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Coke, adding to all those slogans, must now be the only soft drink in the world with its own shrine: a tabernacle for the faithful, constructed by its creator. I can’t compare the New World of Coca-Cola — as this 92,000-square-foot, $97 million museum calls itself — with the old (which opened in 1990 and closed in April, a month before this resurrection). But if you want to have a Coke and a smile, and you don’t mind being engulfed by an enormous commercial (at $15 for adults), this museum offers its own puzzles and pleasures.
It stands in Atlanta’s once-blighted downtown, on a 22-acre plot that the company purchased in the early 1990s. Coke donated nine of those acres for construction of the Georgia Aquarium, which opened next door in late 2005. Then, in October, the company announced it would donate 2.5 acres to the City of Atlanta for a civil- and human-rights museum. Nearby CNN offers tours of its headquarters. Media, liberty, fish and Coke. Maybe only fish spoils the composite image.
MARSEILLES, FRANCE — It was called "Unité d'Habitation," but this massive apartment block overlooking the lavender-strewn hills of Provence and the glinting Mediterranean does not prompt a unity of opinion, even sixty years after it first opened — least of all amongst its own inhabitants.
Upon the 1952 opening of this rough-textured concrete high rise slab — home to 1,600 residents — the never-shy Marseillaises dubbed it "La Maison du Fada" —Provençal dialect for "Crazy House," or even better, "Cuckoo Coop."
There were reasons for these sentiments, as Unité d'Habitation was bigger than any other single apartment block in France. In a tour-de-force of architectural ingenuity, Le Corbusier designed no less than 24 different unit types, accommodating everyone from single seniors to families with 8 children in a demonstration project that was duplicated in five other European cities, including Firminy to the north and Berlin.
With technical assistance from the Getty Conservation Institute and funded in part by a $2.5-million, five-year matching grant from the Getty Foundation, "SurveyL.A.: Los Angeles Historical Resources Survey Project" is an ambitious effort to identify, catalog and ultimately protect not just its physical "built history" but to provide a sharper portrait of Los Angeles and how it came to be.
Of course, L.A. has history — a distinct if not variegated one. But its "City of the Future" moniker has, over time, done more ill than good in bolstering a civic sense of self, leaving Los Angeles ambivalent about its connection to the past and its complex evolution. "There's been a growing sense that the city is going to change and with that a growing realization that there is importance in historic preservation," says Ken Bernstein, manager of the city's Office of Historic Preservation. "It's part of a natural maturing of the city — or coming of age of the city. And it's become important to catalog what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles."
He was the poet of the skyscraper, the coiner of the phrase "form follows function," the man his draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright called "beloved master." The late, great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan soared to the heights of his profession at the turn of the last century, but died penniless and without work. Last year, as Chicago celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth, three of his buildings in the city were destroyed or severely damaged by fire.
So there is something profoundly satisfying, even healing, about the just-completed restoration and reinvention of the last building Sullivan designed before his death in 1924, the Krause Music Store, 4611 N. Lincoln Ave. It's a beloved little building with an over-the-top facade of pale green terra cotta -- and a dark past, its new owners believe, that has finally been exorcised with the help of some unorthodox rituals.
A few years after the building opened in 1922, its namesake owner killed himself in his second-floor apartment. For decades afterward, the architectural gem muddled through life as a funeral home. Bodies were embalmed in the basement, then hoisted up to the first floor chapel by a special casket elevator.
To follow the Tiger Stadium debate (or the drawn-out fights over the old Madison-Lenox Hotel in 2005 and the vanished Hudson's store in the '90s), one might think that preservation is an ugly and divisive process that pits building huggers against cold-hearted developers and city officials.
In reality, preservation is bankable, realistic, widely accepted -- and key to the revival of Detroit.
Preservation of older buildings accounts for almost all of the revival in Detroit's Midtown and a good deal of the downtown revival.
The trend toward downtown loft living? That's almost entirely focused on renovating older office buildings for modern residential use.
Nearly two years after Katrina, New Orleans is still floundering. Enter Edward J. Blakely, the veteran planner named as the city’s executive director of recovery management in January. It’s the job of a lifetime, but one fraught with political peril and hindered by entrenched ways of doing business that predate the disaster. Nevertheless, Blakely moved quickly after his appointment, unveiling a recovery plan two months later that concentrates on developing 17 economic clusters around the city.
The blunt 69-year-old seems uniquely qualified for this rather thankless job. Currently on a leave of absence from his position as chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Sydney to lead a 17-member team in New Orleans, Blakely guided recovery efforts in Oakland following the 1989 earthquake and later ran for mayor, narrowly losing to Jerry Brown. Recently, executive editor Martin C. Pedersen spoke to the native Californian about the future of the Big Easy, his role in shaping it, and the pitfalls of business as usual.
