How do you grasp the schauung in the weltanschauung, and the geist in the zeitgeist? Where is the boundary between the “New Aesthetic” and a new aesthetic?
So far, the best evidence that something has really changed is of this kind. Imagine you were walking around your own familiar neighborhood with some young, clever guy. Then he suddenly stops in the street, takes a picture of something you never noticed before, and starts chuckling wryly. And he does that for a year, and maybe five hundred different times.
That’s the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This wunderkammer proves nothing by itself. It’s a compendium of evidence, a heap of artifacts, and that evidence matters. It’s a compilation of remarkable material by creative digital-native types who are deeply familiar with the practical effects of these tools and devices.
The field describes a space of propagation, of effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relationsLondon of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or careering points, in a word, what Minkowski called the world.
- Sanford Kwinter, 1986
Stan Allen, From object to field: field conditions in architecture and urbanism,in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)
Shock of the New is a 1980 documentary series by Robert Hughes that was broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom and by PBS in the United States. It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. The eight programmes focused on these themes:
Disorientation is the current malaise of the teen-ager. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, the teen-ager lives through a time of disorientation, restlessness, and confrontation.
We had just gotten back from a trip to the British Isles. Norman thought he was going to have a heart attack and wanted to see Europe before he died. He later found out that it was just anxiety.
Pinar & Viola: You have a great interest for the vernacular, can you explain what it means to you?
Ed Fella:
The vernacular is done with great care imagination and love. It’s done with the endeavor that people have. It’s like the history of two masons, one is lying bricks, the other one is building a cathedral. The vernacular is about how people feel about what they are doing. Human beings decorate themselves, it’s part of our evolution, we started with painting our caves. You can compare it to animals. For sexual attraction they grow beautiful hair.
Not all concrete is ugly, hard, cold and difficult to work with. There exists a whole range of light weight concretes “which have a density and compressive strength very similar to wood.They are easy to work with, can be nailed with ordinary nails, cut with a saw, drilled with woodworking tools, easily repaired . We believe that ultra-light weight concrete is one of the most fundamental bulk building materials of the future.” A Pattern Language
1. Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat Major
2. Nature Boy – Miles Davis
3. A Hard Day’s Night – The Beatles
4. In C – Terry Riley
5. Main Titles (from Blade Runner) – Vangelis
Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair. Instead, we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint, much like the profligate court of Charles I.
Alan Moore on the appropriation of V for Vendetta’s main character in the Occupy protests. ↓
A rocket stove mass heater or rocket mass heater, is an innovative and efficient space heating system developed from the rocket stove, a type of hyper-efficient wood-burning stove, named in the 70′s, but dating back millenia in concept, and the masonry heater. Wood is gravity fed into a ‘J shaped’ combustion chamber, from where the hot gases enter a heavily insulated metal or fire-brick vertical secondary combustion chamber, the exhaust from which then passes along horizontal metal ducting embedded within a massive cob thermal store. The thermal store is large enough to retain heat for many hours and typically forms part of the structure of the building. They have proved to be popular with natural buildings and within permaculture designs; they are normally self-built and are not yet recognized by all building codes which regulate the design and construction of heating systems within buildings. via
America always gives me the feeling of real asceticism. Culture, politics – and sexuality too – are seen exclusively in terms of the desert, which here assumes the status of a primal scene. Everything disappears before that desert vision. Even the body, by an ensuing effect of undernourishment, takes on a transparent form, a lightness near to complete disappearance. Everything around me suffers this same desertification. But this radical experimentation is the only thing that enables me to get through and produces that astral quality I have not found anywhere else.
HEY THAT IS GREAT THAT YOU KNOW OF A DURAN DURAN SONG THAT I ALSO ENJOY OR PERHAPS I DO NOT BUT I LIKE THAT YOU ENJOY IT ALTHOUGH EITHER WAY WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS IS MERELY THAT MY APPROVAL WILL BE REGISTERED BY YOU AND BY OTHERS WHO PERHAPS DO NOT KNOW ME AND THAT AFTER ALL IS WHAT IS FRIENDSHIP IS IT NOT.
