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cilff may the modern ranch house


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This summer, internationally renowned artist Chris Burden will exhibit a new sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York — WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME, a dramatic, 65-foot-tall skyscraper made entirely of toy construction parts. Standing more than six stories tall at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens, WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will pay homage to the historic skyscrapers that populate New York and give the city its iconic architectural presence. WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will be on view, free and open to the public, from June through July 2008. The exhibition is presented by the Public Art Fund and hosted by Tishman Speyer, co-owners of Rockefeller Center.

WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will be by far the most complex artwork that Chris Burden has ever made, comprised of approximately one million stainless steel parts that are replicas of Erector set pieces, the popular 20th-century children's building toy. Over the past decade, the artist has been using these specially stamped stainless steel metal parts based precisely upon those of the original Erector set to create complex and elegant sculptures of bridges. Intricately engineered to support and bear enormous weight, Burden's colossal toy constructions showcase the versatility, simplicity, and strength of their unassuming parts, combining technical sophistication with a child-like enthusiasm: building for building's sake.

In 1912, an inventor named A.C. Gilbert created the first Erector set, inspired by the steel framework of skyscrapers that he saw under construction in New York City, then at the height of a building boom. The Erector Mysto Type I—the first set Gilbert made—was a collection of small metal girders, which could be assembled with miniature nuts and bolts. Burden's fascination with this original—and now rare—building kit led him to create his own replica parts, fashioned in stainless steel and electro-plated to produce a polished nickel finish in order to make them weather—and rust—resistant.

Despite being constructed with toys, WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will take on the dimensions of a full-scale building. Burden anticipates that its construction will require approximately one million parts total, and that the sculpture will weigh over seven tons when complete. Models and collectibles have long been important in Burden's work, reflecting his fascination with humankind's industrial ingenuity and creativity, investigating relationships between power and technology, nature and society, and enlightenment and destruction.
thanks lisa!
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Action/Abstraction,” at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates superb exhibits: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by other members (notably Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still), important followers (Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler), and rebellious successors (Jasper Johns, Frank Stella) of American art’s greatest generation. Arshile Gorky’s prophetic “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944), from the Albright-Knox, in Buffalo, alone is worth the visit. It is a desperately vivacious, songful tumult, seemingly executed with bundled nerve ends. Ragged zones of hot color, like open wounds, interact with tight, buzzing linear glyphs—fragments of organic life—that bespeak the artist’s lingering debt to Surrealism, all in concert with intuitions of a new, expansive kind of pictorial space. Something epochal is afoot: a dovetailing of raw personal emotion and disinterested aesthetic experiment, Dionysus and Apollo. Those opposed qualities became the magnetic poles of Abstract Expressionism (which was named in 1946 by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates) and also the virtual battle stations of the movement’s great, mutually hostile critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), who interpreted the new art rather exclusively in terms of existential drama, and Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who exalted formal invention as an end in itself. Rosenberg gravitated toward de Kooning, Greenberg toward Pollock. They squared off over Newman’s smooth expanses of color inflected with vertical bands or lines—spiritual hierophancy to Rosenberg, aesthetic engineering to Greenberg.

The Jewish Museum’s chief curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, has focussed “Action/Abstraction” on the writers, interspersing paintings and sculpture with abundant texts, photographs, and memorabilia. Film clips display the men’s differently impressive rhetorical panache: Greenberg is incisive and imperious, Rosenberg droll and oracular. (Parallel shots witness Pollock dripping and de Kooning stroking.) Born to Jewish immigrants in New York, both critics were public intellectuals in the heroic mold of Partisan Review and other small but scarcely humble organs of cosmopolitan thought. Buoyed by America’s ascendancy among nations after the Second World War, they projected the confidence of New York as the new world capital of progressive culture. Each seemed to covet a throne of high-cultural authority which proved, in the end, not to exist. Their quarrels have been outlasted by the art that was their pretext. The resilient mergers of feeling and form in Pollock’s galvanic fields, de Kooning’s dismembered figuration, Rothko’s transcendent color, and, in sculpture, David Smith’s stately animation mutely chastise lopsided partialities of any stripe. But the notion of bracketing the artistic and the critical audacities of the watershed postwar era is so good it’s a wonder that no museum has tackled it before. The result suggests, to me, the pleasant conceit of considering Rosenberg and Greenberg themselves as types of Abstract Expressionists, in discursive prose: Rosenberg lyrically impulsive, like de Kooning; and Greenberg as starkly decisive as Newman. Both aspired, à la Pollock, to perfect unconventional modes of argument that would knock any would-be antagonist cold.

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RS 20k house


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all arch daily wood tags


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at 95 sf the living lab


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the barns of bucks county pa

The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America


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casa negro remodel


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another black farm house / osb interior


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the barn journal


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fake raven


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The glass exterior of Phillis Wheatley Elementary School in Treme was replaced with a plastic substitute in dull shades of blue and green decades ago. Rust collects on once-gleaming steel trusses, and dented air conditioning units leak condensation from the elevated, cube-like structure onto the littered schoolyard, which has been shuttered since Hurricane Katrina.

No one would argue that the eye-catching building could use some work. But as the clock ticks toward the August release of a final School Facility Master Plan for Orleans Parish, a debate has begun on exactly what kind of work is needed for the landmark Modernist building.

Wheatley is one of four mid-century architectural landmarks that could be demolished, according to the latest draft of the master plan released in January by the Orleans Parish School Board and state-run Recovery School District.

