Documentary on BEST stores designed by SITE inc.

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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

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burlap-crete – homemade concrete cloth…

r.i.p. holy warbles

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.

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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.

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Can Planet Earth Handle Seven Billion People?  (25:45)

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.

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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.

End of musings—-Love DADXX

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.

Raqs Media Collective

Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
(Letter of Solidarity From Cairo)

Police Fire Tear Gas at Occupy Protesters in Oakland

John Zerzan 10-25 ,10-18, 10-11, 10-4

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman

Charlie Rose – A discussion about Occupy Wall Street

From Tahrir to Wall Street: Egyptian Revolutionary Asmaa Mahfouz Speaks at Occupy Wall Street

Grace Lee Boggs’ message to Occupy Wall Street

You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.
Ezra Klien with David Graeber

On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet & Guardian Post
David Graeber

Remembering Andre Gunder Frank While Thinking about the Future
Immanuel Wallerstein

Zizek in Wall Street

Interview with Chris Hedges

Statement from Decolonize LA

If you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store (And why no one should ever listen to Naomi Wolf about “protests”)
Evan Calder Williams

OCCUPY WALL STREET: The Game of Colonialism and further nationalism to be decolonized from the “Left”
Jessica Yee

More here

For building is not merely a means and a way toward
dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell.

—Martin Heidegger

previously
thanks Montse

I’ve been standing on the side of life, watching it float by.
I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

—Mamah Borthwick Cheney

Mamah on her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright

thanks Katie

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.

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“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.”

—Lloyd Wright, Architect

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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.

via

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.

via Gere

. . . 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.

from The Complete Works of Andrea Branzi

Via

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.

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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.”

Henry David Thoreau

from Walden

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“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.”

Edward Abby

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.

Linda Perhacs in conversation with Daiana Feuer ↓

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!

Via: Lebbeus Woods

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.

Voted material of the year 2009 (!)

text via Dezeen.
available via Concrete Canvas
Spec Sheet

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.”

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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.

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“Simply the best made tent in America”

Springbar Tents

“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.”

— Goethe via Paul Renner.

via.

Alone in the Wilderness – Dick Proenneke

“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.”

— WENDELL BERRY

via REFERENCE LIBRARY.

Stanley Tigerman and Susan O’Brien

Kosho by Studiometrico

Some interesting takes on the ceremonial, temporary Jewish hut.

after Pisaro² after Badiou³

1. 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.”




2. 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.




3. Punk rock, like every truth, is the void¹³ of a particular, immanent, situation. This situation is presently Global Capitalism¹⁴.




4. Punk rock, like every truth, is anarchist¹⁵ in this sense: it gives itself as a disordering of the Police.




5. 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.




6. 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.




7. 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.




8. While finally irreducible to any particular, punk rock has something to do with youth²¹. (Although, it has nothing to do with childishness)²².




9. 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.




10. 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.




11. There is no scale for the ranking of a work; its self-identity mocks the dimension of “more or less”²⁴.

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Regarding the Calarts Design School 1970-75…

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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.

Via

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Gruppo Strurm

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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.

via A Pattern Language

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.

Martin Heidegger

from Poetry, Language, Thought 1971

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Via

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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.

via

interview ↓

Orange Juice, Rip it up (1983)

Alighiero Boetti – Ladder and Chair, A-frame

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’.

A series of pastel knobs with generally optimistic faces.

Each is ceramic, has a brass insert, and mounts with the included bolt. All are 1-1/2″ in diameter and just over 1″ in height

via Face Knobs – Lee Valley Tools.

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.

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The whole thing is worth a look, but this is what really got to me…

via Tagbanger

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.

from Autoprogettazione? by Enzo Mari

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.

The Field Lab /  Blog

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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.

via katie

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.

via

Tree House by Ravnikar Potokar

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.

Mobile Architecture

via Southern Missouri Mule Outfitter and Equine Supply

manual for
WALKING HOUSE

Introduction:

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.

N55

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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.

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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.

Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the Miraculous One Night in Los Angeles, 1973. Copyright Bas Jan Ader Estate, courtesy Patrick Painter, Santa Monica.

Via: Lais

You Can Make It Anything You Want

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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.

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Aeschbacher&Rios

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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

Francis Fukuyama on Mathew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft

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).

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“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”

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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.

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A to Z GRANTWRITING MONTHLY ARTS AND EDUCATION NEWSLETTER
February 2011

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They are powered only by the wind and even store some of the wind’s energy in plastic bottle ‘stomachs’ to be used when there is no wind.

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Stuart Brand’s concept of a building’s “shearing layers” that suggest a single building is changing at various speeds all at once.

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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?

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In Hale County Alabama, you see ghost buildings: abandoned barns, tumbledown shanties, and rusted trailers–fragile remnants of a more prosperous agrarian past…

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Many people construct their own Rietveld furniture in the evening-hours. Apparently these designs are an invitation to do so…

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by Adam Werbach

I am here to perform an autopsy.

Autopsies begin with these words.

Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae

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.

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Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwhich and that was it.

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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.

diller scofidio + renfro.

via Charlie Rose

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