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Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne today announced the designation of a dozen new National Historic Landmarks in recognition of their importance in interpreting the heritage and history of the United States. The landmarks are located in Massachusetts, Ohio, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, South Carolina, Missouri, Illinois and Hawaii.
The sites include buildings that mark the evolving architectural style of Frank Lloyd Wright; a quintessential country estate of the Gilded Age; the home of Roswell Field, the legal counsel for Dred Scott in one of the most significant Supreme Court cases in U.S. history; a residence reflecting Nathaniel Hawthornes The House of the Seven Gables; and an American Garden City model of an ideal planned community.
harvard design magazine (this is a scoop on the contents of spring/summer '07 issue - ill repost a heads up when selected articles come online)
mcmansion
well described. too well described.
via justin
Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains. An estimated 2 million stone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons went into its construction. When completed, the 481-foot-tall pyramid was the world's tallest structure, a record it held for more than 3,800 years, when England's Lincoln Cathedral surpassed it by a mere 44 feet.
We know who built the Great Pyramid: the pharaoh Khufu, who ruled Egypt about 2547-2524 B.C. And we know who supervised its construction: Khufu's brother, Hemienu. The pharaoh's right-hand man, Hemienu was "overseer of all construction projects of the king" and his tomb is one of the largest in a cemetery adjacent to the pyramid.
What we don't know is exactly how it was built, a question that has been debated for millennia. The earliest recorded theory was put forward by the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 B.C., when the pyramid was already 2,000 years old. He mentions "machines" used to raise the blocks and this is usually taken to mean cranes. Three hundred years later, Diodorus of Sicily wrote, "The construction was effected by mounds" (ramps). Today we have the "space alien" theory--those primitive Egyptians never could have built such a fabulous structure by themselves; extraterrestrials must have helped them.
Modern scholars have favored these two original theories, but deep in their hearts, they know that neither one is correct. A radical new one, however, may provide the solution. If correct, it would demonstrate a level of planning by Egyptian architects and engineers far greater than anything ever imagined before.
No matter how the work of Atelier Bow-Wow (the mild-mannered, brilliant husband-and-wife team of Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima) tends to be interpreted or misinterpreted -- an exploitation of contextual constraints, an elaboration of personal quirks, an exploration of the potential of narrow spaces, and so on -- it is above all based on taking things seriously. Being serious, as Susan Sontag has said with regard to literature, includes being funny, but excludes being cynical. The houses of Atelier Bow-Wow may embody a subtle critique of the city that spawned them, yet for all their compositional humor, they always avoid subverting or mocking the desires of their clients. Quotidian pleasures and individual idiosyncrasies are all treated equally.
Like many of their contemporaries, Atelier Bow-Wow draw inspiration from French philosophical thought, yet not from the theoretical ambiguities and compositional analogies provided by figures such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Instead, the texts accompanying Atelier Bow-Wow projects often directly and indirectly reference canonical works of sociology such as Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, or Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life and The Production of Space. Indeed, the current exhibition of Atelier Bow-Wow's work at Gallery MA is called Practice of Lively Space. This is architecture to be judged as a platform for enabling activity rather than for its sculptural beauty.
this house construction blog is nearing completion :
The "old" house is gone. I'll have some footage up here are some point, or at least some stills of it being torn down. Wow. You think about a house and how it stands up and shelters you, and then you watch a single piece of equipment tear it down and mash it into little bits. Then, the big trucks show up and drive off with the debris, the foundation gets scraped away, and all that's left is the bricks from the chimney in one pile and a line of tree roots looking like commuters waiting for a bus.
If I thought the internal destruction was rough, the ease with which the house was torn down was both fascinating and disturbing - mostly disturbing.
The lot is now wide open, and while I'm sure it'll look great once the house is up, it's scary to see everything scraped away.
barnboard (appearing) floor mat
via vz