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from the worlds going to hell in a bucket desk:

ferrari world abu dhabi

via things
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bartok

tms

justin found this one
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at moma

One of the many revelations here is the quasi-religious mysticism that infused parts of the Bauhaus in its earliest years. The first image you see when you step into the galleries is an Expressionist painting from 1919 by Johannes Itten, who ran the school’s introductory course. Its colorful abstract forms, which break down into a dense pattern of overlapping triangles, circles and rectangles, evoke the refracted glass of a stained-glass cathedral window.

Just below it is a design for a coffin lid drawn in 1920 by Lothar Schreyer, a director of the Bauhaus theater, for his wife (which, in a nice Freudian twist, was used for his mother’s burial instead). A woman’s figure, composed of interlocking circles and laid over a vibrant background of gray and blue, is framed by the lid’s trapezoidal outline. Farther along you come up against Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair, whose crudely chiseled wood frame looks so out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.

These works reveal an ambivalence about the machine age and what was being left behind. Even as Walter Gropius, the school’s founding director, was promoting a mass-production aesthetic, Itten and others were advocating a more atavistic approach, one that was rooted in the skills of the medieval craftsman. (Itten even began his classes on abstract art with a series of yoga exercises that were meant to reawaken the physical senses and bring the students in closer contact with their work.)

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The idea of "boundless abstraction" first surfaced in the water lily murals of Monet -- for Greenberg they were abstract in all but name, and set the precedent for Pollock’s all-over mural paintings -- and was extended by Kandinsky, however hesitantly, in his early works, particularly the famous First Abstract Watercolor (1911, scholars now say 1912 or 1913). There the eccentric continuum of petite color and line perceptions moves beyond the technical boundaries of the work, suggesting an infinite flux of uncontainable visual sensations. Pollock’s implicitly boundless mural abstractions are the climactic statement of "abstraction as total environment," correlate with the idea of the "environment as totally abstract."

Abstraction came to dominate thinking about the environment as well as art, and the triumph of abstraction signaled by such opposed movements as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism confirmed that it had become a generalized mode of perception and cognition: only when art and the environment were perceived and understood in abstract terms was their presence convincing. That is the point of van Doesburg’s five-step transformation of a naturally appearing cow into an abstract construction that seemed to have no relation to a cow, yet was an epitomizing summary of it in abstract terms. Duchamp’s readymades, which are everyday objects found in the environment, and given a little twist (or "assistance," as he said), can be read as abstract artifacts), however manqué. With the triumph of abstract visual thinking, every dumb thing reads as abstract art: thus the "surprise" of art, suddenly self-evident and extraordinarily present in the banally evident and ordinarily present.

It became de rigueur to see and understand things abstractly -- it was the modern take on them. To distill and convert old appearances into new abstractions was to modernize them. Sol LeWitt’s photographs of urban geometry -- manholes and brick walls -- makes the innate and intimate abstractness of the urban environment explicit, while suggesting the interchangeability and simultaneity of abstraction and the representation of reality. Mondrian came to prefer urban architecture to natural landscape because the former was overtly abstract while the latter was only subliminally abstract -- he spent the first part of his career extracting that abstractness, no doubt to convince himself that the abstract was "real." He came to regard his art as a "representation" of the "abstract real," in the (mystical?) belief that only the abstract was (really) real. Abstract art became the only "correct" and "real" art because it revealed the abstract truth, which made it seem "scientific" -- certainly Mondrian had what could be called a "scientific esthetics," as his preoccupation with precision suggests -- or at least an "experimental esthetics," for his oeuvre is a series of changing esthetic experiments designed to demonstrate the reality of the abstract.
kuspit building up to a stella russo review
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The Jazz Loft Project

Jazz in the Flower District:

Photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Flower District, in 1957. The place had already become a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. Among the visitors to the loft: Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Steve Swallow, Mose Allison, Bob Brookmeyer and hundreds more, over a period of about 8 years.

Four Thousand Hours!:

As Smith settled in and made a home and studio there, he became fascinated – and some say obsessed – with the life in and around the loft. He began to document the activity there in photographs and audio tapes. By the time he left the loft in the late ‘60’s, he’d shot 40,000 photos of musicians, artists, empty rooms, views out the window, jam sessions and parties. He’d recorded roughly 4000 hours of audio tape, including rehearsals for the famous 1959 Big Band concert at Town Hall, featuring the Thelonious Monk Tentet, as well as hundreds of jam sessions among players, known and obscure. Along with the music: conversations, meowing cats, casual visits from the cop on the beat, television and radio programs that happened to be on while the tape was running.