Inside a rock-solid Bronx warehouse, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres walk quickly through a darkened maze of rooms crammed with file boxes, wooden crates and plastic-wrapped furniture that was last called modern 40 years ago. They stop at a partly hidden door, turn the key and push it open with an appropriately spooky creak.
The room is filled with bodies.
They are not dead. Nor are they alive — though they live in vivid memory. They are life-size sculptures of real people from a Bronx that is long gone.
Dr. Melfi: "What are you afraid's going to happen?"
Tony: "I don't know! But something. I don't know!"
governors islands goings ons
Studio 320 is 320sf with a 16'x26' footprint; two 20' containers are slid past one another by 6 feet. It was built for a client who has a large farm property and uses it as a retreat. The foundation is pre-cast concrete footings, and the studio will have a green fern-based roof. It is designed to be off-grid, using propane and solar panels, and is fully insulated to international code.
My visit to Meier’s 173 – 176 Perry Street revealed just how exposing and unforgiving these glazed facades can be. While highly refined, with elegant shadow boxes and a dynamic play of solid and void between glass and thick whitened concrete floor plates, the Perry Street complex, in its aesthetic purity, suffers when the dwellings are actually occupied. One apartment, with its huge curtains left half open, revealed a mess of the spoils of interior refurbishment and not-so-chic furniture pushed out to the building’s transparent skin. It was as if someone had left his laundry out to dry. Meier has, however, attempted to prevent buyers of condos in his Charles Street complex from being messy: There, buyers are treated to Meier-designed interior finishes and can purchase “total design” services for interior furnishings to match the aesthetic spirit of the exterior.10from the current issue of harvard design magazine
These interiors, on view through the huge glass walls, require a hyper slickness devoid of any domestic clutter to match the minimalist chic of the exteriors. Such a minimalist aesthetic might best be described as ascetic, a word appropriate to the monastic, the poor, and adherents of early Modernist models of machine-like living.11 Yet this asceticism is minimal in material but maximal in the resources it gobbles to create and maintain this model of urban hipness. New minimalism — with its finely detailed, overtly refined, and yet empty spaces — as applied to residential inhabitation, requires that the least possible activity actually takes place within its bounds.12 Life must be pared down to the (highest end) essentials to maintain its spotless chic, its sober lightness. Thus, while most of these luxury buildings advertise endless lists of hotel services to augment the value gained at such high price tags, its users — and architects themselves — may not realize how necessary these services are to live stylishly within these spaces. An array of amenities — from concierges and in-house dining to twenty-four-hour child and pet care (to keep the messy creatures out of sight) to on-site fitness trainers, driving ranges, lap pools, wine cellars, movie theaters, stylists, personal chefs, and, of course maid and maintenance services — become a necessary extension of the activities and spaces of aestheticized living. (For the amazingly extensive list of services, see my endnotes.)
Richard Meier thoughtfully includes wall-long closets, so residents can hide their stuff in a mask of whitewashed poché, and he tucks large storage spaces for each apartment discreetly below grade, so that they can keep the bulk of their clutter out of his sparkling white-and-frosted-glass interiors.13 Like the servants’ quarters lurking at the base of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the amenities offered to the property residents become essential for the maintenance of an ascetic-chic lifestyle, spatialized in the sense that they contribute to how the dwellings look and function. The “effortless living” that nightclub owner turned hotelier turned real estate developer Ian Schrager promises with his list of amenities included with ownership in his projects with Herzog & de Meuron at Bond Street and John Pawson at Gramercy Park is a result of more than luxuries — these amenities are necessities for maintenance of the image, both literal and metaphorical, that these properties embody.14
One wonders, with this proliferation of Modernist-minimalist residential properties and the growing spate of shelter magazines promoting similar styles of living as well as a mass audience for now household-name architects,15 is Modernism just a new sign of hipness for the ultra rich and those that aspire to join the circle of real estate fashionistas? By branding minimalist-chic living in properties priced far beyond the reach of average homebuyers, are starchitect designers collaborating in the creation of a culture of good taste inseparable from social exclusion?
