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weird silver house
What do you like better, narratology or ludology?
Excerpt from Espen Aarseth's "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation" in the 2004 MIT publication First Person edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan...
The Global Village Shelter (GVS for short) is pretty basic, but at the same time pretty ingenious. Designed by Daniel Ferrara and Mia Ferrara Pelosi, a father-and-daughter team that runs a design studio in Morris, the GVS is made by Weyerhaeuser, the paper and building products company. Its laminated corrugated cardboard is waterproof, fire-resistant, biodegradable and can withstand most climates for 18 months, Ferrara Pelosi claims.
The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's plan to demolish four of the city's biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.
Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city's urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.
But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city's public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.
So it's not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.
The point at issue: Federal law (the Stafford Act) normally requires a state match--from 10 to 25 percent--of the federal money used in infrastructure repair.
But, as the story points out, after 9/11, after Hurricane Andrew, after at least 25 other disasters over the last two decades, the Feds have waived the matching requirement. Now, with local government in New Orleans still straining for revenue (the State has a surplus), the Feds are refusing to waive the match. Result: vital infrastructure repair can't get started, because the city doesn't have the revenue to match the federal grant. Worse, the city's own laws require the municipality to have the cash on hand before the project is even begun, so the match can't be found later.
mixed up
aak aak eek eek tookie tookie
tiny house / think about it. wont you?
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 15 — After nearly a decade in the city of their dreams, Kasandra Larsen and her fiancé, Dylan Langlois, climbed into a rented moving truck on Marais Street last Sunday, pointed it toward New Hampshire, and said goodbye.
Not because of some great betrayal — they had, after all, come back after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina — but a series of escalating indignities: the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend; the announced move to Nashville by Ms. Larsen’s employer; the human feces deposited on their roof by, they suspect, the contractors next door; the two burglaries in the space of a week; and, not least, the overnight wait for the police to respond.
A year ago, Ms. Larsen, 36, and Mr. Langlois, 37, were hopeful New Orleanians eager to rebuild and improve the city they adored. But now they have joined hundreds of the city’s best and brightest who, as if finally acknowledging a lover’s destructive impulses, have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding.
The film (nostalgia) (1971) by photographer and filmmaker Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) is a powerful document of cultural memory that articulates and demonstrates vital issues of memory, such as the use of autobiographical film, to explicate identity formation and the intricate relationship of photography and film to absence, memory and meaning. To begin, however, I will discuss the historical associations of nostalgia in order to differentiate it from its siblings homesickness and melancholy.
“Originally defined in the seventeenth century in terms of a set of physical
symptoms associated with acute homesickness”—nostos (home), algos (pain nostalgia’s contemporary association is as an emotional disorder, acknowledges
John Frow (1997:79-80). Rubenstein describes nostalgia as “an absence that
continues to occupy a palpable emotional space” and argues that “the felt ab-
sence of a person or place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a
presence that may come to possess an individual” (Rubenstein 2001:5). Perhaps
it is unsurprising that nostalgia is historically associated with the “open wound”
of Sigmund Freud’s melancholia, the neurosis of failed mourning.
The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection,
cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all
activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in
self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of pun-
ishment. (Freud 1984 [1917]:252)
Rubenstein’s description qualifies the “painful awareness” of nostalgia as mel-
ancholic while simultaneously describing nostalgia as a response to “universal
inevitability of separation and loss” and “the existential condition of adulthood”
(Rubenstein 2001:4-5). As opposed to the spatial or geographical separation of homesickness, nostalgia according to Rubenstein reflects a temporal dilemma.
One can never truly return to original home of childhood, since it exists mostly as a
place in the imagination. Although the meaning of nostalgia itself has changed over
time, essentially it has come to signify not simply the loss of one’s childhood home but the loss of childhood itself. (Rubenstein 2001:4-5).
[....]
Frampton’s interest is in creation (of photographs, indi- vidual identity, social meaning) and death (of representation, memory, self). In accordance with Frampton’s approach to photography as a process rather than a predatory act is the artist’s fascination with the natural, and at times social, birth and death of things. This is most obvious in the fourth and tenth images, which depict different objects in the process of deterioration. The narratives corresponding to these images are vital to understanding Frampton’s curiosity about decay.
The fourth image is the only surviving photograph of a series made of a cabinetmaker’s shop window over the course of two years (ironically, Frampton destroyed the others). At the time of exposure/development, the six photographs disappoint him; the voice-over explains, “each time, I found some reason to feel dissatisfied. The negative was too flat, or too harsh; or the framing was too tight” (Frampton 1972:106). When comparing the prints, a natural progression of de- cay is evident: “I was astonished! In the midst of my concern for the flaws in my method, the window itself had changed, from season to season, far more than my photographs had! I had thought my subject changeless, and my own sensibility pliable. But I was wrong about that” (Frampton 1972:106). The documentation of decay’s progression otherwise unnoticed by the daily human eye marks the beginning of Frampton’s fascination.
