s listener to enjoy the remarkablen experience of hearing the actual voices and the music of American composers of the early twentieth century.

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beyondthebeatgeneration


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mc5 concert posters


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NEW ORLEANS - Optimism is in short supply here. And as people begin to sift through the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, there is a creeping sense that the final blow has yet to be struck - one that will irrevocably blot out the city's past.


The first premonition arose when Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced that the model for rebirth would be a pseudo-suburban development in the Lower Garden District called River Garden. The very suggestion alarmed preservationists, who pictured the remaking of historic neighborhoods into soulless subdivisions served by big-box stores.

More recently, Mr. Nagin contemplated suspending the city's historic preservation laws to make New Orleans more inviting to developers - evoking the possibility of architectural havoc and untrammeled greed.

But politicians and developers are not the only culprits here. For decades now, the architectural mainstream has accepted the premise that cities can exist in a fixed point in historical time. What results is a fairy tale version of history, and the consequences could be particularly harsh for New Orleans, which was well on its way to becoming a picture-postcard vision of the past before the hurricane struck.

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As attention shifts from rescue to reconstruction in New Orleans, we must answer the question of how, and in what form, the rebuilding will happen. If we get the answer wrong, Katrina and Rita could turn out to be among the greatest cultural disasters the nation has ever experienced.

On a recent visit to New Orleans, I saw first-hand that the French Quarter and the Garden District are largely intact. That's good news, certainly, because these areas, with their imposing white columns and lacy cast-iron galleries, constitute the world-renowned public face of New Orleans. But the down-home heart of the city beats in lesser-known neighborhoods such as Holy Cross, Treme, Broadmoor and Mid-City, where officially designated historic districts showcase the modest Creole cottages, corner stores and shotgun houses (long, narrow houses, usually only one room wide with no hallway) that are essential ingredients in the rich architectural mix that is New Orleans. These are the buildings that we saw in those haunting images of battered rooftops dotting a toxic sea, and they are the buildings most at risk. Saving as many of them as possible is essential--and I came away convinced that the vast majority of them can be saved.

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schwarz is going on vacation tomorrow - family visit to monticello and colonial williamsburg - will take pics...


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The culpability compounds with each set of hands that touched this property.

Bunshaft could have put covenants on it before willing it to MoMA, but didn't, possibly on the assumption that the Museum would, by the nature of its mission, take steps to preserve this important design.

MoMA could have put restrictions on the house when it sold it to Stewart but didn't. MoMA's not in the house business, so the idea that MoMA woulda shoulda kept it is naive at best. As is any idea that Bunshaft could've intended for MoMA to do anything but benefit from the gift of the house.

But still, the operating principles here were fiduciary, not curatorial or conservationist; and yet the "understanding" with Stewart and the publicity around it at the time, points to a perceived responsibility beyond merely maximizing the museum's return from a donation. Q: Did the Museum set aside the proceeds from the sale for future acquisitions? "Art-for-art," as befits a deaccession? I highly doubt it. If not, however the sale was presented--or spun-- in the press, on the museum's ledger, the house was a financial asset, not a work of art.

Stewart could have left the house as is, but didn't. Can anyone be surprised by that? Martha Stewart is a hack. The queen of hacks. It was her penury and negligence that let the house deteriorate. She's lucky that an over-inflated sense of your own aesthetic superiority leading to the decimation of a modernist landmark isn't a crime, or she'd still be in jail.

Ever since the sale, MoMA said it had a "good faith agreement" with Stewart to preserve the house, which was a stripped, weed-covered shell when her lawsuits with the house's next door neighbor were finally settled.

Pawson's a frickin' hack, but he coulda--no, he was just Stewart's hack.

Alexis... this was a wealth transfer mechanism, nothing more.

Maharam's a hack, and a spineless hack at that. He could have restored the house if he cared to, instead he hides behind the excuse that it was beyond help. The incremental expense of doing so is approximately zero compared to the price of the land. And it's not like he can build anything else; wetlands zoning restricts him to Bunshaft's original footprints (and whatever Stewart/Pawson managed to get approved.)

Did someone mention approvals? That'd be the East Hampton town board who sat by while one of the few interesting feats of architecture in the whole place was modified and destroyed. But then, why should important modernist design get any better treatment in the potato fields of the Hamptons than they do on the corner of Central Park?

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So what do I find in a number of blogs? Yep, advertising via BlogAds. Not only that, the majority of the ads are on sites that are part of the Liberal Network.

