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Pier 57: Chelsea's New Underwater Adventure Unveiled! (adaptive reuse of shipping containers employed)

via drat
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The "Seinfeld" co-creator and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" creator-star says the cast will appear together in the finale of the upcoming seventh season of the HBO comedy series.

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howard kalan interviewed on michael shelly show wfmu


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She's Dead..
Wrapped in Plastic.



via ree
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Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each.

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Nearly every summer, tensions flare among Maine's lobster fishermen over who has the right to place traps in specified areas. The origins of the industry's unofficial territorial system go back to about 1890, said University of Maine professor James Acheson, who has written two books on the subject.

Mostly, those territorial rights stay within local fishing families or among long-timers in the same harbors.

When fishermen feel their turf is being encroached upon, they send signals to the offending lobsterman by leaving a note in a bottle in the trap, by tying a knot in the buoy rope or by cutting out the door to the trap so lobsters can escape. Sometimes they resort to cutting trap lines - resulting in lost traps, which can cost $80 to $100 each.

Lobstermen have been known to ram their boats into each other and occasionally show a gun. Once in Portland Harbor, a boat crew jumped onto another boat and struggled with another crew before they were tossed overboard.

On occasion, lobstermen fire warning shots, and Acheson remembers a lobsterman once firing bullets through another boat's windshield in Penobscot Bay. On Matinicus a few years ago, two fishermen were charged after one of them fired a shotgun at the other.

For the most part, Maine fishermen respect their established territories, Acheson said.


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stream live euro internet radio by genre or country (classical)


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clamp leg tables


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Silbo Gomero (English: Gomeran Whistle), also known as "El Silbo", is a whistled language spoken by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands to communicate across the deep ravines and narrow valleys (gullies) that radiate through the island [1]. A speaker of Silbo Gomero is sometimes referred to in Spanish as "un silbador".

[...]


Guanches (also: Guanchis or Guanchetos), now extinct as a distinct people,[1] were the first known inhabitants of the Canary Islands, having migrated to the archipelago sometime between 1000 BCE and 100 BCE or perhaps earlier. Their culture as such has since disappeared, although traces of it can still be found, an example being the "whistle" Silbo language of La Gomera Island.


via justin
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basilw

If you were a preteenager in the 1950s and had precocious friends or a with-it dad, it’s a good bet you knew the cartoons of Basil Wolverton, the Michelangelo of Mad magazine, even if you didn’t know his name.

Like rock ’n’ roll and beatniks, Mad was a freakish spawn of the A-bomb era. It was like an emanation from some dark, Dada side of Disney; a stink bomb planted in the suburban Eden; and a preview of the underground-comics era to come. Wolverton, who is the subject of a career survey at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea this summer, was Mad’s early signature artist, the one who embodied its sick-and-proud humor.
via vz
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monica


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i dont understand the croc hating


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Cheap Trick's latest album is available on 8-Track tape. Related, noise, noise, noise on The Poor Man's Eight Track Tape, the history of the 8-track tape and 8-track Heaven, which offers helpful repair tips. Some great 8-track pics available in the Analog Rules galleries.

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Cosanti in Paradise Valley, Arizona is the residence and sculpture studio of Paolo Soleri and his staff. Soleri (later joined by his students) began work on the experimental buildings in the mid 1950’s. Designated as an Arizona Historic Site, Cosanti presents a unique bio-climatic architectural environment. Its structures feature many imaginative design elements, reflecting innovative construction techniques.
via vz
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The New Monumentality”, an exhibition of films at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, is about architecture and everyday life – or, rather, the disjunction between the two. The three artists involved, Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter, wrestle with the ways that the strangest of buildings have to be lived in. Byrne and Margreiter do so in the context of a building that stands just around the corner from the gallery – the University of Leeds campus, designed and built by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon between 1958 and 1968.

