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After 100 years the painting of the Forth Rail bridge is to come to an end, depriving the English language of one its most treasured similes. With three coats of a special paint, similar to that used in the offshore oil industry, painting of the bridge is due to be completed in four years. The paint has an estimated life-span of 25 years, although it is hoped it will last closer to 40 years.

But what Network Rail, the owners of the Forth Bridge, stands to gain in productivity, the English language could lose a cherished aphorism.

According to the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, if "repairing or improving something is like painting the Forth Bridge, it takes such a long time that by the time you have finished doing it, you have to start again".

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chocolate factory


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cyclorama (cyc)


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Curator Nader Vossoughian talks about the exhibition (filmmaker/interviewer: Henk Augustijn).
Watch this movie on YouTube.

Next chapter in the ‘After Neurath' project. around the Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist Otto Neurath (1882-1945), who lived in The Hague from 1934 until 1940. The exhibition focuses on Otto Neurath's relationship with architecture and his influence on urban development. Especially his ideas about the democratization of public space and how to reconcile the intimacy and tangibility of the ancient polis with the anonymity and diversity of the global metropolis have been very influential to protagonists like Paul Otlet, Cornelis van Eesteren, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky andLe Corbusier and resound in mainstream architectural and urban thinking of today.

The exhibition ‘The Global Polis' shows the innovative ideas about the modern metropolis of Neurath -and his famous protagonists- based on the social-democratic ideals of the interbellum. Neurath was especially eager to promote participatory forms of democratic exchange (a 'global polis'), and this exhibition shows his attempts in disciplines as varied as architecture, urbanism, graphic design and planning.

The exhibition is structured in three 'acts'.
The first act, 'The Communal City,' examines Neurath's role in Vienna's extraordinary 'self-help' cooperative settlement movement, which inspired tremendous optimism in architects and planners.
The second act, 'The World City', examines Neurath's efforts to internationalize mass education and social enlightenment through collaborations with Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier and others.
The third act, 'The Functional City', looks at his work with the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and the planner and architect Cornelis van Eesteren specifically. This section explores Neurath's struggles with the mass media and modernist architecture on the eve of the rise of fascism in Europe. It also raises deeper questions about the links between culture and politics today.
via reference library
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glashaus

the glass house the movie


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Historic Green: New Orleans: March 8-23...students and young professionals will...help the people of the Lower 9 revitalize their community...an unprecedented opportunity to integrate sustainable practices with preservation of a place.- Historic Green

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Government reports confirm that half of the working poor, elderly and disabled who lived in New Orleans before Katrina have not returned. Because of critical shortages in low cost housing, few now expect tens of thousands of poor and working people to ever be able to return home.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) reports Medicaid, medical assistance for aged, blind, disabled and low-wage working families, is down 46% from pre-Katrina levels. DHH reports before Katrina there were 134,249 people in New Orleans on Medicaid. February 2008 reports show participation down to 72,211 (a loss of 62,038 since Katrina). Medicaid is down dramatically in every category: by 50% for the aged, 53% for blind, 48% for the disabled and 52% for children.

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Doug Tallamy and his wife, Cindy, built their house seven years ago in the middle of 10 acres of former hayfields.

But they don’t sit inside much. Most of their spare time is spent cutting Oriental bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle out of cherry and oak trees. They saw down thickets of autumn olive and multiflora rose and paint the cut stems with an herbicide that goes down into the roots and kills them.

The land was so thick with multiflora rose that they couldn’t walk, so Mr. Tallamy cut paths with hand loppers. They work with handsaws, not a chain saw. And they paint on the herbicide, rather than spraying it, because they don’t want to damage the treasures below: under those thorny rose bushes might be seedlings of black oak, Florida dogwood, black gum or arrowwood viburnum, which, if protected from deer, could flourish in the cleared space.

A meadow cleared of autumn olive can resprout with goldenrod, joe-pye weed, milkweed, black-eyed Susans and many other natives crucial to wildlife.

It’s hard work, but the Tallamys love being outside. And they share a vision, an imperative, really, that Mr. Tallamy lays out in a book, “Bringing Nature Home” (Timber Press, $27.95), published in November.

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lt. amber glass


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