So here I am, trying to make a living through blogging and they think it's cute to have bloggers like me basically advertise their project for free.

Well, here's the deal people : You have crossed the line. It is not viral marketing on my blog when you pay for advertisment to other bloggers. When you do that, you have an ad campaign in place. Asking me to do it for free is in labor-talk, "explotation".

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vintage motorcycle jackets


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"The real challenge," Stockhausen wrote to me, "is to find seven stage directors and stage designers, seven conductors, five orchestras, one children's orchestra, nine professional choirs, two children's choirs, one girls' choir, seven sound projectionists, seven sound technicians, many soloists. This is all possible if one can engage the ensembles and soloists who have already performed parts of Light quasi-scenically in concerts and rehearse in seven auditoriums daily for about six months."

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BG 105

BG-105

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the soul artists of zoo york

via record brother whos posting the crazy shitz on the regular


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terry riley le secret de la via (1975) / no man's land (1985) mp3s


via kenny g fmu blog


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formalisims

GRAV, the Nouveaux Réalistes, BMPT and Support-Surface propounded all manner of theories on the ends and means of art and the destiny and political role of the avant-gardes. The Marxist synthesis of structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis did much to shape the deliberately speculative nature of these attempts at self-definition and positioning. The extent and importance of this critical activity during the 1970s is evidenced by the existence of such reviews as Cahiers théoriques, Macula and Documents sur. This linking of art and the human sciences, which still obtains today in somewhat abated form, became the defining characteristic of contemporary art in France. Among its innumerable consequences was the strangely tortuous procedures that artists had to take to express their subjectivity.

Much has been written about the parallels between the critical intuitions of Frank Stella and those of GRAV, and about the different conclusions drawn on each side. The heritage of Duchampian kinetics had a decisive influence on François Morellet, Julio Le Parc and Jesus-Rafael Soto, (although this reading of it has been totally neglected since), as did the Zurich Concrete Artists (including Max Bill and Richard P. Lohse), Auguste Herbin, Jean Dewasne and Victor Vasarely. These figures constituted a unifying matrix for the work of artists from a wide variety of backgrounds.[27] The interest in movement, which was expressed most literally in the work of Jean Tinguely and Pol Bury, moved many artists to translate it into pictorial form, to attempt the simultaneous use of illusionistic and interactive procedures. With its abstract anamorphoses, its ever-more sophisticated apparatus, its games with parallaxes and mirrors, the work of the GRAV group was aimed at the widest-possible public. As they proclaimed in their Manifesto (1963), “We Want to interest the spectator, to remove his inhibitions, to get him to relax.”

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support surface treatment


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Much of the intense work and the sparks that flew between Kahn and Noguchi during the five years of their collaboration (1961-66) found their way into the design of Moerenuma Park in Japan.

A testament to what can be achieved when public officials, artists and the general public work together, the park was completed after Noguchi's death under the guidance of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, architects Shoji Sadao and Junichi Kawamura (longtime Noguchi collaborators), Kitaba Landscape Planning, Park Director Hitoshi Yamamoto and city officials working with the support of the citizens of Sapporo.

Their achievement is phenomenal and incorporates a full range of Noguchi's work in stone, concrete, wood, metal and fiberglass. More importantly, it showcases his talent for using the sun, sky, Earth and the horizon as his true materials.

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Gulf Coast: A Vision to Revive, Not Repeat

By ROBIN POGREBIN for nyt
Published: October 13, 2005
BILOXI, Miss., Oct. 12 - The work facing architects and urban planners who convened here today at a battered resort is visible right outside the window. A beach strewn with uprooted trees and the detritus of ravaged buildings. Deserted streets lined by flooded empty houses. Hulking casino hotels gone dark.

Over the next several days, this group of some 200 professionals from around the country will struggle to come up with a comprehensive regional plan to rebuild the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It's a design challenge on a grand scale, covering 11 communities in 3 Mississippi counties damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

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paul rudolph tracey towers up in the bronx


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black betty
black betty table


leanon coat rack


brackets included steel shelf


cloud meeting room


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parcel table


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slow cruise on the highline


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The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has announced that it will launch a series of public workshops to determine the programming for the future Memorial Museum. The museum, to be located at the World Trade Center site, will include fragments of materials from both the 1993 bombing and the 2001 attack. In collaboration with the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York and New York New Visions, each workshop will feature a presentation of preliminary programming concepts, currently by developed by curatorial planners Howard+Revis Design Services, Inc., institutional planning consultant LORD Cultural Resources Planning and Management, Inc., and the LMDC. The workshops will offer the public the opportunity to discuss their expectations for the Memorial Museum and to comment on the preliminary concepts. The final recommendations of the Memorial Center Advisory Committee can found on the LMDC’s website: www.RenewNYC.com/memorial.