Local rumour has it that the complex served as a set for the 1970s science-fiction TV series Blake’s 7. This should come as no surprise. There is a divide, in the perception of these buildings, between the future they seem to suggest – a Space Age society with egalitarian buildings that make no reference to anything so prosaic as local materials – and the past they are more often seen to represent. That is, the other 1960s: not the decade reminisced over by ageing soixante-huitards, but the era of towers and slabs, walkways and motorways, which is only now, very slowly, starting to come back into favour.

Unexpectedly, given its tweedy reputation, Britain was briefly at the forefront of modernism. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, foreign directors came to the UK to film this new world, usually projecting it into the immediate future. In the earliest example, the 1966 film of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut shot a book-burning in front of the towers of the Alton Estate, Roehampton. Alton was once described by an American journalist as “the finest low-cost housing estate in the world”. In the film, it represented a frightening future where old media – books – are outlawed.

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communing w/ victor navaski


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Recorded at the Ponderosa Stomp at Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center, a rockabilly show like no other! New Orleans wild man Joe Clay, Sun Records legend Carl Mann and the out-of-this-world Collins Kids backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics. File under: In-freaking-credible!

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Julius Shulman, the legendary photographer who helped make California Modernist architecture famous around the world, died on July 15 at the age of 98. Shulman produced images of buildings — by pioneering architects like Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Pierre Koenig — that defined the postwar architecture of Southern California, among other places. The gregarious and seemingly tireless photographer continued to work until shortly before his death; in a 2007 interview in T Design, Shulman sang the praises of Arne Jacobsen’s classic Egg chair; the renowned architect sent him two as a thank-you gift after a photo shoot in the 1950s.

- the nyt



His career dovetailed neatly with the rise of residential modern architecture as a consumable art form -- a product to be ogled, and dreamed about, as surely as any model in the pages of a fashion magazine. He ought to be recognized as the man who made Dwell magazine and Design Within Reach possible. And maybe even the world-famous, globe-trotting class of designers known as starchitects.

Shulman's vision of modern, stylish domesticity was in many respects an airbrushed one. It's hard to believe anybody actually ever lived the way the carefully posed models in his photographs seemed to, carrying a tray out onto a poolside terrace, or sitting in perfectly pressed suits and dresses on the edge of a Mies van der Rohe chaise longue, city lights twinkling in the distance.

But his images were impossible to resist as a kind of mythmaking, even for the most tough-minded observers of life in Los Angeles. To look for any length of time at a Shulman picture of a great modern L.A. house is to get a little drunk on the idea of paradise as an Edenic combination of spare architecture and lush landscape.

- the la times

Schulman, born in Brooklyn on October 10, 1910, died just two months shy of his 99th birthday, and—with the exception of a short-lived retirement during the rise of Postmodernism (which he detested)—had been continuously working around the world until the beginning of this year, when his health had begun to decline. In his later years he collaborated with German photographer Juergen Nogai.

- the architects newspaper

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Of all English institutions, the one to count on would surely be the pub. Shelter to Chaucer’s pilgrims, home to Falstaff and Hal, throne of felicity to Dr. Johnson, the pub — that smoky, yeasty den of jollity — is the womb of Englishness, if anywhere is. Yet in the midst of this national identity crisis, the pub, the mainstay of English life, a staff driven down into the sump of history, old as the Saxons, is suddenly dying and evolving at equal rates. Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become scarce enough that for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It’s a rare pub that still thrives, or even limps on, by being what it was meant to be: a drinking establishment. The old idea of a pub as a place for a “session,” a lengthy, restful, increasingly tipsy evening of swigging, is all but defunct.

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diddo wetsuits

thx robin
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perma pave (filtering pavers)
geo hay

thx vz
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A fan of Mel Brooks and Martin Short, [Dan] Graham is a devotee of punk rock (he played a key role in the formation of the band Sonic Youth) and country music, and an avid follower of pop culture and sports (he’s a Mets fan). With the possible exception of his pavilions, however, Graham’s art production has pretty much eluded the commodity-friendly consistency that is so often summoned to develop an artist brand.

