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alex ross the rest is noise
In 1954 the artist Asger Jorn wrote to Max Bill, “Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.” Bill, a former Bauhaus student and the founding director of the newly opened Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, a self-anointed successor to the Bauhaus, replied, “Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, but the meaning of a movement that represents a well-defined doctrine.” To which Jorn shot back, “If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, it is the name of a doctrine without inspiration — that is to say, dead.”1from the fall/winter '07 issue of the harvard design magazine
This exchange between the orthodox Bill, who would run his school like a monastery, and Jorn, who as a provocation would create something called the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus before going on to cofound the Situationist International a couple years later, was more than just an epistolary joust. Virtually since its founding in 1919, throughout its fourteen-year existence in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin under three successive directors, and in the three quarters of a century since it closed its doors in advance of the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been the object of veneration, hostility, controversy, and myth. It has been variously portrayed as a seminal experiment in pedagogy, a hotbed of radicalism, the standard-bearer of the ethos of functionalism and industrial technology, an aesthetic style, and most broadly, an “idea” synonymous with the spirit of early 20th-century modernity itself. In a new collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, it is a cultural manifestation closely linked to the political and economic vicissitudes of its times.
Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War comprises nine historical essays, all but two written specifically for the volume. Each draws on recent scholarship, and several are based on original archival research. Without purporting to offer a comprehensive narrative, the collection traverses a series of significant topics and themes that span from the school’s prehistory in the debates of the German Werkbund and the institutions of the Prussian state to its Cold War reception and aftermath in the United States and Germany. American readers will encounter much that is new and even revelatory about this familiar institution. Collectively the essays work to dismantle the hagiography that still surrounds the Bauhaus legacy — largely (though not exclusively) a product of the public relations campaign waged by Walter Gropius after coming to the U.S. — and they attest to the tangled interrelations between avant-garde politics and real politics.
Apropos of “real politics,” among the subjects reexamined by several authors in the volume is the Bauhaus’s legendary status as a left-wing, utopian outpost with its origins in Weimar Republic social democracy. As John V. Maciuika’s opening essay makes clear, the reorientation of the applied arts to industrial production, the raising of the inferior status of German goods in international markets, and to this end, the reform of design education were already national priorities from the opening years of the 20th century under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Likewise, the Bauhaus’s “Bolshevist” reputation was more or less borne out under its second director, Hannes Meyer, who took over the school in 1927. The politics of its other two directors, Gropius (who served from 1919 to 1927) and Mies van der Rohe (from 1930 to 1933), were ambiguous, to say the least. Although Gropius was an ardent supporter of the November 1918 revolution that ushered in the Weimar Republic, he subsequently sought to steer a course between the extremes of left and right, especially in the increasingly hostile and conservative atmosphere that surrounded the school first in Weimar and then in Dessau. In an interesting contribution, James-Chakraborty (who, besides editing the book, is responsible for two essays) compares Gropius to the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who had designed and founded the arts and crafts school in Weimar that preceded the Bauhaus and became part of its first campus, and who had also recommended Gropius as its director. James-Chakraborty reveals how Gropius’s status as a German national made him a more acceptable public servant than the cosmopolitan Van de Velde. Ironically, the older architect was in many ways more of a reformer than Gropius, with social views in the tradition of William Morris and a more egalitarian stance on gender issues.
SABENA (Mexico) Pine log bar with three matching stools, on iron frames. Branded mark. Bar: 34" x 98" x 21 1/2"
auction results (hammer prices) in for day one solo rago arts fall '07 modern
happy phace at 7a
gwar at the pyramid
dean and the weenies
via adman
cave stomp '07 featuring the sonics nov 2, 3, 4
Genius Design: The House That Moves With You
via jz
Believe me when I say : Hillbilly Music Is Here To Stay ! The purpose of the sharing of these musical files, for the great majority published more than fifty years ago, is to make discover the presented musical genres - Good Ole Country Music, Hillbilly, Ole Time, Western Swing, Rockabilly, Rock'n Roll - and when these recordings are available on commercial supports to invite you to acquire them with the concerned labethx oball / via the very cool uncle gills rockin' archive
Her facts are frightening. Here's a small sample:
More than 160,000 US bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete.
There are 1,237 toxic waste sites in the United States.
The cost of returning US schools to an acceptable physical condition is $286 billion.
The cost of making aging drinking-water systems safe is $11 billion.
The National Park Service estimates its maintenance backlog at $6.1 billion.
The number of unsafe dams, a potential threat to human life, rose by one third in the last decade.
Most of these numbers are taken from independent studies by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Goldhagen published these and other facts in a recent article in The New Republic magazine, which is where I first learned of her interest in infrastructure. Summing up, the ASCE estimates that the cost of bringing US infrastructure up to a minimum acceptable standard is, oh, about $1.6 trillion.
nice seasonal set here
classic five six seven
The largest demolition of Lustron houses began this week.
