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gloomy sunday


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For [Georges] Nöel, the ground of his paintings was as elemental as a muddy battlefield strewn with detritus: a thick, mixed-media “magma-matter,” first made with cloth and paper and then with sand and pigment embedded in polyvinyl acetate, a surface embodying chemistry’s conquest of nature. Noël covered this ground with dense skeins of marks, signs, gouges and graffiti, a method that he soon began referring to with the term “palimpsests” -- a form that his then-wife and companion, the celebrated curator Margit Rowell, referred to as “a stratification of writings. . . that blend into a single cryptic text.”

Indeed, the palimpsest is “an exemplary pictorial metaphor” for the human subject itself. For what is the modern individual but a palimpsest, an imaginary unity constituted from uncertain layers of experience, feelings, memories, thoughts, sensations?

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What the volume doesn’t do, perhaps surprisingly, is reprint some of the more famous tomes of that career — absent is that originary moment represented by the discipline-warping dissertation; the polemical essays that comprised Structural Anthropology; the UNESCO-sponsored Race and History; and the symphonic four-volume series of works on mythology published between 1964 and 1971, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.

Why the absences? The editor of the Pléiade Lévi-Strauss, Vincent Debaene, an assistant professor in the French department at Columbia, argues in his preface that the selections represent a double refusal: It avoided the production of a “too technical volume” but moreover avoided becoming another mythological reproduction of a “manifesto of structuralism.” A selection of texts that would have played into the latter tendency, Debaene wrote me by e-mail, “would have reduced Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to an avant-garde which has now been passed over, and the volume would have just gathered the memories of a moment of ‘French Theory’ or of European thought –– and the native Indians would have just become what they were in 18th-century thought: some remote shadows, a conceptual tool to create a relativistic stance, a fiction which would have helped us to think of ourselves and of our present.”

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In “Marvels of Modernism,” the latest installment, 10 photographers have translated the design elements of 12 postwar Modernist landscapes — kidney-shaped pools, Miró-esque reservoirs, boomerang curves, floating cantilevered decks and adventure playgrounds — for the 21st century. The exhibition, which opened Wednesday, will run through Jan. 4 and then travel to museums and botanical gardens. The sites were selected from the foundation’s annual “Landslide” list of endangered places and plants, which was culled from hundreds of nominees and then vetted by a panel of designers and preservationists.

“What we’re trying to do with the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to begin to get people to recognize that the American landscape is in fact a cultural institution worthy of celebration,” Mr. Birnbaum said. Featuring works like the daunting horizon of Boston City Hall Plaza, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, and Dan Kiley’s orthogonal Miller Garden in Columbus, Ind., designated a national historic landmark in 2000, the disparate sites are linked by the civic ambition of those who designed them.

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ill come back to this. A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn By Charles Taylor

i find gehry pretty tedious but he is not representative of all artist/architects. certainly not koolhaas. taylor gets just about everything else wrong in this article.


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barbara galucci achicitectonic photographs


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at sleep away camp summer 63 i wrote the joke: meanwhile back at the ranch the lone ranger disguised as a pool table racked his balls. i found record here that the joke still exists.


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the gobbler - the grooviest motel in wisconsin

via zoller
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a stranger in my own home town


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Local and federal officials on Tuesday announced plans for a 70-acre medical campus in the heart of New Orleans to replace two hospitals damaged during Hurricane Katrina, a $2 billion investment that supporters say will create thousands of jobs and begin to rebuild the city’s shattered health care system.

One of the hospitals, to be built by Louisiana State University, would replace the city’s landmark Charity Hospital, a lifeline for generations of the city’s poor, which has been vacant since the storm damaged its lower floors. The other would replace the vacant Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, also severely damaged by the flooding. The old hospitals and adjacent buildings will be abandoned under the plan, which officials here described as the foundation for a new economy for New Orleans, and the largest investment in the area since Katrina.

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big crate

via vz
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too brutal and just right brutal, robin hood gardens and park hill


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Since summer, daylight has bathed the galleria of the new World Trade Center, pouring through the five-and-a-half-foot intervals between its rounded steel arches and creating a modernist version of the ancient, roofless hypostyle halls of Egypt.

Luminous Views, Soon to Be Lost, at Trade Center Galleria It is a vision that the architects never intended, since the galleria — an east-west passageway connecting the World Trade Center Transportation Hub to Battery Park City — is far below street level. Workers will soon lay down steel roof decking along 250 feet of the galleria, permanently cutting it off from the elements.