Referring to his tendency to combine his diverse interests to arrive at something new, he claimed, "Everything I do is a hybrid. . . . Basically I get bored with what I’m doing and also I don’t want to do trademark work."

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small faces


the hound
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rip dash snow [link] [add a comment]

Despite having failed to learn the piano as a child, Zaha Hadid explains why she and her firm couldn't resist the idea of creating the perfect 'liquid space' to listen to JS Bach


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Last month the foundation that owns Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Ennis House in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood announced that it was putting it on the market for $15 million, potentially taking it out of the public realm. According to the Ennis House Foundation, a study it commissioned evaluating potential preservation approaches showed it didn’t have the resources to maintain the house on its own.

According to the foundation, the study confirmed that it “would need to generate significant philanthropy to operate at a sustainable level for future years, given the house’s ongoing repair and restoration needs,” with the foundation concluding that, “despite many conversations with potential funders, we haven’t found the resources required.”

Since the announcement the preservation community has struggled over the strategy, and some have even speculated that the significant work that went into saving it (The Ennis House Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the LA Conservancy helped fund a $6.5 million restoration of the house beginning in 2005 after it had suffered earthquake and water damage) would go to waste.

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The Times Agrees to Sell WQXR Radio


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paolo soleri wind chimes and bells via reference library


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corten bbq

justin found this one
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Donald V "Duck" Dunn (born November 24, 1941) is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and songwriter. Dunn is notable for the "feel" and groove of his 1960s recordings with Booker T. & the M.G.'s and as a session bassist for Stax Records, which specialized in Blues and Gospel-infused southern soul and Memphis soul music styles. Dunn also performed on recordings with Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Wilson Pickett, Guy Sebastian, Rod Stewart, & Roy Buchanan and many, many, many more.
michael shellly at wfmu devoted a whole show to the music of and interview w/ DD. archived here. next saturday he will interview howard kaylan of the turtles (and flo and eddie).


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barns foundation mystery plans for new home


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431px

i was wondering if there had been any comparison of philip johnsons glass house to snow whites glass coffin. there were none that i could find, but that led me to a miesian reference from an exchange of letters between hugo harring and heinrich lauterbach discussing the farnsworth house.


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cold war modern designer dieter rams


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ferris bueller house


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fresh air - Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, talks about his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson theorizes that businesses can profit by giving it all away on the internet.

nyt book review
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So Honda attacked with niceness. Honda’s larger Dream and Benly bikes couldn’t compete against the British alternatives, but the Super Cub (called the Honda 50 in America in deference to Piper Aircraft’s trademarks), faced little competition.

With its step-through design and molded plastic body panels, the Honda 50 looked too toylike to attract the socially maladjusted. Its quiet 49 cc (that’s three cubic inches) four-stroke engine claimed a modest output of 4.5-horsepower.

It was a product for which Honda could recruit dealers; by 1961 there were 500 across the country selling the $249 bike. And Honda backed them with a clever ad campaign built around the slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.” Suddenly motorcycling was a hip and happy thing to do instead of a menacing ride along society’s margins.

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iwakeupsampling



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JB Lenoir (the JB doesn't stand for anything, the last name pronounced len-Or), was born in Monticello, Mississippi, March 5, 1929.


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last night on the waterfront was on tcm (again). it reminded me of this brilliant village voice report from 2006 which included the true story of tommy hanley.

"That's how it always was," said Tommy Hanley, 66, who started working on the docks when he was 17, three years after he portrayed Marlon Brando's young pal in the memorable rooftop pigeon-coop scenes of On the Waterfront.

"You say something," said Hanley, "and someone in the back of the room says, 'Sit down. You're doing all right. You're working, ain'tcha?' "

Last spring, Hanley, who for years lost out on hours and promotions because he refused to pay off the mob's henchmen, was elected a shop steward at Global Terminal, the local's largest employer, replacing a long line of mob-selected enforcers.

"It was the first legit elections I seen in my 49 years on the piers," said Hanley.