And yet . . . it could vanish any day. Beggars can’t be choosers and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; occasionally the army of volunteers dwindles to a team of one. But that’s the beauty of it: UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience . . . and even ourselves.
Kenneth Goldsmith on the complexities of operating an archive that is free and open to all.
Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many research libraries are economizing on space and converting print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it’s becoming harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key academic and research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user’s screen. And finally, much of the material in our collection is difficult to find in most libraries readily accessible to the general public.
B. V. Doshi worked in Paris then for four years with Le Corbusier. He returned to Ahmedabad to supervise Le Corbusier’s work. His studio, Vastu-Shilpa (environmental design), was established in 1955. Doshi worked closely with Louis Kahn and Anant Raje, when Kahn designed the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In 1958 he was a fellow at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He then started the School of Architecture (S.A) in 1962. via
At the end of Biosphere 2 the ants destroyed the cockroaches. They then proceeded to eat through the silicone seal that enclosed the world. Through collective action the ants worked together and effectively destroyed the existing system. They then marched off into the Arizona desert. Who knows what they got up to there.
TV PARTY is the TELEVISION SHOW that’s a COCKTAIL PARTY but which is also a POLITICAL PARTY.
TV PARTY is cablecast LIVE every Tuesday night from 12:30 to 1:30 on Manhattan and Teleprompter Cable Television in NEW YORK CITY.
GLENN O’BRIEN’S TV PARTY premiered in December, 1978. It is a variety show—incorporating elements of formats pioneered by Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Woody Woodbury, Fulton J. Sheen, Ed Suyllivan, Hugh Heftner, Dick Clark, Dinah Shore and Don Cornelius. Like Hught Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, TV Party combines the talk and entertainment format with an actual PARTY. Distinctions between entertainers and “the studio audience” disappeared. Party guests might suddenly favor the group with a song. “How about a number Sammy?” At TV PARTY even the home viewers can entertain the PARTY over the telephone. On one show home partiers sang and played with WALTER STEDING, CHRIS STEIN, BOB FRIPP and the TV PARTY ORCHESTRA featuring LENNY FERRARI. There is a party in every home where the TV PARTY is TURNED ON.
The United Nations says the world’s population will reach seven billion sometime today, although the US Census Bureau says it’ll happen sometime in March. Regardless of the date, there are some reasons for optimism as well as predictions of doom and gloom. We hear some of both — from the US, China, India and sub-Saharan Africa.
Andrew Revkin, Joel Cohen, Deborah Seligsohn, Patrick French with Warren Olney
The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.
Some days ago you emailed to me a transcript of an address that Slavoj Zizek gave to the Wall St protesters about the worth and justification for changing our social and government systems and what follows is my commentary on these protests and his viewpoint. Perhaps it is a “blog”? Whilst the protests have become world wide they are quickly running out of steam because they lack the credibility of a solution, a policy, or a goal other than the vague notion that the system has to be changed—-but for what? The rantings of Slavoj Zizek are just that, rabel rousing, when what is needed is a well thought out road map, a manifesto, for change and regulation of the imperfect system that we have. To call for a whole change of our system of government i.e. to dump our democratic capitalist system would be gross folly unless you have a workable and socially just alternative. We know that Russian and Chinese communist/socialist systems become totalitarian and repressive party dictatorships so we have yet to find a better fairer workable system—perhaps the Scandinavian countries with their blending of capitalism and socialism have something to teach us about a better system? Any way the protesters are fortunate to be living in countries that permit freedom of expression and assembly! It is to their credit that they have so far been generally peaceful. There is no doubt that there is justifiably present pent up anger and disappointment with the failings of the present system especially in relation to the failure of the banking system to kerb the greed that gave rise to malpractices and fraud and the consequent recession we continue world wide to endure. There are other contributing ingredients too like: High levels of youth unemployment that means school leavers and graduates are unable to find satisfactory work and become the restless unemployed. A growing disparity of incomes between people at the top and people at the bottom. This is common to all developed western countries so we have an excessively rich strata of a few and an impoverished many with all shades inbetween which is bound to give rise to social discontent. Government cut backs in spending especially on social services, education and health that impact on the majority of any population create anger. Everyone has forgotten that our elected governments over borrowed in times of prosperity which we enjoyed and now have to pay back the borrowings e.g. the Greeks! So the cut backs were inevitable, but the further down the economic totem pole you are the more hurt you proportionally suffer. I believe that the growing levels of social injustices will eventually culminate in major political changes to our system for the better. It is an incremental progression achieved in a democratic process which be it imperfect it is peaceful. My point here is evidenced by the social changes achieved over the past century.
