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In »SPOMENIK / The End of History« Jan Kempenaers portrays monuments raised by the communist regime in former Yugoslavia.
the park avenue cubists
sonic weld supersystem
The mystery of a huge container washed up on a beach in the Western Isles has been solved. The 27m container has been identified as a beer fermentation tank belonging to the American brewery Coorsvia vz
drinking images
One of the most anticipated yearly programming features on SPEED, the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event and auction, returns this January with 39 hours of LIVE coverage through six days from Scottsdale, Ariz.
Five hours of early auction coverage begin on Jan. 15 through Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. On Jan. 18 and Jan. 19, 10 hours of live coverage begins each day at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, with another four hours slated for Jan. 20 starting at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.
“We’ve massaged the 2008 Scottsdale Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event air schedule,” said Rick Miner, SPEED SVP of Production & Operations. “We feel the schedule will capture what we believe will be the most compelling bidding wars for the most exciting vehicles.”
Play-by-play announcer Bob Varsha, the voice of Formula One on SPEED, will once again head the broadcast and be joined by Motor Trend magazine editor Matt Stone for analysis. Mike Joy, the voice of NASCAR on FOX and an avid car collector, will once again team with former Hot Rod magazine technical editor Steve Magnante on the auction block. Long-time motorsports reporter and Barrett-Jackson regular Rick DeBruhl will be scoping the auction grounds for event context and storylines.
The 2008 edition of Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale will be an interesting confluence of Italian style, classic design and brute American horsepower all sold at ‘no reserve.’ Headliners include a Pininfarina-designed 1963 Chevrolet Corvette concept car known as ‘Rondine’ and Ford’s 1963 Thunderbird ‘Italien.’ Pininfarina is a world famous Italian design house based in Turin, who is most notably associated with the legendary styling of Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo. Also for sale will be Carroll Shelby’s personal 1969 Shelby Mustang GT-500 and the one and only ‘Robosauras,’ a 42-foot tall, fire-breathing mechanical ‘monster’ that has devoured cars throughout the United States over that last 20 years.
Tom Moody notes the difference in critical stance Roberta Smith takes on Richard Prince’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1992 and now at the Guggenheim in 2007. Smith takes a much softer tone the second time around while Moody in a post that follows observes weakness in virtually all of the later work. I too see the weaknesses Moody points out, and rather wish I’d seen a review by a mainstream critic who felt this way, particularly because Prince’s car hoods, joke paintings and master inspired works so obviously lack the substance of his earlier rephotographed advertisements. Schjeldahl wrote negatively about the exhibition as well in the New Yorker, largely getting it right, though by the end he criticizes a deKooning rip off for not being executed well enough, which even if correct, misses the point, and sounds awfully conservative. As an intellectual exercise this kind of practice just isn’t engaging, (though I have been known to make exception for his Britney Spears deKooning portraits.)
BACK in 1981, Tom Wolfe published the archetypal work of reactionary architectural criticism, "From Bauhaus to Our House," a happy-go-lucky evisceration of modern design and the men who brought it to America. Wolfe's short romp through history struck a nerve, but one close to the funny bone. Reviewing it in the Nation, critic Michael Sorkin quipped, "What Tom Wolfe doesn't know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so, indeed, it has, albeit a slim one."
Now John Silber, former president of Boston University and failed Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, has set himself the dubious task of assuming Wolfe's cranky mantle. It's a game effort: What Silber doesn't know about modern architecture has also filled a book, although one 46 pages slimmer than Wolfe's and absent the master's wit. Indeed, "Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art" is so riddled with red herrings, half-truths and gratuitously provocative exaggerations that Colin Powell might try reading it at the United Nations.
in search of a fine pepper mill
in search of fine (and coarse of course ) cheese graters: microplane
in search of a fine hand crank coffee grinder: zassenhaus
Behold PopSci staff photographer/mad scientist John Carnett's homemade microbrewery:
an elaborate device that boils, ferments, chills, and pours home-crafted ale
"I don't want to be an artist, I want to be a worker." So said Jean Prouvé, who might be surprised that, after a career dedicated to industrial production and the manufacture of functional furniture and buildings, his work has ended up in fine art auctions and displayed in chi-chi gallery windows from Paris to New York. Now on show at London's Design Museum, his furniture, houses and architectural components remain resolutely industrial, sparse and functional, yet beautiful.
architectures top ten 2007 lists
“This is a stone masonry building,” Mr. LeClerc said. “It’s marble and brick all the way through.”
