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I've Heard About Node 1
A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable - merely viable - made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton's output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment - a great rotting blooming stony bubble of a building that, unlike all previous forms of human habitation, would be unplanned, responsive, densely monitored, massively customized, and rock-solid, with all modern conveniences.
The closest thing to a viab today is a small, modest mud-working robot invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Khoshnevis' "contour crafter" works more or less like a 3-D printer, but it's meant to assemble whole buildings. Its nozzle spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place. Roche encountered Khoshnevis, and his agile imagination immediately started pushing the idea toward its limits.
From the nineteenth century on, the house has been seen as a private refuge, and a place (for the husband) to relax after a hard day’s work. In Germany, this view went hand in hand with reformist efforts to allow all social classes to limit their households to members of the immediate family.
This article analyzes the physical manifestation of these efforts, by using both photos and plans of representative houses, and film images in which use of the spaces is shown. The analysis concentrates on the boundaries between the private house and the public street, looking at this space both historically up to 1945, and in its evolution during the postwar era.
The privatization of individual family space takes on new meaning, as “openness” of the house is limited only to the house’s interior, while the boundary between inside and out remains impermeable. A new spatial freedom thus seems only possible in spaces that can be privately controlled.
While the house turns more and more away from any interaction with the public street, the inside of the house expresses a new parity and democracy within the family. Both an increased accessibility and larger allotment of spaces to the children are indicative of a new family atmosphere. This condition helps to soften the impermeability of the house itself, even as its built appearance retains its defensive stance.
cloud-cuckoo-land
The construction of Santiago Calatrava's $35 million townhome cubes in the sky has received a "go" from the New York City Department of Buildings.
Forty-Two for Henry Flynt by La Monte Young performed by Peter Winkler (gong) at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965
via kenny
dmi case study: bringing the braun kf40 coffee-maker to market (pdf)
malls of new york
martin kippenberger schneewittchensarg (snow white's coffin)
One piece I've seen three times, first at Max Hetzler in 1989, then Metro Pictures when it opened in Chelsea, and now at Boesky, is Kippenberger's clear Plexiglass coffin with foam rubber pillows inside. On the outside is a round plastic plate with holes drilled in it. Ordinarily it would be imprinted with "Speak Here," but instead Kippenberger has stenciled " Hier Versprechen ," which translates "Promise Here" or in certain contexts, "Mis-speak Here." Underneath this, stenciled onto the side of the coffin in English, is "Misunderstanding Here." A typical Kippenberger joke. The empty, see-through coffin has a eerie silence now that Kippenberger has passed away. -r.goldman
Anyone who has spent time with Pioneers of Modern Design knows what a brilliant and vexing work it is. It was based on a series of lectures Pevsner presented at Göttingen shortly before he departed for England. Pevsner is often incorrectly credited, as Stephen Games writes in his perceptive introduction to Pevsner on Art and Architecture, with first “assembling the chain of events that led from English utilitarianism to German functionalism” (xxii). But while Pioneers is not an entirely original book—many of its arguments are anticipated in Hermann Muthesius's Stilarchitektur und Baukunst, published in 1902, and in other pre-World War I writings)—it does offer, on first reading at least, a lucid account of Modern architecture's early origins. Yet the book raises far more questions than it answers. How do French and Belgian Art Nouveau lead to German functionalism? How do two currents so seemingly in opposition—the new engineering of the 19th century, with its faith in science and the machine, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to deny industrialization and rampant Capitalism—both fuel the rise of Modern design? Pevsner's answer, that all were the expression of a new Zeitgeist, is reassuring to some degree, but it also insistently begs the question.
"His prose is always a splendid amalgam of careful erudition, remarkable insight, scholarly conjecture, and unfettered opinion. To read Pevsner is to enter immediately into a dialogue, at times comfortable and affirming, at others, annoying and off-putting."