NOTES ON PRACTICE: STUBBORN STRUCTURES AND INSISTENT SEEPAGE IN A NETWORKED WORLD
In a sense this implies a three-stage encounter that we are ascribing between the practitioner and her world. First, a recognition of the fact that instances of art practices can be seen as contiguous to a ‘neighbourhood’ of marginal practices embodied by the figures of the five transgressors. Secondly, that ‘seeing’ oneself as a practitioner, and understanding the latent potentialities of one’s practice, might also involve listening to the ways in which each of the five transgressive figures encounters the world. Finally, that what one gleans from each instance of transgression can then be integrated into a practice which constitutes itself as an ensemble of attitudes, ways of thinking, doing and embodying (or recuperating) creative agency in a networked world.
Milk crates invariably leave full and return empty. They are part of a loop that, as a continuum of contiguous, melded information units, can remain active forever. If the world stood still, the loop that milk crates sketch out in the city would continue to flow, defying entropy and apocalypse. If one crate exits the loop, due to loss or damage, another simply takes its place. The loop is like a tide cycle or a whirlpool. Its indifference, its inwardness, the silence generated by its centripetal flows, should terrify us. It is monstrous in the way its energy absorbs all forms and meanings. As objects move in this flow, their contours, weights, surfaces, articulations, and inscribed data (date of production, type of plastic, percentages of recycled material, ownership markings) dissolve. It’s as if they move under such pressure that they are rendered liquid-like and incorporated into a perpetual spiral of activity.
“In the mountains of California, above the Mojave lies a plateau overlooking the desert, sloping to the East, facing the morning sun, into the West where San Gorgonio’s snow-capped peak reflects the glow of the setting sun. Here, The Institute of Mentalphysics is planning and building its city. Moved by a sense of the tranquil nobility and eternal beauty of the desert, I have planned, not a city of asphalt, paving and steel, or of tight mechanical grid and congested living barracks [but] a city of the Desert, spacious, free-sweeping; its broad floor carpeted by myriads of desert blossoms; its residents dwelling at peace, and sharing with the soil, sky, and trees, their joy of living, its centuries old Joshua trees standing like sentinels above its homes.”
A spirit duplicator (also referred to as a Ditto machine in the United States or Banda machine in the United Kingdom) was a low-volume printing method used mainly by schools and churches. It was also used by members of science fiction fandom and early comic book fandom to produce fanzines. Sheets printed on such a machine were sometimes called ditto sheets, or just dittos in the U. S. (an example of a genericized trademark). The term “spirit duplicator” refers to the alcohols which were a major component of the solvents used as “inks” in these machines. They are sometimes confused with the mimeograph, which is actually a different technology.
The duplicator used two-ply “spirit masters”. The first sheet could be typed, drawn, or written upon. The second sheet was coated with a layer of wax that had been impregnated with one of a variety of colorants. The pressure of writing or typing on the top sheet transferred colored wax to its back side, producing a mirror image of the desired marks. (This acted like a reverse of carbon paper.) The two sheets were then separated, and the first sheet was fastened onto the drum of the (manual or electrical) machine, with the waxed side out.
