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bkln ny shipping container snowboard ramp


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sea / sky photos of jonathan quinn


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found a link for garage hangover going back through older posts at dull tool dim bulb blog. good on the outsider stuff. loads of fun just digging around over there.


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brandeis univ closing art museum selling collection due to economy


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BRONTOSAURUS FSBO


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wyllie water tower @ SpaceInvading


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The image of the destroyed Einstein Tower fascinates for its ability to recall Mendelsohn's original sketches for the building. As in the photograph from 1945, the sketches reveal the lenticular dome atop the tower as a broken and incomplete form. The ground seems incomplete and upturned in the sketch, much in the way it would appear in the second photograph. Is it possible that the building, when damaged and eviscerated, speaks more to the architect's vision than a completed building? The form of the Einstein Tower has withstood damage, but it is a form that has become reduced to its constituent lines of force. Strangely, the bomb blast, with its incredible displacement of pressure, earth, and energy, makes the building more legible. But is this because we are filling in the blanks, completing the forms? Are we visualizing a completed dome atop the building even when we look at the image of the damaged Einstein Tower?

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And somewhere between Lou Reed, Electricity, Marshal McLuhan, and Andy Warhol - I forget exactly the circumstances - I drew a comparison between the translucent walls of the Johnson Glass House, and the metallic-reflective walls of Warhol's silver Factory. They seemed like related opposites: spaces that were very similar, famous for the material surface of their walls that were both materials which both fascinated modern architecture. Both had qualities that embody modernity - transparency, reflection, flat and smooth, seamless, almost textureless, technological, industrialised, cold-to-the-touch and factory-formed into sheets from molten state. The Glass House and the Factory are like opposing twins.

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sesquipedalis

you you


fantastic

dull tool dim bulb


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dropped bra observation

@elseplace
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Admiral’s Row is a series of dilapidated yet gorgeous Second Empire-style mansions once used to house officers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some of them date back to the Civil War. Left to decay since the 1970’s, these beautiful buildings are in desperate need of rehabilitation.
thx lisa
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“I really wanted to fight the used-car-salesman stigma that real estate bloggers have.”

realworld


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introfl

on varied accounts of the origin of skateboarding

The origin of the skateboard, like the origin of the mountain bike, is buried deep in rumor and anecdote. Though the first "official" skateboard, the "Roller Derby Skateboard," was introduced in 1959, hundreds of children claim to have attached a piece of plywood to a pair of rollerskates prior to this date. These early boards bore little resemblance to their modern counterparts, and were often only a few inches wide, and very thick to prevent breaking.

As "sidewalk surfing" (as this first appearance of skateboarding came to be called) grew in popularity, the boards became more purpose designed, growing wider and thinner for better control. However, as advanced as these designs became, they still shared one inescapable flaw: the clay wheel. Clay wheels lacked durability, had extremely high (by modern standards) rolling resistance and did not grip the ground well. As accidents due to clay wheels piled up, more and more cities and towns began banning skateboards, and the fad faded in popularity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The skateboard's earliest ancestors were homemade, wooden scooters ridden by kids in the early 1900s. To make a scooter, all you needed was a two-by-four, some nails, a produce crate and some roller skates -- a far cry from the sleek aluminum scooters kids ride these days. Kids built their scooters by nailing the steel roller-skate wheels onto the bottom of the two-by-four and the crate to the top. It served as the scooter's neck. After attaching another piece of wood to the top of the crate for handles, the scooter was complete.

Kids continued to ride these scooters into the 1950s. How they made the scooters changed over time, but the most drastic change came when children began removing any sort of handles all together, and rode the wheeled two-by-fours hands-free. With that, the first skateboards were born and their popularity soared among young people.

It didn't take long for manufacturers to take advantage of the growing phenomenon among America's youth. The first manufactured skateboard found its way to store shelves in 1959. And in 1963 professional-grade skateboards appeared on the market, along with teams of pro-riders to demonstrate them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is no definitive origin or inventor of the skateboard. One proposed origin is that skateboards arose in the 1930s and 1940s, when children would participate in soapbox races, using soap-boxes attached to wooden planks on rollerskate wheels. When the soap-box became detached from the plank, children would ride these primitive "skateboards". Another suggests that the skateboard was created directly from the adaptation of a single roller skate taken apart and nailed to a 2x4, without the soapbox at all and that it was often surfers looking to recreate the feel of surfing on the land when the surf was flat.

