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47 baxter st five points

thx lisa
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why buildings fall down diana cherbuliez


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The Landmark Preservation Commission had a hearing Tuesday to determine whether Silver Towers/University Village, a concrete complex designed by I. M. Pei in 1966 as part of a Robert Moses urban renewal program, should be designated a historic landmark.

A formal vote will be held at a later date, but already, the discussion about whether to protect the buildings — located between Bleecker and Houston Streets east of LaGuardia Place — has been heated.

Some fans of Jane Jacobs’s philosophy of urban spaces find the buildings hideous. Others see the towers as important examples of postwar modernism.

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No PR firm would have dreamt up the word "brutalism". The term was derived from Le Corbusier's "Breton brut"- French for "raw concrete", the movement's preferred material - rather than anything to do with brutality, with which it has sadly become better associated. In the popular imagination, brutalism is synonymous with harsh, hostile, ugly architecture (or death metal). Two key examples of the movement are currently under threat, Birmingham Central Library and Robin Hood Gardens, and both have sparked furious debate.

Birmingham Central Library, opened in 1974 and designed by John Madin, is apparently the busiest library in Europe, though Prince Charles judged its hulking inverted ziggurat more suited to incinerating books than storing them. The building was slated for demolition as part of a £1bn plan to regenerate the city centre (and build a brand new library) but now English Heritage has recommended it be listed, arguing that it has "defined an era of Birmingham's history". There seem to be plenty in the city who would rather leave that era undefined, but others have defended it as a successful, high-quality design, including my colleague Jonathan Glancey.

It's a similar story with Robin Hood Gardens, in Poplar, East London. One of the original "streets in the sky" housing developments, completed in 1972, this relentless mid-rise estate displayed the worst of public housing design: crime, grime, and societal and material decay. But it was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, arguably Britain's most celebrated modernist architects. When discussions over its future arose, the architectural magazine Building Design launched a campaign to save it led by heavyweights such as Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid. As Simon Jenkins pointed out, nobody who actually lives there has joined this campaign. Why not please everybody and convert it into a National Museum of Bad Architecture?

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Art has concerned philosophers from the beginning. In The Republic, Plato denounced art as mere imitation. For Hegel, too, art was subordinate to philosophy; in 1828 he wrote that art "in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." More recently, philosophy professor Arthur C. Danto announced "the end of art" in 1984.

But Danto didn't mean that artists were no longer making art; rather, he was referring to the end of art history. Throughout much of this history, artists--from Hellenistic sculptors in ancient Greece to academic realist painters of nineteenth-century France--sought to realistically depict the natural world. But with the advent of Modernism, realism devolved in a rapid denouement--brush strokes became visible and bold, color was expressive rather than authentic and the figure became increasingly sketchy and crude until nothing remained but pure abstraction. By the 1980s, however, this linear progression came to an abrupt end as the art world entered a new, pluralistic era. This era was not defined by a dominant school or movement but was characterized by its lack thereof.

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ramones 1975 vertically elongated video distortion.........not


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huffington on mainstream media


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treehouse web porn one and two


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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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