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Even before the storm, New Orleans’s economic ship was powered not by a couple of whales, but by a school of minnows. The city estimates that 95 percent of the 22,000 businesses here before Hurricane Katrina employed fewer than 100 workers (fewer than 25, in most cases). These included not just shops, but also the artists and manufacturers and wholesalers that supplied them, and the accountants and lawyers and cleaning companies that served them.
About 60 percent of the businesses within the city limits have probably not reopened, according to a recent study by Louisiana State University, which tried to call about 8,500 of the 10,000 businesses registered with the state. At about 5,000 of the businesses, the phone had been disconnected or was not answered after five calls.
Long term, more than 40 percent of those businesses are likely to disappear, said Timothy P. Ryan, an economist who is chancellor of the University of New Orleans. As residents return and the city rebuilds, new businesses will eventually open, but Dr. Ryan predicted that they would not be the same kind of businesses as their predecessors. “Many of them may be in Sheetrocking,” he said.
walker evans approximately
A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If it’s a camera with film, a negative is made; if it’s a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.
In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the picture’s integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.
I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.
Curators Bob Bailey and Peter McMahon have put together a sleek, handsome show that follows the rise and fall of the functional geometries of modernist houses in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet. Photos in color and black-and-white and models made by Ben Stracco portray simply built summer homes with broad planes, angular outlines, and modest materials that echo and update the Cape's vernacular saltbox houses. Squatting low among the scrubby pines or projecting like an extended balcony over the dunes, these buildings harmonize with the landscape, providing still focal points around which the constant shift and swing of nature pivot.
Jack Phillips , a Bostonian and follower of Walter Gropius who owned a lot of acreage in Truro and Wellfleet, invited intellectuals from MIT and Harvard to come and make use of the land in the early 1940s. Architects such as Marcel Breuer , Serge Chermayeff, and Paul Weidlinger took their cues from Bauhaus design, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier.
In 1956, several young architects from England, France, the Netherlands and Italy were charged with organizing the 10th meeting of the influential International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), a formal gathering of proponents of Modernism.
Questioning some of the fundamental tenets of Modernist doctrine—among them, a strict adherence to functionalism, a preference for high-rise buildings and ideals of a socially and structurally stratified city— the organizers of the 10th CIAM created a new forum to explore ways to restore a human scale to urban design and to reexamine the role of the architect within society. Adopting the name “Team 10,” the renegade group agreed to meet regularly, each time at a different location. In their open-ended discussions, in advance of Jane Jacobs’s historic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Team 10 championed the unique complexity and diversity of the city landscape, heralding a new age in urban design and planning.
Deliberately informal in tone and organization, the meetings took place in a variety of European cities and towns, from the first in 1960 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France, to the last in 1981 in Lisbon. Drawing on a range of resources and media that includes correspondence, transcripts, tape recordings, photographs, drawings and film, “Team 10: A Utopia of the Present,” brings alive the intellectually charged gatherings of this pioneering group.
In McDonough's world, there would be no "trade secrets," which allow corporations to legally pollute in the name of profit. His world is a transparent one, where the Constitution still reigns, but "freedom" is not reinterpreted as the right to pollute, endanger, or destroy -- and our intentions are not measured by what is not against the law.
"Imagine an economy ... that purifies air, land, and water ...!" GreenBlue's website boldly claims. If only we'd listen to him, the growing crowd of acolytes wails, we'd have a chance of saving the planet and ourselves! We can have it all!
Though this priest is preaching hope and harmony, a prophet has appeared who is making people distinctly uncomfortable. He is preaching that the church of sustainability has gone astray by placing its faith in technology and valuing human life above all others. He believes the priests have become corrupt, and has nailed his theses to the door.
tin lantern house moscow
"It was heart-wrenching," Lindstedt says today. "The park sat there all closed up. They auctioned off some of the stuff, but ... the things that were left were just rotting away. It was kind of sad to see this place all decrepit and failing."
Today, a good portion of Frontier Village is a city park -- not a bad use of the land, in Lindstedt's opinion. But you can hear the cringe in Lindstedt's voice as he reports that the other half is home to a large condo complex. Worst of all? The developers had the nerve to call their development "Frontier Village."
auburn univ / rural studio : katrina response 2
The purpose of the project is to provide FEMA with research, precedent and feasibility studies as well masterplans, models, and schematic designs to establish an array of 'container housing' communities of 100 to 10,000 inhabitants.im looking for follow up information on this project. knowing fema... (!!!)