Built in the 1950s, 34 all-steel houses on the U.S. Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Va., will soon be reduced to rubble, despite preservationists' request to salvage materials.
"I'm really disappointed. It's just a huge loss for Lustron owners across the country," says Todd Zeiger, director the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana's northern regional office. "You can't make these parts anymore."
Only one house was saved: A Delaware man forked up $15,000 to dismantle a three-bedroom house for his retirement. "When I was notified I was awarded a home, I went down there and took a walk through the neighborhood, and this one jumped out as being the one in the best condition," says engineer and architect Dave Mills. "I understand taking some buildings down, but I think a better effort could have been made to save these."
Guests will be able to rent the pan-shaped house to raise money for the Korea Toilet Assocation
redundancy redundancy redundancy
tony fitzpatrick new orleans project
via vz
A woman walking her two dogs along Fifth Avenue recently stared up at the Guggenheim Museum and contemplated the paint swatches hanging from the northeast side of the building, high above the street.
The first, a buff yellow, represents the original exterior color chosen by the museum's architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The second is a sample of the off-white shade that, with slight variations, has been the museum's public face for years.
"The yellow one ... it looks too urine-y," she said, shaking her head. "I think Frank Lloyd Wright probably would have decided to change it to the lighter color eventually anyway."
i love how the new yorker fucks up their text on purpose when you cut and paste it:
It must be tough to be a British architect thes days if your name isn’t Norman Foster o Richard Rogers. The most famous Britis architects since Christopher Wren are filling th world with so many sleek glass-and-stee buildings that it can be hard for thei compatriots to get noticed. All the more reaso to enjoy the rise, in recent years, of Will Alsop Alsop, now fifty-nine, is the anti-Foster. Hi buildings are startling, but also whimsical, gentle, colorful, and modest. Alsop’ playfulness makes him unusual—wit is in short supply among architects today—but his work, on closer inspection, is just as notable for the commonsensica attitudes it embodies
The building that has done most to establish Alsop as an international figure is a bizarre structure in Toronto, the Sharp Center for Design, at the Ontario College of Art & Design. It is a slab, two hundred and seventy feet long and raised nine stories into the air on huge, slanted legs. The legs—red and yellow and black and blue and purple and white—look like a bunch of gigantic colored pencils, or pick-up sticks mid-fall. The slab, which accommodates two floors of classrooms, studios, and offices, is covered in white corrugated metal and decorated with black squares. The building as a whole looks like a crossword puzzle on stilts. It seems to float above its surroundings, and locals have taken to calling it the Tabletop.
Eager to reduce housing aid to the more than 95,000 households still displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA announced a program yesterday offering up to $4,000 for relocation expenses for families or individuals who return home or find permanent housing elsewhere by the end of February.
The offer is directed at the nearly 30,000 households receiving rental subsidies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the more than 65,000 living free in FEMA trailers and the larger mobile home models.
pirolettes
via vz
edgar oliver speaks at the rapture cafe tues 10/23 / oil can press
Leonard Riggio is the rich person who made Dia:Beacon possible. A demanding, emotional, self-made man — a Brooklyn cabbie’s son who built Barnes & Noble into the dominant bookseller in America — Riggio was the chairman of the Dia board during the years Dia:Beacon was being built. He believed in it with every fiber of his being. When Dia needed a piece of art to round out its permanent collection, he bought it. When cost overruns occurred, he covered them. When design decisions arose that entailed additional expenses, Riggio wrote the check. Of the $50 million it cost to create Dia:Beacon, Riggio gave at least $35 million. The second-biggest donor, the Lannan Foundation, gave $10 million. Ann Tenenbaum, the vice chairman of the board, and her husband Thomas H. Lee, the Wall Street financier, contributed $2.5 million.
But last year, Riggio abruptly, and angrily, resigned as Dia’s chairman. He did so shortly after Dia’s director, a rising star in the museum world named Michael Govan, announced his own departure, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). It was Govan who found the Nabisco building and envisioned what it might one day be. And to be blunt, it was Govan who found Riggio to pay for it. Govan is the one who brought Riggio on the board, who whispered in his ear about which pieces of art to buy for the new museum, who consulted with Riggio every day about the cost overruns and the design changes and the million other decisions, large and small, that arose in the five years the two men were building Dia:Beacon. When I interviewed Riggio not long ago, he told me that he viewed himself and Govan as partners in building Dia:Beacon. “We were very close,” he said. After Govan left for Los Angeles, Riggio seethed.
13 OCTOBER, 7PM: PERFORMANCE DDG interview
Artist Dan Graham, whose work was exhibited in Environmental Aesthetic at Storefront in 1986, in conversation with architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina. Graham will show and discuss his most recent photographic work, a contemporary revisitation of his photographic documentation of New Jersey in the late Sixties.