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In February 1958 they announced plans to re-establish the Irish Georgian Society, a group that had created a photographic record of Dublin’s best Georgian buildings earlier in the century; this new version, Mr. Guinness wrote in The Irish Times, would “fight for the protection of what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland.” The following month they began restoring a building of their own, Leixlip Castle, a dilapidated 12th-century fortress on 182 acres west of Dublin, which would be their home and the group’s headquarters.

Now observing its 50th year with a series of celebrations and a lavishly illustrated book, the revived Irish Georgian Society has been credited with restoring dozens of architectural gems across Ireland, from a former union hall for Dublin tailors to the country’s oldest Palladian house. (The society’s early preservation efforts focused on Georgian Dublin, but in later years it expanded its mission to cover noteworthy buildings from any period.) Perhaps more impressively, the group has helped bring about a national change of heart regarding Irish architecture.

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repurposing closed box-store boxes


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Lu-Mi-Num company bikes of St. Louis

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A growing number of Steve McGreens are souping up their gas-electric hybrids to make them go faster and handle better, while delivering stellar fuel economy. It isn't just gearheads busting their knuckles, either. A lot of the hybrid hackers are tech geeks whose innovations may well appear in the cars we'll buy tomorrow.

"The gearhead of today has evolved. People today want performance and fuel economy," Paul Goldman, the 46-year-old CEO of the hot-rod hybrid shop Juiced Hybrid, tells Wired.com. He sells more than 500 items ranging from suspension kits and chassis stiffeners to body kits and floor mats. Most of his customers are "educated people who care about the environment" and modify their cars "because they're tech savvy, not necessarily because they're car savvy."

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Coming in late on this discussion. Catherine Spaeth, please get over yourself. Three posts on your blog about this peccadillo you discovered and all your words here in Johnson’s comments are just too much. Publishing “the plagiarist’s” picture under the blog title “_____ the Plagiarist,” it’s just melodramatic overkill.

I’m not sure that what you’re griping about (and griping, and griping…) is even properly plagiarism. As you describe it, a blogger used some of your words but “sapped your writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder.”

That’s two different issues. If he changed your meaning but attributed the words to you, that’s one thing. Using your words verbatim and passing them off as his is another. It seems like the sins somewhat cancel each other out. I’m sure you can lecture me endlessly about why this is not so.

Cribbing others’ prose is wrong. Unfortunately the Internet is still an intellectual Wild West, and people do all kinds of things on the fly that won’t live up to your ethical standards as a print writer. You are the schoolmaster insisting on decorum while others are ducking from the hail of bullets as the bad guys ride into town. Point out your grievance, move on. No one cares how important you think you are.

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global warming swimming pool


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more swiped net junk

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My original effort was an attempt to understand how Whistler’s vision of the Thames, which is mostly represented horizontally in his paintings, was translated into representations of the vertical reach of New York City. The darkness and mist that covers the bridges and the far shore of the Thames revealed to Whistler an abstract and elemental formal quality that was instrumental in making his art so revolutionary—a deliberate arrangement of colors and shapes on a flat surface. As soon as photographers began looking at the vertical geography of New York, they began to see ways they could capture the unusual forms by covering details in the same cloak of darkness.

Whistler wasn’t afraid to make enemies or to go to court (as in the famous lawsuit against John Ruskin) to demand that he be recognized as a revolutionary artist who had showed urban citizens something they had never seen before. He even compiled his rebuttals to his critics in a book called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His influence extended beyond the realm of the visual arts; for example, when Ezra Pound was trying to promote Imagism in London in the second decade of the twentieth century, he cited Whistler’s courageous artwork in support of his ideas. Returning to the visual arts, even so brash and semiabstract a painter as Joseph Stella, whose sharp angles seem distinct from Whistler’s delicacy of touch, also began his career as a maker of Whistleresque nocturnes.