There is no ink used in spirit duplication. As the paper moves through the printer, the solvent is spread across each sheet by an absorbent wick. When the solvent-impregnated paper comes into contact with the waxed original, it dissolves just enough of the pigmented wax to print the image onto the sheet as it goes under the printing drum.
Mauveine was the first synthetic organic dye. It was discovered serendipitously in 1856 by an 18-year old chemistry student William Henry Perkin, who was trying to synthesize the anti-malaria drug quinine. The dye soon caused an explosion of purple in the fashion world.
. . . is how to serve up an ice cream in such a way that he [the customer] loses the desire to eat it for the rest of his life. Or an ice cream that, once it has been bought, grows bigger than him and humiliates him. Or that becomes a piece of the world surrounding him and frightens him . . . In short, an ice cream with no alternatives: either you eat it or it eats you. Or rather: it starts to eat you as soon as you have finished it. And then we think: apple-bombs, poisonous sweets, false information, in short Trojan blankets, beds, or horses that are brought into the house and destroy everything in it.
The “Skid Row”1 of Los Angeles is a portion of the area in downtown Los Angeles east of the Financial District and the Historic Downtown Center, partially overlaying the core of the downtown Industrial District. It is generally referred to by the City as part of the “Central City East” area, a fifty-block sector of downtown bounded by Main Street (west), Third Street (north), Alameda Street (east) and Seventh Street (south), although Skid Row’s boundaries are actually somewhat fluid.
Wharton Esherick House & Studio, 1520 Horsehoe Trail, Malvern (Chester County, Pennsylvania)
The year was 1913. The 25-year-old, academy-educated artist returned to Philadelphia, packed up his new wife and their few belongings and dropped out of the city forever, retreating into rural Pennsylania to live the simple life and devote all energies to his goal of becoming a successful modern painter.
That quest would be become his greatest failure, yet open the door to his true vocation.
After reaching Paoli in 1913, the Eshericks settled into a spartan existence. Using the crude tools of a colonial farmer and any materials he could scavenge, Wharton made the dilapidated house and barn watertight. The couple dressed in the sturdy clothes of peasants, read by the light of kerosene lanterns, baked bread in a wood stove and grew their own vegetables. Wharton wandered the woods and slopes to commune with nature and find subjects for his paintings. They both read voraciously, with a steady stream of books, magazines and newspapers available at the other end of a morning’s brisk walk to the nearby railroad station village… ↓
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
“The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on. it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert , by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush tree, each stem of grass, so that the living oraganism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individualism of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”
I have to answer that on two levels. This higher energy is in every living thing. A portion of this incredible energy fills all that is alive. There’s also the opposite—I’m going to get pretty deep here.
The idea of Gesamtkunstwerk—a German word for “total art-work”—has long since gone the way of all 19th century Romantic ideals, into the trash-heap of history. It began with the belief that art really mattered in human society, morally and politically. This belief was rooted in the great value the ruling classes had always given to art as a symbol of their wealth and power, but also to its place in religions important to European history. It was only natural, therefore, that at the beginning of the modern age, many believed that newly emerging industrialized democracies, both capitalist and socialist, needed not only their own new forms of art, but also new forms of integrating the arts, as had been done in the great cultures of the past. Architecture, painting, sculpture had indeed been brought together in the important buildings of most ancient civilizations, such as Egyptian and Greek temples, as well as in Medieval cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, and Baroque churches, and were combined there with music and both religious and secular rituals and performances. Total art-works. The most notable modernist attempts to accomplish the same were at the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists, though were each defeated by political forces—but that is another story.
Today, art is a commodity separated from itself, so to speak, in order to break it down into salable units. Modernism never found its Gesamtkunstwerk.
