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His [Henry Wessel] equanimity can be a detriment sometimes. Modesty has its costs, and his views of houses, straight-on like head shots or real estate advertisements, while conveying a curious, plainspoken affection for their home(l)y subjects, in the end don’t overcome their inherent boredom. Noir-ish night shots of darkened bungalows and moonlit trees come to look repetitive too.
Sometimes the point of an image is simply hard to fathom. I gazed at a picture of an empty yard, wondering whether the geometry of it was the subject, before finally giving up. Mr. Wessel doesn’t always make it easy. But then, looking hard isn’t.
With the reopening today, the city will have spent $3.2 million to redesign and rebuilt the Water Gardens, with most of the changes focused on the Active Pool.
The floor of the pool has been raised, bringing the maximum water level to about 1 1/2 feet. The water will drain through a trench along the perimeter of the pool, instead of through a single point in the center. And a newly installed wall with seating and a gate along the top of the stairs will add a protective barrier around the pool.
And the Water Gardens budget has doubled this year, to nearly $732,000. Staffing has been increased from two to seven workers, and the city plans to staff the park from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Workers will lock the gate when they leave at night.
Other changes are less obvious but no less important, officials said. Pumps, electrical switches and filtration equipment were replaced, and a control was added to automatically maintain water levels. The system will also include an emergency stop button and a system to notify operators of abnormal conditions.
"A lot of it, the public will never see," said Harold Pitchford, Fort Worth's acting assistant director of parks.
Randall Charbeneau, an associate dean in the engineering school at the University of Texas at Austin, reviewed the changes at the request of the Star-Telegram. He said the changes should reduce the velocity and depth of the water in the Active Pool.
Those changes, he said, "should greatly increase safety."
next photo series
the pulaski highway t-shirt is finally a reality
for this reason alone, pledge to the wfmu marathon
andy breckman - a man with only three jokes, yet possibly the funniest man on earth - blows the nyt metro diary's mind.
container like pods with more desirable living dimensions using container stacking technology - via the fabprefab container bay msg board - pdf warning!
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.