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Laurie Blazek (left) was thrilled when a team of researchers told her Frank Lloyd Wright had designed her modest, three-bedroom house on William Street in River Forest. Though the house has a ground-hugging profile, geometric art glass windows and other characteristic features of Wright’s Prairie Style, she always thought it was shaped by a lesser architect—someone from Wright’s circle, not the master himself.

“I never in a million years thought I would be lucky enough to live in a Wright home,” said Blazek. “Ever since I bought this house, my mother said I spent too much money. Now she’s less critical.”

Just down the block, a comparable Prairie Style home is for sale, but the real estate agent, Margaret McSheehy, is cautious about its authorship. “Research is currently being conducted to determine if this home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,” says the Internet listing for the property, a stucco-faced three-bedroom priced at $699,900.

Did he or didn’t he?

That’s the question hovering around 29 houses in Chicago’s suburbs—one each in Glen Ellyn and Wilmette, two in Berwyn, and 25 in River Forest, including 24 of the 26 houses in the 700 block of William Street—now that the researchers are going public with their claim that they’ve found “undiscovered works” by the man widely considered to be America’s greatest architect.

“We stumbled on this and said, ‘My God,’” said the leader of the team, William Allin Storrer of Frankfort, Mich., author of two respected books, “The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion” and “The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog.”

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buildings small barns sheds and shelters


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12 x 12 pixel toaster printer


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With "Jackson Pollock: How Installation Can Affect Modern Art," Newhouse tracks and illustrates the five legendary Pollock exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery (1948, '49, '49, '50, '51) with particular reference to the dimensions of the artist's barn/studio in Springs, N.Y. The modest scale of the Parsons space favored the direct transplant of wall-size works from the studio. The 1950 exhibition, in which Pollock was assisted in the hanging by Tony Smith, forced an intimacy to which there was a stunning audience response. "The effectiveness of the exhibition," Newhouse reports, "has never been surpassed." For Alan Kaprow, "the effect was of an overwhelming environment ... assaulting the visitor in waves of attacking and retreating pulsations." The paradox of large-scale New York School painting was clarified: enveloping size forcing intimate viewing. For Pollock's work, as for Rothko's, the distance between viewer and painting determined its effect, a point repeatedly brought home by Newhouse in her comments on subsequent Pollock exhibitions. During the '50s, the uninhabited "installation view" became an indispensable photographic record, and Newhouse has assembled a revealing compendium of gallery and museum installations of Pollock exhibitions. Pollock's subsequent exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1952, '55), lacking wall-sized works, were mounted with a more designed sense of presentation. The 1955 exhibition included the famous display of White Cockatoo (1948) on the ceiling, with Pollock's approval.

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ad r


ad reinhardt "1," from a unique group relating to "Ten Screenprints,"
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A campaign to save the storied Miami Marine Stadium will get its first test on Tuesday, when the city's historic preservation board will consider a proposal to designate the long-neglected but architecturally dazzling structure as a historic landmark.

The effort has received a boost from the city's preservation officer, Ellen Uguccioni, who in a report to the board called the 1964 stadium ''a tour de force of modern design'' and concluded it is eligible for designation.

But the save-the-stadium effort must still overcome a significant hurdle, Uguccioni said: Generally, buildings must be 50 years old before they are eligible for historic status. Because the stadium is only 44 years old, proponents of designation must demonstrate it is ''of exceptional importance,'' she wrote.

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cementfirebox

prefab firebox
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fallen angel

A glazed terra cotta relief by the Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia came loose overnight from its perch above a doorway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and crashed to the stone floor below, seriously damaging it, museum officials said Tuesday.

The shattered 15th-century sculpture, a 62-by-32-inch blue-and-white lunette depicting St. Michael the Archangel in a traditional pose, holding a sword and the scales of justice, was found early Tuesday morning by a guard on regular rounds.

Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the museum, said the sculpture, which had been on display over the doorway in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Galleries since 1996, may have done a back flip in the air as it fell, causing it to land relatively flat on its reverse side and sparing it “catastrophic damage.”

Officials said that a preliminary examination of the sculpture indicated that it could be repaired. Mr. Holzer said that large pieces, including the archangel’s face, were intact and that, late in the day, the conclusion was that the piece was “eminently restorable.”
damage control: “eminently restorable.”


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jacob riis how the other half lives


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schwarz-truck, a 1995 ford f150 with two 17 gallon tanks is more than happy to suck down over one hundred and five dollars worth of 78 in a single feeding this summer. IF THEY'D LET YOU! i was fueling up for a road trip last week that would require all but one quarter of one tank when the mandatory nj pump jockey quit half way through filling the second tank and handed me back my card requiring me to take issue and give some serious attitude. there were no signs indicating any limits by whom ever is in the business of making limitations on things. and since i had been using a self imposed $20 fill-up limit (recently raised to $30) and always used cash i had no prior personal knowledge of sale limits. it was only when the pump cut off at $75 on the return trip fill-up that i put 17 and 17 together. "its the banks" the maine quickie gas lady confirmed. i paid cash for the balance of the fill on both occasions. man, if it aint one thing... its two things.


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kites are fun the documentary-ette

via zoller
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rip edith macefield

The Ballard woman who captured hearts and admirers around the world when she stubbornly turned down $1 million to sell her home to make way for a commercial development died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. She was 86. "I don't want to move. I don't need the money. Money doesn't mean anything," she told the Seattle P-I in October. She continued living in the little old house in the 1400 block of Northwest 46th Street even after concrete walls rose around her, coming within a few feet of her kitchen window. Cranes towered over her roof. Macefield turned up the television or her favorite opera music a little louder and stayed put.

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