Schwarz
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These came from an estate in Virginia where the man was a former police accident and crime scene photographer in the 1950s. He did not use a large fancy press camera; this was a rural area which did not have the benefit of the best equipment. The smaller pictures (3 1/2 x 3 1/2) appear to have been taken by a Brownie-type camera, The larger ones were taken by an early Polaroid. There are 32 in all, which show a variety of wrecks. There is body in a road and another of a person under a tree being covered up next to damaged cars. Several photos show policemen. There is nothing written on the backs. Photo quality is still sharp and clear. Interstesting, historical look at auto hazards in the pre-seat belt days.
nyc gridlock allert days:
-Friday, Nov. 18
-Wednesday, Nov. 23
-Thursday, Nov. 30
-Friday, Dec. 9
-Thursday, Dec. 15
-Friday, Dec. 16
-Wednesday, Dec. 21
-Thursday, Dec. 22
-Friday, Dec. 23
dylanisms
What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game. --jb
terry southern
first houses ave a and third street
This field has been the subject of intensive research and discussion over the last few years. Developmental psychologists now investigate the various ways in which children acquire their skills by copying their parents and peers, and the same issue arises in connection with the widely disputed subject of culture amongst primates and other animals. For instance, how, if at all, do chimps acquire their manual skills? But then, for that matter, how do human fashions spread? Is there really such a thing as a meme? What's involved in copying someone? What do we mean by impersonation? What is mimicry exactly? How do children acquire the accent of their region? How do parrots do so? How does culture determine what we decide to copy? How does social influence work and why is it that certain behaviors such as the high five spreads through one part of the community while leaving others unaffected? How does fashion work and what determines its influence and spread? What's the difference between imitation and emulation? How do living organisms acquire their protective invisibility by reproducing the visible appearance of their environment? What's the difference between concealment and disguise? And then of course there's the question of computers and robots. Can robots copy human behavior and to what extent are computers copies of ourselves?from here
this is me not going there / from here
Maybe it’s time to buy Larry Silverstein out of his lease, Bloomberg mused to the editorial board of the New York Daily News. Ten million square feet of high-end office space may ultimately provide the highest rent for World Trade Center developer Silverstein, but it will require government subsidies and a potentially long wait because there’s neither enough insurance money nor a strong enough commercial office market to build it all now. Instead, why not get going faster and with fewer subsidies and a different mix of office, residential, retail and public space. “I think it’s time to see what the marketplace really wants and perhaps we can better accommodate that,” Bloomberg innocently remarked.
But Duchamp, if not a chess grandmaster, was certainly far beyond average in his passion for the game and its theories. He was obsessed with chess problems and, in 1932, actually co-wrote a book on the game about obscure and unlikely endgame situations called "Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled." And Duchamp got together with another chess-loving refugee from Europe, Max Ernst. Ernst, it seems, did not have the same kind of fascination with chess theory as Duchamp. He saw the game in more mythic terms: the clash of armies, the authority of royal figures, the weird metamorphosis of symbolic beings - part bird, part human, part fish - in other words, as a field in which the hybrid forms of his own painting and sculpture could also be displayed.
A head of its time" can be more than a figure of speech. The phrase is literally true of a house designed by the architect, painter and sculptor Tony Smith in 1951. The house - which is located in a former granite quarry overlooking Long Island Sound in Guilford, Conn., and which was designed for Fred Olsen, an art collector, and his wife, Florence - is not futuristic. It displays none of the sci-fi fixations that 20th-century designers used to thrust into public consciousness when called upon to visualize 21st-century life. But the Olsen House waited nearly 50 years to acquire two owners perceptive enough to appreciate Smith's original concept and an architect sensitive enough to resurrect it from decades of aesthetic disregard. Spared at the last minute from the wrecking ball, the house has re-emerged as a model dwelling for life in the year 2005.from nyt fall design magazine
For the 1984 Issey Miyake boutique in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York, he created a variation on his famous “Star Terrazzo”in which he updated a traditional flooring material by mixing shards of multicolored glass into concrete. In this case the shards were broken Coca-Cola bottles and the terrazzo was extended to cover many surfaces, serving not only for flooring, but also for columns and thin wall panels through which light passed to create a jewel-like glow.schwarz worked for bg at the time and observed the installation of the IM boutique. beautiful. sadly no web pics available.
Mayor Ray Nagin did not name an architect or planner to his 17-member “Bring New Orleans Back” commission on rebuilding. But, he appointed Joseph Canizaro, a local real estate mogul who has developed more than $1 billion in projects, to lead the committee on land use. The mayor later named Reed Kroloff, dean at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, and Ray Manning, AIA, a local architect, to co-chair the subcommittee on urban design. Peter Trapolin, AIA, another local architect, has been chosen to chair the subcommittee on preservation. And, the commission has appointed Philadelphia-based Wallace, Roberts & Todd to devise a temporary master plan for rebuilding the city.
The Bring New Orleans Back Commission was established to resolve conflicting visions of reconstruction, to help decide how to spend federal relief dollars, restart a crippled economy and rebuild neighborhoods. Among the 17 commissioners are a few religious and cultural figures—including musician Winton Marsalis—but most commissioners represent business interests. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, which currently does not include any planners or architects, will name its own task force on rebuilding, according to AIA COO Jim Dinegar. He says the authority has approached the AIA for appointment recommendations.
It wants the government to set up spore testing sites as New Orleans starts to gut mouldy buildings and the spores are released into homes and into the air.
