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"Modernism has been popularly depicted as something that really is not very popular," Sies says, "that is very cold, that is alienating and that sort of insists on a kind of design purity that makes it not necessarily amenable to human habitation."

Many of the notable Modern structures built in the Baltimore-Washington corridor are more "down to earth," she says. Custom and tract homes built in some parts of the suburbs were sited and designed to fit into the landscape, and used lots of wood and stone in addition to glass to establish visual connections with the surrounding environment.

"We really use the term 'baby boom Modernism' to summarize the kind of houses and churches and office buildings and shopping centers that went up in post-World War II suburbs," Sies says. "Architects told us that is where the money was, where people were moving."

While some notable Modern structures in the state have been recognized, including Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Baltimore and Bethesda and a Neutra building at St. John's College in Annapolis, the University of Maryland professors' survey highlighted lesser-known sites such as Baltimore's Highfield House condo building, designed by Mies van der Rohe; Goucher College's Towson campus; and several synagogues and churches in the suburbs.

Some exceptional Modern buildings have undergone alterations over the years, Sies says, but few in the state are as important as the Comsat building. She says it is one of the most significant early works by Pelli, an Argentina native who designed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as well as some of the world's tallest buildings. His structures often feature curves and metal, and the Comsat building "sort of telegraphed his style," she says.

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I've [Fatherflot] been working in my spare time on two projects near to my heart: a freeform webcast station for my university and a "Media Ecology" course with a large online database of readings.

As I've moved towards the stage of justifying each project I've begun to see a lot of connections. A true freeform radio station is a kind of educational institution, after all, serving as an evolving commentary upon/critique of commercial radio (in the case of WFMU, with its world-class "faculty" and "facilities," that critical engagement extends pretty much to the entirety of mass culture). The freeform ethos, in other words, is collective cultural criticism in practice. And while my main response to this practice is to encourage it, support it, tell others about it, and finally, to emulate it, there's nothing like a little theory to illuminate the practice.

Thus, I thought it might not be totally out of place to share some of the links I've found to the more important short works of cultural theory which are available on the web. If you like, we can use the comment section to discuss these texts and to suggest others if you know where they can be found. Here, in no particular order, are some of the biggies I've found:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Georg Simmel - "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
Guy Debord - "The Society of Spectacle"
Jean Baudrilliard - "Simulacra and Simulations"
Clement Greenberg - "Avant Garde and Kitsch"
Walter Benjamin - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Susan Sontag - "Notes on Camp"
Roland Barthes - "Myth Today"
C.P. Snow - "The Two Cultures"
Neil Postman - "The Humanism of Media Ecology"
Neil Postman - "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change"
Marshall McLuhan - "The Playboy Interview"
Marshall McLuhan - "Understanding Media - Chapter One"
Steve Talbott - "Computers, The Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness"
Steve Talbott - "Owen Barfield: the Evolution of Consciousness"
Umberto Eco - "The Future of the Book"
Walter Ong - "Orality, Literacy, and Personality"
Walter Ong - "Media Transformation: Electronics and Printed Books"
Susanne Langer - "A Note on The Film"
Alfred Korzybski - "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process"
Jacques Ellul - "The Humiliation of the Word"
Jacques Ellul - "The Technological Bluff"
Jose Ortega y Gasset - "The Revolt of the Masses"
Slavoj Žižek - online links page at Lacan.com

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