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more afghan war rugs


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homage to matisse

mark rothko - homage to matisse (1953)


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you think your dad was tough - mp3 of murray wilson and the boys from the help me ronda sessions - in parts or the full 40 min version


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Only weeks after the world lost the great R.L. Burnside, another stellar light of both the Fat Possum label and music in general has passed away; Paul "Wine" Jones died of cancer in Jackson, Mississippi on Sunday. He was age 59. His two discs Mule (1995) and Pucker Up Buttercup (1999) were pretty much in the similar vein of so many of his labelmates also plucked from obscurity and saddled in Oxford, Mississippi studios by FP chief excavators Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson: raw, blazing display of an ever-dimming continuum between the roots of Delta jukejoints, Fred McDowell-style ass-shaking repetition and today's primitive blues done with pure spirit. With Junior Kimbrough, Asie Payton, RL Burnside and now Jones gone, that thread gets sadly thinner. Wine's sound was all his own vocabulary, and in the end influenced really by no one but himself and his surroundings. Buttercup is a fractured and odd blues record which at times rips speakers to shreds; it's the sound of someone barely familiar with a studio telling his story (joined by a fellow named Pickle on drums) in distortion-flecked sketches right down to the finale, appropriately titled "I Guess I Fucked It All Up." We at WFMU had the distinct pleasure of witnessing the man in action as he joined Kenny Brown and T-Model Ford for a hard-to-believe-they-were-rocking-AND-drinking-at-9AM live performance on David Suisman's Inner Ear Detour show back in 2004. Listen to his 4-song set here! (Real Audio) And also check out Pucker Up Buttercup's "Goin' Back Home" from another Inner Ear Detour show here (Real Audio). And, if you get a chance, do check out the excellent DVD documentary You See Me Laughin', which traces the story and the intertwining lives of many of these, the very last of the Hill Country Blues men. A third Jones album was in the works according to the Fat Possum catalog page that was originally due in January.
via brian turner on fmu blog


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a revamped wfmu beware of the blog w/ more bells and whistles


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Porch Posts, Balusters, Rails, Etc.


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The pumps at Station No. 1 are arranged in a neat row, their suction pipes reaching down under the building to connect to the city's vast network of drainage canals. The 12-foot 1913 pumps, designed by the engineer Albert Baldwin Wood, are still here, as are four more he designed in 1928. The last two, the biggest and most powerful, were built in the mid-90's.

The night of the storm, Mr. Martin said, "the two new pumps went out right away. They're the most powerful. They sound like freight trains. Four of the old ones kept going all night. The original two pumps, those are the most reliable. I'd use those two before I'd use any of the others."

He walked to the back of the shed, where two towering wood doors are held in place by heavy braces. As the storm picked up speed that night, 100-mile-per-hour winds pounded the doors, threatening to tear them from their frames. If the storm waters flowed past them, he knew, the station would stop functioning. So he threw himself against the doors, struggling to hold them back while screaming for help over the roar of the machines. The other men came running to help, jamming the wood braces between the doors and the machines. That night, the pump stations kept the city from flooding.

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I also knew, or thought I knew, that right up to Thursday night, there had been just two houses in Uptown New Orleans with people inside them. In one, a couple of old coots had barricaded themselves behind plywood signs that said things like "Looters Will Be Shot" and "Enter and Die." The other, a fortlike house equipped with a massive power generator, was owned by Jim Huger - who happened to grow up in the house next door to my parents. (When I heard that he had the only air-conditioning in town and I called to ask if I could borrow a bed, he said, "I'm that little kid you used to beat on with a Wiffle Ball bat, and I gotta save your ass now?") In Jim Huger's house, until the night before, several other young men had holed up, collecting weapons and stories. Most of these stories entered the house by way of a reserve officer in the New Orleans Police Department, a friend of Jim's, who had gone out in full uniform each day and come back with news directly from other cops. From Tuesday until Thursday, the stories had grown increasingly terrifying. On Thursday, a police sergeant told him: "If I were you, I'd get the hell out of here. Tonight they gonna waste white guys, and they don't care which ones." This reserve cop had looked around and seen an amazing sight, full-time New Orleans police officers, en masse, fleeing New Orleans. "All these cops were going to Baton Rouge to sleep because they thought it wasn't safe to sleep in New Orleans," he told me. He had heard that by the time it was dark "there wouldn't be a single cop in the city."

