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zoller featured artist on hunt and gather
hippie era school bus camper conversion. must sell $6,500.00
thanks steve
A California-based environmental advocacy group, Global Green, saw the devastation along the Gulf Coast as an opportunity to push for environmentally friendly construction in New Orleans and nationwide. With backing from an actor and recent New Orleans transplant, Brad Pitt, Global Green last summer held a green community design contest, which the GreeN.O. LA design won over 120 other submissions, earning a $50,000 prize.
The NYPD now treats graffiti more seriously than ever before. It operates an 80-member anti-graffiti task force, has anti-graffiti coordinators at each precinct, and operates a database that allows the cops to start tracking the writers by their tags before they even know their names. A zero-tolerance arrest policy now comes with more stringent prosecution.
The La Concha lobby is spending the winter in an outdoor gallery called the Neon Museum's "boneyard," a three-acre site where the museum stores neon signs it salvages from demolished motels.
In an engineering study funded by the National Trust, Melvyn Green and Associates determined that the building could be safely cut and moved and reassembled.
So the building's owner, the Doumani family, who commissioned Williams to build the motel, donated the lobby to the local Neon Museum and allowed the group time to gather state grants and donations for the project.
So far, the museum has raised $990,000, and the move cost $400,000. Workers had to cut the concrete structure into eight parts so it could be moved beneath a freeway overpass.
"The move was more costly than anticipated because, since this had never been done before (cutting a thin-shell poured concrete structure of this size), the contractor was very cautious and added extra shoring and bracing," Dorothy Wright, museum board member, said in an e-mail.
jimb sent this in:
Interesting article in the March 2007 Wallpaper about a Virginia suburb of D.C. called Hollin Hills that is made up entirely of small modernist houses all built by one developer and one architect between 1950 and 1970. Looks like a really cool place. I'd never heard of it before, and I think you'd be interested if you haven't heard of it either. Unfortunately the article is not on line. Here are some other links though:thanks jim! pictures from google images
http://www.hollinhills.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollin_Hills
http://hollinhills.wordpress.com/
http://www.tclf.org/features/hollin_hills/index.htm
Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants
glam vids on be-dazz
Along the Gulf Coast, in the towns and fishing villages from New Orleans to Mobile, survivors of Hurricane Katrina are suffering from a constellation of similar health problems. They wake up wheezing, coughing and gasping for breath. Their eyes burn; their heads ache; they feel tired, lethargic. Nosebleeds are common, as are sinus infections and asthma attacks. Children and seniors are most severely afflicted, but no one is immune.
There's one other similarity: The people suffering from these illnesses live in trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
An estimated 275,000 Americans are living in more than 102,000 travel trailers and mobile homes that FEMA purchased after Hurricane Katrina. The price tag for the trailers was more than $2.6 billion, according to FEMA. Despite their cost of about $15,000 each, most are camperlike units, designed for overnight stays. Even if the best materials had been used in their construction - and that is a point of debate -they would not be appropriate for full-time living, according to experts on mobile homes. The interiors are fabricated from composite wood, particle board and other materials that emit formaldehyde, a common but toxic chemical.
52 story koolhaas building slated for the 111 first street location in jersey city.
14 years ago today was the botched ryder truck incident at the wtc
in memory of the pa employees who died on the job that day
The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.
machine for parking
While New Orleans haggles over a master redevelopment plan, people in some neighborhoods like Broadmoor have been rebuilding on their own. They are forming partnerships with companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to help gut homes, assemble volunteers and find pumping equipment.
One thing that Wall knew for certain when he took up the profession in the late 1970s is that he would not become a photojournalistic hunter. Educated as an art historian, he aspired instead to make photographs that could be constructed and experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often,” he told me. “They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.” He also disliked the way photographs were typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he said. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. They could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” he concluded.
In this hard-pressed city a proposal by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes has touched a raw nerve. The demolition, which would affect more than 4,500 housing units, represents for some the plight of a poor, black underclass displaced by Hurricane Katrina and struggling to return. It also represents the problems that faced the city even before the hurricane: poverty, crime and racial divisions.
The bluntness of HUD’s solution reflects a degree of historical amnesia that this wounded city cannot afford. In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes — and replace them with the kind of generic mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats — the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of this city.
Offering perhaps a last chance to bring some sanity to this process, a congressional subcommittee is scheduled to open hearings here on Feb. 22 about the future of the city’s affordable housing. It is an opportunity to rethink HUD’s questionable vision and reappraise the role that architecture plays in society.
The hearings should help open up a process that so far has seemed anything but democratic. HUD took control of the four complexes from the Housing Authority of New Orleans in 2002 because of accusations of financial mismanagement. In order to implement the demolition plan, both agencies must comply with a section of the National Historic Preservation Act that requires an appraisal of the historic significance of any building more than 50 years old. But they have largely ignored testimony from of a long list of preservationists, including the Louisiana Landmarks Society and a local representative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
In arguing to save the buildings, preservationists point to the human scale of the apartment complexes, whose pitched slate roofs, elegant brickwork and low-rise construction reflect a subtle understanding of the city’s historical context without slavishly mimicking it.
Tellingly, neither housing agency has closely examined alternatives to demolition, like renovating some buildings in the complexes and replacing others. Although the Housing Authority of New Orleans says that modernizing existing developments would cost more than building new housing, it has yet to release cost breakdowns or the source of the figures. John Fernandez, an architecture professor at M.I.T. who examined all four of the complexes, has suggested that the extent of the storm’s damage has been overstated.
The housing agencies’ tabula rasa planning mentality recalls the worst aspects of the postwar Modernist agenda, which substituted a suburban model of homogeneity for an urban one of diversity. The proposal for “traditional-style” pastel houses, set in neat little rows on uniform lots, is a model of conformity that attacks the idea of the city as a place where competing values coexist.
This is reinforced by the plan’s tendency to isolate the new housing from the rest of the city. Often arranged along dead-end cul-de-sacs, the proposed developments lack the mix of big and small buildings, residential apartments and retail shops that could weave them into the surrounding urban fabric.
The point is not to return people to the same housing conditions that existed before Hurricane Katrina, but to distinguish between failures of social policy and design policy. Architects can’t determine the economic mix of residents in public housing developments nor provide education and health services. Their job is to give physical form to social and cultural values.
In this city that should begin with a fair appraisal of existing housing. With its low scale, narrow footprint and high-quality construction, for example, the 1940s Lafitte development, one of the four complexes slated for demolition, cannot be compared to Desire, a generic, shoddily constructed housing block, built more than a decade later. Some have suggested carving new roads through existing developments to anchor them more firmly into the surrounding neighborhoods.
Solutions like this might preclude the violent bulldozing of neighborhoods in a city so short of housing. A willingness to make case by case historical distinctions would result in a more historically layered urban composition, one that could, eventually, include contemporary architectural ideas as well.
For that to happen, however, HUD needs to listen to the preservationists who have taken the time to examine the value of the city’s public housing stock. It might also consider tapping into a higher level of creative intelligence. Architects like Enrique Norten and Thom Mayne, for instance, are working on major projects for commercial developers in the city’s business district. Enlisting a similar level of imaginative talent to rethink the city’s public housing could help alleviate trenchant social divisions here.
If some feel nostalgia for places like Lafitte, it is partly because it embodies a time when America still seemed capable of a more hopeful vision, one in which architecture, planning and social policy collaborated to create a more decent society.
darren almond meantime 2000 steel sea container, aluminum polycarbonate, computerized electronic control system and components 114 x 480 x 96 inches
mathew marks
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