Schwarz
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crackers dont drink the orange kool-aid
homework
beck(y)
icosavillage pods
from ready made magazine via vz
It's hard to believe that anyone interested in urban planning is unaware of Critical Mass, but just in case, here's the nutshell history and "definition:" Back in 1992, a number of folks in San Francisco posited themselves along Market Street, holding signs that read "Make Room for Bikes," while encouraging passing cyclists to join them that Friday night for a bike ride through the city. A few people showed up for the initial ride that September night, so they decided to do it again the following month. More riders showed up in October, more in November, and so on. Since then, crowds averaging one thousand cyclists (often quite a bit more) crowd Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero for what has become a monthly San Francisco staple. The phenomenon has spread around the globe to about 300 different cities.
Susette Kelo and several other homeowners filed a lawsuit after city officials announced plans to bulldoze their residences to clear the way for a riverfront hotel, health club and offices. The residents refused to move, arguing it was an unconstitutional taking of their property.
The dance floor that helped to fuel the '70s disco craze goes up for auction on April 1, with bids expected both in a live sale and on the Internet's eBay site.
The 1977 movie earned Travolta an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Tony Manero, a 19-year-old Brooklyn paint-store clerk whose mundane existence is forgotten when he takes to the dance floor every Saturday.
The floor, which has more than 300 colored, flashing lights under a Perspex surface, had been a fixture in the 2001 Odyssey nightclub since the movie was made.
Architectural critic for the New Republic, Martin Filler has been studying the rebuilding efforts at the World Trade Center site. As a result of his research he believes that both Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Freedom Tower and Michael Arad, designer of the Memorial, have been made obsolete participants in the rebuilding effort.
originator of surf photography tom blake
don james pre-war surf photography
john "doc" ball
shotgun golf
childs not all first-rate
AFTER struggling to fix up a brownstone in Harlem for the last 16 months, Meyghan Hill, a model and actress, and her husband, Daniel Scarola, a ballroom dancing instructor, are thinking about giving up and moving out. But what may drive them away is not the neighborhood, which they have come to love, nor their four-family house, where they have painstakingly stripped a century of varnish and paint from doors and balusters, but the shock of a tax notice they received last month from the New York City Department of Finance.
The notice indicated that the taxes on their 19-foot-wide house, only $4,100 when they bought it, would be going up in July to about $23,600, a fivefold increase of $19,000 - more, they say, than they can possibly afford after paying their hefty mortgage. Right now, they have no tenants
monuments of passaic
video stream princeton lecture archive
via tesugen blog / lots of good science/art architecture (see previous schwarz post) poly sci and eno material in his archives
Wanted: Umberto Eco Quote On Architecture
I'm translating a text I've written into English, in which I'm quoting Umberto Eco from the Swedish translation of his out of print La struttura assente. In this book, Eco devotes several chapters to a discussion on semiotics and architecture. The passage I'm quoting, and would like the English translation of, can be found on the first page of the major chapter titled “Function and the Sign” (or something equivalent).
Here's my attempt at a translation:
Jeffrey Lewis History of Punk on the Lower East Side - Stream it in: Realaudio or MP3. It's a nine-minute tour de force tracking New York punk from Harry Smith to the New York Dolls
hissssssssssssssssssss
Billy Klüver
In the first part of the paper I will discuss how the universalist attitude toward town planning, as stated in Le Corbusier’s La Charte d’Athènes (1943), was challenged by the younger CIAM members who were looking for an approach that would take into account the individual, as expressed in their “Statement on Habitat/Doorn Manifesto” (1954). In the second part I will examine the manner in which they balanced this thinking with universalist ideal as demonstrated in the project they presented at CIAM 9 (1953) and CIAM 10 (1956). In the third section I will examine their stance against universalization as expressed in their critique of the CIAM “grid,” both as an epistemological framework and method of presentation. The protagonists who made contributions to this new way of thinking are referred to as the ‘younger members’ before September 1954 – when they were first recognized as Team 10.
hiving mesh
The utopias proposed by [Yves] Klein and Superstudio are rooted in an architectural systems aesthetics that mobilized the immaterial as a form of instrumental and political critique. Its origins can be found in the challenge to entrenched modern planning ideals launched by the Team 10(7) architectural group in postwar Britain, a time in which new techniques of military Operations Research and cybernetics were being made public. These had advanced a form of systems thinking that saw complexes of people and machines as information processing systems governable through procedures of decision and control. For Team 10, cities and buildings were no exception. Social change, previously imposed top-down by an avant-garde who assumed an a priori agency of architecture in bringing it about, was now seen as emerging bottom-up from society's own internal processes, which architecture and planning were to steward. The task of the designer was to build the hardware—the amplifiers, attenuators, and gates that regulated the rate and intensity of flow within those systems. At minimum, architecture was to be designed to not get in its way.
renzo piano for the hour on charlie rose
De l'Ecotais reveals the difference between the working methods of the two pioneers of the absurd: "Marcel Duchamp looked for his ready-mades in department stores, randomly, at a given moment. He then gave them titles and signed them. Man Ray, on the other hand, usually constructed images from everyday objects, which were then deliberately transformed by photography. It is the fact of being reproduced and relabelled which gives life to the objects."
So I guess Man Ray, who died in 1976, would have been delighted at the two dates on the Canberra label. But would he insist on the new versions being destroyed so that a third date might be added in future? As Umberto Eco famously wrote: "When originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original."
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"Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It's not distrust. I don't want to subject the original to further wear." "But Ingolf's copy wasn't the original," I said. "The parchment was the original." "Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original."
-- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 18
"From the beginning, Olmsted and Vaux strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce art into the park. In their Greensward Plan of 1858—the competition entry that won them the commission—they wrote that while it would be possible to build elegant buildings in the park, "we conceive that all such architectural structures should be confessedly subservient to the main idea, and that nothing artificial should be obtruded on the view." They considered art a similar distraction from the restorative purpose of the landscape and kept statues out of the park. The sole exceptions were Emma Stebbins's Angel of the Waters, atop the Bethesda Fountain, and a series of figures representing prominent Americans that were to adorn the Terrace, but were never erected due to a shortage of funds."
By not burying a thing the dirt enters into the concept, and little enough separates the dirt inside the excavation from that outside.
Claes Oldenburg
"This account of Earthworks, sculptures best known as enormous mounds and excavations in remote wilderness environments, begins by looking into a hole dug in New York City's Central Park. The very fact that on Sunday, October 1, 1967, an excavation as a work of art was produced by Claes Oldenburg, one who can not be considered an earthworker but who was an innovator in the realms of Happenings and Pop Art, suggests the status in the art world at that time of working with geological material. Exactly a year later, at the Dwan Gallery in New York City, documentation of this work and also other sculpture by Oldenburg would go on view among sculpture by nine other artists in the exhibition earth works, the debut of the genre. Dug a year before that show brought the movement to widespread public attention, Oldenburg's temporary trench epitomizes the multiple sources of Earthworks and the relation of these works to the "dirt" around them."