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the tube bar jersey city
these are the prank calls that influence Bart Simpson calls to Moe's
via jz
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.via vz
The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”
Dear Mailing List Subscriber,
I have work in a couple of fun group shows opening in Brooklyn this week. Hope to see you at the receptions!
What: Dan Levenson Presents The All-Smoking Art Opening – Sponsored by Altria
When: ONE NIGHT ONLY -- 11:00pm – 12:30am, Thursday, November 8th, 2007 (Broadcast begins at 11:30)
Where: New General Catalog, 140 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn (G train to Greenpoint)
This special event will feature more than 100 smoking intellectuals and artistic types perusing an exhibition of all-black artworks (I'm showing a Bootleg "Steven Parrino"). If you missed out on Paris in the 1920s, this is your big chance, and maybe your last chance, as the coming ice age of mediocrity, blandness and uniformity descends permanently on New York’s cultural landscape. Visitors are encouraged to wear dark-colored clothing and chic eyewear. Extra credit for carrying a book of poetry, philosophy or modernist literature. Super extra credit if this book is written in a language other than English. Super double extra credit if you and a friend can discuss this book in that language. The event will be broadcast live over the internet.
Free cigarettes will be available for smokers, provided courtesy of Altria Group. Non-smokers are grudgingly welcome, but stay out of our way.
http://www.cameandwent.com/ngc/episode4.html
"Shipping-container-architecture
A comprehensive repository of information, links, photos, and videos of shipping containers used as buildings or parts of buildings
100 architecture blogs
via meta filter (art)
Janos Starker Bach: 6 Cello Suites (Mono)
Rare originals of this recording have been going on Ebay for upwards of $1,500. The sound quality and performance are absolutely to-die-for.
Today, it is difficult to understand that despite the tremendous Bach renaissance that took place in the 19th century, many compositions by the Cantor of St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig had been underrated. The Cello Suites, for example, have been regarded for almost 300 years as purely a set of tricky etudes that every virtuoso in the making simply must tackle. Janos Starker’s recording of the Suites from 1965 makes a lasting impression on the listener, and even record producers who are well used to recorded excellence have been highly impressed. Starker’s full-bodied sound and technical brilliance are complemented by his finely chiseled interpretation that lends immense expression to Bach’s thrilling harmony and verve to the strict rhythmic construction of the movements.
calder junk on ebay
In that sense, the artifice and the accounting that brought the IAC Headquarters into existence turned, in part, on the molecular configuration of glass. Not that this mattered to Gehry’s personal “creative process,” which exhibited its usual resourcefulness in recognizing aesthetic potential in the natural tendency of so unnatural a material as glass to deflect under pressure. But it does raise a number of questions. The first has to do with authorship. Who designed the IAC? At one level, the answer is simple: Frank Gehry. But maybe we should also say “Frank Gehry,” which is another name for the system behind the “star system”: long lists of extras and bit players, assistants to the assistant producer. To put it slightly differently, this may or may not be a “real” Gehry building. And oddly enough, this possibility makes the entire operation more revealing about what constitutes an authentic work of architecture in the first place, and about the world in which that work may or may not exist.
Presented with such a possibility, the task of criticism is not to reproduce the vernacular of movie advertisements and declare a particular building a “stunning achievement.” Nor is it to register disappointment, via the usual combination of scorn and condescension. Either response only offers more raw material to the culture industry. Instead, the task of criticism is to pose questions — to de-contextualize and to re-contextualize —to understand what is at stake in the situation at hand. So to ask whether (and in what sense) we are actually dealing with something that can be called a “work” of architecture here is to detach the object from the name (or “signature”) of the architect to see the social, economic, and aesthetic function of both more clearly.
Thus: Whether or not Gehry himself arrived at the insight to use cold forming at IAC, an entire team of professionals was necessary to pull it off, not a few of whom worked for the glass manufacturer Permasteelisa. Where is the line between architect / author and consultant / collaborator here? Unclear. Likewise for the building’s interiors, most of which were actually executed by STUDIOS Architecture. Though here, the demarcating line may be a little more visible. Generally, it can be drawn a few feet in from the facade at the perimeter cove light that lines the building on each floor and the accompanying layer of mechanical shades, each custom-cut (and many curved), that can be lowered to reduce or eliminate the sunlight. Regardless of what particular combination of architects and consultants actually designed this combination of details at the building’s perimeter, together with the fritted glazing they construct a layered depth that may be seen from the outside during the day and a phosphorescent glow at night. These visual properties are central to the building’s architectural claims.
Equally important, however, is that STUDIOS, headquartered in San Francisco and veterans of Silicon Valley, are experts in the reinvention of the office. From their early, jaunty-yet-relaxed campus for Silicon Graphics (now the Googleplex) in Mountain View, California, to the New York interiors of Bloomberg L.P. Headquarters, they have developed a systems approach that combines informality with efficiency. Though office culture was evidently not an overriding concern for Gehry, judging from the results it was most definitely of concern to his client. IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller presides over a conglomerate comprising over sixty Internet-related entities, each with its own identity and mission, gathered together here for the first time in one building. And so, inboard from the cove light we find a new-economy office landscape dedicated to intra-office social life (snack bars on every office floor, cafeteria above, etc.). The plans demonstrate the difficulty of squeezing this system of social systems — quasi-modular, loose, but still systematic — into Gehry’s undulating shell and core. STUDIOS accomplishes this with a certain finesse, though the two architectures grate against one another at their many points of contact.
Prince himself has led a double life at times, disseminating spurious interviews, fudging his biography, even exhibiting curtains of Budweiser cans under the name John Dogg. Other biographical snippets are revealed in the recent "Check Paintings," such as the 12-foot-wide My Life Story, which features the artist's own bank checks behind huge block letters spelling out gags, including "I collect rare photographs. I got one where Norman Rockwell is beating up a child." These works dovetail with Prince's collecting mania: He's a serious bibliophile, and he also acquires the signed, cancelled checks and other celebrity memorabilia found in his "Publicity" collages. In one, he juxtaposes a banal shot of Woodstock against a drumhead signed by the Velvet Underground (a band that wouldn't have been caught dead at any hippie lovefest); his witty wrongheadedness chimes a sweet minor chord amid our cultural cacophony.
But in the large "White Paintings," some of which mix bland line drawings with boxing photos in warmed-over Rauschenberg-like layers, or in his flabby de Kooning knockoffs—which feature beaver shots grafted onto the master's flourishes of flesh—it becomes evident that Prince is at his best when performing Pop-cult surgery rather than stitching together high-art Frankensteins. Or, looked at another way, Prince is only as good as his swipe file (those clippings of figurative poses, facial expressions, props, and vehicles that illustrators stockpile for inspiration). In his muscle-car sculptures, for instance, he zeroes in on the smoothly erupting hood scoops and sleekly indented curves, caressing them with body filler and minimalist gradations of color to achieve a tactile, high-octane sensuality. But despite the catalog's breathless assertion that he's making "outlaw art" because of his image "piracy," there aren't any startling transgressions here.
Still, if you want Prince to be a hood, fair enough. So was Fonzie.
eyeball tree house
shtick frame
via jz
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."