In 1919, Georg Simmel observed that fashion is, for the middle classes, tied inextricably to a need for belonging and is, for the upper classes, deeply fixed to a desire for distinction.16 Perhaps it is the exclusivity of maintaining truly minimalist conditions in one’s dwelling and the exclusivity that ownership of such rarities as these properties brings that secures the rich in the realm of distinction so desired by all hoarders of cultural capital. The painful question is: Are these social constructs in any way compatible with Modern architecture’s essentially utopian foundations, and are these starchitects — at least those truly capable of imagining new modes of living for all classes — creating and contributing to a lifestyle that they themselves admire?
detroit pictures
via jz
container #6
via jz
sandy hook
cape may
crumbling asbury park
Wildwood houses over 200 motels, built during the Doo-Wop era of the 1950s and 1960s. The motels are unique in appearance with Vegas-like neon signs, odd architecture, and an overall distinctive look which makes Wildwood one of the most interesting districts of its kind in the nation. [4] New construction in the area however has seen the demise of many older motels being demolished so bigger condominiums may take up residence. The Wildwood Doo Woop Preservation League has taken action to help save and restore these historic buildings but construction of far larger hotels may overtake the area in the next few years. A 50's Doo Wop museum has recently been built which contains property from demolished motels like neon signs and furniture. Neo-Doo Wop buildings in the area feature a neon lit Wawa, Subway Sandwich Shop, and a 1950's styled Acme Supermarket.
house by the sea, ocean grove nj
steven holl with charlie rose
laurie parsons's dematerialisation
gretchen faust 2007, 2003 greengrassi
I'd been making spin paintings on the boardwalk in Ocean City, N.J. ever since the mid-1950s -- some forgotten entrepreneur, inspired by Abstract Expressionism, devised a little machine so that tourists could make themselves an automatic abstract artwork -- and somehow I'd gotten a kid's toy spin-art machine, and was making little paintings on cardboard using housepainter's enamel, which you could buy in small half-pint sizes.
I wanted to make them larger, but didn't know how to make a big spin-art machine. So my girlfriend (who I later married) went down to Canal Street and bought a fan motor and a pulley and rigged up a little spin-art machine. It sat in a wire base and had a three-foot-wide arm made of wood, with little L-angles on the ends to hold the canvases on. That was that.
At Pearl Paint, I bought three-foot-square Fredrix prepared canvases, five to a box. I would set the spin machine up on the floor of a borrowed studio, and build a kind of corral around it with scrap lumber and plastic dropcloths. This would catch the paint as it spun off. I put a on-off switch in the wire, and controlled the machine by turning it on and off.
I used One Step sign-painter's enamel, and poured it straight out of the can onto the spinning canvas. The paint is high in lead content, and gives bright colors. It was very heavy. I made the paintings so fast that I had to build a rack to dry them in, not unlike the racks that bakers have for their loaves of bread.
The idea of the spin paintings was to have a machine that would take all the subjective, arbitrary decisions out of making abstractions -- decisions that always seemed so trivial. The machine would make the artworks automatically. But in the end I subverted my own plan for subversion, and struggled to use the machine as a tool.
Instead of random abstractions, I made "target" paintings, after Kenneth Noland, and tried to make imagistic spin paintings as well, like "exploding hearts" and "volcanic eruptions." I made Op Art paintings with bright blue and red, and "composed with the entire palette" like Hans Hofmann. I made "rose window" paintings by first using oil enamels to make a multicolored image and then pouring black water-based enamel on top of it, with the resulting "resist" creating a latticework and stained-glass effect.
I had two shows of spin paintings at Metro Pictures in SoHo in 1986 and 1987 -- and no one paid any attention. No reviews and only a few sales. I got all 50 spin paintings back. I was kind of happy about that. My plan was to have a show every year, and every year make the spin paintings bigger. I did in fact make some paintings that measured 4 x 4 feet, but a little math will tell you that even though it's only a foot larger to the side, it's almost twice as much area. To make a spin painting that large takes a lot of paint, and a lot of power to spin the canvas fast enough.
Then other things began to happen, and the spin paintings went into storage. I'd spun enough canvases, at least for the time being.
This story is to be continued.
-- Walter Robinson, 4/27/05
and then theres the other guy
IN 2000, when M. J. Gladstone began thinking about the design of his weekend house, he didn’t initially focus on a floor plan, or materials, or even an architectural style, but rather a shape. “I want a 25-foot-diameter octagon,” he wrote to his architect back in 2000.
“I don’t want to give it away — it’s an asset,” Mr. Gehry said. “It’s the one thing in your life you build up, and you own it. And I’ve been spending a lot of rent to preserve it.”
Mr. Gehry, 78, is among a small but influential number of celebrity architects who are considering selling their archives — which can include tens of thousands of objects, from multiple large-scale models and reams of drawings to correspondence and other records — even as they continue to practice.