The diagnostic work is largely done. Over the last several months, the engineers scaled the building from scaffolding or cherry pickers or rappelled down on ropes to examine every one of the 20,000 blocks of stone.
With hand-held devices, they mapped the building, numbering every piece of marble. They tapped the building with mallets, allowing loose pieces to fall (hence the netting that now wraps part of the exterior), and drilled core samples to study the material.
“They took off about 1,000 pounds of stone that was ready to come off,” Mr. LeClerc said.
Now, the library has to determine the best cleaning method: whether to use a laser method that zaps off the black sooty pieces or to apply poultices and then peel off the pollutants.
The main library — also known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library — has been gradually renovating its interior over the last 30 years, most recently restoring the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division space, with its richly carved wood, marble and metalwork, completed in December 2005.
A team of architects led by Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Hargreaves Associates, TEN Arquitectos, and Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, will unveil the final design in February for revitalizing a stretch of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The broad goal of the redesign is to reduce barriers that discourage people from enjoying the river and replace decaying sections with parks and public venues that will trigger private investment.
A team of architects led by Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Hargreaves Associates, TEN Arquitectos, and Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, will unveil the final design in February for revitalizing a stretch of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The broad goal of the redesign is to reduce barriers that discourage people from enjoying the river and replace decaying sections with parks and public venues that will trigger private investment.
The centerpiece of the project, known as Reinventing the Crescent, is a linear park that devotes nearly 85 percent of the development zone’s 174 acres to parks and plazas, bike and walking paths and venues for river-gazing. Signatures of the design include examples of dramatic, forward-thinking architecture as well as inventive ideas for accommodating the various industrial wharfs and terminals that must be retained for cargo and transportation uses.
“Improving public access to the river is the point,” said Allen Eskew whose New Orleans-based firm is in charge of managing the project. “But the plan gives the city a riverfront design that is authentic for our time and does not just reflect the past.”
Palm Springs has become a hotspot for fans of mid-century modern architecture, inspiring restorations of the city's rare collection of Rat Pack-era buildings.
This fall, the new owners of the 1947 Del Marcos Hotel completed a renovation of the 16-room inn, designed by desert architect William F. Cody.
The hotel reopened in September after workers updated the lobby, installed new restrooms, and created a saltwater pool complete with piped-in music. "It's back to A-plus condition," says Jack Davis, the manager and partner in the company that bought the hotel last year.
The Del Marcos Hotel won a design preservation award from the Palm Springs Modern Committee in 2005. It also rehabbed the city's 1960 Wexler House, designed by Bob Alexander, whose 2,200 houses were the city's first subdivisions.
western swing on 78
via zoller
shaker condo bldg bed-stuy bkln ny
shaker catalogue
shaker cabs from crown-point
Ignoring local protests, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week started demolishing historically valuable public housing in New Orleans.
In a city pummeled by government incompetence, the department's intransigence has become surreal. HUD was stopped days later because it had failed to seek required approval from the City Council, and Judge Herbert Cade of Orleans Parish Civil District Court halted most of the demolition until the council agrees to let them proceed.
HUD has threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions of housing reconstruction dollars and thousands of rent vouchers if the council doesn't approve its plan in a meeting on Dec. 20.
Losing the vouchers would mean that poor people entitled to live in public housing -- and no party to the controversy -- would be thrown into the street. Does the council have a choice?
More housing is needed in a city with a serious rental- housing crunch since Hurricane Katrina. Adapting the historic structures on four huge sites -- three adjacent to historic- landmark neighborhoods -- is worth doing because of their sturdy construction, sensitivity of design and quality of materials. That's why these 4,500 units were deemed worthy of listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
cargoyle by barris of la-ca
via jz
LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.
They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.
This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.
The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.
