cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

we are just crazy about those video reports from that man on the street billl cunningham


[link] [2 comments]

sollo rago fall 08 modern art and furniture catalog now up online saturday sunday


[link] [2 comments]

insulating a summer place


[link] [add a comment]

Kusama's Self Obliteration


[link] [add a comment]

fall '08 nyt design mag


[link] [1 comment]

68 or 69 vette convertible


[link] [1 comment]

Already a few things are blazingly clear. Designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, the renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality.

[link] [add a comment]

rothko's seagram murals at tate modern


[link] [2 comments]

strayhorn


[link] [1 comment]

Instant Cities, Instant Architecture, and Incremental Metropolotanism

We have been documenting the before-and-after transformations of these low-density, auto-dependent, single-use suburban formats into urban places and the roles of the public and private realms in affecting these changes.4 Some of the changes have in fact been incremental and indicative of both gradual demographic shifts and public efforts to induce change. For instance, every one of the original Levittowns has added not only countless additions to individual houses but also multi-unit housing for seniors as inhabitants have aged. A decade after Boulder, Colorado, revised zoning and setback regulations along suburban arterials, new mixed-use buildings with sidewalk cafés appear cheek by jowl with older carpet-supply stores set behind large parking lots.

Across the country those older stand-alone retail buildings are also increasingly being adaptively reused for community-serving purposes. A dozen Wal-Marts were converted to churches between 2002 and 2005.5 La Grande Orange in Phoenix is a reborn strip mall whose locally owned restaurants and shops have become so popular that it has its own T-shirts and is regularly mentioned as a selling point in real estate ads for the neighborhood. Daly Genik Architects made an L-shaped mini-mall into the award-winning courtyard-focused Camino Nuevo Charter Elementary School in Los Angeles, with plans (largely realized) for converting more buildings on the block into schools. The addition of sidewalks and pervious public green space figured into both Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle's elegant transformation of a Food Lion grocery store into the North Branch Public Library in Denton, Texas (see figure 1) and The Beck Group's award-winning conversion of a Super Kmart into His Hands Church in Woodstock, Georgia. Many other vacant big box stores have been converted to call centers and office space — including the headquarters for Hormel Foods which includes the Spam Museum in a former K-Mart in Austin, Minnesota. There are countless additional examples of this kind of recycling that show welcome but minor improvements to the physical and social infrastructure.6

However, retrofitting's greater potential goes well beyond incremental adaptive reuse or renovation. By urbanizing larger suburban properties with a denser, walkable, synergistic mix of uses and housing types, more significant reductions in carbon emissions, gains in social capital, and changes to systemic growth patterns can be achieved. On emissions alone, new research asserts that “It is realistic to assume a 30% cut in VMT with compact development.”7 The key to achieving this target is the appropriate balancing of uses so that, once on site, residents, shoppers, office workers, and others can accomplish several everyday tasks without getting back in their cars. This allows mixed-use New Urbanist greyfield retrofits to routinely achieve projections of 25 to 30% internal trip capture rates. In turn, this means that a balanced, walkable mixed-use project will generate 25 to 30% fewer net external trips on nearby roads than a conventional project of equivalent density.8 Such “capturing” of internal trips is dependent upon achieving the critical mass associated with instant cities, not with incremental changes to the suburban pattern. Are these projections to be trusted? Atlantic Station, an example of compact mixed-use development adjacent to midtown Atlanta on a former steel mill site, is generating far greater reductions in VMT than initial estimates projected. In a region where the average employed resident drives sixty-six miles a day, employees in Atlantic Station are driving an average of 10.7 miles a day and residents an average of eight miles a day.9

[link] [add a comment]

It is my humble opinion that Lou Reed is an asshole. You can give this reason or that reason why he acted the way he did--he just kept going on and on about Lester. Lester had written this wonderful heartfelt obituary of Peter Laughner, where he ended it saying, "I wouldn't walk across the street to spit on Lou Reed." Lou had gotten a copy of that and he was reading this to me like he was looking in a mirror--that was the end of the conversation. When I left there, I said, "You know, I don't think I can be friends with this guy." I tried to back away from the friendship, which is something you can't do with somebody that paranoid. I tried to do it over a six-month period, but I had to pay.

[link] [add a comment]

Finnforest Kopello Log Cabin Garage


[link] [add a comment]

CURRENT TOWN parlance, Carder is a "shed boy," a catchy term applied to a non-catchy lifestyle. It refers to people, mostly single men, who live off the grid and low-on-the-hog. Many of the homes aren't exactly sheds. They are boats moored on land, trailers, buses, vans, somebody's spare bedroom, a shipping container. For many, being a shedder is more attitude or necessity than address.

Some residents say the shed-boy buzz, started by the local newspaper, The Leader, is a joke, much ado about a few uninspired men. Others, though, say it captured a Port Townsend archetype and highlighted the city's lack of affordable housing and decent wages.

The Leader articles, written by freelance reporter Rebecca Mizhir, who once was part of a writers' group known as the "trailer poets," captured community attention and sold a lot of newspapers. There was talk of a novel ("The Shed Boy Murders") and jokes of a shed tour. Merchants on tourist-friendly Water Street advertised shed-boy fashion statements.

Many of the people who best meet the definition won't talk about it. They live far off the curb for a reason, and fear the code-enforcement officer. One man, who is devising technology that apparently has interested a major company but lives in a school bus, wanted nothing to do with me. I was escorted to a mini-village of sheds and trailers by one of its residents, but a guy who claims to be a shaman sent word I best not go near him or his trailer.

