birds and wires
In one of the alleys off Friendship Avenue, in Pittsburgh, late afternoon.
Cool. Preservation.
From the NYTimes:
Chicken tractors
“A chicken tractor is basically a bottomless cage or pen of some kind. This is so the chickens can scratch (a chicken’s raison de etre) and eat off of the ground such things as grass, weeds, bugs, etc. In the U.K., chicken tractors are called chicken arks. You can drag your chicken tractor around the yard if you want.”
(Via Boing Boing)
Greek scientists use a laser to clean the Acropolis
if I only had some trees
German company Baumraum has taken the concept of the treehouse and literally launched it sky high…Treehouses can be built in virtually any tree or trees, to any given specification – horizontal, upright, two storey, interconnected – with ropes and stilts often employed to guarantee stability. Built predominantly from larch and Douglas pine, the designers are happy to experiment with stainless steel, textiles and other materials to create truly unique spaces. The pieces are prefabricated and then brought together on site.
pollution sucking sculptures
The replacement for the bridge that tragically collapsed about a year ago in Minnesota has an interesting feature.
Two statues have debuted on Minnesota’s new Interstate 35W Bridge that are shaped to look like the international cartographic symbol for water. Why? Besides mimicking the look of the Mississippi River as it passes through Minneapolis, the new sculptures are made from a type of concrete that is photocatalytic, meaning they will be able to convert gases like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxide to higher oxidized states, making them less damaging to the environment. Another benefit of the new concrete mixture is that it never looks old as it maintains a white oxidized color on its outer skin.
things we bought on ebay, a prologue
As I’ve documented many times before, Amy and I are coming to the end of our years-long renovation. We live in a two bedroom Craftsman-style house built in 1925. There are two neighborhoods in Dallas with homes built primarily in this period and although they went through a couple decades of decline, have become appreciated neighborhoods in the past ten or fifteen years.
I bought the house in 1998. At the time it was at the edge of the established neighborhood and now is squarely in it. I bought the place at the beginning of a transition in my life toward an appreciation of modern aesthetics in design and architecture. What interests me are the transitions and similarities between the Arts & Crafts movement in America in the 20s and its connection to Japanese minimalism before it and mid-century Modernism after. The patterns and rays that emit from these movements reflect and overlap with dozens of movements across history. It is the commonality between them that has always interested me.
I am drawn to minimalism and modernism because of their simplicity. It’s hard to be simple. You really have to know what you’re doing. While an underlying pattern of aesthetics can be argued for or against, my eye sees a continuous relationship between those who appreciated and articulated beautiful essentialness regardless of culture, time, or place.
We have worked hard to honor the Arts & Crafts heritage of our house and to imbibe it with newness and beauty, to streamline it where possible. I often talk about it by saying, this is the type of house this house always wanted to be. We have removed some of the Victorian ornament still present in Craftsman design and replaced it with things that made sense to us in terms of the pure structure of the house.
To this end, we recently purchased a couple pieces of furniture from ebay. One, a Florence Knoll T Angle coffee table (not the one we bought) that arrived today, and the other, a Florence Knoll 57W sofa (also not the one we purchased) that should be arriving tomorrow.
I’ll focus on the coffee table in the next post.
Upside-down House
The architects were inspired by a series of houses in Spain and the US that were upside down on the outside but rightside up on the inside.
The family-sized house, designed by Polish partners Klausdiusz Golos and Sebastian Mikiciuk for the Edutainment exhibition company, is furnished with chairs, tables and carpets stuck to the ceiling.
“We didn’t do it for a reason. We just wanted to do something different,” Mikiciuk told Reuters on Friday.
the world’s tallest building getting taller
The world’s tallest building, still under construction in Dubai, is now 688 meters and 160 stories tall.
Its eventual height remains a closely-guarded secret, though there is speculation it will reach a final height of 900 metres (2,953 feet).
Some construction photos.
More than a Renovation
Deron blogged about Blake’s house in Dwell. The article refers to his house here in Austin as a renovation. I am lucky enough to know Blake and his house. I thought he had built it pretty much from scratch, so I asked if it was indeed a renovation. Here is what he said.
Well, to answer your question, no, the house isn’t a renovation. It’s built from the ground up. That gets a little confused on occasion. And I can understand why. I bought an old house, lived there the entire time, and put another house in the same location, so it’s easy to see why people would call it a renovation. Truth is, I lived there, knocked the whole thing down in stages and built back up. What still exists from the old house is the slab (now about 60% of the whole house footprint), which I had to completely repair and later pour on top of anyways. I also reused material from the house, like doors and framing lumber, too, but nothing else about the original house exists now. I put some pics online awhile back that illustrate the process a little.
It truly is beautiful right down to the wall mounted bottle opener in the kitchen. You can see his pictures of the process here and more of his stuff on his website.