At a certain stage of my life, I fervently believed that architecture could sponsor a reunification of the arts, in the service of both public and private life, even though it would have to do so very much against all tendencies and trends. Vestiges of this have remained throughout the succeeding years—in System Wien, for example—but never in such an ambitious and hopeful a form as these drawings. Auf wiedersehen, old friend!
Called Concrete Cloth, the material consists of cement layered between fabric that can bond with water, backed with PVC. The product can be formed into the required shape then allowed to absorb water, causing it to set after two hours. The material can be used structurally and is fireproof and waterproof.
What Happened to Obama?
By Drew Westen Published in the NYTimes, August 6, 2011
Atlanta
IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.
Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”
Robert Irwin calling it like he sees it. In conversation with Richard Meier architects, a pivotal scene from a Concert of Wills, the story of the construction of the Getty Center.
“we should direct our view outwards, away from ourselves, into the world, not into the distance, but onto those things that are neat, within a hand’s reach.”
“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
The only workable name for the musical4 truth procedure that begins with Elvis Presley, and continues through the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, et al.5, is “punk rock.”
Punk rock, like every truth, is (a) singular6, (b) open to all7, (c) without being8, (d) proceeded upon9 by subtraction10, (e) giving of the impossibility of totality11, and (f) disordering of the Police12.
Punk rock, like every truth, is the void13 of a particular, immanent, situation. This situation is presently Global Capitalism14.
Punk rock, like every truth, is anarchist15 in this sense: it gives itself as a disordering of the Police.
Emphasizing the difference16 between moments of a truth procedure, rather than the singularity they proceed upon, which is their truth, is a type of Policing.
Punk rock has often been flamboyant, however, not the smallest shred of musical truth has ever been wrested by17 hopping around in a band uniform with epaulets.
Proceeding upon punk rock by subtraction means over-concentrating (a) this situation’s particulars18, (b) the materiality of these particulars19, and (c) under-concentrating (subtracting) the differences amongst these particulars by the singularity so proceeded upon20.
While finally irreducible to any particular, punk rock has something to do with youth21. (Although, it has nothing to do with childishness)22.
Representation by the Police usually speaks to a moment’s untruth. This means: to the extent that a work is, e.g., played on the radio, discussed in magazines, sold in stores, etc., it is probably not punk rock23.
Like the subject of any musical truth, the subject of punk rock is fascistically anti-fascist, not as the “tolerant” who would hypocritically hide their intolerance, i.e., their intolerance of intolerance. The punk rocker, through their moment, absolutely embraces the absolute denial of any absolute as creativity, and so defeats the nihilist, the ironist, and/or the cynic, who do not embrace this, but rather concile themselves to the dominance of evil in the world.
There is no scale for the ranking of a work; its self-identity mocks the dimension of “more or less”24.
The first bean bag chair was created by the Italian designers Gatti, Paolini, and Teodora while working for the Zanotta Company in 1969. These first bean bag chairs were called Soccos which were pear-shaped leather bags filled with Styrofoam beans.
When the Socco went into mass production, after several failed attempts, it became the basic model for all bean bag chairs to come. Although unconfirmed, it is rumored that the Socco was actually discovered by accident. This discovery came from a Styrofoam factory that put all the leftover pieces from the production line in a bag. This new fad soon became a very popular item because the Socco was the first chair to move with the person sitting in it.
In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger pattern in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it it.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build a thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and that the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs.
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design. In 1990 she became the director of the Yale University Graduate Program in Graphic Design and the first woman to receive tenure at the Yale University School of Art.
In 1971 Levrant de Bretteville founded the first design program for women at the California Institute of the Arts, and two years later co-founded both the Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, and its Women’s Graphic Center in Los Angeles. In 1981 she initiated the communication design program at the Otis College of Art and Design.
Alighiero Boetti (also known as Alighiero e Boetti; December 16, 1940 – February 24, 1994) was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera. He is most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world,Mappa, created between 1971 and his death in 1994. Boetti’s work was typified by his notion of ‘twinning’, leading him to add ‘e’ (and) between his names, ‘stimulating a dialectic exchange between these two selves’.
