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contenedor cultural - platoon kunsthalle, container art center


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post katrina construction in lakeview la


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open letter to dwell mag

(ha ha) via things mag
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With a recent traveling exhibition and catalog by the Vitra Design Museum, George Nelson (1908–1986) and his talented team are finally getting their historic due. Trained as an architect at Yale, Nelson was not only an important industrial designer but an incisive writer, editor, and lecturer. He wrote about all aspects of design: architecture, interiors, products. Nelson even came up with the idea for the modern pedestrian mall, and in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he created a segment for the CBS program Camera Three called “A Prob­lem of Design: How to Kill People,” a satire on war.

After World War II, the focus of contemporary design shifted to New York, and the Nelson office was at the center of it, producing a series of classics: the Coconut chair, the Marshmallow sofa, the Ball clock, the Bubble lamps, and the Action Office systems. The firm spearheaded the American National Exhi­bition in Moscow, where several hundred American-made products were shown on a vast, three-dimensional jungle-gym display; it became the backdrop for the famous “kitchen debate” between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.

The office was straight out of Mad Men, with men in crisp white shirts and ties, and the few women in black dresses—cigarette smoke everywhere, classical music in the background, and Nelson, ever the impresario, standing in the middle of the tumult with a camera dangling from his shoulders. The graphic designer Don Ervin, who worked at the firm for eight years, describes the atmosphere as open and free. “Everybody worked hard and late,” Ervin says. “We were all underpaid, but it was like going to a special camp.” Michael Graves, Peter Marino, and Ettore Sottsass all spent time in the office. Other designers—George Tscherny, Tomoko Miho, Lucia DeRespinis, Irving Harper, Ron Beckman, and John Svezia—are less well known but equally talented, and they worked on practically everything: exhibitions, interiors, graphics, architecture, and industrial design. We asked them to share their recollections of their time with Nelson and the process that created some of design’s most iconic pieces.

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lamont mansion 107 e 70th st best house best block


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nyc bottle digger


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capuchino the killer bull


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rip stonemaster john bachar


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the maine float rope co


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For the Stahl children -- Bruce, Sharon and Mark -- who grew up roller skating on the concrete floors of [Pierre Koenig's] Case Study House No. 22, the glass-and-steel pavilion perched in the Hollywood Hills has always been more than a landmark. It has been more than the house in Julius Shulman's famed 1960 photo of two pretty girls suspended in time, floating above the twinkling lights of the city -- arguably the most iconic image of midcentury L.A.

For the children of C.H. "Buck" Stahl and his wife, Carlotta, the house was and always will be "just home."

As the Stahl house celebrates its 50th birthday and opens for public tours this weekend, perhaps what's most remarkable is how little people know about the property, despite its fame. The house has appeared in more than 1,200 newspaper and magazine articles, journals and books, not to mention a slew of films, TV shows and commercials.

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Albert Ayler - Nuits De La Fondation Maeght 1970


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lake/flato agua casa (texas vernacular lake house)


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TOKYO — How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?

Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.

A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.

[...]

Nor has any institution, public or private, stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it.

Why is that so? Partly it is because all over the world, postwar architecture is still treated with a measure of suspicion by the cultural mainstream, which often associates it with brutal city housing developments or clinical office blocks. Partly, too, it has to do with the nature of housing blocks in general. They are not sexy investments; they do not feed an investor’s vanity or offer the cultural prestige that owning a landmark house does.

But another concern is that all too often, private developments like the Capsule Tower, no matter how historically important, are regarded in terms of property rights. They are about business first, not culture. Governments don’t like to interfere; the voices of preservationists are shrugged off. “Want to save it?” the prevailing sentiment goes. “Pay for it.”

Until that mentality changes, landmarks like Kurokawa’s will continue to be threatened by the wrecking ball, and the cultural loss will be tremendous. This is not only an architectural tragedy, it is also a distortion of history.

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If You Live in a Glass House It gets quite hot in the summer. Visiting Philip Johnson's most durable architectural achievement.


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drink only fresh beer! check here to crack the various date codes used by beer bottlers. this shit should be standardized!! i want bottling dates (where i can see them on the bottle in the store and on the outside of the case before making a purchase) and not "best if consumed by..." dates or expiration dates!!!


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1st glimpse at new knoll desk chair: Generation


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normandy shelter house by franklin azzi

justin found this one
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The top floor of Corbusier’s Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.

In other words, a work of art that you can actually live in has zero premium over a commodity item, but one that you can look at has a premium factor of 13 million over a commodity one.

There are 2 possible conclusions: architecture is vastly under valued or painting prices are almost entirely irrational.
or perhaps a third: apples and oranges. paintings (art) is a free agent activity and beholding to no one functionally and only comparable to another painting (art object). its not an applied art like architecture, music, dance, literature, ceramics, weaving, etc. ( im taking a little license here mixing dance music weaving and ceramics but it has to be said.) arnt corbusiers undervalued as architecture and paintings overvalued as art?


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time1



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Dave the Spazz broadcasting live from Ponderosa Stomp at Lincoln Center! Two nights of one of the soulrockinest fests in the world, trekking from New Orleans up to NYC's Damrosch Park! Dave and WFMU will be live on Thursday, July 16th from 8-11PM carrying the outdoor soul spectacular with performances from Stax icon William Bell, Harvey Scales, and the Bobbettes all backed by the legendary Bo-Keys! Then, Dave will be recording the following evening's rockabilly festivities and presenting them on his Thursday, July 30th program with sets from New Orleans wild man Joe Clay, Sun Records legend Carl Mann and the out-of-this-world Collins Kids backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics. File under: In-freaking-credible! Damrosch Park is located at 62nd Street and Amsterdam in Manhattan.

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rip sky saxon 1949-2009 but thats under dispute and besides age is irrelevant


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ham radio

via things
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For the moment, at least, Times Square is once again a spectacularly crazy place—crazy enough on a recent afternoon to make a seasoned police officer shake his head with a bemused grin and mutter, “Just when you thought you’d seen everything …” People were sitting on lawn chairs in the middle of Broadway. If, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas asserted, dirt is matter out of place, then this crowd of pedestrians occupying vehicular lanes represented an invigorating sort of filth, a thrilling overthrow of order.

So far, this revolution is thrown together with nothing but orange cones and cheap patio furniture. The fearless Transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, decided that it’s better to take back turf for foot traffic first and worry about piazza-tizing it later. The absence of design results in a triumph of urbanism. Suddenly, the power relationship between people in and out of cars has changed. Now drivers pass through the area at the sufferance of pedestrians, rather than the other way around. Cars don’t honk as they nose crankily into a crosswalk; they wait politely to cross the new mall, giving drivers a moment to reflect on the wisdom of taking a different route.

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ferile kid from neg
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