[link] [add a comment]

This is not all to say that the building should have been left as an untouched, decaying memorial to some episodic, bygone aesthetic rebellion of the 1960s. I do support the new Museum's ambition to establish itself in a new and prominent location, and I wish it luck. But I think the architects could have come up with a more creative way to address and engage the storied and tortuous past of this structure and this site. Cloepfil heralds the preservation of the iconic lollipop columns at the building's base as some kind of concessionary offering to the Sterns of this world. But this is nothing more than petty lip-service to preservationists, and Cloepfil should be ashamed for his brazen contextual ignorance. His project ends up so anodyne, so plain, and so gutless that it fails to make any statement at all about anything other than the 2-foot wide light slots that wind around the facade. (And which, by the way, are completely out of scale and exhibit the innovative capacity of a 1st-year graduate school project.)

[link] [add a comment]

YACHT ROCK

J. D. Ryznar and Hunter D. Stair devised the series after noticing the incestuous recording careers of such bands as Steely Dan, Toto, and The Doobie Brothers and the singer-songwriters Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. For example, McDonald co-wrote Loggins' "This Is It" and The Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes" and also performed backing vocals for several other 'yacht rock' artists, including Steely Dan and Christopher Cross. Yacht Rock's episodes were "hosted" by "Hollywood" Steve Huey, a legitimate music critic for Allmusic.

Ryznar admits to having a fascination with the music of the period. Ryznar explains, "Getting into Steely Dan really started this for me. As did the ability to buy dollar records at Amoeba and put them on tapes for my car. Kenny Loggins has made his way into all the pilots I've been involved with except [one]."[1] As Ryznar told Reuters contributor Andy Sullivan, "I'm making fun of the songwriting process, but the music is generally treated pretty lovingly."[2]

The series depicted some realistic aspects of the music, but builds exaggerated storylines around them. For example, the series' presentation of Hall & Oates, in which John Oates, a clear junior partner given his paucity of lead vocals or songwriting credits, rules over partner Daryl Hall in quasi-abusive fashion, is unrealistic. Michael Jackson is depicted as a hard-rock enthusiast who believes his partnership with guitarist Eddie Van Halen will lead to an endless parade of female sexual conquests. Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, the Doobie Brothers' lead guitarist, is often seen pressuring central figure Michael McDonald to write the Doobies another hit. The real Baxter did bring McDonald into the band but he quit himself after achieving their greatest commercial success because of his displeasure with their new commercial attitude. The Eagles and Steely Dan really did insert lyrical references to each other in their music, as depicted in the show, but these were actually friendly in nature, not part of a longtime grudge involving baseball bats and lunch-money shakedowns.[3]

[link] [1 comment]

Ike, the hurricane, missed New Orleans and ravaged parts of Texas instead. While one might think the Crescent City would breathe easier — it’s really not the case . people there are asking themselves just how many times they can evacuate. it is difficult and expensive to have to haul ass for every potential hurricane. There are those who think that at some point New Orleans should just factor the water in and make itself some liquid thoroughfares like Amsterdam or Venice– have the city adapt… and there might be a lot of sense in that point of view — neighborhoods like the lower 9th and east Lakeview were built ON wetlands, and , it seems, nature is trying to reclaim them. The neighborhoods on higher ground — what the locals refer to as the ’sliver by the river’ are part of New Orleans original charter and were built specifically because they were on higher ground — the rest of these communities came much later……
read the rest of tony fitzpatricks NO diary

via vz
[link] [add a comment]

I love this Scopitone clip of Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks.Yes, the big eared blond on drums is Levon Helm. Not their best tune (for that, try this one-- their version of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love from 1960 (Roullette). It was a huge hit in Canada whose radio stations blasted it into Detroit at the time, evidently it was a big influence on the Stooges' James Wiliamson whose solo on Search & Destroy would echo it twenty two years later. - the hound

[link] [add a comment]

ee

The notion of "leftover space" has always been of great interest to architects, but in the context of global urbanization it conjures a particularly visceral response.Leftover space in the sense of being ghettoized and depicting a sort of bare essentiality of being in architecture is not always easy to look at much less understand, especially for a profession whose responsibility is designing the structures that people will inhabit. For the most part, the issue of global poverty is translated through viral images of shanties infecting the landscape, peripheral slums leaching off the urban core, and pictures that instill fear of an assailant rise of diseased squatter cities. This not only demonizes the third world, it painfully reminds us of our own failures to address the infrastructural necessities of millions. However, these images narrate only part of the story for those who go on sifting through the remains of an urban evolution which has long since abandoned them

[link] [add a comment]

mexcontainer

It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that detoured Brian McCarthy from building houses in Albuquerque to an idea to offer the very poor a chance to own a home. His answer lies in a humble steel shipping container 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8˝ feet tall.
via zoller
[link] [add a comment]

hello down there

via vz
[link] [add a comment]

musical mirages


[link] [add a comment]

how to speak hip


[link] [add a comment]

a look back in history with color photography

via zoller
[link] [add a comment]

My fellow day campers and I used to swim here every summer. A 20 minute walk to the bus stop, wait for the bus, bus ride to ferry, wait for ferry, ferry ride, walk to pool, a nice hike and worth every minute. The Lyons pool was glorious!!!! Huge and gorgeous. I am so happy it won't be torn down now for the "luxury condos". They have 3 pools: a kiddie pool, a diving pool & a normal 4 ft pool. I used to do forward somersaults off the high diving board. So many happy memories. - lisa

[link] [add a comment]