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marilyn avery kamikaze architecture (just found this clipping in my files) too bad no pictures in nyt archive - nice cabin with wrap around screened in 18" clarestory space below the roofline.
french theory in america part two
the message machine
ubu spring 08
Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish (1973)
penn sound makes henry hills films available as streams
grey lodge occult review #18 makes paul virilios book the vision machine available as pdf
the international dada archive
There's so many Endless Summer posters for sale in galleries, poster stores, the internet and eBay how can a collector tell what's what?
in the pre internet days of the early 90's i started tool collector networking by following one tool collectors association newsletter to the next. eventually i figured out that all roads lead to the EAIA. but they were heavy on the antique woodworking planes and i loved (entry level) wrench collecting which took me to the missouri valley wrench collectors group. the subscription newsletters still persist but now they all have web sites too with links pages to each other with even more obscure individual members sites.
Early American Industries Association Inc.
Founded in 1933 to encourage the study and better understanding of early American industry, in the home, in the shop, on the farm, and on the sea. Whether you are a tool collector, a tool dealer, a scholar, a user of tools or just like finding out about tools, there will be something to interest you. Membership of EAIA is open to any person or organization sharing its interests and purpose.eaia members links
fine tool journal links
astragal press links
otca w/ links
mvwca links
Kilogram No. 20
the 7th man A True Cannibal Tale of the South Sea Islands: Told in Fifteen Wood-Engravings and Precisely One Hundred and Eighty Nine Words
"It's our fucking park!" says Jerry "the Peddler" Wade, denouncing the city after it denied him a permit to hold a punk-rock concert in Tompkins Square Park to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the August 6, 1988, police riot that took place there
As of yesterday [4/14/08] Pale Male and Lola are still sitting. The hatching window is open -- it could happen any day. At the Hawk Bench yesterday photographer Rik Davis and I exchanged notes and decided that April 20th is the outside date for hatching. That gives us hope until Sunday.
rat rod of the week
kt has posted some nice photos of their container house project. piles poured. containers stacked. they are getting ready to start cutting holes for the doors and windows and looking for advise on preventing buckling. lets watch and see how they do.
towards a pattern language dialogue
(pdf)
She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.thanks mark
And that's the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime -- war crimes by any measure -- and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle -- who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic -- will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won't stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.
In Preserving New York, Anthony C. Wood sets out to debunk the myth. A professor of historic preservation at Columbia University and chair of the New York Preservation Archive Project, Wood has authored an impressively researched account of the people, places, and events that led to the landmarks law. The loss of Penn Station was a "key chapter" in that evolution, Wood writes, "but for it to be seen as either the entire or primary story … is to rob New York City of the richer, more complex, and inspiring true story of how New Yorkers won the right to protect their landmarks."
That story, Wood contends, begins with several earlier battles to protect notable buildings—including the 1803 St. John's Chapel (demolished in 1918) and the 1812 City Hall (saved in the late 1930s). Beginning in 1939, a nascent preservation coalition successfully challenged city planner and master intimidator Robert Moses, whose proposals to construct a bridge (and later a tunnel) between Battery Park and Brooklyn would have destroyed much of the historic character of lower Manhattan. Of particular concern was Moses' plan to raze Castle Clinton, an 1811 fortification that later served as an immigrant processing facility. Led by George McAneny, who helped found the group that would become the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the coalition won support for saving Castle Clinton until the structure's 1950 transfer to the federal government and designation as a national monument. Efforts to inventory the city's historic buildings and recognize its neighborhoods continued in the postwar period, despite the loss of such significant buildings as the 1854 Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village, the Brokaw Mansions on the Upper East Side (1890-1911), the 41-story Singer Building (1908), and, of course, Penn Station, built in 1910.
A 1950s Googie diner in Downey, Calif., may rise from the ashes. After most of Johnie's Broiler was illegally demolished in January 2007, the city of Downey and Johnie's many fans vowed to rebuild the drive-in restaurant. Bob's Big Boy has volunteered to do just that.