"The outdoor mould spore concentrations could easily trigger serious allergic or asthmatic reactions in sensitive people," said Dr. Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defence Council.
"The indoor air quality was even worse, rendering the homes we tested dangerously uninhabitable by any definition."
The group tested 14 sites in the New Orleans area for mould spores over a three-day period in mid-October, some six weeks after Hurricane Katrina flooded large parts of the city.
They reported spore counts as high as 645,000 spores per 1 cubic metre (35 cu ft) inside a building in the badly flooded Uptown area, and levels up to 102,000 spores per cubic metre in the air.
Solomon said a normal level would be about 25,000 spores per cubic metre, and the National Allergy Bureau views outdoor mould counts above 50,000 as "very high."
Solomon said her group was testing again this week, and those results, due in a couple of weeks, would show if mould levels were subsiding, or if repair work was releasing more spores into the air.
"I do not anticipate that New Orleans will be a mouldy city forever, but as long as there is this much mould growing, and all this work going on, the mould is going to be stirred up, and people with allergies need to be concerned," she said.
This story also led us to the streets. We called our colleague, Steve Edwards at WBEZ, to see if he could help us locate any hidden grills in Chicago. He contacted The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which in turn put us in touch with Jeffrey Newton. Jeffry has been homeless or in shelters most all his life, from boy's homes, to reformatories, to prison by age 17. Then he moved out on the streets, where every day he goes "trailblazing" -- looking for food, shelter, work, the resources he needs to make it through the day.kitchen sisters / hidden kitchens
Jeffry learned to cook from his grandmother. He feels an urge to cook, especially for other people -- under the overpass on Chicago's Wacker Drive; on a George Foreman Grill plugged into a power pole; with a hot clothing iron to toast a grilled cheese sandwich.
In fact, Goldfinger was a modernist. In a not-so-subtle piece of social criticism, Ian Fleming took the name of his most villainous character from a Marxist architect, Erno Goldfinger, known for dramatic high-rise residential towers whose forms echoed the reduced, brutal lines of grain silos and cement factories. Like many Britons, Fleming was appalled by the way buildings like Goldfinger's were transforming London's 19th-century skyline. Prince Charles continues this crusade against the "monstrous carbuncles" of modernist design to this day.
I've been thinking about this stuff recently because I'm in Italy again, staying in an apartment in that retro-Renaissance city, Venice, with only techno-dystopian DVDs like Blade Runner and Until The End of the World to while away the hours (it's been a bit rainy). I've also been to Milan, where I saw a wonderful exhibition called Inventing the Future, a retrospective about the work of industrial designer Joe Colombo, who died of a heart attack on his 41st birthday in 1971.
Colombo's last project interested me the most: the Total Furnishing Unit developed for the 1972 MOMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.
Influenced by the space program, the Total Furnishing Unit was a capsule for Earth living, a 28-square meter "habitat cell" consisting of kitchen, cupboard, bed and bathroom, all made of molded plastic, ready to be arranged as an all-in-one living solution -- a kind of capsule pod -- at the center of an open-plan space.
Resourceful environmental leaders have unearthed opportunity amidst the wreckage left behind by this year's record hurricane season and the battering of the Gulf Coast. They've crafted plans for everything from the building of new, green, affordable housing to the tightening of auto fuel-economy standards.
Of course, powerful people with less eco-friendly agendas have seen opportunity too. In their eyes, the devastating storms were not-so-green lights to fast-track brown legislation.
Such efforts to exploit the hurricanes for different political ends will no doubt continue as the process of rebuilding New Orleans and other devastated communities stretches over years or decades.
Here we examine 17 proposals -- both pro- and anti-environment -- that flooded in soon after Katrina and Rita, and offer predictions for their success.
In the weeks since President George Bush’s speech in New Orlean’s Jackson Square, in which he promised to spare no effort in rebuilding the area, FEMA has alarmingly failed to advance any plan for the return of evacuees to temporary housing within the city or to connect displaced locals with reconstruction jobs. In fact, new barriers are being erected against their return. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metropolitan New Orleans, landlords, galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values, are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)
Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned “to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.”
Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Charlestine Jones, spokesperson for the Forest Park Tenants Association, recently protested that the agencies in charge of these housing complexes, including HUD, “are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.”
Minority homeowners also face relentless pressures not to return. Insurance compensation, for example, is typically too small to allow homeowners in the eastern wards of New Orleans to rebuild if and when authorities re-open their neighborhoods.
Similarly, the Small Business Administration—so efficient in recapitalizing the San Fernando Valley in the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake—has so far dispensed only a few million dollars despite increasingly desperate pleas from tens of thousands of homeowners and small businesspeople facing imminent foreclosure or bankruptcy.
In fact, brokers say, many New Orleans houses are commanding higher-than-pre-Katrina prices, largely because of a shortage of habitable dwellings. True, the speculation that occurred in nearby cities like Baton Rouge (where prices shot up as much as 30 percent after the storm) hasn't come to New Orleans.
But undamaged homes in desirable neighborhoods are bringing in 5 to 10 percent more than they did in August before the hurricane hit, according to Arthur Sterbcow, president of Latter & Blum Realtors, the city's oldest real estate brokerage firm.
At the same time, in parts of the city devastated by the storm, no one is making offers yet, brokers say, while attendance at open houses is way down.
neutra's cyclorama building at gettysburg and the painted solders once inside
secret garden of the high line