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team hobie

thx jim
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the ever facinating

judit bellostes architecture blog


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chooglin' on down the line


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skyway

The Minneapolis architecture firm City Desk Studio just put a skyway up for sale on craigslist. A freakin' skyway.

It's a steel girder and glass box, 20 x 83 feet, and 14 tall, designed by architect Ed Baker ["the father of the skyways"] to connect JC Penney's and Powers department stores. The 12-inch concrete floor accounts for about half of the skyway's 280,000-lb weight. [That's half a Richard Serra retrospective, for those keeping score at home.] It was apparently assembled in three sections and filled in with glass after it was installed.

City Desk Studio's asking price is currently $79,500, which is a huge discount from the $1.2 million they expected to bring in by turning the skyway into the Skyway Retreat lakefront cabin and selling 12 4-week shares for $100,000 apiece.


more on skywalks / via justin


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butt h*le rd


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MODish


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Spotted on Beyond DC, a video of President-elect Obama from a town hall-style gathering back during the election season in Toledo, Ohio. Not only does he speak at length about the importance of building strong cities and metropolitan areas in the economic recovery process, he starts off by praising Jane Jacobs, calling The Death and Life of Great American Cities "a great book." Kind of amazing to see and hear; certainly gives this urbanist hope for the future.

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rip Shigeo Fukuda

trident
blivet man via adman


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nice parade. but it could have used some shriners to pep it up.


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011609

Although his father was a rabbi, Kahn had little formal education. Nevertheless, he rose to become a pre-eminent architect who helped create industrial America in the first half of the 20th century. He and his firm designed more than 1,000 buildings for Ford and several hundred for GM, as well as swank homes and imposing corporate headquarters of those company’s owners and managers. He designed buildings for the Dodge Brothers, Walter Chrysler and the Fisher Brothers, and in the 1930s, while he was serving these titans of automotive capitalism, his firm built more than 500 factories in the Soviet Union. Kahn’s great Ford factory in River Rouge, Mich., was the most impressive — and largest — architectural expression of the modern industrial age.

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adaptive reuse defined


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A 27-story limit - the height of the landmarked Parachute Jump - has been placed on the tallest buildings, but most will be much lower, city officials said.

"This plan protects and preserves the unique character of Coney Island while bringing new housing, shops and recreational facilities to a community that needs more of each," Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement.

The plan's newly imagined "Wonder Wheel Way" will connect three iconic rides; the 88-year-old Ferris wheel, the Parachute Jump and the Cyclone, officials said.

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So it comes to this. Later tonight–6:30 to be exact–the Municipal Art Society will hold its final meeting on Coney Island, where it will take comments from the community, present the work of its charrette team, and, finally, present their recommendations to the city, a copy of which AN has received. The group’s timing couldn’t be better because we have also learned that the city is to certify its own long-simmering plans for Coney on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the entire neighborhood has gone (further) to pot.

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the surfaries wipeout

the ventures wipeout

tom moody (wipeout)


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the east village other

other steven heller


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floating podium


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Paul Virilio's classic book of wartime architectural history, Bunker Archeology, is finally back in print with a fantastic new edition from Princeton Architectural Press. The book had taken on the feel of something like an urban legend—something of which many had heard but few had directly experienced—so it's good to get our hands on a copy.

In 1945, Virilio explains, World War II having finally come to an end, he "discovered" the sea as a 13-year old boy. Until that point, the Atlantic Ocean had been entirely inaccessible, transformed into a heavily fortified landscape by a new, concrete terrain of Nazi bunkers and machine gun nests, all of it surrounded by the ruined killing fields of modern warfare. "The discovery of the sea," Virilio writes on the book's opening page, "is a precious experience that bears thought. Seeing the oceanic horizon is indeed anything but a secondary experience; it is in fact an event in consciousness of underestimated consequences."

What follows from there is an unforgettable tour, verbal and photographic, of the French Atlantic coast—paying particular attention, architecturally, visually, and philosophically, on the abandoned Nazi bunkers that litter the landscape. The book, written in a strange but effective genre somewhere between personal memoir and architectural theory, makes for a broken reading experience, but not from lack of quality: There are so many insights, so many lines worth writing down, that one is almost constantly reaching for a pen or a Post-It note in order to take notes.

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Q: How Can I Tell When My Saranac Beer Was Packaged?

To help ensure freshness, Saranac bottles and case cartons utilize what is called the Julian date coding system -a simple method for identifying when the bottle was produced. The Julian date code assigns a three-digit number to each day of the year, from 001 (January 1st) to 365 (December 31st). A fourth digit designates the year, such as the number 6 to represent 2006.

So...bottle of Saranac produced on January 15th 2005 would carry this Julian date code: 0155 (015 = January 15th and 5 = 2005)

You'll find this code just above the label on the bottle shoulder. The Julian date code is the first four digits. The next four digits represent the time of day.

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They weren't actually sewers, but we liked to refer to them as such. They were really storm drain tunnels, miles of which run underneath the suburbs of Plano, Texas. Even though there's no direct human or household waste flowing through them, it's odd looking back and realizing that at the time we assumed there was, and that it didn't bother us. It never smelled more than just musty, and there was never more than a small trickle of water running through them. The tunnels were mostly bone dry, so it was easy to navigate on their poured concrete surfaces with sneakers and not feel like you'd stepped in something gross. These cylindrical, concrete caves provided a chilly, dim, wholly other universe for me and my friends while growing up...always waiting there for us mere inches beneath our front lawns. The real purpose of storm drain tunnels is to prevent flooding in low-lying areas: drains built within the grid of paved streets (usually along the curbs) sieve off rainwater directly into large tunnels under the ground, or sometimes smaller connecting ones, which lead to others, and others, and eventually dump out into creeks. Rainwater run-off, lawn water run-off, street water, creek water, storm drains, storm tunnels: to us...they'll always be sewers.

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waiting for my gin to hit me


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a whos who of swinging london


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white western dudes with cameras poking around abandoned asian amusement parks

thx lisa
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kromer welding cap

stormy kromer cap


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von dutch stuff


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TLWEC


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