According to the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee, the owner of a Bob's Big Boy in nearby Torrance, Jim Louder, has signed a long-term lease for the site and plans to reconstruct the drive-in restaurant that disappeared 15 months ago. The franchise plans to restore the Broiler's signature Z-shaped sign and salvage other parts of the partially demolished building. In a nod to the 1950s, Bob's Big Boy will offer carhop service.
"It's really exciting," says Adriene Biondo, chair of the conservancy's Modern Committee. "I really have to applaud [Jim's vision and the city for leaving it standing long enough to find an operator that has a vision. Another city might have cleared the site."
In preparation for “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” a show on prefabricated housing that opens July 20, the Museum of Modern Art is letting the public in on the action. The museum has set up a Web site (momahomedelivery.org) that allows visitors to follow the process as five architectural teams create houses to be installed in outdoor space west of the museum’s main building. Every week until the show opens, each team will present progress reports, with photos, drawings and video clips of its efforts to make, ship and assemble the structures.
Donald Judd
Library desk B-vB 27/6, designed 1982
hardwoods, texas pine, and pine; shown in Douglas fir
30 x 88 x 44 inches
Description:
The full lines of metal and wood furniture by Donald Judd are available at Artware Editions.
Most pieces from the wood lines are available in a variety of different wood types and finishes, including Finland color ply in six colors (black, green, yellow, light brown, dark brown, or red), Birch plywood, Mahogany plywood, Texas pine, common pine and hardwoods (cherry, walnut, Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, alder, ash, maple and cypress).
A small selection of pieces is on view on our website. Please contact gallery for full details and pricing.
--------------------------------------------
longleaf yellow (texas) pine
But much of Starck’s playful ribbing was at the expense of the user. One could never find the door to the bathrooms in the Royalton lobby, for example, and the “flaming ornament” atop the roof of Japan’s Asahi Brewery building meant to symbolize the brewery’s dynamic heart but is far better known as the “golden turd.”
Starck’s furniture designs seemed clever the first time you saw them — lamps in the shape of guns, a chair with Louis XIV detailing, a cute (but pricey) gnome stool — but not so much the second time around.
His product design often entered the realm of pure silliness, perhaps epitomized by the goblet-shaped toddler sippy cup in plastic masquerading as crystal that Starck design for Target back in 2002. Or maybe the WW Stool he designed for Vitra, described as a stool or a “support for users who prefer to stand” priced at an astonishing $4,670. (I will give him a nod for his spider-legged juice squeezer for Alessi; if you’ll pardon the unpardonable pun, that design has legs.)
I write of Starck in the past tense because the increasingly cynical vibe of his creations seems to have caught up with him. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit recently, Starck proclaimed that “everything that I designed is absolutely unnecessary.” This continued a jag of self-deprecation started at the TED conference in March, where Starck began by addressing his audience thusly: “I must tell you I am like that [indicates shaking hands], not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless.” Starck also announced his impending retirement (not effective immediately, but two years from now, so we can expect more of the same).
Now, for a designer of objects and things to announce that “we do not need anything material,” that all we need is “the ability to love,” makes for a delicious scandal. It also transforms Starck suddenly into the most unlikely of roles: an advocate for sustainability. This is all the more remarkable as Starck’s material of choice is, more often than not, the incredibly un-green polycarbonate.
In the future, promises Starck, “there will be no more designers.” And by extension, no more stuff! Now, that’s a surefire way to reduce one’s carbon footprint. (Will Starck now join the Designers Accord?) As is Starck’s prediction that the designer of the future is “a personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.” So not only will we consume less stuff (because no one is designing it), we’ll consume less food, too. Brilliant!
And that’s when I began to get suspicious.
For five weeks, until May 17, Storefront for Art and Architecture will operate this satellite space in a backroom of Paperchase Printing, a print shop in Hollywood with some room to spare because its digital printers take up less space than the ones they replaced.
