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a stranger in my own home town


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Local and federal officials on Tuesday announced plans for a 70-acre medical campus in the heart of New Orleans to replace two hospitals damaged during Hurricane Katrina, a $2 billion investment that supporters say will create thousands of jobs and begin to rebuild the city’s shattered health care system.

One of the hospitals, to be built by Louisiana State University, would replace the city’s landmark Charity Hospital, a lifeline for generations of the city’s poor, which has been vacant since the storm damaged its lower floors. The other would replace the vacant Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, also severely damaged by the flooding. The old hospitals and adjacent buildings will be abandoned under the plan, which officials here described as the foundation for a new economy for New Orleans, and the largest investment in the area since Katrina.

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big crate

via vz
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too brutal and just right brutal, robin hood gardens and park hill


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Since summer, daylight has bathed the galleria of the new World Trade Center, pouring through the five-and-a-half-foot intervals between its rounded steel arches and creating a modernist version of the ancient, roofless hypostyle halls of Egypt.

Luminous Views, Soon to Be Lost, at Trade Center Galleria It is a vision that the architects never intended, since the galleria — an east-west passageway connecting the World Trade Center Transportation Hub to Battery Park City — is far below street level. Workers will soon lay down steel roof decking along 250 feet of the galleria, permanently cutting it off from the elements.

During the brief time it has been exposed to raking sunlight and softening clouds, the galleria has offered a life-size preview of the transportation hub itself — a preview that has surprised even the building’s chief architect, Santiago Calatrav

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Since the architect Paul Rudolph’s death, in 1997, his reputation has undergone one of the most dramatic rehabilitations imaginable, and his brutalist, sometimes off-putting buildings—once criticized as the worst of high modernism’s excesses—are now recognized as some of the most expressive American architecture of the twentieth century. They are also some of the most threatened. In 2002, in an effort to honor Rudolph’s legacy and advocate for preserving his work, friends of the architect, including Ernst Wagner, established the Paul Rudolph Foundation. But since then, seven of his buildings have been demolished, and earlier this month, in the face of mounting criticism that the foundation has not helped halt the destruction, Wagner, in poor health, announced he would resign as president. “I felt like Don Quixote,” he says, sitting in his apartment in the Rudolph-designed townhouse on East 58th Street. “But what the hell can you do? You need someone like Jackie O. to raise a huge hurrah.”

This past year has been particularly heart-wrenching for Rudolph fans: While his most famous building, the A&A building at Yale University, was rededicated this month as Paul Rudolph Hall after a $126 million restoration, both the elegantly cantilevered Micheels House in Westport, Connecticut, and his Cerrito House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, were torn down. And next year could be even worse, as at least ten more Rudolph buildings are under threat, including the Concourse Building in Singapore, the Blue Cross Blue Shield skyscraper in Boston, and his Orange County Government Center in Goshen. In Sarasota, Florida, the campaign to save Rudolph’s Riverview High School has stalled, and the Cohen House in nearby Siesta Key is now likely headed into foreclosure.

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Let’s start at the end of one story, the story of the dump, with the view from way up on top of it.

Let’s start at the peak of what was once a steaming, stinking, seagull-infested mountain of trash, a peak that is now green, or greenish, or maybe more like a green-hued brown, the tall grasses having been recently mown by the sanitation workers still operating at Fresh Kills, on the western shore of Staten Island. Today the sun dries the once slime-covered slopes, as a few hawks circle in big, slow swoops and a jet makes a lazy approach to Newark, just across the Arthur Kill. The sky, when viewed from atop a twenty-story heap of slowly decomposing garbage—the so-called South Mound, a Tribeca-size drumlin surrounded by other trash mounds, some as long as a mile—is the kind of big blue that you expect to see somewhere else, like the middle of Missouri. It’s a great wide-open bowl, fringed with green hills (some real, some garbage-filled) that are some of the highest points on the Atlantic seaboard south of Maine. Meanwhile, at your feet, hook-shaped white plastic tubes vent methane, the gas that builds up naturally in a landfill, a by-product of refuse being slowly digested by underground bacteria. The hissing of landfill gas is soft and gentle, like the sound of a far-off mountain stream or the stove left on in your apartment.