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Jean Prouvé: Three Nomadic Structures

MOCA
Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles, California

"He combines the soul of an engineer with that of an architect.”
--Le Corbusier

Prouvé (1901–84) sought to create furniture and simple lightweight metal building systems whose constructive logic permitted easy fabrication and use. His major preoccupation was with prefabrication technology for architecture, and all his work, from cafeteria chairs to public buildings to new solutions for temporary housing, adheres to the dictum "Never design anything that cannot be made.

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arie kaplan


Kings of Comics, How Jews Created the Comic Book Industry
Knowing that I'm both a huge comic book fan and a writer for MAD Magazine, Reform Judaism Magazine recently asked me to write a three-part series on the history of Jews in comic books, "Kings of Comics". I got to interview industry legends like Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Jerry Robinson, and Joe Kubert, newer talents like Jon Bogdanove and Chris Claremont, and even my MAD colleagues like Drew Friedman, Peter Kuper, and Al Jaffee.

...............................................................................................................................................................

Wizards of Wit - How Jews Revolutionized American Comedy
Reform Judaism Magazine wanted to write a series on Jewish Comedy Writers, so they chose (who else?) a Jewish Comedy Writer. I'm very proud of this series, especially since I got to interview some of my heroes, including Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Paul Peter Porges, Nora Ephron and Lewis Black, among many others

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thoughtography


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A. Kaprow - Rearrangeable Panels 2, 1958/94


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phil sims


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korbo


Katarzyna Kobro
(1898 – 1951) Rosja – Polska RzeYba abstrakcyjna (1),
1924 szk?o, metal, drewno,
72 x 17,5 x 15,5
Dar grupy „a.r.”, 1932


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wladyslaw strzeminski unism in painting

"Unist Composition II (10)", 1931, oil on canvas, Museum of Art, Lodz

Kompozycja Unistyczna 11, 1930-32 (essays)


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Retain and restore those buildings that can be salvaged. Due to damage from contaminated water, extensive measures will be required to deal with mold. Gut-rehab will be required for many of the estimated 80% of the city’s 200,000 homes that have been damaged and, of course, many homes will not be salvageable. Building codes should address resistance to non-catastrophic flood damage—for example, the most flood-prone lower floors of houses should have no paper-faced drywall, no ductwork, no air handlers, no wall-to-wall carpeting, and no electrical service boxes. Retaining the character of New Orleans, which is defined in part by its vernacular architecture and its diversity, should be a high priority.

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radical painting group chronology

marcia hafif beginning again

gallery artists charlotte jackson gallery SF NM


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-- let’s elude to the new exhibition at Francis Naumann Fine Art on East 80th Street, where Mike Bidlo has installed 16 erased Willem de Kooning drawings of women, all of his own making -- the drawings and the erasures -- framed and matted, with a black-and-white photograph of the now-obliterated drawing taped to the back, and mounds of eraser shavings, or "ashes," displayed nearby under glass domes. Purchasers of each drawing get some residue of the destruction in a glassine envelope. The drawings are priced at $10,000 to $22,000.

Is Rauschenberg’s original avant-garde gesture, so shocking in its disrespect for art, and so Freudian as an esthetic Oedipal revolt, ever considered a blow against male chauvinism and its construction of woman as a devouring monster? It seems so here -- but the drawing isn’t so much eradicated as given a lighter touch.

Rauschenberg obliterated his de Kooning in 1953, during the dramatically avant-garde decade in which he also made empty white enamel paintings (designed as surfaces for cast shadows, in 1951) and painted the more-or-less identical Factum I and Factum II (as a poke at "Abstract Expressionist" authenticity, in 1957). For his "Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing" series, Bidlo drew copies of de K’s Surrealist portrait of a bug-eyed Elaine de Kooning from ca. 1940-41 through the "Women" series of the 1950s to a late Screaming Girls from 1967-68.