On display will be "CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed," an exhibition of French photographer Frédéric Chaubin's images of Eastern Bloc buildings that went up in the 1970s and '80s -- the last two decades of the Cold War and the final years of the Soviet Union.
The two stories about threats to Bertrand Goldberg's architecture in today's Tribune reveal that Goldberg's architecture still speaks to us today. The question is: Why?
In the 1960s, Goldberg, once an acolyte of Mies van der Rohe, revolted against the master of steel and glass, as well as his devotion to the right angle. Goldberg shifted instead to curves and concrete, and the result was Marina City, including the corncob-shaped apartment towers along the Chicago River that are icons of the Chicago skyline.
on fucking up 2CC
The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that.
Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner had it opened than the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable dubbed it the "Venetian lollipop" building, because of the peculiar arcade at its base. And in the nearly half-century since, that label has stuck, like obscene graffiti smeared across its entrance — to be distinguished, naturally, from the actual graffiti smeared across its entrance. For the longest time, simply to mention "the lollipop building" passed for taste and discernment in matters of architecture and design.
Why did "everyone" hate this building, the loving labor of Edward Durrell Stone, one of America's most eminent Modernist architects? Back in 1964, its tentative embrace of historicism, contextualism, and even irony — qualities later embraced by the Postmodernists — seemed heretical and appalling. It felt like decades since anyone had had the gall and poor judgment to attempt something other than a glass and steel curtain wall.
Often overlooked, however, is that even back then there were people [me] who quite liked the building. Even if its embrace of Venetian and Byzantine motifs was halfhearted at best, still there was a positive enchantment to the place, a sense — and here I draw upon memories from my own childhood — that architecture could open up whole new worlds to the receptive soul. Unlike most buildings in Manhattan, 2 Columbus Circle presented a smooth, windowless expanse of gleaming white marble, qualified by adorable round portholes along the sides and ruddy granite accents. Imagine a Modernist re-enactment of a Venetian palazzo dropped into one of the busiest intersections in the busiest city in the world and encircled, like an island, by the ceaseless flow of traffic rather than the green waters of the Grand Canal!
sputnic lights at vintage oasis
aint it....!
via zoller
justin snags another good shipping container cabin find
"art is either plagiarism or revolution."
-paul gauguin
now can someone get me a job at one of those stupid net surfing art clubs. i can spell fuked up on purpose too.
our friend linda found tables made from reclaimed bowling lanes at the BKLN flea market
porch board
via vz
this is quite a grand discovery for me. at age 13 i visited some cousins in evanston Ill. on the first opportunity i took the train into chicago and headed straight to the old town district. there in a prospering bi-level head shop, hung high on the wall i spotted a life sized poster of a greyhound bus. its stuck with me ever since. epic (!) looking generically warholian (screened americana) and 100% pop (think rosenquist and oldenburg BIG). since the age of the internet ive searched off and on but not until this moment have i found the "A"uthor. turns out, it was mason williams.
i try not to be seduced by the fetish aspects of nakashima furniture. really, they are just straight up trestle tables. free edges? just short cuts to a completed work station. butterfly keys? you need them for mending slabs of wood which might not make the grade otherwise. but this table in rosewood, well it did me in. me and someone with 210k.
In 1954 the artist Asger Jorn wrote to Max Bill, “Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.” Bill, a former Bauhaus student and the founding director of the newly opened Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, a self-anointed successor to the Bauhaus, replied, “Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, but the meaning of a movement that represents a well-defined doctrine.” To which Jorn shot back, “If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, it is the name of a doctrine without inspiration — that is to say, dead.”1from the spring/summer '08 HDM online
This exchange between the orthodox Bill, who would run his school like a monastery, and Jorn, who as a provocation would create something called the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus before going on to cofound the Situationist International a couple years later, was more than just an epistolary joust. Virtually since its founding in 1919, throughout its fourteen-year existence in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin under three successive directors, and in the three quarters of a century since it closed its doors in advance of the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been the object of veneration, hostility, controversy, and myth. It has been variously portrayed as a seminal experiment in pedagogy, a hotbed of radicalism, the standard-bearer of the ethos of functionalism and industrial technology, an aesthetic style, and most broadly, an “idea” synonymous with the spirit of early 20th-century modernity itself. In a new collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, it is a cultural manifestation closely linked to the political and economic vicissitudes of its times.