Robert M. Kulicke, a painter, goldsmith, teacher, businessman and designer who changed the look of postwar art by modernizing frame design, died on Friday in Valley Cottage, N.Y. He was 83 and had lived in Manhattan until about 18 months ago.
Garrulous, articulate and confident, Mr. Kulicke was a man of many talents, interests and passions. He painted and regularly exhibited small, delicate still lifes of flowers, dollar bills or, often, a single pear. He helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation and to establish a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.
But for much of his life Mr. Kulicke was the most innovative and influential picture frame designer in the United States. His reputation rested primarily on several streamlined frames that were both widely used and imitated, especially a welded aluminum frame and a wrap-around clear Lucite “plexibox” frame.
He also designed sectional frames that could be bought and assembled, sidestepping frame shops completely. In addition, he was a superb craftsman of reproduction frames, making them for some of the greatest paintings in this country, including Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Giotto’s “Epiphany” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Manhattan had long lost its crown as the world's skyscraper capital when Mohamed Atta smashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the Twin Towers. Yet that dramatic, appalling moment triggered a defiant reaction. A slew of new towers is now appearing, on screens and on the ground.
Renzo Piano's diaphanously corporate New York Times Tower has just opened to rapturous reviews; Ground Zero is hosting towers by Foster, Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, and slick condo towers are springing up everywhere like minimalist fungus. But the latest proposal is by far the most surprising. French architect Jean Nouvel has proposed the most radical and striking skyscraper to trouble New York's low-drifting clouds in a generation.
The design for the tower, neighbouring the Museum of Modern Art, is a piercing, dangerous-looking spike, an anorexic contemporary version of the soaring twin spires of St Patrick's Cathedral, which dominated the city's skyline until the advent of skyscrapers in the early 20th century.
The proposal, at 53 W. 53rd St, commissioned by real estate firm Hines, comprises 75 storeys of accommodation and, at 350m, pierces the skyline at a height between the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It will embrace 5,000 square metres of extra accommodation for MoMA, which will expand into its lower floors, above retail provision, while the upper floors will house a seven-star hotel sharing services with the 120 or so (extremely) top-end condominiums above.
IT’S hard to pinpoint when the “starchitect” became an object of ridicule. The term is a favorite of churlish commentators, who use it to mock architects whose increasingly flamboyant buildings, in their minds, are more about fashion and money than function.
Often the attacks are a rehash of the old clichés. Cost overruns and leaky roofs are held up as evidence of yet another egomaniacal artist with little concern for the needs of us, the little people. (As a rule, if a roof leaks in a Frank Gehry building it’s headline news; if the building was designed by a hack commercial architect, the leak is ignored, at least as news.) John Silber, the former president of Boston University, has gotten into the game with “Architecture of the Absurd,” a glib little book that eviscerates contemporary architects for the extravagance of their designs.
The more serious criticism comes from those inside the profession who see a move into the mainstream as a sellout. The pact between high architects and developers, to them, is a Faustian bargain in which the architect is nothing more than a marketing tool, there to provide a cultural veneer for the big, bad developers whose only interest is in wringing as much profit as possible from their projects.
rip h and g
Except during earthquakes, or when being demolished to make way for something new, buildings don't move. This stubborn fact about architecture is something most documentary filmmakers feel they have to overcome. You probably have seen the result of this effort in television specials about famous architects and their work: sweaty pastiches of restless jump-cuts, pans and zooms, frequently interrupted by old portraits of the architect, all of it lumbering along under a running commentary intended to give yet more "drama" to the decidedly undramatic stuff of architecture.
Now for something entirely different: German avant-garde director Heinz Emigholz's new film Schindler's Houses
We hated Bauhaus,” Niemeyer recalls. “It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a ma-chine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.” And so he did. This was the heroic period, until the generals took over in 1964, when he became a household name in Brazil, up there with Pelé. From his pen poured astonishing factories, schools, houses, offices, capital cities – Brasilia, “far too quickly made”, he regrets. A World Heritage Site it may be, but its concrete is shabby, its monuments scabbed with favelas, its idealism soured – Utopia gone bad.
praguekolektiv
wonderwood nl (bent plywood classics)
studio brancusi at pompidou
rip
OTHER children had teddy bears and dolls; but Karlheinz Stockhausen had a little wooden hammer. As he toddled round the run-down family farm in the hills near Cologne, he would hit things with it to see what sound they made. Each note, he established young, sent him a different message. No plink or plunk was quite the same as any other.
