{ Jon Kessler, One Hour Photo, 2004 | mixed media, camera, monitor, postcards, lights, motor }
{ Mounir Fatmi, Save Manhattan, 2007 | the installation is made from books on 9/11 held together with rubber bands to cast a shadow of the New York skyline, complete with the twin towers }
{ Mounir Fatmi, Save Manhattan 03, 2007 | stereo speakers }
previously { 1966-2001 }
related { Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s shadow art }
Otto: You pompous, stuck-up, snot-nosed, English, giant, twerp, scumbag, fuck-face, dickhead, asshole.
Archie: How very interesting. You’re a true vulgarian, aren’t you?
Otto: You are the vulgarian, you fuck.
related { Swearing at work can cut stress }
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting a facelift and among the most pressing dilemmas is what color to paint the building’s exterior.
There’s buff yellow, the original color of the exterior selected by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum’s architect.
There’s also a shade of off-white that, with slights variations, has been the museum’s public face over the years.
Warm yellowish beige, cool grayish white? Powell buff or London Fog?
Some preservation groups, pointing out that Wright abhorred white, favor restoring the building to its original color while some neighborhood associations prefer the museum’s proposal to keep it a shade of off-white.
The associations argue that the building was buff yellow only for its first five years and that there have been four additions to Wright’s circular structure, which opened in October 1959 months after the architect’s death.
The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has approved all changes to the museum’s exterior since it was designated a landmark in 1990, could settle the dilemma as early as this week.
Maybe Joe Joe Science a Yellowman
The construction of the Empire State Building started symbolically on March 17, 1930 (St.Patrick’s Day)—per Al Smith’s influence as Empire State, Inc. president and Governor of New York.
The project involved 3,400 workers, mostly immigrants from Europe, along with hundreds of Mohawk nation iron workers. According to official accounts, five workers died during the construction.
The construction was completed on May 1, 1931, one year and 45 days (including Sundays and holidays ) after it had begun.
A former US intercontinental nuclear missile base - with a network of underground tunnels and silos - is on sale on eBay for £750,000 ($1,500,000). Located in a remote corner of Washington state, the 56-acre site is being marketed as a “gorgeous” property and potential resort, reports the BBC.
Bari Hotchkiss bought the base 10 years ago from owners who obtained it in the 1970s after the US government deemed the Titan missile system obsolete.
“The only limit is imagination. We’ve always wanted to see it turn into a summer camp or resort camp,” he said. “Most of those former bases are much much smaller, and most all of them have water problems with water leaking in them. So they’re filled with water or so wet there is terrible rust, and ours is dry. Portions of our missile base look like it’s built last year.”
The website describes the buildings as “castles of the 20th century”. Designed to withstand nuclear attack, these unique properties “bring new meaning to the word ’shelter’,” it says.
{ Ananova | MissileBases.com }
No two cities in the same country have the degree of cultural rivalry that prevails between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.
Munich may tilt from time to time at Berlin’s orchestras and Moscow at St. Petersburg’s opera, yet the art wars of the Aussies have been raging constructively for more than half a century and they are about to enter a decisive new phase.
The strife began in the early 1950s when, learning that Melbourne had landed the 1956 Olympic Games, Sydney commissioned an opera house on its harbor promontory. It wasn’t to be just an ordinary opera house but a conch-like creation that would take your breath away.
Jorg Utzon’s marvel opened in 1973 and, though the Danish architect was brutally ousted and his interior plan altered to malign acoustic effect, the opera house has stood ever since as Sydney’s defining symbol.
Melbourne, in the year of the opera’s opening, established a riverside arts center with a 120-meter-high spire and, a decade later, a neighboring concert hall, which looks from the outside like a multistory parking lot and from the inside like a concrete barn. Not quite the competitive ticket so much as a statement of intent.
When Sydney won the 2000 Olympics, Melbourne was galvanized and corralled its artistic resources into a coordinated cultural quarter around Federation Square, overlooking the Yarra River. The plan, still under construction, will gather visual arts, music, ballet, theater, film and literature in a fretwork of buildings, connected by walkways, forecourts and green lawns.
The opening fanfare will sound in February 2009 with the inauguration of the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Hall (named for the mother of media magnate Rupert Murdoch), reputedly the first dedicated chamber-music building in the southern hemisphere and among the most remarkable music spaces anywhere.
It opened in 1916 as a vaudeville theater called the Ideal and closed a few weeks ago as the Playpen, a seedy porno emporium on the ragged rim of Times Square. It now faces the wrecking ball despite a last-minute attempt to rescue it. (…)
Partners headed by Tishman Realty Corp. acquired the Playpen on Eighth Avenue at 44th Street in July, reportedly for a new high-rise building.
Also, unlike other historic theaters in the area that have been saved and renovated, the Playpen was never given official landmark status that would prevent its being destroyed.
During its near-century of life, the brick-fronted theater operated under at least eight different names, including Esquire, Squire (twice), Cinecitta, New Cameo, Cameo and Adonis, each reflecting a particular kind of screen fare - from Italian and Russian language films to Hollywood B-movies, Scandinavian skinflicks and gay movies.
In the 1940s, a partial ceiling collapse injured 19 people but according to The New York Times it went unnoticed by patrons in the front rows, who thought the noise was just “weird sound effects” of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors.
Located on the fringe of the Times Square district, the theater was excluded from an extensive 1990s project in which sleek new hotels and renovated theaters transformed the midtown blocks where sex shops had flourished since the post-World War II era.
As the Internet start-up boom bubbles along for its umpteenth year, life has never been better for Valley cubicle dealers. Net companies are adding new workers at record paces and they’re buying up cubes at unprecedented rates. Cube sellers say they can hardly keep up with demand.
But by the same token, life for the Valley’s thousands of cubicle-bound workers hasn’t been quite so fine. While companies are gobbling up more and more cubes, they’re having trouble finding new space to put them in.
As a result, the size of the typical cube has been getting smaller.
And so working in a cubicle — already one of the worst things about most Valley jobs — is rapidly getting even worse. (…)
Cubicle sellers across the valley have detected a pronounced shrinkage in the size of the standard cube. They attribute it to two factors: rapid growth in workforce and limited office space.
“It’s directly related to the supply and demand in terms of commercial real estate,” said Bob Fisher, president and general manager of Creative Solutions, a company that specializes in modular workstations.
A few years ago, Fisher recalls, a typical Silicon Valley cube might have measured 8 feet by 8 feet. No more. Now cubes are more likely to be half or two-thirds that size. In some cases, companies are ordering cubicles as small as 5 by 6, or 30 square feet.
As a result, cubicles — sometimes referred to sarcastically as “veal fattening pens” for their claustrophobia-inducing size — are now smaller than enclosures provided for calves.
{ Blachon, 1976 }
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of 166 city bridges labeled “structurally deficient,” putting it in the same category as the one that collapsed into the Mississippi River. { NY Daily News | Continue reading }