Authorship in design is a sticky question, and always has been. There are a few considerations: collaboration, control, voice, and limits. The questions that follow from these considerations are simple enough. If—like architects or filmmakers, but unlike bookwriters or oil painters—we collaborate on our projects with a huge array of people, including paying clients, regulatory and legal institutions, fellow design staff and subcontractors, printers and fabricators, merchants and mailing houses, are we even able to “author” a work? To aid us in this discussion on collaboration’s impact on authorship, some designers (in particular Michael Rock) have pointed out Andrew Sarris’s auteur model, developed for the analysis of filmmaking.
rago has two modern design auctions a year. last fall we saw a frail but spirited Philip Lloyd Powell in the auction room looking very elfin. sadly he has passed on since then. here are some shots of my brothers small PLP side table that came from a little east village thrift shop called "garage sale" which was located on 1st avenue and second street back in the 80's.
back from the rago auction showroom with (up-skirt) images of george nakashima splayed and tapered table legs.
Toward an Architecture is the most influential book on architecture of the modern era. Perhaps only Vitruvius can match it for influence from any age. So let's make that the most influential book on architecture for about 2,000 years.
Emerging from the era of manifestos, it is a radical, hectoring, brilliant book. It blends the eye-catching absurdity of Dada, the strange juxtapositions of surrealism and the technophilic cutaway drawings of a boys' magazine with text that is incisive, sometimes funny and occasionally wholly convincing.
Written in 1923, when Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect living in France, had built only a couple of houses, it has survived as the manifesto of modern architecture. It is a paean to the unselfconscious, functional beauty of engineering - an appeal to architects and patrons to abandon outmoded traditional modes of construction and look to the power and clarity of industrial buildings, aeroplanes and machines. And that is how the book is largely remembered, along with its call for the house to be ''a machine for living in'', perhaps the most quoted phrase in architecture. It is also an ode to architectural ambition - grandeur, proportion, elegance and meaning.
nyc canon
square america
by way of reference library
To the north and south of my plebeian ranch-style home here, my neighbors are transforming their pads into midcentury modern showplaces. At one time all you needed to accomplish this was some orange paint and concrete blocks; nowadays the makeover involves a lot of chopping.
One neighbor ripped out the fig and lemon trees planted there 40 years before by the original owner. To the north, modernistas tore out a jungle of honeysuckle vines and asparagus ferns weaving in and out of an old fence.
All around my neighborhood, new owners are hacking off the blond skirts of the Washingtonia filifera palms and amputating tendrils of black dates. In the latest development, they are even shaving the rough bark of the palms, leaving a shiny blood-like surface.
The skinned palm look is very sleek, very atomic -- it goes back to the early days of modernism in the '40s. But it leaves nowhere for a collared lizard, roadrunner, orange oriole or barn owl to hide. It's not even good for the tree.
As I walk around the neighborhood, it's beginning to look like some modernists are intent on annihilating habitat and banishing nature. More yards -- some had resembled gardens in Pasadena with a loose, shady ambience and alcoves of privacy -- sport a minimalist look, with soldierly rows of tufted grasses, or lone agave spikes in seas of gravel or lawn.
the unisim of wadyslaw strzeminski and katarzyna korbo
abandoned roller coaster
via vz
Plans to save a unique section of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport have stalled on the runway.
MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition by New York artist Mark Dagley. Dagley will present four shaped paintings -- two monochromes and two with checkerboard patterns -- which were originally produced in 1987. Dagley made the works in William S. Burrough's Bunker space on the Bowery in NYC, exhibited them later that year at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho, and subsequently put them into storage. Dagley's exhibition at MINUS SPACE will mark the first time the works will be shown publicly in more than twenty years.