The image of rotting spaghetti provides an experiment in decay, the result, according to the voice-over, of “a painter friend [who] asked me to make a pho- tographic document of spaghetti, an image that he wanted to incorporate into a work of his own” (Frampton 1972:109). Jenkins notes that Rosenquist uses Frampton’s photograph “Spaghetti and Grass, 1965, where the strands from Frampton’s image form the upper half of the lithograph” (Jenkins 1984:21). Frampton documents the spaghetti’s demise by photographing it every day. [T]his was the eighteenth such photograph. The spaghetti has dried without rotting. The sauce is a kind of pink varnish on the yellow strings. The entirety is covered in attractive mature colonies of mold in three colors: black, green and white. I continued the series until no further change appeared to be taking place: about two months al- together. The spaghetti was never entirely consumed, but the mold eventually disap- peared. (Frampton 1972:109)
Q. I want my Victorian fainting couch to look like Sigmund Freud’s. Where can I find upholstery fabric in Persian kilim patterns?
The real bogeyman turns out not be private ownership but architects, especially those in thrall to Le Corbusier, the evil genius of Modernism. In this scenario, hapless working-class families were 'thrust' up in the air by 'arrogant' architects and planners who built 'dehumanising' tower blocks out of 'ugly, brutal' concrete. Surely poor building and lack of amenities are the main issue here, otherwise why do residents of the Barbican (which features concrete, 30-storey buildings and much-castigated walkways), say, or the flashy new residential towers which have sprung up recently all over the place – Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Canary Wharf – feel no need to burn cars, spray obscene graffiti or defecate in the lifts?
'The sameness drives me half mad,' she complains of the 'conforming' and 'anonymous' Wood estate, yet what could be more conforming than the Nash Terraces of Regent's Park, among the most sought after and priciest houses in the country? And in condemning flat living she barely acknowledges that one large area of the UK – Scotland – has a very long and harmonious history of housing all classes in flats.
This myopic view of architecture leads Hanley – in a curious mirror image of the messianic architects of the 1960s – to invest it with more power than it possesses on its own to transform society. She and her neighbours in East London wish to see their 1960s estate demolished and rebuilt as much as possible as small houses with gardens. I sincerely hope that she is right that this will transform their lives, but the troubled North Peckham estate, which underwent just such a reinvention a decade ago, suggests that it takes more than 'comforting lines of terraced houses and pleasing low-rise apartments' to make a happy council estate.
Hanley's mix of popular history, polemic and personal memoir bears a strong resemblance to another insider's working-class history – Michael Collins's The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, and it shares that book's strengths – passion, first-hand vividness – and its weaknesses – partiality, solipsism, historical myopia and most of all a failure to integrate the personal with the polemical. Rather like the council estates themselves, a good idea on paper that does not deliver in practice.
A Louisiana plan called the Small Rental Property Program is designed to help owners of rental properties damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
It's part of The Road Home program, which was started last summer with $7.5 billion of federal money. Most of the Road Home funds are intended for Louisiana homeowners, but $800 million of the recovery money has been earmarked for landlords who own up to four rental properties.
dirty linen
more rainy day blizzard music to watch
the new this old house project is doing a green job on a 1926 austin tx craftsman bungalow
The architecture may be old at This Old House's new project in Austin, Texas, but the thinking is thoroughly modern. For the first time, the show is going totally "green"—using as many environmentally friendly building products and methods as possible—and creating a functional home for a contemporary blended family.
state fair part 2
texas state fair freak tent 1978
from old and water damaged negatives / photog jaschw
toyota houses
poglecto
white-bread and embedded
10 summer of haight photos (for mike - psyber exclusive)
lambertville in on the delaware nj
starting at $200K
untitled, 1968
rip dan christensen
In the late 1960s, Christensen, 64, found that the realism of his classical art training was restrictive and began using spray guns to paint colorful stacked loops on canvas, winning him critical acclaim, The New York Times said. Besides the process of painting and experimentation, he was concerned about how color interacted
liberty harbor north
When complete, the neighborhood of Liberty Harbor North will be the most thorough exemplification to date of the principles of the New Urbanism. Due to its high-density housing, multiple transit connections, and pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use streetscape, this development is likely to serve as a textbook model for healthy urban growth in the future.
Located just a half mile west of the Hudson River on the north bank of the Morris Canal, the 80-acre brownfield site in Jersey City boasts dramatic views of Lower Manhattan to the east and the Statue of Liberty to the south. A new light rail will provide two stops in the neighborhood; and the Grove Street PATH Train, with service to both Lower Manhattan and Midtown, is a five-minute walk away. A water taxi offers convenient access to Lower Manhattan, and New York Waterways has expressed interest in providing large-scale ferry service in the near future. The site is bordered by the Van Vorst neighborhood to the east and the Hamilton Park neighborhood to the north-- two historic neighborhoods worthy of emulation.