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developer sells 7 acres of coney island to nyc


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There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica. These four strands are woven together, over nine pages, to tell a story that ultimately transcends the simple issue of Helvetica and the subway.

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wild horses


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reflibarrow1
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the least unstable primer


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im still thinking about starting up painting again and looking around for very heavy weave fabric to use as a painting surface. ive already looked into weighty linens and canvas and even woven jute etc area rugs with heavier woven textures. still not satisfied. then it hits me, blasting mats!


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History Behind Adirondack Chairs
There is a little town on the edge of Lake Champlain, by the Adirondack Mountains, called Westport. The first Adirondack chairs, called Westport chairs, were named after this town. In Blue Mountain Lake, New York, the Adirondack Museum proudly preserves the Adirondack chair's interesting history.

Trial and error
Each summer in Westport, New York, a man named Thomas Lee enjoyed time with his large family. Stony Sides, the home this family occupied, had a shortage of patio furniture and Lee felt he could not find relaxation. So, in 1903, on the lawn in front of the house, Thomas Lee began nailing boards together, crafting new chair designs for his 22-member family to sample. History relates that, with all of this feedback, Lee created a unique new chair with a slanted back and seat, and the now well-recognized spacious armrests. Lee's family whole-heartedly approved.

Harry Bunnell
Thomas Lee knew a carpenter who owned a modest shop in town. Lee showed his new creation to the carpenter, Harry Bunnell. Bunnell predicted that the yearly residents flocking to the region during the summer would really appreciate Lee's chair. Although Lee originally intended the Adirondack chairs to make his family's summer stay at Stony Sides more pleasant, Bunnell saw the potential for great profit. In 1904, Bunnell requested a patent, calling the Adirondack chair the Westport chair. In the summer of 1905, and without Lee's knowledge, Harry Bunnell secured the patent for what would become one of the most recognized furniture pieces ever. Best Quality! Mahogany Adirondack Chair

Success
Harry Bunnell's Westport Adirondack chair became popular all around the region. Over a twenty year period, Bunnell experimented with some variations on the original, including child Adirondack chairs and tete de tetes. Bunnell's Adirondack chairs were made of hemlock, painted in either dark brown or green, and signed by the carpenter himself. Today, Bunnell's original chairs come at a hefty price, about $1,200 each (Bunnell sold them for around $4.00).

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atelierhaus

justin found this
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How to Construct Rietveld Furniture (the book)


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over the berlin wall



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aldo leopold bench

ALbench

To spy a Leopold bench in someone's yard is to know something about the family who there resides. Even if you haven't read Leopold's opening lines, "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot," from A Sand County Almanac, you will appreciate this easy-to-build bench. If left untreated, this stable bench develops a characteristic gray patina, however, putting some preservative where bench meets ground will prolong its life. Its form, resting alone under a tree or in congregation around a firepit, reminds us of Leopold's thoughtfulness:

"When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants."

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

Materials: One 2x6x33", one 2x10x30", one 2x8x10', six 3/8"x 31/2" carriage bolts with washer and nut, twelve 3/8" x 31/2" #12 or #14 flathead wood screws. Use Douglas Fir for your Leopold bench, if you can, and customize its size to suit you. The materials listed will make a 33" bench, but you may choose to build out to 48".
 

a simple build


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from the worlds going to hell in a bucket desk:

ferrari world abu dhabi

via things
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bartok

tms

justin found this one
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at moma

One of the many revelations here is the quasi-religious mysticism that infused parts of the Bauhaus in its earliest years. The first image you see when you step into the galleries is an Expressionist painting from 1919 by Johannes Itten, who ran the school’s introductory course. Its colorful abstract forms, which break down into a dense pattern of overlapping triangles, circles and rectangles, evoke the refracted glass of a stained-glass cathedral window.

Just below it is a design for a coffin lid drawn in 1920 by Lothar Schreyer, a director of the Bauhaus theater, for his wife (which, in a nice Freudian twist, was used for his mother’s burial instead). A woman’s figure, composed of interlocking circles and laid over a vibrant background of gray and blue, is framed by the lid’s trapezoidal outline. Farther along you come up against Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair, whose crudely chiseled wood frame looks so out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.

These works reveal an ambivalence about the machine age and what was being left behind. Even as Walter Gropius, the school’s founding director, was promoting a mass-production aesthetic, Itten and others were advocating a more atavistic approach, one that was rooted in the skills of the medieval craftsman. (Itten even began his classes on abstract art with a series of yoga exercises that were meant to reawaken the physical senses and bring the students in closer contact with their work.)

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The idea of "boundless abstraction" first surfaced in the water lily murals of Monet -- for Greenberg they were abstract in all but name, and set the precedent for Pollock’s all-over mural paintings -- and was extended by Kandinsky, however hesitantly, in his early works, particularly the famous First Abstract Watercolor (1911, scholars now say 1912 or 1913). There the eccentric continuum of petite color and line perceptions moves beyond the technical boundaries of the work, suggesting an infinite flux of uncontainable visual sensations. Pollock’s implicitly boundless mural abstractions are the climactic statement of "abstraction as total environment," correlate with the idea of the "environment as totally abstract."