Rauschenberg’s de Kooning is now of no consequence, a mere generic marker. But Bidlo’s de K’s are all canonical, well-known, iconic. Before he proceeded, Bidlo sought Rauschenberg’s okay for the project. The master of Captiva, Fla., who turns 90 next month, sent up his sage advice: "All artists take their chances."

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Warhol made the point himself : "So on one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty : i.e., I'm helping people waste their space, when what I really want to do is help them empty their space" (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol). And again, quoted by Alan Jones in Art Press n°199 : "I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and no-one should think he has a better or a worse picture than anyone else. And if the 'original picture' is good, they're all good."

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[Q] From William B McMillan: “Do you know the origin and spelling of the police slang word pronounced skel (often heard on ABC’s NYPD Blue TV show in the USA) which seems to be used to refer to street crooks, thugs, or con men.”

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open source


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Martha Stewart is perhaps not the first person one would associate with architect Gordon Bunshaft, the principal of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Responsible for such masterworks as the the Lever House (1952) and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (1960), Bunshaft may seem at odds with the Colonial revival coziness popularized by Stewart's magazines and television programs.

Yet when the architect's own home, Travertine House, was up for sale in 1994, Stewart was evidently smitten. "I'd never seen the house," she told Brendan Gill of The New Yorker upon buying the structure in 1995, adding that the minute she had heard of it, "I wanted it—just like that!"

This unlikely love-at-first-sight scenario ended last summer with the sale and demolition of the house, a rare domestic project of the architect that had been described as one of the country's most beautiful International-style structures.

Built in 1962 as Bunshaft's home, Travertine House was a symmetrical, single-story structure 26 feet wide by 100 feet long that balanced stone-walled pavilions on either side of a central glass-walled core. Incorporating double-T pre-stressed concrete roof panels also employed in Bunshaft's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. (1974), the house was designed to display his significant collection of modern art, which included works by Giacometti, Dubuffet, and Miro, situated throughout the house's interior and 2.4-acre grounds.

Travertine was "an important Modernist house, unique in Bunshaft's career," says architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who points out that it was a notable design even by the standards of the architecturally distinguished Georgica Pond area of the Hamptons, on Long Island.

Willed to the Museum of Modern Art along with the architect's art collection after Bunshaft's death in 1990, the house was sold to Stewart for $3.2 million in 1995 without any protective covenants beyond what a MoMA spokeswoman, quoted by the East Hampton Star in 2002 referred to as an offer "to maintain the integrity" of the building.

Despite these seemingly exemplary intentions, Stewart hired London architect John Pawson to redo the two-bedroom house. Interior partitions and detailing were removed and windows boarded up; a portion of the house's signature travertine floor was reportedly removed and installed in the kitchen of Stewart's new Bedford, N.Y., home—a perhaps more typically "Martha" complex of New England saltbox-inspired architecture.

The renovation was halted, however, when Stewart began feuding with neighbor Harry Macklowe, a real-estate developer who contested Stewart's plans to build several outbuildings, claiming they would block his view of the pond. The property was soon entangled in lawsuits and rumors. Meanwhile, piles of dirt and rubble from excavations on the site were left on the lawn of Travertine House for so long that, according to visitors, they sprouted weeds.

The two-year-long dispute was finally settled in 2003. Macklowe's appeals were dismissed, and Stewart was granted permission to renovate the studio and add three outbuildings to the property. However, these projects were never restarted, and the house, which Stewart had reportedly never spent a night in, fell into further decay. (Stewart's publicist did not return requests for information; MoMA confirmed the dates of the sale but declined to comment.)

Soon after the ImClone insider-trading scandal broke, Stewart transferred the property to her daughter, Alexis, who then put the deteriorated house on the market for $10.5 million. Last spring, Donald Maharam, a textiles magnate noted for reissues of classic mid-century designs, purchased the waterfront house for approximately $9.5 million.

Despite his interest in modernism, Maharam announced that he was going to demolish the house. In a statement released in June, Maharam described the structure as "decrepit and largely beyond repair," claiming that Stewart's attempts at renovation had ended with "substantial demolition of all but the existing roof." Travertine House was demolished on the last weekend of July.

In a neighborhood where new houses are normally up to five times the size of Travertine House, Maharam's plans for a new house are restrained by zoning ordinances that prevent new construction from exceeding the Bunshaft building's original footprint unless they are set back an additional 150 feet from nearby protected wetlands—an impossibility given the shape of the property. Maharam has decided to construct a modern building "in the spirit of the former house."

