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For the first eight episodes of Season 15, Bob Vila heads to the land of sun and fun: Miami Beach, Florida. He discovers that while most of glamorous "South Beach" has already been developed and real estate comes at a premium, there are still hot buys to be found north of the Deco District.
Just off the Venetian Causeway on a manmade island with gorgeous views of the Miami skyline and Biscayne Bay, he finds a small and very dated condo in a high-rise building and undertakes a high-style renovation. We learn about architect Morris Lapidus, the creator of the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels and trendsetter for 1950's and '60s Miami Beach, and team up with the New York architectural/design team to the stars, Pierce Allen.
Bob shows how removing the popcorn ceiling and wall-to-wall carpet, knocking down walls to open up the space for today's lifestyle, and even refurbishing the existing 1960's aluminum slider and window puts this tired little apartment on the fast track into the next millennium. With glass tile, hip furnishings, custom glass pocket doors, fun curves, and a new take on using old-school products like cork flooring and laminates, this project is a breath of fresh air.
To: The Internet
From: carl@media.org for public.resource.org
Subj: smithsonianimages.si.edu
Date: May 19, 2007
We write to you today on the subject of SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu, a government ecommerce site built on a repository of 6,288 images of national significance. The site is breathtaking in scope, with imagery ranging from the historic cyanotypes of Edward Muybridge to historic photos from aviation, natural history, and many other fields. If the Smithsonian Institution is our attic, these photos are our collective scrapbook.
However, the web site imposes draconian limits on the use of this imagery. The site includes a copyright notice that to the layman would certainly discourage any use of the imagery. While personal, non-commercial use is purportedly allowed, it requires a half-dozen clicks before the user is allowed to download a low-resolution, watermarked image. An image without the watermark and at sufficient resolution to be useful requires a hefty fee, manual approval by the Smithsonian staff, and the resulting invoice specifically prohibits any further use without permission.
For some photos, the prohibitions go even farther. Aviation photos, for example, come from the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), which states, among other efforts to overreach, “even in the absence of copyright, Smithsonian still reserves all rights to image use.” Are these prohibitions on reuse valid? We showed the NASM copyright page to Yochai Benkler, a Yale law professor. Benkler wrote back that the unilateral and unequivocal claims were “nonsense on stilts.”
The Smithsonian Institution is a trust instrumentality of the United States of America chartered by the U.S. Congress to "increase and diffuse knowledge." 20 U.S.C. § 41 et seq. The Smithsonian's Board of Regents is chaired by the Chief Justice of the United States and the Institution receives over $650 million in federal funds every year.
To understand why the Smithsonian is over-reaching when it comes to photographs, one must remember that works of the U.S. government have no copyright protection whatsoever. Works of the United States Government are in the public domain. 17 U.S.C. § 105 While there are subtle exceptions, such as work prepared by private contractors exempted under special exemptions established in the Federal Acquisition Regulations ( FAR 52.227-14), the general principle is quite clear and applies just as much to the Smithsonian Institution as to any other part of our federal government. As Rachell V. Browne, Assistant General Counsel of the Smithsonian Institution said in a statement submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office:
“The Smithsonian cannot own copyright in works prepared by Smithsonian employees paid from federal funds.”
The Institution makes a great show of the distinction between “federal” employees and “trust” employees. But, this distinction is based on an obscure 1962 non-binding opinion [Application for Registration of Claim to Copyright Protection of Publication Entitled “The White House - An Historic Guide,” Op. Off. Legal Counsel (October 26, 1962)]. As a matter of policy it is difficult to conceive of two Smithsonians, a federal institution accountable to the American people and an ironically named "trust" somehow allowed to act as a private, opaque body accountable to only the whims of management. Even if one is to carve off a “private trust” with different rules from those that apply to agencies of the U.S. government, one must remember that the trust is registered under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code and is thus required to perform actions that directly promote the declared charitable purpose, which in this case is to “increase and diffuse knowledge.”
Because the overwhelming majority of the images in SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu appear to be public domain, and because the draconian notices on the site have a dramatic chilling effect on use of these historic images and national symbols, we have performed several actions that we hope will allow others to examine the public domain status: continue
i suppose this guy thinks hes helping. what a knucklehead :
For a small city, St. Louis has an extraordinarily rich history of modernist architecture. Isadore Shank, William Adair Bernoudy, Harris Armstrong, Frederick Dunn, Charles Nagel, Ralph Cole Hall, Edouard Mutrux, Hank Bauer, and Eugene Mackey were all based here at one time or other. Most of their designs -- located in the wealthier, green and leafy suburbs west of the city -- were built during the golden age of St. Louis Modernism roughly between 1930 and 1970 when status was not to be distinguished solely on the square footage of a home.
Modernism, however, got a bad name due to its association with the soulless Internationalist Style of Ludwig "Less is More" Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and their ubiquitous glass boxes designed for an urban population of automobiles and automatons rather than residents, tourists and shoppers. Being socialists first and architects second, Johnson and Mies were concerned mainly with political and social questions -- and thus built structures that reflected their vision of a workers' paradise -- as well as academic questions such as how to express the structure of a building externally. In the process, they forgot about the poor fish who would live and work among these sterile monstrosities.
Sadly they brought the same aesthetic to their domestic buildings, and nowhere was this more evident than in Johnson's Glass House and Mies' Farnsworth House. Historian Franz Schulze noted that the latter is "more nearly temple than dwelling, and it rewards aesthetic contemplation before it fulfills domestic necessity.�
However these domestic "temples" were the exception, not the rule. Unlike Mies's skyboxes, the bulk of modernist residential architecture was warm, open and organic, commingling brick, wood, stone and glass to create a sense of serenity which blurred the distinction between "inside" and "outside." Most important, they took into account the people who would live there. And unlike today's cookie cutter mansions, they were elegant and original. Was there ever a more breathtakingly beautiful home than Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a home built not overlooking a waterfall, but over a waterfall.