Schwarz
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scenes from a mall
"dumb as a painter" a quick survey indicates that the term was originally coined in french. anyone ?
junkspace
"What makes Tokyo a continually compelling yet utterly baffling urban experience? Shows on either side of town highlight the practical, aesthetic and theoretical conditions of this disaster-prone city."
part two
parole by words
Kisho Kurokawa
Architecture in the World of Image
Woodcut Prints
"I dwell on Libeskind here because his project is close to my interests, but also because he exposes most clearly the intellectual tendencies of current public building on a grand scale. And the ROM project shows, more than any other current major building, how monumental-conceptual architecture shares the problem of evanescent novelty with conceptual art. Indeed, conceptual art is an important enabling condition of the current architectural scene. Without the pioneering slyness and precedent of clever self-promotion in the Seth Seigelraub (sic) stable of 1960s New York post-Pop artists, today’s architectural highwire artists would probably not exist or function in the global limelight. In a new book, art historian Alexander Alberro usefully unearths the roots of conceptualism in American art. Seigelraub, an accomplished impresario, successfully packaged Lawrence Weiner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Douglas Huebler, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, and Joseph Kosuth, and sold them as a new art-world brand.Their group exhibitions at Windham College in upstate New York and at Manhattan venues, from Seigelraub’s downtown galleries to the School of Visual Arts, established new norms of intellectual playfulness in an art scene at once moribund and confused."
Monumental/Conceptual Architecture, The Art of Being Too Clever By Half, by Mark Kingwell
conservation resources international
william-morris, willow pattern
hollywood diaries amatha gerelle
70's invasion
architecture w/o architects
Chicken Head Men! With live music from the Fat Possum blues caravan--Paul 'Wine' Jones, T-Model Ford, and Kenny Brown--and a visit from Townes Van Zandt biographer John Kruth
modeling the wtc / via architecture week
virtual walk-thru of the yet-to-be-built
Let's talk about the Freedom Tower for a moment. There has been criticism about the wind turbines that have been proposed for the top of the building: that they won’t work, and that they will produce a ridiculous amount of vibrations. How feasible are the turbines? Could they actually produce 20% of the building’s electricity?
We have researched wind turbines in the past, and it has always brought up the vibration issue, the safety issue, and the bird mortality issue. The WTC is right in the flyaway of migrating birds, and the original WTC was the worst violator in terms of the amount of birds that were killed flying into the buildings at night. They’d either hit it directly or, if it was foggy, get confused and exhaust themselves. So maintenance crews would come out at 5 o’clock in the morning to clean the dead birds off the plaza.
bent ply
St. Petersberg is in the second stage of a program to renovate itskhrushchyovki, the five-story mass-produced housing projects built during the Khrushchev era in the 1950s and 1960s. Judging by the slow rate of progress and the lack of funding for the program, more recent buildings - those built between the 1960s and the 1970s - will be in need of repairs before the first are rebuilt.
coop
henry flynt
"This fantastic, hovering blob will be Archigram's revenge for its many earlier disappointments, for competition-winning schemes that were never realised. [...] And to me it is Archigram at its best. [...] At last we will have a building worthy of their true spirit, albeit 35 years too late. Of course part of Archigram's potency was its ability to initiate by going beyond what was possible, and some might argue that its ideas and messages were not intended to be built. But I believe the fact that this will be built, after so long, gives credibility to Archigram's mid '60s predictions. The amorphous quality of the form, internally and externally, manages to escape the language of a building type, which was one of the major points of Archigram in the twentieth century." Will Alsop*