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"Never really intended for construction, Living Pod was a humorous dig at the established way of doing things, suggesting that houses didn't have to be symmetrical, brick-built boxes. In its obvious debt to spacecraft aesthetics, it also seems to celebrate the possibilities of new technologies and new materials--an adaptable, functional, clip-together kind of future."
"Archaeologists uncover Mies van der Rohe villa
Archaeology is getting more modern—or rather, its uses are. The foundations of a villa built 1925-27 by the eminent Bauhaus architect, Mies van der Rohe, have been uncovered in the Polish town of Gubin. It was the first Modern building by the architect, commissioned by industrialist Ernst Wolf and destroyed in World War II. The excavation project was carried out by an international team of 12 students from the Technische Universität at Cottbus. The villa may now be partially rebuilt or used to inspire artistic interventions"
the sound sculpture of harry bertoia
Claude Oakland
Modern homes for the masses
"From its inception, modern architecture had a social conscience. Especially in the optimistic years after World War II, architects nationwide hoped they could build careers designing dwellings for everyman.
But almost none of them did. Many designed public housing, small tracts and homes for their friends in academe. But most whose careers remained residential ended up building primarily for the well-heeled."
[...]
digital programmable thermostat
"Here's a neat idea for a new television series. Let's get the public to nominate the six vilest books in the English language and in the grand finale, they get to burn them live on camera. No, we haven't come to that yet, but later this year, Channel 4 is offering us the next best thing. Demolition is a four-part series that promises as its climax the total destruction of a major piece of architecture. Or as Nick Kent, the executive producer, puts it: 'The final night of the series will see a spectacular celebratory demolition of one of the nation's nastiest eyesores.'"
Two works of Steven Parrino shown recently in Europe (Milano, Italy and Dijon, France) bring back home thoughts on that 20th century thing called abstraction.
Blob Fuckhead Bubblegum, a big ball of pink painted canvas (100 yards) tightened with duct tape, and Aluminum Clouds (Crush), for Drella (by the way, kiss my ass you wigged corpse) or Lost Hope and the End of Painting, which consists of a number of small bundles of silver painted canvas also held together with duct tape, seem to be an appropriate response to today's confusing pluralism in the arts. Painted monochrome canvases unattached and rolled into bundles clenched with tape - look like what you would do if you wanted to throw away some large, failed paintings. Of course, Steven Parrino didn't get rid of them, he is showing them.
By taking his paintings off the stretcher, rolling them into balls and putting them onto the floor, he is redefining a debate on the conventions of painting and that affair of the integrity of the picture plane. By destroying the surface and the shape of his canvases, he makes his paintings become a kind of sculpture, or more exactly something that is "neither painting nor sculpture." Because of the radicality of his gesture, he also sends the old debate about flatness or the problem of the canvas's outer edge to the dustbin of history.
We know that painting will not die (Philip Taaffe) or that it already died and we can't get rid of its corpse (Sherrie Levine); Parrino himself poses the situation: why not engage in some necrophilia?"
Of course, unstretched material has been seen before (antiform, Support-Surface, Sam Gilliam and others), but here the violent and aggressive dislocation of the picture seems to mark for painting something close to the end of the road. Maybe the only way you can pay attention to the surface of the picture is by destroying it ("Everybody kills the thing he loves").
Parrino's aggressivity in his work and his titles should be welcomed at a time when contemporary art is attacked directly (by certain members of the Congress and Senate) or indirectly (The New York Times, "The Jabberwocky of Art Criticism." Sunday, October 23, 1995). Of course what is really under attack is precisely those progressive attitudes like Parrino's that tend to question the nature of art.
Olivier Mosset
BOMB Summer 1996, No. 56
2004 top ten
1 - wfmu top ten list
2 - andrea fraser from walter robinson's top ten list
3 - red states come out
4 - sherry levine continues to do mediocre work
5 - richard prince continues to do mediocre work (spot trend?)
6 - mediocre shipping container houses hit the nyc art scene and get a mediocre review in architects news paper
7 - frank lives in a drat hole on dave's page
8 - selma actually knows about art and architecture
9 - terminal five show from tom moody's top ten list
10 - my show of a ten year old piece (my first 1000 wrenches) in lori bortz's garage, a studio visit by bob nickas and palemale starts rebuilding his nest
addendum : bbca starts broadcasting trailer park boys south of the border
bootlegs
richard prince the second house
the science between earthquake and the sunami's landfall
clay house via houses of the future
relief housing
case study bird houses
thanks to linda
casa jobin
By JOAN LOWY
Scripps Howard News Service
December 28, 2004
- Bird lovers are worried that one of the world's most high profile construction projects - a 1,776-foot tall office tower being erected on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York - will turn out to be a giant death trap for birds.
The Freedom Tower is expected to be the world's tallest building when it opens in 2009. Plans call for the building to be enclosed in glass, wrapped on the outside with steel cables for support, and crowned with radio towers and wind turbines to supply electricity. Computer generated images on the Web site of the building's developer, Silverstein Properties, show a graceful, brightly illuminated skyscraper.
But scientists and bird enthusiasts say more than a billion birds are killed every year in the United States by slamming into windows or circling lights atop skyscrapers until they are so dazed and confused that they crash.
"Everything that could possibly be bad for birds about a building they are doing," said Rebecca Creshkoff, 47, an avid birdwatcher and member of New York City Audubon.
The Audubon Society and New York New Visions - a coalition of 21 architecture, planning, and design organizations that came together after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the trade center to advise on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan - have warned the project's architects and Silverstein Properties that the new building could prove especially deadly for birds.
"We've made them aware of the problem," but developers "are not under any obligation" to adjust their projects for bird safety, said Margaret Helfand, an architect and founder of New York New Visions.
Janno Lieber, Silverstein Properties' project director, said the company has hired a bird consultant to assist in designing the tower.
"In addition to our broader environmental approach, we are investigating a number of strategies for making the new buildings at the World Trade Center bird-friendly," Lieber said in a brief statement supplied in response to an inquiry.
Construction of the project began this year. The first three years of work are expected to take place below ground.
The trade center towers, among the world's tallest buildings before their destruction, were also particularly dangerous for birds, Creshkoff said. After complaints from bird lovers, the Port Authority, which managed the buildings, helped reduce the problem by turning off lights atop the towers during spring and fall migrations, she said.
"I feel an obligation to do something because if you don't work to protect what you love, what meaning is there in life?" Creshkoff said.
On the Net: www.silversteinproperties.com
www.nycaudubon.org/home/
fmuers post top tens for two thousand and four
sound exchange (get yours)
death as metaphor
holy smokes bullwinkle! i got an air port connection waiting here at the ft lauderdale airport