Y’all
My alma mater is spending money to send a 700 pound stone to Rome and back. They better never ask me for money again.
contemporary renovation in Austin
The most recent issue of dwell has an article on Austin artist Blake Dollahite’s renovated home. It struck a chord with me as we are wrapping up a little renovation project of our own. In 2003, Blake, just out of college, bought a small, decrepit property in a good neighborhood in north Austin. He transformed the bungalow into a beautiful mix of traditional space and contemporary design. Everywhere you see the attention to detail that makes life worth living, creating beauty in the patterns around us. The online version of the article has the same text, but is limited in pictures. If you have access to the magazine, it’s well worth checking out.
“Holy Fuckballs,”
is what I said to myself when I looked at the pictures Rex linked to of the tallest skyscraper in the world.
An alternative acceptable curse would have been “assnuts.”
rhode island couple lived in mall
Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto protested the construction of a mega mall by moving into it:
The Rhode Island couple awoke one morning in 1998 to find the name of their street changed: Kinsley Avenue was now Providence Place, which happened to be the name of the 1.3 million-square-foot mall rising on 13 prime downtown acres. Townsend and Yoto were among the Providence residents objecting to the mall — the cost to taxpayers, the colonizing presence of the structure that dominated the skyline from the highway. But Yoto, a scholar, and Townsend, a public artist, expressed their outrage in an unusual way: They decided to live with the mall. Literally.
In 2003, inside a 750-foot storage space, abandoned since construction days, they crafted a secret apartment within the mall from which they could study its allure. Why do so many of us flock to the mall’s sanitized hallways? Why do we love the sameness of mall life, identical shops and structures across the country? Why is the mall the site of our grievances, the place where gunmen go to inflict maximum pain? Earlier this year, a man set off an explosion in a mall in Exeter, England. The week before, a woman was shot in one.
I’m not the only one
Cindy: “Mike, do you ever think about the fact that you live in a state shaped like a penis?”
The Florida State Capitol Building.
Albert Speer Jr.
Albert Speer Jr., son of Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, is the lead architect of the 2008 Beijing games.
In her biography, the British historian Gitta Sereny depicts Hitler’s architect as unique in the Nazi elite.
He was recognisably human: young, intelligent, educated, lacking (as far as the evidence suggests) any racist views, a gifted architect rather than a political thug. And yet he followed Hitler zealously.
His son, who barely knew his father, has worked as an urban planner for more than 30 years, and his 100-strong office in Frankfurt has advised governments in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Yemen.
He follows in the footsteps not only of his father, but also of his grandfather and great-grandfather, builders from southern Germany. Of his plans for Beijing, he said: “I want to make a leap into the future but at the same time preserve old structures in the city centre.
“We propose the building of a central train station, a new transport gateway, in the city’s south as well as an ecological model city.”
the worst building in history
An Egyptian company has resumed construction on what has been called the worst building in history (alternately known as the hotel of doom) in North Korea. The building was begun in 1988 as a response to development in South Korea spurred by its involvement in the Olympic games.
As the North’s economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s the empty shell became a symbol of the country’s failure, earning nicknames “Hotel of Doom” and “Phantom Hotel.”
Bruno Giberti, associate head of California Polytechnic State University’s Department of Architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently in many cities trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them.
“If this is the worst building in the world, the runners up are in Vegas and Shanghai,” said Giberti.
Touche.
Party Dress
Party Dress is a music pavilion worn exclusively by five women seamlessly injecting architecture into fashion by using the body as space.
Camera Obscura
Mike D. turned his room into a camera.
They asked me what I would do once I was unemployed. “I dunno,” was my response. I was being honest: that was kinda the point.
Yesterday I turned my bedroom into a camera obscura.
What’s so cool, is that everything moves in real time. A bird suddenly flying upside down across my wall gave me a start.
Two Million Dollar House “Staves Off Death”
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a spoof.
David Fisher’s Rotating Skyscraper
Dehydration (Lidos of London)
From the Summer 2008 issue of Polar Inertia: Gigi Cifali’s photographs of drained, abandoned pools, via Pruned.
pedestrian
Pittsburgh is a good city for walking.
house of the holy cow poop
An article from a blog about two New Yorkers who have moved to Deli:
While in Karanpur, we stumbled upon a group of villagers in the process of building a cowpie house. The women laughed at themselves as we came upon them — they were clearly a little embarrassed to be seen by foreigners as they kneaded the poop like bread dough. But it wasn’t a humiliated kind of embarrassment — rather, it was an acknowledgment that we caught them in an awkward moment. It’s how you’d feel if a political candidate dropped by on a door-to-door and caught you mowing the lawn in your rattiest t-shirt.
I Want to Live In One of These
Tiny Texas Houses builds these, and I find myself longing to own one. I love the house we live in now, but something in me has always pushed me toward very small houses, made of stone or wood or adobe–houses that seem to sit at the center of any place you put them. If you had a big “spread,” as they say down here, you might even want to buy several of these and thus have a big house that was just scattered about in an interesting way.