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021816

PERKIOMENVILLE PA / MAKE AN OFFER - Solid stone 3-sty colonial (1778) with new roof & windows. Interior needs rehab, selling as is. Village commercial zoning offers possibilities for professional/business opportunities. Frontage on Rt. 29 & Perkiomenville Rd. $150,000
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Design and the Depression, The Debate: Part One

Is there an upside to the recession? Quite a few people seem to think so. David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, hopes for a good recession in which only rich bankers will be laid off, and the effects of which will be largely ‘cleansing’.

The design version of this argument would have Zaha Hadid, Ross Lovegrove, Marcel Wanders, and Campana Brothers canned; and a moral reawakening would replace stylistic decadence. With echoes of the early-Nineties, designers are again beating themselves up over their supposed excess. Back then, they regretted the superficiality of Eighties’ Post Modernism and the matt black and chrome-trimmed Yuppie lifestyle. Today, outlandish architecture and design-art are placed alongside Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Candy and Candy’s apartments as symptoms of empty extravagance.

But the Bring-On-The-Slump crowd are equally self-indulgent. Recessions are marked by bankruptcies, mass unemployment, house repossessions and general misery, not by moral renewal. A mean-spirited Puritanism lies behind those beckoning recession.Their outlook reveals a shocking detachment from economic and historical realities. The recessionistas just don’t get it, they have not grasped the depth of the economic crisis we face. This is no mere downturn, blip or ‘natural correction’; it’s a process that will last years. It could inflict a terrible toll on the profession. No doubt these commentators come from the kind of backgrounds that weren’t blighted by previous busts, but few practising designers and architects will be able to maintain such glorious indifference in the face of the coming havoc.

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bauhaus at 90

At first Gropius had attempted to reinsert a soul into the industrialized era, with his belief in the importance of the trades and his preference for wood as a material which harked back to the builders' huts of the Middle Ages. However, the director quickly shed these initial notions and his idealization of the past. He still condemned pure art as an end unto itself, and he continued to refuse to produce "luxury items for connoisseurs." But he also began to vehemently propagate architecture and product design tailored to the possibilities of industry.

In 1923, he proclaimed the motto: "Art and Technology -- a New Unit." The master of the Bauhaus demanded speed, wanting to overcome "earthly sluggishness." He complained that some Bauhaus members preferred a "return to nature, preferring to shoot with a toy bow instead of a shotgun."

The old belief in the power of the machine from the prewar days had been reawakened. And it triggered a heated debate over what direction the Bauhaus should be going in. One of the skeptics was Bauhaus master Georg Muche, who refused to enter into a "compromising relationship" with the "world of form, devoid of meaning" in the outside world. Kandinsky, the Russian genius who had helped found abstract art, was also troubled by the fact that "the machine" had been elevated "to idolatry."

Form and function, production and marketing: everything was reinvented from the ground up. "New" was the buzzword of the hour: new building, new vision, the New Man.

The concept of "style" was also controversial within the institution, and yet it existed, of course, -- the unmistakable Bauhaus style. Freed of all flourishes, this minimalist vocabulary of form was an intelligent, democratic understatement. Since then, the mythology of modernism has included the flat roof, the functional logic of a chair and the matter-of-factness of a metal teapot.

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"I can't stand truth," says Philip Johnson. "It gets so boring, you know, like social responsibility." No doubt Robert Stern, who recently won the contest to design the George W Bush Presidential Library, would agree. The Philip Johnson Tapes compiles Stern's interviews with Johnson in the mid-1980s, and features many blasts at the concepts of truth and responsibility, in a manner which may have seemed witty and recherché for a few months in the 1970s, but has long become tediously conformist.

The interviews make clear that whether modernist or postmodernist, Nazi or "apolitical", Johnson's allegiances were similar throughout his career. What connects the oh-so-zany designer of the AT&T tower to the cold minimalist of the Glass House is disdain for the notion of architecture as a functional, social entity. His Nazi activism in the 1930s and his 1980s neoconservatism are connected by a blithe elitism. What is rather astonishing in this book is the story, related by Johnson with some surprise at his own chutzpah, of how he managed to change architectural history at least twice without the prerequisite of talent as a designer or thinker.

