cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

10-3


[link] [5 comments]

47 baxter st five points

thx lisa
[link] [2 comments]

why buildings fall down diana cherbuliez


[link] [add a comment]

The Landmark Preservation Commission had a hearing Tuesday to determine whether Silver Towers/University Village, a concrete complex designed by I. M. Pei in 1966 as part of a Robert Moses urban renewal program, should be designated a historic landmark.

A formal vote will be held at a later date, but already, the discussion about whether to protect the buildings — located between Bleecker and Houston Streets east of LaGuardia Place — has been heated.

Some fans of Jane Jacobs’s philosophy of urban spaces find the buildings hideous. Others see the towers as important examples of postwar modernism.

[link] [2 comments]

No PR firm would have dreamt up the word "brutalism". The term was derived from Le Corbusier's "Breton brut"- French for "raw concrete", the movement's preferred material - rather than anything to do with brutality, with which it has sadly become better associated. In the popular imagination, brutalism is synonymous with harsh, hostile, ugly architecture (or death metal). Two key examples of the movement are currently under threat, Birmingham Central Library and Robin Hood Gardens, and both have sparked furious debate.

Birmingham Central Library, opened in 1974 and designed by John Madin, is apparently the busiest library in Europe, though Prince Charles judged its hulking inverted ziggurat more suited to incinerating books than storing them. The building was slated for demolition as part of a £1bn plan to regenerate the city centre (and build a brand new library) but now English Heritage has recommended it be listed, arguing that it has "defined an era of Birmingham's history". There seem to be plenty in the city who would rather leave that era undefined, but others have defended it as a successful, high-quality design, including my colleague Jonathan Glancey.

It's a similar story with Robin Hood Gardens, in Poplar, East London. One of the original "streets in the sky" housing developments, completed in 1972, this relentless mid-rise estate displayed the worst of public housing design: crime, grime, and societal and material decay. But it was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, arguably Britain's most celebrated modernist architects. When discussions over its future arose, the architectural magazine Building Design launched a campaign to save it led by heavyweights such as Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid. As Simon Jenkins pointed out, nobody who actually lives there has joined this campaign. Why not please everybody and convert it into a National Museum of Bad Architecture?

[link] [1 comment]

Art has concerned philosophers from the beginning. In The Republic, Plato denounced art as mere imitation. For Hegel, too, art was subordinate to philosophy; in 1828 he wrote that art "in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." More recently, philosophy professor Arthur C. Danto announced "the end of art" in 1984.

But Danto didn't mean that artists were no longer making art; rather, he was referring to the end of art history. Throughout much of this history, artists--from Hellenistic sculptors in ancient Greece to academic realist painters of nineteenth-century France--sought to realistically depict the natural world. But with the advent of Modernism, realism devolved in a rapid denouement--brush strokes became visible and bold, color was expressive rather than authentic and the figure became increasingly sketchy and crude until nothing remained but pure abstraction. By the 1980s, however, this linear progression came to an abrupt end as the art world entered a new, pluralistic era. This era was not defined by a dominant school or movement but was characterized by its lack thereof.

[link] [add a comment]

ramones 1975 vertically elongated video distortion.........not


[link] [1 comment]

huffington on mainstream media


[link] [add a comment]

treehouse web porn one and two


[link] [add a comment]

Tourists still flock to the World Trade Center site, almost seven years after the attacks of September 11. What they find when they get there is not a scene of destruction but a busy construction site. While I’m grateful to see Ground Zero filling up with fresh concrete and steel, there’s something about the utter normalcy of the scene that makes me long for that heady period in 2003 and 2004 when the planning process for the site, a grand public pageant bursting with visionary zeal, promised to generate a place brave and powerful enough to heal the city’s wounds. But as the concrete hardens, I can almost see the banality setting in. The only person speaking with any frequency these days about his “vision” for the site is its developer, Larry Silverstein. Lately, he’s been giving what amounts to a stump speech, promoting the vitality of Lower Manhattan and touting his revised schedule. “The buildings will reach street level approximately one year after the start of construction, and Towers 3 and 4 will top out in mid-2010, with Tower 2 following in 2011,” Sil verstein told the Downtown Association in April. “Can you count on this schedule? You bet.”

[link] [2 comments]



His "simple aim in life," or so said Fortune magazine in 1946, was "to remake the world." He did not quite pull that off, but not for lack of trying. Indeed, he was so prolific that 20 years later The New Yorker billed him as "an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmologist and comprehensive designer." By then, R. Buckminster Fuller had adopted the shorter job descriptions of "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist" and "astronaut from Spaceship Earth."

Bucky (as almost everyone called him) was 70 years old when The New Yorker interviewed him on the tiny island off the Maine coast with no electricity, telephones or running water where he spent each summer. His most successful project, the geodesic dome, has provided emergency shelter for many thousands of people, but other designs, including a flying car and floating city, had flopped, and he had yet to complete a long promised book on his theory of Energetic-Synergetic Geometry.

Hailed as a visionary by the 1960s hippie movement, Fuller, who died in 1983, was dismissed as an eccentric by the design and architecture establishments. (This assessment was shared by their peers in mathematics, cartography and other disciplines he had challenged.) The critics and curators who defined 20th century design history tended to prize materialistic achievements, preferably corporate-friendly ones, such as Mies van der Rohe's monumental buildings, and Charles Eames's opulent office furniture. Iconoclastic dreamers were relegated to the margins, especially if, like Fuller, they were self-taught, befuddlingly verbose and uncompromising altruists with a string of spectacular failures in design and business.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is now reassessing Fuller's achievements - and his contribution to design history - in "Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe," an exhibition opening Thursday. "In some ways his 'comprehensive, anticipatory design science' is more relevant for design today than it was even in his own time," said K. Michael Hays, a curator of the show. "He thought of the world in terms of flows of information and energy that interact and exchange in a complex totality. This is why it is relevant for scientists and artists, as well as designers."

[link] [6 comments]