Mark Dagley (b. 1957, Washington, DC) has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art (NYC), Sydney Non Objective (Australia), NyeHaus (NYC), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Up & Co (NYC, London), Riflemaker Gallery (London), Jersey City Museum (NJ), Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences (NJ), The Shore Institute of Contemporary Art (NJ), Axel Raben Gallery (NYC), and Galeria Leyendecker (Tenerife, Spain).
He is a member of American Abstract Artists and his work has been reviewed in publications, such as ARTFORUM, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, and the New York Sun. His work is included in the collections of The Broad Art Foundation, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Swiss Credit Union, Foundation Prini, Hoffman/LaRoche, Henkel Gmbh., and EMI, among others.
Mark Dagley also co- founded and directs Abaton Garage, a project room in Jersey City, NJ, and Abaton Book Company, specializing in artist editions, book projects, cds and videos.
A color catalog accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Matthew Deleget & Nora Griffin, and a comprehensive interview by Don Voisine.
construction site images currently on ebay
rip ralph rapson
your personal theramin
via zoller
i ran in to this shit trying to drag an ebay photo image to my desktop today
end of an era
RENOWNED French designer Philippe Starck says he is fed up with his job and plans to retire in two years.
"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact," Mr Starck told German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
"Everything I designed was unnecessary.
"I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself ... design is a dreadful form of expression."
Starck, who is known for his interior design of hotels and Eurostar trains and mass consumption objects ranging from chairs to tooth brushes and lemon juice squeezers, went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead.
"In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant," he said.
Mr Starck said the only objects that he still felt attached to were "a pillow perhaps and a good mattress".
But the thing one needs most, he added, was the "ability to love".
5 years death toll sweater
beijing 2008
submitted by lisa
ye olde trip to jerusalem
They introduce the ale connor, who would test the purity of the beer by pouring a bit onto a bench and then sitting on it; low-quality beer would be sugary and would glue the connor's leather breeches to the bench.
Questions for Alexandre Nucinovitski
The Times’s longtime architecture critic breaks his silence and reveals what compelled him to come forward with his allegations, how high up the conspiracy goes, and what (or who) is the “Bilbao-12.”
Some have suggested that your dismissal from the paper was imminent and that your recent indictment of your peers is nothing more than a marketing ploy to promote your upcoming book.
I came close to jumping ship several years ago—right after Architectonica opened its new hotel in Times Square—but they threw us a bone and let us go to town on it, sensing that the public would become overly suspicious if we showered it with praise. Then, two years ago, I was all set to break ranks again, following the universal praise for the Morphosis student dormitory in Toronto, but they preempted me by awarding Mayne the Pritzker, thereby making any attack open to attack. My tipping point came following the opening of the addition to the Denver Art Museum. At first they tried to appease me by granting me a paragraph to vent my frustrations—as long as it was limited to something trivial, like its functionality—but the night before I was to send in my review, I had a nightmare that I was trapped in a maze of Serra sculptures while thousands of people looked down from their office windows and laughed at me.
In your letter of resignation/suicide note you make numerous references to the “Bilbao-12.” Can you ex-plain what this was?
The Bilbao-12 was an “informal” meeting of twelve of the top architecture critics that took place just prior to the opening of the Guggenheim. Due to pending legal actions, I’m unable to reveal any names except to say that the meeting was also attended by a high-ranking deputy from the World Bank, an economic adviser from the UN, and a Washington lobbyist from the aluminum and titanium industries. The case was made for using architecture to revitalize the economies of postindustrial cities by establishing a brotherhood of “superstar” architects who would generate spectacles bolstered by our reviews, creating “archi tourism,” or what has become known today as the “Bilbao Effect.” I should mention that we were also handed a list of complex words and terminologies that we were encouraged to use in our writings in the hope that they would find their way into the architectural vernacular, thereby confusing the public and allowing the acrobats to pass through board hearings with minimal opposition.