Retail skateboards were first marketed in 1958 by Bill and Mark Richard of Dana Point, California. They attached roller skate wheels from the Chicago Roller Skate Company to a plank of wood and sold them in their Val Surf Shops.

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early downhill skater

90114

from 2 or 3 things


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living with cinder block

via justin


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more dee dee moments

I really miss Dee Dee Ramone. Of all the Ramones, Dee Dee is the one I knew best. We hung out on and off for around 25 years. It was always a pleasure to run into Dee Dee, he always had a funny story, a strange antidote, bizarre things always happened to Dee Dee. In a way he sought them out, but in another way he was just a magnet for nuts and weirdos. Dee Dee was a doer, and not in a small way. Whatever Dee Dee did, he did a lot of, good or bad. When he decided he was going to be a writer he knocked off three books in less than five years, and all three are great: Poison Heart: Surviving The Ramones (with Veronica Kofman) (Firefly, 1997, this has also been published as Lobotomy), Chelsea Horror Hotel (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001), and Legend Of A Rock Star: The Last Testament Of Dee Dee Ramone (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002). When he got into painting he churned out hundreds of paintings (with help from wife Barbara and Paul Kostabi) we bought the one pictured above. He wrote thousands of songs. When he decided to move out of New York City, he moved dozens of times, first to Argentina, then Amsterdam, then a small town in the Netherlands, then back to New York, then upstate New York, then L.A., with Ann Arbor thrown in somewhere. He got a dog, an Airedale, it died. He got another dog, also an Airedale, it died, he got another. He couldn't figure out why they kept dying. If Joey had OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), Dee Dee had CCD (Compulsive Compulsive Disorder, a condition I just made up).
from they call him the hound
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When Richard Hodgson and his wife, Geraldine, first visited the five acres on which the 4,550-square-foot house now sits, a man crossed the road to ask them if they had an architect. They said no, whereupon Johnson offered his services. He designed two brick pavilions — one for living areas, the other for bedrooms for the couple and their four children — linked by a glass-enclosed passage. The living pavilion was centered on a three-sided courtyard that frames views of the mature trees, expansive lawns (the landscape was designed by Zion & Breen, who did the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art) and traditional stone walls beyond. Although Richard Hodgson would become a successful businessman (he was an original investor in Intel), when he and his wife built the house they needed a mortgage, and banks didn’t approve of Modernist houses. So the couple built the living wing in 1951 and the bedroom wing five years later. In between, the parents slept in the guest room, and the children bunked (literally) in what is now the dining room.

After the Hodgsons’ deaths, their children protected the house from alteration or demolition, obtaining easements from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization to which Johnson gave the Glass House. But Modernist houses are not for everyone; many buyers balk at having to preserve them. Not so Bassam and Fellows. An architect and a creative director, respectively, the two men design the BassamFellows furniture line, calling their 20th-century-influenced stylistic approach “Craftsman Modern.” They renovated a Modernist house down the road from this one, as well as one in Lugano, Switzerland (both of which they have since sold), and they are renovating another in Palm Springs. Both men had wanted to design a house from scratch, but the first time they visited the Hodgson house, as Fellows recalled, “it took your breath away.”

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in the footsteps of marco polo

thx robin
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buy now prices for C3 corvette convertibles 68-82

1977 9.5 k

1973 14.25k

1974 12.3k

1978 15.9k this one is a crazy good deal

1975 11.5k

1968 18.99k


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Collector Car Prices Soften but Don’t Crash


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team hobie

thx jim
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the ever facinating

judit bellostes architecture blog


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chooglin' on down the line


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skyway

The Minneapolis architecture firm City Desk Studio just put a skyway up for sale on craigslist. A freakin' skyway.

It's a steel girder and glass box, 20 x 83 feet, and 14 tall, designed by architect Ed Baker ["the father of the skyways"] to connect JC Penney's and Powers department stores. The 12-inch concrete floor accounts for about half of the skyway's 280,000-lb weight. [That's half a Richard Serra retrospective, for those keeping score at home.] It was apparently assembled in three sections and filled in with glass after it was installed.

City Desk Studio's asking price is currently $79,500, which is a huge discount from the $1.2 million they expected to bring in by turning the skyway into the Skyway Retreat lakefront cabin and selling 12 4-week shares for $100,000 apiece.


more on skywalks / via justin


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