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justins got some nice house porn going on over at materialicio.us


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Last week, floodwaters reached the front steps of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in the second "hundred-year" flood of Illinois' Fox River since 1996.

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contractors spacepen

via vz
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WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER / rural southern cabin paintings


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moms


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President Bush commemorated Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow Wednesday with a somber moment of silence. Across town, in a symbol of a federal-city divide that persists two years after the killer storm, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin marked the levee-breach moment with bell-ringing.

"We're still paying attention. We understand," Bush said in remarks afterward.

The president and his wife, Laura, were spending Wednesday's anniversary in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, Miss., determined to celebrate those he said have "dedicated their lives to the renewal" of the region. But with New Orleans and the Gulf Coast far from their former selves after two years, some here think it's the president's dedication that should be in the spotlight.

The front page of The Times-Picayune advertised a scathing editorial above the masthead: "Treat us fairly, Mr. President." It chided the Bush administration for giving Republican-dominated Mississippi a share of federal money disproportionate to the lesser impact the storm had there than in largely Democratic Louisiana. "We ought to get no less help from our govenrment than any other vicitims of this diaster," it said.

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rip hilly kristal


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On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn't seem to subside.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

On Wednesday, protesters planned to march from the obliterated Lower 9th Ward to Congo Square, where slaves were once allowed to celebrate their culture. Accompanied by brass bands, they will again try to spread their message that the government has failed to help people return.

"People are angry and they want to send a message to politicians that they want them to do more and do it faster," said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, a Baptist pastor and community activist. "Nobody's going to be partying."

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In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric.

Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront.

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la vida de vagabundos americanos

via jzoller
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the james rose center

about jr
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The Lower Ninth Battles Back

The word "will" comes up constantly in the Lower Ninth Ward now; We Will Rebuild is spray-painted onto empty houses; "it will happen," one organizer told me. Will itself may achieve the ambitious objective of bringing this destroyed neighborhood back to life, and for many New Orleanians a ferocious determination seems the only alternative to being overwhelmed and becalmed. But the fate of the neighborhood is still up in the air, from the question of whether enough people can and will make it back to the nagging questions of how viable a city and an ecology they will be part of. The majority of houses in this isolated neighborhood are still empty, though about a tenth of the residents are back, some already living in rehabilitated houses, some camped in stark white FEMA trailers outside, some living elsewhere while getting their houses ready. If you measured the Lower Ninth Ward by will, solidarity and dedication, from both residents and far-flung volunteers and nonprofits, it would be among the best neighborhoods in the United States. If you measured it by infrastructure and probabilities, it looks pretty grim. There are more devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, let alone Mississippi and the Delta, but the Lower Ninth got hit hard by Katrina. Its uncertain fate has come to be an indicator for the future of New Orleans and the fate of its African-American majority.

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the uncola


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It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

The "hole" is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths.

The discovery will be reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

Previous sky surveys that have traced the large-scale structure of the nearby Universe have long shown, for example, how the clustering of galaxies is strung into vast filaments and sheets that are separated by great gaps.

But the void discovered by a University of Minnesota team is about 1,000 times the volume of what would be expected in typical cosmic gaps.
via vz
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NO house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.

Its status as a cult object was enhanced by the house’s relative inaccessibility. For decades it was seen only by a handful of scholars and by patients of a gynecologist whose offices took up the first floor. Later it was mostly used as occasional guest quarters for friends of the doctor’s family, who had long since settled into a traditional 18th-century apartment across the courtyard.

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Wright’s low-slung, earth-hugging houses, spread out horizontally, were usually covered by wide, overhanging roofs. The focus inside was a generous living area in a large masonry core that encompassed a large fireplace wall and a small kitchen. A wing of bedrooms and baths was laid out along an extended axis.

To open up interior space and provide light, Wright outlawed most interior partitions, created built-ins and multitasking furniture, put in broad bands of glass windows that functioned as exterior walls rather than as mere apertures, developed ingenious lighting fixtures and designed large areas of carpeting patterned to resonate with the house’s floor plan. In his 1932 autobiography, he wrote, “The most desirable work of art in modern times is a beautiful living room, or let’s say, a beautiful room to live in.”

For one of his most famous houses, designed for Frederick Robie of Chicago in 1908, he created a large, open living area (shown in a photograph) in which the dining room is reduced to a table surrounded by a set of high-backed chairs. The chairs themselves created an enclosure that gave diners a sense of intimacy within the larger surroundings. A storage unit with vertical and horizontal cabinets was built into a nearby wall, the whole replacing space-hogging conventional furniture.

