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Tourists still flock to the World Trade Center site, almost seven years after the attacks of September 11. What they find when they get there is not a scene of destruction but a busy construction site. While I’m grateful to see Ground Zero filling up with fresh concrete and steel, there’s something about the utter normalcy of the scene that makes me long for that heady period in 2003 and 2004 when the planning process for the site, a grand public pageant bursting with visionary zeal, promised to generate a place brave and powerful enough to heal the city’s wounds. But as the concrete hardens, I can almost see the banality setting in. The only person speaking with any frequency these days about his “vision” for the site is its developer, Larry Silverstein. Lately, he’s been giving what amounts to a stump speech, promoting the vitality of Lower Manhattan and touting his revised schedule. “The buildings will reach street level approximately one year after the start of construction, and Towers 3 and 4 will top out in mid-2010, with Tower 2 following in 2011,” Sil verstein told the Downtown Association in April. “Can you count on this schedule? You bet.”

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His "simple aim in life," or so said Fortune magazine in 1946, was "to remake the world." He did not quite pull that off, but not for lack of trying. Indeed, he was so prolific that 20 years later The New Yorker billed him as "an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmologist and comprehensive designer." By then, R. Buckminster Fuller had adopted the shorter job descriptions of "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist" and "astronaut from Spaceship Earth."

Bucky (as almost everyone called him) was 70 years old when The New Yorker interviewed him on the tiny island off the Maine coast with no electricity, telephones or running water where he spent each summer. His most successful project, the geodesic dome, has provided emergency shelter for many thousands of people, but other designs, including a flying car and floating city, had flopped, and he had yet to complete a long promised book on his theory of Energetic-Synergetic Geometry.

Hailed as a visionary by the 1960s hippie movement, Fuller, who died in 1983, was dismissed as an eccentric by the design and architecture establishments. (This assessment was shared by their peers in mathematics, cartography and other disciplines he had challenged.) The critics and curators who defined 20th century design history tended to prize materialistic achievements, preferably corporate-friendly ones, such as Mies van der Rohe's monumental buildings, and Charles Eames's opulent office furniture. Iconoclastic dreamers were relegated to the margins, especially if, like Fuller, they were self-taught, befuddlingly verbose and uncompromising altruists with a string of spectacular failures in design and business.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is now reassessing Fuller's achievements - and his contribution to design history - in "Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe," an exhibition opening Thursday. "In some ways his 'comprehensive, anticipatory design science' is more relevant for design today than it was even in his own time," said K. Michael Hays, a curator of the show. "He thought of the world in terms of flows of information and energy that interact and exchange in a complex totality. This is why it is relevant for scientists and artists, as well as designers."

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As we approached Lower Gart I couls see that many of the roofs had coffee drying. Indeed, this is the middle of the Yemeni Harvest (October-December) so it makes sense.

As we got closer I could see the coffee drying on the roofs of the village below. They do not have space for "drying patios" like Central America, so the roofs are a convenient place, as well as another limitation on volume.
from sweet marias introduction to yemen
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on vacation on vinalhaven me


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BLUE-COLLAR HEAVEN tony fitzpatrick

via vz
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top of the pops


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remodelista's steal this look series


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jade jagger bathroom/kitchen pods


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Do not worry about damaging anything (damage is good),” it read. “Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show.” Seeing his unsold works strewn across the floor of the gallery, Mr. Parrino coolly proceeded to cover their surfaces with black enamel and carve them up with an electric saw. “Steven was extremely anarchic, especially in relation to gallerists,” said Jutta Koether, a German-born artist who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Mr. Parrino. “He’d been put through the ringer so much. He was like, ‘I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to.’ ”

[...]

