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rip laurie baker
Born in Birmingham in England in 1917, Mr. Baker came to India as an architect to the World Leprosy Mission in 1945. He spent two decades in the Himalayas and the Western Ghats, working among rural and tribal folk, and finally settled down in Thiruvananthapuram with his wife Dr. Elizabeth Jacob in 1970. He received Indian citizenship from the President in 1989.
His work included housing for the middle and lower classes and construction of educational and health institutions, industrial and religious buildings. He believed that a house should blend with the environment, without disturbing the natural features. Most of his creations feature unplastered brick walls, jalis or trellises in the brickwork and frameless doors and windows that let in natural light and air.
The Quiet Evils Of America's 'Favorite' Buildings
The American Institute of Architects recently threw its authority behind a list of America's "favorite architecture," ranking three centuries of design and aesthetic nationalism from one to one-hundred-and-fifty. The resulting menu, culled by survey, of buildings, bridges, monuments, and other solid things amounts to a joyous celebration and a remarkable commentary on America's embrace of beauty. It also reinforces the desperation that arises when aesthetics and nationalism mix.
I have my opinions on the potency of the Empire State Building (1), the sublimity of the Vietnam Memorial (10), and the disappointment of Disney Hall (99), but no matter. Those we can argue over demitasse. Before we go romping through architecture’s greatest hits, it's probably worth asking, why do we recognize individual architects and individual works? And why do it in a country so awash in mediocrity?
Steven Holl may be known for his innovative use of materials, but his award-winning designs have deliberately avoided a signature style
placemaking (bookmark this)
sneakers in the power-lines t-shirt
via vz
jc forsythia 3/31/07
Starting today, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a weeklong series titled “The Real Edie Sedgwick” that further burnishes her legend and her importance as a muse. The major Warhol-Sedgwick collaborations are all here, including those in which she is the star attraction, like “Poor Little Rich Girl,” and those in which she appears as one guest among many, like “Vinyl.” Also on view are Warhol’s western parody, “Horse”; a fragment from Richard Leacock’s “Lulu,” made for the Alban Berg opera; Andrew Meyer’s “Match Girl” (narrated by Warhol); and Edie’s excised footage from “The Chelsea Girls.” Less happily, there is John Palmer and David Weisman’s “Ciao! Manhattan,” a portrait of her in terrible free fall.
quattroporte
NEW ORLEANS — Googe's popular map portal has replaced post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.
Making The Modern
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
going up
Three decades after his Pompidou Center in Paris turned the architecture world upside down and brought him global fame, the British architect Richard Rogers has been named the 2007 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest honor.
little red book (love)
A neon sign that has drip, drip, dripped its message—"The Leak Stops Here"—on Los Angeles' Westwood Boulevard for 60 years is coming down next month.
The animated Clayton Plumbers sign is too expensive to maintain, says its owner, Jim Bacon, who bought the building in 1979 and paid $20,000 to restore the 1947 sign six years ago.
"It got too costly to maintain. It was over $1,000 a month," Bacon says. "I finally said, 'No, I'm not going to do it anymore, that's it. I'm taking it down.'"
A crew will remove the sign, which is about 20 feet tall, on April 16, Bacon says.
happy birthday eric (not-god) clapton hour long special archived here :
sounds of blue
The architect Renzo Piano has withdrawn from a project to build an 80-story tower in Boston that would have involved the demolition of a 1960 building by Paul Rudolph that is valued by preservationists, a spokeswoman for Mr. Piano said yesterday. The spokeswoman declined to give a reason for the architect’s decision, but Mr. Piano said earlier this month that he was resisting pressure from the project’s developer, Steven Belkin, to increase the width of the building. Mr. Piano also said at the time that if his project were to proceed, the 13-story Rudolph structure, also known as the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building, would have to be removed to make room for a plaza. Preservationists are battling to save the Rudolph building, whose somewhat ornate exterior ran counter to the then-prevailing Modernist preference for unornamented exterior glass walls. The Boston Landmarks Commission imposed a 90-day delay in the demolition of the Rudolph building on March 13, but Mr. Belkin said that the Boston firm CBT Architects intended to “implement Piano’s design, making appropriate refinements as needed during the design review process.”
Speed / barrett-jackson / Palm Beach
Thu, Mar 29 9:00PM
Fri, Mar 30 6:00PM
Sat, Mar 31 12:00PM
If Rudolph’s buildings aren’t as highly valued as those of some of his contemporaries, that’s in part because they aren’t as well understood. But it isn’t difficult to become familiar with Rudolph’s prodigious output. In a Rudolph-themed road trip last month, with New York as a base, I was able to see nearly a dozen of his buildings in three days.
This Saturday night, you could win a classic mid-century modern Herman Miller chair and at the same time help raise funds to save from demolition a classic mid-century modern beach house by Long Island architect Andrew Michael Geller.my previous postings on the pearlroth house. thanks to google news alert i received this short notice cry for help. i cant believe the pearlroth estate (always with the threat of immediately pending demolition!), please read on, its a horror story. save the
Design Within Reach Studio at 30 Park Place in East Hampton will host a silent auction and raffles from 7 to 9 p.m. to raise the money needed to move the acclaimed Pearlroth House from 615 Dune Rd. in Westhampton Beach to public land five miles farther east on Triton Beach. Built in 1959, its double-diamond shape has been compared to a box kite and a square brassiere, and is widely acclaimed by architects, critics and historians as an influential example of the Hamptons' innovative and witty - and fast disappearing - post-World War II beach house architecture.
The heirs to the Pearlroth House will demolish it unless it can be moved before the spring building season. Current regulations would make it impossible to renovate it as a dwelling without substantially changing it, and its owner offered to donate the 600-square-foot house to the architect's grandson, filmmaker and historian Jake Gorst. He and fellow preservationists say they'll need about $200,000 to relocate and restore the structure, which they hope will house a museum of mid-century architecture at its new site.
For more information about the Saturday fundraiser, which will feature a slide presentation, wine and cheese, as well as the silent auction - and to learn how to make a donation - call Gorst at 631-651-9939.
Are the curvaceous glass forms of the IAC headquarters building, evoking the crisp pleats of a skirt, a bold departure from Manhattan’s hard-edged corporate towers? Or are they proof that Mr. Gehry’s radical days are behind him?
photo group