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5 60's 45's friday / the hound


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Rose Marie McCoy grew up on a farm in Arkansas. But at the age of 19, she left home and moved to New York City to try to become a singer.

"When I came to New York, I had six bucks," McCoy says. "I got a job working in a Chinese hand laundry and I learned how to iron shirts. Then I worked weekends in nightclubs, singing."

While she was waiting for her break as a singer, McCoy started to write songs, discovering that it came naturally to her. In the pop music world of the time, most performers relied on professional songwriters for their hits, and the entire songwriting industry was centered on one square block in New York City: 1619 Broadway. Better known as the Brill Building, the block housed a 10-story hit factory stuffed with songwriters, producers and music publishers.

After work, many of the employees would gather at a restaurant around the corner, called Beefsteak Charlie's. Soul singer Maxine Brown remembers that it was like a music marketplace.

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chewed gum fridge magnets

thx vz
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the art market is less ethical than the stock market”


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parts of broadway to be closed / times square pedestrian mall


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the real godfathers of punk


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strictly taboo


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american street paving equipment photo document collection 970 x 8x10"s


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nrt
navajo rug with steam engine train motif


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dr gene scott fcc monkey band

herzog gods angry man 1/5


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i couldnt find a decent version of (mercury) rocket 88 so havta settle on this.

do you know how to pony?
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Four years ago, the parts told him to build a custom car out of a 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis sedan and body panels from 11 different classic cars, in particular a 1957 De Soto. “I needed a new car, but I can’t have anything regular,” he said, noting that his Cadillac hot rod is 50 years old.

Oddly enough, Mr. Heller had to deconstruct his own Deconstructivist style and construct something more reliable.

With the help of a friend who had moved to Florida and found the state overrun with large Mercury sedans, Mr. Heller was able to buy a Grand Marquis with low mileage for $6,600. “They’re old guys’ cars,” he explained. The first thing he did was pry off the lights and bumpers. Then he stripped the body panels, leaving only the front doors and the roof. And he went to work.

When Mr. Heller shops for old cars, he cuts off the sheet metal and sells the rest. “I’m not interested in the mechanical parts,” he said. If the metal is rusted, he’ll sandblast it. If it’s dented, he’ll pound it even. He keeps a stocked inventory at all times. The De Soto panels had been lying around for a while.
thx adman
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metal shed porn (avbl with rat guard trim)


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lost oregon

thx erin
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carriage shed

3 bay carriage shed


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ruin-nation


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anvil

whats the buzz? tinnitus.

via things
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eno observed


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weapons grade canvas

Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe, it was a war for hearts and minds—an idea war, an image war, a propaganda war. Global combat on these terms was the policy of the American government. There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.


nytbr


thx steve/jim/tom
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The story of the Brooklyn Navy Yard hospital complex, historically known as the Hospital Annex and recently known as NAVSTA Brooklyn, begins in 1824 with the sale of the Schenck Farm to the secretary of the Navy. Adjacent to the Navy Yard (known then as the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard), the plot of land was envisioned as a hospital and support facility for the Yard. When first purchased, it was separated from the Yard proper by mudflats created by the Wallabout Bay; as the bay was filled in to extend the Yard, the boundary all but vanished.

Construction of the hospital facilities began in earnest in 1830; the main hospital building was completed in 1838. By 1850, the Annex was a self-contained parcel of land, walled-in, with a gatehouse, a laboratory, and a cemetery. In 1864, the Surgeon's Residence was constructed. During the Civil War, the hospital would supply over one third of the medicines used by Union troops, and the basement of the main hospital building would be used to confine and treat wounded Confederate prisoners. During this period, more space was needed, and needed quickly, and a wooden annex was added to the main hospital building. This allowed hundreds of additional beds in the facility; over 500 patients could be treated at once.
thx lisa
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