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Australian Convict photos from the 20's

via jzoller
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Frank Stella, to the envy of many, is that rarest of artists: one who has known little of failure. His initial, post-collegiate efforts—the “Black Paintings”—met with almost immediate commercial success and critical acclaim. And since this auspicious start, his stature and influence have only increased over his nearly 50-year career. No serious museum of contemporary art can be without a Stella in its collection, and his works routinely fetch seven figures at auction.

While Stella (b. 1936; Malden, Mass.) is best known as a painter of flat (and, famously, shaped) canvases, he began introducing relief into his work as early as the 1970’s—and by the 1990’s, sculpture became, and remains, a major part of his output. And as Stella himself puts it, “It’s hard not to think about architecture when you’ve gone from painting to relief to sculpture.”

Indeed, architecture has been a serious focus of his now for nearly 20 years—and his achievements in this area, at least in the eyes of curators at the world’s most prestigious museum, merited a solo exhibition: “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture,” which recently ran at New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three months. (A companion show, “Frank Stella on the Roof,” is on view through Oct. 28, 2007.)

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In an essay titled The Plight of the Prosperous,” published in 1950 in this magazine, Lewis Mumford dismissed the living accommodations of upscale New Yorkers as little better than slums. “I sometimes wonder what self-hypnosis has led the well-to-do citizens of New York, for the last seventy-five years, to accept the quarters that are offered them with the idea that they are doing well by themselves,” he wrote. The typical Upper East Side apartment, he said, was dark, airless, and badly laid out. Mumford was mostly right, but, by the time he was writing, design and construction standards were heading downhill so fast that the prewar buildings he was sneering at had come to evoke the grand living of a bygone era.

Today, if you want such luxuries as high ceilings and a dining room, an old building is pretty much the only place to find them. Forget Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel and their sleek glass condominiums: for connoisseurs of Manhattan apartments, the real celebrity architects have always been Rosario Candela, J. E. R. Carpenter, and Emery Roth, who designed the best buildings put up between the wars. That period—when Roth built the San Remo, on Central Park West, while Candela produced the sombre citadels of 740 Park Avenue and 834, 960, and 1040 Fifth Avenue—ended up being the glory years. Such buildings still represent the apogee of New York residential design. Brokers often mention Candela in their ads, because people will pay a premium to live in one of his buildings.

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Can't Get Used To Losing You
Andy Williams/English Beat

Words and Music by Doc Pomus and Mort Schuman


midi sound


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DO Research (from justins links page - blogger pulls prefab and modern images from odd sources)


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Politics, the political and design

Design, mostly, is a service industry, serving the status quo. It serves to replicate the given reality of our existence in which a ‘politics of the same’ — the only formal politics we have — is enacted. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in consciously overt ways, but rather through the inherent ontologically designing nature of design’s politically unexamined practices and the directional consequences of all that design brings into being. Or, put another way, ‘everything we design goes on designing’. What we are saying here then is that this designing is ever ideological, and this understanding of design, i.e., revealing the designed as continual process rather than just as realised product, is ever political.

It follows that if we want another kind of future than the one offered by the unsustainable status quo, then we all have to change direction, redirect our practices and all that they bring into being — this so we may become another way. Such change can only happen if design is not just acknowledged as political but also becomes politically engaged as an ethically redirective domain of human endeavour.

We cannot go back. While the overt political ideologies of the past have good and bad lessons to teach, they lack the conceptual and intellectual means to deliver sustainable futures. Likewise, democracy as we now know it — as just another marketed commodity choice based upon appeals to self interest rather than the collective good — is not going to deliver such futures. The massive changes needed to secure sustainable futures — such as major reductions in the negative impacts of economic activity, limits on resource utilisation and the initiation of socially just levels of equity — are not the kind of things that politicians are going to put in front of voters.

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Just a few years ago, preservationists worried that the town's collection of modernist houses, one of Connecticut's historical treasures, was in danger of destruction.

The houses' very design - smaller, one-story structures built with natural materials that flow into the landscape - put them at risk of being torn down to make way for the larger McMansions that have become so popular.

But the death in 2005 of Philip Johnson, one of the most famous of the modernist architects, and the opening earlier this year of his world-famous Glass House in New Canaan for public tours, seems to be turning the tide in favor of the town's notable modernist homes, according to local history experts and preservationists.

"People are coming looking for these houses, so the tear-downs have slowed down," said Janet Lindstrom, executive director of the New Canaan Historical Society. "They seem to be much more respected. Many of them are in the process of being refurbished and it could be that maybe five years ago, they would have been torn down and lost to us forever."

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