Most folk at his premières in the 1950s and 1960s might have wished he had never discovered that. Each Stockhausen piece was a shock to the system. It was not just that he had decided tonality was dead; Schoenberg's 12-note serialism had already made dissonance routine. It was not just that he thought “intensive measuring and counting” the key to music's future; Stravinsky had got there long before him. It was that Stockhausen kept on looking for, and finding, sounds never heard before. He made a formula out of the individuality of notes—their particular pitch, timbre and duration, and whether they were soft as a leaf or knocked your hat off—and revelled in it in the most alarming way.
new @ ubu
Art of Field Recording: Volume I : 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum
Ike Turner, whose role as one of rock's critical architects was overshadowed by his ogrelike image as the man who brutally abused former wife and icon Tina Turner, died Wednesday at his home in suburban San Diego. He was 76.
not gordon matta-clark at gav-bro
Just as there is more to art than pretty pictures, there is more to art books than gorgeous illustrations. When the art and architecture critics of The New York Times were asked to choose their favorite books of 2007, their selections included a collection of essays on the museum in the age of globalization, two pessimistic studies of the modern city, a volume of poetry and an anthology of ugliness. But rest assured: the list still includes plenty of provocative, powerful and just plain knockout pictures, from Rembrandt's soulful noses to Martín Ramírez's visionary paintings.
This is not design as feckless consumerist novelty. This is design as lightweight sheet metal and welding. Catenaries, stampings, pressings. And more welding. It's not highfalutin' theory, it's horny-handed practice. It's Jean Prouvé at The Design Museum: the first exhibition of this singular individual with a line so hard it makes Le Corbusier appear an effeminate dilettante. This is what industrial design was meant to be: tough and uncompromising.
There is a marvellous photograph of Prouvé and his family on holiday in the Fifties. They are all on board a rugged American jeep, beaming as if demented with pleasure. Strapped to the sides of the four-wheel-drive, a forest of metal tent poles. Working in metal and designing light, portable structures or rational furniture was Prouvé's lifelong vocation, as inflexible as his material. He liked to be photographed not only with cars but also with lathes and, naturally, welding tools.
Never mind that there is a nagging question about the links between Prouvé's version of Modernism and the energetically exported cultural colonialism that got the French into so much trouble in the twilight of their imperium, at home and abroad Prouvé furnished the institutions of state. In 1931 the Societe des Ateliers Jean Prouvé made, for example, the furniture for the University of Nancy. In 1939 he designed portable barracks for the French army. Readers of Tintin in Tibet (1960) will be familiar with Prouvé's 'Visiteur' chair (1948). In 1967 he was credited as 'ingenieur' on de Mailly's and Depusse's Tour Nobel at La Defense, France's first commercial high rise: he designed its ambitious metal curtain wall. In 1971 Prouvé was on the jury that chose Richard Rogers' metal design for the Centre Pompidou.
But Mr. Reynolds' time has come. Dozens of his hippie houses are recognized today as the ultimate in recycling — for using garbage as insulation within their walls.
All of this is told in the documentary feature film Garbage Warrior, which played at this fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. And his house designs are shown in the timely exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, which documents architectural responses to 1970s oil crisis.
Soon after the newly minted architect moved from Ohio to the sunny southwest, Mr. Reynolds tried embedding discarded car tires in walls; the rubber proved a more efficient insulator than straw. He soon found an even better insulation material: polycarbonate water bottles. Emptied of Evian, they are laid empty and capped, in rows like wine bottles, their ends sealed in wet concrete that forms walls.
For a warm but high-altitude climate like New Mexico's, these bottle walls provide all the insulation needed. The designer then experimented with bottles filled with water that would soak up solar heat during the day, then radiate it back out during cool desert nights.