Pevsner's recourse to the “spirit of the age” runs through many of his writings. It allowed him, as Games notes, “to connect national differentiation in mid-thirteenth-century architecture with the experience of Crusader knights, and to write of the late eighteenth century as a period when artists 'were no longer satisfied with being servants of the ruling class' and a new type of patron emerged, 'self-made, self-assured and cultured'” (xix). Such “loose” scholarship by today's standards was very much part of the German academic world of Pevsner's earliest years, and it became a highly elastic tool for those engaged in the Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities, or, literally, the “sciences of the spirit”) to fashion broad and sweeping visions of the past, present, and future. On the one hand, it could offer, in the hands of a historian like Jakob Burckhardt, an extraordinary panorama of an entire era like the Renaissance. But too often it led to the sort of cursory reading one finds in works like Egon Friedell's Die Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (The Cultural History of Mankind, 3 vols., 1927-1932) or, worse, to the rabid nationalist drivel of Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Pictures in The New York Times wordlessly told the story of those disappearing acts. On the morning after his finish over a crowded field of more famous and prolific competitors, an exultant Libeskind appeared on the Times's front page, beaming amid a sea of clamoring photographers and reporters. In a profession that lately has mimicked many aspects of celebrity culture, this image represented an extraordinary conferral of star status, like one of those unheralded Metropolitan Opera debuts the newspaper of record likes to put on page one every so often. But what had Libeskind actually won? The sponsoring body, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), had insisted from the first that it was conducting not a competition but an Innovative Design Study in which participants were to follow the LMDC's gen-eral guidelines and had to accept that their plans were subject to revisions.
SAUSALITO, Cal. -- Responding to last week's release of the "Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World," Natural Capital Institute's Director Paul Hawken called the new ranking another example of the "black box" effect of social and environmental business research, and urged the SRI industry to increase the transparency of its evaluative processes.
According to its website (www.global100.org), the Global 100 is a list of "the 100 most sustainable corporations" based on ratings by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. The project, co-sponsored by Innovest and Corporate Knights, defines a sustainable corporation as one "that produces an overall positive impact on society and the environment." According to Hawken, such a definition is "nearly meaningless and has no value to science, people, or ecosystems."
PARIS : An administrative enquiry into the fatal roof collapse at Charles de Gaulle airport last year will blame flaws in the design and construction of the newly-completed terminal, officials at the Paris airport authority ADP said.
Confirming a report in Le Parisien newspaper, the officials said that several senior figures at the airport authority -- including possibly its president Pierre Graff -- were likely to be placed under judicial investigation after the enquiry team presents its findings on Thursday.
fmu blog debut
free shit for blogging
Noddy Holder of Slade is Terre's guest this Saturday at 3 PM on the Cherry Blossom Clinic. Tune in and hear the voice behind "Mama Weer All Crazee Now", "Cum On Feel The Noize", and other misspelled classics recount tales from the band's career as the kings of glam rock. The recent release of the Get Yer Boots On greatest hits collection will also be discussed.
mvrdv silodam
postcards from marfa
janos starker js bach suites for unaccompanied cello (complete) mercury OL3-116 (mono)
Site: A flag-shaped, 7,000-square-foot double lot in Berkeley, California, with a two-to-one slope and several constraints: zoning setbacks; a 10-foot-wide access route to the buildable portion of the site; a stand of ordinance-protected live oaks; and a reusable foundation from the site's original 1950s house. 2:1 House, Iwamoto Scott Architecture
house at 7 middagh street
At our local private school's holiday fair, a vendor sold bags labeled Prada and Coach that were clearly counterfeit. I told the principal and the head of the PTA that this was illegal and put the school at risk. They said it must be legal since so many people sell fakes. But I think this is copyright infringement, and a school should not be involved in such things. What do you think? A. Stein, Phoenix
I think if the school had the courage of its lack of convictions, it would sell stolen cars. A lot of people do that, too, so it must be legal.
To sell counterfeit products offends both law and ethics, deceiving the buyers of the fakes and exploiting the creators of the originals. The plight of Prada and Coach may not bring a tear to anyone's eye, but ethics compel us to act honorably even to the makers of inane status symbols. Besides, it would be dispiriting for the students to see their principal dragged off in handcuffs, even fancy designer handcuffs.
45º, 90º, 180º/City
zlad!
Damien Hirst’s shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, recently sold for $12 million to US billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, is disintegrating and will need extensive conservation work to prevent it from further deterioration. This is the view of conservation scientists and natural history specialists who say that the bigger a specimen, the more difficult it is to preserve long-term in formaldehyde.