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The plight of public schools in New Orleans have been a hot topic lately. This past Monday the School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish was released; it calls for a large-scale rehabilitation of the city’s educational infrastructure. This news falls in the larger context of a shift toward privatized education which, depending on how you look at it, is either a welcome solution to an entrenched problem of low-performance (as portrayed in this week’s New York Times Magazine), or a sinister example of “disaster capitalism” (as per Naomi Klein). In either case, something important gets lost in the conversation; that is the impending threat to New Orleans’s modernist architecture.
ct salt marsh barn
duo dickinson
Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.
The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.
Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:
The use of worn-out horseshoes as magically protective amulets -- especially hung above or next to doorways -- originated in Europe, where one can still find them nailed onto houses, barns, and stables from Italy through Germany and up into Britain and Scandinavia. Additionally, wall hangins made in the form of horseshoes are common. In the Middle-East, one finds the terra cotta blue-glazed horseshoe plaque. In Turkey small metal or blue glass horseshoes are blended with the protective all-seeing eye to form a unique apotropaic charm i call the horseshoe-and-eyes that is believed to ward off the evil eye.
There is good reason to suppose that the crescent form of the horseshoe links the symbol to pagan Moon goddesses of ancient Europe such as Artemis and Diana, and that the protection invoked is that of the goddess herself, or, more particularly, of her sacred vulva. As such, the horseshoe is related to other magically protective doorway-goddesses, such as the Irish sheela-na-gig, and to lunar protectresses such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is often shown standing on a crescent moon and placed within a vulval mandorla or vesica pisces.
Whenever a structure wins the accolade of “Britain’s most hated building”, or crowds bay beside a demolition as at a public architectural execution, the victims will be brutalist buildings.
Brutalism is one of Britain’s two contributions to modern architecture. The other is “high tech”, the engineering aesthetic of metal and glass that has, in effect, become the style of the City , the emblem of modernity. Brutalism, an aesthetic based on bulky cliffs of concrete, remains locked up in its filthy, rain-stained bunker, dismissed as modernism’s idiot relative, reviled, unpopular, a manifestation of everything that went wrong with architecture. One of its finest British proponents was Rodney Gordon, who has died aged 75.
Gordon remained unknown beyond architecture circles. His brief, flashy career largely happened in the office of Owen Luder in the 1960s, meaning his name was rarely associated with a building. In that time the office designed a handful of astonishing, sculptural buildings, nearly all of which have been, or are being, destroyed. The finest was the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, a terrific essay in sci-fi concrete that was left to rot by an unsympathetic council and chain stores that would rather have been somewhere else, somewhere with a bit less . . . character. Opened in 1966, its fiercely modelled form embraced a shopping centre, a nightclub and apartments. By the 1980s its apartments had never been fully occupied because of problems with damp and malfunctioning services, the nightclub had degenerated into a shabby casino and the top of the multistorey car park had become the south coast’s most popular spot for suicides after Beachy Head. It was demolished in 2004.
this dynamic new office space serves as a green remodeling example, having been fashioned from 90% reclaimed materials - the highest percentage in the country. the office space design integrates the Rebuilding Center's office space with the design and philosophy of its warehouses. ORANGE began by creating the stunning array of reused windows that surround the building, and has taken its problem-solving genius inside this truly amazing space.via mb