When some of his increasingly well-heeled clients objected to the use of plastic in their walls, he substituted multi-coloured glass bottles lifted from landfills. The walls glow like stained glass windows, and their reuse saves the energy that would have been expended to melt them down for recycling.
After years of reading puff pieces about the coming of the "Hypersonic Soundbeam," a device designed to send targeted blasts of sound waves that can be heard only be selected recipients in an audio environment, it has apparently made its debut in the public sphere, right here in New York. As part of a billboard marketing campaign for a television show.
A&E has placed a billboard (on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott) that shoots sound waves designed to resonate against your head, giving the passerby a distinct feeling that the advertisement is arising from within their skull. The television show is is about ghosts, so that means this is a witty kind of progressive marketing stunt and not just totally fucking creepy, right?
art news flash: skulls are out spider webs are in
big wheel keep on turnin'
black plywood shingle house from:
arkinetia
via zoller
hardware store display
Two lavish new books, New York Noise: Art and Music From the New York Underground and No Wave, trace the highs and lows of this short-lived scene, proving along the way that downtown—conceptually speaking—was less about geography than the importance of staking out one's cultural identity and artistic autonomy.
*excludes the comics in low-scoring cartoon issue
If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?“I never associated advertisements with having an author.” a cute rejoinder but i find this quote a tad disingenuous. i wish prince was more articulate in his discussion of open source subjects and that as targets of assault advertising we in turn own it and freely repurpose it. back at ya!
By RANDY KENNEDY, NYT
Published: December 6, 2007
Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?
Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.
Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”
When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”
But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”
People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)
Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.
But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”
“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”
Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.
“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.
But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.
He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.
Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.
He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.
“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”
He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
A tiny house with enormous glass walls sits on some of the priciest property in New Canaan, Conn. A town of 20,000, its proximity to New York City (about an hour's commute by train) continues to fuel a steady climb in local real-estate values. And with the current trend toward larger homes, many smaller ones face destruction—even gems.
Christened the "little jewel box" by its designer, Philip Johnson, and named after its original occupant, Alice Ball, the glass-walled house stands at the center of a controversy. But it's not simply a local controversy—it's one that touches not only New Canaan, but also many other upscale metropolitan suburbs. At stake could be the future of post-World War II architecture and the legacies of its architectural pioneers.
The Impasse
The Ball House, built in 1953 as a residence for a single woman, is a doll-sized home that the real-estate listing puts at 1,773 square feet, perched on a 2.2-acre tract of land. The one-story dwelling sports a flat roof and glass walls, all in keeping with its International Style.
The house, considered a fine example of Johnson's architectural skills, also comprises a diminishing commodity in New Canaan, where buildings designed by the Harvard Five (Johnson, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, Marcel Breuer and John Johansen) are falling under the wrecking ball.
A preservation group has found a new owner for one of the country's few remaining taverns, the DeJarnette Tavern, built c.1780 in Halifax County, Va.
Named after Daniel DeJarnette, son of a Revolutionary War captain, the building was a colorful stagecoach inn and watering hole. "The tavern is said to have attracted a fun-loving clientele, particularly those who enjoyed horseracing, card playing, and cockfighting," according to the National Register nomination, which APVA Preservation Virginia prepared.
The Oct. 15 sale transferred the dilapidated tavern to a Connecticut couple, Mark Hubina and his fiancee, Tania Bongiolatti. Using state historic tax credits, the owners plan to restore the 1,300-square-foot building to its Civil War appearance, APVA Preservation Virginia announced this week.
In 2001, APVA Preservation Virginia used money from its revolving fund program to rescue the building, listed on the National Register and a state landmark. DeJarnette's Tavern was priced at $29,000. The former state program, transferred to the nonprofit in 1999, is a $1.5 million fund to purchase endangered properties, find the right buyer, and place easements on the property before the sale.
Texas lost a mid-century modern house last month.
Once called the "Carousel House," the circular house in Meyerland was designed and built in 1964 by Robert Cohen, who constructed the house out of wood frames and steel.
