Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
"If you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them."
To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.
Davis' view of Dubai -- one of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, and for the last decade the biggest construction site this side of Shanghai -- is marked by stories of greed, exploitation and enough conspicuous consumption to make a hedge fund manager blush. In classically over-the-top fashion, he characterizes Dubai as "the ultimate Green Zone," a fantasyland built on the backs of overworked and underpaid foreign workers who are violently brought into line every time they try to organize. It's a place, Davis says, that "earns its living from fear," with a skyline that is "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."
But as Blakely himself is quick to note—in his quiet, professorial, and vaguely irritated way—he is exactly the right man for this job. He has authored or co-authored several urban planning texts, is chairman of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney in Australia, and is the namesake of the Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of California, Riverside. He got his expertise in post-disaster planning in his home state of California (he grew up in San Bernardino), where he was involved in rebuilding after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1991 Oakland fires. He also happened to be teaching at the New School University in Manhattan in the fall of 2001 and assisted with neighborhood planning after the World Trade Center attacks.
In speeches after he started work, Blakely put forth some big-ticket ways in which New Orleans could reinvent itself and rise above selling trinkets to tourists. (“We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts,” he said in a speech last spring.) New Orleans should strive to once again become a trade and travel gateway to Latin America, he said. He hoped that well-orchestrated investments could build the city into a major bioscience research center. He'd like to see tax credits help revive the grand old theaters of Canal Street and create a “Broadway South,” just as tax credits have made Louisiana into Hollywood South. (It's third, after California and New York, in attracting moviemaking expenditures.)
And he believes the underused Mississippi riverfront, which contains some of the highest ground in the city, could become a centerpiece of development for the new New Orleans. After attracting entries from teams that included Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind, the New Orleans Building Corp.'s “Reinventing the Crescent” competition was won last December by the team led by architects Enrique Norten and Allen Eskew, landscape architect George Hargreaves, and urban planner Alex Krieger, who together will craft a plan to bring parkland and other public uses to a six-mile stretch of wharves
A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk
After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.
Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.
By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.
“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”
New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.
Space-age cubes, rooftop pods, giant caravan cities and garden sheds you can practically live in ... Steve Rose chronicles the rise of portable architecture.
Ever since Le Corbusier and the Italian futurists salivated over biplanes, steam trains, ocean liners and automobiles in the early 20th century, architecture has been in awe of moving machines. But, as much as the modernist pioneers eulogised these dynamic inventions, they never dared disobey the sacred rule that says buildings stay where they're built. Architecture is architecture. Unleash it from its static condition and you're in some hazy no- man's-land between the disciplines of building, product and vehicle design. Yet this nebulous zone is becoming an intriguing place to visit.
The Hill Country Jacal (a Mexican term referring to a lean-to structure) is a weekend retreat located on a rock ledge above Bear Creek west of San Antonio. The simple screened cedar pole structure is oriented towards the prevailing summer breeze and creek while its stone wall shelters the living space from the northwest winter winds. The thick limestone wall houses an outdoor shower, bunk beds and composting toilet. The screened living sgood find justin!
deconstructing deutsche bank
What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.
The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.
3.5" width jute webbing on wood stretchers
gee's bend rugs on sale at abc carpets
A storm is brewing in New Orleans, and it has nothing—and everything—to do with wind and water. Community organizations, homeowners, and at least one member of the City Council say the city is using federal funding to sweep away historic, flooded, but repairable housing as ruthlessly as did Katrina. Yet city representatives assert they're simply trying to facilitate the recovery and protect the health and safety of residents.
These old homes stood up to the wrath of the hurricane, and now the city is trying to take them down," says Karen Gadbois, founder of Squandered Heritage, a Web site that tracks the loss of historic properties to demolition. "Many of the properties on the list do appear extremely damaged, but others have people living in them, and many are in the process of being remediated or renovated. There are homeowners who are desperately trying to have their properties removed from the list."
City Councilperson Stacy Head, whose district includes the recently demolished Gallo Theater and some Katrina-flooded areas, says the entire demolition process is "incredibly broken." Says Head, "Houses that should be demolished and are unquestionably an imminent danger ?c are not being torn down. Yet other houses that certainly can be restored, that are part of this city's fabric and its economic value, are on the list for demolition."
Sly Stone vanished into rumor in the 1980s, remembered only by the great songs ("I Want to Take You Higher," "Dance to the Music") he left behind. What's become of the funky leader of the Family Stone since he forsook his Woodstock-era utopianism for darkness, drugs, and isolation? After a few sightings—most notoriously at the 2006 Grammys—the author tracked the last of the rock recluses to a Bay Area biker shop, to scope out where Stone's been, where he's headed, and what's behind those shades.
live performance videos from the north sea jazz festival july '07
The only Museum of it's kind in the world, "Electric Ladyland - the First Museum of Fluorescent Art" houses a large room-sized Fluorescent Environment that the visitor enters, becomes a part of the piece of Art, and then experiences "Participatory Art."
In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and art. Why has art failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, unlike performing art? Why has art simply retreated into painting, or surrendered to digital technology? Accidents, Virilio claims, can free us from speed's inertia. As technological catastrophes, accidents are inventions in their own right.
An English duo active in the late seventies and most of the eighties, Renaldo and the Loaf consisted of a pathologist (David Janssen or "Ted The Loaf") and an architect (Brian Poole or "Renaldo Malpractice") who made music often considered strange.via vz
By their own assertion, they achieved their unique sound in part by striving to get unnatural synthesizer-like sounds using only what instruments they had available (acoustic ones.) To that end they routinely used muffled and de-tuned instruments, and often to striking effect, tape loops / manipulation. The two released four full length albums, one collection, various songs on compilation albums, and several self-produced demos. They were "discovered" by The Residents when Brian dropped off a tape at Ralph Records headquarters in San Francisco, during a visit to the US. After being signed to Ralph, they collaborated with The Residents on Title in Limbo.
dirty frank
And maybe he’s right. He did indeed live though an interesting time in Chicago’s history, evidenced by the recent surge of literature tracing the era. Not only "Loving Frank" and "Death in a Prairie House" open those doors—Erik Larson’s "The Devil in the White City," of course, is the definitive take on 1890s Chicago, and Karen Abbott’s "Sin in the Second City," about the Everleigh Club, the brothel of brothels, is causing quite a stir this year.
The [canal] flushing is necessary because, while most of Amsterdam’s 2,800 houseboats have running water, electricity and gas heat, few are connected to sewerage systems and continue to spill their waste into the canals.
The houseboats’ lack of toilet training is their dirty little secret, one that sits uncomfortably with a new generation of wealthier, more demanding owners who are leading a gentrification of the houseboat scene. In the process, they are displacing the less affluent boat people, many of whom are relics of the 1960s and 1970s era of flower power now struggling to pay the upkeep on their boats.
today in concrete :
George Caria feels quite safe in his new offices at 149 N. Stone Ave., where the city of Tucson has restored a former bank building to its 1950s concrete-bunker glory.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
There is no doubt that modernist architecture can be hard to love, and hard to defend. Few people miss the sink estates, the monolithic offices on podiums that mercilessly broke up the ancient street plans of our city centres, the rain-stained concrete or the brutal multi-storey car parks.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Mill House Marco Gorini of Strato Cucine
mexico 6 x 40' container house in progress
links to more pics / so far pretty fugly. hope it takes a turn for the better
group photo
quarry resort
via bc
sinkhole via jz