The unlikely revolution at Local 1588 began three years ago when U.S. District Court Judge John Martin was presented with evidence of massive corruption at the union and agreed to appoint a federal administrator to run the 450-member local's affairs. The judge's orders were to do whatever was necessary to rid the local of mob influence and set it on a path to self-rule.

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The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word "ghost" appeared as early as 900 AD as gast. A gast is a spirit, or as the OED tells us, a "principle of life." "Agast" or "Aghast" thus signals a reaction upon seeing a "gast" -- white knuckles, quickened heartbeats, uncontrollable sweating become evidence that someone has taken fright at an apparition ... that someone has seen a ghost.

For his book Spectral Evidence (2005), critic Ulrich Baer explains how photography facilitates such a reaction. He notes how "In the photograph, time itself seems to have been carved up and ferried, unscathed, into the viewer's present". A photograph therefore does much more than provide evidence of something that happened a long time ago. A photograph is a record, yet it is also a form of transport, a conveyance that interrupts and forces the spectral traces of a forgotten past into a familiar present.

Architectural discourse has made similar use of photography. A photograph of a building in a book or magazine guarantees architecture's afterlife. A picture ensures that a tabled project, bombed-out residence, or failed city plan will live past its own death. A photograph also becomes the primary means for transmission of an idea for a building. A case in point would be the various photographs of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House appearing in various publications in the 1950s -- these images would be an important point of reference for the Smithson's Hunstanton School (1949-1954). But consider a more controversial example -- Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949) . Though Johnson was no doubt familiar with the photographs of the Farnsworth House in publications, he famously quipped that his house, with its abstracted frame and dominating central hearth was inspired by the ruins he saw in 1939, as a correspondent following Wehrmacht troops as they crossed into Poland. The Glass House then operates in a similar fashion as a photograph -- the building's imageability not only records a Miesian precedent, but also suggests the idea of something that happened before. But this is only to reaffirm that photography's promises are twofold: in addition to a guarantee of an eternal life of sorts for architecture, by preserving its forms and volumes for future consumption, photographs also help disseminate a rich visual record to be adopted by generations of future designers.

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contenedor cultural - platoon kunsthalle, container art center


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post katrina construction in lakeview la


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open letter to dwell mag

(ha ha) via things mag
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With a recent traveling exhibition and catalog by the Vitra Design Museum, George Nelson (1908–1986) and his talented team are finally getting their historic due. Trained as an architect at Yale, Nelson was not only an important industrial designer but an incisive writer, editor, and lecturer. He wrote about all aspects of design: architecture, interiors, products. Nelson even came up with the idea for the modern pedestrian mall, and in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he created a segment for the CBS program Camera Three called “A Prob­lem of Design: How to Kill People,” a satire on war.

After World War II, the focus of contemporary design shifted to New York, and the Nelson office was at the center of it, producing a series of classics: the Coconut chair, the Marshmallow sofa, the Ball clock, the Bubble lamps, and the Action Office systems. The firm spearheaded the American National Exhi­bition in Moscow, where several hundred American-made products were shown on a vast, three-dimensional jungle-gym display; it became the backdrop for the famous “kitchen debate” between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.

The office was straight out of Mad Men, with men in crisp white shirts and ties, and the few women in black dresses—cigarette smoke everywhere, classical music in the background, and Nelson, ever the impresario, standing in the middle of the tumult with a camera dangling from his shoulders. The graphic designer Don Ervin, who worked at the firm for eight years, describes the atmosphere as open and free. “Everybody worked hard and late,” Ervin says. “We were all underpaid, but it was like going to a special camp.” Michael Graves, Peter Marino, and Ettore Sottsass all spent time in the office. Other designers—George Tscherny, Tomoko Miho, Lucia DeRespinis, Irving Harper, Ron Beckman, and John Svezia—are less well known but equally talented, and they worked on practically everything: exhibitions, interiors, graphics, architecture, and industrial design. We asked them to share their recollections of their time with Nelson and the process that created some of design’s most iconic pieces.

