cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

Stewart whole earth catalog Brand's New Book is a Must-Read


[link] [3 comments]

sir john sloane the furniture of death


[
link] [add a comment]

my barn conversion

>>bump<<
[link] [add a comment]

reference library been busy


[link] [add a comment]

bridgejpg


[link] [1 comment]

Adherents to these perspectives are known to have viewed as antagonistic the relationship between those behaviors devoted to the pursuit of desire and pleasure and those devoted to the provision of what is needed. If neo-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes are today largely remembered as theorists of pleasure and desire, it is because they challenged the utilitarian underpinnings of our common assumptions concerning these terms, teaching us not only to separate the vicissitudes of desire from the exigencies of mere need, but also to observe behind what we imagine to be our pleasures a jouissance whose most salient quality is its indifference, even hostility, to our personal well-being. From 1968 to the end of the 20th century, the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard) exercised a significant influence on a wide range of professional (Herman Hertzberger, Bernard Tschumi, Jean Nouvel, Peter Eisenman) and critical (Massimo Cacciari, Manfredo Tafuri, K. Michael Hays, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina) practices in architecture. Although important differences can be observed between these various players in their various domains, a set of intellectual and ethical commitments can be said to characterize the corporate ethos that emerges from that diversity: an insistence on the autonomy and artificiality of all forms of social and cultural practice (an insistence typically, though not invariably, predicated on the assumption of a radical discontinuity separating the cognitive and symbolic capacities of humans from that of other animal species); a suspicion, allied with this notion of cultural autonomy, of every naturalist or necessitarian explanatory framework for describing the genesis of human pleasure and desire and those cultural activities associated with them (hence the celebration of the destructive and transgressive impulse at work in all forms of cultural sublimation, as against the interpretation of those forms as strategies of bio-cultural adaptation); and, finally, but perhaps most consequentially for our purposes, a resolute insistence on negation of the given as a precondition for the production of human significance (a negation typically conceived as involving the expurgation of all vital substance from those materials comprising the given).

The counter-vitalist ethos that underpins this constellation of commitments is aptly expressed in Jacques Derrida’s sympathetic assessment of the structuralist legacy, offered in an essay written in 1963, in which he links the revelation of structure to a certain de-animation of form: “The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when the content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer in-habited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture.” The conception of architecture that these lines communicate follows a legacy that includes, alongside Hegel’s description of architecture’s original vocation as one of containing not the life but the death of the mind, Adolf Loos’s description of architecture as the precise inverse of a machine for living: “When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped up in a rough pyramidal shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. There is architecture.”
hdm #30
[link] [add a comment]

This equation of pleasure with the endless variety of city life is also central to the sensibility of European modernists, as we see in Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, Gertrude Stein’s Parisian window shopper, André Breton’s surrealist vagrant, and André Gide’s “disponible” immoralist, all glutting themselves on the heterogeneity and intensity of urban sensation. A century of techno-logical advances has only increased the scope for open-ness and excess, until today we may experience a “global sublime,” a delirious expansion of self into Internet infinity. The 21st-century pleasure economy permits us to exceed ourselves—ecstatically, extravagantly, waste-fully—until, like Whitman, we are “multitudes.”

The popular rhetoric of sustainability, in contrast, is all about limits on freedom and the thwarting of desire: “conspicuous austerity,” “inconspicuous consumption,” “frugal chic,” “going on a spending fast,” “carborexics,” “energy anorexics.” The proliferating mots spell out the pleasures of a hunger artist writ small: the satisfaction of never forgetting one’s reusable shopping bag or failing to separate the brown glass from the green and the clear, the bio waste from the metal and plastic. Watch those paint drips, Mr. Pollock! Green parents now have an excuse for not taking their kids to Little League practice—the drive is bad for the planet—and green children can retaliate by chiding their elders for lolling in full bathtubs or leaving the engine idling in the pickup line. Such meanness has its pleasures no doubt, but they are far from the elation of unfettered self-expression, even among those of tamer tastes than the Marquis de Sade or Charles Manson.
from HDM vol 30: (sustainability) + pleasure
[link] [add a comment]

charlotte perriand chalet meribel-les allues


[link] [3 comments]

scott tallon walker goulding house


[link] [add a comment]

mario botta riva san vitale


[link] [add a comment]

art inc plexi-furniture

via sister slab
[link] [add a comment]

tolix bistro chairs


[link] [add a comment]

mens (fade) eye glasses - safety glasses


[link] [11 comments]


[link] [add a comment]

In a shift of position, the Food and Drug Administration is expressing concerns about possible health risks from bisphenol-A, or BPA, a widely used component of plastic bottles and food packaging that it declared Bisphenol-a (BPA), found in Nalgene brand water bottles, is one of the most widely used synthetic chemicals in industry.

The agency said Friday that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

The action is another example of the drug agency under the Obama administration becoming far more aggressive in taking hard looks at what it sees as threats to public health. In recent months, the Concerns about BPA are based on studies that have found harmful effects in animals, and on the recognition that the chemical seeps into food and baby formula, and that nearly everyone is exposed to it, starting in the womb.

[link] [add a comment]

skull and bones ballot box

via vz
[link] [add a comment]

miapolis


[link] [5 comments]

New York City's public health department last week released draft guidelines encouraging restaurants and makers of processed and packaged foods to gradually reduce the amount of salt in the foods they sell.

[link] [add a comment]

He is the last great exponent of European modernism from the generation that emerged after the war. Born in Montbrison, in the Loire, the charmed and charming son of a wealthy factory engineer, a mathematics student turned musician, he attended the Paris Conservatory, where Olivier Messiaen helped introduce him to serialism. An agent provocateur for serial music before graduating and a master of hardball polemics, he caused even anxious luminaries like the aging Stravinsky to feel the need to earn his approval.

“I like virtuosity, although not for the sake of virtuosity but because it’s dangerous,” was Mr. Boulez’s description of “Répons” when we sat down to talk for a few hours after the rehearsal. By danger he meant that music, to be worth anything — which is to say to be new — can’t stick to safe ground but must entail some risk and effort.

“If you want to have a more interesting life, you will make some effort,” is how he put it. “It’s about the organization of one’s life. I am still shocked that so many people are not more creative, by which I mean more demanding of themselves.

“The main question we need to ask ourselves is: Do I try to be necessary to the evolution of language? Do I try to be original? And being original means using the tools necessary to be original, not just having the desire to be original.”

He was thinking then of John Cage, with whom he had been friendly until they fell out, painfully for Cage. Mr. Boulez, having an entirely more rarefied (some might say angrier or more mandarin or richer or more academic) notion of avant-gardism, decided that the bohemian Cage didn’t have the necessary tools.

“Tools are important,” Mr. Boulez repeated. “Mallarmé chastised Degas for writing poems. He said, ‘You can’t just have an idea that you want to write poems. Poems are made out of words.’ ”

[link] [1 comment]




[link] [6 comments]

new tech led

via the shedboy
[link] [add a comment]

In 1969, Jimi Hendrix slugged Richard Lloyd. Forty years after, Lloyd punches back with a hard-hitting tribute album to Mr. Purple Haze himself. Writer Charles M. Young traces the television cofounder's connection—and devotion—to the world's most legendary guitarist.

via o ball's fb page
[link] [3 comments]

As the sun rose over the site of the Sept. 11 attack, a crane hoisted the Subway restaurant up the signature skyscraper that marks the rebirth of the trade center's 16 acres. The shipping containers-turned-eatery will open in January and keep moving up as the tower is built to 105 floors.

[link] [1 comment]

bread and puppet


[link] [add a comment]