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thoughtography
A. Kaprow - Rearrangeable Panels 2, 1958/94
Katarzyna Kobro
(1898 – 1951) Rosja – Polska RzeYba abstrakcyjna (1),
1924 szk?o, metal, drewno,
72 x 17,5 x 15,5
Dar grupy „a.r.”, 1932
wladyslaw strzeminski unism in painting
"Unist Composition II (10)", 1931, oil on canvas, Museum of Art, Lodz
Kompozycja Unistyczna 11, 1930-32 (essays)
Retain and restore those buildings that can be salvaged. Due to damage from contaminated water, extensive measures will be required to deal with mold. Gut-rehab will be required for many of the estimated 80% of the city’s 200,000 homes that have been damaged and, of course, many homes will not be salvageable. Building codes should address resistance to non-catastrophic flood damage—for example, the most flood-prone lower floors of houses should have no paper-faced drywall, no ductwork, no air handlers, no wall-to-wall carpeting, and no electrical service boxes. Retaining the character of New Orleans, which is defined in part by its vernacular architecture and its diversity, should be a high priority.
radical painting group chronology
marcia hafif beginning again
gallery artists charlotte jackson gallery SF NM
-- let’s elude to the new exhibition at Francis Naumann Fine Art on East 80th Street, where Mike Bidlo has installed 16 erased Willem de Kooning drawings of women, all of his own making -- the drawings and the erasures -- framed and matted, with a black-and-white photograph of the now-obliterated drawing taped to the back, and mounds of eraser shavings, or "ashes," displayed nearby under glass domes. Purchasers of each drawing get some residue of the destruction in a glassine envelope. The drawings are priced at $10,000 to $22,000.
Is Rauschenberg’s original avant-garde gesture, so shocking in its disrespect for art, and so Freudian as an esthetic Oedipal revolt, ever considered a blow against male chauvinism and its construction of woman as a devouring monster? It seems so here -- but the drawing isn’t so much eradicated as given a lighter touch.
Rauschenberg obliterated his de Kooning in 1953, during the dramatically avant-garde decade in which he also made empty white enamel paintings (designed as surfaces for cast shadows, in 1951) and painted the more-or-less identical Factum I and Factum II (as a poke at "Abstract Expressionist" authenticity, in 1957). For his "Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing" series, Bidlo drew copies of de K’s Surrealist portrait of a bug-eyed Elaine de Kooning from ca. 1940-41 through the "Women" series of the 1950s to a late Screaming Girls from 1967-68.
Rauschenberg’s de Kooning is now of no consequence, a mere generic marker. But Bidlo’s de K’s are all canonical, well-known, iconic. Before he proceeded, Bidlo sought Rauschenberg’s okay for the project. The master of Captiva, Fla., who turns 90 next month, sent up his sage advice: "All artists take their chances."
Warhol made the point himself : "So on one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty : i.e., I'm helping people waste their space, when what I really want to do is help them empty their space" (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol). And again, quoted by Alan Jones in Art Press n°199 : "I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and no-one should think he has a better or a worse picture than anyone else. And if the 'original picture' is good, they're all good."
[Q] From William B McMillan: “Do you know the origin and spelling of the police slang word pronounced skel (often heard on ABC’s NYPD Blue TV show in the USA) which seems to be used to refer to street crooks, thugs, or con men.”
Martha Stewart is perhaps not the first person one would associate with architect Gordon Bunshaft, the principal of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Responsible for such masterworks as the the Lever House (1952) and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (1960), Bunshaft may seem at odds with the Colonial revival coziness popularized by Stewart's magazines and television programs.
Yet when the architect's own home, Travertine House, was up for sale in 1994, Stewart was evidently smitten. "I'd never seen the house," she told Brendan Gill of The New Yorker upon buying the structure in 1995, adding that the minute she had heard of it, "I wanted it—just like that!"
This unlikely love-at-first-sight scenario ended last summer with the sale and demolition of the house, a rare domestic project of the architect that had been described as one of the country's most beautiful International-style structures.
Built in 1962 as Bunshaft's home, Travertine House was a symmetrical, single-story structure 26 feet wide by 100 feet long that balanced stone-walled pavilions on either side of a central glass-walled core. Incorporating double-T pre-stressed concrete roof panels also employed in Bunshaft's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. (1974), the house was designed to display his significant collection of modern art, which included works by Giacometti, Dubuffet, and Miro, situated throughout the house's interior and 2.4-acre grounds.
Travertine was "an important Modernist house, unique in Bunshaft's career," says architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who points out that it was a notable design even by the standards of the architecturally distinguished Georgica Pond area of the Hamptons, on Long Island.
Willed to the Museum of Modern Art along with the architect's art collection after Bunshaft's death in 1990, the house was sold to Stewart for $3.2 million in 1995 without any protective covenants beyond what a MoMA spokeswoman, quoted by the East Hampton Star in 2002 referred to as an offer "to maintain the integrity" of the building.
Despite these seemingly exemplary intentions, Stewart hired London architect John Pawson to redo the two-bedroom house. Interior partitions and detailing were removed and windows boarded up; a portion of the house's signature travertine floor was reportedly removed and installed in the kitchen of Stewart's new Bedford, N.Y., home—a perhaps more typically "Martha" complex of New England saltbox-inspired architecture.
The renovation was halted, however, when Stewart began feuding with neighbor Harry Macklowe, a real-estate developer who contested Stewart's plans to build several outbuildings, claiming they would block his view of the pond. The property was soon entangled in lawsuits and rumors. Meanwhile, piles of dirt and rubble from excavations on the site were left on the lawn of Travertine House for so long that, according to visitors, they sprouted weeds.
