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For [Georges] Nöel, the ground of his paintings was as elemental as a muddy battlefield strewn with detritus: a thick, mixed-media “magma-matter,” first made with cloth and paper and then with sand and pigment embedded in polyvinyl acetate, a surface embodying chemistry’s conquest of nature. Noël covered this ground with dense skeins of marks, signs, gouges and graffiti, a method that he soon began referring to with the term “palimpsests” -- a form that his then-wife and companion, the celebrated curator Margit Rowell, referred to as “a stratification of writings. . . that blend into a single cryptic text.”

Indeed, the palimpsest is “an exemplary pictorial metaphor” for the human subject itself. For what is the modern individual but a palimpsest, an imaginary unity constituted from uncertain layers of experience, feelings, memories, thoughts, sensations?

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What the volume doesn’t do, perhaps surprisingly, is reprint some of the more famous tomes of that career — absent is that originary moment represented by the discipline-warping dissertation; the polemical essays that comprised Structural Anthropology; the UNESCO-sponsored Race and History; and the symphonic four-volume series of works on mythology published between 1964 and 1971, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.

Why the absences? The editor of the Pléiade Lévi-Strauss, Vincent Debaene, an assistant professor in the French department at Columbia, argues in his preface that the selections represent a double refusal: It avoided the production of a “too technical volume” but moreover avoided becoming another mythological reproduction of a “manifesto of structuralism.” A selection of texts that would have played into the latter tendency, Debaene wrote me by e-mail, “would have reduced Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to an avant-garde which has now been passed over, and the volume would have just gathered the memories of a moment of ‘French Theory’ or of European thought –– and the native Indians would have just become what they were in 18th-century thought: some remote shadows, a conceptual tool to create a relativistic stance, a fiction which would have helped us to think of ourselves and of our present.”

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In “Marvels of Modernism,” the latest installment, 10 photographers have translated the design elements of 12 postwar Modernist landscapes — kidney-shaped pools, Miró-esque reservoirs, boomerang curves, floating cantilevered decks and adventure playgrounds — for the 21st century. The exhibition, which opened Wednesday, will run through Jan. 4 and then travel to museums and botanical gardens. The sites were selected from the foundation’s annual “Landslide” list of endangered places and plants, which was culled from hundreds of nominees and then vetted by a panel of designers and preservationists.

“What we’re trying to do with the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to begin to get people to recognize that the American landscape is in fact a cultural institution worthy of celebration,” Mr. Birnbaum said. Featuring works like the daunting horizon of Boston City Hall Plaza, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, and Dan Kiley’s orthogonal Miller Garden in Columbus, Ind., designated a national historic landmark in 2000, the disparate sites are linked by the civic ambition of those who designed them.

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ill come back to this. A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn By Charles Taylor

i find gehry pretty tedious but he is not representative of all artist/architects. certainly not koolhaas. taylor gets just about everything else wrong in this article.


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barbara galucci achicitectonic photographs


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