But as you look a little longer, it’s definitely not a Missouri view, and the unmistakable landmarks come into focus: a tower on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a span of the Outerbridge Crossing, and, on Coney Island, the very top of the parachute jump. In the foreground, trucks enter the landfill, climbing the mounds and dumping clean soil over not-so-clean soil. It’s all part of a radical plan to turn Fresh Kills landfill into Fresh Kills Park, with mountain bikers and kayakers and ballplayers sharing 2,315 acres of open space with restored maritime forests, with chestnut trees dotting dry prairies, with new or revived sweet-gum swamps, maybe a fox scooting through persimmon copses or a deer through a new birch thicket.

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abandoned luncheonette

abandoned police station wtf

via zoller
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timberframe cabin project via materialicious

I've started on a timberframed cabin project. I'm making the parts here in Nebraska, and hauling them out to some land in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Wyoming (about a mile from the Continental Divide near Encampment) where I will assemble them into a small cabin. The site is on the edge of the Medicine Bow National Forest, and has a small stream running across it. That cabin will be where I stay and keep my tools as I build a larger cabin over the next decade or so.
the above quote was from when he was just getting started and now hes pretty well finished up the cabin, so you can review the whole construction process start to completion. well done. nice project.


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must listen sunday evenings on wfmu radio 91.1 fm ~ streaming online ~ archived

gaylord fields from 5 - 7 pm

monica lynch from 7 - 9 pm

honorable mention: venerable music radio online stream 78 rpm era music 247


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Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour examines the turmoil that surrounded the late-1960s variety show. With a young and brash stable of writers and performers, including Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour brought an edgy new brand of political comedy to the airwaves for three seasons. When they were fired in 1969, brothers Tom and Dick Smothers took their network, CBS, to court ... and won. This is the fascinating, true story as told by its key players, including the Smothers Brothers, show writers Rob Reiner and Mason William, performers Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Harry Belafonte, and former CBS executives.


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Guitar evanglists, singing preachers and the like....

at the hound
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the endangered french cafe


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Shipping Container Steel Building - Plans & Manuals CD


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shakerst

Shaker Stove/Built-in Closet
Rendered by John W. Kelleher (artist), c. 1938
watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paper
overall: 27.8 x 20.6 cm (10 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Original IAD Object: 68" high; 17" wide (closet)
Index of American Design
1943.8.13677


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science class tables via workalicious


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arts & architecture




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hendrix for everyone

and lou too


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jinhua-architecture-park


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electric mini cooper


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The Fontainebleau was gutted to the studs, its 22-acre grounds completely redrawn. Developers added three upscale signature chefs' restaurants and an enormous new beachfront spa to accommodate 1,504 guest rooms -- just under half of them suites in two new towers. Each features granite counters, walk-in showers and separate jetted tubs, flat-screen TVs and even a new Apple computer. That last part is the centerpiece of the "paperless" hotel -- meaning all guest correspondence will be electronic.

New owner Jeffrey Soffer's team, which bought the property for $500 million and shelled out another $500 million in upgrades, is also opening Fontainebleaus in Las Vegas (fall 2009), Dubai and a fourth, to-be-named location.

Though they wanted a new identity, designers strove to retain architect Morris Lapidus' original vision. For example, Lapidus' affinity for circles is clear throughout the hotel's spacious hallways, where elaborate chandeliers by Ai WeiWei, a consultant for the Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest main stadium, hang from high-ceiling insets.

The grand lobby's original white-and-black bow-tie floor pattern was recreated out of new materials, and its furrowed columns were preserved and refurbished.

So too was the Fontainebleau's famed "Staircase to Nowhere," which historically led to a small coat room just above the lobby. Belles and beaus would take an elevator up, check their coats and descend the stairs for a grand entrance. The coat check is gone -- not a terribly sensible feature in the tropics, anyway -- but the runway remains.

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alan zweibel on lopate


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left wing political graphics


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45 Vintage ‘Space Age’ Illustrations

via zoller
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