Arcology is Paolo Soleri’s concept of cities which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community. The complexification and miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources.
It is not easy to translate into English the Italian word autoprogettazione. Literally it means auto = self and progettazione = design. But the term ‘self-design’ is misleading since the word “design” to the general public now signifies a series of superficially decorative objects. By the word autoprogettazione Mari means an exercise to be carried out individually to improve one’s personal understanding of the sincerity behind the project. To make this possible you are guided through the archetypal and very simple technique.
Therefore the end product, although usable, is only important because of it educational value.
Hello,
Thank you for mentioning this, it is an interesting project. I would like to build an Enzo Mari table and/or bookcase, but unfortunately the file that is linked to has expired. Could you help me?
Have you ever thought to yourself, ” How would I do it if I had it to do all over again?” Usually this thought only pops into your head when you are about to die or your life is in ruin or perhaps during a midlife crisis where family and job stress suddenly takes its toll. This feeling is usually accompanied by mounting debt and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped in the life you have chosen. Tension in the world, an unstable economy, high fuel prices, and mind numbing popular culture may also add to this feeling of utter futility.
Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and series of drawings. Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices (in particular, with regard to energy infrastructure and water use) and the ways people live together.
A palapa (a Spanish word of Malayan origin, meaning “pulpous leave”) is an open-sided dwelling with a thatched roof made of dried palm leaves. It is very useful in hot weather and, therefore, very common in Mexican beaches, such as in Acapulco. It is perhaps one of the most important architectural contributions of Philippine culture to Mexican West cultures.
A new city built from scratch in the desert is in general not a viable proposition. Large cities have evolved out of small, ancient cities: the new city must be an intensification of existing cities.
WALKING HOUSE is a modular dwelling system that enables persons to live a peaceful nomadic life, moving slowly through the landscape or cityscape with minimal impact on the environment. It collects energy from its surroundings using solar cells and small windmills. There is a system for collecting rain water and a system for solar heated hot water. A small greenhouse unit can be added to the basic living module, to provide a substantial part of the food needed by the Inhabitants. A composting toilet system allows sewage produced by the inhabitants to be disposed of. A small wood burning stove could be added to provide CO2 neutral heating. WALKING HOUSE forms various sizes of communities or WALKING VILLAGES when more units are added together. WALKING HOUSE is not dependant on existing infrastructure like roads, but moves on all sorts of terrain.
A HOUSE tour is the highlight of a visit with a proud homeowner, but when one drops in to see Derek Diedricksen, who makes playful micro-shelters out of junk, it is less so. Possibly because the temperature up here on a cold winter day is less so, possibly because his square footage is less so.
At about 24 square feet, the Gypsy Junker, made primarily out of shipping pallets, castoff storm windows and a neighbor’s discarded kitchen cabinets, is the largest of Mr. Diedricksen’s backyard structures. The Hickshaw, a sleeper built on a rolling cedar lounge chair (or as Mr. Diedricksen calls it, “a rickshaw for hicks”), is considerably smaller, at 2 1/2 feet wide by 6 1/2 feet deep. The Boxy Lady, two cubes on a long pallet, is the smallest: 4 feet tall at its highest point.
Structural insulated panels (or structural insulating panels), SIPs, are a composite building material. They consist of an insulating layer of rigid polymer foam sandwiched between two layers of structural board. The board can be sheet metal, plywood, cement or oriented strand board (OSB) and the foam either expandedpolystyrene foam (EPS), extruded polystyrene foam (XPS) or polyurethane foam.
Economy originates with the Greek oikos, meaning dwelling place, and nomos, to distribute. Oikos has the derivatives oikein, to inhabit, and oikoumene, the inhabited world.
The word economy, small e, connotes the flow of goods in an inhabited place, a particular community, informed by the criteria of merit and mercy and true value.