Local preservationists, who had been optimistic about the house given Stewart's apparent commitment, are still asking how such a significant structure could have been allowed to deteriorate. Krinsky says that the house was more important as an ensemble work when considered with the art collection and landscape: "There wasn't much left to preserve."

But Michael Gotkin, director of the Modern Architecture Working Group, doubts Maharam's assessment of the building as unsalvageable. "Donald Maharam has made a small fortune by reviving mid-century modern designers like Alexander Girard and Irving Harper … it's too bad that he did not have the same regard for Gordon Bunshaft."

Tom Killian, who worked with Bunshaft, criticizes MoMA for not attempting to protect the house as part of its sale to Stewart, pointing out that the house was left to MoMA. "Whatever the Maharams and Ms. Stewart may have done, I feel that the museum is the real culprit."

Whoever is to blame, it's clear that the house's loss is "another blow against Modernism's sense of modesty and direction and focus," Goldberger says. "I hope the new design will not be another situation where this tradition is sacrificed."

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Scaffolding is expected to start going up late this week at 2 Columbus Circle, opening the way for a controversial transformation of Edward Durell Stone's building into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design.

"We are remaking a building," Brad Cloepfil, the project's architect, said yesterday. "Restructuring it, recladding it, letting the light in."
stones building has its faults and cloepfil's new re-design is great. i still think its the wrong thing to do though.


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no-bid katrina reconstruction


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reopening NO by zip code


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Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

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What this storm hit was largely American auto-centric sprawl that was largely below sea-level, wrapped by extensive levees, exposed to huge volumes of water, and sinking in the peat of the backswamps. This development pattern, and the resource extraction industries that supported it, created the conditions for this disaster to occur. This was not an act of God, nor a natural disaster -- this was a public policy disaster. New Orleanians need to understand this in order to make well-informed decisions about what and how to rebuild. That means reflecting on public policies towards coastal erosion, the taming of the Mississippi River, sprawl, and sea-level rise due to global warming.

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Disaster. Relief. Housing.

The words fairly echo with dismal images of people forced to live in squalor, desperation and sorrow -- crowds packed into stadiums, improvised shantytowns, rows of identical trailers, school cafeterias turned into shelters. Yet these words also evokes a different picture -- where shelter fulfills its highest, most utopian function. Where a simple structure can provide comfort and warmth and dignity when all else has failed. Where housing literally offers relief from disaster.

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good bye public planning process. the taking of snohetta at ground zero 1, 2, 3


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Las Vegas buildings seem forever either to be getting built or getting torn down, and few have ever been considered for any sort of architectural preservation. On the other hand, few are like La Concha motel, or at least the 1,000-square-foot lobby that remains. Designed by the architect Paul Revere Williams - whose work includes the four-legged terminal at Los Angeles International Airport - the 44-year-old lobby is considered one of the last and best-preserved examples of 1950's Googie architecture.
going to miss all the american googie that dates from around the time of my birth. and holding with the notion that 2 cc is kind of googie too


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The methods of determining the value of historic preservation vary widely, and several challenges persist in applying economic methods to the field. This discussion paper, which is followed with an extensive and annotated bibliography, reviews the current findings on the value of historic preservation and the methods used to assess that value, making the case for needed improvement if the economics of preservation is to more objectively and rigorously quantify the effects of historic preservation.

Toward that end, the paper calls for a hybrid of the most promising analytical methods and more collaboration across research fields. By combining methods, the particular shortcomings or blind spots of different methods can perhaps offset one another. Without further refinement, the ability to make conclusive, generalized statements about the economics of preservation will remain elusive.
from the brookings institution


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the swimmer ~~\o/~~ w/ link to full 1968 v canby nyt review


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gonna need a bigger crane


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In a letter to John C. Whitehead, the foundation's chairman, Ms. Gund lamented the erosion of the original master plan for the site, which was drafted to "permanently memorialize what happened on Sept. 11, while also bringing and weaving the site back into the fabric of the city."

Now, she wrote in her letter dated Thursday, "Governor Pataki (and it saddens me to say, Senator Clinton has joined him) has caved and virtually ensured that there will be no cultural component to the redevelopment."

"I hate to walk away from this situation and leave it to you and the others to sort out," continued Ms. Gund, who is a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. "But I am afraid that the governor and those few family members have succeeded in destroying what could not be destroyed on that awful Tuesday, which is our hope."

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