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All of these aspects of Noguchi's career will be explored in an exhibition opening Friday at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield in England. The stars of the show are a hundred or so of the paper and bamboo Akari light sculptures that he began making in the early 1950s, and that became his best-known work. Lovely to look at and surprisingly robust, the Akari lights not only fuse Noguchi's Japanese and American influences, but art and design, craftsmanship and industry. They were also the catalyst for economic regeneration of a declining Japanese industry and, last but not least, their dramatically shaped mulberry-bark paper shades emit a very beautiful light.

The Akari project came about by chance, after Noguchi went back to Japan in 1950. By then his father was dead, and the Japanese welcomed him as a famous American artist. He visited the city of Gifu, where the traditional candlelit paper lantern industry was declining dramatically as more and more Japanese homes introduced electricity. The mayor asked Noguchi how to revive it.

Noguchi's solution was to modernize the old paper lanterns. Settling in an ancient teahouse with his then-wife, the Japanese movie star Yoshiko Yamaguchi, he designed a series of lamps powered by electricity, rather than candles. For the shades, he used the silky Mino paper that had been made in a nearby village from locally grown mulberry bark since the eighth century, but replaced the recently adopted wire frames with traditional bamboo. The design process was traditional, too. Noguchi began by making a wooden mold in the shape of the finished shade and wound fine strands of bamboo around it. Strips of Mino paper were glued to the bamboo, and the mold removed once the glue had dried. A slender metal structure was designed to hold the bulb and support the shade, both at the top and the bottom, where it seemed to float above the floor on spindly legs.

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VANDENBERG


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Mayor Bloomberg wants to give more New Yorkers a chance to dance.

City Hall is looking to eliminate - or at least loosen - the cumbersome cabaret license so more bars and businesses can allow patrons to let loose, the Daily News has learned.

"We either want to eliminate the license or establish a different license so that it would be less onerous for people to engage in dancing," said a source close to the mayor.

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time is tight (live)


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soulful strut


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the gfos jb's stuff


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totally tubular hand rails


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rip bruce conner break away


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LG LRB-P1031 counter depth fridge

Dimensions
Overall Width 23.4 in.
Overall Height 67.3 in.
Overall Depth 24.6 in.
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art wars: geometry as conceptual art


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etro paisley fabric


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ed roth rat fink decals

via mr bc
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25155

Opening the turquoise cover of this book by architect Giller and his granddaughter, Sarah, is like stepping into the world of the Jetsons. All of his resorts, nightclubs, office buildings, and family houses celebrated innovative technology (air-conditioning!), new materials (Formica!), and the dramatic shapes and roof forms that came to exemplify the style known as Miami Modern, or "MiMo."

The sheer output of Giller's eponymous firm was remarkable. In 1946 he announced the opening of his Miami offices and attracted upwards of 50 clients. By the end of 1968 he and his associates had executed plans for more than 85 separate commissions in the U.S., and Central and South America.

All of those projects were inspired by the abundant sunshine and vibrant colors of South Florida and the Caribbean, and each of them exudes theatricality. It's easy to imagine how impressed visitors must have felt when they drove up to the glowing windows of his Copa City Night Club in Miami Beach, or descended the floating staircase to the lobby of his Thunderbird Motel in Sunny Isles. I only wish I'd had the chance to experience the late architect's famed Diplomat Hotel before its demolition. Distinguished by a massive concrete canopy at the entrance and a bold line of circles punched through the cantilevered roof, the Diplomat was the commission he often called his masterpiece.
mo mimo
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fish sheds fish sheds roly poly...


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bill owens suburbia


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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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