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Behold PopSci staff photographer/mad scientist John Carnett's homemade microbrewery:
an elaborate device that boils, ferments, chills, and pours home-crafted ale
"I don't want to be an artist, I want to be a worker." So said Jean Prouvé, who might be surprised that, after a career dedicated to industrial production and the manufacture of functional furniture and buildings, his work has ended up in fine art auctions and displayed in chi-chi gallery windows from Paris to New York. Now on show at London's Design Museum, his furniture, houses and architectural components remain resolutely industrial, sparse and functional, yet beautiful.
architectures top ten 2007 lists
“This is a stone masonry building,” Mr. LeClerc said. “It’s marble and brick all the way through.”
The diagnostic work is largely done. Over the last several months, the engineers scaled the building from scaffolding or cherry pickers or rappelled down on ropes to examine every one of the 20,000 blocks of stone.
With hand-held devices, they mapped the building, numbering every piece of marble. They tapped the building with mallets, allowing loose pieces to fall (hence the netting that now wraps part of the exterior), and drilled core samples to study the material.
“They took off about 1,000 pounds of stone that was ready to come off,” Mr. LeClerc said.
Now, the library has to determine the best cleaning method: whether to use a laser method that zaps off the black sooty pieces or to apply poultices and then peel off the pollutants.
The main library — also known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library — has been gradually renovating its interior over the last 30 years, most recently restoring the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division space, with its richly carved wood, marble and metalwork, completed in December 2005.
A team of architects led by Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Hargreaves Associates, TEN Arquitectos, and Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, will unveil the final design in February for revitalizing a stretch of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The broad goal of the redesign is to reduce barriers that discourage people from enjoying the river and replace decaying sections with parks and public venues that will trigger private investment.
A team of architects led by Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Hargreaves Associates, TEN Arquitectos, and Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, will unveil the final design in February for revitalizing a stretch of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The broad goal of the redesign is to reduce barriers that discourage people from enjoying the river and replace decaying sections with parks and public venues that will trigger private investment.
The centerpiece of the project, known as Reinventing the Crescent, is a linear park that devotes nearly 85 percent of the development zone’s 174 acres to parks and plazas, bike and walking paths and venues for river-gazing. Signatures of the design include examples of dramatic, forward-thinking architecture as well as inventive ideas for accommodating the various industrial wharfs and terminals that must be retained for cargo and transportation uses.
“Improving public access to the river is the point,” said Allen Eskew whose New Orleans-based firm is in charge of managing the project. “But the plan gives the city a riverfront design that is authentic for our time and does not just reflect the past.”
Palm Springs has become a hotspot for fans of mid-century modern architecture, inspiring restorations of the city's rare collection of Rat Pack-era buildings.
This fall, the new owners of the 1947 Del Marcos Hotel completed a renovation of the 16-room inn, designed by desert architect William F. Cody.
The hotel reopened in September after workers updated the lobby, installed new restrooms, and created a saltwater pool complete with piped-in music. "It's back to A-plus condition," says Jack Davis, the manager and partner in the company that bought the hotel last year.
The Del Marcos Hotel won a design preservation award from the Palm Springs Modern Committee in 2005. It also rehabbed the city's 1960 Wexler House, designed by Bob Alexander, whose 2,200 houses were the city's first subdivisions.
western swing on 78
via zoller
shaker condo bldg bed-stuy bkln ny
shaker catalogue
shaker cabs from crown-point
Ignoring local protests, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week started demolishing historically valuable public housing in New Orleans.
In a city pummeled by government incompetence, the department's intransigence has become surreal. HUD was stopped days later because it had failed to seek required approval from the City Council, and Judge Herbert Cade of Orleans Parish Civil District Court halted most of the demolition until the council agrees to let them proceed.
HUD has threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions of housing reconstruction dollars and thousands of rent vouchers if the council doesn't approve its plan in a meeting on Dec. 20.
Losing the vouchers would mean that poor people entitled to live in public housing -- and no party to the controversy -- would be thrown into the street. Does the council have a choice?
More housing is needed in a city with a serious rental- housing crunch since Hurricane Katrina. Adapting the historic structures on four huge sites -- three adjacent to historic- landmark neighborhoods -- is worth doing because of their sturdy construction, sensitivity of design and quality of materials. That's why these 4,500 units were deemed worthy of listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
cargoyle by barris of la-ca
via jz
LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.
They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.
This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.
The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.
Robert M. Kulicke, a painter, goldsmith, teacher, businessman and designer who changed the look of postwar art by modernizing frame design, died on Friday in Valley Cottage, N.Y. He was 83 and had lived in Manhattan until about 18 months ago.