Still, the market’s embrace of Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein within a decade of their respective deaths elicits some skepticism. “On the one hand, it’s incredibly romantic,” the artist Robert Longo said in an interview. “These artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it’s about a commodity. There’s a limited supply.”
thx skinny
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The rehearsal was in an old abandoned and condemned building in downtown Detroit on Cass Avenue, probably the old offices of Creem Magazine as publisher Barry Cramer was the group's original manager. When Steve Hunter walked into the rehearsal room the first thing he saw was a Marshall half stack....the first time he had ever seen one. The group jammed on Cream tunes under the offices of Creem magazine. He, of course, got the gig, and felt that the other players were awesome. As key as this epiphany was, another component that would figure in to his huge success was meeting producer extraordinaire Bob Ezrin. Hunter and Ezrin took an immediate liking to each other, Hunter appreciating the way Ezrin put music together. The Detroit with Mitch Ryder band toured, their April 1, 1972 gig a "Get Out The Vote" political performance on a bill with Spencer Davis Group remaining an important moment in their history. By this time activist John Sinclair had taken over management of the group from Barry Cramer, Sinclair's eight page liner notes for the CD, Live at the Hill Auditorium: Get Out The Vote, giving much insight. By the summer of 1972 the Detroit band dissolved, though by the next year Hunter and Ezrin would be at work on a masterpiece by Lou Reed, the Berlin album. On September 1, 1973 Steve Hunter appeared onstage with Dick Wagner, the first show of the tour that would promote the Berlin disc, which would culminate in the release of the Rock 'n' Roll Animal album. As David Bowie and Mott The Hoople would open their concerts with mood music, the Steve Hunter/Dick Wagner dynamic guitar duo took it a step further. Check out "Eldorado Street" on Hunter's 1977 album, Swept Away to see if you hear passages from "intro", the sound that launched thousands of guitarists into a new way of conducting business. Hunter says it wasn't a conscious effort to infuse the previous "intro" into "Eldorado Street", but it is good to have a point of reference to see how an artist's craft was evolving. Each night of the tour the show would open with that Steve Hunter instrumental, "Intro", morphing slightly from show to show. Even John Cougar Mellencamp got into the act, nicking the riffs from Hunter's intro and Reed's "Sweet Jane" for his "I Need A Lover" on 1978's A Biography lp. Where Mick Ronson and Mick Ralphs were supplemented by their respective front men's acoustic guitars, in Bowie and Mott The Hoople respectively, Lou Reed now had a two pronged guitar assault as credible as Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, the golden era of The Rolling Stones. As they were re-issuing compositions by The Velvet Underground, music that had already influenced major artists - from Roxy Music to Bowie, Mott The Hoople and even The Rolling Stones - just listen to the grunge version of "Gimme Shelter" on the album Liver Than You'll Ever Be to see Reed influencing Keith Richards - this re-designing of a major catalog would have profound ramifications behind the scenes in the music world. It would have even more of an impact on artists like John Cougar, Pat Benatar by way of Cougar, and most notably, Alice Cooper. Had Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner remained with Lou Reed for the rest of that artist's first stint with RCA Records, how would Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby sounded? As Bob Ezrin returned to his work with Alice Cooper for the Welcome To My Nightmare album and tour, Lou Reed fans followed and watched their guitar heroes put their magical sound into Cooper's work.

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abandoned welders shed


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calf shed

stable shed


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narrow width bathroom sinks

20" pedestal sink
bellacore tina

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beerwewant
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their buckets got a holl in it


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clairtone


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sealing a stone foundation
lime mortar


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trench drain
polycast
mcnichols
zurn


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vote for your favorite shed


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forgotten architects

thx lisa
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sinai hotels

via zoller
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In total, police and workmen took 103 tons of garbage out of the house. Salvageable items fetched less than $2,000 at auction; the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000, of which $20,000 worth was in the form of personal property (jewelry, cash, securities and the like). Items removed from the house included rope, baby carriages, a doll carriage, rakes, umbrellas, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a checkerboard, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands of books about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, a beaded lampshade, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, one British and six American flags, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and, of course, countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old. Near the spot where Homer died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks with a total of $3,007.18.

And in addition to the bundles of paper, there was a great deal of garbage. The house itself, having never been maintained, was also decaying: the roof was leaking and some walls had already caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below. Eventually the house was deemed a fire hazard and razed.

A gathering of some of the stranger materials pulled from the Collyer Mansion were taken to be exhibited at Hubert's Dime Museum, where they were featured alongside Human Marvels and sideshow performers. The morbid center piece of this display was the chair in which Homer Collyer died. Upon being removed from public exhibit in 1956, the Collyer chair entered the private collector's market. As events progressed, the chair earned the reputation of being cursed due to the misfortunes of the series of collectors who had come into possession of it. Today the Collyer Death Chair is maintained in the holdings of a collector of oddities named Babette Bombshell, of Orlando, Florida.

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the who / bucket t


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casab

15c

what you get for your money on miami beach: 49k will get you a studio condo (read: your own hotel room) in the 1948 midcentury modern casablanca and another 58k will get you a 120 sf cabana (w/ bathroom) on the pool and just off the beach. theres a lot more. for instance: 64.9k gets you 640 sf in a 1926 deco building. (just scroll past the rentals and timeshares.)


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