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Black & white aerial photo showing the construction of the East-West Expressway in Dallas, Texas. Date stamp on back says Mar 29 1962 Dallas Morning News, with a notation "East-West Expressway". This photo is in very good condition. No rips, tears, or creases.
hammer museum virtual tour
via jz
If you have an interest in either science or pop culture, you probably recall Biosphere 2, which briefly captured the world's fancy in 1991 when eight "biospherians" boldly went where no man or woman had gone before—into a giant terrarium for two years to live with plants, animals, and a whole lot of bugs. Their mission, driven by a strange philosophical meld of Star Trek and The Whole Earth Catalog, was going to show us everything from how to live in tune with nature here on earth to how we might someday exist on other planets.
It didn't work so well. The air inside the steel-and-glass enclosure went bad, cockroaches thrived, and the biospherians were constantly warding off hunger. Sometime after rumors spread that pizza and candy bars were being smuggled inside and that seven tons of oxygen had to be pumped in to keep them all breathing, Biosphere 2 became a national joke, a staple of late-night monologues and gleefully snarky reporters. By the time the eight biospherians were released back into the wild, the project had settled into a cultural niche as one of those goofy examples of self-aggrandizing counterculture idealism just made for a Saturday Night Live skit.
via justin
Kisho Kurokawa can’t seem to catch a break these days. Just days after the Japanese architect lost his bid for the governorship of Tokyo, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, his best known building and one of the few built examples of the Metabolist movement, was given a date with the wrecking ball.
The Capsule Tower, completed in 1972, stands in the center of Tokyo’s affluent Ginza neighborhood. The building is actually composed of two concrete towers, respectively 11 and 13 stories, each encrusted with an outer layer of prefabricated living units. It has long been appreciated by architects as a pure expression of the Metabolist movement, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, which envisioned cities formed of modular components. But in recent years residents expressed growing concern over the presence of asbestos. On April 15, the building’s management association approved plans calling for the architectural icon to be razed and replaced with a new 14-story tower. A demolition is yet to be determined.
tom warren visual journal #296