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wfmus top 10 07
Julius Shulman, who first photographed the house, recently commented that it was “a sincere attempt by Stone to show the American public what could be done beyond traditional architecture by enhancing the quality of modern architecture offered to the average person. It also showed that architecture is not static, it’s always moving forward.” The house was Stone’s interpretation of post-war modular design popular in Southern California; its plan consisted of a rectangle divided into three almost equal areas. In the center were the entry and living room. On the left, two bedrooms separated by a two-way bath. On the right, the master bedroom and kitchen were separated by the master bath. The plan also included sliding glass doors from each room to a private patio.
Representing a misunderstood and generally disliked style, the home suffered numerous and insensitive changes including the addition of a bedroom, an extension to the living room, and the removal of the carport. The sense of scale is lost due to the altered roofline and pitch and new solid cement walls on the side of the house are higher then the original brick screens which distorts the scale of the facade. Observing it, I am moved to ask, has the house too far gone to bring back? Leo Marmol of Marmol Radziner and Associates, who specializes in restoring modern buildings, points out that “the goal is not necessarily to make the house perfect again, but to clarify its historic fabric. To understand what was there and what wasn’t can be positive and, if disclosed when the house is sold in the future, a new owner can take a fuller approach to restoration.”
The question for any restoration-minded buyer is cost. And while Marmol suggests a partial or gradual restoration—even with the structure’s prestige factor—it may be difficult to sell after restoration if the neighborhood does not reflect the investment in the house. Another consideration is to move the house to a more sympthetic area. The current state of the former Life house raises the issue—now that modernism and preservation are recurring topics within an architectural-loving public, what else can be done to save this and other historic structures?
Jersey City's Little India Kicks Jackson Heights' Ass
Jersey City's Little India wasn't nearly as impressive 10 years ago. Chowpatty anchored the neighborhood back then, the top dog in a modest pack of five restaurants. Named after a popular Mumbai beach, Chowpatty specialized in the vegetarian cooking of Gujarat, India's impoverished westernmost state. In fact, a large proportion of the groceries, chat houses, and jewelry stores— ostentatiously displaying the gold necklaces that form an Indian bride's dowry—catered to Gujaratis.
The ensuing years have been kind to the four blocks of Newark Avenue north of Journal Square. Little India has bloomed like a rosewater lassi, so that now the thoroughfare and surrounding streets form a South Asian business district more impressive than either Jackson Heights or Iselin, New Jersey. On weekend afternoons, the streets flood with shoppers, many in colorful saris, stocking up on cheap mangoes, dals, and such unusual vegetables as snake gourd, loofah, and tindoor.
nowottney sightings:
Marianne Nowottny was a teen-sensation, causing a stir with her 1999 debut album, ‘Afraid Of Me’. Not an album chock full of sugar-laced powder-pop songs as a casual observer might have wrongly thought, it instead was a unique release, shunning pop trends for avant-garde arrangements and dark twisting vocals. After several releases which have established her name in leftfield-pop circles, her latest album, the curiously titled ‘What Is She Doing?’ has been released courtesy of Abaton Book Company. The thing is that I didn’t know any of this before receiving this album and when I saw the digipak I was slightly perplexed. The cover looks like a cross between Wendy Carlos’s ‘Secrets of Synthesis’ and an early nineties Disney-pop release. Furthermore, the track names are extremely pop-centric and they are all 2-5 minutes long which typically means that the amount of experimentation and melodic-exploration are limited. For a professional music reviewer none of this really matters as it’s the music that does the talking and I for one was pleasantly surprised.
bat climb
bat mobile
via zoller
The criticism has spread across the world’s architectural community since KCS recently razed — for safety concerns, the company says — what some considered a marvel of modern architecture.
The building that folks in Baton Rouge called “the Bucky Dome.”
“It was a shock to everyone,” says Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute in New York. “It’s just a real loss to the architectural community.”
I bring this up because the art world is the black hole of charisma, sucking magic in from the outside world until it disappears. Picasso, he who could make love to a woman with his gaze alone, was the last truly charismatic figure in our esthetic crater. Warhol, the anti-charismatic, began the suckage process, feeding off Elvis, Marilyn and Jackie. Martyrdom fed his output, even after he almost became a martyr himself.
Artists, mimicking Warholism, wallow in a dark bath of their own wretched parasitism on the wider charismatic culture. Terence Koh’s comparing himself to Naomi Campbell is a recent pathetic example. Howdy Doody Koons, Death Mask Damien, Barney the Vaseline Dinosaur: a trio of dick-diddling neurotics who couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in Peoria.
Time was that the artist competed with kings and princesses for public adoration, Delacroix and his tigers, Whistler and his babes. American artists killed off these pretensions of the shaman, the Hopper blues and ordinary Rockwell, descending into the illiterate mumbles of a somber Pollock spraying his urine over the ashes of the grand. It became the art that counted, as if a dry legislation were all that mattered in politics.
For all the money, glad handing, high living and secrecy, the art world is a desultory place these days with no real claim upon the public’s imagination. At least its denizens will die in their beds and not by an assassin’s bullets.
justins top 25 2007
steven parrino at gagosian
rip ettore sottsass
The literalization of the picture plane is a great subject. As the vessel of content becomes shallower and shallower, composition and subject maker and metaphysics all overflow across the edge until, as Gertrude Stein said about Picasso, the emptying out is complete. But all the jettisoned apparatus- hierarchies of painting, illusion, locatable space, mythologies beyond number- bounced back in disguise and attached themselves, via new mythologies, to the literal surface which had apparently left them no purchase. The transformation of literary myths into literal myths- objecthood, the integrity of the picture plane, the equalization of space, the self-sufficiency of the work, the purity of form- is unexplored territory. Without this change art would have been obsolete. Indeed its changes often seem one step ahead of obsolescence, and to that degree its progress mimics the laws of fashion.An Artist & His Aliases - Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland
e b white letters
thurber letters
A work in progress, the following chronology includes major events, exhibitions, and writings in the development of reductive and concept-based art in Europe, and subsequently in South and North America. Recommendations for additional information are welcome — please contact MINUS SPACE.
the tenth street school
In »SPOMENIK / The End of History« Jan Kempenaers portrays monuments raised by the communist regime in former Yugoslavia.
the park avenue cubists
sonic weld supersystem
The mystery of a huge container washed up on a beach in the Western Isles has been solved. The 27m container has been identified as a beer fermentation tank belonging to the American brewery Coorsvia vz
drinking images
One of the most anticipated yearly programming features on SPEED, the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event and auction, returns this January with 39 hours of LIVE coverage through six days from Scottsdale, Ariz.
Five hours of early auction coverage begin on Jan. 15 through Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. On Jan. 18 and Jan. 19, 10 hours of live coverage begins each day at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, with another four hours slated for Jan. 20 starting at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.
“We’ve massaged the 2008 Scottsdale Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event air schedule,” said Rick Miner, SPEED SVP of Production & Operations. “We feel the schedule will capture what we believe will be the most compelling bidding wars for the most exciting vehicles.”
Play-by-play announcer Bob Varsha, the voice of Formula One on SPEED, will once again head the broadcast and be joined by Motor Trend magazine editor Matt Stone for analysis. Mike Joy, the voice of NASCAR on FOX and an avid car collector, will once again team with former Hot Rod magazine technical editor Steve Magnante on the auction block. Long-time motorsports reporter and Barrett-Jackson regular Rick DeBruhl will be scoping the auction grounds for event context and storylines.
The 2008 edition of Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale will be an interesting confluence of Italian style, classic design and brute American horsepower all sold at ‘no reserve.’ Headliners include a Pininfarina-designed 1963 Chevrolet Corvette concept car known as ‘Rondine’ and Ford’s 1963 Thunderbird ‘Italien.’ Pininfarina is a world famous Italian design house based in Turin, who is most notably associated with the legendary styling of Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo. Also for sale will be Carroll Shelby’s personal 1969 Shelby Mustang GT-500 and the one and only ‘Robosauras,’ a 42-foot tall, fire-breathing mechanical ‘monster’ that has devoured cars throughout the United States over that last 20 years.
Tom Moody notes the difference in critical stance Roberta Smith takes on Richard Prince’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1992 and now at the Guggenheim in 2007. Smith takes a much softer tone the second time around while Moody in a post that follows observes weakness in virtually all of the later work. I too see the weaknesses Moody points out, and rather wish I’d seen a review by a mainstream critic who felt this way, particularly because Prince’s car hoods, joke paintings and master inspired works so obviously lack the substance of his earlier rephotographed advertisements. Schjeldahl wrote negatively about the exhibition as well in the New Yorker, largely getting it right, though by the end he criticizes a deKooning rip off for not being executed well enough, which even if correct, misses the point, and sounds awfully conservative. As an intellectual exercise this kind of practice just isn’t engaging, (though I have been known to make exception for his Britney Spears deKooning portraits.)
BACK in 1981, Tom Wolfe published the archetypal work of reactionary architectural criticism, "From Bauhaus to Our House," a happy-go-lucky evisceration of modern design and the men who brought it to America. Wolfe's short romp through history struck a nerve, but one close to the funny bone. Reviewing it in the Nation, critic Michael Sorkin quipped, "What Tom Wolfe doesn't know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so, indeed, it has, albeit a slim one."
Now John Silber, former president of Boston University and failed Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, has set himself the dubious task of assuming Wolfe's cranky mantle. It's a game effort: What Silber doesn't know about modern architecture has also filled a book, although one 46 pages slimmer than Wolfe's and absent the master's wit. Indeed, "Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art" is so riddled with red herrings, half-truths and gratuitously provocative exaggerations that Colin Powell might try reading it at the United Nations.