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comuting from fireisland to manhattan year round
WITH the wind riffling the marsh grasses, Russell Groves borrowed an aluminum ladder from the construction crew working next door and climbed up on the roof of the tiny white house to survey the icy bay beyond.
The house is for sale for only $299,000, a rare case in which someone in search of a modestly priced house on the South Fork of Long Island can buy a lot extending into the marshland without anything — or anybody — blocking the view.
it generates. it internets. it cools and refreshes.
This has something for everyone. For the prefab fans, it folds out of a shipping container. For the alt energy types, it has a thousand square feet of photovoltaics and can pump out 16 KW without the optional turbine. For the computer nerds, it has a communications control center with "full range of wireless VSAT, VOIP and wireless communications capable of handling thousands of phone calls and offering wireless connectivity for a range of up to 30 miles." When shipped for disaster relief, it uses the electricity to filter 30 gallons per minute of contaminated ground water to WHO standards for drinking.hat tip to justin. thanks!
The Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art should be required viewing for any architect born in the age of the computer screen. Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.
A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work — many projects were demolished weeks after completion — only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.
joey and ronnie doing johnny thunder's you cant put your arms around a memory
Travelers Insurance Company - The Triumph of Man (mp3s)
we had this disc too. a souvenir of the fair
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.