Abstraction came to dominate thinking about the environment as well as art, and the triumph of abstraction signaled by such opposed movements as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism confirmed that it had become a generalized mode of perception and cognition: only when art and the environment were perceived and understood in abstract terms was their presence convincing. That is the point of van Doesburg’s five-step transformation of a naturally appearing cow into an abstract construction that seemed to have no relation to a cow, yet was an epitomizing summary of it in abstract terms. Duchamp’s readymades, which are everyday objects found in the environment, and given a little twist (or "assistance," as he said), can be read as abstract artifacts), however manqué. With the triumph of abstract visual thinking, every dumb thing reads as abstract art: thus the "surprise" of art, suddenly self-evident and extraordinarily present in the banally evident and ordinarily present.

It became de rigueur to see and understand things abstractly -- it was the modern take on them. To distill and convert old appearances into new abstractions was to modernize them. Sol LeWitt’s photographs of urban geometry -- manholes and brick walls -- makes the innate and intimate abstractness of the urban environment explicit, while suggesting the interchangeability and simultaneity of abstraction and the representation of reality. Mondrian came to prefer urban architecture to natural landscape because the former was overtly abstract while the latter was only subliminally abstract -- he spent the first part of his career extracting that abstractness, no doubt to convince himself that the abstract was "real." He came to regard his art as a "representation" of the "abstract real," in the (mystical?) belief that only the abstract was (really) real. Abstract art became the only "correct" and "real" art because it revealed the abstract truth, which made it seem "scientific" -- certainly Mondrian had what could be called a "scientific esthetics," as his preoccupation with precision suggests -- or at least an "experimental esthetics," for his oeuvre is a series of changing esthetic experiments designed to demonstrate the reality of the abstract.
kuspit building up to a stella russo review
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The Jazz Loft Project

Jazz in the Flower District:

Photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Flower District, in 1957. The place had already become a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. Among the visitors to the loft: Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Steve Swallow, Mose Allison, Bob Brookmeyer and hundreds more, over a period of about 8 years.

Four Thousand Hours!:

As Smith settled in and made a home and studio there, he became fascinated – and some say obsessed – with the life in and around the loft. He began to document the activity there in photographs and audio tapes. By the time he left the loft in the late ‘60’s, he’d shot 40,000 photos of musicians, artists, empty rooms, views out the window, jam sessions and parties. He’d recorded roughly 4000 hours of audio tape, including rehearsals for the famous 1959 Big Band concert at Town Hall, featuring the Thelonious Monk Tentet, as well as hundreds of jam sessions among players, known and obscure. Along with the music: conversations, meowing cats, casual visits from the cop on the beat, television and radio programs that happened to be on while the tape was running.

The Project:

Sara Fishko and WNYC, in collaboration with partners at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the New York Public Library, are building a radio series from the tapes of loft life discovered in W. Eugene Smith’s vast archive.

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missingchair
missing table and chairs

justin found this
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whole tree architecture


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beware the free chair


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bay ridge gingerbread house

via aw and brownstoner
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

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pressed penny


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The legend begins with Erwin George Baker. Baker was born in Indiana in 1882. Throughout the 1930s, he became an extremely popular motorcycle and automobile race driver. Cannonball BakerAmong the many accomplishments in his prestigious career; he won the first ever race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, placed 11th in the 1922 Indianapolis 500 and became the first commissioner of NASCAR. However, he gained his greatest notoriety in 1915 after a New York to Los Angeles drive which took 11 days and 7 hours. It was this intercontinental drive that earned him the nickname “Cannonball” after the famous Illinois Central railway car, “The Cannonball”. In 1933 he would make the cross country trek again, but this time, he’d do it in only 53 hours and 30 minutes, a record that would stand for almost 40 years. “Cannonball” Baker would pass away in 1960 as one of the most revered and popular automobile and motorcycle drivers of all time. He was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998.

Brock YatesFast forward to 1968. Brock Yates is an executive editor for Car & Driver magazine. He writes a scathing article called “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”, which critiques the auto industry, its management and its products which makes him infamous within the auto industry. Then, in 1971, Yates, along with fellow Car & Driver editor Steve Smith, decides to create an unofficial, and illegal, intercontinental road race. Inspired by the travel records of Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, the race begins in New York and ends in Redondo Beach, CA. Officially dubbed the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, the race would serve as a celebration of the US national highway system and also a protest of the soon-to-be passed 55mph speed limit. Yates wanted to prove that careful drivers can safely navigate this country’s interstate system at high speeds in much the same way the Germans do with the Autobahn. Yates also believed that if Erwin Baker could complete the journey in a record time of 53 hours and 30 minutes over unfinished roads and horrible conditions, then a modern driver should have no problem doing it over the uninterrupted expanse of the national interstate system.

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