The two-year-long dispute was finally settled in 2003. Macklowe's appeals were dismissed, and Stewart was granted permission to renovate the studio and add three outbuildings to the property. However, these projects were never restarted, and the house, which Stewart had reportedly never spent a night in, fell into further decay. (Stewart's publicist did not return requests for information; MoMA confirmed the dates of the sale but declined to comment.)
Soon after the ImClone insider-trading scandal broke, Stewart transferred the property to her daughter, Alexis, who then put the deteriorated house on the market for $10.5 million. Last spring, Donald Maharam, a textiles magnate noted for reissues of classic mid-century designs, purchased the waterfront house for approximately $9.5 million.
Despite his interest in modernism, Maharam announced that he was going to demolish the house. In a statement released in June, Maharam described the structure as "decrepit and largely beyond repair," claiming that Stewart's attempts at renovation had ended with "substantial demolition of all but the existing roof." Travertine House was demolished on the last weekend of July.
In a neighborhood where new houses are normally up to five times the size of Travertine House, Maharam's plans for a new house are restrained by zoning ordinances that prevent new construction from exceeding the Bunshaft building's original footprint unless they are set back an additional 150 feet from nearby protected wetlands—an impossibility given the shape of the property. Maharam has decided to construct a modern building "in the spirit of the former house."
Local preservationists, who had been optimistic about the house given Stewart's apparent commitment, are still asking how such a significant structure could have been allowed to deteriorate. Krinsky says that the house was more important as an ensemble work when considered with the art collection and landscape: "There wasn't much left to preserve."
But Michael Gotkin, director of the Modern Architecture Working Group, doubts Maharam's assessment of the building as unsalvageable. "Donald Maharam has made a small fortune by reviving mid-century modern designers like Alexander Girard and Irving Harper … it's too bad that he did not have the same regard for Gordon Bunshaft."
Tom Killian, who worked with Bunshaft, criticizes MoMA for not attempting to protect the house as part of its sale to Stewart, pointing out that the house was left to MoMA. "Whatever the Maharams and Ms. Stewart may have done, I feel that the museum is the real culprit."
Whoever is to blame, it's clear that the house's loss is "another blow against Modernism's sense of modesty and direction and focus," Goldberger says. "I hope the new design will not be another situation where this tradition is sacrificed."
Scaffolding is expected to start going up late this week at 2 Columbus Circle, opening the way for a controversial transformation of Edward Durell Stone's building into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design.stones building has its faults and cloepfil's new re-design is great. i still think its the wrong thing to do though.
"We are remaking a building," Brad Cloepfil, the project's architect, said yesterday. "Restructuring it, recladding it, letting the light in."
no-bid katrina reconstruction
reopening NO by zip code
Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.
What this storm hit was largely American auto-centric sprawl that was largely below sea-level, wrapped by extensive levees, exposed to huge volumes of water, and sinking in the peat of the backswamps. This development pattern, and the resource extraction industries that supported it, created the conditions for this disaster to occur. This was not an act of God, nor a natural disaster -- this was a public policy disaster. New Orleanians need to understand this in order to make well-informed decisions about what and how to rebuild. That means reflecting on public policies towards coastal erosion, the taming of the Mississippi River, sprawl, and sea-level rise due to global warming.
Disaster. Relief. Housing.
The words fairly echo with dismal images of people forced to live in squalor, desperation and sorrow -- crowds packed into stadiums, improvised shantytowns, rows of identical trailers, school cafeterias turned into shelters. Yet these words also evokes a different picture -- where shelter fulfills its highest, most utopian function. Where a simple structure can provide comfort and warmth and dignity when all else has failed. Where housing literally offers relief from disaster.
good bye public planning process. the taking of snohetta at ground zero 1, 2, 3
Las Vegas buildings seem forever either to be getting built or getting torn down, and few have ever been considered for any sort of architectural preservation. On the other hand, few are like La Concha motel, or at least the 1,000-square-foot lobby that remains. Designed by the architect Paul Revere Williams - whose work includes the four-legged terminal at Los Angeles International Airport - the 44-year-old lobby is considered one of the last and best-preserved examples of 1950's Googie architecture.going to miss all the american googie that dates from around the time of my birth. and holding with the notion that 2 cc is kind of googie too
The methods of determining the value of historic preservation vary widely, and several challenges persist in applying economic methods to the field. This discussion paper, which is followed with an extensive and annotated bibliography, reviews the current findings on the value of historic preservation and the methods used to assess that value, making the case for needed improvement if the economics of preservation is to more objectively and rigorously quantify the effects of historic preservation.from the brookings institution
Toward that end, the paper calls for a hybrid of the most promising analytical methods and more collaboration across research fields. By combining methods, the particular shortcomings or blind spots of different methods can perhaps offset one another. Without further refinement, the ability to make conclusive, generalized statements about the economics of preservation will remain elusive.
the swimmer ~~\o/~~ w/ link to full 1968 v canby nyt review
gonna need a bigger crane
In a letter to John C. Whitehead, the foundation's chairman, Ms. Gund lamented the erosion of the original master plan for the site, which was drafted to "permanently memorialize what happened on Sept. 11, while also bringing and weaving the site back into the fabric of the city."
Now, she wrote in her letter dated Thursday, "Governor Pataki (and it saddens me to say, Senator Clinton has joined him) has caved and virtually ensured that there will be no cultural component to the redevelopment."
"I hate to walk away from this situation and leave it to you and the others to sort out," continued Ms. Gund, who is a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. "But I am afraid that the governor and those few family members have succeeded in destroying what could not be destroyed on that awful Tuesday, which is our hope."