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people of walmart

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the wtc a building project like no other

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picnictable

norms picnic table plans


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big slabs


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house dijk


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gas station canopy


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Nonetheless, it was nearly impossible, while sitting in the dark watching it all unfold, not to think that it wasn't just Julius Shulman who was being eulogized and laid symbolically to rest. It was also a certain attitude about what Los Angeles means, here and abroad, and how photographers and architects alike ought to frame life in the city.

After all, in the years before his death Shulman was the greatest living symbol of the idea that Los Angeles and its architecture were synonymous with both expansion and innovation. In that sense, the memorial was another bit of evidence that L.A. is getting a little worse at crafting the future -- as icons of invention like Shulman pass into history -- and a little better at talking about and understanding itself. We are slowly trading initiative for perspective, which is perhaps the fate of any big city as it settles into middle age.

Nearly every speaker touched on Shulman's innate and irrepressible optimism, which was a fundamental element not just of his personality but also of his work. His famous black-and-white photographs of designs by Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Gregory Ain and many others were not just, as Hines noted, marked by clarity and high contrast. They were also carried aloft by a certain airiness of spirit, a lively confidence that announced that Los Angeles was the place where architecture was being sharpened and throwing off sparks from its daily contact with the cutting edge.

Indeed, Shulman's great success was due in part to the fact that he came of age in a period when there was no barrier between the idea of promoting Los Angeles and of uncompromised architectural creativity. Usually these two notions are locked in at least a symbolic struggle: The businessman is the enemy of the artist, and where profit and growth take root they unavoidably crowd out the flowering of authentic creativity.

Certainly, by the 1970s, many of our most talented architects had begun to adopt that attitude, designing buildings that aimed to subvert mass culture or crass profiteering or at least reflect the tensions and inequities in contemporary society. Shulman's Los Angeles -- particularly the quickly expanding city he documented in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s when he was in his prime -- was by contrast a place where business directly fueled artistic and architectural creativity and vice versa, often without guilt or any sense of contradiction.

Shulman saw himself as a working photographer first, a booster for Los Angeles second and an artist not at all; many of Sunday's speakers, including his daughter, Judy McKee, remarked that Shulman was surprised (though also partly vindicated) near the end of his life when his work was discovered and promoted as art by gallery owners, curators, collectors and publishers.

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funky diva marva whitney interviewed by michael shelly on wfmu


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the bedminster inn re listed at 595k


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the national hotel and the rathskeller, frenchtown nj


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diamonds dreams landscapes


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mayne's 41 cooper sq


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british library archival sound recordings blog

via things mag
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rebuilding a digital rome


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To which Marcantonio, at 4:52 p.m., posts in rejoinder: "Hemingway did not break completely with the past. His prose is stripped, unornamented and spare, but it's legible and there's a recognizable narrative. Its architectural equivalent is this: [Here Marcantonio inserts a photograph of Erik Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm public library, in a pre-modernist style largely stripped of ornament.]"

"Stein," he continues, "comes much closer to pure modernism -- not totally, as she uses recognizable words; however, her sentences really capture a modernist spirit. For example, in Tender Buttons we read: 'A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange in a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.'

"That," Marcantonio adds, "is essentially meaningless, only conveying the vaguest of sentiments. And it's intended to be meaningless. And I would argue that this type of stuff has absolutely not made writing better. If anything, it's used as a stick to defend illiteracy. The architectural equivalent is this: [Here Marcantonio inserts a photo of founding modernist Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, France, which looks like a rhinoceros], only Stein's work is superficially prettier and less threatening."

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Graffiti Charges Against Yoshitomo Nara Officially Dropped 08.31.09

Yoshitomo Nara, a multimillionaire pop artist, was arrested in February when cops spotted him drawing a smiley face on the wall of the First Avenue L-train stop with a marker in the wee hours of the morning. The art sensation, whose works of doe-eyed cartoonish children have sold for as much as $1.5 million, was given an adjournment in contemplation after being charged with making graffiti and criminal mischief and spending the night in jail. That meant if he kept his nose clean for six months, the charges would be dropped—which they were yesterday. “This case in now officially over,” said his lawyer, Guy Oksenhendler. The incident happened on the eve of the opening for an exhibit of his work at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea. The forty-nine-year-old, who lives in Tochigi, Japan, called the arrest “a nice experience in my life,” in which he got to meet people he would not otherwise have encountered. “Like in the movies,” he told Art in America magazine. The always cash-strapped Metropolitan Transit Authority missed an opportunity to make some money off the incident—their efficient employees wiped the graffiti off the wall. It's been estimated the brick it was on could have been sold for ten thousand dollars.
via vz
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Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night.
via vz
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weird book room

via ree
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pan terra


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0873
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fekner dk

vie eyeteeth
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Ledger Live: Historical Corruption Tour of Jersey City


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The horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, are still vivid for many Americans, especially the families of the victims. So it is tragic that on this Sept. 11, when family members, politicians and visitors go to the ceremonies at ground zero, they will be gathering at an unfinished place.

Instead of the two memorial pools designed by the architect Michael Arad, visitors will see their barest outlines. Instead of a circle of skyscrapers, the steel for the tallest tower stretches only five stories high. There are just the first skeletal signs of Santiago Calatrava’s magnificent transportation hub.

Why is it taking so long? That is a question that has been asked every Sept. 11. For the first few years, there were too many feuds — the architects Daniel Libeskind versus David Childs, the families versus the designers and builders, the community versus the demolition squads, the developer Larry Silverstein versus the insurance companies. Even now, Mr. Silverstein is locked in arbitration with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the site, because he wants more of the authority’s money to build more office towers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who now supports Mr. Silverstein’s excessive demands for public funds, once recognized the hazards of overbuilding office space in the area. In December 2002, a year after the attack, he bluntly acknowledged that “the twin towers’ voracious appetite for tenants weakened the entire downtown real estate market” — a possibility that today’s real estate experts fear if Mr. Silverstein builds too precipitously.

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