“It would not proceed directly or soon to some supposedly ideal state of things. It wouldproceed directly and soon to serious thought about our culture and our predicament. The use of [a] place would necessarily change, and the response of the place to that use would necessarily change the user. The conversation itself would thus assume a kind of creaturely life, binding the place and its inhabitants together, changing and growing to no end, no final accomplishment that can be conceived or foreseen.”
Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure
Let’s be clear: a political generation isn’t just an age group that can be data-mined for a promising trend. It’s a common resolve that things have to change, and that change begins with you, concretely. Somehow, young and not-so-young people from all walks of life need to discover not only the philosophical principles, but also the popular vocabularies, the social contexts, the media, the science, and the aesthetics to articulate a critical, resistant, and constructive ethos that could challenge this total corruption. Which means, not a new conspiracy theory or apocalypse scenario, not a new and probably failed call for protest movements either, but deeper territorial processes of inquiry, formation of collectives and public spaces, experiments in co-education and alternative economies, all at a distance from existing institutions, but with a willingness to form new ones and to push for a transformation in the very idea of what an institution can be (since the existing ones, including the art institutions, are totally corrupt).
“The problem is that the high creatures are the server mechanisms of the technology and the system they have created, meaning that we’re dictated to as much by cars. We’ve turned the world into a parking lot. Similarly we use musical technology that we create, and it finds a use for itself”
A growing number of artists are abandoning truth-telling political art for a boldly utopian practice, recognizing that political problems can’t be solved by an atrophied collective imagination. With examples ranging from Thomas More’s 16th-century tome Utopia to the Yes Men’s recent “special edition” of the New York Times, Stephen Duncombe explores the creative terrain within this new world of dreampolitik. Duncombe is an associate professor with the Gallatin School at New York University.
What would be necessary to transform “design” into a discipline of un-disciplinary moves and motions, into a practice of possibility and an articulation of becoming?
In Hale County Alabama, you see ghost buildings: abandoned barns, tumbledown shanties, and rusted trailers–fragile remnants of a more prosperous agrarian past…
I’m only halfway through the pdf, but this is so good! Totally up our alley – maybe something we should look into more as a model for our first year? Also as a way to start thinking about engaging with the people in the community to produce work and figuring out what that work would be?
nd — 01/30/2011 @ 9:21 am
“the studio is not a representation of reality, it is a reality” —mockbee
Translated from Latin, this means: “This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.”
I tremble at them, because this is not an easy speech for me to give.
I know in my mind that to forego the examination of death is to fail to honor the dead. But all I can think about right now is my love for what environmentalism was.
Nobody enjoys an autopsy, and yet its value to life is indisputable.
The word “autopsy” means to “see for yourself.” An autopsy is the key tool that doctors use to determine whether their diagnosis was correct, and to see if the treatment was effective. In the past, autopsies were common — in the 1950s, 50 percent of deaths had autopsies performed. Today, that number is barely 10 percent.
We will perform an autopsy tonight. We will question our diagnosis of the problem and prescribe a new treatment.
With fond memories, a heavy heart and a desire for progress, I say to you tonight that … Environmentalism is dead.
I thought it would be nice to keep as much stuff on the site as possible – similar to what south willard does with their articles. That way everything is centralized and we can comment directly on the items. You can add a “more” thing in the post editor or by Alt+Shift+T.
PLYWOOD HOUSE
RESIDENCE: BRIAR CLIFF MANOR, NY 1981
Principal-in-Charge: Ricardo Scofidio
The Plywood House is built on the foundation of a house that burned to the ground the year prior. The construction budget is based on the limited fire insurance settlement. Standard wood frame construction is sheathed with off-the-shelf 4’-0” x 8’-0” plywood panels, stained gray and pre-cut to receive stock windows. The facade is the product of interference between a serial strategy of exterior cladding and specific demands of the interior program.
http://www.jtrcc.org/storage/Labyrinth%20-%20People.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1260922514271