During the brief time it has been exposed to raking sunlight and softening clouds, the galleria has offered a life-size preview of the transportation hub itself — a preview that has surprised even the building’s chief architect, Santiago Calatrav

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Since the architect Paul Rudolph’s death, in 1997, his reputation has undergone one of the most dramatic rehabilitations imaginable, and his brutalist, sometimes off-putting buildings—once criticized as the worst of high modernism’s excesses—are now recognized as some of the most expressive American architecture of the twentieth century. They are also some of the most threatened. In 2002, in an effort to honor Rudolph’s legacy and advocate for preserving his work, friends of the architect, including Ernst Wagner, established the Paul Rudolph Foundation. But since then, seven of his buildings have been demolished, and earlier this month, in the face of mounting criticism that the foundation has not helped halt the destruction, Wagner, in poor health, announced he would resign as president. “I felt like Don Quixote,” he says, sitting in his apartment in the Rudolph-designed townhouse on East 58th Street. “But what the hell can you do? You need someone like Jackie O. to raise a huge hurrah.”

This past year has been particularly heart-wrenching for Rudolph fans: While his most famous building, the A&A building at Yale University, was rededicated this month as Paul Rudolph Hall after a $126 million restoration, both the elegantly cantilevered Micheels House in Westport, Connecticut, and his Cerrito House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, were torn down. And next year could be even worse, as at least ten more Rudolph buildings are under threat, including the Concourse Building in Singapore, the Blue Cross Blue Shield skyscraper in Boston, and his Orange County Government Center in Goshen. In Sarasota, Florida, the campaign to save Rudolph’s Riverview High School has stalled, and the Cohen House in nearby Siesta Key is now likely headed into foreclosure.

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Let’s start at the end of one story, the story of the dump, with the view from way up on top of it.

Let’s start at the peak of what was once a steaming, stinking, seagull-infested mountain of trash, a peak that is now green, or greenish, or maybe more like a green-hued brown, the tall grasses having been recently mown by the sanitation workers still operating at Fresh Kills, on the western shore of Staten Island. Today the sun dries the once slime-covered slopes, as a few hawks circle in big, slow swoops and a jet makes a lazy approach to Newark, just across the Arthur Kill. The sky, when viewed from atop a twenty-story heap of slowly decomposing garbage—the so-called South Mound, a Tribeca-size drumlin surrounded by other trash mounds, some as long as a mile—is the kind of big blue that you expect to see somewhere else, like the middle of Missouri. It’s a great wide-open bowl, fringed with green hills (some real, some garbage-filled) that are some of the highest points on the Atlantic seaboard south of Maine. Meanwhile, at your feet, hook-shaped white plastic tubes vent methane, the gas that builds up naturally in a landfill, a by-product of refuse being slowly digested by underground bacteria. The hissing of landfill gas is soft and gentle, like the sound of a far-off mountain stream or the stove left on in your apartment.

But as you look a little longer, it’s definitely not a Missouri view, and the unmistakable landmarks come into focus: a tower on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a span of the Outerbridge Crossing, and, on Coney Island, the very top of the parachute jump. In the foreground, trucks enter the landfill, climbing the mounds and dumping clean soil over not-so-clean soil. It’s all part of a radical plan to turn Fresh Kills landfill into Fresh Kills Park, with mountain bikers and kayakers and ballplayers sharing 2,315 acres of open space with restored maritime forests, with chestnut trees dotting dry prairies, with new or revived sweet-gum swamps, maybe a fox scooting through persimmon copses or a deer through a new birch thicket.

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abandoned luncheonette

abandoned police station wtf

via zoller
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timberframe cabin project via materialicious

I've started on a timberframed cabin project. I'm making the parts here in Nebraska, and hauling them out to some land in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Wyoming (about a mile from the Continental Divide near Encampment) where I will assemble them into a small cabin. The site is on the edge of the Medicine Bow National Forest, and has a small stream running across it. That cabin will be where I stay and keep my tools as I build a larger cabin over the next decade or so.
the above quote was from when he was just getting started and now hes pretty well finished up the cabin, so you can review the whole construction process start to completion. well done. nice project.


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must listen sunday evenings on wfmu radio 91.1 fm ~ streaming online ~ archived

gaylord fields from 5 - 7 pm

monica lynch from 7 - 9 pm

honorable mention: venerable music radio online stream 78 rpm era music 247


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Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour examines the turmoil that surrounded the late-1960s variety show. With a young and brash stable of writers and performers, including Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour brought an edgy new brand of political comedy to the airwaves for three seasons. When they were fired in 1969, brothers Tom and Dick Smothers took their network, CBS, to court ... and won. This is the fascinating, true story as told by its key players, including the Smothers Brothers, show writers Rob Reiner and Mason William, performers Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Harry Belafonte, and former CBS executives.


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Guitar evanglists, singing preachers and the like....

at the hound
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the endangered french cafe


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Shipping Container Steel Building - Plans & Manuals CD


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shakerst

Shaker Stove/Built-in Closet
Rendered by John W. Kelleher (artist), c. 1938
watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paper
overall: 27.8 x 20.6 cm (10 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Original IAD Object: 68" high; 17" wide (closet)
Index of American Design
1943.8.13677


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science class tables via workalicious


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