3 container stack house in altanta suburb
unstable shipping container stack
via zoller
After a flurry of renegotiations, arguments, Congressional wrist-slapping, and a lot of steam blowing, webcasting's D-Day (July 15) has passed. A low fog still hangs, and for many webcasters, the future is still up in question.
Late last week, as the new webcasting royalty fee schedule approached, outcry from webcasters, the listening public, and Congress sparked another round of negotiations with SoundExchange, the company that collects and distributes webcasting royalties. The minimum per-channel fee that threatened services like Pandora, Live365, and Rhapsody was rescinded. SoundExchange also promised not to take immediate legal action against webcasters who were still in negotiations. But in the meantime, the threat of large looming royalty payments has silenced some small webcasters.
Although NPR's request for a court-ordered stay on the new rates was denied, they have filed a formal court appeal, but hearings may not happen for another year or two. On Thursday, members of Congress introduced a bill postponing the new webcasting rates for another 60 days, but this failed to pass in time for the July 15 deadline.
So what does this mean for WFMU? While the details of SoundExchange's new webcasting rates for non-commercial stations are still unclear, WFMU will continue streaming. We hope that NPR and SoundExchange continue negotiating fair terms for public stations in the coming weeks. If that falls through, there's always the possibility of Congressional intervention (the Internet Radio Equality Act, more info at savenetradio.org), or an appeals hearing in the distant future. With luck, WFMU won't ever have to place a cap on our online audience.
More than 10,600 of the hefty gray bicycles became available for modest rental prices on Sunday at 750 self-service docking stations that provide access in eight languages. The number is to grow to 20,600 by the end of the year.
The program, Vélib (for “vélo,” bicycle, and “liberté,” freedom), is the latest in a string of European efforts to reduce the number of cars in city centers and give people incentives to choose more eco-friendly modes of transport.
“This is about revolutionizing urban culture,” said Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of Paris’s trendy third district, which opened 15 docking stations on Sunday. “For a long time cars were associated with freedom of movement and flexibility. What we want to show people is that in many ways bicycles fulfill this role much more today.”
setting the pool in place
ellenville ny (woodstock area) bungalos
boneyard
oak barrels
wood tank forum
timber tanks
spa dome
1959 lancia flaminia touring gt coupe
go fast (site down)
The last ounce of hope for preventing new webcasting royalty rates from crippling internet radio on July 15 has been dashed by the U.S. Court of Appeals. NPR's request for a stay on the new rates was just denied.
This means that many webcasters, small and large, will go out of business, and non-commercial webcasters like WFMU may have to cap online listenership. The situation is dire, and it seems as though our only hope is to convince Congress to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act (even if they pass it after July 15). If you haven't already, please contact your Senators and Representatives. Visit savenetradio.org for more info.
lawn chairs are everywhere
via zoller
full cleveland
Tourists come here from all over the world to see the shop," says Ryan Titilah, shop manager. "It's like they're walking into the Sistine Chapel. It's the Sistine Chapel of skateboarding."
For much of the 1970s, the store was known as the Zephyr Surf Shop. The 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-boys" chronicled the achievements of a rag-tag group of teenagers who collected at the shop when the surfing was bad and went on to reinvent the sport of skateboarding as members of the Zephyr team, or Z-boys.
"[Our families] really didn't care where we went. Where we ended up was this building," says former Z-boy Paul Hoffman. "This was our home. This was where we hung out. Skip Engblom and Jeff Ho were our dads."
Shop owners Ho, Engblom, and Craig Stycek gave the boys odd jobs and helped them build skateboards. New polyurethane wheels allowed the boys to adapt their surfing moves to the cement, and the partners encouraged them to practice and to invent new moves. In 1975 they sponsored a team of 11 boys and one girl to compete in the Del Mar Nationals, where the Z-boys blew away the competition with their aggressive surf-skate style.
In May, the Santa Monica Landmarks Commission officially landmarked the portion of the 1922 building that houses the surf shop based on its cultural, rather than architectural, significance. The commission first reviewed the building in October after the owner filed for a demolition permit as part of a plan to build a "green" 14-unit apartment building with underground parking and retail space.
rip ladybird johnson
dum da dum dum
THE FABCHAT BOARDS ARE TEMPORARILY DISABLED WE ARE TRYING TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SPAM THE BOARDS WILL BE BACK UP A.S.A.P. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AS WE STRIVE TO FIX THIS PROBLEM.
top gear odd vehicles
via zoller
Win the book, Glass House, edited by Toshio Nakamura, photographs by Michael Moran (Monacelli, 2007, $95.00).
In 1974, Philip Johnson’s Glass House was 25 years old. The Architectural League of New York celebrated with a birthday picnic on September 22 of that year, with photos documenting not only the house, but the grounds and other Johnson-designed structures.