In 1987, the elderly Cohens moved out, and the house remained empty until June 2004, when Texas lawyer John O'Quinn purchased it for his classic car collection's manager, Zev Isgur. After Isgur went to jail, the house was deserted.
Over the next two years, the house was neglected and subjected to roof leaks, vandalism, and furniture theft. For some reason, the house was never marketed publicly and in September 2007, a construction company called Granit builders purchased it with plans to build a new house in its location. The Carousel House was demolished on Nov. 20.
"The house was smashed to bits," says Ben Koush, president of HoustonMod, a nonprofit that advocates the preservation of modern architecture in Texas. "I cannot imagine how it could be salvaged at this point."
The house was destroyed despite efforts of preservationists and locals. "I think the perception of the expense of restoring it is one of the reasons it was demolished, but there's also just the fact that it was never offered for sale publicly," says Jason Smith, HoustonMod board member. "I think if we had been able to do a 'Mod of the Month’ open house, we may have been able to find a buyer."
post apocalyptic classics
"that guy who burns furniture" via adman
movies with department store pneumatic tube appearances
guest editor:
Dieter Rams is the most important and influential designer of the post war era. As head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, he revolutionised the design of domestic technology and developed a design language that married technical innovation with a strict formal and functional elegance.
Click on the image above to see a gallery of Rams' work.
Born in Wiesbaden in Germany in 1932, he first joined Braun in 1954 as an architect and interior designer but soon moved into product design. In his forty-year stretch at Braun he designed (or oversaw the design of) hundreds of products from audio equipment, coffee makers, calculators and cigarette lighters to electric shavers. For Vitsoe he designed the 606 shelving system and 620 chair.
SURFS UP!!!
SAN FRANCISCO -- Ocean swells towering up to 16 feet pounded the Northern California coastline Tuesday as the first of two storm fronts roared through the area with showers creating chaos on local roadways during the Bay Area morning commute.via adman
The National Weather Service reported its off-shore buoy system indicated swell heights near 16 feet every 15 seconds. Wave models predicted westerly swells increasing to around 20-26 feet during the day and then subsiding to around 15 feet by Wednesday afternoon.
The big waves attracted surfers to the coastline, but the southerly winds adversely affected conditions at some popular beaches.
"The waves are so big right now at (San Francisco's) Ocean Beach, they all come at once, there is no way to get out," said Aaron Hope, as he prepared to surf the waves at Fort Point in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. ___________________________________________________
Mavericks surf contest organizers said they expect monster waves Tuesday.
Weniger aber besser
digmodern (books)
historic house parts
book store
Q I grew up in an unusual building, the Vermeer Studios, two side-by-side structures on 66th Street east of Park Avenue. We had 19th-century landscapes in our apartment, and I remember my father going next door to visit A. Conger Goodyear, who collected modern art, and coming back and saying “You can’t believe what that man has on his walls!” What can you tell me about the Vermeer? ...
Alice Cooper live in Detroit 1971 - Is It My Body
Here are a few video clips that will be of interest to Mick Ronson fans.
All The Young Dudes at the Agora-- wow.
via vz
Ralph Peer (May 22, 1892 – January 19, 1960) was born Ralph Sylvester Peer in Independence, Missouri. He died in Hollywood, California. Peer was a talent scout, recording engineer and record producer in the field of music in the 1920s and 1930s.
Peer spent some years working for Columbia Records, in Kansas City, Missouri until 1920 when he was hired as recording director of General Phonograph's OKeh Records label in New York. In the same year he supervised the recording of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues", reputed to be the first blues recording specifically aimed at the African-American market. In 1924 he supervised the first commercial recording session in New Orleans, Louisiana, recording jazz, blues, and gospel music groups there.
He is also credited with what is often called the first country music recording, Fiddlin' John Carson's "Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane"/"That Old Hen Cackled and The Rooster's Goin' To Crow". In August 1927, while talent hunting in the southern states with Victor Records he recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in the same session at a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee, known as the Bristol Barn Session. This momentous event could be described as the genesis of country music as we know it today. Rodgers, who later became known as the Father Of Country Music, cut "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep", while the Carters' first sides included "Single Girl, Married Girl".