The Project:

Sara Fishko and WNYC, in collaboration with partners at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the New York Public Library, are building a radio series from the tapes of loft life discovered in W. Eugene Smith’s vast archive.

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missingchair
missing table and chairs

justin found this
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whole tree architecture


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beware the free chair


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bay ridge gingerbread house

via aw and brownstoner
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

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pressed penny


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The legend begins with Erwin George Baker. Baker was born in Indiana in 1882. Throughout the 1930s, he became an extremely popular motorcycle and automobile race driver. Cannonball BakerAmong the many accomplishments in his prestigious career; he won the first ever race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, placed 11th in the 1922 Indianapolis 500 and became the first commissioner of NASCAR. However, he gained his greatest notoriety in 1915 after a New York to Los Angeles drive which took 11 days and 7 hours. It was this intercontinental drive that earned him the nickname “Cannonball” after the famous Illinois Central railway car, “The Cannonball”. In 1933 he would make the cross country trek again, but this time, he’d do it in only 53 hours and 30 minutes, a record that would stand for almost 40 years. “Cannonball” Baker would pass away in 1960 as one of the most revered and popular automobile and motorcycle drivers of all time. He was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998.

Brock YatesFast forward to 1968. Brock Yates is an executive editor for Car & Driver magazine. He writes a scathing article called “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”, which critiques the auto industry, its management and its products which makes him infamous within the auto industry. Then, in 1971, Yates, along with fellow Car & Driver editor Steve Smith, decides to create an unofficial, and illegal, intercontinental road race. Inspired by the travel records of Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, the race begins in New York and ends in Redondo Beach, CA. Officially dubbed the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, the race would serve as a celebration of the US national highway system and also a protest of the soon-to-be passed 55mph speed limit. Yates wanted to prove that careful drivers can safely navigate this country’s interstate system at high speeds in much the same way the Germans do with the Autobahn. Yates also believed that if Erwin Baker could complete the journey in a record time of 53 hours and 30 minutes over unfinished roads and horrible conditions, then a modern driver should have no problem doing it over the uninterrupted expanse of the national interstate system.

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Does anyone now believe that Modernism in any of the arts simply disappeared into a black hole in order to make room for Postmodernism? You don’t have to go back far in time to discover trendy architectural academics that were promulgating variations on this theme. As a result of this massive historical distortion codified both in highbrow architectural journalism and college texts, some lesser known architects dedicated to thinking of Modernism as an ever-regenerative mind-set and rigorous tool kit for bold design were marginalized. And among the most talented? Gunnar Birkerts.

My first experience of Birkerts’ architectural power was during a visit to the Kemper Museum of Modern Art and Design in Kansas City. Overshadowed by the nearby Nelson-Atkins museum, it must be the most overlooked small museum in the U.S. Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist offers a fine assortment of Birkerts’ plans: initial and finished drawings and clear color photographs of the Kemper. Martin Schwartz, whose commentary fills most of this text, describes the Kemper as “muscular and assertive even if it is only about 23,000 square feet in area. One observer is reported to have called this museum, ‘the biggest little building he ever saw.’” I would concur – and add that the interior spaces possess a swooping vertiginous dynamism wholly appropriate to the Kemper’s collection. Think of an architect influenced by Aalto who brings to that Northern European austere sensibility the flash and dash of Futurism.

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esquerita rules

the hound
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twentinox sierra papa large chain mail


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milk design stairs and rails


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bebo y chucho valdes


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1800I
KOKO architektid fahle house


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marmol radziner prefabs


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c. 1765 PELATIAH LEETE, III HOUSE, GUILFORD CT

via amy wilson
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altered images


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Musician Chris Butler was looking for a house where he could make loud music without disturbing his neighbors. He found the perfect house and for a deal, but it came with certain "conditions." The house was the childhood home of Jeffrey Dahmer and the scene of Dahmer's first killing.


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jeepcrate

the car talk guys were yacking about the legend of the $50.00 army surplus jeep in a crate packed in cosmoline.

via jeepparts


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