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lamont mansion 107 e 70th st best house best block


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nyc bottle digger


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capuchino the killer bull


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rip stonemaster john bachar


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the maine float rope co


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For the Stahl children -- Bruce, Sharon and Mark -- who grew up roller skating on the concrete floors of [Pierre Koenig's] Case Study House No. 22, the glass-and-steel pavilion perched in the Hollywood Hills has always been more than a landmark. It has been more than the house in Julius Shulman's famed 1960 photo of two pretty girls suspended in time, floating above the twinkling lights of the city -- arguably the most iconic image of midcentury L.A.

For the children of C.H. "Buck" Stahl and his wife, Carlotta, the house was and always will be "just home."

As the Stahl house celebrates its 50th birthday and opens for public tours this weekend, perhaps what's most remarkable is how little people know about the property, despite its fame. The house has appeared in more than 1,200 newspaper and magazine articles, journals and books, not to mention a slew of films, TV shows and commercials.

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Albert Ayler - Nuits De La Fondation Maeght 1970


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lake/flato agua casa (texas vernacular lake house)


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TOKYO — How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?

Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.

A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.

[...]

Nor has any institution, public or private, stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it.

Why is that so? Partly it is because all over the world, postwar architecture is still treated with a measure of suspicion by the cultural mainstream, which often associates it with brutal city housing developments or clinical office blocks. Partly, too, it has to do with the nature of housing blocks in general. They are not sexy investments; they do not feed an investor’s vanity or offer the cultural prestige that owning a landmark house does.

But another concern is that all too often, private developments like the Capsule Tower, no matter how historically important, are regarded in terms of property rights. They are about business first, not culture. Governments don’t like to interfere; the voices of preservationists are shrugged off. “Want to save it?” the prevailing sentiment goes. “Pay for it.”

Until that mentality changes, landmarks like Kurokawa’s will continue to be threatened by the wrecking ball, and the cultural loss will be tremendous. This is not only an architectural tragedy, it is also a distortion of history.

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If You Live in a Glass House It gets quite hot in the summer. Visiting Philip Johnson's most durable architectural achievement.


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drink only fresh beer! check here to crack the various date codes used by beer bottlers. this shit should be standardized!! i want bottling dates (where i can see them on the bottle in the store and on the outside of the case before making a purchase) and not "best if consumed by..." dates or expiration dates!!!


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1st glimpse at new knoll desk chair: Generation


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normandy shelter house by franklin azzi

justin found this one
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The top floor of Corbusier’s Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.

In other words, a work of art that you can actually live in has zero premium over a commodity item, but one that you can look at has a premium factor of 13 million over a commodity one.

There are 2 possible conclusions: architecture is vastly under valued or painting prices are almost entirely irrational.
or perhaps a third: apples and oranges. paintings (art) is a free agent activity and beholding to no one functionally and only comparable to another painting (art object). its not an applied art like architecture, music, dance, literature, ceramics, weaving, etc. ( im taking a little license here mixing dance music weaving and ceramics but it has to be said.) arnt corbusiers undervalued as architecture and paintings overvalued as art?


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time1



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Dave the Spazz broadcasting live from Ponderosa Stomp at Lincoln Center! Two nights of one of the soulrockinest fests in the world, trekking from New Orleans up to NYC's Damrosch Park! Dave and WFMU will be live on Thursday, July 16th from 8-11PM carrying the outdoor soul spectacular with performances from Stax icon William Bell, Harvey Scales, and the Bobbettes all backed by the legendary Bo-Keys! Then, Dave will be recording the following evening's rockabilly festivities and presenting them on his Thursday, July 30th program with sets from New Orleans wild man Joe Clay, Sun Records legend Carl Mann and the out-of-this-world Collins Kids backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics. File under: In-freaking-credible! Damrosch Park is located at 62nd Street and Amsterdam in Manhattan.

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rip sky saxon 1949-2009 but thats under dispute and besides age is irrelevant


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