Garrulous, articulate and confident, Mr. Kulicke was a man of many talents, interests and passions. He painted and regularly exhibited small, delicate still lifes of flowers, dollar bills or, often, a single pear. He helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation and to establish a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.
But for much of his life Mr. Kulicke was the most innovative and influential picture frame designer in the United States. His reputation rested primarily on several streamlined frames that were both widely used and imitated, especially a welded aluminum frame and a wrap-around clear Lucite “plexibox” frame.
He also designed sectional frames that could be bought and assembled, sidestepping frame shops completely. In addition, he was a superb craftsman of reproduction frames, making them for some of the greatest paintings in this country, including Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Giotto’s “Epiphany” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Manhattan had long lost its crown as the world's skyscraper capital when Mohamed Atta smashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the Twin Towers. Yet that dramatic, appalling moment triggered a defiant reaction. A slew of new towers is now appearing, on screens and on the ground.
Renzo Piano's diaphanously corporate New York Times Tower has just opened to rapturous reviews; Ground Zero is hosting towers by Foster, Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, and slick condo towers are springing up everywhere like minimalist fungus. But the latest proposal is by far the most surprising. French architect Jean Nouvel has proposed the most radical and striking skyscraper to trouble New York's low-drifting clouds in a generation.
The design for the tower, neighbouring the Museum of Modern Art, is a piercing, dangerous-looking spike, an anorexic contemporary version of the soaring twin spires of St Patrick's Cathedral, which dominated the city's skyline until the advent of skyscrapers in the early 20th century.
The proposal, at 53 W. 53rd St, commissioned by real estate firm Hines, comprises 75 storeys of accommodation and, at 350m, pierces the skyline at a height between the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It will embrace 5,000 square metres of extra accommodation for MoMA, which will expand into its lower floors, above retail provision, while the upper floors will house a seven-star hotel sharing services with the 120 or so (extremely) top-end condominiums above.
IT’S hard to pinpoint when the “starchitect” became an object of ridicule. The term is a favorite of churlish commentators, who use it to mock architects whose increasingly flamboyant buildings, in their minds, are more about fashion and money than function.
Often the attacks are a rehash of the old clichés. Cost overruns and leaky roofs are held up as evidence of yet another egomaniacal artist with little concern for the needs of us, the little people. (As a rule, if a roof leaks in a Frank Gehry building it’s headline news; if the building was designed by a hack commercial architect, the leak is ignored, at least as news.) John Silber, the former president of Boston University, has gotten into the game with “Architecture of the Absurd,” a glib little book that eviscerates contemporary architects for the extravagance of their designs.
The more serious criticism comes from those inside the profession who see a move into the mainstream as a sellout. The pact between high architects and developers, to them, is a Faustian bargain in which the architect is nothing more than a marketing tool, there to provide a cultural veneer for the big, bad developers whose only interest is in wringing as much profit as possible from their projects.
rip h and g
Except during earthquakes, or when being demolished to make way for something new, buildings don't move. This stubborn fact about architecture is something most documentary filmmakers feel they have to overcome. You probably have seen the result of this effort in television specials about famous architects and their work: sweaty pastiches of restless jump-cuts, pans and zooms, frequently interrupted by old portraits of the architect, all of it lumbering along under a running commentary intended to give yet more "drama" to the decidedly undramatic stuff of architecture.
Now for something entirely different: German avant-garde director Heinz Emigholz's new film Schindler's Houses
We hated Bauhaus,” Niemeyer recalls. “It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a ma-chine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.” And so he did. This was the heroic period, until the generals took over in 1964, when he became a household name in Brazil, up there with Pelé. From his pen poured astonishing factories, schools, houses, offices, capital cities – Brasilia, “far too quickly made”, he regrets. A World Heritage Site it may be, but its concrete is shabby, its monuments scabbed with favelas, its idealism soured – Utopia gone bad.
praguekolektiv
wonderwood nl (bent plywood classics)
studio brancusi at pompidou
rip
OTHER children had teddy bears and dolls; but Karlheinz Stockhausen had a little wooden hammer. As he toddled round the run-down family farm in the hills near Cologne, he would hit things with it to see what sound they made. Each note, he established young, sent him a different message. No plink or plunk was quite the same as any other.
Most folk at his premières in the 1950s and 1960s might have wished he had never discovered that. Each Stockhausen piece was a shock to the system. It was not just that he had decided tonality was dead; Schoenberg's 12-note serialism had already made dissonance routine. It was not just that he thought “intensive measuring and counting” the key to music's future; Stravinsky had got there long before him. It was that Stockhausen kept on looking for, and finding, sounds never heard before. He made a formula out of the individuality of notes—their particular pitch, timbre and duration, and whether they were soft as a leaf or knocked your hat off—and revelled in it in the most alarming way.
new @ ubu
Art of Field Recording: Volume I : 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum