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"It's our fucking park!" says Jerry "the Peddler" Wade, denouncing the city after it denied him a permit to hold a punk-rock concert in Tompkins Square Park to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the August 6, 1988, police riot that took place there
As of yesterday [4/14/08] Pale Male and Lola are still sitting. The hatching window is open -- it could happen any day. At the Hawk Bench yesterday photographer Rik Davis and I exchanged notes and decided that April 20th is the outside date for hatching. That gives us hope until Sunday.
rat rod of the week
kt has posted some nice photos of their container house project. piles poured. containers stacked. they are getting ready to start cutting holes for the doors and windows and looking for advise on preventing buckling. lets watch and see how they do.
towards a pattern language dialogue
(pdf)
She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.thanks mark
And that's the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime -- war crimes by any measure -- and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle -- who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic -- will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won't stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.
In Preserving New York, Anthony C. Wood sets out to debunk the myth. A professor of historic preservation at Columbia University and chair of the New York Preservation Archive Project, Wood has authored an impressively researched account of the people, places, and events that led to the landmarks law. The loss of Penn Station was a "key chapter" in that evolution, Wood writes, "but for it to be seen as either the entire or primary story … is to rob New York City of the richer, more complex, and inspiring true story of how New Yorkers won the right to protect their landmarks."
That story, Wood contends, begins with several earlier battles to protect notable buildings—including the 1803 St. John's Chapel (demolished in 1918) and the 1812 City Hall (saved in the late 1930s). Beginning in 1939, a nascent preservation coalition successfully challenged city planner and master intimidator Robert Moses, whose proposals to construct a bridge (and later a tunnel) between Battery Park and Brooklyn would have destroyed much of the historic character of lower Manhattan. Of particular concern was Moses' plan to raze Castle Clinton, an 1811 fortification that later served as an immigrant processing facility. Led by George McAneny, who helped found the group that would become the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the coalition won support for saving Castle Clinton until the structure's 1950 transfer to the federal government and designation as a national monument. Efforts to inventory the city's historic buildings and recognize its neighborhoods continued in the postwar period, despite the loss of such significant buildings as the 1854 Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village, the Brokaw Mansions on the Upper East Side (1890-1911), the 41-story Singer Building (1908), and, of course, Penn Station, built in 1910.
A 1950s Googie diner in Downey, Calif., may rise from the ashes. After most of Johnie's Broiler was illegally demolished in January 2007, the city of Downey and Johnie's many fans vowed to rebuild the drive-in restaurant. Bob's Big Boy has volunteered to do just that.
According to the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee, the owner of a Bob's Big Boy in nearby Torrance, Jim Louder, has signed a long-term lease for the site and plans to reconstruct the drive-in restaurant that disappeared 15 months ago. The franchise plans to restore the Broiler's signature Z-shaped sign and salvage other parts of the partially demolished building. In a nod to the 1950s, Bob's Big Boy will offer carhop service.
"It's really exciting," says Adriene Biondo, chair of the conservancy's Modern Committee. "I really have to applaud [Jim's vision and the city for leaving it standing long enough to find an operator that has a vision. Another city might have cleared the site."
In preparation for “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” a show on prefabricated housing that opens July 20, the Museum of Modern Art is letting the public in on the action. The museum has set up a Web site (momahomedelivery.org) that allows visitors to follow the process as five architectural teams create houses to be installed in outdoor space west of the museum’s main building. Every week until the show opens, each team will present progress reports, with photos, drawings and video clips of its efforts to make, ship and assemble the structures.
Donald Judd
Library desk B-vB 27/6, designed 1982
hardwoods, texas pine, and pine; shown in Douglas fir
30 x 88 x 44 inches
Description:
The full lines of metal and wood furniture by Donald Judd are available at Artware Editions.
Most pieces from the wood lines are available in a variety of different wood types and finishes, including Finland color ply in six colors (black, green, yellow, light brown, dark brown, or red), Birch plywood, Mahogany plywood, Texas pine, common pine and hardwoods (cherry, walnut, Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, alder, ash, maple and cypress).
A small selection of pieces is on view on our website. Please contact gallery for full details and pricing.
--------------------------------------------
longleaf yellow (texas) pine
But much of Starck’s playful ribbing was at the expense of the user. One could never find the door to the bathrooms in the Royalton lobby, for example, and the “flaming ornament” atop the roof of Japan’s Asahi Brewery building meant to symbolize the brewery’s dynamic heart but is far better known as the “golden turd.”
Starck’s furniture designs seemed clever the first time you saw them — lamps in the shape of guns, a chair with Louis XIV detailing, a cute (but pricey) gnome stool — but not so much the second time around.
His product design often entered the realm of pure silliness, perhaps epitomized by the goblet-shaped toddler sippy cup in plastic masquerading as crystal that Starck design for Target back in 2002. Or maybe the WW Stool he designed for Vitra, described as a stool or a “support for users who prefer to stand” priced at an astonishing $4,670. (I will give him a nod for his spider-legged juice squeezer for Alessi; if you’ll pardon the unpardonable pun, that design has legs.)
I write of Starck in the past tense because the increasingly cynical vibe of his creations seems to have caught up with him. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit recently, Starck proclaimed that “everything that I designed is absolutely unnecessary.” This continued a jag of self-deprecation started at the TED conference in March, where Starck began by addressing his audience thusly: “I must tell you I am like that [indicates shaking hands], not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless.” Starck also announced his impending retirement (not effective immediately, but two years from now, so we can expect more of the same).
Now, for a designer of objects and things to announce that “we do not need anything material,” that all we need is “the ability to love,” makes for a delicious scandal. It also transforms Starck suddenly into the most unlikely of roles: an advocate for sustainability. This is all the more remarkable as Starck’s material of choice is, more often than not, the incredibly un-green polycarbonate.
In the future, promises Starck, “there will be no more designers.” And by extension, no more stuff! Now, that’s a surefire way to reduce one’s carbon footprint. (Will Starck now join the Designers Accord?) As is Starck’s prediction that the designer of the future is “a personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.” So not only will we consume less stuff (because no one is designing it), we’ll consume less food, too. Brilliant!
And that’s when I began to get suspicious.
For five weeks, until May 17, Storefront for Art and Architecture will operate this satellite space in a backroom of Paperchase Printing, a print shop in Hollywood with some room to spare because its digital printers take up less space than the ones they replaced.
On display will be "CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed," an exhibition of French photographer Frédéric Chaubin's images of Eastern Bloc buildings that went up in the 1970s and '80s -- the last two decades of the Cold War and the final years of the Soviet Union.
The two stories about threats to Bertrand Goldberg's architecture in today's Tribune reveal that Goldberg's architecture still speaks to us today. The question is: Why?
In the 1960s, Goldberg, once an acolyte of Mies van der Rohe, revolted against the master of steel and glass, as well as his devotion to the right angle. Goldberg shifted instead to curves and concrete, and the result was Marina City, including the corncob-shaped apartment towers along the Chicago River that are icons of the Chicago skyline.
on fucking up 2CC
The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that.
Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner had it opened than the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable dubbed it the "Venetian lollipop" building, because of the peculiar arcade at its base. And in the nearly half-century since, that label has stuck, like obscene graffiti smeared across its entrance — to be distinguished, naturally, from the actual graffiti smeared across its entrance. For the longest time, simply to mention "the lollipop building" passed for taste and discernment in matters of architecture and design.
Why did "everyone" hate this building, the loving labor of Edward Durrell Stone, one of America's most eminent Modernist architects? Back in 1964, its tentative embrace of historicism, contextualism, and even irony — qualities later embraced by the Postmodernists — seemed heretical and appalling. It felt like decades since anyone had had the gall and poor judgment to attempt something other than a glass and steel curtain wall.
Often overlooked, however, is that even back then there were people [me] who quite liked the building. Even if its embrace of Venetian and Byzantine motifs was halfhearted at best, still there was a positive enchantment to the place, a sense — and here I draw upon memories from my own childhood — that architecture could open up whole new worlds to the receptive soul. Unlike most buildings in Manhattan, 2 Columbus Circle presented a smooth, windowless expanse of gleaming white marble, qualified by adorable round portholes along the sides and ruddy granite accents. Imagine a Modernist re-enactment of a Venetian palazzo dropped into one of the busiest intersections in the busiest city in the world and encircled, like an island, by the ceaseless flow of traffic rather than the green waters of the Grand Canal!
sputnic lights at vintage oasis
aint it....!
via zoller
justin snags another good shipping container cabin find
"art is either plagiarism or revolution."
-paul gauguin
now can someone get me a job at one of those stupid net surfing art clubs. i can spell fuked up on purpose too.
our friend linda found tables made from reclaimed bowling lanes at the BKLN flea market
porch board
via vz
this is quite a grand discovery for me. at age 13 i visited some cousins in evanston Ill. on the first opportunity i took the train into chicago and headed straight to the old town district. there in a prospering bi-level head shop, hung high on the wall i spotted a life sized poster of a greyhound bus. its stuck with me ever since. epic (!) looking generically warholian (screened americana) and 100% pop (think rosenquist and oldenburg BIG). since the age of the internet ive searched off and on but not until this moment have i found the "A"uthor. turns out, it was mason williams.
i try not to be seduced by the fetish aspects of nakashima furniture. really, they are just straight up trestle tables. free edges? just short cuts to a completed work station. butterfly keys? you need them for mending slabs of wood which might not make the grade otherwise. but this table in rosewood, well it did me in. me and someone with 210k.