It can be said that Whistler showed people how to paint a “moonlight” (his original term for what he later called nocturnes) without ever depicting the moon. This, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of artificial light, helped liberate the representation of night from a number of qualities that had become clichéd, most notably that it was a time of reflection and pastoral repose that would carry us back to childlike innocence.

But of course the book is not all about Whistler. The motif of the flaneur runs throughout. I try to show that Edgar Allan Poe had partly celebrated and partly parodied this figure in his story “The Man of the Crowd.” What he notices is that the flaneur can’t really make anything happen; his whole job is to observe and comment. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, the flaneur becomes an investigator. Think of Jacob Riis who was dedicated not just to observing the world but also to changing what he saw.

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New Media vs Artists with Computers

Abigail Solomon Godeau


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used wood burning stoves phil pa area


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gloomy sunday


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For [Georges] Nöel, the ground of his paintings was as elemental as a muddy battlefield strewn with detritus: a thick, mixed-media “magma-matter,” first made with cloth and paper and then with sand and pigment embedded in polyvinyl acetate, a surface embodying chemistry’s conquest of nature. Noël covered this ground with dense skeins of marks, signs, gouges and graffiti, a method that he soon began referring to with the term “palimpsests” -- a form that his then-wife and companion, the celebrated curator Margit Rowell, referred to as “a stratification of writings. . . that blend into a single cryptic text.”

Indeed, the palimpsest is “an exemplary pictorial metaphor” for the human subject itself. For what is the modern individual but a palimpsest, an imaginary unity constituted from uncertain layers of experience, feelings, memories, thoughts, sensations?

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What the volume doesn’t do, perhaps surprisingly, is reprint some of the more famous tomes of that career — absent is that originary moment represented by the discipline-warping dissertation; the polemical essays that comprised Structural Anthropology; the UNESCO-sponsored Race and History; and the symphonic four-volume series of works on mythology published between 1964 and 1971, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.

Why the absences? The editor of the Pléiade Lévi-Strauss, Vincent Debaene, an assistant professor in the French department at Columbia, argues in his preface that the selections represent a double refusal: It avoided the production of a “too technical volume” but moreover avoided becoming another mythological reproduction of a “manifesto of structuralism.” A selection of texts that would have played into the latter tendency, Debaene wrote me by e-mail, “would have reduced Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to an avant-garde which has now been passed over, and the volume would have just gathered the memories of a moment of ‘French Theory’ or of European thought –– and the native Indians would have just become what they were in 18th-century thought: some remote shadows, a conceptual tool to create a relativistic stance, a fiction which would have helped us to think of ourselves and of our present.”

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In “Marvels of Modernism,” the latest installment, 10 photographers have translated the design elements of 12 postwar Modernist landscapes — kidney-shaped pools, Miró-esque reservoirs, boomerang curves, floating cantilevered decks and adventure playgrounds — for the 21st century. The exhibition, which opened Wednesday, will run through Jan. 4 and then travel to museums and botanical gardens. The sites were selected from the foundation’s annual “Landslide” list of endangered places and plants, which was culled from hundreds of nominees and then vetted by a panel of designers and preservationists.

“What we’re trying to do with the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to begin to get people to recognize that the American landscape is in fact a cultural institution worthy of celebration,” Mr. Birnbaum said. Featuring works like the daunting horizon of Boston City Hall Plaza, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, and Dan Kiley’s orthogonal Miller Garden in Columbus, Ind., designated a national historic landmark in 2000, the disparate sites are linked by the civic ambition of those who designed them.

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ill come back to this. A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn By Charles Taylor

i find gehry pretty tedious but he is not representative of all artist/architects. certainly not koolhaas. taylor gets just about everything else wrong in this article.


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barbara galucci achicitectonic photographs


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at sleep away camp summer 63 i wrote the joke: meanwhile back at the ranch the lone ranger disguised as a pool table racked his balls. i found record here that the joke still exists.


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the gobbler - the grooviest motel in wisconsin

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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

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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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