Not much has changed but the people. All you have to do is identify as many guests as possible from the architectural community in the following photos to win the prize.
There's an inconvenient truth that preservationists typically gloss over in their ever-more-pressing fight to save mid-20th Century modernist buildings from demolition: Many (though certainly not all) of these buildings are tough to love.
Perhaps it's their cool abstraction, or their labyrinthine floor plans, or their harsh materials, like the serrated concrete that can practically cut your skin. Whatever the reason, the American public has yet to cotton to these buildings. A survey of America's 150 favorite works of architecture, released last February, didn't contain a single structure by Chicago's master of steel and glass, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But popularity is one thing; quality is another. A half century ago, when Space Age America was infatuated with all things new, there wasn't yet broad-based popular support for preserving old Victorian houses or Beaux Arts train stations that evoked the grandeur of ancient Rome. They were, like today's threatened mid-century modernist buildings, too old to be new and too new to be old. And so, they were shortsightedly torn down. Now the question is whether we're about to make the same mistake again.
johns new fridge
the ashley book of knots (TABoK)
"Design for the Other 90%," on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan through Sept. 23, seems born directly from this big idea. As the title implies, the exhibition is meant to persuade designers and design aficionados to turn away in embarrassment from our usual preoccupations: namely, expensive vanity projects, including $599 cellphones (are you still in that iPhone line?), $4,500 sofas and $3-million second homes. In place of those designs, it gives us a range of projects aimed at increasing, in the words of the museum, "access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them."
An impressive exhibition of Modernist objects, and a missed opportunity to say something about Modernism, at the Corcoran Gallery.
castor design>>projects>>8'X8' container sauna
spider web chalet
via vz
the plaza
so long hill country
sc rivershack
These men would do Roald Dahl's parson proud. Like the character in his short story Parson's Pleasure, who went scouring the English countryside persuading ignorant country folk to part for a pittance with furniture they thought was worthless, but was actually an exquisite Chippendale commode or pricelees Queen Anne chairs, a few French collectors have zeroed in on Le Corbusier's forgotten legacy in Chandigarh and made a killing out of it.via justin
Buying heavily at routine government auctions of "junk" furniture, stalking old employees of Corbusier and his cousin and collaborator on the Chandigarh project, Pierre Jeanneret, and acquiring neglected artefacts lying with them, these collectors have bought symbols of Corbusier's heritage—from manhole covers to wood-and-cane chairs—for as little as Rs 100, restored it to pristine perfection at a workshop in Delhi and shipped it to exhibitions and sales at Paris and New York galleries.
As recently as June 5, leading auction house, Christie's New York, auctioned off around 50 lots of furniture and other artefacts designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at extraordinarily high prices . They all came from the collection of Eric Touchaleaume, a French dealer who has been on an active buying spree in Chandigarh for the last few years. At the Biennale des Antiquaires held at the Grand Palais in Paris in September last year, yet another Frenchman, Patrick Sequin, proudly displayed his 'collection' from Chandigarh.
Yet it is also easy to see why Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a pillar of early Modernism and Johnson’s mentor, stormed out in a huff when he saw it. The house was famously influenced by Mies’s Farnsworth House, which was designed before Johnson’s Glass House but built, in Illinois, several years later, leaving the impression that the student had leapfrogged over his master. More important, Johnson’s vision lacked the intellectual rigor and exquisite detailing that were so critical to Mies’s genius. The steel I-beams that mark the corners of the Glass House are clumsily detailed — especially disconcerting in a work of such purity.
strong like bull house
hairpin legs
200 sf norway house via materialicious
Gentilly, home to about 47,000 people before the storm and a thin fraction of that now, is not dead. Haltingly, in disconnected pockets, this eight-square-mile quadrant north of the historic districts that line the Mississippi River is limping back to life, thanks to the struggles of its most determined former residents.
But they have had to do so largely on their own, because help from government at any level has been minimal, in their accounts. In recent weeks, some residents have reported getting checks from the state’s Road Home rebuilding program, but four-fifths of applicants have not.
Each block still contains only a handful of occupied houses. But a beachhead has been established here, a residential area critical to this city’s survival and one that before the storm was dominated by black homeowners, professionals and multigenerational citizens of New Orleans.
A similar story is unfolding in two other once-flooded family-centered neighborhoods, neither of them flashy but both equally important to this city’s future: Broadmoor, in central New Orleans, and Lakeview, in the northwestern corner, show signs of life here and there along the wounded streets. Neighbors, encouraged by the earliest post-Katrina pioneers, are moving back in.
pendleton and old hickory fabrics
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